Blogging Ottinger (tim)

Well, when the blog turns to “all links all the time” it’s a good indicator that I’m really, really busy. I’m teaching a class this week, using some new tools and techniques, and learning like mad. It’s a great gig, though we’ve had our difficulties getting a good solid start. I’m eager to teach again, since I’m now into the rhythm of the thing and have a set of ideas for how to make it faster, smoother, and better.

Great students at UGS. Highly motivated, self-propelled, hard-working students who come early and stay late. I don’t know what UGS is doing right, but it is certainly doing something right. I’d gladly return several more times.

But in the meantime, I’m not keeping up so well with blogging, email, and other personal contact. Forgive me, and know that I’m only in a busy season. Hopefully I’ll be settling in a bit later on.

When I was working with the youth group at Avon, I had these rules for pranking, and I guess it’s a good time to offer them to youth workers, pastors, and all those who have the task of reigning in the madness:

1) No property damage (nobody should have to pay for your fun)
2) No personal injury (nobody should be hurt)
3) No humiliation (nobody should feel hated or inferior).

I think that any pranking within these guidelines should be acceptable. Well, with perhaps one rider:
4) No staying up past curfew to pull pranks; get up early in the morning instead.

Now we have a perfect set of pranking guidelines, I think. Or close enough for me.

I was most happy to read this article about the French hearings on interoperability and freedom. This was most encouraging. Of course, this has been said often enough (some better than others) but there are those who expect to make money by restricting freedom, and they won’t hear this message.

These spammers are already scum to begin with, right? They try to make a living by making everyone else’s life miserable, spamming hundreds of millions in hopes that some of them will be dumb enough to buy products from someone like themselves. They’ve been doing the whole “zombie network” thing — hey, these guys think that any tactic that makes money is a good thing. So we shouldn’t be too surprised to find out that this jailed spam king was caught conspiring to kill witness.

Nice class of “entrepeneur” here, huh?

Forgive me for even mentioning this in such a public place, but someone has to say it (and I’m just the guy).

Going to the bathroom should be performed as if it were a criminal act: it should be done quietly, and one should leave no evidence behind.

That’s all I’m saying.

I just read another riveting Ars article about a guy getting in trouble for using an unprotected wireless network. Yikes.

I guess I’d better put some security on mine just to keep my neighbors from being guilty of FELONY computer network intrusion.

But I guess sharing is unpopular with telecommunications and adds a burden to the RIAA and MPAA when they’re tracking down evil people who actually buy their products *after* listening to them. And I’m sure homeland defense would rather we were using IP connections that are tracked to a single owner (or better, a single user).

Me, I think this is all a little silly. I think the laws need a little adjusting. A big public cloud is still something I’d like to see, where we all share our connections and we can all connect next door if our connection is too far away from our garage or bedrooms. But if ISPs and various troubled concerns make it felony-class illegal, we have to become selfish for their sake.

I think the solution is at least as wrong as the problem. But that’s modern life.

I’ve been in meetings this week, estimating tasks for the next iteration. Our ambitious, optimistic team member was pushing for us committing to more work while the more beaten-down were arguing for less. We ended up with a good compromise, which is the point of such meetings (I think).

It made me think about how so much of our lives are involved in sailing between Scylla and Charybdis, between fear of failure and ambition to get more done — between the comfortable and the impossible. I don’t think it’s just a feature of software development teams, but maybe a human feature. We find the same issues in ministry. We are always wanting to risk too little out of fear or risk too much out of enthusiasm.

My recent church history has me thinking about this a lot. The question is how to navigate between these two monsters and make decisions based on something other than fear and ambition. In software, we push to make decisions based on data, and we talk about “yesterday’s weather” being our best guide — what we’ve done before is what we’re likely to do again.

What about when you’re talking about faith? Maybe we should use yesterday’s weather — what God has brought us through, what he’s done for our friends, what we see he’s done in the past. Maybe we need to stop watching what we’re afraid of and what we’re capable of doing so much.

But what do I know?

You know what I think? I think that to patent a thing you have to be its originator. Therefore, facts which are discovered would not be patentable, nor the fact that one fact is related to another as reported in an Ars Technica article. I think that we shouldn’t patent the human genome because we didn’t invent humanity. Likewise, mathematics is discovery, not invention. Nor human biology, nor sunshine, rain, or earthquake.

I’m so tired of patents and other barriers to research and development. I think that if we fail to develop as a species, it will be because someone was able to tell us that we weren’t allowed to grow and develop without paying royalties. It’s crazy stuff. Somehow, we’ve got to just grow and develop and think and reason and discover and not live in constant fear of lawsuits. Already americans are half-afriad to invent or even to write code. It will only get worse until somehow this is all sorted out.

My bet is that the countries which develop most in the next few decades are those who are allowed to, by lack of intellectual property systems. Watch while we get left behind, waiting for the lawyers to sort things out.

In further proof that the Recording Industry is smoking rope, we find that peer-to-peer users buy MORE music. Why? Becuse they get exposed to more music, and actually find something that they like!

