Thoughts on the Infinite

I need a pure mathematician to discuss this with me but I have been having some shower thoughts on infinite numbers and their implications.  I am not a formally trained mathematician and am almost certainly using words like “set” and “infinite” differently than would be properly used by one, but regardless I need to get these out of my head.

First, it seems logical for order sets of infinitely large things, of a defined group, that the nature of their being ordered would mean all possible patterns for that set would occur.  For example the defined group of 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9 in the order of “1”, “2”, etc through infinity would always contain any possible finite “number” regardless of the patter if we assume the patter must contain those ten characters.

Second, it seems just as logical for unordered sets of infinitely large things, of a defined group, that the nature of their being unordered would mean all possible patters for that set would NOT occur.  In other words, that because such a set is ordered in a non-exhaustive way that even if the set was used infinitely it would not guarantee all possible discrete sets would be used. For example the defined group of a, b, c, d, e… through z order via “one”, “two”, etc. through infinity would not automatically contain the word “xxxzxxznnnzzz” because such word violates the rules of the English language.  So an infinite number of words would be produced but non of them would be xxxzxxznnnzzz.

The natural implication for this is that for sets that have arbitrary rules that the normal assumptions for infinite breakdown.

A totally different question also comes to mind.   For infinite numbers that (although unordered still contain all possible patters) for example pi.  Do specific patterns in these sets generally appear random (at least within the confines of their set length?)   Is their randomness generally uniform?

My Creed

Over the course of the last couple years of I have been putting more thought into some of the core beliefs I hold about things other than faith or family.  How do I see the world and how does such beliefs affect my decisions and opportunities.  Piece by piece I have been writing these down and although I am certainly NOT done, have decided it is time to actually “say” them out loud.

I believe in actions and distrust intentions.  Every man believes in the cause of his behavior even when that behavior brings about pain and suffering.  Those who created socialism believes they were bringing about an egalitarian utopia and inquisitors believed they were saving the souls of men.

Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it. –Milton Friedman

The evil that is in the world almost always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding. –Albert Camus

The logical corollary to my first belief is that I believe that the ends never justify the means.  Partly because, I believe that there is no ultimate good that springs magically from a “necessary” string of injustices and evil.  But also because we become what we do and our actions ultimately sculpt us into the object of our behavior.

…let a prince have the credit of conquering and holding his state, the means will always be considered honest, and he will be praised by everybody because the vulgar are always taken by what a thing seems to be and by what comes of it; and in the world there are only the vulgar, for the few find a place there only when the many have no ground to rest on.  –Niccolò Machiavelli

I believe those who desire to “throw away and start from scratch” dramatically underestimates the complexity of a given problem.  Real change happens through evolution over time, through trail, through error, and through the accumulated power of experience to reinforce decisions.  Throwing away history for no reason other than frustration with having to deal with it, most often causes one to repeat it.

It’s important to remember that when you start from scratch there is absolutely no reason to believe that you are going to do a better job than you did the first time. First of all, you probably don’t even have the same programming team that worked on version one, so you don’t actually have “more experience”. You’re just going to make most of the old mistakes again, and introduce some new problems that weren’t in the original… –Joel Spolsky

I believe people are most truly defined by the parts of ourselves that we say NO to.  I don’t drink, I don’t borrow money, I almost never drive a car, and I won’t have sex until I am married, say more about a person (good or bad) than the 10,000 things everybody does or everybody wants to do. Saying yes implies we are like everyone else, that you capitulate to the will of society.  Saying no is self sacrifice and a dramatic statement of individuality.

Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter, and those who matter don’t mind.  –Bernard M. Baruch

If then follows that I believe great acts take great sacrifice and the only sacrifice this is truly great is self sacrifice.  While it may sometimes be necessary to force others to sacrifice, there is never anything admirable about it.  No man should be held in esteem for giving something that he took from someone else.  Sacrifice is not sacrifice when forced upon.

A man who was completely innocent, offered himself as a sacrifice for the good of others, including his enemies, and became the ransom of the world. It was a perfect act. –Mahatma Gandhi

The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. –David Foster Wallace

I believe, and can categorically prove, that the free market is the greatest vehicle for eradicating poverty, hunger, and disease that has ever existed.  Nothing, no government program, no charity organization, no religious denomination has come anywhere close to the success that the free market and capitalism has at improving the corporeal lives of the human race.

