Indiana Jones and the raiders of the temple of the lost crystal ark

I have seen Indiana Jones 4. My impression are thus:
Harrison Ford is old, but surprisingly good.
Harrison Ford is old, so his pants are suddenly incredibly baggy.
Mutt is a STUPID name for a character. I don't care if he's a greaser.
It's hard to write a greaser without making them fix their hair every 30 seconds. It's creepy, stop.
Lucasfilm has lied to me. They have billed Cate Blanchett, but in actuality have cast Lime Helmet Cat. I guess he was cheaper.





And (SPOILER)












What the hell is up with the hook? In raiders the ark was just a box until they opened it, temple of doom it was just a sect until the magical heart ripping out thing. Even in last crusade there was nothing magical until they found the knight and drank from the cup. The whole time through #4 there's some crazy crystal skull which is magnetic (despite being crystal) but also somehow attracts gold, scares away plus-size jungle ants, drives space miners insane. (Right: picture of insane space miner)

And seriously...inter dimensional aliens? Maybe you should'nt have explained the skull to us, George.










However, it could have been much worse and I actually enjoyed it. As a matter of fact, I wouldn't be opposed to the concept of more Indiana Jones, even if Harrison Ford is old.

Setting up for failure.

As an IT student it, certain things about the way IT is viewed by the rest of RIT. Not the least of which being why everyone I meet always says "Oh, don't you mean 'I Tried'?" when I mention I'm an IT major. I always feel like I need to defend my major, because really...in college we are defined very much by our majors, because once we graduate these will be our careers and we'll be defined by our jobs. Sorry, Fight Club.

As depressing as it is, though, I realize there's an amount of truth to the myth of I Tried. In some sense, anyway. I don't know a single washed out CS or SE that went to IT because they couldn't hack "real programming".

RIT's first mistake is using Java to teach Programming and OOP to IT students. At least in CS you're eventually exposed to C++, but that leaves a bitter taste with a lot of people. They get used to the language coddling them and holding their hand, which is what Java does. In addition, it's incredibly well documented which makes it easy to teach. But the way the sequence is designed, all you do is learn to write code...they don't teach anything about design, or WHY OOP, or the more groady low-down details of programming.
Not that I have any idea what would make a better language...Python maybe? The problem isn't the language, but how they teach it. They spoonfeed you things, and never teach you how to be a programmer. It sets people up to fail when they think they know how to code but don't actually know the finer points.

Since I am on the web track, I had to take RIT's programming for web class, but was lucky enough to be allowed to bypass it. I helped out tutoring some of the students and I was initially horrified at the way to class was taught. It taught students to use procedural, spaghetti code. Now while there isn't anything wrong with procedural code...make spaghetti of HTML and PHP is very bad. It's hard to maintain, confusing to debug, and makes it nigh on impossible to correctly design a large project.
Soon I moved from horror to disappointment when I realized that that was how I learned to code PHP, but I moved on. Unfortunately what I had that RIT doesn't (Maybe can't?) teach is the idea that there is more beyond this.

What they're not doing, is exciting people about programming. Now I'm not saying that they should be trying to get people to become programmers if they don't like it, but there's gotta be a decent amount of people in these classes...especially track courses...that already like programming or are just looking for a reason to.
In programming for the web, RIT should show off some cool stuff that PHP can do. CMS, templating code, sessions, security layers, image editing...interact it with some javascript. Make it do cool stuff on the backend, like talk to other services and send info back to the browser...and not just databases.
All they teach is code-by-numbers quizzes and blogs. Some basic "stick some PHP in here to pull from MySQL and bake a dynamic website" stuff. Yes it's simple and gives you enough to learn the basics of the language...but people need to know it's a spring board to REALLY dive in, and not the end of things.

RIT's failing us as IT programmers, and it's making us look bad. Not cool, dudes.

--PXA

Shenanigans!

The requisite post describing how sweet Steak And Whiskey Night was will be coming soon. This post is serving as an announcement, I am calling shenanigans on the IT department.

I have found a security vulnerability in http://it.rit.edu/, the IT department's public facing website which allows me to arbitrarily inject faculty and staff into the site's database. I have made the department aware of this issue, however should they fail to acknowledge the issue or attempt to take any action against me I will make the exploit publicly available.
Also should they fix it, I will also make the exploit (and my theories for how they fixed it) publicly available as website security is an interest of mine...being a web developer. It should be an informative adventure.

Also the IT department has elected to not offer the course I need to finish my concentration in fall, meaning I will likely not get to take it until winter...and I'm sure will somehow play a role in prolonging my stay at RIT.

-- PXA

Checking for life...... Not found.

Since the last update to BE, RIT has been bending me over the desk as is its custom. I have a small amount of time free at the moment and I feel I need to keep a modicum of momentum in my quest to have a regularly updated web log. Since I have nothing major to report I will just summarize.

