What is BGP? It's border gateway protocol.

"which is the routing protocol different networks use to find communication paths to each other" per: this

If you press F7 in Windows 8 at the command prompt's little black window you should get a list of all commands run.

If you do not, it is because you have not yet run a command. This stuff is session specific and not a history of all commands run at the command prompt ever.

have spooled Func expressions return a count?

I thought today of spooling up Actions in an observer pattern as described here and wondered if there would ever be any reason to use Funcs instead of Actions. (In C# a Func returns something while an Action is identical save that it returns void.) I guess you could return true as a Boolean example in a ceremonial display of, yes, this worked, or you could return the time for logging, though you could just get the time when logging too. In circling back to the first circumstance, what if you returned a number and the number came from a global variable which kept a count of how many Funcs had been run and this number was being incremented as each Func in the chain ran? (In a spool of Funcs the value returned is that of the last Func ran begging the question: What is the merit of a collection of concatenated Funcs?) Such a number could then be used to sanity check if the appropriate number of Func expressions ran. Of course, you could just pull this number from the global variable if you did the same thing with Actions instead of Funcs. Well, whatever. I suppose you could compare the global variable to the thing returned by the last Func as a sanity check. We are sort of back to the return value being ceremonial in this circumstance though.

Black Hat!

I went to the Black Hat security convention this year in Las Vegas and attended nine talks. The tenth of the nine talks was the keynote of Alejandro Mayorkas, our (America's) Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security, at DEF CON which was titled "Working Together to Keep the Internet Safe and Secure" and which was an apologetic reaction to what he had experienced at Black Hat and an unabashed attempt to try to extend an olive branch from the government to the distrustful hacker community. The only specific idea that Alejandro suggested was to form an advisor board from the hacker community which could interface with our government. This seemed like a good idea to me. Alejandro had spoken at Black Hat and must have faced some abrasion as this talk seemed to be entirely about doing damage control. He acknowledged a woman in the audience sitting near me who had told him that Wassenaar (information sharing between nations on the distribution of arms to other nations) was a train wreck at Black Hat in trying to sight examples of the fact that the government was listening and wanted to listen to the hacker community. Alejandro acknowledged that a divide of distrust had grown between "the two groups" (government peeps and hackers) over recent years. He didn't mention Edward Snowden or Bradley Manning by name but clearly this was about the bigger picture they are a part of and the whole sense of 1984esque watching-over-your-shoulder ubiquitous gloom that is so much on everyone's mind. The government needs the trust of hackers and their embrace (patriotism) and such trust is not going to be rebuilt overnight. He asked that we start somewhere and try to find a place of acceptable risk within which to take a chance on being vulnerable and, thus, trustful. In the wake of this or perhaps just before, some of the DEF CON staff walked onto stage with him and told him that he had to have a shot of Jack Daniel's in front of the crowd as an initiation into DEF CON given that he was a first time speaker. Of course, given his tiptoeing and how-can-I-win-your-trust-pretty-please projections there was no way for him to say no. He negotiated that the shot be small and mentioned whatever party it was that he had to meet on official government business immediate after to try to rationalize the shot being small. He had a small shot of Jack Daniel's which may have been inappropriate as could be if he was working for the government officially in that moment. In return I will trust that the government did not hack my laptop while I was at Black Hat. There was a time, a few days earlier, when I jumped on Four Seasons' wireless which required no password for a moment to check email and when I did the command prompt's little black window on my laptop flickered open/closed twice before I powered my laptop off in reaction. I'm going to have faith that this wasn't Uncle Sam Mr. Mayorkas. At the end of the talk, when he took questions, a member of the audience tried to get Alejandro to denounce the imposition of backdoors asserting that it was stupid for commerce. This was a theme I saw at Black Hat. No one likes the backdoors and the golden keys. Alejandro said that he knew what the problem was with respect to the threat of terrorists and that he did not know what the solution was. He did not denounce the backdoors and the crowd did not boo him either. I guess he did OK. So what is Black Hat? I once had a coworker give a presentation on the six thinking hats which Wikipedia describes like so:

1. Managing/Blue what is the subject? what are we thinking about? what is the goal?
2. Information/White considering purely what information is available, what are the facts?
3. Emotions/Red intuitive or instinctive gut reactions or statements of emotional feeling (but not any justification)
4. Discernment/Black logic applied to identifying reasons to be cautious and conservative
5. Optimistic Response/Yellow logic applied to identifying benefits, seeking harmony
6. Creativity/Green statements of provocation and investigation, seeing where a thought goes

...but black here goes just back to black versus white thematic good versus evil I think. There used to be a separate White Hat convention (I've heard) for the security professionals and then Black Hat was an independent convention for the hackers they tried to keep out, but they got combined into one annual event. I have always heard stories, and now, I've been. As mentioned, there were another nine talks I saw and if you'll be patient I'll type up blog postings for all of them.

