It’s funny, last night I read this reuters article about Microsoft beginning an initiative to improve their interoperability and thought wow that’s excellent!  I bet Slashdot completely misses the point of the message and rants on about how Bill Gates also mentioned that opensource doesn’t necessarily lead to interoperability.  Sure enough, Bill Gates Claims Linux Has Poor Interoperability.  Sigh.

Gates of course is right – there are plenty of open source products out there that aren’t interoperable in one way or another.   Further, while Linux systems generally adhere to standard network protocols well, they have an abysmal track record of interoperability on the same system.  The best example of this would be the lack of robust drag and drop support.

For about the first time ever I actually looked at the MT activity log for this blog.  It’s interesting to see the massive amount of spam I’m blocking with MT-Blacklist – between 50 and 100 comments or trackbacks blocked every day.  The HTML entity block (which is now modified to block the use of numeric HTML entities for the letters e and o only due to it blocking too many trackbacks before) is by far and away the most effective – hopefully not too many of the things it’s blocking now are actual ham.  Please let me know if you think you’ve been blocked inappropriately.

Apparently in Britain, cartoon frogs are allowed to have genitals – assuming of course they don’t refer to them in a sexual manner.  This is obviously a great triumph for free speech in Britain and I’m sure the mobile phone ringtones the frog advertises would have been devastated if the frog had been void of genitalia.

It is however somewhat concerning that:

Five parents said they were embarrassed by questions their children had asked.

A little while back, Robert Scoble pointed to a job opening as an evangelist at Microsoft.  An evangelist looks like a pretty cushy job to me – flying around the world to conferences and posting on mailing lists and blogs a lot – something to look into becoming when I eventually get sick of coding all day.

Now by the job description I’d say I’m reasonably qualified for such a position and there’s good examples of evangelizing technologies on my blog.  Sadly, most of the technologies I comment positively about are competitors to Microsoft’s offerings and on a number of occasions I may have gone so far as to directly criticize Microsoft.  There appears to be a blog sized hole in my foot…

Brian put forward a Java pop quiz and it happens to be an area I know very well:

Without breaking out a compiler, or BeanShell ;-), what is the output from the following:

System.out.println("**" + foo != null ? foo : "NULL" + "**");

The statement is equivalent to:

System.out.println(foo);

Why?

The left most + operator is the first thing to be evaluated. So the if statement then evaluates whether or not "\*\*" + foo is null which it never is and so the value of foo is always output. Similarly, the "NULL" + "\*\*" may as well have just been "NULL**", in fact the compiler optimizes it to be exactly that as javap shows:

G. Andrew Duthie asks: “Will 2005 be the year of Least Privilege” (via Robert Scoble).

Not a chance.  Why not?  Scoble sums it up pretty well (unintentionally):

For those who don’t know what Least Privilege is, it means turning off a bunch of administrator rights so that no software can install without logging off and logging back in as administrator

People don’t want to have to log off and log back on to get stuff installed!  That’s awful.  People want to use their computer and have it get out of the way.  What should happen is that they are prompted for an administrator login when admin privileges are needed and it should all just work seamlessly once such a login has been provided.  Similarly, if they are logged in as Administrator, they should have to provide their password to install software anyway so that they know it’s happening.

Every piece of comment spam I’ve had come through in the past few weeks has tried to disguise itself by using HTML entities to escape letters so that spam filters don’t trigger.  Fortunately, this makes it exceptionally easy to filter out that spam – just block HTML entities.  So as of now, if you type an HTML entity into a comment the comment will be rejected.  If you really need a HTML entity to convey your point, post an entry to your own blog and track back.

According to Reuters, everyone’s favorite former Judge – Donald Thompson – has fronted up to the district court and plead not guilty to 3 felony counts of indecent exposure after his famed usage of a penis pump in court (and other assorted indecencies).  I’m sure the team from CSI will put his DNA sample to good use, though I’d be surprised if there were a big enough twist to make a good episode out of the story.

Robert Scoble points to an article at Microsoft Monitor complaining that Microsoft is releasing too many betas.  Personally, I love the fact that companies are releasing previews of their software openly and regularly and I want to see more of it.  I know if it actually leads to better software or not, but it lets me evaluate new technology ahead of time and decide if it’s worth pursuing.  Most commonly it’s not worth pursuing straight away but later I run into a project that could benefit from that technology and return to see where it got to.  By that stage the product is normally out in a final release (often a 2.0 or 3.0).  The beta allowed me to see in broad strokes what the software was capable of and get a quick feel for it.

I finally gave in an bought a 40GB iPod this afternoon.  I intend to use it as much as a hard drive as an mp3 player though I’m already addicted to having music follow me everywhere, so it may wind up changing the way I listen to music – we’ll see how that pans out.

Where it will be useful (and has already been) is when the band is learning a new cover song and we need to find a copy of the song to refresh the memories of how it goes and work out the details etc.  Previously I’d have to go home, burn a CD and remember to bring it with me to the next rehearsal whereas now I can just plug the iPod into the PA and hear the song.  That alone will be worth the money over time and it only works if you can store your entire music collection on the player, easily carry it in your pocket (my hands are full carrying instruments and assorted paraphernalia) and most importantly, be able to navigate the songs quickly and easily.  I don’t know of anything other than the iPod that meets those requirements.  The fact that all my music is already stored, sorted and correctly tagged in iTunes (it’s only taken about 4 years to get there) is a major bonus.

A while back I mentioned that spamassassin wasn’t filtering my spam too well anymore and that I suspected it might be because the bayesian filter had been neutered.  Apparently I was right.  Since I upped the score for BAYES_99 the amount of spam reaching my inbox has dramatically reduced.  I’m back down to one or two spam messages getting through per week instead of four or five a day.

Very happy.

Technorati seem to have worked out much better ways for claiming your blog in their listings than Feedster – particularly the new auto-claim mechanism (of course you need to trust them a fair bit to use that).  With Feedster I have to paste this stupid link in a blog entry and annoy anyone subscribed to my feed or any of the planets that aggregate my feed with a pointless entry.  So Feedster, when are we going to get a less annoying method?