Disqus - Friends of mjg

Re: How Obama can be stopped in Electoral College

Curtis Poe — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 08:08:45 -0000

Ignoring the fact that this idea isn't legal (you've misread your Constitution), what you're really saying is "I support elections only so long as people vote the way I want them to".

Re: News

Curtis Poe — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 07:22:40 -0000

No, I did *not* propose changing the name. I asked that we discuss the pros and cons of said change. I wanted a clear and open discussion of the issues here and when I wrote "why not ... rename Perl 5 to Perl 7", I also wrote "or we can ...". In other words, I wanted discussion of alternatives. After reading a lot of the discussion, I finally wrote this: http://blogs.perl.org/users...

In short, I concluded that renaming Perl 5 to Perl 7 was NOT something I could support. If there are issues here, the issues themselves should be discussed rather than pressing ahead with a solution for an ill-defined problem.

Re: News

Curtis Poe — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 08:14:51 -0000

And thanks for clarifying that in the original post :)

Re: Rand Paul Wants to Loosen Laws on Offshore Tax Evasion

Curtis Poe — Fri, 10 May 2013 08:05:59 -0000

I am an American living abroad and I write extensively about issues facing expatriates, FATCA being one of them. I simply don't understand articles like this which make sweeping, emotional generalizations about expats, our means and motivations, without even bothering to look into the facts. I generally like Mother Jones, but this is disgraceful.

First, there are estimated to be over six million Americans living abroad. Are we all obscenely wealthy tax dodgers? Not at all! We're teachers, spouses, accountants, retirees, bankers, beggars, taxi drivers, and so on. What few studies have been done show that both geographically and financially we're all over the map. We're just normal people.

So why do you think we're wealthy? Census data? Nope. The US Census, despite lawsuits from various states, has repeatedly refused to count Americans living abroad. Or maybe it's a congressional study? Nope. Congress has repeatedly rejected bills aimed at learning more about US citizens living abroad. Everyone seems keen on passing laws that impact expats, but no one is keen on finding out what that actual impact is!

What's worse, the FATCA law is trying to compel *every* foreign financial institution on the planet to turn over financial information on Americans to the IRS. Not only is this often in violation of the privacy laws of many countries, it begs an obvious question: how would Americans feel if North Korea passed a law demanding that US banks turn over financial information to North Korea? Or Iran? Or *all* of the roughly 190+ countries across the planet? The banks would incur significant costs, be at risk of significant liability, with no benefit! Why does the US feel they have the right to compel every foreign financial institution on the planet to submit to US law, often in contravention to their local laws? There's this little concept called sovereignty ...

People back in the US have no idea of what they've done. We now have Americans abroad being called "toxic assets" and banks are turning them away. If you live abroad, you need a bank account in your country for such outrageous extravagances like depositing paychecks and paying rent, but thanks to FATCA, Americans are being denied even basic bank accounts!

And did you know that under FATCA, if you have signing control over a company's accounts (for example, if you're an accountant), that company has to turn their financial data over to the IRS? I actually had a chance to join a company at an executive level with equity, but it was clear that this company ... operating solely in Europe and having no US business whatsoever ... had to reject me due to FATCA. They couldn't justify the costs of preparing all of that financial data for a country they don't do business in. That hurt.

I'm not rich. I'm just a guy trying to support my wife and daughter and I'm being punished for the crime of loving a French woman and living in France.

Please, Mother Jones: the next time you publish something like this, please do some research rather than allowing this emotional drivel.

Re: Rand Paul Wants to Loosen Laws on Offshore Tax Evasion

Curtis Poe — Fri, 10 May 2013 09:01:13 -0000

@Talis well, here's the story Alice and her trouble with being an expat: http://www.overseas-exile.c... (Note: I'm the author of that piece which is why I vouch for its accuracy).
And here's information about banks turning away US customers: http://www.overseas-exile.c...

Here's the story of an American woman in Sweden facing bankruptcy for not knowing about the legal requirements for filing FBAR paperwork, even though she dutifully paid her US taxes her entire life abroad: http://www.thelocal.se/3952...

This article contains a nightmare story about a semi-retired gentleman in New Zealand who was having his retirement savings wiped out by the US government: http://www.reuters.com/arti... (note that had he lived in the US, his fines would have been much, much lower).

I've a friend in a foreign country who lost her job because of cancer and drew unemployment. That's when she found out that because the IRS doesn't consider unemployment payments to be "earned income", she found herself facing thousands of dollars in taxes to US government, despite the fact that she's lived in a foreign country almost her entire adult life and has ZERO financial ties to the US government.

