Ramblings of a Wayward Code Slave

The International Dark Sky Association

Since the immortal phrase by astronomer Carl Sagan was said on television in the '70s (remember "Cosmos"?) the stars have stayed up there but our ability to see them has been decreasing rapidly. Thanks to mercury and sodium vapor lights we pollute the night skies with light, effectively eliminating any chance to see the stars. There are still a few up there that are visible in urban/suburban areas, but the skies don't look anything like they should.

I've lived in several urban areas and visited others. Houston, Dallas, Lafayette, Shreveport -- they all have the same problem: a night sky that looks yellowish from all of the lights shining upward with only a few stars being visible. The interesting thing is that the outdoor lighting is shining the wrong way! Have you ever seen an old-fashioned flash-bulb attachment for a camera? They have this circular metal reflector behind the flash bulb. Why? Because the photographer doesn't want the light in his face, but he does want it focused forward. There are similar devices that can be attached to most outdoor lighting, including the major offenders -- mercury and sodium vapor lights. They just cost a bit more so cities don't purchase them. Dumb. We're squandering a special piece of the beauty of our planet. Would you buy a house on a lake and keep the blinds closed all the time? We've got one helluva good view if you're fortunate enough to be far enough in the boondocks to see it.

I'm an amateur astronomer, so I can tell you plenty of stories about trying to find places that are out of the way, dark, and safe for viewing. My luck has varied quite dramatically in that effort, but I remember finding the Holy Grail of locations. I have an aunt who used to own a ranch in Round Top, Texas, about 1 1/2 hours out of Houston. I've only been there once overnight, but it was an experience I still remember even after almost 14 years. It was a cold night close to New Year's Eve, and I walked out for a bit to look at the sky. The moon wasn't visible at all which made it that much more dramatic. The detail I could see with just my own imperfect sight -- the Milky Way sprawling across the sky, the Orion Nebula, and more stars than I thought could exist -- was incredible. I felt the presence of God more strongly standing there under the stars than I ever have in a church. It's an experience that transcends understanding unless you've been someplace similar.

It would be a travesty if we continue along our road of urbanization to the point where it's infeasible for the typical person to witness this sight and experience this feeling. Unfortunately, it's already happening. Mount Palomar, located in southern California about 100 miles away from Los Angeles, was one of the premier observatories for decades before more modern observatories started popping up in Hawaii, Chile, and other places. Now, Mount Palomar struggles to do research because Los Angeles has continued to grow since the '40s and its light pollution has reached the skies around the observatory. If Los Angeles had only purchased light shields for the outdoor lighting as they bought the lighting it wouldn't have been such a massive expense. They have laws in Los Angeles to completely encase oil rigs inside concrete enclosures to not offend people's sight. With that degree of pickiness, why not require the extra money for a light shield?

The irony is that the light shields focus most of the light downward where it can do some good. That means darker skies as well as brighter sidewalks and freeways. And if we don't need them brighter then we can use lower-wattage bulbs and save money, starting with the cost of the shields! It just makes sense all the way around...

So support the International Dark Sky Association and make municipalities stop throwing away our good view on the universe!

InformationWeek > IT Employment > Study: Technology, Not Outsourcing Is The Biggest Threat To Jobs > June 25, 2004

Well, it looks like we're all shooting ourselves in the foot in the IT industry. We've streamlined, optimized, and otherwise upgraded countless people out of their jobs so I guess it's only fair that we're doing it to ourselves, too.

I guess it's time to re-read that book on AI and Intelligent Agents. I wonder where I put it...

Television comes from tele for "up close" and vision for "vision". Putting the two together, television is supposed to be like our vision and up close and personal. An eye into the affairs of the world.

So how come a sampling of the things on television right now includes Close Encounters of the Third Kind for the thirty-third time, bad Japanime, a documentary on enemas in healthcare, Jerry Springer, The Nanny, and Emeril Lagasse? Is this an eye into the affairs of the world? Is this like my vision of life? It's more like a impersonal guided tour of apathy and basal swill, but with a remote control and pay-per-view.

As both an educatee and an educator, I can say without a doubt that students entering college these days are amazingly more apathetic and less motivated than people were when I was a freshman. I blame most of it on television (and the rest on the breakup of the family unit and irresponsible parents, but that's another rant). Thanks to reality TV, MTV, and a host of other offenders the children of America are awash in a sea of no-style, no-substance refuse that attempts to maintain viewers through manipulation and titillation. If we treat the youth of America as future french fry technicians with three-second attention spans then that's precisely what we're going to get.

