Selective Updating

Update: Buggy game DRM puts Windows users at risk

Nobody seems to be talking about this angle, since everyone wants to harp on DRM (which is great, by the way, keep on finding vulnerabilities in DRM software and take this machine down the right way! By showing that they don't care about you that much more...), but this sounds to me like Microsoft and Macrovision discovered this vulnerability while developing Vista and knowingly didn't report it or update existing users. Failure to update a known glitch is the kind of thing someone does when they don't want people to be able to use their old stuff so that they have to switch to the new stuff.

Come on consumers! It's your job to police the product! These things aren't right, you shouldn't have to hand over all your hard earned cash for things that offer little-to-no additional functionality. It's amazing all of the things out there this system applies to; start checking your products out.

I know somebody who experienced a "necessary update" scenario recently that was just ridiculous. A friend with an Apple iBook was about to break down and buy a new battery (which is, of course, overpriced by Apple; check out replacement batteries for the iPod and then see what superior yet cheaper technology 3rd party manufacturers make for iPod replacement batteries...) when she found out that her laptop wouldn't function unless it was plugged in, not because her battery was dead, but because there was a software update necessary to fix it. I'm sorry... did someone say a laptop shipped with a bug in the software that prevents you from using it without being plugged in?!?!?! That's not a laptop! It's a ball and chain.

Here's another one: My Phone, the ever-awesome HTC Apache (dubbed the PPC 6700 or XV 6700 in the US). Awesome phone, pretty good setup; downside: Sprint (and other manufacturers) stopped releasing updates beyond AKU 2.2. AKU 3.5 has been out for quite some time now! That's basically the equivalent of someone giving you a computer with Windows XP Service Pack 1 on it and telling you that you're not allowed to install Service Pack 2. WTF?! You sold me this device and now you're not willing to support it?! And it's great that the independent developer community has managed to make some excellent ROM Kitchens for using both Windows Mobile 5 AKU 3.5 as well as Windows Mobile 6 on the Apache (now I have no need to spend $600 on the HTC Mogul/PPC 6800, since it doesn't really offer anything but WM6 and a pretty antennaless case). It gets worse than that too. The radio chipset inside this phone is perfectly capable of retrieving and reporting GPS data with or without assistance (a-GPS, GPSOne; these are methods used for 911 calls and Sprint Roadside assistance and such. They need data from the cell phone company.) It's just a crying shame you can't actually access the already present GPS device. Sprint/Verizon/etc. have it locked down so that the only way to get GPS data from this phone is through special phone calls (such as 911). So I'm expected to wait until Sprint gets their act together with their own proprietary navigation service or go out and buy a really expensive GPS device when I've already purchased an expensive GPS unit: MY PHONE.

Anyway, that's the end of my rant, but seriously people: take more pride in yourselves and more responsibility for ensuring people do the right thing. No matter how many times we try to get the government to change things for us it's not gonna matter unless we work with each-other! (Another rant on this topic some other time :p).

Anyway, I'd like to talk about some cool nerdy stuff but I seem to have exhausted all of my time on this. See, now if you all could change the world for the better I might not have to waste my time on things like this and we might be able to work on *progress* ;p

-TheXenocide

John "Delegate" Doe

It seems I've just experienced a unique little caveat of anonymous delegates. One of my favorite things about an anonymous method in .NET is that it can carry over variable values from the defining code into the definition of the method. Essentially this (which is just sample code and not a good reference for proper logging practice ;D):

private void RegisterClickLogger(string logTitle)
{
Log log = new Log(logTitle);
this.Click += delegate(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
log.Write("Clicked!");
};
}

will write "Clicked!" to the log object created as a local variable in the RegisterClickLogger method even though RegisterClickLogger has stopped executing. The purpose of this post isn't really to introduce this concept though, there are many views on proper usage and such for anonymous methods out there, but rather to point out a unique scenario that caused me to think a bit about it.

As some of you may have discovered through other annoying experiences (like myself :p), Dictionary stores it's values in a structure called KeyValuePair. The key here is that it's a "structure" (a Value Type), not a class (Reference Type). A common issue with this is that it complicates serialization (when using a Reference Type for one of the type parameters). Today, however, the following code through me for a bit of a loop:

foreach (KeyValuePair<string, Type> pair in s_tests)
{
b = new Button();
b.Text = pair.Key;
b.Click += delegate(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
Form f = (Form)Activator.CreateInstance(pair.Value);
f.ShowDialog(this);
f.Dispose();
f = null;
};
b.AutoSize = true;
flow.Controls.Add(b);
}

It seemed all was fine when I clicked the last button, but later when I needed to click one of the earlier buttons I noticed that the same Form was appearing for every button. Looking things over a bit I decided to try changing the code to this:

foreach (KeyValuePair<string, Type> pair in s_tests)
{
b = new Button();
b.Text = pair.Key;
Type t = pair.Value;
b.Click += delegate(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
Form f = (Form)Activator.CreateInstance(t);
f.ShowDialog(this);
f.Dispose();
f = null;
};
b.AutoSize = true;
flow.Controls.Add(b);
}

It's a very simple change, hardly noticeable really, but sure enough it did the job and my problem was solved. So what happened? Well I'd have to look into things a bit more to give a truly accurate, in depth answer, but from my initial impression it seems that the value of "pair" (that was referenced by all of the anonymous delegates created) was updated (as expected) through each iteration in the loop. When a delegate would finally get called the loop had finished iterating and pair was the value of the last item in the Dictionary. I should probably look into it a little further to identify whether this treatment is related to the fact that pair was a Value Type or if the declaration of the variable "t" inside the scope of the loop is the only reason it was solved (t being a Reference Type). I'm just curious because I don't recall all of the nuances of anonymous methods in .NET, though I'd venture a guess that the second possibility is more likely (though I would, so much like to have another reason to hate KeyValuePair being a Value Type).