These stories are common and I could cite plenty of them constantly and they're all caused by US law being passed which impact expats, but no one cares what that impact is. We're not just a bunch of rich tax dodgers. Most of us are middle-class or below, just like most Americans back on US soil.

Re: Rand Paul Wants to Loosen Laws on Offshore Tax Evasion

Curtis Poe — Sat, 11 May 2013 04:08:21 -0000

Don't feed the trolls. It's clear that TruthLiesInLogic has an ironic nick, but is more interested in picking a fight than exchanging ideas. Engaging with people like that on the Web rarely produces good results.

(Update: as his reply below proves)

Re: Stevan Little, author of Moose and Moe

Curtis Poe — Mon, 13 May 2013 11:49:45 -0000

That was a very fascinating interview. I never knew his background before. Hooray for programming language polyglots.

Re: Why I Haven’t Hired a Single Developer in Canada

Curtis Poe — Tue, 28 May 2013 04:51:31 -0000

Amongst other things, I do international IT recruiting and I see this *constantly*. And the reality is, some of them are going to get hired for those positions. The only thing which confuses me in the above article is the author's assertion that talent was easy to find. The companies I work with are struggling to find good talent and that's why they'll relocate people internationally, but yes, sometimes companies will hire fresh grads and give them senior positions. The companies aren't happy about it either, but sometimes you find your back against the wall.

Re: Dynamic Languages are Unmaintainable (and Unit Testing is Overrated) - William Edwards, Coder

Curtis Poe — Mon, 01 Jul 2013 08:14:02 -0000

I love Perl, one of those "unmaintainable" languages. If there was ever a language with a reputation for "unmaintainability", it's Perl. So what are your two first examples of said unmaintainability? You claim I can't see if a variable is misspelled at compile time, but since I "use strict", I definitely can.

You also claim that I can't tell at compile time if I have a "property attached to the wrong object". Given how vague the term "property" is and how many programming languages like to define things differently, I'm going to assume you're referring to an attribute or a method. And yes, I very much *can* tell if they're missing at compile time (well, composition time and that's close enough to be splitting a hair). That's because I use something called "roles", but that's a digression.

And no, I *don't* write unit tests for typos because I don't have to. Mind you, I wrote the test harness that is shipped with the Perl language, I have commit rights to much of its testing infrastructure and I'm a well-known author, trainer, and consultant for, amongst other things, testing! I've been doing this for a loooong time and I feel that you're setting up straw men here.

You make some valid points about integration testing versus unit testing, but there's one thing I am very clear about when I teach: integration testing will often expose bugs faster, but unit testing will tell you where those bugs are. I've recently been contacted by a company who went with integration testing for their entire code base. Their code base is huge and when bugs show up in their tests, they waste a lot of time and energy finding out where the damned bugs came from. They hear the bugs, they just can't see 'em.

Also, note that "static analysis", while it's a beautiful tool, isn't the only way to go. I point you to Smalltalk and their excellent IDE. In their model, rather than looking at code as a document, it's an object graph that is easily traversible. You can load the code and see what it's actually doing rather than relying on an IDE's ability infer what's going on. Smalltalk's refactoring tools are awesome as a result.

In short, many of the points you raise appear to be from the viewpoint of someone on the outside looking in, which is strange because you do appear to be familiar with dynamic languages. Perhaps you're just struggling with the limitations of the particular dynamic languages you're familiar with?

Re: Want to Move to Europe, What’s an American to Do?

Curtis Poe — Thu, 12 Sep 2013 18:01:10 -0000

Hi there. This is a wonderful blog entry and gives a lot of people hope. Could you be so kind as to post links to the laws you've researched that allow people to move to European countries with a stable income, regardless of having a job offer in the country they're moving to?

Re: Germany to introduce minimum wage

Curtis Poe — Thu, 21 Nov 2013 07:49:28 -0000

What's really going to make this interesting is how this will impact exports. Many people are concerned that France is struggling because she refuses to adopt strict austerity measures, but they ignore the fact that France is doing much better than pundits think (http://www.overseas-exile.c.... However, one obstacle to France getting back on her feet is Germany's wages. Here's the problem.

Germany exports many goods to foreign countries. However, Germany pays many workers less than €6 an hour, while France has a €9.50 minimum wage. As a result, German export goods are relatively inexpensive and this leads to high demand. What usually happens in this high demand scenario is that consumers will then start purchasing large quantities of the exporting nation's currency to buy that nation's goods, but this drives up the value of that currency, resulting in the goods costing more. However, much of German's export market is to other nations on the euro, ensuring that the value of the German currency can't rise, thus artificially keeping the price of their goods low.

