February 2007 Archives

Actually, while I am thinking about environmentalism that's worth having, let me encourage interested parties among my readers to go have a flip through - and yes, I bookmarked this, if you're on the feed, but it's worth another mention as well - WorldChanging .

They have quite a lot of good, interesting ideas on there that are neither the usual anti-human deep-green schtick nor the warmed-over socialist fiddle-faddle that "mainstream" environmentalism delights in serving up.  Excellent site.  I want their book:

The scripting games are done now, and so, my solutions to events 9 and 10 are up.

(As are my perfect scores. Go me, and all that.)

Jeffrey Snover from the PowerShell team explains why they didn't alias "new" to "new-object"...

...and why I shall be removing said alias from my profile forthwith.

(See, this is why I like weblogs so much. Instant feedback!)

It would be nice to think that this might go some way to counter the demented anti-Americanism that's rife among my ex-countrymen, but I fear the rot has gone too far for that. Still, I enjoyed it.

On a more personal note, it appears my mother's breast cancer has returned, this time in her hip, in newly metastasised form.

I really wish there was an intelligent designer, because then I could have the satisfaction of beating the living crap out of the person responsible for the self-destructive flaws in human biology. That's not an option available to you when there's no-one to blame but the random malevolence of the universe, but dammit, it would be nice. That's all.

If your epistemology is wrong, then everything that depends on that is wrong.

Everything else - well, nearly - depends on your epistemology.

This is something that everyone should keep in mind.

(As an aside: around here, we like pancritical empiric rationalism. Other variants on rationalism and empiricism accepted. Constructivism: take a hike.)

Just because you people are useful in prevailing over the goddamned Commie hordes doesn't mean you're any less of a bunch of bloody morons.  Remember that.

Rarely has there been a better time for Rule 29 to be invoked.

...to appear in my head.

“Here’s the difference between Terrans and Eldrae in a nutshell. When we invented the automobile, we each started out with maybe a tachometer, and an oil pressure gauge, and a voltmeter to keep track of.  On Earth, you found that cars sold better the more instruments you got rid of, until you ended up with a ‘Check Engine’ light.  On Praecis, though - while there usually is a ‘Master Alarm’ light - we found that they sold better if we added ammeters and torque meters and shift-speed regulators and auxiliary-power couplers and on-the-fly exhaust gas analysis and controls to let you retune your engine timings while you drive and every other bell, whistle and gong that we could possibly come up with. Imperials love options, and the more options the better. Even if they never use ‘em, they like to know they could. You want to sell in our market, learn to love complexity.  And open standards, but they don’t look so shiny.”

Now have solutions up from Microsoft and from me.

And they were nice enough to update my scores after I fixed that "new"/"new-object" issue, which was decent of them. I'm still a little concerned as to what my score for advanced event 8 will be - the announcement that valid meant "does what you think it does", rather that strictly "executes" came out after I'd sent my answers in, although I did take the precaution of annotating my answers with notes that, for example:

If ($x = 1) {"$x is equal to 1"} Else {"$x is not equal to 1"}

is legal code, so yes, valid, but is also profoundly unuseful, given its behavior.

I hope they take my parenthetical comments into account, y'know?

...as Chavez threatens to jail grocers who don't play ball with his price controls. Except they can't comply with his price controls if they want to stay in business, because inflation there's currently running at 18.4%, meaning the poor bastards would make a gross loss if they tried to play ball with him.

Entering a supermarket here is a bizarre experience. Shelves are fully stocked with Scotch whisky, Argentine wines and imported cheeses like brie and camembert, but basic staples like black beans and desirable cuts of beef like sirloin are often absent. Customers, even those in the government's own Mercal chain of subsidized grocery stores, are left with choices like pork neck bones, rabbit and unusual cuts of lamb.

[...]

But in recent weeks, the scarcity of items like meat and chicken have led to a panicked reaction by federal authorities as they try to understand how such shortages could develop in a seemingly flourishing economy.

Someone should send 'ol Hugo a copy of The Road to Serfdom... or any decent Austrian School economics text, really.

