So the reason I really like the GPLv2 is exactly that it allows everybody to be selfish and not having to really believe in any other politics. We can all be selfish and do things that make sense for ourselves, and it really boils down to a very simple equation: “I will get more effort out of other people working on it too, than I have to give back.”

And yes, you can be a free-loader, and not do anything at all, but on the other hand, if you do that you don’t really “cost” anything to any of the people who truly help in development, and you also won’t actually get your specific needs looked at. So to get the most out of the whole process, you really do end up having to help with the process yourself.

That’s a kind of beauty, to me. People are encouraged to chip in and help, not because of some political agenda, or because they try to be “good people,” but simply because it helps themselves more than not chipping in and helping would. That’s what I would call “positive feedback!” — Linus Torvalds

I think “positive feedback” is a really lame term for the awesome effect he described. Instead I would describe this effect as “systemic self-enforcing behavioral incentives providing a socially net positive outcome”. It’s a rare effect, but totally awesome when harnessed — you don’t need a complicated bureaucracy or reliance on assuming people or organizations will play nice.

I’d like to see politicians and other organizational leaders to target this effect broadly across society as an alternative to traditional approaches. If by design the self-interested actions of various members can lead to co-operation and mutual benefit without need for heavy-handed central management or irrational hope for goodwill… that would be a huge win.

I have to admit… this effect is a large reason why I love free software.

They asked for it, so I gave them a piece of my mind.

Part of my job is to answer questions that the executives have which are difficult to determine, so I set up a little website which has a dashboard of various different queries and graphs I created. Of course, this leads to more requests and sometimes this falls outside the bounds of what I can easily do. For example, I couldn’t determine how many people were using a particular tool on our website because I didn’t have access to the the logs.

After pestering our IT department for several months, I finally got them to create a new database account for me so I could parse the statistics from our websites for reporting purposes. It’s a proprietary windows app which uses a MS-SQL database for storage, so I hooked it all up and started looking around at the tables.

It all looked pretty straightforward… for each website there was a set of tables named logical things like sumVisits and sumPaths, etc. And I could even find the results from custom reports I had already designed, making it very easy for me to gather the data I required. The table looks like this:

----------------------------
| DateVal | Visits | Views |
----------------------------
| 2454020 |   1304 |  1632 |
| 2454021 |   1124 |  2553 |
| 2454022 |    502 |   964 |
| 2454023 |    707 |  1388 |
| 2454024 |   1164 |  1332 |
----------------------------

Pretty simple, right? Now all I have left is to figure out what the hell this DateVal references. Normally these things reference another table so I check to see what it is a foreign key of. If you don’t speak database, that’s jargon for “lookup value referenced in another table”. Except in this case, it didn’t exist. And after poking around in every single table I determined that no, it simply wasn’t referencing anything else.

So what the hell is this DateVal anyhow? Just scanning the table visually shows that they are incrementing by one per day, so it’s a date counter of some sort. So what was 2454020 days ago, and why do I care about it? I read the documentation but it was not helpful in the slightest.

Since I work in MySQL quite a bit, I check there first to figure out what the original reference date is: “SELECT date_sub(current_date, interval 2454020 day)”. Except MySQL refuses to return a result for that, its date_sub routine isn’t built to handle such large numbers. Fine, I’ll try it in python. “print datetime.datetime.now() - datetime.timedelta(2454020)” Damnit, that overflows too.

This is getting ridiculous… this stupid application is issuing dates which I can’t seem to process, and can’t even figure out what the hell it’s doing. As a last ditch effort to try to figure out what the hell is going on, I consult the oracle of our times, google. Searching for one of the DateVal values with the word “date” finally told me what I was looking at: a Julian Date Count.

“The Julian Day Count is a uniform count of days from a remote epoch in the past (-4712 January 1, 12 hours Greenwich Mean Time (Julian proleptic Calendar) = 4713 BCE January 1, 12 hours GMT (Julian proleptic Calendar) = 4714 BCE November 24, 12 hours GMT (Gregorian proleptic Calendar)). ” — ref

That just happens to be about 2.5 million days ago, which this stupid application helpfully uses to tell you what day the results happened on. It’s extremely useful for a website analytics program, in case an archaeologist happens to find a 6000 year old webserver which uses Apache Common Log Format logs, they won’t have a problem at all.

