IE7 Quick Take

Curious about IE7, I installed the beta preview.

The browser itself looks OK. Basically it's Firefox look and feel. Tabs. Wow. I'm interested in exploring the RSS/Atom support but did not get the chance to exercise much. They do have a little "subscribe" icon that looks just like Firefox's. It makes you wonder: If it takes the equivalent of a space program to catch up to dinky little Firefox and feed aggregators, how is MS going to keep up with whatever comes next? They'll be starting out a nose behind. The little guys will blazing new continents before MS ships Vista.

About ten hours later, I had to do System Restore to get back to IE6. Principally, that's because I was working on a project using somewhat unfamiliar tools ( Nullsoft Installer and VS 2003) and needing the online help a lot. After installing IE7, almost no pages were visible in the Nullsfoft CHM, and all the pages lost their styling in VS online help.

Demonstrating the tightly coupled Microsoft world: Install IE7 and you'll be "upgrading" several other products that used to work just fine.

Nokia, Ericsson gonna slap you upside the head

Fear, uncertainty, and doubt being spread by Iron Mountain to get webheads to enroll in their seminar:

In May 2006 the new global .MOBI top-level domain extension is expected to arrive. It’s not the usual "yada-yada" new domain extension. It’s backed by major players in the mobile world, like Ericsson, GSM Association, Hutchison, Microsoft, Nokia, Samsung Electronics, Syniverse Technologies, Telefonica Moviles, TIM, T-Mobile and Vodafone. These investors are serious about bringing a much better and consistent mobile browsing experience to all users no matter what device they may be using. They plan on enforcing certain web site formatting requirements. Failure to comply may mean you are shut out reaching mobile users, even if you meet all legal requirements for registering a .MOBI domain name.

Oracle acquires Sleepycat

I lost a whole day today because a Berkeley DB file hit 2^31-1 bytes, jamming our subversion repository. That's when I discovered svn has migrated to using its own fsfs filesystem (we skipped two svn revs).

Then at the end of the day we get the news: Oracle acquires Sleepycat, maintainer of BDB, as part of its continuing rollup of open source (InnoDB, Sleepycat) and small private (Times Ten) database providers. I'm no fan of Sleepycat, and I admire Oracle DB; but this is giving me the creeps.

Dear Hugh,

I'm pleased to announce today that Sleepycat Software has been acquired by Oracle.

By joining the leading database company in the world, I expect that we will be able to serve our customers and the open source community better. With the additional expertise, resources and reach of Oracle, we'll be able to accelerate innovation, offer you greater choice, and provide more complete solutions. For Oracle, we fill a gap in the product portfolio for high performance embedded/edge databases, an area which we believe is a significant and growing opportunity....We look forward to working with you as part of Oracle!
....

Regards,
Mike Olson
Vice President, Oracle
Former President and CEO
Sleepycat Software

Nice job change, Mike.

We can hack this too

Via Kim Cameron: Companies are injecting employees with RFID chips.

My pet theory is that efforts to use technology to nail down identities are the more hackable, the more confidence authorities place in them. It's a corollary to Edward Luttwak's thesis in Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace, summarized in one review as

The crucial question to be asked of any new tactic, strategy, or technology is not: “how will this affect battle?” but “how will the enemy react?”

Patterns: Another Way To Say "Bloat"

A quote I'd missed at the very end of this oft-linked Paul Graham essay:

...in the OO world you hear a good deal about "patterns". I wonder if these patterns are not sometimes evidence of case (c), the human compiler, at work. When I see patterns in my programs, I consider it a sign of trouble.

It's elementary information theory, sir. Any pattern, or predictable part, of the signal is non-informative bit bloat. Compression programs work by identifying predictable patterns and encoding them simply: if the pattern recurs, you don't have to repeat it verbatim. You can just say, e.g. "Pattern 3 again" to substitute for the longer sequence.

It's the same with programming. Coding patterns is cut and paste. Eclipse will even help you do it, in Java; it has all sorts of nifty shortcut keys to do patterns like "return an array from a collection instance." That's reverse compression: You type Ctrl-Shift-J or whatever, and Eclipse expands it into the pattern for you.

Here's a pattern that gripes me in java: for data access, I usually make two methods for each thing I want to access. Both methods accept all the parameters you need to select the thing; but one method accepts a JDBC connection parameter, while the other constructs and destroys the connection and calls into the first method. The second method is a convenience procedure, while the first one allows you to make the call as part of a series of actions withing the same transaction. You know...

   public static long getMetainfoId(UID uid, String objectType){
       try {
           // notice the pattern within a pattern below (service locator)
           Connection conn = ServiceLocator.getInstance().getDataSource().getConnection();

           try {
               return getMetainfoId(conn, uid, objectType);
           } finally{
               conn.close();
           }

       } catch (Exception e) {
           throw new RuntimeException(e);
       } finally {

       }

   }

   public static long getMetainfoId(Connection conn, UID uid, String objectType){
      .... do the real work
   }

I have cut and paste that snippet about five hundred times.

I want a way to avoid both compile time and run time bloat. I don't just want a magic macro that saves source code; I want the actual wrapper code to be generic. I asked my friend and colleague Brad to sketch a Lisp solution:

the wrapper function would be something like this:

(defun wrapper (resource-creator resource-usinge-function &rest args)
 "resource creator is a function that creates the resource we will
 temporarily use. We can also parameterize it if necessary at compile
 or run time using lambdas depending upon needs"
 (let ((resource (funcall resource-creator)))
   (unwind-protect
     (apply resource-using-function resource args)
     (resource-close resource)))) ; resource close could be a generic
function or parameterized as well


when defining a wrappapble function:

(define-wrapped get-uid (connection metainfold)
 (create-connection p1 p1) ; this line specifies the resource creation function
 (your code here)) ; the body that does the work and gets wrapped

I'm going to learn Lisp!