Harbinger Down

Today I drove from Las Vegas to Las Cruces and on the way I stopped at the AMC Arizona Center 24 in Phoenix to see the film Harbinger Down. As far as made for pennies science fiction films go, I liked this film better than Primer (2004) but not as good as Coherence (2013) and I'm still up for more cheapo Sci-Fi yet! All of the acting is great. I didn't catch any real mistakes. I wanted to see it because it "starred" Lance Henriksen, but it turns out that he really has a supporting role and not even the best of the supporting roles. The film stands on its own by way of a cast of unknowns just fine. At one point Lance says "this thing has been frozen since the '80s" in reference to a reentered soviet satellite that the heroes come across to their detriment (a monster awaits within) and I wondered if he was breaking the fourth wall a little and talking about perhaps

1. himself, or
2. this subgenre, and in particular this subgenre is of old school rubber suit movie monsters without any computerized digital touch-ups to what is filmed.

This romanticism for the queso of a bygone exploitation age is both formulaic and, yet, more original than you'd think when you get down to some of the smaller details. I like this little movie. Milla Bjorn (left) and Camille Balsamo (right) are the real stars. They are pictured here:

use SSMS Red Gate SQL Prompt to complete a join

If you just type a space after the ON, the IntelliSense will most likely suggest the join that makes sense.

Windows 10!

On Wednesday, July 29 of 2015, Windows 10 was released and I went to a tech talk on it one day later (July 30) at the Microsoft Center in Austin's Domain mall which was partially coordinated by Ryan Joy pictured here. Over five million Windows Insiders have been testing Windows 10 up until now so it is hardly super mysterious or new. Why no Windows 9? Ryan explained that there is a lot of old Java code that tried to match on the first piece of a string for "Windows 9" to try to distinguish Windows 95 and Windows 98 from Windows NT. It is pretty easy to roll back an upgrade from Windows 8.1 to Windows 10. There is now a start menu again, but it isn't much like the Windows 7 start menu. Basically, when one opens the menu one sees something like that home screen full of Metro tiles that one sees at Windows 8 only now this new screen is three quarters of the whole screen and sort of sits on top of the desktop at the lower left. At the leftmost edge of this thing is a list of programs in a shape sort of like the Windows 7 start menu, only the hierarchy only drills one tier deep past the initial hierarchy. There is no deep nesting. There is a feedback option baked directly into the start menu to allow users to easily/quickly give feedback to Microsoft on Windows 10. A user profile sits at the upper right of the start menu three-quarters screen thingy. You may access it there. Microsoft Edge is now the default browser at Windows 10. It interfaces seamlessly with Microsoft Office. One may take a web page, "draw over it" with One Note to make whiteboardesque notes on top of it, and then send it on via email, I guess as a flattened screen grab plus. Three dots in a horizontal row at the upper right of Edge are its equivalent to the hotdog menu of Google Chrome. You use that button to break into the settings. Microsoft has a goal of continuum in which users get a consistent look a feel at a desktop/laptop, tablet, or phone, but that said there is a specific control to toggle between desktop/laptop and tablet modes and the tablet mode has more of Windows 8 feel. I myself am not overly excited for Windows 10. I can't imagine we will use it at work anytime soon. It seems like everyone just really liked Windows 7 and wished it would stay. :(

Before the event there was a meet and greet where we, the guests, were fed and we socialized some. Someone I spoke to suggested that he had seen installs which made him think that the program was trying in vain to put stuff in the start menu in a hierarchy more than two tiers deep and the stuff beyond the first tier was just getting flattened into the second. This individual, Jeff, said that one of his frustrations with Windows 8 was that at a list of programs he often saw a swath of multiple items with long names which each started out the same, but which each got truncated in the name of screen real estate before they could be told apart. He said that while this problem still exists in Windows 10's menu system too, one may now mouse over such a listing to see a tooltip revealing the full name. Jeff said that the AOSP (Android Open Services Project?) was the open source core logic that Google itself did not control (open source, remember?) that was the centerpiece of every Android device. Some Chinese vendors sell dumbed-down Android phones that have just the AOSP baseline and nothing more. Anyways, Windows 10 for Windows Phone is very likely to soon work with AOSP allowing Android app store apps to run on the Windows Phone which could save the Windows phone from obscurity/irrelevancy. Think of the apps you use on your iPhone or Galaxy. Does it have a counterpart in the Windows Phone space? No, it does not, not that app for your bank. No one builds apps for that platform and that keeps the platform from being competitive. Jeff said that Objective C is to be interpreted by Visual Studio 2015 and that "sitting is the new smoking" and encouraged me to get a standing test, but I'm not delving into that silliness. No thank you. This was my first time in a Microsoft Store and I was intrigued. The Microsoft Stores have existed for six years and the Austin locale for three. The staff does first-line-of-support Geek Squadesque work for its clientele. The Microsoft Store sure reminded me a lot of the Apple Stores I've been in. There is a difference however, even when Microsoft pretends to be fluffy feel good like Apple, it is making the real tools for work and not the toys. I went there. Challenge me?

Addendum 8/2/2015: AOSP really stands for Android Open Source Project.