Illuminating Oneself

My Blog’s New Home

2010-07-21T12:04:53.6854862-07:00

If you are seeing this, you have successfully landed at my blog’s new home on my new domain, http://i.llumin.us/

For a wee bit, I struggled with the prospect of porting a blog engine called Oxite over to .NET 4 and then upgrading it to use Microsoft’s Managed Extensibility Framework, (I liked Oxite because it was a good MVC site to play with), but despite previous notions I ended up just using dasBlog. I couldn’t get dasBlog to run on .NET 4, and I haven’t touched any of it’s code – but for the most part, it just works.

One note to the awesome family and friends that I have, that is, you folks reading this right here, is that this site is still a little buggy. If you notice any funny behavior, drop me an e-mail or send me a Facebook message, and I’ll look into it. (For the nerds out there, it’s because I’m using IIS’s Url Rewrite module extensively, and I keep finding little things to tweak.) I also had to drop the comments from the old content. (A bit of me died with ‘em…)

So, tell me what you think!

Trying To Get A New Blog Engine Going

2010-07-04T22:19:00.001-07:00

Above is a screenshot of my blog via the “Oxite” open-source blog engine. Oxite was written by Microsoft to show off ASP.NET MVC 1.0 and the Unity Dependency Injection framework.

The Oxite codebase was abandoned about 2 years ago. Woefully incomplete. But still tempting to thine eyes.

I’ve been working on converting it to ASP.NET MVC 2, .NET 4, and replacing its use of Unity with .NET 4’s baked-in Managed Extensibility Framework.

It’s been quite a chore. And most of the chore has been since I did the initial conversions. I made the mistake of not giving the software a thorough test-run before I happily decided to start converting it. The conversion took about 10 hours spread across a couple days. When I was done, I came to find that it was buggy as hell, and doesn’t even have some very basic features like user registration. (It already has some wonderful features like MetaWebLog API support, trackback support, SiteMap serving, etc.)

But despite it’s inadequacies, I still prefer its codebase over DasBlog or BlogEngine.NET. It lacks the completeness that I’ve come to expect from small little Microsoft-released OSS packages. It has a big “cut-and-run” feel to it. But it has an architecture that I’m comfortable wading into. So I’d like to get user registration into it, and play around with the “theming” a bit before I go public with it, and then I will. At a whole new web address, too.

One of my major struggles has actually been getting my current blog’s content into it. I’ve managed to pull this off with a small, 100 lines-of-code executable, to parse Blogger’s export output and then dump it into Oxite using LINQ-to-SQL. This bit was actually a lot of fun, but one more hindrance on my way to my own personal blogging soap-box.

Since the biggest change with this project has been converting it to using MEF instead of Unity, I’m tentatively calling this codebase “OxyMefadon”. Because MEF is just that awesome.

Basilisk Birthday Cake!

2010-06-27T11:46:00.001-07:00

IMAG0038.jpg
Originally uploaded by illuminus86

Ryan's dad David made me one of his awesome birthday cakes!

It's the stylization of a basilisk from the Secret of Mana series of games.

Isn't it awesome!?

David and Leona showed up with it today while we were playing D&D and delivered it. Unfortunately, they didn't stay for a bite...

A Fruity Tweet In The Dark

2010-06-15T09:34:00.001-07:00

The joy of multiple manufacturers of the Android phone is not just selection, it’s fault tolerance.

One company breaks a patent, the others keep on rolling. One company’s distribution deal falls through, the others keep on rolling. One company fails to be as awesome as Apple, the others keep on rolling.

I don’t own an Android phone. And I don’t want one (yet). But in a manner of only months, I now have the same number of friends with Android phones as I do friends with iPhones.

The difference: none of the people I know with an Android phone are fan-boys of anything. They saw a cool phone that they could get from their preferred provider, so they got it. The App(le)-niche goldmine has reached its peak, from here on, it is just over-saturation. From here on, it will be about UIs, multi-tasking nuances, and the number of buttons on (or the presence of) a slide-out keyboard.

