The lazy blogger’s post generator

By Mark O’Neill
Contributing Writer, [GAS]

If you blog for a living like I do, you’ll know that some days the words just don’t come.   For hours, you’ll sit there looking for stories or you’ll try to make the words come out to no avail.    Or you’ll simply not be bothered, give up and watch daytime TV instead.   There’s been many a time when Kiltak has sent me an IM message with a not so subtle “planning on posting anything today Mark?” to which I’ll reply “sssh…Oprah’s starting!”

Well if you find yourself in that terrible word drought situation then I have the very thing for you – the Lazy Blogger Post Generator!    Simply choose your phrase, hit the button and out pops your post!   Simple as pie!

So I chose my words and phrases, hit the button and…..here’s my Pulitzer winning post –

Blimey! I just got slapped with a wet salmon – really – I have not updated this since dearest Mummy was still alive… You would not believe how terribly tardy the Victorian internet can be. I prostrate myself in sorrow and beg thy forgiveness..

I am lost in a sea of pseudo-olde-english with finding Jesus (after someone told me he was lost), selling my soul to Google, just generally being an embarrassment to the bodyguards of the blogger I am stalking, my day drifts aimlessly from lunchtime to sun down and beyond. I am beyond drunk most of the time. I wish you could be here to share it.

I swear on the bones of my ancestors I will make more of an effort to blog more often. You have my word! Don’t hold your breath though, you’re likely to turn blue..

I’m convinced Kiltak will never notice the difference….I can automate this stuff and spend my whole day on the beach living a life of luxury and getting paid!   Wait…did I just say that out loud?



Memphis bloggers – respect ma authoritah!

By Mark O’Neill
Contributing Writer, [GAS]

First it was Chinese and Iranian bloggers getting the boot in from their government, then a Russian blogger received a suspended prison sentence for saying nasty things on his blog about the local police.   Now the Memphis Police Department (MPD) in the good ol’ US of A is attempting to discover who is behind MPD Enforcer 2.0

The blog, which is apparently operated by a former MPD officer, is extremely critical of the MPD and its director, Larry Godwin.   Now Godwin and the MPD’s lawyers want to know who’s behind MPD Enforcer.

So they have taken AOL to court because it looks like an @aim.com e-mail address is associated with the blog. They want the company to hand over all records that will identify the perp so the heavily armed SWAT teams can raid the premises and take the dangerous violent S.O.B down – ASAP.   If that doesn’t pan out, I’m sure Google’s Blogspot is next on the hitlist.   We can then all sleep easy in our beds knowing that a dangerous blogger has been taken off the streets and will never harm our children or our children’s children.

Some thoughts – first, by doing what they are doing, the MPD is playing right into the blogger’s hands.   Not only are they giving the blog lots of publicity, but they are also confirming what the blogger is probably constantly saying – that the MPD is heavy handed and bullying.

Secondly, doesn’t the MPD have real criminals to catch instead of getting all worked up over one blogger?

Third, shouldn’t somebody teach the MPD and Director Godwin about something called the First Amendment?

Fourth, shouldn’t police officers be tough and develop thick skins?   It looks like the MPD can’t handle a bit of criticism on a blog without crying about it and running home to Mummy.   What about either ignoring the criticism or responding to it in a mature adult manner?   Isn’t suing a bit over the top?

I’m sure all you US readers don’t want to see your tax dollars being spent on lawsuits like this when they should be spent on catching criminals, building prisons and maintaining a justice system in general.   Instead, the MPD seems to be using your tax dollars to keep their egos intact.

The Wind from the Sun: From Fiction to Reality

To kick off this post, we’ll start with an excerpt from The Wind from the Sun, a short story by Arthur C. Clarke:

“Hold your hands out to the sun. What do you feel? Heat, of course. But there’s pressure as well – though you’ve never noticed it, because it’s so tiny. Over the area of your hands, it only comes to about a millionth of an ounce. But out in space, even a pressure as small as that can be important – for it’s acting all the time, hour after hour, day after day. Unlike rocket fuel, it’s free and unlimited. If we want to, we can use it; we can build sails to catch the radiation blowing from the sun.”

