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Defying Classification

Malcolm Tredinnick's blog

Thoughts About Two ReleasesDecember 1

In the past week, two software releases have caught my attention for various reasons: Wordpress 2.6.5 and MySQL 5.1 GA.

Thus, a couple of observations about some aspects of the two releases. Nothing that hasn't been noted elsewhere here, but I wanted to write down what I'd been thinking about.

Wordpress

"You are handed a large PHP codebase. Do you choose to run away and use practically anything else, or stay and fight on behalf of humankind?"

Given its popularity and feature base, it's probably not too surprising that security holes are found in Wordpress with reasonable frequency. Every package has bugs. Web frontends to databases tend to have bugs that have large consequences.

My experiences from reading the codebase to make small customisations or fix bugs for friends and clients has been that it's reasonably easy to read and logically laid out. I haven't seen a lot of evidence of any symptomatic negligence in the way it's written. There are a few inconsistencies, but, again, every codebase has those, because code is developed over time. End of the day, practical experience shows that the product works, is easy to use (hence popular) and relatively well-supported, all things considered.

The Good

An interesting security problem was found. Interesting because it showed how server-side c

Removing The Model-View-Controller StraitjacketNovember 30

Here's a summary (no, seriously!) of a collection of notes I've been making for quite a long time about the infamous model-view-controller architectural style. I keep intending to post it during some quiet period when there isn't a parallel "MVC furore" debate going on somewhere, because it isn't a reaction to anything. However, such lulls do not exist, it seems, so time to publish.

It seems to be traditional to add a note that if you disagree with me, that's fine. In this case, though, if you disagree with me, you're claiming that there's no ambiguity or misunderstanding or misuse of the term and pattern MVC. Since there's lots of evidence to the contrary, I would suggest that if you disagree with me, you need to do more reading. I'm not taking sides (here) on which of the many alternatives might be correct; I'm identifying the problem. Pretending that an issue doesn't have two sides just because you don't agree with one of the sides is, I'm sure, one of those styles of debate that has a fancy Latin name and all the validity of "proof by aggressive hand waving".

This is a fairly long piece with a lot of offsite linkage. For those with short attention spans or things that you want to get done today, here's the capsule summary:

• We have this term that everybody likes the throw around. Unfortunately, the only clear definition (the historically documented one) is not how people commonly understand the term MVC. In fact, there appears to

Bob Wade, 1921 - 2008November 30

A few different chess news sites and blogs are carrying stories this morning that English IM Bob Wade passed away overnight.

Bob was a really nice guy and a living connection to so much chess history. I met him for the first time in London in the late 1990's and then a couple of times since. Most memorably, when he made the enormous trip from England to Queenstown, New Zealand in 2006 to play in a tournament. That's a seriously long couple of flights for anybody, let alone an 85 year old. He didn't leave the hotel in Queenstown, so I spent quite a few hours talking to him over tea in the mornings before games. Great sense of humour, a million and one stories, and a willingness to listen as well.

The Week In Chess has a nice obituary on its front page at the moment, although there's no permalink to the item, so it will move away from that link over time. Hopefully a more permanent one will appear.

Shaun Press has a game that Bob played against Sydney's Frank Crowl in 1945. I'll add one other story with a connection to that era: in the Gibraltar tournament in January, 2007, Bob played one of the top Australian players, David Smerdon, and was defeated. He mentioned in the post-mortem that the last time he lost to an Australian was 1949. Admittedly, he hadn't played a large number of them in the interim (although he play

Chess Players Can Be So DumbNovember 27

I don't write a lot about chess here, since more than a small amount of national and international chess involves politics and it's all fairly nauseating. But, at times, it becomes a little hard to resist pointing out the obvious. I'm not going to discuss Australan national chess here, since I've more or less given up on the national organisation some years back and I can't see how that can be salvaged. I still follow international chess events for entertainment.

During the recently completed (finished a couple of days ago) Chess Olympiad in Dresden, there was a press conference with former (2005-2006) world-champion Veselin Topalov. He came up with some of the dumbest answers from a smart guy that I have heard for a long time.

FIDE (the world chess body) went through their almost traditional farce of announcing yet another change to the way they would determine the world champion. Topalov commented that he doesn't see why anything should change and how that is unfair and inconsistent. Such unfair and inconsistent changes, he conveniently neglects to note, is exactly why he is even involved in the current world championship cycle. Topalov lost to Vladimir Kramnik in a match in Elista in 2006 and the terms of the match were that he would then be out of the current cycle. FIDE then made a few shuffles (possibly redefining the term "cycle", it's hard to tell) and gave Topalov preferential treatment by giving him an automatic match against the winner of the la

The Art Of Max PayneOctober 22

After being brought down with an ear ache over the last few days, I felt vaguely human again yesterday and wanted to get out — anywhere but here! — for a while. So I wandered around the city a bit and ended up going to a movie, since Tuesday is cheap day in Sydney. The only movie on was Max Payne, about which I knew nothing beyond having seen the trailer. The movie itself was nothing special. I'm not a good judge of that sort of "game to movie" conversion, but it seemed like a fairly formulaic plot and standard ending. Nothing special, but I had no real expectations to begin with and I don't mind the occasional really bad movie, so I didn't feel entirely ripped off. As a movie on its own, it's something like 4 or 5/10. This isn't a review, though

One aspect stood out, once I realised didn't need to exactly concentrate on the storyline: It was a beautifully filmed and edited movie, outside of the action sequences (which were a bit "blah"). Almost as if a comic book was being filmed. This is really a combined piece of work from the director of photography and the editor (providing the images and then weaving them together), along with possibly/probably some post-production CGI teams.

I can't think of a Hollywood-style movie recently where negative space has been used quite so well, without making everything just seem dark and confusing. That's hard to pull off because there needs to be something go