One of the first compilers I worked with, VS-Pascal, had a very “HAL-like” confident behaviour, after it had finished a succesful compile, it wrote:
“No compiler detected errors”
I found that almost rude, but it was also something to keep in the back of your mind, and today I remembered this clearly.
For the last week or so I’ve had a mysterious ASP.NET/C# problem on the back-burner. I’m trying to populate a drop-down list on a webpage. The list is based on a list of documents. For that purpose I had an entity class with a constructor, in the Page_Load code of the webform, I’m initialising the drop-down with a desciption and an id from the document list.
The list was populated just fine, but when I did a post of the form, I was consistently told that the first item was selected, even if I selected item number 2, 3 or 4.
This was very frustrating, especially because I have two drop-downs, and the other was working just fine.
Today I couldn’t postpone the problem any longer, and I tried a number of things, including moving the drop-downs, and finally I started doing websearches for bug-reports, but it’s extremely unlikely that ASP.NET has such a fundamental bug, so I was clearly doing something wrong.
When you’re using frameworks like .NET, a lot is done behind the scenes, luckily I know HTML so I finally hit View/Source, and to my surprise all the option values in the select tag were set to 0, why was that, I knew that my list was initialised to values from 0-4, but it was consistent with the test-results.
I was clearly doing something wrong. Below is the C# source-code for the entity class, can you spot the problem?
public class ShredYearDocument
{
private int _shredYearId;
public int ShredYearId
{
get { return _shredYearId; }
set { _shredYearId = value; }
}
string _shredYearDescription;
public string ShredYearDescription
{
get { return _shredYearDescription; }
set { _shredYearDescription = value; }
}
public ShredYearDocument(int ShredYeadId,
string ShredYearDescription)
{
_shredYearId = ShredYearId;
_shredYearDescription = ShredYearDescription;
}
}
I’ll give you a hint: there are no compiler detected errors, but I’d argue that the compiler should,at least, have generated a warning, because I have something that could be likened to unused, or uninitalised, local variables.
Another hint: Remember that I always had the id set to zero (0), no mater what.
But shouldn’t the compiler generate a warning here?
“Advarsel”: Dette er jo et politisk indlæg – oh well, nu er valgkampen jo ovre, så man kan jo tillade sig at tale politik igen 😉
Jeg føler mig hensat til fiktionens verden, takket være et brev jeg modtog lørdag:
[…] Erhvervsvirksomheder med mindst én ansat og offentlige institutioner skal betale medielicens […]
[…] Hvis adressen skal tilmeldes, kan i indsende dette brev i den vedlagte svarkuvert. […]
Dette er et udsnit af det rent Kafkaske brev som jeg har modtaget fra DR.
Og det slutter:
[…] Hvis denne adresse for nylig er blevet tilmeldt til medielicens, beder vi jer se bort fra dette brev og undskylder ulejligheden […]
Hvad mon der sker hvis man ikke reagerer på dette, og undlader at returnere brevet, som man bliver “opfordret til”?
Jeg mener ikke at jeg er pligtig til at betale erhvervs medielicens, da jeg betaler privat, og da mit firma kun har en adresse, fordi man ikke kan undlade at have en. Herudover har mit firma ikke udbetalt løn til den eneste ansatte, yours truly, i over 1,5 år.
Der er dog næppe tvivl om at jeg, ifølge loven, er pligtig til at betale erhvervsmedielicens, men jeg orker, helt ærligt, ikke at undersøge om jeg er pligtig til at betale den – for DR Licens har ikke fremsendt reglerne, dem skal man selv finde på Internettet. Jeg har tænkt mig bare at afvente, og “se hvad der sker”.
Noget helt andet er, at jeg ikke mener at det p.t., giver mening at tale om mobiltelefoner som licenspligtige, da man, i praksis, kun kan bruge dem til at hente indhold fra DR, hvis man f.eks. tegner et 3tv abonnement.
Jeg antager at jeg har modtaget dette brev fra DR, enten fordi de sender det til alle ikke registrerede erhvervsvirksomheder – nogle skal jo betale for det skandaløse, og helt unødvendige, mediehus – eller også er det fordi jeg er blevet 3 kunde.
Jeg tror på det første er tilfældet, da brevet er påført et KOB id og en virksomhedstype (ApS).
