February 2006 Archives

Grad school has been on my mind a lot lately.  Problem is I don't know what I want to be when I grow up, and yet I think I'm too old to use that excuse any more!  The Lord has blessed me tremendously right now.  He has given me good friends, a nice home, and a good job that I enjoy.  But I don't know where I want to be 5 years from now.  There are guys in my life that I believe are Godly men and I think I would make sacrifices to be near them because I think God would bless that; but I don't really know what God has in store.  I'm interested in so many things.  I think it would be cool to get a degree in Physics, Quantum Chemistry, Microbiology, or even Law.  How sweet would it be to be a Judge?  The one thing I'm sure of is that I don't want to go to the University of Arizona for my graduate work.  But then again I don't want to leave Tucson right now.  I'm not sure if I am resisting the Spirit in this by clinging too strongly to his blessing or just recognizing how great his blessing truly is.  The proposition of moving out of state, which I would have to do to go to any of the schools that interest me, is really scary.

I know that God is good and He will reveal His plans at the right times; but I want to diligently seek them too. 

During lunch today a friend of mine mentioned that he doesn't understand young conservatives.  I asked him to explain his position and basically it sounded like it was that the current "conservative" government is obviously and totally corrupt and incompetent.  I challenged that position and he cited the Iraqi war as an example of the incompetence of the current administration, claiming that they went into the war guns ablazing without any kind of plan. I believe that Bush did have a plan going into the war and, futhermore, I believe that it was a reasonable plan.  I'm not trying to justify Bushes plan here but simply show that he had a plan and it was not an illogical plan.  Here's the response that I gave my friend:

Bush did have a plan in the Iraqi invasion.  A summary can be found in a speach of his from 2005 at whitehouse.gov:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/05/20040524-10.html

Prior to the war the justification was (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_War):

1. The Hussein regime was in violation of United Nations demands for weapons inspections. The reason was however obviated by the Bush administration itself, who set a deadline while inspectors were active in Iraq.
2. Hussein's regime produced and possessed stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction and posed a threat to the U.S.
3. Iraqi government had failed to comply with 19 UN resolutions requiring a full accounting of its weapons of mass destruction and full cooperation with UN inspections.
4. That the Hussein regime had ties to al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations that posed a threat to international safety; and,
5. Promoting democratic self-government in the nearly-entirely autocratic Arab Middle East.

1. Remove the threat posed by Iraq    
2. Establish a Democracy in Iraq that will serve as an example to the Middle East.  This objective hinges on the belief that democratic states will ultimately be superior to other forms of government and will best serve the interests of the Iraqi people and the US.  

Thus the plan was basically to remove Saddam Hussein from power and establish a democratic state in Iraq.  Wether you agree with this strategy or not I believe it still constitutes a rational strategy and is a reasonable plan.

I really enjoy debating these topics.  People are not perfect and the problems we are facing today are difficult problems, they need as many words and as much debate as we can afford them.  When we challenge one anothers ideas we sharpen ourselves and hopefully give ourselves the opportunity to come to the right conclussions.

FOr a long time I have wanted to create a website that provided functionality similar to the Logos software, a package that is basically an incredibly extensive Christian library.  A friend of mine gave me the idea of calling it Red Letters, a reference to the red lettered text in the bible that is supposed to refer to the words of Christ.  I've had the idea for a long time and haven't really done much with it beyond a few mockup sites.  Over the weekend I got interested again and looked over the mockups, decided they all sucked and started a new one.  I don't know if it's going to happen but it sounds like a good chance to check out the Django web framework which seems really nice.  I'm not sure how well suited it is to the problem though as most of the site will probably store the content as ThML files (an xml format for marking-up religious text) and there is no builtin support for XML, although since it's just python I should be able to add it easily.  We'll see, hopefully something comes out of all this.

Over the weekend I was gassing up my car on the way to Globe and while I was gassing up another person at the gas station become extremely irate over over someone using a cell phone within 25 feet of the pump.  To begin with I think this is absolutely ridiculous, anyone with half a brain should be able to figure out that a cell phone in all probability is NOT going to cause an explosion or fire.  But if the intuitive isn't enough there has never been a recorded case of a cell phone causing an explosion or fire and to top that off MythBusters did an experiment trying to make gas explode with a cell phone ... as hard as they tried they were unsuccessful.  All that to say this guy was an idiot.  So to all those out there who get upset over someone using a cell phone while gassing up their car, get over it--it's not a big deal and nothing's going to happen!