That’s why I think Microsoft is doing a good job playing catch-up with their Windows Phone 7 platform. There will always be apps for everything, so make the experience better. (Of course, they still have room to screw up.)

Sometimes I just wish Gruber would just spontaneously combust.

Tasty Sweetness On The Rotten Fruit

2010-04-13T14:06:00.001-07:00

Apparently Slashdot erupted on Saturday, over the new iPhone OS 4 SDK license agreement. (In fairness, Slashdot erupts over everything.) I was blogging about this same issue on the same day.

[Here’s the link to the Slashdot article: http://apple.slashdot.org/story/10/04/10/2142245/Adobe-Evangelist-Lashes-Out-Over-Apples-Original-Language-Policy?from=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+slashdot/eqWf+(Slashdot:+Slashdot) ]

I thought these tidbits were particularly interesting:

Anyone could pose as an Anonymous Coward, obviously, but these seem believable to me. Apple has never been very transparent. Jobs is too obsessed with making perfection under tight deadlines, and letting the rest of the world react as aftermath. So it fits the Adobe developer’s story.

You And Me, Babe

2010-04-10T16:07:00.001-07:00

I’ve been struggling the past couple of weeks. On Tuesday, March 30th, my grandmother Margaret Tess Brown / Markham / Fullerton passed away. We called her “Memaw”.

Memaw was a unique figure in my life. She may very well have been the nicest person I’ve ever known. She was genuinly joyful all the time. Whether she realized it or not, I think her example gives us alot to go on.

To be honest, Memaw was probably so pleasant mainly for two reasons. She never held a grudge against anyone for anything, and she had selective hearing. Whether you were telling her for the third time that she didn’t need to re-wash and re-fold your clean laundry while she’s visiting, or that you burnt a house down, she would just faintly smile, nod, and keep going. She made a conscious effort every day of her life to focus on the positive, and to show compassion to all those around her.

Memaw only thought of other people.

One thing that stood out about Memaw was that she would reliably send cards on every major holiday. Up until she started getting particularly sick, there were plenty of times that I had forgotton St. Patrick’s Day or Halloween were coming up, until I received a card from Memaw in the mail. I’m sure any of her other grandchildren could probably say the same thing.

Another thing that stood out about Memaw, at least when I talked to her, was her penchant to ask about people she knew I cared about, despite the fact that she had only met them once or twice, just so she could know how they were doing. Sometimes she would ask how my half-sister Megan was doing (though she had only met Megan a couple of times and it had literally been 12 or 15 years since she had), or Memaw would ask me if I still talked to some random high school friend of mine she had met at one of my birthday parties years prior. And sometimes she would call me out of the blue, just to say ‘hi’, and ask me how my job was going.

Memaw was mindful of all of us.

For the last week and a half since Memaw’s passing, I knew I needed to come up with something to say here this afternoon. And sadly, I had trouble narrowing down one or two specific memory to exemplify my relationship with her. Most of the time I’ve spent with her was during my earlier childhood – when she lived up here, later when she didn’t, when she visited often – but it was still my early childhood. And honestly, who remembers much about their early childhood? But as I sat down to write, having thoroughly procrastinated, two memories came to mind.

The first, is from my mid-teens, when she was in town one winter to be helpful around the house when Melissa was on bed rest. I had managed to talk Memaw into pouring some coffee for me to take with me to the bus stop. And I kid you not, when I got up to that bus stop and took a sip, that coffee tasted soapy. It’s not something you miss. Annnnd I was bold enough to tell Memaw about it later. Naturally I wasn’t sure she believed me, but I let it slide. I mean, c’mon, I didn’t want to hurt her feelings. But she drew entertainment from the notion, and for the last 8 years, every time coffee has been mentioned when her and I were both around, she made sure to chortle that it had better not be soapy. She thought it was hilarious. And I guess it was.

My other memory, one more distant, is from when I was a wee lad. It was on a particular night that Memaw was babysitting me, and some sort of program, I think that involved music, was on TV. I can’t tell you what it was, maybe it was a Sonny and Cher re-run, I honestly don’t know, but I remember one of the people on the TV saying something to the effect of “just you and me, babe”. And I turned around and said it to Memaw “just you and me, babe”. And Memaw repeated it back to me for years, with a warmness that was unique to her.

