Summer Fun

Wow, the summer sure goes fast! I've been busy with my daughter, who turned one year old in June. She's changing every day, and is so obviously aware and intelligent that I'm in awe. We're planning on homeschooling her, and are wondering who will be teaching who!

On the geek front, I ran across Cambrian House lately. They're a company that wants to generate ideas from the Internet community, build a product, and reward all the community contributors from the profits. It's an interesting idea, and one that deserves to work. Whether it will or not is another matter. The barrier to entry for anyone with an idea is high enough these days that this business model is quite attractive.

Plus, you have a like a company with style enough to deliver 1,000 pizzas to Google's headquarters, and to run a "Guess the weight of a goat" contest.

Since I like the concept, I contributed a few ideas of my own. The way it works is that the community votes on ideas by comparing pairs of ideas and saying which ones they like the best. This community rating system is supposed to separate the ideas that are good from the ones that are not so good.

You can also click the links directly below to show support for my ideas. This contributes to the idea's total rating in some undefined way. On the page that comes up, you'd click "Yes, Please add my support to this idea!" assuming you do support the idea.

NewbiesGuides.com -- this would be a site for what's turning into the average computer user. A person buying a computer who has no built-in knowledge of how the Internet works, and needs the basics spelled out for them. Most guides out there in Internet land assume a base level of knowledge already.

eNonymous Community -- this would be an online community where you're expected to lie about who you are. You'd get to craft an online persona and play the role as well as you could in this community, knowing full well that everyone else was doing the same. A bit wacky, but it could be fun.

Trusted Recommendations -- you'd build a trust network by linking to other members, and rating how much you trusted their opinions on different topics. For example, you might trust your friend Joe's opinion about automobile dealers, but not his opinion on books to read. As you do things in your life, you'd enter your recommendations, and your friends would be doing the same. You can search your trust network for the highest rated recommendations in a category the next time you need a recommendation. If everyone does it, it works out well.

I'll be following Cambrian House over the next year to see how they do. Hopefully they'll do much better than the recently deceased Blue Security spam solution, another neat idea that deserved to succeed.

Google Web Toolkit

So, I have this huge to-do list this summer, and recently added writing some AJAX applications to the list.

Now, I like the way that the AJAX techniques allow web pages to be more interactive, stateful, etc. But I wasn't at all looking forward to fiddling around with Javascript on the client. Javascript has evolved far beyond its original purposes, and isn't that fun to use for a large application. So I'd been procrastinating at starting the AJAX applications.

Luckily, I procrastinated long enough for Google to release their Google Web Toolkit. The GWT is basically a framework that makes writing the client side of an AJAX application far easier than it previously was. Instead of fiddling with Javascript, which varies from browser to browser, you write the client in Java. Once you've written and debugged it in Java, you run the client code through the GWT compiler, which take the Java code and spits out Javascript.

What's even better is that the GWT provides a bunch of user interface widgets that would have taken me years to get right working in Javascript. So now, in my summer AJAX projects, I can focus on the application itself, and not worry about fiddling my summer away figuring out user interfaces in Javascript.

Life is good!

Betrayed by Spring

This early spring has been lovely, but brought an unexpected drawback.

I actually had to mow my lawn in May, rather than waiting for June. All the flowers had gone to seed, and even some of the grass had gone to seed. All you could see of our cat as she walked through the backyard was her head. It's about that time that Lisa starts suggesting it's time for the first mowing.

So, I mowed. But first I had to pick up sticks. One downside of having so many mature trees in our yard is that the yard is littered with sticks. The smallest I let the mower chop up, but the larger ones need picked up. I had about two wheelbarrow loads full of sticks by the time I was done.

Then I mowed. I have to admit, a freshly mown lawn does look good. I think for us, it looks especially good because of the contrast between the ragged, natural look, and the freshly mown look. I don't quite understand our neighbor across the street who mows twice a week, rain or shine. Seems like artificial turf would be easier to maintain.

