/bill's House O Insomnia : Misc Technology

Windows Mobile 7.0 Delayed

William — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 13:39:00 GMT

At first glance, the announcement that Windows Mobile 7.0 will be delayed is pretty frustrating. MS has been in the mobile phone game for a while now and it's really hard to argue that Apple didn't get it right with the iPhone. So why can't someone with Microsoft's power get it right a little quicker? One of the main things I would guess is hardware - Windows Mobile is rolled out onto a lot of different devices and that complicates things greatly. With that said though, it's not as disappointing as it may seem. Perhaps the biggest frustration with Windows Mobile has been the browser and as the article states, there's going to be a better one released well in advance of 7.0. The flashy screen that's responsive and easy to navigate is the other big issue and there are already several providers coming out with UI's that rival the iPhone. 6.1 was far from perfect but did a decent job bridging the gap and well, if both of those issues are addressed in a timely manner, it'll go really far into mitigating any frustration related to the postponement of 7.0. Truth is, when 7.0 comes out, it needs to make a Huge splash. It doesn't need to just be good, it needs to be great. And it needs to be visibly better than anything iPhone. Being that MS can't afford to get that wrong, it's understandable (yet no less disappointing) that they are taking the 'better safe than sorry' strategy.

Using Facebook to launch a Botnet army

William — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 17:07:41 GMT

Wired has a piece talking about how easy this would be to do. It's not entirely speculative since researchers built such a beast. I think the hype is a bit much though. The argument they make could be made for any mechanism that can get people to install software on their own computers. But unlike most other means, such an attack seems really easy to countermeasures. It wouldn't take long to figure it out and Facebook could easily send out a notice telling you to uninstall it. Much like human viruses, computer viruses and botnets are only really effective if they are allowed to exist in the infected host for a period of time, at least long enough to spread in the case of viruses, or long enough to be used in the case of botnets. I'm not so naive to think that some Facebook users aren't all that computer savvy, but overall I think it's a demographic that's fairly sophisticated. And they talk to each other a lot. Even if every facebook users downloaded the app (something really hard to fathom), it seems it would be pretty easy to eradicate. The more popular and more pernicious the bots, the more buzz there would be. That's not to say they don't raise some good points and that Facebook shouldn't try to prevent such things from happening, but it seems like it's only worrisome in the theoretical sense.

Rescuing the Hubble

William — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 15:54:15 GMT

Kudos to the Boston Globe for providing such high quality and just kick a55 pics of the mission to repair the Hubble telescope.

Chrome's EULA

William — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 15:32:30 GMT

Yah, I'm probably like the 10 trillionth person to post about it, but until now I hadn't really had a chance to look at it. This morning Gizmodo had a piece on it which definitely makes you shake your head thinking WTF. However like most things, I'm guessing that there's a huge gulf between 'reserving the right' to something and actually using that right. Additionally, I'm guessing a lot of this is just legal CYA. For instance, they could want access to information you post on a blog for efficiency purposes (being privy to it directly instead of having to crawl for it later) and just use language like this to avoid battles over the content. Then again, i'm just speculating as I'm not a lawyer and have no clue.

I decided to search around and see how much was written about this and as of the time of this post, the terms "Chrome EULA Controversy" returned over 7,430 hits if taken together and well over 15k if you leave out the quotes. And if you've been following this then you no doubt are aware that Google capitulated and is taking all the yucky stuff out. If you're trying to roll out a new product and have a big impact, then you definitely wouldn't want the type of press Google was getting over this.

Their quick capitulation is some food for thought though. the most likely answer is that they didn't really think they were doing anything bad b/c they weren't intending to use it, it's boilerplate etc etc. So it's no sweat off of their backs to just get rid of it. If you wanted to be conspiracy minded about it (I can only imagine for instance the Cow Alex Jones is going to have over it), it wouldn't be hard to imagine that they threw it out there, willing to take it back but more than willing to use and abuse it if public outcry wasn't too bad. I'm guessing there's a small shred to that theory but little more.

