R. Tyler Ballance's Blog

New Blog

Wed, 3 Jan 2007 09:45:44 -0600

I've finally taken the jump away from Nucleus to Drupal. I've created my new blog on my other new (stupid) website www.unethicalblogger.com.

This site will stay up until I figure out a good means of migrating content over to Drupal.

In theory, you should be redirected shortly.

Bribing Bloggers, Better

Tue, 2 Jan 2007 15:00:39 -0600

I very rarely actually read other blogs (Chris Hanson, and David Young excluded). Ever. I have it hard enough wasting my spurious freetime between work, bleep work, actual open source work, stupid hacks, and half-finished projects, let alone throwing in the cavalcade of technology related blogs out there that aren't mine and happen to provide insightful commentary on MacHeist, too Heisty?, or Leopard's secret ingredient!, or Tim's latest LSD-induced Mac rumour?!, or any number of inane topics that are either 100% speculation, or 95% speculation, with 5% google ads. While I try my best not to agree with Todd Manning on anything (including music), he captured my feelings about the "Web 2.0" shtick perfectly when he said: "I hate the web, the web sucks."

With that quasi-disclaimer out of the way, I found Joel's post on Bribing Bloggers marginally interesting in his ideas about the ethics of accepting gifts for free press (bloggery). While reading his entire post however, I couldn't help but think "no shit." It's unethical for the same reason offering your Senator a nice fat christmas goose on behalf of your corrupt megacorp is unethical, or giving Dick Cheney a free (brand-new) shotgun on behalf of Exxon-Mobile and then pointing him in the direction of a bio-diesel sales rep, sending the judge presiding over your DUI case a fine case of Johnny Walker blue-label. This of course all rests on one absolutely ridiculous assumption made about most blogs/bloggers: that they are journalists.

The bribing bloggers "scandal" only exists if you allow yourself into thinking that anybody that's writing a review on SomeHardwareSite.com or TimsBlogAboutWindows.co.uk, etc is somehow "supposed" to follow the same ethical guidelines that an actual journalist is "supposed" to follow. I can't even trust FoxNews, CNN, the New York Times, or the Washington Post to be objective, why on earth would I expect a faceless blogger amidst the crowds on the interweb to be somehow more objective? While I think it is unethical to accept free "stuff" in exchange for blogging about a topic, it's a per-case issue. If JoeBlogger builds a reputation for offering objective reviews for software/hardware/juice/arabian oils/etc, then it is up to that particular individual to maintain his own integrity in not accepting free stuff. If some other fellow blogs about the wonders of the Intel Core Duo's performance in his intel iMac, is it that bad if an AMD rep sends him a evaluation machine to check out the latest AMD64 chips for comparision? What if he discloses the link? As with anywhere else in life, no issue is ever black and white.

I see no ethical dilemma if Parallels approaches me with a free license for their software, for example, with an email stating "how can we make this better for you." Of course I would blog about it, I would also disclose that I was given a free license, and maybe an unreleased beta of Parallels etc, in spite of my ever-so-obvious bias towards VMWare. Regardless of "actual" journalism, or pretend-blog journalism, nobody (except me of course) is ever objective, there will always be biases on a story/review, the diference between reputable sources and those that aren't is in the disclosure of those biases.

"As a former resident of New Orleans, the destruction left by Katrina has an emotional pull for me, that's why ...."
"Up until recently, I've been a die-hard .NET developer, until I purchased an Apple and started looking into Cocoa..."
"While Windows Vista performs adequately on the top-of-the-line machine I received from Microsoft, for most average home-users ..." (I'll let you fill in the blanks on that one)

They're just soapboxes, get over yourselves.

[tags: joelonsoftware, bribery, burberry, bilberry]

Kernel Panic At The Disco

Mon, 1 Jan 2007 05:51:51 -0600

VMWare Fusion isn't all teddy-bears and bunny rabbits, it has it's own respective WTFs to share with us all.

