Peter Bromberg's UnBlog

"if we were all meant to get along, there would be no people who wait until all the groceries are rung up before starting to look for their damn debit card." -- Dexter Dotnetsky I just had to laugh at how incredibly stupid people can be after reading this Wired story about how some schmuck got the "Administrator" Keypad password (which you can get right out of the PDF manual, which you can search for, find, and download online -- and that's not the only ATM model you can do this with). The password basically allows you to reconfigure the machine to think it is holding $5 bills instead of twenties and dispense four times the amount of money you ask for. Use an untraceable prepaid debit card to get the cash, and you got some fun times. Nine days went by until some Good Samaritan customer informed the store owner that she had gotten more money out of the ATM than she asked for. The crook had never reset the Admin password back to "normal". The lesson he...

Here's the deal: Pope (who ostensibly represents tolerance, love for humankind, etc. around the world) says something that one particular group (Muslims) can misinterpret to be slanderous to Islam. Actually, he was quoting someone else, trying to explain the Vatican's policy that there is no room for violence in religion, but the Muslim fanatics went nuts. Why? Because of the way the MEDIA reported it. Fanatic Islamic groups around the world respond by protesting and burning Christian Churches. Yo, man!-- It's a self-fulfilling prophecy! Even if the Pope did not -- in any way -- intend for his utterances to be interpreted to say that Islam is bad, Islamist extremists will dutifully react and start burning Christian symbols, knowing full well that the media will report it, thereby proving to all the world that Islam is indeed "bad" - when in actual fact, Islam is a peaceful religion that does not preach violence at all. Who is responsible for this? THE MEDIA. Beca...

Well the good news is out: Microsoft invented Remote Scripting (not a very sexy term, to be sure) and Jesse James Garrett coined AJAX, which has now further been modified to "AB" - see my post here where I make the case that we don't need an acronym at all, based on my interpretation of the new "rules". They have decided to drop the "ATLAS" moniker and replace it with more "product-y" sounding names, which include the ever - popular but now defunct (according to the guru himself) "AJAX" name: 1) The client-side Atlas javascript library is going to be called the Microsoft AJAX Library. This will work with any browser, and also support any backend web server. 2) The server-side Atlas functionality that nicely integrates with ASP.NET will be called the ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions. As part of this change the tag prefix for the Atlas controls will change from <atlas:>to <asp:>(Jeesh! I thought they would change it to <aja...

"We were guessing about Iraq. We are not guessing about Iran. If they get nuclear weapons they will foster terror on a scale that cannot be imagined." -- Benjamin Netanyahu Well, they put out RC1 today and I think I have been getting wiser in my young age with BETAs and stuff -- I've been smart enough to hold off on the various Vista Betas. Not a bad decision after reading some of the horror story blog entries. But you know, "RC1" is by definition so substantially a final release that I decided to down it and install on my second hard drive - the one that currently runs Windows XP x64 - and which I hardly use anyway. So I burned the DVD, booted up into the XP OS, and inserted the DVD and let it come up. Guess what? The Upgrade section is greyed out! I'm like, "Wait a minute! This is a Release Candidate!" Bottom line, this is what people are going to get when they buy this and you can't even upgrade over a valid Windows XP x64 edition? Well the...

One of the biggest challenges to web developers is accomodating the browser. Standards with the DOM and CSS have come a long way, and so has the implementation. (Before you start harping about "Internet Exploder vs. Firefart", do yourself a favor and review the over 200 behavior and other changes they baked in as of IE 7 RC1, which was released today, at the IE7 blog page and see for yourself). So now that you have an RC for IE which basically means no more code changes until the next release, it's time for developers to start zeroing in on the defects and anomalies and workarounds for rendering, positioning and behaviors between different browsers. I for one would appreciate some sort of a site that highlights the differences between say IE, Firefox and Opera, one-by-one according to type (CSS, DOM, script, etc) with workaround examples for each. A community site wiki - style, with some developer participation, would go a long way toward helping the community as a wh...

"Adults are just obsolete children and the hell with them." -- Dr. Seuss I follow ProgrammableWeb in the API space just to try to keep track of what other people are doing, and found an interesting tidbit from Gartner: "According to the just released 2006 Emerging Technologies Hype Cycle mashups are nearing the hype cycle peak. They get a rating of moderate and Gartners analysis is that: Mashup is rated as moderate on the Hype Cycle (definition: provides incremental improvements to established processes that will result in increased revenue or cost savings for an enterprise), but is expected to hit mainstream adoption in less than two years. A mashup is a lightweight tactical integration of multi-sourced applications or content into a single offering. Because mashups leverage data and services from public Web sites and Web applications, theyre lightweight in implementation and built with a minimal amount of code. Their primary business benefit is that they can quickl...

Over at one of my favorite hangouts, eggheadcafe.com, we get lots of forum posts from people just starting out, and many of these posts remind me of when I first started with .NET and ASP.NET back in 2000. There are two major themes that seem to dominate many of these posts. I call them "Developer Paralysis" and "Exceptionless Programmer Syndrome": Developer Paralysis This is when a programmer (even sometimes an experienced programmer) is faced with a request or requirement to create something that they have never done before. The programmer becomes consumed with doubts - doubt about whether they can do what is requested, doubts about how to do it, doubts on whether they'll be able to do it in the timeframe requested, and so on. This process of self-doubt becomes so all-consuming that the developer is literally paralyzed to the point where they are virtually unable to even begin a project. Days can go by with nothing happening. If this ever happens to you, there...

How many times have you run across this, usually by some component vendor? Is there any way for C# to be anything BUT "Pure"? What the fyook is the point of this? Rest my case. More later! Google Code Google Code is google's new twist on Sourceforge.net and it looks promising. At first blush, after only a week, there are already 89 projects just under the "C-Sharp" Section. I checked out one using Tortoise SVN with little trouble, and I just added the Ankh SVN SCC plugin to Visual Studio 2005, as well as installing SVN locally. I"ll post more about my discoveries as I get a chance to spend more time with this. Conspiracy Theories I like to entertain myself a couple of times a day by visiting Digg.com. I've noticed a distinct leftward slant in the politically charged atmosphere there, and it appears to have gotten pretty bad. I'll give you an example: There was a post with an article about the fact that the air quality after the 9/11 attack in New Yo...

I've been developing software by myself for the better part of 20 years now, and in a team environment for at least the last 6 years. Here are some of the lessons I've learned along the way. Not all of these are 100% my own ideas, but I can state that I've "taken ownership" of all of them, having been both a developer and a development department manager: 1) A development team should have a single design authority. The best systems have one member of a team who dominates the design and development and has a clear view of where the system is going. Without this strong focus and lead, many projects throw together a set of conflicting ideas and the system will ultimately stagnate or become extremely difficult to maintain. This person needs to be big on communication and small on ego. 2) Code should be documented, but not overdocumented. Lots of documentation does not equal good design and will not guarantee a good, well designed system. A system can have a good desi...