Older blog entries for DeepNorth (starting at number 5)

Have posted some additional material about Migrating From Microsoft"

It is astonishingly cold here today -- approaching the point where Celsius == Farenheit. No bother for me. I am wearing "performance underwear".

Am about to start some prototype coding for a 'vector translation' engine pursuant to research into 'advanced data packaging' -- whatever that means.

Mulling over the idea of preparing a GPL'ed version of a 'raw radix' sort in ANSI C. For short records of -non-degenerate' data it is the fasted sort I have tested -- much faster than quicksort on large files. Would anybody care?

19 Aug 2003 (updated 19 Aug 2003 at 17:16 UTC) »

Have posted another article. Things really do move slowly here. If I wanted to and had the time, I could post the majority of articles on this site.

I note that diary entries take place fairly frequently, but I wonder who reads them. I have scanned a few and it seems a totally mixed bag -- not worth wading through. Some of the stuff could/should have been posted as articles and some of the stuff could/should have been better left unsaid. Maybe this entry is one of the latter :)

I'm wondering now if things are not slower here than they have been in the past.

Even though I've never joined before, I've been here before and it seems to me it was more active. What has happened, I wonder? I never went in for the mayhem that is slashdot, but they are active -- I'll give them that.

I like the minimalism of the site, but I wonder if that has anything to do with the apparent lack of interest. My sites are similarly (well, not quite) minimalist and we have been criticised for not being 'jazzy enough'. I would have thought a lot of serious hackers would go for this sort of lean content driven stuff. However, there seems to be a lack of interest, going by the number of articles and replies.

OTH -- maybe less is more with respect to the traffic here. I noticed that the replies to one of my articles here were quite thoughtful. Maybe a lower amount of high quality traffic is best. I will ponder this.

Well. After grousing for a grand total of about 48 hours I was certified as a 'Journeyer'. That's ok by me. I think with respect to the standards here I AM a Journeyer. Imagine that. Thanks to the guys that jumped in to certify me.

I got to post my reply about the voting stuff and due to breaking news, I even had an excuse to post an article about it. Mmmmm.

I also posted an article about making forge-proof bills from plain paper. I would love it if some geek actually did the legwork and printed a few. <rant>

Am currently slugging away with code for my websites. It is just drudgery right now as I attempt to 'beta-ize' hacks for session management, table management, etc. PHP is a thing of great beauty, but it does not really have a client-side counter-part. I am trying my best to minimize the java code needed on the client, but it keeps growing anyway. Why can't the browser guys get together and make SIMPLE standards that work everywhere and do what you actually need. Do you think the stinking browser could send a little RELEVANT information to the server???

I am currently trying to work my way around a nasty hack to resize the page without destroying the automatic 'printability' of my pages. It's a joke.

Realistically speaking, a modern page should be a document that reformats for different media like screen and print. I have CSS that deals with some of this, but obvious document stuff is missing from the HTML specs and the browsers implement these fine points differently.

The code I am currently working on is supposed to allow you to put up a set of presentation pages that can be viewed as a presentation but then go through a few filters to produce a reasonable printed document. Why do I have to code the GD filters??? This should be standard out of the box stuff, but instead the people working on this stuff have gone off into outerspace producing plugins for everything under the sun and extending things like java to the point where the browser is becoming an operating system. Meantime, some of the obvious stuff (like pagination in a printed document) is missing.

This diary is a case in point. There is no way to specify that a new body of HTML code has started or ended. That means that all these editors have to restrict the HTML tags you can use. Blah!

As a programmer of long standing, I can tell you the reason that things are like this: Programmer's do not use their own code as extensively as users do. If they did, they would fix the bugs in the vanilla stuff instead of constantly hacking in new features. Mea Culpa as well, but still... As a user, I object. </rant>

Things move slowly here at advogato ... Am I really in cyberspace?

Someone (Dave Bauer) has kindly read my diary entry and added a certification. He has certified me as 'master', but I have a feeling that this may have ended up having no effect...

I read the trust metric stuff and now wonder if, given the nature of the traffic on the site, it might be impossible to get proper certs unless you are actually known to the individuals who happen to look at who is coming in.

Maybe if they knew I had a hand in:

The world's biggest omelette!

I was called in as they were going for the record to fix the computer that was supposed to be webcasting but had stopped. I just managed to fix it in time so they were able to broadcast the declaration that they had finished the omelette.

Since I do web stuff and they had not thought to do any type of permanent memorial, I used a company 'shelf site' we had saved for charity to put up the news. You can see it here:

PureWish.com

I have had a pretty good career and some personal luck over the years. I feel a bit sheepish about not having given enough back, but I have given something.

Come to think of it, I wrote a program for these guys to operate a charity auction thing. I should GPL the thing and put it up at PureWish...

Still trying to think of an ethical and polite way to break into the 'trust web' here.

Jiminy Crickets!

I was(am) a Master Programmer and was both the main designer of the Guild's point system for certification and the Code of Ethics

Here's my certificate as a Master Programmer (M.Prog):

MyGuildCert

Here's another bit of GPL'ed code from my 'Crypt' Data Packaging project:

distr.c

I like the idea that there is a certification procedure here, but a little peevish that I have to constantly re-prove myself everywhere I go. Sigh. It's the lot of a programmer -- it's always 'what have you done lately'...

I hope that anyone reading this will check my credentials and certify me ASAP

I came here, because I would like to comment on the electronic voting article. People there are saying that there is no way to provide a Convenient, Secure, Auditable, Private and Transparent electronic voting system. At least as far as Canada is concerned, I beg to differ. We present a scheme here: HushVote Security Overview

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