A cautionary tale from the iPhone market in which a successful app developer discovered that an unscrupulous development house included his product in their portfolio.

I can attest that this happens. I have had direct experience with a component that, in retrospect, was almost certainly stolen and reverse-engineered. When confronted with irrefutable proof that an identical component was in the hands of a competitor, the Indian subcontracting company said “Wow! They must have stolen our component!” (There’s no proof they were lying, but the circumstantial evidence was substantial.)

Registax needs a VFW H264 compressor in order to process video from the Vado HD camera. After installing DTS x264 Vfw 01.22.2007 things seem to work.

Complex derivatives are “intractable” — you can’t tell if they’re being tampered with - Boing Boing.

Determining if a “Collateralized Debt Obligation” was tampered with is a “densest subgraph” problem, which is NP-Complete. Which is a fine thing to depend a global economy on.

I had put off buying a telescope my entire adult life because I knew that you had to spend a good amount of money for quality and that, when it comes to a hobby that revolves around fleeting glimpses of faint and fuzzy objects, you must have confidence in your equipment.

But, I couldn’t forever ignore my easy access to one of the premier dark sky sites in the world. Once you’re resigned to spending enough money for a quality scope, there’s another tension: aperture versus convenience. On the one hand, Dobsonian-mount reflectors are inexpensive per inch of aperture. On the other hand, they’re bulky. I knew that I didn’t want to fall down the rabbit hole of aperture fever, so I decided to get a high-quality refractor.

Considerable research led me to a 102mm Stellarvue ED. I have been absolutely blown away by this scope. But something happened in mid-October — the scope must have been jarred during the ride back from Mauna Kea — and an element in the focuser fell off.

After posting a plaintive “Can I fix this myself?” post on the Stellarvue Yahoo group, Vic Maris of Stellarvue directly contacted me, said “Call me up to talk about this,” walked me through a quick check of the problem on the phone, and then said “Send it in and we’ll take care of it.”

Two weeks later I received a package back from Stellarvue containing an entirely new focuser. Invoice: $0.

I don’t know how long it will be before I buy another refractor, but when I do, it will be from Stellarvue.

HTML is typically formatted to show structural containment:

<h1>Topic</h1>
   <p>Some paragraph.</p>
   <p>Next para.</p>
   <ul>
      <li>item 1</li>
      <li>item 2</li>
   </ul>

Code is typically formatted to show flow-of-control:

node = tree.append "Topic 1"
node.append "Some paragraph."
node.append "Next para."
list = tree.append "Unordered"
items.each { | i |
   list.append i
}

One reason that tag-based languages can lead to such confusing pages is that they are often formatted both ways:

<h1>Topic</h1>
   <p>Some paragraph.</p>
   <p>Next para.</p>
   <ul>
      <% items.each { | i | %>
         <li><%= i =></li>
      <% } %>
   </ul>

The purpose of formatting is to make structure apparent, not to slavishly increase the amount of whitespace in the world. Since the page is primarily the UI designer’s domain, I think that flow-of-control ought not to be indented in tag-based pages:

<h1>Topic</h1>
   <p>Some paragraph.</p>
   <p>Next para.</p>
   <ul>
      <% items.each { | i | %>
      <li><%= i =></li>
      <% } %>
   </ul>

I’ve tried to make the difference more explicit in this image. Note how the 2nd sample, which combines indenting styles, has control-flow indenting (in blue) which I recommend eliminating:

Update: A more programmer-like thought is something alone the lines of “Control-flow on a page ought to be encapsulated,” but I don’t think the design tools of designers are capable of rendering componentized snippets, which I think is why designers are so darned resistant to them.

I have recently finished an engagement with a client and am footloose and fancy free.

If anyone is looking for an excellent developer with an object-oriented bias and a deep belief that to improve productivity teams should concentrate on quality, please drop me a line at lobrien “at” knowing “dot” net. The technologies I most prefer right now are: Ruby, Rails, iPhone using MonoTouch, or C# with ASP.NET MVC. However, I’m very comfortable and have experience ranging from “some to extensive” with most major technologies.

