CSCI 467

I’m currently in a class, in which I can’t describe the subject matter nor can I tell you its use. This class could probably fall into the category of principle. The principle of something to do with gathering requirements for software. No matter actually writing the software, there will be no opportunities for writing code, we will instead use UML, MS Access, or MS Visio. I’ve never used any of these things, and I wonder how they might be useful in my desired line of work. In this final quest I expect to fail.

My professor keeps repeating, we need to train ourselves to think object-oriented. I’m not entirely sure what that means.

I miss coding. I need to go back over some Assembler and COBOL if I want to find a job in mainframes. It’s a shame there’s nothing online or in the way of open courseware in these subjects. I’m really interested in that sector of the software market..

My class smells like cigarette smoke, which is giving me a bit of a headache.

Thoughts on a Sunday night.

At this point in my life, I listen more than I speak. There’s much more I have to learn, than there is to know.

This will always be true.

If this were a post on Twitter, it would end there. I just finished listening to this week’s This American Life, which tells a story about something each week. It’s a podcast, or as some would call it, a weekly electronic radio broadcast programme. Today, I turned off the distractions and listened to the podcast. I took in what was being said, and learned quite a bit about about how our electronics are made in China.

Americans don’t hate communism, they love it, many of us just don’t know it.

With only audio, there’s a lot left to your imagination. That might be the most captivating part of a show, sans visual element. All you get is a little slider indicating how much time has elapsed, and how much is left, before you’re doused with silence. To paraphrase an overused term, pictures are worth many words. If this is so, how many images are produced, by just one word? A sentence spoken without context or description?

Has the following thought ever occurred to you, “That’s not how I pictured them at all”?

It’s becoming a more scarce occurrence every day. I don’t have evidence or facts to back this up, but I’m led to believe more people are consuming entertainment passively. They are being told what to think, and their minds are shaped by someone else. Something else. News corporations craft and tailor their messages so that only what they want you to know, is what you see.

Don’t believe me? Look at what they’ve done to Ron Paul.

Can you think of any information you receive from a primary source? It’s usually gossip, or a story about someone else’s life. All this “world news” and “national news” is taken from somewhere and given to you in what’s supposed to be a palatable form. The story of something, taken by someone it didn’t happen to, and told to you through their vehicle. You also have to keep in mind that many of these vectors of information, are a business. They want your viewership, and I can only imagine the message is tailored to suit you, the viewer.

That’s the beauty of capitalism, right?

I have a problem with “the free market” in a few key areas, namely healthcare and utilities. Healthcare should be a guaranteed right to all citizens of every nation. Unfortunately this is not the way our country works. We have middle-men and greed. Everyone wants money. Everything is about money. Think of a decision you made, that didn’t involve weighing the cost of something. Whether it be the purchase price, or opportunity cost expressed as a monetary value. I couldn’t do it.

Everything is about money, from where I’m sitting. “Sitting” being used as a loose metaphor for where I am observing from in relation to the world. An in-debt college student writing this on a computer he pieced together, because he likes that kind of thing.

The political system is all about being liked.

Sometimes I wonder why we go along with laws and the constitution, and capitalism… or the representative republic for that matter. Have you ever though about how unfair the electoral college system is? It’s a relic from a bygone era which required a consensus be reached in smaller sub-units of population to be conveyed to D.C. With the internet, what’s the point? Why doesn’t the popular vote decide who wins?

If we had used the popular vote in 2000, Gore would have won. Or so I’m told.

If we consider someone’s vote is among three candidates, their vote can be expressed as a two digit binary number. The size of said value, is of course, two bits. If the entire population of the US voted on election day (which may or will never happen due to apathy, state of consciousness deviations, age, incarceration, or not being registered) the maximum size of all this data in a jumbled mass is around 300million * 2 bits.

That’s 600,000,000 bits. A byte is 8 bits so 600,000,000/8 is 75,000,000 bytes. 75 million bytes, is equal to 75 Megabytes. or .075 Gigabytes. 1Gigabyte is the size of a very inexpensive flash drive for comparison. I alone, can transmit that much data from my family’s home connection in about half an hour.

So in short, my family’s $20/month internet line is able to transmit enough data to express every United State citizen’s vote for president.. in half an hour. Organizing all of that data on the other end is another story, but it’s just my way of showing how outdated our stupid election process is.

Someone had to make up the rules and guidelines we follow. Someone thought that the law, or that section of the constitution was a fantastic idea from where they were. Times have changed.

Maybe some of the rules have to change too.

Consumerism

Advertisements scream at me from every angle, telling me time is running out and that I have to prove to those I love they deserve a present. A majority of the things I use daily, I’ve purchased myself.

You ever look at what you have, and realize how much of it is just “stuff” that sits.

