BrilliantConcept

More and more every day, it seems the giant lurking over the tech industry known as Google uses it’s own tagline “Don’t be Evil” in some kind of strange half-irony. The company squashes companies in every industry it enters, gobbles up patents while clamoring on how they ruin software innovation, and amasses enough data it should be self-aware soon.

In a different timezone, Italy has become the joke of the legal world (well, my small legal world). The jokes around the Italian “Bunga Bunga” Prime Minister are just too easy. The guys over at the Daily Show (which has been on fire lately) must been cackling their asses off. It’s like crack for a coke addict (or your entire search history to Google).

Anyway, the case thrown at them from the jester’s court, where a man sued for defamation when he discovered Google’s helpful autocorrect feature replaced his surname with the Italian translations for “conman” or “fraud”…….

….Seriously?

I assume you’ve been through school; I personally know some of those years can be tough. I’m not saying being a kid in California and being a kid in Milan are the same thing. But I know we’ve all heard some pretty nasty things thrown our way during some of those tougher days. “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but searches can never match me.”

Even despite that, the censorship is still stupid. Sorry dude, but 99% of the other Italians, when they get a couple letters deep, are going to be actually searching for what “conman” translation they opt to. So even if it didn’t “defame your name” in the same way a schoolground bully does, it would be hurting the overall optimization for the rest of Italy*. Unless you get to be huge celebrity that is, but I pretty sure a requirement for that is to drop all but one of your names.

So, in the end I think I would have to side with the search giant on this one.

I wonder which one of his names he would keep…

The post is written on a fine-line between serious and joking. I’m not sure where the line is at all times; see if you can find it

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* Maybe even all over the world. A fairly common use for Google could be to look up an unfamiliar word in a foreign language. So your little name change is hurting all of the world’s efficiency!

…of a Gold Master, my iPad homescreen displayed a funky bug for a few minutes Tuesday night. What do you know? There’s a Gold Master of iOS 4.3 just a few days later.

A while back, LifeHacker had an article about the iOS app versions of some of O’reilly Publisher’s book. Most of the book are great, and the iOS apps were dirt cheap, compared to the iBooks, Kindle, or from-the-horses’ mouth variety, usually $4.99 or $5.99. If you find the app bundle on your hard drive, treat it like a .zip file, you can get at the actual content on disk.

**NOTE: There are better options if you want to make an .epub file, and apparently O’Reilly even sanctions it to a certain extent! My solution is for a straight HTML page, though; not an .epub.

Of course, you end up with a collection of .html files, and at the least the book I tried this on, there was not TOC at all. So I cranked open a text editor and wrote a simple Python script for scowering the .html files and creating a TOC page as an entry point. The cover image, chapter titles, and section titles are output to a simple HTML file.

This is my first real use of Python beyond just playing with the language, so don’t expect highly polished code.

Download the script here.

I don’t want to make this into a complaint blog, but some opportunities are just too good to pass up. Like this TreeHugger article which demonizes electricity.

Ignoring all the good electronics have brought us, like instant communication of oppression and human-rights violations, the first assumption that electricity “doesn’t come from nature” is completely and utterly false. There are pictures of lightning strikes throughout the article, yet refuse to mention them or how they are composed entirely of a voltage difference between the rain-falling sky (creating a positive charge) and a grounded earth. You know, things an EE would learn before they even enter a classroom.

There’s also another phenomena I want to get out of the way: “natural” does not mean “best”. The majority of our development as civilization has been overcoming nature to the point we could be un-relentingly flurishable. Even TreeHuggers will embrace this idea when they really think about it: what’s the most natural power source we have? By god, it’s Nuclear Fission, coming from the Sun! Of course you’d never see Nuclear Power* on the wish-list of any environmentalist because of that pesky waste that has to be desposed of somewhere**.

Did I mention the irony that they had to use electricity to write, post, and (continue to) host that article?

* Yeah, there’s a difference between Fission and Fusion. But since Fusion reactors are many years from even being feasible outside a laboratory, we’ll define “nuclear power” as “nuclear fission-derived power”.

** Such as storing it in the most remote place the U.S. government could find. Yet the middle of absolutely nowhere wasn’t remote enough, apparently. Have you seen what those containers can go through?

These charts are great:

http://andrewvos.com/2011/02/21/amount-of-profanity-in-git-commit-messages-per-programming-language/

I’ve been known to sprinkle jokes in comments, maybe an occasional “damn”, but nothing like that. Although if I could, I probably would.

What a day. Craziness aside, an article on Unix/Linux today ruffled my feather’s a bit. Maybe it’s because I’ve been really interested in nitty-gritty details (and thus Linux), but the whole community really seems to be the slowest at learning from any of their previous mistakes.

