By the way, it's the 62nd anniversary of D-Day (June 6th, 1944). But I was listening to WIP today and Anthony Gargano and Steve Martorano, and they were talking about today being the end of the world. It took me a few minutes to understand why. Before I had realized it, I was trying to think of who might have said that today would be the end of the world, like if Nostradamus or someone like that said so. Then they said the "Number of the Beast". June 6th, 2006.

However, I'm not superstitious like that. I figure the world would have ended a long time ago if that were the case. How about on June 6th, in the year 666 AD? Or January 1st 666 for that matter. If that's your logic, there's at least 2 times every 100 years that the world could end. June 6 '66 or June 6 '06, be it 1906 or 1966, 18,17, etc.

Plus with science, there's no way someone in the world, perhaps high up in government where secrets can be kept, would not know about the end of the world coming.

I think the whole "End of the World" bit in the Bible was just a giant metaphor. Everything in the Bible is a metaphor. Everyone reads between the line on everything in the Bible except the part about the end of the world. I think it's more about death. Even the parts where the Anti-Christ and Jesus will meet before the end of the world and have a good old fashioned bar fight. That's simply your life being decided. Were you good?

That said, the world might end eventually. But what's written in the Bible was always meant for everyone, not for those people who live right up to the point when either humans or the world no longer exist. If I wrote a book and it was directed at people who have naturally green hair, my audience would be comparably small to if I had decided to write it directed at people who have hair at all. But those writers of the Bible were just Philosophers, giving their views of what they think will happen. If they had written about a spaceship following an asteroid passing the earth marking the beginning of the end of the world, I'm sure that whole incident would have gotten out of hand. We shouldn't take the Bible literally, but it's a good book :)

This is a filler post. It's a play on the old riddle, "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?" It's computer science related, of course.

Which came first, the program or the compiler? It just baffles me, that before the first compiler, people had to type in machine code directly. The first compiler was made this way... it had to have been, right? It sort of has philosophical meaning behind it. The chicken would have had to have come first, but something made it, possibly building it up by hand. Because you can't have an egg without a chicken, how else would it get there? An egg doesn't just appear out of nowhere, but neither does a chicken... Theories point to some form of evolution or "intelligent design". It's a topic worth mentioning. One that I have no clear conclusion on. I tried to post on it a few weeks ago, did some research, and was unable to discount either. The more interesting argument is that of intelligent design. A compiler would have been made with intelligent design :) A supreme being, a computer scientist like me, designed the first compiler so other supreme beings could write software. Imagine a supreme being designing DNA, which is like machine code, and from a living creature comes the ability to make other living creatures. Is it science? Yes, that's what we call it. It's just whatever you happen to believe. I have come to no conclusion, though. The one site I visited, very much biased towards the God part, has a compelling argument. The chance that the Big Bang would have ended up with a part of it perfectly capable of allowing life is so small that believing that a supreme being started it all is actually the better bet. Imagine that. Those gullible scientists :)

Todd and I recently had a discussion where I described to him everything that I was working on currently, and my "dumb" system mentioned in the "Your Site Rules!" section. I had brought up my Philosophy of Computer Science. I couldn't explain it in such a good way though, so I will attempt to now.

I am a learner. When I'm done learning something, I go and learn more. I am not exceptionally brilliant, but apparently (or seemingly) I'm capable of absorbing huge amounts of data though. I take as long as the next person to learn something, but it sticks. My brain tends to tie things together logically, instead of memorizing something outright. So that I can remember small amounts of facts and deduce the outcome using them. I'm sure a lot of people do this. There are some that will memorize everything, but us lucky ones who can remember less but seem to memorize more, make more room in our brains for other small tidbits of information, making us seem exceptionally brilliant.

However, calculating an outcome each time you have to recall it is somewhat inefficient. It's very inefficient. When someone asks you how old you are, you don't calculate "well, I was born in 1979 and it's 2005, that makes me 26" every time... You just know that you're 26 or whatever age you happen to be. Or you lie to get into a bar or because you look younger than you are :)

Someone recently asked me "Why do you learn so many technologies, when you can be an absolute expert at one?" To me, this is an invalid perception of what I do. I don't learn any specific language. I spend a lot of time using Java instead of what I use for work, C# and .NET. When I was in college, the classes that I had made me realize the answer to this question. Not the "Programming Language Paradigms" class, or the "Organization of Programming Languages" class... these were Computer Science classes. I learned the answer to this question in my Philosophy classes. I took quite a few. My favorite one was "Logic". It made everything clear to me.

