tbradford.org: Tom Bradford

New Song, New Album, New Drummer, and You!

2008-06-30T08:24:00.001-07:00

I noticed that I haven't posted any news about Glamour Shot (my band) in quite a while, so I thought I'd send out an update.

We've posted our latest song. This one is entitled "My Every Whim," and you might find it a refreshing detour from some of our other work. Additionally, the song "How You've Changed," which I didn't announce here before, has also been receiving quite a bit of play time.

In other news, our search for a drummer is going well, and we should have an announcement in that area very soon.

We are now officially announcing our intend to record our first album within the next few months. We plan to release this album independently, with our primary distribution method being digital. There will be a CDs pressed as tour merchandise and for promotions, and we will also be pressing a limited set of Vinyl.

In other news, if you hadn't noticed a bulletin that I posted on MySpace, Peter Hook (of Joy Division and New Order) will be DJing a set in Phoenix on July 4th, and Ben (our friendly neighborhood Guitarist) has been asked to perform a set in support. We're all very excited about this, and will be attending the event as well.

Oh, and we recently surpassed 30,000 MySpace friends. The vast majority of you (90%?) are people who have 'actually' listened to our music, and like it enough that you've decided to add us to your worlds, so we really would like to extend our heartfelt thanks to your continuing support.

You like us! You really do!

Thanks,
Thom, Ben, and Scott (Glamour Shot)

Technorati Tags: Glamour Shot, Music, Post-Punk

Ruby is Object Oriented?

2008-06-26T10:01:00.000-07:00

Well, for better or worse, I've been doing a lot of Ruby coding lately.

One of the first great selling points that Ruby developers like to flaunt is that their language is 'truly object oriented' in that everything is an object, even numeric literals. Really? Cool! Well, I've done a lot of object oriented programming over the last twenty years... You know, languages like Java, C++, Objective-C, ObjectPascal, and yes, even a little SmallTalk.

With the exception of SmallTalk, all of these languages feature visibility modifiers that allow you to identify a method as public, protected, or private, and all of the languages present consistent behavior when you tag your methods as such. In particular, private methods allow you to write code that is specific to the internal implementation details of your class, and those methods are never exposed outside of your class.

Ruby has private methods too... or does it? Take this code for example:

class BaseClass
  private
  def private_method
    puts "base class private"
  end

  public
  def public_method
    private_method
  end
end

class SubClass < BaseClass
  private
  def private_method
    puts "sub class private"
  end
end

d = SubClass.new
d.public_method

According to the traditional rules of object-oriented inheritance, what should the last line of this snippet display? If you were thinking "base class private," you'd be thinking like an object oriented programmer who has spent more than three minutes writing code in Java or C++, but according to Ruby, you'd be completely fucking wrong.

Why? Well, Ruby, while it doesn't allow you to call private methods from outside of their classes, does allow you to override them in subclasses. That's okay, other OOP languages allow you to do that as well, except for one thing: other OOP languages don't add private methods to the class's virtual method table, and so there's no risk involved in defining methods of the same name in descendants.

Ruby makes it even worse by making private methods accessible to subclasses. That's what protected methods are for! So what used to be the proper way of hiding implementation details from consumers of your APIs has now become a fucking minefield. The Ruby developer stance regarding this mess is "well, you should be familiar with the code you're extending, or you should just write an adapter."

I'm sorry, I thought the value of object-oriented programming was to allow developers to utilize or inherit the public functionality of APIs, while remaining buffered from the internal details of those APIs. It was supposed to save us time and allow us to concentrate only on the functionality that we needed to implement rather than the inner workings of functionality that we're leveraging.

As Ruby developers, I suppose if I decided to open a socket and send a byte buffer from point A to point B, you'd also recommend that I learn the internal workings of the Linux kernel? In that case, I should probably also know the inner workings of the BSD kernel as well, because it also has a socket() call.