All in all though, I think Chrome's introduction is a good thing. Firefox kicked off a ferocious battle that led to IE becoming a much better browser. With another major player entering the market (and one that certainly has gotten under MS' skin when it comes to search), I'm guessing MS will pull some rabbits out of hats with IE 8 and when the dust settles, we'll see some awesome functionality. In the meantime, I like Chrome ok, but still sticking with IE for the foreseeable future.

Create a Mobile office with Windows Mobile

William — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 12:23:20 GMT

With such a compelling title, I figured the article would be quite intriguing.

I've had a lot of phone drama recently, dropping my WM 6.1 Dash and breaking it, leaving the replacement on the roof of my car and driving off, buying another imate but dropping it into a diet coke. So I reverted back to my old beloved Voq. A coworker of mine got in iPhone and hacked it up so it would play relatively nice with T-Mobile. He wanted to get rid of it though so I ended up buying it off of him (I can almost hear Sahil gloating now). Shortly afterward, I received a Samsung i780 as a gift so I've mainly been switching between the two (I still can't get the iPhone to work with my T-Mobile data service which gets frustrating). I mention this b/c while the Dash was a pretty nice phone, it really didn't perform all that well. In fact, it was often frustrating. The 6.1 Flash made it a lot nicer but it still was rather slow compared to an iPhone. I had gotten rid of my original iPhone before I really got a chance to use it b/c at first, i didn't like it. After using it regularly for a while though, I'll admit that its usability is very impressive. Its frozen up on my twice in about a month and a half (with heavy usage) compared to the daily freezes I experienced with the Dash. The comparison isn't completely fair b/c hardware wise, the dash is a lot cheaper. And so I guess I'll just come out and concede that Sahil was right, with respect to consumer features, the iPhone provides a much better experience even when you factor in hardware differences. 6.1 mitigates some of that, but there's still a way to go.

Although the iPhone's screen is quite responsive, I think I still prefer an actual keyboard. Unless I'm extremely careful, I almost always spend more time correcting stuff then I do typing when what I'm working on is more than a sentence. Away from that though, there's the Push with Exchange and Sharepoint integration (which surprisingly, I find myself using quite a bit). B/c I don't have wireless Internet on the iPhone, it might be a bigger deal than it should be but AFAIK, Push/Exchange isn't available on iPhone yet. Another really annoying thing w/ iPhone that makes Windows Mobile more 'business friendly' is copy and paste. I never realized how much I used it until I lost it. And I guess I end up using copy/paste much more when I'm mobile then at work b/c typing is still not much fun but being able to quickly edit Excel sheets and paste stuff from word to Outlook and vice versa is huge. And I don't know if it's a true iPhone limitation again b/c I don't have my gprs, but I don't see any way to do internet sharing - from what I can tell, it's not doable with standard USB or Bluetooth.

As far as development goes, well, I'll give Apple some props for the iPhone SDK and I can't say I've spent more than a grand total of 15 hours trying to build stuff with it, but all else being equal, I still think that if I had to build any sort of critical business application, the compact framework not only makes it an easier trip, but it opens up a lot more doors. I don't want to run my big mouth too loudly b/c some of what appear to be limitations may just be limitations with my familiarity of the SDK, but I'm pretty sure that WCF integration is off the table with the iPhone, as is MapPoint / LiveEarth. Same seems to be the case for connecting w/ Sql Server or Oracle although the local db solution offered by Apple does the job pretty well.

At the end of the day, i can say I've really grown to like the iPhone and well, I already like Windows Mobile, even with some of the performance issues that would drive me nuts at times. But I find myself using them for totally different purposes other than of course, to talk. In the same way that I use my UMPC totally differently from my laptop, I find myself switching between these phones the same way. It'll be interesting to see how things develop b/c there's no doubt Microsoft is going to use Silverlight to greatly enhance user experience w/ Windows Mobile 7 and it's a similarly safe bet that Apple is going to try to make the iPhone better at business applications. For now, I'm just really glad I can swap out a SIM card and use whichever I want b/c having to make a firm choice between one or the other would be a real bummer.

WCF to the rescue

William — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 23:41:23 GMT

Although part of the idea below was mine, James Ashley was crucial to helping me figure this out.