As a footnote, I should also point out that when I finally implemented that feature it was in the language PHP. PHP is well known for having way too many function names, and it just so happens that they have a built in feature to serve the extremely common purpose of converting Julian Date Counts into standard timestamps.

print jdtounix(2454020);
?>

You’ve got to be kidding me.

I just had to…

1. I just read an article by some loser trying to sell people ideas on how to blog.
2. Todays tip is about getting a Wii.  I suggest getting to the store at 6:15a in the cold.
3. We’ve outlined many of these steps in red permanent marker, sorry about your car.
4. There are a lot of ways to query a database.
5. What I like about our industry is that we get free soda in the fridge.
6. Most of what Ive written hurts the brain.
7. For those who don’t know already, playing the Wii can make your arms very sore.
8. I’m thoroughly impressed with myself.
9. Do you really want to make a difference?  Because you can’t.
10. We have an exciting new announcement: I like cheese!
11. There are many proven and time-honored strategies, but a shot to the head is of course still the best.
12. Thought it would be fun to share, why are you arresting me?
13. An interesting thing happened recently, or so I assume.
14. The older I get the more I realize that time passes.
15. Sitting out here by the sea tac airport, I am waiting for Joh3n to arrive.
16. One of the best ways to write a blog entry is to make fun of others.
17. Ouch. Not really even a fight, more like a flight.
18. There’s a tremendous swell of interest in that giant meteorite coming to crush us all.
19. More often than not, you will not cut off your arm with a butter knife.
20. In case you missed it, I finally got a blog.  You’re reading it.
21. Have you ever tried to figure out why that guy tried to eat your brains?  You look pale.
22. Here is a different twist on the nipple.  Oops.
23. You’ve heard me say that I am not a fish.  In fact, I am not a fish.
24. It looks like there is no hope and we’re all going to die from ebola.
25. Knowing what it means to GeekPDX, I’m still going to make fun of him for not having a Wii.
26. One of the earliest lessons I learned about riding a bike is to not crash into a wall.
27. Entering the mind of a tadpole, I start wanting to swim and become a frog.  Weird eh?
28. Are you looking for a change?  Or just change, because I’ve got four quarters if you got a dollar.
29. Every so often, I talk with clients who would like to stop paying me money to shoot at them.

If shepard’s pie is made of beef, is cattle rancher’s pie made of sheep?

BBC News, on Sasha Baron Cohen:

In the film, Cohen’s character Borat portrays Kazakhs as a nation of misogynists, racists and anti-Semites.

(ref)

This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the humour that Ali G provides. To see his characters including Borat as making fun of the characters he portays is totally missing the point — if that were all that was it would be a really dumb show. Ha ha, look at how dumb foreigners are, ha ha.

It’s more true to say that Cohen is a master of the art of trolling, that is to say creating great controversy just for the sake with people who don’t know better. To the people who know better it’s funny to see the reactions of those not in the loop, because we know we’d probably be just as taken in. That’s also the basis for hidden camera shows, though of course Cohen mixes more offensiveness into the batter.

The real crux of the humour in the show is that Cohen shows just how much common folk in the US and UK are willing to take so long as he portrays himself as an outsider. He does horribly offensive things and is treated like a child because his victims assume that his differences provide him with an excuse for the things he says as does. Instead of standing up and saying “hey that’s wrong you jerkoff” as they ought to, they’ll condone it as if his outsider status gives him immunity from the responsibilities of being a good person.

In this way, the character of Borat doesn’t make fun of Kazakhstanis any more than Ali G makes fun of people from Staines. The joke’s not on them, but it’s on us.

If it’s opposite day in oppositeland, that means that it’s just like it is here.

So much of the entertainment I watch is about murder.  Perhaps more than for most people as I quite enjoy the Sherlock Holmes genre so I’m a rabid consumer of lesser known shows like Law & Order: Criminal Intent and Monk.  In addition to those I also usually catch the more popular CSI and Law & Order shows — which adds up to a lot of murder.  There there is the news, which is also quite murder-heavy, be it school shootings or Islamic suicide bombers or whatever — the news of the day is probably about murders.
Except… I’ve never known a single person in my whole life who was actually murdered.   I’ve known plenty who have died through accident, suicide, overdose, disease… but never murder.  This is perhaps an obvious observation, but we are massively bombarded with these things which are actually exceptionally rare.  I don’t have a conclusion.

