Personal Registry Editor

Time 2022-09-30 12:16:12

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Personal Registry Editor

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Nicolas Bize
coder. blogger. gamer.

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How I ended up conducting the most successful technical interviews with a single question The Best IDE in the World. The Positive Coder Experiment.

Recent Posts

30 years later, QBasic is still the bestThe Positive Coder ExperimentLudum Dare – Mr BoxHarmful Security7 Tips to Speed Up EclipseCoding Alone In The DarkBecoming a GMail NinjaThe Great and Dusty Intentions of TODOsThe Code Zombies of StackOverflowFavIconX : Make progress bars out of favicons.

30 years later, QBasic is still the best

(5 minutes read)

My oldest son Noah turned 7 three months ago. If he could trade his family for a 2 hour session of playing minecraft, he would do it in a heartbeat. The other love of his life is Super Mario Maker, and it’s been a thrill to see him play the same game and levels that I played when I was his age. About 5 months ago, I left my family for my yearly pilgrimage of ludum dare: a game dev competition during which I lock myself away with friends, return to a state of primitive caveman, not sleep for 48h, and create a full game from scratch (play it at the end of this post!) As I proudly showed my revolutionary AAA title to my wife, Noah was naturally intrigued and I introduced him to the world of code, showing him how simple words (he had just learned how to read) produced an actual game. Since that very day, Noah has been asking me repeatedly to teach him how to make his own video games. And for the past 5 months, I have been looking for the holy grail of language/IDE for kids in the hope of turning that spark of interest into a memorable experience…

My quest has led me to endless forums, through which I have tried countless suggestions: SmallBasic, Pico-8, Smalltalk, Scratch, etc. I have even inquired of the Great Oracles of StackOverflow, to no avail. After 5 months, I ended up with a disappointing conclusion: nothing is even close to what I had back in another era. 30 years later, QBasic is still the best when it comes to discovering programming. 

“OMG please don’t teach him GOTOs!!”

10 PRINT “OH NO, WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!!!”20 GOTO 10

Yes, QBasic is a terrible procedural language. It introduces one to concepts widely considered harmful, uses awkward syntax for implicit declarations, is not case sensitive, is non-zero-based, etc. the list goes on… When developing a skill, it is much better to acquire the right reflexes from the start rather than have to correct years of bad practice. Following this advice, I should have probably started off with the basics of the ruby language which I love. Yet, while most of those QBasic concepts are today generally considered as red flags by our peers, they each served a very specific purpose at the time: to keep the language simple and accessible, a notion that every other language has left behind in favor of flexibility, complexity and logic.

I installed QBasic on my son’s 11” HP Stream today, having to hack a DOSBox manual installation. He double clicked the icon on his desktop and in a split second, we were in the IDE, greeted with the introduction screen which brought back so many memories to my mind:

I then told Noah that there was a very sacred ritual, mandatory for anyone who enters the secret inner circle of programmers, to start off with a program that greets every other programmer out there. As I dictated the formula, he slowly searched for each key, carefully typing with his right finger the magic words: PRINT “hello world”

He pressed F5 and looked amazed as he saw his code being compiled into text rendered on his black screen. He smiled, gave me a high-five, and then scribbled down the code in his little notebook so that he could remember later.

We went on to a couple more commands: CLS, COLOR, PLAY, INPUT, and IF. There was nothing to explain: no complexity, no awkward operator, no abstract concepts, no documentation that needed to be read, no notion of objects/class/methods, no framework to install, no overwhelming menu/buttons in the IDE, no special keyword or parenthesis. It was code in its purest simplicity and form.

After less than an hour, he wrote his first program on his own – an interactive and incredibly subtle application which lets you know the computer’s feelings towards you as an individual and sensible human being:

…which he ran with utmost pride for his cousin and best friend Christian:

…after which he proceeded to easily explain him how it worked and what the code was doing!

