Off On a Tangent

Immigration and Social Security

2006-04-11T16:14:00.000-07:00

I used to believe the common (mis)perception that Social Security was doomed from the start due to its "pay-as-you-go" nature. The argument being that since current earners are always paying current retirees, and since people are living longer and longer while having fewer and fewer children, it just stands to reason that eventually the burden of supporting too many retirees by too few workers will break the system.

This argument suffers from three problems. First, and least important, extrapolating current trends is nearly always an error. Counter-acting forces usually crop up that bring the trend to an end, or even reverse it. In this case, there is most likely a maximum ratio of retirees to workers that would be very difficult to exceed.

Of course, the limit of this ratio could still conceivably be high enough to break Social Security. The second problem is that the argument ignores productivity increases. As productivity increases, it means fewer workers can accomplish the same work, which essentially means the same overall wealth can, in fact, be generated by fewer and fewer workers. For this reason, Social Security could remain solvent indefinitely if productivity keeps pace with the ratio.

The third problem with the argument, and its implicit conclusion that Social Security could work if only it had been set up as an individual retirement savings scheme, whereby each generation saves and invests money for its own retirement, is that whether the money is being drawn from current workers' incomes or from stock market pension plans, the value of that money can only be supported by the efforts of current workers. In other words, if the ratio gets too high for the workforce to keep up, then the value of the stock market either crashes, or loses ground to rampant inflation. Whether you're getting your money from income tax or from capital gains, you're dependent on the current workforce producing enough to support the entire population - workers and retirees alike. Individual savings accounts is no solution to the problem.

Productivity increase is the only real solution to allowing people to retire in the future. And if productivity doesn't keep up, then retirees will be forced back out of retirement, either by hardship, or by salaries so high they can't refuse.

But what's that have to do with immigration? IMO, it'd be ideal if there were no immigration quotas, and anyone who wanted to, could come to the US, work for a few years, and become a citizen. I see only two obstacles to that ideal: entitlement programs, whereby the working force supports non-workers, new immigrants included (think education, medicare, medicaid, social security, welfare, etc); and the basic ability of our economy to absorb new workers.

If we allow infinite immigration but keep all our entitlement programs, it could become impossible to keep up with the costs, as people come here and go on welfare until they can find a job, send their kids to schools, and wind up in the emergency rooms without health insurance. One can limit the entitlements that green card holders are entitled to, but we seem to have already decided, as a society, that there are some entitlements we are unwilling to withhold.

Of course, if the economy could absorb and employ infinite numbers of new workers each year, there'd be no problem, as everyone would have a job and the increase in the tax base and in the wealth produced would solve all the problems with the entitlements. But I know the economy can't do that, though I'm not sure what it can absorb, exactly.

Even if everyone who comes doesn't immediately get a job, our system can support some number of jobless immigrants. If we had fewer entitlements, that number would be greater. And the more immigrants come that eventually find jobs, the greater would be our resources to fund the entitlement programs.

Including Social Security.

I hope my point is clear: limit immigration at your own future economic risk. I do feel allowing as much immigration as possible is a moral issue, in addition to being an economically beneficial one. I think there are entitlements we would be better off without - education could be greatly trimmed, welfare could be phased out I think (I'm ignoring all other wasteful gov spending, such as much of the military and corporate welfare as being irrelevant to the issue of immigration). And if doing so allows more poverty-stricken people to come to the US and find new lives, I think there's a good moral argument for doing so. But even though moral arguments are rarely persuasive, I'm not sure why the basic economic argument isn't.

Multiples of Minimum Wage

2006-04-05T09:25:00.000-07:00

I'm always pleased when I hear about a company with a policy that limits the top-salaried to some fixed multiplier of the lowest-salaried. Ben & Jerry's was that kind of company, and apparently, so is Whole Foods. I think it's a great idea for a company to do. Some will argue you'll block yourself from attracting the best talents with these limits on salaries, but I'd argue you'll be able to hire better quality workers in general (cause you'd be paying them more), they'll be happier and thus more productive, and you'll attract the right kind of top-brass. Meaning people who's ambitions include more than raping and pillaging all the way to their swiss bank account.

Although it would never happen, I think it'd be great if publicly-held companies were restricted to this sort of structure. True, it represents a loss of freedom, but then again, these are publicly held companies, and for the advantages of raising money through stock-ownership, restricting the greed/corruption potential of upper management seems like a decent trade-off. Too often publicly-held companies are proving to be a deal between the top management and the shareholders and the workers are simply used to achieve an wealthy end for a few. That's why we have unions. This is better than unions though - no artificial work restraints, no union bosses and taxes and all the politics that go with it. And if you want to run your company differently, keep it private.

What To Do About Iraq

2006-04-04T14:08:00.000-07:00

Whoever gets elected in 2008 is basically screwed. This is a correlary of the idea that there is no near-term solution for the problem we find ourselves facing in Iraq. If a democrat wins in 2008 and pulls out, Iraq turns into terrorist haven heaven and the democrats look really bad - much worse than Bush does now. If a democrat wins and 2008 and "stays the course", then, as things get steadily worse and steadily more taxing to the budget, it only re-enforces the idea that democrats are the party without any ideas.

My in-laws recently asked me what I'd do about Iraq now. I suggested there are two basic choices and that there have always been two basic choices - and they are one extreme or the other. Either withdraw completely and use the $200 billion (or $1 trillion - the long-term cost estimate, where long term is something like 5 years from now) to fund alternative energy sources (in preparation for the eventual disruption of the oil supply and/or being screwed over by emerging anti-west regimes) and anti-terrorism intelligence efforts; or go in whole hog and remake Iraq. Require all rebuilding contracts be filled by Iraqi-owned companies, get 1 million+ troops into Iraq to safeguard the rebuilders, and pour your Western/Liberal heart-and-soul and money into making Iraq a real democracy.

Going the middle road, IMO, guarantees failure and still costs more than we can afford.

Going all in also costs more than we can afford, and when this whole thing started, this was my primary reason for being against the war - we can't afford it and it will cost us dearly in economic terms. One of these days, we're going to hit a crisis point and we won't have any padding in our savings to deal with it - instead we've decided to rack up enormous debt during the good times. When the bad times come, we'll have nothing to fall back on. That is the basic reason why our high debt is bad - it's not because it's too high to manage, it's because we won't have any borrowing room when things turn bad. And things always turn bad.

Going all in also has the downside that it would mostly likely fail too. So, you've spent more than you could afford and failed anyway. Not good. Does that mean complete withdrawal is our best choice? It may be our least bad choice - or perhaps least catastrophic is a better way to put it. Yes, withdrawal would turn Iraq into a warzone, where Iran, Syria and Al-queda might struggle for dominance. Iraq might become the new terrorist haven that Afghanistan was. The sudden cessation of American pressure would probably free up a lot of bad people to do bad things.

But consider: we already need to protect the homeland - the whole "we're fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them over here" argument is bullshit: terrorists are more than capable of fighting everywhere. Additionally, by fighting them over there we're fighting them someplace where A) they can win and B) they gain momentum for their cause amongst the previously non-terrorists. Eventually that momentum will catch up to us as the increased number of al-queda recruits means increased attacks all over the globe, not just in Iraq.

The war also serves as a distraction from efforts to protect the homeland. $200 billion goes toward body armor and vehicles and training the Iraqi army, etc - which is an opportunity cost with regard to what might have been accomplished with that money and manpower were it spent in intelligence (not to mention hurricane relief efforts).

