The Scientific Impossibility of Evolution
November 9, 2009 9:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. St. Pius V University (Rome)
In Response to Pope Benedict XVI’s Call for Both Sides to be Heard
http://sites.google.com/site/scientificcritiqueofevolution/
October 26 2009 | Geek Stuff and Jesus Stuff | No Comments »
http://www.nekogames.jp/mt/2008/01/cursor10.html
Great concept, and clean implementation, impossible to stop clicking until you beat it.
May 20 2008 | Geek Stuff | No Comments »
Many people working with MSI aren’t aware of the UPGRADINGPRODUCTCODE (http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/msi/setup/upgradingproductcode.asp) property, which Windows Installer sets when uninstalling the product being upgraded. This property should be used to condition custom actions that need to be run only when “really” uninstalling vs. uninstalling as part of an upgrade.
So…
March 21 2007 | Geek Stuff | No Comments »
This isn’t news, but is worth remembering…
Peter Hallam commented on what consumes most of a developer’s time between the following:
He argues that most developers spend most of their time understanding, modifying, and verifying that existing code still works. His focus is primarily upon how this balance impacts (or should impact) editor (Visual Studio) features, but the discussion is interesting outside that context also.
Why do we hire developers based upon how well they can write some lame from-scratch sample code? My current employer did something unique in my experience: they gave me some unfamiliar buggy code and asked me to discuss what was wrong with it, discuss some possible solutions, and implement one of them.
Hello? Test driven development? How about even starting with automated unit tests, even if they’re written after the code?
Does the whole thing make the wacky world of literate programming less whacky?
April 19 2006 | Geek Stuff | No Comments »
I came across an interesting article with implications for game design and, perhaps, for the etiology of some addictions. In their study The Psychophysiology of Video Gaming: Phasic Emotional Responses to Game Events , Ravaja, Saari, Laarni, Kallinen, Salminen, Holopainen, and Järvinen discovered that “Not only putatively positive game events, but also putatively negative events that involved active participation by the player elicited positive emotional responses…” Interestingly, the reaction to failure was more strongly positive than the reaction to success, and the pleasure associated with success was primarily anticipatory, with a noticeable drop once success was achieved. It’s no secret that a game that is too easy, that presents no opportunity for failure, is quickly abandoned as “boring”. Game designers and Game Masters have long been aware of the necessity of balancing challenge and achievement. A “Monty Haul” adventure is generally accepted to be less “fun” than “Mission: Impossible.” So it is no secret that the actual or perceived possibility of failure is critical to the enjoyment of success, but the concept of failure as a source of pleasure was new to me.
The upside of this is that game designers have an additional tool to apply consciously in the quest to entertain and educate. The downside is the ugly intersection of this pleasurable failure with the unhealthy psyche. For individuals convinced at some level that they deserve to fail, whether by neurochemical imbalance, environmental factors, or an agent of the enemy of their soul, this quick and repeatable source of failure can be dangerous. The endless treadmill of MMPOGs are perhaps the most dangerous. It’s like putting a crack-dispenser in an addict’s bedroom.
This doesn’t mean I think games are evil or should be eliminated or restricted in some way. I am firmly convinced that games, storytelling through games, and the art of game design offer benefits to society, technology innovation, education, etc. that outweigh the associated dangers. Additionally, I suspect that perhaps this pleasure in failure may underly other addictive behaviors. Similar patterns appear to exist in addictions to work, unsuccessful relationships, spending, approval from others, food, pot, and other psychological (vs. chemical) addictions.
What I do suggest, is that mentors, parents, pastors, and others who care about someone demonstrating symptoms of addiction consider this as a possible underlying cause. In my experience, games stopped being a snare for me when I came to grips with my belovedness in the eyes of God. Human approval, even intense human love, was insufficient. People can be deceived or mistaken; God cannot. Only recognizing that the same God who knows everything about me loves me intensely was sufficient to drive the changes that took me from addicted and depressed to joyful and free.
April 13 2006 | Geek Stuff and Jesus Stuff | No Comments »
Ambrose Little has a thought-provoking article on Architects vs. Developers over at ASP Alliance. He follows up with some additional comments on his blog.
Oh, and speaking of thought-provoking check out Paul Graham’s latest essay on Software Patents. I actually beat SlashDot to this one by 24 hours or so which was nice. It gave me a chance to ponder this before being utterly corrupted by the SlashDot community’s followup. I find Graham alternately insightful and annoying, but almost always thought-provoking.
