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bITs and blogs

There's a rule of thumb that is peddled in some (many?) circles of programming that goes a little something like this:
No function should have more than one return.
I'm not sure I understand why that's an effective rule of thumb. As far as I am aware, this rule of thumb was invented during the "structured [...] This post originally appeared on an external website

I just composed about 95% of what would have been a lengthy post about fascism, socialism, a book called The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, intellectual property law, and sociopolitical systems in general. It was probably in the range of 1500 words of text before I accidentally middle-clicked to paste some text just about [...] This post originally appeared on an external website

As reported by ZDNet in an article titled EC: Software is not patentable, the European Commission seems to have reversed its position on software patents. Previously, the European Parliament's decision favoring the invalidation of software patents was ignored by the European Commission, which issued statements suggesting it would use the upcoming Community Patent legislation [...] This post originally appeared on an external website

Do I have any expert Perl hackers in the audience today?
I've been rereading some of what Jonathan Rees has to say about the object oriented programming menu. I've only read this stuff about a half-dozen times before, and I've been reading about the Perl object model recently, so I decided to get another look [...] This post originally appeared on an external website

A discussion of the "whitespace problem" of Python occurred in another venue, and some of what was said there got me thinking. It starts with a complaint about the way Python eschews punctuation, and snowballs from there.
One particular point that came up was the assertion by Pythonistas that using significant whitespace instead of punctuation [...] This post originally appeared on an external website

That just about sums it up for me too. Significant whitespace is a touch easier for a non-programmer to understand, so I can see why those languages are used for instructional purposes. But how hard is it to teach someone that a semicolon functions like a period in a sentence? "End your programming 'sentences' with a semicolon, OK let's move on class." Languages where whitespace is not relevant really tend to introduce only two items, a statement ender (again, typically a semicolon), and a block open/close method (typically a curly brace). Languages that are whitespace sensitive have to introduce mechanisms to let the coder maintain readbility and simultaneously obey the whitespacing. Seeing an underscore (VB/VBA style, to use a sadly familiar example) at the end of a statement introduces absoultely zero value to the statement, while decreasing the readability. To make it worse, in an extremely long statement spanning multiple lines (like an embedded SQL statement; I've written SQL statements that were 28KB of plain text), if the next statement is not popped down another line, it is easy to think that the next statement is part of the first.
To be a bit cynical, if someone can't understand C-style syntax (or something similar) from Day 1, they have no business writing code.
J.Ja

Yeah, there's some truth in that. Whether you like it or not, a C-like syntax is pretty ubiquitous in programming, and you're going to have to learn it sooner or later. Sooner is better, before you get stuck thinking that a syntax like Python's or Pascal's (or worse yet Visual Basic's) is all there is. Ruby is quite suited to beginners because of the fact that it actually makes it possible to use one language to learn a whole range of syntactic styles from Python's ("instructional language" syntax) to Perl's (C-like syntax). Another good approach is Logo, which uses a syntax oddly somewhere between a C-like syntax and a Lisp-like syntax — after all, it's basically just Lisp with a "friendlier" syntactic form. There's quite a lot of value in that, since a person learning to program who wishes to actually be good at it should learn some kind of Lisp eventually anyway.

Speaking of Logo... ever mess with StarLogo? It is interesting, they implemented the Logo concept (functional programming, applied to a mass of items at once) in a Java environment. I used it years ago to disprove a scientist's theories on ant behavior, very interesting system to work with. It is essentially Java with some specialized libraries, but the imperative aspects of Java are hidden "behind the veil" and you just program in a functional-like code into a class, and it basically handles having a list of objects for you. I spent some time doing evolutionary game theory, where functional programming as opposed to imperative programming is the way to go.
J.Ja

I went to sleep at about four-thirty in the morning last night. I was in bed a few minutes before that, but I did a little reading about Perl's canonical object model, using the bless() function and all that nifty built-in class hierarchy stuff. It got me thinking about lexical closures in Perl [...] This post originally appeared on an external website

