I remember a time… waaaaaay back in, oh… say… 1997 when the internet was really just starting to get “cool.” We would drink the latest caffeine laden beverage, take the latest “keep you wide-eyed” herbal supplement and write code until we were all convinced our hair was moving all over our skulls of its own volition. Back then, we would eagerly watch for the latest release notes for Netscape Navigator and relish any additions they made to JavaScript (bonus points for anyone who can remind me what the name of the scripting language was originally). As soon as a new change was in place we would attack it and put it somewhere… anywhere… on our sites. The code was raw, usually poorly formatted and documented and almost always protected by the author like it was going to be the next billion dollar idea.

That was then. In the ten years since that time we, as web developers, have evolved. Not quite far enough to exist only on a temporal plane but far enough to consider when writing code that other people may find it useful. No longer is the “cool” stuff of a proprietary variety. Now, developers more commonly take a little extra time to make their code understandable and customizable… then they do what was unthinkable ten years ago and (gasp) distribute it for free!

In steps Ajax Rain. A new resource style site that provides the coolest in JavaScript, DHTML and AJAX code for discerning veteran and budding rookie web developers alike. All of these snippets are downloadable for free and anyone can add their latest creation to the database.

So saddle up and ride some else’s code horse for a change. Quit reinventing the wheel (never mind that Good Year and Michelin continue to make millions doing exactly that) and get with the times. Go download and implement someone else’s code and take full credit for it yourself when praise is dished out at your next company picnic! After all… all the kids are doing it and they’re making you look lame in the process.

Today, while researching some issues in our production environment… without having access to the production environment, data, error messages or logs… I stumbled across a really, really cool article over on the Wired blogs.

If you’re a fan of “24″ or any counter-terrorism / crime-fighting / detective fiction you’ve long been shown what the writers and set designers of the material consider “super top secret cool software” which in the end amounts to nothing more than rudimentary Flash animations on a Windows XP machine.

Now, however, according to this article we have all been given the source code to graphics processing software which will outline anything in the image or video which was added after the original filming or snapshot.

I won’t rehash the entire article here, you’d be much better off to head to the link above and check out the pictures and article credits… as things should be.

I knew the day would come, it had to.

For a long, long time I have accused console games and the overlords who control them of ruining everything that was once sacred in video games. In a rush to make more money the big console companies would blitz right past all of the important things in games: fun, originality, playability, FUN; and instead focus on the quick fix items such as graphics and speed of play.

While graphics and speed of play are a necessary component to any great game, losing the fundamentals of what a game is, by definition, loses the purpose to have a game in the first place.

Then Nintendo decided to change everything. More after the flip…

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I stumbled across an article hosted on Slate today written by Jacob Weisberg. The article, entitled “Where Have All the Flower Children Gone?” does a really good job of outlining some of the reasons we’re not seeing as many anti-war protests lauding our presence in Iraq in comparison to the many protests that were seen during the Vietnam era.

In a time where the war in Iraq is often compared in many ways to the war in Vietnam I thought it was nice to see some fairly objective observations as to the differences between then and now in both the wars and our personality as a society. Enjoy!

This article actually started about three years ago, when a coworker and I were discussing the move by the French government to outlaw the word “e-mail.” At the time, in 2003, I found it very odd that a government would be taking such drastic measures against a seemingly low payoff end (there’s no way to enforce it and people are going to call it what they call it, regardless of what they should call it). During our very casual lunch conversation, I mentioned how odd I found this and a discussion began that intrigued me even more than the French government’s seemingly misplaced energy.

As it turns out, this coworker’s father was a very, very high ranking official in the U.S. military (yes, I verified it). As part of his responsibilities he maintained contact with officials from all European countries, including France. Not long before our discussion my coworker’s father had been discussing with his son the sad shape the French government was getting itself into.

According to him, France was losing all cultural identity. The constant concessions shown to special interest and minority groups had begun to give those groups powers which far outweighed their position within the society. In turn, the majority of the society was bearing the brunt of the loss of their power. The minority and special interest groups were holding much more sway than would normally rightfully be theirs.

After our discussion, my coworker revisted the issue with his father and mentioned our discussion. His father’s take on the issue was… again… interesting.
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Who is Ray Beckerman? He’s a lawyer attempting to defend people against the blanket, John Doe style lawsuits the RIAA is perpetrating all over the place. I’ve only kept up with this information in a general sense (compared to some others I know) but haven’t seen any information on the lawsuit side as detailed as what he provided in an interview he did with DefectiveByDesign.org.

Probably about 10 minutes of reading that will enlighten you to some pretty interesting stuff:

http://www.defectivebydesign.org/node/404

In what can only be described as unsurprising the U.S. Government has released a document which outlines a new relationship with the Russian government that will rule how the two interact based on intellectual property.

I didn’t provide a link, because the one I found was a PDF. Check here if you would like to read it.

I’ll summarize as best I can without causing an unnecessary loss in interest to those who are barely hanging on anyway, but nothing beats reading the original for yourself if you are someone who is interested.

