Archive for December, 2009

Scripting Excel: can it really be this horrible?

Sunday, December 27th, 2009

OK, I have managed to avoid this for a long time, but I guess it was inevitable: here comes Martin’s cheap, nonconstructively sarcastic I-hate-Microsoft post.

So I was visiting my parents this week-end, and my Dad asked me to help him with a little macro job on an Excel spreadsheet. It sounded simple enough. However, I had forgotten just how astonishingly horrible Visual Basic For Applications, the sorry excuse for a programming language built into Excel (and the other Office applications), can be.

As far as I remember, the last time I did anything with VBA was probably somewhere in the late nineties. Even by the standards of back then, VBA is a really shitty programming language. By the standards of 2009, it’s spectacularly bad. The only explanation I can think of is that somewhere high up in Microsoft Strategic Command, somebody decided to spend a lot of effort on making it as useless and infuriating as possible, while still keeping it just barely functional enough to be able to do the things you want to do with it, if you’re willing to go through a lot of pain. God only knows why they made that decision, but surely a language as bad as this cannot be created by accident.
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Posted in hacks | 4 Comments »

Paying with bits

Monday, December 14th, 2009

In the course of a friendly discussion with Dirk-Jan, I’ve been reading up on the miracles of digital cash.

And by digital cash, I do not mean lame stuff like Paypal, which is basically just an ordinary bank account to which you can send transfer orders. No, what I’m interested in is the real heavy stuff, whereby you have a digital wallet full of cryptographic “coins” which can be transfered from one party to another, without a single central entity keeping track of the contents of your wallet. Ideally, you want to be able to transfer such coins even off-line, without the central entity needing to be involved with every individual transfer.

There are a couple of basic problems with the idea of using bits as money, which any “crypto cash” system will need to find solutions for.
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Posted in algorithms, security | 2 Comments »