The number of large software systems in the world is growing steadily. Old first generation solutions get improvements and grow more sophisticated. Completely new areas open up for automation. More systems, more lines of code. More complexity everywhere. Inevitably, more questions about the behaviour - why did it do that??? And, of course, more errors, from bugs in the systems themselves to malfunctioning of external dependencies and processes.

There are various tools that software developers can utilise in order to deal with the complexities of their systems. One of the core ones is known as logging. The sea captains of the old kept meticulous records of their voyages in the ship’s log, allowing those who followed to know more about the state of the currents and the winds, the lands and their natives. In similar fashion, software developers of today add their own log entries at various points of execution to indicate what the program is doing or planning to do, together with other relevant morsels of information. At some later point these records can be examined in order to learn what the system was doing at that particular time.

Telegram, one of the largest instant messaging applications, introduces bot support some time ago. Their main purpose, it seems, is to have a sort of interactive communications with users. However, you can use the API for much more prosaic, but constructive purposes.

For example, bots are perfect for sending notifications for your DevOps/admin activities, or for your automation scripts. Of course, you can utilize email for the same purpose, but there are a few pros to using bots, and we will look at them in a minute. First, let’s see how one can use a bot for non-interactive notifications.

Bokeh is a nice library, helping python web developers to visualise your data in the browser. It is on good terms with pandas, the statistical and data manipulation package beloved by data scientists. It can source points from a dataframe object directly. Unfortunately, it can’t get a result of a group by object directly to display it as multiple lines, yet. But no worries, with just a few lines of code you can convince it to draw you a nice multiline graph. Take a look at the code snippet below:

Yaml is a convenient format for config storing . There are bindings in most of the popular programming languages, including .NET. The latter is well served by the library called YamlDotNet.

Yaml has a nice feature calls anchors which allows you to reuse portions of config. It works like this:

foo: &anchor
  K1: "One"
  K2: "Two"

bar:
  <<: *anchor
  K2: "I Changed"
  K3: "Three"

Essentially bar will start with everything foo has and then either add or override these values as needed. YamlDotNet supports this feature. Unfortunately, it’s documentation isn’t very clear on the subject. In particular, it doesn’t mention that the feature will not work with the vanilla deserializer. Luckily, all you have to do is to use the bundled MergingParser like this:

Microsoft is continuously improving its record with the open source community. First dumping massive chunks of .NET into github, then actually making very dedicated effort to clean it up and make it portable to Linux and Mac. Now comes another step, albeit smaller, in the same direction. Visual Studio 2017 will support CMake projects in a native way, without the need to generate .proj and .sln files first. This is great news, because it saves some effort for those working on cross-platform C++ products.

String interpolation is a useful feature in many programming languages which helps the developers to generate formatted messages easier. An example from C# 6 could read like:

var msg = $"Value of parameter {nameof(val)} is {val}";

Scala, Ruby and some other languages have similar features. Until recently Python was not one of them. However, the recently released version 3.6 introduced, at last, string interpolation. It can be used as demonstrated:

msg = f"From {start} to {finish} with some step={stepValue}"

More details can be found in PEP 498 . PyCharm IDE already supports this feature in its latest version.

For quite some time I wanted to have a Drupal theme that would allow me to have a bootstrap based theme together with the look and feel as dictated by the Material Design principles from Google. Mainly because I like the way these two look and because I myself have very limited abilities in creating pretty user interfaces.

That said, I didn’t want to spend any time writing the necessary code in the required technologies, namely PHP, CSS/LESS and JavaScript. Luckily, this is no longer necessary. Thanks to considerable effort put in by the nice people of the World Wide Web, all the necessary ingredients are already there and all you need to do is to combine them.

Scrapy is a nice python environment for web scraping, i.e. extracting information from web sites automatically by crawling them. It works best with anonymous data discovery, but nothing stops you from having active sessions as well. In fact, scrapy transparently manages cookies, which are usually used to track user sessions. Unfortunately, the sessions don’t survive between runs. This, however, can be fixed quite easily by adding custom cookie middleware. Here is an example:

After doing some web development work recently, I have clearly remembered why I hate JavaScript so much. Not only is it ugly as a language, lacking in type checking or even decent syntax for inheritance (actually faking it with various workarounds), but the actual fact of having effectively two separate code bases - front end and back end forces you to repeat quite a bit of code. And hunting for missing variables and fields or mismatching types is the favourite pastime of JavaScript developers. CoffeScript makes life more bearable, but it is essentially a fancier and more concise JavaScript with all that it implies.

Yesterday I received an invitation to Google Inbox - a new mail service from Google on top of the famous GMail. I wanted to use it because it provided reminders and allowed you to snooze emails in the inbox until later. I find these features extremely useful. However, the current versions of both Android client and the web interface are not without issues. Here are some of them I have noticed so far:

Again I find myself thinking about how to write as little code as possible when developing applications for various mobile platform. I do find it annoying in the extreme, that iOS, Android and Windows Phone all have mutually incompatible technologies. As if they were doing it on purpose. But maybe they just do? It helps the companies to lock in software developers as well as end users, doesn’t it? Maybe they hope, that the developers won’t bother to write code for all the platforms and will just stick with one. Well, that doesn’t seem to be the case - any serious project is quickly ported to both iOS and Android, with Windows Phone and Blackberry sometimes joining the fun.

Sometimes you want to automate some SSH command execution and don’t really care about checking the remote machines in

~/.ssh/known_hosts

Warning: do this only if you really understand the consequences! I.e. it is very silly to ignore known_hosts on any machines across the Internet. It makes some sense on your intranet, where servers are rebuilt frequently and where external access is restricted; or where the user, executing the script, doesn’t have write permissions for its own home directory, so no known_hosts file can be created. And even then think long and hard before using this trick:

There is no doubt - spammers are becoming cleverer every day. I’ve added CAPTCHA verification to my site in order to prevent spam comments from being submitted. It really helped - previously I used to remove about 10-20 of them on daily basis, offering everything from child pornography to grey mortgages. However, even after the new safety measures have been introduced, I still get a couple of comments a week, which were created by spammers. Somehow they manage to break CAPTCHA. In addition, they texts are quite long, compared to the traditional “go-to-this-web-site-and-buy-stuff” ads. They seem vaguely related to the content of the actual article to which they are added. I suspect some graduate or Ph.D. student, involved in Artificial Intelligence (AI) studies, has written a program to both analyse the text and to bypass the filters. Well done, mister hacker.

