Thirty-Six Years, Prime Numbers, and Italia

I'm about to celebrate my thirty-sixth birthday. As I've been developing software since I was about twelve years of age, two-thirds of my life have now been dedicated to the design and programming of computer software.

Out of those twenty-four years, I believe I've spent the latter half of them complaining about how much I loathe technology, how I can't stand the directions it's taken, and how I can't wait to walk away from it all. I believe that I've spent nearly the same amount of time complaining about the direction that my country has taken, and debating whether I should invest the time in trying to help fix it or walk away from it all.

I was not a particularly good student in grammar school. While I was quite obviously gifted in mathematics and science, I put absolutely no effort into my studies. I was young, thoroughly bored, and far too lazy to suffer teachers and homework. The only thing that saved me from failing out of school was that I tested well. This turned what would have been F's into C's and occasionally B's.

That having been said, it only made sense that during my first semester of college, I found myself in the same state of boredom and contempt. I withdrew from school during that semester and entered the workforce as a junior-level computer programmer, only to find myself being rapidly promoted to a senior level engineer by the age of twenty.

So now that I've spent just as much time hating my career as I once did enjoying it, it's time to make firm decisions about the future. I'm thirty-five years of age, half way through my useful life, and my brain has begun to refuse my requests for it to continue operating in the methodically logical ways that had once allowed me to excel in software development.

Subjects that my previously logical mind would have found far too abstract to pique my interest now challenge me. Because I've had to pay taxes, I've naturally become interested in politics. Politics has cascaded into an appreciation of history, and history has opened my mind to many things, but particularly philosophy, religion, science and mathematics.

After complaining for so long about the directions of both technology and my country of birth, I've realized something: Neither of these things are going to get any better, and since I'm still relatively young and my mind still sharp, it's time for a change; time to act toward the future. It is with mathematics that I see that future, and it is in Europe where I see it taking place.

While doing genealogical research a few weeks ago, I discovered that the Italian government recognizes implicit citizenship for those of Italian descent, so long as their immigrant ancestor was not yet a United States citizen at the time of his or her child's birth in the US. After doing quite a bit of digging, I found out that I qualify for Italian citizenship via bloodline (jure sanguinis), and am now going through the process of gathering the required documents to apply for recognition of that citizenship.

Having one's Italian citizenship recognized is no quick and easy process. It takes months to gather the documents, a month or more to obtain an appointment to present your application, and thereafter a couple of years for the Italian government to finally get back to you with confirmation of recognition and an application for an Italian passport.

Because of how long the process takes, Milisa and I have at least a few years left in the United States before we can even plan our departure, and so we both intend to pursue our Bachelor degrees. She will be studying Landscape Architecture, while I will be studying Mathematics. Once in Europe, I plan to continue my studies by pursuing a doctorate, while Milisa will likely work as a landscape architect in the commercial sector.

I'm looking forward to this change, and can't honestly say that I'll miss the United States or Software Development, but all of this is still a few years away, so who knows. I can say one thing with some certainty, and that is this: Don't expect any of the Presidential candidates to make your lives any better, because they won't. We've long since passed the threshold at which government ceases to serve the people and instead serves itself. The United States that we once called a Republic is no more.

Technorati Tags: Careers, Italy, Life, Technology, United States of America

iPhone SDK Beta 2 PPC Fix

So Apple released the second beta of their iPhone SDK today...

I work on PowerPC Macs because I haven't felt the need to plunk down a couple thousand dollars for another computer when my Powerbook still works perfectly fine. I did, however, purchase an iPhone, and I'd really like to develop applications for it. Considering the fact that I paid almost $600 (after activation, etc) for the thing, and I previously dropped $2500 for the PowerBook, I feel that Apple owes me something for the money spent.

The previous version of the iPhone SDK didn't install the Aspen platform packages on PPC, but you could still manually install those packages and compile for the simulator with a simple warning about your unsupported (ppc) platform. Apple changed that with the second beta. First, the Aspen packages have now been prefixed with 'iPhone'... No big deal. Second, they've unfortunately made it a compilation error to attempt to compile for the iPhone simulator using a PPC computer. I find this unacceptable and I’d like to pay bills rather than buy new computers, so here’s what I did:

• Once you've moved the iPhone platform directories to their appropriate location under /Developer/Platforms, drill into: /Developer/Platforms/iPhoneSimulator.platform/Developer/
  Library/Xcode/Specifications/
• In this directory, you will find a file called "iPhone Simulator Architectures.xcspec" Make a backup of it and open the original in your favorite editor
• You'll notice in this file that the 'RealArchitectures' variable only defines i386 as a valid architecture. I change that to "(i386, ppc)"
• What I did next was essentially steal some of the definitions from the Mac OS X Architectures.xcspec file and added them to the end of the file.

The end result can be found here and can be used as a drop-in replacement of your "iPhone Simulator Architectures.xcspec". Make sure you back up the original though, or be prepared to reinstall.

After changing the file and relaunching XCode, my iPhone Simulator builds run fine... Not even the original warning. Wonderful!

[April 9, 2008 Note: This also works with the iPhone SDK Beta 3]

Technorati Tags: Apple, iPhone, PowerPC, Programming

Glamour Shot: New Song

So the guys in the band and I have been writing and recording up a storm. We've got about six new songs under development, the first of which is called "The Contaminant," and has just been posted to the Glamour Shot MySpace Site. It's post-punk influenced music, so if you're interested in that sort of thing, please do check it out.

