Lately I've noticed how impossible it is to talk about Object Oriented Programming without peppering your conversations with scholarly-sounding acronyms. I don't know if we programmers just like to sound smart or if we see it as part of a special club of sorts. As my good friend Anonymous once said, "If it is Computer Oriented and if it doesn't have an Acronym, then it doesn't exist" That being said, here is a list I comprised of acronyms that are related to OO or have come up recently in blogs about OO. See how many you can identify, and comment with any additional ones you think of.

[More]

Can anyone tell me why there is no widely adopted protocol for instant Messaging software? Every web browser and web server use HTTP. Want to transfer files with your favorite FTP client? No problem, they all use the same protocol. What about sending and receiving E-mails? There's always POP3 and SMTP. Telnet and SSH are the same story. Sure, there's some different flavors, but most all clients are interchangeable. Why then, must I sign up for AIM, Yahoo, Skype, ICQ, and MSN just to keep in touch with everybody? Trillian sure helps, but I still have to have all those accounts. Why? Why can't we all just get along?

If you missed it, Jeff Chastain put up a very interesting post over at Alagad's Blog. Also good was the "spirited" discussion that followed between Barney and Peter Bell. I don't know how I feel about all of it, but the entire thing is very fascinating.

[More]

I was working on a friend's multi-meter today and found myself needing to run to RadioShack. I'd rather not elaborate why I needed to fix my friend's multi-meter. It involves a test lead in the Ohms plug, 120 Volts AC, 2 blown fuses, 1 smoked capacitor and me. Suffice it to say I set out to fetch a new ceramic capacitor with radial leads, measuring 82 pico farads that wasn't shorted out.

[More]

Today over lunch I was recounting my first hour on the World Wide Web. I was in middle school (I'm 28 now) and we had visited a friend's house. He told me if I was good he would give me one free hour on The Web.

[More]

So as the SQL injection attacks have rained down on my server for the past few days, my logs have been steadily filling up with data about the requests. Frankly, the data probably can't be trusted, it's all totally un-scientific, and doesn't really lead me any closer to the people responsible for the attacks. Regardless, I think it's pretty interesting. I've compiled some graphs and stats here.

[More]

I love infinite loops. They're sort of the black hole of programming. No one really knows what you code does when it reaches the last iteration of an infinite loop, but I speculate it has something to do with String Theory and unbounded time and space increasing proportionately to the rate of dense matter being compressed by gravitational forces so strong even light can't escape. Well, that's what I came up with off the top of my head anyway. Speaking of infinite loops, I found one happening on my server today.

[More]

So, I assume you've heard the latest buzz about DNS Cache Poisoning and the subsequently released patches. It's rather interesting, and a bit unnerving that the "patch" for now simply makes the exploit harder to pull off-- not impossible. I guess that's basically because the patch simply makes name server requests more randomized. Anything more would require an overhaul to the DNS protocol itself.

[More]

In the beginning was assembly, and it was with the programmer and it was good. Through it all programs that have been made were written, without it no programs were written. The compiler shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it. Then came a design pattern sent by Alan Kay, its name was OOP.

The other day, someone asked me a really dumb question. "Why are there so many programming languages? Why don't you just all use one?" Ok, that was two questions, and they aren't really dumb, but I felt kinda' dumb trying to answer them.

[More]

Here's a couple functions you've probably rarely used in ColdFusion: bitand(), bitor(), bitnot(), bitxor() etc. Frankly I've rarely needed any of them, but this week I did find a clever use for bitand(). I was messing around with a simple database-driven calendar I put on my church's website because I promised them a reoccurring event feature. I needed a simple way to store 12 "monthly" checkboxes without using 12 columns in the database.

[More]