Google provides APIs to access its data using various languages. You can manipulate Google calendars, contacts, documents etc. Most of the time the usage is pretty straightforward, but sometimes it is not clear how to achieve a specific goal. For example, it took me some time to figure out how to download all events for a given calendar. The main reason behind the difficulty is the upper limit Google places on the number of calendar entries returned by a single query. There are API calls, which help you to overcome this constraint. Below is the relevant code for your enjoyment. It is in Python, but it can be very easily ported into Java or C#.

I have been introduced to Markdown format some time ago and today I find it extremely convenient for most of the writing I need to do. Markdown is essentially “markup without markup” - it requires you to do very little in order to format your text and it can be easily converted in a number of other formats, such as PDF, Word, ODT, LaTeX, HTML, Docbook etc. From experience I found that the most convenient environment to edit Markdown files is OpenOffice (or LibreOffice). Not only is it free and open source, it is actually quite convenient. You don’t need much to get started - just install the latest version of OpenOffice and open your .markdown document in it.

If you want to right-align the “Help” (or any other) menu entry in your menu bar in a WPF application, you can use the following example:

Code sample taken from here .

WPF is still relatively new and many developers are only scratching the surface of its abilities. Coming from a different framework, one must learn anew how to do the familiar tasks. Sometimes you need to to trigger a click or some other event for one of your WPF controls, such as a button, a menu or a checkbox, directly from code. There are no methods on the controls to invoke these events explicitly. However there is a simple and generic way to do it which works as fine - just use

I was quite surprised to learn that Iran is actually importing almost half of its petroleum. This is despite the fact, that the country is one of the largest oil producers in the world. Also, the price is heavily subsidized - a liter would cost you around 5 pence! However, they are about to cut the import and start imposing limits for consumption, according to this article from BBC .

We are all devastated by the terrible events in Oslo, Norway, where almost 100 people were killed in two closely linked incidents of terrorism. Browsing the news about these events, I couldn’t help but notice facial similarity between the alleged executor of the terrible acts, a certain Anders Behring Breivik, and the notoriously famous manager of Wikileaks, Julian Assange.

I’ve been experimenting with GWT (Google Web Toolkit) recently. GWT allows you to write responsive and consistent user web interfaces in a subset of Java programming language. The source code is then compiled into JavaScript, which can be run in any supported web browser.

This concept looks very attractive to me. While I’ve done a fair amount of web development, including JavaScript, in my earlier days, including writing some Ajax even before it was known as Ajax, I grew disappointed with scripting languages in general and JavaScript in particular because of lack of strict typing and browser differences. GWT abstracts these things away nicely and improves speed of development, maintainability and readability of the code. It is quite surprising to discover that GWT is open source, so even if Google goes bust, it will not disappear. As an example of GWT’s power consider the fact, that GMail’s interface is written in it, as well as Google Reader and a number of other Google web products.

Sometimes Microsoft likes to hide installed applications from you in the “Add or Remove programs”, especially when you play with their beta products. It can be very frustrating and can lead to unstable system. In that case, use a removal tool from, well, Microsoft. Works for various versions of Windows, including XP and Windows 7.

I have released a new product: Event Importer for Google calendar. It allows importing iCalendar files (.ics), downloaded via browser quickly and easily. Possible use cases: event export from Facebook, Meetup, other online services, e-mailed .ics files etc. Please give it a try and let me know what you think.

Looking for a way to integrate Subversion with Visual Studio .NET 2005 I came across AnkhSVN - an open source VS.NET plugin which does exactly that.

My current tests show that the tool works pretty well and in its latest generations is very convenient. It supports not only Visual Studio 2005, but 2008 and 2010 . Make sure you install the latest version. I also suggest that you use WinMerge instead of its built-in diff viewer.  You can do that by selecting “Options” from the “Tools” menu in Visual Studio and then going into “Source Control” subtree and selecting WinMerge as the diff viewer in the “Subversion tools” section.

WPF is a very powerful framework for GUI development. Among other things, it contains a unified approach to user input validation. Adding validation in WPF is very straightforward in most cases. However, validating DataGrid rows is slightly challenging. However, the good people of the world has already taken care of the problem and provided quite detailed walk-throughs. I recommend reading this interesting article (WPF DataGrid Practical Examples) about WPF DataGrid. Among other things, it describes how to perform row validation using the standard

Sometimes you would like to use a standard Windows system icon, such as error, warning, question etc. in your WPF program. The main reason is usually consistent look with the rest of the system. While you could have extracted the desired icon from one of the system resource files, there is a much better technique for doing it. First, add a reference to System.Drawing to your project. Then you can use this sample code to get the desired icon quickly:

With arrival of WPF the usage of

INotifyPropertyChanged

interface has expanded dramatically. The most annoying and dangerous part of implementing the interface is, obviously the fact, that you have to pass your option names as strings. This leaves your code prone to bugs - if in 3 months time you rename one of the properties, there is very good chance that you will forget to update the string name as well. In order to overcome the problem we can use some reflection and a little bit of boiler plate code. The good people of the Internet have done all the work for us already, so just copy, paste and enjoy!

WPF allows you to create localized applications with relatively little effort . The localized strings are put into resource files (.resx), one per target language, and maintained as needed. The editing facilities of Visual Studio, however, are not designed to help the localization efforts, however. The GUI can only show one resource file at a time. It would have been much more convenient if files could be edited side by side, allowing easy synchronisation and addition of missing strings. A simple open-source program Simple Resx Editor does just that.

I was quite eager to learn about Windows Phone 7 when the development preview came out. I downloaded the tools and tried to build a sample to get a feel. I must admit that developing .NET application for the new OS is quite easy. However one bit I couldn’t make work - localization. With today’s global markets and multi-language consumers it is important to be able to deliver your product in different languages. I suspect there was a bug in the version of software I was dealing with then. Now I have downloaded the latest release and followed this blog entry and it actually worked. This is good news, hope you enjoy it as well.

Apparently, Microsoft allows users of Visual Studio to include some icons, supplied with the product. For example, to look at available icons in Visual Studio 2010, locate the file

VS2010ImageLibrary.zip

in the installation directory of your copy of VS (i.e.

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\VS2010ImageLibrary\1033

) and extract the .png files you need. You can extract the necessary sub-images from them.

For convenience, you might consider a free image editing application Paint.NET . In order to be able to save files in .ICO format, you will need this plugin .