Computer science isn't "using computers to achieve a task". It's a connection of objects. Either different computers, different technologies, different objects in an Object Oriented Programming Language... different ideas with their own logic, connected together in a way that they all work as one beautiful system. Why I don't learn one specific language or technology is because you are then stuck in that technology. I happened to take jobs in only .NET in the past, so now I'm only able to get .NET jobs, which is part of why I don't learn one technology, but not the only or even most significant one. It's pretty insignificant, actually.

With many technologies in Computer Science, and by technology I mean anything in Computer Science, I find it more important to know what they do, rather than how they do it. Ok, here's an analogy. You learn how to use chainsaws, you don't learn how to use one specific chainsaw. By learning how to use chainsaws, as opposed to one specific chainsaw, you can use any chainsaw. Why should technologies be any different. Writing a website, or using sockets to connect to the internet, or zipping up files, or using a printer, or writing graphics libraries, or using rule engines, or a scripting language, etc. Knowing what something does is much more important than knowing how to use one of those things. Memorizing one language is bad, unlike my "I'm 26" analogy. Being able to deduct this information, based off of that little fact that you store (it's a programming language), is huge. So, when someone says "This is a programming language", I immediately know that it will contain features like input and output (I/O), ways to connect to the internet, something for printing, ways to create objects and inherit from them, interfaces, basic objects like ints, longs, floats, Strings, etc, a mechanism for threading and synchronizing data access, etc. It's a programming language, it's gotta have this stuff, and logically, I can deduce that. So, now all I have to do is sit down with a reference and a text editor, and I can write a program using that language that was introduced to me 3 minutes ago. As I said though, this isn't only to do with programming languages. Tell me what a technology does, I'll show you how to use it in a programming language. I will need a reference, but it just makes sense to me that you call certain functions in a certain order with certain parameters, and it works. Nothing more, nothing less.

So, this is my philosophy of Computer Science, Part I. I'll have more soon.

Today, I have ceased development on this website. I will still be making news posts, uploading music, adding photos, etc, but I won't be making new features or even fixing bugs. I won't be able to! Actually, I will be able to, but just pretend I won't. I'll be "branching" the code used in this site, sort of backing it up if you will, rewriting all of it, hence breaking this website on my local machine. I will have backups though. There are a few things wrong with it.

First and foremost, I have ideas. Lots of ideas. I will be building a new site, called stringed.org which will just be a showcase of technology. This was explained before. If there is news on there, you might see posts like "Jason is t3h l33t" and just utter garbage like that. Come here for the real news :) It will just be test data, and it'll probably be open to the public, so you will also be able to log in, or just click an admin link, and edit things and input crap, just like I can! It'll be fun for everyone.

Second, I have ideas :) Ok, so that's the same as the first, but I have to reiterate the fact that these ideas could be life changing. You might be working for me or for one of the companies I will own in a few years, so you might want to respect these ideas. The future is easiest achieved in a non-persistent world. That's a cool quote that I just made up. You know all the movies about the future (most fresh in my mind is Minority Report) where everything is different. Buildings are futuristic, cars, houses, everything. We won't ever get there because it will just be too expensive to tear down a building and make it "futuristic". However, in software, it's very easy to tear something down and re-do it. Not for gigantic companies, but for us "hobbyist" software developers. True, I do it for a living too, but I do the hobby stuff more passionately :) That's because I only work on the cool stuff at home. I am doing cool stuff at work though that I haven't done anywhere. I'm rambling. Anyway, if I can just get a good idea in my head, like I have now, I can throw away most of what I have done and start fresh and build my idea. It might not be life-changing for everyone, but I'll get a kick out of it... :)

Third. I just always think things should have three points to them. Three is the magic number. But really, I'm someone who quickly bores of programming. If you've written one input screen, you've written a thousand. If you've updated one table in a database, you've updated a billion. Same thing with most tasks in programming. However, if you have written something to automatically generate SQL for you and update a database, then you don't have to write that thing again, and you never have to write SQL or anything to update the table AGAIN. I wondered when I got done writing "dumb", and still was doing repetitive tasks, like scheming a database out, building input pages, building output pages, building backing beans, etc, if it could all be automatically done for me. That is what I plan on figuring out with this new design. I will find an answer, and that answer will be the future :) For me anyway. I'll buy you a hoverboard when I'm there.

