Andy Roddick

Is it wrong to live and die with a sports athlete? Andy Roddick is five years older than me. He stepped up into professional tennis as I stepped into high school tennis. His greatest competitive achievements were recorded in 2003 and 2004. Mine came in 2005 during my senior year. When he thought he could make his greatest achievement by winning his second slam at the 2004 Wimbledon Finals, he ran into a rain delay which allowed Roger Federer to regroup and gain the upperhand. I was controlling my quarterfinals match at Districts my senior year against an opponent everyone said I could not stand toe-to-toe with before rain moved the match indoors and completely changed the outcome.

Roddick has a huge serve, a big forehand, an inconsistent backhand, and his volleying is mediocre for how much it could add to his game. I win with my serve, punish people with my forehand, roll the dice with my backhand, and do what I can from the net despite what it could do for my game. He has a sense of humor regardless of his situation. This includes when Roger Federer crushed him in this year's Australian Open Semifinals. When you piss him off, he will not pull any punches as demonstrated by his relationship with Novak Djokovic in the past year. There is no one in the sport who is more competitive. No one has a stronger drive to win. He leaves everything out on the court everytime he steps on it. Despite his efforts, he has only one slam title to his name and has only been ranked #1 overall from November 2003 until February 2004.

In some ways, it is almost creepy how similar to him I am. Perhaps this is the reason why I celebrate for a few hours when he wins before getting prepped for the next match, why I take a day to mourn a loss before turning towards the next tournament. When he falls down, I feel the pain. When he catches a bad break, I am frustrating. When he has need to yell at the chair umpire, I am already angry. This man is living my life on the big stage and I will follow him every step of the way.

Best of luck at Wimbledon, Andy.

Preventing File Sharing for Fear of Illegality is Stupid

I came across this news article. I will start with a disclaimer that this article does not explicitly state any of the things on which I am about to rant. With that out of the way, I have a serious problem with networks and internet service providers (ISP's) killing all usability of torrents. They can do this through a number of ways, but I am not going to get into the technical details here. My problem is that they cannot distinguish between what is a legal file download and an illegal one. Someone could very easily use a torrent to download the latest version of Ubuntu which is quite legal. They might also be downloading the latest movie at the same time which is very illegal under most circumstances. However, it is not illegal under all circumstances. Thus, most files cannot even be filtered simply based on what they are. The reason being is a file download can be legal for one person and illegal for another person. The result is if you are going to attempt to seriously hinder file sharing to prevent software piracy, you are also preventing legal uses of it.

Most universities use bandwidth shaping tools to limit how fast a file can be downloaded via P2P clients. I will not fight too much against the argument in which a school wants to keep bandwidth available for web browsing which tends to be more conducive to school-related activities than file sharing. Though I will say a computer science major can learn as much by downloading the latest Ubuntu .iso as a sociology major can learn on Facebook. Regardless, when a university prevents file sharing to check its illegal uses since apparently college students are the number one software pirates in the world, things become stupid. I will admit most policies are put in place because some government agency is breathing down their necks, but stand up for yourselves already!

Why do I have a problem with eliminating P2P file sharing on a network? Let me ask you this: why do we not prevent FTP on those same networks? It can be used for illegal file sharing. It tends not to be used because it is less efficient, but it has the same illegal potential. However, I will point out to you in another way just how absurd this whole idea is. If Microsoft slanders Apple in a commercial on the ESPN channel on your local cable, who is responsible for the breaking of the law? Is it Microsoft for slandering Apple? Is it ESPN for allowing such an advertisement to be aired? Is it the cable company for allowing ESPN to air such a commercial? I am guessing most of you think it is Microsoft. However, preventing P2P file sharing because someone might attempt to acquire a file illegally is the equivalent of putting ESPN at fault. All P2P file sharing does is present the content. It is not illegal until someone uses it in an illegal way. Thus, any network or ISP preventing file sharing amounts to a coward afraid to stand up to the lobbying RIAA mongrels.

Why do I cite the RIAA as mongrels? They started by attacking the poor, defenseless college students sharing files. They tried to make it a responsibility for universities to give up their students who were sharing various files the RIAA was monitoring. Some universities fell for this gag. Some students were wrongly punished because of this. Then some people started to stand up to the RIAA, and we all laughed because they finally got what was coming to them. It turns out college students are not always as defenseless as people like to think they are. Counter lawsuits ensued. I will not go into the full history because I am not as well-versed in it as I would need to be to do it justice. So now the RIAA is trying to shutdown file sharing. Good luck with that one. There will always something along the lines of FTP at the very least due to the need to push files to servers. The internet would die without such a technology. The RIAA just happens to be stupid enough to believe it can somehow win this fight. In the words of Agent Smith, "you are only delaying the inevitable."