When it comes to space-technology prediction, almost no one has ever reached the level of Arthur C. Clarke. Once again, it seems that Mr. Clarke was right.

Just next week, NASA is planning to launch a new space propulsion system named NanoSail-D. The technology consists of a 10 square-meter metallic polymer sail that uses solar pressure as a mean of propulsion for spacecrafts. Even though Mr. Clarke passed away last March, I doubt that we’ll stop hearing about him anytime soon, and I’m sure he’ll keep on amazing us again and again with his prophetic writings. Video after the jump.

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Original Hoverboard Up For Grabs

By JR Raphael
Contributing Writer, [GAS]

This is heavy, Doc: Marty McFly’s original hoverboard from the Back to the Future series is up for grabs on eBay.

Oh, and it’ll run you at least $30,000.

Price aside, though, this would be a pretty sweet purchase. Used in both BTTF II and III, the board is one of two different styles made for the movies and is described as “the best example of all wood Hoverboards to have survived the rigors of filming.”

The other style, interestingly enough, combined wood with styrofoam — and as a result, didn’t last as long. The one up for sale, however, is said to be in “used but outstanding condition.” It’s equipped with ballbearing-mounted rear footpads that’ll let you do full 360s, just like Marty. There are also bottom-installed magnet plates and even two holes on the top — evidence of the handlebars originally on this board when Marty borrowed it from a little girl in the second flick.

The Hoverboard live auction begins August 1 at 11:00 PDT. It’s estimated to go as high as $50,000.

In related news, if anyone has $50,000 I can borrow, please contact me immediately.

Gmail introduces secure net connection

By Mark O’Neill
Contributing Writer, [GAS]

Gmail has introduced the ability for its users to access their email through a secure “https” connection.

Previously, if you wanted to access Gmail through a https connection, you had to use a Greasemonkey script or Gina Trapani’s Better Gmail Firefox extension.   But now Gmail has integrated it right into their interface.

You may be wondering though, if a secure connection is so important, why Gmail gives you the chance to opt out of it.   The Gmail blog explains :

We use https to protect your password every time you log into Gmail, but we don’t use https once you’re in your mail unless you ask for it (by visiting https://mail.google.com rather than http://mail.google.com). Why not? Because the downside is that https can make your mail slower. Your computer has to do extra work to decrypt all that data, and encrypted data doesn’t travel across the internet as efficiently as unencrypted data. That’s why we leave the choice up to you.

I personally use a secure connection all the time so I am glad that Gmail is now offering this feature officially.     Https is another tick in the plus column for why Gmail is so much better than other email services!

Being Gmail, it is possible that they are rolling this out slowly, so if you don’t see it in your settings, wait a few days.   I’m sure it will make an appearance eventually.

Professor Randy Pausch is dead

By Mark O’Neill
Contributing Writer, [GAS]

Professor Randy Pausch, the man who brought us the inspirational speech “The Last Lecture” has died of complications from pancreatic cancer.

The speech, delivered at Carnegie Mellon University, was an urge by Pausch to celebrate life and do great things.   This was made all the more poignant given the fact that he was fighting terminal cancer and not given much time to live.   His speech went viral on YouTube, he appeared on Oprah and the speech was made into a bestselling book.

So even though Professor Pausch has died, his memory and his ideas will live on for generations.

The ascent of scripting languages

When you say “scripting language” these days, most programmers think of Perl, Python, Ruby, PHP, ASP, or JavaScript.  But the history of scripting languages starts much earlier than any of these.

The Early Days: JCL

At least as early as 1964, programmers realized that having to do everything in code, including copying files, was too tedious.  So IBM introduced a “job control language” (JCL)  on the OS/360.  In this language, you could copy a file from one location to another using only 9 lines (punched on cards, of course), as compared to writing a Fortran programming that would be much more complex.  JCL was also used to run programs in batch mode, specify their parameters, and branch based on their result.

