Noah's Mark - Latest Comments

Re: Demoware

noahrichards — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 02:20:59 -0000

Like I said, though, it depends on how you define "useful". Adding those knobs and levers attracts the KDE types to compiz - the people who want their UI to be infinitely configurable, so that they can make it feel just right. It also makes the extension author's life easier - instead of making decisions about what looks best, he or she just leaves it effectively unconfigured (hopefully to the trade off of making the extension even better).

And besides that, my rant isn't meant to say that you *shouldn't* care about things looking pretty, but that you shouldn't sacrifice real usability for making things pretty (e.g. if compiz causes your computer to crawl when any of the effects turn on, to the point that normal UI actions take 4x as long, fewer people would use it). If none of the software on my mac worked well, I'd probably care much less that they all look pretty to me.

Remind me later to give you the real-life example I encountered that led me to write this blog; it would be funny if not for the fact that the person suggesting it was completely serious :)

Re: Demoware

Steven — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 01:47:01 -0000

I read this and thought about all those little knobs you can adjust in the latest Linux compiz stuff. All of it is completely unncessary but it's a good example of where pointless things not only make a neat demo but also get someone to try out the product for more than 10 minutes ... as I did.

There is absolutely nothing necessary or useful about them.

Re: Demoware

Corry — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 20:23:29 -0000

This is an annoying problem, though as you show in your example, a fair share of the fault lies with the customer, who is willing to have management make the purchase.

Re: meh

Corry — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 20:19:33 -0000

Hi! Yay post storm!

Also, according to Google Reader, you have at least 7 readers (Including me).

Re: Go Vote

PaulSolt — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 12:24:37 -0000

I voted! Hope Ines is happy.

Re: Go Vote

Matt — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 11:24:35 -0000

Woohoo! Your dad's voting after all? Hardcore. And well put, Ines. Go vote.

Re: andoid tomorrow!

Elmar Langholz — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 13:40:38 -0000

Amen to that brother!
I have to say I definitely agree with much that you have kindly explained. Having myself programmed for WinMo 6/6.1 (C# and C++), Android 0.9 SDK (Java) and currently iPhone firmware 2.1 (Objective-C), I have to say that by far the worst experience as a user and developer has been with the WinMo. The funny part here is that you can only use Windows and Visual Studio to code for WinMo, Mac and Xcode to code for the iPhone but you can use Eclipse in cross platforms in order to code apps for Android. sweet! However, due to the fact that most people willing to pay for software which has a GUI that rocks and doesn't have those large sleep(3000) (which also happen in Android 0.9) I just decided to stick with the iPhone which is currently way slicker and faster than the competition.
I have to agree that the software that Android has working correctly does have a good quality but still has some security issues as well as others. However, I can't wait to try Chrome on Android.
Keep us posted if you develop something interesting. Maybe you could use some extra hands. :)

Re: Firefox’s SSL policy is not bad, you idiot

PaulSolt — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 13:23:55 -0000

Good read. I think it's a good system to get in your face; especially for my relatives who are computer illiterate. This step is completely necessary to protect any user from doing harm to themself.

Re: Firefox’s SSL policy is not bad, you idiot

noahrichards — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 23:50:44 -0000

Because they are different services - note the keyword _verification_ in that second part. The first part, the "I want a domain name here plzthx", isn't a complicated problem because there aren't many (enforced) trust/identity strings attached. Also, because there are an inordinate amount of domains being registered and a much smaller number of sites getting SSL certs, I can only imagine the cost for the first will be much cheaper than the second. Sounds pretty simple to me.

Oh, and the real answer is, "because they charge that much and people will pay it." Enter capitalism.

Your suggestion, in the first paragraph, is for how a "trusted" authority should establish trust with an untrusted endpoint - you do some activity to prove to that party that you "own" the domain, and that third party, which is a trusted authority by some other definition, is depended on for its verification of your site. Maybe that is enough to establish trust, but how does it relate to the post?

If you want to complain about the methods CAs use to verify identity, then that is a different discussion. If you feel a CA charges too much for its services, find a different one. The digicert price I found was after clicking 2 links in a google search. I bet you can find better prices without looking too hard.

