> we have a big fuss over seeing one > female breast exposed on national TV
No, we had a fuss over a television station violating FCC regulations.
If you want the regulations changed, fine, but enforcment of existing regulations shouldn't surprise anyone.
Change one thing at a time
on
Debugging
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
> Change one thing at a time: Isolate the > key factor, grab the brass bar with both > hands (understand what's wrong before fixing), > change one test at a time, compare it with a > good one, and determine what you changed > since the last time it worked.
This is helpful with unit tests, too. If I find a bug, I want to figure out which unit test should have caught this and why it didn't. Then I can either fix the current tests, or add new ones to catch this.
Either way, if someone reintroduces that particular bug it'll get caught by the unit tests during the next hourly build.
...I called their tech support last week and ended up with a guy in Panama whose English was fine. He had me run some hard drive diagnostics and figured out that it had some errors, so he had a new one shipped to me and I got it two days later.
The whole call only took about 5 minutes, and now my laptop is happy again. Good times.
I've heard it on 99.1 HFS. I listen to the Sports Junkies, but when they go to commercial I switch over to DC 101 for as long as I can bear the annoying cackle.
Sometimes I think it's best just to stick with CSPAN radio:-)
> How do you figure "Sign up for Cisco > and Microsoft training!" implies that > they are the same company?
Hm. Good point. I guess it's always sounded to me as if the two companies were being lumped together - perhaps they could say "Cisco _or_ Microsoft training".
I agree, however, that it's efficient to refactor the noun "training" rather than leaving it behind two different adjectives separated by a conjunction.
So true. Here in the Washington DC area there's a radio ad to the effect of "Sign up for Cisco and Microsoft training! Get the pay and respect you deserve!"
I'm not sure which is more implausible - the idea that the world owes me more money or the idea that Cisco and Microsoft are more or less the same company.
> I don't want people reusing my code > without permission
Hm. Fair enough.
> "Copyright Tim Macinta" to "Copyright his name"
Jeepers. What a low blow.
> I had somebody email me the source code to > an applet I wrote once (which he > apparently decompiled) with a note > along the lines of "Ha, ha! Now I > have your source!"
Yeah, but you could have written him back saying "woop-tee-do, so what?" I mean, what's he going to do with the source code? Start a business and sell it? Probably not, and if he did you could email his business partners and let them know what kind of fellow they're working with. Or post a note to some place like Slashdot.
It just seems to me that a product like, say, MMB, is valuable not just as source code, but also in the support and updates and so forth that you and your company provide. So if some loser decompiles the code and posts it on a message board, the only folks that are going to download and use it are people that wouldn't have bought the product in the first place.
Anyhow, thanks for the note, glad the obfuscation is working well for you. Food for thought...
Right, yup, obfuscation reduces class file size. Certainly, that can be important in some environments.
> anybody with a casual interest could just > glance at your code using javap,
Sure. But what will they learn? How the code processes MouseEvent.MOUSE_CLICKED? How you use sockets? How you show that nifty splash screen? I mean... who cares?
- the jar files were secure because they were on the server and - bytecode optimization and jar size was the least of our problems
Obfuscation seems to be useful only for client-side Java applications that contains super-secret valuable algorithms. I mean, who cares if somebody decompiles your code to see how you did sortable JTables or whatever?
Code Reading by Diomidis Spinellis contains a bunch of ideas on ways to comprehend large codebases more easily.
He talks about browsing code, package structures, adding features or fixing bugs in a large codebase, and so on. It's a good read - well worth the money.
Right on! Read more about Ruby here, and check out lots of projects using Ruby here - games, sysadmin utilities, wrappers for WxWindows and ImageMagick, and so forth. Good stuff!
Second, we're going to see lawsuits in the next 2 years where Microsoft identifies code in Linux, added after February 10, 2004, which are either copied from, or influenced by, the Windows source code. And, as absurd as this is, it will be used to have, as Microsoft would say, a chilling effect on innovation.
Hm. I bet Andrew Morton has better things to do then trawl through WinNT code. Staying away from it does seem safest, though...
Slashdot Mirror
> Who said I was an atheist?
Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that you're an atheist.
You said that you wanted our country to be free of it's religious yoke, so I'm trying to understand what that freedom would look like.
> atheists typically have higher moral
> standards because they believe in them
> without having the fear of eternal
> punishment hanging over them
Hm. I'm not sure. How would an atheist arrive at a moral standard? And when he arrived at one, wouldn't it be a bit arbitrary?
> I cannot understand how a female breast
> is indecent
Intrinsically, it's not. In some contexts, it is. If a lady went to a funeral and whipped off her shirt, that would be indecent.
> If you are Christian then show me were
> in the bible it says that baring a breast
> is wrong.
Sure, 1st Timothy 2:9 - "In like manner also, that women adorn themselves in modest apparel...".
> a fine (as called for by the regulations)
> would have sufficed
The reason it's a big deal is because it wasn't a violation of the regs on an 11 PM local channel, it was the Super Bowl halftime show.
> Someday I hope we will be free of this
> religous yoke that is holding us down and
> we can be free.
Hm. Do you think that there are any decency standards that, say, an atheist would/could support?
> I, on the other hand, would throw in
> some print statements so I could see
> what was going on
That's the beauty of unit tests - they're the equivalent of print statements, but the computer checks the output. Sweet.
> we have a big fuss over seeing one
> female breast exposed on national TV
No, we had a fuss over a television station violating FCC regulations.