En ting er sikker, KOB har tjent rigtig gode penge på at agere mellemmænd i denne sag, og fantastisk timing, brevet kom efter valget.
Jo kreativiteten er i højsædet hos etaten.
Tak medielicens, og navnet er K, Joseph K., eller var det Dent, Arthur Dent?
Welcome to ICT Mythbusters Episode Two – this time we’ll be investigating the myth that Microsoft is just copying Apple. The post is indeed subtitled “Attack of the Clones”, but bear with me, I have to take a detour to the world of digital typography, before returning to the real topic, so if you’re the impatient type (pun intended), just proceed to the end of the article.
ICT Mythbusters is inspired by the great Discovery show Mythbusters, and you’ll find Episode One here.
Is Microsoft just copying Apple?
Among Apple Macintosh faithfuls, it’s considered common knowledge that Microsoft, with Windows, just made a bad copy of the Apple Macintosh, but who’s copying who?
What triggered me to revisit this myth, that I’ve covered in detail before, was the screening of the great documentary, Helvetica, that I went to yesterday.
In the Helvetica movie Apple Computers was very much the supporting actor, and Apple was indeed mentioned in the credits. More prominently one of the Gurus of Type design, Erik Spiekermann, stated, as a fact, that Microsoft Windows was nothing more than a clone of the Apple Macintosh.
Spiekermann’s statement sounded just like the Apple marketing hype, and the fact that it was being stated by a very influential person in the industry, triggered me.
Firstly: I was somewhat surprised to hear this in a documentary about type. There’s no doubt that all the graphic designers interviewed for the documentary were already using Apple hardware, but I found it strange that Spiekermann’s statement didn’t end up on the cutting floor.
Show some love for the Mac
First there’s no doubt that Microsoft, and Bill Gates always has been great fans of the Apple Macintosh, as the clip below documents:
To create a new standard, it takes something that is just not a little bit different, it takes something that is really new, and really captures people’s imagination, and the Macintosh, of all the machines I’ve seen, is the only one that meets that standard
Case closed: Bill Gates just admitted that Windows is nothing more than a cloned stormtrooper.
Now wait a minute…As you might notice the clip is quite old, and at that time Microsoft was working on creating one of the key selling points, even to this date, for Apple hardware, the Excel spreadsheet.
Excel was originally developed for the Macintosh, and it wasn’t released for Windows until the the dying moments of the 1980ies. In fact, Microsoft has done more for the proliferation of the Apple Macintosh than any other software manufacturer, and you could argue that the commitment to the Macintosh platform that Microsoft guaranteed at the famous MacWorld keynote in 1997, was a pivotal turning point. Steve Jobs even declared:
We have to let go of the notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to loose. […] The era of setting this up as a competition between Apple and Microsoft, as far as I’m concerned that is over.
And then Jobs went on to establish the fact that Apple and Microsoft, together, is the standard with a combined market share of 100%. Whatever Apple and Microsoft does is the standard.
Well I’m sure the $150 million investment by Microsoft, and the televised image of Bill Gates in the background, had something to do with it, but Steve Jobs was just saying exactly what the stockholders and board-members wanted to hear.
What’s your type?
The market for Apple Macintosh was very much created by the fact, that the Macintosh Computer was the first desktop computer capable of doing print quality design, this revolutionised publishing.
Really it wasn’t so much Apple’s technology that helped create this market, as it was the PostScript technology developed by Adobe.
Until PostScript, all fonts used by desktop computers were so called bit-map fonts, it meant that the fonts were digitised to a specific resolution, and they looked horrible if you tried to scale them to a different point size than the one that was provided with the operating system.
Another problem with the bit-map fonts was that they required a lot of storage, laser-printers use a resolution of 300 DPI (dots per inch), a point in typography is 1/72 of an inch, meaning that 12 point X roughly requires 50 x 50 pixels = 2.500 pixels, and you needed that matrix for all 256 possible characters in the character sets used until the 90ies, a rough calculation yields 640.000 pixels, in bytes that is 80.000, meaing that you’d need approximately 80KB to represent a 300DPI bit-map font. Multiply that by several factors, because the italic and bold versions need their own representation as well, and that should once again be multiplied by the number of fonts installed.