My biggest pet peeve about attacking people ranging from random people on the street to The Pirate Bay is the entire concept. Let us say I leave my school bag and a cd unattended on a table in the union at my college because I want to go get food and I have a friend coming by any minute to borrow the cd. Some random person walks by and steals the cd. You might argue I am stupid for leaving it there, but I do not think you would say I am at fault with the law. Am I accomplice in the stealing of my own cd? It seems a bit ridiculous does it not. I am allowed to loan my physical cd to a friend under law. The only thing I have done is left the cd in a place where it can be easily taken by someone who does not have legal rights to possess it. This is the same situation in file sharing. I am not asking random people on the internet if they want a particular file. I am merely leaving the file in a public place for appropriate people to pick it up.

If this is illegal, I argue any computer possessing copyright information or confidential data and connected to the internet is illegal. I will paint another picture for you. Pretend I have a server at home with various music files on it that I purchased through iTunes. This is obviously only hypothetical since I would never use iTunes. I decide to open SSH to the world so I can work on some things on the computer while I am at my grandma's house for the holidays. Have I broken a copyright law? Someone could illegally acquire the music by hacking my SSH login and obtain the file. The only difference here is I put a security barrier between the file and unauthorized users. However, if it is illegal to share files because people might download them illegally, then is it not also illegal to setup SSH? I am providing an opportunity for a hacker to illegally access my system. I should be ashamed of myself! The only difference is the amount of security I have setup in an effort to prevent unauthorized users. Just as I had no security to prevent my cd from being stolen off the union table. In case you are worrying, no, I have never had a cd stolen from me at college.

Just to drive the point home, if you want to be stupid, try to prevent file sharing because someone might use it illegally. Ooo! Maybe we should shutdown the internet because somebody might use it illegally!

Rough Night

Last night turned out to be a pretty rough night to the point all I keep thinking is "did anyone catch the number on that bus?" It started out when I decided to play some Call of Duty 4 on the PS3. I have no idea why, but I was not on my game last night. There were a decent number of games where my team completely dominated, but I was fighting for my life in everything else. In case you do not know how I play that game, such struggles are usually rare. This was the first night I really got to play with the old crew I played with so much last summer. The result was me playing from approximately 9pm to 3am. I was already tired from not getting a whole lot of sleep during the week and putting in a full round of golf yesterday afternoon. That round of golf included two hours in the rain.

To make matters worse, my sleep was not amazing either. At some point in the night, I managed to rollover in such a way that I face-planted into my bed's headboard. I recommend not doing that. It hurts. I had a dream that I went to Turkey with my sister's family. We had a few guys hassling us, and once I got that resolved, I found out my girlfriend had hid herself in my backpack to come with us. How she fit and I did not notice a backpack that has suddenly gained the weight of a person, I have no idea. The unfortunate part about this was the need to figure out how to get her back into the United States. Her lack of a passport and the scan of luggage which shows up human bones were the prime source of conflict.

About at that point, I woke up only to find out I am extremely dehydrated. I decided not to open the window last night thinking it would be warm outside before I would want to wake up. I thought the cool apartment would be able to hold out despite having Ellinore running. The result of this was my apartment being very dry in the morning and a little warm. So yeah, fun night...

FOSS

I was talking to my brother-in-law, Jamie, the other day about Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). It got me to thinking about how much FOSS I use on a regular basis. Here is a list of all the software I have come into contact with recently. If you realize I am forgetting something, please leave a comment.

Software Used on a Daily Basis:

• Ubuntu (Operating System)
• Open Office (Documents)
• Mozilla Firefox (Web Browser)
• Mozilla Thunderbird (Email Client)
• Pidgin (Instant Messaging)
• Eclipse (IDE)
• Spaz (Twitter Client)
• Apache HTTP Server (Web Server)
• MySQL (Database)
• PHPMyAdmin (MySQL Web Interface)
  
• Simple Machines Forums (Web Forums)
• Mediawiki (Wiki)
• Tomato (Router Firmware)
  

Software Being Investigated:

• Trac (Project Management Tool)
• Zabbix (Network Monitoring Tool)
• Wordpress (Content Management System)
• SVN (Version Control System)
• Elgg (Social Networking Software)
  

Software Used in the Past:

• CVS (Version Control System)
• Joomla (Content Management System)
• phpBB (Web Forums)
  

Trac Review

I spent some time at the end of April playing around a little bit with a project management tool known as Trac. Then a friend asked me my thoughts on it. So I told him I would write blog about it. A month later, I am finally getting it actually done! Let me first qualify that I was looking at the tool to manage software development projects.