If Germany adopts a minimum wage that is considerably more than the wages their export-producing workers currently earn, this will drive up the cost of German exports and will give surrounding countries a chance to be more competitive with Germany.

In the short run, this will help many German workers, but could cause widespread disruptions in the German economy. In the long run, this would be good for Europe, but German's may be upset at a leveled playing field and weaker exports, but it will be hard to roll back a minimum wage once it goes into effect.

As I live in France, I'm very happy to hear that this might happen, but it could be very disruptive while economies adjust.

Re: Project Xpat: Exploring The Expatriate Life

Curtis Poe — Mon, 25 Nov 2013 03:58:06 -0000

I live on the west coast of France, having recently moved here from Paris. I walked to work every morning in Paris, passing by an old boy's school. I would always stare in fascination at the plaque on the wall, a memorial for the young Jewish boys taken from that school and sent to Nazi concentration camps with the complicity of the Vichy government. The last sentence on that plaque reads "Ils furent exterminés dans les camps de la mort" (They were killed in the death camps).

A friend wanted to know what freedom of speech meant over here when public figures can stand trial for using a racial slur. I sent him a picture of that plaque. In the US you mustn't slander individuals, but in Europe, we get constant reminders of what it means to slander groups.

Americans who never live outside the US miss so many opportunities to appreciate the world from a different point of view. A world where I met British Libertarians defending the NHS because medical care is a "human right." A world where a Cockney accent from a burqa catches you unaware. A world where the French in Calais hate the British and the French in La Rochelle tolerate them, both for the same reason (tourism). A world where a young black "gangsta" on the Métro (Paris subway), sporting a puffy jacket, backwards cap, and sporting plenty of "bling" is casually chatting in perfect French about about the wine he is bringing to go with dinner.

I have been studying and writing about expat issues for years, helping Americans move abroad because, damn, it's a great world out there. While I know much of this thread has been taken over by those Americans expressing concerns about FATCA and the tax situation we face (and to be fair, it's a nightmare), I don't want people to forget that there are many beautiful, glorious things to see in the world and you're never going to appreciate them watching an hour-long travel show on the TV.

Re: TCK: Where are you From?

Curtis Poe — Fri, 10 Jan 2014 11:40:01 -0000

I am frustrated every time someone asks me this. I try to say "the US", but they want to know where (they wouldn't ask that if I said I was from Romania). So I say "the last place I lived was in Portland, Oregon." But where were you born? Well, I was born and mostly raised in Texas, but I haven't lived there in three decades and barely remember it. I've also lived in Louisiana, Alaska, Washington State, Hawaii, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Japan, and now France.

I have no idea where the hell I'm from any more.

Re: New documents in N.J. bridge scandal

Curtis Poe — Fri, 10 Jan 2014 18:43:45 -0000

So you're OK with top officials blatantly lying, breaking the law, and doing so merely out of spite? Ah, you must be a Cheney fan.

Re: Horizontal Reuse: An Alternative to Inheritance

Curtis Poe — Thu, 23 Jan 2014 11:02:46 -0000

A great summary!

One thing to note about Ruby mixins: they're actually implemented via inheritance. When you have duplicate methods with the same name, with multiple inheritance, the first class you inherit from will generally provide the method (and C3 method resolution doesn't provide a clean alternative). However, because Ruby classes *inherit* from mixins (call Tractor.ancestors for proof), you find that the *last* mixin that you've "mixed in" has the winning method.

For roles (er, traits) in Perl, if you have two or more roles providing methods of the same name, you generally get a compile-time failure and you have to either rename a method (bad if other classes depend on it), or you can specifically exclude or rename the method and *explicitly* provide the method resolution rather than allowing Perl to simply guess which method you wanted.

Multiple inheritance and MI both have ordering problems, but the original traits researchers designed traits to be both associate and commutative, meaning that if they're implemented correctly, it doesn't matter how you mix or match them: you're guaranteed the same behavior.

Re: What are string and numeric contexts?

Curtis Poe — Thu, 23 Jan 2014 11:28:33 -0000

You're quite welcome. Assuming people like them, I plan to write more articles for this site in the future.

Re: American Power: No Myth: The Urgent Reality of Dangerous French 'No-Go Zones' (VIDEO)

Curtis Poe — Thu, 22 Jan 2015 03:22:49 -0000

Source: I'm a white American living in France. I am not religious.

"Sensitive urban zones" is certainly how Google translates zones urbaines sensibles, but Google Translate is not a credible source. These are "urban renewal areas": poor areas that the government feels it should spend more money on. I've lived and worked in them. They are not "no go" zones.

