Human hex. Gary Bernhardt has an interesting idea for human-readable encryption keys. Entering hex keys like ‘61aa60e43a5e7fdb4b86a4897b52a0dc’ is an excercise in counting sky-scraper floors. Gary solves that by encoding them to read like ‘BUSY BARN RUB DOLE TAUT TOOK ALTO PRY KIT WALL MUG CURT’. Not short, but definitely something you can read & paste.
Thinking, then typing. Guilty as charged:
If you are spending more time writing code, than thinking about what code you should write – you are doing something wrong. Very wrong. Or it’s something trivial enough to not be of much importance. Or it’s Java.
Thinking in types. Worthy as its own post, Nostrademons’s overview of typing strategies:
So basically, there are 4 dimensions:
- Static (expressions have types) vs. dynamic (values have types)
- Strong (values cannot be coerced to other types without a cast) vs. weak (the runtime performs a variety of coercions for convenience)
- Latent (no type declarations) vs. manifest (type declarations)
- Nominal (subtyping relations are declared explicitly) vs. structural (subtyping relations are inferred from the operations available on types)
Not quite SOAP. A sign of things to come?
So does this mean an about face for WSO2? Of course there is the famous April 1st blog from Sanjiva, but you can’t take that seriously! I don’t think you will see WSO2 dropping SOAP anytime soon, but these releases certainly signal a broader approach to SOA than just WS-*.
Year in review. And to end the year, a little Google mishap:
Google Reader: What part of “shared” and “public” did you not understand?
Teh People: Raise a hand, all who did not read “Burning Chrome“!
Lots of good wit spent on this incident, but my favorite is Paul Kedrosky’s overview of Social-Networking Tea-Pot Controversies, 2007:
But it wasn’t secure, of course. It was just a dopey feature, poorly implemented, and badly documented. In other words, it was normal software. And when Google finally, you know, made the Sharing feature share things — it linked your sharing feed to your address book — people got all pissy because a feature created to drive blind sharing of content with relative strangers began making it easier to blindly share content with relative strangers.
Hell, to adapt a cliche, hath no fury like that of a software user whose software newly works the way the documentation says it will.
Above, even Savage Chicken fears change.