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	<title>Dragons in the Algorithm</title>
	<link>http://mcherm.com</link>
	<description>Adventures in Programming</description>
	<lastBuildDate>Fri, 03 Feb 2012 20:21:09 +0000</lastBuildDate>
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	<item>
		<title>Host Error 2</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Another posting on how to understand Profile errors. If you ever see &#8220;Host error number XXX&#8221;, it means that this was the XXX&#8217;th error of the day that this Profile instance wrote to the logs. Get someone to look it up in the Profile logs. Also, Calling mrpc ZWRAP with [925, 8864, ""44758220"", &#124;!&#124;] will [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://mcherm.com/permalinks/1/host-error-2</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Removing the &#8220;Macros&#8221; warning in PowerPoint</title>
		<description><![CDATA[When you open any PowerPoint presentation made by my company&#8217;s default presentation format, you get a warning that it contains macros and asking whether the macros should be disabled. The macros are useless, but removing this is somewhat awkward and difficult to remember so I&#8217;m writing down the instructions. Launch PowerPoint (these instructions work for [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://mcherm.com/permalinks/1/removing-the-macros-warning-in-powerpoint</link>
			</item>
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		<title>Using a Mix of Computers and Humans for Security</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Suppose that your bank offers currency conversion as a service: give them a deposit or make a withdrawal in euros and they&#8217;ll adjust your balance in dollars. They don&#8217;t do this out of the goodness of their hearts: today&#8217;s conversion rate is around 1.28 $ / €, so they&#8217;d give you 0.75 € for every [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://mcherm.com/permalinks/1/using-a-mix-of-computers-and-humans-for-security</link>
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	<item>
		<title>Namespace for a valid SOAP message</title>
		<description><![CDATA[A brief hint: if you see an error message like this: InputStream does not represent a valid SOAP 1.1 Message check the namespace of the SOAP envelope SOAP 1.1: http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/ SOAP 1.2: http://www.w3.org/2003/05/soap-envelope/]]></description>
		<link>http://mcherm.com/permalinks/1/namespace-for-a-valid-soap-message</link>
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		<title>Binary Backward Compatibility</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I saw this interesting article about a weakness in the Scala language. The weakness applies not just to Scala, but to pretty much any language: the community using the language cannot grow past a certain point until it somehow solves the problem of libraries depending on other libraries in a large (deep) tree. Why is [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://mcherm.com/permalinks/1/binary-backward-compatibility</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Election Guide for Nov 8, 2011</title>
		<description><![CDATA[My election guide for November 8, 2011. My endorsements in Bold. Retention of Judge, Pennsylvania Supreme Court (retain or not): J. Michael Eakin NO, do not retain! &#8212; In 2006, The PA State Legislature voted itself a pay raise in direct violation of the plain wording of the state constitution which states. Judge Eakin was [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://mcherm.com/permalinks/1/election-guide-for-nov-8-2011</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Story Points</title>
		<description><![CDATA[If you have complete and accurate requirements for your project which won&#8217;t change, and your development team is spot-on in estimating and highly consistent in their development pace. and there are no surprises, then you can produce highly accurate project timeline estimates up front. Such accurate estimates are (or, more accurately, would be) quite useful [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://mcherm.com/permalinks/1/story-points</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Faster than the Speed of Falsification</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Lots of science writers are getting very excited about the news that an experiment measured neutrinos going faster than light. But as we all know, they are overreacting. Look, this really shouldn&#8217;t surprise anyone who has ever done any actual science. Karl Popper had a really simple and idealistic concept of how science works: you [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://mcherm.com/permalinks/1/faster-than-the-speed-of-falsification</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>How Even Immutables are Hard with Threads</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Armen Rigo has a blog posting (worthy of an article of its own) proposing using STM (Software Transactional Memory) in PyPy. In a discussion on reddit someone suggested that you could have weaker threading guarantees and just use locks manually. It wouldn&#8217;t be so hard, they explained, because: You really only have to do it [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://mcherm.com/permalinks/1/how-even-immutables-are-hard-with-threads</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>When to Wrap a Library</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I find that this comes up fairly frequently. You find some useful library: perhaps it does logging, or enforces design-by-contract, or it provides an API for calling web services. But someone on the team suggests that instead of using the library directly, we should create a wrapper: &#8220;that way, if we ever decide to switch [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://mcherm.com/permalinks/1/when-to-wrap-a-library</link>
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