I remember when I was a lowly operator on a Data General Eclipse system, and I needed to load the contents of a tape into a file on an IBM 4331 in another department.  I strolled over to their operations window with the tape in hand.  When I finally got an operator’s attention, I asked him to “please run this tape into a disk file for me.”  He stared at me and said, “Where’s your JCL?”  I replied, “JC who? On the DG, I can just enter a command on the console to do that.”  He looked smug and said, “That’s impossible.  You can’t read a tape without JCL.”  So, I had to research the required JCL and punch the cards.  Which goes to show how command line interpreters on minicomputers had already advanced beyond mainframe batch jobs by the late seventies.

Scripting Command Line Interpreters

Command line interpreters, such as DG’s CLI, DEC’s MCR and DCL, and more famously Unix’s Bourne Shell not only accepted simple commands to perform (what at the time seemed like) complex operations, they also provided a way to execute a series of those commands stored in a file.  DG called them “macros”, DEC called them “command files”, and Unix called them “shell scripts”.  These early scripting languages also provided local variables and flow control mechanisms, so it wasn’t long before they began to be used for even more complex operations that used to require compiled programs.

When I was first introduced to Unix systems back in 1984, I was thrilled with the C language, the Bourne shell, and powerful utilities like awk and sed.  But there was one thing that bothered me:  their syntaxes were similar, but not identical — and the overlap in problem domain was significant.  I thought, wouldn’t it be cool if you could have one language that addressed the combined problem domain in a consistent syntax?  But I was too busy to do anything about it.

Perl

A few years later, Larry Wall found the time to do something about it: the Perl language.  Perl combines the ease of shell scripting with powerful features borrowed from C and various Unix utilities.  Immediate and easy access to regular expressions, lists, associative arrays, the ability to treat any value as a string, no need for scaffolding (not even a “main()” declaration), automatic resource management, eval (the ability to execute a string as code at runtime), and the ability to combine different programming paradigms freely are some of the language’s strengths that combine to make “easy things easy and hard things possible.”  And you can choose from a number of ways to do the same thing, a principle known as TIMTOWTDI (There Is More Than One Way To Do It).

Object-orientation can be a good approach for managing complexity, but languages that force the use of object-oriented notation usually add unnecessary complexity to almost every project.  When Perl added support for objects, it did so in an optional way that can be freely mixed with non-OO code so that complex modeling can be achieved when needed, but otherwise not required.  The syntax for objects was initially a bit of a kludge, but that seems sufficiently remedied in Perl 6.

Tcl

About the same time (late 1980’s), John Ousterhout created the TCL scripting language.  It’s an interesting functional language in its own right, but its enduring contribution to scripting languages has been the Tk, a framework for enabling cross-platform graphical user interfaces that can be used from within many popular scripting languages.

Python

Guido van Rossum was also at work in the late 1980’s on a new scripting language: Python.  Unlike Perl, Python’s philosophy is that there should be only one clear way to do something.  This philosophical rigidity is reflected in the language’s syntax.  Rather than curly braces to group statements, indentation (significant white space)  is used.   Rather than a semicolon to terminate statements, the end of line is used.  These rules may prevent clever programmers from writing code that is easily misunderstood, but they also limit flexibility of coding style.

On the other hand, Python does not limit the choice of programming paradigm.  It readily supports structured, functional, object-oriented, and aspect-oriented programming — and allows you to mix those styles.

Python gave us the term duck typing (although some earlier languages also provided forms of this).  If a class provides the methods expected for an interface, then it meets the requirements for that interface — whether or not it is derived from any base class of that interface.  The name comes from the duck test:  “if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like duck, then it probably is a duck”.  In Python, if an object implements the methods we want to call, then it qualifies as a receiver.  This seemingly simplistic form of typing easily enables polymorphism without requiring inheritance — thus eliminating the need for complex inheritance hierarchies.