Alas, there is never enough time and I must run, but I'll be back soon to discuss some developments in my research (as promised),

-TheXenocide

Minor Accomplishments in an Otherwise Hectic Life

You gotta love those swings and turns life throws at ya, eh? I won't bore you with torrents of dry complaints or excuses; suffice it to say life is plenty good enough to ignore a few bumps in the road.

On a slightly more positive note, I've found time to complete a small project! Nothing terribly exciting or related to my larger scale goals (more on those later); something useful and fun none-the-less. If you're not an iGoogle user you're simply not as cool as me :p. Kidding, but really, I love Google; use it all the time (I mean like alot!), and I'm a big fan of the veritable plethora of goodies and usage features tucked away in the depths of iGoogle. Somewhat recently I stumbled upon a couple of gadgets I always wanted but never got around to writing myself.

"Your Page Here" was something I had always wished for; nothing like bringing a few more commonly used things to your homepage--load on demand web page in it's own tab sounded great!

Another thing I wanted, since I'm a screen real-estate whore (even with multiple monitors or HDTVs I'm stingy as all hell :p), was something that could hide the header and footer of the page. This was the first gadget I considered making myself (if you want to be my pimp it's gonna cost you a full 5 flat-panel setup and 4 graphics cards ;D). Luckily, i thought one day, some other people wrote them for me! I found two decent ones in the Directory: "No Google Header" and "Homepage Header Toggler" both of which were rather sufficient, I'd say different people would pick either for their own reasons.

Today, however, I ran into a problem. I actually wanted to use these things today, and to my surprise they couldn't be used together. On top of that, the "Your Page Here" gadget was configurable, but a little rough around the edges (no offense, I still thank you for the noble effort of helping everyone out). Intrigued, and with a need to put my mind on something I could accomplish in a short while I got to work on my very own Google gadget. I was rather impressed with how simple the technology was. With some reference code, firebug and docs at my disposal I created what I call "iCustomize." Hopefully I'll think of other things here and there to add to it, but for now I've kept it simple to obtain functionality as quickly as possible. The link will take you to a screenshot and link to add it to your page, below is a small image that shows the settings.


An iCustomize link is added to the tab bar which allows you to toggle the hide setting. The "Custom Tab Page" is currently only visible when the header/footer are hidden. This allows you to include gadgets on your tab which will be visible when the header/footer are visible. If the custom tab page option is disabled gadgets will always be visible. I'm happy with it for now, but I'd love to hear some comments... this blog has been barren for a little while now :).

Anyway, I'm pretty tired so I'm off, but I'll be posting sometime soon with developments from my bigger projects; I've not been slumbering ;)--See you soon,

-TheXenocide

Chaos is not a Theory it's a Way of Life

Well it has been awhile hasn't it. I've not disappeared, life has just been a bit hectic lately. I've sort of been screwed over by a good friend/ex-roommate in ways that complicated my finances and my household responsibilities but I think I've finally got all that straightened out and beyond that my project at work deploys today! Yay!!! :p

Other than that I've been thinking bunches about my research and how I plan to accomplish certain core goals, though down the line my thoughts tapered to other fun ideas as well, some of which, I have found, are already on their way to being what I thought of as very cool useful concepts. Make some beautiful code merged love out of them and I think you'd be on to something, lol. I won't detail my hopes and dreams too much more as I've already divulged quite a bit of hopes while not delivering much on any of them right now, but here are the really neat, already existing, partial implementations of my dreams; I suggest any C# developer who's ever done any JavaScript, Ajax, ASP.NET or Windows Forms check these out, they are pretty cool:

• Script# - an absolutely awesome freeware concept and implementation, a little incomplete as far as I'm concerned (though I'm always pretty rough on that stuff, constantly looking for low level features). This is an incredibly useful C# compiler that compiles to JavaScript code instead of IL; complete with object oriented definition, proxy object creation for Ajax support and a robust framework developed around it for ease of use and RAD.
• Visual WebGui - WOW! I didn't believe my eyes, I so wanted to do something like this (still do want to do a lower level implementation :p) but this is a great package. In a nutshell this is Windows Forms development for web applications. If you're still reading this instead of that link I dunno if you caught how important that was ;) I'm talking visual design using the same interface driven Windows Forms designers you're used to only it allows client-side use of the application (windows, buttons, textboxes, the whole shebang) while the logic runs in the safety of the server.

Beyond that, I thought it necessary to give a shoutout to a project I've been using in some of my prototypes for my research project. Props to the Managed DriectShow project by Kristoffer Vinther. I've tried other managed wrappers and this one is definitely the best design for a managed library. It's not just a wrapper it's an object oriented implementation that follows .NET patterns and practices and provides a scalable and usable media interface for playback, streaming, buffering and recording of media files, streams and capture devices. I'd like a little more documentation for it but it's in the early stages and it runs very well.

I have so many things I want to say about so much that I've been reading and thinking, but if I unload now it will be a disorganized mess so again I creep into the shadows to sort the random data that swarms me, hopefully to return with understanding to use and share :)

beginning: work(); try { if (sleepAllowed) sleep(6); else throw new SanityCheckException(); } catch { if (sane) goto beginning; } finally { die(); }

Life is CRAZY! :P

Apparently it's been a long time since I've posted, lol... I didn't even notice. I have been running around like a madman lately trying to finish up a project for a client that likes to complicate things in order to try to make it to a graduation ceremony for someone very close to me. It's been nuts, and I'm glad things might finally start winding down a little (I could use some real R&R, even my "vacation" for this graduation started with me leaving just in time to hit rush-hour traffic in NYC in order to update a server at work). Things aren't done yet, I'm sure I'll be partially debilitated by my wisdom teeth extraction scheduled for Thursday. That'll be fun, lol; my face hurts pretty darn bad right now though, so I don't know what else it could really be like, but I'll tell you this much: I can't wait :)

I don't have a huge bit of time to talk about what little progress has been happening with my research and the projects around it, but I will put props out for the true Project Link stumbling on my blog in search of their long lost friend Link. Here's your update: The 2D Game framework is still conceptual at this point (making sure we don't have to try to redesign again and trying to figure out a truly reusable and scalable engine) but Xem has been doing some awesome work with his 2D client nFurc, all of the knowledge and super speedy rendering of which will be ruthlessly and brutally raped of it's originality to be thrown into one hardcore 2D game engine. I haven't gone without noticing the comments either guys, we'll be in touch; thanks for the love and support.

