A New Beginning

January 22, 2010 – 12:10 am

Over a year ago I got fed up with b2evolution: the blogging software I had been using for some years. The main problem I had with it was that the tools for dealing with comment spam required constant manual intervention. So I switched to using a paid Typepad account and hosted my blog at blog.limul.us. I considered this a stop-gap solution until I wrote my own minimalistic PHP blogging software. It’s not like it’s particularly hard to write blogging software, but my attempts at writing it became overly-complicated projects. I’ve recently decided to give up on the idea and simply use WordPress.

For the record, I am not a fan of WordPress. Mostly becuase it is a product that seems to always be victim to some new security vulnerability. However I now feel much more capable of staying on top of security updates than I ever have before. This is in large part due to having adopted GTD. (It should also be noted that if I could easily install and maintain Gyrobase on my VPS, I would use Foundation’s blogging module in a heartbeat.)

This blog entry also marks the renaming of my blog to “Ad Hoc”, from the far-too-plain “Eric’s Blog”. I chose this name after skimming my old Programming Language Pragmatics textbook. Considering it’s a term I often find myself using, and could easily apply to my blog posts, I figured it would fit quite well.

By Eric | Posted in limulus.net | Comments (0)

Computer Graphics as an Art

January 14, 2010 – 12:22 am

Around the time Toy Story was coming to theaters, a high school art teacher of mine said she couldn’t consider something that was computer animated to be art. I think this opinion stemmed from the misconception that once you learned to use computerized tools to do 2D or 3D animation you could create anything with very little effort. This position didn’t sit well with me at the time, but I didn’t have a basis to refute it. Since then I’ve dabbled a bit in 3D modeling and animation and there’s no doubt in my mind that—while computers do make many tasks easier like all tools do—it still takes talent and effort to produce a compelling computer animation. I’ve learned it’s a talent of which I don’t have even a modicum.

Yesterday I watched The Third & The Seventh (via Daring Fireball), a fully computer animated short film featuring iconic pieces of architecture. Watch it full screen and in HD on Vimeo’s site if you have the bandwidth. If this isn’t art then I don’t know what is.

By Eric | Posted in Computers & Technology, Random Links | Comments (0)

What’s Wrong with Miss California’s Answer

April 21, 2009 – 12:39 am

Miss California at Miss USA pageant

The Miss USA pageant isn’t something I generally find myself tuning into, but my DVR recorded it last night due to Kings moving to Saturday night. Out of morbid curiosity, I skipped around the recording until I got to the question and answer section. Miss California, or Carrie Prejean, was asked by pageant judge Perez Hilton, a popular blogger, if she thought same-sex marriage should be made legal in all 50 states. Here is her response in full:

Well I think it’s great that Americans are able to choose one or the other. We live in a land that you can choose same-sex marriage or opposite marriage. And you know what, in my country, and my family, I believe that marriage should be between a man and a woman. No offense to anybody out there, but that’s how I was raised and that’s how that I think it should be between a man and a woman.

The controversy that her answer generated seems to be focussed on the second half of her answer. I interpret that half as having to do with her religious beliefs, to which she is certainly entitled. Yet this seems to be the only part of her answer that the media is quoting.

The indisputably wrong part of Ms. Prejean’s answer is the first half, that “Americans are able to choose” same-sex marriage. This is only at most 5% true: the 2000 census populations of the states that allow same-sex marriage (Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont and Iowa) divided by the population of the U.S. is 0.047.

I suppose that in one sense, the religious sense, it is true. Religious entities are free to choose who they marry. That’s a fundamental right guaranteed by the freedom of exercise clause of the First Amendment. However, in the legal sense, the vast majority of states do not recognize marriages of same-sex couples. It is the legal sense that Mr. Hilton’s question explicitly pertained to.

Despite being factually wrong, the first half of Ms. Prejean’s answer suggests that she actually favors the legalization of same-sex marriage, calling the ability to choose “great.” I wonder if her rather bipolar response reflects America’s confusion over this issue. Many Americans probably don’t grasp that there are rights and benefits denied to gay couples who would be married if legally allowed and purely see the issue through a religious lens. If they truly understood that rights were being denied, then they’d have to come to the same conclusion as John Hodgman, that “opposition to gay marriage has no logical foundation in a civil society that is premised on equality.”

By Eric | Posted in Progressive Politics | Comments (0)

A Great Photo

June 12, 2008 – 8:25 pm

Phoenix Descent, Taken by HiRISE

I’d say that this is one of the most amazing photos ever taken.

By Eric | Posted in Random Links, Science & Skepticism | Comments (0)

Scalia On Torture

April 27, 2008 – 10:51 pm

I like Lesley Stahl, but I wish she would have presented Justice Scalia with a better argument on why torture could be considered “cruel and unusual punishment.”

Isn’t the obvious argument that it’s punishment for not giving the torturer the information he or she seeks? Either in the case that the person tortured has the information but is unwilling to give it, or doesn’t have the information and can’t make something believable up?