Chavez, whose leftist populism remains highly popular among Venezuela's poor and working classes, seemed unfazed by criticism of his policies. Appearing live on national television, he called for the creation of "committees of social control," essentially groups of his political supporters whose purpose would be to report on farmers, ranchers, supermarket owners and street vendors who circumvent the state's effort to control food prices.

• Shortages of basic goods, check.
• Creation of an infrastructure of informers, check.
• Being any different from any of the last socialist disasters of, well, ever - decidedly not check.

(The Death Camp Countdown remains at six to twelve months.)

Note to self:

In a standard PowerShell installation, "new" is not an alias for "new-object". You added that. You should therefore know better that to make this kind of dumbass mistake.

Sigh.

It's that time again; Microsoft have posted their solutions to Beginner and Advanced PowerShell events 5 & 6 in the Scripting Games, and so have I...

(Looks like they have a problem with my answers to 3, 5 and 6 in the Advanced category, though - not sure why, as those of you who may have tried running my solutions will know, they do indeed work as specified. Anyway, I hope to have the bad scores reversed on appeal...)

My solutions to events 3 & 4 (Beginners and Advanced PowerShell divisions) of the Scripting Games 2007 are up on the web.

http://notebook.arkane-systems.net/index.php?title=2007_Scripting_Games

The .NET System.Security.Cryptography CryptoStream, that is?

I'm using it in about its simplest configuration - write a byte array (of text) through one to a file (FileStream), then read back the same byte array through another one, but for some unfathomable reason, the first 8 bytes I get back when decrypting come out corrupted. And more to the point, on multiple executions, they come out differently corrupted each time...

And the really odd thing? This happens whichever symmetric algorithm I use - so far, it's done exactly this whether the CryptoServiceProvider I use is Rijndael, DES or TripleDES.

Anyone seen this behavior before?

So, what have I been doing today?

Well, apart from running some errands, I've been entering the 2007 Scripting Games at Microsoft, in the PowerShell section, in the interest of keeping the old brain sharp during this period of annoyingly obligate unemployment. Got all my entries in to the Beginner's section, and about half of the Advanced, among other thises and thats, and so it goes.

If you're interested in PowerShell scripting at all, I'm posting my solutions to the events up on the Notebook after each event's closed and Microsoft post their solution, so you can look at them here. At the moment, of course, that just means solutions to events 1 & 2 in each section, which closed this morning.

Chicago Tribune:

The heavy presence of security around Obama was also a silent reminder of the change that took place with the announcement. Michelle Obama, the candidate's wife, acknowledged it in an interview to air on CBS' "60 Minutes," in which she was asked if she fears for her husband's life as a black candidate.

"I don't lose sleep over it because the realities are that . . . as a black man . . . Barack can get shot going to the gas station," Michelle Obama said in the interview, set to air Sunday night. "You can't make decisions based on fear and the possibility of what might happen."

Now, I have bought gas at gas stations many times - sometimes at night, for what it's worth - since coming to America, and I have even bought gas at gas stations where there were quite a few black men there buying gas with me, and I have never noticed the whistle of bullets passing my ears to strike said black men down. Indeed, as a white middle-class guy, and thus more racist than most KKK members in the eyes of the leftist pseudintelligensia, I might have expected them to let me have a turn with the gun. (Nobody was shooting at the Hispanics, either, and - note to people behind on the game plan - to the truly aspiring right-wing whacko, Hispanic is definitely the new Black.)

Now, this may be because I've been buying gas in the nicer bits of Wichita, KS, a relatively quiet city in an eminently civilised part of this great nation, and if I poked around said nation's darker corners some more I'm sure I could find quite a few gas stations where a black man might be shot while buying gas. However:

1. I'm also sure that anyone else might be, either.
2. I'm even surer that the Obamas haven't bought gas at any of them in living memory.