On to something really really sad:

The graduate I sought this weekend has had some very unfortunate circumstances surrounding their life. They, admittedly, did something reasonably stupid and got arrested for it. The sad part is as follows: the student had received acceptance and scholarships from an Ivy League school, valedictorian status and plenty of other things for their services of being a truly wonderful example of a great human being. The best I've ever met for that matter (which is saying something). Well said student lives in an everybody-knows-everybody town and it just so happens that they happened to oblige a friend with something atypical only to find out that "friend" was actually setting him up because that "friend" was caught doing something really stupid and didn't want to go down so he thought he'd implicate someone else instead. Now, as a result, this valedictorian has had all college acceptances (Ivy League), scholarships, awards, and the right to speak during graduation (or be mentioned for anything other than a diploma) stripped from them for a one time mistake for reasonably small potatoes compared to many of the problems in the area. The police, for whatever reason, thought it would be wise to go after a well established high-school student with public service credentials like you wouldn't believe instead of, say, the heroin dealer that was reported to them (whom they told who narced on him) or the crack dealers, or the (excessively) numerous people drinking and driving. Now their only mission seems to be to catch the graduate slipping up again so they can really ruin lives... it makes me hurt inside to see such awful treatment of such a great person for a single mistake. Worse yet, simply mentioning this to the parents would have been plenty sufficient for repercussion... trust me. Hell I've messed up plenty of times, but I've always had second chances; why do I deserve one, or why do you deserve one when somebody who truly stands for freedom and kindness to one-another, somebody who builds houses for Katrina victims and unites with like minded action-makers that peacefully express their concerns and their reasons. A true American (and I don't consider many people to be one) is being robbed of their hard work and I would easily lay mine on the line for theirs, no matter how hard I've worked I don't deserve half of what this person should receive in praise. Why?! Why rob the world of a good person? Worst case scenario this could mean prison, and prison doesn't make a good person any better... I'm beginning to lose faith; it hurts a lot.

Now that I've got that off my chest I need to get back to work, but stay tuned :p hopefully I should have at least a little spare time coming up.

-TheXenocide

Lost to the World

Sorry Everybody :) I've been running a muck in "reality" and have been so overwhelmingly busy with work that I haven't really posted much.

Unfortunately, I'm dealing with an infamous deadlock exception and beyond all that we've had a bit of a perplexing time trying to figure out why something is happening in our code. We have a problem with ASP.NET validation summaries accurately displaying error messages but then disappearing after another postback/validation attempt. The page is still not valid, but the messages do not display.

Other than that, I haven't had much time to work on much in my personal time, but I have made some changes here and there to the ExtenDev core and some UML diagrams we've got around for projects associated with ExtenDev. I'll try to make a post sometime soon about the direction we're going, but for now it's crunch time at work.

-TheXenocide

SharpDevelop Community Site - Pure .NET SharpDevelop

SharpDevelop Community Site - Pure .NET SharpDevelop

Just posting a link to a SharpDevelop thread I've been interested in, and my comments.

-TheXenocide

Wish List and "My Research Project" Unveiled

WARNING: This post is extra extra long (even for me), the top portion consists of recent wishes, and the bottom is a very detailed account of what I've been most interested in the past few years.

As of late I've been encountering more and more tools I wish I had and less and less time to make them myself :p.

As some people may have noticed, I've been interested in GForge a bit lately, and I thought it was kinda cool that they have a SOAP web services API, and there's obvious usefulness when you see that they have a Visual Studio plugin, but I've been thinking:

These guys are an open source group with an extensible project management, tracking and collaboration system that is familiar to many developers (based on SourceForge) and pretty easy to use. It includes things like Bug Tracking, CVS/SVN support, Status tracking, Wiki, Mail lists. All of these features are really neat and usable, but I think that open source developers should be supporting the project more because there's a lot of potential, but (as SourceForge found when it stopped supporting it's open source license model) not so many people are using it's developer oriented nature to their advantage. Here are some things I would really like to see for GForge's sake:

• SharpDevelop, MonoDevelop, NetBeans IDE, and Eclipse integration.
• Can integrate SVN systems already present with bugtracker and project status id's/links.
• Support for associating projects with their forge space to allow internal IDE support for searching the project wiki, checking statuses, sending messages to project members, bug reporting.
• All of these platforms can benefit greatly from a true collaboration suite; Visual Studio 2005 Team System is great for companies that can afford to do that, but the open source and free software developers need access to these powerful tools as well.
  
• Even easier installation, currently the apt packages are pretty good and the dependency checking and such is ok, but you still have to have a lot of knowledge about how you're trying to use the system even before you've played with it. I went through several install attempts and even had some minor problems with the VM images.
• It would be pretty cool to see some sort of hybrid of Joomla/Mambo and GForge to provide standard CMS options for project websites. This would be a really nice quick-start solution for any project and if it were coupled with some nice blogging software with tag feed support on a per-user basis it could even come pre-configured to aggregate all blog entries from all users working on the project based on a unique tag for that project I think that would be just about everything a development team needs :).
  

Other than GForge, I'm sure people are aware of my interest in the Mono project. Mono is developed and maintained by a bunch of great and bright people (who's blogs I strongly recommend reading :p) and they've been making great progress. Why mention them in my wish list? Because as great as everything is going, I'd love to see even more support. The project really has the potential to put out a great cross-platform implementation of the .NET Framework but their project is not realizing it's full potential because the people working on it already have their hands full. Plenty of people are out there are playing with mono, which is great, but lets see some mobile developers get their hands a little dirtier and start making more packages for mobile platforms. What about running Mono on Windows CE or more supported packages for ARM/MIPS/SHx flavors of linux? Why use .NET CF if your embedded device has more memory and more storage space when you can benefit from the full blown features of Mono? Not to say these things aren't being looked at, and not to say the people looking at them aren't capable of doing them, but why not give some of these guys a break so they can get even more of their official projects done (Goooo WinForms! :p).

