Tim Hardy

I’ve recently discovered an excellent new podcast on software engineering - Software Engineering Radio. I’ve long been a fan of IT Conversations and In Our Time and this is a very welcome addition to my listening schedule.

As I client I’ve been using my Nokia N95 after upgrading the firmware to v20.0.015. The upgraded phone has no difficulty addressing memory cards larger than 4G, vastly improved battery life while playing mp3s, no longer crashes from running out of memory (thanks to on demand paging which also cuts the boot time significantly) and has a podcast client built in that remembers where I left off a particular episode. This is ideal if, like me, you use podcasts to claw back otherwise wasted time and so often digest episodes in several minute chunks.

Oh, and you can sync up your subscriptions and download new episodes direct to the player using wireless which makes it extremely convenient.

I’m working through the Software Engineering Radio backlist at the moment and have particularly enjoyed the following episodes on game development, Erlang, Lisp and an interview with Erich Gamma. You know something must be good when you find yourself looking forward to doing the washing up because it will give you another ten minutes to listen to more of the latest episode. For anyone interested in software development, I’d heartily recommend it.

Starting with Bjarne Stroustrup’s observation “our civilization runs on software”, Grady Booch offered a thought provoking overview of the history and promise of software at this year’s BCS Turing lecture, taking listeners from the austere beauty of Alan Turing’s 1930s thought experiments through to “the rise of the machines” in 2030.

Booch is an interesting, relaxed and witty speaker, whose asides on the superiority of OS X to Windows, George Bush and Google (”Am I the only one who thinks there’s a company in desperate need of some adult supervision?”) provided comic relief in an at times informationally dense speech.

One point that intrigued me was his observation that much of the history of computing is unrecorded, existing only in the “tribal memory” of the greybeards. He foresees the emergence of both software artists and historians who might translate and record some of the strange beauty of code for non-programmers as well as formally archiving a form of communication in danger of vanishing with the death of its authors.

The full lecture is available as a recording from the link below and is well worth watching.

Over 90% of email is now junk mail according to a recent BCS article.

Not only are spam volumes increasing, but junk messages are proving harder to filter. Some spam buries its message in images to prevent filtering on content. To reduce the number of these in your inbox, quarantine messages with headers containing “Content-Type: multipart/related” but check your quarantine folder regularly for false positives.

Others send spam for you to a third party and forge the sender’s address so that it appears to have come from you. This technique is known as backscatter. If you keep receiving messages with the header “Undelivered Mail return to sender” about emails you never sent then you may be the victim of this technique. Quaranting messages containing “Action: failed”, “Delivery Status Notification (Failure)” and/or with the subject containing “Undeliverable” will help reduce the volume of these although again this risks filtering off genuine messages alerting you to a failed delivery.

I’ve just started testing greylisting on my email. Email from unknown senders is temporarily bounced back: legitimate mail clients will try again later; spammers either will not try again or hopefully will have been added to a blacklist by the time they do so. Known senders are added to a whitelist and automatically bypass the greylist filter.

Mailsnare offer server-side greylisting. However, I have been disappointed with their service levels recently and am not sure how strongly I would recommend them.

Google’s latest addition to google maps is too beautiful for words: now you can explore the red planet from your desktop.

At last, portable batteries are beginning to evolve. Lack of adequate power is holding back portable computing. The M1, while designed for heavy-duty equipment, is a much needed sign of progress.

The M1, based on the same lithium-ion technology used in your cell phone and laptop, is the first product from MIT spinoff A123 Systems. Cofounder Yet-Ming Chiang, a materials science professor, succeeded in shrinking to nanoscale the particles that coat the battery’s electrodes and store and discharge energy. The results are electrifying: Power density doubles, peak energy jumps fivefold (the cells pack more punch than a standard 110-volt wall outlet), and recharging time plummets.

Super Battery | Wired

OK, so I’m about a month late on this but I’ve been too busy with my studies to keep abreast of news and my toread pile is overflowing.

New Scientist are running a nine-week pilot of podcasts: details here. I’m downloading the last six weeks of shows as I post but I’m sure I won’t be disappointed. Another otherwise wasted 15-mins a week is now filled. Funny how much less stressful having to queue is when you’ve got something intelligent to listen to on your mp3 player.

I don’t really know my way around OS X but I know enough to get frustrated at how unnecessarily difficult it is to set up access to a shared printer on a CUPS server from an iBook.

John Fry’s advice to set up your CUPS server (in my case my Debian box) to broadcast services on the local subnet is a lifesaver.

Forget about printer setup on the Mac, and just let your print server broadcast its services on the local subnet (or to specific IP addresses). Your /etc/cups/cupsd.conf file should look something like this:

ServerName foo.bar.org
MaxLogSize 0
MaxJobs 10
Browsing On
BrowseProtocols cups
BrowseAddress @LOCAL
BrowseAllow from All
Listen 631
<location />
Allow from All
AuthType None
<location /admin>
AuthType Basic
AuthClass System
</location>

Remember to restart CUPS with /etc/init.d/cupsys restart after changing the cupsd.conf file and you should have no more trouble.

You can help bring about greater public awareness of the dangers of software patents by voting on the following two sites:

[Pasted from a ffii.org newsletter]

Today we would like to bring two more online polls to your awareness:

- Corporate Europe Observatory, an organization that keeps an eye on
questionable lobbying tactics, has nominated the so-called Campaign for
Creativity, a Microsoft/SAP pro-patent lobbying entity, for the “Worst EU
Lobbying Award”: http://www.corporateeurope.org/worstlobby/?showcontender=1
“Nominated as a fake NGO brilliantly disguising corporate demands as
grassroots concerns”

Please vote “for” the so-called Campaign for Creativity:
http://www.corporateeurope.org/worstlobby/?vote=1 If they “win”, i.e. if that
campaign is chosen as the worst lobbying initiative in the EU in 2005, then
there will be some additional attention to the methods employed by the
pro-patent lobby.

- IT website Silicon.com, which belongs to the CNET network of IT websites
(ZDNet, News.com, Builder.com etc.), recently named Florian Mueller, the
founder of NoSoftwarePatents.com, among the 50 “Silicon Agenda Setters”. As
always, Florian himself has pointed out that he owes such nominations to our
entire movement.

There is an online poll in which Silicon lets its readers determine their
own ranking among the top 50 people in the IT industry:
http://www.siliconagendasetters.com/vote.htm

Florian is #43 on the ballot, or the 8th from the bottom of the list.

Visit The Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII) if you’d like to know more.

Bedazzling Names
Choose variable names with irrelevant emotional connotation. e.g.:
marypoppins = (superman + starship) / god;
This confuses the reader because they have difficulty disassociating the emotional connotations of the words from the logic they’re trying to think about.

How To Write Unmaintainable Code offers amusing advice for programmers looking to guarantee a lifetime of employment maintaining their own inpenetrable code.

Amazon have taken the idea of outsourcing tasks at which a human outperforms a machine (eg image recognition) and building an API to a marketplace that makes these jobs available and retrieves the results. They call this the Mechanical Turk after Wolfgang von Kempelen’s 1769 pseudo-mechanical chess-playing automaton. Coders can call the Mechanical Turk with a query as though it were a normal RPC request.

It’s a fascinating concept with all kinds of political ramifications I don’t want to think about right now. Read more about the technology side of it here.