Apparently, the well-known hosting provider GoDaddy allows remote access to MySQL databases, created within its environments. Quoting from the help page :

Direct Database Access allows you to remotely manage your hosting account databases with external tools such as Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio Express and MySQL Query Browser. These tools offer a fast connection to your database(s) and additional functionality for advanced users, however, it is a less secure way to manage your databases.

Offlineimap - a utility, used to synchronize between IMAP servers and Maildir style mailboxes on Unix systems, is very convenient. It can be used to back up your mail, stored on a remote IMAP server. Unfortunately, some releases of the utility are quite buggy - the latest version from the previous maintainer was simply broken, refusing to connect to many remote servers. It appears, however, that there is a new maintainer for the project. The GIT repository can be found here . Caveat emptor.

During the last day of 2010 news has leaked about a substantial breakthrough in the world of hacking. The quite famous and popular smartphone HTC HD2, also known as Leo, was hacked to run Android 2.2 and 2.3. Originally the phone comes with Windows Mobile 6.3 preinstalled. One needs a lot of space in order to describe all of this OS’ shortcomings in the areas of stability, performance, user interface and productivity. However the hardware itself is amazingly good and at par with latest phones from the same and other manufactures. The community felt, that it was a great waste not to utilize it properly. The latest achievement allows HTC HD2 owners to replace the Microsoft’s OS with Google’s one. The actual process is a bit convoluted, but there are lots of very detailed, step by step guides on the Internet, including all the necessary links and even demonstration videos. I suggest you give it a go if you happen to own an HTC HD2 phone.

I’ve just finished reading a very interesting book by Frank Partnoy – “Infectious Greed”.  I actually remember seeing it in a library back in 2005, however at that time I chose not to invest the effort into reading it, a decision which I regret today.  Nonetheless, better late than never, as they say. The book is devoted to a number of related, as far as the author is concerned, crises in financial markets that happened in late 90-s and early 2000-s.  He starts with comparatively minor losses in Bankers Trust, today part of Deutscher Bank, and some industrial companies, i.e. Proctor and Gamble, followed by collapse of some institutions, Orange County in California among others, touches the collapse of some foreign currencies (Mexican peso, Thai bhat) and finishes with the Enron and WoldCom disasters.  Losses in all the crises amount to absolutely mind-blowing figures of hundreds of billions of dollars. He makes a few points, which in his view are the main reasons behind the failures on the modern financial world, and he demonstrates them with specific examples.  I will highlight some of them below.  I think it is quite important to understand, that all these causes are interrelated and in many ways feed one another.

The recently released Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 does not support mobile development for OS versions prior to the new Windows Phone 7. If you want to write software for Windows Mobile 6.5 or lower, you need to stick to Visual Studio 2005. So much for backward compatibility.

So, if you are happy to try the new waters of Windows Phone 7, you can download the relevant SDK from Windows Phone Development web site. However, if you are getting an error message, saying “WE’RE SORRY. AN ERROR HAS OCCURRED.”, chances are you’ve hit a bug with the Microsoft’s web site. If you are connecting to it from outside the US, you can try to access the US version once. Just follow this link , it should register you for the US version and all subsequent entries should be fine.

Apple has recently announced the long anticipated release 4.0 of their iPhone OS. The list of new end-user features is disappointingly short - the main item seems to be the addition of some GUI multitasking. Many important, easy to add and practical features, already found in the “jailbreak” versions are not mentioned. It is a pity Apple has such tight control on their product and that it takes so long to release productivity related features to the market. I am pretty confident than in a few years they will be punished by other players on the market.

I have recently installed Fedora Core 12 on my server box. It was an upgrade from Fedora Core 9 and I had to do an intermediate upgrade from 9 to 10, since direct transition from 9 to 12 is not supported. Aside from this small annoyance the process went through very smoothly. It looks like Fedora Core 12 supports an “in place” upgrade mode, similar to recent version of Ubuntu. That means that a new release of the system comes out, you don’t need to create the upgrade media (DVD or a USB image), but can upgrade directly via your current session. This is very convenient in my case, because my server doesn’t have an attached monitor.

Monitoring text log files is quite important activity in our day to day programming lives. Unfortunately, Windows operating system does not include convenient tools to perform the task by default. Nothing comparing to

tail -f

or GNU

less

is deployed with an installation of the OS from Redmond. Luckily, some free alternatives are available on the Internet.

• BareTail
• Log Expert

Use at your own risk, as always.

This is most certainly not the recommended way of implementing QuickSort, it assumes there are no duplicates, but it should work:

private IList<int> sort(IList<int> a)
        {
            if (a.Count <= 1)
                return a;
            return sort(a.Where(x => x < a[0]).ToList()).Union(new List<int> { a[0] }).Union(sort(a.Where(x => x > a[0]).ToList())).ToList();
        }

It’s a nice demonstration of how C# is getting closer to resemble a proper lambda-oriented functional language.

I have been using Tiscali (now TalkTalk) broadband services for more than 4 months. At the beginning everything was fine - I even was quite pleased with them, since they promised to connect me within 10 business days, but in fact I was on the Internet after just one week.

But 2 and a half weeks ago the nightmare began. For whatever reason my Internet connection disappeared. I called the technical support line straight away. Of course, their call centre is somewhere in Bangalore, so it was rather hard to communicate with the help persons. Soon enough it became obvious, that they technical knowledge was limited to whatever was on their script. For instance, the fact that I used a simple ADSL modem-router got them startled. They said, that non-Tiscali equipment was not supported and no fault report will be filed.

A Pascal compiler for .NET not from Borland is available from RemObjects. However the site seems to be dead.

Serialization in .NET world is not straightforward. For years we’ve been told to use

XmlSerializer

, but it has its limitations. It is unable to serialize anything but the public properties/fields, it cannot deal with interfaces in most of the circumstances (specific collection interfaces being the only notable exception) etc. Something that has been used as an alternative for years is

SoapFormatter

, but it is also far from ideal, most importantly because it cannot handle generic types. This renders it almost useless for any practical .NET application, developed nowadays.

Drupal - a very popular open source CMS (Content Management System) - doesn’t have a built-in support for mobile and handheld devices (PDAs). If you want to make your site more accessible to mobile users, your only option now is to have an additional “mobile” theme in your set-up, which would be very simple and lean, and somehow use it automatically when users access your site from small devices. Since automatic detection is required and you probably don’t want to change core Drupal files, you can use this module Mobile Theme - it handles the selection for you. It works pretty well, but please be aware that it also requires the Browscap module installed.

