Channel 9 - Discussions by John Melville-- MD

Coffeehouse - Thank you Mr. Jobs. I guess.

John Melville-- MD — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 04:04:27 GMT

kettch said:

Blue Ink said:

*snip*

Is it quite so bad to make it different than anything else? This whole touch thing is very different than anything we've had to deal with before. Of course "yuck" isn't a good response, so "different, but without the yuck" would be good.

I second the request to see what the mothership would like us to be doing with touch based UX. We've seen that touch can work well at a small scale on phones, and at a larger scale on Surface. The only thing missing is at the scale that tablets are made in.

Another complication in this whole mess is that pen is a whole different game than touch.

I am currently developing a pen+touch app on the HP Touchsmart TX2, which supports both technologies. Both are different from mouse and keyboard, but are different from each other. For example.

With the pen, icons on the extreme right hand side are hard to click (for right handed users) because you can't rest your hand on the screen to click them.

Target size is smaller with the pen than the fingers, but not as small as the mouse.

Occlusion is not as much as a problem with the pen. People are used to writing with a pen and looking at the result as they go.

Palm rejections work very poorly (on my machine) so switching back and forth between modes is difficult.

If Charles interviews someone about touch designs, I would love to hear how they consider the pen in the whole design equation.

Tech Off - Can I launch a program when a FOLDER is double clicked

John Melville-- MD — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 05:55:52 GMT

Sven Groot said:

I think a better approach would be to store your data in e.g. a zip file with a custom extension so your app can recognize them, much like Word's .docx files are actually zip files.

Thanks for the tip. I actually not only thought of that, but implemented using the .net package library. A few problems came up.

1. The .NET package library performs very poorly in a highly multithreaded enviornment, and trying to serialize my data accesss was turning into a whack-the-mole bug farm that wasn't working. (I often have multiple audio streams and photos comming in from multiple devices simultaneously, multithreading is a must.)

2. The .NET package library has a particularly egregious bug that if you don't close it right, it throws an exception and leaves the file in a completely unreadable state. The software threw one of those bugs at me just as I was printing the results of a 6 hour long forensic consultation. I swore I would never use a data store that didn't support transactions. (So I could guarentee that the worst clicking save would do is take you back to the last save point.)

3. Beleive it on not, renaming a file from .pda to .zip is a little to complicated more complicated that some of my collegues want to deal with. (By expert here we mean medical experts, who are by no means computer experts.)

4. WPFs media player will play from a file, but not from an arbitrary stream. It would be nice to be able to hand a video file to that componet and have it just play rather than trying to jimmy it into working with a stream.

Anyway your solution is very good, and had a lot of positives running for it. If I could find a ZIP library that did in place zip file modifications, was transactional, and was threadsafe, it would be the perfect solution. Given that no such library is forth comming, I was hoping to find a hack to make it work.

Tech Off - Can I launch a program when a FOLDER is double clicked

John Melville-- MD — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 03:19:15 GMT

I write software to assist medical professionals in collecting evidence in cases where children may have been abused. I have an interesting problem with data storage.

I would like to have my "data file" actually be a folder. My files are large (200+MB) and contain multiple JPEG, WMA, and (soon) WMV streams. I would like to use the file system to manage this stucture because that's what the file system does best.

Furthermore, when my district attorney discloses my data file to the defense (like we always have to) I want it to show up as a completely normal folder so that the defense experts (who presumably don't use my software yet) can quickly see that its just a directory structure full of file formats they already know about. Since we always disclose evidence on read only media I am not worried about the defense modifying the folder.

I am worried, however, that my own users will muck with the files in the folder, and my software is not robust to this possibility. (Right now I am using a SQL CE database that is pretty hard to modfy outside of my software.) I also want to have a real easy "just click on the file and my software opens up" experience.

Is there any way to make a folder look like a file? By this I mean that when you click the folder in the shell my software would open up instead of the shell opening a new shell window with the contents of the folder. It would be very nice if I could replace the folder icon with my own, this would make the disguise sufficent that any users who manage to open the folder in the shell are sufficently skilled to be held responsible for their own misery.

Thanks in advance for any assistance

Coffeehouse - Programming as a hobby?

John Melville-- MD — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 02:54:42 GMT

I am a completely hobbiest programmer.

BS/MS in computer science and then off to medical school for me. I dream at times of writing software for a living, but no one will pay me to write code what I can get seeing patients, so oh well.

I write software on my own time to relax. Maybe some day that will be useful to someone. Who knows?