I do most of my work on openSUSE, so this bug is a cute one to put it lightly. Grumble.

openSUSE dislikes Fusion

[tags: vmware, parallels, fusion, opensuse, suse]

Incriminating Evidence

Sat, 30 Dec 2006 21:41:04 -0600

While I slept today, I put up an away message of: "thinking of all the different ways to destroy evidence"

Leaving it up as a joke, and a not-really-clever alternative to "Away" I received some interesting messages while I was out, from "evidence? what did you do?" to the weirdest one:

what sort?
the FBI cant do forensics on Linux systems, they have to outsource the job to a firm in Canada
so im guessing state goons are just as crummy if not worse
so if its HDD stuff I'd run a cron job to touch every file on the HDD (mess up all the timestamps), then delete them
then run a shredder with something like 20 overwrites
then set it up as removeable storage and fill it with whatever torrents you think would be fun, delete and shred that
then thermite.
Always with the thermite.

I know some interesting people.

[tags: destroyingevidence, thermite, fbi]

Suspension of Disbelief

Thu, 28 Dec 2006 20:33:08 -0600

Disclaimer: I don't work for either VMWare or Parallels, as it turns out, neither has offered me a job

In my ceremonial replacement of the Parallels icon in my dock with the VMWare Fusion icon (Fusion or Fission) somebody left a comment telling me to hide my employment by VMWare, etc, marking my video as a blatant attempt at thrashing Parallels. Not only do I get about 200-400 hits a day (i'm exceedingly relevant to the industry), I don't work for VMWare. I simply have endured Parallels since it was released, and am happy that VMWare released a great competitor to the market.

This video is of a prime example of where Fusion excels where Parallels...doesn't. Virtual machine suspension, and resume. Parallels, even when not being used hogs resources in such a way that I've considered scrapping my intel 20" iMac for a Mac Pro just so my other applications don't beachball; because of this resource-suck, I had gotten in the habit of suspending virtual machines whenever possible.

Music by KiloWatts. The set used in the video can be downloaded from hybridized.

Suspension in Parallels and VMWare

[tags: parallels, vmware, fusion, virtualization, resume]

Fusion or Fission

Wed, 27 Dec 2006 21:46:50 -0600

"Fission? No, I haven't been fishin' since I was on Lake Erie"

VMWare's Fusion is a major leap forward compared to Parallels, and much less camera shy. Instead of writing some long out review, and listing the numerous reasons why Fusion blows Parallels out of the water, how about a silly video instead?

Parallels vs. Fusion

[tags: parallels, fusion, vmware, virtualization]

Preventing Reader-Rage

Tue, 26 Dec 2006 13:54:29 -0600

I'm reading a book I intend to write a review for before the end of the month on this very weblog, but I needed to vent/discuss something in the meantime.

Unless you're telling a god damned story, don't use the first person.

Blargh! It is annoying whole new level to be reading a bit of quite technical writing spattered with phrases like: "[In the code above] Additionally, I implemented blah blah blah explicitly to give the compiler a ..." Or something a bit worse, first-person conclusions: "I quickly discussed method overloading in blah blah blah"

Albeit, I've not (yet) written a book, as a random dickbag on the internet it is my god-given right to call this author out for bad style, right? :) In quasi-technica writingl (i.e. the realm between developer documentation and a Clancy novel) I think addressing the reader is quite acceptable "if you use the -Wapocalypse flag, your brane will implode at compile time" but speaking in the first person is outright annoying. I cannot tell if this author is attempting to create some unnecessary connection with the reader of his book or what exactly he's attempting to do with the incessant use of first-person, but the consistency thereof has repulsed me enough to where I've skipped a number of paragraphs as soon as the author launches into a first-person, marginally-relevant, portion of text.

Just remember kids, even though your teachers might say of writing introductions and conclusions "tell them what you're going to tell them; tell them; then tell them what you've told them."

They don't mean it literally.

[tags: reader-rage, writing, first-person]

Caution, Flammable

Thu, 21 Dec 2006 03:47:26 -0600

I think next time I need to get my hair cut I'm going to pull out a pack of matches, and just light my head on fire.

At least then I'm less likely to absolutely hate my haircut. Great Clips, why hast thou betrayed me?

Update: Here's what look like now

[tags: hair]

Apple strudel, and other things that don't traverse NATs.