RIT SG:
RIT Student Government Elections are this week, I have already voted. My initial thoughts on the election can be found at the RIT Sentinel:
http://sentinel.ironcouncil.net/2008/04/07/sg-election-time-2008-edition/

As a note, apparently SG will actually count votes for the cockboat this year.

Unfortunately, due to academic concerns, I was not able to make it to the RIT Parking Advisory Group meeting this month. Which is actually quite a pity considering I finally don't have class or work during the hour of the meeting and would've have been able to go if my System Administration lab hadn't taken 6 hours to do. It's hard to find the time to be politically active.



Google Sync:
I have made a pretty decent amount of progress on the Exchange -> Google implementation, however there are still some problems translating Microsoft to Standards. This makes for some annoyances when applying recurring appointments. I was hoping to avoid having to parse and then reassemble the RRULE myself, but this appears to be the only way to get Google to play ball. The UNTIL clause of some RRULEs uses a date/time format which looks like "20080512T010000" or yearmonthdayThourminutesecond. According to Austin from Google's API team I should be saying "20080512T010000Z", I don't get why something that is likely just looking at the day/month/year stuff cares about what timezone the stamp is in (Z refers to Zulu time which was an older name for what became UTC)


Samba:
Recently a co-worker upgraded all the Vista computers in the office where I work to SP1 of Vista, which generally went unnoticed until he went to update our department's intranet site (called DSWeb). DSWeb has been a bit of a pet project for a while for me, working on my sysadmin skills in a practical application environment. The new update to Vista breaks the way it talks to standard Samba servers. Windows based shares (Win 2k3, XP) are likely not affected but the open source implementation Samba, which emulates bits of Windows networking in Linux to allow Linux to do things like Windows File Sharing or join Active Directory managed domains, cannot speak the new dialect that Vista is using. Something about SP1 causes Samba to fail decrypting the challenge when a Vista machine is trying to authenticate. After much misadventure I found that Samba released a bugfix version, 3.0.28a, to address the issue. This is generally marked as unstable or testing by most distributions and must be explicitly installed at this time. However, I have seen no major issues with it and it did fix the Vista issue without even having to modify the configuration file.


Steak & Whiskey Night:
Back in the fall my apartment began a celebration/tradition called Steak & Whiskey Night. It can be celebrated at any time, as often as we want to. This became quite popular, even in the short span of time it existed before Rochester weather became too cold to enjoy the outdoors.
This May, Steak & Whiskey Night returns! It is currently planned for Friday, May 2nd. Attendees are encouraged to bring their own cuts of meat or custom steak rubs. It promises to be delicious.


Graduation:
Is approaching, that is all. With any luck if I can hack around some requirements and get another co-op soon, I will likely be RIT Alumni come next Winter. This concept is bizarre, and frankly a little frightening. I have paid over $32,000 a year for 4 years of my life for this education, and everything I consider at this point to be a marketable skill I have no learned from RIT. I have taught myself, or learned on the job. When my knowledge and RIT's curriculum overlapped, I was told I was out of luck and had to sit through their version. My self-motivation and ability to learn very technical skills on my own was NOT rewarded like I always thought it would be in college, it was effectively punished. So...if they're not going to teach me anything...and I'm not learning anything...Why am I paying this much again? And why does this degree matter? ...Do these skills even matter?

It's probably just Realworld-phobia. I hope.

Syncronization again

Google has, in some ways, beaten me to the punch. For this I am actually grateful, since they built the calendar service, and the GData API they should have figured it out before me.

Unfortunately they're doing so in a bit of a different way than I am going about it so we may still be leaving some people in the dust.

The Google Calendar Sync utility:
http://www.google.com/support/calendar/bin/answer.py?answer=89955

The nature of the tool requires you to be using Windows, and Microsoft Outlook which is problematic. I primarily use Linux with Thunderbird at home, and I have the Lightning Thunderbird plugin to allow me to use it for calendaring. At the office I do use Windows mostly, but spend some of my time in Linux and Evolution or using Entourage on the Mac. Google cannot help me here.
The utility itself is a compiled executable and Google has not release the code, so developers don't know how the tool works. The Terms of Service also prevent developers from reverse-engineering to find these things out, so our only hope is to ask Google how this thing does what it does.


On a related note I've been making some progress with my own sync tool, but Spring Quarter here at RIT just started so my time is growing slim. With any luck I should have a working beta within a few weeks, but that probably will have limited support for recurring appointments, at best.

-PXA

(Edit, I went to retag this and blogger.com ate some of my article. Looks like their regex got a little too greedy)

YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG! Part 2: Speed

Now that part 1 of the series has been imported to the new blog I think it's appropriate to finish the 2nd part of the series. Doubly appropriate after recently being deemed by New York State as not a threat to the road.

