bugfox blog

Typealyzer asks you the enter the URL of a blog, and attempts to determine the personality of the author according to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. (via Megan McArdle.)

Naturally I immediately put in the URL of this blog and was told I am an “INTJ”, which it describes as a nerdy scientist type. Then I put in the URL of my other blog, where I write about “fun” stuff. This time it said I was an “ESTP”, which it describes as “active and playful.”

Of course these blogs have very different tones. Nevertheless the term “personality” as used by psychologists (including Meyers and Briggs) is something that applies to people, not blogs, and it is not supposed to change depending on what you are writing about. If Typealyzer gives different results for two blogs written by the same person, then it is not a reliable measurement technique.

Typealyzer also displays a chart purporting to show which areas of the brain were used in writing the blog. I’m not an expert in this field but I suspect this is pure hokum.

I had been happily using the “aLinks” WordPress plugin by Sean Hickey for quite a while. The plugin automatically generates links for keywords that you specify. Version 1 did everything that I wanted, but it broke when I upgraded to WordPress 2.6. I found that Sean had written a completely new aLinks 2.0, so I installed it and found that it mostly worked, though with some minor problems.

Then Sean seemed to vanish from the face of the Internet. His web server went off line, making it impossible to even send him an email, and has been that way for several months.

So I had no choice but to go into the source code and fix the bugs that were bothering me. Since the code is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL) I am making the revised plugin available to anyone who is interested.

Download

Bugs Fixed

1. aLinks failed to respect word boundaries when identifying keyphrases, causing links to be inserted in the middle of words.
2. aLinks was ignoring the “classes” setting which allows you to assign one or more CSS classes to the links.

Warning

If you are upgrading from aLinks 1.x you must first export your keyphrases to a file, then import them back in after you have installed version 2.0. Otherwise you will lose your keyphrases.

Other Notes

To install, unzip and copy the entire alinks directory to your wp-content/plugins directory.

The documentation is included as a PDF file in the alinks/includes directory.

Michael Lewis, the author of Liar’s Poker, delivers a blow by blow account of the final days of the subprime bubble, from the viewpoint of some people who not only predicted the collapse but managed to profit from it by shorting subprime derivatives. (via Tim Bray.)

Some of Lewis’s observations:

• He mentions the central role played by the bond rating agencies, who screwed up in a big way. Amoung other things Standard & Poors apparently relied on a computer model that did not take into account the possibilty that home prices might fall. Most of the institutional safeguards intended to keep something like this from happening relied on these agencies to give reliable ratings. Some sort of reform is probably needed to address the conflicts of interest that they face.
• He thinks the problem really started when investment banks first switched from partnerships to public corporations. A partner is personally liable for the firm’s debts and thus has strong incentives to make sure that it doesn’t take on insane levels of risk. A corporate executive knows that it’s the stockholders who bear the risk, and thus will be tempted to take big risks in order to earn big bonuses.

Mark’s latest list of software he considers essential for a Linux desktop.

Just add the following to the web.config file for the application:

<system.net>
 <defaultProxy>
  <proxy proxyaddress="http://127.0.0.1:8888" />
 </defaultProxy>
</system.net>


Thanks to Rick Strahl.

Get Fiddler here.

I just upgraded to version 2.6.1 (after leaving the site at version 2.5.1 for a dangerously long time.) In the past a “second-digit” version upgrade has sometimes caused trouble.

If you notice something obviously wrong with how things display, leave a comment and I will try to fix it.

In the Risks Digest Bruce Schneier discusses the flaws in the TSA’s system for checking photo IDs at airports, flaws that would allow any reasonably competent terrorist to walk onto an airplane, even if his name is on the “no fly” list and even without using a fake ID.

This might be considered an illustration of the general incompetence of the TSA, but it also illustrates the great difficulty of setting up a secure system that will foil a reasonably clever and determined attacker. It’s not something that the average political appointee or bureaucrat without special training is likely to be able to manage.

Here’s one of those things that “can’t possibly happen” but does. The project builds fine under the Visual Studio 2008 IDE, but if I run it directly under MSBuild.exe it fails with the error

error BC31094: Implementing class 'MMCLTSVCS.FooClass' for interface 'MMCLTSVCS.Foo' cannot be found.


The key is that the error involves calling a COM object. The project contains a reference to the interop for that COM object: Interop.MMCLTSVCS.dll. However it does not contain a reference to the interop for one of the other COM objects that Interop.MMCLTSVCS.dll uses. Apparently this works fine under the IDE but fails with an obscure error message under MSBuild.

Visual Studio’s “Unused References” function provides an easy way to get this error. It will helpfully remove any references that are not used by your .NET code, without considering whether they are used by any of the referenced interops.

Consumers of digital hardware, software and services lost their most tireless advocate last week when Ed Foster died of a heart attack.

EFF’s Fred von Lohmann provides an obituary:

In Memoriam: Ed Foster, 1949-2008

I converted an old console app from .NET Framework 1.1 to 2.0 using Visual Studio 2008. When I ran it I got the following helpful error message

This application has failed to start because the application configuration is incorrect. Reinstalling the application may fix this problem.

Looking in the Security Event Log I found the following messages:

Generate Activation Context failed for C:\ParsII\bin\server\CCSWinService2.exe. Reference error message: The operation completed successfully.

Syntax error in manifest or policy file “C:\ParsII\bin\server\CCSWinService2.exe.Config” on line 1.

The last one was the key. In the app config file the first line was

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="Windows-1252"?>


That should be perfectly legal for an XML file, but deleting it caused everything to work perfectly.