robkeeney

Official crime figures show the UK also has a worse rate for all types of violence than the U.S. and even South Africa - widely considered one of the world's most dangerous countries.

Not too well, I see. If you don't punish crime, you'll get more of it, and the Brits seem to have thoroughly given up the idea of punishing crime (but they'll smack you down right quick if you try to defend yourself).

So, over a week ago the driver side power window on my "junk" van that I drive to work quit working and of course, it was rolled down. Now, all that time that it wasn't working, it was raining every day, so I couldn't drive it -- can't leave it in the parking lot soaking up rain all day. I had to drive the family van. Monday afternoon I got the window motor pulled off the parts van and replaced the dead one on my van. It hasn't rained since, and the national weather service shows only 2 days with just a 50% chance of rain for the next week. Hmmmm....

Well, the obvious conclusion is that broken car windows bring rain. To everybody in the midwest, I'm sorry I didn't fix it earlier. I won't let it happen again. :^)

The programmer's job is to turn interesting problems into boring solutions.

So I have to develop on a *nix box through a Windows desktop PC. Plain terminal emulation is no fun (who wants to develop in vi?). Through the magic of open source, I don't have to and neither do you! Here are the simple steps to follow:

1. Install Cygwin including Cygwin/X — download the installer, make sure the xinit package is selected in the things to install, and hit go!
2. Install PuTTY and enable X forwarding in your session settings. PuTTY will automagically set your DISPLAY environment variable correctly.
3. Start your X server (Start -> Programs -> Cygwin/X -> XWin Server ) — you may want to copy this to your Startup group so it runs whenever you log in.
4. Use PuTTY to connect to your *nix box and fire up an X Windows program — remember to "amp it off".

Your X program should pop up on your desktop and look just like it's running locally — the beauty of X!

So, night before last it seems our DSL modem got fried by lightning. I just ordered a new one which should be here by Monday. No internet at home until then, but we are going to the in-laws for the weekend anyway, so no big deal. I am going to get a surge suppressor though...

An exciting rum & coke.

...and the journalists who've blindly parroted the FUD.

You may have seen all the fear mongering in the press lately about the state of our GPS satellites. You may have even seen it on certain church "news-related" web sites as evidence of the coming prophesied dominance of Europe.

Well. Cringley proves that journalists are worthless. Since when is parroting press releases "providing the knowledge necessary to manage life in a complex world", which our intrepid media lawyers assure us it takes "real journalists" to do? I've read way too many "news stories" that were nothing more than minor rewording of a press release, and more than a few that were press releases out right. Big newspapers are dead and deservedly so. The sooner the corpses are interred, the better.

Journalism is still being done these days, but it's done like this.

When your only goal is to win and hold the position, you're irretrievably lost.

Code clarity results in performance gains.

Code "optimizations" result in bugs.

Knuth was right.

A thought in passing... Properly done object modeling is not a complete modeling in software of all the real-world attributes and interactions of the real-world objects being dealt with. There is (likely) no need to note the color of a mail piece in the software object that represents it. On the other hand, there is frequently a need to add to them entirely conceptual attributes such as synchronization objects (e.g. mutexes, semaphores) or properties such as being a singleton or serialization methods, which have no real world analog. These allow the object to cross into an orthogonal domain from the real world problem domain, and later pop back into it, easing the solution of the real world problem. A sort of conceptual hyper-space jump, you might say. :) Being a mail piece is an entirely different domain from being a synchronization object is an entirely different domain from being serializable to persistent storage.

In the wake of Sunday's post re: journalistic hubris comes the news that the San Jose Mercury News plans to bankrupt themselves.

Don't try to sell me water when you're standing right beside a public water fountain.

Perhaps the most concentrated dose of hubris and self-importance I have ever seen. Major newspapers today serve no one but their own egos. If they provided a valuable product, people would buy it.

Today is the birthday of Austrian economist Friedrich A. Hayek.

So, four pox ridden children aren't so fun. They weren't too bad, but now that evening has come they're getting more restive and grumpy. Bed time soon, I think. But it was a beautiful day to stay home from church. I laid in the orchard for a while and read. The kids played outside a lot. Gwen and I took a little walk through the corn field and picked up a few cobs of corn that were missed, then gave them to the chickens. I also made Chinese steamed yeast rolls. They were neat. Not a bad day overall.

When I got home from work, the power was off. No power means no sump pump. The power came back on at ~1AM. The basement is pumping out, and stuff floats around. :(

This afternoon, we went shopping in Logansport. One of the intended purchases was ducklings at Rural King. They were out of ducklings. They were not out of heavy bodied chicks. We brought home 25. We are true farm folks now; they're in a kiddie pool in the front room. Yes, we have livestock in the house. Six or eight weeks hence: freezer full o' fryers! YUM!

Friday we intend to go to the auction to get some sheep too. Mmmmmm!

A long way ahead. Because of Deuteronomy 21:22-23, the Jews were probably in the habit of asking the Romans to take down the dead bodies of the crucified before sundown on the day they died. So for Joseph of Arimathaea to ask for the body of Jesus was likely very run-of-the-mill to Pilate. This seems to be confirmed in Mark 15:44, where Pilate verifies with the centurion that Jesus is dead, and then grants the request.

Solutions.

So. Properties. Can we be any more lame in pretending to object orientation? They're completely wrong. They're just so idiotic.

That's all for now. There will probably be more later.

Excellent essay on dumb security ideas.
This has a lot of good points. The way we set up computer security these days is like posting a guard a the door who only turns away people he knows he's not to let in. Everyone else gets into your office by default.

Given an object of type Apple and an object of type Knife, how should cut() be implemented?