Author Archives: Josh

First you have to convince me…

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I was doing some research on cell phones today. (Trying to do compare/contrast research on the mobile phone market is such an exciting adventure. Really not a fan of the industry.)? Ended up following a link to a page about the Droid, a device I’m actually quite curious about. I was greeted by this:

Holy throwing stars batman! When your website is to terrifying to contemplate how do you expect me to get interested in your device?! Nein!

Seriously though, technology needs to be elegant and transparent. Your website is invasive and confusing. End of Line, no sale for you. I have no confidence, and I haven’t even started!

The quest continues. Somewhere out there is a mobile data device that isn’t going to require my giving AT&T more money than they could possibly deserve. Forward and onward!

The parable of the boat builder…

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Once upon a time there was a man who loved to build boats. Building boats takes a lot of space, and his apartment just wasn’t big enough. He went to a local warehouse and asked if he could rent some space to build a boat. They worked out an agreement. He would build boats and sell them to the burgeoning local sailing industry, and in exchange for 30% of the profit from the sales the warehouse would let him use the space for free during construction.

“One small caveat” said the warehouse owner, “we have final say on the distribution of your boats. We may suggest certain changes we think will help their marketability.”

The man agreed. Surely allowing some oversight would be no problem whatsover. He knew the local market, and he knew his boats would sell! He began drawing the designs that very day.

The man worked 12 hours a day for two weeks! Over 150 hours of work later he had the plans for the first boat. He went to the warehouse and began to lay the forms for the keel. As he was laying the forms one of the warehouse managers came by and looked at his plans.

“Looks great!” said the manager, “However I thought we were getting a sailboat, and this appears to be a small yacht! Our company has recently decided that we want to be ecologically sound, so we can’t really support powered boats. Redesign it as a sailboat and then you can start building it.”

The boat builder agreed, but he began to think that perhaps this oversight agreement may not be as simple as he thought. Throwing away his last two weeks of effort he began again, this time designing an eco-friendly sailboat.

Two weeks later, plans for the sailboat in hand, the boat builder once again began construction. He worked uninterrupted for 2 months, day in and day out, until after over 700 hours of hard labor he finally had his boat completed. It was a beautiful solid wood boat in natural hardwood color, with natural white cloth sails. After admiring his handiwork he went to tell the warehouse managers to have them begin looking for a buyer.

The warehouse managers looked at his boat and seemed suitably impressed. After a few moments though one of them spoke up. “It’s quite a beautiful boat, no doubt about it. In the last month however, we’ve decided to try to sell carbon-fiber racing boats, and we want people to think of these boats when they think of sailing! So before we try selling this boat you need to paint it bright red and change the sail for blue nylon. That should make it acceptable to the current market!”

The boat builder was astounded! A classic wooden boat with natural cloth sails and they wanted to make it look like plastic! He would have none of it, and he told this to the owners in no uncertain terms! The warehouse owners were firm though. Carbon-fiber racing boats were what people should be using, they said, and if he didn’t comply then they were not going to be able to sell his boat. The boat builder said that he was fine with that, and he would just take his boat and leave.

“Not so fast”, one of the owners responded, “you’ve been using our space without paying rent, and we’re due a portion of the value with the boat. If you don’t change it the way we want and sell it, then you can’t take it anywhere. There is no third option, this is our warehouse, and partly our boat.”

The boat builder agreed, there was nothing he could do. The owners went away and the boat builder sat and looked at his boat for a time. Then he went to his boat, puled out his lighter, lit the corner of sail, and walked from the building and never returned.

Where do you draw the line? ? Where should you? And what about the boating consumers and their ability to choose when the market is this controlled?

If you haven’t guessed, I’m not really for walled gardens, no matter how well decorated they are.

Quick Hint: CSS Selectors and pseudo-classes

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It seems obvious now that I know it, but it seems that I never figured out that you could use include pseudo classes in a CSS Selector.

“a:hover img” gets you any image contained inside an anchor? tag that is currently being hovered over.

Why did I never know this before? Can’t say. But it sure is handy!

Bad day to be a target…

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Shot 150 rounds through my G19 today. Really focusing on trigger control and grip. Here’s the result:

I Learned two major things today.

  1. My supporting-index-finger-on-trigger-guard ad-hoc grip doesn’t actually seem to make much of a difference if you’re careful. Several other Glock shooters at the range use this technique, it doesn’t seem to matter much. However due to the 2nd issue, I’m going to continue and try to keep my left index finger from drifting up onto the front of the trigger guard.
  2. I’m not using the right part of my finger for the trigger. Making sure the trigger is between the first and second joint of my finger seems to help quite a bit! Once again, this is confirmed by some other Glock guys at the range. Using the tip of your finger can easily cause you to push the muzzle to the left as you’re squeezing the trigger. Really feels weird to put that much of my finger through the the trigger, but it seems to help quite a bit.