I understand the value of entertainment. Owning over 200 DVDs myself, I enjoy a good film and am willing to see it more than once over time. However, I can make discerning choices about my viewing habits, just as I can select the salad bar at Ryan's instead of having two plates of dessert. However, the children of this country by themselves cannot discern between the quality of a show on the Discovery Channel vs. some reality TV show that depends upon the degradation and ridicule of people to get ratings (e.g., "Joe Schmo"). This is what parents are for. Without changing this rant from one on the decay of entertainment to the decay of parental supervision, I'll ask one time, "Where are the parents?" As I'm not a parent I cannot answer that, but for the sake of all of us in the future we had all better start asking it.

The sole purpose of television is to convince us to buy a certain kind of car, toothpaste, hemmorhoid cream, floor cleaner, and to dupe us into paying off our credit cards with our hard-earned home equity. Television shows cater to the lowest-common denominator and are solely interested in getting us to sit in front of the box and not leave it. Unless we as a people force our friends in the entertainment and advertising industry (and it is one industry) to raise the bar on the quality of their shows and unless we more closely monitor the viewing habits and choices of children then our future is doomed.

Greece, Rome, France, England, Russia -- all superpowers at one time and all have faded into the background. We're going the same way, except that we're doing it by shooting ourselves in the foot. And every time we turn on the television and let kids watch whatever they want (or, shame on us, watch it with them) we're loading the gun.

Recently having developed the need for image enhancement, I purchased a copy of Adobe Photoshop 5.0 LE. The LE stands for Limited Edition, but I think the only think that's limited is my ability to use it. Never before have I felt so completely inadequate when faced with a new piece of software.

In the past, I've been rather snobbish about the Fine Arts people, thinking my rational and logical Science & Engineering background vastly superior. I'm going to apologize to the first person I see with a sketch pad on campus. I feel like a drooling idiot drawing on the wall with a blue crayon.

All I wanted to do was to take an image (an old map) that required four scans -- one for each corner -- and paste them together into one image. Well, the concept of layering was simple enough, but the scanner wasn't nice enough to scan each corner of the image with the same coloring and tone. So after rotating, re-rotating, and re-re-rotating each piece to make them all line up exactly, I find that they all have different colorings and it looks like a patchwork quilt...

So, like the rational person I am, I move to the Adjust menu under Image. Since I could change so many things, I just started doing the Mad Bomber thing and experimented with each. After turning individual layers yellow, blue, and a disgusting shade of yellow-green, I aborted the process and realized that the only thing that got adjusted was my patience.

I think I'll let Kinko's scan it and I'll buy a book on Photoshop. About the only good thing out of the experience is that I stuck to my guns and purchased the software in keeping with the promise I made myself as a poor bootlegging student. I have yet to bootleg a piece of software since I've been gainfully employed. Of course, gainfully is debatable in academia, but I count that even though it's questionable.

Hoorah! The fan motor showed up today and got installed this afternoon. In the past two hours the temperature has dropped in the house from 87 to 84. At this rate, we should be in the mid-70s by prime time.

It always takes something like this to make me take a step back and appreciate the little things in life. Back when I had that surgery last year I suddenly developed a fond appreciation for ice cubes since I couldn't drink anything for a few days. Now I've learned to develop an appreciation for air conditioning. I take things for granted far too often. I wonder if I do the same with people. Hmm...

At any rate, it's gonna be a great evening sitting in a cool house once again. It'll be a long time before I take A/C for granted again. By the way, I still love ice cubes. The hallmark of a truly advanced civilization must be ice and air conditioning. Unless you're Scandanavian, Siberian, or Inuit, of course.

Well, it wasn't enough that my wife's car died and had to be towed to the Hixson BMW repair shop in Monroe last month. After that $1,700 repair bill, the air conditoner in the house died last Saturday (this is Thursday at 3 A.M.) and the temperature in the house has varied from a cool 80 to a toasty 90 degrees since then. It was the condenser fan motor that went out, so this will be another $400 repair bill. And even better, the motor was due in Wednesday afternoon but the shipper sent it to the wrong place, so we're delayed an extra day. Hopefully it will be installed later today.

Now, just to add insult to injury, the battery in my truck died this afternoon and we had to get someone to put a new one in there. This was only a $70 bill but it's the principle of the matter. Enough is enough.