And so it was that in a single hour, my 7 year old was able to not only write his first text game, but also to experience the fun and thrill that comes from creating, compiling and executing his own little program. Bonus points, it all fit on a single notebook page:

I was so glad that he was able to understand why I keep saying that I have the best job in the world. My only regret today was to realize that in more than 30 years, we have not been able to come up with something better for our kids: Qbasic has a limited set of simple keywords (the entire help fits on a single F1 screen and is packed with simple examples!), does not distract the coder with any visual artifacts, has a very confined and cosy dev environment, shows errors as early as possible, compiles and executes the code in a heartbeat with a single key, and is extremely straightforward.  We have built more robust and more complex languages/frameworks/IDEs (which are of course necessary for any real-life application), but we have never really made a simpler or more direct access to the thrill of programming than QBasic. Even running QBasic today has become dreadful to the novice that uses a modern Mac/PC/Linux machine, whereas it used to simply require inserting a 3,5” floppy in the A:\ disk drive…

Enough rant, today is all about the celebration of yet another person who discovered the excitement and beauty of programming!

Cheers!

(as promised, my AAA title for which I await EA’s call to purchase copyrights)

The Positive Coder Experiment

(10 minutes read)

About a year ago, we were trying to teach my 2-year old son to go up the stairs one foot at a time. It was interesting to watch him learn.  He quickly got the first half right: He would get his right foot up and push on his right leg with enough strength to lift himself up. But strangely he would never use his other leg. We weren’t quite sure why. Most likely because once he had learned a way to go up one step, there was no need to learn another way! I remember being behind him and telling him constantly: “OK now the other leg… No not that one, the other…” He would still use his right leg. “No, no no! The O-THER LEG!!” No matter what I said, it would always be the right leg. This lasted for a few weeks and what was amusing at first became a little frustrating as he only made use of that right leg. We had tried to lift his left leg to show him how to do it. We had his older brother show him the example. I mean… We just tried so many things in vain… Until something happened.

As we were headed towards the staircase together, he put forth his usual right leg and pulled himself easily up on the first step. But then, instead of targetting my thoughts and words on his left leg, I congratulated him on that easy right step: “Allright!!! Good job Clement!! Way to go! That’s great!!” He paused for a brief moment and listened while I cheered him up. And then, out of nowhere, he lifted his left leg, put it down on the step ahead and lifted himself up! I cheered him up even louder as he quickly went back to his right leg, and hop he went back to his left leg! In a breeze, he was now going back and forth with his little 2-year-old legs.I felt one of those rare privilege moments that a parent feels for his child. It was an amazing discovery for me: my child was much more driven by positivism than by explanation, example, or any other means of education.

A few weeks later, I wanted to try that same experiment at work. In my day to day job, I write code, I read other people’s recent/old code, I perform code reviews, I conduct technical interviews, I share common code with my team, etc. In the end, a lot of what I see as a coder is the output of others. As a software developer, I found that it is extremely easy to look at someone else’s code and focus on the WTF parts. In front of our monitors, our digital world of code is often depersonalized and rarely displays signs of tolerance for errors. I personally found myself being mostly negative when it came to dealing with what others were producing.

At that time, I was struggling with one member of our team who was working remotely on the other side of the world. It seemed to me that no matter what I tried explaining, i ended up being disappointed with what he produced. Most likely the language barrier made it hard for us to exchange clearly on the expectations for quality. His work was uneven: sometimes it was really good and often it was just plain awful. Anyways, he had just completed a feature and was waiting for my code review. I spent a good hour looking through his code. Every time I would see an error, I would mention it. But most importantly, I was now on the lookout for the good parts. I was able to find 3 methods that he had actually written really well. They were clear, concise, well thought out and unit tested. I proceeded to write long comments praising those methods, I mentioned it again in the code review summary, and again in an email. Maybe the impact was amplified by him being used to seeing me grumpy all the time, but boy did I not expect the outcome! A day later, he had made some awesome changes to his code. He had rewritten every other method so that their quality would equal or surpass the 3 methods I had highlighted. All of his code became great code! This was an eye opener for me.

I decided to keep going. With time I quicky found out that while no code is perfect, it always leaves just enough room for positive feedback. In every code review, pull request or answer from interview candidates, there were always positive things to spot and emphasize.

I had to be careful not to encourage bad behavior. This required me to make sure i wasn’t just tossing positive comments out of the blue. Bad code does not magically become good code if left unchanged. The experiment was not about dismissing the bad parts, and I never stopped underlining the bad or erroneous code that I saw. But as I gazed through lines of code, it was all about taking that additional time, sometimes twice the time, to look for and highlight the positive things that I saw: an algorithm which was well written, portions of code which were very clean, smart ways to handle a problem, etc. The aim was to cheer up my peers whenever they produced something good, with the hope that it would carry them one step further. I always made sure to largely outweigh the negative by the positive. If there were 2-3 things to be fixed, I would try to find 4-6 positive things.