A sudden release of American presence and pressure would be like Glasnost for terrorists - suddenly allowed to run amok, they most certainly would do just that, and the resulting mayhem would rival the collapse of communism in Russia. However, to unreflectively believe that such a result must be avoided at all costs is irrational - obviously there are costs we should not be willing to pay. We are paying dearly in opportunity costs, and in the long-term we will pay dearly in terms of degrading security as terrorists gain in strength from this conflict. We could pay the latter cost up front by withdrawing, and mitigate the downsides by redirecting our money and manpower to better intelligence and homeland protection and energy self-sufficiency (or at least sufficiency from trusted parts of the world).

It's a bitter pill to swallow, though. Not only is the danger involved in withdrawal very real, not only does it leave the Iraqi people in a terrible position on their own, it would even damage America's reputation a little bit further than it already is.

But at least we'd survive relatively intact as a nation. As it is, when I say I believe we can't afford this war, I really mean we can't afford this war.

The Brilliant Unconscious

2006-04-02T14:39:00.000-07:00

Few people question the existence of the "unconscious mind" anymore. That part of us that solves problems while we're soaking in the steam of a hot shower; the part that issues forth whole complex ideas while we walk through the woods. The part that reveals our lies by making us rub our nose while we talk.

But these demonstrations of a mind below the surface fly in the face of where the idea of the subconscious came from - that it's the sealed container of repressed desires, fears, animalistic urges. We seem to be of two minds about our unconscious - on the one hand it's stupid, brutal, childish, utterly sexual and depraved, and full of thoughts we dare not have, and on the other, it's brilliant, solving our toughest most complex problems while we suntan, and the source of ideas we wish we could tap into more readily. So which is the real unconscious?

Of course, it could be both, but even that suggests we don't have wretched thoughts and fantasies in our normal thoughts (or am I the only one incapable of repressing them all successfully?), that sexual thoughts don't dominate our wakeful minds, etc. So, maybe the unconscious is really just more of the same, a seamless extension of what our supposedly conscious mind is?

What is an unconscious mind anyway? Something that thinks without self-awareness? I think therefore ... nothing. Just content to think and think and think without any I whatsoever? Thinking without being. To think without self-awareness seems a lot like what a computer does, really. If there's a big part of our minds cranking away solving our problems without either our awareness nor its own doesn't that make for a strange division between "us" and "it"?

If "it" is unreflective thinking that goes on whether we will it or not, what is the "us"? Maybe we are just focused attention. Our working mind is large, thinking many thoughts all the time, but our ability to focus attention is small and narrow, so from our perspective, the conscious mind is small and there appears to be a large unconscious beneath it, but really, the unconscious is all around, and we are only able to perceive it through a kind of tunnel vision. It moves and ideas spring up from nowhere. The tunnel moves, and we feel we are exercising free will and directed thought. But maybe in reality, our directed thought is very small indeed, and limited to changing the focus of our attention.

But then, it sure feels as though focusing attention on something affects our ability to reason about it. After all, we can all drive a car without even being aware of what we are doing - but how often do we find ourselves driving off to work when we snap out of our reverie and remember we were trying to go somewhere else? So attention is either capable of some feats the whole mind-thing can't do, or else attention provides something that let's the mind do something it normally can't on its own.

Not that any of this is new, but I don't think it's the normal way we think about ourselves. The normal way seems to be to consider "I" to be a conscious mind, saddles with an unconscious mind "below" it, and running a body that (most of the time) does our bidding. What if instead we thought of ourselves as a mind machine that solves problems like a computer (though vastly complex, flexible, and reprogrammable) and an attention director, able to view the mind computer through tiny windows and maybe focus some extra computing power on certain things? How would that change how we lived?

Well, I don't know, it just seemed sensible to ask the question at that point in my ramblings. Maybe we'd consider increasing our powers of attention as important to our ongoing efforts at self-improvement as more "purposeful" learning. And maybe that's what meditation is? Working on powers of attention. Learning to pay attention to things we rarely do. Learning to not get caught up paying attention to everything that passes by the narrow window. Maybe even learning to increase the size of that window. I don't know, I didn't start out this blog intending to talk about meditation - but guess maybe my subconsious did.

Jaime Says:

2006-03-18T07:06:00.000-08:00

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Jaime eats it!

2006-03-15T17:52:00.000-08:00

Jaime has started eating real food, and he's absolutely adorable doing it. So far he has tried sweet potato (not yam) and banana. Kind of indifferent to the sweet potato, but he's nuts for banana. He concentrates so hard on the spoon when you hold it in front of him, but he doesn't open his mouth until he grabs the spoon and your arms with his hands and then shoves it towards his face with reckless abandon. More than anything else, these feedings make me wish I had a digital video recorder. The boy loves to eat.

Work's been a bit of a bummer lately as my laptop is misbehaving. Last friday, I lost the boot sector on the hard-drive, and I had to use a ubuntu live cd to access the contents and save them to an external hard disk (couldn't get the network working). Then I re-installed Mandrake and managed to recover everything (my /home dir is a separate partition and wow did that make things a snap). I wish the /var dir had likewise been a separate partition for the database I had - I had to spend most of Friday and Monday recovering Firebird and the databases.

And then, starting yesterday, the laptop was back to its old tricks of freezing up several times a day. With the hard-drive superblock failure and these continuing problems even after reinstalling the OS, we're fairly confident there are hardware problems, so I am sending it back to our IT guy to get a more thorough checkout and maybe send it back to Dell for service. Which means I'll be without the laptop for a fairly long time. I've decided to bring my home computer in and use that since it's very fast and not being used - I haven't turned it on in well over a month.

I'm reading the book Lost Mountain currently, an incredibly despressing account of the process of mountaintop removal in the Appalachian mountains and the damage it causes. It is things like this that just make me shake my head when people talk about how much coal there is in the US as a possible substitute for oil in the future. How much environmental degredation is acceptable to maintain our lifestyles? I'm afraid there is no limit. I think it is the first book I've read whose real-world assertions I can actually go and verify.

Painting Paradise

2006-03-08T10:27:00.000-08:00

I've taken up painting. Y'know, artistic painting. Yeah, like Rembrandt. Sort of. Well, ok, I don't really think of it as art. More craft or hobby. After work, I go home, play with my son till he falls asleep, and then I get ou my easel and canvas and acrylic paints and start painting - very therapeutic and fun. And, I happen to be liking the results, which is very surprising for me - I'm usually my worst critic. But, it seems with painting, my attitude is "I can't draw, I can't paint, I have a terrible sense of color and aesthetics and visual design, so therefore anything I paint is going to suck in most people's opinion, right?" Right, so I don't care that it's terrible - I like it the same way a tone deaf person likes his own singing and to hell with the rest of you.

I get to turn my inner critic off because he's no more qualified to judge than my inner artist.

The paints are great fun to play with, though I wish I could use oil because I've noticed my oil pen just covers completely whatever I draw over with it, whereas the acrylics let some of whatever's underneath show through - sometimes requiring 3-4 coats to be completely opaque. But, oil would interfere with the nice easy relaxing nature of the activity - what with the turpentine and smell and all. Fortunately, I've found not all acrylics are equal - some are thicker and more opaque (and more expensive) than others. I'm hopeful that just buying better quality paints will improve the experience.

