Sarah Taraporewalla's Technical Ramblings » Uncategorized

YouTube is Flipped

Sarah — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 06:47:21 +0000

YouTube is offering you a great new experience to watch your clips with. Their new feature allows you to flip the image upside down! They are recommending you move to Australia in order to view your clips correctly.

Make sure you check it out today!

Australia to censor the internet

Sarah — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 08:37:15 +0000

If you haven’t heard of Australia’s plans to censor the internet, let me be the first to inform you. The current government has a plan “to force all Australian ISPs to implement server-based filtering systems to block access to ‘child pornography’, ‘X-rated material’, ‘violence’, ‘prohibited’ material, ‘inappropriate’ material and ‘unwanted’ material on a secret blacklist compiled by a government agency”[1].

Originally, the plan stated that the mandatory ISP-level blocking would be opt-out. However, Communications Minister Stephen Conroy has now revealed that there are no such plans to allow opt-out and that all users internet will be subject to filtering and blocking.

So, what is the big deal? Blocking child pornography – thats a good thing, right. Yes it is, until you look at the technology that they are planning to use. Apparently, tests have shown that the filters block the wrong content in at least 25% of cases[2]. The technology also needs to look at everything coming through (not just headers) to determine if it should be on the blacklist and the filter they use isn’t that performant – the internet will become slow again.

And lets not go into civil rights, freedom of speech or the beauties of an open internet. And exactly where will the draw the line. Today its kiddie porn, tomorrow: anti-government websites.; no blogs allowed – no opinions allowed.

It is good to see that the media seems to be behind the anti-censorship parties[2] and that protests and petitions are happening around all capital cities on 13th December : see http://nocensorship.info/ for more info.

Lastly, let me leave you with my letter of petition[3] to Stephen Conroy:

Senator Stephen Conroy
Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy
Level 4, 4 Treasury Place
Melbourne Vic 3002

Dear Minister,

As an Australian citizen and an internet user, I wish to advise you of my serious concerns about your mandatory Internet filtering policy.

Given the importance your Government has attached to modernising Australia’s broadband network, pursuing a policy that can only slow down and increase the costs of home internet access seems misguided at best. Australian households are diverse, and most do not have young children, so mandating a one-size-fits-all clean feed approach will not serve the public well. I don’t think it is the Government’s role to decide what’s appropriate for me or my children, and neither do most Australians.

Given the amount of Internet content available, the Government will never be able to classify it all and filters will always result in an unacceptable level of over-blocking. I feel that the time and money could be spent in better ways both to protect children and improve Australia’s digital infrastructure. Australian parents need better education about the risks their children face online. Trying to rid the Internet of adult content is futile, and can only distract from that mission.

Sincerely,

Internet User

Sarah Taraporewalla

Retrospectives for the code base

Sarah — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 06:49:14 +0000

At the conclusion of a lot of projects, we conduct retrospectives in order to gain a deeper understanding of the success factors of the project, discuss what could be improved and how to incorporate these into future projects.

How many of these focus around the actual design elements of the software developed? I have not heard of any projects which have had a post-development analysis, so I can only conclude that it is through introspection that good developers learn and improve. I wonder why teams have not done this retrospective analysis, or if they have why I haven’t heard of it.

I am approaching the conclusion of my current project, so I will be keen to try a technical-only retrospective, where we take a look at the various patterns we employed, and how effective they were in solving our problems.

How many O’s in Woolloomooloo*

Sarah — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 06:45:00 +0000

I am often asked how to pronounce my surname. It’s not too difficult, but for your benefit, I will now attempt at a phonetic guide to my last name.

Essentially, it can be broken down into 3 parts: tara – pore – walla**.

Tara

pronounced ta-ra. Like the girls name; like the house in Gone With The Wind (but without Vivian Leigh’s accent please.)

Pore

pronounced like pour or poor. The ‘e’ is silent.

Walla

pronounced wa-lla. Not wall-a.

Put it all together and you get : ta-ra-pour-wa-la

I hope that helps.

Please feel free to let me know how you thought it was pronounced or spelt.

* The title of this post comes from a riddle by C.J.Dennis:

How many O’s in Woolloomooloo?

Two for the W, two for the M

Four for the Ls and thats plenty of them.

(Woolloomoloo is a suburb of Sydney, Australia)

** Oh – and I have one vowel for every consonant (I always lump the double Ls together)

ReSharper – Saint or Sinner

Sarah — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 06:32:00 +0000

I love ReSharper. It makes life in Visual Studio such a breeze. You are just so productive in it, with all of its navigation tools, code completion and automatic refactorings. I tried to use Visual Studio without ReSharper the other day – it was so impeded that I swapped computers after about 5 minutes work (mind you – when I swapped, I redid the work in about 30sec).

But, sometimes I think ReSharper makes you, the developer, dumber. Or maybe not so much dumber, but definitely less in control of the code, and therefore makes the code wild and messy.

Before I used ReSharper, I had quite a lot of information about the code base in my head. I knew how classes connected, which files and namespaces they belonged to, what the model looked like. A file rarely got too long, because that would mean I would have to scroll through the file to look for my desired class. If something had changed within a class, like the addition of new methods, I would recognize it quickly regardless of whether it was in the code path I was following.

Now, I only find new features when I actively look for them. I find files that are quite long because I never look at the whole file, only the method that ReSharper brought me to when I used it to navigate a code path. I can’t describe how the classes are connected, what namespace or class individual methods are in. And the reason – because I gave ReSharper the power. I stopped being in charge of the code. I stopped inspecting the code base.

Are we too becoming lazy? Are we reverting back into old, bad practices because ReSharper makes it just so darn easy to use? Are we becoming dumber?