In another online venue (TechRepublic, to be exact), I often get embroiled in technical discussions gone wonderfully awry. I'm a common counteractant to FUD there, and there are a few others with whom I regularly interact who stalk the discussions to provide the same public service. Then, of course, there are the trolls [...] This post originally appeared on an external website

The IBM Model M keyboard, introduced circa 1984, was the very pinnacle of keyboard construction technology. They are characterized by buckling-spring switch keys with swappable keycaps, a satisfying clicky sound and easily recognizable-by-touch contact threshold, a heavy steel backplate, and enough heft to fell an ox with a single blow coupled with the durability to [...] This post originally appeared on an external website

A man named Larry Elder, sometimes known as "the sage from South Central", and sometimes called "the Antichrist" — and often called any of a number of things between, including "the Oreo" — wrote a book titled The Ten Things You Can't Say In America. Of course, the title is slightly misleading: the word [...] This post originally appeared on an external website

Sterling, aka "Chip", posted an interesting challenge/exercise to his weblog earlier this month. Because I'm a slacker, I haven't gotten around to reading that weblog entry until last night. I do this sort of thing regularly: I "forget" to read much of my regular online reading material for a couple weeks, then I [...] This post originally appeared on an external website

This story is about Windows, not Linux. You won't see any mention of any unixy OSes in this entry, after this. If you didn't already know I use Linux pretty much exclusively at this point, you'd never get that from this entry.
I started with stuff not related to Microsoft. Some old pre-DOS [...] This post originally appeared on an external website

Quotes of Stephen Hawking's recent commentary on the importance of space colonization to the survival of the human race has been making the rounds in the news, in the thousands of weblogs that have taken notice, and in pseudo-intellectual coffee shop banter. The Associated Press wire first carried news of this back on 14 [...] This post originally appeared on an external website

In an entry at Chip's Quips, Sterling discusses the various approaches to software development planning (or not) that have occupied him recently. From his presentation of others' (un)common practices, I get this as a good way to handle things, complete with euphemistic jargon that could cover your arse (aka leverage a common contextual linguistic [...] This post originally appeared on an external website

Last night, I was elected to the Larimer County Libertarian Party Board of Directors. Being on a board of directors isn't a requirement for being old, but I think being old is a requirement for being on a board of directors. I'm now officially old.
Apparently, the board meetings now take place in a [...] This post originally appeared on an external website

What's all this Web 2.0 nonsense about?
I give it about another three years before the term "Web 2.0″ is nearly meaningless. It's already at the "powerful buzzword" phase, which means it's probably just about cresting before heading screaming downhill. That's not to say that it won't enjoy a few more years of increasing [...] This post originally appeared on an external website

Windows finally gets cron without the cygwin unix emulator. It's about time. The Windows Task Scheduler has always been a subpar solution at best, and more often has actually been actively problematic. One of the worst Windows NT vulnerabilities I've ever seen in my life was a result of the necessary conditions for running the Windows Task Scheduler for NT domains. It even looks like the thing is a pretty excellent piece of software. Unfortunately, the free version of this relentlessly proprietary utility is limited to a 45 day trial period and to get a license that is even reasonably useful in a small network will cost you an two limbs and your firstborn child. Luckly, you get to choose which limbs to give up. As such, if I ever need to set up scheduled tasks from a Windows machine again, I'll be looking into doing it from Cygwin instead. I'm not keen on doing any major system admnistration tasks on a server that doesn't support OpenSSH anyway, so that's my best bet.
OpenVPN is getting a reasonably good treatment here at TR. It can be a useful approach to secure, encrypted remote access, particularly if you want to take the "users are to be kept in the dark" approach to offsite network security. It can also be reasonably easy to set up and monitor, and provides some administrative hand-holding for setup. It's a bit fatter a solution than I tend to prefer, however. As hinted above, I'm a fan of OpenSSH , which is highly versatile, lightweight, and extremely secure. It can be used for protocol tunneling to encrypt the connection necessary for basically any network protocol you want to protect, and a savvy administrator can make it do backflips on a high wire if need be.

