Lord Palmerston on Programming

There was a time when if you read by Peter Norton, you literally knew everything there was to know about programming the IBM-PC. Over the last 20 years, programmers around the world have been hard at work building abstraction upon abstraction on top of the IBM-PC to make it easier to program and more powerful.

But the means that even as they built the abstractions that are supposed to make programming easier, the sheer amount of stuff you have to know to be a great programmer is expanding all the time.

Becoming proficient, really proficient, in just one programming world takes years. Sure, lots of bright teenagers learn Delphi one week and Python the next week and Perl the next week andthink they are proficient. Yet they don't have the foggiest clue how much they're missing.

I've been working with ASP and VBScript since it first came out. VBScript is the dinkiest language on earth and ASP programming consists of learning about 5 classes, only two of which you use very often. And only now do I finally feel like I know the best way to architect an ASP/VBScript application. I finally think I know where the best place to put database access code is, the best way to use ADO to get recordsets,Coach Outlet, the best way to separate HTML and code, etc. And I finally use regexps instead of one-off string manipulation functions. Only last week, I learned how to get COM objects out of memory so you can recompile them (without restarting the whole web server).

Fog Creek is too small to have specialists, so when I needed to write a really good for , our ASP/VBScript based product, I drew on several years of C++/MFC experience, and years of experience with Windows APIs, and good Corel PhotoPaint skills to create a neat picture in the corner of the wizard. Then to get FogBUGZ to work perfectly with Unicode, I had to write a little ActiveX control using C++ and ATL, which drew upon years of C++ and COM experience and a week or so learning about character encodings when I implemented that code in CityDesk.

So when we had a weird NT 4.0-only bug, it took me 3 minutes to debug, because I knew how to use VMWare, and I had a clean NT 4.0 machine set up in VMWare,Prada Bags, and I knew how to do remote debugging with Visual C++, and I knew to look in the EAX register to get the return value from a function. Someone who was new to this all might have taken an hour or more to debug the same problem, but I already knew a tremendous amount of "stuff" that I've been learning, basically, since 1982 when I got my first IBM-PC and that Norton book.

Leaky abstractions mean that we live with a hockey stick learning curve: you canlearn 90% of what you use day by day with a week of learning. But the other 10% might take you a couple of years catching up. That's where the really experienced programmers will shine over the people who say "whatever you want me to do, I can just pick up the book and learn how to do it." If you're building a team, it's OK to have a lot of less experienced programmers cranking out big blocks of code using the abstract tools, but the team is not going to work if you don't have some really experienced members to do the really hard stuff.

There are a lot of programming worlds, each of which requires a tremendous amount of knowledge for real proficiency. Here are the three I personally know best:

All, basically, what you would call Windows programming. Yes, I've written Unix code and Java code, but not very much. My proficiency in Windows programmingcomes from knowing not just the basic technologies but also the whole supporting infrastructure. So, I claim, I'm really good at Windows programming because I also know COM,Prada Handbag Online, ATL, C++, 80x86 Assembler, Windows APIs, IDispatch (OLE Automation), HTML, the DOM, the Internet Explorer object model, Windows NT and Windows 95 internals, LAN Manager and NT networking, including security (ACEs, ACLs, and all that stuff), SQL and SQL Server, Jet and Access, JavaScript, XML, and a few other about the square of the hypotenuse. When I can't get the StrConv function in VB to do what I want,Prada Outlet, I bang out an COM control so I can drop into C++ with ATL and call the MLang functions without dropping a beat. It took me years to get to this point.

There are lots of other programming worlds. There's the world of people developing for BEA Weblogic who know J2EE, Oracle, and all kinds of Java things that I don't even know enough about to enumerate. There are hard core Macintosh developers who know CodeWarrior, MPW, Toolbox programming in System 6 through X,Prada Outlet Handbag, Cocoa, Carbon, and even nice obsolete things like OpenDoc that don't help any more.

Very few people, though, know more than one or two worlds, because there's just so much to learn that unless you have to work in one of these worlds for more than a couple of years, you don't really grok it all.

But learn you must.

People get kind of when they go on job interviews and get rejected because, for example,they don't have Win32 (or J2EE, or Mac programming, or whatever) experience. Or they get annoyed because idiot recruiters, who would not know an MSMQ if it bit them in the tailbone, call them up and ask if they "have5 years MSMQ."

Until you've done Windows programming for a while, you may think that Win32 is just a library, like any other library, you'll read the book and learn it and call it when you need to. You might think that basic programming, say, your expert C++ skills, are the 90% and all the APIs are the 10% fluff you can catch up on in a few weeks. To these people I humbly suggest: times have changed. The ratio has reversed.