Problem:

Without getting into the ghoury details, we have an application that allows users to send messages to large groups of people. Anyone using a client application that is logged on will get a special notification which they can respond to once a message is sent. So far, Polling has been the bane of our existence. We're trying to fancy up the UI and Telerik's Winforms controls have helped out a lot, but there's simply no way I've been able to find to have a snappy UI with a lot of really cool looking effects - all the while polling every few seconds. Until now, I just bit down, and took a walk through multi-threadedville.

I wanted to remove the polling. We had experimented with a few different architectures, but all had the same problem, polling. So let's say you had 200 users logged on. In the User's bar, we wanted to show each user and their picture - much the same way IM does. This app had to work across network boundaries and you couldn't count on being able to use TCP so we had to at least make it work with http. If you poll every three seconds, to get the latest info on who's logged on and off, rebuilding the list of user's was painful. We resorted to several tricks to determine if a user was already in the list, but all of it was putting lipstick on a pig.

Solution:

One of the big things you often hear about with WCF is self-hosting. I had ignored it for the most part. But today, I wanted to basically have a Winforms app host one service, and a Windows Service host the other part of the service, having the services talk to each other. The client winforms app would simply talk to the client service, it would never hit the Windows Service directly.

So we built a client service and server service, with a client winforms app hosting the client service and a mock Windows Service (which was simply another winforms app) that hosted the service.

The problem we kept running into is as each client signed on to the system, how could we tell the server svc that they were online? Dynamically adding endpoints is child's play, but with each winforms app, you could only interact with the ServiceHost - not the service.

We tried using traditional events to no avail - that wasn't a surprise but we figured it's worth a try. Then James recommended a static event. I was completely skeptical, but alas it worked.

After looking at Juval's framework though, it became really clear. If we want the services to be able to interact with the hosts, then simply self-host the things.

So we had a method called ReceiveMessage which was called from the service (via a client proxy for the client service). Here's basically what the client looked like:

public partial class Form1 : Form, IClientService
{
    public Form1()
    {
        InitializeComponent();
    }

    ServiceHost currentHost = null;
    private void btnStartService_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
        currentHost = new ServiceHost(typeof(Form1));
        try
        {
            currentHost.Open();
            lblServiceStatus.Text = "Started";
        }
        catch (Exception ex)
        {
            lblServiceStatus.Text = ex.Message;
        }
    }

    public string ReceiveMessage(string msg)
    {
        String myMessage = msg;
        MessageBox.Show(myMessage);
        return msg;
    }

....

Now, from the Administrative application (which interacted with the service, you could Send a message by doing the following:)

private void btnSend_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
      proxy = new ClientServiceClient(new NetNamedPipeBinding(), endpoint );
      try
      {
          proxy.ReceiveMessage(rtbMessageText.Text);
      }
      catch (FaultException ex)
      {
          lblServiceStatus.Text = ex.Message;
      }
}

ClientServiceClient is a stupid name for a client proxy class, but we were just experimenting - the main thing to note is that it's simply a proxy class for the client service, the same service that's effectively being hosted by the Winforms client. There's a server method called SendMessage(String msg) which you'd call on the service, which in turn would dynamically add endpoints for each active client , and then send the messages to them.

You can easily store all the information for clients you want to send messages to in a List<> or similar structure - or if you need stronger persistence or have different needs, then you can use a database. Either way the end result is the same - loop through all the clients, add an endpoint for each one, loop through each and call the method you want.

I'm having trouble getting to my ftp server from where i'm at, but I'll post the code when I can. In the meantime, if you're interested, just drop me a line.

Utter Coolness compliments of Roku

William — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 20:01:14 GMT

My first Roku Soundbridge joined the family back in 2005. As far as wireless media players go, it was a bit pricey. But it looked really cool and I got it through a special offer making it a lot more reasonable. The form factor and styling was the main thing I attributed the cost to, but I quickly learned that it was all the cool features that were responsible for the cost. That was pretty much the case with each Roku product I've owned, they looked really cool and had all sorts of unanticipated goodness brimming throughout. With Windows Home Server, an XBox 360 as an extender and a few Media Center pc's in the house, it's been a while since I looked at any Roku products, mainly b/c I just didn't really need them - one network media player is usually plenty, let alone several. But when I saw Endgadget's latest post on the sheer coolness of Roku, it made me realize what I was missing.

