http://www.order-order.com/2008/07/hain-brought-to-book.html

The news that Peter Hain is working on a biography of Nelson Mandela disappoints Guido. Guido was hoping that Hain, who already has a criminal conviction for conspiracy, might work on a follow-up to his 1984 book, Political Trials in Britain (still available on Amazon.)

There should be an opportunity to update it with topical first hand reports.

That is if the CPS decides, for once, to prosecute a politician who breaks the law. Scotland Yard has handed over the file to the CPS. Just to re-cap, over a hundred thousand pounds of money was mysteriously laundered through a slush fund called the Progressive Policies Forum. Nobody had heard of this before and none of the donations were declared. Steve Morgan his campaign manager blames everyone else, Hain blames him. We all eagerly await their day in Court...

http://archive.gamespy.com/comics/dorktower/images/comics/dorktower659.gif

Dork Tower by John Kovalic

Current Comic

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001147.html

When you join a team, it's important to bend your preferences a little to accommodate the generally accepted coding practices of that team. Not everyone has to agree on every miniscule detail of the code, of course, but it's a good idea to dicuss it with your team and decide on overall approaches and philosophy beforehand. It promotes team harmony, and more than that, it's just common courtesy. As they say, when in Rome, do as the Romans do.

I've always been wary of cowboy coders who rolled into an ongoing project on fresh horses and immediately started dictating terms. It's a very short trip indeed from there to Who Wrote This Crap, and the predictable, inevitable finger-pointing at the foolhardy programmers who came before you begins. Don't be that guy or gal. Work with your team, not against it.

Still, there are some coding preferences people may feel.. strongly.. about. If that's the case, try to clear the air and address those strong preferences up front, as early as possible. Don't let them simmer. For me, the use of #region is one of those things. I tried to make myself clear in this twitter message:

So what is #region? It's a named hint you place in C# or VB.NET code to set a code folding point. Any code placed inside that region is, by default, collapsed when you re-open it in the editor. Here's a random example from the Log4Net project:

Immediately I have a problem: I can't see anything! I have to manually expand those sections to browse any of the code in this class. It is possible to configure the Visual Studio IDE to not fold any of the regions when files are opened, but this is the out of box behavior, so that's what most developers will see. And of course there are keyboard shortcuts to deal with the regions:

Here's the really sick part: once you expand the above log4net code there's literally three pages worth of code there! After you strip out all the massive XMLDoc comments and the dozen or so #region directives, you could have had all the code at your fingertips with a minor flick of the mouse wheel, in a simple scrollable layout.

I daresay being able to see the damn code is more important than having it meticulously segmented into six pointless little named buckets, but apparently a lot of programmers can't get enough of stuffing their code into pointless little named buckets. It's as if they've forgotten what the scroll bar -- and incremental search -- is for.

The #region directive drives me bonkers. It's not evil, per se, but I feel it is criminally overused in practice and heavily prone to abuse. I strongly urge you to think about how you're using code folding, because as I see it, there are a lot of downsides:

1. Folding directives are glorified comments. #region has zero meaning to the compiler; it's a hint to the editor to allow code folding. It doesn't do any namespacing or scoping. Why, exactly, are we writing code to accommodate the editor? It boggles my mind that we'd add significant lines of code to our project that do nothing but offer organizational hints to the editor. Even traditional comments are a better value for your keystroke, because they can be more expressive. And folding is certainly no substitute at all for bona-fide refactoring.

2. Folding is used to sweep code under the rug. Got a bunch of boring boilerplate code that makes your eyes water? A slew of ugly, gnarly code that nobody in their right mind wants to look at? Hide it in a region and fold that sucker into oblivion! Problem solved, right? Hardly. Your project is now full of crappy code that you can't see. That's worse. Much worse! Code that hides from you is code that will rot in the most putrescent and painful way possible. Your code should be front and center at all times -- exposed to as many programmers' eyes, and as much healing light, as possible.

3. Folding is used to mask excessive length. The presence of folded code can lull developers into a false sense of what clean code looks like. Under the cover of folding, you can end up writing long, horrible spaghetti code blocks. If the code needs the crutch of folding to look organized, it's bad code.

4. Folding can hide deficiencies in your editor. The presence of so-called "standard" boilerplate regions like "Public Constructors" and "Public Properties" and "Events" is not a feature. It's a bug. The editor should automatically offer to fold up these common structural blocks for you! I'm continually amazed that programmers spend time doing this scutwork when they could be writing useful code. Or at least demanding a smarter code editor.