Tech Off - USB cannot read barcode scanner

John Melville-- MD — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 19:32:33 GMT

Years ago I worked with a "wedge" PS2 barcode scanner. It had an odd property that it HAD to have a real keyboard connected to the "outbound" port of the scanner, even if you weren't going to use it. (IT was reallty annoying to have an extra keyboard lying arround when the laptop keyboard worked just fine.)

I was wondering if you did the same thing I did. Use it on your desktop with a "real" keyboard plugged in, and then use it on the laptop all by itself. For me, plugging in a real keyboard fixed the issue.

Coffeehouse - world's fastest computers

John Melville-- MD — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 02:05:13 GMT

jason818_253.33 wrote:

So the question is, can you think of a real world situation where the human mind and human networks are used as a way to solve a world problem?

Yes ... Its called :

Most of the people who go to work every day. I personally sit down with seven other doctors (incredibly bright people I work with BTW) and we work out problems of medical diagnosis and treatment. (Which, despite many people's best efforts, no electronic computer does very well.)

I think the analogy of the computer to the brain is fundamentally flawed, because the brain is not a computer. Computers have a remarkable ability to store and retrieve information with bit level accuracy that no human can match. Ditto for computation and database query. Humans, even very young humans, have visual perceptive and pattern recognition skills that tax even the largest computer system.

Excuse me, I gotta go "network" with my wife.

Coffeehouse - But...Linux is.....Unhackable O.O

John Melville-- MD — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 06:23:11 GMT

Xaero_Vincent wrote:
Here are some useful tips a guy on slashdot posted to help protect your Linux severs in addition to the things I've mentioned:

Run a hardware NAT firewall/router. Any ol' Linksys, Dlink or Netgear thang will do. Just remember it's not the be all and end all to security problems.
Open as few ports as absolutely possible. I have nothing open on my router except port 22 and BitTorrent, and I don't leave BitTorrent running all the time
Check your logs at least once a day. Look for any suspicious signs -- missing log entries, ssh connects you weren't expecting, services running that you don't normally have running, NICs going into promiscuous mode unexpectedly, excessive mail being pumped through any MTAs, etc.
When running OpenSSH, I disallow password authentication. This prevents problems with users due to the use of stupid passwords. My sshd only accepts a valid RSA key exchange as acceptable authorization.
Regularly update and run rootkit checkers. These are not be all end all, but they help spot obvious rootkits
Make cron jobs that regularly scan your system for unusual permissions -- world writeable, binaries that are setuid, etc. and for suspicious files. There are programs and scripts that will do this for you. STFW or check with your distro.
Perform MD5 checking on your files and executables, espcially.
Regularly check your /etc/passwd and /etc/group files for new or unusual entries.
Don't run NIS -- it's inherently insecure. You should be using OpenLDAP if you need directory authorization on your network.

umm ... Excuse me -- I really don't want to do all of that. I really don't want to do all of that every day. I don't know about you but I spend all day seeing sick people for a living; and I program computers its so I can do that better. When I sit down at my computer I want to do what I want to do, not defend my pc against the evil internet I cannot live without.

If linux requires me to do all of the above just to be safe on the internet then linux is broken.

Coffeehouse - Hey, um Rory...

John Melville-- MD — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 02:53:57 GMT

I feel compelled to mention that just about all the advice about drugs in the prior post is extremely poor medical advice. The reason he can't find a doctor to implement it is thay any doctor who did would (and should) lose his or her medical license.

Coffeehouse - Windows 7 coming soon...3 years

John Melville-- MD — Sat, 21 Jul 2007 03:43:12 GMT

Cybermagellan wrote:

CNET Article

"Microsoft is planning to ship its next major version of Windows--known internally as version "7"--within roughly three years, CNET News.com has learned."

3 out years eh?? Can anyone say PDC!!!

Come on Microsoft -- Bring it on!!!

Coffeehouse - Hey C# Team..

John Melville-- MD — Sun, 01 Jul 2007 03:24:06 GMT

Check out TransactionScope. It does this exact function (minus some trivial flow control) without modifying the language, which most of us view as a bad thing anyway.

Coffeehouse - Coderush, who is using it?

John Melville-- MD — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 06:05:04 GMT

I use it, love it, and swear by it. Didn't know how much I would love it until I got it. Now I'm refusing to go to orcas until they do.

Runs great on my machine (AMD athalon 64X2 2 gb memory.)

