Unto the pure, all things are pure

(I will justify shortly that) to most people, the set of things in the world is divided as follows (not to scale): Things I do not know Things that I know Figure 1 For the past thirty years or so, I have always assumed that the set of things is as follows (not to scale): Things (I know that) I do not know Things that I know Things that I do not know that I do not know Figure 2 I spend most of my waking hours tranfering things from the yellow zone to the pink zone.  It is only too easy to lapse into Figure 1 thinking if I lower my guard. Why do I think most people think like in Figure 1? I draw this conclusion from the ridicule poured on Donald Rumsfeld from almost 100% of the press. Some thought it was poetry ! The BBC called it bizzare .  I don't know whether to believe that the British Plain English Campaign doesn't understand what Mr Rumsfeld was saying.  It appears that people do not realize there is a Figure 2. To me what Mr Rumsfeld sa...

For almost five thousand years, we were certain that the sun rose in the east and set in the west. People went about planning a day's routine based on this knowledge that the sun moved in the sky around the earth. No one was hurt or killed even though our understanding was badly wrong. Newton put forth many laws of physics that govern almost everything we do. We build bridges, skyscrapers and aeroplanes based on those laws. No one has been known to be injured or killed because any of Newton's laws were faulty. But 300 years after Newton, Einstein's theory on relativity showed that Newton's laws were wrong! Newton was right only if speeds were slow.  Luckily the rocket scientists had time to make the adjustments before sending people to the moon. So, we can be right but still be wrong, and be the none worse for it. We can be wrong in totality, but if our application of knowledge is restricted to the scope of what we know, it is possible that we can still be s...

Finally, today I see someone with similar views. See Programming is a Super Power . You might have discovered that I too started with assembler on 8-bits.  Survivors from that bygone era respect power, or rather the lack thereof.  Some of us are stupid enough to always optimize every line of code in the head, mentally mapping the compiler output to IL to Intel opcode, notwithstanding that the entry-level CPU is running at a billion instructions per second in each of its four cores.  Most of the time we are proven right, as any application beyond the trivial will become sluggish when one relaxes and indulge in "easy" code, no matter how BIPS you may have. With today's hardware and the enormously rich class libraries, I am continuously thrilled by the amount of heavy lifting that a single line of innocuously looking code can do.  It must be like flying a jumbo plane - little movements on the stick maneuver 350 tons just like that! After a while, it becomes addi...

IE9 is out today and web sites have sprung up benchmarking it against Chrome, Firefox, et cetera. 100 years ago, the lunch time conversation probably centered around who's got the fastest car, and if yours was 38mph and mine was 42mph I get the looks of envy and admiration. About 50 years ago, people forgot that cars came with a maximum speed limit. Because whatever roads there were, and whatever you wanted to do, every car could go faster than what the other restrictions impose. Here we are at IE9 on an entry level consumer PC with quad-cores and a billion instructions per second per core, who are these people talking about browser benchmarks, and what are their motives?

The great thing about Visual Studio is that it pampers you, by doing a fantastic job on your behalf to hide all the nitty-gritties.  The downside is that when you depart from the default values/names/settings, you may not know what manual changes are needed. If you have read Keith Elder's article about WCF, you will understand what a Boeing 747 you have.  And you need a lot of new skills to pilot such a plane.  I would like to share some basics about web.config/app.config that I learned the hard way. The new section of interest in the configuration file is: < system.serviceModel > .   You can have nothing in this section, and everything will simply take on certain default values.  The commonly used elements in this section are: <services> <bindings> <behaviors> <services> The < services > section defines the web services you want to publish. (On the client's web.config, you would not have this but a < client ...

After two years, the age of my Nokia E-71 showed.  The main shortcoming has been the display size.  The good and real keyboard has made it impossible to go higher than 320x240 without increasing the thickness of the phone. So I got myself the Samsung Galaxy S recently.  It is a very good copycat of the iPhone 3GS, down to the packing box.  What did they say about imitation and flattery?  I am speculating that the next version of the Galaxy would, like the iPhone 4, have rectangular instead of curvy edges on the sides. I have not used the iPhone other than testing it.  I find Android much more usable compared with my experience with the iPhone.  The menu and back buttons on the Galaxy S are really handy.  The Program Monitor gives me a very visible state of my phone.  If control equals power, I am power-drunk.  People like me would have difficultly living under the yoke of Mr Jobs. The biggest jump in capability has to be ...

[As at January 2011, this web site cannot be viewed from within China.] Lord Carrington explained it most clearly when he said that English speakers do not call Moscow Mockba. I see two fundamental misunderstandings on names and languages. First, English speakers do not need the permission of the CCP to decide how to name the capital of China in English . English speakers do not seek Italy's permission when they call Roma Rome. The list goes on. Similarly, Britain does not, and cannot, insist that the Chinese do not call London 伦敦 but London. Britain cannot object the French from calling that same place Londres. President Obama cannot command that the Chinese call him 奥峇马 instead of 奥巴马. In summary, if users of a language decide to name something X, no one else from another language can come and say it must be Y instead. Second, the capital of China in Chinese is 北京, not Beijing. This second point may be a bit subtle.  "Beijing" is 100% not a Chinese word. C...