Ruby

I may not be qualified to write objectively about Ruby, because it’s currently my most favorite programming language.  Yukihiro Matsumoto, affectionately known to the Ruby community as “Matz”, released Ruby to the public in 1995.  His design philosophy focuses on creating a language for human programmers, rather than for the machine.  The result is based largely on Perl and SmallTalk, with nods to other languages.  It follows the POLS (“Principle of Least Surprise”) — so where it may be minutely inconsistent, it usually does what the programmer expects.  Ruby also embraces Perl’s concept of TIMTOWTDI — you can probably find eight or more ways to perform even the simplest operation.

Ruby is one of the more thoroughly object-oriented languages around.  Almost anything can be treated as an object, even literals — which provides amazing expressiveness.  Nevertheless, you aren’t required to explicitly use classes at all, unless you want to.  If you define a function that isn’t in a class, it actually extends the global Object class.  You don’t have to be aware of that, and yet you can also use that fact to your advantage.

Ruby uses duck typing, like Python.  Ruby also allows any class to be reopened and extended.  For instance, you can add your own methods to String and Integer, or override the ones that are predefined.  This makes most OO purists wet their pants.  Potentially it’s a truly dangerous capability, but in the right hands at the right time it can be amazingly powerful.

Because of its great flexibility, Ruby is inherently multi-paradigmatic.  It’s possible to write Ruby code that reads like Lisp, Java, or even Pascal.  You can tune for readability, performance, minimum code, cleverness, or just about any other emphasis you’d like to achieve.

And since we’ve been talking about Ruby, now might be a good time to throw in a continuation (pardon the pun).

To be continued…

There is so much more ground to cover, and I’ve probably already exhausted your attention span.  So, I’ll continue this thread in a later post on the use of scripting languages and the web.  I have also neglected to talk about scripting languages embedded in applications.  There are many scripting languages that I won’t be able to cover, and many distinguishing features and capabilities that I won’t have space to discuss.  But I hope you’ll find this overview helpful.

This post is part three of a series on the history of programming languages.  For the first two parts, see:

Parking Goes High-Tech with New Wireless Sensor System

By JR Raphael
Contributing Writer, [GAS]

You’ll soon be able to find an open parking spot without having to do any actual searching in part of California.

San Francisco is getting ready to debut what’s being billed as the largest mesh wireless parking network ever created. Streetline, a local company, is setting up 6,000 sensors around the city to keep tabs on available spaces and how much traffic is passing by. The data will then be made available via smartphones or online maps and will also be displayed on specially designed street signs.

The sensors will actually be embedded in the streets’ surfaces and will use magnets to detect cars above them. There’ll be wired receivers situated every several blocks that will send the data back to a main server.

Streetline says the system is 97 to 99 percent accurate.

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Followup: San Fran Network Guru Coughs Up Key for Mayor

Last week I wrote about Terry Childs, the jailed network administrator for the City of San Francisco who, if the press is to be believed, went nutty, changed the admin passwords, and then locked everyone out of administration of city systems.  It was the cyber equivalent of swallowing the key.

In a twist to this story, Childs remained silent, vowing only to disclose the true passwords to Gavin Newsom, the young mayor of San Francisco.  In a secret jailhouse meeting between Childs and Mayor Newsom, the true passwords were disclosed, and Mayor Newsom then passed the information to the current staff in the Department of Technology.  Access has now been restored to those admins who had been locked out.

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How to make it in corporate IT (by the skin of your teeth)

By Vaughn Brown
Guest Blogger

It’s not easy to break into corporate IT, unless you’ve got more than some hope and a little courage. I should know, since I’ve spent nearly two decades overcoming one struggle and stumbling block after another and am finally arriving at true IT happiness. My story, titled “The Paper MCSE,” can be found here, and can give you some tips. Until then, use this short list of essential dos and don’ts as a guide.