The results were quite surprising. What I had discovered with my son was also true with everyone else, me included. Interview candidates became much less stressed out whenever I provided positive feedback on the correct answers they would give, thus increasing the rate of successful interviews. Code reviews which used to require multiple back and forth exchanges now brought much better fruit as the corrections were often perfect right off the bat. The relationship between team members improved and noone was left to code in the dark. The overall quality of our code increased and generated much less issues. I really can’t take any credit for any of it, as the behaviour quickly spread: everyone started doing likewise and most team members were doing it much better than I was.

I am sure that this can be applied pretty much everywhere. The majority of comments on the internet is negative feedback. This is simply explained by the fact that those who agree and enjoy a product or article rarely take the time to mention it, whereas those who disagree feel a natural need to voice out their opinions.

We may all be different as coders, but noone is immune to legitimate and thoughtful positive feedback. To praise a part of someone’s code is to show appreciation for one’s intellect. It increases self-esteem and confidence, it boosts morale and generates a desire to become a better coder. Were you looking for new objectives for the coming year? Take the additional time to look for the positive in what other people produce, and you will not only create greater code overall, but you will also be part of a much greater team.

Thanks for reading, and Merry Christmas!

Ludum Dare – Mr Box

Last week-end, I participated with my brother Max at Ludum Dare. We both worked on individual games. It was a lot of fun, but it prevented me from writing an article. So this week I invite you to try out the game I produced in the span of 48h:

Play the game (WEB / Unity player) : http://nicolasbize.com/LD31/LD31.html

Timelapse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7p97ZCaTX0

All source code & assets were made from scratch for LD31 and are available under MIT licence on github: https://github.com/nicolasbize/ld31

Download Music:
Intro Theme – https://github.com/nicolasbize/ld31/blob/master/Assets/Music/intro-1.mp3
Main Theme – https://github.com/nicolasbize/ld31/blob/master/Assets/Music/main.mp3
End Theme – https://github.com/nicolasbize/ld31/blob/master/Assets/Music/end.mp3

Tools used:
Unity 4.6 (C#), Photoshop, Blender, Audacity, Bfxr

Harmful Security

I’m in line at the guard post. The lady at the front desk is in her 50s. She speaks German on the phone, then English to the person in front of me. She then asks for my ID in French. I glance around the room. Security guards are keeping the entrance and the exit. Outside the bunker, a gate is also heavily guarded by employees who filter out the small amount of cars allowed to go through.

– Who are you here to see?
– Joseph Leblanc (name changed) from the flight performance department.
– Let me call him in. Please have a seat until he comes to pick you up.

Outside, people pass through one-way gates, using electronic badges to go through. The gates only leave room for one person at a time. Even if they tried, security officers carefully watch what comes in and out. One message is clear: security at Airbus is not taken lightly.

Today is July 1st, 2006 in Toulouse, Southern France. Joseph arrives, smiles and greets me as we shake hands. He then goes to the front-desk, signs a bunch of forms and I trade my ID for a temporary badge.

The M01 building is on the left. It’s shaped like an eight figure. Joseph uses his badge to open the front doors. We take the elevator to the 3rd floor. I get a bunch of forms letting me know that I’m forbidden to carry any USB key or external storage device from outside the premices. I cannot bring in my own laptop and cannot bring home anything from Airbus. Those caught with sensible data will face suspension.

I arrive at my desk and turn on my desktop computer, excited to discover what hardware I was provided.

Crap, it’s at least 5 years old. I sigh and as I greet my new teammates, I notice something intriguing: some keyboards have sticky notes next to them. It appears to be some sort of serial number for each computer…

Back at my desk, I am asked to enter my first password. Not just any password. Ten chars minimum, with a required mix of numbers, letters, uppercase and special characters. It takes me a good minute to think of a solid password I can remember. Done. I then try to install Visual Studio. No admin privileges. “Oh you can’t install anything on your machine, We have to issue a ticket for that.” We do. 2 hours later, some guy from an the outsourcing company remote-desktops to my machine, opens up the network folder and installs Visual Studio. 1 hour of installation passes by.