Good for 18 Doughty Street. This is what I call an effective anti-tax advertisement:

(Hat tip: Devil's Kitchen; read the whole thing there.) So, the German's are pushing a nice set of kerbs on speech which might cause hatred, violence, genocide denial, etc.  Quoth DK:

The document is highly contradictory, the most fundamental being that, whilst it aims to make the voicing of certain opinions a criminal offence through out the EU (punishable by one to three years in prison), it also states that it should not contradict inviolable rights, such as "the right to free expression." This is a nonsense, as the proposed law quite obviously does so.

Furthermore, whilst it requires member states to prosecute violations, as defined in the document, it requires them to do so under the methods of corpus juris; that is the Continental system whereby you must prove your innocence, a concept that goes against one of the most fundamental tenets of the British justice system.

The Framework also deals with what it calls "Legal persons", which includes companies, charities, etc. Under these provisions, if one of your employees, for instance, says something racist that is reported, your company can be banned from "commercial trading", banned from "receiving public funds" or even compulsorily wound-up.

Most worryingly of all for we bloggers, there are Articles, concerned with "information systems", contained within the document that are specifically aimed to cover blogs and websites.

So, so glad I'm not still living there. They'd lock me up in a shot.

(In related news, I'm told that France is considering a law to make denying the Armenian genocide a crime, while mentioning it in Turkey is, I believe, currently a crime. If Turkey joins the EU, that should set up a nicely confusing legal situation, shouldn't it? Perhaps it would be best not to mention That Country Whose Name Begins With A, You Know The One I Mean at all.)

(Hat tip: Jackie Danicki)

“It seems as if politics has become a business instead of a mission, that power in Washington is always trumping principle. We’ve got a lot of so-called leaders who don’t do much leading.

“Yes, there is that brand of politics, but there has always been another tradition of politics that says, ‘I am connected to you,’ that we are acceptable to each other, that we have a stake in each other.”

Had quite enough of that latter brand of politics in the transpond, thank you so very much.

What does everyone have against horizontal scrollbars anyway?

http://google-code-updates.blogspot.com/2006/12/beyond-soap-search-api.html

Evil! EVIL! Evil-evil-evil!

We hates them, precious. We hates them forever^Wuntil they replace this with something that's any damned use for non-web applications.

Well, kind of. As a couple of you already know, I keep my worldbuilding details in the form of an "in-world encyclopedia", for ease of reference. This is the front page, which I guess could be considered one giant color-quote.

(The image of the page is linked to from the half-size, and thus unreadable, thumbnail, as it's a little wide for the page.)

The United States is, technically, a multi-state nation.
The United Kingdom is, technically, a multi-nation state.

Does this confuse people used to much more common 1::1 mapping any, I wonder?

Incidentally, if anyone wants to go for the big one and assert using the faculty of judgement on any moral choices but your own is the ultimate sin, two points:

1. You just did. Notice that? Or are you excepting yourself or that particular exercise of it through special pleading?
2. I judge that you're an idiot.

Ain't socialised medicine wonderful?

(Short version; it's the incompetence, stupid.)

Given my plans to live until the heat death of the universe, and only stop then if there's absolutely no alternative, I'm really quite glad to be out from under the aegis of "The World's Greatest Healthcare System".  About the only good thing to be said for it is that at least they haven't yet adopted the Canadian option of banning all private money in health, so that you might be able to find another option without going to the expense, time and trouble of leaving the country entirely.

Sensible words...

...which are unlikely to have any impact on the British government's desire to take a hammer to fundamental legal principles in catering to the irresponsible moron population - ever-growing since perpetual adolescence and its corollaries became the cultural fashion - unfortunately.  And while I find it easier and easier to not give a rat's ass what the Old Country does to itself, we have enough irrational, pandering leftists around here that I fear I'll have to bitch about that one locally before the decade is out.

And it doesn't do a damned thing to address the real issues in the areas of jury incompetence and victim intimidation.

And finally, abortion.

I have no idea, looking back on it, why this came back to sour my morning today. The trouble, however, with trying to stay reasonably well-informed in this modern era, if you make any nods whatsoever to minimizing the drinking-from-a-firehose effects of Internet infoglut, is that you get to read about an awful lot of tangents to topics, and temptations to read other things that happen to look interesting.

