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

I’m a glutton for punishment.

I’ve been reading our creationist friend’s blog and I saw this.
It actually sounded nice until the last couple paragraphs, but then I realized that there were some really bad misconceptions (imagine that?!?). First off, why should only San Francisco proper join this great new country? Is the rest of the Bay Area not liberal enough for inclusion? Secondly, and more egregiously, liberals don’t work?

I’d like to see Radar actually cite examples here, which I know will be a huge challenge for him, considering the tenuous relationship he has with actual facts. I challenge him to find a red state that can match the output of California or New York. Texas has money literally coming out of the ground, and they can’t touch us. According to the The bureau of Economic Analysis our GSP is 1.8 times that of Texas ($1.5 trillion to $885 billion). We might not get to work until 10:00, but we work damn hard, and get shit done. Heard of Google? Yahoo? Apple? Fuck, you heard of the Computer Industry? All from California. That blog contraption you’re posting on? California. All of the food that goes into your right-wing young-earth creationist mouth is paid for with money which is a direct result of some dirty hippies from the Bay area who just sat around 30 years ago smoking weed and accidentally created an entire new economic ecosystem. I’m sure if California didn’t create the whole damn computer industry, Indiana would have stepped up and done so –except it’d be corn based.

I also really admire his anecdote from San Francisco. First off, the ‘gay section’ is called The Castro, you ignorant troglodyte, and I’ve walked down it many a time with nary a word said. I’m going to wager that you weren’t exactly ‘minding your own business either’. I’m so sure a right wing nut job would just be wandering around the Castro ‘minding his own business’. Admit it, you were looking for a leather daddy and couldn’t find any takers, then you got pissed. That’s always the story with homophobes like you.

Now, I’ve read Radar’s blog, and I’m familiar with his style of argument, but I’ve anticipated it. So let me retort before he even starts the rusty cogs that pass for a brain in that monstrously over sized drool-box he calls a head.
First, you’ll say that I’m not fit to judge the Midwest because I don’t understand it. Radar, I can judge the Midwest because I’ve lived there almost all of my life, and you know something? It really sucks. First off, your state –hell, pretty much every state west of Pennsylvania– is flat and boring. Ansel Adams did not travel to Indiana to take life-affirming pictures of your landscape. He did, however take some quite lovely pictures of my adopted state. Hell, he even took a photo of the city you love to hate. That is, of course, before he was killed and eaten by the indigenous hippy population in a tragic case of the munchies. The other problem with the Midwest is that people like you are driving away all the smart people. There’s a reason they call it the rust belt and why the population has been declining these past 20 years. It’s no fun at all to be called into your boss’s office and have to debate evolution ad nauseum. If you don’t believe in it, that’s great. Believe that the world was created by God or Vishnu or Allah or even Rifle Jesus, but keep quiet about it. You work as a computer security expert, which means you have absolutely no qualifications to debate evolution with any lucidity or insight. Your arguments are not compelling, they’re not insightful, and they’re not even original. At the very least, be original; claim evolution is incorrect because humans don’t retain the poop-flinging gene that chimpanzees obviously posses. Everyone knows how useful poop-flinging can be in today’s society.

Let me relate a story to you: There was a cryptographer who had a friend that fancied himself to be a cryptographer, and was always coming up with encryption algorithms. Every time he came up with a new one, he’d give it to his friend, who would come back with a reason why it was not secure. Invariably, the Cryptographer got tired of this, and when his friend came to him with yet another algorithm, he told him why it wouldn’t work, and gave him an envelope. “Inside the envelope are three additional reasons why your algorithm isn’t secure.” said the Cryptographer, “Don’t open open it until you have figured out what they are.”. His friend never returned.

So it is with you and evolution. You have stated in your blog that while in college you “read voraciously on evolution and fossil-related subjects”, yet you fail to understand evolution in even the most trivial way. You don’t even know the difference between evolution, cosmology and bio-genesis, which are totally separate fields. Cosmology, for instance isn’t even a biological science –it straddles Physics and Astronomy. You post daily about evolution and repeat the same tired misconceptions that are pervasive in the creationist community. So, in that spirit, I’m going to name five things wrong with your young earth creationist hypothesis. I’m not going to give you an envelope, but just know that it would be so large, I’d probably have to use one of those envelopes that Publisher’s Clearing House leaves their giant checks in if you’re not home.

1. Given that the speed of light is constant, explain why we can see galaxies that are billions of light-years away. This means that the light we are seeing is billions of years old. As of this post, the furthest galaxy is 13.2 BILLION light-years away.
   In effect, looking at this light is like looking back in time, and we can see the universe forming. Did God create all this light just to deceive us? Note, “God works in mysterious ways” is not an answer that is valid.
2. Hindu culture and religion have texts that date back 10,000 years, easily old enough to document the biblical flood, yet they mention no such event. Did they just not notice that they were buried under a deluge for a year, or were they the first culture to develop SCUBA technology?
3. The sun has consumed about 50% of its fuel. This used to be a win for young earth creationists like yourself –when we thought the sun was on fire. Back then, doing the simple equation for combustion would fix the sun’s age at 5000 years. However, since fusion is much more efficient than combustion, the sun’s age is now estimated at 4.5 billion years. Do you believe the sun is on fire, or that modern physics is wrong?
4. Most of the DNA in our bodies doesn’t code for anything. It’s junk left over from millions of years of evolution. If we were all created by god, why do we have all this junk? Is god a sloppy engineer? Why does the theory of evolution predict this junk DNA even though it was created before DNA was even discovered? Why does your idea of creation give no insight in to this matter?
5. Explain exactly how a worldwide deluge could possibly carve the grand canyon in under a year.

I know that you will never actually try to answer any of these questions in an honest manner, because frankly, the only conclusion you could possibly reach is that we live in an incredibly old universe and that the theory of evolution has many stunning insights into modern genetics and creation is merely a belief that gives us no additional information. Instead, you’ll probably harp on a small error I have made in the above post, or accuse me of ad hominem attacks, when in fact none have been made. Astute readers note that while I have called Radar a troglodyte, I did not say his arguments were wrong because he was a troglodyte . You’ll probably retreat back to your comfort zone of parroting arguments that have been made over and over by intellectually dishonest people that are trying to remove your ability to critically analyze your religion’s dogma. These people have a vested interest in keeping you fat and dumb. But maybe, just maybe you’ll see how your ideas are really childish and don’t help our society progress. You’ll see that creationism does nothing to further our understanding of ourselves or the universe, and is morally bankrupt, and you’ll come around and see that this country was made great by our quest for knowledge. Maybe you’ll give up on your quest to force religion down our throats and instead work to further science education in this country. Maybe you will.

But then again, I am a Liberal.