On the summer to-do list front, we created a new flower bed for some mother's day lilies Lisa was given by a friend of hers. The new bed looks pretty professional, if I do say so myself. That's mostly due to Lisa's detailing of it. I haul stone, dig, and mix soil, and she comes along and makes it look like a garden instead of a disaster area.

Unfortunately, I've added at least three or four technical projects to my to-do list. Make my brain stop!

Free, At Last!

I've officially submitted grades for the spring semester, and now have a summer of total freedom stretching ahead of me.

Well, okay, I am teaching an online class for another university. And my wife has that long list of projects to be done. And I have my own list of projects. And I have four classes to prepare for in the fall. Where am I going to find the time?

Seriously, this should be a fun summer. My daughter will be one year old on June 6th, and she'll be toddling around before too long. She loves to be outdoors, so I think we'll spend plenty of time outside this summer. I need to buy a new tent so we can try camping (our current tent is a three person tent, which means it's barely big enough for two adults) in the backyard.

On the subject of freedom, I recently came across the Topfree Equal Rights Association. When the subject of women being topless comes up (which isn't all that often, so I must not live an exciting enough life), most women I talk to are still surprised that it's legal for them to do so. This is despite the public demonstrations that have been held in our own city on the subject.

I find it fascinating what a hold cultural conditioning has on us, that we may hear about something and immediately dismiss it as irrelevant. There are so many fascinating ideas out in the world that are hard to understand or accept because of cultural conditioning. It'd be nice if grade schools taught open mindedness and critical thinking as part of the core curriculum.

But I guess if we taught kids how to overcome cultural conditioning, they'd have nothing to rebel against later in life.

On a side note, if you were a student of mine this year at Muskingum, and will be in Columbus on May 20th, I'm holding a bonfire get together and you're invited. Send me email to get the details.

Blue Security, Again

I'd posted here earlier about Blue Security's opt-out list for spam.

Recently, Blue Security was the target of a denial of service attack, allegedly by a spammer who decided that Blue Security was too dangerous to continue its opt-out list. There's been a fair amount of controversy about the incident, some of it targeted at Blue Security for what seemed to be poor handling of the attack itself.

I won't get into the details, because I haven't done enough research to know what actually happened. But, I think it's worth looking at the logic of the situation. The spammer responsible obviously sees Blue Security as cutting into his business. So he decides to attack Blue Security, and as a sideline also start a spam campaign targeting Blue Security's customers.

First off, who actually clicks on spam and buys anything? Nobody who subscribes to Blue Security would do so. And anyone who would isn't going to mind getting spam. So the logic of Blue Security cutting into a spammer's business is a bit dodgy. If anything, Blue Security is helping spammers to clean their lists so each email on the list represents a better candidate for their products. Not that that means much to an email spammer, since the cost of sending a single email is negligible.

Second, what's the likely result of sending even more spam out to the world? It seems like it would draw more attention on the problem of spam, and prompt more action against spam.

The logic all around seems to be a bit flawed, which might make me wonder if there isn't something more going on, except for the fact that most of what you hear in the news seems to be based on flawed logic. It's certainly possible this is all some ploy by Blue Security to raise interest in their opt-out list, but unless they're about to go public with stock, I don't see the point.

I guess it's just a crazy world.

Google's Summer of Code

Any computer science students reading this should go directly to http://code.google.com/summerofcode.html and read about what Google's doing this summer.

But, if you're still reading this, I'll recap. Google is funding student work on open source projects. Basically, open source projects register with Google and specify defined tasks they want to have completed on their projects. Students apply to complete a task, and if they're approved and actually complete the task over the summer, Google pays them money.

You may not get your college to actually count this as an internship, but you'll get some great experience, earn a little money, and support an open source project at the same time.

So why are you still reading this? Go apply!

Jay - 6, Weedy Bushes - 0

I did another stint at digging up weedy bushes this weekend.

It was an odd weekend. I woke up early each day, and then by lunch was dead tired. So tired I did something unheard of for me, which was to take a nap. I don't normally nap, since I wake up from them feeling worse than when I did before the nap, but this weekend I napped both days.

