Rick's World

The first subject I want to talk about, is what I consider to be the most important subject of all, when it comes to writing software - memory management.

Why is memory management so important? Because I would estimate that 90% of all bugs, crashes and security holes that occur in software are related to memory management. It is a tricky subject to get right. Memory management is the process of allocating memory, using it and freeing it when you are done with it. A well written program uses as little memory as possible. It should not 'hog' the machine. This is one area, where I feel that C# fails, despite admirable efforts to succeed.

In C++, you are completely on your own when it comes to memory management. You tell the program exactly when to allocate the memory and exactly when to free it. This is the simplest and most straight-forward way to do things. It is also, unfortunately, the most error-prone. As programs get larger, and more complicated, you tend to lose track of where memory was allocated, how big it is, and where you need to delete it. This leads to frequent 'memory leaks' where you allocate memory and forget to delete it. This memory is then essentially lost for the remainder of the life of the program. Over time, these memory leaks can add up causing losses of performance or potentially causing the program to crash due to an out of memory condition. Plus, many programmers are unaware of the fact that in C++, there are two different ways to delete memory. You use one technique to delete a single object, and another techique to delete an array of objects. If you use the wrong one, you can potentially leak memory or even cause a crash. While this way of handling memory management is prone to errors, it also gives you great control. If you are able to control exactly when memory is allocated and when it is deleted, you can write your program to use memory very efficiently. This is a good thing.

In C#, things work very differently. In C#, you allocate objects and never delete them! The idea here is that the C# runtime will keep track of when an object is used and when it isn't. When the object is no longer used, it automatically deletes the memory for you. This design was intended to solve the problem of forgetting to delete the memory and having memory leaks all over the program. It has been my experience, however, that this feature has had the opposite effect. It's lead to more of what I would consider 'memory leaks'.

The problem with the way the C# runtime deletes memory is that it doesn't delete the memory immediately once it determines that the memory is no longer being used. This memory is instead placed in a pool of memory to be deleted later, whenever the runtime decides to do it. While this memory is in this pool, it is effectively 'leaked'. It's still wasting memory, even though it's not being used by the application. There is no way to know when this memory will be cleaned up by the runtime and thus no way to know at any given time, exactly how much memory your program is using! If your program is creating many temporary objects, this can lead to unusually high usage of memory by your program. This is wasteful in my opinion.

The other problem with the C# way of deleting memory is that it leads programmers to develop very dangerous habits. If you learned to program on a language like C#, you've developed the habit of just going around happily creating objects and never cleaning up after yourself. This can be a very dangerous habit to have if you suddenly have to switch to a language like C++ or Objective-C where this is your responsibility.

A while back, I bought my first Apple Macintosh - a Mac Mini. If you've been following my blog, I'm sure you've read some of my articles about what I like about the Mac and my occaisional comments about what I *don't* like about Microsoft. Since I am a programmer by trade, naturally, once I got the Mac I was curious to learn how to write programs for it. While studying this, I came across Cocoa. Cocoa is the Mac's implementation of Objective-C. Objective C is a variant of the regular C language that many programmers are familiar with. It basically takes existing C, and adds a thin layer of object oriented features to it. It appears, that Cocoa is the way to go when it comes to writing Mac apps. There are MANY Cocoa classes provided by Apple to make writing Mac apps easier. C#, on the other hand, is a relatively new language, invented my Microsoft. It is a variant of C++ (notice how the '#' sign looks like two '+' signs stuck together?). I always thought that C# (pronounced "C-Sharp" was a very clever name for a C++ variant. Over the last few years, Microsoft has been moving more and more of their development over to C#. C# has rapidly evolved into a very capable language for developing Windows and web applications.

I wanted to write this blog as a way of expressing my thoughts on the pros/cons of each of these languages and which I think is better , from a programming point of view. I expect this will be a long entry, so it could take several blogs to complete. (Yes, Rick is writing another 'book'.)

To give you an idea of where I am coming from in this article, a little background is in order. I have been programming in C++, mostly on Windows, as my day to day job for the last 12 years. I have a bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Florida State. Most of those last 12 years have been using 'plain-vanilla' C++ on Windows, although I did spend a year doing C++ on Linux, about 6 months doing Java, and about 1.5 years doing C# on Windows. My experience in Cocoa has been admittingly brief - only about 1 month of playing around with it in my spare time, but despite that, based on my past experience with object oriented languages, I can easily 'project' Cocoa's features onto my C++ experience and be easily able to see how these things would apply in day-to-day situations.

