Saturday, November 29, 2008

Madagascar 2: Escape to Africa



I would never have imagined that a movie could have successfully combined references to Jaws and Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King along with a sacrifice to a volcano in one scene. That was before Lisa and I saw Madagascar 2 this afternoon. Since this movie is from Dreamworks Animation, there are lots of clever pop culture references. The CGI animation is state-of-the-art, and as such may be taken for granted. That's a bit of a shame, because it is so well done.

We laughed quite a bit and had our heartstrings tugged, too.

Thinking back to the summer, three of the last four movies we've seen at the cinema have been CGI comedies. The other one was Will Smith's usual big summer release. I find that I have no desire to pay $8.00 for 2 hours of heavy melodrama, tragedy, or completely mindless action any more. A $4.00 matinee that makes me laugh is what it takes to get me to the cinema nowadays.

If you saw the first Madagascar three years ago, you should remember the penguins. They steal the show again, especially when they stage a mugging just after the opening credits.

Black Friday

Yesterday, on the biggest shopping day of the year, an employee at a Long Island Wal-Mart was trampled to death when, just after the front doors were opened, the crowd of around 2000 "out of control" shoppers surged in. These same shoppers protested the store closing for several hours because an employee had been killed. One Wal-Mart worker was quoted, "How could you take a man's life to save $20 on a TV?"

I have no problem with quite a lot of the commercialization that comes with Christmas. This is the time of year that most American retail establishments live or die by; but, people that will trample someone else to death over savings on material goods? They've lost touch with why we give gifts.

I refuse to sully the spiritual underpinnings of the Christmas season by honoring the dollar to anything close to that extent.

Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Another Thing About That Elephant In The Room


I had both a mammogram and an ultrasound this morning. The radiologist interpreting the tests diagnosed me as having gynecomastia, which is the development of large mammary glands in males, resulting in breast enlargement. This can be caused by certain prescription drugs or by changes in sex-related hormones; many cases have no clear cause.

In my case, I'm not taking any drugs known or even suspected to cause gynecomastia.

The radiologist indicated that the lump is benign, and there's no need for any follow up treatment. That's why the elephant is doing a happy dance.

Monday, November 24, 2008

The Christmas Season Has Started!

The Trans-Siberian Orchestra came to Greensboro last Friday, and as is our custom, Lisa and I went. This is five years running we've gone to see TSO live, and this year we took Lisa's mom Meki, brother Rusty, nephew Cooper, and niece Ripley. A couple of the vocalists were different this year, as were the bassist and one of the keyboardists, but the heart of the performance is guitarists Chris Caffery and Alex Skolnick, who have been in the traveling troop we've seen every year. Oh, and the light show:



We also went to the Tanglewood Festival of Lights in Winston-Salem, on Saturday night. There are roughly 1,000,000 lights in all the displays, and a great deal of cleverness. Here's the final display:

In the woods


CNN reported this bemusing story today.

Friday, November 21, 2008

Last Night While We Slept


My car and the bush that guards it got a dusting. Central North Carolina, November, and snow just don't mix.

The Future is Here, and So is the Past

I've just read two wildly divergent bloggers / columnists, John Scalzi and Chet Flippo. The first is a science fiction writer, the second a music journalist who covers country music. And they both had some extremely interesting points about human behavior and identity (both individual and group), and how these are affected by technology.

Scalzi is here, and Flippo is here.

Thursday, November 20, 2008

DotNot, Part 3.5

I forgot to mention the most frustrating characteristic of Microsoft .Net in my last DotNot post. C#, Visual Basic .Net, and indeed any .Net language, are strongly typed programming languages. Types in .Net include not only all data items, but all classes.

I have never before programmed in languages that are so rigid in conversions between data types, and this concept is harder to wrap my brain around than any purely object oriented concept I have encountered.

About That Elephant In The Room

I've long heard the saying about ignoring the elephant in the room, and I don't want to be guilty of ignoring an obvious truth. So, here goes.

I have a lump in my right breast, and my doctor is sending me to a specialist for a mammogram and an ultrasound. It's also a source of concern that my mom has twice had breast cancer.

This may be nothing, or it may be everything. I'd be rather deep in denial if I said I were totally unconcerned, but I'm not afraid. I'm going to wait to freak out until I have something to freak out over.

Wednesday, November 19, 2008

DotNot, Part 3

Previously in this series, I have covered my professional history, my past. Before I move on to an extended discussion of the present, let's sum up a couple of pertinent points concerning the past.