I also note that the CBN video was a hit piece. Guy Millière is a far-right French author who supports US neo-conservatives and is one of the forces behind dreuz.info, an Islamaphobic site. The gentleman "Max" was listed as being part of Génération Identitaire, a white nationalist group. And citing the Islamaphobic group Riposte Laique after falsely claiming that the French experiment in multiculturalism is going up in flames? I suppose if CBN wants to go around cherry picking sources, they have that right, but it completely distorts the reality of what's going on over here and it's far more complicated that the propaganda being spewed all over the place.

Re: Reverse Polish Calculator in Perl using a stack

Curtis Poe — Fri, 23 Oct 2015 10:48:37 -0000

That's a nice bit of code. Here are a couple of changes I would probably make.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use v5.10;

my @stack;
RPN: while (1) {
    print '$ ';
    my $in = <stdin>;
    chomp $in;

    for ($in) {
        when ("q") { last RPN }
        when ("c") { pop @stack }    # remove the last value                                                                                                                                                                             
        when ("=") { say pop(@stack) }
        when (m|^[-+*/]$|) {
            my $x = pop(@stack);
            my $y = pop(@stack);
            
            when ("*") { push( @stack, $x * $y ) }
            when ("+") { push( @stack, $x + $y ) }
            when ("/") { push( @stack, $y / $x ) }
            when ("-") { push( @stack, $y - $x ) }
        }
        default { push @stack, $in; }
    }
}

You can safely replace "given" with "for" and that should eliminate your warnings and give you the same behavior (it even reads nicely). I also remove some duplication and tried to structure the code to make it easier to follow what's going on. I also nested the "when" statements, something that can really clear up code if done well.

Re: What the SpaceX Failure Can Teach Us About North Korea’s Missile Program

Curtis Poe — Fri, 12 Jan 2018 05:35:18 -0000

This is a hatchet job or very sloppy journalism. This was not a SpaceX failure and you know it. It wasn't just a poor title, in the very first paragraph you wrote "his failure", referring to Elon Musk. You make repeated comments about their failures and later write "SpaceX ... sometimes shoots a dud" when, in fact, you know they did not (and you admitted that on Twitter).

Re: When agile isn't the answer to everything

Curtis Poe — Wed, 28 Mar 2018 04:14:21 -0000

"Agile was created by 17 software developers. It is about developing software. Period."

This is incorrect. The Agile *Manifesto* was created and signed by 17 software engineers in Utah in 2001. Agile had existed long before that and was generally referred to as "lightweight methods." However, the group that met in Utah felt the word "lightweight" was pejorative and adopted the word "Agile."

They didn't invent anything other than a word.

They wrote nothing but a statement of belief.

They are not gods to be worshipped.

What those 17 people did was extraordinary, but there is nothing in Agile which inherently ties it to software development. For example, Kanban, one of the more popular Agile methodologies, was invented by Toyota to improve the efficiency in which they manufactured cars. It had nothing to do with software.

I've was approached by a video production company for improving their agile processes ... to produce videos. That had nothing to do with software.

To imagine, even for a moment, that a project management system which is highly effective in reducing the cost of change and uncertainty only belongs to software is not only ignoring historical reality, it's thinking small. Don't think small.

Re: When agile isn't the answer to everything

Curtis Poe — Wed, 28 Mar 2018 04:15:14 -0000

I know nothing about a response being marked as "spam" and certainly had nothing to do with it.

Re: Test Site: Sol / Tau Station

Curtis Poe — Wed, 28 Mar 2018 10:17:19 -0000

A note to anyone playing: This is the first station of the game and it's PvE only. You cannot be attacked on Tau Station.

Re: Death By Database

Curtis Poe — Thu, 20 Sep 2018 04:25:13 -0000

I have to say that some of the off-site discussion of this has been amusing. Many people who apparently don't appear to really understand databases chiming in on "easy" fixes, or others assuming we missed "obvious" solutions in our example. Pro tip coming from years of consulting: if something seems to be too easy to be true, it usually is. Ask first.

Re: Fixing MVC in Web Applications

Curtis Poe — Thu, 18 Apr 2019 08:56:53 -0000

Thank you! It's not just PHP—though they're particularly bad because PHP makes it easy to push business logic into the view. I also see this a lot in Perl, Python, and Ruby code. Very frustrating!

Re: The Tyranny of Budgets

Curtis Poe — Tue, 14 May 2019 11:55:23 -0000

It's worth noting that after my first round with this company, I estimated we could have had their core issues sorted in about half a year with a reasonable team. Maybe longer if they wanted fewer devs. They basically threw away something they could have easily saved.