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So I came across this reading Schneier’s blog… hilarious

So I get a kick out of the fact that now four months later that Alex Bosworth’s article on 6 Places to use AJAX is coming up on digg.com. Maybe there’s hope for me afterall?

Nonetheless, I find it interesting that there is such an outcry for using Ajax anywhere and everywhere. On the discussion boards that I read on a regular basis, I hear people talk about how it would be great to start programming all of their applications with Ajax mixed in. It’s interesting to see this idea put forth mostly because it’s completely useless to think that way.
I remember writing a simple form program a year ago for a friend and doing it all in Javascript so that it would have form validation, embedding it in code that would then be displayed on the page. My friend came back and said, “But why not write it entirely in PHP?” Sure, PHP was what the server was using for its backend application server, but JavaScript worked perfectly fine for what the need was.
I see this occurring more and more with regard to Ajax. There’s a need for it here and there such as Alex mentions, but there are times where it’s basically pointless to have such code included when it adds a level of complexity that some coders aren’t ready for and in some instances becomes so much of a hindrance to the end user that it drives people to other sites in search of the information for which they seek.

So you’ve uploaded hundreds of photos to Flickr and you don’t have space on your work computer or your home computer to actually view them or you just wish you had a better way of having them come up as random backgrounds? Then look no further than to check out John’s Adventures for his Flickr Background Changer. Very very cool utility to use =)

So a good friend of mine who I shall refer to merely by the letter J suggested the book “Alexander Hamilton” by Ron Chernof. Needless to say having read just the preface I am blown away. So quickly we forget the roots of the country that we live in and enjoy such incredible liberties, rights and privileges. I suppose that my AP History and AP Government courses in high school prepared me for this great biography of Hamilton, but to say the least, with the little that I’ve read so far, the picture that is woven is astounding. Perhaps its just from having aged ten years and my eyes being a little more focused and able to handle such incredible knowledge, but seriously, I’m glued. Thanks J Here’s a little snippet of the preface that really just puts things into perspective about this great country in which we live.

It is an auspicious time to rexamine the life of Hamilton, who was the prophetof the capitalist revolution in America. If Jefferson enunciated the more ample view of political democracy, Hamilton possessd the finer sense of economic opportunity. He was the messenger from the future that we now inhabit. We have left behind the rosy agrarian rhetoric and slaveholding reality of Jeffersonian democracy and reside in the bustling world of trade, industry, stock markets, and banks that Hamilton envisioned.

Four years ago when I was graduating from the University of Virginia, I would have never imagined that I would be learning C#. The reason for this mostly being that while in college I was learning open source web development in PHP and Physics, as well as some UNIX and network systems administration. I think it’s funny that the name is C-Sharp (not C-pound as many have called it) mostly because those that don’t know music call it C-pound (as just mentioned) which leads me to think that they therefore think it’s super powerful. I’m glad that Microsoft was somewhat optimistic when naming C# for the reason that if it was going to be a dismal language they could have named it C-flat (Cb).
Needless to say it’s been interesting and I can definitely say that after learning C, C++, and Java a few years back, learning C# has been relatively easy. So what’s my suggestion you ask? Well, I like Jesse Liberty’s Learning C# as well as Programming ASP.NET. I have yet to get my fingers on a copy of Alex Ferrara and Matthew MacDonald’s Programming .NET Web Services.
Now, you might be wondering why my sudden aversion to C#, call it technical training of sorts Additionally it’s very interesting to see how one can build custom components and what not that can be integrated into other Microsoft Software.
Trust me, I still love working in PHP (mmm, C like programming) and developing database schemas for MySQL.
Last but not least, back to my open source roots I should mention Mono, which is the open source framework that is capable of running .NET code on open source platforms — Java finally has some competition on Linux. Very cool project, for more check this out for more about the project over at Go-Mono.com or to read a Developer’s guide on Mono, click here.

