Almost Finished at Microsoft & Work Reports

My work term at Microsoft is coming to an end. I've been working on my work report, which will likely be my last post to the blog I have at Microsoft. In the spirit of leaving on a good note, I'm planning on bringing in some beer and scotch for my last day.

Work reports have never been something which I've enjoyed doing even with Simon Law's wonderful work report package. I keep on intending on releasing an updated version of his template, but I have yet to have one of my work reports conform the formatting guidelines, which seem to vary in interpretation from term to term.

I'm looking forward to the break between terms, this term has been too busy for me to get much interesting work done on my own projects. I'm hoping to have something resembling working before I have to jump back into next semester.

Upgrading to Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron)

I recently decided to upgrade to Ubuntu 8.04 (HardyHeron), despite it being in beta, so that I could give the new ghc a spin. During my upgrade I ran across bug 174148 (“Element <standard_system_servicedirs> not allowed inside <busconfig> in configuration file"). The simple work around is to restart dbus ("sudo /etc/init.d/dbus restart") and then continue with the upgrade. Other than that its been a smooth upgrade.

Cogent & TeliaSonera make nice

After breaking off connectivity Cogent & TeliaSonera have resumed peering which is wonderful news for everyone, especially the two ISPs customers. As of right now neither Telia or Cogent have issued press releases.

You can verify that the bits are flowing by taking a peek at telia's or cogents looking glasses and running a traceroute.

Its pi day!

Today is pi day (3/14 , 3.14)! I'm going to be brining in some pie (the edible kind) into work today, and I'd encourage all math nerds to do the same.No doubt my university will be celibrating, but I'm all the way over on the west coast working on Co-Op for MS (where I don't think they provide the pie) so I must provide my own pie.

Some people insist on waiting until 1:59pm to enjoy pie so its 3.14159, but I'm not a true mathy (CS, although I do my best to blend in) so I'm going to have my pie when I get hungry instead.

In an informal survey (sample size of 4) 100% of people asked for strawberry rhubarb, so I'll be bringing that in (along with the cheapest pie I can find).

Happy pi day calibrations!

Update: A coworker pointed me to this trippy pi video

Protecting IM from the NSA, a Canadian's view

Ian Goldberg, leading security researcher, UW professor, previous CSC president and sysadmin, and co-creator of the Off-the-Record Messaging (OTR) protocol discusses why you should use OTR to make sure your instant messages remain private.

read more | digg story

Canadian Commissioner on Designing Software With Privacy in Mind

Dr. Ann Cavoukian, Canada's Information and Privacy Commissioner, recently gave a talk entitled Privacy by Design. The talk starts off by covering the basics of privacy, and privacy law, and then moves onto the important component: how to design software that properly protects users privacy.

read more | digg story

More Subversion Scheme Bindings (this time for mzscheme)

The mzscheme bindings for subversion should now mostly work. As is with any software project, there are probably quite a lot of bugs, if you find any I'd love to hear about them (e-mail holden@pigscanfly.ca ) or if you use the bindings and they do work for you I'd been even more happy to hear about that :).

You can check the latest version out of the scheme-bindings branch from http://svn.collab.net/repos/svn/branches/scheme-bindings/ . To build the mzscheme bindings just run "make swig-mzscm", it even produces a plt package (although theres a little bit of extra cruft in the package). You can get an idea of how to use them by looking at the test file (subversion/bindings/swig/mzscheme/tests/run_tests.scm) , along with looking at the exported symbols (subversion/bindings/swig/mzscheme/README).

Next Generation C++

Awhile back I wrote about a talk given on C++ to the University of Waterloo Computer Science Club. Permission has recently been obtained to post the video files, so you can now watch the talk yourself. Dr. Bjarne Stroustrup, creator of C++, discusses new features that will be present in the next version of C++ (tentatively C++09). He addresses many important questions form the audience, and gives his views on C++ compilers, including GCC and Visual C++.

read more | digg story

Getting REXML to play nicely with the non-english world

Its a large world out there, and not everyone uses the same character set. REXML does its best, converting everything into UTF-8 so you don't have to worry. Unfortunately older versions of REXML (such as version 3.1.2.1 presently in Ubuntu) fail to correctly parse most XML feeds encoding specification. Fortunately, the latest version (3.1.7 as of this writing) has fixed the regular expression to properly match the encoding types. This is great for importing non UTF-8 documents, but it simply reads in UTF-8 documents without first cleaning them. Most of the encoding & decoding in REXML is done using Iconv, so with a small patch against version 3.1.7 (based on Secure UTF-8 Output in rails) we can make REXML strip out invalid UTF-8 characters.

