Thursday, January 14, 2010

This is how bad the TSA's screening process is...

"Myth: The No-Fly list includes an 8-year-old boy.

Buster: No 8-year-old is on a T.S.A. watch list.

“Meet Mikey Hicks,” said Najlah Feanny Hicks, introducing her 8-year-old son, a New Jersey Cub Scout and frequent traveler who has seldom boarded a plane without a hassle because he shares the name of a suspicious person. It’s not a myth."
No wonder the TSA officials never catch the terrorist carrying a bomb in his undies!

Can California's problems boil down to something so simple?

To quote an oft-used principle in deductive analysis, Occam's Razor states that "entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity" and the conclusion thereof, that the simplest explanation or strategy tends to be the best one. With this in mind, this simple hypothesis could be the root cause of California's ailings:
"The simple tragedy of California is that its tax and budgeting restrictions — voted in by citizens’ initiatives — make it impossible to pay for the prison, school and health mandates OK’d by those same people."

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Another day of honest labor completed

Time to go home, recharge a little and then workout until it's too late to do anything else. Good start to this week - challenging bug fixes, some good refactoring and the satisfaction that with each iteration, this product's appeal is widening.

My constant stream of updates have stopped since I decided to unplug myself from the world once I leave work. Not having the Internet at home has been a boon, and though I miss blogging, I have found an outlet for my immediate thoughts on Twitter. I have resolved to write more often just before leaving work this year - hopefully your readership will make me want to keep that resolution.

Cheerio...

Sorting a List with a specific String Comparer like Ordinal

Sorting strings is always a tricky issue and a cause of subtle bugs that are hard to unearth until a customer encounters a weird corner case. The AWS SDK for .NET had a bug that resulted in S3 metadata being incorrectly sorted because the SDK used the default String Comparison algorithm. The fix was two fold:
1. Change the ArrayList into a List
2. Specify the correct StringComparer - Ordinal in this case.
            List list = new List(headers.Count);
            foreach (string key in headers.AllKeys)
            {
                string lowerKey = key.ToLower();
                if (lowerKey.StartsWith("x-amz-"))
                {
                    list.Add(lowerKey);
                }
            }
            // Using the recommendations from: 
            // http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms973919.aspx
            list.Sort(StringComparer.Ordinal);

Friday, January 08, 2010

Amazing writeup on the rumored Apple Tablet

Then again ...

... And, of course, assuming there’ll even be an Apple Tablet, or an iSlate, or whatever we think they’re going to call it.

My course is clear. My airfare is non-refundable. During the final week of January, I hope to be sitting in an auditorium at Yerba Buena Gardens learning about the Apple Tablet.

If I fly out there and Apple doesn’t hold their rumored launch event, then I’ll drive down to Cupertino. I’ll stand outside the Apple campus in a trenchcoat holding a boombox over my head, playing a Peter Gabriel song up at the upper windows until Steve Jobs is so touched by this romantic gesture that he sends me away with an engineering sample.

Dammit, something needs to be done. This frustrating state of affairs simply can’t continue.
Some day, I wish I can conjure up a single idea that moves the press to wax poetic and yearn for just an *Engineering* sample...

Tuesday, January 05, 2010

Nexus One won't work with AT&T 3G

U.S. users can also use the unlocked phone with AT&T, although the phone’s radio isn’t able to use AT&T’s 3G network.