Now that we've got that out of the way, on to the fun!

Ok, so I've been living with my Mac Mini for over a month now. How time flies when you are having fun! I have to say that I've truly enjoyed working with it and have not missed my PC at all. However, the Mac is not without it's little annoyances, so in the interest of fair play, I decided to list some of the things I've encountered that annoy me.

• Sleep. On occaision the computer refuses to go into sleep mode.
• Waking. Sometimes when you wake it up from sleep mode, it comes back up and asks you to enter your password. You enter your password and you end up with 'the beachball of death'. The cursor turns into this spinning beachball and it just sits there.
• Bluetooth. I have a Microsoft Bluetooth Keyboard and Mouse. While I can get the mouse and keyboard to work in Bluetooth, as soon as you turn off the computer, it loses track of them and doesn't reconnect them when the computer comes back on. This effectively means I can't have a wireless keyboard and mouse (using Bluetooth anyway). On the plus side, I was able to transfer some files from my cell phone using Bluetooth. I've never been able to do that in Windows using Bluetooth.
• Selecting multiple files in Finder. Finder is the Mac equivalent of Windows Explorer. You can select multiple files easily with the keyboard and mouse. Once you do this, it highlights all the files. Then you right click on the highlighted files to copy/move etc. This is identical to Windows. However, if you don't right-click on the filename itself, it automatically unselects the files. This means that you have to aim carefully with the mouse or you have to reselect everything all over again.
• Internal hard drive. The internal hard drive on the Mac Mini runs at only 4200RPM. THis is a slow hard drive! I connected a regular IDE hard drive running at 7200 RPM using an external USB connector and this drive is much faster. Of course, this is a Mac Mini. The higher end Powermacs have much faster hard drives.
• USB device detection while in sleep mode. If you plug in a USB device while it is in sleep mode, the Mac will wake up out of sleep mode. This is not really a bad thing. I use this to allow me to turn on my monitor and have that automatically wake the Mac. This works because my monitor has a USB hub built into it. When you turn on the monitor, the hub comes on, so the Mac detects the new hub and wakes from sleep mode. The odd thing is, sometimes it will wake from sleep mode when I turn the monitor OFF! In other words, I tell the Mac to go to sleep. I then turn off the monitor and walk away. Sometimes when I turn off the monitor, it wakes back up! It's odd.
• Scrollwheel mice and KVM switches. I use a KVM switch to switch the monitor, keyboard and mouse between my Mac and PC. Everything works fine here, with one odd exception. When I use the mouse connected through the KVM, the scroll wheel doesn't work! If I connect the same mouse directly to the Mac, it does work. Everythine else works about the keyboard and mouse just fine, but the scrollwheel doesn't and that's very aggravating. Granted I have a cheapo KVM and I use a PS2 to USB converter for the Mac, so maybe one of those two is causing the problem.
• The single menu bar at the top of the screen. I have to say that at first I hated this feature of the Mac. After using it for a while though, I can understand why they did it this way and why it is better. It leads to a much cleaner interface and it's much easier to find the menu knowing that it's always up there on the top of the screen. That being said, however, sometimes a slight mis-click of the mouse can cause aggravation here. The menu bar at the top of the screen switches to match the menu bar of whatever application is currently active. The desktop is an application as well - namely the Finder. If you have several windows open and you move the mouse over to click on a new window, but you slightly 'miss' the window, you end up clicking on the desktop. This switches the menu to the Finder menu, rather than the menu of the app you meant to click on.

All in all, despite these little gripes, I love this thing! Now I just have to wait for one of the upcomming Intel PowerMacs and then I can upgrade!

This entry will act as an index to all my Losing Fat articles.

I watch a lot of movies and on occaision I'll watch a horror movie. Many people don't like horror movies, because they find them scary. I don't. Horror movies don't scare me, because most of them are so preposterously fake that you can't possibly take them seriously (Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street, etc.) Most horror movies, in my opinion are also really stupid and not worth the time. There are a few exceptions that I did find scary (such as Seven).