We’ve been conditioned to like things. That’s the product of our society. Buy this, buy that, give us your money. Gotta make money, gotta spend my money to be happy, gotta buy this and that or else I’m just out of touch.

Consumerism is a disease.

If I were a politician, this would be my platform:

• The government has no place in telling people what to do with their body, get an abortion, or don’t, it should be up to you.
• Bring as many soldiers home as is possible. Costs need to be cut, and “offense” is the biggest area of waste.
• Decriminalize drugs. Stop incarcerating those accused of possession, and instead offer counseling which is far less expensive.
• Reform the healthcare industry to align it with a system similar to Cuba, Canada, and the UK. All facilities should be government run and paid for by taxes. No more health insurance companies deciding who lives and dies by being stingy with payouts.

These are the big issues, and I’ve run out of things to say. Here’s my update for today.

Learning Outside the Classroom

I’m interested in administering my Minecraft server on hardware I own, because it’s a learning experience. I find the task interesting, and having understanding users is a plus for when I want to take the server down for something. I’ve been trying to find out what most cost-effective hardware I would buy, should I go that route eventually, to provide the optimal experience without spending too much.

There is surprisingly little on building the aforementioned machine, because I think fewer people are building their own machines these days. Most of the documentation for Minecraft in general is far below me. The feeling I get, is that many people want to run a Minecraft server, and have it work, without trying to understand how the program works. There are pre-written scripts and ‘painless’ installers which keeps all the difficult technical stuff hidden.

I’m interested in trying to figure out how many threads the java executable can run, in order to select how many cores should go in the server. If all of the processes I run are single-threaded, then they won’t benefit themselves from a multi-core system. While the system overall will be able to split up different tasks to the cores, java may be stuck to running on one core, under-utilizing the other core(s). From what I know, this is largely based on the way the program is written. The code itself has to spawn more threads and then the hardware figures out how to run them.

I could do this kind of thing as a profession, administering systems and making sure servers keep working, it’s just the road I didn’t go down. I suppose I could still do that if I find a position that fits, but I’m really looking for a software position.

In other news, my second to last finals week is nearly over. I have one more final tomorrow and then I await my grades whilst performing my duties until Sunday when I come home. =)

Right now I’m going between studying HTML, which is basically just writing a webpage over and over again to get the syntax down, and writing this article. I figure it should be a bit longer because I have lots to say and haven’t posted in quite some time due to being busy or unwilling to do much of anything.

The election rhetoric is going to get ridiculous soon, once the candidates are narrowed down. I’m kinda behind Ron Paul because he campaigns mostly as a Libertarian. I don’t like that he’s pro-life because a woman should have the right to chose. I also don’t like that he introduced legislation to end assault weapon bans. I like him, but I don’t like everything about him, like I do Dennis Kucinich.

Newt Gringich’s campaign is already in debt.

Michelle Bachman needs to go away forever.

Rick Perry needs to cut out the religious shit for me to care.

I don’t want to put up with religion from every angle, you go your way and I’ll go mine. No Jesus this and God that. This isn’t a Christian nation, it’s the land of slaughtered natives.

Finance Is Dumb

Learning the principles behind the valuation of stock is how you would spend your ideal Monday afternoon, right? Finance 320 is my favorite thing to complain about recently. My professor has too high an opinion of himself and the subject which he is paid to force upon us.

I don’t really care about risk free rates, risk premiums, beta ratings, market inflation trends, hypothetical investment return calculation, portfolio valuation, maximizing the return on my money, the idea of risk aversion, or required rate of return.

I just thought about what it may be like, were I to only post updates on google plus. Twitter will always be the place for one-off thoughts I find amusing, but I should use Google+ for incremental “blog-like” updates, instead of wordpress. Ideally I would post everything to one website that I completely control, but for now I’m spread all over the internet. My updates can be as long as I like, but I may be flattering myself with thinking anyone reads my writing.

There are drawbacks to continually switching up where I post things.. but I could always just copy and paste to all the places I am on the internet.

Have a nice day.

( original location )

Server Direction

Since Apple inconveniently doesn’t update Java on OS X Tiger, installing Linux on the G5 is mostly impossible, and the Power Mac is essentially a space heater.. I want to replace the Apple proprietary innards with some older hardware I have.

I’ve been trying to figure out how to best put the motherboard tray from an ATX case into the Power Mac shell. Whilst this option seems a bit po-dunk, it’s better than trying to figure out how to change the location of the mounting pins in the case.

I want to use the Power Mac case as a shell, with a few larger fans installed and stick the motherboard and powersupply inside somehow. There is probably no easy way to do this. If only there was a way to stick an ATX frame inside the case I have..