The gist of the document is that Russia has agreed to begin to more aggressively chase down and penalize the people who would allow others to gain what the U.S. government would consider “intellectual property.” The most interesting thing about the document, of course, is that on page two, the first bullet point specifically names allofmp3.com as a target. Among other interesting, valid and needed points it seems questionable that allofmp3.com would be specifically targeted. Anyone who has ever been to Russian can tell you about the rampant illegal CD sales that go on, surely there were factories making these illegal CD’s which could be named as well? Instead, those points are glossed over and vague enough to actually allow continued violations while allofmp3.com takes the brunt of a direct reference, assuring that they will be specifically targeted and made an example of.

While I would be hesitant to say that the negotiations are in direct response to RIAA’s repeated demands even in the face of Allofmp3’s repeated justification it is hard to ignore the constant crowing the RIAA does about the site. Why would the U.S. government have any interest in specifically naming allofmp3.com as an enemy unless it is because of the constant complaints from the RIAA?

Now don’t get me wrong. While I like the idea behind allofmp3 much better than the blatant ripoff (I’ll write an article about that soon enough) that is our DRM overlords, I think the idea has been taken to an extreme and as such doesn’t compensate artists properly (or at all, actually). As such, it isn’t an acceptable solution to everyone and some changes should be in order.

I guess this is just another case, building on the suing of minors and people who don’t even own computers, which points out the complete and utter failure which is the RIAA. At some point artists are going to realize that they can make much, much more money by selling the bandwidth to download their songs rather than paying the RIAA and its minions to market the songs for them. I, for one, will be glad when the money I spend on music goes directly to the artist who created it instead of the executives who greedily mark up the prices to distribute the music.

Do the math… the DRM controlled music you buy is a ripoff.

Today I came across an article on CNN where Kofi Annan presented a proposal to the U.N. Climate Change Conference that indicates a possible solution to global warming is to create more polution in the air, thereby creating a sort of “shade” around the planet which would filter the sun’s rays.

I’ve seen the idea referred to as the “global haze proposal.”

To be sure the article doesn’t escape (CNN has a habit of moving their articles after a while) I’ll include the full, quoted text here:

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A project I work on requires that we developers edit stored procedures and store the resulting script in a text file that we put in our source control tool. In our case, we use Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio to do the aforementioned editing and we use CA’s Harvest Change Manager as the corporate mandated code repository and source control tool.

Now if you were using another tool, Notepad or Query Analalyzer, for instance, you probably wouldn’t have the problem I’m going to outline. As a matter of fact, the problem I’m going to outline is probably pretty rare. But it exists and I found a solution, so I’m going to write about it.

As it turns out, whenever you “Save As” in Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio the default encoding for the file is Unicode - Codepage 1200. Yes, this is a new approach to saving your beloved stored procedures and no, it wasn’t done that way in the past. Further, I can’t find any notification that the “standard default” was going to be changing.

Anyway, Harvest doesn’t like Unicode files. So when you go to add the file to your Harvest project it won’t let you. Oh, the humanity! ANSI for everyone!

Now I may be in the minority here, but I originally failed to notice that on the “Save File As” dialog there is a small arrow on the right side of the [Save] button. Once I noticed it, I clicked it… Then I clicked “Save with encoding…” Now I’m happy again! Kind of…

The good thing is that this will let you save your file in whatever encoding you want. The caveat is that it will let you save your file in whatever encoding you want.

So how is the default set? I’ll leave that for another article… Mostly because I don’t know yet.

Update (04.11.2008): Thanks to Chris May for the following step by step instructions on how to overcome this issue (edited for formatting, the original version is comment #8):

I have found some information about this.

Though it is possible at the time a script is saved to change the encoding to ascii it is tedious. Here is the process.

1. Choose File\Save
2. Choose the name and folder to save the file then look really closely at the right edge of the “Save” button for a tiny arrow
3. Click that tiny Arrow and choose “Save with Encoding”
4. From the Drop list select the encoding you want (the default encoding is “Unicode - Codepage 1200″, which means “UTF-16″). I have been using “US-ASCII - Codepage 20127″
5. Hit OK and Save. Your files should now work just fine with Perforce, CVS, etc.

Additionally, Chris has voiced his feedback to the SQL team, I encourage everyone to go have a look and hopefully we can get a solution sooner rather than later… although the outlook is bleak.

So not too long ago I came across this article on the New York Times’ site. It started off as an interesting read and eventually evolved into what I would consider borderline panic that the world was about to end. OK, so I knew the world wasn’t going to end, but still… Go read the article. I’ll wait here with my opinions on hold until you’re done.

…

So now that you’ve read it you’ll agree that: A) Anyone with enough nerdness to reconstruct a virus extracted from DNA has seen many, if not all, science fiction movies and; B) They didn’t learn a thing from these movies.

So how, on Earth, does someone consider it progressive science to reintroduce viruses, possibly some which culled the population to nearly nothing, into society? With our immune system dependencies on medicine do we really think it’s a good idea to just start introducing old viruses all willy nilly?

I mean… Aren’t there enough new viruses for you guys to work on?