The reason I was interested in seeing this movie was due to the trailers that I saw in the theater. This movie centers around a subject called EVP or Electronic Voice Phenomenon. It is a technique by which, supposedly you can record the voices of the dead using such electronic devices as tape recorders or even record video of the dead using a VCR. The commercials in the theaters for this movie contained real EVP recordings, supposedly of dead people. I remember being really affected by those recordings. They were freaky. After seeing these commercials for the movie, I went home and researched the subject on the Internet. Here I found many many more recordings that I could listen to and even some pictures taken supposedly showing the dead appearing in video. It was all very fascinating and quite unsettling. I never did see the movie in the theaters, but I did finally get around to seeing it on video. It was a good movie.

The movie centers around a man who's wife gets killed in a car accident. After a while, an EVP researcher begins to get messages from his wife after her death. He contacts the architect and plays him the recordings. This eventually leads the architect to become obsessed with EVP and trying to receive messages from his wife. At first, he is unsuccessful, but after a while his wife starts to contact him directly through EVP. Over time her messages get clearer and more insistent. It turns out his wife is trying to direct him to go to certain places at certain times. He later discovers that his wife is actually sending him messages to warn him about the impending deaths of people, so that he can prevent their deaths. He makes several attempts without success. All along it appears that there are these 3 evil ghosts watching him. These 3 ghosts don't want him saving people. Eventually it leads up to a great confrontation with the 3 evil ghosts. The movie wasn't really horror, but more of a suspense movie. I thought it was very well done and at moments very unnerving. The ending was enjoyable if a bit sad. I enjoyed this movie and think others would as well.

If this news story turns out to be true, this is huge news!

On Monday, Apple will start it's annual WorldWide Developer's Conference (WWDC). Usually at big shows like this, Apple makes big product announcements. The question, amoung Apple enthusiasts like myself, is what will be the big product announcements? They just release a new version of their OS X operating system (Tiger) about a month ago. They just upgraded their line of PowerMacs a few weeks ago. Those are already out there. There's been rumors of a new version of iTunes (version 4.9) that will support Podcasting, but I hardly think this is big enough news to announce. Perhaps they would announce new iPods or something. That's a possibility, but noone heard any rumors about this lately so that seemed unlikely. The only rumor left was the on-again off-again rumor of Apple switching to Intel processors. This rumor has popped up time and again over the years, but nothing ever came of it. I was attracted by the thought of this rumor, but I thought it was very unlikely because this would be a HUGE and very risky change for Apple. I never thought it was true. Apparently it is. Here is why I think this could be an incredibly smart move by Apple.

Apple computers currently run on a processor made by IBM called the PowerPC. This is a completely different processor from the ones made by Intel and AMD. This means that any operating system, or application written for this PowerPC would have to be significantly different from the same application written for an Intel processor. This is because each processor has a completely different instrucution set, different registers etc. This means that for an application to run on an Apple computer and an Intel computer, it would require essentially maintaining two completely different simultaneous versions of the program. This is a big undertaking for any company. Due to the cost and time involved in maintaining two separate programs, one for Apple processors and one for Intel processors, many companies simply choose not to support Apple. Apple computers are much less common than Intel computers, so companies naturally choose to go with the more common computer that they can make money on. This changes now. With Apple now running on Intel processors, most of the differences between the Apple version of the application and the Intel (i.e. Windows) version of the application go away. This means that converting your application to work on Apple computers just got significantly easier. This means more companies are likely to start supporting Apple OSs in their applications. More software for Apple computers means a larger potential market, which means more sales of Apple operating systems.

I would be willing to bet that Apple already has their OSX operating system running perfectly on Intel CPUs and has had it running for some time. Why? OSX is based on a free, open source operating system called FreeBSD. FreeBSD has always had a version that runs on Intel CPUs, and since most of the foundation of OSX is FreeBSD, that means that most of OSX already runs on Intel CPUs. The only issue from an operating systems point of view, is how to get all those old PowerPC applications running on Intel cpus. There are emulators out there that are available to run applications written for one CPU on another CPU. Likely Apple will build this CPU emulation into a future version of their operating system. This will act as a good interim measure to allow everyone's older software to continue to run until the providers of the software have a chance to convert it to run on the Intel CPUs.

This change over to Intel CPUs also makes some other things I've been observing lately make more sense. Recently AOpen produced a new computer that runs Intel CPUs but is essentially a perfect clone of the Mac Mini. When I first saw this computer, I thought that this was serious 'lawsuit-bait'. Why would this company intentionally built a perfect clone of the Mac Mini when they know Apple would sue them over this? Perhaps the truth is, this was done with Apple's blessing. If Apple is considering switching to Intel CPUs, they would like to see if it is possible to build a Mac Mini based on Intel CPUs. So they go out and secretly hire AOpen to build a proof of concept Intel CPU based Mac Mini. Either Apple did this, or Intel did this as a way to prove to Apple that their CPUs could work in a Mac Mini style box.