Enough with the wishes, how about the results of my actions?!

I've yet to disclose a lot of details about my personal research project. This is mostly because many of the people who read this already know what they want to and because it's somewhat complicated to explain and I haven't had the time. Well fear not those who really want to know :p, here is the information you thirst for (I presume I'm speaking to myself here, lol):

The Project: I aim to design a multi-language pervasive distributed extensibility platform for generic extensibility using dynamic methods of communication and a strong service oriented architecture.

The Research: It is my opinion that mankind has been repeating their actions in a cycle where we strive to solve inconveniences. After we solve so many of them we realize that it's too complicated now and our latest inconvenience is the number of inconvenience fixes we apply, so we then work to integrate those pieces with one another so we can use less concrete items or actions to scratch those itches. After that we find new inconveniences and start over. I would like to see if it is feasible (and if so if it is reasonable) to create a standardized system that will provide applications with standard lines of communication and service registration, recognition and consumption that can be used either standalone or as a transparent distributed system. Ideally using this system should allow us to integrate already existing technologies with new technologies without having to change either so that we can stop reinventing the wheel (which we do in way more than one way).

The Reason: As technology has been evolving the rate at which new technologies comes out is speeding up tremendously. The ultimate goal with this is to make it so that any technology can, without any prior knowledge, access the data and features of any other technology (within the system) as though the features provided were natively available in the first place. All that should need to be done to add new devices and concepts is to define new known service types, implement new service consumers on various platforms and then make the new technology compatible by exposing it's resources via a service provider. This sounds like a lot, but really it's basically what we already do. Operating systems use drivers all the time, but if this is done right we can use all of these exposed features in a distributed system.

The Method: Plenty of madness, followed by using the extensibility platform (the research project) to design and implement a personal and household device integration and automation system. The goal is to make it so that you can change the temperature of the house or turn of your kids TV while you're driving in the car touching your dash mounted screen that's communicating using the network access exposed by the bluetooth connection your car has established with your phone while getting roadside directions from the GPS location server in your phone and playing music from your wife's laptop using WiFi in the kitchen. I know this seems like a lot, but when it's broken down into small pieces it's very easy to see how everything fits together.

The Pieces: Since there are really two projects here, the pieces will be categorized as either being part of the platform or the implementation.

Platform:

• Extensibility Layer
• Allows dynamic loading of extensions in a type-safe manner with an Extension Manager that can be configured with pluggable loaders, management, and security zones to allow isolation of trusted and untrusted or critical and non-critical extensibility. This is the core of the platform.
  
• Communication Layer
• Facilitates the transport of messages (commands, requests, updates, etc) using a pluggable architecture to allow communication through dynamically defined channels in an abstract manner to allow new communication channels to be added at any time and to allow all pieces of the system to communicate using these channels without any knowledge of how they work. The communication layer should be the only section of the application that is aware of any process instances and application boundaries and it should be responsible for the detection and usage of the most optimal means of communication between providers and consumers.
  
• Distribution Layer
• Automatically provides communication for Extension Manager/Extension Manager and Extension Manager/Extension Loader across application domain boundaries using the communication layer. This should be transparent; service registration, consumption and communication should occur using a static reference to the platform host which will either be a real platform host (Extension Manager) or a virtual host (a secured proxy loaded in a sandboxed application domain).
• Configuration Layer
• Establishes a secure standard model for configuration. This should support pluggable persistence mediums, atomic synchronization through the communication layer, and configurable zones that allow various portions of the application and it's extensions to be isolated and persisted where most applicable without requiring the extensions to be aware of the location of their configuration. The configuration layer is likely to maintain a hierarchical form in which application zones are responsible for managing configuration of their children including nested application zones. Utilization of existing configuration persistence mediums is encouraged.
  
• It will be very important for there to be a rich, easy to use UI for configuration of the system as a whole, since it may actually be somewhat complicated to have various security zones communicating with one another on different machines. Also, pretty much every portion of the platform can be dynamically modified so any part of the platform must be completely configurable.
• Secure Design
• While this isn't actually an individual piece so much as a common theme it is important that all pieces of the system can be configured to be as secure or open as desired and continue all of their allowed functionality under those situations.
  

Each piece of the Platform will have to be implemented for each programming platform to be supported (ie: Java, .NET/Mono/.NET CF) but integration of some platforms may benefit more from initiatives to make languages compatible with common language structures similar to JRuby, Phalanger, IKVM, etc. SOAP, JSON and other service oriented platforms are the obvious choices for integrating the various language platforms, but I thought it would also be nice to facilitate native lines within virtual compatibility hosts (ie: host an IKVM in a .NET domain with a virtual host and then use IKVM-.NET stubs in conjunction with the native Java extensibility platform to facilitate faster translation to native communication methods using IKVM to proxy). One very important thing to make note of is that any extension can utilize the same underlying extensibility and communication frameworks to be just as extensible and distributed as the main application.

Implementation:

• Currently Planned Host Applications:
• Shell/Desktop Management Environment
• pluggable environment defining many:
• Environment providers (Windows, Linux, Mac, Windows CE, etc)
• Input providers (keyboard, joystick, remote, voice command, etc)
• Support for pluggable "Desktop Managers" to facilitate different styles of user front-end usage. A media desktop might simply expose available media, show visualizations and load semi-transparent widgets whereas somebody running the system on a touchscreen on their fridge may want something a little more home automation oriented. Either way, the fridge should technically be able to stream music while the media center turns your lights off, but the end user experience is more consistent with what they expect.
• Service Daemon
• A passive background application designed for desktop computers and servers that will load and run services in the background and allow individual platform compatible applications to serve and consume without capturing the entire environment.
• HTTP Access Platform
• Facilitates end-user service consumption through a web browser using pluggable widget/webpart style service consumers.
  
