Bob Congdon

Unicode Snowman

Sat, 30 May 2009 13:30:00 GMT

The Miscellaneous Symbols plane of Unicode (2600â��26FF) contains various glyphs including weather symbols: ☃ ☀ ☁ ☂ The snowman symbol indicates "snowy weather". Combine the Unicode snowman with Internationalized Domain Names and you can have http://â��.net/, the Unicode Snowman web site. The Unicode standard doesn't specify what the glyph is supposed to look like. Depending on what font is used, you may see a smiling snowman surrounded by a ring of snow balls or an unsmiling snowman wearing a hat that looks like a fez.

Note: since my blog posts are encoded as ISO-8859-1 rather than Unicode, the link above is actually http://xn--n3h.net/ which contains the Punycode version of the hostname.

When Monkeys Flew

Thu, 28 May 2009 13:30:00 GMT

One of my younger son's favorite books is Curious George Gets A Medal where George becomes the first monkey in space. The book was first published in 1957. I hadn't realized that it predates a real world event. Today is the 50^th anniversary of the space flight of Abel and Baker, the first monkeys to survive spaceflight. Able was a rhesus monkey, and Baker was a squirrel monkey.

The Five Stages of Soylent Green

Mon, 04 May 2009 13:00:00 GMT

Lang.NET 2009

Mon, 04 May 2009 04:30:00 GMT

I didn't attend the Lang.NET 2009 Symposium but I've been watching some of the presentations online. A few that stood out:

Jeffrey Snover on Powershell V2. I've been using Powershell since it was called Monad. I use it all of the time. There's lots of cool stuff in V2 and it's great to watch Powershell's creator show them off.
Lars Bak on Google's Javascript V8 engine. Lars Bak talks about the V8 engine used in Google Chrome. Lars has been behind lots of innovative VMs including Self, Strongtalk and Sun's HotSpot. V8 builds hidden classes from JavaScript and performs dynamic native code generation rather than interpreting JavaScript.
Anders Hejlsberg on Co- and Contra-variance in C# 4.0 This is a narrow topic but interesting to me. Generics types in C# didn't support co-variance which means that, for example, an object of type IEnumerable<string> cannot be assigned to a variable of type IEnumerable<object> even though string is a subtype of object. In C# 4.0 this will be supported.
John Rose on Method Handles and Interface Injection in the JVM The Da Vinci Machine Project is extending the Java VM with first-class support for languages other than Java, especially dynamic languages. One of those extensions is Method Handles which is quite similar to C# delegates.

Poken Schmoken

Mon, 04 May 2009 00:30:00 GMT

Did you ever own a Palm Pilot or other Palm device? One feature that was pretty popular in the early days was the ability to "beam" items from Palm to Palm, usually "business cards". It uses infrared to transmit and receive the data and can be used to beam any sort of data that you want, including full applications. But both parties need a Palm device.

Bluetooth can do much the same thing but never really caught on in a big way. Exchanging email addresses verbally or the like seems to work just fine today. Given that, what do you think the chances are that a new physical device called a Poken will become successful?

You connect with someone else that has a Poken by holding them together (this is called "poken someone" — ugh!). The devices exchange tokens and you plug your Poken into your computer to upload your new contacts.

The Poken has two components: a Poken hand and a little character that the hand connects to such as these:

Would you pull one of these out in a business meeting? Hey, can I poken you? Probably not but that's not the target audience for this device anyway; teens and college students may love them. Will Poken succeed? Maybe. Depends on whether enough Poken get out there for owners to, er, poke. Otherwise the whole thing may be silly as the CueCat. And the CueCat was free while each Poken costs ~~$24.95~~ $19.96.

The Freesound Project

Sat, 02 May 2009 01:30:00 GMT

The Freesound Project is a collaborative database of Creative Commons licensed sounds. Could be pretty useful in games, videos, etc.

Uncomfortable Plot Summaries

Fri, 01 May 2009 02:30:00 GMT

137 uncomfortable plot summaries of movies, TV series and books. Some favorites:

ALIENS

Disaster Recovery

Thu, 30 Apr 2009 01:30:00 GMT

Last week my MacBook Pro would not boot. This happened after a less-than-graceful shutdown. Rebooting would get as far as the gray screen with the "spinning wheel" but even after waiting a long time it didn't appear to make any progress. Rebooting while holding down the option key showed a Macintosh OS partition on the drive but it wouldn't boot. I attached my backup drive (thank you SuperDuper!) and was able to boot from that. But the internal drive would not mount and Disk Utility wasn't able to repair it. I then tried booting into single user mode (hold down Command-S while booting). The OS partition was there and the contents appeared to be fine. Okay, the drive is fine, there must be a file system problem. Following directions found here, I ran fsck in single-user mode. It fixed the file system, I rebooted and the MBP was fine again. Phew!

IMDb 250

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 02:00:00 GMT

IMDb maintains a list of the Top 250 movies (as voted by their users). I noticed that several of my friends on Facebook have reported how many of these films they've seen. While I was trying to figure out how to show my own results, I discovered Track the IMDb 250, a web application lets you mark movies that you have seen on the IMDb Top 250. It's built and hosted using the Google AppEngine. The source code for the app can be found here. The current list of seen/unseen movies for any user can be queried and returned in JSON format using the path /data/user/seen. My current seen/unseen list is here.