My only regret is that we didn’t get her any great-grandchildren before she passed. But I’d say she got good mileage out of the family she had.

We love you Memaw, and we’ll keep you with us always.

One Bad Apple Spoils The Bunch

2010-04-09T12:44:00.001-07:00

I’ve been struggling the past several months. What used to be a tingle of distaste for a brand has become a torrent of madness. Where once reason and uncertainty made me bite my tongue, familiarity has now bred contempt. I speak of course, of Apple.

In the interest of full disclosure, I’ll say here and now: I’ve never owned an Apple product. (I’ve also never employed a prostitute or smoked PCP, but I can still argue against their use.)

For the longest time, I avoided Apple products because the only things in that categorization were computers - and I knew how to use my PC quite well, thank you. Fast forward a decade and a half, Apple is the biggest sensation in tech. Even the pundits that despise Apple can’t keep their mouths shut about ‘em. (Myself included.)

Apple has graced us this month with the release of the iPad. For those of you not following the situation, the iPad is basically a giant iPod Touch:

Boasting 9+ hours of battery life, the 1.5lb iPad is heavy enough that you won’t want to hold it for more than an hour at a time lest you change your workout regiment. (Or integrate it in.)
With its “9.7-inch (diagonal) LED-backlit glossy widescreen Multi-Touch display” you’ll get to use your favorite content-consuming apps at double the size, but it’s ineffective “fingerprint-resistant oleophobic coating” will make it look like a CSI crime scene and leave you needing to carry a terry cloth with you everwhere.
With it’s built-in speaker, microphone, bluetooth, and video codecs – you’ll be able to do all of your favorite multimedia consumption, except for video conferencing or taking pictures because it doesn’t currently have a camera.
Being one of the only “large” mobile multi-touch devices on the market, it features one of the largest on-screen keyboards out there – but the extended typing they claim you can easily do on it is still so unwieldy they’ve simultaneously released a keyboard attachment.
It also features the all-acclaimed Safari Mobile, supporting large chunks of HTML 5 and CSS 3, so it’s ready for the web of tomorrow - but without Flash support it’s useless for 90% of today’s internet.

Okay, so the hardware sucks. The browser sucks. Shouldn’t it be about the apps?

I’m a software developer, so I can appreciate “apps” - little nuggets of easy-to-maintain code and functionality that are sold individually, for cheap prices, to the masses - little nuggets of code that are small enough, I would be tempted to find a means to simultaneously develop for multiple app platforms easily, so that I can move on to the next app without hassle.

And you know what? Microsoft gets this. Google gets this. Apple hates it.

Fresh out of the pearly gates of Cupertino, the Apple iPhone OS 4 SDK license agreement says, amongst many things:

Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs
(e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited).

What this means, in layman’s terms, for any programmer or software shop that used to sneak apps across the Apple border by cross-compiling their Flash, Java, or C# into C/C++/Objective-C before deployment, they are simply out of luck.

My brain is simply without recourse in its search for a plausible explanation. The most I can figure is, Apple doesn’t want the slew of upcoming Windows Phone 7 apps to be translated and submitted to the Apple App store. (That is, they want developers to pick a side and stay on it.) Or they just really really really want to absolutely kill Flash. It’s no secret that Jobs hates Flash. The fact that his complaints against Adobe and Flash are retorted with the reality that Apple doesn’t have any decent high-performance APIs to code against, doesn’t seem to weaken his resolve.

Despite my nay-saying in the past, and my general bias towards the Microsoft development stack, I have been secretly enthused the last 4 or 5 weeks with the possibility of writing a .NET app that would run on Windows, Xbox, Zune, & Windows Phone 7 – and then using Mono to run it on Mac, iPhone, iPod, and iPad – all with 90% shared code – but Apple has eliminated that possibility. I am no longer tempted to take a bite out of the Apple development community.

This one’s got a worm in it.

