Bool considered harmful

I’m not sure who said it recently (I think it was Haacked) but I completely agree: Never Use Bool, or more specifically never user bool as a parameter. It is the most foolish of datatypes and conveys the smallest amount of information possible. Which means that you have to add all the context of what it means to the parameter name which is not visible once your intellisense has faded. I recently came upon this little gem in my code:

Function names have been changed to protect the innocent. but you get the jist. What does those boolean flags mean? I certainly don’t know! And things get even more fun when you need to refactor out one of the parameters or even worst add one in.  A far better function call would look like this:

Now, not only is the intention of the function explicit but also you have somewhere to go if you want more options for a parameter. I pretty sure someone covered mentioned this in the past 3-4 months but I think it’s worth re-iterating.

Of coarse it is more verbose and Atwood would probably have me strung up. But what do I care..?

I can listen faster than you can speak

I was listening to a SilverLight Media Stream today and found it quite annoying that I couldn’t speed up playback. Double speed (or faster) playback has been a feature of Windows Media Player for a long time. When I find a long rambling technology interview about something I’m interested I often play it at back at high speed. Ive often found nuggets of valuable information in hour long videos I would have otherwise not watched.

So I was disappointed when i found that the standard player skin has no such feature. I guess it’s part of the current industry-wide design drive to cut back on clutter.

As an aside it’s amazing how much smarter most people sound when you speed them up. The ums, ahs and parasitic words fade into the background noise and the sentences move along at a clipping pace giving the speaker an air of urbane technical authority.

BumpTop on TED

I’ve loved BumpTop ever since I first saw it. Recently Anand Agarawala presented it at TED, so hopfully it will actually become my desktop some time soon.

The Algorithm Sucks

Despite Robert Scoble’s zombie blogging. The ‘new’ Ask.com  search product, or as Ask call it The Algorithm; completely sucks.  I tried a few searches, which is more then most people would do, and the results were very poor. What sums it up, however is this search I did on the EventBroker ThreadOpion enum I spoke about in my previous post.

The ‘correct page’, which is the Microsoft documentation page for the enum, did not even show up. I was given a spelling suggestion which I did not take but which Ask used because it offered me 8 sponsored links for Option Brokers.

There seems to be a bias for newer, blog or editorial content which commented on the actual piece of information I was interested. This is possibly why Scoble liked it.

So in sort, at the moment; The Algorithm Sucks

Photosynth Will blow you away…

More amazing technology from Microsoft. You have to try Photosynth it hyperlinks photos taken of the same thing together using visual recognition. Here’s a TED talk by Blaise Aguera y Arcas the creator of Microsoft’s newly acquired SeaDragon technology which powers Photosynth. Wow, exciting stuff.

In a similar vein to Google Streetview.

Jobs and Gates Interview Videos

Great set of videos from the D Conference on a moderated discussion between Bill and Steve. Quite retrospective and personal but still really insightful. Steve was all about software, Bill was all about rich local experience. Linux didn’t come up which is a pity.

Microsoft Surface is Just Amazing

I’ve seen tech demos of interactive surface technology for years but now Microsoft look like they are about to create a consumer version called Microsoft Surface. This is genuinely revolutionary technology and if Microsoft can pull it off and get it into the home/office it will make them the purveyors of the future of computing.

Google and Apple have nothing on this… Wow.

Online Communities Map

Saw this excellent map of online communities over on strangemaps. It’s cool; but then you see the compass and it’s even cooler.

iPod RIP

Pandora just launched the future of music as far as I’m concerned. Who want’s to lug about 80 GBs of storage in a connected world?

I hope that some of the cool network mesh technology coming out of Nicholas Negroponte’s excellent One Laptop per Child project finds it’s way into consumer handsets soon too; so these services are no longer just an urban phenomenon.

Sex and the Slashdot

Just reading the Guardian (I know, I know) that the president of Jimmy Choo shoes Ms Tamara Mellon was being spied upon by a ‘hi-tech’ private investigation company called AIS under the direction of her minted but somewhat slow witted husband.

Now any security professional (and I know a very good one) will tell you that the best way to Attack and Penetrate a target is via social engineering. That’s were you confidently walk in, plug in your laptop and download the entire companies network contents and walk out. Which works due to the wonders of social compliance. But failing that you could intercept wifi comms using the newly popular ‘Evil Twin‘. Or maybe intercept traffic coming out of her office and use a man-in-the-middle attack…. but no.

What id AIS do? Wait for it… They sent her a ’sleasy’ email with a Trojan key-logger in it.

What an incredibly poor method of attack. You need great naivety on the users part to run it. Great weakness in outbound firewalls to get you data. Easy tracking of where the logger transmits that data if it does transmit it and pretty dubious information anyway.

I’m agog…