Welcome to 201X

Dear readers:

I am resurrecting my blog and bringing it into the (not-quite-so-) new decade of 201X. These days I am no longer studying computer science at BYU, so my blog will probably not have such a computer science focus, but rest assured that technology will still play a role.

Let's start off the new post with a list of awesome things:

Super Mario Galaxy 2

Wii

Christmas

Donkey Kong Country Returns

Netflix

Tara's secret Christmas present

The binary on Tara's secret Christmas present

Moltentail Masticore

Landfall

Snowfall

Not being at IHOP

Our fireplace

My hacked subwoofer

A job that will most likely last

Flex UI

Eclipse

Eclipse shortcuts

Chipotle (the restaurant)

Tomato Basil Mozzarella

Butternut squash soup from Kroger

Charlie the dog

Our wonky Christmas tree

Black Keys

Arcade Fire

Broken Bells

The giant window in front of my desk at work

Of course, Tara would be at the top of every one of these lists (awwww!), so I omit her from the list (booooo!) to give the other items a fighting chance.

Super Mario Galaxy 2 is indeed extremely awesome. Unlike many other games I've played recently, Mario Galaxy has fresh ideas at every turn. My favorite part at the moment is the spring mushroom. Tons of fun for a girl or a boy.

Tara's secret Christmas present was a surprise to me, but an even bigger surprise to Tara. It is currently resting under our tree, awaiting Christmas Eve. Tara has no idea what's about to hit her. It's gonna be good! To make it look more secretive, I encrypted the gift by drawing binary all over the sides of the box.

I am happy that I am currently not at IHOP. Last night we went to IHOP for a very late dinner, and had the misfortune of arriving there at the same time as a business party of 30 Amway salesmen. A good comparison would be to imagine yourself trapped in the Inferno with 30 high-school drama students who are all out to impress each other with their great wit. I ate my omelette hastily.

My hacked subwoofer makes me happy. It is a computer subwoofer (seen here), that I got for $5 at a yard sale, and which is absolutely not made to work with my surround receiver. Through rather clever wiring, and maxing out the sub channel, it sounds just like a real powered sub.

The butternut squash soup that Tara got me from Kroger is exceptionally good. You may have had good butternut squash soup before, perhaps even excellent butternut squash soup, but Kroger has them all licked. Yes, Kroger, the evil spawn of Kermit and Grover, has the best butternut squash soup I have had in my life.

Welcome to 201X, courtesy of HAL 9000!

New Blog

Dear Rabid Readers,

Please check out my new blog: We, Robot. I started it for my CS 404 (Ethics and Computers in Society) class, because it is mandatory, but don't let that discourage you from reading it. I assure you that the brilliance and charm of icantdothatdave will also be exhibited in my other blog. It's also far more likely to receive updates since I'm receiving credit for it. We have a lot of freedom in selecting the topic and content of our posts, so I promise it won't be boring

Yours Truly,
The Management

Novembruary the Arth, 20X7

It's been much too long since I've written, and therefore I write. This semester has been a ton of hard work, but also very rewarding. I've been doing school work from the time I get home until the time I go to bed every day of the week including Saturdays for the whole semester. That's what I get for taking 4 computer science classes. It is, however, paying off. As it stands I have A's in all of my classes, so this could be the first time in my life I've had a 4.0. The closest I've ever come was in high school when I had a semester with one A-.

It's also paying off in other ways. This semester I've written a fully functional web server from the ground up, a 3D renderer that does lighting and shading, and a ray tracer (that's what Pixar uses to render 3D scenes) that does lighting, shadows, and reflections. By the end of the semester I will have also finished two computer games as group projects. One of them is an RC Racing game (which is starting to look really awesome), and the other is a 3D version of Tower Defense. I will also have written a database query language and a website similar to IMDB for video games. At work I just finished a tool for searching e-mail gateway log files, and I wrote a website for one of Tara's co-workers.

So no, I'm not exaggerating when I say I've been working non-stop, but it really has paid off.

This week I had an interview for an internship with Pixar that Dr. Egbert arranged for me. I think it went really well, but I won't hear back for a few weeks. It would be really awesome to get the internship, but at the same time I don't have my heart set on it because video games are what I really intend to do. Don't get me wrong, if Pixar takes me for the internship, I would love to stay and work there as long as they'll keep me, but video games are what really interest me, so I wouldn't be heartbroken. Anyway, I think they were somewhat impressed by all of the graphics experience I've been getting this semester, so hopefully I'll make it to the next round.

Time for another round of awesome things!:

Ray tracing
Pixar
Mario Galaxy
TES4:Oblivion
TES4 mods
Supreme Commander
Spiderman 3
Dashboard Confessional
Sufjan Stevens
Ratatouille
Smash Bros. Melee
Gray Fox
Quad core
In Rainbows (Radiohead's new album)
In Rainbows' distribution method
Live
Airwalk
Slashdot
Harry Potter 7 (again)
Signal Fire video
Ubuntu 7.10
Compiz Fusion
Amarok
C++
OpenGL
Amazon MP3 downloads
Cycling
1062 TMCB

Thoughts on Flip-Flopping

It's debate time again, and one of the most commonly used attacks in presidential debates is to call your opponent a flip-flopper. Today I would like to make it known that I find the "flip-floppers" are usually better candidates than their accusers.

Flip-flopping is the derogatory term for a political candidate who has changed their mind on an issue. My question is: what's so bad about changing your mind? If someone were to look at the history of my political opinions, I would be a flip-flopper of the worst kind. So would almost every American voter. If we don't allow ourselves the freedom to change our minds, then what good are we? The best people readily admit their mistakes and immediately change upon recognizing them. Only a fool knowingly sticks to his wrong position just to save face. I admire the candidates who are willing to candidly change their positions when new evidence shows them that they were previously wrong.