I made a couple of quick "paintings" for Jaime when he was born. Actually, they are just made with sketch paper and permanent marker, but it gives an idea of my "art" :-)

Three Basic Game Types

2006-03-01T10:38:00.000-08:00

Domination-positive - Games where winning leads to winning. Chess and Stratego are example domination games because the side with the advantage usually is able to leverage the advantage to create more advantages. Most wargames, games where opposing player pieces are "eliminated" are domination games.
Domination-neutral - Games where winning creates no leverage for increasing the advantage of the winning side. Many sports are like this - ie, leading in scoring creates no inherent advantage in future scoring.
Domination-limiting - Games where winning leads to losing, or where taking a lead makes it difficult to progress to winning. Sorry, Aggravation, Parchesi and many multi-player games are like this, where as you start taking a lead toward winning, your continued progress to finish off the win becomes more and more difficult, often allowing come-from-behind victories to be the norm.

Obviously, this is only one of many ways to categorize games. Why I've made this division will hopefully become clear in future blogs.

Going Your Own Way

2006-02-13T10:04:00.000-08:00

Every now and then a question looms large in my mind, and I get somewhat obsessive about digging out answers. Usually it's one of several questions that keep coming back to haunt me, in various different forms. The current question goes something like this: if you became convinced of some (almost literally) earth-shattering truth, would you have the courage and conviction to change your whole life as a result? I'm not talking becoming a vegetarian because you suddenly decide eating meat is unethical, I'm talking really radical changes to your life. Would you do it, or would you find some way to convince yourself you're wrong so you can get back to watching TV?

I've become really interested in the Amish lately - I'm fascinated that such a large group of people have successfully rejected the modern lifestyle that surrounds them - for hundreds of years. Are they communally insane, or do they know something the rest of us don't? Is there some deep rooted fanaticism that enables them to do this? Is it a brutal dictatorship that keeps the people in line? Do they all genuinely know the issues and prefer it that way? How does it happen? It's that type of life-altering change I'm talking about. Imagine a group of people deciding to quit their day job and mimic the Amish. I know there are people who make such changes in their life - I'm just trying to understand what it takes to do it.

A guiding principle in my thinking comes from Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, in which Abraham's willingness to kill his own son because an invisible God asked him to is examined. For the deeply religious Kierkegaard, it was important to understand how to distinguish faith from madness, at least internally, since externally it seemed impossible. Kierkegaard argued that individual relationships with the Absolute transcended universal truths - in other words, what God asks of you takes precedence over any universal ethical truths.

Today, we have no simple God who commands us, we have our individual intuitions, our gut feelings, our own beliefs that may fly in the face of our societal norms, and what gives us any confidence that we know something the rest of humanity doesn't? When scientists tell us low-fat diets are healthier, who are any of us to say, my gut says all that is wrong? When the world tells us murder is wrong, who are we to say, no, in this instance, it's right and necessary? For Kierkegaard, the answer was that your personal relationship with God can create individual answers for you that fly in the face of universal truth. For us today, it's both simpler and more complicated: we aren't talking going against universal truth so much as massive consensus, but we also don't have God to hide behind - only our own fallible and small resources.

But sometimes, you cannot deny yourself, and you know your way is right - even if just for you. And so, do you follow your conviction like the Amish, or do you convince yourself you're mistaken and go with the world? There is no doubt that in many cases, we'd all suffer less if people ignored their own convictions.

Not that I'm alone in thinking that Peak Oil is likely going to ruin our current society in the near future, but I am alone amongst anyone I actually know in real life. I am genuinely scared and horrified at the prospects of life here 20 years from now, and in particular for my 3-month-old son Jaime. What do I do about it? What do I dare do about it?

Mommy, let me taste that thing!

2006-01-11T13:25:00.000-08:00

I think this blog needs to have some pictures.

2006-01-05T07:34:00.000-08:00

Enjoy.

A Trans-Siberian Orchestra Christmas

2005-12-24T07:09:00.000-08:00

Many years ago, while listening to Rimsky-Korsakov's Capriccio Espagnol, it seemed to me a shame that such great classical music had been allowed to fall into disuse. Pieces like Capriccio are clearly of interest to today's youth and rock culture, but just need a re-interpretation by some good musicians with a populist sensibility and modern instruments. Last night, I got to see my idea live on-stage.

The Trans-Siberian Orchestra brings classical music alive with electric guitars and drums and bass - Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, Mozart, Pachelbel, with distored guitars, throaty vocals, and colored flames, sparks and lazers. So, my vision came to be, right? Well, not exactly.

The show was a Christmas show - a Christmas Story told by a narratator and punctuated with rousing renditions of traditional Christmas songs and classical pieces, sometimes with lyrics written for them. Even putting aside the amateurish writing (of lyrics and narration) and the frequently comical juxtaposition of suggestively dressed females singers with the Christams themes, the music was not what I envisioned. Although they played a variety of Tchaikovsky and Mozart and Beethoven pieces, they managed to make them all sound alike. A little keyboard intro leading into a wall of guitar/bass sound. With 2 keyboardists, a drummer, bassist, 8 cello/viola/violin musicians, and 2 guitarists, they pretty much managed to fill every slot in the harmonic territory, leaving no gaps for the listener to enjoy himself. The Tchaikovsky pieces were especially out-of-place as they missed entirely the lightness of the pieces.

But there were moments of very good music, thankfully. Their rendition of Pachelbel's Canon in D was done in markedly different style to good effect, and even the lyrics added to the piece were inspiring. Another piece I didn't recognize, also done in a change of style away from the wall-of-rock-sound was excellent - mostly due to the excellent vocalist Jay Pierce and the gospel-bluesy guitar work of Alex Skolnick. Later, the thudding of the electric guitars plus bass worked well for the Beethoven inspired finale, featuring variations on the 9th's second movement and the 5th's first movement. One can easily imagine a deaf Beethoven appreciating being able to feel his music in his very bones. Mozart played in the same style, while fun and amusing, just didn't work as well.

The light show was very entertaining though, and the whole production very impressive. I just wish more rock groups, especially the older ones like Kansas and the like, would allow themselves to move on and see themselves as a band, not a group - the difference being the a band plays music live from any composer (not just their own pieces), reinterpreting it for a live audience. Bringing up-to-date the pieces that have made music history. But it needs a little more musical sensibility that what TSO brought last night.

A World of Wolverines

2005-12-24T06:55:00.000-08:00

Wolverine is a Marvel comic hero (anti-hero?) whose bones are laced with the made up steel "adamantium". Adamantium is the material of convenience for unimaginative writers needing a crutch - due to it's complete indestructibility. Such things are needed in a comic universe whenever one needs something even The Hulk can't smash. So Wolverine has a bone structure that can't be beat, so to speak.

In an earlier blog, I made an offhand remark about wanting carbone nanotubes incorporated into my bones. Apparently my remark wasn't exactly prescient, as scientists have already started on it. What especially kills me about this article is the line The nanotubes were chemically treated to attract calcium ions and produce the growth of hydroxyapatite crystals on their surfaces. Of course, it seems carbon nanotubes can be chemically modified to do nearly anything.

Maybe someday we'll all be able to leap tall buildings.

Reason #834 Why little Jaime is (hopefully) destined never to go to School

2005-12-06T11:54:00.000-08:00

School Lunch

I'm not sure what there is to add to that link. My favorite line?

As a culture, we Americans tend to fixate on certain exotic dangers (unpasteurized cheese will kill our children!) while completely ignoring real and pervasive dangers (there's shit in our meat; our schools are feeding children swill).

