Those Who Can, Code

I just found out that I can upload this Weblog directly to http://www.ThinkingIn.NET/ and everything (comments, etc.) works! Well, goody, now I can spend a day modifying my Radio UserLand template to match my homepage.

Finished a review of Kylix 3 today for SD Times. Short version: very nice tool for C++ development in Linux, particularly for enterprise apps with a need for highly replicable clients (e.g., POS, brilliant terminals, custom data-entry, etc.).

The reason that I had to write a PayPal backend is that the publication of Thinking in C# has been delayed until something very close to the end of the year. The reasons have nothing to do with the content of the book, which is very frustrating, but these things happen. In the meantime, I'm planning on experimenting with charging for a downloadable pre-publication version from www.ThinkingIn.NET. The free preview generated on the order of 100,000 downloads over the past five months, so I hope that by charging people a few dollars for the download of a complete, 1000-page, 300-working programs text, I can generate, oh, I don't know, $20 or so.

I just wrote a C#-backed ASP.NET PayPal backend. I'm not going to post it because it was so trivial that I just made it totally custom to my needs. Wow, C# rocks, ASP.NET rocks, and this is an indication of why Web Services rock (even though the PayPal back-end is HTTP POST instead of a decent SOAP call). Less than an hour between "Is this possible?" and a functioning mini-payment scheme.

I saw Todd Solondz' Storytelling the other night. No sir, I didn't like it. Solondz wrote one movie that I liked for its honesty (Welcome to the Dollhouse) and one that didn't make a lasting impression on me (Happiness), although I remember that it was really "edgy" in that Philip Seymour Hoffman played a pedophile. Whatever.

Anyway, the thing about Storytelling is that it portrays a bunch of people who are clueless -- graduate writing students, documentarians, stoner teenagers. Meanwhile, it too makes things "edgy" by taking swipes at received stereotypes, the definition of "rape," the banality of the omniscient authorial voice... In short, it's a movie about the concerns of the very belly-gazing po-mo graduate students it mocks. Meanwhile, the movie is deliberately unrealistic in its characterization and situations, so there's no legitimate basis for projecting realistic motivations onto or interpreting behavior from its characters. A classic question that one might ask of the movie is "How did Scooby get a 710 in the math SATs?" And Solondz is probably happy if people conclude "Why, we don't know! The picking and choosing of incidents from the ontological continuum is a social construct!"

It's a movie that tries to accomplish these high-art meta-examinations of our assumptions and so forth, which is all well and good, but such rarefied structures can't be built with the incomplete character sketches that Solondz provides in Storytelling. (yeah, yeah, I haven't built enough of an argument to make that conclusion; I got tired of writing about a movie I didn't like and I just wanted to put something on the Web that has the slightest possibility of turning up in a Google search, because most of the people writing about Solondz on the Web are, you guessed it, naval-gazing po mo grad students. )

"In the second quarter, partially due to the massive incentives it offered, Ford made less than $8 in profit for each car it sold." Can that possibly be true? Not only do SUVs suck, they aren't even profitable?

Without naming names, it's absolutely shocking how many people at development tool companies, don't know that SOAP is not an HTTP-only protocol. I was getting a preview of a very, very nice tool yesterday and was being shown its SOAP support. Very nice stuff, and I saw something that made me wonder about whether one could use this support with SOAP bound to, say, SMTP. The product manager said that SOAP was an HTTP-only thing. No, it isn't. If there were still programming magazines around worth a damn, I'd write an article on binding SOAP to MSN Messenger protocol.

McDonald's is going to switch away to a cooking oil that reduces the amount of trans-fatty acids. Okay, that's great. But the reason they're doing this is because "In July, a New York man sued four fast-food chains, including Oak Brook, Illinois-based McDonald's, claiming the contributed to his obesity, heart disease, and diabetes." Suing McDonald's because it makes you fat? Is there simply no lower bounds on how stupid one can pretend to be when filing a lawsuit? "I was shocked, shocked to discover that a quarter pounder with cheese with a 32 ounce coke and an extra large fries contributes to obesity!"

Hooray! Monster has made "C#" a searchable keyword. I can't figure out how to paste a direct link, as Radio "unescapes" the escape, but you can now use "C#" in job searches. (Unrestricted except for that keyword: 846 jobs in the US on Monster -- I smell a tracking program!)

"Few at LinuxWorld would dispute the increasing interest in Linux," according to a Wired News article from last month.

In another CACM article, there's a photo of Carlo Sequin's Sculpture Generator. Cross your eyes and dig this! Anyway, the article is by Danny Hillis and makes the important point that just as digital artifacts reflect reality, so too is our reality increasingly being influenced by digital artifacts. The thing that I'll always remember on that point is the way that cars in the early 1990s suddenly transformed into bars of soap. Now the transformation is happening strikingly in the field of public architecture, where you have things like the Bilbao Guggenheim which is famously "neo" (-architected, -constructed, etc.).

Tina and I had a long conversation last night about whether any art created on a screen (specifically digital photography and video) was inherently crippled by the media. While I had to concede her points thatworking on a computer today is a cramped, RSI-inducing solo act, but I argued that if you look at something like the gesture interfaces in Minority Report, you can overcome all but the tactile feedback, and even that is probably somehow going to be overcome.

The latest issue of Communications of the ACM includes an article (The Reality of Simulated Actors) that estimates that it will be 20 years of computing power advances before we'll see digital actors truly capable of verisimilitude. 20 years == 4 orders of magnitude. One can't help but wonder if grid computing couldn't bring this to fruition significantly faster. What would be involved in creating Olivier @ Home ?

The author, Alvy Ray Smith, divides the problem into two parts -- the "model problem" (representing the appearance of reality in a convincing way) and the "control problem" (the interface to the model). He sees both as requiring major increases in computing power, but more importantly, the "control problem" may be "difficult" (e.g., you can't hand-animate all the surfaces involved in an amused glance).

Just finished reading the August 2002 issue of Scientific American and, once again, was dismayed at how this magazine that I grew up adoring has declined. There's an article by a scientist who states that his alternative equation for gravity explains the whole "missing mass" problem with the universe. Okay, fine, the guy's probably wrong but never mind the fact that the article doesn't give a mechanism, it doesn't even give the equation! What in the world is the point of such an article? It's neither a primary source nor an introduction sufficient to guide you towards claims or counter-claims regarding the subject. What a waste. (To be fair, there's an article on asynchronous computer chip design which I found worthwhile because it actually had helpful explanations of two interesting circuits.)

SA is now nothing but a pale imitation of New Scientist. A few years ago, when I was flush with cash, I paid up my SA subscription for something like five years. Then, last year I stumbled into some great offer to get New Scientist for a reasonable price (as opposed to its standard cost of US$200 per year). That will be up in October and I am already anticipating New Scientist withdrawal.

"We modeled the [unmanned aerial vehicle's] controller after the PlayStation 2, because that's what these 18- and 19-year old Marine have been playing pretty much all their lives. If a Marine can use Microsoft Word, he can get this plane to fly." -- Major John Cane, Marine Corps Airfighting Lab, as quoted in the July 2002 Communications of the ACM

Macintosh, not just evil, but Communist! "Furthermore, the Darwin OS is released under an "Open Source" license, which is just another name for Communism. "

If you do video editing on Windows XP, don't install the DirectX 8 SDK. It appears to install a debug version of the libraries (I think, most importantly, quartz.dll) that screws up, at the very least, ULead MediaStudio Pro and Scenalyzer. Probably other video editing software, too, because I think they all rely on DX for rendering. Boy do I hope that DX 9 is coming soon.