It’s finally out, after more than a year of development, my first Open Source project finally hit 1.0. It has all of the features that I originally wrote down on the wish list in December of 2004 and more. I’m also very happy with the user response –it’s widely considered to be better than the official Flickr uploader. So, on to the release.

Admittedly, not much has changed since 1.0RC1 with the exception of the inclusion of the new SWT libraries. Most of the time, new libs aren’t much of a big deal for end users, but in this case, the libraries decrease the scaling time of images drastically. Thumbnails now appear almost instantly even for the largest images –it’s a big improvement.

Have fun! Here’s hoping I won’t need a 1.0.1 release!

Go Get jUploadr

I got a comment a week or so ago on an old post that immediately rubbed me the wrong way. The post was talking about an open source version of Java and its many flaws. In the post, I concluded that it was an admirable project, but wasn’t mature enough to distribute widely. The commenter immediately went for my jugular –here it is:

So you would prefer no Java support at all for free software users? GCJ/GIJ currently aims to support popular apps such as eclipse, azureus, ooo2’s java components and that is the reason it is included in the distros, it is useful at it’s current state even if it does not happen to run every possible java app. You could always modify JUploadr to be runnable on gij so you don’t force anyone to change to a non-free version of java just to upload some pics to Flickr.

Last time I checked, there is a version of Java available for Linux, so you really have to be impressed by someone who starts a conversation with a strawman argument. I especially like the last sentence and how it simultaneously trivialized my application and demanded that I re-write significant portions of it. More impressive is the implication that I’m forcing Linux users to switch java versions. Excuse me? I know jUploadr is a nifty little app, but forcing people to switch?

If you read my post, I really didn’t lay into the free version of Java (GCJ/GIJ) when it would be easy to do so. GCJ acts like it’s Java 1.4, but it doesn’t implement a large part of the Java API. That’s like buying a Ford and then finding out that the engine is actually an engine-like shell with no internal parts. I ask you, if you bought a car like this, would you want to build the internals of the engine when there was a Ferrari sitting next to the Ford that you could just take?

I replied that GCJ was nice and all, but I really didn’t want to spend my development time re-implementing stuff that should already be there. The API is one of the reasons I use Java after all –it’s nice to have a bunch of well debugged code to do stuff that you don’t really want to program 500 times. I also said that if he wanted to help, he was more than welcome to. He wrote back –still not offering to help, by the way– and dropped this bomb:

My suggestion to work around this in JUploadr assumed you have desire to let your users have a good experience and make it possible for them in the first place to run the software at all. Few people are going to change to a Sun supported processor architecture/OS or change their values because of JUploadr. They’re simply not going to have running it as an option.

So now the problem is that I want my users to have a bad experience with bad software that doesn’t work well. His argument is really getting strained here since I actually disallowed GCJ/GIJ because I wanted to have my users (you know, the ones who were running my software) to have a good experience. I wanted them to do advanced features like being able to save their preferences, and have that oh-so-useful feature of uploading their pictures to Flickr. You know, the things they can’t do in GCJ. Furthermore, I really admire the two-facedness of his ‘argument’. I’m supposed to write my own preferences API, and it has to work in every architecture/OS/processor that GCJ ‘supports’. That’s a task that’s most likely bigger than writing jUploadr in the first place –and the kind of task you’d expect the GCJ/GIJ people to tackle. Finally, I realize that no one is going to change their computer so they can run jUploadr, and it really doesn’t bother me –I’m doing this project out of the desire to have a great program so I can upload my pictures to Flickr. That a thousand or so people use it makes me feel very happy indeed, but I don’t feel that I have some sort of responsibility to support every arcane architecture out there. You know something? If you’re running QNX on a HP-UX processor, you’re not going to run jUploadr. Ever. Sorry.

