Remote Desktop Connection quits without a word

So, I am firing up a remote desktop (RDP) connection, and the little box appears saying that it is trying to connect:

And then the box just disappears, without an error message or any other hint as to what might have gone wrong.

The interwebz abound with reports of this happening, and people asking how to fix it, and various solutions being offered that range from the complex to the hopelessly complex.

Luckily, every time I have encountered this problem, the solution for me was very simple: just wait and try again later.  The remote computer is probably busy booting, or perhaps booting and installing updates.

Now, I will tell you a little secret: when something goes wrong, software can ALWAYS give a meaningful error message.  If it does not, then someone, somewhere, is being either EVIL or INCOMPETENT.

If it could not find the server, it would have said that the server was not found.

If the server was not responding, it would have said that the server is not responding.

In this case, the server was actively refusing the connections, and someone at Microsoft was either so evil that they decided that in this specific case the software should not say anything, or, more likely, someone at Microsoft was so incompetent that they could not simply write their world-class software to give a meaningful error message in a very frequently occurring usage scenario.

Intel NUC5CPYH incompatible with Windows 7 Ulitmate 64 bit?

Intel advertises NUC5CPYH - (Celeron N3050) as being compatible with Windows 7.  It is not.  All my attempts to install Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit on it failed.  The installation would start, and when it would reach the first interactive screen (language selection) the keyboard and mouse would be dead, (not even NumLock would work on the keyboard,) even though both keyboard and mouse work fine on the BIOS screens of the NUC.  On other occasions I managed to overcome this problem, (I don remember how,) and the installation would proceed to 99%, only to fail in the end with some error about not being able to update my computer's boot configuration or something.

Edit: be sure to read nucblog's comment below for a link to an article with instructions that might bring you more luck than I had.

In general, my overall experience of interacting with the BIOS of the NUC5CPYH was not pleasant at all.  The spiffy looking BIOS screens were not welcome by me, as they were not structured in the perfect logical order that I would expect of them, and certain parts of them were clunky.  Attempts to introduce an aesthetic upgrade which result in something technically more flawed than its ugly predecessor generally make a very bad impression, at least to me.

Perhaps the most annoying thing is that the initial screen with the prompts to press F2 to enter setup, F10 to enter the boot menu, etc. appears as if it requires not one, but two key-presses.  It probably requires only one, but there is an initial period of time during which if you press a key, that key is ignored, and that's extremely annoying.  Hey you, Intel BIOS programmers, I have a hint for you: if you are not ready to accept key-presses, do not display a prompt for them!

On dogma in engineering

I once had a colleague who had a higher rank than me, and who was not only unconvinced by my rational and articulate arguments for doing a certain thing in a certain way, but he concluded the discussion by stating that --and I am not paraphrasing here, this is what he actually said-- the way he wanted it done was mentioned in a book, so unless I could find a book backing up my proposal, it was to be done his way.

I did not argue with him at that time, (how can you argue with that?), but I would now like to quickly jot down my thoughts on why saying such a thing is incredibly stupid:

Wow, 5 upvotes, 10 downvotes and counting

I have this answer on programmers.stackexchange.com which, at the time of writing these words, has 5 upvotes and 10 downvotes, and in all likelihood it will continue collecting downvotes, while I adamantly refuse to remove it, standing 100% by my ideas. I am dumbfounded, as such a thing has never happened before.

Here is the programmers.stackexchange.com question:

Is it okay to have objects that cast themselves, even if it pollutes the API of their subclasses?

I have a base class, Base. It has two subclasses, Sub1 and Sub2. Each subclass has some additional methods. For example, Sub1 has Sandwich makeASandwich(Ingredients... ingredients), and Sub2 has boolean contactAliens(Frequency onFrequency).

Since these methods take different parameters and do entirely different things, they're completely incompatible, and I can't just use polymorphism to solve this problem.

Base provides most of the functionality, and I have a large collection of Base objects. However, all Base objects are either a Sub1 or a Sub2, and sometimes I need to know which they are.

It seems like a bad idea to do the following:

for (Base base : bases) {
    if (base instanceof Sub1) {
        ((Sub1) base).makeASandwich(getRandomIngredients());
        // ... etc.
    } else { // must be Sub2
        ((Sub2) base).contactAliens(getFrequency());
        // ... etc.
    }
}

So I came up with a strategy to avoid this without casting. Base now has these methods:

boolean isSub1();
Sub1 asSub1();
Sub2 asSub2();

And of course, Sub1 implements these methods as

boolean isSub1() { return true; }
Sub1 asSub1();   { return this; }
Sub2 asSub2();   { throw new IllegalStateException(); }

And Sub2 implements them in the opposite way.

