Brandon's Blog

12/12/2007 #

Eye Mat Work

I’ll testify to the literal accuracy of this comic, although I will not fully confess that I am beginning to read XKCD on a semi-regular basis. Dual booting BSD is something that is unmatched in its difficulty-to-theoretical-difficulty ratio.

We had a Christmas party lunch, effectively, today at a dinner theater. I played Noah El the First, superhero and wearer of pimp’s clothing. I had to announce I had “buns of steel” and pose heroically. It was fun, especially now that I’m not taking myself as seriously as I did in my pre-collegiate days.

My actual plot function was much less dramatic.

I decided my superhero weakness was my need for vision correction, as I was in the glasses today.

I’m back at work despite the early dismissal, of sorts, because of a 4:00 meeting. It’s proactivity time, meaning there might actually be room next week for Special Projects (i.e., what makes things especially interesting).

12/10/2007 #

Somebwody's Got a Case of the Muhndays!

A quote from Viktor Frankl to get your The Fountain juices churning:

Pointing through the window of the hut, she said, “This tree here is the only friend I have in my loneliness.” Through that window she could see just one branch of a chestnut tree, and on the branch were two blossoms. “I often talk to this tree,” she said to me. I was startled and didn’t quite know how to take her words. Was she delirious? Did she have occasional hallucinations? Anxiously I asked her if the tree replied. “Yes.” What did it say to her? She answered, “It said to me, ‘I am here — I am here — I am life, eternal life.’”

12/9/2007 #

The Golden Compass

We were supposed to go see The Golden Compass on Friday, but we didn’t make it out. Turns out it flopped at the box office, and critical reviews ranged from generally negative to that sort of positive review that might as well be a negative one (e.g., “Kids will enjoy,” “Great visuals,” or for other movies the ever-present “Wild ride”).

I actually read The Golden Compass somewhere in later elementary to junior high school, and I liked it to some extent. Yes, it has some stuff that knocks on Christianity, and I understand that the latter two books in the series (which I did not read) involve children killing God. At the time, it was just a pretty good story to me, and I don’t think, quite frankly, that the author was skilled enough to bury subliminal poison in my head. The first book was basically just an interesting fantasy epic-type story.

That being said, it’s really something to get out on Digg or Slashdot these days, just to see the rancor and vitriol that is tossed around routinely regarding Christians. I suppose you get enough like-minded people in the room (especially noisy ones), and it starts feeling like home. And home breeds groupthink.

Here are some quotes from the discussion on Digg:

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I wonder how much of that is due to the religious nutters kicking up their usual fuss…

I’m looking forward to seeing it, based upon loving the books. This doesn’t bode well for the next two films though. :(

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i read on wired that they took out most of the religion bashing that made the book so good. if they left enough of it in the movie it stands a chance of being good.

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I loved the anti-religious theme, but that’s far from enough to make this a good film.

—

I have to wonder what the reason would be for people to be this negative about Christianity. Is it just the feeling of rightness taken to an extreme, or is it due to some bad experience in earlier life?

Honestly, there aren’t really enough “religious nutters” to make a dent in a box office gross. Meaning that looking at every household with the Left Behind series on the bookshelf, there is probably a fairly high percentage with an impressive Disney video library, Harry Potter books and movies, and probably a few Taco Bell wrappers in the trash (the Methodist church boycotted Taco Bell due to farm worker conditions).

Not damning any of the above things. Disney is okay with me, Harry Potter doesn’t float my boat but I don’t begrudge the enthusiasm, and Taco Bell is gross in that perfectly awesome way.

My point is that it’s quite hard to mobilize people to vicious reaction when their primary reason for adopting a set of beliefs is to feel peace with their surroundings.

It’s pretty easy to get a bunch of “Yeah!”-type support from people who feel surrounded by a somewhat dominant philosophy all their life.

12/8/2007 #

Colbert on Sub-Prime

… and those pesky chess-playing computers.

12/5/2007 #

Crunch

My poor car got rear-ended last night while I was heading back (early) from the gym. That will teach me to be tired and lazy.

Houston’s Finest (there is a finger-shaped deformity in the city limits to ensure “Space City” includes NASA) left me out in the cold in my sweaty gym shorts for about an hour before a tow truck driver informed my new compadre and me that we could just drive to the station.

We had caught a shift change, which is apparently the point in time where only police interest is served and protected.

We formed a two-car caravan and drove down the street to the station, where we were made to wait five minutes in the lobby before being handed police report forms. There was no officer involvement throughout. We weren’t even allowed to turn in the form at the station.

The damage dealer (+2 Decimator of Bumper, Chevy Class, 5d20 + Dark Bonus) was a rental, and phone support from all involved parties was patently useless.

I did learn that I do a lot of reasoned things unconsciously when under shock. Upon impact, I emitted what might be classed as a bass clef transposition of the Macaulay Culkin Home Alone “Ahhhhhhh!” (no face slapping). After taking account of my situation, my car was in park, my radio was turned down, and I was rolling down my window to direct traffic while checking in the rear-view to see if the driver was okay.

She was just scared.

So, bah. I have to go get fingerprinted and ID’ed today to help Secure our Homeland, which will take some time. I’m on a business trip from Thursday afternoon to Friday morning. Hopefully the body shop and rental car process will be a smooth one. Perhaps I’ll be rolling in Impala in no time flat.