If you want the regulations changed, fine, but enforcment of existing regulations shouldn't surprise anyone.
> Change one thing at a time: Isolate the
> key factor, grab the brass bar with both
> hands (understand what's wrong before fixing),
> change one test at a time, compare it with a
> good one, and determine what you changed
> since the last time it worked.
This is helpful with unit tests, too. If I find a bug, I want to figure out which unit test should have caught this and why it didn't. Then I can either fix the current tests, or add new ones to catch this.
Either way, if someone reintroduces that particular bug it'll get caught by the unit tests during the next hourly build.
> So someone used a combination "giver"
> and "formatter" technique on you?
Touche!
...I called their tech support last week and ended up with a guy in Panama whose English was fine. He had me run some hard drive diagnostics and figured out that it had some errors, so he had a new one shipped to me and I got it two days later.
The whole call only took about 5 minutes, and now my laptop is happy again. Good times.
One of the nicer things about KDE is the plethora of language bindings.
There's another pointer to the Ruby bindings - and a place for feedback and such-like - here.
> How about I save the few grand
Yup, that's why the subject line says 'if you're there'.
> the stupidest damn thing I've ever heard of.
Add "declare all local variables at the top of the method" to that list and you'll be all set. Word up!
> on 104.1?
:-)
I've heard it on 99.1 HFS. I listen to the Sports Junkies, but when they go to commercial I switch over to DC 101 for as long as I can bear the annoying cackle.
Sometimes I think it's best just to stick with CSPAN radio
...he's doing a presentation on Ruby.
The slide images alone should be worth attending... he's hunted far and wide for images of pythons, pearls, rubies, and such-like.
> How do you figure "Sign up for Cisco
> and Microsoft training!" implies that
> they are the same company?
Hm. Good point. I guess it's always sounded to me as if the two companies were being lumped together - perhaps they could say "Cisco _or_ Microsoft training".
I agree, however, that it's efficient to refactor the noun "training" rather than leaving it behind two different adjectives separated by a conjunction.
> doesn't seem to stop them from running ads
So true. Here in the Washington DC area there's a radio ad to the effect of "Sign up for Cisco and Microsoft training! Get the pay and respect you deserve!"
I'm not sure which is more implausible - the idea that the world owes me more money or the idea that Cisco and Microsoft are more or less the same company.
> I don't want people reusing my code
> without permission
Hm. Fair enough.
> "Copyright Tim Macinta" to "Copyright his name"
Jeepers. What a low blow.
> I had somebody email me the source code to
> an applet I wrote once (which he
> apparently decompiled) with a note
> along the lines of "Ha, ha! Now I
> have your source!"
Yeah, but you could have written him back saying "woop-tee-do, so what?" I mean, what's he going to do with the source code? Start a business and sell it? Probably not, and if he did you could email his business partners and let them know what kind of fellow they're working with. Or post a note to some place like Slashdot.
It just seems to me that a product like, say, MMB, is valuable not just as source code, but also in the support and updates and so forth that you and your company provide. So if some loser decompiles the code and posts it on a message board, the only folks that are going to download and use it are people that wouldn't have bought the product in the first place.
Anyhow, thanks for the note, glad the obfuscation is working well for you. Food for thought...
> in environments where every byte counts
Right, yup, obfuscation reduces class file size. Certainly, that can be important in some environments.
> anybody with a casual interest could just
> glance at your code using javap,
Sure. But what will they learn? How the code processes MouseEvent.MOUSE_CLICKED? How you use sockets? How you show that nifty splash screen? I mean... who cares?
Going off topic now, but, anyhow, nifty!
I've done mostly server-side work where:
- the jar files were secure because they were on the server and
- bytecode optimization and jar size was the least of our problems
Obfuscation seems to be useful only for client-side Java applications that contains super-secret valuable algorithms. I mean, who cares if somebody decompiles your code to see how you did sortable JTables or whatever?
> Does the fact that Diomidis Spinellis has
:-) Yup, he talks about that a bit in the book, and makes the point the to IOCCC winners usually employ the preprocessor in their entries.
:-)
> repeated won the International Obfuscated
> C Code Contest (IOCCC)
Heh
Then he goes on to suggest that preprocessor usage be minimized in 'normal' programming activities
Code Reading by Diomidis Spinellis contains a bunch of ideas on ways to comprehend large codebases more easily.
He talks about browsing code, package structures, adding features or fixing bugs in a large codebase, and so on. It's a good read - well worth the money.
> a web dashboard portal showing the latest
> results in an easily-assimilated color
> coded HTML table
So true. I've set up one of these for a project I work on, and it's really helpful to be able to see at a glance the status of a bunch of projects.
Seems like some lintish tools could be incorporated into a kernel daily build, and maybe something like CPD as well...
...check out various tools on SemWebCentral.
For example, you can browse the GForge project listing using OWL - more precisely, using an HTMLized version of the ObjectViewer.
...for the code for the book.
The list archives are here and the project site is here.
Done.
Many's the time I've been guily of awhen awould have done just as well...
> Information is more like a web of relationships.
Yup. You might be interested in the Ontologic Web Language - you can see, for example, an OWL representation of the projects on SemWebCentral.
> don't forget ruby! =)
Right on! Read more about Ruby here, and check out lots of projects using Ruby here - games, sysadmin utilities, wrappers for WxWindows and ImageMagick, and so forth. Good stuff!
Hm. I bet Andrew Morton has better things to do then trawl through WinNT code. Staying away from it does seem safest, though...