Needless to say, I’m actually rather pleased with myself. This week’s targets look much better than last week’s. Almost all of these shots were made both-eyes-open. The first 50 were all slow fire, the second target mixes slow fire and multiple shots. All drills go from high-ready position to on-target and firing.

On data ownership…

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Something I’ve been working on in my programming projects recently is ways to allow users to use their data from outside my service, and to take the data they have in services I create elsewhere.
In the new era portability is king. If you don’t allow users to use their data how they want, your service is utterly useless and doomed to failure.

Whoa there, you say, them’s some big bold words! If it sounds like I’m including the large portion of current generation products people are familiar with as the target of my wrath, you’re right on the money. Let’s take a look at a recent real life example, MobileMe.

MobileMe offers some excellent syncing tools for those of us with Macs and iPhones. Over-the-air (push!) syncing of contacts and calendars is a great tool, especially for those of us with a desktop, a laptop, an iPhone, and an iPod Touch all trying to stay perfectly in sync. However that’s exactly where the scope of the tool ends. Want to share contacts/calendars with someone else as “joint ownership”? Screwed! Can’t do it. So MobileMe loses one user/evangelist to Google, where I can choose to allow another user to collaboratively edit my calendar. MobileMe ends up in the trash heap because the data I give it can only be used in the ways that MobileMe wants me to use it, and I have different ideas.
Google also frustrates me though because I would very much like to set up a group of shared contacts between Bev and my accounts so we could maintain contact synchronization, but that’s not supported through them either. I have a huge store of data, and I can’t even grant another user ACCESS to it. This is full of fail.

Obviously one of the core problem with this is common language. There has to be a standard protocol that is used for each type of data in order for sharing to really work. For inter-service data (like sharing contacts with another user of the same system) there really is no excuse however.

There is another form of data usage to consider beyond just sharing. A good example of the type of thing I’m thinking of is WebHooks, but I’m not completely convinced on their implementation.
A current example of the concept would be posting? to an online forum that lets you “follow” the thread. When you post you can check the box for “email me when someone replies”. Now whenever someone posts something you get a notification. WebHooks is like that, except instead of providing a simple email notification it allows you to provide a URL and a notification is posted to that URL. The notification contains whetever data the application designer wants it to. This may seem like a power-user feature, but once the concept is widely accepted it allows you to let websites (and the datasets they contain) to interact with each other in fabulous new ways.

This starts with us, the application designers. And this is why I’m so hot and bothered about the idea. If I don’t design my own applications to allow the sort of data interactions that I want from other websites I use. Once again though, the problem is standards. How do you output the data? Do you create your own refspec for the specific website/application? Where do you draw the lines?

Once again, the problem is standards. There’s no reason why any user should have both MobileMe contacts and google contacts. Ideally either service should allow the user to use, not just “import”, contacts from the other.

We’re not there yet, and I understand how people scoff at this idea, but I’ll say it again. Data portability and access is king. If you don’t let your users get to the data they’ve entrusted to you and use it in the ways that they want to use it, they’re going to abandon you.

Nothing to see here…?

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I’ve just deleted 3 draft posts, the oldest of which was from 2 months ago.

Here’s what happens when I “blog”. I have a situation or an idea that I find really interesting, and I write about it. Then I decide that I want to expand on it a bit. I maybe do a tiny bit of research, or think things through a bit. Then I make it longer and more thoughtful, trying to draw interesting parallels or point out strange things…

Then I delete it because it is long, it wanders, it’s uninteresting, and it just rehashes everything everyone has heard everywhere else. Nothing valuable to add, nothing truly unique to contribute, and nobody really wants anything like that anyway it seems.

So, you miss out on my rant about the parallels between gun control and health care, (wherin I cleverly coined the phrase “happiness is a cold gun”, which I was actually rather proud of..) my thoughtful ramble on why my job is utterly horrible for me even though I actually love it (wherein I rambled somewhat about geekiness and why we interact with people the way we do), and a truly utterly boring post regarding the state of television shows these days.

So, I’m blogging, really.. It’s just such utter crap that I never actually hit post, thus saving you all the effort of reading it. And then I decide to post something like this. wheee

You know, half an hour ago I was almost ready to re-install facebook and twitter on my phone and perhaps start interacting with the world again. Then I sat down to finish one of the drafts I had, now I just want to delete everything and close accounts and sites everywhere. What a weird turn…
Maybe this is how society dies?