I’ve been running Linux for ten years now, and have contributed to several open source projects and have to say that if this is the face of the new open source zealots, you can count me out. I’m shocked at the sense of entitlement given off by these posts. I’ve worked hard to write this software, and it rocks. People seem to really enjoy using it, it’s high quality and has an intuitive interface. But apparently, that’s not enough for some people, I have to meet their exact ideology as well. That’s just too bad because if I were to do so, I’m absolutely certain jUploadr would not be as good as it is.

Oh, one last thing. Mr. Open Source Zealot™ runs windows half the time.

My Finger

Originally uploaded by scohen.

Two nights ago, I made some spaghetti sauce. I used my 8″ chef’s knife to cut up celery, carrots, parsley, garlic, onions and tomatoes. Everything came together beautifully, topped off with wine, but as I opened the wine bottle, my right index finger got caught in the gears beneath the arm of the opener. The result is pictured.

Last night, I asked Nikki to take some pictures of the wound, and the results are really nifty. The new macro lens doe indeed take very close up pictures, as the main wound is only 5mm from one end to the other. The little bubbles you see in my fingerprints are droplets of Hydrogen Peroxide solution doing their disinfecting job. Very impressive.

Strangely enough, this doesn’t stop me from being able to play guitar, but it does stop me from doing just about everything else with this finger, including typing. Of course, at work, I have the datahand which causes no pain, but at home, my Natural just hurts me.

So I un-cork my new deodorant, and as my bleary eyes looked down at it, I was surprised by the words “Take the risk” carved out on the top of the product. Surely a surprising message for deodorant. What risk am I taking by using this product? Is it not an effective anti-perspirant? Will it cause my pits to burst into flames? What’s the risk here?

In reality, it’s just some marketing schmuck somewhere trying to make his product ‘edgy’ and ‘extreme’, but I have to say the results are amusing. However, if you see me running around and my armpits are on fire, just know I took the risk.

I’m edgy like that.

Oh… my… god… this is the awesomest post evar!!! Radar has outdone himself with this one by claiming that Beowulf was based in fact.

Little did I know all that time in english class I was learning actual history instead of folklore.

It’s really amazing; he’ll believe just about any myth in order to not believe a little bit of science.

P.S. I was a bit surprised that he thinks Grendel was a dinosaur <chuckle>, I always thought he was humanoid and I guess I wasn’t the only one.

I saw that PZ Meyers over at pharyngula just saw What The Bleep do we know Anyway?, and I have to say, I feel for him. It’s been about eight or nine months since I saw that pile of crap and the mention of it still sets me off. I was so tired of the pseudo-scientists in that movie telling me that everything is just a quantum field and that the universe is what you make it. If that’s so, why does the probability of me dying approach 100% if I jump out of a 20th story window?

The big rip-off was when I learned at the end that the creepy blond woman (JZ Knight) was ‘channeling’ a 35,000 year old spirit and that is what gave her so much insight. Yeah, that’s credible. Apparently the 35,000 year old warrior had a mastery of quantum physics, but a spherical earth and the circulation of blood were about 34,500 years too advanced for him.

In short, never trust a movie that features a nut job medium and a chiropractor.

So, in dealing with the creationist, I’ve been reading a lot of far right blogs and websites, and I have to comment on their design. Chances are, if you see a lot of jumbled text, garishly colored beveled buttons and a plethora of advertising for books you’ve never heard of, chances are you’re visiting a right wing web site.

Why are they like this? Is there something in the conservative mindset that precludes them from doing competent website design, or is the desire to return to a simpler time –in this case 1996– just that strong. Even Radar’s site isn’t immune from this scourge. Despite using an almost vanilla blogger template, he somehow manages to mess it up with a bunch of run-on text at the top of the blog. I’m betting it looks fine in IE.

One of the strangest looking sites has to be this one. Besides being tragically un-funny, it’s just hideous to look at. Who on earth thinks this is an appropriate way to design a site? It looks like the car from the Beverly Hillbillies with graphics stuck in a seemingly haphazard fashion over the site without regard to their actual purpose.

Here’s hoping the conservatives take some remedial web design classes.

