Daily Archives: August 25, 2004

Is Code Obfuscation another nemesis of the open source community

Tools

Once again, I’m getting it from James (though he and I agree to respectfully disagree with each other) for *considering* the DotFuscator Community Edition that is bundled in with Visual Studio .NET.

Here are his posts:

http://www.artima.com/forums/flat.jsp?forum=155&thread=67231

http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/blog/blogView?showComments=true&entry=3270899203

James is a passionate guy. I’m just a curious girl.

Yahoo Toolbar – Where the f did *that* come from

Tools

I explicitly chose to put the google toolbar in my i.e.. I *never* installed a Yahoo toolbar and I was never asked. It just appeared out of nowhere. That ticks me off – quite a lot. What’s going on here? Is Yahoo being run by the we-are-going-to-take-over-your-computer Real Networks, now? I wonder if it was because I went to a website that uses MacroMedia Shockwave and I said yes to installing that but changed my mind and aborted.

Well, here’s another pretty picture for you, Yahoo..

Single-Sex education – in grade schools?

Just Rambling

Interesting article from CNN . I had no idea this was being done in grade schools. I went to a women’s college, Wells, and I can definitely attest to the fact that I found myself definitely able to focus on my studies and start definining myself as a human being rather than worry about how I looked in class or would I sound too smart or too stupid…

However, there were a few geeks in my high school that definitely turned out to do some cool stuff that I wouldn’t have been exposed to if I were at a single sex high school. One perfect example is Dan Schwinn, who started a company called Shiva Corporation in the early 80’s that was eventually purchased by Intel. Now he’s into aerospace technologies, heading up Avidyne, a company he started with the dream of bringing high-tech instrumentation to moderate airplanes.

 Dan was definitely our “bar” in high school as there was a group of us who were interested in math & science (oh my god, I just realized, I’ve been a geek all my life – eeeek!) and he was clearly the smartest among us and I also think the most self-confident, in those troubling days of high school social politics, as well. But it wasn’t all geek all the time. I think our poor mother’s drove us to ski about 6 or 7 days a week during the winter!

I went off to a small liberal arts women’s college and Dan went to MIT (oh, shock!) and I remember hearing that he was coming home during college breaks driving a Porsche because he was already doing some amazing stuff for some high-tech companies during the summers. In the late mid-80’s, I was working in the marketing dept for a magazine (already doing lots of programming related stuff). We were heavily invested in Macs as one of the first companies to do a lot of in-house computerized graphic work, and I remember that Dan’s company had the back cover ad of MacWeek (or something like that) every single issue! I’m talking about the 80’s. It was not the norm for 20 somethings to be doing big stuff like this, so it was pretty notable.

Obfuscation – are we using DotFuscator Community Edition?

Tools

I just received an email from PreEmptive, the makers of DotFuscator. This is the obfuscation tool that has a “lite” version embedded into Visual Studio. Their email pointed me to a survey they are doing and based on the questions, I wonder if they are not seeing a lot of Visual Studio users upgrading to the Developer or Pro editions and they are trying to figure out why.

I *know* that obfuscation is  another level of security that we can all leverage. I *know* Microsoft has made it really easy by putting this “lite” (Community Edition) version into Visual Studio.NET. So, raising my hand, yet again as a typical developer – writing custom corporate applications that are not being put out in the market place – why have I never touched  it, used it, thought about it? I have even listened with fascination, as Brent Rector talked about obfuscation on DotNetRocks (his company, Wise Owl, also has an obfuscation tool called Demeanor).

I know with the many many things we are learning all of the time about .NET, for me at least, this is one of those items that is “on my list”. It just hasn’t bubbled to the top yet.

Update: is this about opensource (or lack thereof)? Not in my mind, but since James thinks so (my interpretation), I thought I’d point to his post about this post. 

VS2005 debugging on tabletpc?

Tablet

On whatisnew.com, Lora points out a (reprinted) InfoWorld article by Tom Yager on VS2005. In it he says:  “While testing remote debugging, I learned how well a Tablet PC works as a debugging console”  but he does not elaborate. I wonder what he means? I don’t have these bits on my tablet, as I am using it for current tablet development (VS2003), testing and presenting, so I haven’t experienced the combination of VS2005 and tabletpc. However (and this is big) I have no expectation of programming in tablet mode – not when I can type as fast as I do!

VB6 int() oddity

Just Rambling

I just noticed this when doing some testing in a VB6 app:

(green is expected results, red is unexpected)

?int(88.941*1000)
 88941
?int(88.932*1000)
 88932
?int(88.929*1000)
 88929
?int(88.931*1000)
 88930

huh?

?88.931*1000
 88931
?int(88931)
 88931

So what is up with that value 88.931? I’m sure there is some background processing that explains it. But for now I’m going to have to do a kludge with something like this to ensure my return values are correct

x=88.931*1000
?int(x)
 88931

In case you were wondering…I am using this to begin with to get around possible rounding problems.