Common mistakes Dutchies make in the use of English

City Skyline Across Body Of Water In The Evening In Rotterdam, The Netherlands by Scopio from NounProject.com

Object-adjective instead of adjective-object.

"I will learn you how to skate." ("Learn" instead of "Teach".)

"When you want, we also have it in white." ("When" instead of "If".)

"Let's meet at sex." ("Sex" instead of "Six".)

"Dear colleagues, hereby the schedule." ("Hereby" instead of "Here is" or "Hereby I give you".)

"I am a cineville" ("cineville" instead of "cinefille") -- there is even a .nl domain misspelled this way.

"We have lot's of bicycle's" (Genitive instead of plural suffix.)

"Meet you at the busstop" (Concatenating words that are not normally concatenated in English.)

Dutch pronunciation rules cause some really weird phenomena, for example when you call Vodafone, the operator informs you that you have reached "Fodavone".

A Programming Language

"Coding Software Running On A Computer Monitor" by Scopio from NounProject.com

Abstract

My thoughts and notes on how I would like a new programming language to look like.

The main goals of the language are:

• Simple and elegant. (So that it is suitable for the academia.)
• Expressive. (So that it is suitable for experienced programmers.)
• Consistent. (So as to be attractive to developer teams.)
• Fast. (So that it is suitable for high performance computing.)
• Lean. (So that it is suitable for resource-constrained computing.)

This is work-in-progress; It is bound to be heavily amended as time passes, especially if I try some new language, like Kotlin or Rust.

Summary of language characteristics

And now, for something completely different... in Java

Summary

This post presents a coding construct for Java which reduces the total number of lines of code necessary to declare and initialize fields whose values are copied or computed from constructor parameters.

The problem

Let us suppose we want to write a class which exposes a `greet()` method that prints "Hello, <name>!" where <name> has been passed as a constructor parameter. Here is a trivial implementation:

Why the majority is always wrong | Paul Rulkens | TEDxMaastricht

I knew I was definitely going to watch this one, from just the title. It turns out that he comes across a bit annoying due to attitude; nonetheless, the talk is definitely worth watching.

Bret Victor - Inventing on Principle

Interestingly enough, in his code snippets he is using JavaScript, whereas one of my personal guiding principles is thou shalt not suffer an error to go undetected, which means that no scripting language should be used for anything at all, anywhere, ever. But, I digress. Excellent presentation.

Bathyscaphe

The Bathyscaphe logo, a line drawing of bathyscaphe Trieste

by Mike Nakis, based on art found at bertrandpiccard.com

Abstract

This article introduces Bathyscaphe, an open-source java library that you can use to assert that your objects are immutable and/or thread-safe.

The problem

Programmers all over the world are embracing immutability more and more; however, mutation is still a thing, and in all likelihood will continue being a thing for as long as there will be programmers. In a world where both mutable and immutable objects exist side by side, there is often a need to ascertain that an object is of the immutable variety before proceeding to use it for certain purposes. For example, when an object is used as a key in a hash map, it better be immutable, or else the hash code of the key may change, causing the map to severely malfunction.

Furthermore, when an object is not immutable, there is often the need to ascertain that it is at least thread-safe before sharing it between threads, otherwise there will be race conditions, with catastrophic results.

Note that when any of the above goes wrong, it tends to be a bug which is very difficult to troubleshoot.

Fixing broken module names in IntellijIdea

Quite often, when I rename a maven module, IntellijIdea gets confused and keeps showing the old module name in the project view.

• Re-importing maven projects does not help.
• Clearing the IntellijIdea caches and restarting does not help.
• Even deleting the .idea directory does not help.

I discovered that this is happening because: 

• IntellijIdea keeps information about a project outside of the .idea directory
• IntellijIdea fails to delete that information when you invalidate caches and restart.

The solution I have found to this problem is:

1. Exit IntellijIdea.
2. Go to the application data directory of IntellijIdea (on my Windows machine, this currently is %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\JetBrains\IdeaIC2022.1)
3. Delete the `external_build_system` subdirectory
4. Start IntellijIdea.
5. Re-import all maven projects.