It does take a while to grow on you though. Expect to have the training window open for a while and learn how to code "the code rush way."

I also love the references window, which I keep open on the right hand side of my wide screen monitor. Nice to be able to just glance over and see where the identifier under the caret is used. Gives a very intuitive, and admittedly error-prone, "am I making a big change or a small change" feel.

Code rush is of course only half the story, Works best with refactor which blows VS 2005 out of the water. Not only more refactorings but lots of tiny useful ones for "just cleaning up code" with less risk. I love the one hotkey "what refactorings can I do here?" feature.

Anyway for more gushing read their promo literature. But these products have made me much more productive and are very plesant to use,

Coffeehouse - WPF for Word Processor

John Melville-- MD — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 07:16:40 GMT

Bobinho wrote:

Interesting Andy.

We want to build a word processor that is aimed specifically at academics. We all come from a Mac dev background but we think there is a real need for a credible alternative to Word on the Windows platform.

I think what is bugging some of the people is that an simple and vaguely stated question is being asked about an extrodinarially difficult problem. While it is possible you are, jutifiably, trying to hide the details of your idea; it makes some of us wonder if you understand how difficult a task writing a word processor is.

I am using WPF on two real world projects, and it is certianly "production strength". It will reliably put text anywhere on the screen you want it to. You aren't going to use many of the advanced text or layout features anyway. If you're a word processor, layout and flow of the text is what you do and you wouldn't dream of handing over that much of your core functionality to anybody's library.

So yes, WPF is production grade. If your real question is "Can I spend a few months learning XAML and put out 'a credible alternative to Word?'" the simple aswer is: Forget it. The Word code base is over a decade old, with tons of little fixes for things that didn't quite work right, and now do. Word is actively maintained and enhanced by a large team of programers at huge expense. Your, or anyone's, inibility to duplicate that accomplishment, let alone exceed it, in a short ammount of time is not an indictment of WPF, its just a matter of fact.

I would be interested to know what makes word not an acceptable alternative for you. I have written academic papers for both computer science and medicine in Word without a problem. Word is very extensible. An add-in that provided the functionality you needed could turn a formidible competitor (Microsoft Word) into an asset.

The Sandbox - Bitmapeffects reprocessed sample

John Melville-- MD — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 02:18:12 GMT

I need to write a custom Bitmapeffect for a project I am working on and have sound a surprising absence of samples and details about how to make anything work. Even more depressing is that even after I found RGBFilterEffect in the SDK, it didn't compile, and then it crashed, and then it required com registration, and on and on.

Lou Franco presents an interesting idea that branches off the sample, write the BitmapEffect in C++/CLI and then you can package the managed and unmanaged code in a single assembly. Furthermore since the unmanaged half is living in the same assembly, a little bit of COM goo (that I frankly don't understand) removes the requirement of COM registration, and restores our favorite CLR x-copy deployment paradigm.

Unfortunately, Lou, doesn't give a complete sample and his code doesn't quite compile. I spent the better part of two days mucking around in C++/CLI, a language I don't really understand, to get everything pasted together and working. I thought I would share the result.

For those of you, like me who couldn't care less about the pipes and just want to muck with the pixels look in in the RGBFilterEffect.CPP CRGBFilterEffect::GetOutput

Coffeehouse - Vista or not to Vista

John Melville-- MD — Sat, 02 Dec 2006 19:23:06 GMT

Dual Booting Vista and XP. (Just waiting for Visual Studio with Refactor! and CodeRush to work well on Vista) Cursing every time I have to boot XP.

Coffeehouse - Basic Notation 1.0

John Melville-- MD — Sat, 25 Nov 2006 05:27:09 GMT

I think the biggest advantage of XML right now is also BN's biggest disadvantage and the reason XML gets bent into all kinds of wierd applications.

Xml already has parsers / generators / searchers ... etc on almost every platofrm that already work and have been very well debugged and field tested. Choose BN and you're on your own.

Coffeehouse - Mr. Sampson, you owe us $0 - Pay Up!

John Melville-- MD — Sun, 19 Nov 2006 04:16:31 GMT

jsampsonPC wrote:

Anybody else ever had an experience like this?

I had this exact experience. Back when I was just out of med school, I had no credit whatsoever. The power companyt made me pay a $100 deposit, which would be refunded after a year of on-time payment. Since my power bill at the time was about $40, a year later I had a few months of negative balances because they just creditted the deposit back to the account and I spent it off over a few months.

