Dan McKinley
Math, Programming, and Minority Reports

John Dvorak Benefits from the Public Stupidity He Decries
July 3rd, 2005

Something has been bothering me about John C. Dvorak’s site for the last few days. This post in particular drove me to write about it. Here is a screenshot of the post. I would like to point out two things.

Figure (1) is John Dvorak complaining about public ignorance and stupidity. For this, I would normally applaud him. Figure (2) is John Dvorak profiting from public ignorance and stupidity.

Perhaps Dvorak isn’t in control of the content of that ad. If that’s the case, hopefully he’ll stop using that particular vendor. If he doesn’t, I don’t think there’s anything you can call this behavior other than every gadfly’s favorite insult, hypocrisy.

Some of the comments to his post are seriously pretty scary. Somehow, these people are allowed to procreate.

There is a slight parallel here to My God Problem, which is a thought-provoking article by Natalie Angier that appeared in Free Inquiry magazine. Simply put, the point is this: you cannot turn a blind eye to certain (popular) superstitions and still bemoan the public’s inexplicable distaste for evolution.

Four Irritating Lines of Code
June 25th, 2005

At many places in the framework, you’ll see properties of types named for the enumerations or types they receive. I was indifferent to that until just now.

I just wrote these four lines of code. It took much longer than it needed to.

BinaryFormatter f = new BinaryFormatter();
f.FilterLevel = TypeFilterLevel.Low;
f.TypeFormat = FormatterTypeStyle.TypesWhenNeeded;
f.AssemblyFormat = FormatterAssemblyStyle.Simple;

Consider the last three lines. None of the enumeration names are even close to the corresponding property on the formatter.

For all three of these, I typed out something like this:

f.FilterLevel = FilterLevel.

[No Intellisense, there’s a problem]

[Backspace repeatedly]

f.

[Intellisense shows up; oh, it’s “TypeFilterLevel”]

f.FilterLevel = TypeFilterLevel.Low;

Maybe the usability studies didn’t make it to System.Runtime.

Annoy Your Friends and Colleagues with Global Flags
June 23rd, 2005

Step 1

Open gflags.exe. It comes with the Debugging Tools for Windows.

Step 2

On the Image File tab, enter the name of a popular executable. Suggestions:

• devenv.exe [developers]
• outlook.exe [human resources]
• excel.exe [bankers and finance dweebs]
• iexplore.exe / firefox.exe [catch-all]

Step 3

Press tab to refresh the form. Check “Debugger,” and enter sol.exe in the textbox. Press ok.

Step 4

Bask in the hilarity of your sophisticated prank.