Category: tech things!

these things are geeky!

Do Americans want to build the future anymore?

(Saturn 5 liftoff courtesy NASA)

I’ve read some excerpts and discussions of Newt Gingrich’s speech about settling the Moon and allowing the colony(s) to become States of the United States. He’s gotten a lot of flack from all sides on that, a disturbing amount coming from the conservative blogosphere. It’s like so many Americans don’t want to think about a future that might involve doing something we haven’t done before, because “it’s too crazy” or “too dangerous” or “too expensive.”

After reading a lot of “conservative” commentary on many blogs, it’s just depressing to hear coming from them the same Leftist phrases I heard in the 70’s dismissing the space program, mainly “it’s too costly in money and lives” to go into space, “we need to solve the problems here on Earth, first.” We used to dream big, and we used to “do big,” often just to spite the naysayers and doom mongers who said something couldn’t be done.

Our ancestors carved a continent-wide Republic out of nothing, laid thousands of miles and kilotons of steel in bridges, railroads, buildings, dams. Twice they fought and destroyed the forces of totalitarians, against whom it was “too dangerous” and “too risky” to try to even fight, much less beat down. They and we even dared to dream of expanding our frontier into that great black Unknown above our heads, and the men and women of that Great Generation that defeated the Axis powers actually pulled it off, actually putting people on another world! For some of us that watched it as children then, it was amazing, thrilling, it made us think that we could dream and do big things like that, too!

But somehow we let the bureaucrats and politicians and naysayers take over the dreams, a host of “Grima Wormtongues” whispering soft words of “take it easy”, “don’t rock the boat”, “play it safe”, weakening us like Theoden in “Lord of the Rings”, making our society old before its time. I hope we can wake up as a culture, start to dream and do big again, but I’m afraid the “sensible” voices are too loud to hear above. SpaceX and Bigelow and the others might be able to prove the “too expensive” and “too crazy” voices wrong and start to build their own infrastructures out there, unless the FAA/NASA/EPA/DHS/NLRB bureaucrats suck the life out of the infant industries in their cradles.

It’s possible that it may be left to countries that are young and energetic and hopeful, like India or Brazil, to take up the flag of frontier building, of facing and facing down the future. They’re likely more motivated than we are, anyway. We have more important things to do, like catch up on “Jersey Shore” and update our Facebook pages.

(expanded from a comment on the Evil Blogger Lady’s website

It’s coming, the Geek Singularity! A review of the webcomic “Weregeek”

This webcomic, “Weregeek”, is one of my favorites, mainly because it deals with all kinds of nerdy, geeky, fanboy things, like RPGs, sci-fi, games, comics, etc.

http://www.weregeek.com

This webcomic, “Weregeek”, is one of my favorites, mainly because it deals with all kinds of nerdy, geeky, fanboy things, like RPGs, sci-fi, games, comics, etc. Continue reading “It’s coming, the Geek Singularity! A review of the webcomic “Weregeek””

Be prepared to kiss your Internet goodbye…

Our Government is about to take away most of our rights on the Internet, all in the name of preserving the profits of the movie and music industry, two groups that have already made copyright a permanent thing, even though it spits on the memory of the Founders. The idea of making some money off of a creation is okay, but the Founders understood that society and the US in particular would benefit if that time was limited.

But after Disney and other companies became powerful (by using creations that were freely available) they were able to “persuade” (buy off) the Government into making copyright permanent, so that creations never become free to use by the next generation of Disneys. Regular people will lose their rights, all in order to protect another year’s worth of profit, even though the companies have had 80+ years to make their money.

The Internet has been the one channel that the movie and music industries couldn’t control, which means we US citizens were not being controlled, which means we were free to speak, to create, to copy and create new things from the copies (the Founders called this “fair use”).

Now we have one chance to keep our free channel open, but Disney and Sony and Fox and Comcast have a lot of money that they’ve used to buy Congress, and to spread lies and propaganda about the Internet and its users.

Watch what will happen if Sony and Fox and others get their way:

Presenting The Oomphalapompatronium!

Now, if this thing doesn’t make you want to go out to the garage and throw together some kind of music-making thingamajig, I don’t know what would!

Apparently this guy, Leonard Solomon, makes all kinds of musical instruments out of, well, stuff. He gives performances of his musical and geeky machinery, since at least 1985. Check out the other videos on his page!

Impressive Photoshop painting skills

This person has them, by a long shot. Goes from a sketch, to a drawing, to a painting, to near photorealism. Catchy Russian music, too…

A mini-rant about my profession…

I’ve just spent the last two days fighting a software problem at work, one that has kept me from making any progress on the task I was assigned. It wasn’t a problem with the program thatI was assigned to fix, it was a problem with the tools I was trying to use to find the problem in the program in the first place. The fact that the tools are also software, and the fact that the tools also have bugs has been causing far too much stress, mainly because it was so ultimately wasteful of time (and of my limited sanity!). As I drove home last night, after 10 utterly fruitless hours spent trying variation after variation of settings and configurations and watching them all fail to make any difference at all, I thought of ways of trying to describe to non-programmers why I was getting stressed. After all, surely software should be easy to do, and far less stressful than something physical like building a house. As I drove along, I realized a pretty good analogy in house-building.

Imagine trying to build a house, when you are limited to only the tools and supplies you have with you.

Imagine that all the tools you have to use, all the supplies you have to work with, were made with other shoddy tools.

Imagine that the tools work about 80 percent of the time. Your hammer’s head flies off the handle at odd times with no warning, your screwdriver’s handle comes off the shaft, your power drill bursts into flames. Always randomly, always without warning, and at least once a day. And you can’t replace them.

Imagine your saw is made of high-quality aircraft titanium, but it’s missing about 20% of its teeth, and is slightly warped.

Imagine you have to pour a concrete foundation for a 1200 square foot house, but you only have one 5 gallon bucket.

Imagine that the architect keeps bringing in changes every day, on things you’ve already managed to put together.

Imagine the person wanting the house insists that you put in PVC pipe, but you’re not allowed to cut or bend any of the pipe.

Imagine they also want a sophisticated air conditioner installed, but won’t tell you where, and won’t give you the installation instructions, and won’t give you the specialized parts to make it fit in and work with the power.

Imagine building a house this way, knowing you can only use what you have, even if you need more or better supplies and tools. This is what developing software is like in the 21st Century, and has been for the past 30 years of my career. We could have more robust tools, that are at least as dependable as a carpenter’s, we could have easily adaptable procedures that can handle changes to design, and we could build software that is more robust and less fragile.

We could, if there were enough people who cared, who were willing to see (and admit to) the problems, and who were willing to spend the effort in time and money to fix the problems. Unfortunately there are far too many people, both technical and management, who accept the status quo, each for their own reasons. Management is more concerned about the illusion of saving money, even though shoddy tools and the lack of good ones causes much more waste of time, which is really money after all.

Many technical people, on the other hand, don’t mind the difficulty that using poor tools entails, and often don’t even know that better ways are possible.

More on that in another rant.