The Wayward WebLog : Rant

Reddit Randomnes and Wayward SPAM

mattwar — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 21:49:00 GMT

I am left to only chuckle at the inanity of it all. Wayward == Marketting? Uh. Sure. ...(read more)

Sound Bites

mattwar — Thu, 16 Jun 2005 00:44:00 GMT

It’s time for a rant, time to dredge up those same old topics, same tired old arguments. Why did they? What where they thinking? Who designed that? You think I’m talking about software? That would be too easy. No, I’m back to my favorite pass-time, skewering the dysfunctional world of audio.

To be brutally honest, I don’t know much of anything about audio. I’m not an audiophile or musician or sound-geek. I doubt I could tell the difference in sound quality between a $30 boom box and a $3000 speaker. Yet I do like the directional sound effects of my home theater system and I do enjoy the rumble of a good subwoofer. However, I just don’t understand the need for all the complexity; A/V Receivers, amplifiers, etc. It’s just all too much. The back of my television system is some Lovecraftian nightmare of cables begetting cables, begetting cables.

I think kind of, sort of, out of the corner of my squinting eye, I see that the vision of convergence of media, a single set top box that does it all for you, helps get rid of much of that tangled mess. And better than that, my dream is that it helps get rid of all the remote controls. Please, oh, please, why can’t there just be one remote, with only one or two buttons. If there’s going to be convergence into one box, be it media center or Tivo or what-have-you, use the screen, that’s what it is there for. Give me menus. Give me preferences. If I still end up with multiple boxes, let the ‘one-box’ control them all. Believe me; it won’t end in the destruction of middle-earth.

Yet, even with all this talk of convergence, all this grand-vision being bantered about, day and night, year after year with product offerings creeping closer and closer to the ultimate end game, no one is doing anything about audio. Sure the boxes all understand audio as a digital media; they all play it or emit it. However, they still either only emit stereo or require external boxes to decode the multi-channel signals, a separate system to control the speakers, one that is not integrated and with a user-interface only a mother could love.

As long as we are ‘fixing’ everything else, why can’t we fix speakers too? Why can’t speakers be first class citizens in this new world order? Imagine speakers that receive digital signals and decode those signals automatically; speakers that have a CPU and can be controlled from a central host to automatically adjust to play any particular channel from any particular stream. Imagine them wireless. Imagine them able to auto-sense their locality relative to other speakers in the home.

Imagine the possibilities.

Quality Fake Rolex Now

mattwar — Mon, 25 Oct 2004 19:27:00 GMT

I'm sure you must have have at least 35 to 40 fake Rolex watches, each, by now. No? I'm drowning in them. I just match up each real-mail offer for a new credit card with each e-mail offer for a fake watch. I'm planning to give them out as holiday gifts this year.

I used to think TV shopping channels were silly. Do people really sit in front of their television watching those channels waiting for them to show something they are interested in buying? Of course, its probably not hard to figure out what is going to be sold. Something with cubic zirconium that slices and dices at fifteen separate speeds. And then there are the 'discount' PC sold for amazingly low price, but are actually models/configurations that even the discount superstores discontinued the year before, all for 30 easy payments of $49.

I wonder if the same television viewers now sit in front of their PC's, waiting at the email 'in' hopper for news on really great deals, like Rolex watches.

My guess is yes.

Matt

Less than Express

mattwar — Sat, 21 Aug 2004 16:43:00 GMT

I'm heading out today on vacation for the week, far away from all things digital, miles and miles away from anything with a functioning central processing until, no cell phone coverage, no bandwidth, just blue skies, mountains, tall green trees and the sea. Of course, that's why I'm bringing my laptop, so I can code. Can you blame me?

I figured it would give me a chance to take that C# Express out for a spin. So I cleaned my machine of all alien debris and installed it off the external net, just like everyone else. It went smoothly. (Don't worry this isn't a cheer leading post. It took just as long to install for me as it did for you, except maybe my bandwidth was a wee bit higher.) Anyway that's not the story. I actually had the machine set up quite some time ago. I knew it was functioning so I figured I'd put it to use. What I also needed for my beach side endeavor was a functioning database. Since the C# install also pulled down SQL express I figured I ought to be in hog heaven.

Except I wasn't. I was just too stupid to get the thing to work. I thought it would just work automatically, you know since it installed without a hitch. Maybe I should have read some docs? Were there any docs? I asked around my building and actually found a few others that had ventured to try it, and none of them had figured out the secret incantations either. Sure the server was 'running' but no one could access it. Over here we say that's a "no hire." After a three hour tour of utter frustration I finally had a bright idea. I googled for the answer. Thank goodness for the Internet, a bunch of you savvy developers had already figured out what ailed me and had many good posts on making the thing actually function. Now all I needed was a graduate degree from MIT to finish the job. Fortunately, I squeaked by with my lousy credentials.