Additionally, I am hoping to continue working with some colleagues with whom I have been collaborating on recent projects. These are developers who are highly productive, committed to quality, and responsible.

Here’s my CV on Stack Overflow Careers: http://careers.stackoverflow.com/lobrien

Google Code Blog: Introducing Closure Tools.

Given Google’s resources, goals, and products, this automatically becomes a leading candidate as a “standard library” for developers doing JavaScript work (i.e., anyone working with the Web). Not sure of its overlap / incompatibility with other major libraries, but this will definitely reward study.

Introducing Debugging for MonoTouch - Miguel de Icaza.

I’ve been very impressed by MonoTouch and MonoDevelop for iPhone programming: it’s a great combination of the CocoaTouch APIs (which are very nice) and the C# programming language (which is my favorite mainstream language if you don’t think that Ruby has crossed the chasm). The major challenge has been a lack of debugging. Well, it’s a challenge no more.

In my SD Times column, I said that (even without debugging) “MonoTouch is the best entry point for C# developers interested in seeing what all the hubbub is about.”

The 15th anniversary of the release of Design Patterns led to the following interviews:
Design Patterns 15 Years Later: An Interview with Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, and Ralph Johnson
Grady Booch on Design Patterns, OOP, and Coffee

I posted two old articles that were perennial Google link-bait:

Genetic Algorithms in C#

Programming Sabre in C#, Java, and XML

I’d lost the articles as part of switching from DasBlog to WordPress.

/hosts is defeated using MacSpeech Dictate. Well, that was not very successful first sentence, was it?

This blog post is being dictated using MacSpeech Dictate. That’s more like it.

I am using the jawbone Bluetooth headset, connected to my Mac. Actually, the word was “A.” not “the” in the previous sentence.

In general, I am not a great fan of voice dictation software, which often has both gross mistakes where nonsensical words are returned and fine mistakes, where short connecting words are lost or transposed. This is all okay,. Sigh. This is all a pity, because it certainly seems like composition by dictation would be an enormous productivity boost for a writer.

I’ve been using voice dictation software for, let’s see, something in excess of 15 years. I first reviewed voice dictation software when I was working for the magazines, and I left in 1996. I think I first reviewed Dragon for AI expert Navy from (? — I have no idea what I actually said) 1992.

It’s Almost always been just like it is now, where as soon as you think “okay that’s an acceptable level of performance,” you get results like the last paragraph. You really can’t turn away from the screen, lest you risk some catastrophic recognition problem.

The other thing that is really frustrating is that you don’t realize how much composition is not stream-based. When the voice recognition software makes a mistake, navigating back to it then jumping to the end of the document has always been, in my experience, a frustrating experience. Given that there’s probably some amount of correction going into 80 percent of the sentences you write, whether because of transcription error or simply because you want to rephrase, any problems with navigation are a big deal.

I think that is as far as I will go with this blog post. Your mileage may vary.

Manual corrections for legibility in red.

I don’t know if this is new to Snow Leopard, but I just paired my Jawbone Bluetooth headset with my Mac Pro desktop as the input/output audio device and it works! Sound quality for playback is not great (I don’t think I’ll be listening to much music this way), but it sure beats a USB headset for video conferencing and voice dictation. I’ll be setting up my MacDictate speech profile now.

Instructions: Basically nothing to it. Turn on Bluetooth on your Mac. Press and hold both buttons on the Jawbone to make it discoverable.

Quicken 2006 doesn’t run under Windows 7 and there will not be a Mac version until 2010.

I can’t get Hugs or Mercurial running under Snow Leopard due to architecture incompatibilities (32- vs 64-bit) in various support libraries. It’s frustrating wasting so much time downloading, building, tracking dependencies, etc. Especially since these are both essentially optional tools, and not directly related to the bottom line.

