Blogamania

Good news everyone! I've imported my blog to tumblr. I'm also making use of ifttt so that every subsequent post I make here, Blogger, should show up there too. It should also post links on twitter and Wordpress. Ain't that just grand!

I've actually planning to do a massive toy project that incorporates ifttt and some other neat little things. Problem is, I just have to come up with what the project will be in what little spare time I have.

Anyway, welcome to all the new viewers and I hope you get some enjoyment, and possibly information, out of my posts.

Open Source Software: Doom and Gloom

A few years ago there was a rumor that the Linux Hater's Blog was being abandoned. I took the opportunity to read through his old post. Most of his posts were filled with immature rants and filled with swears, but he had a genuine point at times.

Open source software may not cost you any money, but poorly designed software will cost you time and effort. I have seen more than my share of dropped projects; projects that start out with a small team that slowly erodes away until that last person leaves up a “Thanks for all the fish” post.

The greatest evil of OSS is probably fragmentation. The mantra of OSS source software has always been freedom of choice. And it’s good if you’re a consumer trying to pick a media player or web browser, but it is hell for software developers. Each distro has a different set of libraries and a different kernel and a different set of binaries. Your software might work on distro and not on another at any given time. That’s one of the reasons companies are so afraid to make software on linux, they have no clue what libraries they can support.

I recently found out about the Linux Standard Base, who are attempting to standardize binaries across distos. However, the LSB has failed, to a certain extent. The LSB doesn’t have the influence over the distros that they need. How many distos are going to listen to the LSB and use older binaries for compatibility when they can update to the latest and greatest?

Check out what distros the LSB has certified:

Ubuntu: the latest release certified is 9.04, which is no longer supported. 8.04 (LTS) is also certified, but support ends next month. And having used an LTS this late in this life cycle, I can tell you, they are unusable.

Mandriva: the last desktop version certified is from 2006 (2007.0)!

SUSE: version 11.0 is no longer supported.

Debian: not certified at all.

Fedora: not certified at all.

Mint: not certified at all.

Congratulations Linux Standard Base, you’ve managed to standardize a bunch of Linux distros no one is running!

But that’s not to say OSS is the only software affected by these issues. Let me illustrate it with an example. Before Microsoft released Vista it was codenamed Longhorn and it was a much grander undertaking than the released product. There were, what Microsoft called, the “3 pillars of longhorn”; 3 key technologies that would form the backbone of the finished Longhorn. One of these pillars was WinFS which called for all the files on a computer to be stored in a database. For those less technically minded, this was a big deal and allowed for some neat things to be done.

At the beginning, everything seemed to be going fine; Microsoft released multiple preview releases of Longhorn and, with the exception of the normal bugs, everything was moving along. Then nothing was released to the public for several months; no preview builds, no progress reports, nothing. One day, Microsoft announced that they would be releasing WinFS after Longhorn’s release and would be porting the other 2 pillars back to XP. The reason was, they simply bit off more they could chew, they kept on adding more and more features, they had to eventually crunch bugs and make a release. In the end it WinFS was further delayed and then outright canceled.

At the same time, linux had a similar open source program: Gnome Storage. Like WinFS, it planned to put every file on a computer into a database for organization purposes. What happened to it? Well, it was abandoned. It was done almost entirely by a college student, maybe he graduated, maybe he got a job, maybe he just was no longer interested in it anymore. The end result is Gnome Storage is in a perpetually unfinished state.

Two separate project failed for entirely different reasons.

Banking: Money for Nothing

Happy new year everyone. I've been quite busy recently. So, excuses the large gap between posts. I meant to have this in my last post, but it was already such a meaty post I’ll just create a new post for it. It's not as timely as my last post. It certainly seems like the Occupy protests have wound down, which is a shame. There's rumors of something happening in March, but we'll have to wait and see.

I’ve always had a bane for banks, specifically insurance banks. You pay every month in case something unfortunate happens, making the insurance company nice and rich without providing a single product or service. And when something actually does happen, you have to fight them tooth and nail get them to give you what they agreed.

