Yes, the New York Times is with it. So much so that they can pull off an ironic headline in full belief that they and their equally hip readers will all get the joke when they read this article.

Patent Owner Sues the Internet

We salute you, Gray Lady!

Actually

Well, it’s always fun to take a big shot to task, but in reality this article covers a not-so-funny lawsuit. You’ve probably never heard of Brightware Inc., Amy Rice, or Julie Hsu, but in 2002 they more or less claim to have invented automated email response systems, and were awarded US Patent 6,411,947.
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Angie’s List is a web site that allows consumers to see ratings on local service companies, such as plumbers, remodelers, electricians, and so on. All ratings are subscriber driven, and Angie’s List seems to make most of their revenue from the $5.95/month subscriber fee they charge - an anomalous revenue model in today’s web.

I subscribed to Angie’s List when in 2006 when I was in the midst of a batch of home projects, and found it pretty useful. When searching through the local ratings for a contractor or tradesperson in my area, I could usually find a least one or two highly ranked businesses, and they normally turned out to be as good as their ratings would indicate.

Angie’s List was useful, and provided a pretty good service for the price, but I finally dumped my membership this fall. Let me try to explain why.
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Exceptions are a necessary part of the C++ language, but for most programmers they are worse than worthless - they are unusable. When exceptions were first added to the language back in the days before standardization, they were seen as a brilliant improvement over the hideous setjmp/longjmp facility from ANSI C. Because exceptions unwind the stack when they are thrown, they call destructors and clean up all of your untidy messes as they go.

Tom Cargill

It didn’t take long for somebody to notice that the emperor had no clothes. In 1994, Tom Cargill published a prescient article in the late C++ Report. Tom pointed out in detail just how difficult it was to write code that actually held up when exceptions were used. Scott Meyers flags this as one of his five Most Important C++ Non-Book Publications…Ever. (Incidentally, Tom is responsible for a piece of wisdom that sounds like a an offhand quip: the ninety-ninety rule. Any project manager who doesn’t understand this rule all the way into his or her bones needs to quit. Now.)

The intervening years have not been kind to exceptions. The problems Tom foresaw in 1994 were real, and while they can be managed, writing exception-safe code is still fraught with peril. As a result, exceptions are basically unused by by most C++ programmers. After all, we have to deal with tough problems like writing safe multithreaded apps, understanding template metaprogramming, and dealing with the language’s high-maintenance memory management. The last thing we need is to make use of a feature, that while useful, is basically impossible to use correctly.

Naturally, after this rather verbose introduction, you have probably guessed that I’m using this article to tell you about a simple little utility class I use to help me throw informative, easy to build exceptions in my C++ programs. Yes, exceptions are problematic, but there’s one place I can use them with impunity: to cause a fatal error that aborts my program.
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Dr. Dobb’s Portal November, 2007 Article on DDJ site

As I’ve confessed in the past, I’m a sucker for word puzzles. My recent post on a Will Shortz puzzle from NPR Morning Edition ended up provoking a surprising amount of comment, much of it in the vein of Watch me solve it better, faster, and with more style using language XXX.

I certainly enjoyed watching other people solve the problem, and found their solutions instructive. As the XP crowd has figured out, we programmers spend too much time working on our own problems and not enough time watching how other people work. There’s a lot to learn, both good and bad, from getting a peek inside another person’s head.

Out of the Blue

Which brings me to the puzzle at the center of this article.
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I’ve bumped into this ad campaign from the sub-branded Visa Signature Card a few different places on the web. The ad trots out a list of “things to do while you’re alive”, (a bit of a tautology, isn’t it - I think they didn’t want to have the word die appear next to Visa in any context,) which includes such gems as Explore the Seychelles, Experience the Magic of Broadway, and the ever popular See California wine country from a hot-air ballon.

I looked at this list, and then went to the Visa Signature Living site to see all 31 items, and I came away with a total meh.

In fact, my blah reaction to this ad campaign has inspired me to create a counter reaction in the form of a contest, which will all be explained in a bit.

Us and Them

This ad just served to highlight a vague feeling I’ve always had, that the modern world is partitioned into us and them. You’re reading this article, so there is an excellent chance that you are a member of the us side of the partitioned set.

Without getting too You Might Be a Redneck If on you, you know you’re one of us if:

• You spend half of every holiday trip home performing tech support on your parent’s computer.
• You spend two hours every day on your RSS feeds and you still can’t keep up.
• Your pets make regular appearances on LOLCat sites.
• When you give your S.O. a surprise birthday present, you accompany it with a Boom!

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Chances are good that you don’t know who Richard Platt is. Richard was never in the business of self-promotion - had he been, he could have been a household name among the cognoscenti. But Richard didn’t spend his time talking to the press, speaking at conferences, or teeing up with the titans of industry. His passion was devoted to building great products and taking care of the people whom he asked to share that passion.

