Myself, Coding, Ranting, and Madness

ACTA Thoughts

Today, ACTA is to be signed by all the EU member states. Having not yet read the fine print, I'm not going to say whether I'm for or against this. What I'm going to quickly do is break down some of the myths

I don't know where this one comes from; what it shows is that the people writing haven't even looked at Wikipedia. Official negotiations began in June 2008, after a joint announcement in October 2007 [from] the United States [of America], the European Community, Switzerland, and Japan. Both PIPA and SOPA we introduced in late 2011, after the US signed ACTA.

Thanks of the Day

I'd like to make a big shout out to every single tech news feed I'm subscribed to for pointing out how to bypass the various anti-SOPA protests. Also, to all those on facebook posting about it going to be happening.

The former annoys me noticeable more because the suggestions are so mind-numbingly obvious to anyone who spends a minute to look at the page. Or, in fact, think about what Wikipedia is protesting against - SOPA / PIPA won't stop people finding what they want on the internet, but merely make it more annoying / easier to punish. If you watch it loading, it clearly loads the page before the lovely banner comes up, so there is already clearly going to be some way to get at the information. In this case, it's as simple as pressing escape.

Building Testable Network Programs

All code should come with tests that cover everything that the computer and user can do to break it, and they should check that it performs to the specification, or however the programmer felt that it should at the time. This is generally possible (even if most unit tests test really simple uses, and many people don't even bother with the simple tests to write such as passing null as an argument, checking for the immutability of member objects, and so forth): for example, most website interactions (and file interactions) can be tested by including test files as part of the test suite. Interaction with an entire class of remote service, however, can be rather problematic in certain types of code.

Blood (or: The Convergence of Reality)

Disclaimer: Having written this, it seemed a shame not to post it. I've been little on the quiet side anyway. Welcome to the darker side of my mind.

They say that Blood runs thicker than water. I'm not entirely sure that it's going to have much to do with the rest of what I write this evening, but the saying is oddly stamped across my mind, and it's where the thoughts started.

Music Tagging: Introduction

Structure is nice. Order and regularity do appease the side of me that some might label Obsessive/Compulsive. One wonderful example of this is music - something of which I have a lot of, which I spent (and still spend) a lot of time making sure it's tagged correctly.

Correctly is an interest concept here, actually. The way that tagging is handled in music files is a mess. A huge mess. Leaving aside the issues of normalisation, which I'll cover later, there is no unified tagging format, no unified set of tagging fields. And, for once, this isn't even really an issue of multiple conflicting big standards, just that no standard was ever that popular.

Computer...Display Blog Post

So, once again, it turns out we're living in the future. It's somewhat strange how that keeps happening - if I didn't know better, I would begin to believe that time moves in the forward direction more than the backward. Whatever causes it, the internet keeps telling me that the present I understand has been replaces with something more future . Not future in the sense of time travel, but Sony have made new shinies. Which are yet to be mentions on /. that I can find.

Amusement at Wordpress

So, it turns out Wordpress doesn't behave in quite the way I expect. For one,protecting a post with a password does not automatically stop it being published in the RSS feed, nor can I currently find an option that allows me to make that the default behaviour.

As far as I'm aware, no one actually managed to guess the password (it was, of course, alligator7). If anyone did they...would have found nothing much of interest. Not even rapid response Ninjas.

Links for All

I promise, there are posts in the work. With, like, actual content. The situation in Westminster is busy enough that I can't keep up with what's actually important; it reached the point a little while back that I created a new Google account to keep track of the feed of information coming in. In the mean time, I will distract you with better writers putting out more content than myself!

Back (to the drawing board)

I return.

It's been too long (again) - coming up on two months, if I can read between the large number of half completed drafts correctly. But somehow, the blog has reached 2000 views (give or take - I no longer have an accurate number for how many the counter on the original host showed before I moved the blog, but it has also gone up...)

Tearing Apart My Little Streamer

A while ago, I published a post on How to write your own music streaming service. What I'm not going to do is go over some of the things I did wrong or failed to do, which feel within the scope of the code - the assumptions I made beyond the code's control were referenced in the original post.