Very few people get to work on low level C algorithms that just move bytes around any more. Most of us spend these days calling APIs, not moving bytes. Someone who is a fantastic C++ coder with no API experience only knows about 10% of what you use every day writing code that runs on an API. When the economy , this doesn't matter. You still get jobs, and employers pay the cost of your getting up to speed on the platform. But when the and 600 people apply for every job opening, employers have the luxury of choosing programmers who are already experts at the platform in question. Like programmers who can name four ways to FTP a file from Visual Basic code and the pros and cons of each.

The huge surface area of all these worlds of programming leads to pointless flame wars over whose world is better. Here's a smug comment somebody anonymously made on my discussion board:

"Just one more reason why I'm glad to be living in the 'free world.' Free as in speech (almost) and freedom from pandering to things like setup programs and the registry - just to name a few."

I think this person was trying to say that in the Linux world they don'twritesetup programs. Well, I hate to disappoint you, but you have something just as complicated: imake, make, config files, and all that stuff, and when you're done, you still distribute applications with a 20KB INSTALL file full of witty instructions like "You're going to need zlib" (what's that?) or "This may take a while. Go get some runts." (Runts are a kind of candy, I think.) And the registry -- instead of one big organized hive of name/value pairs, you have a thousand different file formats, one per application, with .whateverrc and foo.conf files living all over the place. And emacs wants you to learn how to program lisp if you're going to change settings, and each shell wants you to learn its personal dialect of shell script programming if you want to change settings, and on and on.

People who only know one world get really smarmy, and every time they hear about the complications in the other world, it makes them think that their world doesn't have complications. But they do. You've just moved beyond them because you are proficient in them. These worlds are just too big and complicated to compare any more. Lord Palmerston: "The Schleswig-Holstein question is so complicated, only three men in Europe have ever understood it. One was Prince Albert, who is dead. The second was a German professor who became mad. I am the third and I have forgotten all about it."The software worldsare so huge and complicated and multifaceted that when I see otherwise intelligent people writing blog entries saying something like "Microsoft is bad at operating systems," frankly, they just look dumb. Imagine trying to summarize millions of lines of code with hundreds of major feature areas created by thousands of programmers over a decade or two, where no one person can begin to understand even a large portion of it. I'm not even defending Microsoft, I'm just saying that big handwavy generalizations made from a position of deep ignorance is one of the biggest wastes of time on the net today.

Frequent readers, by now,Prada Handbag Outlet, have noticed that I've been thinking of the problem of how one might deliver an application on Linux, Macintosh, and Windows without paying disproportionately for the Linux and Macintosh versions. For this you need some kind of cross-platform library.

Java attempted this but Sun didn't grok GUIs well enough to deliver really slick native-feeling applications. Like the in Star Trek watching Earth through a telescope, they knew exactly what human food was supposed to look like but they didn't realize it was supposed to taste like something. Java apps have menus in the right places but there are all these keyboard things that don't work the same way as every other Windows app and their tabbed dialogs look a little scary. And there is no way, no matter how hard you try, to make their menubars look exactly like Excel's menubars. Why? Because Java doesn't give you a very good way to drop down to the native facilities whenever the abstraction fails. When you're programming in AWT, youcan't figure out the HWND of a window, you can't call the Microsoft APIs, and you certainly can't intercept WM_PAINT and do it differently. And Sun made it plenty clear that if you tried to do that, you weren't Pure. You were Polluted, and to hell with you.

After a number of highly publicized failures to build GUIs with Java (e.g. Corel's Java Office suite and Netscape's Javagator), enough people know to stay away from this world. built windowing library from the ground up using native widgets just so they could write Java code that had a reasonably native look and feel.

The Mozilla engineersdecided to address the cross platform problem with their own invention called XUL. So far, I'm impressed. Mozilla finally got to the point where it tastes like real food. Even my favorite bugaboo, Alt+Space N to minimize a window,Prada Wallet, works in Mozilla; it took them long enough but they did it.

Mitch Kapor, who founded Lotus and created 123, for his next application to go with something called wxWindows and wxPython for cross platform support.

