Archive for March, 2007

Law of Demeter

Saturday, March 31st, 2007

From Wikipedia: When applied to object-oriented programs, the Law of Demeter can be more precisely called the “Law of Demeter for Functions/Methods” (LoD-F). In this case, an object A can request a service (call a method) of an object instance B, but object A cannot “reach through” object B to access ...

HOWTO Decompose your code into functions

Wednesday, March 28th, 2007

For the sake of keeping code readable and as comprehend-able as possible, good functions comport to a few simple rules: Give it one purpose. And the counting of the purposes shall be one. Not two purposes, not three purposes. Five is right out. Continuing with the theme of having one purpose, subtasks ...

Nobody in here but us chickens!

Tuesday, March 27th, 2007

Dmiessler makes a good point I'd been meaning to make myself: the axiom against 'security through obscurity' is often taken too far. First of all, any kind of cryptography, whether the algorithms are publicly known or not, always ultimately relies upon 'obscurity' in the form of an unrevealed piece of ...

Thine desktop runneth over

Monday, March 26th, 2007

I don't have to be Aunt Tillie to crave a simpler desktop computing experience. Whether I'm using Windows, OS X, GNOME, or KDE, my current work flow gets tangled as I juggle several open folder windows, half a dozen instances of Firefox with 30 tabs between them, a text editor, ...

I hate Macs

Monday, March 19th, 2007

Continuing a discussion of desktop UI from the previous post. Be clear that most of what follows applies equally to Windows and the Linux desktops; my point is that Apple popularized these ideas and the others----misguidedly----still follow Apple's lead. Compared to Microsoft, I don't especially begrudge Macs for their existence, and ...

Fuck Aunt Tillie

Sunday, March 18th, 2007

The Linux community is often accused of being poor at catering to non-expert users, but this is a misdiagnoses. Contrary to myth, the community is not full of old Unix beards demanding the rest of us master perl before they give the rest of us the time of day. Surely, ...

A brief explanation of Java versions

Saturday, March 3rd, 2007

How does one make sense of Java's version history for learners? The full story is at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_version_history, but here's the brief version: First be clear that that there is only one Java language---one set of syntactical rules for how to write Java code. This set of rules has grown a few ...