Right now I could be attempting to do my C++ program which is due on Monday, but I can’t figure out the syntax of a function I need to use to create multiple POSIX threads. Quite unhelpfully, I add, my professor has not returned an email which I sent this morning. The biggest obstacle I’ve encountered in all of my computer science class, is figuring out the syntax of a built-in function with a really bad man page. That’s the biggest problem with computer science, not figuring out how to solve a problem, but be baffled by the tools provided to solve it.

Building A Server

Been thinking about what hardware should go in a server.

I could buy all new hardware, this is the most expensive option, but I don’t have a budget nor do I know what parts are worth my money.

I could buy a used Socket 478 CPU with a clock speed higher than the 2.4Ghz I have in an old ATX board. This would probably be the most reasonable investment, but I’m not sure how large of a performance gain it will yield. Preferably I would upgrade to one with HT and the highest clock speed available.

The least expensive option I have, is to keep the Power Mac G5 1.6 that I’m using right now or move back to the 2.4Ghz P4 board I was running before. I may have to fall back to the latter, as OS X 10.4 doesn’t support Java 1.6, which is required for the bukkit plugins my friends are demanding.

With an open mind, I’ve been looking through value/$ benchmarks which use Passmark and price. The AMD A6 APU is making an appearance at the top in many of them, and I don’t know much about them.

Introspection

I don’t always get introspective, but when I do it’s late at night and no one else is around.

Hello to all who dare read my musings.

I watched season one of The Walking Dead, in its entirety today and I’m in awe of how well it was done. The writing, acting, directing and post-production is all fantastic. Finally a mini-series / show, to develop characters and attachments to the people thrust into this zombie scenario. The series feels so real and gritty, that I can’t help but want to watch the season again to “re-live” the experience.

I’m now fully prepared to anticipate each new episode as it airs this fall, once I watch the one episode which has already been released.

Education

Lately I’ve been waking up to a political talk show which leans “to the left”, even though direction is basically irrelevant in the political landscape, because everyone is moving backward.  The parties fight with each other instead of fighting for the people of our country.

There needs to be more accountability in politics. I can’t implement it, but I can at least write what I like.

I wonder if there’s a possibility of finding a logical and unbiased take on the political system of the US. Perhaps someone respected like Noam Chomsky or Neal deGrasse Tyson could give some opinions worth hearing. Science! Oh no, republicans don’t want anything to do with that… it’s logical.

From where I’m sitting, republicans look like empty suits with pretty faces and democrats look like plain oatmeal. While the republicans chase after corporate money, the democrats can’t help but be stirred by the spoon of political contribution. Torn between whatever’s left of their lumpy personal convictions and these exorbitant mountains of money… what would you choose?

I say the republicans need to lose religion and start thinking while the democrats need to find a way to help us. The political system as a whole needs to realize how the internet works, how badly software patents hurt the economy and what computers really do.

–

You may have already heard my opinion of education, but I think some things need repeating until more people realize what I’m saying is true.

“Some for one and the rest equally distributed among programs which help all”  -Kevin Hamilton

I also wouldn’t be opposed to restructuring the entire system to eliminate waste and teach young minds what they need to know sooner, thus helping them find jobs earlier. I’m mature enough and willing to do work for a reasonable rate of return. I feel as though I have been for several years now.

Give young people more responsibility, expect the best of them, and stop wasting our time! Unfortunately, many of my college-aged brethren do not share my sentiments. They want to increase debt whilst partying and becoming a draining force upon the economic landscape of our country. “More debt!” they exclaim, until crushed by the weight of it.

Giles “University-Student” Corey, debted to death, unable to decide what to do with their life in a misdirected parody of what was intended to be honor. Between credit cards and student loans it’s meaningless to begin with, but our need for money now and our inability to weigh risk, is exploited. I’m left watching the whole scene unfurl. “Where are we headed?” I ask the wind.

It only pushes me away.

This is what I do instead of paying attention in my finance class. I enjoyed myself quite a bit more, actually.

Sunday

We all need hobbies, writing is mine when I want it to be.

Currently I’m installing Linux as the primary operating system to my Macbook. While I wish I had a blank disk to write an Arch ISO, all I have is a two year old version of Ubuntu. Arch is the somewhat complicated and customizable version of Linux, while Ubuntu is the ready for everyone to use variety. At this time I’m also unable to come up with a more eloquent passage to describe the differences, but that’s assuming you (the reader) is at all interested in learning about the niche knowledge I garner.

Now that I think about it.. there was a day’s worth of notes sitting on the desktop waiting to be copied over or put up on Google docs, oops.

Still waiting for my textbooks to arrive, which I kinda need.

We can be who we want to be, but sometimes you have to realize you’re trying to be something impossible. I like that way of thinking over the “be who you are” camp, which suggests we be complacent in failure. If one does not like who they are, change should be an option. My version is a more universally applicable message for this very reason.

I’ve eaten far too much candy in the span of a few hours, and I’m out of words for today.