A Short History of VoIP

In early 1997, David Tucker and Richard Platt were running a division of Intecom called Incite. They were developing and promoting an innovative product designed to optimize the use of video on corporate networks, using a backbone of isoEthernet. I spent some time contracting for Incite, and believe me, in 1997 it was pretty cool to be able to watch four channels of broadcast TV on a PC. But the technology that made this possible, isoEthernet, was also the weakness of the Incite solution. Interface cards were expensive, and isoEthernet wasn’t compatible with emerging Fast Ethernet standards.

David Tucker

This could have been the end of the story, one that is played out daily in technology companies - a bet that didn’t pay off. But instead, a couple of remarkable things happened. First, Richard and David sat down and decided that their existing call processing software and engineering expertise could take a U-turn and instead produce a Voice PBX that ran over the network - all signaling and media would travel over the corporate network instead of using a separate wiring system. The software that had been routing multimedia traffic over isoEthernet would have to now route voice calls over IP, and a complete set of apps and hardware would be needed to complete the effort.
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Dr. Dobb’s Portal September, 2007 Article on DDJ site

Finding the Convex Hull of a set of points is an interesting problem in computational geometry. It is useful as a building block for a diverse set of applications, including thing such as:

• Collision detection in video games, providing a useful replacement for bounding boxes.
• Visual pattern matching/object detection
• Mapping
• Path determination

Just as an example, if one of the Mars rovers has to chart a path around a boulder, the convex hull can be used to provide the shortest path past the obstacle, given a map that shows the points where the boulder abuts the ground.

This article will go over the definition of the 2D convex hull, describe Graham’s efficient algorithm for finding the convex hull of a set of points, and present a sample C++ program that can be used to experiment with the algorithm.

The Convex Hull

There are many ways to draw a boundary around a set of points in a two-dimensional plane. One of the easiest to implement is a bounding-box, which is a rectangle that spans the set from its minimum and maximum points in the X and Y planes.

Creating a bounding-box is easy, but it doesn’t form as tight a wrapper as we might like around a set of points. Consider the bounding box around the three points shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1 - A standard bounding box around three points

We can certainly wrap those points much more tightly using easy-to-compute straight lines, and Figure 2 shows an example that is significantly more compact:


Figure 2 - A convex hull around the three points from Figure 1

As it happens, Figure 2 is a convex hull.
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Dr. Dobb’s Portal October, 2007 Article on DDJ site

This article discusses the use of C++ hash containers to improve storage of subproblem results when using dynamic programming (DP.) Memoization is a key part of dynamic programming, which is conventionally done by storing subproblem results in simple tables or lists. Using hash tables instead of these simpler structures will allow you to use dynamic programming while retaining your algorithm’s natural recursive structure, simplifying design and making your code easier to follow. I’ll provide a fully-developed example of an algorithm, and show how it can be adapted to use hash table memoization.
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It seems like this is the summer of multicore panic. I can’t open a technical magazine without some pundit declaring that our current programming paradigms are useless when running on new multicore CPU architectures. Venerable analyst John Dvorak, who generally actually understands what he is writing about, coughed up this mess (with minor excisions for brevity):

Nobody wants to face the fact that Linux, Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows XP, and Vista are based on OS designs that are as old as the hills …

Meanwhile, none of these operating systems has the power to make multicore chips work as advertised. In the end, these chips are little more than novelties. Intel actually has the gall to claim that its extra cores can save power by automatically shutting down when they’re not in use. This just means they’ll be shut down most of the time. If the software could take advantage of these extra cores, there wouldn’t be any need to shut them down….

Why can’t operating systems simply dedicate extra cores to housekeeping chores and cool background tasks? It’s simple enough to work. Here are a few choice uses for core dedication. There are six of them, since we may see a six-core chip on the road ahead.

According to this piece in Wired, things are even more dire than that:

The problem is that many software applications weren’t written for chips with multiple cores, and the hardware is advancing so fast that the software runs the risk of being left behind.

“You can imagine a scenario where people stop buying laptops and PCs because we can’t figure this out,” said David Patterson, a computer-architecture expert and computer science professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

People are going to stop buying computers? Panic indeed!
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My email address shows up in a lot of public places, including domain registration records, hundreds of USENET posts, magazine articles, and various web sites. As a result, it has been harvested by every spammer known to mankind, and I get a lot of bad email.

This includes more than just spam. I show up as the return address in tons of virus attacks. I have a Gmail filter that automatically trashes email that looks like this:

***********************
—————— Virus Warning Message (from gemini4.ieee.org)

Found virus Possible_VBSDrpr in file private.hta
The file is deleted.

If you have questions, contact virus-admin@ieee.org

***********************

Hi!!!!! You haven’t been writing for a long time. I began to worry) Where have you been? You remember, you’ve asked a progy from me? I’ve finally found it, so here it is. Check it out if this is what you’ve been looking for… bye

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