Technorati Tags: Glamour Shot, Music, Post-Punk

Stagnation Nation: The State of Technology

It's 2008 and I'm bored. I've been sitting here for years, waiting patiently for some type of technology to be invented that might actually get me excited; that might possibly contribute something great and/or useful to the world, and I've seen absolutely nothing. It seems like all of the 'innovation' that we've been doing over the past couple of decades has simply consisted of refinement, rebranding, recomposition, and outright shit-polishing.

iPhone? That's not innovative. Neither are Web 2.0, Social Networking, Service Oriented Architectures, nor anything Google or the other big boys are developing. People tout these 'new technologies' as if they had actually required a brilliant mind to pull them out of thin air rather than having just been minor evolutions or refinements. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office actually grants patents to bullshit like this!

So my question is this:

Is there ANYONE doing anything innovative and interesting in the tech world?

If you are, PLEASE EMAIL ME (tom at this domain), because you're the company or person that I want to work with. I'm sick of writing the same code over and over again with minor variations. I'm sick of having to design systems that are nearly identical to the previous ones with only minor modifications based on customer requirements.

The kicker, of course: I doubt such a mythical beast exists, so back to work for me!

Technorati Tags: Computers, Innovation, Programming, Technology

ECMAPlasm: An ECMAScript Platform

ECMAPlasm strives to be a fully compliant ECMAScript Platform.

When we say 'platform,' we mean that, while ECMAScript alone is great, it could be so much more with the addition of a rich set of run-time libraries.

Such run-time libraries would allow ECMAScript to compete with other scripting languages in performing many system-level tasks. They would also allow web developers to leverage their skills in a variety of environments and to tackle new and exciting problems.

Unfortunately, ECMAScript on its own can't perform many of these functions, and so one must rely on a host environment to provide them.

Goals of the project:

• Support all standards related to ECMAScript 3rd Edition (ECMA-262, ECMA-290, ECMA-327, and ECMA-357)
• Support all proposed features of ECMAScript 4th Edition
• Attempt to be fully compatible with Adobe's ActionScript implementation
• Implement an ActionScript-compatible Bytecode Compiler
• Implement an ActionScript-compatible Virtual Machine
• Support optional Just-in-Time Compilation of Bytecode
• Implement an ECMAScript Native Interface for access to platform-specific features (used by run-time library)
• Develop a suite of APIs for performing tasks not traditionally associated with ECMAScript (threading, sockets, system calls, database access)

The project is being hosted at Google Code, and is just getting under way. You may find it at code.google.com/p/ecmaplasm/. The project's home page will ultimately be anchored at ecmaplasm.org.

The project is licensed under a liberal OpenBSD-style license.

Technorati Tags: ActionScript, ECMAScript, JavaScript, Open Source, Programming

Poll puts Clinton, Obama in Granite State dead heat

Poll puts Clinton, Obama in Granite State dead heat - BostonHerald.com: Sometimes politicians and their ridiculous tactics infuriate me.

In a Dec. 2 memo titled “Obama tries rewriting history again...” Clinton staffers seek to debunk Obama’s assertion that he is “not running to fulfill some long held plans” to be president. The evidence: “In kindergarten, Senator Obama wrote an essay titled ‘I want to become President,’” the memo reads before going on to quote Obama’s kindergarten teacher.

When I was in kindergarten in the Boston Public Schools, I'm pretty sure that I wrote no essays. In fact, I don't remember anyone in kindergarten writing essays. Most of us were lucky we could even spell our own names, much less write an essay about our future hopes and dreams.

I seem to recall that back in kindergarten, I wanted to be an astronaut, a ninja, a pirate, and a speed skater. Today I'm none of those things. I also wanted to become President. This was back when being President was actually a cool thing. It would have been especially cool to be a speed skating ninja President, but it apparently wasn't in the stars for me. I doubt many children today are proclaiming that "When I grow up, I want to be just like George W. Bush."

The question I'm really asking here is "Who hasn't said they want to be President as a child?" I'd be willing to bet that the majority of children have made such statements, but considering their race, religion, gender, and sexual orientation, we've certainly limited them in their options, haven't we?

If Barack Obama has had long-term plans of becoming president, then bravo for him. He's part of the very small percentage of Americans who can actually set a goal for themself and follow up on it without becoming distracted by money, NASCAR, tractor pulls, wrestling, or little shiny things on the sidewalk. He should be applauded for it rather than criticized.

Not that I'm going to vote for him, but shame on the Clinton campaign for even making this an issue.

Technorati Tags: Barack Obama, Democrats, Hillary Clinton, Politics

Where Shall I Begin?

It's not that there's nothing about which to rant. No, on the contrary, the problem is that there's too much damned stuff to serve as rant material. Identifying a good place to jump in might prove to be laborious, but I think I can do it. After all, I spent the first few years of my blogging career complaining venomously about XML and how its blatant commercialization was a scourge to the technology industry.

Of course I was wrong about that whole XML thing. After all, nobody can claim to have not adopted all of those wonderful 'WS-*' technologies, right? Oh, I was also wrong in that all of the best social networking sites now use that awesome FOAF format. Don't they? Perhaps I missed the mark quite a bit since there are no XML documents out there these days whose elements aren't part of a namespace. To top it all off, I was totally wrong when I criticized that technologically superior semantic web idea.

Shame on me. I should be publicly denounced for having doubted the great minds who brought you such wonderful and life altering technologies as the rapidly finalized XQuery specification, XML Schemas, Microsoft Bob, and the dreaded blink tag. To question the collective genius of committees or faceless corporations with their own competitive agendas seems to have been incredibly silly in retrospect.

I promise, it will never happen again.

Technorati Tags: Cynicism, Technology, World Wide Web, XML