Not only does this help our application, but also for any XML documents we produce it ensures that we actually are following the encoding, making the world a slightly better place.

AideRSS opens Beta to the public

According to a blog post AideRSS (started by a Waterloo graduate) opened its doors to a public beta today. I've been using AideRSS over the past few weeks to filter my RSS feeds (including slashdot & reddit) and I've been quite impressed.

I'm also using there feed widget on this blog ( look on the left hand side ) to allow people to subscribe to various levels of my inane writings :) They have a screencast on how to add the best posts widget to your blog. If you are a blogger user you might find it easier to go to the layout section, add a page element and then chose HTML element and put the code in there.

Its also proved useful for measuring the takeup/interesting of various blog posts.

digg this

Richard Stallman talks on Copyright V. The People

Richard M. Stallman recently gave a talk entitled Copyright vs Community in the Age of Computer Networks to the University of Waterloo Computer Science Club. The talk looks at the origin of copyright, and how it has evolved overtime from something that originally served the benefit of the people to a tool used against them. In keeping with RMS' wishes to use open formats, the talk along with the Q&A session are available in ogg theora only.
Update: the talk is now on slashdot & working its way up digg

Guelph DemoCamp 2

I went to the Guelph DemoCamp last night, and there was a larger turnout than last time. The demos included Zoomii books, Delphi, BlogThot , FreshBooks, WSGI, and castroller.

Zoomii books is essentially an alternative interface to online book stores, which attempts to provided a user experience similar to that of a real book store. BlogThot is a twitter clone with better integration with things like video sharing. FreshBooks is a way of billing people. The FreshBooks demo focused on its report card feature, which compares the performance of your company against that of other companies in its system.Castroller is a system for making it easier to manage your podcasts.

Personally, my two favourite demos were the live coding ones, but thats probably just my style. The Delphi demo was a blast from the past, reminding people that a lot of the "new" features in Ruby on Rails, such as SQL query generation, have been around for a long time. While he wasn't actually trying to get people to use Delphi, he encouraged people to at the very least toy around with it so we know what features to steal. The WSGI demo started of with the standard demo application and then proceeded to integrate various components. WSGI's claim to fame is that it allows you to integrate components from different frameworks, making it easier to re-use existing work.

Bjarne Stroustrup talks on "C++0x: An Introduction"

Bjarne Stroustrup and the UW Computer Science Club
Originally uploaded by Naleag Deco

Bjarne Stroustrup recently gave a talk entitled "C++0x: An Introduction" to the University of Waterloo Computer Science Club. While most of my programming is done in languages like Ruby and Ocaml these days, it was quite interesting to here about the upcoming features in C++.

A lot of the talk was spent explaining the difficulties of adding language features to a language with such wide usage as C++.

One interesting tidbit that caught my attention is the introduction of "auto" which will apparently do very basic type inference. So where you use to have something like vector::iterator foo = bar.begin() you can instead have auto foo = bar.begin() .

For those of us out there parsing C++ code (codesearch engines, IDEs, etc.) our lives may be getting a bit easier soon. Bjarne mentioned he is working on a re-usuable C++ parsing tool :)


I think someone on the C# team said it best when they said "We are very much aware of the past and are working as quickly as possible to get there."

New emacs bindings coming to subversion

According to a post by ESR to the subversion dev mailing list, subversion will be getting updated emacs bindings. The most exciting change he mentions is having the emacs version control interface think in things in terms of changes of groups of files, rather than individual files. Presently its not yet at the beta stage, but for those of us who use emacs for everything its interesting news.

Subversion Scheme Bindings

The initial revision of subversion scheme bindings is now checked into the subversion scheme-bindings branch. Both stalin and mzscheme bindings are built, but the mzscheme bindings aren't ready. The stalin scheme still aren't particularly reliable, but I'd greatly appreciate any comments you have.

You can check the bindings out from http://svn.collab.net/repos/svn/branches/scheme-bindings/ . To build the stalin bindings run "make stalin-bindings" and if you really want you can run "make swig-mzscm-bindings".

Improving usability using datamining

In a talk at the University of Waterloo, Professor Michael Terry discusses the use of data mining, in a customized version of the Gimp, in order to discover and analyze real-world usability data. He touches on encouraging users to participate, privacy concerns, as well as common user categories that the software is currently able to sift out. While the talk focuses on gimp, I think his ideas have great applicability to web applications, since we already have the logs.

read more | digg story | reddit story