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November 23, 2004
Jobs and more jobs
The recent lack of postings can be explained pretty quickly, I've taken a second job. As the winter months approach the days become shorter and in typical fashion, I become less active after my normal job. This year I've decided to try something different with a part-time position as a ski instructor. In theory this would be a great job, I love to ski, I get to spend hours outside, meet a bunch of new people, etc etc. This works great until you realize that the muscle cramps and what not don't go away quickly making your day job really really painful. Ouch...
Posted by Dan at 12:34 AM | Comments (0)
November 12, 2004
Keeping Things Happy
Not to move the postings in towards a political realm, especially now that the election season is over, but I couldn't help but get a good laugh at this video. Check it out.
Posted by Dan at 02:00 AM | Comments (0)
November 10, 2004
When Did This Happen?
Picked up on an article in The Register, wherein a man in Connecticut was caught trying to sell the source code of Windows to an FBI agent. The reason this caught my attention is not that someone has access to the Windows source code, but rather the charge he was brought up on: "unlawfully distributing a trade secret".
Huh? I'm not a lawyer, nor do I follow the law that closely, but when did we enact a law that protected corporate trade secrets? I mean, isn't that the point of a trade secret, you're not supposed to tell anyone so that you may profit from what you know? This sounds like a completely bogus and made up charge, but seems to carry a stiff sentence with it.
Posted by Dan at 11:44 PM | Comments (0)
November 07, 2004
The Incredibles are it
I braved the crowds over the weekend to checkout the latest Pixar animated film, The Incredibles. It's been getting some rather rave reviews from the mainstream media outlets, which isn't all that surprising given the current run Pixar films enjoy on the box office. Beyond the manipulation of the main stream media, I've been an enormous fan of director Brad Bird's work since his release of The Iron Giant to the big screen. The Iron Giant paid attention to many little details so meticulously, like the print on the wallpaper or countertop, that it just helped to completely absorb you in the story without having to constantly remind you that it's set in 1957. As such I had high hopes for such things with the release of a new movie.
The Incredibles lives upto the hype you've been reading about. Worth every cent you pay. I was completely sold on the story, characters, and action throughout the way. The movie is more of a spoof on the James Bond style action films with over the top adventure sequences, a secret island base, and of course a super villain with a twisted sense of right. I won't say much more about the film other than certainly do go see it. Brad Bird, if you ever read this, thanks for another great film! I certainly hope that Pixar allows you to continue writing and directing movies for them.
One thing yet to be seen, in both of Bird's films, the ending leaves open the possibility of a sequel. Unfortunately there has never been one for the Iron Giant, and I doubt there ever will be. Could this change for the Incredibles? I also wonder how many people will catch one of the most important tribute/homages in the film. At one point in the film, two older men are shown on the screen in a close up discussing what just happened. These men are Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnson, two of the most famous Disney animators of yesteryear, and Bird has somehow incorporated them into each of his movies. A wonderful gesture and trademark if you ask me.
There were no "outtake" credits on this movie. One thing that did catch my attention in the credits though, rendering power donated by Intel corporation. It's surprising mainly because Steve Jobs runs both Apple and Pixar, I would have thought he'd try to bring in Apple based systems for the rendering.
Posted by Dan at 07:31 PM | Comments (0)
November 04, 2004
Comments on PDO
I've received a few emails from various users of PHP asking for my opinion on the PDO extension. Written by Wez, who for all I've ever seen is a rather intelligent programmer, my initial impression is that it's purpose is to unify the many database functionalities to one extensible interface. Admirable goal in my opinion. Stig and I had talked about this years ago and obviously not done anything with the concept. Partly because as I thought about it more, it seems implementing such a beast (to me at least) would be re-inventing the ODBC wheel (unified abstracted database accessor functionality that is industry supported).
Not to toot ODBCs horn, because my initial guess is PDO works significantly faster when utilizing native driver connections, and it probably also works faster in ODBC mode by not using a dynamic cursor like the ext/ODBC does. In any case my general opinion is it looks nice, seems to work, isn't documented very well (yet), and I have no idea what the general long term goal is for it's development.
The lingering question is PDO going to split the PHP database support, attempt to nullify the current generation of extensions, or is it going to just peacefully co-exist? I have a feeling it's original intention was to be a C style system, but I see it becoming more of an A+B case as time goes on.
Posted by Dan at 11:18 AM | Comments (0)
Post Election
I'm not going to rant on about the election, for the most part it's done.