For years I was server-oriented developer, quite often writing code for Unix environment and helping others to do so. However I never mind doing occasional user-oriented application or two. Lately I’ve been doing a lot of .NET GUI development using WPF (Windows Presentation Framework). A small task seems to come up quite often. If you have a GUI application, you usually want it to start in the same state it was left it when used last time. In particular this is true regarding its position and size. Effectively, you would like your application to restore its position ans size automatically on startup. So the following procedure should take care of that.

It is nice to be able to blog about software. For instance, a few years ago I wrote an article about web development using C++ . I still get a comment or two about it almost every week, despite the fact that not a single line of code has been written for the project, unfortunately. However, if I ever took the initiative and started working on it, I would, no doubt, write some interesting progress reports here as well. As things go, it would be very neat to show off some code in the process. By using the Geshi source code highligher/formatter, it is much easier with Drupal nowadays. Just install the module, install the library and off you go!

I have never suspected that Microsoft had this built-in, but it appears to be the case. Code generator called T4 , which targets both C# or VB.NET, is built into your copy of Visual Studio and is available as you read this article. Basically, all you need is to add a new file to your solution with the extension

.tt

, and that’s it, besides from actually writing the code for the template. Read more about it in the article Visual Studio .NET Macros for quick insertion of C# Conditional and Iteration Statements .

Great new piece of software, recently discovered by me - Foxit PDF Reader . Just a few advantages over the standard Acrobat Reader: it’s faster, simpler and, most important, it allows you to save data in PDF forms ! Yes, the so much desired feature, that is not available in the free version of Acrobat is readily usable in Foxit absolutely free of charge.

To continue with the great news, OpenOffice.org version 3.0 has been released. Interface and functionality have been improved greatly - definitely worth giving it a try.

From the Internet:

*NVIDIA announced a new category of supercomputers — the Tesla Personal Supercomputer — a 4 TeraFLOPS desktop for under $10,000.

This desktop machine has 4 of the Tesla C1060 computing processors. These GPUs have no graphics out and are used only for computing. Each Tesla GPU has 240 cores and delivers about 1 TeraFLOPS single precision and about 80 GigaFLOPS double-precision floating point performance. The CPU + GPU is programmed using C with added keywords using a parallel programming model called CUDA. The CUDA C compiler/development toolchain is free to download. There are tons of applications ported to CUDA including Mathematica, LabView, ANSYS Mechanical, and tons of scientific codes from molecular dynamics, quantum chemistry, and electromagnetics; they’re listed on CUDA Zone.*

I like Drupal a lot. It’s a great system, easy to set up and use, and the most important thing, there are plenty of modules, which provide additional functionality. However, every time the Drupal development team release a new major version, the module authors have to change their modules in order to adopt to the new platform. This is a major drawback, because it is a considerable obstacle for those, wishing to migrate to the new version. Module authors are often busy and it takes considerable time for them to make the necessary changes.

Finally Firefox 3.0 is out, grab it fast :)

After using Fedora Core 9 for some time I feel that I have the right to wine a little bit.

First of all, on my machine it feels rather slow, especially in X. Faster, than Fedora Core 8, so there is some progress, but still not as fast as I would like it to be. I have a pretty decent machine and its performance is quite acceptable in Windows. For instance, Firefox 3 simply flies under Win32, but is dragging under FC. I suspect, that the open-source drivers for my Radeon 9200 are to blame here, but my half-hearted attempts to use the proprietary ATI modules failed. To complicate matters, ATI has stopped support for my chipset, therefore all new releases don’t include it.

Firefox Release Candidate 1 is available for download and I decided to give it a go. My first impressions are quite positive - performance is must better on the same machine, the design has been improved and they have added quite a few usability features.

For instance, when you log into a username/password protected web site, Firefox will propose you to save your credentials only after you’ve logged in successfully, while previous versions would ask you to save them every time before the submission. Another nice feature is much more visible site security information, especially for HTTPS-enabled web site.

An article in FT cites a recent report about tax levels around the world. Not surprisingly, United Kingdom has one of the highest levels in general and in property it has actually scored the first place.

In property there was a sharp rise in taxation during the last 5-10 years, when the prices were soaring and therefore more properties were affected by the Stamp Duty, which is charged based on value. Other taxes, such as Council Tax, inheritance, capital gains and so on have been adding up to the bill of an average taxpayer.

According to the press release from Mozilla Foundation, there is a new e-mail initiative, which will be developed via a separate entity to be formed by Mozilla and the head of ActiveState.

Given the fact, that Thunderbird is already an impressive and very useful mail client, we can hope for great new features in the future. And the healthy $3,000,000 of funding, provided by Mozilla Foundation will make it quite realistic.

Looks like IMAP support has been added to GMail. More details at Google help center

It is not uncommon for the richest people in the world to present themselves with luxury yachts . Billionares, such as Paul Allen, Roman Abramovich, many of the Saudi royal family, are all quite keen of long and well-equipped marine vehicles. These yachts are large and self-contained, providing all the services one can find in a modern house, but wherever his or her owner desires to travel.

I have always thought, that buying a large yacht was just another way to enjoy enormous wealth, but now I think that at least some of the buyers have plans beyond tanning and having good time in different parts of the world. By trying to put myself in billionair’s shoes (unfortunately, only in my dreams), I thought about what I would do, if I had more money that I could possibly spend in 100 years.

I have upgraded my hosting database to MySQL 5. Let’s see whether it gives me any trouble. So far it seems to be much faster, than the previous version.

I was quite impressed by the spellchecking features of Konqueror - the KDE web browser. It highlights misspelled words as you type in web forms. Luckily, there is an extension for Firefox, which gives you similar functionality. SpellBound works for Windows and Linux builds of Firefox. Multiple languages, including English, Russian, German and so on are supported. The version, found on the main site, actually doesn’t support on the fly spellchecking, but if you download the latest development version, it will do it happily. More information can be found here .

Lord Chancellor has delivered his new budget speech for 2007. Surprisingly for many, he promised some tax cuts for businesses and individuals alike. Not surprisingly, most of the money will be recovered from the tax payer using new taxes and elimination of existing allowances. All in all, according to most comments, the speech is more about politics and much less about UK economy.