Commerce [and] entrepreneurial capitalism take more people out of poverty than aid. We need Africa to become an economic powerhouse. –Bono

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. –Adam Smith

Life is what you make of it

The most difficult aspect of software development for new programmers often has nothing to do with algorithm complexity or syntactical quarks; it’s all the other “stuff” associated with building, managing, and testing software systems.  When a developer steps into a existing business that already has a software stack to support the problem can be mitigated by relying on the institutional knowledge that the existing developers have formed over the course of maintaining their software.  I haven’t, in most cases,  had that fortune  in my career because either a) I was the companies first software engineer, or b) the existing software engineers had become proficient at a “alternative” software stack (and honestly, alternative is the kindest word I could come up with for Mainframe/Cobol.)

The longer a programming language has been around the more complex these build & management tools get.  The reasons are pretty simple.  The longer a language has been used, the more complex and more broad the uses of that language become.  Build tools generally start off pretty simple (make was originally an 8 line bash script for gods sake) but they must expand to cover more and more complex setups with more and more non-standard configurations.  In the most extreme cases the support tools even need to consider multiple platforms on multiple hardware configurations.  This problem can be exacerbated when a language needs to be “compiled” (and I use the term loosely) or works on “core” systems, meaning closer to the hardware, network, or data layer.*

C suffers from all of the above listed problems and more.  Having been around for around 40 years, in constant usage, on every platform ever made (super-computer to toasters), used for hardware drivers, operating systems, core network stacks, and even to create other programming languages; means that C can be the most complicated system ever supported by mankind.  I’m really not kidding about this.  More than one person has pointed out that the Linux kernel (95% pure C code) is many orders of magnitude more complex than sending a man to the moon is or even sending a woman to Mars will be.  Anyone who has had to create a Gnu build-chain supported C program from scratch has had to kill themselves learning the intricacies of make, automake, config, autoconfig, m4, autoreconfig, cmake, libtools, and autoheader.  Seriously, a “correct” Gnu C project with 1 header file and 1 c file has 26 buildchain files supporting it on initial setup.

Recently I have been doing some really interesting C development on micro-mobile platforms.  The first language I did significant (i.e. not a GWBasic MadLibs game) development on was C.***  My college experience with C was relegated to a couple hundred lines and using the up arrow to re-compile the program after changes.  Now my annoyance with with the autoconf build tools (and its many many gotchas) is replaced with the need to support cross-compiling, manage external libraries, and automate build deployments.  I have had to learn each of these tools and what it is they accomplish for me so I don’t have to re-invent the wheel.  Here are some of the more useful sources of information I have come across:

  • Gnu Autoconfig, Automake, and Libtools – by Gary V. Vaughan, Ben Elliston, Tom Tromey and Ian Lance Taylor.  Available as a Web Book it covers the entire build chain and practical usage of each of the tools.  Also does a great job of showing how modern technological development owes a huge debt to the flexibility and power these tools gave (and continue to give) C developers.
  • Gnu.org amhello – A “Hello World” tutorial for getting Autotools setup and configured in a simple project.  Great example for getting a full build setup running for C.  The full code of which can be found in the automake doc folder on Linux systems, generally something like /usr/share/doc/automake/amhello-x.x.x.tar.gz.
  • Clemson Automake by Example – Old article (the pages images are all broken) that walks through a simple C program and its build chain.  Excellent tutorial for getting a notice programmer setup with a distributable and effective build environment.
  • Autotools Mythbusters – Practical, if high level, overview of autotools and its associated components.  There is an Appendix with a list of examples that is particularly outstanding.  Think stackoverflow for autotools that has been aggregated into a Cookbook.
  • Simple Makefile Tutorial – A newbie guide to creating Makefiles for building software.  If I include code examples in the project documentation I will generally create a simple Makefile that will build the examples with a “make someexample”.
  • Martin Mann’s HowTo Autotools – The examples are in C++ but the step by step process to add functionality to the autotools build chain is outstanding.  Especially useful if you have figured out some of the basics already.

Finally, because setting up and creating the necessary files for getting a C project started in libtools/automake are so annoying, I decided to create a single file bash script to do the work for me.  You can find it as a gist on github.  You can download and run it by doing a:

wget http://tinyurl.com/brockers-cmaker -O ~/bin/cmaker && chmod +x ~/bin/cmaker

On the Linux command line.  Then create your new C/Autoconf project with cmaker init newprojectname.  My primary concern with the script was that is should need NO outside dependencies besides libtools/automake itself and that it has everything needed to start the autoreconf –install, ./configure, make process.  Hopefully I will add some additional functionality to it soon.