I've watched 188 of the current IMDb 250. I doubt that I'll end up watching all 250 of them but 16 of the films that I haven't seen are in my Netflix queue.

Note: IMDb's convention of listing foreign films with their original titles might make some of the entries hard to recognize (e.g. El laberinto del fauno was released in the US as Pan's Labyrinth). Here a list of the US titles:

Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain (2001) → Amélie
Das Leben der Anderen (2006) → The Lives of Others
Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi (2001) → Spirited Away
El laberinto del fauno (2006) → Pan's Labyrinth
La vita è bella (1997) → Life Is Beautiful
Nuovo cinema Paradiso (1988) → Cinema Paradiso
Der Untergang (2004) → Downfall
Ladri di biciclette (1948) → The Bicycle Thief
Per qualche dollaro in più (1965) → For a Few Dollars More
Mononoke-hime (1997) → Princess Mononoke
Smultronstället (1957) → Wild Strawberries
Det sjunde inseglet (1957) → The Seventh Seal
Le salaire de la peur (1953) → The Wages of Fear
Le notti di Cabiria (1957) → Nights of Cabiria
Les diaboliques (1955) → Diabolique
La battaglia di Algeri (1966) → The Battle of Algiers
Låt den rätte komma in (2008) → Let the Right One In
Hotaru no haka (1988) → Grave of the Fireflies
Le scaphandre et le papillon (2007) → The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Wo hu cang long (2000) → Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922) → Nosferatu
Les quatre cents coups (1959) → The Four Hundred Blows
Vals Im Bashir (2008) → Waltz with Bashir

Hope that's helpful.

Cloudy Manifesto

Thu, 02 Apr 2009 02:00:00 GMT

When software companies get together and use a ten-dollar word like "Manifesto" it means that they want to be taken seriously. So it goes with the Open Cloud Manifesto.

Who are the dominant players in cloud computing? Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Salesforce and, maybe, Yahoo. Are any of them supporting this manifesto? Nope. Who are the supporters? IBM, Sun, Cisco, SAP and a number of smaller companies. Why the disconnect? As Tim Bray puts it:

I've seen this movie before: There's a new area of technology, there's a dominant incumbent who got there first, and there's a bunch of other voices calling for standardization, being genially ignored by the incumbent.

It's perfectly reasonable to suspect the incumbent of wanting to protect their turf, and also to suspect the standards-promoters of simply wanting a piece of the action.

Anyone remember OpenDoc?

Ten Years Ago Today

Wed, 01 Apr 2009 02:00:00 GMT

Notes/Domino R5 shipped ten years ago today. The release culminated with a terrific ship party in the Bahamas.

Ten years. Wow. An eternity in the software business.

Obama Sushi

Thu, 26 Mar 2009 13:30:00 GMT

According to tofugu, the Japanese love our current president enough to create an Obama-themed sushi platter.

American presidents and sushi... Doesn't that sound familiar? Oh, right! That incident inspired a Japanese slang word, Bushusuru.

Advice to Obama: on a state visit to Japan, avoid the Natto!

Weekend Forecast: Rain, Sleet and Dippin Dots

Mon, 09 Mar 2009 02:45:00 GMT

This weekend we've had mixed weather. Rain, sleet, thunder and lightning. And lots of snow pellets. They aren't hard ice balls like hail. They aren't fluffy flakes of snow. They're little pellets of snow that look just like Dippin Dots. The official name for this stuff is soft hail.

Octal Literals

Mon, 02 Mar 2009 05:00:00 GMT

Back when computers had limited address spaces, octal numbers were handy. Each digit represents 3 bits and a short string of octal can represent a 16-bit or 24-bit address. Octal numbers were so handy that programming languages like C included octal literals. The syntax is simple: a numeric literal with a leading '0' and no decimal point is an octal literal. For example, 0777 is the octal representation of 511 decimal.

As address spaces expanded to 32-bits and beyond, octal syntax was replaced with hexidecimal. The transition happened more than ten years ago. Octal literal syntax is unknown to many developers today and can cause unintentional errors. For example:

int powersOfTen[] = { 0001, //okay 0010, // error: this is 8, not 10 0100, // error: this is 64, not 100 1000, // okay };

Given that octal isn't that useful today, would you expect that any recently developed programming language to support them in the same way as C/C++? Probably not but many do. Java does. So does Javascript. And Ruby. And Perl. And Python (although Python 3 has adopted a less error-prone syntax). Why were C-style octal literals carried over into these languages? Probably because their interpreters/compilers were initially written in C/C++ and old habits (and syntax) die hard.

Some languages have bucked this trend. Smalltalk for example, uses an explicit radix prefix for octal and hexidecimal (e.g. 8r377 and 16r7FFF). And C# does not support octal literals at all.

President Bob?

Sat, 28 Feb 2009 03:30:00 GMT

I don't usually have work-related mail sent to my house but I have used my home address for free subscriptions and conference registrations. So sometimes I get mail addressed with Microsoft, IBM, Lotus, etc. after my name. And sometimes it includes a job title as well. But this is a first. I got a mailing from HP addressed like this:

President of Iris Associates? I believe that the last president of Iris was Bill Hume (or Steve Beckhardt?) before it was absorbed into IBM in 2001. Before that it was Ray Ozzie. I left Iris in 2000. How did HP end up with this title and company on their mailing list?