[Smalltalk]

I Want One of Those

The new Seascape 18 is one fine sailing boat. I want one!

Security Theater, by Microsoft

All that security theater around air travel, especially when flying to the US, is already an enormous pain in the ass (I feel sooo much more secure now that I have to pay 3 Euros for a bottle of water inside the airport security zone). Now Microsoft is bringing Security Theater to C and C++ development. I mean, banning memcpy and replacing it with memcpy_s, which takes an additional parameter specifying the size of the destination buffer, will suddenly make all memory-related bugs disappear. Because all those stupid developers who used memcpy inappropriately will for sure not find out that they can simply pass the same value for source and destination buffer size. Very innovative developers will probably even define a macro for that purpose. I would suggest making memcpy_s even more secure by adding a fifth argument, as in

void* memcpy_ss(void* s1, size_t n1, const void* s2, size_t n2, bool iAmReallySure);

Or, why not pop up a dialog box asking the user to confirm any call an application makes to memcpy. I mean, Vista is already the most secure operating system I have installed on my systems. It's so annoying to use with its all-to-frequent requests for confirmation that I just don't use it unless I really have to (which mostly means finding workarounds for perfectly legal things that used to work under previous Windows versions, but no longer under super secure Vista).

Why it would suck to be Richard Stallman

In response to Richard Stallman's recent musings about JavaScript, here are various reasons why it would suck to be Richard Stallman:

• You cannot drive a modern car, because every modern car has lots of non-free software in it.
• You cannot use a modern TV, because modern TVs contain non-free software.
• You cannot even use a modern household appliance, because modern household appliances have non-free software in it.
• Well, actually, you cannot use any modern electronic gadget, because it very probably has non-free software in it.
• You probably cannot use a PC, because the BIOS is most probably non-free software.
• Even if your BIOS is under GPL, the firmware in your hard disk controller, graphics card, etc., very probably is not.
• Given that you cannot use ordinary off-the-shelf hardware, where do you run all the free software?
• You're toast.

Happy 25th Anniversary, Macintosh

25 years ago the Mac was introduced. What better way to celebrate this than by watching the classic "1984" commercial.

Seven years later, in 1991, I got my first Mac, a Macintosh LC (with a super-sharp 12" black and white display). I still have it, by the way. I have owned Macs ever since — a Power Mac 7200/90, a PowerBook G3 (Lombard), two Power Book G4 12", a Mac mini, a Mac Pro and a Mac Book Pro 15".

Microsoft Still Does Not Get The Web

Had an experience with Microsoft Support today that basically shows all that's wrong with Microsoft. First, some background. We have a MSDN subscription which includes two support incidents. We have never needed MS support in the past, but now we have a strange problem with POCO on Vista that's clearly not POCO's fault (WSAStartup crashes with a null pointer exception in user.dll when the application is started as a service. Only on Vista.).
Now, one might guess, just purchasing a subscription will automatically activate support. Wrong. In order to make everything that causes work for Microsoft as unpleasant as possible, you have to first activate a support contract. The respective web page on MSDN shows a list of phone numbers to call. So, I called the number for Austria and was greated by a voice menu. I love those, as they never give you the option that you actually need. So, I chose the option I thought would be the most appropriate, and was transferred to another voice menu. I also found a not-quite-suitable option there and finally got a human on the line. He took my contact data and switched me over to a technical person. Who then told me a URL which I should go to to activate the support contract. So I typed the URL into my browser, which promptly showed me a fancy 404 Not Found page. After some more discussion with the tech I finally gave up. Some more trying made me notice a country selection menu on the top of microsoft's support website. I showed USA for me. Curiously I changed that to Austria and entered the same support activation URL again. And voila, now I see the support activation page. That's exactly how the Web should work. URLs that refer to different things depending on cookies, sessions, or whatever. Great job, Microsoft web team. Okay, now I am at least able to download the activation forms (RTF forms), fill them out in Word and send them via email(!) to Microsoft. You know, it's late 2008 and HTML forms still have not been invented yet.

Fun With Mindstorms®, POCO and the iPhone™ Accelerometer

Here at Applied Informatics, we like to have fun at work. We recently built a Mindstorms vehicle that's remote controlled by the iPhone's accelerometer. To add some POCO touch to it, the iPhone does not talk directly to the Mindstorms NXT, but to a Digi ConnectCore 9P running Linux and a POCO-based application. Connected to the Digi board is a Serial-to-Bluetooth™ dongle from Ezurio. We have a small application running on the iPhone that sends accelerometer data to the server process on the Digi board over UDP. The server application then sends command to the Lego NXT over Bluetooth. The Mindstorms vehicle is equipped with sonar, sound and light sensors, and the sensor data is sent back to the POCO application, which has a builtin web server to visualize the data on an Ajax-based web page. The NXT is running nxtOSEK, which allows us to program it in C and even C++. Thanks a lot to the nxtOSEK team for their work. The program running on the NXT is a modified version of the nxtgt sample application that ships with nxtOSEK. See it all in the video. The video was filmed on November 8, 2008 at the "Lange Nacht der Forschung" in Klagenfurt, Austria, where it was a favorite among children of all ages.

Elections in Austria

Tonight I feel very ashamed being a citizen of Austria. Enough said.

Football Fun

Being at home, sick with some damn infection, I created my first YouTube movie.
So I present to you a collection of the finest moments the Austrian national football team had during the European Championships 2008.

My apologies to the unknown guy who first came up with this kind of parody (starring the Swiss football team) and to our national football team who, despite clearly being the by far superior team on the field (as every Austrian football expert noted), lost their first match against Croatia 0:1. Life ist not fair. Get over it.

The Subprime Primer

A funny explanation of the subprime crisis (via twitter.com/codinghorror)

Mac OS X 10.5.2

The latest update to Mac OS X is out. This time the update has been eagerly awaited by me. I am currently installing it, but from the change log it looks promising:

• Updates Stacks with a List view option, a Folder view option, and an updated background for Grid view. [Thank You!]
• Addresses legibility issues with the menu bar with an option to turn off transparency in Desktop & Screen Saver preferences. [Not so much an issue for me, but lots of users complained.]
• Adjusts menus to be slightly-less translucent overall.
• Fixes an issue with deleting messages located in the Drafts folder. [Interestingly, I experienced this bug lately.]
• Fixes an issue in which the body of email messages with certain MIME structures may not be displayed. [Thank you. No I can read my GULP mailings again (without reverting to viewing the raw message source)]

If this holds what it promises, my current issues with 10.5 are pretty much solved. Thank you, Apple.