And Bananas

2010-02-17T21:07:00.001-08:00

A friend of mine just today posted an epic (4,500 words!) blog post he has been working on for well over a week – which basically boils down to why “Apple is awesome and the iPad is the future”. This has inspired me to pen my own views.

Frankly, there are several debates here:

Form ~~vs.~~ Function
aka Functionality vs. “Just Works”
Flash vs. Html 5
aka “Future Shock” vs.. All Of The Above
(maybe others, but the above seem most currently relevant)

Form vs. Function…

Apple has always been about form. Microsoft has always been function. The dichotomy is evident from the first steps taken by each: Jobs deliriously struggled to make the perfectly pretty computer that wouldn’t intimidate the home user, Gates ~~created~~ connived a programming environment that would bring developers to the same level playing field.

This dichotomy continues today. Apple makes these bubblegum-perfect consumer devices – all made by one company, designed to span out and touch everyone. Microsoft focuses its expertise on an OS and programming platform that entices developers like never before.

Windows has never been really pretty – (not until Vista/7, anyway) – and I have no qualms with that. I don’t need pretty, and I don’t think even Mac users seriously stick to that as legitimate point in their favor.

Consider the following code check-in statistics from Ohloh:

Keep in mind that Ohloh tracks code statistics solely for open-source projects. Also keep in mind that C# is primarily a Windows programming language, and Objective-C is primarily a Mac programming language. I hear all the time of C#/VB/C/C++ people writing code for Mac/Linux – because it is possible – but I’ve never heard of someone using Objective-C to write a Windows or Linux application. So I’m assuming that taking a language-preference pulse of the open-source community is a reasonable measurement of the health of said code ecosystems as a whole…

…and it looks like Mac is sadly lacking. Objective-C tumbled around the time Microsoft released .NET 2.0, and Objective-C has managed to stay down throughout the entire stint of iPod/Phone/Pad popularity.

Application innovation always comes from application developers – and frankly, .NET developers have more to innovate with than Objective-C developers. When you combine this with Microsoft’s push to make “form” more important (look at Windows 7 and Windows Phone 7 Series, for Christ's sake) – this isn’t a point so easy for Mac fans to argue anymore. Moving forward…

…Functionality vs. “Just Works”

This has been the biggest ongoing point for Apple and fans. I hear things like:

I plug in “X” and it just works
I don’t need to see my file system
My can use it

Followed by, (from geeks/nerds):

but I have a PC for “Y”

Why? Mayhaps that Apple’s dominance over their own platform has painted them into a corner where they can literally control everything. Is it a bad thing? No. It ensures quality. But choice suffers.

I can buy my applications, hardware, and music from anywhere – for my PC - and I’ll know it can work. Heck, I can buy Mac hardware and make it work. The operative benefit – choice. I don’t want to use a cookie-cutter computer, because I want my computer to fit *me*. I never pay extra for fancy looking chasses, I don’t buy fancy graphics cards for work, and I don’t have a finger-print scanner on my gaming computer at home. And you know what? Both computers cost the same, each only 2/3s of what it would cost to get the same thing on the Apple route, and both with amazing performance for what they are supposed to do.

And I’ve never, ever, had a Windows crash that didn’t come from me trying something nerdy and predictably dangerous with my system configuration.

If you don’t want choice, then buy a Dell. Heck, buy a Mac. But you will always reach that point where “Well, I wish I could…” or “Why did I pay…”. Sure, I know not every computer user can be a nerd – Apple rightfully seeks to change that - but then, seriously, if you aren’t at least a little bit of a computer nerd, why are you reading this?

Flash vs. Html 5

I would like to segway into the root cause of this post. The iPad is coming. You’ll never look at Playtex the same again. (Har har!) And I’ll admit, we’ll probably never look at tablets the same way again…

There, I said it. But I’ll finish the sentence with “…but the iPad is not the future of tablets. Or the web.”

Why? Flash runs everywhere! Except for the iPad/Phone/Pod OS. Despite the fact that the iPad will be popular, and sell like hotcakes, to all those people that could finally figure out an iPod Touch and never their PC, 90% of the web is currently inaccessible to this demographic. And I don’t think Flash (or technologies like it), are going to die out anytime soon.