Ok, so let's say I follow your advice and I refer to the code that I'm extending and purposely avoid the definition of methods that duplicate the names of private methods in a base class. What happens if the upstream vendor of an API that I'm using decides to add a private method to their base class that duplicates the name of a method in my class? Should they keep tabs on the thousands of potential 3rd party extensions to their classes? Should we be forced to perform code reviews every time we update a dependent API?

What the fuck, Ruby people?! I shouldn't be seeing "sub class private." Fix this!

Technorati Tags: C++, Java, Objective-C, Programming, Ruby, SmallTalk

An Open Letter to Democrats in Congress

2008-06-14T12:02:00.001-07:00

An Open Letter to Democrats in Congress:

As our representatives, you have sworn an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States. You have also been elected for no other reason than to represent the will of your constituents. Several days ago, thirty-five articles of Impeachment were presented against President George W. Bush, and while a few of those articles were clearly not impeachable offenses, the vast majority of those articles were substantive, and should be pursued for the sake of maintaining any semblance of freedom and representative democracy in the United States of America.

As the people of the United States, we compel you to press forward with impeachment proceedings and to cease being so wholly consumed with your own political careers that your actions are to the detriment of the United States as a free and just people. We also make it clear to you, our Democrats in Congress, that your inaction in this matter is itself both unconstitutional and illegal inasmuch as you are aiding and abetting high crimes and misdemeanors that have been committed in plain view and with reckless abandon.

When over one-third of a country's population insist upon impeachment, sending this matter to a committee wherein it will exist in limbo for eternity is clearly an obstructive course of action and completely misrepresents the will of the people. If you, the Democrats in Congress, insist upon this course, know that you will have directly contributed to the further disintegration of both constitutional government and representative democracy, and know that the American people will make their disapproval known in future elections.

The American People will not stand for this. We will not urge you to change your minds on this matter, instead we demand that you perform your duties as our representatives and as constitutional officers by moving forward with impeachment proceedings against both George W. Bush, President of the United States, and Richard B. Cheney, Vice President of the United States.

Sincerely,
The Voting Citizens of the United States of America

Technorati Tags: Bush, Democrats, Impeachment, Kucinich, Politics, U.S. Constitution

Why Don't We Impeach Nancy Pelosi?

2008-06-09T22:16:00.001-07:00

This evening, Dennis Kucinich stood before Congress for a few hours reading off an extensive list (thirty-five, to be exact) of charges against President Bush, and in the process formed what I thought to be a reasonable argument to support impeachment of the President. After watching this, it occurred to me that even though C-SPAN was carrying the coverage live for hours, and even though the story had been picked up by all the major wire services, the story hadn't made it to the front page or politics sections of any of the major news web sites. It made me wonder why.

Has the Bush administration successfully manipulated the major media such that the only stories they're willing to publish have to do with his succession rather than the actual news of the day? That can't be the case because only a couple of the major networks have a glaringly conservative and pro-Bush leaning... You know which ones they are, I needn't tell you.

Then I remembered something. Kucinich presented similar charges against Vice President Cheney a while back. These charges received a little more attention by the press than today's story, but Nancy Pelosi again reminded us that she has no intention of leveling impeachment charges against the current administration. Her claim is that such charges would be divisive and likely unsuccessful. Divisive for whom? The American people? Congress? The Democratic Party?

I've long believed that the Democratic party, while appearing to be sympathetic to the American people, are no better than their Republican counterparts in that their only duty is to themselves. The only major difference between the two parties is that at least Republicans don't pretend to care, so you can take them for their word (as ridiculous as their words may be).

On the other hand, it's quite obvious that Nancy Pelosi acts neither on behalf of the will of her party nor that of the American People. I seem to recall that a couple of years ago, the American People chose to overthrow Republican rule of the Congress to expedite an end to the war and a return to sanity in American politics. What happened to those promises? Why have the Democrats failed us and who is left in American politics that we can trust? I fear not a single person.

