Software Development Process and Industry Analysis by the former Editor of Software Development, Computer Language, and Game Developer Magazines
Archive for October 2007
I would say that these have nothing to do with software development, but there was actually a great “Philosophy Bites” on vagueness that touched directly on fuzzy logic (which I think Williamson dismisses too quickly — I’m not at all sure that the absurdity that he says “follows from fuzzy logic” does, in fact, follow according to the rules of fuzzy logic).
“Citing Medicine” has issued a standard for citing blogs in academic writing, which would like this for this entry:
O’Brien, L. Knowing.NET [blog on the Internet]. Kailua Kona: [Larry O'Brien]. [June 2002] - [cited 2007 October 13]. Available from http://www.knowing.net/.
The first thing I don’t like is the “blog on the Internet” as the “type of medium.” Why not just “Internet”? Or, if there’s some legitimate distinction to be made between a blog and, say, a wiki or customized homepage or Facebook page, why not simply “blog”?
Worse, though, are the rules for date of publication [June 2002] and the availability block. Date of publication is the starting date of the blog, which in a sense parses logically, but that’s like citing a television show as dating from the start of its network. But the lack of a permalink for the availability is terrible. To find a particular post, you have to find the main site, somehow navigate to the citation date, and seek the particular reference. Yuch. Permalink, people, permalink.
Between the semi-regularly broken CAPTCHA on my comment system and reports I’m getting from some correspondents, I may have been hard to get in touch with recently. Try lobrien -at- email for a day or two.
Word to the wise: do not combine Windows symlinks with Subversion; it cannot handle them:
G:\svn\websites>mkdir foo
G:\svn\websites>svn add foo
A foo
G:\svn\websites>svn commit -m “message”
Adding websites\foo
svn: Commit failed (details follow):
svn: File not found: transaction ’39-1′, path ‘/websites/foo’
This seems to hold true no matter which side of the symlink on which you work.
That’s a bummer.
Yuriy Solodkyy demonstrates the combination of LINQ and Reflection APIs, a technique which could prove to be tremendously powerful and which strikes me as allowing LINQ-enabled languages to have a level of “dynamism” that puts to shame duck-typing.
Could this simply replace the Visitor pattern with an approach that needs no cooperation from the data structure?
Would this allow an Abstract Factory that allowed you to dynamically find all products of one Factory and replace them with those of another?
[via Steve Pietrek]
A year ago I said that HDTV didn’t make sense for me. But with the arrival of Tivo HD, the dollar weakening and making dramatic price drops less likely, and the Red Sox making the playoffs, I decided to make the jump and bought a Philips 42″.
The biggest problem is that once you see high-definition channels in your own home side-by-side with standard definition, the standard definition channels look horrible. We actually had the TV for a couple days before I got the HD cable package and we were like “OK, definitely more noticeable compression and blurriness on the bigger screen, but that’s fine.” And then I got the set-top box and saw how much better the pictures look.
Then, all the trouble started. I chose to stick with Oceanic Time-Warner Cable rather than satellites because to receive HD satellite programming in Hawaii, you have to place two 2.5m dishes in your yard! Our neighbors have them and they’re huge and ugly — a non-starter for us. Plus, my Tivo HD was winging its way island-ward. All I would do is order some CableCards and life would be good.
Well.
Oceanic TWC no longer provides CableCards for HD. You can get a CableCard for SD channels, but if you want HD, you have to use one of their set-top boxes or DVRs. I was a little stunned, but I figured “OK, Tivo had this figured out from the start. So I’ll take the set-top box, hook it into Tivo, and use Tivo’s magic IR blasters to control the set-top box.”
Well.
Turns out that Tivo HD has no facility for inputting HD other than CableCards. (And, just to make it complicated, some people are saying that Oceanic TWC can not legally convert-to-incompatible-form the HD streams of the networks, which provide the majority of the HD content I’d be looking to Tivo (at least until Battlestar Galactica restarts).) (If you thought that forbidding just this kind of practice was the whole point of CableCards, join the crowd.)
So I left my Tivo HD in the box and set up my old Tivo to control the set-top box with IR blasters. “If I need to watch HD, I’ll watch it live.” Which ticked me off no end. Not only is watching live TV unthinkable after you’ve gotten used to a DVR, watching live sports in Hawai’i is difficult due to the 3 hour time shift.
Even worse, the picture quality on shows recorded via the set-top box is noticeably worse than shows from the previous week, when they were recorded straight off our previous non-digital cable service. I suspect this has to do with double-compression: we had been recording analog and applying Tivo’s compression to it; now we have a digitally-compressed stream decoded by the set-top box, sent to the Tivo and recompressed, naturally resulting in many more artifacts and general degradation of quality.
So to summarize:
I’m definitely going to live with the status quo through the playoffs (or at least through the Red Sox run). Manny Ramirez’ homerun last night looked awesome in HD.
But after that, I have no idea what I’m going to do.
Trying to play the very first HD DVD that I’ve rented (“The Host”), I received an XBox blade popup that said “Can’t play this content. Reason code: C66700B.” Does anyone know what this is? Please don’t tell me there are incompatible HD DVD formats or DRM restrictions that say “Oh, hey, sorry, we don’t approve of your TV.”