Coffeehouse - "your chosen programming language is not l33t enough"

John Melville-- MD — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 03:54:08 GMT

My computer science program was very different. The program was designed (intentionally or unintentionally) so that by the end of four years you had written graded assignments in each of about 20 programing languages. Occasionally you would be assigned to solve the same problem in different languages.

The faculty regularly told us that spending more than 4-5 hours to master a new language was beneath the skills of a professional computer scientist, and that we should be prepared to redily accept work in any language customers should choose to employ us in.

I have found this to be true. It takes a few hours to master how each language does the 5-6 things that all languages do and the 2-3 "neat features" the language has. After that its just learning the libraries.

Its also nice to be able to put an end to the "which language is best wars" with "what language would you like me to program in tomorrow?"

Coffeehouse - A new solution to Anti-Trust Version creep

John Melville-- MD — Mon, 16 Oct 2006 08:50:13 GMT

The EU has demanded that Windows be availaible without Media Player -- Hence the "N" versions.

South Korea has demanded a "K" version that lacks windows messanger.

The obvious version creep and testing matrix is simply getting out of control.

To effectively solve this problem I propose one cut down version to satisfy them all! Behold Windows "L" (for lame) edittion.

Its simple. Set up a website where government (or any 2 bit company) can complain about anything in windows. Say the word and Bam! its gone. Windows "L" just got a little bit lamer.

Just think about how much you could save in media and support by installing and running Windows L. Windows Lame edition: No Patchguard or Security Center for Symantec, No IE search bar for Google and Yahoo, well really no IE at all to satisfy Firefox and OS. Office Lame edition could have no PDF or XPS support, by default or for download.

We really should extend the new spirit of cooperation to all the other losers who have wasted our time in the past whining about progress. We could really make Netscape the default browser, presuming we could still find a codebase that actually compiles. Of course we couldn't actually run Netscape because there wouldn't be a GUI; a necessary concession to Apple's former legal response to Microsoft competition. I'd even remove the file system because the excellent minds at Samba couldn't reverse engineer it correctly. I hope you understand that I am really going out of my way to please everyone here.

There you have it, every legislator's dream: a completely unobjectionable version of windows and office. I think I will assist this effort by providing the entire, compilable source code, absolutely copyright and royalty free.

#include

void main () {
    // printf("Hello World!");
    printf("Windows Vista L Edition Version 6.0.0.1");
    printf("C:\");
}

Coffeehouse - Posting Old Memories

John Melville-- MD — Mon, 14 Aug 2006 02:42:00 GMT

I think I'll be a little bit of a maverick here. I really think the risk is quite minimal.

Point #1 -- child abuse by a complete stranger is rare. I work as a pediatrician, including a stint in a child advocacy center where we evaluate child abuse, and I've never seen it. The overwhyelming majority of abused children and abused by close associates or family members. (The rare cases of random kidnappings strike at a primal fear in every parent, including me, and get lots of media coverage. Theys till are, mercifully, quite rare.)

Point #2 -- kids are everywhere. If a perp really wanted to find a random kid to go perp on he (or she) really doesn't need the internet for help. There are far better ways, like listening to kids play at the local park to get names and interests of kids who are local, without the travel requirements of looking up kids on the internet. (Most of the children who are "lured" over the internet are middle and older adolescents, looking for sex with an adult, and in interactive contexts. Your project has none of these attributes.)

Point #3 -- the information you are talking about providing (picture and names. maybe some of the parents educational history) is pretty innocuous. There is concern about perps playing the "confidence trick" on young kids, but young children are very easy to trick even with minimal information you can get with observation, and very few older children will be impressed by a stranger who only knows their name and their parents' names.

In summary, I think a photos of your classmates with pictures and names of their kids are pretty safe. What I worry about more are websites that advertise that children will be vulnerable or away from their parents (like the birth registries that hospitals used to put up,) than websites that merely identifyt the existance of certian children.

PS: For all the niners who I know will flame me for thinking like a perp. Yes, I do think like a perp, as revolting as it is: it's my job! There really are monsters out there that prey on children and it is my honor and my duty of protect kids, and so I do my job well. So thanks in advance for processing this information like the adults we all are.

Coffeehouse - Microsoft can have fun too

John Melville-- MD — Tue, 04 Jul 2006 01:32:19 GMT

I really don't think its just a file integrity issue, although that is the easiest to mention, and the easiest to defeat.