If you visit my site, you've never heard even the implications of the term above mentioned by me. I'm no politician. I am something that begins with a 'P', though, and it's not a curse word. I'm a philosopher. Well, I don't know who determines that, but I like to think. That's why I'm here. The term above implies "Republican", or "GOP", the Grand Olde Party. Yellow infers the old western term of the same name, spelling, etc. That they are cowards. Operation means that they are doing something. Read this post for a proper introduction, I'm afraid my words are weakening their cause.

Alright, a little briefer on liberal vs. conservative. As far as I can tell, conservatives take over the world and liberals complain all the time ;-) I'm just kidding. So, conservative, by its dictionary definition, means a person that likes things the way they are. Liberal means a person who likes things to be changed. Regardless of what tags and stereotypes these people are given, these are the definitions we'll use. There is definitely more to it, but my argument doesn't require much info on either of them. Just that they think differently.

So, this site posts a contest. A contest to make a sign and hang it somewhere. Specifically:

Create signs relating to Operation Yellow Elephant's mission to expose the hypocrisy of hawkish College Republicans and other young conservatives who are too cowardly to fight in the war they demanded.

That can arguably be ruled "harassment" right off the bat. But, I don't like to assume anything. Philosophy does require assumptions, but based on past arguments. So, I'll make it quick.

Suppose you're walking by on campus, and some dude comes up and calls you a coward. Or a hypocrit? I would consider that harassment. What if these words were on signs? Signs are a form of communication, so transmitting harassing words through any medium of communication can be considered harassment. How about if someone gives you the finger? You would feel pretty offended by any of these forms, I would think. I will assume that the act of calling someone a coward and a hypocrit is not widely considered to be a compliment, and that will make my assumption true, that it is also considered harassment. Or, at a bare minimum, unfriendly or unkind, maybe even mean. This is a basis for my argument, along with the fact that liberals and conservatives think differently.

Using these two assumptions, I can move on with the argument. I have to come up with analogies, of course.

One commenter on that thread mentioned this:

Your actions are the same as giving prizes to people for putting up posters to harrass Blacks, Gays, Women, etc.

Ooh, he was SO close. In these examples, these groups of people are different from, well, from me anyway, in the following ways.

Blacks - Skin color obviously.
Gays - Sexual orientation obviously.
Women - Umm, I'm not a woman.

You can argue that 'gays' can think the same as us in every way fathomable except of their sexual orientation. This was the closest example to my point that this commenter came up with. I'm not about to prove, however, that gays only think differently from us in sexual orientation, assuming that it's a thought process that goes on where they eventually determine that they "want" to be gay, that it's a choice at all, or a fate. Since I can't make an argument either way on this matter, I have to throw it away, and come up with something else. I haven't studied sexual orientation, I'm sorry to say. I say this because you can also say that there are no differences between me (or us) and blacks (unless you are black) other than our skin color, and no differences in us and women (unless you are a woman) other than our sex. There may be differences between one person of each group, but overall, I'll say that these physical characteristics are the only differences.

One group of people that this commenter missed is "people of different faiths". This is incredibly similar to politics. We are born with no knowledge of God or any superior being. We are taught, by our parents and churches, about God and religion as we grow up. Therefore, this is not an inherited trait. Once we believe, we can't be budged, however.

Belief is a very broad term. If I believe that the Eagles are going to win the Super Bowl this year, wouldn't you also agree that "I think the Eagles are going to win the Super Bowl this year." Thinking and believing go hand in hand. "Thinking certainly" is believing.

With politics, liberals believe something, conservatives believe something. They have ingrained in their minds so firmly that they are correct. Would you question someone else's religion? In this country, it is a constitutional right that you have to practice whatever religion you believe in. It is also a constitutional obligation, implied by that constitutional right, to respect someone else's religion. At the very base, isn't religion just thoughts? Thoughts taught to us by our parents and churches? Why wouldn't it also be a constitutional obligation to respect someone else's political alignment?