So at first glance, it looked like Roku came up with a streaming media player which served up content from Netflix. I always found Netflix's pre-addressed envelopes a really nice touch - and a convenient one at that. But Every time I've signed up for Netflix, it ended up being a waste of money b/c I don't typically get around to watching many movies in any given month. So I've signed up a few times only to cancel my account b/c of lack of use (Kim and I just can't seem to let go of paying for movie rental late fees ;-) ). After the third or fourth time, i just sort of gave up on the whole thing. By the second sentence in this paragraph, I realized it's time to rethink that policy - and go enable my subscription.

Roku is a truly innovative company with nothing but cool products, but it looks like they might have just raised their own bar.

Looking for some .NET Developers

William — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 02:19:26 GMT

A client of mine located in the Aiken/Columbia South Carolina Area has asked me if I had any friends who are .NET Developers and looking for a job. They are looking for at least one Junior Developer, on Mid-Level Developer and several Senior developers. I know these folks quite well and I can vouch for the following:

They pay extremely well
Generous benefits package
There's plenty of cool people on their staff
They are growing at an explosive rate so there's plenty of room for upward mobility. There's also a very strong focus on learning/teaching and career development.
They are an Agile/SCRUM shop
Currently developing with the following technologies:

Visual Studio Team System 2008 / .NET 3.5 Framework
Windows Communication Foundation
Windows Presentation Foundation
ASP.NET
LINQ
Silverlight
Windows Mobile 5/ Windows Mobile 6/ .NET Compact Framework
Sql Server 2005 / Sql Server 2008
Windows Installer for XML
Sandcastle

If you're in the area and looking for a job... if you know someone who looking for a job.... or if you're willing to move, please drop me a line using the Contact option on my blog or emailing me directly at WilliamRyan@gmail.com and I'll put you in contact with them. They are looking to hire folks immediately so I can probably get you an interview within a few days.

Junior Developer:

Ideal candidate will be a recent college graduate with a Computer Science of MIS degree. No experience is necessary for this position. The main soft-skill qualifications for this position are:

A true love for development
Strong desire to learn
A desire to stand out among one's peers

The hard-skill qualifications include a good theoretical understanding of at least two of the following:

Object Oriented Design and Analysis
Relational Database theory
Design Patterns
Familiarity with at least two of the following: C, C++, Java, C#, VB.NET

This is essentially a dream job for recent college grads b/c the job is being offered "no experience required". Since they are a SCRUM/Agile shop, you'll get to work extensively with their Senior and Mid level devs via Pair Programming. You'll be able to pick an area to specialize in which you will decide on for yourself. Additionally, you'll be using some of the most sought after Microsoft technologies available. Go to Monster.com or Dice.com and see for yourself how much demand there is for the above technologies and how much those jobs pay. You'll get to work with these on day 1 and essentially carve out a path for yourself using whichever technologies you like the best. If you want to be a "UI" expert, that's where you'll be put. If you want to be a Web Services dev, again, that's what you can focus on. If you want to be an expert buildmaster who specializes in installers, that's what you'll get to do. The company is looking for some excellent candidates and willing to offer a really fun and great paying job with plenty of training and career development available.

Mid-Level Developer:

The ideal candidate will have a computer science or MIS degree and 1-3 years of development experience. The ideal candidate will have two or more the following abilities:

Solid command of OOP/OOD using C++, C#, Java or VB.NET
Test Driven Design
Service Oriented Architecture
Familiarity with MySql, Sql Server (T-SQL), Oracle (PL/SQL)
Basic understanding of both Winforms and ASP.NET
Basic familiarity with Web Services, MSMQ, Enterprise Services/COM+, .NET Remoting, DCOM, J2EE, Java Beans