To paraphrase an old saw: Arguing with a young earth creationist is like wrestling with a pig, at the end you are both filthy and exhausted –and you get the distinct feeling that the pig enjoyed the experience.

So, Radar saw and responded to my rant. What I wanted to get out of him –some kind of defense of his ideas didn’t happen. Instead, I got a couple of insults thrown my way (fair enough, I threw a couple his way, though I really don’t think calling him a troglodyte was meant as an insult) but he totally skirted the issue at hand and instead talked about politics. I have to say, I really didn’t expect that, I thought he’d at least acknowledge some of the points that I have made that have not been made on his blog, but he chose to ignore them, and instead tell me to go on the Democratic Underground whatever that is.

So I decided to confront him on his blog by responding to his posts. At first, it seemed to go well, the other commenters praised my insights and arguments, even though he would not respond to direct questions. Then it all went to hell. In this post he said this in reference to the ACLU:

“You think we are better served by having such an organization around even though they are financed in large part by your tax dollars?”

Which struck me as strange. Why would the government fund an organization that sues the government? So I did a little research, and lo and behold, they are not funded by the government. The only “government money” they recieve is money awarded to them when they win in court, which they use to fund their organization (kinda like a law firm). For instance, the New Jersey ACLU received 1.2 million dollars in court settlements which constituted 18% of their total budget. Reasonable people will realize that’s not a “large part” of their funding –hell, it’s not even 1/5. It’s also worth noting that they only receive this funding when the government is demonstrably wrong on an issue. His counter argument is that reducing his salary by 20% is a lot, which really makes no sense, 18% is still not a large part of anything. Even though he’s been given notice that this isn’t true he still makes this claim, and I believe he has firmly stepped over the line of mis-characterization and is now lying. I take the truth very seriously, and have to say I would never knowingly repeat a claim that is false even if it helps my argument. That to me is against the rules, but to him, it’s just a tactic to prove a point.

So that’s why I’ve given up wrestling with him, because we can’t even agree on ground rules for debate. He’ll dissemble, ignore, taunt, belittle and yes, even lie in order to make a point. I’m not going to stoop to that level.

The ACLU episode has also changed my opinion of his intelligence. Once I thought he was misguided and possibly ignorant in the sense that he hadn’t been exposed to scientific thought, but now I just think he’s ridiculously childish and wants to keep it that way.

And on that note, I’ll leave you with a final quote.

“Wrong again! (Hee-hee, two for two!) Both creation scientists and evolutionists evaluate data and the same data is available to both. The difference is in the interpretation of the data. Your science is limited by your world view and so also your science is the poor science out of the two.”

What? No Nyah Nyah Nyah at the end? That’s how all good arguments end.

I just got some very sad news. One of my old co-workers passed away in late January, and they just found his body in his house.

Steve was probably the best software architect I have known. Many of the things he designed made our lives developing software much easier and I learned a lot from him. He was somewhat misunderstood and could be quite prickly, but he always was patient once you got to know him. He liked his quiet, and I remember taking the old razor scooter nine kicks down the long hallway of officemax.com to see him which was fun in those dot com days.

The last time I saw him, I was consulting at Westfield, and we got beers at Buckeye Brewery. I got there shortly after 5:00, and we talked ’til the place closed at 10:00. He seemed very happy, which was odd for him considering he was generally pessimistic. I think he hadn’t started to hate OMX again after leaving for a couple of years. He wrote me shortly after I moved out to the Bay Area, and congratulated me. He mentioned moving out of Cleveland in the near future to greener pastures, but I guess he never made it out. Cleveland can be like that.

Rest in peace Steve. You will be missed.

I’ve been using ICQ since 1997 and recently, the spambots have taken control. I’ve been getting spam messages every minute or two for three weeks now, and I can’t take it any more. GAIM couldn’t block them for some reason, and I don’t feel like clicking close, so I’m not on ICQ any more.

I’d like to thank spammers and AOL for making a once useful service a huge annoyance. You really have to hand it to spammers, they are so good at ruining everything