Another thing I've noticed lately is a seemingly renewed interest in the Mac version of Microsft Office. It was announced recently that the next version of Microsoft Office (version 12) will be released at the same time on Windows (using Intel CPUs) and Macs (supposedly using PowerPC CPUs). At firt I thought this was odd. The differences between the two CPUs would cause the Mac and Windows versions of Office to be very different. I would think it would be difficult to release them both at the same time, since they would have to be so different. Now, with the announcement that Apple will use Intel CPUs, this means that the two versions won't be that different after all. This means that Microsoft's job to port Office to the Mac is MUCH easier and it makes this simultaneous release of both versions much easier. Could it be that Microsoft has already known about this switch to Intel CPUs for some time and was already preparing for it?

By switching to Intel CPUs, Apple also makes the porting of other Open Source applications to their operating system much easier. I would expect that most open source software is written on Intel CPUs these days. This is due to the sheer numbers of them and the cheap availability of them. PowerPC chips on the other hand, are relatively expensive and less common. Since most apps are written on Intel CPUs, this means that by switching Apple's OSX to run on Intel CPUs, you have basically taken care of most of the work of porting the app to OSX already! If the app is written for Linux on an Intel CPU, porting it to run on FreeBSD (the basis for OSX) on an Intel CPU is little or no work. Hence, even more software available for the Mac.

This switch also opens up an interesting possibility - porting Apple software to Windows! I know my friend Dave would certainly be interested in getting his hands on GarageBand for Windows! This would also make maintaining such critical apps as iTunes easier since they no longer have to maintain two completely different versions.

As for the hardware side of things, I think this is quite possible and not as difficult as you might think. Most external devices on PCs and Macs use either Firewire or USB. Since Macs and PCs already support both of these, that means these devices should easily work in the new Intel based Macs. As for internal hardware, both PCs and Macs use PCI or PCIe hardware. This means that by switching to Intel CPUs, Apple makes the jobs of device drivers much more simple. Since the CPUs are the same on both Macs and PCs now, the driver differences are much less.

This could even have the pleasant side effect of helping Linux. If hardware manufacturers suddenly have to write drivers for FreeBSD on Intel CPUS in order to make sure their hardware works on Macs, it's not difficult to port those drivers over to Linux, due to the similarities between FreeBSD and Linux. This could lead to a vast increase in driver support for Linux.

The possibilities in this switch boggle the mind. I hope Apple is successful in this move. I suspect they will be.

It's not often that I compliment Microsoft.

If the news released today ends up being true, I have to say I am impressed by Microsoft. Today, Microsoft announced that they will be opening the file formats of the next version of Word, Excel and Powerpoint. The new formats will be based on XML compressed using ZIP into a single file. The entire specification will be open and available for anyone to use on a royalty-free basis. This is huge news.

Why is this huge news? Over the years Microsoft has had a habit of closely guarding their file formats from others. They did this in order to insure that if you wanted to make a Word document, for instance, you had to use Microsoft Word (part of Microsoft Office). By locking you into Office, they thereby insured a steady stream of profits from the sale of Microsoft Office. Not everyone knows, but Microsoft derives most of their profits from the sale of Office and not from Windows. The fact that Microsoft has decided to allow essentially ANYONE on any operating system to make Word/Excel/Powerpoint documents means that these will become the de-facto standards for word processor documents, spreadsheets and presentation software.

Each Word/Excel/Powerpoint document will be stored in a single file. This single file is essentially a ZIP file (a compressed file) storing a series of files and subdirectories containing pure XML. Zip is a very common compression format that can be generated and read by any operating system. XML is a text based format, so it can easily be generated by any program in any operating system. The combination of two easy to use/generate formats, makes this file format a no-brainer for everyone to implement.

I predict that within 6 months of these file formats being released, every competing office suite vendor will support them and every operating system (including Linux and Mac OSX) will also support them.

I admit to being very skeptical over whether this will happen, or how 'open' the formats will really be, but if true, this is fantastic news for everyone.