To understand banks, you must first understand money. A long time ago, paper money was simply a substitute for a real product: gold. You could take your $1 to the bank and receive $1 in gold. This was called the gold standard. But, our economy grew beyond the amount of available rare metal, so we switched to a fiat money. Money now has value because or government says it does, and we have faith in our government and the value of our currency.

The financial crisis of that started in 2007 seems like a complex issues, but it’s actually quite simple. Read a few articles, here and here, and you begin to get the idea. Large investment banks invested sold loans to people who probably wouldn’t pay them back (sub-prime loans). And then sold “insurance” on these “investments”. When people stopped paying their loans, the investment banks were in trouble. Had these had been smaller banks it would have been no big problem. But these were huge international banks, they had insured and invested in many other companies. They were “to big to fail”.

Bear Sterns was lucky, they found a buyer. But Lehman Brothers was allowed to fail. Some blame it on the government wanting the free market to take over, others blame Lehman Brothers for being uncooperative. And it sent ripples across the market. When later financial institutions when to the government and essentially held the market hostage for government money, they got what they wanted.

Years ago, this would not be possible. There were laws to prevent banks from becoming too large and taking stupid risks. They were implemented around the great depression to prevent what happened then from happening again. But, our representatives repealed those laws. I don’t know if it was greed or stupidity that led to that decision.

Let me explain, to the best of my abilities, how banks create money out of thin air. Most people believed that money is created at a mint and makes it’s way into everyday life by some form of government magic. But this is not how it happens for most money. Most people know, when you deposit currency at a bank, that bank can loan out the majority of the money to generate income from interest in loans. As anyone can who’s watched It’s a Wonderful Life can tell you, this can get banks in a heap of trouble if everyone wants to withdraw their deposits. What most people don’t know is that banks can loan out more than you deposit (called a monetary base). Lets say you deposit $1 in a bank and the government has set a reserve rate of 1:9, the bank can now conjure $8 into existence and loan out $9!

Now remember how I said our money is fiat currency? How I said our money has value only because people believe in it? That is why preventing counterfeiters is so important, if we did not protect our money, it would become worthless. What would happen if the average person found out that the “money” on their credit card was conjured into exist out of thin air?

Corporations

Where to start? There is so much I could say on the topic of corporations. People are always so scared of what the government does; believe it or not, the government is probably the least of your worries. The law tell you exactly what they are allowed to do, meanwhile corporations are a lot more free to do what they want. I could talk about class warfare and wealth disparity. That’s the popular thing to talk about, but I don’t feel the need to repeat what you’ve already read. I’m here to tell you things you might not have heard.

I would first like to start by talking about something that, on the surface, is wholly unrelated to corporations. Immigration reform in America. This is a hot button issue. Some people believe that support of stronger immigration reform is tantamount to racism. Not in my opinion. There are laws already in place making illegal immigration just that, illegal. Illegal immigration is disrespectful legal immigrants (they made the effort to immigrate legally), to the illegal immigrant (they are exploited for cheap labor) and America (lost tax revenue).

But why am I talking about it in this post? Arizona, known for it’s controversial immigration policy, was recently considering 5 bills to try to curb illegal immigration. But it did not pass. That’s not why it’s interesting though. It’s interesting because of the reason why it did not pass:60 businesses sign a letter asking them not to do so. Why would they refuse to tighter laws on immigration? Well they cite bad press for being Arizona located corporations, but how does that apply to Wells Fargo, Intel, or Cox Com.? The implication is that these corporations profit, directly or indirectly from illegal immigration, it wouldn’t be the first time a major corporation has been caught doing such.

