brentashley

In England, there’s an expression for everything. I heard one today – sent to Coventry – it means being left out of the communication loop. These idiomatic expressions don’t really travel well. I guess then that in Toronto when communication breaks it’s a given that someone has been sent to Guelph or some such thing.

I think it’s time for these Karate people to soften up their image. Let’s start with some new belt colours.

Saffron
Marigold
Aubergine
Teal
Licorice
Pomegranate

Don’t mess with him – he’s a third-degree Lavender belt!

A very interesting technical paper on Passport, identifying numerous weaknesses.

I have a neighbour who was apparently quite a computer enthusiast all the way up to the 386 and Windows 3.1, but stopped short at the Web because in his words “‘W’ was 06 on mainframe punch cards, so you know what that makes WWW!!” (As it happens, the 0 on Hollerith cards meant +10, so I guess he’s terrified of 16-16-16. Must be some evil lawn fertilizer). He went on to warn against the web being the incarnation of the beast, don’t accept the mark, impending doom, yadda yadda.

Anyhow, knowing that it was the type of conversation I was keen to avoid, I did my usual in such a situation and made sure I was at least knowledgeable of the issues before dismissing it out of hand. So I had a read of the relevant biblical passages.

A local Toronto radio station has a contest to win a car. They give out these cryptic clues and you’re supposed to figure out where in the city they have chosen as the “spot” you’re looking for. I was absolutely certain recently that I’d found the spot. I decided where I thought it was, and from that point forward, I could rationalize every single clue to somehow be pointing right at that spot. Turned out that the place was actually 5 miles away and entirely different, but I was powerfully convinced that the clues pointed to the place I expected they should.

Where was I – oh yeah, Revelations. So, if you read the particular passages that mention the beast, his number, his control of all the languages, how the mark is necessary for all commercial transactions, and all that, while Passport is your selected endpoint, you can have a lot of fun making parallels.

Of course, I put absolutely ZERO credence into it. It’s just a fun diversion. Make what you will of it, preferably nothing.

I can’t believe this (sorry, 3MB) video of Steve Ballmer dancing around at an MS pep rally being a testosterone twit. What a complete freaking idiot. And I thought Larry Ellison was the biggest self-centered fucknut around.

Now that I find this explanation of punchcard codes I note that really 0 is used as a “zone” hole, sort of like ctrl, shift, or alt. I’m not going to correct it above because that would break my fertilizer joke, and I practically peed myself with glee over that one. I’d have to “un-pee” myself, and I don’t quite know how to go about that, so it stays, and damn the pedants.

Pike may think he’s at a disadvantage when he says

I feel I have a bunch of weaknesses in design and fundamentals, because I’m self taught. My main goal now is not only teach myself ASP but to gain a hard background in the theory and why all this stuff works. I can tell you how to make an array call a function and process to it, but I don’t know why. Strange because it seems some developers have trouble saying they need to work on their skills.

but I think he’s at the peak of his form. He’s in the thick of developing a craft. The lust for knowledge is what will drive him to succeed in this. His humility allows him to keep on the road to knowledge, where those who think they’re there already will never get there, because the road ain’t got no end. There is no there. So there.

In 1972, Edsger W Dijsktra wrote a paper for the Association of Computing Machinery and presented it at the Turing Award Lecture at the ACM conference in Boston that year. The paper was entitled “The Humble Programmer”. The gist of it is that a truly good programmer will admit that his cranium will never be up to the task of managing the complexity necessary for many problems, and must call upon the machine to help him. It’s one of the truly classic seminal texts in the history of programming and deserves a good read. Unfortunately, I think it’s hard to find. I have it in a copy of Ed Yourdon’s Classics In Software Engineering, which is unfortunately now out of print.

In programming, fundamentals are way more important than most people know. It’s self-taught guys who really care about the craft who actually learn from the classic teachings of Dijkstra, Yourdon, Jackson, DeMarco, Wirth, Knuth, et al. Sure, some of it washes over huge classes of rote-learning students every day, but it only sticks with those of us for whom programming is a passion.

