joel's thoughts

[Background]
Two weeks ago, my family and I made a visit to our local Family Christian Store. I was there primarily to pick up the Casting Crowns CD [Snapshot review: tracks 2-4 are absolutely fabulous, the rest ranges from ‘good-thoughts’ to ‘eh’; overall musically solid but unremarkable, the strength is in the lyrics; really, tracks 2-4 alone are just about worth the price of the CD], but we ended up browsing for a bit anyway. I wandered over to the section with various bible translations and printings because I’ve been thinking about picking up one of those “thinline” bibles — softcover and very…well, thin. Since I went to Urbana ’96 I’ve been using the bible I got there, but I’ve been thinking I might like something that would fit a little easier in my laptop bag. Yes, I know, we Americans and our conveniences. Anyway, I was looking over the various shelves of King James and NIV and NASB and…ESV? English Standard Version, eh? What’s that about? I asked Andi if she knew anything about it, and she hadn’t heard of it either. I shrugged and made a mental note to find out about it at some point. Time was running short, so I paid for my CD and we left, and I hadn’t thought about the ESV since.

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Spolsky gives the pitch. Basically remote-screen-access customer support, super-easy, through any firewall, over any connection. Sounds pretty slick. I know I have family I might use this with, and I can think of several scenarios at work where this might come in handy.

This was just too funny. I was reading this article about some redesign of the Freedom Tower in NY when I happened to scroll down and notice the following product ad:

Web and programming technologies have enabled a huge degree of automated business interaction and processes. But eventually you figure out it doesn’t hurt to have an actual human keep an eye on things from time to time, or you’re going to end up with people trying to buy chopped fingers to defraud some fast food chain. 😉

Lately I’ve been casually following Project Aardvark, the summer-intern-project brainchild of Joel Spolsky. It’s to be open source (GPL, I believe), but they haven’t yet said what exactly it is they’re building, and there’s been all kinds of speculation on that particular point.
The last few posts on PA’s site really have me wondering…there’s mention of some SSL encryption (via OpenSSL or MatrixSSL), but that’s not particularly informative. However, in Ben Pollack’s last post he mentions a taskbar object that manages connections, followed by a comparison of naming conventions used in TightVNC and WinVNC source code. Now, if he wasn’t actively waist-deep in the source code for one or both of those projects this isn’t likely the sort of comparison that would have been fresh in his mind. Not to mention using the comparison as a follow-on to his and fellow intern Tyler’s challenges in coming up to speed on an unfamiliar codebase felt a little weak. I’m almost starting to wonder if part of their blogging assignment is to slowly leak or suggest details about the various parts and pieces of the project.
I admit I’m still at a loss for even a guess of the whole, though. VNC over SSL is nothing new, although I’m not sure if anyone’s integrated the two before. And Spolsky’s company makes money on bug tracking and web publishing software. A multi-server remote administration app, maybe? Might be handy, rather than opening up multiple remote desktop windows (come to think of it, maybe someone needs to write a tabbed interface for rdesktop on Linux…but I digress). But then I recall there being mention awhile ago of an e-commerce engine in there somewhere, and that doesn’t seem to fit. So I have no idea, but we’ll find out soon enough, I suppose.

A-post-a-month is just wrong, and I apologize. So much I want to say about random things, as always, and/but life is too crazy, as always, so for now I’ll just drop this random note and hopefully follow up on other stuff later.

Came across this writeup by Bob Cringely on Apple’s recently announced plan to move to Intel hardware in a year or so. Bob smells a merger in the air, with obviously huge industry repercussions. Interesting read.

This probably won’t mean much to most folks who stop by here on a regular basis, but I put it up mostly in the hopes that it might be useful to someone out there trying to figiure out what their code is doing.

We use ColdFusion in one of our projects at work, and we’re still stuck on CF 5. I’ve been tinkering with writing a few custom tags to make use of the excellent PsTools package from SysInternals using the cfexecute tag, and I’ve discovered a few interesting things about cfexecute.

First of all, the obvious annoyance — in CF 5, cfexecute doesn’t provide a handy way to capture any output in a variable. You either give it an output file or it will display its output to the generated page, which means the only way to capture it in a variable is to wrap the cfexecute call in a cfsavecontent tag (this has been fixed in CFMX 6.1, which adds a ‘variable’ attribute to the cfexecute tag). But hey, I can live with that. It’s not clean, but it works.