I will say I have never been a fan of Michael Moore, finding his style of "documentary" telling to be very very one sided and opinionated. As such, I found it really funny to see this on Fark. It will probably be gone soon so get a laugh while you can.
In what is probably the best rumor from the election though, Drudge has a rumor that "Attorney General John Ashcroft 'plans to submit his resignation to Bush in the next several days'...". Unfortunately that is all the news that gets attached to the rumor. I so hope there is some truth to this, and that the Asscrufts replacement will be someone with a more sane view on things. Yes I have high hopes and am destined for failure.
Posted by Dan at 01:29 AM | Comments (0)
How I Learned to Like Microsoft
My recent position has required me to move from my traditional bastion of development, FreeBSD/MacOSX, to the entirely old but new realm of Microsoft Windows programming. The current project has me with an open ended development environment, but a request to make it cross compatible with a future Linux client. Typically this isn't a big deal as ANSI C can handle this very nicely if you're careful. The catch with this project is that it requires a large amount of functional GUI, something I'm not very well versed in being a systems hacker, and Windows MFC is certainly something I'm not looking forward to thanks to many horror stories.
Since the requirement was open, I decided to check out the .NET platform instead of running down the MFC route. It would mean learning C#, which in turn would bring me kicking and screaming into the modern realm of object oriented programming (what's a delegate?) while at the same time removing some responsibility from me the programmer. The really nice thing is about C# is that the Mono project has almost completed the entire ECMA standard for C# and is working on the Windows.Forms compatibility portion.
Windows.Forms has to be one of the most intelligent advancements Microsoft has ever accomplished, despite it sounding rather brain-dead obvious. For the first time I can very easily author a GUI mockup without having to actually understand the underlying code. What's even nicer is the unified API that allows all languages to operate the same way. As far as product development goes, it's nothing too exciting, just what should have been done from the start. As far as a Microsoft move to sanity goes, this is a HUGE leap forward.
Before you start asking what happened to Dan, and who this is writing, I do have complaints. To start with the fact that C# is a run-time language ala Java just makes me sick. I don't really like the fact that it's possible someone can decompile my byte-code and get functioning source out of it. That is bad. C# itself is a little confusing. Take for example it's threading mechanism. There is an option to make something a foreground thread, which sounds like giving a thread a higher priority than another in your thread pool. No it just means the thread won't die when you think you've killed it. Enums and bit-masks seem to not work either (just try checking your thread's ThreadState enum for more fun and excitement).
My biggest complaint has been that you still cannot create an application with multiple output formats. Meaning that I can't write an application that will contain a GUI when no arguments are used, and a CLI when > 1 arguments are given. Well, I lied a little bit. Technically you can do this (and I have), but it seems your GUI will forever be tied to an annoying persistent black console window for it's entire life. Why I can't kill that, I don't know.
Posted by Dan at 01:18 AM | Comments (0)
Hypocrites!
I've been hesitating to make this post as I do try to avoid posting personal notes, but the pieces have been nagging at me for a few weeks now.
The title pretty much sums up the situation for me at the moment. Recently a friend of mine had asked for a bit of advice on some aspect of their romantic life. The short of the conversation revolved around if they should be getting back in touch this person after an ugly fight between the two. I don't really know the estranged partner at all, but my general belief was if you wanted restore the relationship one party has to initiate the communication. After a bit more discussion it was decided that the relationship really was worth salvaging. After a bit more discussion it turns out that I am a victim of not following my own advice. Oddly enough, it seems that when asked for opinions, I can find my own counter-points in myself to each of my opinions.
The other odd tidbit of news recently arrived in my US postal mailbox. Not something I typically use to receive much news (beyond the IEEE or ACM subscriptions, or various magazines). A letter arrived announcing the 10 year reunion of my high school class. Ron and I had discussed this a few years ago when we realized we had known each other for almost 16 years, and both generally agreed it wasn't going to happen for a few reasons. The first has been a historical precedent set by the school. Essentially the school is so small that instead of having singular class reunions they hold entire school reunions, mixing those from recent years on back to as far as the former classmates may be living. These mini-reunions happen about twice a year and none as of yet have been graced by my attendance. I don't see why a class specific version should be any different. The second reason Ron and I came up with is that essentially we've kept in touch with everyone we wanted to from high school. Yeah there are one or two people, but they get outweighed by having to deal with many of the same characters again. There were reasons I didn't associate with many of them in the first place, and I'm willing to bet many of them haven't changed at all. Does anyone ever goto a high school reunion to have fun, or is mostly to re-affirm your self-esteem and place against others?
Posted by Dan at 12:57 AM | Comments (0)