Everything New is Old

2005-12-05T13:51:00.000-08:00

So, just when I got a new baby, I also got a new job, though I haven't blogged about it yet because I've been kind of busy with Jaime. However, it's really an old job at Lazer, whom I worked for in 1998-1999. I've wanted to go back to working at Lazer for a long time because I've learned to hate big companies and working with too many other people with differing viewpoints. It's nice to be a good team player, but when you're not, then it sucks to try to pretend you are. Trying to work within the framework of what is acceptable/understandable/satisfying to others has been little else but a drag.

On the other hand, I originally left Lazer to better learn the craft of programming, and nothing makes it clearer how successful I was at that than to come back here and work with my old code. Ugh! On the one hand, working with others was annoying, but on the other, I was right that I needed to do it to learn. It's a good thing I learned one other thing though, or else this return to Lazer would represent nothing but acceptance of stagnation.

I learned how to learn. Most of what I learned I learned via open-source projects and by engaging in conversation with other programmers around the net. And so, coming back to Lazer, I'm armed with the connections and the habits of exposing myself to new ideas on a daily basis - via the internet. I not afraid I'll stagnate here at Lazer - in fact, without having to work under an organization that doesn't share my biases, I'm hopeful I'll progress more quickly. And best of all, I get to do it at a small company I actually enjoy working at.

I'm feeling pretty fortunate about how all this has worked out.

Jaime settling in

2005-11-16T08:24:00.000-08:00

Last night was a first really good night of sleep with Jaime. He went the whole night without once crying or fussing. We only got up once to feed him around 2:30 (but I can only say that cause Vivi was willing to get up at 6:00am and not go back to bed - not me, I slept till 9:30).

He's sleeping now in the pack'n'play crib - the first time he's been able to sleep on a flat surface with no blankets or anything. Which means maybe he'll start sleeping in the crib at night, which would be fantastic!

I'm starting to feel human again after 1 week. I guess that's not so bad :-)

Jaime is Here!

2005-11-08T11:29:00.000-08:00

Just a quick note: Jaime was born at 12:50 pm Tuesday, November 8th, 2005. 9 lbs, 1 oz, 22 inches long and a full head of hair. Everything went well and both mother and baby are perfectly healthy. Labor was extremely long, but in the end, it was all worth it. Expect pictures soon.

Labor is here

2005-11-07T10:00:00.000-08:00

It's actually been here for 36 hours now - very mild contractions anywhere from 10-60 minutes apart. They're getting stronger now and we've been expecting to have to head to the hospital at any moment, but nothing more seems to be happening. We're scheduled to go in at 6pm tonight for inducement - it looks like we won't be early for that appointment.

A Future Made of Carbon

2005-10-29T10:19:00.000-07:00

There are some who predicted the 21st century would bring a bio-tech revolution to change the world. That may still be true (a century's a long time these days), but I think there's another revolution that might change the world first - a materials science revolution. Specifically, carbon nanotubes, and the hugely diverse materials that can apparently be made from them.

From Space Elevators to Display Panels to fighting cancer, carbon nanotubes prove their versatility. Imagine clothing made from carbon nanotubes - not only would it be bullet proof, it would be dryer proof! Virtually indestructible. And not made by human hands, it would the type of thing that eventually is produced by touching buttons on a "carbon replicator".

Of course, it doesn't stop at clothing. What about building walls and car and airplane frames? Walls that are display ready? How about books? Wireless ready and electronic display books - that still feel like paper? That are indestructible? Indestructibility seems to go well with just about everything, doesn't it? How about integrating some of that into my bones?

There are two more capabilities I'd like carbon nanotube materials to have - transparency and rigidity (carbon nanotube material can already be made either electrically conducting, or not, thermally conducting, or not...). If a sheet of carbon nanotubes can become transparent, then opaque, then transparent - well, now your house is just 4 steel pillars with carbon nanotube sheets stretched across - and windows everywhere whenever you like. And if it can be made rigid, then skip the steel - we'll have cars weighing 400 lbs and homes that can be packed up into your van (that gets 50mpg, btw). Oh, sorry, your wireless, internet-ready home, use any wall you like as your computer/TV.

An Aura that Breaks Things

2005-10-11T13:29:00.000-07:00

I once read someone's theory that magical things do happen in the world, but that some people radiate an aura that prevents such things. The result is that when the skeptics appear to debunk the magical claims, the phenomenon don't happen because skeptics tend to be these people around whom nothing magical ever happens.

I like to think there is something to this theory. Some of us are very mechanically oriented, and some of us are not. I am the latter. I am such a bumbling idiot when it comes to doing simple handy-man-type tasks it's not even funny. I was talking with my father-in-law (FIL) over the weekend, describing my latest dismal failure in trying to install a semi-permanent baby gate at the top of my stairs. I couldn't find a stud to work with, and when I tried to install a wall anchor, it just ripped up the drywall.

So we got talking about finding studs and how hopeless I am at it - my method of choice is to drill holes in the wall every 1/2 inch until I hit a stud. It is the only method that works for me. Of course my FIL was incredulous and asked me why I didn't just use a stud finder. Well, because I've never known one to work (I tried many many many!). They're nothing but false positives and false negatives. Of course, he wasn't satisfied with that because for him, they work perfectly.

He got his stud finder and proceeded to demonstrate how well it worked, and lo - it marked out the studs on the wall at very regular, stud-like intervals (I don't know, every 16"? 18"? something like that). So then I tried it on a different wall. The entire 5 ft length apparently had no studs. Then he tried it, stud ... stud ... stud. I tried again and then I found lots of studs - every 4 inches a new stud! And mobile too! He tried again, very regular pattern. I tried moving the stud finder just like he did, but it still just didn't work for me.

Am I cursed?

Sober thoughts

2005-10-10T10:20:00.000-07:00

The other night, I made Vivi watch the movie Ordinary People with me. This movie never fails to make me cry (and those who know me must know how rare that is). Yet, as we watched, I began to realize the movie just wasn't approachable for Vivi. When the big scene appeared and I was choking up, she was completely unfazed. She couldn't relate.

I realized it was analogous to me watching the Spanish movies that she loves. I've watched them, tried to read the books, but the problem is the characters make no sense to me. They do ridiculous things, or engage in activity that is, to me, clearly immoral and/or repugnant. To her, they are familiar and heart-wrenching. Likewise, the characters in Ordinary People were equally repellant - being, from her point of view, cold, hateful, cowardly. How can one feel sympathy for such characters?

One might think Vivi and I have a huge cultural gulf between us as a result, but actually we talk about it all the time and we each can understand exactly what it is about our differences that the other can't understand. I understand why she finds the distance in American families difficult to understand, and she understands why I think 40-year-old men marrying 12-year-old girls is a little creepy. Some might call it cultural relativism, but from my point of view, it's just recognizing that all cultures get things wrong - badly wrong at that.

Declining America

It saddens me to watch the whole Intelligent Design attack on science gaining apparent momentum. It seems like American culture is committing a kind of suicide or out-of-control immunilogical reaction by attacking such things as science, intellectualism, education, and critical discourse. We seem to avoid electing people who seem too smart. Could Al Gore have won the popular vote if he'd written this well-thought-out article in 1999?