Astronomers find most distant objects
BBC Science & Nature: “They are bright and powerful - quasars that can be seen at a time when the Universe was very young.” - Of course now that the Universe is quite mature and educated it’s shunning these little quasars off, flinging them off into the Universe at unbelieveable velocities, hoping that we won’t see them. But guess what Universe, we’ve got your calling card. And even more so, let’s see, they’re finding objects - yippity doo! I’ve been finding objects since I was a few days old… and after taking CS101 in college I was writing them and creating them and instantiating them! How about you Mister Universe?

What cracks me up though is that these astronomers are so distant minded that they continue to just look outward away from the planet. And yet they are unable to find things such as all of the left socks that I’ve been looking and searching for for years.

I do find it quite interesting however that they are seeing these things zoom off into the distant sky. The only question I have for them is whether or not there is a chance that the red shift that they have in the lens is due to something in the air. When I lived in Hawaii we used to have the sky turn red all the time due to the clay seeping into the air.

Speaking of things that are red, my hair… now is this a shift because I’m moving off into the distance or is this some other phenomena that I should be clued in about? I bet that they would rate my hair as being something like a 6.3. I’d get into all the record books Nonetheless, back to reading about TCP/IP packets.

Study: Speed of Gravity, Light Match
AP Science: “Einstein was right. The speed of gravity matches the speed of light, according to astronomers who took advantage of a rare planetary alignment to measure one of the fundamental forces of nature.” - It would seem that once again we have a brain buster on our hands dealing with Physics. It boggles my mind to think of light moving at 186,000 miles per second as it is, but then to think that perhaps little gravitons (yes, yes, I realize that they have yet to really be observed in the lab) are flying along at the same speed, pulling as they go, in different cluster lattice structures, thereby having different densities.

So in this article, there is the mention of “experiments” being on the way. I’m curious just what sort of experiments might be on the way. Last time I checked, it was slightly unethical and highly frowned upon by those that be, to smash a planet or two together or fling one around a sun or some other highly powerful body. Seriously though, my guess is that these experiments will be dealing with the analysis and interpretation of lots and lots of data from telescopes measuring the arcs and angles and intensities of stars in the sky.

While driving to work this morning I had yet another “moment” as you might call them. It was quite interesting to say the least as I started thinking about the way that XM radio and other things work and how it would be so cool if each car had a MAC address that it could use to communicate over some sort of network to other cars and what not with. Just think of the things that you could do - access e-mail on the road, download streaming music via some nutella like network, play Yahoo! Pool, chat with friends through instant messenger, get into car accidents and blame it on bad ping.

Of course, in doing this, and making it mandatory that every vehicle had such a device I’m sure that civil liberties groups would be up in arms, granted I would be too. So there would of course have to be some way to do a MAC ID spoof :o)

In other news, I’m trying to figure out some way to have a Perl script do all my work for me at work so that I can simply arrive, read TCP-IP Illustrated (Stevens) and relax. Alas, things are not this way. Perhaps Timmy, my simian kung foo coder friend and compadre, will be able to advance in both knowledge and strength and be able to reach the keyboard to perform said duties for me :o)

How sweet it is… the TCP/IP protocol suite that is. It’s incredible that something dreamed up nearly 30 years ago to give the military the ability to have redundant networks has grown into something that is so incredibly cool. With TCP allowing for error redundancy and making sure that the data is “good” and IP pushing things along at nearly warp factor 9, it’s amazing that people have tried to say that protocols such as UDP are better. Granted, UDP is pretty stinkin’ fact but when you’re not even getting anything back to let you know that it got there, me thinks that there’s something wrong with that.

In other news though, it’s pretty cool reading about SLIP, CSLIP and PPP and seeing just how different the protocols are and how PPP shall rule them all. If anything it definitely makes me thankful that I’m not having to use this slow interface - yay for Cable Modems. The only downside of the cable modem of course being that when everyone else in the neighborhood is on you sure can tell :-\ But then again, with DSL, at least with Verizon, most of their customers are constrained to PPPoE which is in my opinion cool but at the same time a very very bad thing :-\

Alas, this brings up the reason I think I’m going to put a FDDI network in my apartment :o)