So I think the simple answer to my original question is that the mainstream media is ignoring the story because they know that any efforts to impeach members of the current administration will be completely wasted to afford members of the Democratic party more leverage in the coming election. Because of the Democrats' failures over the last few years, the race will be very close, and so their party can't afford to alienate independent voters and those Republicans who are so fed up with their party that they might be willing to jump ship for a couple of years.

Having just written this, I can't believe I had to. I'm reporting on politics as usual, and so I should have known better. We should all know better by now.

Technorati Tags: Bush, Democrats, Kucinich, News, Pelosi, Politics, Republicans

Jumping Ship to JumpBox

2008-05-25T10:50:00.001-07:00

In two weeks I'll be walking away from my role with Apriva to join friends and former co-workers at JumpBox. Why would I leave a cushy job at which I do mindlessly simple work and leap head-first into the seemingly unending tempest that is a startup? The simple answer is that I'd prefer to be challenged and happy rather than bored and miserable. Some people thrive in startup environments while others are wholly consumed by them. I fall into the former group.

The more complex answer is that, for quite a while now, I've believed that one of the major problems in computing is its gross inefficiency. Data centers full of servers each exposing different facilities and operating at about 90% idle is an incredible waste of space, energy, time, and resources. Furthermore, the thousands of clients connecting to those servers are almost guaranteed to be operating at 90% idle as well, thus compounding the problem of wasted CPU cycles.

The answer to the server-side dilemma, as is becoming increasingly more obvious, is virtualization. The guys at JumpBox have understood this for a while, and instead of embarking on the route of providing a virtualization platform, they've instead sought to provide a comprehensive set of virtualized appliances. They do the busywork of installing and configuring solutions for you, providing them as portable virtual machine images that you need only double-click to launch. Anyone who's ever installed and configured Trac or MovableType will understand the inherent value of this service.

That said, there's more to solving the overall inefficiency problem than simply virtualizing the server side of the computing process, and it is my hope that my joining JumpBox will in some way assist in identifying and developing solutions.

Technorati Tags: Careers, Life, Virtualization, Technology

Slashdot | Dealing With Dialup

2008-05-12T09:31:00.001-07:00

Slashdot | Dealing With Dialup: Some dumb-ass on Slashdot is wondering how to get faster internet access for his rich-ass parents who live on Cape Cod. One thing he suggested was this:

I also suggested they talk with their senators and local political reps.

Since when is it your god-given right as an American to have high-speed internet access, so much so that you'd feel it appropriate to put pressure on your senators when they have other, more important shit to take care of? You know, shit like a failing economy and a war that has contributed to the failure of that economy?

Seriously, what the hell is wrong with Americans? We live in this massive, United-States-sized vacuum of entitlement and irrationality that disgusts many of the people living within it, and undoubtedly the entirety of the rest of the world. Yet, we believe that the rest of the world is simply 'jealous' and hateful of our 'freedom' rather than simply reacting to our obliviousness and arrogance.

Over one hundred twenty thousand people in Myanmar just died, with up to one hundred thousand more possibly dying due to secondary illness. Over ten thousand have died in the Chinese earthquake. About a half million Iraqis have died as a result of our invasion. There is horrible genocide occurring throughout Africa and Asia. Yet we Americans, people of the richest country in the world, would rather do nothing and sit in our comfy little Victorians worried about whether or not we can download photos of our spoiled and entitled brat grandkids in under ten seconds.

What the fuck, man?!

Technorati Tags: Democracy, Myanmar, Technology, United States of America

Thirty-Six Years, Prime Numbers, and Italia

2008-04-21T09:25:00.000-07:00

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

2008-03-27T18:53:00.001-07:00

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

2008-01-30T10:25:00.000-08:00

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

2008-01-22T12:12:00.000-08:00

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

2007-12-19T09:17:00.001-08:00

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

2007-12-12T12:25:00.001-08:00

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?

2007-09-11T20:14:00.000-07:00

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