People say that HTML 5 is an open standard, and that Mobile Safari will give it a leg up. Poppycock! Even at Apple’s wonderful growth rate, they still probably have another 15 years (if that is even enough) to catch up with the kind of market share they need to make Flash and its brethren hurt.

Why? In the meantime, Microsoft is leveraging their platforms – the ones that developers love so much – on more and more platforms all the time. Windows Phone 7 is undoubtedly going to have its “native” apps be Silverlight – which means they will run anywhere, out of the box, without recompile. (Anywhere = Windows, Mac, Linux). Windows Phone 7 games… (well, you know, the ones tied into Xbox Live, the largest online game network?) …written in XNA. Which runs on Windows, Xbox, and Zune.

Both Silverlight and XNA are merely buzzwords for subcomponents of the .NET initiative. English? A C# programmer like me can write an app that runs on any of the above platforms, with minimal design overhead in consideration of portability. That means my app choices for these platforms will be more numerous, as well as cheaper.

HTML 5 will raise the bar on what comes built-in to a browser. There is no doubt on that. But baked-in will never be enough. There will always be a 3D app, an involved game, or sensitive business logic, that will need a runtime to run in. And the runtime will always run faster than JavaScript. Be that runtime Silverlight, Flash, or Java applet.

“Future Shock”

I’ve heard this one batted around the interwebs. It seems to be Custer’s Last Stand in the Mac world. “But, but, Mac is innovative!”

Yes they are. The innovation has brought droves of “normal” people to ~~computing~~ electronics, without even realizing what they are doing. But the people doing actual computing, are the ones in that playground just over the rainbow. The one where anyone can write software without corporate approval. The one where anyone can choose their hardware without it coming with a ridiculous price tag. The one where the real innovation is not in the basics, but in the ground of “what’s next?”, not re-hashing for the dumber demographics what was 8 years ago.

I love that Apple is innovating. I love that the attention of detail they have paid brings a sense of panic to their competition. Apple is definitely competition.

But when I ask “what’s next?” – I sit down on my PC and start typing. I don’t wait for Apple to spoon-feed me something my computer can already do.

Response To Saevus: On Free Will

2009-12-30T21:14:00.003-08:00

A friend of mine has started a blog (separate from his personal one) to explore philosophy and get some of his interpretations gathered into one place. The few posts that he has made already have made me aware of my own philosophical shortcomings: namely, I really don't know what I believe. I've responded deeply to philosophical questions that have passed me by – but I've never sought said questions (nor possible answers), and my positions have not been consistent with themselves. I don't know if I can fix this without dedicating significant portions of my spare time – but maybe uneducated responses to my friend's blog entries will help. So my first helping to pop philosophy: free will versus predestination.

When I hit Wikipedia, (the source of all modern knowledge), I immediately see the issue unfold into several facets. Determinism versus indeterminism, compatibilism versus incompatibilism – there is a lot there to absorb. I don't want to spend all night drawing up charts of pros and cons of varying viewpoints, (and forming additional assertions about them) – heck, a learned man could spend his whole life on it and not come out any the wiser, (since this is one of the oldest questions of human philosophy.)

To me, this comes down to a question of human consciousness. What is human consciousness? Is our awareness just an aggregate of our neuronal pathways, or does the quantum foam itself instill in effable spirit onto the bio-computer we call a brain? Let's consider it differently. Imagine a movie you've seen. If you watch again, the progression and outcome remain the same. From which we can surmise that, in a bubble universe representing the plot of said movie, no one has free will. The problem is – to life, no one has a rewind button. (And even if we did, adding ourselves to the past as an observer constitutes a separate reality from the original one we observed.) Does this mean we are in a movie that we aren't allowed to rewind – and that we still don't have free will? Or maybe free will is a contextual issue. Could you ponder free will and self-awareness, if you lacked the former and couldn't the latter? My guess is no. But watch a mind-bending movie twice or more, and your perspective, as an observer, will change.