Ever wondered how to convert a Word document into PDF? Or wanted to share a PowerPoint presentation with a Linux user? You can do it very easily by using PDFCreator - an open source printing driver for Windows operating systems.

I personally use it to convert proprietary Microsoft multi-page TFF files, generated by MS Office scanning tools. I scan quite a lot of documents, and Microsoft Office Document Scanning is very convenient to use, but it is almost impossible to open the generated TIFF files in anything, but MS applications. However, by printing them into PDF, I can easily share them with anyone, and the size is not much different from the original, or sometimes even smaller.

An interesting article in The Ecomist - drug dealing analyzed just as any regular industry. More entertainment, than a real business case.

If you are really interested, here is the full 2007 budget speech, given by Gordon Brown on 21st of March 2007

In this my eleventh Budget, my report to the country is of rising employment and rising investment; continuing low inflation, and low interest and mortgage rates; and this is a Budget to expand prosperity and fairness for Britain’s families - and it is built on the foundation of the longest period of economic stability and sustained growth in our country’s history.

I am quite disappointed with the knowledge demonstrated by wannabe C++ programmers today. Hardly anyone knows what

#x

and

x##y

preprocessor directives do, and only few can explain the danger in preprocessor macros with parameters. If the things keep going this way, in 5 years no one will know what

extern "C"

means.

Have a look at the new project - Burstsort .

Quoting from Wikipedia:

Burstsort and its variants are cache-efficient algorithms for sorting strings and are faster than quicksort and radix sort for large data sets.

If you have any experience with the new library - please share your opinion with the general public.

The sums are getting bigger and bigger .

If we want to be more environmentally friendly, we should consider reusing our glasses in pubs. When you order the same type of beer/wine/whatever, there is no need to use another container for your drink - simply handle over the empty one to the bartender and ask him/her to refill. This will save quite a lot of resources, wasted on dish washing, and your health won’t be compromised.

A friend of mine told me an interesting story. A trader in bank X tried to make a profit, building a private portfolio with some new financial product and using bank’s money. Apparently, he abused his position and connections within the firm in order to do so. The sad part of the story is, that he ended up playing against bank Y and loosing half of the cash. Obviously, he wasn’t an exceptionally bright trader and also no proper pricing model was available for that particular product/portfolio.

Apparently, JD Whetherspoon shares fell , after the company issued a profits warning. The pub management firm is worried, that the smoking ban, to be introduced in Britain this summer, will reduce earnings in the short run.

I think it’s probably a great opportunity to buy, since Whetherspoon’s pubs are extremely popular and the ban will apply to all, so their pubs won’t suffer more than others. And as long as no drinking ban is legislated in this country (chances of that are much lower than me winning all lotteries on the planet on the same week) people will go to pubs to drink a pint or two.

Some time ago Microsoft released a free sample - an HTTP server, written completely in .NET and able to host ASP.NET applications. It has been extended and improved by some other company, which now makes it available for download .

The new server will be most useful for demonstrations or embedding, but probably won’t be deployed in environments, where speed and stability are required.

Google allow you to install a Java MIDLet (a small Java application for mobile platforms), which gives you access to your GMail account. Current version is

1.1.1

. The advantage of the MIDLet over web is mainly speed and more mail-oriented interface. And compared to the Mobile Outlook it has the advantage of not destroying e-mail when you download it.

However I am unable to use it productively, since the MIDLet manager, installed on my T-Mobile Vario I has very tight security settings. So every time the application tries to access the Internet, it pops up a warning Yes/No dialog. And, if you think about it, almost any operation requires network access - checking for new e-mail, sending messages, moving them and so on.

An article claims, that there is a proposition to create either

ldn.uk

or

.london

domain. Great idea, but what about other cities? The idea is actually not that new. There is an unofficial domain for St. Petersburg -

spb.ru

.

Heiko Ebens, a Merrill Lynch director, claimed , that hedge fund industry has ceased to deliver higher than average returns and can be mostly replaced by index trackers. Merrill Lynch’s trackers, for instance.

There is an interesting review of the upcoming Windows Server.  The OS seems to be full of goodies to simplify daily administration tasks and to improve security.  It is nice to see, that PowerShell is finally making it into the OS - Microsoft keep on learning fron Unix experience.

As some of you probably know, Google provides an “on-line office” - AJAX-based web application, which allows you to edit formatted text and spreadsheets on-line, storing them on Google’s servers. There are some extra features, including change tracking, sharing of the same document with other Google users etc.

I tried to edit a very simple spreadsheet today. Although the interface is quite slick and not dissimilar from, say, Excel, it is far from perfect. Some quite straightforward operations are missing (Copy sheet, for instance). It is also very slow for many operations - adding rows/columns, changing format of cells and so on.

There is an open source .NET wrapper for (former) SleepyCat Berkeley DB file database system - you can find it on SourceForge .

The chances for another interest rate rise this month are not very high, but still possible, according to Reuters . The house prices are growing, and even if we are spared this month, before the end of the summer the interest will almost definitely go up. It is hard to say whether this will actually cause the prices to go down - the rate has already been increased a few times, but it seems to have very little effect on the market.

An article on Reuters, lap dancers have to pay their own VAT, similar to other self-employed.

Mozilla and eBay are working on a way to improve shopping experience of Firefox users, accessing eBay’s auction sites in some of the countries, according to this press release .

It is really nice to hear, but I personally think that the best tool for eBay is the JBidWatcher - the open source auction sniper.

In C++ you can declare class methods as

const

. The idea is that a

const

method does not change the value of instance’ member variables (and doesn’t call non-const methods on them). The idea is nice, since it allows the compiler to detect a probably undesired changes to data. But as with almost every nice feature of C++, there are times when you need a way to circumvent it, because otherwise it prevents you from doing what you need.

I think it would be great if banks provided “read-only” access for on-line banking - a set of credentials, which can only be used to view the current state of the accounts, but which would not allow to execute any operations. The advantages of this approach are:

• Much smaller risk when you want to check your balance from a less secure place (Internet cafe, library computer, your PDA)
• Can be stored in accounting programs, such as Quicken, Microsoft money and so on, to retrieve statements. Currently many banks don’t support those programs, since there is a considerable security risk if someone steals the login credentials
• Can be used in special monitoring scripts, which can send you alerts if your balance goes too low or there are some unusual transactions

For banks there is obviously more headache in developing and supporting the right applications and also issuing and troubleshooting the extra credentials. Maybe they can find a good business model for the service in the end, such as small extra payment or provision only to better clients as an intensive.