The Cool Things about Trac:

• Lets you create milestones in the development process. It seems to be common to use these to represent version releases. My initial thought was to use them for various key components of the software.
• Has a great ticket system for reporting bugs found in the software. These can be setup to allow your users to fill out tickets when they discover a bug. The tickets can also be attached to milestones to allow you to manage fixing them as well.
• Integrates a wiki as well to allow you to document the software and its development process.

The Disappointing Things about Trac:

• Installation is a series of commands that call Perl scripts if I am not mistaken. This made me sad. I wanted a pretty web interface to ask me the questions because it would make a lot easier for installing on my web host. I can survive, but I think it would be a big step in the right direction.
• Along the same lines as the installation web gui, administration tasks need to be pushed completely into a web interface. Some things can be done in the web gui, but not enough. I was still having to run some commands from a terminal for very basic setup and user administration needs.
  
• No concept of submilestones. I see milestones as tasks needing done. Tickets as bugs. From all the reading I did from the Trac community and developers, this does not appear to be the future idea of Trac. Right now, people create milestones and attach tickets to milestones. Tickets are being used to represent tasks. Rather than implementing sub-milestones, the direction is to implement sub-tickets. Personally, I just don't like this system, but I can roll with it if needed.
• No forum integration as I recall, but I could be very easily be wrong on this one. It would allow your user community to talk with each other and help each other. This would be useful for all those cases that do not make it to the wiki or when a user simply does not use the wiki or find what they need on the wiki. It could also be used for communication between developers.

After all of this, I will likely still use Trac. I spent some time looking at other project management software, and this was the closest one to really handling what I needed. I did have the requirement that the software was free and preferably open source. I do not intend for this to be a large implementation so the unpolished aspects are not as big of a problem. Things were still easy to figure out so I did not have to spend much time trouble-shooting or pushing through a learning curve. Ultimately, if you are looking for something like this, feel free to give it a solid look and see if it will work for you.

Perl => Micro$haft Rant

The other day I tweeted in a mad fury with very little details as to the source of my frustrations. To enlighten my Twitter followers, here is the email which served as the source of such anger:
It turns out that when you pass an array as an argument in Perl, it flattens the array, thus giving you a lot of arguments.

Example:
@array = (1, 2, 3);
Print_array( @array );

Sub print_array() {
 My ($1, $2, $3) = @_;
 Print "$1\n";
 Print "$2\n";
 Print "$3\n";
}

Rather Than:
@array = (1, 2, 3);
Print_array( @array );

Sub print_array() {
 My @nums = shift;
 Foreach my $num (@nums) {
  Print "$num\n";
 }
}
 

Unfortunately this really screws things up when you want to pass an array along with some scalars.

Such As:
@array = (1, 2, 3);
$sum = 6;
Print_math( @array, $sum );

Sub print_math() {
 My (@nums, $math) = @_;
 Print $nums[0].'+'.$nums[1].'+'.$nums[2].'='.$sum;
}

Working Solution:
@array = (1, 2, 3);
$sum = 6;
Print_math( \@array, $sum );

Sub print_math() {
 My ($num_array, $math) = @_;
 My @nums = @$num_array;
 Print $nums[0].'+'.$nums[1].'+'.$nums[2].'='.$sum;
}

Ignore the auto-caps. Have I ever mentioned I hate M$ products?

Microsoft: "We're so smart we know how to capitalize sentences. You must be too stupid to know how to do this like we do. We will help you capitalize your sentences."

Me: "But I'm not typing sentences..."

Microsoft: "What do you mean? People only type sentences in their emails. No one except us understands code or other non-sentence based writing."

Me: "Go #@$* yourself Micro$haft! You're #@$*ing retarded! You're 'increase indent' button claims it can't work with plain text emails even though I clearly have tabs in this plain text email because I had to type everyone @*%&@() one of them myself!"

Alone in the Dark

This morning I woke up with some lines from Tristan & Isolde in my head for no known reason. Here is my thought process:

1. Tristan is a pretty cool name.
2. However, Alexander might be one of the coolest names of all time.
3. That being said, I would also like a kid to have the name Kyle.
4. If I name a kid Alexander Kyle Sparks, his initials would be AKS!
5. If he sins, he would embody the three-way handshake!
6. SYN, SYN + ACK, ACK!

This is one more testament to why I should never be left alone in an apartment by myself for an entire three-day weekend.