chrishowie.com

Today was a really good day, at least for summer break. I got to see my girlfriend again (second time in the last week… woot), got a long-standing WikiBench todo done, and found some pretty nasty bugs in Mono’s implementation of the 2.0 framework TryParse methods for integer types.

Somewhere in there I sent a form letter to the three Indiana congressmen urging them not to support the IPPA of 2007. I’d encourage you to do the same.

WikiBench now has proper support for blacklisting anonymous users, as well as blocks of IP addresses. You can ask it to blacklist, say “192.168.0.0/8″ and every edit coming from an anonymous user in that range will be reported. Combined with state persistence, as I just blogged about, this is really useful. I also toyed with the idea of allowing a user to maintain multiple user-defined blacklists, but am not certain when or if this will happen.

Coming soon to WikiBench: watchlist and citation builder pads.

(I should really release a beta soon…)

I got a car! They just had some work done on it so it should be working for a while yet. Not bad for $500.

Some of you may know that I celebrated my 21st birthday recently. So I guess I’m legally an adult according to the law, which means that I should be mature enough to choose how much of my time I want to spend drunk. Apparently turning 21 is that life-changing, I guess, according to the government anyway. I think I’ll stay sober, thanks.

It got me thinking though. Does our society really have a grasp on what it means to be a man? If popular culture is to be believed, the measure of manhood is how much sex you can get, how many different people you get it with, how much pain you inflict on said persons, and how big your porn collection is. Oh, and throw some racism in for good measure.

It’s amazing how many of my close friends subscribe to this “ideal.” There are some things I can tolerate; nobody’s perfect. But the way society tells men to treat women is so bizarre, and frequently conflicting. We have on the one hand rap “music” with its utilitarian view (and that’s being generous) and sitcoms that glorify cheating, and on the other we have advertisements for diamond stores and … uhm, well, I just sat here for about five minutes trying to come up with another counterexample and couldn’t think of anything. Suffice it to say that society has some complex on this subject. But I think it’s fair to say that the dominant message is that women are devices for the amusement and pleasure of man, and if you don’t like the one you’ve got you can throw her away and get another.

This is absolutely sickening. Maybe it’s just me. Maybe it’s the fact that my parents have been outstanding role models on this subject. Maybe I’m a dinosaur… at 21. But every time I hear this message (and it’s impossible to avoid today) I get enraged. To me a woman has always been someone you treat with respect and courtesy. You don’t make jokes about her behind her back to impress your buddies. You don’t order her around like your slave. You don’t tell her you’re working late so you can go do it with some whore at your workplace.

This message from society isn’t how to be a man, it’s how to be an animal. It’s degrading to women and to men. Where did honor go?

I’m not trying to rant (well, maybe a little). I just think that it’s time men reclaim manhood — real manhood, not this degenerated replacement we are spoonfed by culture.

My school newspaper published an article about Wikipedia. The author used me as a source, so I thought I’d share it here. I only noticed one minor factual error — VandalSniper is used by many non-administrators too; it’s not limited to admins.

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Tonight Anderson University SIFE Consulting held their group competition. My group was responsible for the creation of an ecommerce website for Rivers Resources, a local company that sells among other things ink and toner cartridges at rates below OEM.

I was the lead web developer for the project, and it went smoothly for the most part. The site has not been deployed yet as there is still a little work to be done before the site is ready for production, but the major pieces work. A little polish to the shopping cart and it’ll be ready.

We competed against four other groups. While we did not win, several of the judges told us that it was obvious we did the most work out of all of them, and the Rivers Resources CEO may be hiring several members of our group to expand the website to include some of their other products.

It was a fun project. I got to work with several good friends, and while I enjoyed the experience I am also glad to have one less responsibility.

Update: Our team manager just told us that we placed 2nd. Considering that the group that won used a box of candy as their handout to the judges, that’s not bad!

I’ve written before about how the academic world has frustrated me. The feeling is coming back, only this time related to my major, not the required liberal arts courses. And more related to the students than the professors.

I realize this is a dangerous thing to say, as many of my friends read this blog, but I feel like I have to say something.

My entire elementary and high school education was gained through homeschooling. The only other student I came into contact with on a daily basis was my brother. While this restricted my social development, I quickly learned how to teach myself. This resulted in a different frame of mind: education is about the student seeking knowledge. Hanging out online in various computer-related IRC channels further strengthened this notion, as geeks are reluctant to help someone with a problem unless they’ve demonstrated that they’ve tried to solve it on their own and failed.

