Murphy Bytes

I’m divorced. Here’s to the end of something old and the start of something new.

I hate them. I am especially annoyed when a library that exposes some sort of API requires it’s own configuration file. So, not only do you have a configuration file for your application, you also have to have another for this stupid library you integrated into your application. Wouldn’t it be nicer for the API to expose some methods, structures or something so that the data needed by the api could be set from the consuming application? That way, if you insisted in persisting these settings in a file you could do so in the application config file, giving you a single config file instead of two. I suppose one might make an exception and have a separate config file for a something that is so pervasive that is canonical like the log4XX logging libraries.

i’m hanging out at lisa’s house, noodling around with this some stuff i’m working on with some of my friends  it’s cool and it’s got me excited about doing tech stuff again using lighttpd ruby memcached sqllite and a bunch of other cool stuff anyway i’m setting up a development instance of lighttpd and i want to see if i’m doing anything with port 3000 on my dev box so i fire up firefox and type http://localhost:3000/ in the address window great server not found oh hey i think i’ll look at facebook oh hey that link to  christopher walken’s twitters looks cool oh hey i think i’ll check my rss reader oh hey this article looks interesting and two hours later i haven’t accomplished a fucking thing

In the Midwest this occurs at about 5:31 PM Friday, February 13! Coincidence? I don’t think so. If you are on Facebook there is an event dedicated to this auspicious occasion.

Defensive Programming is usually thought of as a software quality technique but I have another use for the term. Defensive Programming happens when you are dealing with two or more modules of code that interact with one another in some way and the modules are written by different developers. That’s the programming part. The defensive part happens when something is wrong and each of the developers blames the other for the as yet unknown problem because they are covering their ass, have low self esteem, are lazy, are arrogant, you fill in the blank. This drives me nuts. Let’s just collaborate to solve the f*ing problem. Software has bugs. It’s fundamental. If the defensive programmer spent half of the time they spent pointing the finger at someone else fixing bugs in their own code we’d all be better off.

I work for a big corporation.  Well I don’t know if its really big when compared to other corporations but its much bigger than the little company that I used to work for that was bought by the corporation that I now work for.   Be that as it may in the past I’ve made disparaging remarks about the corporation that I now work for and corporations in general.  It’s kind of fashionable to do that kind of thing if you’re an OSS Linux tech geeky kind of guy.  Corporations Evil!!! Just read about Microsoft on Slash Dot and you’ll get this gist of what I mean.  Lately I’ve been appreciative of the corporation I work for.  There are several reasons for this change of attitude.  One of them is that I am still employed.  I’ve got an open position in Jersey and I see stacks of resumes from people that just a few months ago were working at big investment banks and hedge funds that have imploded.  Comparing these pedigrees to mine is like comparing a Westminster Dog Show Best of Breed to some mutt in a dog pound.  Suffice it to say I am glad I still have a job.  The other reason that my attitude about the big corporation has changed is largely philosophical.  I think that in an increasingly crowded world the ideal of individualism is outmoded or maybe it would be better to say that the priority placed on individualism is excessive.  I think more priority should be placed on utilitarianism.  The good of the many outweighs the good of the few.  The big corporation is comprised of many individuals working together for the good of the corporation and it’s shareholders.   In return for this work the individuals are rewarded. Some individuals are rewarded to a disproportionate degree but all individuals are rewarded.   Sometimes a few individuals are discarded but this is generally done for the benefit of the corporation as a whole.  The good of the many outweighs the good of the few.  Sometimes dealing bureaucracy in the big corporation is a bit frustrating when compared to doing things in a little start up but it stands to reason that one has to be more collaborative when dealing with many more people.  As long as the bureaucracy doesn’t become a reason for people to not do things or to delay doing things or to shift responsibility it’s really not much of a problem.  So I try to be a good little worker bee anonymously doing my part for the greater whole.  I get my allotment of honey and all is good.

What to say. I’m going on the infamous Bike Ride to Rippey aka BRR on February 7 with my girlfriend.

Other than that bit of insanity I’ve been doing a lot of software optimization at work, ice skating, running, playing guitar and not blogging. I really wish I had something profound to say but I don’t. Sometimes I think of something profound to say but when I do I’m not around my computer and by the time that I am I forget what the profound thing was. Oh well, c’est la vie.

