very no

I just can't believe someone would design it this way on purpose. This is a one line task.

DocumentBuilderFactory docBuilderFactory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();

DocumentBuilder docBuilder = null;

try {

docBuilder = docBuilderFactory.newDocumentBuilder();

} catch (ParserConfigurationException e) {

e.printStackTrace();

}

Document doc = null;

try {

doc = docBuilder.parse (new File(fileName));

} catch (SAXException e) {

e.printStackTrace();

} catch (IOException e) {

e.printStackTrace();

}

Seriously? DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance()?

more "the family" news

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2009/07/c_street_on_the_skidz.php

And today we have news of yet another C Streeter falling off the fidelity wagon.

Now it's the turn of former Rep. Chip Pickering (R) or Mississippi, who appeared to be in line to grab Trent Lott's Senate seat and was allegedly offered the gig by Gov. Haley Barbour (his office denied this to TPMmuckraker), but decided instead to leave Congress altogether.

Pickering and his wife divorced soon afterward and now she is suing the novelistically named Elizabeth Creekmore-Byrd for "alienation of affection," i.e., for stealing her husband. What's more, according to legal papers filed by Leisha Pickering, some of the "wrongful conduct" between Pickering and Creekmore-Byrd (I guess that's what they call it down there?) took place at ... you guessed, the C Street group home up on Capitol Hill.

I mean, I don't know about their politics. But these dudes know how to party. I don't see how you get around that.

my contribution to wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Juan_Méndez&diff=302536030&oldid=298996974

* Juan Mendez, alleged inventor of the [[burrito]], Ciudad Juárez, Mexico (circa 1910)

wait no really

self-serious downloadable board games

http://interformic.com/ishexes.html

Unfortunately, 3mm is too thick for the Ellison, and 2mm is too thin for InterSpace hex tiles. So you will need to cut 216 hexes (42 cuts of 6 hexes each) from 2mm foam and glue hexes together in pairs to produce 108 4mm hex bases.

InterSpace hex tiles TM demand that you manufacture them from the highest quality materials. Do not attempt to use inferior materials or processes.

my god it's full of stars

People are great. The internet is great. I wanted to put these links here, most of them are board game / evil geniuses related.

print on demand custom board games

http://www.thegamecrafter.com/home

pre-cut hex tiles

http://www.litkoaero.com/page/LAI/CTGY/MB_HB

more game parts

http://www.spielmaterial.de/english/

custom steel rule dies

http://www.mag-knight.com/diecutting/Steel_Rule_Dies.htm

scrapbooking is a real hobby!

http://www.scrapbookscrapbook.com/scrapbook-die-cut-machines-info.html

OMG Chart!

http://www.paperthreads.com/bonus/paperthreads_machine_compare_112008.html

and the quote of the day:

CraftRobo might be Japanese. Seems to be listed on overseas shops more than USA ones. , www.craft-robo.net for UK, www.craftrobo.jp in Japanese

epic wtf

I'm just gonna quote the whole post.

Ensign's Weirdest Moment

from Talking Points Memo by Josh Marshall

Yes, I know that's pretty bold billing given the recent news out about Sen. Ensign (R-NV). But beyond all the salacious detail there's a picture emerging of the man -- who, remember, is a high-profile senator and had been considered a serious presidential candidate -- that combines deeply manipulative traits with an almost childlike approach to those in authority around him.

Ensign is a member of something called the C Street group, which is part of a highly secretive religious outfit called 'The Family'. It's a combo religious fellowship and Capitol Hill group home where a number of Republican members of Congress live. And it's run by a guy named Doug Coe. (Because the comedy never stops, remember that Gov. Sanford too is a member of the C Street group/Family.) In one of the more surreal episodes in this whole drama, while folks from 'The Family', including Sen. Coburn (R-OK), were trying to get Ensign to end his relationship with the girlfriend and write her and her husband a big check.

So Ensign agrees to do this. But the members of his fellowship had so little trust he could follow through that they had him write out a letter to the mistress that he was ending the relationship and then drove him to the local Fedex office to make sure he actually dropped the letter in the box. So he does that. But then after he shakes them loos he calls the mistress to tell her his friends made him write the letter and to ignore it.

It makes having his parents pay the couple off sound far less out of character.

And this was a man who was going to run for president.

I heard a piece on 'The Family' and this Doug Coe character a while back on NPR. They're pretty good conspiracy theory fodder; one of their key beliefs is that greatness is not a matter of morality or faith, it is a matter of being chosen by Jesus Christ. I'm probably misrepresenting them, but...meh!

heh

It's still kindof neat that I get paid a lot of money mostly to know what the hell people are talking about.

incentive engineering

I've read (I don't remember where, and I'm paraphrasing) that there's a belief that's arisen since progress was invented, some few hundred years ago, that humanity's natural habitat has not yet been invented. That is, that the ideal environment for human beings does not yet exist, but that we are designing and building it as we move forward through history, and especially with the advance of science and engineering.

