A Few Thoughts…

Well this is weird – in a bizarre turn of events a previous post ended up being on the front page of Google when searching for the term which also happens to be the title of the post…

Upon searching for it a second time from a different browser, I didn’t place as high on the first try, so it may take a few searches for you to get there…

This is pretty cool – it was on digg a while back, but I’m just blogging it now becuase I wanted to test out digg’s “blog this” button. Anyway, I played with this for more than an hour probably!

read more | digg story

Okay – no, this is not a dig at java itself, rather at the license agreement for windows when working with java programs:

“The software product may contain support for programs written in Java. Java technology is not fault tolerant and is not designed, manufactured, or intended for use or resale as on-line control equipment in hazardous environments requiring fail-safe performance, such as in the operation of nuclear facilities, aircraft navigation or communication systems, air traffic control, direct life support machines , or weapon systems, in which the failure of Java technology could lead directly to death, personal injury, or severe physical or environmental damage”.

I guess someone could say that because it’s easier to kill someone with Java in windows than with C (according to the license agreement anyway) that Java is more powerful…but that’s just silly…

From an article in the New York Times no less, an NYT/CBS poll of Americans found 53 percent saying they were okay with warrantless wiretaps in an effort to reduce terrorism! When asked a different way:

In the poll, 70 percent of respondents said they would not be willing to support governmental monitoring of the communications of “ordinary Americans”; 68 percent said they would be willing to support such monitoring of “Americans the government is suspicious of.”

The article is a decent read, and I don’t generally read through political articles in the NYT. There is still an obvious twist on things – the numbers didn’t quite come out as they had hoped, but there was enough to make a story where they could put their own slant on what the numbers mean.

Okay, so this is in part just to remind me of some thing I want to try. I have a WRT54G and I want to make it do more than just sit in the corner…well…technically on the desk. Anyway, I think I’m gonna try and throw OpenWrt on the little guy and see what happens. If all goes well, I think having gkrellmd on there to let me monitor the router would be pretty cool. Who knows, maybe I’ll set up a vpn on it, there’s a ton of packages out there all ready for me! Updates later….

I may not be a huge fan of Microsoft’s software (see earlier post) but their marketing team is spot-on. TechEBlog has a video of an ad that was pulled because it portrays “mass public violence”. Yeah. My only thought was that I could see myself a bunch of friends doing this….

Not according to some research done by Wake Forest economics professor Robert Whaples.

[We] measured the cost of each major American war up through the first Gulf War. We took these costs and compared them to the cost of the Iraq war and found that the Iraq experience has consumed a smaller percentage of GDP (just 2 percent of one year’s wealth creation) than every other American war except the first Gulf War (which measured just 1 percent of GDP).

This stands in stark contrast to the Vietnam experience, which opponents have often attempted to liken to the Iraq war. Vietnam comprised a much heartier 12 percent of GDP at the time. Other conflicts, such as World War II, took a remarkable 130 percent of a year’s GDP to see through to success

Go check it out

Okay, I confess – while being an engineer, I do enjoy the occasional art show/gallery visit. I don’t get into a lot of the modern art stuff, or maybe it’s post-modern art, of which the term never made any sense to me. Anyway, what I do enjoy is digital art, especially art based on mathematical and scientific principles such as projections of 4 dimensional objects onto a 3 dimensional space (2 dimensions loose WAY to much information to make them useful for anything other than text-book material). Anyway, there’s an artist who has done some of this in metal no less: Bathsheba Grossman. There’s some really cool stuff there, go check it out!

The other thing that I enjoy looking at, and working with (though I don’t have the necessary tools or time right now) is completely digital representations of real environments. I’ve always wanted to work on a ray tracer/rendering tool – not to put it to market, but just for personal edification on the techniques of such a system. A company called Next Limit Technologies have come out with some really awesome tools that do much of what I would like to attempt: real-world physics renderers and fluid simulation tools – geared for presentation, not engineering (though they could be used for science). The renders may take longer, but the results from complex materials with internal caustics is simply stunning. Very cool stuff indeed! It’s times like this I know I’m a nerd: “Hey Joe, what would you like to do for fun?” “Why, I’d like to write a rendering engine based on the physics of the real world!” Just go look at the galleries [render] [fluid - click on the gallery button at the top] and you’ll see what I mean!

We used LaTeX for our senior design documentation, largely because we had people on 3 different platforms in our group (Linux, OS X, and some work in Windows), and we needed something everyone could edit and work with easily. LaTeX file this requirement, well, actually TeTeX did, but that’s a petty difference. Anyway, I’ve been having to use MS Word for things here at work, and I would give just about anything for a doclatex tool a’la pdflatex! Something to convert a tex file into a word document, so I could write everything in TeX, and then give my co-workers a doc file to look at. It would have to be able to include other doc files, which are kinda like standard introduction things, so I don’t really need to see those as I’m editing MY text.

All of this is mainly the result of having moved around some sections in a document, and not having the references to those headings move. This alone is reason enough for me to rant a little about Word. Spell checking is nice, and the ability to leave comments is nice. Change tracking could be done through subversion or any other change tracking tool, leaving comments could be done in text with a \comment{} block pretty easily, and spell checking could be done via a WYSIWYG TeX tool, or just through aspell.

Okay, end of rant, now back to documentation….

BIAS WARNING: Not a huge fan of Microsoft’s products – as a business I think they have made excellent choices in order to make more money – but I don’t like a lot of their “flagship” products such as Word (Excel is awesome though)

If I had to pick a favorite…I think it would be #1 – that’s how I try to run any organization I’m in charge of.

Courtesy of Doug Ross @ Journal:

10. “Politics is supposed to be the second oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first.” —Remarks at a business conference, Los Angeles, March 2, 1977

9. “You can tell a lot about a fellow’s character by his way of eating jellybeans.” —The Observer, March 29, 1981

8. “Thomas Jefferson once said, “We should never judge a president by his age, only by his works.’ And ever since he told me that, I stopped worrying.” —Circa 1988

7. “I have left orders to be awakened at any time in case of national emergency, even if I’m in a cabinet meeting.” —Said often during his presidency, 1981-1989

6. “How do you tell a communist? Well, it’s someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It’s someone who understands Marx and Lenin.” —Remarks in Arlington, Virginia, September 25, 1987

5. “The government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.” —Remarks to the White House Conference on Small Business, August 15, 1986

4. “I am not worried about the deficit. It is big enough to take care of itself.” —Said often during his presidency, 1981-1989

3. “All great change in America begins at the dinner table.” —Farewell Address to the Nation, The White House, January 11, 1989

2. “I’ve noticed that everyone who is for abortion has already been born.” —The New York Times, September 22, 1980

1. “There is no limit to what a man can do or where he can go if he doesn’t mind who gets the credit.” — First Inaugural Address, January 21, 1981