Al Hoang

Well this certainly sucks. I’ve been working with IIS a little bit and
have installed URLScan and locked down the IIS server the best that I know
of with all the tools available from M$ to help lock this stuff down.
(The Microsoft Baseline Auditor Tool works well for this).

So here I am happy with a somewhat secure lockdown for my purposes and
I figure why not serve up files from the web server such as some nice
freeware utilities I found. Well, it seems URLScan bans all files ending in
.exe unless you unconfigure it. Suck. I want just a set of files
in one directory banned not ALL of them.

Kudos to this web archive (and Der Keiler
of the microsoft.public.intetserver.iis.security newsgroup:


From: (Jeff Cochran)
Date: Fri, 01 Nov 2002 13:45:40 GMT
>Does anybody know if I can allow a specific .exe file and not ALL .exe
>files?

Jeff

I’ve been thinking of dabbling in PLT Scheme
since it seems to be one of the nicer Schemes however it seems that it
does not support Unicode. Bummer. This puts a damper on trying to use it
seriously for awhile.

Thanks to 80/20 for pointing this out to me

80/20 post on it

The Register comments on DotGNU and Mono. Personally, I’ve been ignoring
any of the Open Source .NET projects until they hit 1.0. And even then
I’m going to wait until some killer app convinces me I need to install
any of these frameworks just to try that app. In the meantime, I’ve
not seen anything out of the projects that looks remotely useful for
me as a programmer.

I am
impressed with Miguel and buddies technical prowess at building this
stuff from the ground up. I fully agree with The Register article.
By the time Mono or DotGNU get around to implementing all of the stuff that will
be USEFUL to OTHER programmers Microsoft will have moved on to the next
project built on top of other building blocks that they’re building NOW.

Mono and dotGNU are interesting projects for people who are interested in computer languages, compiler construction and other fairly esoteric, hard-core areas of software engineering. But they have no practical use, and exist only with the patronage of Microsoft.

Link to story

I’ve been looking to find something that I could use to send posts to
Manila without having to login to the Web interface. I work MUCH
faster with vi than I do with a web interface.

Here are three links to I found really handy for getting you
started if you can program Python (I listed them in preferred reading order):

Flip Page Tutorial

Addingi to a Manila Home Page

The Manila-RPC Interface

After reading these I was able to play with Python via the interactive
interpreter and figure out what I needed to call to make a post remotely
to Manila. Tres cool.

Seems AT&T Labs which was carved from Bell Labs has almost halved their
number of researchers. The parallels between this and the Xerox ParcPlace
exodus seem high. I doubt the research branch will ever recover from
losing so much talent.

However, at the same time if your bottom line sinks to the red and keeps
sinking and research hasn’t been able to keep things afloat I can see
why you would let them go.

One thing that I find interesting is that of the researchers that
split to the four winds. Some of them might become wildly successful.
How come they don’t band together to create a fund for basic science
research if it’s so important?

Comments (0)

This is a seriously cool project:

Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. Markdown allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML).

Check it out

I’m not a hardcore CVS user yet. I’m slowly getting there with tracking like 10-15 open source projects in CVS. (Need to start seeing about code reviewing more). However, one of the things that has puzzled me was how to hold onto seperate branches in CVS so I could compare 2 branches in a simple fashion. Here’s one way that I think I’ll be doing.

Many kudos to the KDE Edu group (which I sometimes track the ML) for pointing out a very useful methodology that I’ve not been able to find in any CVS manuals or books online.


Link to Post

Umm…. here’s something you don’t stumble across everyday.

I found a link to an old interview with Dr. Mark McCahill who was one of the inventors of the Gopher protocol.

Interesting perspective on an older search technology and the design decisions that governed it.

Here’s a snippet:

McCahill: … My dream
environment is a Mac client and a UNIX server … My dream system is Mac 3400, because I can carry most of my world with me in my hand.

Some of other people here are much more addicted to X Window than me.