Today this doesn’t sound like much, but remember that the first Macintosh came with only 128KB of RAM, and NO harddrive. In those days a Linotype typesetter had a resolution that was a factor 16 higher, so Houston we have a problem.
Mathematics to the rescue
The PostScript technology used mathematics to describe the fonts (quadric BézÃer curves), making them scalable to all sizes, and a special “hinting” algorithm that reduced the processing power needed when rendering the types.
The technology is known as Adobe Type 1. Adobe had also secured licensing deals with Linotype, the dominant player in the type-foundry business, and owner of a huge share of the mainstream fonts.
The fact that that you could do close to print quality proofs on the desktop, and then simply send the PostScript files to the Linotype typesetter, for print quality, and be confident that the result would look the same as the proof, was nothing short of a revolution.
Fight the power – TrueType this
So heavenly bliss, we had scalable fonts of “infinite” quality, and thanks to the software Adobe Type Manager (ATM), type 1 fonts also worked on the screen, delivering the holy grail of desktop publishing, true WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get).
So what was the problem with this? The problem was the exorbitant licensing fees that you had to pay Adobe to use the technology and Linotype for the use of their copyrighted fonts.
One of my favourite parts of the Helvetica documentary, is in the scene where we’re taken to the “holiest of holy”, deep below the HQ of Linotype, where they keep the original Hass designs for Helvetica, it’s their “precious”.
Another problem with Adobes technology was that it was very processor intensive, making the screen rendering of the fonts quite slow. Anyone that has ever used ATM on early 90ies hardware will know what I’m taking about.
So Apple was developing a competing technology, TrueType, and later Microsoft and Apple worked together to create an alternative to type 1. Microsofts work included the introduction of replacements for the predominant fonts of the day, Helvetica became Arial, Times Roman became Times New Roman and Courier became Courier New.
Microsoft has contributed a number of major enhancements to TrueType, mainly ClearType, which is an anti-aliasing technology to improve the readability of screen fonts. The technology, which is bundled with Microsoft Reader, has failed to make to much of an impact, but anti-aliasing of screen fonts is the standard today.
Back to the real topic – who’s stealing from who
Oh well, this was a long talk about type, fonts and technology, and proof that the competition between Microsoft and Apple mostly takes place in the minds of the faithfuls (devotees?) of the “Church of Steve Jobs”.
Why is it that neither Bill Gates nor Steve Jobs really want to talk about copying, well it’s because Windows AND Mac OS both are clones.
The work that is the foundation of all graphical user interfaces was done at the Palo Alto Research Center of XEROX, but XEROX being a hardware company, also developed hardware, and the XEROX Documenter or XEROX 8010 Star that really was the first modern computer.
The Star was introduced on April 27th in 1981, several months earlier than the IBM PC. The Macintosh, Windows and GEM shipped 4 years later.
Despite the fact that it wasn’t until the introduction of the NeXT computer, that the mainstream computer industry delivered anything remotely akin to the Star, XEROX failed to make the Star a mass-market product
Attack of the clones! MYTH BUSTED!
Today most people are oblivious of the fact that the Imperial clones were ordered by the agents of the Empire, the ICT equivalents of Count Dooku and Palpatine: Apple and Microsoft. The praise for creating the fantastic tools we have in our hands today should go the XEROX, the Palo Alto Research Center and the amazing people that worked there, for instance Alan Kay, whom Steve Jobs often quotes.
The picture of the real myth busters, Adam Savage and Jamie Heyneman, actually is a banner add, but I make ABSOLUTELY no money from it, if you click it and make a purchase, all proceeds go to the Jamie, Adam and of course Café Press. I hope this will settle any copyright issues with them.
The picture of Erik Spiekermann above, is a still from the Helvetica film, and it is copied from the official site of the Helvetica film. The picture is copyright Gary Hustwit, but I consider my use here to be fair use.
The picture of the XEROX 8010 Star is copied from the wonderful DigiBarn website. The picture is copyright DigiBarn, but since it is under a CC-NA-SA license, I can use it – the wave of the future!
The MYTH BUSTED picture was copied from the webiste of MARIJNBOSCH.COM, there’s no copyright notice on the site, and I consider my use here to be fair use.
So I thought that Linux was ready for prime time, but not just yet – it was hurting my productivity too much :-(. I need some help setting my system up, and will attempt to get that when I soon will attend LinuxParty in Roskilde.