Things have been very interesting at work lately.  I've gotten S.A.G.E (Scalable Adaptive Graphics Display) to a place where it is working reasonably well.  It's pretty cool but I am still interested in something that allows me to have a distributed X client.  I found a program today that does just that: Xdmx.  I haven't had an opportunity to try it out yet but hopefully I'll get a chance tomorrow.  If it works it could make my life a lot simpler because ANY application would be able to run on the display without modification.  To use the display with Xdmx all one would have to do is set their DISPLAY environment variable to the Xdmx display.  This is very simple and since it's the standard people already know how to interact with it.  There is still a bandwidth problem but I don't know how you would get around that unless your application is aware of the multi-display ability of the wall and programs to take advantage of it.  There appears to be extensions to support this in Xdmx and it also looks like there are a few other libraries out there that make using the Xdmx extensions easier.  I'm very excited to try it out to say the least.

In other news today a friend showed me Max Lyon's website, he has some amazing hi-res (some gigapixel) images that he created by stitching together many shots from his Canon 60D.  Check out his website, I think you'll be impressed ... I was.  Website: http://www.tawbaware.com/maxlyons/ 

I just finished listening to John Piper's sermon this week.  I really like him.  God consistently uses the words he speaks to convict and inspire me to do what is right.  This last week he spoke on abortion.  It's amazing to me that since Roe vs  Wade there have been about 46 million abortions in the United States.  That is an astounding number.  Most agree that about 6 million Jews died during the holocaust; with these numbers in mind, the holocaust pales in comparison to the loss of life as a result of Roe vs Wade. We must do something and that's the part that I really liked about Piper's sermon--his call to action.  He says that it isthe Gospel that is going to stop these atrocities.  It is Jesus that saves and He will make the world right.  So let us pray for those who are administering abortions and let us eagerly await to see the hand of God move.  How great it would be to see the work of redemption that God will work in this generation!

A common feature a user has come to expect from JComboBox's is autocompletion.  I don't know who started this but I think it was popularized by web browsers in the address bar.  Swing does not provide auto-complete functionality by default; but a quick search on google reveals many people have come up with solutions.  I found this tutorial: http://www.orbital-computer.de/JComboBox/ which I like quite a bit and the code is in the public domain so anyone is free to use it however you want.

Everything should be pretty much back to normal here. I think I've got all the links that needed to be changed and the templates installed.

Previously I was hosting this site on my own webserver... recently I signed up for an account with Westhost to use as a backup server for some of my clients with Corwynn. I needed to transfer a domain for the new account and I chose to put my personal site on it. I've gotten all my old entries and comments moved over but I still need to install my custom templates and such. Stuff should be back to normal shortly.

There are several open source projects that I keep tabs on because I enjoy the services they provide.  Recently one of the projects had several issues registered concerning timeouts with MySQL 4.0 and 5.0, the response from the developers was this is not a bug in our software, just increase the timeouts in the mysql server.  This is a bad solution for a number of reasons but mainly it is a bad software design decision.  Software should be designed to be as robust, stable, and usable as possible.  It is not hard to add a simple check if a connection is open and reopen if it has timedout.  When designing software we should follow a couple of simple principles where ever possible:

1) If something can be solved in software don't make the user deal with it.  Only involve the user unless it is absolutely necessary (ie, need some form of input or something of that sort)

2) If your software relies on a 3rd party package, don't expect the 3rd party package to work correctly, adjust for mistakes in your software as appropriate.

These developers that wanted the user to adjust timeout values broke both these rules.

The other day I recieved the first issue of a magazine I got for christmas in the mail.  Funny thing about it was that it was really thin, too thin--it was just the cover.  The cover came in a plastic bag from USPS saying that they apologized for the damaged mail and that they cared.  Now I'm thinking to my self that a magazine cover isn't very useful and if they really cared the could have at least provided a phone number that I could call.  I probably would have just let it drop at this point but  I was somewhat annoyed with their statement "We care" when it samed rather obvious that they could really care less.  So I went online and found a phone number from the USPS website, after a myriad of confusing options I finally got a person on the line that said they couldn't help me and I would have to call my local post office between 8am and 5pm.  OK, so I called my local post office today and a woman answered (I think her name was Cindy), she wasn't very friendly and basically said that I should have the magazine send me another copy.  Now I'm thinking to myself well why should the magazine have to pay for it.. USPS damaged it, it's their responsibility.  And gee that's a really sweet deal, USPS damages something, it gets sent twice as a result and they get paid twice.  Now I'm really annoyed and ask to speak to her supervisor.  Her response?  "I am a supervisor."  After about 5 minutes of trying to get her to tell me who her boss is so I can talk with him, she tells me that his name is Lee and he's not there.

USPS does not care and it's really annoying.  I wish I was somebody more important so I could make something happen here... oh well.