A posting at Jeff Atwood’s Coding Horror discusses project names. There have been some famous project names throughout the years. Longhorn and Orcas should both be familiar to Windows developers.

Naming servers is a little different than naming projects. Once you name a server, you are probably stuck with that name for years and years. While you are also stuck with a project name, the project will (hopefully) be completed at some point in time.

People inside and possibly outside your department and organization may refer servers by name. So might software.  DNS definitely alleviates some of this.  However, changing the name of a server is never a great idea, so coming up with an adequate name from the beginning is always a good thing.

There are a few of schools of thought on naming computers that I have encountered in my career.

1. Name a desktop computer based on the person using the computer.
   This method usually ends up just being the person’s domain login. If your name is John Smith, your domain account is probably jsmith and your computer is probably named, you guessed it, jsmith.
2. Name a computer (server) based on its function.
   Pre-Win2k domain days, it was not uncommon to have machines named something like PDB or BDC, for Primary Domain Controller and Backup Domain Controller respectively. Mail is a popular name for the mail server, etc.
3. Name a computer based on a random scheme.
   One customer site I visited had machines like QB1Z2. This had no meaning other than the fact that no other machine on the network had the same name.
4. Name a computer based on location or department.
   In very large organizations it can be handy to be able to *find* a computer, especially if you are the IT guy. A hospital that I visited (a customer) had machines like Triag001 and ER004.  This allowed IT staff to quickly find machines.  Where is Triag004?  Well, it must be in triage!
5. Name a computer (or often a server) based on a predetermined naming list.
   This method is usually used for servers. I have seen the Periodic Table of Elements used at two different jobs sites. Imagine a mail server named Helium, or a file server named Oxygen. At one site a server was named Upgradium. At one of those two sites just mentioned, all of the externally-facing machines were named after local lakes. I thought this was a pretty good idea for two reasons. First, it was easy to remember if a given server was in the DMZ or could be seen (attacked) by the outside world just by the name. Second, people outside of our organization (partner businesses, etc) probably did not have a knack for remembering elements, but they might remember the name of a local lake.

In the end, I think all of these except #3 are fine ideas.  I personally like #5 for servers because it gives developers and IT staff something fun to do: come up with lists of names.  Its always fun to refer to servers in this fashion as well.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is currently suing AT&T for violating the rights of its customers and a number of other Americans. AT&T (allegedly) illegally captured internet and phone traffic at one of its data centers in California (and maybe elsewhere) at the request of the NSA. There was no warrant for these wiretaps, and the wiretapping was (allegedly) done on the phone lines of US Citizens. A brave AT&T engineer turned whistle-blower named Mark Klein brought all of this to light.

Boing Boing posted a link to an excellent EFF Video by Mark Klein on what he and the EFF allege was occurring at AT&T’s data center, and about certain members of Congress trying to grant retroactive immunity to companies that may have illegally cooperated with the NSA like AT&T. It is worth noting that QWest told the NSA to shove it.

I don’t ever want to get too political on this blog. If you read anything that refers to a politician or some other political statement, I am *probably* joking around. But this is something that truly is disgusting. First of all, the NSA should never have done this (allegedly). And second, AT&T should never have gone along with it (allegedly).

A coworker sent me this link.

http://granades.com/2007/05/02/loltrek/

It combines LOLCats with a famous episode of Star Trek.

A fellow developer (lets call him George) recently made me aware of a static function in Microsoft’s Regular Expression namespace in the Regex class called Split. I had not been aware it existed, but George informed me that if I wanted to split strings that were delimited with more than one char that I had to use this Split function instead of another, better known Split function, in the String class. This is wrong (both functions work), but it highlights a problem with writing an inconsistent API, especially one as popular as .Net.

Split and Join are two of my favorite string functions in any language. They rank right up there with Substring and Trim. Split is used to create an array of strings from a single string, splitting on a delimiter character or string. Take the string “Blue,Green,Red,Orange” as an example. Running Split on this string using “,” as the delimiter would create an array of length four, holding the strings “Blue”, “Green”, “Red”, “Orange”. Join works in reverse. Join will take in an array of strings and a delimiter (“,”) as arguments, and return a single string.

In .Net, Join is a static member of the System.String class, and Split is an instance member of that same class. This makes good sense when one thinks about it. One must first have a string to split it (member), and one needs access to a function without having to instantiate a class to join a set of strings (static). The Join method follows a kind of factory creational pattern.

So far, so good. I like what Microsoft did making one an instance member functions, and one a static member function. But that is where it ends. You would assume that Split and Join would accept the same types of arguments. For example, if one accepts a string as a delimiter, the other should accept a string as a delimiter. Not so.

It is these types of inconsistencies that bubble out during the initial release of any technology. .Net 1.0 was a huge milestone for Microsoft back in 2001. You may or may not recall those days, but Sun was taking a lot of developer real estate away from MS with Java 1.1 and Java 2.0. In my opinion, Microsoft was behind the 8-ball. When getting a massive API out the door that will be the development platform of the company for the next 10 – 20 years, one can be forgive for making little mistakes.

Still, I find things like this annoying. Why not fix a few of these glitches in .Net 2.0? There should be a simple overload of Split that takes 1 string argument (the delimiter), just like there is a simple overload of Join that takes 1 string argument (the delimiter) and the string array to join.