It's crazy watching our society implode like this. The consequences of dumbing ourselves down, of turning our backs on science and intellectual progress are frightening. It gets confused because there are scary things going on out there in the name of scientific progress, though, from my point of view, they are scary because a large impersonal corporation is wedging themselves into a position of power by creating a dependence on their existence - things like genetic manipulation of seeds and plants, drugs that solve problems created by the modern lifestyle, etc. Liberals and Religious Fundamentalists can often have some interesting common complaints about our current lifestyles, but the cure can't be just to go backward in time - that way leads simply to decline and eventually to economic subjugation by others who continued moving forward.

I'm not happy about the environment in which I'm bringing a new life into the world, but I don't know where I can find a better environment. I suppose I should fight it harder, but I don't have a lot of fight in me.

RIAA Madness

2005-10-05T05:14:00.000-07:00

Every now and then I read something that forces me to re-appraise my estimation of what sort of world and nation I live in. I find it chilling to think that such cooperation between police and corporate interests comes about so easily, with the apparent effect of negating all those "rights" we thought were ours - things like search warrants and being told what you're being arrested for. Why are the police acting like the RIAA's dogs? Don't they have more pressing matters? I'm pretty sure if I were to make a call about violation of my copyright, I wouldn't get this sort of police action.

My only question for the dear reader is - what would it take to convince you to boycott the RIAA completely? No more music from RIAA companies for you or your kids. Only buy/find music from non-affiliated labels. Can you do it? Are you willing? Or would that be too much to ask?

Finding a Pediatrician

2005-09-09T11:52:00.000-07:00

It seems Vivi and I got lucky again in finding a nice pediatrician for Jaime. The Panorama Pediatric Group is still around, and we met Dr Chesley today - what a nice guy he was! An interesting little tidbit - he wqas hired to the group by none other than my old pediatrician, Dr. Nazarian, who now teaches med students at either Strong or General.

I couldn't have asked for better answers to my concerns - primary of which was about vaccinations. It seems virtually all children's vaccines no longer use Thimerosal as a preservative - which just left the flu vaccine to consider, and I was reassured to hear that he is not in the habit of routinely administering the flu vaccine to all children. He also said there are flu vaccines available made without Thimerosal, and, in any case, we the parents had final say anyway. I was glad to hear that.

Although doctor's surely know more than me about medicine in general, I won't yield all authority to them as I think there are times when I do know best. In any case, it's my life, my child, my family, and ultimately, my responsibility - I couldn't abdicate that if I tried.

Dr. Chesley is a "DO", and not an "MD", which apparently means he grew up on the chiropractor's side of Medicalville. Interesting. He's fully certified as a pediatrician and can do everything doctor's do - legally - like perform surgery, prescribe drugs and all that. He's been mostly trained as a doctor, but has also been trained in areas such as chiropracty (sp?), acupuncture, homeopathy (er, ok, I guess), etc. He says he doesn't much use these things because he's the only doctor in the group trained in these things, and he doesn't think it would be appropriate to practice them there. That seems like a reasonable attitude. I got the impression that, to him, his training in some of these arts gives him the authority to explain to patients why they're not very useful. He mostly talked about it as an advantage in the sense that if a patient comes to him with a specific problem, he'd be likely to expand the scope of his investigation to include life situational factors, psychological factors, and other such areas. I liked that too.

So, one more about-to-have-a-first-child task done - and done happily. On to the next

Those wacky design enthusiasts

2005-08-22T09:43:00.000-07:00

Vivi is complaining I haven't written a new blog in a long time. I'm not sure this is what she had in mind, but, it is what I have in mind.

Design enthusiasts are always stirring up trouble. I should know, I'm one myself. We are a strange breed, often caring more about how something is designed and created than how well it works. Not to say it's all impractical pie-in-the-sky time wasting, but I do think it's a personality thing more than an educational thing (ie, many design theorists seem to have the impression that their attitude comes from knowing more).

So I was reading Alan Holub's column about getters and setters being evil. It's a classic of uncompromising design principles. Now, I am considerably sympathetic to the view that implementation inheritance and getters/setters are evil - it seems like a bit of a challenge to write code in such a fashion, and that of course attracts me (see what I mean by it being a personality thing?).

However, like many poor suffering Java developers, I spend much of my time writing dull little CRUDy web apps, and a lot of classes are spent simply holding data that must be transferred to and from a database and to and from a web page. The web pages are written using a templating system (to assist in separating display logic from business logic). So, as I read about how all my getters and setters are evil, I'm wondering how else I could write my (Velocity) templates other than by handing off my holder objects and calling the various get methods on them from the template (this allows me to create an HTML web page with dynamic values embedded within).

According to Mr. Holub, I would tell my object to "draw itself". This plainly is not possible though, since there is not clear line drawn between the display of one object and the display of another - rather, the web page template allows me to create a page in which 5 or 6 such holder objects have their data embedded in no particular order. Mixed data. I suppose I could make conglomerate special purpose objects that would know how to create each page given a set of these holder objects - but then that's pretty much what the template is, and the template is a heck of a lot easier to read and edit.

Besides, I have a basic question about the evilness of getters and setters - is the use of all Map objects evil? After all, using a Map object is nothing more than get/put. I'm sure Mr Holub would say no, the get/put methods of Map are not evil since that's not revealing anything about the implementation of the Map - ie, how a Map works has nothing to do with the specific objects it's holding.

But then, what if my getter/setter methods on class Person are really nothing more than a typed Map get() methods? I could have used a Map object to hold FirstName, LastName, Address, SocialSecurityNumber objects, or I could make a simple class, Person.java, that has these four private instance members and getters/setters for each. Am I revealing implementation details, or am I making a special case Map class?

This Person class has an interface that reveals the semantics of what a Person is (as far as the software is concerned). If the Address class returned needed to be changed to a different implementation class, then that could potentially adversely effect all the code that was pulling that piece of information. The solution there is to make "Address" an interface, and return an object of type Address from the getAddress() method. In fact, Person itself would have to be an interface too, and we could have several different implementations of Person (ie, one with a USAddress instance member, and another with a CongoAddress instance member - or whatever, you get the idea).

Does that mean that if I have a instance members that are essentially acting as special case Map objects, and whose getter/setter methods are defined in a public Interface, then I am not violating the rule that says don't expose implementation? Cause if so, I could get down with this "getters/setters are evil" idea.

It's a Boy!

2005-07-15T10:40:00.000-07:00

The little bugger is tricky. I went to the ultrasound this morning with Vivi, and nothing could be seen - his legs were crossed the whole time and he was mostly turned away from the camera. The doctor tried for a good bit, but gave up in the end. So, I left for work. Then, at lunch, I met Vivi and her brother and folks at an Indian restaurant, and Vivi surprised me with news that we were having a little boy! Apparently, the doctor wanted to try again in case the baby had moved, because they had been unable to see the heart as well as they would have liked.

I guess we tricked him in the end, cause they caught him with his pants down!

Learning Bridge

2005-07-13T15:39:00.000-07:00

While in North Carolina visiting my parents, Vivi and I beseeched them to teach us Bridge - my dad is a very avid player. I've always figured I should learn the game, but never did just because I didn't have anyone to play with and it seemed kind of a bother - all that memorization of bidding conventions. But, Vivi was interested, and Vivi's parents were also once upon a time extremely active Bridge players in Brazil, and friend from work alsom mentioned interest in playing, so it seemed the time was right.