Prices for both commercial and residential property seem to go up, especially in London.

According to this article on Reuters, there is a surge in office space lettings in the City and other places in London. And another one discusses house prices, which seem to be unaffected by the latest lending rates rises by the Bank of England.

There used to be quite a few problems, when installing Drupal on GoDaddy’s shared hosting. There is a lengthy discussion of the related issues. However, recently GoDaddy fixed a few most serious ones, in particular, they gave users permission to invoke MySQL “TABLE LOCK” command, which was the greatest problem of all. So if you deploy Drupal on GoDaddy now, it should be a very straightforward process.

If you want your Drupal to use PHP5 and not PHP4, which is a good idea if you want slightly higher performance and better handling of Unicode, you will need to make adjustments to your .htaccess, since by default files with .php extension are handled by PHP4. Simply add

If you tried to install Service Pack 1 for Visual Studio .NET 2005 (aka KB926601), via Microsoft Update or manually, chances are high that the upgrade failed. The reason is that the deployment MSI package is almost 500M large. Before the actual installation process begins, Windows tries to verify the package. In order to do it it needs to load it into a continuous block of memory. Since even modern machines might not have that much memory available, the process fails and causes the upgrade to fail as well. An error, similar to “Error 1718. File was rejected by digital signature policy” will be produced.

An article in EconBrowser tells an interesting and probably worrying story of an employee pension fund for the City of San Diego, USA.

In short, a legislation was passed, that used any fund’s profit above 8% to increase the final payments to the employees, without any requirement to invest additional money into the scheme. For years it worked quite marvellously, since markets performed exceptionally well and the fund made 8%+ easily. However, when the profits went down, it was realised (surprise, surprise) that the scheme had accumulated a substantial amount of liabilities without proper cover.

Looks like Yahoo! follows closely Google - they have now something called SiteExplorer - very similar to what Google provides via Webmasters tools.

Most important, they now support sitemaps , which is very convenient.

A review of the latest budget speech from the small business point of view has been published .

A simple Q&A article about the budget is available on BBC.

A very interesting article in The Guardian tells the story of a nice elderly couple from Ashford, UK, which has built a property empire worth £280 million. It’s simply amazing what you can reach, if you start at the right time and in the right place.

I was deeply disappointed to discover, that .NET framework 2.0 didn’t contain XQuery implementation. Apparently, it was included in one of the earlier beta releases, but then was dropped by Microsoft in favour of the forthcoming LINQ project - some sort of blend between C# and Oracle’s Pro*C (probably much prettier than the latter).

I can’t say I buy their explanation on why it was done or their proposition to use XSLT as an alternative. Nonetheless, here I am, wishing to use XQuery in C# and .NET in general and without an implementation from Redmond.

Service Pack 2 for Windows Server 2003 has been released. To be honest, I don’t understand why the changes required a whole SP - the list is very short and doesn’t look all that important. Maybe the release notes are incomplete?

The web site has new look - share your comments!

The official build of Fedora Core 6 doesn’t include Firefox version 2, rather the outdated 1.5. Fortunately, a French RPM repository seems to fill the gap.

Apparently, you can also get Firefox 2 from the development branch of Fedora - simply run

yum -y --enablerepo=development update firefox

and it will install the fox.

To elaborate, this entry in the Fedora Project Wiki briefly explains, why there is no official Firefox 2 RPM build for Fedora 6 and gives a few other alternatives.

So, what is the software that I hate the most? The list could be long, but some applications are internal to places where I worked and are unknown to the rest of the world. From the familiar to an average Internet user things I can mention:

• Picasa - I already wrote about my feelings toward this bastrad child of Google
• Windows Media Player - I think its interface is not suitable for music playing and it consumes too much CPU time.
• Outlook Mail - it is really beyond me, why they cannot create a decent tree-like view of letter threads. Even their own Outlook Express can do it. I wish I could use something else at work
• Lotus Notes - this most ridiculous piece of garbage has found its way onto corporate workstations only due to IBM’s powerful marketing. It’s unusable even on modern machines - both from GUI and performance points of view
• Java (I can imagine huge virtual tomatoes thrown in my direction) - I still don’t understand why Sun cannot have neither proper performance nor normal graphics for GUIs. There are quite a few nice frameworks and libraries in Java, and I myself have made good living from programming it, but it doesn’t cause me to like the language and its current implementation anyway

To be continued, for sure…

At last, there is a downloadable beta of the Macromedia (now Adobe?) flash player 9 for Linux. For quite a long time release of the Linux version was lagging behind the Windows. Many popular web sites utilized features from the newer versions, and such sites were unusable on Linux.

Download the new plugin from here .

Property-related indexes are falling on LSE, according to an article in Financial Times. Many analytics mention in their comments, that current property prices in the UK are “unrealistic”. Maybe they have been talking about it for long enough to actually cause price drop in the end.

I have just installed AcdSee - and I can tell you it is way better than Google’s Picasa. Starting with the simple thing - full screen viewing, and down to the proper interface and all the rest. Picasa looks like a quick hack compared to the slick and polished feeling, provided by AcdSee, and the functionality of the later is very good as well. It will take me some time to get used to it, but I already enjoy the experience.

I am testing Drupal 5 beta. A lot of useful modules have not been upgraded yet, but using this page I was able to upgrade manually a few of them, including Google Search, Quicktags, Pathfilter and a few others.

This is unbelivable! I have received 155 spam messages in one day! The world is going crazy.

Despite high prices and rising interest rates, recent figures from mortgage lenders show that the property market is acutally booming, writes BBC. I personally find it hard to explain, taking into account the fact, that the affordability levels are falling throughout the country, and especially in large towns, and the first time buyers often require parents’ help to get on the so called property ladder.

In London, according to many lenders, estate agents and analytics, the rise is even higher than in other parts of the country. I feel that only the recent inflow of workers from the new EU countries, such as Poland, Baltic states etc., prevented the market from falling, since the demand went up and not enough new development was in place.

For years I wanted to run the personal finance manager Gnucash on Windows - in my opinion, it is way better than Microsoft Money or Quicken. Unfortunately, it was only available under Unix. But it seems that now, with the release of version 2 of the application, it is possible to compile it on Win32. So in a few months we might have a stable port of Gnucash for Windows.