Now I'm off to that remote location, for fun, sun and endless coding bliss. You may still be hearing from me if I can figure out how to dial in (there is a phone somewhere), RAS over VPN and sit through ten to twenty minutes of painfully slow security downloads, connect back out to MSDN and get a post off all before the modem drops. See, now that's living dangerously!

Matt

User Interference

mattwar — Mon, 26 Jul 2004 23:14:00 GMT

There's a lot about todays web-site interfaces that bug me. First, let me say that many sites are utterly fantastic and its not the lack of content or style (that plagues many home page sites for example). It's the sheer overload of unrelated information that makes sites practically indecipherable.

Back in the 'old' days before GUI's there was this thing called text. Back before there were guidelines and other supremely popular apps from which you could borrow/lift your app's look and feel, there were apps that took over control of your entire machine, where every app was its own domain, where every app had its own rules determining how you could or could not interact with it.

Let's just say, things were bad. Of course, nobody knew it then. Everyone just accepted it as the way things were. Then GUI's came into vogue, there was the Lisa and Mac that showed what a consistent user interface could do for productivity. Then we had nearly a decade of UI bliss.

Then came the WEB, and we are back in undiscovered territory. Interfaces are a mishmash of individual designers whims. You cannot go between sites and carry forward any knowledge or understanding about how to interact. Sure, there are buttons to click and fields to enter, but do the buttons always look like buttons and are the fields so obvious?

Every day I visit many sites on the web, and every time I click between them I have to shift mental gears and remember how to navigate each. Some are so crowded with uninformative text and ads that its near impossible to recognize what you need to do.

Some have menus in side lists, some on top, some on bottom, some embedded in clusters surrounded by ad copy or informative messages. Some have one or more or all at the same time. Most 'buttons' are text links to other pages, etc, and they are hard to distinguish from other forms of text cramming a page. I visited one site for over a month before I realized that you could actually register an account and log in, it was that difficult to recognize what I was seeing on the page.

I guess, I just wonder if most site designers actually know what they are doing. I mean there is a lot of knowledge that can be acquired in the design and layout of pages for books, magazines, billboards, etc. There must be something like that by now for web page design. Or are we all just flying blind?

Matt

Reusability Rant

mattwar — Mon, 19 Jul 2004 18:12:00 GMT

During my lifetime (so far) of programming I've worked on a many projects that were built around or including external libraries and components. These are packaged units of software purchased from a vendor for a specific purpose. However, no matter how useful the software claimed to be, the specific purposes these packages were designed for never quite matched the specific purpose we were attempting to apply them to.

Never having been directly involved in these purchasing decisions I can only imagine the reasons that led to them. I suppose it must have seemed like the easy way out. Instead of building up expertise in a particular domain, you could just buy that from someone else, plug it into your project, and away you go. The costs of these libraries were minuscule compared to the cost of the expected effort that would have gone into rolling our own. And no matter how many times I'm certain this all must have seemed the truth, the reality was far from it.

Because the software never actually did exactly what we wanted it to. Maybe 70 to 80 percent, sure, but never all that we wanted and so we had to compensate for what it did not do. Now, this would not have been such a big deal if the package was designed for extensibility from the beginning, but not many were, and even those that were often allowed extensions only in areas we cared not to go. So, in order to actually get what we wanted we had to work around the flaws ourselves.

Usually, this lead to a lot of trial and error, building advance frameworks to augment or encapsulate the purchased piece, that often solved many of the shortcomings, but never quite all of them, and certainly not the most critical. Eventually we would reach the conclusion, over many months, that the only plausible way to achieve our goal was to modify the actual source code, of which we did not have.

Now you might think that we ought to have abandoned ship at this point, to just take our lumps, learn from the experience and move on. We would most certainly have gained enough knowledge to understand exactly what we wanted and would have been able to build it ourselves. That might have even been true in some cases, but not entirely practical. As the project evolves you only learn about its true cost as you forge onward, only aware of any additional costs after you are so deep in that backing out still seems more costly than plugging ahead. Of course, you never really appreciate the full cost until much later, and by then it is just too late, you've used up a year or two and it is time to ship your product.

Of course, if you flash enough money you can convince any vendor to turn over the source code, provided you are not going to resell it, etc. And that's usually what happened. We'd pay handsomely for the rights to modify the code, and we would do it, fix what we did not like, add what we needed and be done with it. Our product would ship. We'd have a party and then relax for a few days. And then we would hear about the big dreams for the next version, the new features and purchases already made.