Or you get behind someone like CACert.org, who gives out free (as in beer) certs and (I believe) is still trying to be accepted by mozilla as a trusted root CA:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=21...

Mozilla has a nice, fair, and public policy for how to become a trusted CA:
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/security/certs/...

So I don't think there are major roadblocks preventing somebody from using your method to establish trust and charging less than $100 a year and getting accepted by mozilla as a root CA. Except, you know, capitalism.

Re: Firefox’s SSL policy is not bad, you idiot

trevelyan — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 16:02:26 -0000

Server identity verification can and should be tested in the same manner that Google Apps does it - stick a new page up on your server or add a new CNAME record to prove you control the domain.

If domain names can be registered for under $10, why should domain name verification cost hundreds of dollars per year?

Re: the keyboard/mouse and “bandwidth”

John Floren — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 18:13:16 -0000

I agree that the worst part of it is moving your hands to the mouse and getting the cursor to the right place, moving back to the keyboard to type the command, and then switching back to the mouse again to select and execute the command, but I also find it convenient in its own way.
I use acme exclusively for editing on Plan 9 and emacs or vi for editing on UNIX. I don't work with Windows if I can help it but vim is the preferred option there too.

Re: the keyboard/mouse and “bandwidth”

noahrichards — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 22:54:42 -0000

So it sounds like you have to do the following:
1) You are typing along (hands on keyboard) and you want to replace something in a piece of text
2) You select the paragraph (hand on mouse) and move the mouse somewhere
3) You type in "edit s/foo/bar/g" (hands on keyboard)
4) You middle click it (hand on mouse)

The slowest part of using an editor is the movement back and forth between keyboard and mouse, I think, so this still feels suboptimal. In vim, for example, you could do the following:

1) You are typing along and want to change text in the paragraph
2) You select the current paragraph with "vip" or "vap": visual mode ("select") inner/"a" paragraph (the current paragraph) (more below).
3) You type ":s/foo/bar/g" and press enter

No movement of the hands, no movement off the keyboard.

For #2, you can replace the "p" in that with any of the following:
"w" - word
"s" - sentence
"[" or "]" - a "[]" block
"(" or ")" or "b"- a "()" block
"{" or "}" or "B" - a "{}" block
"<" or ">" - a "" block
" or ' or ` - a quoted string
"t" - a tag block, a la html (e.g.: "<foo>sometext</foo>")

You can also replace "v" (for selecting) with other commands like "d" (to delete) or "c" (to replace) or "y" (to copy). And the difference between the "a" and "i" version ("a" block vs. "inner" block) is that the "a" version includes the delimiters of the block.

The command remains, in a sense, for further use: pressing "." immediately runs the last command (so if you move the cursor to another paragraph and press ".", it will do it again). Pressing ":" and then the up arrow key will scroll through your history (if you've typed a part of something, like ":s/", it will only complete history items that match what you've typed so far). If you want to save it around, type "qa" (record macro into register 'a'), do steps 1-3, then hit "q" again to stop recording. "@a" runs the macro in register 'a'.

The paper is an interesting read, and I do believe that using the mouse for selecting text is faster for most people than would be the vim keyboard equivalents (my coworker uses gvim for this very reason, but I stick to just vim). However, I think that anything that requires some use of the mouse is still suboptimal to a solution that provides an optional mouse interface. Then again, to each their own :)

Here's a paper from the author of vim (Bram Moolenaar) about effective editing in vim: http://www.moolenaar.net/habits.html

Re: the keyboard/mouse and “bandwidth”

John Floren — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 12:29:40 -0000

#ifdef ADVOCACY
Regarding the keyboard/mouse idea, I would say that a system must either provide keyboard shortcuts OR allow the user to accomplish almost any function in a small number of mouse-clicks. I personally enjoy a Plan 9 editor called "acme"; although there are very few keyboard shortcuts besides ^E for end of line, ^A for beginning, and left & right arrows to move one character at a time, it allows you to compose and run ed/sam-style editing commands on any selected text, easily pipe it through external programs, etc. Basically, my only desire would be for ^F and ^P to move forward and backward instead of the arrow keys; the interface allows me to work quickly enough without extensive shortcuts.
For example, to replace all instances of "foo" with "bar" in a paragraph, I just highlight the paragraph, move my mouse to the file tag-line, type "Edit s/foo/bar/g" and mid-click it. It may take a bit longer than vi, but the command remains for later editing/use, which helps reduce time spent later.