April 11 2006 | Geek Stuff | No Comments »
My friend Adam pointed out this link, and it is too critical to world history not to mention. J
http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/images/h96000/h96566kc.htm
January 20 2006 | Geek Stuff | No Comments »
Yesterday, I came across this post on Jomo Fisher’s Blog about an interview question he’s considering. To quote the problem in case his blog dies before mine does. . .
static Shape Recognize(IGrid grid) {
// Implement this.
}
Calling CountBlocksSet is very slow (imagine that it’s driving a physical scanner) so you want to call it as few times as possible. The speed does not depend on the size of the rectangle passed in to CountBlocksSet.
I misunderstood the question, so my results aren’t precisely relevant (hence the posting here and not in his comments). I thought that (0,0) (0,0) for example, would define the bottom left-most point on the grid, and therefore not define a valid area. It looks like he is actually considering that to define the bottom-leftmost square, where I considered the space between (0,0) and (1,1) to be the bottom-leftmost square.
So, my results may not correspond directly to his, but they might still be interesting. Play with this a bit and then compare your results to ours. My best effort so far is 1.17 calls to CountBlocksSet per grid.
One pointer to verify algorithm correctness. We know that the number of squares should equal 204, the number of rectangles (including squares) should equal 1296, and the number of non-square rectangles would therefore be 1092.
Attached are testdrivercs.txt, the test driver and sample implementation, and gridcs.txt, the sample IGrid implementation.
mysolutioncs.txt is also attached, and includes my iterative improvements.
June 09 2005 | Geek Stuff | 1 Comment »
MSDN Nuggets
Don’t have the time to read a 10-page how-to article or watch a full length webcast? Try an MSDN Nugget, a webcast that takes you step-by-step to discovering new functionality or exploring a hot developer topic, all in 10-15 minutes. View them online or download for later reference.
http://www.microsoft.com/uk/msdn/events/nuggets.aspx
The few I’ve watched so far were “not lame.”
June 07 2005 | Geek Stuff | No Comments »
Junfeng Zhang’s .NET Framework notes (http://blogs.msdn.com/junfeng/archive/2005/06/03/424680.aspx) referenced a bug logged against Fusion and answered as “Won’t Fix”. I do not think that Microsoft has correctly understood or responded to the problem.
Here’s a quick summary of the bug:
The problem is that Fusion allows the assembly binding to fail rather than invoke MsiProvideAssembly (…INSTALLMODE_DEFAULT…). The MSDN article describing how assemblies are located says that “If the assembly is not found after probing, the runtime requests the Windows Installer to provide the assembly.” This is referring to dependent assemblies, not to how Fusion attempts to locate assemblies directly invoked via Explorer.
Junfeng Zhang’s response is:
“We don’t invoke MSI install every time we see a binding failure. There are many by-design binding failure for resource probing. If we do that the perf will go to hell.
Instead, we query MSI before we invoke MSI install. If MSI says it has the component we then will invoke MSI install. In John’s case, the query returns nothing because ClassLibrary1.dll is in the wrong context/component.”
To address each point without hijacking that post. . .
There are certainly by-design binding failures, but these are most often for .resource assemblies, and do not result in a final Unhandled Exception attempting to load (right?). In this case, Fusion knows that the assembly is going to fail to load and that it is because there was an unhandled exception while attempting to load a dependency. The probing process already consumes significant time at this point, so investing additional time necessary to ask MSI to provide the assembly and repair if necessary seems like a good return on investment. The only time we’d take the hit of actually running a repair would be when MsiProvideAssembly detects that a repair is necessary.
Without knowledge of Fusion’s implementation, I can only speculate about how they are querying MSI in this scenario to see if it “has the component”. It doesn’t appear that Fusion ever loads MSI into it’s process, and no separate msiexec process is started. If Fusion used MsiProvideComponent (…INSTALLMODE_DEFAULT…) then the directly invoked assembly and any components in the component’s feature or feature parent would be reinstalled. Even if Fusion is somehow querying MSI in this scenario, doing so for only the directly invoked component would be almost useless in a real-world scenario. Very rarely would we have an assembly with no dependencies.
I’m not sure what “the query returns nothing because ClassLibrary1.dll is in the wrong component” means. MSI only allows one assembly per component, so I assume that “wrong component” just means “not the component we’re specifically verifying”. Even that is suspect, however, since a Component’s state can only be accurately evaluated in the context of a Feature. The “wrong” thing here seems to be Fusion’s implementation of the described functionality. Fusion should be using the MsiProvideComponent method rather than directly referencing a component out of the context of the associated feature.
The best solution would seem to be that if an assembly fails to bind dependencies after probing, the runtime requests that Windows Installer provide the assembly; the same solution that the documentation indicates has been implemented.
June 06 2005 | Geek Stuff | No Comments »