Link to Story

Executive explanatation:

Prefs -> Editorials -> Editing Tool -> NONE

The long version with lots of rants

The Browser based editor is a *&(*^#!@# annoyance to me when posting from Windoze. If I use IE or Netscape this stupid WYSIWYG editor pops up and it’s taken me months to figure out how to disable it because:

• I don’t care THAT much about it
• I want to POST on stuff I find interesting, not screw around with the interface
• Finding documentation on certain features of Manila is a fricking pain.

The web interface for Manila is good enough for that simple stuff that fulfills 70% of what I want out of blog but everytime I stray out of that 70% area the curve for learning what the hell I’m doing shoots up exponentially for finding that information. “Oh just go read the docs you lazy bum.” I am, believe me I am. But too bad Manila is so complex that it has to define a vocabulary for itself and to find anything you need to know the vocabulary. But I don’t want to learn the vocabulary I want to get turn off or on feature X that I know by another name thank you very much.

Anyways to click here to go to the URL that explains how to turn off that infernal editor.

The 1/10th Rule: When passing software code to others, strive to pass comprehension to others in 1/10th of the time it would have taken you to learn it without any guidance.

Programming isn’t an easy job (although for some it might be). A critical moment in time in any software project is when a 3rd party comes to look at your code.

Imagine yourself as a complete beginner working on a new software project. You are willing to learn but have no idea where to start. The project seems so large! I asked a couple of experts and each tell me to start in a different place and learn that thoroughly. But it feels like trying to understand the mechanics of a car by first studying axels in depth, then wheels in depth, and so on. This could eventually lead to understanding how a car as a whole works but that’ll take time. The introductory document explains stuff in a hand waving fashion but it doesn’t allow me to sink in enough to understand what’s happening. argh!

This is where effective documentation and code commenting helps (and the 1/10th rule comes in). Say you spent 10 hours making that perfect algorithm to solve some problem. So you code it up and in it goes. You spent 10 hours and know it perfectly. You leave a comment here or there saying (clean memory!) but don’t explain your intentions about why you wrote this. The next person that comes along now has to stare at your code for another 10 hours just to understand what you wrote. But perhaps they get sick of this and decide to just write their own version and replace it. A few more comments so they can understand what you meant in an hour would have helped immensely! When it comes time to explain something think very hard about how you can reduce the next person’s mental burden to 1/10th.

When writing comments in my code I try to carry this rule out. I’m not sure how well I follow it but I think it’s an ideal to strive for.

Looks like the Grand Challenge is finally under way. I’m still cheering for the
RPI Team (Team LoGHIQ) to do their best and kick some butt. They’re still
up for the QIDs (Qualification, Inspection, and Demonstration) sometime soon.
So if you’re cheering for underdogs here’s one to cheer for.

Seems the
Red Team which is the prized CMU team passed the QID (Qualification, Inspection, and Demonstration) already. Then again with the budget and people they’ve thrown on, it’d be an embarassment if they didn’t

The Grand Challenge Status Board

Michael Watkins gives an illuminating description of his tenure process (which ultimately resulted in a nay) at the Harvard Business School.

Mr. Watkins also gives some thoughts on why he feels HBS might be creaking at the seams:

I believe that the answers to these questions are, respectively, little no, and very much so. I further believe that this is the result of the “capture” of business schools (including unfortunately and increasingly HBS) by discipline-oriented academics who consume more value from their institutions than they create for them.

A very interesting read, especially if you’re interested in the academic process (it isn’t a breeze after you get your PhD like some imagine).

Read it yourself

Now you know

I was looking at installing MySQL on OS X and I was bouncing between either
fink, source compile myself, find some random person’s installer on the Internet
when lo’ an behold:

MySQL Corp offers downloads of binary packages for OS X. I’d like to think
that the company that hosts this project would know how to package MySQL
correctly so this is a no-brainer. (And if it does mess up, well I’ll know that
very soon too).

Go Get MySQL 4.0.x