• Media Distribution Services/Consumers
• Generic service providers for exposing and streaming shared media resources (files, TV Capture output, proxied multi-cast streams, etc.).
• Generic service consumers for accessing and playing back media
• Common Device Services/Consumers
• Service providers and consumers for such things as GPS/other bluetooth devices, Printers, Scanners, IR Ports, Cameras, Microphones, etc.
  
• Automation Services/Consumers
• Provides support for registering, recognizing and exposing non-computer devices that can be controlled or polled remotely (ie X-10 household automation, RF controllable vacuums/robots).

The implementation is very incomplete in it's definition because much of the engineering thus far has been focused on the platform, but the implementation definitely needs to be solid because it is what will be used as a reference to see the capabilities of the platform. Currently I've got some good work started on the extensibility and communication layers and I've been playing with the configuration layer a bit lately too, though only on the high-level side, not so much on dynamic persistence and whatnot yet. Also, I've got a precursor to the Environment/Desktop Management Application that demonstrates a windows environment provider and a desktop provider configuration dialog with multi-head support (using display devices exposed by the environment provider) as well as simple input provider demonstration. Next is loading desktop providers and associating them with individual/multiple contiguous displays.

Anyway, this post is even longer than my average of really really long, and I'm just about out of time, but I thought I'd also draw attention to the new location of this blog :) - I'll try to let everyone know what my intentions are with it soon enough :p.

-TheXenocide

Tracking Back and Moving Forward

bunnie’s blog » Blog Archive » Scritch scritch–huh?
First, thought I'd start the day off with a trackback to some unfortunate us politics that I wish would be different. Just follow the link, read the resources and formulate your own opinion, it's pretty obvious what it says.

Also, I've just recently seen "An Inconvenient Truth" the Al Gore global warming educational film. I feel that the film is a well put together, documented and scientifically backed cry for unity the likes of which is complicated by the greedy nature of our political system and it's "campaign contributions" (That's my own personal opinion, not directly expressed in the movie). This film clearly and truthfully (look up the data) indicates the insanely critical point we're at as a species and as members (the primary unbalancing ones at that) of a planetary ecosystem. I strongly suggest you watch it because I can't do as good a job as they do at stressing how important this is. Turns out scientists have had to sue to have their names removed from the report because their claims were censored and did not want to be considered supporters of the modified message. Also, Al Gore has owned share in the carbon offsetting business for quite some time. Sorry for the hasty statements.

beyond all that, in the Software Engineering and Development side of my brain I have been planning and planning more of the development of my research project and along the way I have stumbled upon several really really neat ideas for projects I'm sure other people will be interested in too. I only wish I had the time to work on them as well, but it seems I barely have enough time to work on my own commitments. This can also be assumed as a plea for somebody... anybody, to be my hero and organize these projects into being; I'm totally game for participating in the engineering process and things of that nature but I do not have enough time to be considered a significant help on actual implementation/coding. These projects, in the long run, can also be easily adapted into my infrastructure to make a distributed pervasive system who's usefulness will extend well into the era of grid and mesh computing (provided, of course, it is maintained and the same coding concepts apply :p). Enough beckoning, to the projects!

Hah! Tricked yah (not really, but there's a little bit of background information first :p)

If you haven't checked out IKVM.Net you should. It's a Java Virtual Machine that can dynamically interpret (JIT compile) and statically compile Java bytecode to .NET CIL (supporting both Mono and Microsoft's .NET Framework). I see this project as a tremendously important idea because it would bridge the gap of the oh so similar next generation programming languages and environments currently separated by a great chasm only vaguely crossable using J#. I haven't taken the opportunity to check into support for JRuby, Groovy, JACL or Jython but I do know that it is currently aimed at support for Java 1.4. Honestly I feel this project would get some tremendous headway if it were taken seriously and contributed to by the Java/Sun and Microsoft communities. There are other projects like Phalanger that do similar managed interoperability support and I love it, but Java is the one we really need guys. There's no reason for us to constantly be reinventing the wheel on different languages and platforms when we can just bridge them together in an efficient manner and let everyone use the language that will benefit them most without making it so nobody outside their little inner circle can use it. Anyway, this rant went a little long :p, my ideas:

I feel that IKVM could use help in the following areas:
-Migration to a J2SE 5 model
-Support for bridging the existing Java/Sun written runtime instead of the GNU Classpath (this is more of a political venture) since IKVM supports JNI this should work relatively well; in retrospect another option is to bridge the awt packages and native control libraries to .NET GDI+ (System.Drawing/System.Drawing.Drawing2D) and System.Windows.Forms base classes (System.Windows.Forms.Control). Note: it seems like this is further along then i remember, which is great, but it's still incomplete.
-Support for App.config settings to support local classpath definition for applications that don't use IKVM directly.
-Attributes to apply to .NET code (ie [IKVMPackage("something.whatever")]Something.Whatever) that would allow IKVM to better translate .NET code to Java calls and to allow things like making Java stubs of classes written in .NET that don't use a cli.* package so as to be able to replace existing Java packages with native .NET ones easily. Perhaps this should include other things like the ability to rename classes and interfaces (to support different naming standards, ie: [IKVMName("SomeInterface")]public interface ISomeInterface.
--I believe that the generated property accessors should also be more like standard Java bean definitions (void setProperty(type value); type getProperty()) instead of the standard CIL set_Property and get_Property.
--MulticastDelegates (events) should function more like Java events;

Thus C# event System.AppDomain.ProcessExit is the static Java function cli.System.AppDomain.add_ProcessExit().

This should translate to
cli.System.AppDomain.addProcessExitHandler(
new ProcessExitHandler() {
void ProcessExit(Object sender, EventArgs e) { /*blah*/ }
});
or a derivative that doesn't use an anonymous inner class.