It is quite strange - Google has robots.txt file, while both MSN and Yahoo! do not. It would be interesting to see, what other high profile sites have robots.txt and what do they put there.

Following a tribunal ruling, the Financial Services Authorithy , UK’s financial regulator, will have to pay legal costs of two men it tried to fine in the so called Cyprotex case, reports BBC.

If we believe the schedule , Fedora Core 6 should be with us this Tuesday. In the past the Fedora team honored their own deadlines, so hopefully we will enjoy a new rollout of the wonderful Linux distribution.

An article on BBC , published in 2000, but still relevant today, shows, how automobile fuel is taxed in the United Kingdom. The current duty figures, somewhere between 70% and 80%, are among the highest in the world and can explain, why petrol is so expensive in the country, despite the fact that there are oil fields in the North sea.

A recent article on BBC cites an interview with the former Sony executive whines, that the Japanese industry is losing to competition, mainly from US. But reading into the article further reveals, that the main victim of the battle between Sony, Apple and Microsoft is actually the executive himself, who apparently didn’t get along well with the newly appointed welsh replacement.

It is really amazing - so far my spam filter has prevented more than 3,500 spam comments! See here for more info on the issue.

Open source is making its way into breweries! An OS beer recipy is available on freebeer.org , and beer based on it is being sold, mainly in Scandinavia.

Wholesale prices for oil and gas are going down, but it doesn’t look like British Gas is going to reduce the retail prices.

What can be done in order to cause people not to use dark background and light font color on their web pages? Reading long text, which

looks like this

can be frustrating! Yes, I know about bookmarklets and use them extensively (you should as well, if don’t already), the “zap colors” one being my favorite, but why do I have to use it in the first place?

For testing purposes a colleague of mine selected an LSE stock at random. The lucky winner was CRT.L - Chariot Plc, the new lottery runner, which failed miserably during the first public sale of its tickets. Having the luxury of Reuters feed on my workstation, I could easily check, that the new threat to Camelot started around 180 pence per share when they had their IPO in February, but today it is worth a little bit more than 5p.

I saw a link in my favorite property whining blog to an article in New York Times, which talks about mortgage-backed financial securities in the US and their role in the current housing boom.

Even more interesting is the quote from John Keynes, given in the blog: “A sound banker, alas, is not one who foresees danger and avoids it, but one who, when he is ruined, is ruined in a conventional way along with his fellows, so that no one can really blame him” .

BBC informs us, that a major fraud, targeting account information of private clients was prevented by a new government body, called “Soca”. The acronym stands for “Serious Organized Crime Agency” which I find rather amusing.

As already mentioned , profits are rising, and the investment industry expects unusually high bonuses this year. Goldman Sachs have allocated more than half a million USD per employee on average. Naturally, most of the money will go to the fraction of the work force.

I have recently registered with Google apps for your domain . I was surprised with the speed by which they processed my application and gave me a go ahead.

So now I can create e-mail users in my own domain and have a full-fledged web interface - and all for free! Addresses are something like

andre@baryudin.com

or any number of other e-mail addresses I can think about - for any purpose, including spam filtering and mail sorting. Google chat and Calendar are available as well.

As mentioned earlier , I have been suffering from increasing numbers of spam comments. I got tired of it and installed the anti-spam module for Drupal, mentioned in that blog entry. It looks like with a little twisting and adjusting, it catches almost all of the garbage. Cool!

It looks like investment banks’ profits will be exceptionally high this year as well. On the radio they have been saying that once again “those people with six figure salaries will get extra high bonuses”. Not me, unfortunately.

It probably cannot get more ridiculous than that: a blind man has been arrested for driving .

Lately I am getting lots of spam comments to my blog entries, mainly concerned with pornographic sites or anti-impotence drugs sale. This is really annoying, and although my comments are not published automatically, but are rather stored in approval queue, it wastes more and more of my time to go through it and delete all of them.

A valid option would be to use a captcha module for Drupal. I tried it, but it obviously has some bugs, which prevents even humans from posting, so it is not really useful.

Those of you who use Microsoft Outlook know about its address auto-completion functionality. You type a few letters into the address field and Outlook presents you with a list of possible completions. The list includes those recipients, to whom you sent e-mails recently. The problems start when an address is no longer relevant, either because the person has got a new one, or you don’t write him/her many letters any more.

According to an article in The Economist, London attracts more capital and hedge fund managers each year. Mayfair starts to threaten NY’s dominance as the hedge fund capital of the world. Higher profitability as well as better regulation are quoted as the reasons behind the change. An interesting quote:

Amazingly, the FSA (the UK financial regulator) has fined only one hedge-fund manager thus far—and that was for just £750,000 ($1.4m). As London catches up with New York, though, this will surely change.

I wonder whether there are ways to improve ratings of my site without paying for advertisement. Any bright and not too obvious ideas are welcome! Write in comments below…

Microsoft is developing a command line environment, which they call PowerShell . I read some negative feedback, but it looks rather interesting and powerful. The main difference from traditional Unix approach is that the commands do not communicate via standard input/output channels, but rather export and consume objects with properties. These properties can be queried and eventually actioned upon.

The current release candidate uses .NET Framework 2. It would be very interesting to see a port to Unix - a lot of ready code can be extracted from currently existing Unix tools. Maybe an open source project will start to create such a port.

All you Windows developers - there is an alternative to Regsvr32.exe - Reggie . I haven’t used it yet, but it looks quite promising. You need it if you experience problems registering your COM+ DLLs or typelibs, and don’t have a clue what is the cause. Reggie is more informative, and even provides a shell return code, so it can be deployed in scripts.

I really like Drupal - the open source community and blogging software. But their alphabetic sorting drives me nuts - is it so complicated to create proper manual ordering? They have something called “weights”, which can be assigned to items in a list, but this is really not convenient, especially when lists change frequently or are long.

But given how many great and useful features they already have, I hope that this problem will be solved in the future.

Since I heard about first release of Mozilla browser, and the fact, that most of it was written in JavaScript and XUL, I thought about creating a web testing tool, which would use Mozilla-based browser to test web site functionality automatically.

The tool would automatically visit every link on every page and would try to click every button and so on. The tool should be configurable via some sort of script language. In the end the human user would be presented with a report.

My site exports Google Sitemap , using a module for Drupal. I find it quite amazing, that every time I add content, Google actually go and download the sitemap and then the new content! I guess it is still not very popular, so they can afford to devote quite a lot of resources for individual updates of sites with low rank.