I go on the internet and start browsing developper forums, but most of the time I am greeted with a “Forbidden Site” intranet page. With time, I realize that the blacklist of forbidden URLs is huge. I am told that “it’s a security measure for everyone, to ensure that noone downloads a virus.”

As the days go by, I notice that people regularly change the serial numbers on their stickers… And within just a few weeks, I am greeted by the system for a new password. Already!? Yes, passwords change very frequently here. Security Measure. When working on things as sensible as the upcoming A-380 airplane flight data, a lot of precaution is taken. I talk with someone about using a rotation number, but they apparently received a security warning regarding that behaviour.

It takes me 2 minutes to create and memorize a new password. Deep inside, I actually have no desire to memorize it, knowing that within a few weeks it will already be obsolete. As a result, I often mismatch it with my first password. With time, I finally manage to forget the first one and remember the second one. And then before I knew it, it was back: “Change password.”

No, I don’t want to memorize yet another password you stupid fat-bordered dialog. Luckily, there’s no harm in me carrying the password on me. I take a pen and write down a random password on a sticky note, which I then put in my wallet. The process quickly becomes fastidious. I am constantly taking it in and out of my wallet… One day, taken by other thoughts, I put the paper back directly in my pocket, outside its protective wallet. The washer seizes the opportunity and destroys the note before I can realize it.

The next day, I’m of course unable to find the yellow piece of paper. It’s OK I’m pretty smart I managed to remember it. “Account locked”. Guess not. Time to talk to my superior.

Joseph: “Aie, that’s not good… OK let’s call IT support and see if they can reset your password”.

We call in. I explain my situation and indicate that I find all the security measures a bit extreme.

I receive a sermon on how critical and sensible all the data is, as well as why all the security measures in place are so important and shouldn’t be taken for granted. The guy is clearly in a bad mood. Either he’s just really French, or I’m not the first one having password issues. He finally resets my password. I get back to my computer, hoping he will choke on a croissant the next breakfast.

I attempt to log on. And there it was again, smiling at me like the clown who never dies in horror movies: “Change password”.

Sorry, but I’m done. I take a sticky note, write down a new random password, and put the sticky note under my keyboard. Another serial number. Guilt and remorse start kicking in. I kick it right back in the face through idiotic self-justification: “who cares anyways, it’s always my team in that open space… everyone does it… it’s ridiculous, they asked for it…”

And there I was, creating yet another flaw in a system designed to be so secure. The security’s absurd rigidity had become its biggest vulnerability.  It was just a start, as I couldn’t work properly with so many websites blocked. I didn’t feel protected, I felt in jail and compelled to get out.

7 years later, I have become a security software engineer. I look back at those times and regret my irresponsible behaviour. I have empathy for the IT guy who was doing his best to educate the employees about the importance of security. Having strong passwords, changing them often, enforcing strong security policies, mastering what is done by the users, etc. are all somehow necessary evils. And yet, having personally seen so many sticky-note passwords around me, I cannot wave away the thought: Creating the most secure system without focusing on its users is like looking for the strongest ciment for a house built on San Andreas Fault.

7 Tips to Speed Up Eclipse

About a month ago, I blogged about my love/hate relationship with Eclipse. I was asked by a few people to share my tips on how I was able to speed it up so here we go… As a side note, this article is not about comparing IDEs, please refrain from displaying your hate for the IDE or your preference for another…  This post is just about optimizations that help Eclipse run faster for those who use it. I’ve described each tip for Windows, Linux and MacOS users. Once you have gone through all the optimization tips, Eclipse should start within 10 seconds and run much smoother than before.

[edit]: most of those tips will speed up your Eclipse experience, not just the startup time. Classes will open faster, jumping from one definition to another will be faster. Viewing method javadocs will be faster… Unfortunately, none of that can be timed precisely so there is no specific benchmark about the actual speed gains for each tip.

Note: I assume that you already have an SSD and at least 8Gb of RAM. If not, look no further for performance boosts…

Tip 1 : Always run the latest JDK and Eclipse.

More often than not, every new JDK and Eclipse version includes fixes and optimizations from previous versions. Make sure that you are using the 64 bits version of Eclipse and of the Oracle JDK. For any web development, you will want to use Eclipse for Java EE and not Eclipse for Java.