Update:

Shortly after I discovered this, a new release of IntelliJ IDEA came out, (IdeaIC2021.3) and there appears to be no "external_build_system" subdirectory in its directory. Miraculously, it makes use of the "external_build_system" subdirectory of the IdeaIC2021.1 directory!

Also, with this new version, when I apply the above steps, IntellijIdea for some reason starts to believe that I have chosen to "ignore" all of my pom.xml files.  So, I have to open up maven settings, go to "Ignored Files", and uncheck every single one of my pom.xml files.

Mouse Wheel Natural Scrolling in Windows

Some time ago and for about a year I used a Mac, which had natural scrolling by default. I decided to resist the urge to immediately configure it to work like Windows, and instead I made it a point to give natural scrolling a try for at least a while before making up my mind as to whether to keep it or lose it. While giving it a try, I was surprised to see that it was very easy for me to adjust to it, despite the fact that I have been using the unnatural Windows scrolling mode for nearly 30 years. (Ever since the mouse wheel became a thing.) I found that natural scrolling was indeed... natural. So, I kept using it, and I became addicted to it. Ever since then, I always have to configure natural scrolling on any Windows machine that I get my hands on before I can start using that machine.

Artwork based on original mouse-15887 by Arkthus from the Noun Project

Windows is so poor that it does not offer any user interface through which a novice user can change the mouse wheel scrolling mode. To do that you have to edit the registry, and the setting you are going to be modifying is a machine setting, so you will be affecting the mouse wheel mode for all users, not just for yourself. This is unbelievably lame, but hey, that's Windows, we are totally used to lame.

Getting AntiVirus software to trust a Windows Application

One of our customers tried installing our Windows Application on one of their computers and their antivirus software complained. They in turn complained to us, so we had to find a solution. I am documenting the solution here.

Possible Causes

Antivirus engines may find a certain file suspicious for many different reasons. The most obvious reason is the file containing a byte pattern which has been encountered in some known malware.  Unfortunately, this does not necessarily mean that the file is infected; it may simply be a coincidence. Furthermore, many other checks performed by antivirus engines tend to fall well within the spectrum of paranoia.  It appears that some particularly paranoid antivirus engines will flag an executable as malware simply because it has not been code-signed or strong-name-signed, or because it has undergone obfuscation. Our application checked both of those boxes.  Your mileage may vary.

How to Troubleshoot

The first problem that you are likely to run into when troubleshooting issues of this kind is how to tell whether your application is passing antivirus checks or not. Obviously, the antivirus suite at the company that I work for was not finding anything suspicious with our application, or else we would have certainly noticed; however, a couple of antivirus suites that our client was running were taking issue with it. I did not have access to the antivirus suites that our client had, and even of I could somehow get my hands on them, I would not be able to install them on my machine, because the antivirus suite which had already been installed on my machine by our IT department played god and did not allow me to touch it.

Luckily, there is a website that provides a solution to the problem. It is called virustotal.com, it aggregates a large number of antivirus engines, and it allows you to upload an executable and see what all these engines think of it. It is quite famous in the security community.

Unfortunately, checking an application with virustotal.com is not an exact science, for many reasons. 

Digital Audio Waveform Generation

For various projects of mine I need to be able to synthesize sound, so I decided to take a quick dabble in the realm of Digital Signal Processing. I mean, how hard could it be, right? 

After some fooling around with the Sampled Audio Subsystem of the Java Virtual Machine I was able to hear sinusoidal waveforms of various frequencies from my speakers, and I was starting to think that I am probably almost done, until I tried to play square waveforms. That's when I realized that I had barely scratched the surface. The square waveforms sounded pretty awful at any frequency, and especially at high octaves they sounded like random notes. Triangular waveforms, sawtooth waveforms, really anything except sinusoidal waveforms all suffered from the same problem.

A bit of googling around soon revealed the name of the source of my troubles: aliasing.

A naïvely sampled square wave, exhibiting a bad case of aliasing. Note how some of the peaks and valleys consist of 3 samples, while some consist of only 2 samples.