Thu, 21 Dec 2006 03:44:07 -0600

NAT, or Network Address Translation, is the absolute bane of my existence (next to Barbara Walters of course). It finds itself near the upper-ends of lists like "technologies that frack my network code" and "reasons IPv6 will save us from ourselves," but what many of you don't know, is that NAT was designed by giant salmon with a bad attitude. Why, if it weren't for NAT, we might not get to enjoy such wonderous atrocities like "Universal Plug and Play" (UPnP).

UPnP, oh how I hate you, let me count the ways:

Runs over HTTPU.
HTTPU is a silly acronym for an even sillier concept, HTTP over UDP which isn't really a standard, but an outdated (2001!) internet draft (draft-goland-http-udp-04.txt).
Over-engineering? Is there a better modifier than "over" we can use?
Imagine what would happen if SOAP, and some network engineers got hammered and made a bastard love-child in the back seat of a 1993 Buick Le Sabre, UPnP would be it. It exists in this weird realm of trying to cover device and service discovery and advertisement, and about 13 other things that don't need to exist but do.
Description. C'mon, are you serious?
After "addressing" and "discovery" in the UPnP hall of horrors, it's time for description. This part of the freak show is where "we" (as in our machine/device/etc) know about "interesting devices" but don't know much about what those do, so "we" request a "description" after which, the other device sends us 8-10 pages of XML (double spaced) telling us about the hardware, the services, and anything else we might ever care to know about (mood, mother's maiden name, etc).
Internet Gateway Device
This is where the NAT happiness happens, I'm pretty sure it's just as miserable as the rest of UPnP, but i'm not willing to read a couple hundred pages of documentation on why IGD sucks, but if the couple hundred pages wasn't enough to convince you, I've got a note from my mom confirming it.

"Aren't there alternatives?" I hear you quip, why of course! In the realm of NAT mapping protocols there exists another contender which I will hit on in a later posting, NAT-PMP, but other than that, UPnP is pretty widely adopted.

On the other side of the fence exists NAT hole-punching protocols, such as STUN, which helps coerse UDP packets from one side of a NAT to the other side with relatively few bumps and bruises. The downside of using a protocol like STUN, is that is is based on UDP, so unless you receive an ICMP error message your packets may just continually disappear into the ether and your application wouldn't be the wiser (unless you implement some TCP-like error-checking and packet ordering on top of UDP). For most applications that use STUN such as VoIP, this isn't a major issue. For other applications where data integrity is a major issue, UDP in general is most likely not on the table to begin with. Which leaves most folks (like me) working with something like STUNT which extends STUN's functionality to add support for TCP packets.

Nothing is fool-proof however, NAT is such an abomination that there exists a good proportion of NAT devices in the "real world" that misbehave, preventing hole-punching protocols like STUN(T) from getting through to allow clients behind the NAT to perform the actions they wish to. The situation worsens if you're behind two NAT devices (which I was in my last apartment, BLECH!), as no amount of UPnP, hole-punching, or Merry Christmas sugar cookies will allow traffic to traverse in the fashion which some applications (iChat AV for one example) need in order to function.

Did I mention that I abhor NATs? Grumble.

[tags: nat, nat-pmp, upnp, stunt, stun]

Reticulating Spines and Other Wastes of Time

Tue, 19 Dec 2006 10:27:24 -0600

I just posted a message to the monodevelop-list of the same title, but I figured since there's about 7 people on that mailing list, I'd better post to my blog to ensure maximum coverage (9 people!). The actual mailing list posting can be found here, but I'll summarize.

The splash screen loading messages in MonoDevelop are about as exciting as a 1040 tax form, so I created a patch to randomly display more interesting messages like:

"Nerfing Pirates, Buffing Ninjas..."
"Zesting Oranges...
"Adjusting Radiation Levels..."
"Locking Boxes..."
"Burninating the Peasants..."

There's quite a few more, and it's thoroughly entertaining to watch. To get an idea of what it looks like, check out this screenshot on flickr.

The behavior is triggered by an environment variable "RETICULATE", so setting the environment variable will turn on a more exciting splash screen when you start MonoDevelop. Starting it from a build set of sources, you would call: tyler@onion:~/sources/mono-project/monodevelop> RETICULATE=1 make run

The patch: ProgressTracker.cs.diff

[tags: monodevelop, mono, burnination, reticulatingspines]