Performance of the applications is really great though, and I hit on one of the biggest obstacles, non-functioning DVD playback due to patent issues – really amazing that the International anti-thrust organisations haven’t looked into that :-(.
I hope to return to the Linux world soon, Ubuntu keeps improving
But the future really lies in simpler technology, and “the puck” is moving elsewhere than the monolithic computer. My mobile is increasingly my primary Internet access terminal, and Apple might just have got it right with the iPhone. The iPhone is actually much more Linux than people realise, it’s powered by FreeBSD and contains source code form from several open source projects, most noticeably KHTML which is the basis for the Safari browser.
Welcome to ICT Mythbusters Episode One – who needs prequels, start your numbering scheme at one!
ICT Mythbusters is inspired by the great Discovery show Mythbusters
It’s also premiering a new concept in advertising that will revolutionise it:
Commercials that the host – in this case me – don’t make any money from, so click the banner and support the REAL Mythbusters, if you want to me support, send me some money ;-).
Was Bill Gates wrong?
A very famous quote from Bill Gates is:
640KB of RAM should be enough for everyone
Everybody has been laughing at that statement, but was he actually right?
I can access the web in high-fidelity from my Nintendo DS, and any modern phone with Java ME can run the Opera mini browser, and these phones rarely have more than 1MB of RAM. I’d say that approximately 4MB should be enough for everyone.
So Bill Gates was right, or? Why is it that he wasn’t? It’s of course because we’ve moved our storage to the server, as a college of mine was so friendly to point out – actually I think he was quite annoyed with me – but that’s only because he didn’t understand what I meant.
The desktop and portable computer is an anachronism, as I’ve written before, and we need to move ALL the storage to the server – where it belongs, and run only thin clients. VERY thin clients would actually suffice for something like 90+ percent of the worlds business users.
So yes my college is right, yes 640K isn’t enough for everyone, neither is 4MB, but how much is then?
And we’re talking server storage, to cater to the computing needs of the entire world, at the time, not considering the more than exponential growth we’re likely to se in the future.
Help me do the math, or should I just submit it to Jamie, Adam, Toby, Grant and the red-hot Kari.
Da jeg skal til at “spise hundemad”, har jeg seriøst brug for hjælp, hvad mon der sker hvis man medbringer en “pristine” Vista maskine, og slipper nørderne løs med at gøre den til den sejeste Linux kværn i byen!
En god veninde, gjorde mig opmærksom på at Undervisningsministeriet har opbygget en hjemmeside, Min Kompetencemappe, eller REALkompetencer.
Hun sendte mig faktisk bare et link i en mail med emnet “se her…” og uden nogen som helst forklaring på hvad det var for en størrelse. Det er sådan hun er, og det kan vi godt lide 😉
Her er et klip fra hjemmesidens forside, som forklarer hvad det er der er tale om.
Min Kompetencemappe er et personligt redskab til alle, som ønsker at få overblik over hvad de kan og har lært gennem tidligere uddannelse, på jobbet og på højskole, aftenskole og i andre aktiviteter i fritiden. Mappen er udviklet af Undervisningsministeriet som en hjælp til, at du kan dokumentere og få anerkendt din realkompetence.
Jeg må indrømme at var skeptisk, kan en statsinstitution virkelig udvikle noget sådan, og findes der ikke masser af privatudviklede profilsider på Internettet?
As you might remember, I just found a surprising winner in the contest to find the device best suited for basic Internet access – like Jaiku presence checking – at a public hotspot: the Nintendo DS, with the Opera browser. Since all my “computers” have “names” – a practice I learned from Jerry Pournelle @ Chaos Manor – my DS is now officially baptised “Tölva”.
For the last week I’ve been carrying my “weapon of choice”,”Tölva”, around town, and I’ll be maintaining a list of “Tölva” friendly hotspots on my web-site (most likely the wiki).
Copenhagen:
High Q (WEP encrypted, ask for WEP keyphrase in the bar. I am considering talking them into joining FON – which shouldn’t prove too daunting a task ;-))
I’m still amazed at the battery-life of the Nintendo DS. I hope to be able to compare it to other highly mobile Wi-Fi capable devices like the Nokia N95, in the future.