I'm excited about it, because Vivi really seems to like it, so it may be something we can both get into and learn together. Tonight we're going to a another friend's house to begin teaching them how to play(!). As though we're pros now or something :-) Hopefully we won't lead them to far astray.

JMeter is nearing a 2.1 release, and as always at release time, I find myself dreaming up all the things I'd like to make work for the next development phase. This time is particularly interesting, because I would like to use my new Coinjema project in JMeter - that would provide an excellent proving ground for Coinjema. We'll see.

On the game development front, Vivi and I ran into an interesting person while in North Carolina who talked to us about clay modeling techniques. She mentioned using an extruder, and it suddenly dawned on me that an extruder is exactly what I need to make my clay block pieces (forming them by hand is extremely tedious). I asked her about extruders that have a 3/4" aperture, and she suggested that a ceramics shop might have such a thing since ceramic modellers would have need of such a large size.

So I'm off to search the web for extruders.

Book Meme Blog

2005-06-20T14:10:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned previously, Ken tagged me with the book meme. So, without further ado:

How Many Books I Own

I'm sure I can't estimate this properly. Not nearly as many as I would like. I've probably lost/lent/sold as many books as I currently have, at least. I've been slowly filling my computer room walls with bookshelves, and a quick count and estimate reveals about 700 books in here. There may be half again as many still in boxes and hidden away.

Five Books That Have Influenced Me

What, only 5?

The Dispossessed, Ursula K. LeGuin.

Strangely, this is the only fiction entry on my list. I read a lot of fiction, and my choosing only one is not an indication that I don't find it as worthy. It's just that I only get 5 books (yes, I'm going to keep complaining about that).

So anyway, The Dispossessed makes the list because it fundementally changed my understanding of people. It's a story of an ambiguous utopia - an anarchy that only barely works. In spite of unanswerable questions about whether the described society could ever really exist, it makes an absolutely convincing argument that human beings inherently like to work. Not just for money, not just for gain, but for its own reward. And when one reflects on our current society and why it is that the opposite seems to be so thoroughly true, one can't help but wonder if the way things are now isn't horribly wrong for us.

Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches : The Riddles of Culture, Marvin Harris

A populist anthropology book that is absolutely fascinating. Sometimes I wonder about things that just don't seem to make sense. Things we're all taught as true, but that we simply know can't possibly be true, but we're not experts, so we don't fight it. For instance, dogs will choke and die if they eat chicken bones (I feed my dogs raw chicken all the time). A moment of thought, of course, reveals that dogs would have failed long ago were that true.

Marvin Harris tackles questions about human history, culture, and our beliefs about them. Why don't Jewish and Muslim people's eat pork? Because it's a dirty, diseased animal? How do you explain the Chinese then? Why don't Hindu's eat cows? Why do some cultures engage in cannibalism and other's not? Why don't Americans eat dogs and horses like so many others? Combine this one with Marvin's book, Our Kind, and see if you're not enthralled like me.

It's better than Guns, Germs, and Steel :-).

In Search of the Miraculous, P. D. Ouspensky

I have to include this one, though it's not a book I recommend. Whereas the previous two books changed my understanding of people in general, this book changed my understanding of me. But reading this book occurred along with an experience with a Gurdjieff work group here in Rochester, which was a large part of the package. From this book and from that experience, I learned meditation in a way that I could understand and value, and I learned that all is not as it seems in my inner psychic life.

Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code, Martin Fowler

Well, I am a programmer, and this book finally captured (for me) what code design and management is all about. Fowler is the epitomy of concision and always packs his punch into the first few chapters of his books - the remainder existing to flesh out the details. This book was a revelation for me as a programmer.

Underground History of American Education, John Taylor Gatto

I wasn't going to include this on my list, wanting to add more fiction (I wanted to put Lois McMaster Bujold in here as a whole for clarifying for me what story-telling should be about and why so many authors fail to be story-tellers, preferring to be show-offs instead. Hmm, I guess I got her in anyway :-). But, I can't deny the influence of this book on me - the author's writings helping to convince me that I would home-school my own children. I'd say that's a big influence!

Last Book I Bought

The Tyranny of the Night : Book One of the Instrumentalities of the Night, Glen Cook

Well, I've been making my way through Glen Cook's books lately - just good fun.

Last Book I read for the first time

Beasts, Joyce Carol Oats

I got a whim to read an Oats novel, and this one seemed to get interesting reviews. Can't say that I really *got* it, though. I think it was supposed to shock me, but I didn't feel much shock. Kind of ho-hum, and a lot of money to pay for what is essentially a short story that should have just been in a magazine.

Last book you read for the second time

Hey, I'm adding a category to this book meme thing. After all, I wanna know what people read again. Anyway, a while back I re-read A Separate Peace by John Knowles because I remembered it from school as one of the few books I liked, and I recently saw the movie. It's still good :-) Not sure why I don't find it boring, but I just don't.

Five other bloggers to tag

Hell, not sure I know 5 bloggers well enough to tag. Let's see:

That's all the bloggers I know - sorry!

My Newest Creation

2005-06-18T08:30:00.000-07:00

No, not the baby - that's an old creation. And it's still baking anyway. I'm referring to Coinjema, a Dependency Injection (DI) framework I've been working on (and blogging about on occasion), and I've just made the first release.

So, Ken tagged me with the book meme, but I'm not quite ready to do that blog. I made a list of candidate books that I have to choose from and about which to write something pithy. I'll do that next week, and decide who amongst y'all will then get tagged by me.

This evening, Vivi and I are going to the Copacabana Brazilian Steakhouse Restaraunt - a Churrascaria. A Churrascaria is a steakhouse where they serve Rodizio, which is skewers of meat carried around by servers who stop by your table and slice of freshly cooked shavings from the meat. They then take these skewers back to the fires to cook the newly exposed uncooked surface. Back and forth like that all night. They are typically all-you-can-eat places.

Huge salad bars are part of the experience, Brazilian style, of course, hopefully with lots of fishwada - a yummy bean dish filled with smoked meats. We are meeting a co-worker of mine and his family, and their Brazilian exchange student. It should be a great time!

I am the Proud Papa of a Beautiful Blurry Blob

2005-06-07T16:32:00.000-07:00

The most beautiful blurry blob ever, in fact. Vivi and I went to her 20 week ultrasound last week, hoping to discover the sex of our baby. No such luck - it was lying face down and sleeping. There was little movement either, and not a hole lot was clearly visible to non-ultrasound-technicians like Vivi and I. We could see that the little guy was sucking his/her left thumb, which, according to Discover Magazine, is the best predictor of handedness we know of. Vivi will be getting more ultrasounds before giving birth, so there will be other opportunities to know the sex.

On a different topic entirely, SourceForge has accepted my little Coinjema software project, and I had some fun with that last night and today. Even wrote up a little doc for developers. I don't know why it's so much fun to start a new software project, but it is. Plus SourceForge has so many bells and whistles, it can be very entertaining playing with all its fiddle-able bits. The software itself is just a tiny tool framework, and basically done and ready to go. But I feel strange releasing it since I don't yet use it myself at work or anywhere. What if someone actually tried to use it? Because it's an aspect-oriented framework, that'd be a little scary.

Writing aspects is kind of like modifying the JVM itself, since the changes just automatically become an invisible part of the environment. Documentation of aspects would seem to be of the utmost importance as a result. I can't imagine how terrifying software development would be if virtually ever third-party library I use started using aspects in their code. Aspects could well be the worst thing to happen to software development since Perl.