Which is better, XUL, Eclipse's SWT, or wxWindows? I don't know. They are all such huge worlds that I couldn't really evaluate them and tell. It's not enough to read the tutorials. You have to sweat and bleed with the thing for a year or two before you really know it's good enough or realize that no matter how hard you try you can't make your UI taste like real food. Unfortunately, for most projects, you have to decide on which world to use before you can write the first line of code, which is precisely the moment when you have the least information. At a previous job we had to live with some pretty bad architecture because the first programmers used the project to teach themselves C++ and Windows programming at the same time. Some of the oldest code was written without any comprehension of event-driven programming. The core string class (of course, we had our own string class) was a textbook example of all the mistakes you could make in designing a C++ class. Eventually we cleaned up and refactored a lot of that old code but it haunted us for a while.

So for now, my advice is this: don't start a new project without at least one architect with several years of solid experience in the language, classes, APIs, and platforms you're building on. If you have a choice of platforms, use the one your team has the most skills with, even if it's not the trendiest or nominally the most productive. And when you're designing abstractions or programming tools, go the extra mile to make them leak proof.

Have you been wondering about Distributed Version Control? It has been a huge productivity boon for us, so I wrote Hg Init, a —check it out!

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About the author.

Im ,co-founder of ,a New York company that proves that you can treat programmers well and still be highly profitable. Programmers get private offices, free lunch, and work 40 hours a week. Customers only pay for software if theyre delighted. We make Trello, which lets you , FogBugz, enlightened for bug tracking, and Kiln, which provides distributed and code reviews.Im also the co-founder and CEO of .

Scientists have combined spinach’s photosynthetic protein,Prada Bags, which converts light into electrochemical energy, with silicon in a new “biohybrid” solar cell.

“This combination produces current levels almost 1,000 times higher than we were able to achieve by depositing the protein on various types of metals. It also produces a modest increase in voltage,Prada Wallet,” says David Cliffel, associate professor of chemistry at Vanderbilt University,Prada Handbag Online, who collaborated on the project with Kane Jennings,Prada Outlet, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering.

“If we can continue on our current trajectory of increasing voltage and current levels, we could reach the range of mature solar conversion technologies in three years.”

The research was reported online on September 4 in the journal and Vanderbilt University has applied for a patent on the combination.

The researchers’ next step is to build a functioning PS1-silicon solar cell using this new design. Jennings has an Environmental Protection Agency award that will allow a group of undergraduate engineering students to build the prototype. The students won the award at the National Sustainable Design Expo in April based on a solar panel that they had created using a two-year old design.

With the new design, Jennings estimates that a two-foot panel could put out at least 100 milliamps at one volt—enough to power a number of different types of small electrical devices.

More than 40 years ago, scientists discovered that one of the proteins involved in photosynthesis,Prada Outlet Handbag, called Photosystem 1 (PS1), continued to function when it was extracted from plants like spinach. Then they determined PS1 converts sunlight into electrical energy with nearly 100 percent efficiency, compared to conversion efficiencies of less than 40 percent achieved by human-made devices. This prompted various research groups around the world to begin trying to use PS1 to create more efficient solar cells.

Another potential advantage of these biohybrid cells is that they can be made from cheap and readily available materials, unlike many microelectronic devices that require rare and expensive materials like platinum or indium. Most plants use the same photosynthetic proteins as spinach. In fact, in another research project Jennings is working on a method for extracting PS1 from kudzu.

Since the initial discovery, progress has been slow but steady. Researchers have developed ways to extract PS1 efficiently from leaves. They have demonstrated that it can be made into cells that produce electrical current when exposed to sunlight. However, the amount of power that these biohybrid cells can produce per square inch has been substantially below that of commercial photovoltaic cells.

Another problem has been longevity. The performance of some early test cells deteriorated after only a few weeks. In 2010,Coach Outlet, however, the Vanderbilt team kept a PS1 cell working for nine months with no deterioration in performance.

“Nature knows how to do this extremely well. In evergreen trees,Prada Handbag Outlet, for example, PS1 lasts for years,” says Cliffel. “We just have to figure out how to do it ourselves.”

‘Doping’ silicon

The researchers report that their PS1/silicon combination produces nearly a milliamp (850 microamps) of current per square centimeter at 0.3 volts. That is nearly two and a half times more current than the best level reported previously from a biohybrid cell. The reason this combo works so well is because the electrical properties of the silicon substrate have been tailored to fit those of the PS1 molecule.

This is done by implanting electrically charged atoms in the silicon to alter its electrical properties: a process called “doping.” In this case, the protein worked extremely well with silicon doped with positive charges and worked poorly with negatively doped silicon.