True to form, I woke up feeling pretty bad, so I went into the yard and dug up more of the weed bushes that have taken over the woods. Between Saturday and Sunday I managed to get rid of half a dozen of the more annoying of the bushes, including one that had completely overgrown our walking path. Now we have a big hole in the woods that we'll have to fill with something more manageable.

On the geek-front, I finished up a program I'd been working on to make playing board games by email a bit easier. I used Game Maker to write it, which allowed me to get it done in record time, but made some aspects of the program pretty slow (such as doing a flood fill of a screen region). So I downloaded Irrlicht, which is primarily a 3D graphics engine but it also is supposed to do 2D well. Over the next few weeks I'll look at rewriting the program in Irrlicht so it isn't so slow.

Lawn Envy

Spring time brings out some interesting behavior.

We live in a suburban neighborhood, and one of the spring time rituals is the first mowing of the lawn. Each year, the men in the neighborhood seem to compete to see who can be the first to mow their lawn. This year I think someone got the prize by mowing their lawn in mid-March.

Lawn-care seems to be contagious, too. On an otherwise relaxing weekend, all it takes is one person to mow their lawn, and before you know it everyone else is out mowing their lawn, too. I'm not sure if they think their lawn looks bad now that someone else's is mown, or what, but it's a definite phenomenon.

We tend to take the minimalist approach to lawn mowing. We mow the first time each year after all the flowers scattered through the yard have died. That's usually in mid-May. We then mow once a month, whether it needs it or not, until the last mowing, probably in October.

We've found the trick to taking this approach is to not fertilize the grass, and to learn to enjoy all the other sorts of ground cover that will grow when you don't use chemicals on your lawn. We have the loveliest clover through part of our front yard, and some sort of other leafy ground cover in the backyard. Our grass grows pretty slowly, whether due to the lack of fertilizer, or all the other ground cover taking up nutrients, I'm not sure.

A side-effect of all this non-grass ground cover is that we get fewer dandelions in our yard than our neighbors do. Which is a shame, because we like dandelions.

A Game of Thrones

There's a board game called A Game of Thrones that some friends of mine love to play.

Normally I stay away from tactical war games. In high school, my group of friends loved to play tactical war games, the more detailed the better (at least that's what it seemed like to me at the time). And I played, but never did very well in them.

Lately, I've been playing A Game of Thrones, and it's a nice change from the ultra-detailed war games I played in high school. The game is detailed, but the focus is not so much on simulating an actual war, as trying to capture the feel of a series of novels the game is based on. Diplomacy among the players is not only expected, but almost mandatory.

Another interesting aspect of the game is that it's difficult to actually eliminate a player. Units retreat when defeated, and the boundaries of kingdoms ebb and flow over time as territory is retaken. You win the game not by eliminating the other players, but by positioning yourself so that on the last turn of the game (turn 10), you can ensure you hold the largest number of cities on the board. You can also win by holding a certain number of cities (7 cities for a 5 player game, 6 cities for a 6 player game), but I think that's relatively rare.

I still don't do extremely well at the game, but it's fun to play. I'm doing better in a play by email version of the game with those same friends, so there's definitely something to be said for having more time to think about all the ramifications of a move.

Sleeping Out

I'm not sure what term is the opposite of sleeping in, but that's what happens to me more often than not.

It's the scenario where you get up in the middle of the night, maybe to go to the bathroom, or feed the cat, or whatever, and you discover that it's only 23 minutes until your alarm goes off. That's enough time to make you drag during the day, but not enough time to do you any good if you go back to sleep. Just enough time, in fact, to do a blog entry before starting your day.

To make it worse, I'm not a morning person. I'll cheerfully stay up late without blinking an eye (okay, maybe an eye blink or two when I get tired), but getting up early feels like it takes way too much energy. But, since my body's normal wakeup time is about 8:00am, most jobs require me to get up early, especially the current one with an hour's commute.

Okay, enough whining about my schedule, it's time for me to start on my commute.