So does that mean that an entity with an awareness beyond our own – say, a 5 or 6 dimensional creature – can't predict our outcome? Not at all. When I look at a 2-dimensional drawing on a 3-dimensional piece of paper – the drawing is stateless. Its state is static, locked into the moment. The drawing itself will never be 3-dimensional. Even if I used the 4^th dimension of time, in my own context, to ball up the paper – the drawing itself is still on a 2-dimensional plane. I assert that the metaphor can be extended to us 3-dimensional creatures on our fixed path through 4-dimensional space. If we have no soul, and our consciousness will never leave this state – then we have free will in the sense that our own path is uncertain to us and that predestination for us is true but we will never tap it. If we do have a soul, and we will eventually transcend our current context, then we will observe our experiences, become different for it, and make "choices" within this new context.

This leaves questions. (There are always questions, it is the human condition.) Higher states of consciousness may or may not extend limitlessly – and our current level of consciousness as a result may be the only one. For such pondering, I leave you with an XKCD:

I Can't Sleep...

2009-11-24T21:16:00.002-08:00

...because I watched someone get fired today.

Since I was hired (as the 4th employee) at my current place of employment, 2 years have passed, and 12 people have been hired. For the first time in our company's history, we terminated someone today. Someone who I was very close to almost calling a "friend" instead of a coworker.

This coworker, in tears, managed to let an outburst ("Hey ya'll, just thought you should know I'm being *fired*, so Happy Thanksgiving and Merry Christmas...") as this person was ushered out the door. I saw pain in this person's eyes. This single parent who is now unemployed 2 days before Thanksgiving and 4 weeks before Christmas.

My first thoughts were "How did this happen?" My second thoughts were "Is it because they just didn't like this person?" And, later in the day, my third set of thoughts, as irrational as they were, was "How do I keep this from happening to me?" (I know enough of the details to know that the termination was marginally justifiable - but this person was so kind and thoughtful that it just seems like heartless timing.)

I've been fired before. 3 times, in fact. Each time has a story (that I'm sure are floating around on my blog somewhere), but I feel like on average I'm only about 60% reasonably responsible for those incidents. Not responsible enough to feel like I have major flaws in my work ethic or employability, but too much to keep me from being paranoid.

In the last 8 hours, I've found myself flashing back to the fear, (nay, near panic attacks), that I experienced during my own terminations. Which flashes me back to the same symptoms I had those several times, all those years ago, I was called to the principal's office growing up. Each time, and even this one, leaving me so wracked that my brain keeps leaning towards wanting to lash out irrationally. (With wit and narcicism only, I might add - nothing sociopathic or violent.)

I don't know what it is, but situations where I feel no amount of rhetoric (which I mean quite literally) in the world will change the outcome. So partially, it is a trust issue. I'm literally afraid that an idiot or an asshole will decide I'm not worthy and dump me on my ass and leave me vulnerable. It's a horrible explanation of the thought processes I've had today - it makes me sound like I have some sort Freudian problem - and I can't surmise what the problem arose from. Not understanding my father's (relatively light) discipline growing up? Being abandoned by my mother without due cause or reason? Even if these *are* viable explanations, it doesn't help. (These are not things I dwell on - honestly - but they define who I am. I see them as explanations all the time for some of the oddities in my day-to-day behavior.)

It's a very primal, distinct reaction I have. And like I said, it's only been triggered but a handful of times in my life. And today, I've literally had to stop myself from sub-vocalizing horrible emotions that, given enough festering room, could fulfill my own fears.

I would like to think I have a good handle on my demons, but sometimes I don't know. If I got too happy with a bad status-quo, became a little too non-complacent, or started holding the wrong grudges, and ended up in this coworker's shoes - it would be hard for me to not burn bridges or even come to grips with myself. Maybe I just have a problem with authority - but I'm still not sure what that means exactly.

Maybe I'm normal. I mean, no one wants to get fired! But I'm the one typing a blog entry about this an hour after I tried to go to bed.

Heck, I'm still shaking. But I guess being outside in 45-degree weather with nothing but a laptop, a pack of smokes, and a bath robe might be playing a part in the equation.