Of course as an engineer I find this very compelling... I love the idea that my work is part of a larger human project to understand ourselves and our universe.

This concept leads us right into the field of incentive engineering, which I think of as the intersection of politics, religion, and game design: how do you write the rules of a system in order to encourage certain behaviors?

It's surprisingly difficult to balance a multiplayer game and keep it fun for everyone. There are always hackers or griefers or exploiters, and they are amazingly good at getting around your rules. The best games try to set up incentives against this kind of behavior, or at least try to shield the bulk of their user-base from the most abusive behavior.

Civil society uses an escalating ladder of social pressure, laws, police, and prison to keep things from getting too broken. There's a lot of negative-punishment in that list, and once you're on the punishment track it can be difficult to get off of it. Taking a cue from modern game design, perhaps there's a more positive-reinforcement way of looking at the problem.

hilarious graphic design

I love the choice this fundraising email gave me:

The large number fonts/sizes, the question mark, the way they try to make the negative option not as attractive, but still classy... it's all there.

I chose the red pill. It seems that everyone who voted for Obama has their own very important issue that we all need to pay attention to right now. For me, if we get a real public option, it will all have been worth it.

java hibernate error reminder

Thanks dude.

org.hibernate.PropertyAccessException: could not get a field value by reflection getter of com.mypackage.MyEntity.entityId

There are reports that messages of this sort were due to bugs in one or more Hibernate releases. But this is also a legitimate error.

I wasted a lot of time before it hit me.

....

This is a sneaky one because when the database is laid out, you think in terms of foreign keys. But in ORM, you don’t see those keys directly - they translate to object references. So the original version was attempting to compare an object to the key of the object instead of an instance of the object.

now legal to catch rainwater

I only heard about this craziness a couple of months ago, I'm glad to see that common sense is beginning to prevail.

DURANGO, Colo. — For the first time since territorial days, rain will be free for the catching here, as more and more thirsty states part ways with one of the most entrenched codes of the West.

Precipitation, every last drop or flake, was assigned ownership from the moment it fell in many Western states, making scofflaws of people who scooped rainfall from their own gutters. In some instances, the rights to that water were assigned a century or more ago.

Now two new laws in Colorado will allow many people to collect rainwater legally. The laws are the latest crack in the rainwater edifice, as other states, driven by population growth, drought, or declining groundwater in their aquifers, have already opened the skies or begun actively encouraging people to collect.

“I was so willing to go to jail for catching water on my roof and watering my garden,” said Tom Bartels, a video producer here in southwestern Colorado, who has been illegally watering his vegetables and fruit trees from tanks attached to his gutters. “But now I’m not a criminal.”

kevin kelly and the amish

Kevin Kelly is one of the founders of Wired magazine, and he has some interesting things to say about the amish and minimalist living, why the Amish are happy and fulfilled, but why their way of constraining themselves is ultimately selfish, even if it works for them as individuals and communities--and ultimately unsustainable.

....In the late 1960s some million self-described hippies stampeded to small farms and make-shift communes to live simply, not too different from the Amish. I was part of that movement....In tens of thousands of experiments in rural America, we jettisoned the technology of the modern world (because it seemed to crush individualism) and tried to rebuild a new world....Our discoveries paralleled what the Amish knew -- that this simplicity worked best in community, that the solution wasn't no-technology but some technology, and what we then called appropriate technology. This day-glo, deliberate, conscious engagement with appropriate technology was deeply satisfying for a while.

But only for a while....One-by-one they left their domes for suburban garages and lofts, and much to our collective astonishment, transformed their small-is-beautiful skills into small-is-startup entrepreneurs....barefoot to billionaire, a la Steve Jobs.

....In retrospect we might say the hippies left for the same reason Thoreau left his Walden; they came and then left to experience life to its fullest....In the past decade a new generation of minimites has arisen, and they are now urban homesteadin....They are trying to have both, the Amish satisfaction of intense mutual aid and hand labor, and the ever cascading choices of a city. [ed-- yes we are.]

....I remain fascinated and deeply impressed by Leon and Berry, and Brende and the Old Order Plain Folk communities. I am impressed that their tightly bound mutual support can reliably resist the perennial lure of modernity. That's an amazing testimony because so few other cultures can boast that.

....But there is one aspect of the Amish, and the minimites, and the small-is-beautiful hippies at their heyday, that is selfish. The "good" they wish their minimal technology to achieve is primarily the fulfillment of a fixed nature. The human that is satisfied by this agricultural goodness is an unchanging human. For the Amish, one's fulfillment must swell inside the traditional confine of a farmer, tradesman, or housewife*. For minimites and hippies, fulfillment must rise within the confine of the natural unhampered by artificial aids.