But it's so powerful, we won't be able to resist. The productivity increase that well-designed aspects generate will be enormous. But I don't know if it will balance the negative effects of poorly-designed aspects. And who can tell when two "well-designed" aspects interfere to create an unholy mess together?

Nevertheless, I am diving in. Dangerous toys are more fun :-)

An Epidemic of Sanity

2005-06-02T06:36:00.000-07:00

While there are certainly a lot of mentally disturbed people in the
world - maybe more than ever before - there is a disturbing tendency
toward unnecessary sanity in our culture. How often do we hear someone
express dislike for a public figure because they're "an asshole"? How
often do people express the opinion that the only reason person X is
doing <some grand project> is because they're egomaniacs? How many
people talk to a therapist rather than their friends either because
their "friends" told them "I'm not your therapist" or because they
didn't want to seem needy?

To be human is to be needy. Repeat that. If you're not needy, if
you're completely self-sufficient, don't need others, don't need human
contact, communication, affirmation, etc - then you are a sociopath. Do
you do vanity searches on the internet for your name? Congratulations,
you're human. Do you dream of starting a grand project or business to
make money and be famous, or at least well-known by some? Also human.

Do you want more children so you'll have a bigger family so you be
surrounded by people you love and who love you? You get the idea.

Somewhere along the line, needing others has become a disease to be
stamped out. When no one needs anyone else, they'll be no more war and
murder, no stealing, no unhappiness. No more selfish people striving
for more than their fair share. It sounds nice, doesn't it? Except
that's not how humans are. As we strive for the perfect centered
existence, what we really create is loneliness and distance.

It's fashionable to attack people who do things out of an obvious need
to be noticed - at least in the online community. To which I say
phooey. For those who don't need, more than likely, their neediness is
only replaced by enough rage to keep the need in check.

Embrace your inner need.

My Wife The Troll

2005-05-05T16:57:00.000-07:00

Vivi's trolling the pregnancy web forums. She used to troll the bachelorette forum. She says the pregnant women are easy to troll because their hormones are out of whack.

Yep, that's my lovely Vivi!

birds, caffeine, and mysticism

2005-05-05T16:14:00.000-07:00

I've been reading a book, In Search of P. D. Ouspensky, that I found when I wandered into a used bookstore while Vivi did some shopping at Big Lots. Pure serendipity. It gives such a different view of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky than you'll find anywhere else - really interesting. It takes the book a while to get going, but when it does, it's like an Entertainment Tonight episode about the world of early 20th century esoterica and occultism.

Having belonged, for a short time, in a group of The Work here in Rochester, I found it interesting to read this book by someone else who also took part in a similar group for a time, and who apparently came to some similar conclusions about it. It's very hard to explain Gurdjieff's ideas to most people - it seems to be something that either resonates with one or doesn't. And most people don't seem to take kindly to being told that they are "mere machines" :-)

Vivi and I saw Hitchhiker's Guide ... on Tuesday. I didn't think too much of it. Vivi enjoyed it some. In the end, it was a lot like the book (surprise!) and therefore pretty juvenile and really not all that funny. Sad to say, I just haven't been enjoying movies much anymore. Sideways was the last movie I really liked, and before that I can't even remember.

Vivi is enjoying bird watching lately. She keeps the bird feeders up to date, and we've seen lots of cardinals, finches, two varieties of woodpeckers (they eat seeds too apparently), robins, sparrows, squirrels, and doves. Once she saw 5 cardinals all together under a feeder. This is why I have so much ambivalence about clearing the brush from the back of my yard - I figure all that dense brush/woods is one of the reasons why we get so many interesting birds.

Now all I need is a bat house and get a big family of them to move in.

I've had no caffeine in 5 days. So far so good, let's hope I can keep it up.

Blogging All Around

2005-04-28T14:05:00.000-07:00

So today I sent an email to my friend Ken and happened to mention that
I'd started a blog that he might find interesting (providing he finds
keeping tabs on my life interesting). Little did I know I've been
behind the times! Ken's had a blog for years. And our friends Derek
and Carol also blog, which is very cool. It makes keeping up to date
with friends a lot easier, especially for those of us who have trouble
coming up with excuses to pick up the phone and call.

Of course, it'd be nicer to have more time to meet f-t-f with friends,>
but people are busy, and family is far away. Derek mentions being in
favor of unscheduled time for creative activities (I agree
wholeheartedly), but not having any such for himself. I hope that
doesn't happen to me! I'd go insane pretty quick, I'm sure. Right now
I have the opposite problem - too much time on my hands, and little to
do but activities on my own (notwithstanding comments further down, as
you'll see if you keep reading). Ken and Kari joined us for breakfast at
Charlie Browns last week and seemed to enjoy - hopefully it'll be a
regular thing. Maybe a breakfast club will develop, who knows?

Played Europe Engulfed more with Jeff last night. It's really a neat
game, but large and lengthy - particularly for a two-player game.
However, it's really nice to again have a friend who actually likes to
spend that much time on big games. It has been a long time since I had
the opportunity. I still prefer games that involve multiple people,
just because I enjoy the group dynamics so much, and the opportunities
for cooperation in addition to just plain competition.

Again, it reminds me of my own goals for making a game. I want a game
that makes players feel part of group more than part of a competition.
Some competition is necessary, because one needs a dynamic backdrop to
go up against (playing ping-pong against a wall gets dull quick), but I
think a cooperative element needs to have equal emphasis. I think part
of the reason so many people avoid wargames is the stress involved in
winning and losing, and there's so rarely any other aspect to these
games to balance or alleviate that stress. The simple idea of teammates
changes things for many folks, I think.

I'm excited by all the blogging though! I'm inspired to work on my
family some more, and Vivi.

Grab-bag of Goings On

2005-04-23T11:00:00.000-07:00

Vivi and I go out for breakfast nearly every Saturday, and today we were
joined by some friends, which will hopefully become a regular thing.
They told us they had started the process of adopting a child from China
after we told them we were expecting. So, of course, we talked about
kids and being parents and all that. I guess it's inescapable that
having kids will dominate your life. We are all very excited.

Vivi is still being sick much of the time, but she is getting accustomed
to it. She had an ultrasound and some blood tests done to test for
various abnormalities, and the first results we have gotten have allowed
the doctors to reassess our risk for Down's syndrome from the normal
1/300 to 1/4000, and for another syndrome I can't remember to 1/10,000.
So we are very happy with that - it means for one that we can skip the
amniocentesis, since the risks involved in doing that procedure far
outweigh the chance that it would reveal any problems.

In the meantime, my efforts on my context-based IoC container have
stalled as I have been having difficulties with the latest Eclipse and
the AspectJ plugin. I can't compile the code without encountering null
pointer exceptions from it, and I'm sort of waiting for the eclipse
community to work it out a bit better before I get back to it. I've
also been working fairly hard at work, and I have been keeping away from
my computer at home. As I've known for a long time, there's only so
much time I can spend staring at a computer. Plus the weather has been
so nice, I've been outside a lot. But I do want to get back to it.

I also need to get back to working on my game(s). I've been playing
some EastFront from Columbia Games, and it seems like a nearly flawless
game system from my limited experience. So of course I am stealing
ideas from it shamelessly for my own work :-)

No Computer and AWOL bossman

2005-04-07T07:16:00.000-07:00

My computer is in the repair shop currently getting a new heatsink. It stopped working last weekend and I noticed the cpu temperature at 95c. Living without my computer is terrible! For me, the computer is the new tv, and I have nothing to do without it. Oh sure, I could read, or watch the old tv (yuck!), but I happen to be in the middle of a book of only so-so entertainment value. Not bad enough to dump, not good enough to devote my undivided attention to. So, I keep trying to convince Vivi to play a game, but she's mostly not feeling well....