The paper is a bit old, but interesting: http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/acme.html
#endif /*ADVOCACY*/

Re: The MSR-SSLA - The ultimate EULA assrape.

Raoul Duke — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 01:20:13 -0000

wow, your post reminds me of myself on a good day ;-) thanks from this ex-msfty for the fun venting.

Re: How to convince people you have no clue what you are talking about

Elmar Langholz — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 21:17:04 -0000

If I only had a cent for every time I've seen these responses I would definitely share my fortune with you. I ran into a similar issue recently and just responded the thread, in an eloquent manner, by writing the answer in one line and asking the "holier than thou" individual to keep the responses low on propaganda. I could rant on saying that the multiple references to his/her books denote low self esteem issues and his/her alleged acquired bragging rights shouldn't be pushed down everyone's throat for his own satisfaction... After all, if others were interested on his background they could just google him up. In the end I will say this: It doesn't matter where you're from or what you've done but what you've contributed to the solution. Keep It Simple Stupid or go write more books, it's simple as that!
Good research my friend!

Re: Getting over the hump

Stump — Thu, 22 May 2008 10:54:33 -0000

good to have you back, Noah

Re: A joke

Paul Solt — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 16:47:06 -0000

Fun

Re: C#: -100, Java: +1 (?!)

noahrichards — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 03:44:06 -0000

Because an IList and an IList<T> are fundamentally different types: in other words, IList != IList<object>. Even if they were, it still wouldn't be ideal, because I want the methods to return the thing passed in (as an IList<T>), instead of requiring casts everywhere. Added to that, the methods/properties on IList/IList<T> are different.

Re: C#: -100, Java: +1 (?!)

Matt — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 03:30:03 -0000

Also, curses on your blog for accepting markup without warning and turning all my IList<T> into IList for me. That should read public MyType(IList<T> first, IList<T> second), and "showed how you wanted the IList<?> to look".

Re: C#: -100, Java: +1 (?!)

Matt — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 03:27:49 -0000

Geez, I didn't realize you were so angry and emo about programming languages, of all things. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding, but why can't you just declare "public MyType(IList first, IList second)"? That looks the same as what you did with the funky U-ness. Unless you actually want the type to expose List as a type somewhere instead of just IList, which seems unusual to me. I guess it would make more sense if you showed how you wanted the IList to look.

Re: C#: -100, Java: +1 (?!)

Elmar Langholz — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 12:45:41 -0000

Check it, more on what the team has to say about C#:
http://blogs.msdn.com/mattwar/archive/2005/10/0...

Re: Eric Meijer invented dumb.

John F. — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 13:08:25 -0000

Haha, I can't believe he tried to claim the REPL of all things. What's next? VB invented the GUI? Invented whitespace?

Re: Eric Meijer invented dumb.

Elmar Langholz — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 15:11:13 -0000

I definitely agree. There is a tendency to hype up languages which we like and have developed code for them, especially if we helped implement key features (http://research.microsoft.com/~emeijer/Papers/P...). I guess this sort of behavior comes from a feeling of belonging as one would have with our children.

BTW, I couldn't agree more with the IsNot patent! I'm all about trying to avoid these type rocks on the road.

Re: C/C++ and sizes of types

PaulSolt — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 00:44:57 -0000

There are two big problems. People don't appreciate your time and they don't know how to help themselves.

People really need to understand and learn how to find information to help themselves before jumping to conclusions. However it never hurts to be helpful in the situation where they don't know how to help themselves. Don't let it eat your soul.

Re: “value”

PaulSolt — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 00:13:41 -0000

I agree with you. You can't sell a product back to someone once they've made a conscious decision that your piece of software is lacking or pointless to use.

Vista is a mess and I have no intentions of using it in place of XP.