JavaScript Programmers

I know you don't need it explained to you.

But they do.

Your Feature Has Been Cancelled

Or At Least Postponed

Surely that calls for a Rage Comic? I suppose we'll find out next summer, whether there's still going to be any appetite for an Office 2007 style user interface.

Maybe the more interesting question is, will there even be a desktop then?!

Oh, That Would Be A Fine Trick

After a quiet month or two, I've started hitting my stride again. I've reached my quota of four technical articles for this month, two of those security related (however vaguely). This means I can relax, and fill up the rest of June with popular culture references. Let's enjoy a couple of my favourite tricks from last year's Penn and Teller: Fool Us series. This first is by the Canadian World Champion of Magic, Shawn Farquhar:



This next shows the maestros themselves doing what they excel at. They let the audience in on both the joke and the magic, while still overfilling with enough additional indirection to ensure our ultimate bewilderment:

Best Rock Gag Ever

The surprise return of Dexys after mumble mumble years, with this charming bit of theatre...



...somehow reminded me of the best ever lyrical gag in a rock song...



After listening to Meat's and Ellen Foley's performance of that Jim Steinman epic (though that's actually Karla DeVito in the video), I think you'll agree the best bit starts at 07:00.

Tri-State Logic in C#

First, a Story About Trees

Certain friends and colleagues, asking me about the origin of my "Stanislaw" Facebook persona, have already been introduced to the shady night dweller "Stanislaw the Philosopher". Found in and around 1980 sweating over some maths and engineering textbooks in the wee small hours, listening to Mike McLean Through the Night on Radio Clyde, and occasionally sending in record links in the form of unbearably awful puns. Like this:

The king's gardener feared for his life. Long and hard he had toiled in the royal grounds, trying desperately to make the castle's fir trees thrive in the dry, dusty and too-barren earth. Nothing would work to save them. And now that his life was forfeit, he had begun to see ghosts during his nightly rounds. One of these came up to him, holding forth a small cloth pouch, and saying "These are the droppings of the kestrel hawk. Lime for this climate, bone for these flora. You must feed it to their roots, one and all. For either you and they shall die, or else neither."

The gardener did as he was bid. Three nights later, walking through the grounds in the dark of an otherwise still night, he now sensed those trees rising up before and around him, moment by moment blocking off a little more of the violet horizon. Was this truly and solely an imagination? Then too, he began hearing something wholly unaccustomed and chilling on the air, what was that sound? The raising of a distant breeze, the creaking of old bones and branches, the arrival of some new monster unseen?

Or kestrel manure firs in the dark?

On another occasion, Stanislaw the Philosopher posed a riddle from Raymond Smullyan's book of logical puzzles, What Is The Name Of This Book? The hardback book itself was sent to the radio station as a prize. Stanislaw then sent in the correct answer under the guise of his good friend Tom, who was subsequently baffled to receive such a book, from a radio station he never listened to, as a prize in a competition he'd never heard of.

But Seriously...

This whole confession is prompted by Eric Lippert's blog Fabulous Adventures in Coding, and in particular by today's entry, null is not false, part two. Eric starts off by using Dr Smullyan's deductive logic puzzle books to introduce the concept of multi-valued logic systems, including the nullable boolean. This 3-state scheme has the possible values: true, false, and null.

The rules of null are quite straightforward and obvious, if you think of replacing it everywhere with "unknown". So for example in arithmetic, we would have

X + null = null,

which translates as the self-evident "Anything plus unknown, equals unknown." Now in our 3-term logic,

false AND Y = false,

since whatever the second term might represent (including null), the first false makes the expression false. But this also implies that

X AND false = false,

which can be a problem for computer languages featuring short-circuit boolean evaluation. Eric considers the cases of the C# operators && and ||, which are specified as strictly short-circuiting operators, and asks the question, how should we evaluate

X && Y

when X is null? The truth table gives unambiguous answers: false if Y is false, otherwise null. But to obtain that answer we had to violate the specification that Y is only evaluated when X is true. Eric closes by saying "...either we sometimes evaluate Y when we shouldn't, or we sometimes return a value that does not match the value that X&Y would have produced. The way out of this dilemma is to cut the feature entirely."

So, the operators && and || are not "lifted to nullable". That seems a shame! I'd have preferred the alternative way out of that dilemma, where we allow nullable overrides of these operators, and simply replace the pair of statements

In the expression X && Y we evaluate Y if and only if X is true
In the expression X || Y we evaluate Y if and only if X is false

with

In the expression X && Y we evaluate Y if and only if X isn't false
In the expression X || Y we evaluate Y if and only if X isn't true

Focus!

A Fortuitous Juxtaposition

RSS readers will have missed the coincidence of expression in my Technology sidebar today, where these two articles from different Microsoft blogs collided:

Nice to know the Key to Success at Microsoft is not something that you need to steal.