If all you ever knew about me, you read from this website, then you would be shocked. You would probably think I'm some loud-mouthed kid, talking all the time, squeezing in a joke here and there, and sometimes keeping quiet to get some programming done. This is almost completely opposite from the truth. See, I'm as quiet as the next deaf-mute. I listen a lot. But when I do want to say something, I get impatient if you talk all the time. All the sudden, some people are like 5 topics ahead before I have a chance to add my wisdom, and this makes me look stupid. Rarely have I ever seriously considered myself to be stupid. Then if I do just blurt out what I'm thinking, I'm all of the sudden rude :) That's why I have this place on the web. People can be like "Hmmm, I wonder what Jason has to say...", and hop on in and leave completely disappointed or with a chuckle, and maybe a gold nugget of wisdom. The thing that I do a lot though, which is why this site ever even came to be in the first place, is think. I'd say 99% of the day I'm thinking about stuff that is important to me. I like to think, it makes my day. And it makes it go faster :)

I'm going to clean my room today. It's not like there's food and wrappers and dirty plates all over the place, but there is a lot of computer stuff lying around, and soda cans. But, I look around and I'm like "F#@%#$@!!!" That's all I can mutter. But, then I just remember the definition of recursion

an expression such that each term is generated by repeating a particular mathematical operation

So, WTF in the WORLD does that have to do with cleaning my room? Simple. Well, let me break it down into a function.

int removeItem(Item[] items){
if (items.size() == 0) return 0;

items[items.size()-1].remove();
return removeItem(items);
}

As you can see, it's all about performing the same action, over and over again, but with a twist. Recursive functions call themselves. It's a very neat way to think when you're writing a program, and once you start to "think recursively", which I have to admit took me a few months in school, then you start to always think recursively, which is why I post this entry. So let's look at the program.

public void cleanRoom(){
Item[] items = ;/// get items from "Room" database
removeItem(items);
}

So, calling removeItem once will clean your entire room. Of course you could just have a "for loop":

for (int i = 0; i < items.size(); i++){
items[i].remove();
}

This gets into asynchronous access issues, array indexing issues, and everything that I just don't want to have to deal with when cleaning my room. You would have to reverse the loop, from items.size() to 0, and it's just too much thinking for something that shouldn't take much thinking at all. Grab item, throw it in trash bag. That's it. I'm not thinking any more than that. Thinking's stupid.

Thinking this way helps me to not feel overwhelmed. It's just one action, repeated over and over again, until the room is clean. And, the room will be clean when I cannot repeat the action any further, when there are no more items. Or when I'm passed out on my bed under a pile of computer game and parts boxes, and shoeboxes, coincidentally. That helps me as well as putting on my favorite tunes from Jimi Hendrix and Cracker. This is going to rule.

Hopefully you've learned a bit about recursion and computer programming, and how someone can think about this stuff all the time, except when they're trashed. Get it, trashed?! I kill me.

Greed n.
An excessive desire to acquire or possess more than what one needs or deserves, especially with respect to material wealth.

I recently tore this definition a new A-hole. Put me in front of a dictionary full of cool words, and I'll have a field day. This one is particularly interesting because I basically proved it to mean the opposite of what everyone thinks it means.

The whole definition would have been dandy up to this point
An excessive desire to acquire or possess more than what one needs

But then it goes and adds
or deserves

I read that and thought, how can I tell you what I deserve? I can't, and I definitely can't tell you what YOU deserve. This makes the whole definition completely objective. Take, for instance, a CEO of one of the richest companies, who just wants the company to keep getting richer and richer, so their paycheck keeps getting bigger and bigger. I think that this person greedy. However, the whole deserves clause in the definition above makes this impossible to consider.

I can say, without anybody getting too upset, that everything that I have right now, I deserved. The $184.23 worth of my life savings, the guitars, computers, the car, clothes, everything I have. I deserve it since I worked for it and was able to afford it. Now, let me make this statement 10 years down the road. I deserve the $207.87 worth of life savings, the few extra guitars, more computers, same car, more clothes, everything I have. I deserve it since I had the means to acquire it. Fair enough?