Conservatives and the Golden Rule(s). What’s the deal?!

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It seems to me that there are two golden rules that are in direct conflict with each other, and I’m not sure how conservatives reconcile it.

Rule 1) “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”
Rule 2) “He who has the gold makes the rules”

The real question is, why do “conservative” and “Christian” show up next to each other? They should be mutually exclusive! Conservative philosophy teaches that you should take care of yourself and that money is the only force capable of incentivizing people to act other than in their own best interests, and amassing piles of it is the proper approach to life. Christian philosophy teaches that “the love of money is the root of all evil”, and that you should be nice to people because it’s the right thing to do.

How do these people resolve these two things?! I would very much like someone to explain to me how these two philosophies are anything other than mutually exclusive. They are matter and anti-matter, they should not be able to exist together. I can’t figure it out.

Liberals and Guns: What’s the deal?

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Attention Liberals! I am with you, I agree with you, we are for the same things. For the most part I think we completely own the high road here. You’re not the ones attempting to destroy the future of our civilization simply because you’re bitter about political losses, and you’re not the ones trying to cover our racism in a thin veil of indignation.

Why though, is intellectual dishonesty okay when it comes to guns? Do you not understand that your glib mockery makes you look completely inept and hardens the attitudes anyone who might be on the fence against you?

Number one: You know nothing. Stop using the words “machine gun” and “automatic weapon”. This causes anyone who knows anything to think you are stupid. Automatic weapons/machine-guns are illegal on a federal level, and nobody was carrying any of those. Please understand what you are talking about before you open your mouth, otherwise you’re really no better than the uninformed propaganda-spewing FOX hosts we do so enjoy making fun of.

Number two: Isn’t being open-minded sort of something we’re trying for? Isn’t not being arbitrarily hateful to an entire class of people sort of one of the platforms we’re attempting to stand on? I’m completely willing to agree with you that some of the people out there carrying assault rifles to meetings may just be crazy anarchist militia members, and I don’t much care for those people any more than you do. Is it that hard for you to allow for the possibility that not everyone carrying a gun IS a crazy anarchist militia member though? Owning and/or carrying a gun does not mean that someone wants to kill your dog. Let’s keep in mind the differences between causation and correlation here.

Number three: What’s so bad about guns anyway? There have been discussions on many interesting issues such as gun rights, health care, NASA funding, and making fun of FOX hosts, and I think it’s been enjoyable for everyone. Would it surprise and terrify you to learn that during many of those conversations there was a gun present? You really shouldn’t assume that just because someone is on your side that they’re as biased as you are. Admittedly it may not have been an assault rifle, and hopefully you never knew of it’s existence, but the point was that it was there. Does that change the validity or value of the conversations?

I know that one of the standard responses is “Concealed isn’t the same as visible”. I call bullshit. Carrying visible vs carry concealed should not make a difference to anything other than the tactical approach of the carrier. When you sit across a table in a restaurant from someone discussing your view on health care you have to allow for the possibility that they may in fact be carrying a gun. You must allow for this possibility. How does knowing that they’re carrying a gun make things any worse? If they’re the type of person who you fear might do you physical harm because they disagree with you, you shouldn’t probably be having dinner with them in either case!

For anyone still concerned with the very concept of someone carrying a gun, that is a different issue which we should discuss separately. (I would refer you to Dave Grossman’s “On Sheep, Sheepdogs, and Wolves” as an entry point to this discussion.)

It’s also worth noting that I believe that a weapon is only a tool. A gun may be a more powerful tool, but in the end it’s no different than the difference between a spring rake and a shovel. Different tools, different jobs. Guns are not evil, people are evil. Go ahead and say “look at those crazy loonies!”, but reasoning that they are crazy loonies because they have guns is intellectually dishonest. An evil person will perform evil acts, by gun, by knife, or by fist, just as a good person will perform good acts using whatever tools they have available. A person is a weapon, when they so choose to apply themselves.

The point that I am trying to make here is that fanatically clinging to “guns are evil” completely ruins your credibility as an seeker of change and truth, and makes you appear to be as closed-minded as any racist. Yep, I’ll happily say it. Discrimination based on “you’re different than I am” is equally bad, no matter what that difference is.

I’m white, I’m tall, and I use and carry many variety of tools. Which of these do you think is okay to hate and deride me for?