But even more disturbing is that even though 6,500 citizens could not prevent the turning of the first reforms in the state, just 60 businesses could do so today. The reason for that is lobbying. Not many American know what it is. Basically, it’s legalized bribing. I know, I know, you were as swoon as I was when my grade school teacher recounted the tales of how the muckrakers exposed all of societies ills in the early 20^th century and did away with corruption. But today bribing is as alive as ever was, there’s just a few technicalities now. In a 12 year period our public officials accepted $30,529,002,364 in bribes! And if bribes aren’t enough, they offer to hire them! All of this is exacerbated by career politicians, being a statesmen is now a job and not volunteer work. We’ve created a buffer between representatives and the people they represent. It’s not a bad idea, considering you don’t want every yokel in America to exert direct control over the entire nation, but politicians have forgotten who they're representing.

“Too big to fail” has become a buzz word these days to describe some financial corporations. But I think is an apt phase for some of other corporations: super large, super connected companies who pose a systemic risk. Comcast, AT&T, too a lesser extent Disney, and Sony. These corporations dominate a market to the extent that every action they take has an effect on the market. They are able to dictate market conditions beyond what would occur in a competitive environment. And when these corporations are in trouble, the effects are felt even outside their market. When corporations are able hold our economy hostage for a government bailout, it is no longer a question of free market capitalism and instead a question of national security.

CNBC sometimes runs biographies on companies. They’re not really journalistic, more of an hour long commercial for whatever company their doing. But for every one that I can remember seeing, there is always something awful that the company has done to get where they are. And they are not ashamed of it. One of the executives of Coke boasted how they made a killing in South Africa when other companies were boycotting the region at the behest of Archbishop Desmond Tutu because of apartheid.

What do you expect though? Corporations aren’t people, but we treat them as equals under the law. The case of corporate personhood is rather complex and hits on some constitutional issues. First, some background. There’s no definitive corporate law. That is to say, there’s no international law on how these multinational organizations are treated. Most contain some form of idea of Ownership and Separate Legal Personality from that owner. Worst still is the fact that this is one of the few areas where the 10^th Amendment is at play and the federal government has left states to create their own laws governing corporations. So, you get odd cases of a Delaware company suing a New Jersey man in a California court. Add to this that federal law is being applied to these corporations and you end up with 50 different pegs being fitted to one hole.

Now, you also have to understand how different companies are structures. One of the core differences between an incorporated business and an unincorporated business is the concept of limited liability. Limited liability prevents owners of a company for being sued for the improprieties of their company.

Let’s take an example: Mom and Pop form a partnership (a form of company that does not provided limited liability), Mom and Pop Company, and start a shop. A customer walks in and slips and falls due to a slippery floor. This customer sues Mom and Pop Company and wins, but Mom and Pop Company has not had a good year, it doesn’t have enough assets to pay the customer. However, because it is a partnership and it’s owners don’t have limited liability Mom and Pop personal accounts must pay the remainder. Now, let’s run this scenario again and assume Mom and Pop incorporated their company to form Mom and Pop Corp.. This time our customer can only sue Mom and Pop Corp. and not Mom and Pop individually. Assuming Mom and Pop Corp. hasn’t done well this year and can’t pay the judgment, there’s nothing our customer can do. Now that’s an extreme simplification, but this is a very important concept, Mom and Pop Corp. is a different legal entity from Mom and Pop. It has its own responsibilities and rights under the law.

So, let’s put this all together. States create laws allowing the creation of corporations, distinct legal entities under that state’s laws. The federal government enacts national laws intended to protect a person’s legal rights. These federal laws are then applied to corporations because they are distinct legal entities. The end result is corporations with far more rights than anyone intended. I'm honestly surprised they haven't been given the right to vote.

But corporations aren’t like us. Corporations aren’t moral. They aren’t people. Regardless of the theory of stakeholder, corporations don’t have a vested interest in their community beyond profits. Look at the job situation. You’re a business and you’re in it to make a profit, so you want the best person for the job. So, you through up insane requirements like 2-3 years of experience for the exact same entry level job because you know it’s an employer’s market and a bunch of 401k’s just dried up so you can maybe get someone. And then you use come up with strange requirements like GPA, irrelevant courses, even SAT results because it might lead to better candidates. And because it’s an employer’s market you can ask for unreasonable things: unpaid training, substandard pay, and employer benefiting agreements. Or maybe you just have one of your employees do the job instead of hiring someone new, you save on hiring and training someone new in a tough economy. All the while you have a buildup of perfectly good, fresh graduates filling up unemployment.