Forget about this whole “holiday season” nonsense.. I propose a new name: The Turkey Season.  In each of the following three months is a major holidays where turkey is consumed in massive quantities: Canadian Thanksgiving, American Thanksgiving, and Christmas.

I like turkey season.

In America they call pamplemousse “grapefruit”. I mean really, who the heck looks at pamplemousse and thinks “oh I know, this is like a grape but it’s fruit so let’s call it grapefruit in order to indicate how similar it is to a grape”?

For one, grapes are fruit. Why are grapes not grapefruit? Also, pamplemousse is much much larger than a grape and has a totally different taste, it’s baffling to me how anyone could thing that one is even remotely similar for naming purposes.

an orangefruit.

You know why spaghetti and meatballs is so awesome? Because you get both a good sauce (ground beef in sauce is just not totally awesome) but also meat at the same time. Starch, sauce, and protein but not all mixed together in some unholy concoction! You get the best of both worlds instead of some mixture that does justice to neither.

However, meatballs are a frigging pain in the butt to make. So that’s why you go out to get them, and at a nice restaurant too because they’ll have the best sauce which is part of the whole point of having them separate right?

NOW YOU ARE CATCHING ON.

My friend mns made a brilliant observation today which I will paraphrase badly: in recent years US Presidents have chosen their VP’s in such a way as to provide a disincentive for assassination.  If you shot Clinton you got Gore — if you shot W Bush you’d get Cheney.  With Carter you’d get Mondale and with H Bush you’d get Dan frigging Quayle.  The one exception to this is with Reagan, and he got shot at!
It’s a good plan.

As a gift to my good friend joh3n whose first child was born just a few days ago, I made for him a Book of Zogg. This was one of the coolest things I have ever done — though I give credit for the idea to my lovely wife. Read more for the pictures in all their glory!

(more…)

I had thought about getting a new some server, a little mac mini or something — just something that would quietly sit there and run a little home webserver and act as the print/fileserver for the house with the various music files etc all stored there.  Except that fluffy is now hesitating on getting rid of his mac mini which gave me some time to rethink the situation.

What I’m thinking now is to use my broken laptop as the home server.  It’s certainly more than powerful enough — moreso than a mac mini would be that’s for sure.  And because I’ve got my work laptop now there really is little need for having two laptops around all the time.   Right now I’ve been using my work laptop for work stuff and trying to use my home laptop for home stuff — which is very difficult because of how difficult it is to prop the screen up correctly because the LCD hinge is badly broken.

The only drawback to this idea is that my work laptop runs windows, and as you probably know by now I really hate windows with a certain passion.  I’m not stupid enough to try to install a linux distribution overtop of my work drive, but something else may work ok.  What I’m thinking is that I can run Linux under VMWare at fullscreen when I’m home, pretty much ignoring that there is another OS sitting underneath.

This is what I’m doing now, just to see how irritating this would actually be.  So far it’s not too bad really.  It’s a little bit slower than I’d like, but everything works like it should so really I shouldn’t complain.

Says the guy who contributes only a thought.

But seriously, what’s wrong with those folks?  Take for example their national drink, Fosters, pretty much always judged the best tasting beer in all of Australia.  I mean, that stuff is pure crap — what on Earth are they thinking, drinking that stuff?

Also, when they were naming states, how the halibut did they decide to choose the abbreviation WA for Western Australia?  Didn’t they realize that this would frustrate the efforts of Database Developers everywhere who would like a unique key on the state code field that encompasses Australia, America, and Canada?  I first suggested that the best solution would be to destroy the state, however this was considered impractical because of all the effort that would be needed to evacuate the beloved cane toads.

So instead, I suggest an official name change, from Western Australia to “Another Empty Australian State”, abbreviated to AEAS.  That will be a unique code so Database Developers around the world can rejoice, knowing that they can include Australian states in their tables without having to add a second key for country code.

Who’s with me?!?

The hilarious comments to this article got me thinking. Nietzsche was wrong when he proclaimed God was dead — really, it’s Thought that is dead.