Many a Windows system administrator is learning about the Windows Genuine Advantage software on the job, much to their annoyance. It is one of the latest in a long series of ever-more intrusive, restrictive, and overbearing measures Microsoft is employing in its fight against "unauthorized" use of Microsoft Windows operating systems. WGA has [...] This post originally appeared on an external website

I was inspired to follow an ad link related to blogging as business on Sterling's weblog, Chip's Quips, earlier today. Ultimately, where it led me was to some graphical representations of the weblog ecosystem, sometimes known by that too-hip term "blogosphere". The overview of digital social networking that emerges from these graphical networking [...] This post originally appeared on an external website

I got a perfect score on this quiz of my Web 2.0 jargon knowledge. How will you do?
By the way — learn to touch type. Trust me on this. No master uber leet ninja hunt-n-peck skillzzz will compare to the benefits of touch typing.
When you're done with the quiz I'll tell you [...] This post originally appeared on an external website

The Tour starts tomorrow today. For those of you who are not terribly familiar with it, the Tour de France is a twenty-stage bicycle race that takes place in the month of July every year, wherein (ideally) 198 men on 22 teams try to get their team leaders to put in the best showing [...] This post originally appeared on an external website

The Tour starts tomorrow today. For those of you who are not terribly familiar with it, the Tour de France is a twenty-stage bicycle race that takes place in the month of July every year, wherein (ideally) 198 men on 22 teams try to get their team leaders to put in the best showing [...] This post originally appeared on an external website

Hey, h3st! It looks like a Norwegian won the Tour de France's Prologue!
George Hincapie, formerly Lance Armstrong's right-hand man on the Discovery team, came in a close second (only 0.73 seconds slower than Hushovd). It's pretty much a given that any "graduate" of Lance's team over the last few years is going to [...] This post originally appeared on an external website

You may recall my recent mention of graphical representations of the weblog ecosystem, or what some call the "blogosphere". The originator of the images, a weblogger named Matthew Hurst posting under the title Data Mining, took notice of some comments made by me and Teresa Valdez Klein. Shortly thereafter, I was credited, via [...] This post originally appeared on an external website

I thought it unlikely that there'd be too much to report about today's stage — Stage 1 is usually not the most exciting. There was the usual jockeying for sprinting points and for the stage win, of course. George Hincapie got a two second time bonus in the middle of the stage for [...] This post originally appeared on an external website

It's not easy to find free/libre/open source software these days that is licensed other than GPL, I'm finding. There are major projects with other licenses (Apache, X Windows, and the various *BSD operating systems come to mind), but it's simply not as easy as I'd like to live GPL-free without going entirely the other [...] This post originally appeared on an external website

You've gotta love the hypocrisy of some people — or at least hate it with some humor. These guys couldn't find their own asses with a map and a flashlight. Thus the title.
As requoted from Slashdot in an OPEN . . . post entitled RMS on DRM, Richard Stallman said of the difference between Free Software [...] This post originally appeared on an external website

As my friend Anna put it:
Happy 4th! 'Cause everyone needs a summer holiday that's an excuse to pig out, blow **** up and take off work.
Of course, I spent a chunk of today rewriting contact page mailing scripts, so I'm not so sure I made use of the opportunity to "take off work". [...] This post originally appeared on an external website

I've created, and made available on the Web, the ARChive: Apotheonic Resource Collection. It includes the essay Humanity's Launch Window, previously referenced in the SOB post titled Movin' On Up: the necessity of space colonization, as some of the more astute of you might have noticed if you remembered the URL for it.
New, with [...] This post originally appeared on an external website

What a mess — what a bunch of high school drama queen nonsense this is.
Rocketboom blew up. There's a gen-u-ine he-said/she-said set of (apparently) incompatible statements being made by Amanda Congdon and Andrew Baron (the apparent 49% and 51%, respectively, owners of Rocketboom). Amanda and Rocketboom are separating.
I've never watched a Rocketboom video [...] This post originally appeared on an external website