mwilber.com has been in serious need of a redesign for years now. Well, there’s no time like the present. Twice a year, for the past two years, web designers register their site for an event known as CSS Reboot. On Reboot day every participant turns on their new site design. All entries are listed in a gallery, driving traffic to all the sites. I missed out on CSS Reboot last year and I don’t know if it’s happening this year. If it is happening, then my new design will be revealed on May 1st. For now, I will leave you only with this purposefully annoyingly small preview.

I try to keep my political views to myself, but sometimes things can’t be ignored. For years I’ve been outspoken against computerized voting machines. Not only because, as a professional programmer, I know that they will always be flawed. But also because Diebold, the primary manufacturer of these machines, continues to fail at making a single reliable model, let alone an unhackable one.

I was outraged by a recent report from a Princeton University team. With less than one minute of access to a Diebold machine they were able to steal an election. This report is getting huge press now, even from Fox News, of all places. This is extremely serious. Even if the Diebold machines are locked down (unlikely), the very nature of digital votes makes them unsecure.

These machines need to go away. Despite all of the problems that comes with paper ballots, they will always leave some trail behind. As the Princeton team showed, digital votes can be stolen before they are cast. Please contact your local election board and make it known that digital votes are unacceptable.

The LEGO corporation has started a campaign to rebuild a New Orleans school. For every lego brick they receive in the mail, they will donate a real brick for the school. The lego bricks will go to the local children to build a model of their vision for the city.
I’ll admit that my son doesn’t claim all of the legos in the house, so I’ll be sending them a box of bricks. Think about digging up your old collection (I know you have ‘em) and send it in.

In case you missed it, here’s the link again.

– Matt

Imagine that you are in kindergarten again, and it coloring time. Look around at your friends; all have boxes full of colors. You however have one of those 3-packs you get at a restaurant, one of them is broken, another is white, and the meal cost $650. Teacher then instructs you to draw a rainbow….

… That, my friends, was my experience with Lasso

If you’re a professional programmer, then chances are you’ve never heard of Lasso. This is a good thing. Lasso is a very expensive way for people with no programming experience, to put together simple web applications. That is, of course, instead of paying a professional half the price to do it right.

Lasso uses a tag-based language. It has no classes, no functions, no way to organize your code… except with include files… lots and lots of include files. It comes in two flavors: Bracket Syntax, which serves to make your code look more like the creative brick wall that it is; and LassoScript, which despite looking more like a modern language, is touted to be the “less-sophisticated” of the two styles… go figure.

To give you a better understanding of the nature of the beast, I submit a little demonstration I call C# vs. Lasso:

// Simple C# Example
string strOutput = "This is C#.Net";
for( i=1; i< =5; i++ ){
    Response.Write("Line "+i+" : "+strOutput);
    //intCtr++; Bad Line Commented out
}

[Output_None]Simpe Lasso Example[/Output_None]
[Var:'Text_To_Display_Var'='This is Lasso']
[Loop:5]
    ['Line '+(Loop_Count)+' : '+($Text_To_Display)]
    [Output_None]
        [NoProcess]
            [$Item_Counter_Var=Item_Counter_Var+1]
        [/NoProcess]
    [/Output_None]
[/Loop]


Be forewarned young programmers, Lasso is out there. I battled it for over seven months and barely made it out with my .Net library in tact.