I think this would be great especially since, with full swing support and JDK 1.5 support alongside better .NET support we could fully write .NET applications using things like NetBeans IDE and even potentially add debug support, hell maybe even J2EE. The reason I consider IKVM one of the best solutions to this is that a complete implementation for interoperability requires direct communicatioon/translation between virtual machines, not just service oriented architecture (as great and important as it is). After running some simple computational tests you find that running Java code that has been statically compiled to CIL runs tremendously faster in the Microsoft.NET and Mono CLRs than it does in Sun's own JVM. Unfortunately the complications of translating from one object base to another wind up slowing some things down a little bit (Like IComparable to Comparable conversion) but still IKVM runs much faster than I could ever imagine .NET running in the JVM. This would allow Java developers to leverage and take advantage of .NET benefits without losing the cross-platform (Mono) and language specific features they love.

Other than IKVM, another great project/standard to look at is JSON which is gaining popularity. There is currently a project to support JSON-RPC for .NET called Jayrock that is pretty full featured, but I had a great idea that would be a truly impressive and usefull .NET implementation of JSON-RPC. A JSON Serialization Formatter and JSON-RPC based remoting channel would be a much more applicable approach that would make JSON totally usable with .NET applications without having to modify any code (assuming they use App.config based remoting configuration).

If anybody were to create these projects I would certainly be able to leverage the technologies in my research which I aim to be able to run services, consumers, and even desktop environments on everything from ARM mobile processors to x64 breeds simply by using a very simple base extensibility framework that is currently .NET specific but I would love to bridge support to Java with. I've even considered using db4o databases with both (if they're still language compatible) the Java and .NET libraries as a means of providing a standard consistent persistence model that requires arbitrary conversion for the storage of objects. I haven't done a full architecture review on this though, so I'm not sure what part IKVM will play in relation to db4o (ie, running Java db4o with IKVM for Java apps and running .NET db4o with native .NET or using .NET db4o for both with IKVM stubs for Java and saving Java db4o for native JVM implementations).

I'm also desperately interested in information on how well Mono runs when compiled against Linux 2.4 and 2.6 for ARM/MIPS/SH processors, including how well Mono's WinForms run on it and if there are any Mono based "Compact Framework" builds. If there aren't any Compact Framework builds it's not really that big of a problem, but a windowing toolkit for mobile devices would be much appreciated :p.

Anyway, those are my ideas/requests/plans 8) people should learn to reply sometimes, lol.

-TheXenocide

2 Course Meal for Thought

bunnie’s blog » Blog Archive » A Physics Puzzler

That there is a cool and fun exercise of thought I stumbled upon after following a link from a link from a link or whatever :p. I was curious what other people might think about this problem, and furthermore I am truly impressed with electromagnetic energy and how much we still don't have a common understanding of it; I would love to be better informed on the matter.

Anyway, this was just a quickie :)

-TheXenocide

24 Hour Idea Soup

The following is a brief recipe of disaster known as the information swirling about in this thin-walled cranium of mine. Today it'll be divided into sections since my interests and ideas are a little all over the place :p.

Voting Concerns

OMG! I have recently been made aware of the voting travesty that has been taking place in our country. I'll let you do your own research because I'm not a fan of pushing "Conspiracy Theory" agendas, but the voting process in our country is diluted by an insecure, closed door system where commercial funding and part representation may play a huge factor in the reliability of voting machines or counts in precincts. One site that you might look at for some background information is BlackBoxVoting.com though i strongly urge you to look at more points of view (please, please, please! don't ever sit on one resource and assume it to be true) there is a plethora of information out there and unfortunately, it is the responsibility of each of us to review this information in our own process and come to our own conclusions.

I do not tread lightly on the subject of voting, I've been a big fan and supporter of Democracy for some time now and to find that our system just plain isn't good enough truly frightens me. If our voting process doesn't represent who we are then what is it that truly makes us American? Over-stimulated economy? Corporately backed law-makers? Ego-centric America knows-best attitudes in world affairs that allow us to inject ourselves into any global politics without any true rhyme or reason? None of these things are American; if anything they go against the general premise of America, which was to keep everything fair and provide open opportunity to all.

Now complaining of course, will do nothing to solve the problem. We are to formulate ideas of solutions and act accordingly as good American citizens. It is this process that frequently gets overlooked as very rarely does anybody feel like they alone will make a difference. Well I'm here to share my idea for a solution with you and I would be very interested in your ideas for solutions as well. This is what our country is supposed to be about.

Personally, I propose that we establish (bare with me) an Open Source project designed, directed, written, managed, tested, reviewed and accepted by the American people. We have the technology to provide significantly more secure systems. I know it seems odd to propose openly publishing something that could be so severely exploited, but I feel that public review and analysis is the only way for us to establish the fact that we, the American people, are satisfied with our voting system. If we're not satisfied with our voting process we should be able to do something about it. I submit that we are perfectly capable of developing the necessary software, hardware, and processes all in an openly reviewable process that would consist of thorough secure design with full logging, secure data transfer, tamper/intrusion detection. I propose that we require more than one person to use a secure and uniquely identifiable data transfer medium in which all of the data distributed across multiple storage mediums cared for by separate people to transfer data from each polling machine to each tabulation machine. Furthermore, I submit that, since the entire design would be open to public review, the fabrication, installation, and maintenance of all voting related materials should be viewable on video by the American people all the time. If we can keep constant surveillance of the devices and know matter-of-factly that there is no way somebody has tampered with our votes then we can be reassured that we have the power to prevent a travesty like this from ever happening again. If anybody is supportive of this proposal please let me know so that we might begin to formulate a plan of action (As interested as I am in it, I'm pretty awful at this Government stuff, too much confusion legal terminology and enigmatic processes wind up leaving me a little lost on the official paperwork side).