Just like the Junior development positions, these ones will provide a great deal of flexibility to learn and specialize the area of your choice. These are considered 'fast track' positions to move into the Senior Developer or Architect roles

Senior Developer:

The ideal candidate will be someone with at least 4 years experience. This person will love challenges and love coming up with solutions to problems that other people run from. They will be people that love figuring out how to do things that everyone else said can't be done. They will be the stereotypical Alpha-Geek, Someone that spends their spare time answering quiz questions like these:

All of the requirements for the Mid-Level Developer as well as several of the following skills:

Proficiency with T-Sql or PL/SQL. You should be able to write a 5 table join on your own. You should have written several stored procedures that were > 100 lines long.
Strong command of query tuning and ability to easily spot design flaws
Ability to design 'real' objects.

Someone who pays meticulous attention to the scope modifiers of their classes/functions/properties
Someone who understands the problems associated with coupling and strives to avoid it.
Someone who can write and use events in their classes without thinking twice about it.
Someone with a solid understanding of thread safety and thread synchronization
Someone who is comfortable using several different design patterns
Someone who is comfortable implementing several different interfaces in one object, using combinations of interface implementation and inheritance and someone who can use inheritance responsibly

Keeps up with technology, reads computer books regularly, has favorite blogs in multiple disciplines and/or blogs themselves, attends or speaks at user's groups, is active in one or more online forum or newsgroup
Someone who answers "Which is better, C# or VB.NET?" with "Either can be better depending on the circumstances but I'm comfortable writing in either of them" and then "But I've been learning F# lately and it's really been growing on me"
Experience with .NET Remoting, Web Services & Web Services Enhancements, MSMQ, Enterprise Services and/or WCF
Ability to create syntactically correct UML diagrams (meaning they can do more than write the letters "UML" on their resume) and if not, they are willing to learn to do this.
Understands data structures solidly and could easily implement their own HashTable or LinkedList
Someone who's always looking to come up with a newer, cooler, faster, and more secure way to do implement something
Experienced with either Biztalk server or Sharepoint
Takes pride in their code without falling in love with it or getting all defensive about it. Ability to acknowledge the fact that everyone makes mistakes and can talk about their mistakes/bugs without getting defensive.
Someone who is the first to raise their hand whenever the boss says "I need someone to learn ____________, do I have any volunteers"

Basically, if you love development, love creating new cutting edge solutions all the while making a lot of money and having a lot of fun you definitely should talk to these folks. If you're interested...... Please drop me a line using the Contact option on my blog or emailing me directly at WilliamRyan@gmail.com and I'll put you in contact with them.

How cheap are SMS messages?

William — Mon, 12 May 2008 19:16:00 GMT

Normally, when you hear a price comparison and the govt is involved, it's some ridiculously expensive item from the govt. However in the case of the cost of SMS messages vs the cost of pulling data from the Hubbell, it's just the opposite it's just the opposite. Hat Tip: http://www.odetocode.com/

The Associated Press' Double Standard

William — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 13:46:00 GMT

Exhibit A

Whether it's legal, illegal, moral, immoral or whatever, it's not a good idea to post stuff on the internet if you don't want people using it without your approval. The main reason is that if someone does use it against your wishes, it's really hard to detect in most cases. By the time you do, it could have been indexed and copied so many times your head would spin. On top of it, attempts at making people take things down usually end up backfiring. Like many bloggers, I've personally found my posts on other people's blogs where they are taking credit for it. It used to annoy me. Then I got ot the point that I figured it's not worth fighting b/c it would require a lot of ongoing energy. My way of dealing with it is usually to create variable names or comments that are self referencing - so basically I give myself the link back. If I wrote something though that I wanted to control, it would not be posted on my blog.

Personally, since I make my living selling intellectual property, I have a tremendous amount of respect to other people's IP. On the other hand, the doctrine of Fair Use is necessary and life without it would not be good. It seems too often there are two extremes that people operate in. On the one hand, if it's on your site, no matter how much legal verbiage you surround it with, they act as though they can take it and do with it what they please. On the other hand, you have folks that post stuff that people reference which clearly falls under the domain of Fair Use and they start making all sorts of noises about it.