Unfortunately, some politicians flip-flop on issues because of lobbyists, and other issues of greed and gain. These are the politicians that flip-flopper accusers would have you believe the accused to be. The problem with this argument is that a politician is just as likely to stay firm to a position because of lobbyists and greed as he is to flip-flop on a position. For instance, Candidate A might be bribed by several different lobbyists over time, and therefore waver back and forth on a position, while Candidate B might be bribed by the same lobbyist for an extended period of time and therefore appear firm in his beliefs. It is therefore important to research your favorite candidate, find out who his lobbyists are, and try to understand why he votes the way he votes. I tend to be more suspicious of the candidate who never changes his opinion on any issue because this indicates he is being bribed to keep those opinions, or he is afraid of political fallout for doing what he thinks is right.

Because flip-flopping indicates corruption no more than it indicates consistency, all it amounts to is an ad-hominem attack (character assassination), and nothing more. The candidate who debates the correctness of platforms rather than trying to build a false impression of his opponent's nature is the candidate who is more likely to have the good nature I would like to see in a leader.

Ubuntu for Robots

Recently I started a new project called Ubuntu for Robots. It's a blog about how to make Ubuntu more user friendly and fun. If you are interested, go to ubuntuforrobots.blogspot.com.

At work I'm busy writing a program for the IP phones that lets you use the phones like an intercom system. It's a little bit frustrating because the documentation that comes with the phones is not well written, and the different models of phones seem to behave in different ways. It is nice to be doing some programming for a change instead of just working on IT stuff all the time.

I also wrote a program in Java that finds the fastest server in a list of mirrors. Ubuntu publishes a list of servers where you can download updates, and you're supposed to just pick the one that seems to work the best. My program contacts all of the servers and figures out which one will give you the fastest downloads. What's really cool about this program is that I made it multi-threaded, so it can be talking with multiple servers at the same time. This makes the program run about 20 times as fast as it otherwise would. It's the first multi-threaded program I've ever written, so I was happy I could get it to work.

For Memorial Day, Tara and I went to a park in Provo Canyon and had a barbecue and a campfire. It was really pretty there because the park is in a valley between some really tall tree-covered mountains, and there is a really clear stream that runs past it. We managed to get a picnic table with a barbecue and fire pit that was only 30 feet from the stream. The food was good and the fire was fun!

On Saturday we got our garden planted. It's a bit late because we had to clear and till the ground by hand. We planted lettuce, marigolds, onions, spinach, dill, tomatoes, beans, broccoli, and cauliflower. Today, only four days later, the spinach was already coming up. It's really fun to have a house instead of an apartment and be able to have a yard where we can do what we want.

Digg Rebellion

Last Thursday I had the pleasure of experiencing the Digg revolt. Digg.com is a website where the users submit and rate content. One user posted a key that cracks HD DVDs. Other users rated it highly, and it eventually made the front page of Digg. Digg subsequently received a DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) takedown notice from AACS. The Digg staff decided to remove the offending post to avoid legal retribution from the AACS, and eventually banned the user who posted it because of his repeat attempts to repost it. Users were angered that Digg complied with the DMCA takedown notice because they felt it violated their rights to free speech. The argument was that the key is just a number, one that took no creative input to come up with (all computer programs are just numbers, but there is a minimal requirement of creative input for it to be copywriteable), so it should not be censored from the website. Even if the DMCA covers such content, users felt that a more important law, namely the constitution, guaranteed their right to post a number. All content on Digg comes from user submissions, so censoring those users unfairly, at least from the users' point of view, is not necessarily a good idea.

Digg users revolted against the censorship and posted thousands of references to the number. Eventually, the entire front page of Digg was plastered in references to the key. Digg then issued a statement saying that they had overwhelmingly heard the users voice their opinion, and that they would allow the number to remain on the website and take on the AACS legally if it came to that.

This issue is really a deep one. It touches on several different sore spots in our legal system's relationship with digital media. Can a number be copyrighted? Should a huge company be allowed to crush a small company by pumping lawyers full of money, even if it is a miscarriage of justice? Can and should a website control user submitted content? Why are we allowing cartels (AACS, MPAA) to fix prices and attach arbitrary restrictions to content (DRM)? Why do special interests carry more weight than the voice of the people? Has America become a lawyer state? Why won't America uphold its own constitution?

I don't know the answers to these questions, but I have a sneaking suspicion that greed is the primary reason why these companies do what they do, as well as being the reason that they can get away with it. I am proud of Digg and its users for choosing to stand up for what they believe in, even if it means they will be crushed.

Politics as usual

I've tried a couple of times to make an update, but each time I somehow get distracted in the middle of writing and never make a post.

Concerning the MSNBC presidential debates, my current favorite candidate is Ron Paul. He is a strong supporter of the original intent of the constitution, and he is opposed to the Patriot Act. He also wants to reduce or do away with the IRS and income tax. He also struck me as the only candidate who wasn't an actor, he was up there because he is genuinely interested in restoring America's constitutional values.

My second favorite would have to be Romney. He only gets this honor because he is LDS, which is a strong attribute in his favor. However, I understand that just because he is LDS doesn't necessarily make him the best person up there, and something about him strikes me as fake from time to time. He did reasonably well at answering the questions, but I'm still unclear where he stands on the issues.

As far as Democrats go, I don't really like any of them. If I had to pick the one that I dislike the least, it would have to be Obama, and I really hope he gets his party's nomination over some of the whackos like Clinton, Biden, Kucinich, and Gravel.

Well, enough for now. What do you think about the candidates?