I urge developers to write code that doesn't need folding to be readable, clear, and concise. I'm sure there are sane uses for code folding out there somewhere, but I rarely see them.

http://sideshow.me.uk/sjul08.htm#07071310

It looks like the wingers are ready to go after Obama on drugs, now that they've found that passage from his in his own voice from the spoken-word version. Hugh Hewitt played it on his radio show, where he talks about having used drugs "enthusiastically", and there is speculation that we could be hearing it in anti-Obama ads. (There is also a passage where he is laudatory toward Rev. Wright and quotes from a sermon in which white folks' greed is identified as a problem. Oh, dear.) (via) No that it is likely to hurt him with libertarians, who are mostly okay with drugs, and increasingly seem to like him better than McCain - so much so that they actually seem hopeful that he will be another Bill Clinton. And Montana, of all places, seems to be turning blue.

Oh, great, now we have states wanting to help you wear your Christianity on your car. Time to demand an equivalent FSM design.

The British had a perfectly good way of counting votes, but then they decided to fix it: "there is insufficient evidence available to allow independent observers to state reliably whether the results declared in the May 2008 elections for the Mayor of London and the London Assembly are an accurate representation of voters' intentions.""

http://www.bennee.com/~alex/news.php?wl_mode=more&wl_eid=1069

The weekend has been a full an entertaining one, involving doing some entertaining as well as being entertained. It started on Friday with a visit to another one of our local pubs, The White Horse. We headed down after work to meat up with some work colleges as well as ex-work colleges I hadn't met before. It turned out Sarah, being an HR person and used to remembering names and faces, asked me if I had indeed gone to Sawston before informing me me she was in my year. Unfortunately my memory of my years there is more than clouded by intervening years but we exchanged a number of names that did ring bells.The pub was very nice too, and a landlord who knows his beers and gets a good selection of short-run guests in :-)

We headed into town on Saturday to do a little wardrobe re-stocking and picked up a new Le Creuset pan for the evening. We had both sets of parents over for an evening meal and bridge. Many comments on the cleanliness of the house were made and we felt very adult about our new home. It seems a good time was had by all which was nice.

Fliss was given some tickets to finals day at Wimbledon so Sunday was spent down in SW19. Unfortunately we didn't have centre court tickets but did catch the Boys Singles Final and a little doubles action before the traditional Wimbledon rain storm. We caught some of the main match on Henman Hill although it was very crowded. After the second rain delay we decided to head back to Cambridge and the warm comfort of the house. We caught snatches of the main game at the station and they were still playing when we got home so we caught to catch the end of a fantastic match before catching up with the finale of Who.

http://www.order-order.com/2008/07/let-them-eat-crusts.html

http://www.order-order.com/2008/07/marr-gets-all-aggressive.html

The Indy this morning has an interview with Andrew Marr, this passage made Guido laugh:

"I can be exceedingly aggressive when I want to be," he says, claiming that encounters with Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling on his Sunday morning BBC1 programme, The Andrew Marr Show, "were as aggressive as any interview you will have seen for a long time".

Yes we all remember that aggression when a nervous Gordon Brown gave him an exclusive interview immediately post Gordon's attempted coup d' etat and was a crucial opportunity to get to the truth. Gordon's fingerprints were all over it, he was clearly lying about his knowledge of, and attitude to it. He had even met Tom Watson on the eve of the putsch. It was clear for all to see and Gordon was in difficulties. Nick Robinson, Paxman or Andrew Neil could have crucified Brown, Frost would have ambushed him silkily. Even Ant and Dec would probably have scored a goal. What did Marr do? This pathetic interview was the political equivalent of fellatio. Marr had an open goal yet Gordon left smiling and relieved.

It was hardly a fearsome interrogation that revealed Gordon would not be having an election., more a summons for an official communique delivered by Marr (see picture above). The eve of premiership biopic in Kirkcaldy was more soft-focus than hard questions was hardly aggressive. Marr may now regret being a patsy, but that is what he was, so spare us the false claims to aggression Andy. The reason he is Brown's preferred interlocutor is not because Brown is courageous...

http://www.dictionary.com/wordoftheday/archive/2008/07/07.html

http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/blog/2008_07_01_archive.asp#3272307198496728100

http://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=1180

Today's comic goes out to my buddy Theo who looks a good ten or fifteen years younger than he actually is.

So I saw Wall-E this weekend and goddamn if it is not the best animated movie I have seen in a long, long time. I exhort you to go see it if you haven't already.

See you tomorrow.

http://xkcd.com/446/