I suppose that's why I sort of chuckle anytime someone talks about reusable software components. Because, it's mostly a myth. It only ever works in misguided wishes and dreams.

Software is only truly reusable at the source code level. Read it, learn it, write your own.

Slow as Molasses

mattwar — Fri, 02 Jul 2004 22:14:00 GMT

I hate it when it goes slow. Everything has been blinding fast for months, and now its such a slow crawl that it is driving me a little over the edge. I'm not talking about the CPU, or the compiler or even my speedy sports car. I'm talking about my ability to crank out lines of code.

I just seem to be limping along. One line here, another there, then a recompile and blizzard of error messages. Fifteen minutes later all those are sorted out and can I get back to writing? No.. Silly, me, I must run the code under the debugger and check out what I just did. Grr. Mistakes, mistakes. Thank goodness for the debugger, or I'd be frying my machine about now. Back to the editor, fix, fix, fix, fix, fix, fix.. Better.. Now compile again.. Dang, another long blast of error messages..

Rinse. Repeat. Rinse. Repeat.

You can see why it is mind numbingly slow. This isn't programming. I feel like I'm trying to convince some old recluse to come out of his log cabin deep in the woods. He just won't budge. Maybe in a few hours, I'll coax him to take a peek out the windows. That'll be time to celebrate.

Matt

Through the Looking Glass

mattwar — Tue, 29 Jun 2004 00:16:00 GMT

What's the fascination of 3D for the desktop? I'm referring to the Sun announcement of its new Looking Glass desktop. Of course, it looks intriguing. I'm not one to scoff at the overuse of CPU power just for the sake of using it, and I have not seen a demonstration live so I'm definitely not in the know. But what is it about 3D that people think is useful to apply to a desktop metaphor?

Sure, its all fancy and glitzy, but has it really added anything new, made anything easier? Does anyone recall all the failed and still failing attempts at making 3D virtual worlds where you walked around 3D spaces, only to saddle up to a 2D portal of your document/app/browser to actually do anything of note? The rest of it was just brainless avatar scrambling. If I'm going to be doing that, at least let my slay a monster or two on my way to the trash bin. Does the tedium of all this pseudo 'reality' get in the way of actually getting things done?

I'm not claiming the Sun product does any of that. I'm not sure what it does, except twist your 2D windows into a slant view. I suppose that's to make it easier to find what you are looking for, kind of a skewed thumbnail of your opened windows. Frankly, I never have enough desktop real estate to do anything but stack the windows. Usually I've got the apps maximized so it covers up everything else!

What do you think?

Matt

Flaming the Feed

mattwar — Fri, 25 Jun 2004 19:41:00 GMT

Great balls of fire, batman, there was a fire alarm a while ago. The whole building was evacuated. I had to finish my last post 'What you definitely don't want to see', before I could add a few more zingers. Now I've been away from the keyboard so long (stopped off for lunch) that I can't remember them. (sigh).

I suspect foul play. Someone must have pulled the alarm, or something as devious. They knew I was right in the middle of my writing, the creative juices were flowing, the spice elixir blending into my conciousness, my mind expanding into the infinite universe of possible puns, and I was shot down by a loud boisterous klaxon. There must have been an unscrupulous individual behind it all. Jay? Cyrus? Somehow both of you seem to post twice during the 'down' time.

All I can say is, why was I not that clever?

But I digress

Matt

Technicolor Dreamshirt

mattwar — Tue, 22 Jun 2004 17:04:00 GMT

I'm back at work today, and its now worse than ever. It's happening all around me, and its hard to miss. I see it everywhere I go. I even see it on me. It's kind of easy to understand though. I mean, what with this place being what it is and the people being who they are. It's easy to see how it would come to this eventually, this descent into the bottomless pit of bad taste.

It's true. I'm here today garbed in clothes purchased by a three year old, a Hawaiian shirt from the ninth level of hell. That's what being Dad is all about; the humiliation. Now I know how my father felt years ago. I'm sure I did much worse to him. I wonder how much money is spent every year on the millions of yards of unsightly fabric. I wonder if the textile industry secretly target markets to three year olds. There are probably subliminal messages in those Disney flicks tauting the exceptional coolness factor of Technicolor polyester. In fact, the color scheme of this shirt is awfully Disney-esque. I wonder if the Disney store sells this stuff too. I bet they could make a fortune on it. At least in June.

But I digress.

Matt

It must be blogona

mattwar — Tue, 22 Jun 2004 16:46:00 GMT

A few visitors arrived late last night while I was sleeping. Had I known they were waiting I wouldn't have left them there, alone, in the dark. I wouldn't have ignored them as I arose in the morning and went through my morning ritual. I wouldn't have taken so much pleasure in my breakfast had I been aware of their plight. You see, they were there all along, but I did not know, not till later.