The abundance C++ standard library implementations is quite surprising. You have at least the following:

• Apache’s STDCXX (former RougeWave)
• STLPort -I used it myself in a couple of projects, and it is bundled with Borland C++ Builder
• SGI - well, this is mainly STL
• GCC’s implementation
• Dinkumware - used in Microsoft’s Visual C++
• …and more

It is really astonishing - imagine all those people sitting and coding the standard library time after time, for years. You must be very devoted C++ programmer in order to participate in such a project.

Another, this time much more serious problem, for Dell. According to all major news sources, the computer manufacture is recalling more than 4 million laptop batteries due to safety reasons.

Personally, I never liked Dell’s laptops, always preferring IBM’s.

According to a BBC article Dell gave false information in some of its advertisements. They claim it was a genuine mistake in one of their sales brochures, but it didn’t save them from being sued. This is not surprising at all, given the number of desperate lawyers in the US.

Talking of Dell, I am quite impressed by their marketing department, at least in the UK - most of the companies I have worked for here used Dell as their main supplier of both workstations and servers. I personally assemble my own machines, but businesses, apparently, prefer ready-made solutions.

Skype has just released its API for X Windows. I suspect it is still not very stable - after all their recent beta is far from perfect, but if you are interested to try it out on Linux - give it a go.

I have just seen new Dell’s Axim PDA, version X51v-624 . I am actually quite impressed, since it has almost everyting I want from a PDA: Windows Mobile 5.0, a lot of RAM, VGA screen, powerfull CPU and long-lasting library (if you buy the double-capacity one). If it only had the smart-phone features as well, mainly GSP chip, I would probably buy it.

Well, even NY Times is shrinking in size. I hope that FT will follow the lead and eventually abandon their broadsheet style and start publishing in tabloid format. Although very against tradition, it is much more convenient to read in an overcrowded train or tube carriage.

An interesting paper from you know whom, talking about new features, planned for the next version of C++ (yes, someone works on C++ too). It looks quite nice the way they describe it, but given previous attempts to improve it, I wouldn’t be surprised, if the extension turned the arithmetic operators into a super-Turing language, with its own intellect more powerful than that of an average Nobel prize winner.

It looks like the cellular companies couldn’t stop the proposed legislation for slashing prices of roaming calls in the EU. Good news for frequent travelers and chatterboxes.

After many years of development, GnuCash - the open source personal and small business money management application, has moved to version 2.0. This is essentially a port go gtk2/Gnome2, and will hopefully, run on Windows as well, given true cross-platform open source and high quality tool for everyone.

I used GnuCash for many years and find it quite intuitive and simple.

Financial Times writes , that Google is about to launch its own on-line payment service, a rival to PayPal. This is not at all surprising, since Google has been expanding its basket of products recently. Given their powerful advertising base, they are almost doomed to succeed. And this new service will be one of the few which actually generates money, AdWord being the first, of course.

Awhile ago I read an interesting article (and another one ) about bottled water popularity. According to its authors, selling mineral water is a genius business idea, but the product has very little to offer to an average consumer in the Western world, especially where tap water is good.

It connects, actually, to a not so recent scandal in the UK, when Coca-Cola was caught red-handed pouring tap water into plastic bottles and selling it with a very nice profit (estimations around 3 pence per bottle were quoted, with retail price around 50p at least).

According to this article , IT students do not waste their precious time on doing their own assignments anymore. Instead they hire cheap developers from India and other places and for just a few pounds have their word done for them.

I can’t help recalling all the nights I spent writing code as part of my homework, after exhausting studies and a day shift at work…

It is nice to see that shared_ptr is finally making its way into C++ standard library. The question is, of course, when it will actually happen. The document was composed in 2003, but today no compiler ships with anything but std::auto_ptr.

From Microsoft’s Media Connect FAQ :

Fewer software requirements. Unlike Windows Media Connect 1.0, version 2.0 no longer requires installation of Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1

Well, even Microsoft sometimes dump .NET, although it is hard to believe.

Once I read about a rather unusual fraud scheme. In essence, some 1000 random people would receive letters, 500 of which claimed, that stock A would go up, and the other 500 that it would go down during the next NY Stock Exchange trading day - all based on their new ground braking prediction models or insider information. Well, it is not hard to realize, that at least half of the predictions were correct!

According to this blog , some Chinese engineers claim, that they managed to reverse-engineer the protocol, used in Skype VoIP products. They are also said to be developing an example application implementing the protocol, which will be able to communicate with other Skype clients.

After almost a year of development, the long-awaited Linux version of Skype with proper sound support has been released . It definitely seems faster on my machine.

Firefox 1.5 is quite cool, but the forthcoming Firefox 2.0 should be even better. Built-in spellchecker and a few other user-visible features, and a lot of bug fixes and performance improvements.

If you want to try it without tampering with your current installation, try using Portable Firefox 2.0beta .

According to an article in FT, EU is actively discussing the issue of taxes on diapers. I especially liked the phase, that it has “exposed a rare split in the otherwise harmonious 25-strong executive body of the EU” - I think it’s rather ironic.

According to an article on BBC, the EU Commission plans to increase competition by introducing international telecom regulator and removing limitations, imposed on foreign companies by national legislation.

In general, it seems like a great idea, and goes in line with previous steps taken by the Commission in order to reduce roaming charges in EU. Hopefully, one day we will be able to travel around Europe [and the world?] and not even think about how much we must pay for calls.

I am quite surprised by the fact, that I have not received yet a single spam letter, despite the fact, that my e-mail account appears on every page and is not protected by any kind of fancy JavaScript. The only explanation I can think of is that my site is still too young and the spam crawlers simply haven’t discovered it yet. A lot of spam to come in the future, probably.

It looks like there is no Flash player ver. 8 for Linux. The only information, available on the Internet on this issue is a blog entry by some developer from Macromedia, who claimed in December last year that version 8.0 would be skipped and 8.5 released for all platforms. Nothing happened since then.

The problem with Flash 7 is that Google Analytics are not displayed properly with it - all the captions are missing.

Working in financial sector in the UK definitely requires a strong liver, since visiting a pub is one of the most popular forms of socializing. It is made only worse by the fact, that quite often the drinks are sponsored by the company. When beer is free it is much harder to say no. And on the other hand you need to watch your tongue, since your boss might be sitting next to you and you don’t want to be sacked next morning just because you were too drunk and said something that was never meant to be said.