I wonder if liability insurance pays for dubs.

Work continues to evolve into programming and ever-more-sophisticated Excel work. I’m starting to think we should require a class in “standard” string services, conditionals, variables, and flow logic as a math class in most college programs. This would be stuff like substrings, strlen(), and if-statements. Since we even have access to those features as Excel functions, it’s getting pretty important.

11/30/2007 #

Temporarily Idle

I think my favorite aspect of Financial Derivatives was the idea of breaking down various “financial instruments” (financial products like bonds, options, swaps, insurance, etc.) into sub-component instruments, then calculating a fair price for the entire package. This thinking, similar to how an engineering education tends to influence graduates’ thinking styles, permeates my logic on many less technical issues as well.

Anybody who hears me utter the words “implied option” should pretty much know they’re in for a circuitous foray into derivatives thinking. Most of the time, the conclusion that I draw is that a whole lot of retail and service-sector commerce that goes on is unwittingly laced with small purchases of various forms of insurance.

Anyway, don’t really know how that came to mind.

I reached a marked step in my professional development journey today, as I realized it’s always better to ask the question “Based on this logic, can you approve this course of action?” rather than “What should we do?” Much more likely to get a “Giddy Up”-type message back that leads to beating deadlines and making everyone happy.

In business school, this is called “satisficing,” and that, my friend, is a stupid word. It is a hybrid of satisfactory and suffice and ing, indicating you are finding a satisfactory solution without worrying about doing too much legwork to find the best one. This can also be called ⁸⁰⁄₂₀ thinking or its proper noun form, the Pareto Principle. I vote for “Pareto” as the best term, because it’s hard to argue with the idea, and you can basically manipulate the definition of the 80% and 20% quantities to make your point.

Essentially, 80% of the useful output comes from 20% of the inputs.

When Outlook doesn’t open e-mails in maximized view by default, my productivity crashes. Not because I’m that fast of a reader that I need to avoid scrolling, but that I so quickly go up to the upper-right corner of my screen to close the window that I close Outlook rather than the message.

The most important part of the ⁹⁄₈₀ schedule is that it empties the office, but puts people in their chairs at least half the Fridays. This is not being pejorative or rude here, but it honestly gives people time to Google the Pareto principle, sort e-mails, and do some thinking and discussing without all the bustle of an ordinary day.

11/27/2007 #

Strange PHP

There is a Lynchian underbelly to some dark corners of PHP. Except, in place of dwarves in lamp-lit rooms behind red curtains, there are functions that aren’t functions that act as l-values.

Nerd Note: An l-value is something that can receive (and generally store) a value or other data. It’s called an l-value because it can be on the left side of an equal sign. Functions typically produce values rather than hold them, so it’s a weird thing to see.

Anyway, the CMS project is pretty much my project right now, and it’s nice to have a clean enough plate to focus on it nearly exclusively. PHP can be pretty messy, but its simplicity reduces your lines-of-code count so far it’s pretty easy to audit a reasonably-sized project for foolishness.

Contrary to my normal seat-of-the-pants design process, this application has been blueprinted fairly extensively, especially as far as what features will be in the system and which ones are being left out.

There are always surprises, and mostly for the good. I slightly redesigned my main storage system last night, to allow the file names to have all the required information aside from what is actually part of the content itself. So far, this implementation is on a clipboard, so there is work to do tonight.

Editing is basically done, so I’m forging my way into revision control now. Using the fabulous Text_Diff package for PHP last night, I have validated that I can produce an inline diff of a page. Inline diffs look like this. They’re great for seeing how a page changed between revisions. It’s almost like someone went through scratching things out and writing in new stuff.

Revision control is pegged to complete within a day or two. Then, users and permissions are fleshed out fully. Quite a bit of work has been done on this already, but functions like adding, modifying, and deleting groups are far from complete. It is also the core backdrop for the system’s security features, so there is a huge code audit to enforce access permissions once they exist in full force.

11/26/2007 #

Trust

Upon beginning a required online Ethics & Compliance course, I was asked to verify my identity. First question that arose in my mind was: how do they know I’m not lying?

Probably result of web application development, where failing to assume your user is Snidley Whiplash reincarnate would constitute a weak security architecture.

Web apps are a bit of a culture shock for any developer accustomed to the comforts of the standalone application. The cornerstone of web security is the concept of “trust no user data,” meaning that anything sent from the user has no guarantee of being legitimate.

This is hard to stomach for a standalone developer. An example of a classic theme from my current CMS project: I have a checkbox that, about half the time, needs to be disabled (grayed-out) and checked at the same time. Intuitively, a grayed-out option should be untouchable, but a web client (or a simulated web client) could just as well don a pegleg and eyepatch and uncheck the box just the same.

One might say it takes enough knowledge to pull this off that the pesky user may merit the privileges of unchecking the box. This is called “security through obscurity,” and it’s a dumb idea used fairly often.

Doing things the Right Way takes a lot more thinking than actual effort. You have to run scenarios like “what if they hand-type the link for a tab that is hidden to them?” Once you figure out the scenario, it’s a two-line “if” statement to knock out the capability.