I got a nice long weekend in NYC for my birthday. We went to August: Osage County, MoMA, went to the top of the Empire State Building at midnight and walked around looking at Christmas lights. Here’s a bunch of pictures from the trip. New York is nuts around Christmas. The sidewalks are just packed with people and it’s fun just hanging out people watching. Some of the store window displays are amazing and in general the street life just can’t be beat. We hooked up with Lisa’s cousin and ate at a fabulous vegetarian restaurant called Candle Cafe. Oh, one thing that was really cool was how useful the maps application on my iPhone worked to navigate through the city using public transportation. As some of you may recall, my Android submission was an application to do just that, help people use public transportation to get from place to place. With iPhone update 2.2 the maps application will not only show you the best way to drive from point A to point B, it will also show you the best way to get from place to place using the subway, bus or walking in many major metropolitan areas. I know it works in New York, and Minneapolis, but it doesn’t work in smaller cities like Ames Iowa. Anyway, it works great. When I needed to get from where we were staying down in the financial district to any place we wanted to go to, I’d just use ‘Current Location’ and type the street address to where I wanted to go and the maps application would show me the best way to get there by subway. It would also include how to walk to the nearest metro station, and how to walk from the station where you get off the train to your final destination. If all you type in is the street information, neglecting to supply the city, state, etc, the application is smart enough to fill in these details for you. It really is one of the most fabulously useful applications I’ve ever used.

I was having coffee with Pieter Hintjens talking about a bunch of crazy ideas fueled by caffeine and lack of sleep when I decided I need to become a defense contractor and build weapons. If you know me you probably scoff at the idea that I actually have something to contribute in the field of defense but read on before you judge. Before I explain my idea for a weapon I need to discuss some characteristics of what we’ll call the enemies of freedom. Enemies of freedom would be countries like Iran, North Korea, and Taliban tribal chiefs in regions of Pakistan like East Whathefuckisstan that don’t like us westerners very much. Some would say we need to defend ourselves from these enemies of freedom. We customarily use the military for this sort of ‘defense’. In a way this makes sense because someone who is dead can’t really attack your freedom. An error in judgment made by the Bush administration was that if you use the military to get rid of the despots ruling a non-free country the population of that country will welcome Americans as liberators and naturally adopt freedom (and give us their oil). Of course experience has shown this isn’t quite true, you have to kill quite a large number of the non-freedom adopters before you manage to convince the survivors that being alive and free is better than being dead and not free. Some never do quite figure this out and so we have suicide bombers. Killing people is a really bad way of spreading freedom.  The people being killed tend to get pissed off if you start killing them and so it becomes easier for their despotic leaders to point the finger of blame at the nasty westerners doing the killing which takes the focus off the despotic leaders and the killing and the torturing that they do to remain in power. This tends to perpetuate non-freedom. Anyway, the non-free people really don’t care about freedom. What they really want is enough to eat, a nice place to sleep and no worries that they will be arbitrarily hauled off in the middle of the night and tortured. They don’t know that in many countries people have enough to eat, have nice places to sleep and can pretty much say whatever they want to without fear of night torture and that these types of things follow from having a free society. This is because the leaders of non-free people try really hard to control the information interchange with the outside world.

This is where my weapon idea comes in. The philosophy behind my weapon is to inundate the non-free with information (and consumer goods) from the free world.  My weapon consists of portable solar powered kiosks. Each kiosk contains internet enabled computers with browsers bookmarked to Amazon.com, Ebay, You Tube and a variety of popular porn sites. Each kiosk has a certain amount of store credit that can be used to purchase consumer goods and also dispense free espresso and other coffee drinks. Dozens of kiosks can be stacked inside a C-130 Hercules for rapid parachute deployment over a non-free country. The idea is that you seed a non-free area with hundreds of internet kiosks and the non-free people of the area will start using them, communicating with the outside world, buying stuff and browsing porn.  The kiosks would also provide a place to sleep and the store credit could be used to buy food.  If the despots leave the kiosks in place, the populous will naturally be assimilated into the consumer culture and people in these countries will soon be too dept ridden to stop working and go to war against the west. If the despots attempt to take the kiosks people will be outraged for being deprived of their porn and consumer goods and will overthrow them.  In any of these cases the west comes out looking like the good guys.  We’re not killing people, we are merely providing consumer goods, coffee, a nice place to sleep and some harmless diversions.  Also, I’d have to think that one of my little kiosks would be cheaper than your basic smart bomb, currently a common tool used by the military to liberate people .  The GBU-39 variant of the 250-pound class bomb equipped with an INS/GPS guidance system costs about $100,000 apiece. I think I could build one of these little kiosks for a lot less than that.

Last Tuesday night I went up to Manhattan to visit my friend Dmitri. Later when I was taking the train back to Princeton Junction they announced that Obama won the presidential election. The train erupted in applause and cheering. I don’t know that there were any McCain supporters on the train but if there were they were keeping a pretty low profile.