Unfortunately, while my own position on this matter could, I have previously thought, be described as "moderately pro-choice", if one admits that the latter term actually makes any logical sense whatsoever, which I don't, and if you can reasonably apply the term "pro-" for something which one believes only exists out of necessity and should preferably be eliminated along with that necessity, which I would consider linguistically dubious -

(Incidentally, if you want the details, I seem to remember writing about it two Januaries ago, ish. Not going to repeat myself right now.)

- what I mostly came across this morning were articles highlighting, to my reasonable mind, what fundamentally awful people so many members of the "pro-choice" lobby seem to be, morally and in many cases personally. Fortunately, for the sake of my writing length, Squander Two has a very good article (and his general position seems to be fairly similar to mine, although it's hard to tell the underlying philosophy) on why the British pro- and anti- lobbies, such as they are, and their US counterparts don't match up.

(Summary for the hard of time: the Doe vs. Bolton decision implicitly allows pretty much every form of abortion you want for any reason, including right up to the ninth trimester, so-called "partial-birth abortion". Englishmen think "that's a physiosophism for infanticide".)

Now, my reasonable mind says that if you actually believe that the state of sophoncy (or "humanity", for the speciesists out there) is conferred automagically at birth, you're either an imbecile or a superstitionist - in which case, get out of the debate and leave it to those of us who remain capable of exercising the faculty of reason.

If not, and you still support the status quo pro-choice position which includes this, you're supporting a moral monstrosity - which seems an adequate description for sophicide-for-convenience - and thus you have my heartfelt loathing. And I would appreciate it if you would do me the great kindness of getting the hell out of my light-cone.

And I guess I'll have to adjust my perspective to being part of the "pro-life" lobby now, which once again - and this really gripes - ends up aligning me with people who may have the right individual idea, but for reasons that are complete baloney. *sigh*

(Incidentally, he also has a post listing things he's been called for having that particular radical position.  If you disagree with my position and are incapable of mustering a real argument, and so have the urge to do that here, please don't bother. I have a thick skin and, really, the opinions of people like you are slightly less important in my universe than the methane rain of Titan.)

Or, The Cerebrate Does E-Commerce

So, the current project here in Cerebrateville happens to be an e-commerce web site, and the part of that that I'm soon to be working on is the "shopping cart". But here, there is a decision to be made between two different models of operation, and in the interests of user-friendliness, I'm soliciting opinions on which of the two would be better - from those people who've done this before, and also from people who might just be using it.

Model 1: The Pessimistic Shopping Cart

...when the user places an item into the shopping cart, the item is deducted at that time from the quantity in stock; other site users stop seeing it immediately (well, on new pages - if their timing is bad, they may still get an oops-not-in-stock message). It doesn't need to be deducted again when the user checks out; if the user instead cancels the transaction or the shopping cart times out (with their session), the items in it are removed from the cart and added back into stock, becoming available again.

Advantage: If you have it in your shopping cart, it's yours - you're guaranteed to be able to get it as soon as it's in your cart.

Disadvantage: Many of the items on this e-commerce site will be in stock as single and/or one-off items, so using the pessimistic model will make those items disappear from the site entirely for a while, even if the transaction is cancelled or times out (this model also requires that shopping carts time out relatively quickly, to minimise this problem).  This can harsh other users' shopping experience, and possibly also search engine indexing.

Model 2: The Optimistic Shopping Cart

...when the user places an item into the shopping cart, it's not deducted from the quantity in stock; the item remains available to other site users. When the user checks out, items are deducted from stock at that time; if the user cancels the transaction or the shopping cart times out, no action is necessary other than throwing the cart away.

Advantage: Items stay visible on the site until actually purchased, letting site users browse unhindered by each other.  As a corollary of this, shopping carts don't have to time out quickly (or at all), so registered users can keep carts around while they think about it, or even waiting for items to come back into stock.

Disadvantage: If you're unlucky in your timing, when you go to check out you may get a message telling you that an item in your cart has sold out between you adding it and you checking out, so sorry.

Thoughts, anyone?

LINQ is the awesome.

This brought to you by the Microsoft Beta Stuff Cheerleading Team.