If this works, it could have an impact similar to the contraceptive pill for women

My personal opinion is that the freedom women now enjoy comes a lot from the humble contraception pill. Indeed, who would have the resources to pursue a career, fight for their rights or have a life of their own if only the men would carry the responsability for sexual protection? The pill allowed women to break the recursive loop, so to say.

Now, men have used condoms for a long time, with various degrees of efficiency, though. Sometimes they break, sometimes mysterious holes appear in them, sometimes they are so annoying they are not used. The search for a contraceptive pill for men is ongoing, but even if some progress was made, it is not yet a usable solution.

Here come James Tsuruta and Paul Dayton with "A Sound Decision", a method which would involve placing your balls into a liquid, zapping them with ultrasound and become sterile for a specified period of time.

Can you imagine the social impact this could have?

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Error installing the .NET Framework 2.0 SP2 Security update KB974417

First of all, check the WindowsUpdate.log file found in the Windows folder. It should tell you how the update failed. Look for something looking like this: WARNING: Command line install completed. Return code = 0x0000066a, Result = Failed and later on WARNING: Install failed, error = 0x80070643 / 0x0000066A.

If you have the same error, check this article out: Fix KB974417 Installation Failure—Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Service Pack 2 Security Update for Windows 2000, Windows Server 2003, and Windows XP.

However, my problem was that I had NOT installed the KB976569 Windows update that the guy recommends removing before installing the new one.

I found this article: KB 953297 and KB974417 Fails to Update Through Windows Update that recommends a clean reinstall of the .NET Framework. Haven't tried it, though. I just didn't do the update. Probably when all hell breaks loose I am going to regret it, but at least I passed the message on :)

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Science of social networks

I am a great TED Talks fan, where most of the talks are impressively smart and useful and well presented, but this one I just had to embed. The title is a little misleading, if you ask me: The hidden influence of social networks. It is more about how statistical analysis on social connections yields all sort of interesting information about the human condition. Enough of this, watch the talk:

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Multiple controls, same ID, different containers!

I was minding my own business doing this ridiculous ASP.Net project and suddenly I am hit with: "Multiple controls with the same ID 'lbTitle' were found. FindControl requires that controls have unique IDs.". I was using this web control that contained two others, each of them having a lbTitle control.

If you think about it, it does make sense to throw this exception when the FindControl method is used in the parent control. Which control did I mean? But the error appears even if the FindControl is used inside one of the child controls, what is up with that?

As a secondary thought, I wasn't using any FindControl. It seems that what does is the AssociatedControlID property of the Label control. Therefore I will set the HtmlTextWriterAttribute.For attribute manually to resolve this. Pretty damn ugly, if you ask me!

Update: My fault! The controls needed to implement the INamingContainer interface. It's not that the ClientID was not different, but FindControl works by going to the NamingContainer control and finding then children by ID. Too bad that you can't just specify the ClientID and be done with it, but that's that.

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ASP.NET 4.0 allows CON, PRN, COM, LPT and NUL in the URLs

I don't want you to think that I started working on ASP.Net MVC, but this article about a 36 year trek through backward compatibility hell was really funny and needed to be linked. What is so funny, I guess, is that it is factual and the humour is in the situation more than in the article itself.

On a separate note, ASP.Net 4.0 fixed this issue with a web.config setting.

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Safely transfering files from a Linux computer to another

I wanted to build a script to copy some files from a computer to another. This can be done using a few utilities like:

• nc - for stream network transfer
• tar - for clumping all files together
• gpg - for encryption

Here is the quick and dirty version.
On the receiving computer:
nc -dl _MyPort_ | gpg -d -q --no-mdc-warning --passphrase _MyPassword_ | tar -xjC _DownloadFolder_

On the sending computer:
tar -cj -C _Folder1_ _File1_ -C _Folder2_ _File2_ -C _Folder3_ _File3_ _File4_ _File5_ | gpg --passphrase _MyPassword_ -c | nc _MyIP_ _MyPort_

In other words:
On the receiving side nc is listening on a specific port for a stream that will be passed through gpg and decrypted, then passed to tar which will decompress it and split it into different files in a specified download folder.
On the sending site the files to be transferred are clumped and compressed into a stream by tar passed through gpg and encrypted, then sent to a specified IP and port via nc.

nc and tar are standard Linux utilities. gpg must be downloaded and installed.

The scripts themselves are more complicated, but the gist of it is in here.

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Pro JavaScript Design Patterns by Ross Harmes

The book started really nice, at a beginner to medium level with which I could not feel neither embarrassed nor overwhelmed. The first chapter was about the expressiveness of Javascript and how different styles of programming could be employed to achieve the same goals. This part of it I would have liked to see expanded in a book of its own, with code examples and everything.

The second chapter was also interesting, comparing the interface style of programming with the options available inside Javascript as well as giving some real life solutions. Personally, I didn't think the solutions were valid, as writing the interface as comments and trying to enforce the interface inside methods and getters/setters feels cumbersome and "unJavascriptish" to me.

The third chapter, Encapsulation and Information Hiding, described object creation, private, privileged (not protected!) and public members, while the fourth was dedicated to inheritance. All these are great reading for a Javascript programmer, as they might teach one or two new things.

From then on, 13 chapters described various software patterns and their application in Javascript. Alas, since this was the explicit purpose of the book, I can't say I enjoyed that part of the book. It felt like any other rehashing of the original GoF book, only with the syntax changed. Well, maybe not quite so bad, but it lacked a consistency and a touch of the writer's personality that makes books easy to read and to remember.

That being said, the technical part was top notch and the structure of each chapter made it easy to understand everything in them. The software patterns described were: Singleton, Chaining, Factory, Bridge, Composite, Facade, Adapter, Decorator, Flyweight, Proxy, Observer, Command and Chain of Responsibility.

Overall, a nice book for reference, but not one that I would call memorable. An easy read and also an easy browse, since one can pass quickly through the book and still understand what it is all about.

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