Unfortunately there are these great big JERKS on the road who mess with people who understand the true nature of today's article. The topic is SPEED and the jerks are the POLICE. Yes, the police are jerks. While I'll admit that in theory they do some good things for society most all of these things are not on the road. On the road these men are tyrants. Angry bullies who hide behind bridges and bushes and try to catch you driving faster than some arbitrary number that was posted on a sign somewhere IF you're lucky.
Adding to how much they suck is the DMV, keeping track of points and passing calculated judgment on the status of your driving license based on another arbitrary number. 3 even MINOR infractions in A YEAR AND A HALF can have your car languishing in not-being-driven-ness. I nearly got boned on my first ticket in 15 months because of the way the system "works".

So now that these JERKS and this crappy system have created an arbitrary middle ground, us drivers can create the extremes.

My roommate lives on the one extreme, the one they make movies about. Unfortunately a significant amount of you live in the other one...it's a little unbalanced but true.

In theory many of us are taught that Speed Limit is a LIMIT, hard DO-NOT-GO-FASTER and this is enforced by the JERKS. However in practice this number is generally derived from a physics equations to determine the maximum safe speed in relatively inclement weather. In standard weather conditions, given any amount of skill, it's usually possible to drive twice the posted limit and still be completely in control of the car. Of course, if you're the target of this series...you haven't got the skill. Sorry, buddy.

Safety on the road is paramount and if you can't handle a speed don't drive that fast but NO ONE can seriously expect me to believe they can't handle 65, 55 miles an hour. Although maybe if there's something else wrong with you but then you really shouldn't be on the road at all. This idiotic "SLOWER==SAFER" behavior so many of you seem to be indulging in is HAZARDOUS. Just as people without skill driving too fast is bad, ANYONE driving too slow is also bad. If you're so damn stubborn that you can't handle the idea of driving the speed of everyone around you then you are putting me in danger and I have every right to be mad at you. The speed of the road is determined by the drivers and not the number on the sign. If you're not driving at least the speed of the road you are creating congestions and unnatural traffic flow which makes it harder for everyone else on the road to adjust to the other drivers.

So driving too slow is bad, and generally lends itself to 2 other also bad things:
1) Everyone else assumes you're an 80 year old lady. Seriousy, stop.
2) You will turn too slow.

Turns can normally be handled safely at 15-20 miles an hour, up to 30 but not easily or comfortably. And these are the 90 degree intersection types of turns, not merging off the highway. So if you're taking your sweet time with a turn driving 5 miles an hour, other drivers will be forced to pull an "OMG GOTTA SLOW DOWN PERSON STILL THERE" because you are not following the flow of traffic and causing unnatural congestion. This is how rear-end collisions are made.

Way-too-long story short: Speed, if weather allows, for the love of all that is good and holy...SPEED. 15, 20 miles an hour over... Just do it.

And don't worry about JERKS, they'll just as soon pull you over for driving faster than everybody else as they will for driving SLOWER than everybody else. So just fit the traffic flow and let those of us who want to, go faster than your slow ass.

YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG! Part 1 (repost)

Since I started Build Environment I realized that the RIT Sentinel was probably not the best place for my person, non-RIT related posts...so I have imported my series of complaints against the poor drivers of NYS. This is the first in the series on the subject of turn signals, Enjoy...LEARN. Don't crash into me, I like my car too much.

There is a law of software design which dictates that the more lines of code a project has, the more bugs it has. I believe this holiday season has proven this also applies to drivers. It is this which compels me to write to you all tonight.

In this series, titled “YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG”, I have appointed myself as grand master of all your crappy driving. So, stop what you are doing…pull the car over…YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG.

The other day I saw a man driving some form of SUV. He had begun to exit the expressway and realized that he was doing so early…and pulled into that weird “buffer” area. He tried to re-enter the highway proper and turned on his TURN SIGNAL to indicate his desire to do so. The other drivers saw what he wanted to do, and reacted accordingly. Is the man a good driver? Possibly. Is what he did legal? Probably not. BUT he does know how to use a turn signal, which is a step or 3 beyond the rest of you bitches with your insane lane changes and random 2.5 MPH turns that come out of nowhere and take 3 seconds to figure out what the HELL you’re doing.
Seriously, people. The turn signal was put into the car so no one had to wave their arm out the window in funny shapes to tell other drivers what they wanted to do…am I actually to believe in this age of high communication that we can’t flip a freaking lever to tell someone else we wanna drive our car in the general direction of left?

So! Just incase you missed it the first time:
How to not crash your car into other people when changing direction in 3 easy steps!
1) SIGNAL your desire to stop moving straight.
2) Make your direction change. And try not to take forever with this…seriously. Unless there’s something wrong with your car there is no way your suspension is that bad.
3) Turn the signal off. Not doing this only flies if you’re over 70. Once you no longer want to change your direction, stop telling people you wanna change direction.

THERE you have it! A quick and easy way to not only stop offending the other people on the road but also to help lower your insurance premiums because when other people can react to you, since you told them what you were going to do with your car, they’re less likely to CRASH INTO YOU.
Dammit people. You are so full of suck.