If I can digress for a minute. Most of us will require the services of a lawyer at some point or another. When a relative dies, when you buy a house, when you for a corporation etc, you'll typically want to enlist the services of an attorney. On the other hand, most run of the mill folks only have limited dealings with an attorney (cost alone prohibits using a lawyer frequently). I"ve had to use a laywer for a few different things in life but in each case, I needed on for different tasks. I don't ask the guy who did my house closing to run a patent search for me. So I, do not have "a lawyer". That brings me to my little rant point.... "You'll be hearing from my lawyer". Whenver I hear this (I've only heard it twice in reference to something I did, but I've heard people in line at the Verizon store say that twice, and have heard people threaten it on other occassions to random people"), I always think "WTF Ever". To have "my lawyer" typically means that you keep him on retainer. Very few people have enough legal dealings to warrant keeping a lawyer on retainer for indefinite periods of time. So when I hear that, It warrants only a chuckle. Even if you really do have a lawyer, you just sound stupid making such threats. If you are really going to get a lawyer involved, just do it. And whatever you do, don't send ridiculous absurd threatening emails where you threaten frivolous litigation where you mention your big city lawyer over and over again, especially when you don't have a lawyer, lied about everything in your email and don't have the money or grounds to file litigation. You'll just make a fool out of yourself.

Ok, anyway... I think you ought to play it one way or the other, but you can't have it both ways. In order for a site like http://www.snappedshot.com/ to do what they do (Criticize and point out inaccuracies with photo journalism), they really need to show the images at hand. They don't charge money and they aren't presenting it as their own. But if they just referred to the photos at hand, it would really diminish the effect. If they linked to the image, several problems would present themselves as well. But for the Associated Press to say he has no right to do this, and then go and snake "Kristins" photos, that's pretty shameless. Clearly they have a legal department and he doesn't. So they thought they'd just bully him around with their big city lawyers (unlike unemployed nuts who can't live without borrowing money from people and not paying them back). When they needed some images for their story though, they had no problem swiping them. And they were definitely under copyright so they engaged in sheer hypocrisy by doing this.

Silverlight for Windows Mobile

William — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 13:16:00 GMT

Speaking of new features that should help Windows Mobile remain the dominant player in the market, a mobile version of Silverlight is going to be coming down the highway .

The good news:

Expected release is Q2 - 2008
You can use Expression Blend to develop it with. So you won't need a new or additional IDE

The bad news:

It will be Silverlight 1.0

I know, the teeth on that horse you gave me are a little crooked. Response time is really going to be the big factor here... if it's fast and works right, this is going to be a huge, HUGE, feature that will open many doors to mobile development.

The Microsoft® Windows Mobile Line of Business Solution Accelerator 2008!

William — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 13:04:00 GMT

Rob Tiffany has got the details... .

The main features include:

Intelligent resolution awareness
Synchronization Services
Windows Communication Foundations "Store and Forward"
MapPoint
LINQ
Custom Controls
Managed Stored Procedures and Triggers
Notifications and Online Help
Language Switching and Localization

Some of these (WCF, Synchronization Services) are a lot more thrilling than others but all in all it's a great step forward. With that said, I think MS really needs to work on a few things. When the iPhones first came out, I was lucky enough to have one sent to me. I liked it but didn't go gaga over it. After two days, I decided to sell it. I think UI wise, it was far ahead of a typical SmartPhone although the PocketPC edition phones gave it a lot better run for the money. But I know that my opinion is not typical. In fact, most iPhone users who have used or use Windows Mobile are really adamant about the superiority of the UI and usability. I think some of that is b/c they are comparing a 500.00 phone with a much cheaper one in many cases but across the board, the iPhone does probably have the advantage. Having started to toy with the iPhone SDK, I have to admit it's fairly easy to pick up (nowhere near as easy as the Compact Framework) so once more applications come out for it, it will make it all the more attractive to mainstream users. I have a lot of faith in Microsoft though and nothing would please me more than for Windows Mobile 7.0 to work so well that my obnoxious iPhone owning friends will have to pipe down about the greatness of the iPhone. The accelerator however, is definitely a step in the right direction.