Now I'm a perfectly gracious host, even for unexpected, unwelcome visitors as these. It's not that I loathe them precisely, its just that they are so annoying, always showing up when I least expect them. And they don't even have the decency to act like normal drop-in guests. Instead of coming straight to the front door, they arrive at the back and try getting in through an open window. They know my locks and alarms will be there up front and so try to avoid them altogether. It's despicable really. I shouldn't have let them in. But I did.

Yes, sir, foolish me. They were waiting to taunt me as I went to get the morning mail. I could have looked away and pretended I did not see them, but its hard to ignore what is right in front of your eyes. So I did it. I clicked on them.

I hate blog spam.

Matt

Thunder bored

mattwar — Mon, 14 Jun 2004 21:20:00 GMT

This movie is probably going to be a stinker. They really should have kept the puppets.

Matt

The most popular topic in the blogosphere

mattwar — Thu, 06 May 2004 18:16:00 GMT

Sometimes, when I'm not too busy working, eating, sleeping, playing, and cutting my toenails, I take a few moments to read what's on the web. Some of it is directed at my favorite news sites, some of it at bloggers I know and some of it at random stuff I pull up off of google and its ilk. Invariably, I end up on someone's blog site reading their opinions on a variety of topics. However, I've noticed, over my vast history of blog awareness, there is one topic that shines above all others, that is hotly debated (or it would seem so) by the voracious bloggers out there in the void. That topic is blogging itself, or the most important holy grail: RSS vs any comer.

Please stop it. I'm sickened by it already. I don't need to hear about it anymore. I don't want to know. I don't want to debate. I don't need to hear the technically drab details about the formal underpinnings of my posts, whether the whole world agrees on one format or protocol or schema. Blech! That's like having everyone that uses post-it notes drone on endlessly about the merits about their favorite form of the sticky-glue.

Anyway, Ignore me if you will. Tell me I'm free to not read those posts and those bloggers. All true.

Back to your own business. Blog on!

Insecurity Training

mattwar — Tue, 04 May 2004 17:18:00 GMT

I spent most of the day yesterday in a conference room with about a thousand other co-workers of mine. I know them all personally. You should have seen the size of the table! But seriously, it was a mandatory training session for the likes of us unruly code slingers. Microsoft is serious about security. I’m not cheerleading here. I’m not trying to convince you of anything. The powers-that-be have raised the focus on security to a level of utter annoyance; security reviews, threat analysis, tools that discover, tools that defend. Now they even want to rate us on whether we adhere to these ‘rules’ or not; no more flagrant use of strcpy; no more cryptic pointer arithmetic; no more fixed sized buffers sitting innocently on the stack; no more XOR encryption. It’s gotten to the point where I don’t know if I can code anymore. Between security concerns and the paralyzing fear that just about every common practice is now buried in some gold-digger’s patent portfolio, I don’t know if there is a safe line of code to write; seriously.

We’d be better off just compiling large libraries of last-known-safe algorithms. Then if we needed to build something we could just cut-and-paste these suckers into our editor. We would never actually be ‘writing’ code anymore. We’d be ‘orchestrating’ code. I can see it now, the operating system of the future comes complete with a vast library of API’s that are deemed safe and covered by licensing that allow you free use of such things as: assignment, arithmetic, comparison, and if you buy the enterprise edition you even get the ‘branch’ instruction. The compilers of tomorrow would only compile to these calls, they would not generate any other processor instructions, because those would all be patented by someone or proven a threat to security.

But I digress

Matt

Gmail: What were they thinking?

mattwar — Thu, 08 Apr 2004 00:53:00 GMT

I've been thinking about this quite a bit. Google's proposed gmail will 'read' your email and based on words/subjects/etc that it finds it will target ads at you whenever you go to the site to read your mail. It will store up to one gigabyte of email for you and use all this 'history' to datamine subject matters that might be interesting to you. On the surface (if you ignore the glaring privacy concerns) this might seem like a good idea. Why waste time showing me adds for golf resorts when I don't golf? But show me an add for a tropical get-away at a dive resort and I might just click!

Of course, as it turns out this is a really bad idea. Not that I wouldn't mind getting ads showing me luscious beach-scapes and crystal clear oceans. It's just that very little of my mail actually pertains to anything I'm at all interested in. What's this? Don't believe me? The truth is, 90 percent of all mail messages I recieve on my 'public' accounts are spam, messages sent out by disreputable personages trying to hock their wares. So, if google uses this data to determine what I'm interested in, then all they'll find are subjects pertaining to insurance, home loans, pornography, viagra and various other unmentionables.

I really don't need more pop-up ads targetting this stuff.

Matt