Now, what about someone who can't afford these things. My buddy Doug used, as an example, a teenager who got knocked up and is working as a waitress for $3.50 / hr plus tips. Is it WRONG for them to want to be able to afford college? If they can't, do they DESERVE it?!

What I deserve in my life I will eventually acquire. Does the opposite hold, where if I don't acquire something, then it means I didn't deserve it? Surely, our waitress deserves the opportunity to give herself a better life. Our "greedy" CEO, who is in fact rich beyond any of our mental capacities, deserves everything he or she gained, through his or her hard work, education, and all that other good stuff.

To desire beyond that of which we deserve. By that definition, our waitress is the greedy one. If she cannot afford it, she won't acquire it. Since, what I am able to acquire, I can say I deserved, this waitress won't be able to acquire college education (our example), so we can argue that she didn't deserve it. Yet, she desires it. This is a perfect fit with the above definition of greed.

This is overly cruel, you might say. I'm just being philosophical :) Now, you ask the dictionary people if that's a fair definition of the word "greed".

London was attacked today. Coming right after they had received the bid on the 2012 Olympics, a thought popped in my head. It wasn't a joke, per se, but it was lighthearted in times of non-lightheartedness. Oh well, I am an optimist, I don't stay mad at anyone, really. Honestly. Come up to me and kick me in the face, tomorrow I'll smile and say hi. Don't really do that though. So, it's nothing against anybody, it is just the way my mind works. Of course, I hate terrorism even more and feel bad for London that we weren't able to help extinguish the threat, and of course I realize that I am as susceptible to terroristic attacks as anyone, so I can't really explain any better why this thought popped in my head. Here's the thought:

"Perhaps al Qaeda wanted to host the Olympics in 2012?"

Pretty lighthearted and harmless, huh? I thought so, but excused the F out of it anyway when I posted it here.

[Update] Great. The US is raising the terror level for rail and metro. I take the trolley and the El into Center City. Like I said, I know I am as susceptible to these attacks as anyone.

This article brought to light a legal document which can be used by, what I like to call, people who write on the internet (AKA web writers, journalists [technically they are writing in a journal], 'bloggers', webloggers, etc). This legal document is interesting. It includes sections that guide you on actually securing a "Press Pass", so you could like, go in the conference room and interview Andy Reid after the game, and when he says "Time's yours", it's actually yours, which would just tickle my fancy. Since some of these "personal journalists" are reporters, just not working for an established, official press outfit, it makes perfect sense.

The article that introduces the legal document has some disturbing pieces of literature in it though. It has a whole section on "how to blog anonymously". There's some validity in the argument about future or current coworkers/employers finding your journal and finding you insane. That I can see being a problem. However, it also uses family, friends, etc, as an example of people who you wouldn't want to know about your journal. I come from the complete opposite point of view I guess. If you have really dark secrets or crazy stuff going on, wouldn't you feel better just letting everyone know? Hi, I'm Jason and I love Jennifer Connelly.

I can't help it. She's gorgeous. And we have the same initials. And nearly the same last name. We could get married and she'd just shave a "y" off her name. That's enough incentive, I think, she may just marry me for that reason alone. Although, with some awful luck, we're probably related. Sorry Jennifer, it's probably not going to happen.

Another thing about this. People love to slander people anonymously. Whatever happened to people like John Hancock who would put it all on the line. Not like he signed where he would be when you read his signature, but he put a lot on the line there, signing in 20 point "Independence" font. Some people can't have an opinion unless they are anonymous about it.

To bring philosophy more heavily into it... what is Anonymous? If you have a name that you use consistently that is not necessarily your own real name, is it anonymous? Probably not. You have an identity, and that identity is your "moniker". It doesn't tie to your real life identity, per se, but it's an identity. So while it is anonymous in the fact that you aren't tying your two identities together, you are consistently using an identity for online purposes. If you walk down the street, and see a guy in pink pants, he's the guy in pink pants, to you right now. You may later learn his name, his real identity, but for the meantime he has an identity, one which he may regret later. So, going by this, first names are an identity, so they are not anonymous. However, if you use different names every time, it's anonymous, or your identity becomes the guy who uses different identities, which to me is anonymous since, with the nature of online, you cannot tie any of those two random identities to one person, making them anonymous. You might ask, with this definition, is anyone on the internet anonymous? I'd say there are degrees of it then. Actually, degrees of non-anonymity. You have the least non-anonymous, which is someone who posts their name, physical address, phone number, and anything else you can think of. Then there is the person with one online identity that is a clever moniker or something like that. They are the least non-anonymous. In between that you may have a picture and a moniker, a first name and a picture, or a full name, and any other combination of identifying qualities.

