The New Road

9/11 conspiracy theories

I've never been much of a 9/11 conspiracy guy. My own personal theory was that the buildings were rigged for a controlled demolition after the first attack so that should the building ever be attacked again they could be brought down safely and not topple over creating much larger devistation. That being said, this movie, wow, it's compelling.

One could ask why Bin Laden took responsibility for it, if it was in fact, not his doing. I suppose that if he said he didn't do it, nobody would listen. But if he said he did do it he would become a hero in the radical islamic movement. So why not just take the blame and feed the fire of the war he always wanted.

How stupid is Kirk Cameron?

After watching the movie about the banana again I have to wonder to myself, just how stupid is Kirk Cameron? So here is this aussie talking about how the banana is so perfect for the human. It fits nicely in the hand, it's got a convenient pull tab at the top and on and on. Which is all great. And was all selected by us, humans, by selectively planting and harvesting bananas over generations. And, ok, I'll admit that it's easy to forget that and take it for granted. But had the aussie extolled the virtues of a head of brocoflower, would Kirk have picked up on it? Like; Hey, dumb aussie dude, brocoflower came out of a LAB, not from GOD.

I've actually been thinking about this a lot today. As I drove around to get coffee I looked at what I was driving through and there wasn't a single thing that wasn't engineered or tinkered with by man. All of the trees were selectively bred and placed here. The road and buildings all engineered. The grass, not even native to this area, and of course, genetically manipulated. All of food I buy. Certainly the coffee I buy. I mean, what really is organic anyway? Can you get organic "brocoflower"?

Anyway, Kirk Cameron, whoo! Idiot. What's that expression, "An average person is pretty stupid, and 50% are even stupider than that."

Of course, one could always argue that 'everything comes from God'. And I can't really argue against that. If that's what you believe. But that's not what's being argued here. What's being argued is that God initially designed the banana exactly as it is today and gave it to us. Which is just, on it's face, not true. If he had, then he certainly hasn't settled on one design, or maybe he has and he also had some divine influence over the Safeway produce buyer.

Creationism

I watched a YouTube video a while back (I'll link to it if I can find it again), where a preacher said that he could debunk the theory of evolution with a banana. Then he went on to describe how the banana must have been designed, since it fit so well in the hand, and was the perfect size and had a great flavor. And I thought two things:

First, this man clearly knew nothing about farming, genetics or how we have been genetically modifying our food sources since the day we stopped hunting and gathering and started planting seeds. It's a pretty simple idea, you plant the seeds of the nicest fruit, then do it again, and again. And in very short order you will get a product that you designed that you like. Collectors do it with orchids as a hobby. Hell, we do it with dogs, cats, whatever. Daschunds certainly weren't around at the time of Christ, but they are here now. Yes, the banana is evidence of a designer, and that designer is us. And actually, the modern Safeway style banana is proof of genetics, which actually reinforces the theory of evolution, not debunks it.

Second, it's clearly sad that this white evangelical preacher had never been to an ethnic grocery, or eaten plantains. They are very much bananas, but they do not conform to the geometry of the Safeway style of banana, and they have a far more complex taste.

Guys like this always go off on how smug non-believers are. It's like we know the facts or something! Which is just, crazy. And they say we call them stupid. Well, frankly, if you are going to take a genetically modified organism and display it as somehow proof of God and counter-proof to genetics, well, your pretty stupid.

Update: Lori found the video. It's part of Kirk Cameron's series on the end of times and creationism and all that BS.

Richard Dawkins

I've always had nagging issues with my atheism. Probably for the same reasons that I'm an atheist in the first place. Which is that I always question things. And Christianity never provided me with any real answers. I would get to the tough questions, and get the inevitable "That's a matter of faith", and when I would push I would invariably get the teed off "how dare yea" reaction.

Aside: I don't get why people take this 'matter of faith' answer lying down. If I had an employee that told me to take something 'on faith', I'd fire his ass in a heartbeat. So if I'm putting money in the coffers then the pastor is my employee, plain and simple. And his job is to give me answers. Not any 'you have to have faith' crap. Oh, and along those lines, with the advent of the "faith based initiative" church welfare program, all of our taxes now pay for those churches. So feel free to ask all the hard questions you want. You own them; priest, cross, collection plate and all.

Before my mom died she asked me some hard questions, like "Where will I go?" And while I don't think she was looking for concrete answers, because she too was an atheist at the time of her death, I didn't have any answers at all for her, and I still don't. The hard reality is that the only people who know what happens after we die aren't in any position to tell us. And the people that say they have the answers, well, they are selling snake oil from what I can see.

Now I have been an atheist for a long time. I've never actually believed in Christianity. I was taken to a church when I was young. I sang the hymns and carols (love the carolling, actually). But I always thought it was bullshit. Nothing anyone said about it made a lick of sense. And I've always thought that it was a strong position to take. Instead of just giving everything over to the "big guy in the sky" I'm taking responsibility for my decisions, both right and wrong, and having a strong moral compass. In particular the moral compass part. Because, frankly, I think it's insulting to think that I would need the threat of some fiery afterlife to make me not rape, kill or steal. (And with the way these theocons split hairs about torture, it makes me wonder if this church thing is helping their moral compass, or giving it some spin, cause their compass is pointing in the wrong direction.)

What I didn't know was that I'm not alone. Turns out Richard Dawkins has been there a long time. And he makes some great points. And he doesn't take any shit. Which I really like. I mean, seriously, beyond the traditional aspect of religion, why should holy men deserve our respect? Priests have raped kids. They should be locked up for life, chemically castrated and never get within 1,000 yards of a kid ever again. And yet still we for whatever reason, give these guys the time of day. Every fact they have; the earth is 6,000 years old, the sun goes around the earth, etc. It's all provably wrong. And yet, people still listen. What's up with that?

So I feel a little better. Of course, I will continue to question my lack of religiosity, in much the same way that I wish religious people would question their beliefs instead of just driving off cliffs like lemmings. Not that I want to take away someones faith. Whatever it takes to get you through the day. But I would rather that the person think twice about taking non-religious folks on the 'crazy train ride' with them. It's fine with me if you want to bring on your own personal apocolypse, but if you are in elected office, please don't use the office to bring apocolypse down on the whole damn planet.

Bill Clinton fights back... finally...

Wow, I have been waiting for the day when Clinton finally fights back for a long time. Bill has been letting the righties ride roughshod over his legacy for far too long. I think he was trying to take the "ex-President's" line of not overshadowing the current, whatever the hell it is, we have "in office". But this bullshit about him being handed Bin Laden on a plate and saying, "No thanks." It's just stupidity.

He is spot on when he points out that the righties only mention Bin Laden in one of two ways. To beat up on Clinton. Or to try and justify the war on Iraq through some false transitive property connection to Bin Laden through "The War on Terror".

So it's good to see Bubba calling it like it is. And this guy Wallace... gutless moronic stooge.

Oh, yeah, and don't get me started on this recent torture stuff. When did this country become so damn obsessed with what types of suffering we can inflict on each other legally? Wasn't Chimpy McCokespoon supposed to be the 'values President'? When did waterboarding become a family value?

State of the Onion

Every year Larry Wall gives his "State of the Onion" talk about the future of Perl. This year was no different. Now I like Larry personally. And I really like Perl 5. I've written a lot of Perl and it's always been very reliable fast and friendly. But Perl 6, it's troubling. I get that he is at least concerned himself at this point, which is good. Given that for the last couple of years he has been saying "It's done when it's done." Which is fine, but leaves a lot of people hanging.

But I look through this presentation and I think to myself, "If I hung my professional hat on Perl, where would I be after this talk." And honestly, I would feel as if I just walked into The Osbournes for an episode. I'd be kinda looking around, in amazement, wondering, "WTF?" and "Where does this leave me, my team, and my company, which invested in Perl?"

Gorillaz

Dru was over with the kids yesterday. After we had some fun with the underwater camera in the pool we went back to my place to hang out. While the kids were busy playing we tuned into a Gorillaz concert on HDNet and it was really cool. I had no idea who Gorillaz was beyond the radio hits, and now I am really intrigued. The level of musicianship is stunning.

RailsPlayground

I've been doing some work with Rails recently for more own edifcation. I'm hosting the app I'm working on with RailsPlayground and I have to say that the support has been tremendous. Tonight I asked for them to install the Sparklines GEM and literally, not three minutes after sending the email, I got a response back that it was done. Phenomenal.

How It Should Have Ended

I just caught up with yet another web crazy, the How It Should Have Ended site and movies. The movies on the site don't work, so I went to YouTube. I think the best are Willy Wonka, Lord of the Rings and Superman. With Superman being by far the best.

Princeton and Diebold

Some researchers at Princeton University have shown that you can throw an entire election run on Diebold hardware, in such a way that it's undetectable after the fact, if you have physical access to only one machine for just one minute.

These are exactly the machines that Lori and I used to vote on. Unfortunately, this isn't the only way these machines can be hacked, Black Box Voting showed that these machines can also be accessed remotely to alter votes. So physical access isn't required.

The fact that these machines provide no paper receipt for your ballot is insane.

After watching the video one might be tempted to say, "Sure they can be hacked, but only by a super genius." Not true. You only need one genius guy to write the software. Then he can make a handy virus creator program that would allow anyone with even a little technical know-how to put a virus on a card that would throw the election whichever way they wanted. It's called a 'brown bag hack' and it's used all the time.

New fitness goals

Well, with the 10K done I've reached all of my current fitness goals. So I'll add some new ones:

• A 50K bike ride this month (September)
• A three mile swim in the pool before the end of October (this one is just for me since it well exceeds any triathlon distance)
  
• A two mile swim in the open air pool before the end of October
• A sub thirty-five minute swim mile by the end of the year
• A sub twenty-five minute three mile run by the end of the year
• A sub fifity minute six mile run by the end of the year 

And that should about do it for this year. Though I'll probably add more in the biking area since I'm kinda neglecting that one, and the 50K ride should be illuminating. 

Star Wars

Lori and I have been watching all of the Star Wars movies from Episode I throug VI in that order to see if the whole thing actually works now. It does, by the way. There are some minor incosistencies. But my advice to anyone in episodes VII through IX if they ever materialize, stick with R2D2. He is the kingmaker of the series.

Some impressions from this time around. Episode I was as bad as i remember. The acting is tremendously bad. The story is dull. Yoda looks awful. And then there is Jar Jar, who continues to this day to be a mystery for Sci-Fi fans. How is it that nobody at Lucasfilm had the balls to say anything to Lucas about how Jar Jar would viewed as an obvious racial stereotype.

Episodes II and III were actually a little better with this viewing. I think viewing them back to back actually does lend some continuity and interest.

Episode IV, the original Star Wars, now looks really bad. And that's with the 2004 cleanup! The acting is horrible. Leia is made up like a two dollar whore. The lighting is bad. The editing is bad. The pacing drags. The only really good part of the movie is the last 15 minutes.

Episode V, where we finished last night, is really the bright spot in the whole thing. In comparison to Episode IV it's a dream. The cinematography is light years better. The pacing is really good. The acting is so, so much better. I heard that Mark Hamil took acting lessons after IV and it really shows. And the dialog and story are just far, far better than the previous film. Normally sequels are worse or nearly as good as the original, in this case Empire is just a completely different level of movie. It makes the original look like it was shot in a garage. 

Ah well, wrap it up with Jedi tonight. Ewok a yub, yub! 

10K run achieved

A couple of months back I set the goal of running a 10K. I did that this morning with a charity run for the families of our soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.

i'd like to say I did well. I finished. Which is great. About middle of the pack. Which is better than finishing last. Because of my calf tear I had only trained to 5K, so the 10K was a real challenge. I hadn't run that long since the Bay To Breakers.

There were only about 20 runners, so it was a very small and disperse group. That's pretty tough since normally I depend on other folks for pacing and encouragement during long races. So there were a few times when I doubted if I could even make it. But somehow I muddled through. The last mile was really tough. The guy said if we got back to the park we were done, turned out there were about 500 more yards to go and that was killer. But I finished reasonably strong.

I think this is kinda like swimming the mile. The first time it was horrible and painful. And the next time I did it in 10 minutes less. And now it's not easy, but it's do-able every time. I'll start training to 10K from here on out. 

More underwater movies

I spent ten minutes trying to convince Megan to jump into the pool as I took a video of her from under the water. She finally did it on her own and when I showed her the video after that she couldn't stop doing it. Here are the three best; one, two, and three. It seems to me that having a resource like one of these cameras for swim coaches could really help young kids get excited about swimming and help old geezer like me refine their strokes.

2 mile swim

I did a real two mile swim this morning. Turns out the last one wasn't quite two miles because at the time I thought the pool as 25 meters, when it turned out to be yards. So I thought a mile was 33 laps instead of 36.

Anyway, that really doesn't matter, what matters to me is that my form really improved today. I was swimming with much more ease and grace. For the first mile and a half I was still breathing pretty heavily. But for the last half mile it was as if I broke through a wall into this zone of transcendent bliss. It was amazing. As if swimming had become little more effort than walking. It was absolutely wonderful. Easily the best workout experience I've had, probably ever.

Megan underwater

We got a cool new gizmo yesterday. It's an underwater shell for Lori's point and shoot digital camera. I had played with a disposable underwater film camera before, but this is much more fun since it's not only almost unlimited stills, but video as well.

Here is a picture of Megan after having jumped into the pool:

And here is some video of her swimming to Lori. 

Megan at the Ren Fair

A cute picture of Megan from our recent trip to the Ren fair:

This was her after her hair-braiding session. 

Jesus Camp

This is what I'm talking about. It's scary. Listen to the kid talk about being the 'key generation' for the return of Jesus. This is all revelations stuff.

Battlestar

Need a Battlestar fix? Get it with the Webisodes coming in front of the new season.

What I learn from Project Runway

Chongo replied to my Ruby rant, and gave some wise insights that it's about the people and not the language. That's very true. What I find is that engineers have development styles that they fall into. For example, some like to experiment, make lots of versions, and see what works and what doesn't. Others like a more spec'd approach. You give them the spec, they write the code, if the code equals the spec the project equals done.

Organizations generally fall around those types as well. Some have a lot of process; the marketing people talk to the customers, then talk with the architects, the architects then translate that into designs and then engineers implement the designs. Where other organizations have the engineers talk directly with the customers, then deliver pre-release code to get feedback directly from the customer, and make changes to match.

I call that latter approach the 'Project Runway' approach, since it's what they do on that show. The producers come up with some idea, they tell the designers. The designer then work on something. Then the host comes in and gives them feedback. Then they incorporate that and release it. Obviously, more cycles of feedback would often times be better. But what are the advantages? Lots of clothes are produced. Some suck. Some rock. But at least stuff gets out there. Plus the cycle time on development is reduced. And bad design ideas get killed early.

If Project Runway were run like spec-driven process-heavy software shops it would look like this. There would be three levels of people between the customer and the clothes. The marketer would talk to the customer and get some 'general impressions'. For example, the customer likes crocodile skin handbags. Then they would talk to the architect who would broaden those 'general impressions' into some wider perspective. At this point the design would be something like; build a object toting system with interchangeable exterior elements. Since two days is lots of time, this process of broadening the marketing ideas takes one and a half days.

All the while the engineers who are actually going to construct the clothes, not knowing anything about what's going on, spend there time building the perfect sewing machine that can create sails for sailboats in two minutes. When the engineers are finally given the "object toting system" design they scramble because they only have four hours left in the two day schedule to build the impossible. Obviously their amazing sewing machine was a complete waste of time, since they aren't building sails for sailboats. So they scrap that. Somewhere along the line one of the engineers finds a paper bag. They glue some random felt cutouts on it and deliver it to the marketers. That matches the spec. Job complete! A job well done all around.

The result? The customer, having told the marketer that they specifically wanted a crocodile skinned handbag is drop-jawed at the sight of the paper bag with felt cutouts.

Unfortunately, this is what happens so often in software jobs. The engineers are either too close to the customer, and are driven mad by ever changing requirements. Or so far away from the customer that they have no idea who is going to use what they build, or how they are going to use it.

This is why systems like Ruby on Rails appeal to me. I'd much rather error on the side of being too close to the customer. I like to spend some time with them, see what they want, go off and prototype something simple, then bring it back and say "Is this what you mean?" Then get their feedback, incorporate it, and continue the cycle. Yes, it's hard to know when you are done. And yes, it means lots of code rewrites. And yes, it means lots of schema changes. But that's natural. It's software, which means that you can change it.