As an example, imagine our string from above is “Blue~|~Green~|~Red~|~Orange”. In this string, “~|~” is the delimiter. The solution is to use the instance method of System.String, Split, passing as an argument an array of strings to use as delimiters. The most common usage is to send an array of length one.

string[] theSplits = myString.Split(new String[]{“~|~”}, StringSplitOptions.None);

To further complicate things, this overload (the simplest that accomplishes what is needed in this example) takes an often-unneeded, second argument. Why not just have the following, MS?

string[] theSplits = myString.Split(“~|~”);

The point I am getting to here is that the most obvious overload that should exist doesn’t, and so “George” from above became confused and went looking for another split function. I have to give him kudos for looking in the Regex namespace. I try to think of things like this when I am writing code that other programmers will use. I *try* to write my functions in a consistent manner so that once a developer knows how to use one, they know how to use them all. A good guide to doing this is Microsoft’s own Framework Design Guidelines book. They learned a lot while doing .Net 1.0, and formalized their design guidelines for internal use and then decided to publish them. This is a common reference whenever I get in a discussion about variable naming, etc, with fellow developers.  I highly recommend the book.

Microsoft really should add the obvious Split overload to the String class. And with the C# 3.0 Extension Methods, you can do it for them.

Disclaimer: The Framework Design Guidelines link uses my Amazon affiliate membership, so I get a few cents if you purchase it with that link. The book is fairly popular for a tech book so you can probably find it at your local bookstore, B&N, Borders, or Bookpool.com as well as Amazon.com.

I have been through a few programming languages in my life. In 6th grade my father got me a Commodore 64, which used a flavor of Basic. Later on in Junior High I took a semester of Basic on Apple II, and messed around with a little QBasic in High School. I really fell in love with programming my first semester of college. Every freshman at SDSM&T was required to take Fortran. The next semester I changed majors to Computer Science and started learning C, C++, Assembly, and once learned Pascal to help a girl I liked with her homework. Because I knew several older guys that went to work at Microsoft, I also had gotten some experience with Visual C++ and Visual Basic. In particular, I remember VB 1.

Once out of school, I hopped into Microsoft’s Visual Basic 5 and Active Server Pages. I also dug into Java 1.0. Soon .Net came out, and I was in VB.Net. But when Microsoft released .Net, they created a brand new language called C#. To my eyes, C# had everything good I liked from Visual Basic 6 and Java 1.1. The common language runtime looked, at least to me, like an improved version of the Java runtime.

I have found myself dabling in other languages over the years. I have gotten into PHP, Ruby, Python, Tcl, and others. But I always feel at home in C#. The additions they made to the language in the C# 2.0 release only added to the language, as will the C# 3.0 changes, when it finally comes out of beta.

A lot of programmers I have met over the years have a similar story. The languages they have cycled through are often dependent on what school they attended, their age, and what their employers were using. But the path usually resembles, in nature, the one I described. Many people find their way to a language they love, the way I love C#.

O’Reilly has a great poster detailing a lot of programming languages, spanning from Fortran in 1954 to our modern languages as of 2004. I see it posted once every 6 months or so at Digg or Slashdot, or one of the handful of programming blogs I read. It details the various connections between languages, and their general histories. As usual, Wikipedia has a fine collection of articles on the subject including A History of Programming Languages and A List of Programming Languages, broken down by timeline, category, generation/relationship, alphabetical, and non-English languages.

It has been spring errrr fall cleaning this weekend. While my wife and I have been under the weather, we have still managed to get a lot of old stuff out of the house. Some of it has gone to the trash, some of it to Goodwill, and some of it I will be taking to work to see if someone wants it.

While my wife has mostly been cleaning out old clothes and shoes, I have been concentrating on old computers and books. As I mentioned in a previous article, I like to buy tech books. I also have a difficult time letting go of old machines. But as technologies become antiquated, so do some of the books I have purchased. And the old computers break down.  It is even hard to justify keeping some of the really old hardware I have that is still functioning.  Do I really need a seven-year-old Linux desktop sitting in my spare bedroom when I can download one of 1000 Linux VM images from the web and run it on much nicer hardware.

I ended up throwing out three old computer cases. In two the motherboard had finally gone kaput, and the power supplies we too ancient to do any good with new components. There were also a number of cards like WinModems, 10/100 NICs, and a lot of old, old RAM, and other worthless components. The whole lot are sitting in my garage, ready to be taken to the curb on trash day. I have really turned into a notebook guy anyway, and if I do decide to build a desktop in the future I kept my best case.

Pictured here is a stack of books with which I am parting ways. Many of these are VB 6 books, and related technologies. Also, I have a few certification books. I was really into certifications a few years back. I am a big believer in certifications for young developers. I know my certs got my foot in the door on a couple of jobs.

I figured out that I spent around $700 for that pile of books. That is a bit depressing, to think that one can spend that kind of money on books that have become relatively worthless. I am never going to program in VB 6 again. I am never going to go after any of those certs again. And there are several other subjects that are now out-of-date.  I don’t even want to think how much money I spent on the hardware!

It feels good to jettison so much baggage.  The technology industry is all about change.  My wallet might be a little harder to open the next time I want to buy a computer, knowing that in less than 5 years it will be completely ancient. But when I do buy it and get it home, I will probably be too happy to care.  And I will go through all of this a few years from now.