This is crazy. I keep saying it, you keep saying it, maybe someone will listen to us. DRM is a nonsense product. It has producers galore but there are no consumers asking for it. It’s marketless, useless, unwanted. Imagine if I started making purble pantaloons and nobody bought them — should I lobby congress and force laws into existence that guarnatees me that everyone who makes pants will have to pay for my pantaloons? No. A marketless product is a contradiction.

Oh, support the EFF. They have a new letter writing campaign on digitial consumers rights. The least you can do is join in. Do at least the least.

Wow. They’ve built the world’s first completely transparent IC. Admittedly, it’s not doing a lot of work yet, but what a neat thing. I’d read about transparent transistors a while back and what that could mean to projectors and LCD screens. Now here we have something even more weird. Pretty soon your modded, watercooled case could be see-through.

I can’t wait until we see stuff appearing in windows, glasses, etc. Even novelty drinking glass tricks. I wonder what smart windows and doors will be like.

Neat stuff on slashdot.

Today I started with Visual C++ again. I asked it for a “hello world” app, and got a C app with a proprietary pre-compiled header hack added in. You know, I wanted a C++ “hello world”, not a C “hello world” polluted with whatever MS thinks is a good idea.

I changed it to the standard form, using cout rather than fprintf, and rather than something ending in a .h, and the code would not compile. The reason? You have to have the precompiled header, or else turn it off. That leads to a question: why do you need precompiled headers for a “hello world” app? What is the sense in that? How any milliseconds are you saving for introducing the extra complexity.

So now I remember why I dislike MS VC++ (at least up to and including 6.0), even while having a grudging admiration for C++. They add complexity, but without adding real power. Less of the language works, and more extensions get in the way. I guess MS had the “a better C” in mind, rather than a real C++ mindset.

Personally, I much prefer to look at C++ as a language unto itself, and the base for other languages like Java and C# (which are constantly trying to “crawl back home” by adding back C++ features). As a language unto itself, it’s okay. As a “better C”, I think it has problems.

Tim

You know, when the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie? That’s annoying!

I found an article at Advogato on the interface of XP and Open-Source. This is another link that I put in just so I don’t lose it. Expect this article to be edited with commentary later.

I’m posting this link because I’m too lazy to set up delicious, but here is an article on open-source licensing that is interesting. Or I think so. I’ve not read it all yet.

This is a gratuitous mention of Thomas J Peckish intended to skew the count of references maintained regularly by one Mr. B Foote. It’s like a shout-out, in a way. It’s the result of some guy leaving a catfish in the pool. The memepool, that is.

I think today’s pin-up girl is just beautiful. She’s got great color, and is so nicely sculpted. She’s full of nice accessories too. Duncan HB-101s, Bigsby, Grover — all good stuff. Serious hotness. I wonder if this one feels and sounds as good as it looks.

So who’s got a grand they want to give me?

Is Microsoft’s fear of standards is deeper than its commitment to standardizing? It looks like .NET is the environment that THEY make for YOU to use, rather than the environment that teams at microsoft choose for themselves. At least that’s what the slashdot article leads one to believe.

A friend once told me that he believes that all products built by people for their own needs turns out to be successful (even beloved sometimes), whereas any tool built by one group of people for some other group to use tends to be ultimately unpopular.

I like .NET much better than I liked MFC, though it still is a bit warty in places. Maybe if the programmers were forced to work in their own environments (and why woul d they have to be?) they would make it more poweful and more usable.

At least it’s a theory.

When you take the spin-doctoring out of it, you find that firefox is better. Nyaaa, nyaaaa.

The thinkpad T42p is in, and I’m using it right now. I don’t yet know how good the battery is, though I’ve realized that my home wireless could be a bit better. :-/

It has a nice, bright screen and a decent hard disk. The keyboard is amazingly comfy. I’m not totally crazy about th elocation of the Fn key, but the rest of the controls are handy. I like the little eraser mouse, and I find that the touchpad doesn’t really get in my way.

I got this one from Emperor Linux. They set up the dual boot (Debian/Windows) and configured all the weirdness that is a laptop. Everything worked right out of the box, including the wireless. I’m really happy about that. I think that I’m going to be pretty happy with this box.

Now, there is a little bit of trouble. When I installed XFCE, I started to get system lockup every once in a while. I also think that I synced too much from my old laptop. I have to drop a bunch of configuration files in order to get back to normal. It sure is nice to have drive bays and batteries not held in with tape, and it’s nice to have a full complement of keys on the keyboard.

:-)

Witness the awesome power of the linux command line. All the people I know who most hate the command line hate it because of an association with the Windows command line or maybe DOS. Oh, my friends, the Unix-like command line you get from Bash or the like is an entirely different thing. It is a little programming language with a huge library and four-on-the-floor. It’s fast, powerful, and amazing. It makes text files into a killer database. Oh, just you wait.

I’ve been seeing more and more articles on command-line usage. Good.