* As an example, look at Perl.  It initially started as a glue language to allow developers to piece together software solutions in a single language instead of having to create divergent sed, awk, and grep scripts in sh**.  Then the WWW took off and the little glue language became the core component of the most powerful websites on the planet.  Perl went from being a support language to the core language of all things http.  The number of tools exploded.  CGI.pm, mod_perl, and DBI gave the developer massive power but managing these libraries in production created a boom of support tools (kids these days forget that cpan was the ruby gems/bundler of its day.)

** As a side note that last sentence sounds more like a caveman grunting then a discussion of software development tools.

*** OK, ttechnically it was C++ but our CS chair was a former NASA Chief Engineer who basically taught us C using a C++ compiler… with a little Class thrown in.  I think my first object was linkedList with methods push and pop.

This is how the world end

I have a family member who recently said to me that if I posted pictures of them on Facebook, they would stop speaking to me.  This, entirely understandable, concern stems from their conscious concern that personnel information collection by large companies has a tendency to be abused.  Once you have surrender your privacy it is nearly impossible to get back.

What made the conversation stand out to me wasn’t their “fear” of business; but that this particular family member is one that inherently trusts government to solve this (and many other) issues.  There seems to be a fundamental disconnect between the perceived danger from business and the real danger of government.

Coca-cola cannot force my soda consumption (or limit the size of my cup.)  Google cannot regulate which sites I am allowed to visit, or what the content of those sites can be.  Phillip-Morris is entirely unable to limit the extent of my free speech by defining who is, or is not, a “legitimate” reporter.  And while Facebook may want to use your personnel information to sell you crap, or profile you activities; it doesn’t have the ability levy punitive damages, listen in on any phone conversation you have ever had, or target you with a drone strike.

One’s personnel privacy should certainly be safeguarded, but a healthy fear of the abuse of capitalism should always be tempered with a real fear of the only institution that has the ability to use force against us.  An institution that has demonstrated time and time again that it abuses that force to the detriment of both our privacy and our liberty.

Lux et Veritas

From the earliest days of software technology, the term hacker has been used to describe someone who was particularly proficient with technology.  While the term “hacker” has come to mean something malicious to those with only a cursory understanding of geek culture, it is still held as a term of high regard among those who know otherwise.  Lately I have gotten the question from students in my IT/IS classes concerning how best to become a “hacker”.  While the question they are asking is not precisely the information they want to know, I have decided to answer the question correctly.

While this may seem like a silly exercise, it actually has a long and storied tradition inside of hacker communities.  There are a number of well known “guides” that have circulated the halls of old Usenet and dusty Jargon files from many years back with contributions from such luminaries as Bruce Parens, Eric S. Raymond, and Larry Wall.  Basically I am going to offer a stupidly basic outline of what I would like to have learned, in the order I would like to have learned it in, to have developed my skill-set (or lack thereof) in the quickest fashion possible.

*One caveat is that I have changed this list 8 times in the last 3 weeks (which is why it has taken so long to post) and added another step just minutes before posting again.  My point is that I will probably continue making updates for a while and I would encourage anyone comments or suggestions on how it can be improved.