By Eric | Posted in Progressive Politics | Comments (0)

What I’ve Been Up To Lately

March 1, 2008 – 3:20 pm

February, despite the extra day, sure went quick. At the end of January, I was in San Francisco attending the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies annual Web Conference. Before the conference I was starting to feel sick, but during the conference I somehow got better. Then, a few days upon return to Tucson, I relapsed and spent most of the rest of the week with a fever, coughing and generally feeling miserable. Then, a week after finally getting over that bug, I wound up getting sick again; this time it was something intestinal.

I’m all better now, but the point of bringing up being sick for too much of February is that it’s not conducive to productivity. At the AAN Web Conference we announced our new product, and the good news is that everyone wants it. But the bad news is that everyone wants it yesterday, and it’s something that we’ve only just announced, not something we can start selling. (It’s also not a boxed product, but rather an improved framework for developing and maintaining our customers web sites. As such, there will be a non-insignificant amount of setup work and time to get a client’s site into the new framework.) So I wish February didn’t have to go quite so quick, since there’s quite a bit of work still to be done.

I wasn’t too much involved with the development of this product before the conference, but I have been since. I’m glad I am, because I’m pretty darn excited about it. In addition to allowing clients to more directly manage the layout, style and functionality of their sites, it should help cut down the amount of development time we spend on doing site redesigns and allow new employees get up-to-speed quicker. That’s important, because there is already enough for a new developer to learn, considering we have both a proprietary abstracted database layer (Gyrobase) and proprietary programming language (<ev>).

Speaking of <ev>, that’s what I’ve been spending just about all my free time working on improving. Currently, the language’s parser and evaluator are written completely in Perl. While you might think this is a recipe for slowness — an interpreted language running on top of an interpreted language — it actually holds up reasonably well. But that’s not to say there isn’t lots of potential for improving performance, there is.

So, I’ve spent many nights and weekends in January and early February creating a compiler and virtual machine for <ev> written in C. In 2007 I had spent a weekend here and there writing an <ev> parser in C, mostly for the purpose of being a syntax validator. But it’s secondary purpose was to be the basis for this compiler and VM I’m now writing. It’s actually come quite a way. For instance, it successfully compiles and runs code that sets and displays variables. Though there’s still many more months of work ahead to get it to interact with the massive amounts of Perl code that would be impractical to re-implement in C, plus support for loops, conditionals, and math operations.

Truth be told, this compiler/VM has become a bit of an obsession. When I discovered that a compiler and a VM weren’t really such complex things and were well within my abilities to write, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about how to go about implementing them for <ev>. And it’s actually been a lot of fun.

By Eric | Posted in Computers & Technology, Life Stuff | Comments (0)

Martin Luther King Day

January 20, 2008 – 8:57 pm

A selection from Martin Luther King’s Letter from the Birmingham Jail:

I had hoped that the white moderate would reject the myth concerning time in relation to the struggle for freedom. I have just received a letter from a white brother in Texas. He writes: “All Christians know that the colored people will receive equal rights eventually, but it is possible that you are in too great a religious hurry. It has taken Christianity almost two thousand years to accomplish what it has. The teachings of Christ take time to come to earth.” Such an attitude stems from a tragic misconception of time, from the strangely rational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.

By Eric | Posted in Progressive Politics, Random Links | Comments (0)

DailyKos Scares Me

January 11, 2008 – 9:48 pm

I mean that in the best possibly way though. I’ve posted my first substantive diary there this evening. In two short hours my thoughts on skepticism and Kucinich’s recount of the 2008 New Hampshire presidential primary generated 80 comments and 19 people voted to put it on the recommended diary list. That’s a lot of eyeballs for something that only took an hour and a half to write.

By Eric | Posted in Computers & Technology, Progressive Politics, Random Links, Science & Skepticism | Comments (0)

McCain Tries to Scare Up Some Votes

January 6, 2008 – 10:39 pm

McCain has a web-only ad that uses footage of a terrorist bombing to scare people into voting for him in the Republican primaries. Tim Russert confronted him about it on this morning’s Meet The Press:

Despicable.

By Eric | Posted in Progressive Politics | Comments (0)

Bring Out Your Base!

December 30, 2007 – 9:55 am

Looks like this is what the Arizona GOP is planning to bring their xenophobic base out to the polls in 2008:

Rep. Russell Pearce, R-Mesa, says he is introducing measures this legislative session to:

  • Deny regular birth certificates to babies born in Arizona unless at least one parent proves citizenship.
  • Expand the state crime of trespass to cover anyone in the U.S. without authorization.
  • Require proof of legal presence in the U.S. to register a vehicle or get a title.
  • Deny workers’ compensation benefits to undocumented workers injured on the job.
  • Bar local policies that prohibit police officers from checking the immigration status of those they encounter.

Pearce is not taking any chances the measures will be rejected by Democratic Gov. Janet Napolitano, who previously vetoed a trespass bill and similar proposals. All are being drafted so if they pass the Republican-controlled Legislature they go directly to the ballot.

The fact that that first provision is meant to deny citizenship to people born within the borders of the United States — and therefore unconstitutional under the 14th amendment — won’t prevent the legislature from allowing this proposition go to the ballot. They’ve proven that they can’t be trusted to uphold the Constitution.

By Eric | Posted in Progressive Politics | Comments (0)