As a software developer primarily using COBOL, I thoroughly internalized the procedural programming model. This methodology requires an extremely straightforward, step-by-step mode of thinking. A flowchart is a very good representation of this style.

Scope is the lifetime of a data item in a program. It is also the reach of both a piece of information and executable code. In a program written in a procedural oriented program, scope encompasses the entire program.

So, to the present. The dominant software development methodology currently is object oriented programming. What, you may rightly wonder, does this mean, and how is it different from what went before?

Object oriented programming, or OOP, is a philosophy that focuses on "black box" entities rather than processes. It is a way to represent real life items, their attributes, and their behaviors in executable code. These representations, these "objects", are discrete building blocks that, when combined, form functional programs. They are also easy to reuse.

OOP is accomplished through myriad programming tools, among them the classic languages C++ and Smalltalk, as well as the contemporary Java from Sun Microsystems and Microsoft's C# and Visual Basic.Net. Each of these languages must support certain concepts: encapsulation, inheritance, polymorphism.

Encapsulation is the embodiment of a program as a black box object. The idea is that the user of an object needs to know that as long as the interface to the object is consistent, he will receive consistent data back on each use; there is no need for the user to be aware of the inner workings of the object. The interface defines what will be passed to the object and the what will be returned to the user. The how of achieving this is hidden from the user, encapsulated in the object.

Inheritance is the notion that you start with a very generic template in code. This template is called a class, and it contains your basic functionality. Now, describe a slightly more specific case, one that requires one or more small functional extensions. This more specific case requires a new class that is derived from the generic base class; the only new code is what the extensions require. Everything else is inherited from the base class. Think Car or Truck based on Vehicle. This can be extended to more and more specific cases.

Remember that a class is a template for an object; an object in turn is an instance of a class. When the program for a class is executed, an object has been instantiated.

Polymorphism means that something has multiple forms. Objects have methods, which, when invoked, do something; in fact, an object can have multiple methods with the same name. Imagine Car Starts using only a key in normal circumstances, but it Starts with a key and jumper cables when the battery is dead. Object Car has at least two Starts methods, and the one that executes depends on what parameters are passed when the method is invoked.

There's certainly more to OOP than this introduction, but take away this basic difference from the procedural model: where procedural programming is extremely straightforward, specific, and concrete, OOP is indirect and generic. Its goal is the abstraction of functionality, especially very common functions, into a library of plug-in modules that can be snapped into an application wherever they're needed, and reused as often as possible.

In OOP, the scope of both data and executable code is severely limited compared to a procedural program.

My company uses Microsoft technology in software development. Microsoft's approach to OOP is the .Net (pronounced dot net) framework, and as I've said before, OOP is a struggle for any programmer who learned and practiced procedural programming, as I did, for 15 years. That's why this series of essays has been entitled DotNot.

I learn any new concept or skill best by hands-on practice. As I do more OOP, the struggle lessens, so maybe I'll reach DotYes someday.




An addendum, wherein I whine about the .Net type system.

If the Matrix ran on Windows XP

Monday, November 17, 2008

Somebody stop the wagon...

...that I fell off of last week! I didn't make the best choices in what I ate last week, but at least I didn't gain any weight. I did exercise a bit more than I had been.

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Empire From The Ashes



This is an omnibus edition of three early novels by David Weber: Mutineer's Moon, The Armageddon Inheritance, and Heirs of Empire. This story is grand scale space opera, and it's a great deal of fun.

In Mutineer's Moon, we find that Earth's moon is actually a disguised starship named Dahak that has been in place for 51,000 years. It is following the orders of its captain, to quarantine a group of crew members who mutinied, fled to Earth, and have used their superior technology to control and reshape the destiny of the human race. Dahak has over the millenia become self-aware and more autonomous than his initial programming allows; he impresses astronaut Colin MacIntyre to be his new captain. There is a new urgency to Dahak's actions. He was part of the fleet of an interstellar empire, the Fourth Imperium, which was formed to combat the repeated encroachment of the genocidal Achuultani, and readings from still active sensors tell him that the Achuultani have returned and are a couple of years away from Earth. War against the mutineers ensues.

The Armageddon Inheritance chronicles the larger war against the Achuultani and the formation of the Fifth Imperium.

Heirs of Empire tells the story of an unbelievably ruthless and deadly conspiracy against the Fifth Imperium by one of the human descendants of the Dahak mutineers.

Despite coming out early in his career, these novels show many of Weber's considerable strengths: tight plotting, furious action, intricate political maneuvering; and few of his faults: straw man characters (his villains especially tend to be rather two dimensional) and bloated prose (he handles exposition by resorting to huge info dumps, often in the middle of conversations).