  • Step 1: Start by visiting/read these websites, netcasts, mailing lists, IRC forums, & newsgroups.. everyday!  ArsTechnica,  Phrack, SecList, Schneier on Security, OWASP, ITSecurity, cDc, Toms Hardware, HackerNew, and the LiquidMatrix Blog.  Listen to every episode of Security Now!  For extra credit read everything you can handle from the SANS Reading Room.  If you don’t understand what you are reading, Google it!
  • Step 2: The best resources you can possibly have as an IT Professional are OTHER IT Professionals.  This means you need to be part of your local community by networking with other professionals.  Nationally there is ACM, AITP, and IEEE. MORE importantly are your local groups & chapters.  In the Oklahoma City area we have OKC JavaScript Developers Group, OKC LugNuts, Okcruby, DC405, Oklahoma Game Developers, OK InfraGuard, ISSAOKC, and OKCJug, just to name a few.  Join a couple groups and start attending monthly meetings.
  • Step 3: Build your own computer.  Check out the ArsTechnica System Guide to make sure you have compatible hardware that will actually be cost effective and then purchase the parts at PriceWatch (be sure to check the vendor ratings before you buy.)  Yes, you could actually buy a system “kit” from someplace like NewEgg but the value of this exercise is in learning the hows and whys of each component.
  • Step 4: Install a Unix style OS on your newly built system… and/or every other system you can get your hands on.  I recommend either Fedora or Ubuntu to start with as they are the easiest to begin using but in reality any *nix style will work (i.e. FreeBSD, Linux mint, OpenSuse, OpenSolaris, etc.)  No hacker I know lives in Windows (well… unless they are gaming.)  Linux OSes provide access to a system on a level you simply will NEVER get on Windows.  This is partly because of the power of the Unix system model and partly because hackers develop for hackers on Linux/Unix.  After you install your new OS, use it, everyday, as your primary OS.
  • Step 5: Make your own website… from scratch.  Go get a $6.00/month HostMonster account, decide on a domain name, learn FTP, setup an email account, and start making a website!  It is a cheep way to get some direct experience doing many of the most common web task.  Finally, got get a copy of the Lama, Pythonista, or Rails Tutorial and go through the ENTIRE tutorial thus creating your first dynamic website content.
  • Step 6: Continue building your library.  Nobody can know everything there is to know about technology.  Having quick access to information that you have (at the very least) read before is a HUGE help.  Additionally, going through the programming and hacking literature will give you the best hands-on experience necessary to take the next steps.  You should own/have read as many of these as possible:
  • Step 7: Pick a transformative technology and learn how to use it. “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” — Abraham Lincoln.   In many ways this is the basic activity that all IS/IT employees do on a daily basis.  Technology solutions have a tendency to be very darwinian.  Therefore, you should start by picking tools that have stood the test of time.  Very few technology resources have lasted longer than 4 or 5 years.  Tools like
  • Step 8: Find an Open Source project that interests you, pick a problem, and fix it.  Meaningful contributions to Open Source projects now rank as more valuable than experience with a fortune 500 company and by volunteering yourself to something used by hundreds or thousands of people, you increase your credibility as a contributor to the community.  Often contributors get their names listed in the software itself (imagine being able to show a prospective employer you name in the Firefox contributors tab.)  It doesn’t have to be software development either, many projects need volunteers to answer forum questions, update documentation, translate it to other languages, or simply test and report bugs.
  • Step 9: …and then teach.  No amount of experience will develop your skills, help you network, or let you enjoy technology more than passing on the things you have learned.  Write articles or blog posts, offer to teach a computer class at your local library, or do mentoring to grade school kids.  Sometimes this step can even turn itself into a decent part-time job.
  • Step 10: Download the Linux From Scratch book and build your very own custom operating system from source code.  You will learn more about how operating systems work than 99.9% of IT professionals do.  Doing your own OS build will change the way you see systems and how to protect them.  The results of a LFS build is not the system itself (you will probably go back to using Fedora shortly after finishing) but that you will NEVER go back to be just a technology user…

A Part of the Maine

Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.
-Martin Luther

While checking one of my WordPress sites I noticed an update for one of my favorite plug-ins, The Events Calendar.  Everything was broken after the update so I when to the support site to get things running.  Long story short, I got the site working again based on the support recommendations they had but regardless, some functionality was still missing.  The reason for this was related to a huge shift in the underlying focus of the WordPress post design.

the issue you state about other plugins integrating has more to do with WordPress being in a period of flux between having everything be either posts or in its own table and authors fully adopting custom post types. The core WordPress team is placing a heavy emphasis on CPTs and most major plugin authors are moving over… As more and more plugins make the move, the integration you want to see will return in a much more powerful and controlled manner.
–Shane Pearlman

The Events Calendar has converted over to a new design method called Custom Post Types (CPT) whereby individual modules can define their own post “types” instead of adding functionality to default post type already available in WordPress.

This drew my attention because the new version of The Event Calendar provides a “Professional” version, with more functionality, that can be purchased. I haven’t actually seen much software in the WordPress universe that followed this model (and I don’t believe The Event Calendar did until this new update occurred.)

My concerns were confirmed with some web searching:

Custom post types aren’t really meant for that use [¦] Custom post types are great for things that are more or less catalogued: products (in an e-commerce site), listings for a real estate site, etc. For regular content creation as described [by Chris], you can already do [that] by using custom taxonomies and/or stylesheets to make post templates.

Some part of the WordPress team has been pushing these these CPT’s and it looks like they have been doing it primarily to capitalize on the success of a Free Software program. I suspect that most developers who are interested in focusing on this kind of feature set are probably not Free Software developers but are, instead, quasi-open source developers running Macs who would be making iPhone apps if they knew something more useful than PHP.