The next interesting thing is that cfexecute will take the first output it receives and finish executing, regardless of whether the called command is complete. For example, the first PsTools command I wanted to integrate was Psinfo, to find out things like the system’s uptime. When you run Psinfo, it displays a few lines of copyright info and pauses while it queries the system for information. Cfexecute will grab this initial output and return, ignoring anything else the process might return. Which, among other things, means it’s not waiting for an exit code from the command. In this case I was able to get around it because the initial output from Psinfo is apparently on StdErr rather than StdOut. So I made a batch file that calls Psinfo and pipes StdErr to a temp file (does Windows have anything like /dev/null?), and then deletes the temp file. Cfexecute then calls the batch file (actually it calls ‘c:\windows\system32\cmd.exe /c psinfo.bat’) and receives the correct output, which I then chop up and stuff into a struct for later use.

However, I encountered this two days ago, and I tried to reproduce the problem set just now to make sure I wasn’t crazy. Unfortunately I may have strongly suggested the opposite because I can’t reproduce it, so YMMV. This is maddening…

Anyway, the next one I am sure of, which is that when cfexecute is capturing and returning the output (rather than piping it to a file using the ‘outputFile’ attribute) there is a 4Kb (which is to say, 4096 character) limit on how much it can hold. The effect when running a command that returns more than that (like, say, pslist) is that cfexecute will fill up its buffer, wait until its timeout has expired, and throw a timeout error (which you can, of course, cfcatch), leaving the actual command running indefinitely, waiting to give the rest of its output to someone who isn’t listening anymore. This too has been fixed in CFMX, but for CF 5 it seems the only answer is to use cfexecute w/ outputFile, followed by a cffile read and a cffile delete. Talk about ugly…

Everytime Andi and the girls go out of town to visit grandparents or something, I always end up staying up later than I intend to, tinkering around with one thing or another.

This time it was trying once again to put a cap on the firehose that is comment spam. I found James Seng’s plugin for using a captcha in the comment submission form, and after a bit of tinkering got it to work. Yes, it’s one more step for you to tell me what you think, and I apologize for that, but after several days of cleaning out hundrends of comments hawking all manner of things for which I can’t even begin to hazard a family-friendly description, I just got sick of it. There may be other solutions that won’t require the active challenge-response you see now, but…well, who knows when I’ll get around to playing with that.

For now, I’ll just have to keep an eye on my inbox and see if it worked or not.

After I get some sleep…

I can’t get this out of my head. I came across a news item this morning on MSNBC about a UN-commissioned public service spot on stopping landmines that’s hardly getting any airtime. Turns out I’m a bit behind the curve on this one, as news of this hit the blogs over a month ago:

The explosion appears to kill and injure some girls, sparking panic and chaos among parents and other children. Shrieks of horror are heard through much of the spot, and a father is shown cradling his daughter’s lifeless body, moments after celebrating a goal she had scored.

It closes with a tag line reading: “If there were landmines here, would you stand for them anywhere? Help the U.N. eradicate landmines everywhere.”

It’s not a graphic video at all — just a puff of smoke and dirt, chaos and confusion, and a limp body. But it still manages to connect at a very visceral level. You can talk about landmines all you want, but there’s something about a visual depiction that is so much more effective at getting the message across.

A little too effective for the tv networks, it seems. We enjoy our reality tv, as long as it’s not too real. We can watch movies like Saving Private Ryan, because that’s history and wasn’t it tough back then? We can even handle live footage of a war going on (now with New Improved Embedded Reporting!), because that’s what soldiers are paid for, as long as it doesn’t get too graphic. But the hypothesis that you and your family can be going about your everyday life and suddenly lose a leg or, you know, a child, because someone buried a landmine fifty years ago and forgot about it? And the truth that for far too many people in the world that’s not a hypothesis but their reality? That people really live like that? No, that’s a little too close to home. Thanks, tv networks, for keeping our bubble firmly intact. Thank goodness we didn’t have to collectively think about that one.

Whatever. I’m still shaking from seeing the video. StopLandmines.org has the streaming video (Windows Media format), or you can get the 8Mb Quicktime version here. Yes, it’s disturbing. That’s the point.

Craig offers a link to a Christian doctor’s thoughts on end-of-life decisions, and I thought it was simply too good not to share it here. Very insightful and clarifying. Enjoy.

Interesting article over at Newsweek on the history of the resurrection of Jesus, and the theology of the early church. It’s a fairly even-to-positive portrayal of the subject matter, and makes for worthwhile reading. Thanks to chambrook for the tip.