Unfortunately, now Sub1 and Sub2 have these methods in their own API. So I can do this, for example, on Sub1.

/** no need to use this if object is known to be Sub1 */
@Deprecated
boolean isSub1() { return true; }

/** no need to use this if object is known to be Sub1 */
@Deprecated
Sub1 asSub1();   { return this; }

/** no need to use this if object is known to be Sub1 */
@Deprecated
Sub2 asSub2();   { throw new IllegalStateException(); }

This way, if the object is known to be only a Base, these methods are un-deprecated, and can be used to "cast" itself to a different type so I can invoke the subclass's methods on it. This seems elegant to me in a way, but on the other hand, I'm kind of abusing Deprecated annotations as a way to "remove" methods from a class.

Since a Sub1 instance really is a Base, it does make sense to use inheritance rather than encapsulation. Is what I'm doing good? Is there a better way to solve this problem?

Tags: java, inheritance, type-casting
asked by codebreaker

Mandatory disposal vs. the "Dispose-disposing" abomination

This article started as a stackoverflow answer, and then I copied it over here to expand on it.

For a discussion of the same issue but in java-oriented terms, see this stackoverflow answer of mine: Is overriding Object.finalize() really bad? http://programmers.stackexchange.com/a/288724/41811

There is this practice which is unfortunately very prevalent in the C# world, of implementing object disposal using the ugly, clunky, inelegant, ill-conceived, and error prone idiom known as IDisposable-disposing. MSDN describes it in length, and lots of people swear by it, follow it religiously, write walls of text discussing precisely how it should be done and precisely how it works, and precisely how they arrived at this particular way of doing it, etc.

(Please note that what I am calling ugly here is not the object disposal pattern itself; what I am calling ugly is the particular idiom of implementing an extra Dispose method with a bool disposing parameter.)

This idiom was invented under the assumption that the invocation of IDisposable.Dispose() is something optional, or in any case something which might be OK to forget, in combination with the fact that it is impossible to guarantee that our objects' destructor will always be invoked by the garbage collector to clean up resources.  So, people tend to make their best effort to invoke their IDisposable.Dispose() methods, and in case they forget, they also give it one more try from within the destructor. You know, just in case.

Solid State For The Win!

These two screen captures are from CrystalDiskMark measuring the performance of my brand new Samsung 850 PRO 256GB Solid State Drive (C:) versus the performance of my old Seagate Barracuda 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache Hard Disk Drive (D:).  Higher numbers are better.

Both devices are capable of SATA III, but my machine only has SATA II.  Under SATA III I would expect the HDD to perform somewhat faster, but the SSD to perform a lot faster.  I will update this post when I upgrade to SATA III.

SSD, where had you been all my life?

Minimal MySQL Memory Footprint

The following image shows the mind-boggling amount of memory occupied by MySQL 5.6 server on Windows 7 64-bit.

(This is despite the fact that during installation I explicitly specified that this MySQL server is going to be used for development, not for production.)

A quick search on the web shows that this preposterous amount of memory can be reduced to something less preposterous by editing my.ini (usually found in some place like ProgramData\MySQL\MySQL Server 5.6\) and replacing the following line:

table_definition_cache=1400

with this line:

table_definition_cache=400

Unfortunately, even though the savings are huge, the memory footprint of mysql is still nothing short of gargantuan:

A stackoverflow question that received no love.

Movie: Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

This post does not contain any spoilers, unless you would consider as a spoiler my opinion on how the quality if the movie varies as the movie progresses.  (Or the image below.)

Picture source: cgmeetup.com

So, I watched The Dawn of the Planet of the Apes yesterday, and what can I say, wow, it blew my mind. I started watching it having very low expectations, and I was very pleasantly surprised for about one hour and fifty minutes of its total two hour and ten minute duration, which includes the end titles. Then, starting with the "I am saving the human race" incident, it transformed into the crap that I had expected from the beginning, perhaps even worse, but that does not annul the fact that the first one hour and fifty minutes were one of the most pleasant movie watching experiences I have had in quite some time.

The transaction pattern and the feature badly missing from exceptions.

Exceptions are the best thing since sliced bread.  If you use them properly, you can write code of much higher quality than without them.  I think of the old days before exceptions, and I wonder how we managed to get anything done back then.  There is, however, one little very important thing missing from implementations of exceptions in all languages that I know of, and it has to do with transactions.

At a high level, exception handling looks structurally similar to transactional processing.  In both cases we have a block of guarded code, during the execution of which we acknowledge the possibility that things may go wrong, in which case we are given the opportunity to leave things exactly as we found them. So, given this similarity, it is no wonder that one can nicely facilitate the other, as this sample code shows: