You Cannot be a Programmer Without Understanding Computers

In The Perils of JavaSchools, Joel Spolsky pretty accurately describes the problems with a lot of programmers who are coming out of colleges today. Back in the mid to late 1980s when I was in college, C++ was brand new and Java didn't yet exist. Most classes still used Pascal, though C was becoming more and more popular. The thing is, our classes back then mostly taught concepts, not languages. I even had to take a hardware digital logic class. (Much fun!) The only classes I really remember are Assembler (IBM 370 assembler at that!), Data Structures (taught by Jeff Harris, who last I heard, went off to a very well paying job at Motorola after being let go (!) by a university that obviously didn't appreciate the tremendous value of his teaching), Systems Design, where we wrote a software coputer and then later an assembler and linker for it. Everything else was fun, but just entertainment. Those three classes are the ones where I learned stuff that became the foundation for everything I've done since then. The sad thing is now, none of those classes are even offered, much less required.

This is Certainly a First

A friend sent me a link Well, That Certainly Didn’t Take Long and told me, "read this article...and pretend like Limbaugh or Noonan wrote it. I'm in somewhat of a state of shock." I generally don't read columns from the likes of Maureen Dowd. As a matter of fact, I had to ask my friend who she is. His response was, "ultra-ultra-ultra lefty; Huffington crowd".

Well, that was certainly interesting. Now I'm in a state of shock. Happy, but still shocked. Some leftist acknowledgment that there's a lot of liberal agenda in the stimulus bill as is and that even some Democrats are getting disillusioned is very refreshing.

Libertarian Frustration

A friend pointed to me to an excellent article by John Hasnas, Associate Professor in the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University. In this short article, titled What It Feels Like To Be A Libertarian, Mr. Hasnas accuratly sums up the frustration felt by Libertarians, as they watch markets be manipulated by politicians who later declare that free markets don't work. The frustration that comes from watching "fixes" that make the problems worse.

Righteous Politicians

I'm already tired of the righteousness I'm perceiving from the Democrats in Congress. I'd like to remind them that they rode into office on the coattails of a man for whom people voted for not primarily for his policies. The reasons I believe many people voted for Barack Obama are, in order:

1. He's not George W. Bush.
2. Sarah Palin was perceived to not be qualified for a job she was not even running for. I'm still scratching my head over this one.
3. His race. I'm sorry to say this, but I really do think that for some voters at least, the color of his skin was more important than the content of his character. Hopefully someday Dr. King's dream will be achieved, but I don't believe it was this time.
4. His policies.

With Democratic policies in fourth place for a lot of people, I feel like the Democrats should be very careful. They need to stick to their bipartisan¹ promises. They need to do what is right for the country, not what rewards their pet issues.

I am still hopeful that Mr. Obama can guide his party to a higher standard, but I have my doubts, considering what he has to work with. Despite all of the Democratic complaints during the past eight years of the Bush administration, they seem to be willing to act in the same ways they complained about now that they are in power. I'm hoping for better, but not expecting it.

1) I hate the word bipartisan as it implies their is something inherently "right" about a bipolar system. I believe that our cyclical tit-for-tat approach to politics does far more harm than good.

New in Java 7

Java 5 was the first version of Java that I found usable after years of developing in C and C++. The inclusion of generics and other syntax enhancements combined with the appearance of Eclipse made developing in Java finally much less tedious and more productive. Java 6 seemed like more of a maintenance release, though it did provide some nice enhancements such as a better JAXB. I am particularly excited about some of the things promised in Java 7, including closures, BigDecimal operator support, type inference, improved catch clauses, and other fixes that will make working with collections more natural. I still wish they would just give us real operator overloading. The one that has me scratching my head, though, is automatic resource block management. In an attempt to rid Java code of most finally code, they have come up with:

    do (BufferedInputStream bis = new BufferedInputStream(is); BufferedOutputStream bos = BufferedOutputStream(os)) {
  // do stuff with bis and bos
}

Which is certainly an improvement, but I just don't understand why we can't get a real destructor in Java. My nearly twenty years of OO programming have convinced me that if a language has a constructor, it should have a destructor. Exceptions are academic languages and pseudo code, both of which are free of resource concerns. Real world programming is almost always working with some sort of a finite resource, such as database connections. It is not just good form to clean these up the moment you are done with them, but often simply necessary to make things work in a busy production system.

These new blocks are an improvement I suppose, but they still suffer the fatal flaw of resource management in Java which is that it is dependent upon the programmer to always remember to free up resources. My real world experience has also taught me that the less that you have to have programmers do manually, the less problems you'll have. I'll gladly accept the new features of Java 7, but I'm still waiting for a truly automatic solution to resource management in Java.

Don't Just Stand There, DO Something!

Finally, an article that quantifies what I have often felt but didn't know how to explain concerning the inefficiencies of big corporations: They become inefficient because they have too much process, or, as Paul Graham explains, because they are too careful.

On a smaller scale, I've realized that it is often better to simply DO something rather than spend too much time thinking, or really, agonizing, about how it should be done. If you're not sure how to proceed, then simply exclude any stupid directions and pick randomly from what is left. If you happen to have chosen the right path, then you are done. If you chose wrong, then you have effectively reduced the number of choices and can perhaps even use the experienced gained to choose better between those that are left. Often you can go through several cycles of trial and error before you could have made a decision simply by thinking about it.

You may say there are some endeavors where this does not work such as spaceflight or safety systems, but I suggest you can use this same principle there. Not that you won't have failure, but if you are working in engineering, you should be working with test harnesses and other simulators. In software, this has led to "agile development" or "test driven development". If you're not doing this, start.

Copyright vs. Culture

I found a very well written summary of the conflict between copyright and culture by Cory Doctorow on Locus Online.

JD Wallpapers

You can find some nice Jack Daniels wallpapers on the Jack Daniels website. No wide screen variants, unfortunately.

Good Things to Know

This is completely silly, and I'm not sure how useful it is, but I guess it's good to know:

I could survive for 1 minute, 16 seconds chained to a bunk bed with a velociraptor

Created by Bunk Beds Pedia

Rush in Dallas

Rush-Dallas-2008-04-24-009
Originally uploaded by TXTad

A friend bought several good tickets for several of his friends, including me. It was a great show. I've only seen Rush twice, though I've been a fan of theirs for over 20 years. They're simply good at what they do, and it's obvious that they enjoy it. The fact that they are devoid of the drama that a lot of other artists have only adds to their appeal. I won't try to review the show. I was enjoying it too much to pay attention to the set list or other details. I'll leave the review for someone who paid more attention the details and is more eloquent than myself, but you can go look at my photos from the concert.

Old Fashioned Blogging

In the dark ages before computers, people actually wrote on paper with pen and ink. Most journals were probably just diaries that nobody but their author ever read. The nice thing about such a journal is that paper survives power outages, hard drive crashes and sorts of other catastrophes that affect digital words. Sure, a notebook can be lost in a fire, but it takes a heck of a fire to actually burn a book up completely. Try it sometime; you'll be surprised at how long a book can be in a fire and still be readable. Only if it's closed tightly, though.

After meaning to do it for most of my 40 years, I've decided to finally try to keep a journal or diary and towards that end I have discovered Moleskine notebooks. I chose one of these rather than a cheaper made in China alternative, partially because I don't want to buy any more from China than I have to and partially because I don't expect to get any sort of quality out of any thing mass produced in China.

I did find a funny article talking about the proper pronunciation of the name. I think it really doesn't matter what you call it.

Why did I finally decide to get started on this after so long? I read an article in Tin House magazine about a fellow by the name of Lee Meriwether. As a young man he went to Europe on a shoestring budget and wrote about it in a book called A Tramp Trip: How to See Europe on Fifty Cents a Day. Besides the fact that Mr. Meriwether was such an interesting person throughout his entire life, his travel journal is simply interesting. It shows how interesting a simple daily report of events can be over a century later. Hopefully someone will be interested to read my journals someday.

The Lesson of Vietnam

The other day I was driving to work listening to some reporters on the radio talking about Iraq. Of course the usual subjects were being covered: The false pretenses for the war; Washington politics; The costs of the war; The comparisons with the Vietnam War. It was that last one that put me into a white-hot anger, and that is why I am writing this a couple of weeks later because I didn't want to write mad.

The particular point that angered me was that one of the speakers was opining about what event might be analogous to Vietnam's Tet Offensive as the point at which the war became unwinnable. Let me be very clear: The Tet Offensive was the moment in Vietnam when the media lost the Vietnam war. Despite how it is remembered, the Tet Offensive was one of the most spectacular military victories in American history which was squandered away as a lost opportunity.

Tet, or Tết Nguyên Đán, "is the is the most important and popular and festival in Vietnam". The Tet Offensive was timed to start on the night of January 30-31, 1968. Due to the importance of this holiday, it was believed that the chances for any significant NVA or VC attacks during this time were minute, so much of ARVN was on leave and even U.S. military forces were at a low level of alert. The attacks were a total surprise as earlier hints of the attacks were dismissed by intelligence agencies as disinformation. Despite this, within only a few days, most of the attacks had been repulsed and the North suffered heavy losses.

By the end of the offensive, the VC was all but obliterated. Formerly secret operatives had exposed themselves during the attack and were then captured or killed. The NVA also suffered heavy losses. Some sources quote northern losses at nearly fifty times that of American losses. All military parts of the planned offensive failed. Even the hot spots at Hue and Khe Sanh were finished a few weeks after the offensive started.

The North's plans included a general uprising by the population which never occurred. According to several captured VC commanders, most mid-level VC commanders didn't expect any uprising in their area to occur, but they said nothing and followed through with the plan on hopes that it would occur in someone else's area. Apparently the North was blinded by its own communist ideology. I'm sure the widespread atrocities committed by the North did nothing to help foment this expected rebellion.

The true genius of General Giap wasn't his military plan, but rather his shrewd reckoning that a major attack would sway American public opinion against the war. He may have been more successful in this than he expected as he received a huge help in this way from Walter Cronkite and his "Cronkite Moment" when Mr. Cronkite declared the war unwinnable and stated that America must leave Vietnam. I belive Mr. Cronkite owes me and every other American an apology. I grew up in the 1970s thinking that the Tet Offensive was a huge military defeat for U.S. and allied forces until I became interested in history just before my teenage years and eventually learned the truth about Tet.

And now we have reporters looking for an Iraqi Tet, or perhaps more accurately, an Iraqi "Cronkite Moment". All we hear from the media is how horrible it is that America is in Iraq. We hear terms such as "civil war", yet the Iraqi coalition government is still in place with all major Iraqi ethnicities participating. We hear that American forces are taking a beating in Iraq despite the fact that we have never lost an engagement that involves a unit of platoon size or larger. We hear about every bad thing that a soldier does, but we seldom hear of how any American soldier has helped or befriended anyone.

And what about those the U.S. is fighting? Christians are terrorized routinely all over the muslim world, insurgents behead children, insurgents have children beheading people, all in the name of Allah. Where is the media outrage over these sorts of events? These are not the sort of people you can have a dialogue with. These people simply have to be killed because they are a threat to everyone.

The media needs to stop trying to teach what they believe is the lesson of Vietnam, and learn the real lesson themselves. That lesson is that they are the ones who lost the war and they are trying very hard to do it again.

References:
Give 'Em Surrender Harry Finds His Tet Offensive
Is 'Cronkite Moment' Just a Media Myth?
The Tet Offensive at Wikipedia
The Tet Offensive at Digger History
The Tet Offensive at Ashbrook Center
More About the 1968 Tet Offensive
The Tet Offensive at Vets With a Mission

Truth

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." -- Upton Sinclair

College Sports is Entertainment, Not Academics

On the way to work today, I heard an editorial by Frank Deford of Sports Illustrated. He explains that worrying about money spent on college sports was pointless because it's not going to stop. The better way to look at college sports is that they are entertainment, not academics and should all be moved to a new Department of Entertainment.

I couldn't agree more. College sports are big money entertainment and have nothing to do with academics. Certainly they have money spent on them well beyond their intrinsic value, but it's unclear if this money really takes away from what is available for academia. It may, but then again, it's quite possible that such money would only go to some other form of big entertainment if big name college sports didn't exist. If the commercial sports entertainment programs at colleges were distanced from academia, it might be possible for academic budgets to operate without any question of effect from sports.

The World is Insane

How can we ever have a rational, safe, functional world when, in the 21st century, people are murdered for practicing sorcery? And how is it that some people seem to think that a tortured confession is worth something?

George Washington, Whiskey Maker

I was happily surprised to learn that George Washington was a distiller of whiskey in his later years. Even better, his distillery is being recreated.

Everyone is Always Offended

According to CNN, a "senior British Cabinet minister has sparked fury by saying that Muslim women who wore full veils made community relations more difficult." Apparently a lot of people are offended by his comments, but there is some truth in what he says. What about those who are offended by the veils? Why is offending them acceptable, but offending the wearers of the veils not acceptable?

Evening Deer

Evening Deer
Originally uploaded by TXTad.

I wish I lived somewhere that was like this every evening. This is just off the Pacific coast south of Mendocino, California. The cool weather was quite nice too.

Pearl Harbor

Today is the 64th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Indeed it is true that this day has lived in infamy, but I also feel that the importance of it is lost on many younger people. Those who suggest that war is always unavoidable must remember that they are talking about an ideal, not reality. Peace is what we strive for. It is also has to be earned and protected. Without military might, we can have no peace for there would be no strength to protect it. Without the proven willingness to use military force, we will always be under attack from those who wish take our peace.

Go by Bicycle

Go by Bicycle has a list of 15 good reasons to ride a bike.

Biofuels Sustainable?

"A major criticism often levelled against biomass, particularly against large-scale fuel production, is that it could divert agricultural production away from food crops, especially in developing countries." Apparently this isn't so according to this article at the Journey to Forever website. Actually, it seems that any problems with farming outputs now and throughout history have more to do with bad government policies and greed than anything else. This article links to several others, all of which are good reads.

The Battle for Control

AT&T is back and they, along with other companies concerned about their power rather than your rights, are working to come up with creative new ways to charge you for things. One of the keys in this looming future is manipulating Congress and redifining some of our basic rights (fair use and access) as crimes. Doc Searles of Linux Journal has an excellent article entitled Saving the Net: How to Keep the Carriers from Flushing the Net Down the Tubes. It is a long but worthy read.

Movie Studios Don't Know Anything

In this story, NPR correspondent Kim Masters talks about the long road to bringing Narnia to the movie theatre. Apparently one of the obstacles was that studios thought that American children would have no interest in a story about British children. It took the Harry Potter movies to disabuse them of that notion. Their small thinking must be caused by the same thing that makes movie studios always feel the need to make pointless changes in books they adapt to the screen. I wish the studios wouldn't think they were so smart because they seldom make a story better for their changes. It's pretty evident that they are generally wrong with what they think when they start trying to second guess what people will like and not like. True, they know how to make a lot of dreck that will sell, but they are unable to imagine that anyone wants anything different.

Veterans' Day

Armistice Day. World War I is not a war that is very much in the American public conscious, but it should be. It is the first modern war from the point of view that it included most of the modern weapons that we now associate with warfare. Tanks, airplanes, submarines and chemicals came into destructive maturity during WWI. It was also the war in which civilians began to be targeted indiscriminately as part of warfare. It is also the war that shaped pretty much the rest of the 20th century. It created many of the circumstances from which came World War II, as well as modern problems in the Balkans and the Middle East. It was the catalyst of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, which led to the rise of communism and the Cold War.

War and suffering isn't what Veterans' Day is about, though. This is the day where we remember the people who gave so much to fight for their country. During the past century, millions of men and women have gone off to war, often to places they had never heard of. They fought, suffered and often died to protect Freedom. Regardless of the politics of the wars they fought in, their sacrifice remains important and should be remembered and appreciated.

After World War II and Korea, Armistice Day was renamed Veterans' Day to remember all American veterans of wars and peacetime.

• Veterans' Day
  
• World War I
  
• Time Overtaking World War I Vets

Quality Legal MP3s with No DRM

eClassical will sell you quality classical music MP3s at a resonable price without treating you like a criminal.

Ethanol Isn't the Answer

The San Diego Union-Tribute has an article explaining why ethanol isn't an answer to our fuel problems.

Iraq is Not Another Vietnam

The November/December 2005 issue of Foreign Affairs has an interesting article by Nixon's Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird detailing why Iraq is not "another Vietnam" along with warnings about how it could degenerate into such. He makes some policy recommendations that make good sense. I found his descriptions of what went wrong in Vietnam to be as interesting as his comments regarding Iraq. I do not completely agree with every point in his analysis of Vietnam, but for the most part I do agree. Regardless, his comments are some of the most lucid ones I have read on the subject.

When Struggle Becomes a Crime

Regarding the bombing attack on the Radisson SAS hotel in Amman, Jordan which occured during his wedding and killed his father, his bride's father and many of his other relatives, Ashraf al-Akhras said, "This is not Islam. Muslims don't kill each other or any other person, what can I say? This is crime, not a fight against oppression in the world. It's a crime."

I hope this sentiment becomes shared by more.