Update: According to Ports wiki :

An installation of MacPorts and the ports installed by it are only designed to work on a single OS release and a single CPU architecture. If you upgrade to a new OS version (e.g. from Leopard to Snow Leopard) or migrate to a new machine with a different type of CPU (e.g. PowerPC to Intel), you may get lucky and have your ports keep working, but in general, things will break.

And the solution is “reinstall all your ports”. Argh.

I just uploaded a MonoTouch tutorial porting Sadun’s Recipe 2-1 (Stepwise Subviews) to MonoTouch. Let me know if you find it useful.

On the 24th of October 2009, at 8.00am (GMT +10) Townsville, Queensland Australia time, thousands of people from all over the world are participating in the world’s largest “single moment in time” photographic project.

That translates into Noon this Friday in Hawaii. I am trying to think of something appropriate — maybe an underwater shot.

Read more at http://www.heapfo.com/oneclickonepic.htm

The FTC recently produced new rules governing disclosure for bloggers and other “word-of-mouth-advertisers.” Basically, the take-away is that a blog, Tweet, Facebook, Amazon review, etc. is now viewed as a paid endorsement if you receive the product from the manufacturer for free. Okay, fair enough. But the FTC “does not consider reviews published in traditional media…to be sponsored advertising messages.” The Commission believes that “knowing whether the [traditional] media entity that published the review paid for the item in question would not affect the weight the consumers give to the reviewer’s statements.”

As a guy who makes maybe a grand a year reviewing stuff for traditional media, this strikes me as wrong (and unfair). There is an enormous disparity in the review policies of traditional media. At one extreme you have Consumer Reports, with a famously rigorous policy of avoiding vendor influence, at the other you have, say, dive travel magazines where you can find “reviews” written by advertising representatives! Such policies are not obvious to readers and are relevant to their judgment. On the matter of fairness, what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander: drawing lines between “old” and “new” media is a sucker’s game.

It doesn’t make sense to me that in a review published in this blog, I am legally obligated to add a line that reads, say, “I received a free copy of this book” but that very same line doesn’t have to appear if I write the review for my column in SD Times. It’s not the obligation to “clearly and conspicuously” disclose in the blog that I object to, it’s that traditional media are exempt from disclosing the exact same “material relationship” between the manufacturer and the reviewer.

I plan on writing a little “standard disclosure” page that reveals the (I hope not surprising) fact that I receive a lot of books, software, and conference registrations for free. I’ll link to that when I write reviews in my blog. I don’t see why a similar disclosure of review policies is a burden for traditional media.

But you tell me: when you read or view a review in traditional media, does the knowledge of whether the product was paid for affect the weight you give the review?

Erik Meijer, an excellent lecturer and one of the smartest people at Microsoft, is giving a 13-part lecture series on “Functional Programming Fundamentals.” It begins here.

I am absolutely positive this will be worth the time invested. I just listened to the first lecture, ordered the textbook, and fired up MonoDevelop to do the homework from the first lecture…

Update: That was fun. It highlighted that I don’t know LINQ as well as I ought: I spent more time trying to deal with flattening lists than with the quicksort algorithm…

Young Denis grew up to be every client you’ll ever develop software for:

Ted Neward wonders “Where is this decade’s Access?” From 2007: same question, For me, Rails was the answer.

There are two issues: one is the ease with which a person with some knowledge can solve some (relatively simple) task (the classic “build a doghouse” project). If I want to build a doghouse on the Web, I’ll do it in Ruby on Rails (in part because I always want the option of evolving it into a more sophisticated structure).

The other issue is the bridge between power-users and programmers.  Although I suspect that most people with an interest in computers would “get” Python or Ruby and might be intrigued enough to learn how to build doghouses, I think that the reality is that PHP has become the dominant bridge — it’s the Basic, dBase, VB, Access, etc. of the Web. Almost every resume from young programmers I’ve seen in the past few years includes some reference to PHP.

For almost 50 years we’ve seen programming languages succeed and fail. But no one talks about the lessons to be learned from that. Everyone just wants to walk through the carnival, gaping at the pretty lights and giving up their money to the hucksters.