The article, which I found linked on CodeProject, is somewhat interesting, discussing “internalizing” vs “externalizing” design. I don’t have a problem with what the article states: “externalizing” decisions into the software can surely lead to more “dead-end” situations if not done carefully, and “internalizing” design leads to less dependance and increases retention.

Yes, the tools seem cryptic and “hard-to-use”, with hardly any crutches for the beginner. But if you stick with it and keep learning you will be rewarded. When you grok the power of economical command lines, composability and extensibility, you’re glad you didn’t run back to the arms of the GUI on the first day. It was worth it.

Here’s the thing, though: Step learning curves don’t get things done. That is why you use a computer, after all, isn’t it? To do things?

That’s why everyone else uses them, and we as developers can’t loose sight of that fact. If everyone wanted to be a programmer they would have done so; they didn’t, which is why they hire us. WE know and learn the details because it interests us. THEY just want to get this damn report filed so they can go home and watch some Wipeout and have a beer. And you know what? There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that; I’m that way a fair amount of the time, as well. I bet you are too.

Human beings have a limit amount of brain processing power, and most of us would like to reserve that for what’s most interesting or dear to us. Ever tried to explain IP address to a non-tech relative? If not, don’t. They won’t absorb much, if anything, and you’ve done nothing but waste both of your time.* They’re just going to ask the same questions next time things stop working.

Doing things the hard way because it’s good for you isn’t an excuse the majority of the population will accept. Bottom lines and grandmothers alike could care less if you can change your IP address, reroute traffic to a different server, and patch the kernel from a single command line. Congratulations! You’ve wasted an hour getting all those switches right, when a GUI would have taken 15 seconds, tops.** (Okay, maybe not to patch a kernel)

On the contrary, those of us in tech should be proud our efforts have reached the point where “Get the hell out of my way and let me do the interesting stuff” is a perfectly acceptable usage model.

* [tech_cliché] Even more so when you realize you’ve just become the family tech support line [/tech_cliché]

** Not to give the impression I hate or can’t use a Command Line. I actually love it, in some cases. But when I have something I’m actually trying to do, let me focus on the task at hand. Don’t make me stop to look shit up in a man page.

…the ultimate form of irony when the setup of a popular C/C++ LINT program crashes with an Access Violation when it tries to dereference a null pointer?

This video posted over at Microsoft’s Channel9 is a great watch for any Visual Studio C++ developers. The comments at the end alone are a rollar coaster of emotions*, as Craig and Mohsen seem to hint and not-hint at what is and is-not going to be in the next version of Visual Studio. The question and half-coy answer both seemed to hint at the same thing: Unit Tests.

Unit Tests in Visual Studio was the most hard-advertised feature of VS2008, but the only one left out of the party were the natives. Even those over in C++/CLI land (no offense lads) began testing to their hearts content, while the natives get to forage for grass and tidbits- I mean… – use a non-integrated solution**.

While not actually saying anything, they seemed at first to try to not break our hearts; sorry, it’s just too hard without any value resounded throughout the room. Just a minute before the end, though, Mohsen hinted at something big on the horizon; something Native-Only for a release (maybe two?). What could it be?

My interest is officially piqued.

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* Well, maybe I’m a little too attached to my IDE.
** googletest is by-far the best I’ve used here

Time to dust off this blog after a little time off. I could give excuses for my lazyness, but why bother?

Instead, here’s a little goody I wrote today: a Visual Studio macro. Nothing amazing, but it was nice to re-acquant myself with both Visual Basic.NET, and Visual Studio’s Macro environment. Hopefully after this refresh, I’ll be more confident in adding more macros that accomplish these 4- or 5-step tasks that I feel should be one-step.

Here’s what the macro does: it takes the current editor document, looks to see if there is a .ui file (Qt Designer’s XML format) with the same name and path, and launches Qt Designer with the file if its found in the solution. See? Not painful (programming in VB is always a little painful, though).


Sub OpenQTDesigner()
    If DTE.ActiveDocument Is Nothing Then
        Return
    End If

        Dim p As New System.Diagnostics.Process
        p.StartInfo = info
        p.Start()
    End If
End Sub


This interesting story appeared on Slashdot a couple days ago. In summary, according to Italian law, YouTube is now a Television station. The editorial impact of this is described in the article, but what caught my attention was this last bit:

It must be good to be the Prime Minister. Have a pending court case? Just change the classification of the defendant and get save yourself the hassle from your last legal blow.

Does NO ONE in the Italian government not see the conflict of interest?

Here at home, instead of spending all our political rage trying to budge the lobbyists, how about we create one simple law any politician must follow: To be elected, you must never have been the CEO, or served on the board or directors, for any major coorporation making more than $500 million* annually. Or will a “CEO Preservation Lobby” suddenly spring up?

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* Number chosen completely arbitrarily