Too Much to Do, Never Enough Time

As of late I've had such a diverse interest in topics and I've wanted to know more and more about these topics. My general interests have always been diverse, but typically in diversity you find a lack of specialization (the "Jack of All Trades" syndrome) and so I invest the majority of my time in Computer Science because I thoroughly enjoy engineering new systems and have always had a knack for it. Well I've been more and more interested about what happens when I'm sleeping (I wake up with a lot of answers, not knowing how I postulated them) and my subconscious processes. Along my travels studying said interest I've also stumbled upon several resources about "Lucid Dreaming" and now I'm starting to think... could this be a solution to my lack of thinking time? Might I begin to utilize this construct of my mind while my body rests to continue where I left off? I'm definitely interested in what people have to say on the topic, especially if they have had any experiences being lucid, though I consider myself too inexperienced to share more than the wikipedia entryI've found for lack of being able to verify the validity of information. At least with wikipedia they provide the necessary resources for you to verify the information yourselves.

AJAX with Java Made Easy

On the development note I noticed a neat NetBeans module DWR NetBeans plugin Seems to demonstrate a pretty easy to use AJAX model with Java; good to see active competition here. I'm wondering, has anybody done a compare and contrast against the Java and .NET AJAX implementations? Perhaps I'll find some time to look into it later.

I'm running low on time (I invested a little extra time in the voting segment because I feel it is absolutely essential we iron this out) so I'll have to cut things a little short, but there's enough here to mull over :).

Thanks and TTFN,

-TheXenocide

Tesla and Other Derivitive and Integral Interests

Just a bunch of reading I've been doing:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson
http://www.magnetricity.com/Tesla/Tesla_Biography.php
http://prometheus.al.ru/english/phisik/onichelson/onichelson.htm
http://home.earthlink.net/~drestinblack/generator.htm
http://freeenergynews.com/Directory/Electromagnetic/ / http://freeenergynews.com/
http://lhcathome.cern.ch/
http://www.casavaria.com/sentido/science/2006/06-0802-new-universe.htm

All of which was inspired by my recently higher than average research and general interest of Nikola Tesla, which not only includes just about all of the Wikipedia information I could possibly click through (see one of the RSS Comics listed on the right, possibly in the read more section by now, ;p) but also a great number of discovery channel/history channel type shows and additional researched reading as well. I'm convinced that Tesla's dreams should all be possible and I am happy to see that he had the same "serve all" mentality that modern open source projects have. I think everybody would do good in paying respects to the man that invented modern society. If you don't know of Tesla as the man who invented today then I recommend you do some reading :).

With all of that said, should anybody be interested in the same things or happen to take the time to read (and click on other topics) the information above, perhaps you'll be better prepared when I try to figure out how to put some more philosophical and theoretical ideas of mine to paper, which should be interesting.

The beautiful nature of existence and consciousness (what I consider to be the random anomaly that is the independent variable in our equation) astound and captivate me. I only hope that the research we are conducting during this lifetime is enough for us to come to a true understanding
of how the Universe works (however unlikely a final end-all solution is) and that we can truly begin utilizing and being a part of the universe rather than stumbling on neat coincidences. The potential proof for string theory and quantum mechanics are right around the corner, nanotechnology is now in development (in some ways anyway) potentially solving many energy, information transport and medical needs and we could be sitting just before the crest of the next wave of mankind (if the ancient cultures accurately predicted anything this could very well be in 2012 :p).

In stating this, when my research and life accomplishments and interests are studied, perhaps even posthumously, that I did it all for nothing. Mankind has been stuck in a recursive cycle for some time now constantly inventing new scratches for our itches, integrating things with each other and starting over again, all the while finding out "revolutionary" new concepts which better mankind, when really we haven't actually accomplished anything terribly extraordinary compared the magnificence of existence alone; more likely we have been an infestation eating away at the beauty of the system (which, in being an extreme unlikeliness is a beauty in and of itself).

Anyway, that's all for me today!

<edit>

If anybody happens to want to (either manually or by writing a simple spider) extract all the images of Tesla's Patents that would be crazy cool! I wish I had a little more time right now, but I don't. It shouldn't be too difficult, the images are stored as TIFFs. Another option might be to spider the images available on this site.

</edit>

-TheXenocide

Extracurriculars

I figured another great place to start with this blogging thing is to introduce people to the other projects I'm working on/helping with as well as a couple places I'm frequently found online.

Excluding my research I am currently helping with the engineering and development of the following projects:

Project Link (website currently down) - This project was inspired a good friend of mine that goes by the name of Xemberad (some Furcadia nuts out there might recognize the name :p). The goal is to create a game engine/platform that we will use to re-create the fun and feel of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past as an immersive MMOG. The project has been through some ups and downs but we're working on redesigning the architecture of the engine (we first started this project when we weren't quite as capable as we are now) and we're really excited about the ideas being mapped out.

XFighter (website coming soon) - If anybody has ever played M.U.G.E.N. you know how awesome and fun it is to be able to set up dream matches in a customizable 2d fighting engine. Well my beastly Athlon 64x2 with 2GB Dual Channel DDR and dual GeForce 7600GT cards was struggling to run it recently; based on the animation frame timing patterns (since sometimes it runs slow enough to see them) as well as how input processing seems to work and a minor hint from the process manager it seems M.U.G.E.N. is not only no longer (if ever) open source, but it seems to be a single threaded application with nested loops. Our goal is to make a much more modern 2d fighting engine that will be completely extensible (note the use of extensible instead of customizable, this application will be designed using provider style design patterns and dynamic extension loading in mind). We've got a lot of ideas but the project is still in it's early stages, keep your eye out for updates :p

with my ever apparent shortage of time these days that's all I can really invest my time in right now, but I have a tendency to troll around several IRC channels (some I visit most weekdays, others I drop in from time to time); if you're ever interested in discussing any ideas about the above projects or anything else for that matter drop by for a bit :). These are the channels I frequent:

Server: Americhat (irc.americhat.net)
Channel: #genscripts Link
#genscripts is my home on the internet, it's full of great thinkers and skilled coders of all shapes and sizes and they're just generally fun people too. There's a lot of mIRC development that occurs in there, but really there's everything from PHP developers to realtime concurrent systems developers and everybody brings something worthwhile to the table.

