Cubelogic Improv

There’s a list of official aid collaborations provided by all (or most) countries here.
The death count is now 125,000, and for the Indonesian ambassador in Malaysia, it could reach 400,000 _for the sole_ Indonesia. (link). I am totally blown away by what happened.
I don’t know how I can possibly greet the new year with happiness. It’s just beyond belief.
A little, yet nice reaction to this tragedy: in Italy many towns cancelled the already planned new year’s eve parties because of the catastrophe in south-Asia. I’m just curious…. I wonder if other countries have adopted similar “anti-happiness” initiatives policies.
Today’s Apple home page is a shut-down page, reading “Out hearts reach out to those hurt by the Indian Ocean tsunamis.” and then “Help survivors and their families by making monetary donations to these organizations: American Red Cross, AmeriCares, Direct Relief International, Médecins Sans Frontières International, Oxfam, Sarvodaya, Save the Children, UNICEF”. (Google cache link)
Llamasoft’s forum partecipants are organizing a fund donation effort in the thread “Come on lets fuckin help them.“. The llamasofties are people you can trust. Please partecipate, donate a buck or two.

Update (4 Jan 2005): on the the Llamasoft forum 1100 uk pounds have already been donated by various forum partecipants.

SimpleTimer is finally completed. The current nightly build is going to be pretty much the final build for v1.0. Before officially releasing it, though, I wanted to finish the redesign of the web-site, because it seems like a logical thing to do. The new design is more minimalistic yet efficient IMO. My graphic skills suck but OmniGraffle is my friend.

E.g. During the web-coding redesign efforts of today, I had the need for a nice download icon. Iconfactories, Icongardens, xiconsforyou, …. after 30 min of looking around, I realized, why paying? So I started OG and 15 minutes later I had my icon. OG is art.

Dopo un ennesima ora passata in compagnia di OmniGraffle (by the Omni Group), ho deciso di scrivere una sorta di recensione pubblicata per l’intelligente piazza di antanisoftbbs.org.

Sto finalmente completando SimpleTimer, e in un certo senso non vedo l’ora di poter pensare ad altro, anche se ho imparato varie cose sviluppando questa piccola applicazione. Ciò di cui mi preme dire, tuttavia, è un aspetto dell’attività dello sviluppatore per me assai importante. Io lo chiamo, “mettere le cose a posto”. Se il refactoring è ristrutturare, riadattare, ricompattare la struttura del software che è stata sottoposta a svariate modifiche nel corso dello sviluppo (un’attività fondamentale che provoca sublime piacere), il “mettere le cose a posto” si riferisce ad aspetti meno tangibili, o non pragmatici. (Ad ogni modo è in effetti un figlioccio del refactoring.) In breve, significa imbellire il codice. In genere ciò non comporta la modifica del significato del codice: metterlo a posto significa riformattarlo per renderlo più leggibile, cambiare i nomi di qualche variabile, aggiungere commenti, cancellare alcune vecchie note sparse qua e là nel codice, e dare ad esse una forma, al pari del codice “vero”:

• spostare e raggruppare blocchi di codice correlato,
• riformattare e correggere gli errori di indentatura del codice,
• cercare di contenere ogni statement su una sola riga ed evitare di “andare a capo” (perché andare a capo è cosa riprovevole nei miei standard), e a questo scopo magari:
• cambiare i nomi ad alcune variabili, ai fini della lettura: ciò include guardare al significato della variabile e alla sua lunghezza,
• ottimizzare l’allocazione di variabili,
• eventualmente aggiungere una o due variabili per facilitare la lettura,
• aggiungere commenti,
• riscrivere commenti,
• riformattare commenti,
• riformattare il codice,
• eccetera.

I commenti sono comunque parte del codice secondo me. Ad essi va posta la stessa cura con la quale si progettano le astrazioni. Senza i commenti, risulterà più difficile lavorare attorno alle astrazioni stesse, e potrebbe essere il caso che tali astrazioni vengano confuse durante una seconda rilettura. In aggiunta, mi accorgo di difetti o bug che prima non avevo visto.

Ad ogni modo, non metto le cose a posto per un motivo strettamente pragmatico, ma solo perché mi piace farlo. Mi sembra che il codice acquisti una nuova luce che prima non c’era.

I rarely watch TV, but occasionally I stumble upon the shouting “idiot box”, as somebody calls it. Yesterday, on my way to the kitchen I came across “Everybody loves Raymond” and I watched 15 minutes of the show. During that show, the following statement was made: “Money is freedom”. It was said in a reassuring way, not as a joke: like a fact.

TV is harmful and depressing.

I updated my body “specifications” page.

A few months ago I had installed Norton Antivirus 2005 (notice the corporate absurdity of the title) on Judy’s Windows ME computer (a Dell Dimension 2100, Celeron 800Mhz). She didn’t have an anti-virus solution, so I thought to adopt Norton’s. I knew it is dangerous and evil on Macs, but my idea was that it still worked okay on Windows boxes. I was wrong. Since the very first day of the installation, all sort of weird things started to happen on that once streamlined computer:

• an enormously long boot time
• boot sometimes wouldn’t complete nicely, and the machine would hang once inside Windows
• increasingly frequent BSODs (Blue Screen Of Death)
• sudden hangs, e.g. while launching Netscape
• less responsive UI
• computer won’t complete shutdown sequence (happened frequently)

Today, after another BSOD at startup, and the consequent “push-the-reboot-button”, the machine actually refused to reboot, even in safe mode. Corrupt registry. So: I took the boot disk I prepared years ago, typed scanreg /restore, thought of some prayers to the logic god, and rebooted. It did boot. Yes, and after one minute, I got another BSOD. Rebooted again. Then, while hoping the Blue devil will leave me alone for 5 minutes, I surely went to uninstall the Norton AV 2005. At the beginning of the procedure, the uninstaller nicely asked me “Do you want to completely remove NAV from this computer?”. This sounds sarcastic…. Anyway, I thought, at least it asked me. Now I know. Now I am sure that no rotten Norton cadavers will be left on my computer. Then, after the un-installation successfully completed, and after another “recommended” reboot, I logged into Windows again. Immediately, I notice the startup is still insanely long. I look at the active processes inside msconfig, and… I get very, very angry. I see 2 stupid, unrequested, undesired, spurious Norton processes. Didn’t I just completely remove the whole thing? Why, if it was not possible to remove those nasty undead cadavers, why didn’t the evil Norton un-installer warn me?!? Why?! I made an uninstaller application. I know it’s easy to warn the user if something goes wrong. Well, unless you don’t actually want to warn anybody.

Beware of Norton Antivirus. It’s a nasty evil beast. It’s in its nature.