Curiouser and Curiouser!

ID cards to use 'key database' of personal info. Blunkett blanket trawl By John Lettice . [The Register]

This whole "biometic-ID cards will save our asses" stuff thing is a lot of old hooey.

Organized criminals will, as they always have, use their financial muscle and, where necessary, blackmail, to get valid ID's or insert phoney data into the system. If anything happens to go wrong with your data you, the ordinary blighted citizen, will be screwed since the government will argue that nothing can go wrong.

In this age of decentralization the governments big idea is to put all the data into one big centralized database? I think it's amazing, amazingly stupid that is.

And let's just consider for a second how responsible we think they'll be with this new toy:

"Of course the state should have, on occasions, the right to information about individuals," he says. "But what safety measures have been put in place? This is not paranoia about being found out. It's a reasonable concern in a democratic society. This government has proved as bad as any other in terms of protecting rights of privacy." [The Guardian]

and:

As long ago as 1990, Sir Nicholas, then a senior high court judge, now a law lord, warned: "If the information obtained by the police, the Inland Revenue, the social security services, the health service and other agencies were to be gathered together in one file, the freedom of the individual would be gravely at risk. The dossier of private information is the badge of the totalitarian state." [The Guardian]

Giving the government more powers doesn't work. Haven't we learned that yet? They keep telling us how with a little more power they can fix the problem... they've been telling me that for the last 32 years. Has it worked? I think it's time for a change and it starts with saying no to Blunketts latest stupidity.

Radical software customization. The always-interesting Sean McGrath has a great column this week about software customization. He says, in part:

In order to stay sane, most programmers concentrate on the part of the problem they are working on today. As a consequence, their view of what pieces of the functions under development need to be parameterized and which do not, tends to be a quite low level. Indeed, most of the items programmers will chose to parameterize will amount to double dutch to the business analysts. [Sean Mcgrath: The mysteries of flexible software]

In the companion blog entry Sean gives the example of a Jython script that he used, instead of an XML configuration file, to parameterize a piece of software. It illustrates, by example, one of the points I tried to make in my recent IT Conversations interview with Doug Kaye. Dynamic languages are a great way to record data when a solution is fluid and requirements are evolving. And, come to think of it, when aren't those things true? ... [Jon's Radio]

I've seen the power of this approach too.  When I needed a way to run-time configure a customised Reflection package I was originally going to write a configuration file, maybe a .properties file or, since everything must be XML these days, use some cool XML syntax.  Just as I was gritting my teeth at the thought of parsing XML to read in class names, light dawned!

Took a leaf out of the Dyanop book I decided to use a BeanShell script instead. A simple modification to the Reflector class makes it execute a pre-defined script when instantiated.  Before the script runs the Reflector statically imports a method called registerClass into the scripts namespace.  The configuration file is then a simple script as follows:

// Generated file - Do not edit!
//
// This file configures the Db4o activator reflector package.
//

registerClass( com.evectors.persistence.samples.SampleComposite.class );
registerClass( com.evectors.persistence.samples.SampleType.class );

Job done!  If the reflector ever requres more advanced configuration options I can just add the appropriate methods to the Reflector class and import them into the script namespace.

And, best of all, not a hint of XML in sight!

How to fold a T-shirt in 2 seconds.

Some of you probably have seen this my wife showed me this video that has been going around among Korean-American mothers: a Chinese video showing how to fold a T-shirt in 2 seconds. The technique works for long sleeve shirts too but takes a couple of seconds longer. Although I am pretty much a typical male chauvinist pig when it comes to house chores, this video was so amazing it actually made me want to fold some T-shirts! Wow.

[Don Park's Daily Habit]

Holy folding shirts Batman!

If you own any Dell computers, or have ever had the misfortune to need Dell customer service then you owe it to yourself to take a stroll over to I Hate Dell which is a site run for disgruntled current & former Dell employees.  It makes for fascinating, if depressing, reading.