To make the device, the researchers extracted PS1 from spinach into an aqueous solution and poured the mixture on the surface of a p-doped silicon wafer. Then they put the wafer in a vacuum chamber in order to evaporate the water away leaving a film of protein. They found that the optimum thickness was about one micron, about 100 PS1 molecules thick.

Protein alignment

When a PS1 protein exposed to light, it absorbs the energy in the photons and uses it to free electrons and transport them to one side of the protein. That creates regions of positive charge, called holes, which move to the opposite side of the protein.

In a leaf, all the PS1 proteins are aligned. But in the protein layer on the device, individual proteins are oriented randomly. Previous modeling work indicated that this was a major problem.

When the proteins are deposited on a metallic substrate, those that are oriented in one direction provide electrons that the metal collects while those that are oriented in the opposite direction pull electrons out of the metal in order to fill the holes that they produce. As a result, they produce both positive and negative currents that cancel each other out to leave a very small net current flow.

The p-doped silicon eliminates this problem because it allows electrons to flow into PS1 but will not accept them from protein. In this manner, electrons flow through the circuit in a common direction.

“This isn’t as good as protein alignment, but it is much better than what we had before,” says Jennings.

Graduate students Gabriel LeBlanc, Gongping Chen, and Evan Gizzie contributed to the study.

The research was supported by National Science Foundation and by the Scialog Program of the Research Corporation for Scientific Advancement.

By. David Salisbury

Where there's oil and gas, there's milk and honey.

That is the thrust of the American Petroleum Institute's report to the platform committees of the Republican and Democratic parties. It was previewed in Washington on May 15 by API President and CEO Jack Gerard, the oil industry's man on Earth, known for his tough attitudes to just about everything, but the Obama Administration in particular.

In unveiling the report at the National Press Club, Gerard declared that the recommendations were without political slant and were delivered to both parties’ platform committees without favor; although it is generally known that the oil and gas industry -- and Big Oil in particular -- cares not a jot for the Democrats. In a slip, while reading a prepared statement, Gerard referred to the “Democrat Party,” which is a term used by conservative commentators and members of the Republican Party who cannot stand the thought of Democrats having a monopoly on the word democratic.

As expected, and in line with other recent utterances, Gerard called for accelerated leasing on federal lands,Prada Outlet, demanded more sensitive regulation, and declared his belief that the United States is potentially the greatest energy producer on Earth.

The White House shot back at API almost immediately, claiming it is the oil the industry that is lagging not the government.

Not to be outshot,Prada Bags, Gerard said, “Once again, the administration is trotting out claims about idle leases to divert attention from the fact it has been restricting oil and natural gas development, leasing less often, shortening lease terms, and going slow on permit approvals—actions which have undermined public support for the administration on energy. It is also increasing or threatening to increase industry’s development costs through higher taxes, higher royalty rates,Prada Handbag Outlet, and higher minimum lease bids.”

Even if the administration is right this time, it has a hard sell ahead.
In the case of natural gas, there has been a giant windfall from shale seams; but that has been coming for some time, and the administration can take no particular credit. Similarly, oil imports are down from 57 percent to 45 percent, reflecting increased domestic production, something that helps more with the balance of payments than the price at the pump.

Gerard admitted that while natural gas prices are at historic lows because of new recovery and drilling technology, oil is priced internationally and that is no help to American consumers. API and its chief tend to conflate oil and gas to make a point. Likewise, they like to include Canada in “North American” energy.

But the energy claims of the administration are even harder to follow and more dubious. It likes to confuse fossil fuels – coal, gas and oil -- with electricity and,Prada Outlet Handbag, in particular, with alternative energy,Prada Wallet, like wind, solar and,Coach Outlet, in a manner of speaking, nuclear.

Most energy gurus see the dawning of a switch from oil to electricity for personal transportation, for buses and some trucks. But that dawn is breaking slowly with consumer indifference, battery life questions and other problems, including the availability of rare earths for motors and wind turbines.

Experience suggests that energy is a lousy political issue. It is complicated; each side has its own facts and there is some truth to both sides’ facts.

At the end of the day, the energy debate is reduced not to the amount of drilling taking place on federal lands, or to the virtues of natural gas over nuclear,Prada Handbag Online, but to the price of gasoline at election time. If that is lower than it is today, Obama garners votes. If it is up, no matter why, all the GOP and Mitt Romney have to say is that it is Obama's fault.

The money vote is known already: With a very few exceptions the energy money is on the GOP. But that is not new. What is new is that environment is not on the agenda. Better wait until 2016.

By. Llewellyn King

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of “White House Chronicle” on PBS. His e-mail is .