Microsoft has spent untold advertising dollars to inform people that the only legal way to get Microsoft products is from a Microsoft Reseller. Many non-beta microsoft products are illegally distributed using bittorrents. To allow this one bittorrent to be legitimate would be taking all that advertising money and flushing it down the toilet.

Maybe I just think like a laywer, (although I am not one) but I am a lot more surprised that Chris Prillio thought that it would be tolerated than that it was eventually shut down.

Coffeehouse - Who is female?

John Melville-- MD — Tue, 30 May 2006 22:21:15 GMT

borosen wrote:

Does the channel 9 mascot of today even have a gender?

The channel 9 Guy is definitely male!

We see him in the mens' room doing his stuff standing up in one of the road to PDC videos.

Sorry . . .

Coffeehouse - Where do you honestly believe .Net to be in 5 years time?

John Melville-- MD — Fri, 19 May 2006 20:58:27 GMT

If its any indication, WinFX is programmed exclusively from managed code. They claim this is their API for the next 20 years, and that they spent 20 years tinkering with the last API gives that some credence.

Hence my predictions for .NET in 2011:
1) It will exist.
2) C# will continue down the road of "look dynamic without really being it."
3) Some beginning ideas on multithreadded paradigms that won't really work yet.
4) "The answer to all your problems" will be shipping in about eight months

Coffeehouse - uning goto statements

John Melville-- MD — Tue, 09 May 2006 01:48:57 GMT

I seen a parade of misinformed "instructors" warning me to not use a certian part of a language because its "dangerous," or hard to understand. The maligned programming contexts include everything from pointers, to the ?: operator but especialy GOTOs. In most cases this advice originates not from the properties of the language but the ignorance of the advisor.

Skilled programming in any language means knowing all the properties of all the constructs, and also knowing the common semantic implications of those constructs. It is pure lunacy to avoid portions of a language merely because someone else might not understand the full language.

Thus, it seems that all programmers know that too many GOTOs can lead to confusing, unmaintainable code. What it seems fewer programmers understand is tha occasionally a well placed goto can significantly simplify an algorithm, especially in deeply nested loops with middle exit points. The construct is not good or bad, it just had good and bad properties and can be easily misused. This is why gotos continue to be included in modern languages like C# and java even though their negative properties have been known for decades.

I have a bigger problem with the "well I'll just synthesize a goto with a try block argument." Perf concerns aside, this construct says the wrong thing. Exceptions semantically mean error handling, and using exceptions for control flow is going to confuse people becuase it is using a construct for the wrong thing. Its like using:

int i = 0;
while (i < 10) {
// do something
i++
}

instead of
for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++){
// do something
}

because someone told you that for statements are confusing. (And they are until someone explains them.)

I use unrestricted gotos very rarely, less than once a year. But to write any language element off as "bad" without reference to context or usage is just intellectual laziness

Coffeehouse - Subtitles?

John Melville-- MD — Fri, 17 Feb 2006 21:44:30 GMT

Manip wrote:

I just tried to transcribe the Gates interview and discovered it would take me AT LEAST 2 hours and would have a lot of mistakes in it. Plus it doesn't make a lot of sense on paper (e.g. "your you understand")

When the secretaries in my office do transcription they use special hardware. They have a foot pedal that will advance the sound foreward and backwards, without having to take hands off the keyboard. From watching them, it seems like this would be pretty essential to doing any non-trivial amount of transcription. I have no idea how much this hardware costs, but it might be an obstacle to a cooperative subtitling scheme.

Coffeehouse - WPF still optional on Vista?

John Melville-- MD — Mon, 06 Feb 2006 23:11:18 GMT

Am I the only one who gets it here?

It seems that for every microsoft operating system I've seen released since DOS 4.0 (which really was so bad people were downgrading to 3.5) there is some loud but insignificant group of naysayers announcing that there is insufficent "meat" in the product to justify an upgrade. (The first that I recall was a PC Magazine artice "I will not upgrade!," about MS-DOS 5.0)

And yet OS after OS after OS continue to be a considerable success. There have been no mass defections to apple or *nix, despite very active communities on both these platforms. Even the abomination that was windows Milenium Edition did not seem to be enough to hurt Microsoft's brand image or stock price.

So in summary, if you don't want to upgrade, please don't. Windows XP will still be supported for another 9? years for security patches. Your dissatisfaction that Microsoft shared some ambitious goals and then did not achieve all of them does not make the current incantation any less of an excellent platform.

For those of us who have been arround this block more than once, we've just heard it too many times!