Server: DALNet (irc.dal.net)
Channel: #partyhouse Link
#partyhouse is the very first IRC channel I ever entered back in the mid-'90s and, while I've taken a few hiatuses from it I always go back when I get the chance. To enjoy chilling in #partyhouse I recommend you remain open minded and bring your sense of humor, it's not all developers but there's some intellect present if you need it :).

Server GIMPNet (irc.gimp.net)
Channel: #mono-winforms Link
#mono-winforms is home of the Mono Windows Forms team. These guys are working hard to make it so that rich UI applications written against the Microsoft-designed .NET Framework can be run on Linux and Mac operating systems without the stress of using third party toolkits. They're not done but they get my respect; if I had enough time to choose another project to contribute to, this would be it. Just trolling in the channel I have become a part of many intellectual and thought provoking conversations and I enjoy all of the people who spend time there.

That's all for today folks :p - if you have any interest in any of the projects I'm on let me know, either by commenting or by finding me in one of the IRC channels mentioned above. Help is always appreciated :)

-TheXenocide

Quick Thought

Being brief tonight because I still have work to do, but if anybody reads this and knows of a solution or is inspired (and has the time :p) to make a solution, please please please let me know. Basically I wish there was better support for XMI export and/or source generation for Visio 2003 UML Models because it's a cheaper program I can use at home (I'm not exactly rolling in cash) for projects. Searching around it seams Microsoft has written an Add-In for Visio, but it appears as though the features are a bit lackluster for real usage :'(.

Anyway, I must be off :*

<edit>

I've also been using SVN a lot lately (free and whatnot :p) and I was really impressed with #develop's TortoiseSVN integration but I wanted to see if I could do the same with Visual Studio (cheaper than relying on VSS or TFS). In the process I've stumbled on AnkhSVN which I haven't been able to test yet, but it seems like a perfect candidate and it is now a stable release. I'll try to post back with my experiences. I'd also like to take a look at GForge's project management capabilities; it seems really useful but I've had some difficulties getting it set up myself (more about GForge another time).

</edit>

-TheXenocide

I Am Xeno

Welcome creatures of the internet; this is the newfound home of TheXenocide. I had some spare time whilst waiting for someone to get back to me in the office and I decided that I would start a blog :).

Who? Online I go by TheXenocide; if my real name is ever of any pertinence simply bring it to my attention and we can work things out ;). I am a Software Engineer in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States currently working full time and finishing my undergraduate course load part time. I've been tinkering with code since about 1992 when my stepfather introduced me to Basic, since that day my interest in computer science has never waned. Beyond all the professional crap though, I'm a generally fun loving, relaxed, easy to get along with guy who likes to hang out with friends, play video games, eat/cook good food, travel and most importantly learn. I've always said I never met a boring subject, just a boring teacher.

Why? To be honest, I'm not really sure; I've tried it before and wound up not liking the situation it put me in. Maybe I want people to see all the cool ideas I have, maybe I want to help software engineers and developers in the same ways other blogs have helped me, maybe I just need a place to vent. In reality it's probably some twisted cocktail of all of these and some whiskey sour from someplace in my subconscious.

What? This blog is my brain dump; you're liable to find anything from random events in my life to cool websites i stumble upon to generally useful software engineering concepts and the status of my personal projects.

When? Whenever; If you're that interested in keeping up with my posts I'd recomend some sort of RSS reader because I have absolutely no idea how often I will be posting.

... so... let's get started ;)

As of late, I've been working for a wonderful company that takes pretty good care of me. I'm really happy that I finally found a job that would take my experience seriously; Previously I've had several internships where the employers decided to treat me like some kid who didn't know anything; when I finally demonstrated my worth to them these companies saw nothing more than better slave labor and started asking more and more of me while treating me the same. Finally I'm free.

Outside of work I have also been working on a research project for some time. By some time, I wouldn't say my work is very close to complete, much of my time has been spent trying to plot and calculate the best ways to design my system and playing with features of various programming languages and platforms here and there to ensure my ideas are headed down the right path. The topic of my research is deeply connected with some of my theories on the recursive nature of existence and many repetitive occurrences in mankind's history. I'm sure there'll be more details later, but to give the topic as short and sweet as possible I'll be using a lot of big words :p--I am working on a "Multi-Language Pervasive Distributed Extensibility Platform" that I hope to use (and to see others use) to tackle many common compatibility problems engineers, developers and even users face today.

When I'm not attached to a computer (or rather, when I'm attached to less computers, seeing as how my PDA Phone is pretty much always by my side) I love watching Anime, Adult Swim cartoons, Comedy and most recently Heroes (AKA the greatest show on the planet!). I also enjoy reading, though I can rarely find time for it anymore, and I absolutely love (for some reason) driving around... Book-wise I enjoy Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Non-Fiction (computer books sound a lot more boring then they really are :p), more specifically I absolutely love Orson Scott Card's work (did anybody notice "The Xenocide"/TheXenocide :p) and I'm not at all ashamed to say I also really enjoy the Harry Potter books by J.K. Rowling. I also spend a fair bit of time watching Discovery Channel's awesome science, math and physics shows and studying up on beginner String Theory, Quantum Mechanics and general Physics.

That's pretty much all of me (at least all of me that I could think of or rationalize placing in a single post) so, in closing, I'll leave you with some of my favorite quotes:

"What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us" - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Love is Like War - Easy to Start, but Hard to Stop" - Some Fortune Cookie a long time ago.

and some of my more recent media favorites:

Waking Life - great movie, a really fun approach to philosophy.

A Scanner Darkly - also a great movie, directed and co-written by the director/writer of Waking Life; it's a little jumpy and, in my opinion, not quite as good as Waking Life, but still worth watching.

What the BLEEP!?: Down the Rabbit Hole - Absolutely awesome introduction to quantum mechanics but truly just an interesting work. Take it with a grain of salt and anything that sparks your interest should be something you take the time to research a little yourself, don't just take the things said as fact, but rather immerse yourself in a creative thinking environment, otherwise you may miss the point.

With that I think I'll call it a day (especially since it's time to get back to work :p),

-TheXenocide