This kind of monetizing has become massively popular with the success of Apple’s App Store and Google’s Market. A significant number of developers who have built very popular software stacks on top of Open Source applications are looking for ways to turn that work into cash flow, and I don’t blame them. That said…

…I really don’t like something about it. Maybe it is because I left a “free” blog application because it stopped being free (I learned a valuable lesson between Free Software and free software and I still have a bad taste in my mouth about it.) Maybe it is because I have actually contributed work to a number of WordPress plug-ins and would NOT have done so if I had known my efforts were going to help someone else make money. Maybe it is because the new version of The Events Calendar actually broke a lot of functionality in the name of changing their platform model to a for-profit design and now I have to use an unsupported version of the software until I find another or I write one myself.

Whatever the reason, Open Source software is loosing something of itself if this is actually the intent of their focus, and we are all the less because of it.

If you can prove you don’t need it

For years, I have watched the number of technology companies that operate without debt.  The trend has always been popular among IT/IS companies because of the fundamental instability of intellectual property over hard assets.  The logic is hard to argue with.  If everything you “own” of value only has value as a direct cause of its perceived importance, then a shift of public perception doesn’t just hurt your brand, but fundamentally devalues your property.

Think of it this way; if tomorrow everyone stopped trusting Google for their search results (say, you know, someone found out their code sent all our personal information to the Chinese) then overnight they could loose 95% of their US market share.  How much is Google’s code-base worth at that point?  Currently Google is trading at 183 billion so a 95% loss in usage would probably translate to a market value somewhere south of 3-5 billion.

Physical assets don’t behave the same way.  1,000,000 lbs of steal doesn’t just loose 98% of its value overnight.  Even in heavily over-inflated markets things like… I don’t know… homes, don’t loose 98% of their value.  People may be upset that their 350,000 home is now worth 260,000 but just image if one NIGHT your $350,000 home was worth $7,000.  THAT is the danger for companies whose primary assets are intellectual property.

I will give you another concrete example.  Once upon a time there was a company who made A LOT of money in the energy trading business.  Basically the company had sold off almost ALL its physical assets because they made so much money acting as a broker for energy trading.  Think of them as the stock market (or eBay) for energy.  The only problem was that their principal value lay in the fact that people trusted them, trusted their market, trusted their systems, and trusted their software.  Then one day  it was demonstrated that this company lied, cheated, and stole in almost every way you could imagine.  Enron’s stock dropped from $90 to just under $1 in a matter of weeks.  Basically, Enron’s major asset was trust, which it lost, and the company disintegrated overnight.

So how does a company protect itself from such quick devaluation?  The same way you and I protect ourselves from economic turbulence; a big savings account and as little debt as possible.   Microsoft, for example, is famous for “saving” close to a billion dollars a month… yes, a MONTH!  At the same time, Microsoft doesn’t borrow money.  I have been told, by people I put NO trust in to know this information, that they don’t even lease the copiers.  Competitors who want to beat Microsoft can certainly do so, but it will not be an easy fight.  That kind of financial position means that competitors must beat them dollar for dollar, customer for customer, year in and year out… for YEARS!

So who else do you know that doesn’t use debt?  Here are are couple names both in IT and outside of it.  Accenture, Activision Blizzard, Apple, Bed Bath & Beyond, Broadcom , Citrix Systems, eBay, Gap, Google, Infosys Technologies, Juniper Networks, Marvel Technology Group, Qualcomm, Research In Motion, Stryker, Texas Instruments, and Yahoo.  Want to see something more amazing?  Check out those companies 1, 3, and 5 year average returns compared to the market average!

I think it was Warren Buffett who said, “Leverage [i.e. debt] is a funny thing, people who don’t understand it shouldn’t use it; and those who do, don’t.”

A Thousand Furlongs of Sea

We must learn not to disassociate the airy flower from the earthy root, for the flower that is cut off from its root fades, and its seeds are barren, whereas the root, secure in mother earth, can produce flower after flower and bring their fruit to maturity.
–Kabbalah

Generally speaking I work behind a desk eight hours a day (OK, more like 12) but once in a great while I will get to go out with a field crew to do actual physical work.  While physical labor is generally pretty scary stuff; I love getting out-of-doors.  My most recent excursion was to the western side of Oklahoma on a GIS mapping project.

I have driven through the panhandle a couple time previously but really didn’t spend any time there.  It is absolutely BEAUTIFUL.  For someone who is used to the lush green of the Ozark mountains; the naked beauty of the gypsum hills and high plains was like landing on another planet.  This trip was actually months ago, but I forgot I had taken pictures until today. You can check out the photo gallery by clicking the link below.

Oklahoma Gypsum Hills and Eastern Panhandle