Corporations poison our land, our air, our water, our food, our medications, our military when it makes them a dollar. They are the greed manifest: “every man for himself”. And we look the other way.

Because we get our high fructose corn syrup and our reality TV. We’re not poor, we get our stomachs filled and our promotions and we’re happy. That’s something that all those dictators in the Middle East forgot. So, you’re not likely to see a wholesale revolution or something like the end of Fight Club anytime soon. And I wouldn’t want to see one; life is pretty good compared to other times and places. So, what can we do?

In the past we had regulation. And not just regulation that intended to foster R&D but instead created loopholes. We had trust busting laws. We broke up Standard Oil once! But no more. Now we make sure Microsoft includes a ballot screen in Windows. Blame it on globalization, I blame it on corporations learning who to bribe.

Outsourcing is another devious thing corporations tend to do. Can’t get cheap labor to come to you, go to it. So counties that have laws that protect laborers lose jobs to countries that don’t. Right now, our tax code actually rewards corporations for doing so.  What about heavier import tax or, dare I say, embargos? It would certainly create a niche where that company used to be. Kind of artificial trust busting: when a corporation gets big enough, it outsources and can’t sell their goods in their original country anymore, opening up the market again.

And on the topic of taxes, a flat tax is not unobtainable. Some simple calculations will tell you that based on the total income taxes in 2008, $1,091,473,000,000, and the 2008 budget, 2,900,000,000,000, that a flat tax of %8.76568 would yeild the same amount of income tax and that a flat tax of %23.29017 would cover the entire budget. Especially when you factor in removing all the loopholes from the current tax code, a flat tax becomes less absurd. Capital gains are treated differently than earned income in our current tax code, millions of tax dollars slipping passed. If the adjusted flat tax puts too much burden on lower income brackets, increase the minimum to compensate. It’s been kept artificially low through our tax system, and that’s not what a tax system is for. The role of a tax system is not to supplement low income or reduce wealth disparity; its role is simply to generate income for the government to operate.

Back to the topic of corporations, perhaps the solution to corporate greed is simpler than regulation.

In the 1960s and 1970s a company called IBM had commanding control of the computer industry, which was at the time relegated to mainframes. There were other companies that manufactured mainframe, but IBM was so much larger than them that they were referred to as “Snow White” and the others as “the Seven Dwarves”. Everything was going swimmingly for IBM up until the 1980s. By this time IBM was bloated and slow, allowing technologies that they owned to be replaced by newer technologies and allowing their competitors to undercut their prices. When the PC revolution came, they lost their core business, mainframes. To this day, they have never regained the market control they once had.

So, perhaps there is a chance that, if left to their own devices, corporations that grow too big will be consumed in a similar way, without posing the systematic risk of “too big to fail” corporations.

Minireviews 2: Electric Boogaloo

Wow, it’s been a while. I’ve been busy, trying to find a job and all that. Things are looking positive on that front and hopefully soon I can change that title on my twitter profile. But I haven’t forgotten about the blog. I actually have some posts ready to go, they just need some polish and I’ll be putting them up for you to enjoy. Anyway, enough with the meta, let’s get on to the meat of this post.

I enjoyed doing my last reviews of anime, so I thought I would do another. These won’t be as flattering as the last though.

Neon Genesis Evangelion

Status: Finished (Retellings being produced)

The Plot: “At the age of 14 Shinji Ikari is summoned by his father to the city of Neo Tokyo-3 after several years of separation. There he unwillingly accepts the task of becoming the pilot of a giant robot by the name EVA01 and protect the world from the enigmatic invaders known as "angels." Even though he repeatedly questions why he has accepted this mission from his estranged and cold father, his doing so helps him to gradually accept himself. However, why exactly are the angels attacking and what are his father’s true intentions are yet to be unraveled.”