Losing Fat, Index

Ok, the previous parts of this series have been all about the theory and mindset of losing fat. It's time to get into some specifics. Here is a list of foods to avoid if you want to be successful at losing fat:

1. Fried Foods: Should be obvious. Fried foods are high in fat and low in any nutritional quality. Avoid them like the plague. This includes such things as Fried Chicken, French Fries, Fried hamburgers, cheeseburgers, etc (i.e. McDonalds burgers)
2. Hydrogenated or Partially Hydrogenated Oils: These are essentially 'fake fats' that are man-made. By Hydrogenating oils, you essentially alter its physical state to allow it to remain solid. These types of man-made fats are even worse than regular fats! Check the ingredients labels on the products you buy. If is says "hydrogenated' or 'partially-hydrogenated', avoid it!
3. White bread: Bread in general should be minimized due to it's high carb content, but especially white bread. It has no nutritional quality to speak of. If you must eat bread, eat only 100% whole wheat bread.
4. Bagels: Bagels are in large white bread, so they should be avoided. In addition, bagels are a very dense version of white bread. One bagel equals approximately 5 slices of white bread! This makes bagels essentially a 'carb-bomb' with no nutritional content.
5. Cream sauces: If you are eating out, avoid anything with 'cream sauce' in the description. These sauses are high fat, high calorie and low in nutritional content.
6. Potatoes: Note that I refer to regular potatoes here, not sweet potatoes. Why shouldn't you eat potatoes? Because they are a high Glycemic Index food. What is the Glycemic Index (GI)? You can find out more about it here, but I will talk about it in a future blog. It's a VERY important topic.

To all those reading my blog who've noticed some odd and very questionable links over on the right under "Recent Referers" and "Top Referers", I want to apologize for this. This is something out of my control that I've been fighting ever since I started this blog. It's refered to as Referer Spam.

Referer Spam is similar to the Spam email that everyone gets these days. What happens is that a person/organization who traffics in Spam discovers your blog through the various blog search engines. They then bombard your blog with hits with an invalid 'Referer' flag. The Referer flag is a piece of information sent from the browser to the web server whenever it requests a web page. The Referer is supposed to list the web site the person was browsing when they clicked on your link. In other words, its the web site that 'referred' them to your web site. The problem is that spammers have found a way to fake this information.

Normally this referrer information is something that most people who browse the web don't know anything about and never see. So why would spammers want to send spam over a system that noone sees? Because in the case of blogs, people do see it. It's common for blog engines, like the one I use for this blog to show the last several referers as links on the homepage. Idealy this is to let readers see who else is reading the blog. In reality, what happens is that these spam links are automatically placed on your home page. By having more links on web pages throughout the Internet, they increase their visibility, which increases their search engine rankings on sites such as Google and thereby makes them more money! Thesee scumbags are essentially altering someone else's web site without their permission to make money!

The blog engine I use has excellent support for fighting referer spam, but it's a difficult battle. The blog engine is designed to blog based on keywords in the referer, but since they keep changing the keywords, it's difficult to stop.

My apologies and please understand that I do not endorse any of the products or services in those links and I'm doing my best to get rid of them. Things like this are a sad reality of the Internet these days.

In response to a friends blog about good programming books, I wanted to put up my own list of good programming books:

1. Must Have Books:
   
   Every good programmer should have these books!
   
   Title: The Art of Computer Programming Volumes 1-3
   Author: Donald Knuth
   Description: These three books aren't cheap (about $150 for the set), but they are absolutely the most amazing set of computer books I've ever read! If you want to know about all the fundamental algorithms used in any programming project, read these books. The author goes into great detail describing each algorithm, so it's not an easy read, but the books are very well written. If you can read and understand all three of these books, you will be a master programmer.
   
   Title: Design Patterns - Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software.
   Authors: Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson and John Vlissides
   ISBN: 0201633612
   Description: This book is the book to read if you want to master object oriented programming. It describes a large number of design patterns that you can use to write well designed object oriented software.
2. .NET Books
   
   Title: MCAD/MCSD: Developing XML Web Services and Server Compontents with Visual C#.NET and the .NET Framework
   Author: Amit Kalani, Priti Kalani
   ISBN: 0789728249
   Description: If you are studying for the MCAD or MCSD tests, this book is the book to get for the 70-320 book. It is very well written. I do NOT recommend the Microsoft books for studying for MCAD/MCSD. While they do describe the topics you need to know, they don't explain them very well. This book does. Kalani also writes books for the other MCAD/MCSD books. Those should be good as well.

More to come...