Well, another year has come-and-gone! It was the best of times, it was the worst of times....
What can we look forward to for next year? More DMCA Copyright Bullshit and IP Trollery, to be sure. More assaults on Fair Use by uptight douchebags who can't stand to see one word of their precious "content" uttered outside their absolute control.
Will it be a Happy New Year for Free Speech? Stay tuned in 2011!
Democratic Underground Responds to Righthaven Copyright Troll Lawsuit
Have a read on that!
Here is some Free Speech for you (that is, if opinion is still protected speech): Righthaven, You Suck! Las Vegas Review-Journal, You Suck Too! Stephens Media, LLC, Suck The Big One! You Suck So Bad, I'm not even linking to you! Maybe you will scan this blog and try to sue, based on 0% excerpt from your crappy publication. Hell, you sue based on 10%, why not "up" the ante?
But wait, what would you negotiate the copyright to? Oh wait, I mentioned the publication's title....
Here is some more Free Speech: EFF, You Rock! Kick the Shit out of the Copyright Trolls!
When on the road, my favorite channel to watch is Univision.
I do not speak Spanish. However, that is not a barrier to enjoying another culture.
It's all the Hot Latinas, isn't it?
Well, it helps keep my attention....
Anyway, it just got more interesting, with the help of Our Newest, Bestest Buddy, Google Translate.
Wondering what the title of that show is? No Problem! What does that caption say? Punch It Right In!!
The best part is that you know they all speak English, because every-so-often, they slip in a word; while everything else is flowing with the perfect native accent, words like "Twitter" come out just as effortless, without any native accent. I daresay, with Midwestern American accent.
¡Hasta más tarde!
We all know This Guy: his code is of the lowest quality. He's never really "done-done" until about the third "Done", and even then, you're all just crossing your fingers....
Is this really just a PSA for Input Sanitizing?
Why yes, Yes It Is.
Protect your code from this fucker! You know he's going to call it with all sorts of invalid parameters, because, well, His Code Sucks.
Check all parameters. Make sure the error messages that go into the exceptions explain it to Joey clearly enough that he can get it.
Don't be cryptic!
If a parameter can't be null, Say So! Use its name in the message! If the string is too short, Say So, don't leave an IndexOutOfBoundsException time-bomb just because you're lazy and it will only be called by such-and-such or everyone knows to pass zot for the blah parameter.
Joey will! You will get all sorts thrown at your code.
On the converse, when you are calling Joey's code, Be Vewy Vewy Careful....
Don't expect null-checking, or any kind of checking, because quite frankly, Joey doesn't have time or inclination for that kind of stuff; it just gets in the way of the Real Work, or he's Just Ignorant.
Either way, your strategy remains the same. Don't expect his code to tell what's wrong. Be prepared to spend tons of time in the debugger hunting down copious amounts of NullReferenceException. What Fun! Just what I want to be doing: spending most of my time in someone else's code!
But what about Tests!?
Oh, Joey either doesn't write tests, or writes completely deficient tests, e.g. only testing "success" cases and not testing any failure modes, since you know, his code doesn't throw any exceptions on purpose!
What A Fuck-Job!
PS: No Offense Personally to anyone named "Joey", unless, you know....
This blog is a total backwater, not to be confused with Backwater.
The "Stats" are abysmal:
Yet the posting must continue....keep....typing....must....rant....
Now that Oracle has "taken off the gloves", we can all have another good laugh at what the US Patent and Trademark Office thinks are "new and novel" uses worthy of patent protection.
You can find a version of the complaint here.
Anyone with even a rudimentary education in Computer Science can see that these "patents" are really not specific-enough to be granted. Based on this, anyone who "gets there first" can patent such industry-stopping concepts as: data compression, use of fork() to make copy a process, etc. I'm no genius, but isn't that what fork() was designed to do?
Good thing no one thought to patent these gems:
Boy are they in the pockets of Big-Business. Everyone on the bench must have gotten a watch!
We are talking about the case of Costco Wholesale Corp. v Omega, S.A., where the watch manufacturer is basically pissed off that the wholesale retailer found a way to get the watches cheaper, by buying them overseas and bringing them into the US to sell.
The recourse? Simply throw away the First Sale Doctrine of our Copyright Law! Their loophole? The fact that the watches bear a copyrighted logo (the Omega logo) on them! Apparently they believe that transforms the entire watch into Copyrighted Work!
The gist of the Ninth Circuit's ruling: if it was made abroad, no First Sale, until it gets sold within the United States! This entitles the "copyright holder" to very strict control over (re)sale of the copyrighted "work". Remember, the watch is not copyrighted, only the logo appearing on it!
Now apply this contorted bullshit ruling to everything (copyrighted) with a secondary market: books, movies, video games, etc. All things we rent/borrow on a constant basis.
If this ruling stands, you can expect all that to dry up, as merchants will be loathe to touch anything that cannot be proven to originate here, or have been initially sold within our borders.
If this ruling stands, you can expect to see even more jobs sail overseas, as manufacturers arbitrarily add "copyrighted works" to packaging or labeling, and have them made abroad.
I was doing some GTalk, and taking advantage of the Voice Recognition input feature of Android, when I incidentally uttered and shit at the end.
Imagine my satisfaction to see it properly transcribed!
I felt like I was in an episode of Beavis and Butthead:
Beavis: Heh, Heh, your phone said "shit"!
Butthead: *grunt* Yeah, cool....
Note: you must explicitly enable this in the Settings.
From CNET that bastion of informed journalism:
I'm officially spreading The Rumour that Apple has somehow made this happen, via their network of mindless fanboys willing to do the evil bidding of One S. Jobs (not the Fake One).
I have no proof, that's why it's a rumour. Don't bother with lawyers, I am admitting right here, this story is total bullshit.
So this is a pure SEO-juju ploy?
Why yes, yes it is....
How many "other" places can we point The Finger:
Of course, let's not forget to chastise the dumb-fuck(s) that had their AutoRun turned on, making this even possible.
Blame it on Windows? Blame it on stupid idiotic fucks!
How did these SD cards even get into someone's insecurely configured Windows Workstation, before being installed into the phones? Why didn't they go directly from shrink-wrap to cellphone?
QA stands for Quality Assurance, not Quality Assination!
This link is for you....
... with a really nifty finalizer attack!
Sweet Creamy Goodness!
I've been reading on this set of pages and wahoo!
If you are coming into contact with threading, and more-often than not, that's the case, you better become really really educated about stuff like defensive copying, TOCTOU, and other delicious topics that if ignored, you eventually end up with data races or even deadlock.
There's still a ton to learn, and the topics are only going to get more-advanced.
Always prefer designs that only share immutable state, if that's even necessary. Using Futures facilitates this, because the input to it can be immutable, and creation of the result is totally private to the future, and "returned" in a controlled way to the caller. The only synchronization point is on obtaining the result.
Oh My Fucking Deity!!!!!!
Watching the Border: The Virtual Fence - 60 Minutes - CBS News
Since this is a blog, I'll wait for you to get back....
Now, repeat it with me:
Are You Fucking Kidding Me!!!?
Here is the paragraph that really got me ranting (emphasis mine):
But the biggest problem - and you may find this hard to fathom - was that no one at the Department of Homeland Security or the engineers at Boeing bothered to ask the people who would actually be using the surveillance system what they wanted or how they wanted the system to work.
Jesus Christ, is this still the 1970s?
Of course, there's lots to be disappointed about regarding Virtual Fence, after reading the article. Boeing played that one pretty fucking stupid, but sucked in the cash nonetheless. Maybe not so stupid....