Your initial impression of Evangelion may to classify it under “Action”. You wouldn’t be entirely wrong. It has it’s fair share of mechs fighting giant monsters. But, Evangelion is as much an anime about mechs as Moby-Dick is a book about a whale. It had mechs in it, but it is not a series about them. That becomes very clear by the end of the anime.

Just looking at it as a mech alone, it's not terribly good. 17 battles in the entire series, most without any real action. Most of the sci-fi mysteries and questions were left unanswered in favor of a finale that revolved exclusively around the psychological state of the main characters. As a result, the plot is left unfinished in regard to the sci-fi aspects of Evangelion. Most of these plot holes are filled in by supplemental material: video games, pack-ins with DVDs, ect.

That’s not to say that it’s a bad story (psych student’s probably go wild over it). Personally, it left a bad taste in my mouth.

Toaru Majutsu no Index

Status: Halted(waiting for more source material)

The Plot: “Toaru Majutsu no Index is set in Academy City, a technologically advanced Academic city located at western Tokyo which studies scientifically advanced superhuman students with powers, but is also set in a world where magic is also real. Tōma Kamijō is a student in Academy City whose right hand, the Imagine Breaker, has the ability to negate all magic and psychic powers, but also his own luck. One day he finds a young girl hanging on his balcony railing named Index. She is a nun from Necessarius, the secret magic branch of the Church of England, and her mind has been implanted with the Index Librorum Prohibitorum—103,000 forbidden magical books the Church has removed from circulation.”

The plot seems to jump around a lot. 2 or 3 episodes will concentrate on one thing, and then in the next episode, something completely different. Although some of the plots are really intriguing at times, it robs the series of a centralized plot that seemed to be building in the first few episodes. Also, some of the design in the series is rather unoriginal: spiky haired protagonist, magicians, school uniforms, ect. This may have been the suber’s fault, the anime’s fault, the source material’s fault, or my own fault for not holding a degree in physics, but at times the language was a bit cumbersome. It felt like some conversations were just going right over my head.

So, in the end, it’s a series with a lot of potential that could be really good if they just got a solid plot going. I’m interested enough to watch the second season when I get the time, but not enough to watch its spin-off Toaru Kagaku no Railgu.

Ergo Proxy

Status: Finished

The Plot: “In a future where the world has been ravaged by a nuclear apocalyse, there exists salvation in a domed city named Romdo, where humans and their android servants, the AutoReiv, live in. Under the implementation of complete management control, it is a paradise where feelings are literally discarded, and the governing council dictates the way of life the citizens should live. But this utopian landscape is soon broken by a series of mystifying murders.”

This one is a depressing anime. The setting and plot take a huge deviation from what the plot I posted says, but you’ll find that out if you watch it for a few episodes. The art is rather bland and “brown”, but that serves the mood of the series.

Unfortunately, none of the characters are particularly dynamic. They all seem to be on a rather heavy dose of Ritalin. And the plot is rather odd. It has a good plot at points, and the writers created an intriguing backstory, but it feels like the writers decided to bury it for some reason. The backstory gets “explain” in one very odd episode and then never really brought up again. The ending was also kind of strange and left me utterly confused.

In the end, it left me disappointed and wanting to know more.

My Favorite Programming Language

Having spent some time on technical message boards, I've seen this topic pop up a lot. “What programming language should I learn?” “What language is the best for beginners?” “What’s better C#, C++, or Java?”

When I was in high school, I was taught a stripped down version of C++ that avoided a lot of the Object Oriented concepts. When I went on to college, Java was emphasized in the intro courses and then C in high level courses. There were those courses that would force you to learn some eclectic language (x86 assembly, Scheme, Prolog). Outside of the mainstays, I’ve also run into C#, SQL, PHP, and HTML (which are not programming languages and, rather, scripting languages).

