Coding on a Budget

Come fly away with me..

Sun, 08 Mar 2009 06:20:46 -0500

For Christmas, my wife bought me a discovery flight package from Premiere Aviation.

My first thought was - we're in a recession, I'm thinking of ways to keep my business going and here is this teaser that will cost me thousands of dollars in the long run. I really didn't want to look at a gift that way, my wife was only trying to come up with something unique and special and she knew I always wanted to learn to fly. The gift certificate sat on my desk looking at me for 2 months before I did something about it. I made the call and setup an appointment.

I was paired up with flight instructor Brandon Reed and it didn't take long to realize this was one of those rare people who really enjoyed what they did for a living. Whenever I meet one of these rare people, their enthusiasm is infectious and it makes me more productive - at least for a short period of time. How many people do you know who actually likes going to work? On a side note, just to show how small the planet really is, notice Ed Murray on the same page. Ed was vice president at a company called Trillion Digital Communications where he hired me to do some Linux programming for them. Long story short, the company was eaten by it's "sister" company located out in Austin, Texas. It shouldn't have happened and a bunch of people, some of which I consider friends, lost their jobs.

Back to the original story. The discovery flight basically takes you up in a plane and lets you fly around for a bit. You can talk all day about flying, read all the articles, see all the pictures, but you don't know if you're going to like it until you actually do it. Very similar to swimming, how do you know you like to swim without getting in the water? Reading about swimming in a brochure is not going to give you the sensation of buoyancy. The aircraft assigned to me was a 2006 model Diamond DA-40 G-1000 with the glass cockpit.

We climb in, buckle up, start the preflight checklist, and Brandon talked about how you absolutely cannot stall this aircraft and how great it is to fly. However, when it came time to actually crank it up, it absolutely would not fire up. Apparently this particular model is subject to contact corrosion that will interfere with grounding system. So my first contact with a personal airplane was very much like my first contact with my car - I had to put it in the shop.

Nearby was our backup plane, a 2006 Cessna 172S G-1000 with the glass cockpit.

This plane is for the advanced students who want to be instrument rated licensed. I always considered myself an overachiever so switching to the more difficult plane was fine with me. However, my friend Ryan, had a good laugh as while my plane was new with a digital dash - his was old and half the indicators didn't work.

This plane did start and we proceeded to taxi on to the runway. The sensation of leaving the ground is very much like a commercial flight but much more amplified. You feel the air pressure change around the plane much like you feel the texture of the road via your tires. We performed a straight climb until we reached 1500 feet and then climbed once again to 3500 feet before doing any turns. Doing anything only requires the slightest of moves on the stick. Just like a slight move on a steering wheel while traveling at interstate speeds will perform a lane change, the slightest move on the stick will start a turn. Everything else is micro-moves to keep the plane in a straight line just like you must make constant corrections to keep your car in your lane on the interstate. My wife was in the back seat with the camera taking pictures the whole time. This is what Bessemer looks like at 3500 feet:

Some of my students should recognize the parking lot in the bottom center of this picture. Also displayed in the picture is one of my customer's real estate development park.

I had a blast.. More than a blast actually. Flying that plane around triggered one of those life altering moments. I had a silly grin on my face for hours after the fact and I really can't wait to go back up and do it all again. It really was one of the best days of my life and to top it off I was able to share it with my wife. Now my priorities are: How can I keep my business going? Oh yeah, how can I sneak in paying for a pilot license while doing that?

Linux holding kids back?!

Sat, 03 Jan 2009 16:44:13 -0600

Let's talk physics. Most people have heard of the law of conservation of energy. It says that energy cannot be created nor destroyed, but simply changed to something else. Economics dumbs this idea down to there's no such thing as a free lunch. Nothing is really free. Even that pen you borrowed and the owner told you to keep it costs someone something. It took energy to come up with the idea, make the pen, ship it, sell it, use it and the act of giving it away.

So let's apply this to FOSS.

Here is a guy who reconditions old hardware, loads Linux on it and deploys it to kids who need it. One of the kids made copies of a Linux Live CD (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_LiveDistros) and gave it to his classmates. The teacher confiscated the CDs and wrote a nasty graham.

--- quote

"...observed one of my students with a group of other children gathered around his laptop. Upon looking at his computer, I saw he was giving a demonstration of some sort. The student was showing the ability of the laptop and handing out Linux disks. After confiscating the disks I called a confrence with the student and that is how I came to discover you and your organization. Mr. Starks, I am sure you strongly believe in what you are doing but I cannot either support your efforts or allow them to happen in my classroom. At this point, I am not sure what you are doing is legal. No software is free and spreading that misconception is harmful. These children look up to adults for guidance and discipline. I will research this as time allows and I want to assure you, if you are doing anything illegal, I will pursue charges as the law allows. Mr. Starks, I along with many others tried Linux during college and I assure you, the claims you make are grossly over-stated and hinge on falsehoods. I admire your attempts in getting computers in the hands of disadvantaged people but putting linux on these machines is holding our kids back.