That was a good philosophy break. I pretty much ran out of gas and material for this post :)

If the sum of the odors of a pile of clothes (or clothes in a closet) passes the sniff test, than any item of clothing in the whole is acceptable for wearing.

This is only a theory.

Read this... We'll all have electronic ID cards in May 2008. It's not cameras in our homes, so it's not that bad, but that's what the government wants to do, step up the invasion of privacy in increments so we can painlessly get to the point where we have cameras in our houses :P

Actually, I'm not an activist on this subject. I jest. So I will have to carry one more card with me, I have a wallet. If I have to renew it, if I can renew it when I have to renew my drivers' licence, then it's fine, it's one trip. Also, it shouldn't cost anything. Do we have to get it insured? :P It's 3 years away. Moral of the story is, this isn't that big a deal ... dot dot dot ... yet.

I was just reading the comments by some people on that article. They are interesting. Some are complete dillholes, but others make good points. What criminal do you know that will have an ID card that says their name on it? This leads to a point that says this is a method that will only be a hassle for us law abiding citizens, which is somewhat valid. It's an interesting argument.

Have you ever noticed when reading reviews or generally opinions by other people, even when people talk, they always say something is "One of the Best" 'whatevers' out there. Why can't they just say "It's the best one ever." I'm guessing people don't want to be held responsible for saying that, for instance, a restaurant is "one of the most exciting new restaurants of the year" (from Philly.com), they don't want people to come back and say "That restaurant sucked, that guy from Philly.com is full of s@#%@". I see it a lot on game sites, like GameSpot. I'm almost positive it's used to protect their reputations as a reviewer. If they say "it's the best game" then someone who plays it and finds Game X better will not trust what that reviewer says anymore. However, I'm not in the business of keeping readers, so I'll be very extreme in my opinions. If I think something rules, you'll know it. If I think it's the best, I'll say it. The opposite is true. On that note, this post rules, but it's not my best.

I check my email about 3 times a day consciously. "Unconsciously" (from Tin Cup), I check it about 100 times a day. It's one of those things where you have no control over anything your hands, eyes, and brain are doing, they just check your email. They scheme against me. They get together every 10 minutes or so and say "Hey, he's not doing anything, let's check email." That's the hands talking, they're clearly the leader of the pack. After about 2 hours of this, I'll obviously have no recollection of these acts, and I'll wonder if I have any email, so I check.

I'm kind of forgetful about things like that. When I leave my car in the morning, I HAVE to lock it with the remote at least 5 times so I'll remember that I did it, so I don't have to worry about it that day. It really has to do with the fact that I don't pay attention to what I'm doing. When I leave in the morning, I check to see that I have the 4 or 5 things that I need in my pocket.. these I check 4 times. Keys, check.. Security Card.. check.. Wallet with SEPTA pass.. check. Smokes and Lighter... check.. Phone.. check. It's a time consuming routine with the number of times I go through it. After that, when I get out of my car, I check again, but this time I make sure I have some more items, namely my iPod and headphones to listen to on the El. There's another minute wasted.

Making coffee in my combination grinder/brewer is a similar embarassment. Beans, check, filter, check, water, check, coffee holder thing, check, GO!!! Recently, I've had to add some things to the list since I forgot to put the lid on the coffee holder thing, and water and grounds just poured all over the countertop. One time I forgot the filter... Luckily, before any water came out, I emptied the grinds into a filter. Close one.

I really should start paying attention more.

Read Phaedo which is part of Plato's Complete Works. It's amazing. Socrates is in a jail cell waiting to die, explaining to these two well-minded blokes that he is not afraid to die because the soul of the Philosopher is sound and will be accepted by the gods. It raises a lot of questions for you, which Plato answers later on, and basically proves the existence of a soul in a way that does not rely on faith, but on logic (which is why Philosophy rules). Socrates and his company cover all of the angles. Plato is my favorite to read for fun.