A quick list for success in information technology

If you want to succeed in IT despite some common challenges, follow these four simple rules to stay ahead of the game. They’ll help build your experience and get you on the road to a resume that will knock the socks off of hiring executives and IT directors at XYZ Corp:

1. RTFM!!! I know, this is the most basic and essential component to IT success but if you want to succeed, just hit the books and get to work. Go to your local Barnes & Noble, buy your favorite java concoction and dive into some tech books while enjoying the free air conditioning. You won’t have to pay for the books and you can read to your heart’s content. Another option may be the library, a great resource for learning — it’s not just for kids. Take advantage of those tax payer dollars and get some education! Look online for resources too, they are everywhere. But when you’re in cyberspace, be careful! Remember that most Wikis are open resources and can be chocked full of misinformation. Learn to discern opinion and truth. This is critical to your IT success.

2. Make the tech-support dude your bitch! I’m serious. You paid for support, now take advantage of it! I’m not talking about Acer tech support in Costa Rica where the first step to recovering from a computer lock up is to reformat your hard drive and start from scratch. I’m talking about leveraging that support contract to your advantage. Use those guys to guide you and educate you. Take notes as you troubleshoot and work through problems. This is invaluable to the success of any IT infrastructure. Always remember that the guy on the other end of the phone line is sitting there in a cubicle with a headset, surfing the Web and just trying to get through the day. Make it a great experience for the both of you—be friendly, ask questions, above all make sure you listen well—and you’ll get more out of it than you might expect. Don’t be afraid to escalate the call if you find yourself treading water. Never be insulting to the guys on the other end of the line! Making friends with support people at high levels is something that can carry you through some tough times. They’ll throw you some bones when you need it. Stay on your toes and always stay in learning mode. This is essential to success in the IT world.

3. Learn to work as a team! I can’t tell you how frustrating it is to have egomaniacs on an IT team being Negative Nancy, complaining about user issues, talking about how much better their code is than dude-over-there’s code and how they bucked standards and structured their Linux installs far off the beaten path. This type of attitude is great if you’re in a pissing match but it does nothing to build the team and help move your projects forward to completion and success. Don’t hate on technology! Don’t get caught up in the Linux vs. Windows or Mac vs. PC wars. All technology has its place and it all needs to work together. Think of the next guy in your position and think of those who came before you, since thinking of others is important in being a cohesive and forward moving IT team. Get together! Standardize! It doesn’t matter which standards you follow so much as you understand the vision and need of the end user, your clients and the purposes of the projects you’re working on. Remember, you have a job because there is a need! Find out what the users need and work to deliver it to them. Learn to know the differences between what people want and what they need.

4. Look to the future, have vision and stay positive. Don’t use band-aids! Instead, implement solutions that work and have staying power. When urgent and unexpected issues rear their ugly heads, you need to comfort and reassure the executives that all is well. Keep communication open and fresh and be patient with them while you’re troubleshooting, and don’t panic. The executives drive the business forward while you’re in the engine room driving the ship. Help them understand this too, so that when things get hot and stressful they have confidence in you and the patience with you that you need from them. While we in IT understand what it takes to get from A to Z, the executives often only see dollar signs. The costs are enormous and the bridges to success require architects with vision and wisdom. Executives sometimes don’t understand how complex a process this can be. Don’t be afraid to humble yourself and contact an IT consultant. They will visit you with hopes of big sales and therefore give you invaluable advice, direction and guidance. Just like the tech support guys, make these boys your bitches. Let them take you out to lunch and learn all you can from them. Throw your complex problems in their lap and start spitballing solutions with them. This is what they live for, and you’ll get all the credit when you implement their solutions. You’ll have incredible success as you leverage their experience and knowledge and they will provide you with a roadmap to success. They will help you bridge that gap between IT and the corporate brass and the proverbial planets will align.

Enjoy your success and always keep moving forward!