This is a world where Windows runs on virtually every computer and putting on a carnival show for an operating system is not helping these children at all. I am sure if you contacted Microsoft, they would be more than happy to supply you with copies of an older verison of Windows and that way, your computers would actually be of service to those receiving them..."

Karen xxxxxxxxx

xxxxxxxxx Middle School

AISD

--- end quote

This both amused and angered me at the same time. So much in fact that it became the main topic of my Linux classes for that week. Yes, I'm one of those college instructor types that teaches Linux, part time of course, but a teacher none the less. So let's get this out of the way - no software is free as it took energy to make it. It can be free as in the freedom to do with it what you want. I can, as the creator of the software, give permission - the freedom - to the user so they can use my software as needed. They can even change my software to suit their needs.

Real world example, FollowMeIP. I wrote this little server for a project I had at the time and it turned in to something useful for some people. I've been hosting the site for years now - for free. No catch, if you want to use it, use it. Does it cost me money to run? Yes. Do I sit up at night worrying about how I'm going to recover that lost money? No.

One could say the quality of software isn't as good as commercial and I'd agree in FollowMeIP's case as it took me all of a weekend to write and I haven't put much effort into it since. It will be my test site for that magical day where I decide it's time for Ruby on Rails goodness. Point is, I'm going down the non-traditional road of - here, I wrote this, it was useful to me at some point, maybe you'll like it too.

On the other hand, take a look at OpenOffice. Here you have a fantastic open source project funded by Sun. The quality of this package is the same if not better than similar commercial packages. In fact, I'm using OpenOffice to write this blog post. So what is Sun's angle? Why dump all the time and money into a product that they could easily sell? Instead of worrying about the answers to those questions, I focus on the fact that I have the source code to OpenOffice and the freedom to do neat things with it. If Sun fell off the planet tomorrow, I can still change or patch OpenOffice myself or even form a company that does nothing but OpenOffice support. In my day to day life, I really could care less about Sun's long term strategy regarding its open source initiative.

As for Linux's ease of use. This is completely relative. If you grew up on windows, all you know is windows and you didn't even know there was an alternative - sure anything else is not going to be "easy" for you. I've asked my students many times - why haven't you even tried a mac? The answers are mostly - well, it just never occurred to me that I should. One even said he would feel like a traitor, which means on some level he was emotionally attached to windows. Anything you don't use or do on a daily bases is going to be hard on some level.

My buddy Gary got me a Professor's Cube for Christmas. While I find it fun, it's not easy nor intuitive to me at all. I suppose the natural response for the majority of people is to simply give up as soon as they encounter the slightest difficulty. My reaction was to watch many videos, read many articles and to go as far as setting up a video chat with Gary so he could help me remotely. While I still don't fully understand some of the algorithms I used nor feel like it's "easy", I still enjoyed the challenge.

I remember the first time I saw Linux, Ryan had it running reading his email in a text based console. My curiosity got the best of me, at 20 I was already sick of windows. Here I was pulling down major bucks for rebooting NT servers everyday and it bored me to tears. Then I saw this new and different operating system and I had access to the source code. Computers became fun for me again, I was energized, I couldn't get enough of this new and continuously changing frontier called Linux. It was computing the way it was suppose to be and it didn't take long at all for me to nuke windows and become a Linux only shop.

Since those days, Linux has gotten a thousand fold easier to use and is very accessible to any level of computer user. There's guis for everything, yum installers, even wifi drivers for windows only cards. I can install it on one computer or a million and the cost to me? Time.

No need to call India and beg for a new activation key if I decided to upgrade my mainboard. Freedom is good.

In closing - Karen from xxxxxxxxx Middle School - shut the fuck up.

The stackoverflow drinking game

Thu, 21 Aug 2008 19:05:42 -0500

Caution: You will die if you play this game..

Minor background information:

Joel Spolsy and Jeff Atwood are great writers. They talk about things programmers would be interested in - for instance screw the desk, get a great chair.

But then they decided to do a podcast about their new social networking site that will be this haven of information on a .net stack. I'll quote my friend Ryan: "After hearing them talk, Joel needs to go back to writing and I wouldn't hire Atwood to mow my lawn." After listening to 18 hours of them talk, I agree - take a drink.

The rules are simple:

When Jeff agrees with Joel - take a drink..

well, you're already drunk by now.

When Jeff mentions having a "out of band conversation" - take 2 drinks.

When Jeff says "Absolutely" - take a drink.

When they both deny they're .net programmers - just start chugging..

When Jeff talks about earning badges - think about special mounts on Warcraft and take a drink.

When they say LAMP stacks are dog slow - 3 drinks

When Joel claims macs are only luxury items - 2 drinks

When Joel bashes open source - 3 drinks

When Jeff claims he's open source friendly - fire off a nasty email, then drink

Every time they don't take a user call - take a drink

By now, you should be dead. Either from the alcohol poisoning and/or the aneurysm that ruptured from listening to these guys. While I have no idea if their new site is going to flop or become the greatest thing since sliced bread, I would suggest they concentrate on coding and kill the podcast.