As far as what language you should learn first, in my opinion it really doesn't matter. As long as you go on and learn more about programming, your first language is going to affect you all that much. All programming languages have their pros and cons and one may solve a specific problem better than the other, but at the end of the day, it really won't matter which one you choose.

C is much simpler than a higher level language like Java or C#, however it can be less forgiving than them as well. Java gives you nicer errors whereas C relies on the programmer to catch a lot of those dumber mistakes like running over the bounds of an array. Some of that can be solved using the right IDE (Visual Studio is very good in my opinion).  C# and Java introduces Object Oriented concepts, which can be too complex for first time programmers and can add unnecessary bulk to smaller projects. I’ve also heard that Java’s garbage collection can be extremely cumbersome, as a CPU heavy task that pops up at random intervals.

Nothing beats being taught in a formal course, but here are some learning resources I would recommend:

The first is A Guide to Programming in C++. This is basically baby’s first programming book. It will hold your hand the entire way. We’ve all got to start somewhere and if you’ve never taken a formal class in programming this is the book I would recommend. The book is a little old, so, you’ll need to do a few tricks to get code to run on current versions of visual studio.

Java Concepts is a great Java introductory book. It will introduce you nicely to object oriented concepts. If you read some of the later chapters,  it will also touch on some of the higher level concepts in computer science.

Next is Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective. This is a very advanced book. I would almost say the material in “separates the boys from the men” in the programming world. After you’ve finished with intro books, consider picking this one up.

For C#, I recommend Learn Visual Studio’s Absolute Beginner's Series for Visual C# 2005 Express Edition. The entire series used to be available for free on MSDN, and you can still find some of it in existence on that site.

Photosynthesis and Cellular Respiration

I was going to make a detailed post on the formation of kidneys (mostly to make the joke “Zac Efron the Nephron”) but I found the subject to dry and uninteresting. However photosynthesis and cellular respiration is a much more interesting subject in my opinion. In a way it is the basis of all life.

Photosynthesis is the process by which plants (and certain other organisms) store solar energy in carbohydrate molecules: 6CO₂ + 6H₂O + photons => C₆H₁₂O₆ + 6O₂. This is how most new energy enters the food chain. This reaction takes place in the chloroplast. Photosynthesis is split into light dependent and light independent reactions.

That internal structure is called the thylakoid. The light dependent reaction takes place right at the membrane of the thylakoid. Basically, this reaction takes sunlight and uses it to attach a phosphate to ADP to create ATP (the energy “currancy” of the cell) and hydrogen to NADP+. The molecules hold the energy in these bonds. For a summary of the light dependent reaction, see below.

The light independent reaction (aka the Calvin Cycle) occurs outside the thylakoid in the lumen of the chloroplast. It basically uses the ATP and NADPH created in the light dependent reaction to take CO₂ and create carbohydrates.

Cellular respiration is kind of the opposite of photosynthesis. Carbohydrates break down and release energy: C₆H₁₂O₆ + 6O₂ => 6CO₂ + 6H₂O + energy. The main method of cellular respiration is aerobic respiration. A lot of biological reactions operate as a cascade of small reactions, and aerobic respiration is just such a reaction. See below for a summary:

Glycolysis is a 2 phase reaction takes glucose and creates 2 pyruvates.

The pyruvates are then converted to Acetyl coenzyme A.

The citric acid cycle converts Acetyl coenzyme A to coenzyme A. This creates 2 ATP.

Electron transport generates a whopping 32 to 34 ATP!

Anaerobic respiration (fermentation) requires less oxygen, but releases less energy. Glycolysis runs and releases 2 ATP, but pyruvate is converted to lactic acid or alcohol depending on the organism instead of continuing on through respiration.

Now, you’re asking, what about all the other stuff we eat, how do we get energy from that. Well they enter at different parts of the pathway. See below.