Hallow Tao

The Hard Root

Hallowe'en is hard,
Hollowing is hard.
There are many turnips --
Which am I to hollow?...

With apologies to Li Po.

Take The Paper

Technology Fail

See, that's what happens when you let these printer manufacturers rip you off with their wet razor business model. First, their toners and inks become, quite literally, more expensive than gold dust. Meanwhile, the non-consumable part of the deal - the manufacture of the actual printer - has slid so far down the durability slope, that it's achieved parity. Replete with delicate plastic hinges and cogs, precision engineered by the cost-benefit equations of modern quality control, it can now be relied upon to cease functioning, and instead to whirr and roll unproductively, exactly ninety one days after unpacking. Meet the new consumables.



Hat tip: John Scalzi.

Password Reuse

...And What To Do Next?

Today's XKCD cartoon covers multiple issues.

Some of these are related to computer security, and to password issues in particular, while others (especially in the punchline) are not.

Click through to enjoy the whole page, and then just for fun, answer these two questions:

(1) What would you do with that much power? - And remember to be honest with yourself, this isn't a psychometric exam!

(2) What can you do today, in terms of the way that you manage your online identity and transactions, to prevent the puppetmasters, the guys in the black hats, from ever getting that much power over you?

The Artichoke of Attack

They Shallot Pass

Onion, that steadfast, reliable, archetypal model of network security, was reportedly receiving therapy today, having broken down in tears after this stinging and allegedly unprovoked attack by Cisco network consulting engineer Kurt Grutzmacher: "You used to hear about hackers having to peel away at the network’s onion layers, but in the borderless environment, that analogy does not apply."

"We gave service for years, decades even, to modelling the typical network's defences against threats and vulnerabilities" said a tearful Onion, in an apparent reference to its ofttimes colleague, Wild Leek. "Suddenly Cisco's mid-year security report comes out, and this guy's all like, It's not onions any more, it's more of an artichoke. I mean, WTF? So we're being replaced... by a fucking thistle?"

A representative from the pair's legal firm, Scallions Garlic and Chives, was later quoted as saying "We are naturally disappointed by Cisco's decision. We have many members, far more capable of representing attack surfaces in this new, so-called borderless environment. This could all have been better handled without going outside the family. The new Artichoke guy, sure he sounds tough, but underneath it all, he's not that hard. We call him Cisco's Thistle. But he ain't even got no sting."

In other news, ogres are expected to continue to have layers; donkeys, not so much.

I Killed My Wife...

...'s Interest in Cookery Programmes...

...by the simple expedient of pointing out - with the honourable exceptions of Keith Floyd R.I.P., and Rick Stein - how frequently every TV chef utilises (and almost always incorrectly) the word "literally". For example: "Then the Kiev will literally explode with a garlic aroma." Sounds more like Chicken Chernobyl, than Kiev.

It really does appear to be the sole quadrisyllabic entry in their cooking lexicon. And now, when any of her favourite cookery programmes comes on the telly, she just can't stop herself from playing "Literally Bingo". Truly I have completely ruined one of her favourite pastimes.

TV chefs aren't the only people who both habitually overuse and entirely misapply this word. There are also those AWFUL Americans (that's not just some random insult, incidentally; if you haven't met it before, it's the acronym from Americans Who Figuratively Use "Literally").

Here's David Mitchell complaining just a little about their Queen's English usage habits:



Actually I think I've finally made my peace with the American "I could care less"; let's just assume they've dropped an initial "As if", leaving it now silent, and implicitly understood. Hereby is logic painlessly restored. This was not easy for me to do, because a favourite variant (to which I claim authorship) runs thus: "I could care less, but it would take more effort."

Yet one greater bugbear of mine, with these darn Yanks, still remains: their use of "dumb" (mute, or vocally challenged) to mean "stupid" (Republican)...

Anyway, good luck in the 2010 World Cup, America, and always try to remember that in spite of the name, other nations are also competing. Who's that you're playing first? Engerland?

Go USA!

Update: Though we may have hoped and dreamt, still we never truly believed you would deny our Auld Enemy their opening win - especially after you went down in the 4th minute. Apparently. I was watching on HD, where it actually ended USA 1-0 England! So, For The Win: well done guys.

Also, still finding it hard to believe that we willingly sat through an England football match, while Scotland's rugby squad - away! - were so historically hammering Argentina on the other channel. I could care less! Literally!

Dayjob Orchestra

The Other Flower Kings

You're probably aware of Dayjob Orchestra's contributions to the art and science of flower arrangement:

http://www.dayjoborchestra.com/fa.htm

You might also be aware that they're also a fairly unproductive, progressive rock band based in Toronto, Canada, whose first CD "Unsolicited Material" may readily be stolen from here:

http://www.dayjoborchestra.com/us.htm

But did you also know they used to provide soundtrack material for Star Trek: The Next Generation?





Yes, I thought so. Yes, this was just an excuse to post those two YouTube clips. For future reference, you know?