At college I see the antithesis of this idea played out daily. Students ask for help with trivial homework, expect a direct “this-is-what-you-must-do” answer, and are frustrated when the professor responds with a question that (if the student took any time at all to think about) would solve their problem. I am sick of students who expect to be spoonfed answers. I am even more sick of professors who comply.

This is the machine of education. This is the machine that creates “computer scientists” who barely understand the concept of data type casting, who, if you asked them to modify a simple sorting algorithm to return elements in reverse order, would stare at you as if you had just asked them to change the laws of physics.

Computer science is not memorization of past solutions. It is a constantly changing field, and education is creating students that can barely grasp last year’s technology.

Computer science is a lost art.

It’s true. For the first time in my life, I am head over heels in love. I’m not even sure what to write; words are about as inadequate to express love as a glass is to contain the ocean. But since this is mainly a technology blog, it may be useful to explain it like this.

When I receive a SYN packet from her IP address, every other packet in my outbound queue is deferred for the reply SYN+ACK. When I receive the inevitable ACK the PSU voltage is slightly increased, and the CPU frequency accelerates a bit (sometimes increasing the error rate). The GPU starts blurring and desaturating irrelevant portions of the output video buffer. Every packet transferred in this connection is logged to disk. For the life of the connection, the RTC fires much less often, sometimes as little as a fifth of what it should, requiring frequent synchronization of the system clock using an external time server. Existing connections may be randomly disconnected, and incoming SYNs have a greater chance of being ignored (based, of course, on the importance of the remote host). Most processes are reniced to 19 or sent SIGSTOP.

When the FIN is received, the reply FIN+ACK is placed at the very end of the outbound queue and delayed as long as possible. Then the ACK response is received. The CPU frequency and PSU voltage drop a bit, but remain higher than usual. Incoming connections are again accepted, and processes are gradually restored, being reniced back to 0 or sent SIGCONT. The RTC begins firing normally, while the GPU still blurs the output buffer for some time, eventually returning to normal operation.

Several times a day, the kernel inexplicably assigns real-time scheduling to a process whose only job is to analyze the logs of previous connections. Some of the effects described above may be experienced while this process executes. Interrupting this process or altering the scheduling may take several minutes. When this finally occurs, the inbound packet buffer may have overflowed due to the lack of time slices given to the networking stack, resulting in varying degrees of packet loss on established connections, and possibly a missed connection or two.

Periodically a SYN will be sent to her IP address. If no connection is established within several hours, the PSU voltage may drop below normal and the CPU error rate may increase dramatically.

That’s about as close as I can get. Don’t bother calling me a geek; I already know.

I love you, De.

If you don’t like rants you may not want to read this post. But quite frankly I can’t hold it in anymore.

College has drained me. Not merely to the point of having no energy (when does college not do that) but to the point where I just don’t care about anything. I used to love working with computers. Programming wasn’t just a fun way to occupy an afternoon, it was a passion. That is gone, destroyed by the machine of “education.” How can I work on my projects knowing that I have a ton of homework to do? But I have no motivation to do homework. Why should I? Half of it is pointless, the other half is mindless programming that I did when I was, oh I don’t know, ten? Eleven? So to escape the torture I work on projects or play video games. Which I can’t do, because I feel guilty for wasting my time.

And I’m paying for this wonderful experience.

There’s no point in talking to any of the faculty or administration about it. “This is preparing you for life,” blah, blah. Yeah well in life I’ll be recieving a paycheck for putting up with crap; I won’t be paying you so you can make me put up with crap.

In case one of my professors is reading this, I want you to know that it is not you that I’m upset with. It’s the whole system of “education” — this thing that’s supposed to give me passion for learning, not take it away. I have liked most of my professors, even the ones for the classes that I can’t stand. (Sometimes especially those.)

It’s also not any of my friends — actually it’s only because of my friends that I’ve made it this far. But enough it enough. This summer I will be putting together a resume and will start hunting for a programming job.

And If I get a stable one, then the hell with college.

It’s amazing how much you forget over the years. That’s why I’ve started my own personal wiki to record events, people, places, and other things. I’m not sure if it will be made public as it may contain quite a bit of personal information, but I may post selected articles from time to time.

I hope to eventually have quite a sizable collection of articles that I can browse for reference and nostalgia’s sake.