Whitney Weaver is now blogging

William — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 21:38:00 GMT

My friend and co-worker,Whitney Weaver is now blogging at the Magenic blog site. Actually, he's been blogging for a little while now, I've just been a bum and not updated my blog in a while. Although he's certainly an up and coming programmer, Whit's main area of expertise is data, so if you're a data guy (or gal), you should check out his site

Interesting Mac iBook story

William — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 21:16:00 GMT

Every time I hear about the TSA, I become more and more convinced that if Darwin's theory is correct, the TSA will cease to exist before long. The latest 'can they really be this stupid?' incident has to do with a Mac Airbook. At first I started thinking along the lines of a corollary to Chris William's 'Grandma Theory'. Maybe the TSA officers weren't dumb and clueless, maybe they were just older and technologically illiterate. But that can't be the case here b/c they clearly know enough about technology to know what a hard drive is and what ports are. They knew enough to think there's something fishy about a computer without a disk drive and ports. That made me start to envision a Cliff Clavenesque know-it-all who is a self-proclaimed computer whiz - trying to look smart in front of his/her peers. It's kind of hard for me to imagine that a TSA agent, unless they just started (and his comments indicate more than one TSA agent was involved), hasn't come across an iBook by now. At a minimum you'd think they would have come across some really thin/small computer that wouldn't have had a disk drive in it.

"I'm standing, watching my laptop on the table, listening to security clucking just behind me," Nygard recalls of the situation. "'There's no drive," one says. 'And no ports on the back. It has a couple of lines where the drive should be,' she continues."

Assuming the reports are true and accurate , this would be hysterical if these people weren't 'protecting' our country (and at ridiculously high union wages). My personal experience with TSA is a lot different. While they are often strange, bitter and/or incompetent, they don't seem technologically clueless. I have a travel bag that I keep my Ultra-mobile, my Zune, Phone, Headphones, USB Hub, a trackball and a few other misc items in. It always causes them to run it through the machine a few times (even when I pull just about everything out). But usually, after they see what all the stuff is individually, they either make some gadget geek joke or ask about one of the items (the most common one is asking if my Zune is 'the new iPod').

I'd just close the hole...

William — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 02:15:00 GMT

There are often times that I read something, typically involving a lawsuit, that I'm shocked people push. Often they are so embarassing, I'd probably pay extortion money to keep the crap quiet if someone threatened to go public about something I did. But instead of trying to keep it quiet and just fixing it, they involve lawyers and threats. NewsFlash - threatening bloggers and web sites backfires. I can say unequivocally, if I was the one that created something this widely used, that brough in this much money and had such a glaring security flaw , I would just fix it quietly. I wouldn't want my name associated with something this moronic and sloppy. I'd be paying bribes to the owner of HowardForums to have him keep it quiet, not threatening him and attracting attention. Actually, I'd do neither. I'd thank him for helping me create a more secure system (then I'd fall on my sword in ritual suicide b/c Gawd this is embarassing)

The Genius that is Frans Bouma

William — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 17:56:00 GMT

I've known Frans for a few years now and he never fails to impress. He is very well learened in many areas and he's speaks with a brutal honesty that's all too rare these days. His little discussion on a few well known mailing lists is so good in so many way but it was actual hard to read. That's because he dished out spoonful after spoonful or brutal honesty and completely valid criticism to a group of folks that are in desperate need of it, but are least likely to accept it. Kudos to Frans for calling a lot of that crap for what it is. Perhaps my favorite part is his discussion of how the word "Waterfall" can make TDD people turn blind. At the end of it, you almost want to send his post to Trey and Matt and ask them to make a Southpark episode about AltDotNet

Is this legal?

William — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 20:15:00 GMT

Bruce Schneier has a new article on a program that Sears is installing on people's computers.

Money quote: "If a kid with a scary hacker name did this sort of thing, he'd be arrested. But this is Sears, so who knows what will happen to them. But what should happen is that the anti-spyware companies should treat this as the malware it is, and not ignore it because it's done by a Fortune 500 company."

