Digital Apocrypha

Today we had earthquakes here in Manchester. One of them even woke me up. Freaky. We just don’t have that kind of thing in Britain.

Some notes an a Presentation on Microsoft’s Palladium DRM system. This is the first description I’ve read with some technical detail and no marketing bollox. The trust-based architecture sound vaguely similar to that of the XBox, which was cracked a while back. It’ll be intersting to see how this plays out over the next few years, especially if general-purpose hardware devices like hard drives start to incorporate DRM technology too.

Visual Studio Magazine has a very interesting interview with Alan Cooper – the original architect of Viual Basic from way back before Microsoft bought it from his company. Lots of insightful comments on the realtionship between how we build software and the way that users experience it, and a fairly positive verdict on .NET. Good stuff: now I want to go and buy his books.

The Write the Right Stuff. Grown-up software production vsMicroserfs. Written for a general readership, this is one of the better non-technical articles on software engineering I’ve read. A very refreshing antidote to our industries’ all to frequent rhapsodizing about the latest system architecture fashion or complex middleware layer. If I could have one sentence from this article pummled into the head of every software development manager, it would be “Don’t just fix the mistakes — fix whatever permitted the mistake in the first place.”

Dave Weiner posted a link to this Doonesbury cartoon. Spot-on, as usual, and the first time I’ve seen a reference to blogging in popular culture. Of course, there areother opinions.

Deeply cool wallpaper. Check out the free gallery. I have Morning Light on my system at 1152×864 – it reminds me so much of the forest on Myst Island and Selenic. #

The Onion: New National Parks Website Makes National Parks Obsolete. #

Extreme Ironing. Love it. #

Explorapedia Nature: Earth Rotates in Wrong Direction. This behaviour is by design, no doubt. Theres a whole load of these atHoppoDoc. Q253912 is splendid…

Been nosing around a few maths and physics sites today…

I first read Godel, Escher, Bach at the age of about twelve when I borrowed it from the library back in Hull. I didn’t understand much of it at that age, but G?del’s Incompleteness Theorem blew my mind. It still does. There’s a whole load of explanations, in English, of this deciptively simple theorem. I prefer the one by Rudy Rucker – somewere, I’ve got a copy of Infinity and the Mind that I haven’t read it for at least ten years.

I like the idea of Penrose Tiles – you can tile an infinite surface without the tile pattern ever repeating. You can play with Penrise tiles using this rather smart Java applet. There’s an interesting site about the mathematics and history of tiling: the galleries showing the full set of plane symetry groups are very beautiful.

Now goggle your eyes at the Penrose Tribar.

M-theory is a kind of generalisation of Superstring Theory, which is itself what we gor when someone added extra dimensions to the old idea of String theory (sooo Eighties, darling). Greg  Egan‘s bookDiaspora uses this type of physics to make possible a very complex plot. Recommended if you like hard SF.

Today I finally added a couple of new and, ahem, rather snazzy features: a photo album and an RSS feed. Just like the proper grown-up blogs have…

– # –

The technical details, for anyone who wants to know.

The photo album is a ASP.NET web application written in C# with a Jet database at the back-end. (I don’t yet feel like dropping $100/year for SQL Server.) As with classic ASP, the pages are all generated on-the-fly at the server using the database. The output formatting needs some adjustment and the code is still fairly raw and unforgiving of errors, but hey – it works.

This was my first webforms app, and it went quite well. Knowing a bit about winforms and its object model certainly helped. Having built an Intranet at Cogsys using classic ASP 2.0, VBScript and InterDev, this experience was certainly several orders of magnitude less painful. Now is probably a good time to get Dino Esposito’s book to find out how I should have done it.

By contrast, the RSS feed’s XML is built by CityDesk when it generates the site. No dynamic server-side stuff at all, just a statically generated file. Viewed from within CityDesk, its really just some boilerplate XML with an embedded CityScript loop that iterates over all the articles in the CityDesk database. For each article, it then emits a chunk XML with appropriate tag values pulled out of the article’s properties. Although this approach is nice and simple, it does have one problem. Because CityScript lacks string manipulation functions, I can’t escape any HTML tags in the <description> block, and therefore I can’t have hyperlinks inside the description text.

(If you’ve got this far and you still don’t know what RSS is, take a look here. Its cool stuff indeed.)

Ultimately, and time permitting, I intend to cut the dependence on CityDesk by re-implementing the whole site using ASP.NET, with the dynamic content in a database. Even if nobody ever reads the site, it’ll be a nice learning exercise.

– # –

Update: 22nd October 2002. Found a fix for the tage escaping problem described above. Thesolution is to bracket the field in a [CDATA[ … ]] .block

Oh No…  I’ve got a Seismic Intruder Detection Device stuck to my shoe.

This is kind of interesting. Pity they based it on Pascal: limits the immediate real-world applications somewhat.

There’s more info on the project’s site and here (warning: nasty cursor-tracking animation thingy). The sound downloads appear to be missing, but there’s some disappointingly simple ones here.

I wonder what kind of audible difference there would be between equivalent programs written in different languages. I imagine C++ as sort of fast and spiky (like, say, the The Rite of Spring), and VB as slower and more melodic. Hopefully, someone will turn this into a Visual Studio addin soon. I must know what COM Interop sounds like.

This stuff reminds me of the stories of programming poineers debugging programs on early systems by listening to the radio interference generated by the machine. Always wondered about that, but it appears to be plausible.

---

Musical approach helps programmers catch bugs

http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99992757

09:32 05 September 02
Exclusive from New Scientist Print Edition
 
Making music out of computer code is helping programmers to catch the bugs that can cause software to go awry.

Computer code is often prone to errors that are difficult to spot. In a long program, made perhaps of hundreds or thousands of lines of programming language code, it is possible for the writer to misjudge how the various elements of the software will work together.

So-called debugging software can iron this out, by letting people look at a graphical representation of a program. This helps find bugs by highlighting which parts of a program are communicating with others.

But the computer’s sound capabilities are ignored in debugging, says Paul Vickers at the University of Northumbria. “It’s sitting there as a completely unused channel, while lots of effort is being put into visualisation tools.”

So Vickers and James Alty of Loughborough University developed a system that automatically converts computer program code written in Pascal into simple “music”.

…

When different sections of code are put together, they should form a harmonious tune. But if a loop, for example, does not execute properly, the music would not ascend properly and the programmer should hear the error. Similarly, a duff statement would produce a different chord that would be immediately apparent.

…