Work has been interesting. Our boss never returned from vacation. Turns out, he had sold his house over 2 months ago (that was the closing date) and had moved to South Carolina without telling anyone and was never coming back. Kind of an interesting way to quit your job. Of course, the company wants the vacation pay and the bonus back that he collected before they realized he'd skipped out on them. This should give you some inkling how much fun it was to work for this nutjob. We have no boss now, and we're hoping to get someone good, but the upper-ups haven't yet decided.

With luck, we'll get somone reasonable enough to let us work from home most days. The way gas prices are going, it's completely irresponsible to make us drive in to work when it makes no real difference in how we work or how well we work.

On Climate and Moving

2005-04-04T11:01:00.000-07:00

After yet another Rochester winter, Vivi and I feel even more desire to move somewhere nicer. After visiting my parents living in western North Carolina, it seems an ideal place - not too hot, very sunny and usually dry, beautiful scenery. So Vivi started talking it up to her parents at dinner the other night, but didn't get very far. It would be hard to pack up and leave her family behind.

I think I could work my job to a point where I could move to NC and continue working here via telecommuting. Most of my peers are telecommuters from around the country, and I used to be one too, till I got moved to a sister group with a manager who demands physical presence. But it looks like things will change soon on that score, and in any case, I won't be ready to move for a few years - by then, the chances of working out such an arrangement seem likely. Provided the company itself is still around.

The thought of living somewhere where winter doesn't last 5-6 months of the year is enticing, and this past weekend only reinforced that feeling, as it rained non-stop, and even our "sunny" days are merely less darkly overcast days in reality. But we call them sunny.

The main problem is we want to convince Vivi's parents to move with us - her brother is already in NC. Their main objections seem to be: bugs, quality of food, and social climate (are they all rednecks down there? :-) Vivi and I are pretty much sold on the idea though - we want sun!

Context IoC

2005-03-29T12:26:00.000-08:00

Sony Mathew posted an article about IoC at TSS a while back that caught my imagination. It seemed so similar to the direction of my own thoughts on the matter that I decided to try to put together a framework that would make such a thing manageable. In a nutshell, Sony's idea was that a class could define everything it needs to function in an inner interface, and code that instantiates the class could provide implementations of that interface. This would provide a very simple mechanism for dependency injection.

It also creates a whole lot of indirection, and it doesn't tackle the problem of how one creates the implementations of all those interfaces, which people rightly pointed out in the comments for the article. But then, Sony did make the point that part of his argument is that IoC/DI is a design pattern, not a framework, and, being a design pattern, it wasn't the point to provide a nice API for achieving IoC.

I, on the other hand, do want a framework that makes this idea for IoC workable. And so I set off to learn AspectJ to help me do that. Part of my goal is to make an IoC container that is invisible to the developer. You use it, and you know you use it, but it doesn't show up in your code. For instance, if I create a new object:

MyObject obj = new MyObject();

Then that should be all I need to do, and (with the help of AspectJ), the new object will be injected with everything it needs to function.

One of the primary uses of such dependency injection is to ease the delivery of highly changeable configuration information to the code that uses it. And so, of course, this framework must provide a mechanism for reading/creating that config info. I suppose XML is the standard for such info, but since I dislike XML for config info, I've gone another route. I've used a simplified format for basic text information, and supplemented it with Groovy for more complex info. In other words, your new object could essentially be provided it's context by a groovy script or groovy class file, either of which can be easily modified after the system has been compiled and deployed.

Not to be confused with the idea of Context interfaces describing a class's dependencies, I realized I would need the concept of different contexts to allow multiple sets of configuration data and flexibility. I'm using a tree structure to organize such contexts, using file-path type naming (ie "root/childContext/grandChildContext") and allowing children contexts to inherit configuration information from their parents. I use AspectJ to keep track of what the context is of the current code, so that when you call new MyObject(), it will be configured with the same context as the currently executing code. If you want to change contexts, you use new MyObject(String contextName).

Ok, so what's the result of this experiment? Interestingly, my configuration information does not need to specify a list of services to be created and stored in some sort of service locator. Nor do I need to use singletons - though a Context implementation can be defined in such a way that it will end up being a shared object for all classes that declare themselves dependent on it. However, this shared behavior is hidden away in the aspect and framework code. All the developer ever writes is new ObjectIWantToUse().

At first, I did write code to handle the loading and startup of such services, but I am finding that I don't actually need it. I wasn't out to remove the use of Singletons or service locators (I'm pragmatic enough to make use of both), but I'm happy with this unexpected result. My goal was to make it easy and simple to write code that is highly configurable, and effortless to write. To remove a lot of boring code that we often have to write wherein we are essentially just passing around information to classes - instead, I wanted the information to get to those classes transparently. And by doing so, encourage greater use of dynamic config-file-type info.

On the downside, using AspectJ to intercept calls to constructors means creating objects is more costly performance-wise. Fortunately, my aspects don't intercept calls to every constructor - only those of classes that implement a ContextOriented interface. Still, the difference is drastic - being about 100x slower than normal object creation (not counting whatever code you might write to pass needed info to that new object, so it's not an entirely fair comparison). I'm hopeful, however, that this performance blip won't be too disabling, as it's fairly specific to object creation, and not a universal slowdown (in other words, I'm hoping the penalty in terms of absolute performance isn't that great).

Making a Family Blog

2005-03-28T18:42:00.000-08:00

My family lives all over the place. Keeping up-to-date with each other
is tough, and so I thought it might be fun to make a family blog, where
we could all do the blog thing and keep better track of what's going on
in each of our lives.

I think this could be especially fun for the younger ones. I know some
people are skittish about how un-private a blog is, but that too is part
of what blogging is. It's not direct communication amongst family
members, but the indirectness adds a certain value, a quality to the
communication that we don't get over the phone or email, or even in
person. Call it a blending of public and private persona, a blurring of
the divisions we create for ourselves.

Intelligent code

2005-03-25T05:13:00.000-08:00

Most developers I know, usually myself included, loathe working with software code that tries to be intelligent on your behalf. Most especially if that code was written by someone else. Inevitably, the "intelligent" code gets in the way more than it helps you, due to it making all kinds of hidden assumptions you are unaware of. You, as the developer, are forced to adapt your normal coding habits to work with these assumptions that originated in a foreign mind.

The problem of hidden assumptions in "intelligent" code is similar to the problem of hidden assumptions in crappy code. Maybe not similar, maybe they are the same.

But, who of us hasn't written our own intelligent code, and then gone on to use it happily, patting ourselves on the back for making our own lives so much easier. When we're aware of the assumptions (after all, we put them there) and work with them, suddenly they start working for us.

I dream of using intelligent code that makes my life easier, and that others find equally useful. In my job, I try stick to writing dumb code that doesn't outsmart you. At home though, and in open source, I strive to create that perfect beast - intelligent code that helps you more than it annoys.

And that's one reason why I like open source so much - we don't have to fear failure. Our jobs aren't at stake. We can make miserable code 9 times out of 10, but on that tenth, maybe we've created something startling and eye-opening.