Our luck is so bad right now that black cats are avoiding us out of guilt.

Here's the PHP class for the RSS/XML feeds for my homepage. The word for the day is "kludge". The xslt_process() command requires filenames as parameters, so I have to take the parameters and cache them in temporary files to do the processing. So if it's a remote URL and stylesheet, it's all cool, but if it's a local stylesheet then I'm copying that from a local file to another local file first.

There's some room for optimization, obviously, but it works. The trick is that you have to have a fairly recent version of PHP (I have 4.3.3) and you need the Sablotron extensions compiled into it, plus those extensions need to be somewhat recent as well (0.98 for me). It's unfortunate that the code changes depending upon the version of PHP and Sablotron, but that's life on open source. This code should work for PHP 4.3+ with Sablotron 0.95+ if I'm not mistaken.

The cool thing about it is that it's browser-independent, so none of that hokey "Is it Netscape? Is it IE? Is it something else?" stuff is involved. This displays the same in Netscape, IE, Mozilla, Safari, and probably most everything else.

If someone optimizes the kludge, e-mail it back to me, will ya? Thanks... The code is below in a zipfile.

class.xmlFeed.php.zip

I'm getting sick of spending money on cable -- digital cable with premium channels, no less -- when I can't find a decent movie on that I haven't seen 8 times already. I'm watching "The Matrix Reloaded" again, which I also have on DVD, and I think I can act out the parts a la Rocky Horror sans the special effects. It's about time that I drop the premium channels totally -- almost everything viewable is something I've already seen at least once and the rest is just garbage that fills in the gaps.

I'm waiting for on-demand movie selection and playback to finally be deployed. They've been talking about it for years -- a video jukebox where you can select any movie you want to see at any time and watch it. If they can make it a flat-rate subscription service I'd pay for it. Why purchase DVDs when you can connect in and have it streamed to your home theater on-demand? When the transmission technology comes of age I'll be more than ready for it.

EFF: The Patent Busting Project

It's about time that someone got on the bandwagon and started challenging the idea of making common algorithms "intellectual property." I have absolutely no problem with companies patenting innovative techniques that contribute in large part to their core business, i.e., a 3D graphics company patenting a new way to speed up ray tracing. However, the idea of taking common ideas that everyone else considers to be in the public domain and patenting them is insidious. All it does is create a legal minefield for any new software development and it ensures that large corporations with legal divisions can squash their competition.

It's a known fact in the software industry that most of the innovation in the field comes from small outfits with starving programmers working nights and weekends in the garage. These people simply can't afford to do a thorough software patent check prior to going to market. If they're successful, then the big guys start checking them out for violations and, if found, then their profits fly out the window. So at best, trivial software patents are a way to bleed money from other companies for essentially nothing and, at worst, are a way to squelch the competition. In either case, it's a bad idea unless the big software companies are now more interested in becoming parasitic than in maintaining their core business.

Look at some of the original software patents. The LZW compression algorithm (UNIX compress), natural-order recalc in spreadsheets (which is just a topological sort from a data structures book that is applied to spreadsheets), and the "backing store" concept pioneered by MIT for keeping track of covered-up windows (and patented by someone else). Then there's the grossly trivial exclusive-or cursor transformation algorithm.

As a philosophical note, I don't think one should patent ideas, merely products or processes. Patenting ideas is venturing into exceedingly dangerous territory where I don't think the free enterprise system should travel.

By the way, British Telecom has a patent on traversing hyperlinks with a dial-up connection to the Internet, so the software you just used to get here probably violated their patent if you didn't use broadband.

Well, here I go again. I guess I just wasn't smart enough the last time to realize that I'm unable to regularly add entries to a Blog. What do they say? Those who don't study history are doomed to repeat it? Well, it's at least a common affliction judging from the headlines of the past year or so.

While I'm on the subject of things that need to be done that I get behind on, that report to the Louisiana Board of Regents regarding the equipment grant I received needs to be written and sent in soon. It's ironic that the only time my Academic Director wanted to talk to me this past year was to help me spend the money on the grant. If it was something I could do for him, he was all over it. If it was the other way around, my e-mail went in the trash. Maybe I'll let him write it since he was so interested in spending the money.

Today, we got rid of another person who does our yard and hired yet another. The kid who used to do the yard was okay but his mother was something of a problem. Maybe the new one will work out better.