I know when things are bad in the heavy process world when the engineers sit around arguing about technology stacks, or the size of fields, or they spend their time writing random pieces of technology that don't relate to what the company is doing (the sewing machine specifically for sails on sailboats.) It's busy work. And frankly, it's safe. The engineers can always say they 'were working' and 'solving problems'. When really all they were doing were debating the fine points of computer science. The hard work is in solving actual customer problems.

After I wrote the Ruby rant I had a look over at The Server Side to see what they thought of Rails. The Server Side is all about Java technologies. It's obnoxiously named The Server Side because it implies, wrongly, that Java is the only legitimate implementation language for web servers. Anyhow, the rant against Rails was exactly as I would expect there. It's all about the implementation, without any mention of how Rails could actually help get customer working functionality sooner. Threading and scalability FUD this. Domain model that. EJB and JDO this. And XML configuration that. Whatever. Java certainly supplies ample material for computer science debate with it's forty-five different persistence technologies, and more language specs than you can shake a stick at.

This is why Rails wins and Java loses. Chongo is right. It's not about the technology stack. It's about the teams that use it. If the team is close the customer and rapidly iterating to get to the customer requiements, which is really hard work, then it will win. And Rails allows you to do that. If you just sit around all the time debating tech, and ignoring the customer, then you are going to lose.

I particularly enjoy the scalability FUD that Java folks sling at Rails; "Ok, Rails scales to thousands of transactions, but what about billions." My answer is simple. If the application needs to handle billions of transactions, then the problem I'm going to have, is how to spend all of the money from my options. And it will be some other poor chumps problem to get Rails to scale to billions of transactions. No canned system, not Java, not .NET, not Rails, handles scalability seemlessly. Google doesn't use any standard technology stack. They can't. It's all custom. The only real scalability solution is innovative engineers who can adapt quickly and solve the scaling problems that pop up where you least expect them.

P.S. This is why .NET wins as well. .NET projects ship. They ship crap spaghetti code. But they ship, and that's what counts. IMHO, Rails is better because there is less code, less spaghetti, and more inherint structure to the project. Rails has inherint opinions about stuff. This is a view, this is a model, this is how you connect wih the database, this is how you do HTML, so on and so forth. And that will help drive Rails adoption because most people will be doing things the Rails way. So it will be easier to hire for Rails skills.

Ruby and Java

Lori says my blog has lost it's edge lately. Probably because I've been on a politics fast. Well, I could talk about how we are learning more about how the both the Miami and the British terror plots and all points show to 'wag the dog'. But that's so boring. So, I'll talk about Ruby and Java.

i saw an advertisement for an upcoming tech talk. The abstract for the talk say that Ruby and Java are both strongly typed and then tries to mount the Java disaster frimly onto the coat-tails of the Ruby revolutoin.

Ruby and Java are twin languages, separated at the birth of the Object Oriented revolution, only to meet each other many years later.  They are both strongly typed, OO languages with a rich set of tools.

The notions fill me with disgust.

First the idea that Java and Ruby share any common ancestry is ludicruous. In the beginning of programming languages there were two roads that diverted in the wood. Fortran started the strong typing, compiled, close to the hardware approach. LISP took the other path and had managed memory, loose typing, and didn't require compilation. Java's ancestry can be drawn straight back to Fortran, and Ruby goes straight back to LISP. In fact, many have called Ruby, literate LISP. This idea that Ruby and Java are siblings or related in some way, just flat wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

I also resent the entire idea that Java is an any way helping, or advancing, or responsible for, anything to do with the success of Ruby and Rails. Dynamic languages, like Perl and Python, were running web servers long before Java and Java Server Pages, or Faces, of J2EE, or any of that worthless Java crap came along. Java was meant to, and was strongly pitched as, the destroyer of dynamic languages on the server. Java has been, is, and always will be, a failure in any environment it's placed into. J2EE failed on the server. Applets failed in the browser. And Swing failed on the desktop. The only place Java seems to succeed is in creating IDEs to remove a portion of the tremendous pain involved in developing Java applications. 

Obviously the guy giving the talk is just trying to get more people onboard with Ruby and Rails. That's a good thing. But let's cut the shit that somehow Java has been this great success and it's time to pass the torch. The reailty is that Java a phase of computer history that's best just dumped into the circular bin of history.