A thought on Morality and Justice

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Watching an interesting documentary about the european sex slave “industry”. Apparently in Turkey if a girl escapes from her pimp and gets to the police she’s got a pretty decent chance of having the police return her to her pimp. The life these girls are subjected to is horrible, and the apparently a blind eye is turned in large portions of the world.

In very many cases the pimps who are perpetrating these are very clear cut, very easily identified, and there is no possible question of their intentional commission of unquestionably evil acts. Kidnapping, slavery, abuse, sexual exploitation, are these gray areas in any possible way? When someone who has kidnapped hundreds of people is not even pursued by the police, and another is given 5-years probation, is there any question that something must be done?

Hypothetical situation: A large security firm, or even nation, decides to take care of the issue and sends in teams to black-bag these unquestionably guilty people. (Leave them dead on the floor, or “extradite” them to a prison somewhere for the rest of their lives, take your pick.)

Clearly this violates the right of the host nation, which could be an act of war, which which is bad. Ignore that part. Maybe the nation never finds out.

Is it moral?

If a dog was running loose through a neighborhood biting people it would be put to sleep. Why should not we extend the same courtesy to humans who follow the same pattern of behavior? Could removal of such clear and present threats actually be a sign of a truly civilized society, interested in the well-being of all?

I would like to think on this further. If you have any suggested reading material or resources please leave a comment. There must be some wise philosophers who have muddled around this issue at some point.

Warehouse 13. Welcome to the stupid zone…

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We just watched the first episode of a new (?) “SyFy” show called Warehouse 13. Let me tell you what it is: Men in Black meets Eureka meets X-Files. With everything interesting from any of them taken out, a horrible special effects team (Look, when I *SAW* the green on the green screen you need to get a new job buddy), and writers who, based on their apparent belief that they’ve invented something new that nobody has ever done before,? may have just graduated 8th grade.

Beef #1: I don’t even NEED to watch the rest. I’ve seen it. After seeing this one episode I predict the following things will happen within the first few episodes: (I’m not including all the incredibly obvious “something bad happened in his past? HIS DAD DIED YOU MORONS” moments in the pilot.)

  • One of the team gets kidnapped. This causes team bonding all around and further cement the team’s new assignments.
  • Security issues. Someone sneaking around inside the warehouse, probably stealing stuff. It will likely be revealed later that they are exporting these artifacts as weapons, possibly to a competing government agency with some sort of cryptic (yet clearly nefarious) acronym for a name.
  • We will encounter an artifact causing people to behave scandalously. Sex sells, and we’ve gotta get it in soon! This being a scifi (oops! “SyFy”) show “scandalously” of course will mean perhaps a bit of heavy breathing, possibly someone in a shortish skirt. C’Mon, when the alien artifacts make your brain lean toward the pleasure center you get naked and have an orgy in town square until nobody can move a muscle. Nobody ever takes these artifacts seriously enough I say.
  • MOST likely, someone on the team will get into trouble somehow, once again causing lots of nice team bonding as everyone goes around trying to prove that their new best friend isn’t actually involved with nefarious-acronym agency stealing stuff. This is actually a re-hash of the kidnapping episode cleverly disguised. Sadly for the writing staff it’s an adaptation of the same script so they didn’t actually get paid for this one.

Beef #2: Is it really THAT hard to try and be a little original with your science/tech? My pal Big Frankie C commented on a recent post:

My beef is that writers always complain about how hard their job is, and it is a hard job, but they are very very lazy. Real science is every bit as entertaining as junk science, and is just a easy to film. The only place it is harder, is in the writing. If you’re writing a script, all you have to do is find a scientist (the internet works pretty good here) and you can get all the free advice you need.

I can’t even add to that. I KNOW your show is about paranormal, but can we perhaps just once try just one tiny little bit to have something plausible and/or possibly related to paranormal things in ways that we agree are not understood? Don’t use phrases like “pandora’s box” if you don’t want to look stupid okay? ONE well timed placement of the phrase “quantum entanglement” and I might be happy. Toss in a cat joke or two and heypresto, satisfaction. Pots that produce ferrets when you wish for something “impossible” bother me. If it grants wishes how can it be “impossible”? Hmmm? Schrodinger’s ferret? W.T.F?

In short: everyone involved with this show please quit your job and come become a homeless person here in portland for a year or so. Get some life experience, maybe a little perspective on the world. Stop pushing useless poorly created tripe on a public that very desperately needs a little bit of intelligence and original thought.

Look for my review of the movie “Moon” coming soon. I’ll give you a hint: it’ll be exactly the polar opposite attitude.