Oracle JDK : http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads
Eclipse : https://eclipse.org/downloads/

Place Eclipse and your code on your SSD.

Time to launch Eclipse.

Tip 2 : Tune Eclipse Preferences

General > Startup and Shutdown : remove all plugins activated on startupGeneral > Editors > Text Editors > Spelling : Disable spell checkingGeneral > Validation > Suspend allWindow > Customize Perspective > Remove stuff you don’t use or want (shortcut keys are your friends), same for Menu Visibility (how many times have you printed a source file…)Install/Update > Automatic Updates > Uncheck “Automatically find new updates”General > Appearance > Uncheck Enable AnimationsStay with the default theme. Unfortunately, anything else makes it really laggy and slow.

I personally turn off autosuggestions so that they don’t slow down my typing. Instead, I manually trigger the auto suggestions using Ctrl+Space when needed. This is done through:

Java > Editor > Content Assist > disable Enable Auto Activation. Advanced > Remove all unwanted kinds

Tip 3 : Keep your JDK on a RAM Disk

A RAM disk is a virtual disk or hard drive that is stored into the computer’s memory. It boosts the I/O performance on anything that is on it. Creating a RAM disk uses your RAM even though it just appears as a drive on the computer. Because the memory used will be reserved for the disk and become unavailable for other programs, we will only be putting the JDK on there. 300MB will be enough.

Warning: Don’t put anything permanent on the RAM Disk we will create as it will be erased/recreated at each reboot.

Step by Step for Linux users:

Everything is described here already

Step by Step for Mac Users:

The RAM Disk is created with the diskutil tool:

1. Create a new batch file, for example: ~/tools/batch/ramdisk.sh
Replace x, y, and z with the JDK version you have installed on disk:

#!/bin/bash diskutil erasevolume HFS+ 'JDK RAMDISK' `hdiutil attach -nomount ram://614400`cp -r  /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk1.x.y_z.jdk /Volumes/JDKRAMDISK

(Note that diskutil expects the number of 512 bytes sectors to be allocated: for 300MB, 300 * 1024 ^ 2 / 512 = 614400)

2. Save your file and make it executable:

chmod 755 ~/tools/batch/ramdisk.sh

Now run ramdisk.sh to create the Ram Disk:

$ ramdisk.sh Started erase on disk4Unmounting diskErasingInitialized /dev/rdisk4 as a 300 MB case-insensitive HFS Plus volumeMounting diskFinished erase on disk4 JDKRAMDISK

You should now see in Finder the new device called JDKRAMDISK containing your JDK. You can remove the RAM Disk and free its memory by clicking on the Eject button:

Note that if you follow this tip, you will always need to have the RAM Disk in order to launch Eclipse (otherwise you will see the error “A Java Runtime … must be available in order to run Eclipse”). You can configure your system to run the ramdisk.sh script automatically upon startup using Automator or using a launchtl daemon.

Step by Step for Windows Users:

1. Download and install the utility called imdisk 

2. Create a new batch file, for example: C:/tools/batch/ramdisk.bat
Replace x, y, and z with the JDK version you have installed on disk:

@echo Placing JDK on Virtual Disk N:/@echo offsc config imdisk start= autonet start imdiskimdisk -a -t vm -s 300m -m n:format n: /q /Ycall xcopy C:\<path_jdk>\jdk1.x.y_z N:\jdk1.x.y_z\ /S /E /Y /Qlabel n: JDK RAMDISK

By running ramdisk.bat, you will have created a new disk N: labeled “JDK RAMDISK” that will contain your JDK.

3. Make sure the file is run as an Administrator. Right click on the file, go into Properties and check Run as Administrator.

Note that if you follow this tip, you will always need to have the RAM Disk in order to launch Eclipse (otherwise you will see the error “A Java Runtime … must be available in order to run Eclipse”). You can configure your system to run the ramdisk.bat script automatically by placing the script into your Startup folder.

In order for Tip 3 to work, you will need to add the -vm setting in eclipse.ini (see next section)

Tip 4 : Tweak your eclipse.ini

This is one of the most confusing areas of Eclipse optimizations. There are thousands of online articles preaching different configurations… I’ll just describe the way I tweaked my options and add more to the existing confusion

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