The downside to copy and paste

William — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 05:01:01 GMT

As much time as I spend on computers, it's really hard to imagine life without the Clipboard. Copy/Cut/Paste is such a handy feature I couldn't begin to calculate how much time and effort it's saved me. However, it's definitely caused me some problems. Mainly in cases where I've been filling in boilerplate information in templates, I've copied and pasted stuff I shouldn't, or forgotten to replace stuff. Two times in particular come to mind but personally, when it comes to client material or stuff that I'm going to publish, I've sworn off copy/paste completely. It's too easy to use a template from scratch (and ensuring beforehand the template is as empty as possible and uses consistent terms I can search for at the end to ensure I've removed them all). In one case, I had material on the clipboard that didnt' belong there. In the other, I was copying and pasting over an existing document and didn't replace everything correctly, after all it 'looked right'. I ended up with a lot of egg on my face in both cases and it made such an impression, I've fundamentally changed how I work with boilerplate stuff.

I was reading this today and just cringed because I've been there myself. The stuff I screwed up was not anywhere near this important and didn't cause as much damage as this does, but man, it's an easy thing to do until you get burned:

Anyone with a computer probably has cut and pasted sentences or paragraphs while using a word-processing program. The shortcut can save time and simplify a tedious project.

However, when a police officer uses the same technique on a report, it can get messy. Or worse, illegal.

Critics of the practice call cutting and pasting police reports "dangerous" and say it puts the integrity of law enforcement at risk. Others say the technique can be used effectively in certain situations, such as using one report as a template for another and maintaining accuracy.

The issue resurfaced in East Contra Costa earlier this month when a Pittsburg police officer testified in court that he cut and pasted one portion of a witness account onto another in a felony hit-and-run case.

The revelation came three years after two former Pittsburg police officers were convicted of intentionally falsifying drug arrest reports dozens of times in a similar manner. After their termination and six-month home detention, and an internal and independent review, the police chief instituted a new report-writing program that includes software preventing officers from using some cut-and-paste techniques.

"It's a shortcut and I shouldn't have done it," Officer Daniel Pratt said in his recent testimony, before apologizing on the stand.

Read the rest here

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The Bill of Rights in 2007

William — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 03:31:21 GMT

So often when I hear talking heads pontificate about constitutional issues, I hear two basic sides. The first is the strict constructionist interpretation where they claim the constitution is clear as day hence end of discussion. On the other side you have the 'living constitution' side that often acts like anything that is inconsistent with their agenda should just be interpreted away. Whichever side one buys in to, it's hard to argue that rapid technological advances don't really complicate many legal issues. Orrin Kerr examines the United States vs King.

In short, a contractor in Saudi Arabia was connected to a military network. While doing routine patrols of the network, an analyst found some porn and happened to notice a folder named Pedophilia. That prompted him to look further and as it turns out, the folder was accurately labeled. King was arrested and charged. His defense was that the search was illegal. Personally, all normal legal issues aside, i think he should be thrown in jail for being a sick SOB and stupid enough to plug a computer with highly illegal material on it into a military network. It's not like that's material you bring to work to show your buddies and you'd have to know that a military network is likely to be subject to a higher degree of scrutiny than your average office. I know, there are tons of examples of amazing security lapses and incompetence on govt networks, but counting on the fact security might currently be lax is really foolish b/c just b/c it's lax now, who's the say that the next network guy they hire won't be competent? Having experience on two military installations, from what I saw, security was very tight. So much so, that our standard operating policy was "Don't do anything on that network that you wouldn't be ok with if it showed up on the front page of tomorrow's newspaper." And for God's sake, if you're doing something illegal (as well as something that you can rest assured will seriously anger just about any sane human being on Earth), why would you use the naming conventions he did?

All that aside, the case is mighty interesting and such issues are only going to become more and more frequent.

Is she really this stupid?

William — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 04:02:46 GMT

On the one hand, I believe she's being sincere. On the other hand, it's hard to imagine anyone is this much of a moron. "I thought Europe WuZZZZZ a country"? Getting schooled by a 5th grader has to really suck.