stephen's blog

Last week there was a post on Coding Horror about the "Dangers of programming alone". Jeff quotes this article which does a fairly good job of expressing the plight. Programming is not a full-time aspect of my work (at least not now) but when we need an application to do some piece of analysis or run some piece of equipment I am the sole developer. While I can relate to watching myself make those mistakes I don't share the same bleak opinion of being a lone programmer. Over the years I've been slowly figuring out how to make the sole-developer arrangement work.

It's been far too long since I've lobbed a shell in the direction of a good "discussion" on open source licensing, so thanks whurley. I haven't stood on my soapbox/posted here in a while either, what better opportunity to go off on why I don't think the GPLv3 does anything worthwhile and what I think is wrong with nearly every GPLv3 vs. GPLv2 discussion.

Came across an article through slashdot (I should almost template that intro) that presents the opinion that Microsoft wins over developers by not offering the wide variety of development tools for Windows that are available on Linux. I've got quite a bit of insight on this topic, and I'll get to that in the context of some quotes from the article, but let me start with one thing I think the author has absolutely right.

Every time I thought I was going to be stuck, there were a dozen articles explaining how to do exactly what I needed to do, with sample code that was up to date with the versions of the software I was using, and that actually related to the problem I was trying to solve.

There are always cases where you end up thinking "this example isn't what I want" on any platform, but by and large the material you can find on MSDN is second to only the OpenBSD man pages in documentation that I've found useful and usable. There is also a huge amount of additional information online for .NET programming (Code Project comes to mind). This is the only part of the article I can say I strongly agree with.

I recently recommended to a client that a project they were looking to have done in Visual Basic should be done in C#, but I found that it wasn't as easy as I thought it would be to articulate *why* I was recommending that. The easy answer was because I'm a C programmer at heart and C# is what I'm into these days, but given that the bulk of my professional experience in the last 4-years has been in Visual Basic, and that both C# and current versions of VB are fairly interchangeable for someone familiar with both, that reasoning seemed a bit weak.

I'm shocked that anything as simple as a music download site offering popular music (not major label stuff, but still some high profile artists) in unprotected mp3 files could be done so poorly. Seriously, how crappy must that system be if they have to force a .wma extension onto the mp3s? If they have a non-ActiveX download setup what's the deal with Mac downloads? How hard is it to have a properly descriptive error message for Mac users?

I can't even come up with words to describe how poorly they've done this. Has nobody involved with this mess ever actually thought of testing the site?

DRM made news thanks to Steve Jobs' open letter. I don't really have anything to say that hasn't been said already, but I found an article today that sums it up pretty nicely.

Of course I don't use iTunes much anyway, I'd much rather buy-and-rip CDs. I guess I'm doing just what Bill Gates says.

The pre-release version of Mono 1.2.3 handles the painting events properly, so it appears that FTGL# actually works on Mono, at least on Windows.

Thanks to the kind folks in #mono-winforms for taking a look at this for me.

I finally got around to testing FTGL# with Mono on Windows. Didn't require any modification, but there's one oddity ...

C:\Documents and Settings\stephen\My Documents\work\FTGLSharp\sample\bin\Debug>"FTGLSharp Demo.exe"
Opening Font File C:\Windows\Fonts\arial.ttf
Setting 24pt, 72dpi
Done font initialization
sap.ftgl.MainForm, Text: FTGL.OnActivated() called
sap.ftgl.demo.demoControl.forceRefresh()
sap.ftgl.demo.demoControl.OnPaint() called
sap.ftgl.MainForm, Text: FTGL.OnActivated() called
sap.ftgl.demo.demoControl.forceRefresh()
sap.ftgl.demo.demoControl.OnPaint() called

C:\Documents and Settings\stephen\My Documents\work\FTGLSharp\sample\bin\Debug>mono "FTGLSharp Demo.exe"
Opening Font File C:\Windows\Fonts\arial.ttf
Setting 24pt, 72dpi
Done font initialization
sap.ftgl.MainForm, Text: FTGL.OnActivated() called
sap.ftgl.demo.demoControl.forceRefresh()
sap.ftgl.MainForm, Text: FTGL.OnActivated() called
sap.ftgl.demo.demoControl.forceRefresh()

I don't know yet if it's Mono or Me (I'm usually missing some detail ...) but OnPaint() isn't happening when it should if I fill my control with another control

Apparently, predictably, and late to the party, research publishers are getting nervous about the push for Open Access. Hopefully this is just an idea for a push from the publishers that will quickly be dropped, but from an article on nature.com (found via slashdot of course):

Public access equals government censorship

I hesitate to even quote that because it's so far off-base.

I neglected to mention it here, but I released some quick code to allow me to write text in OpenGL and C#. It's called FTGL# and hopefully someone besides me will have a use for it.

The wiki page has svn info

Disclaimer: I posted this in the mono category, but haven't actually tested it on mono yet.

Update: I have finally gotten around to actually running this on Mono (version 1.2.2.1) on Windows.

Found an interesting article (through slashdot) on how we should be educating engineering students. The bird's eye view is that students should come out of school with the ability to continue learning rather than some specific skillset. The slashdot discussion and the article really cover mostly different ground on the subject, with the comments on /. debating the pros and cons of teaching engineers as thinkers or trades-people and the original article focusing more on how the education of thinkers can be done. Of course this isn't limited to engineering, any really good Comp. Sci. program runs the same give-and-take between teaching students to program and teaching them how to solve problems.

Yesterday afternoon at the Flash Fire Facility we got a visit from Rick Mercer. Since it won't be airing for a week or so (and thankfully I won't be in it) I won't yet comment on the stuff we did, but it was pretty cool. It was a lot more fun than some of the other TV spots we've done (local news, Daily Planet). Rick was pretty cool, and needless to say very funny. I'd invite him over for a BBQ anyday.

Interesting post on Groklaw about freely available "courseware". The OpenCourseWare Consortium seems like a fantastic idea to me. Academia is really all about sharing knowledge.

I've already bookmarked the MIT Mechanical Engineering page, though I can usually find comparable material in my own department.

Why would I sign up for another blog when I barely even create content for the first one? Maybe now I can keep that one clear of random bitching and cell phone reviews.

Besides, tyler is one cool frood.