The Shoes of the Fisherman's Wife Are Some Jive-Ass Slippers

Fri, 18 Feb 2005

Z400 Installation

I installed my Z400 this morning. I plugged it in to the TV, configured it and updated to the latest firmware over the Internet without too much hassle. As mentioned in one of the reviews, there is no way to configure a ESSID or WEP key using the configuration wizard but this is supposedly fixed in the latest firmware revision.

There's a small amount of user interface crack though. Zensonic's combo-box widget (i.e a list of alternatives of which you can choose one) is a bit hard to use. There is a red ball next to the currently selected option which has really tiny white up and down arrows to indicate that there are more choices to be made. A more traditional implementation, maybe a dropdown list, I think would work better.

The next step is to install the Windows server software in VMWare and start figuring out how to write a Linux replacement. Should be fun. It's supposed to be based on the Universal Plug-and-Play standard which, after a bit of research, looks like some XML over HTTP thingy.

The Programmatic Horseman of the Apocalypse

From Slashdot:

Absolutely every single time I see HN in use, I quickly end up learning that the programmer who wrote the code was an idiot. On at least two separate occasions, I've had to correct C code with HN that did not allocate space for the null terminator on any strings anywhere in the code. That's pretty much the level of programming talent you can expect when you see HN in use.

Conversely, I have never seen any code using HN which I looked at and thought to myself "Well that's a sweet way to solve that problem!" Not even once have I ever seen an elegant algorithm expressed in code written with HN. Not one single time.

As another poster puts it, "I'm Hungarian, and a progammer, you insensitive clod!"