Weber often has pivotal events happen off-stage and then has other characters tell the reader what happened. This greatly dilutes the impact of the climax of one of the plot strands in Heirs of Empire. A more stringent editor could help keep this from happening.

Veteran's Day 2008

Today is Veteran's Day here in the US. It's Armistice Day in many other countries. World War I ended 90 years ago today. My grandfather was on a troop ship headed for Europe on that day.

My father was drafted not long after the end of the Korean War. He had no desire to be a warrior, but he served his two year tour of duty in Germany.

I am forever proud of and grateful for their service.

I can't match what they did. To my lasting shame, I failed Air Force Office Training School.

I would not want to see my children sacrificed to the machine, the grind of War. But, if any one of them told me she or he was answering Uncle Sam's call, I would look her or him in the eye and tell them how very proud I was. And I'd mean it. You give up a great deal to join the Armed Forces, and I'd never dishonor that decision.

I have twice in my life knowingly stood on sacred ground. Abraham Lincoln said this about the Gettysburg battlefield: The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. And the other place?

The Wall at Night

Blood, memory, and sacrifice. The willingness to give everything. Some do it for blood lust. Some do it for discipline. Some do it for love.

To our troops past and presence: Thank you. May we serve you as well as you have served us.

Sunday, November 9, 2008

A Fine Carolina Autumn Afternoon

Today I had to work, testing several web transactions for a client company's dealer network after a mainframe upgrade. It would have been very straightforward, if I'd remembered to bring a list of user ids and passwords home. I'm glad the office is only a 15 minute drive away. I'm not so glad that there was network maintenance going on in the office. On the other hand, there were only intermittent outages, and I was able to test everything within 30 minutes.

Life's good, and I just had to share this view:


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Now playing: Creedence Clearwater Revival - Lookin' Out My Back Door
via FoxyTunes

Saturday, November 8, 2008

The Odd Connection

I recently finished re-reading Odd Thomas, and I see a bit more clearly now why Koontz fans are split over the character of Odd. He's a very humble fellow, but his humility is almost aggressive. We're to accept him as nearly as hesitant to act as Hamlet, if we're to accept him at all. And yet, if we buy into the premise that Odd sees the "restless dead" and acts as an agent of justice and perhaps comfort for them, we must buy also that he has to be very sure before he does act. Additionally, we have to understand that he has to live a very simple, almost ascetic, life to maintain his sanity.

Odd accepts, indeed embraces, Mystery in his life. See the Black Room in the Fungus Man's house as the prime example in this first volume in the series.

I am currently reading a collection of HP Lovecraft stories, beginning with The Call of Cthulu, and incredibly I have noticed marked similarities between this story and Odd Thomas. This is most notable in the Lovecraftian narrator's acceptance of Mystery, and in the tone of prose. This part I'm not really sure how to explain; it really has to be experienced in the reading.

Of course, Mystery in Lovecraft means something quite different than it does in Koontz. After all, remember that Cthulu and the other Old Ones are the very incarnation of evil and horror and madness. I guess I can't push this connection, this similarity, all that far.

Wednesday, November 5, 2008

The Last Political Post

Did you hear the speeches last night? John McCain was as gracious and honorable in defeat as it's possible to be. Barack Obama showed himself to be a master orator capable of rising to a historical moment.

I've heard the cliche all my life that, in this country, anyone can grow up to be anything if he or she has the vision to see the path forward and the persistence to stay on it. We now see that to be more true than in the past. Only in America indeed.

Thanks, Dad, for the phone call tonight.

RIP Michael Crichton

The Andromeda Strain. Westworld. Congo. Jurassic Park. ER. This man provided me much entertainment in my younger days, and he was one of the very few people who succeeded as a bestselling author, a film director, and a TV producer. He was a Harvard trained doctor who never practiced medicine, an Emmy and Peabody winner. He may not really have been a Renaissance man, but he was surely close.

His books were written in such a matter-of-fact way, usually tied very close to the present day, that you had to wonder if they factual, if they were true. That's a mark of a superior storyteller. I hope he's enjoying spinning tales in Eternity.

Saturday, November 1, 2008

The downside can be harsh and steep

The evening after I posted my Election 2008 entry, my dad called and told me he'd read it. This was quite a surprise; he's got a severe computer phobia, and he can't type.

He took strenuous exception to my political choices, to the point of imploring me to change my mind. I declined.

My dad then proceeded to declare that my judgment is impaired. When he said that, I felt part of the bedrock of my life shift, and break.

How long does it take for something like this to heal?