My all time favourite programming book is Steve McConnell’s Code Complete. If you only ever buy one programming book, this is the one. There’s an entire chapter on personal character, and you’ll be all be pleased to know that laziness is an inherent positive attribute in programmers.

While I’m doing the personal book recommendations thing, get Dale Carnegie’s How To Win Friends And Influence People. It’s all about how being a truly good person will make you successful. Not acting like one – being one.

Another solution looking for a problem. In order to figure out if this is worth anything, not only does this require me to load up their plugin that assumes the self-importance of putting itself in my system tray, all the docs require Acrobat. Reminds me of Soul of a New Machine, where they described kludgy addons as “hanging a bag off the side of the machine”. Using this stuff with your browser is like riding around on a Grand Canyon pack mule. Besides, whether it’s part of some nice design or not, languages with a “let” statement give me the creeps somehow. It’s a je-ne-sais-quoi sort of thing.

A few of us were rapping at lunch about Rap music and we strayed off to discuss the less savoury quarters of that milieu – Gangsta Rap and Eminem. To describe these types of Rap as musical is like describing rape as sexual. It’s not about the medium at all. It’s all about the rage and violence boiling beneath. It disgusts me to the point that I can’t do the usual courtesy of providing links.

Funny, seems every day is somebody or other’s birthday. My wife Clare is [mumblemumble] today. Happy birthday, Clare. Rachel, not yet four, promises to make a cake for Mummy… this i gotta see!

Doc Searls made reference to a great quote on his 54th birthday yesterday:

I’m reminded of what P.J. O’Rourke said about his bad habits. It went something like this: “I know if I quit drinking and smoking and driving fast, I could add ten years to my life. The problem is, I’d be adding them at the wrong end.”

Sjoerd uses a javascript implementation of XML-RPC to do his archive search. Techno-weenie does a similar thing with JSRS. Most cool.

Ironically, the moving target title above applies to both parts of today’s blog…

I was oddly serene today in the strangest of circumstances.

Just after lunchtime, I was rear-ended on Hwy 401 in Toronto.

Now, for those of you who know it, the 401 at Toronto is an imposing stretch of road, sometimes as much as 20 lanes wide, constantly patrolled by traffic helicopters and planes just to let you know where the inevitable numerous accidents are at any one time.

So, the interesting thing is that this didn’t faze me in the least. I calmly got out of the car, surveyed the damage (apparently little to me, but the other car was pretty bunged up). I smiled at the other driver, told her that heck, shit happens. Immediately, we were literally surrounded by a phalanx of tow trucks, all competing for our attention. I didn’t get ruffled by this, I just picked one and let the others know they could leave. Things progressed nicely, we proceeded to the accident reporting center and we were outta there an hour and a half after the accident. I carried on about my business as if nothing happened, called my mechanic, my insurance, set up appointments.

Another day, different shit.

I guess the perspective is that if you have an accident on the 401 and you can still come home and tell your kids about it, you might as well smell the roses along the way, they’re blooming for you.

I released JSRS 2.0 yesterday. Due to popular demand, I gave it POST support for IE/Mozilla.

It seems it’s broken for Mozilla 0.92. I had tested it on an earlier version and it had worked. It now returns undefined when I try to get the document element of an iframe so I can write to it. It also doesn’t let me assign a function to a Select box’s onChange event, which breaks my Select demo.

I can’t tell whether 0.92 is broken in these respects, or whether the Mozilla folks have decided that these previously working features must be changed in order to better conform to the DOM spec.

I could waste a whole bunch of time chasing this with the atrociously nonexistent debugging tools at my disposal, but when I fix it, what are they going to change in

0.93
0.94

0.9998

1.0(ReleaseCandidate)
1.0(ReallyTrulyAlmostReadyToReleaseCandidate)
1.0(JustOverTheNextHillKidsReleaseCandidate)?

COME ON, MOZILLA.ORG, RELEASE THIS FUCKING THING!!! GIVE US A SOLID TARGET TO PROGRAM TO!!!