Older blog entries for robocoder (starting at number 158)

2 Dec 2004 (updated 4 Dec 2004 at 22:47 UTC) »

The Mozilla folks ran into this error a while back (bug 246616):

The procedure entry point SHGetSpecialFolderPathA could not be located in the dynamic link library SHELL32.dll
If you can't make a programmatic change (i.e., use ShGetFolderPath in shfolder.dll), here's the user fix:
Install Internet Explorer Desktop Update, which may mean reinstalling IE, and then including the desktop (shell) enhancements in the installation (under the "Customize" option).

Putting together a wedsite (granted it's for my upcoming wedding) isn't exactly high on my list of cool things to work on in my spare time. Should I solicit ideas? >=)

You can add my praise to the others extolling the movie, "The Incredibles"! I laughed, I cried out, I laughed some more. I think the only low point of the evening was the opening animation short -- a rather inane and unwelcome tale of a dancing sheep.

22 Nov 2004 (updated 22 Nov 2004 at 14:01 UTC) »

The "Voting Systems" theme in the October issue of "Communications of the ACM" didn't really grab my attention, but one that piqued my interest was "Open Source Software Development Should Strive for Even Greater Code Maintainability". Setting aside the fact that the authors only studied the various iterations of 5 projects (albeit almost 6 million lines of code), the item of interest was the application of various source code measurements to determine "maintainability", specifically:

  • Lines of code excluding blank lines and comments, LOC,
  • Percentage of lines of comments with respect to lines of code, PerCM,
  • Halstead Volume, V, and
  • Cyclomatic Complexity, V(g), which make up the
  • Maintainability Index, MI.
Also in this issue was the GLAT -- the Google Labs Aptitude Test -- with some questions that struck me as fun, and others aimed at the mad-yet-non-evil genius with eclectic, esoteric interests. And despite what you may have heard, I am not one of the latter. :)
18 Nov 2004 (updated 19 Nov 2004 at 06:13 UTC) »

Adware, Spyware, Viruses: Hate 'em. My brother brought his notebook to work, and out of curiousity I checked to see if it (OS, anti-virus, etc) was up to date. It wasn't, as noted from the following uglies: ttuh.exe, midADdle, sdexe.exe, gAdDEK.exe, Bxxu3v4, mmview_101.dll (trojan downloader). I think I've cleaned it all up...but my sister-in-law and I couldn't resist giving him a hard time about having PurityScan installed. ;)

I was intrigued by the October issue of "Quality Progress". Of particular note, "The Metamorphosis of the Quality Practitioner", which argues that the roles of quality professionals will "nearly disappear or be subsumed into other processes within the next 10 years". This is the first time I've seen competency defined as consisting of five factors:

  1. Knowledge
  2. Experience
  3. Skills
  4. Aptitude, and
  5. Attitude.
"Stoplight Charts (With SPC Inside)" presented a novel charting approach for defect tracking and continual improvement. Instead of arbitrary thresholds (i.e., number of defects), the author uses a control chart. And instead of colour levels (based on the aforementioned thresholds) where each colour represents a band/range, colour indicates either levels (e.g., an unacceptable level is outside the control limit) or significant trends (i.e., improvement vs mounting problems).

"Computer Careers for Quality Professionals" claims a growing market for skills in testing and configuration management (based on feedback from two recruiters for a technical services firm in DC).

Back from vacation, and catching up on email. A recruiter left me feedback about filling the position of "Internet Architect" -- a position that I didn't apply for, with a recruiter that I've never contacted before. A quick peek (i.e., grep) at my server logs reveals how they ran across my site : a Google search for "software developer pages from Canada". Post-dot.com, recruiters still do this? (Even more surprising is the recruiter's persistence ... my site isn't even PageRank'd in the top 100.)

In the age of outsourcing, are we to believe there's a dearth of competent and experienced IT folk at the upper end of the [so called] value chain?

Away in Vancouver (Nov 1-8)

21 Oct 2004 (updated 22 Oct 2004 at 16:55 UTC) »
KISS: as I asked more clarifying questions about the hospital ward's scheduling requirements, the problem became increasingly more complex, e.g., different shift lengths (8 and 12 hours), different rotation lengths (1 week, 2 weeks, 6 weeks), load balancing with overlapping shifts, supervisor overrides for overloading and underloading, extended leave (disability, maternity, stress), deferred statutory holidays, partial vacation days, request-not-to-work particular days (or shifts), etc, while uncovering undocumented "rules" for seniority and employment type (full-time, part-time, casual, agency temps), and bias (preferential treatment?) from the schedule committee itself. The simplest solution turned out to be a spreadsheet which closely mimicked their paper schedules in appearance, but with formulas to show each person's hours for the pay period, and the load for each shift. Scheduling is still a manual process, but at least, the calculations are automated.

WORKSFORME: it's getting harder and harder to distribute a spreadsheet without digitally signing the macros.

  • Excel must have the VBA add-in installed to change the Macro Security level. (By default, it defaults to "High" which automatically disables unsigned macros.)
  • Anti-virus software that "Block" spreadsheets. (The spreadsheet is then read-only.)
  • Self-cert digital signatures are only good on the computer that created it.
15 Oct 2004 (updated 18 Oct 2004 at 19:57 UTC) »

Open source captchas. For Perl, there's Authen::Captcha. For PHP, there are several different wheels available, including Captcha-TT, OCR Captcha, HN Captcha, Captcha, Veriword, Forms Validator, ...

18 Oct 2004 - Catptcha-TT appears to be the most comprehensive of the above. (Reference: CAPTCHA comparison.)
11 Oct 2004 (updated 11 Oct 2004 at 17:50 UTC) »
*grumble* My mobile phone provider doesn't use captchas for their web-based "Send a Message" feature. I'm guessing they don't have a spam filter or throttling mechanism on their email-based service (i.e., 10digitmobilenumbers@msg.myprovider.com) either. And since mobile customers bear all the costs of receiving any unsolicited text messages sent via the web or email, I'm guessing we may soon have the makings of a class action suit...
WTF?! I was left wondering if "Wading into Alernate Data Streams" (Communications of the ACM, April 2004) was peer reviewed when I ran across this erroneus statement in the first paragraph:
Built on a Linux kernel, OS X stores resources in separate .rsrc files.

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