....For Berry technology peaked in 1940, about the moment when all these farm implements were as good as they got....1940 cannot be the end of technological perfection for human fulfillment simply because human nature is not at its end.

We have domesticated our humanity as much as we have domesticated our horses. Our human nature is a malleable crop that we planed 50,000 years ago, and continue to garden even today. The field of our nature has never been static. We know that genetically our bodies are changing faster now than at any time in the past million years. Our minds are being rewired by our culture. With no exaggeration, and no metaphor, we are not the same people who first started to plow 10,000 years ago. The snug interlocking system of horse and buggy, wood fire cooking, compost gardening, and minimal industry may be perfectly fit for a human nature — of an ancient agrarian epoch. I call this devotion to a traditional being "selfish" because it ignores the way in which our nature — our wants, desires, fears, primeval instincts, and loftiest aspirations — are being recast by ourselves, by our inventions, and it excludes the needs of our new natures.

....Perhaps someday someone will invent a tool that is made just for your special combination of hidden talents. Or perhaps you will make your own tool. Most importantly, and unlike the Amish and minimites, you may invent a tool which will help unleash the fullest of someone else. Our call is not only to discover our fullest selves in the technium, but to expand the possibilities for others. We have a moral obligation to increase the amount of technology in the world in order to increase the number of possibilities for the most people. Greater technology will selfishly unleash us, but it will also unselfishly unleash others, our children and all to come.

For myself, I do seek a middle way. Not quite, as Kevin says, the minimum amount of technology, but just a satisfying compromise. I don't want to be a farmer, but I want to work with my hands, and grow some of my own food. I want to count farming as a hobby. And then I want to play some videogames. Finding fulfillment within the realm of our constructed society will not be simple; it took out ancestors hundreds of generations to more-or-less figure it out in an agrarian context. But there's a lot of good work to be done here, and I'm excited to be a part of it.

*Still the number one reason to not be Amish.

the essential problem with java

First, I want to say that eclipse is WAY better in Java than it is in ActionScript. It does a lot of nice stuff for you. I still hate it.

The essential problem with Java is it's foundational principle, which is:

"The programmer is dumb and must be prevented from doing unsafe things."

The thing is, the types of problems we have to solve don't really change; in C++ or C# or AS3 you can just say, "trust me, I'm actually smart," and the language will say "ok, I guess" and get out of your way and let you do whatever moderately (or grossly) unsafe thing you want. In Java the language says instead, "no I don't think you are."

Then you have to write twice as much code because you don't have function pointers. So where you could have had two classes instead you have 5, and sure, you never did anything unsafe, but doubling your line count and file count gives you that many more opportunities to slip up.

To balance this out, Java IDEs like eclipse have super-good code-time auto-compilation and automatic error and warning resolution, which is awesome, but I can't shake the feeling that it's really all there to make some of these language defects livable.

See.... C# is just as safe as Java... it manages garbage collection and the rest of it, it's very pleasant, but in C# if you need to do something, you CAN. You may have to be very explicit about it, but there's a psychic atmosphere of the language trying hard to accomodate you. I just have never gotten that feeling from java. The psychic atmosphere of java is like being in a dusty lecture hall with a bunch of 60 year old computer science professors who are all bickering amongst themselves, and you raise your hand to ask a question and they just ignore you, or when they notice you, talk down to you because you're an implementor, not an information scientist.

Yay Java!

second thoughts and also more currency talk

Man, shipping containers are probably a terrible choice for heritage-worthy construction... they're gonna rust out and be hard to insulate and generally unpleasant over the course of 50 years. For temporary they're very exciting, but plan to replace them with concrete.

Also, this is an interesting interview with Douglas Rushkoff about his currency and modern life and whatnot. Kinda long, but full of big ideas.

the new plan

Today's lunch discussion topic, or how to get ocean plus mountains in 5 years:

1. Buy an acre of land in Topanga, ~400k.

2. Keep working full time.

3. Buy a used trailer or mobile home and park it on the land to live in for steps 4 through 8

4. Start the process of getting a Septic tank, etc., put in. May take 1-2 years.

5. Buy a bunch of shipping containers ($1500 each), enough to give you 2-3 thousand sqaure feet.

6. Dig into your hillside and use the shipping containers to terrace your land, stacking multiple containers on top of eachother in a staggered pattern.

7. On top of (one of?) your shipping containers goes the aquaponics portable farm, the fish tank goes inside.

8. Weld the shipping contianers together, insulate them, and make them livable.

9. Move in permanently and sell the trailer.

10. Add modular components as needed.

It's all coming together.

<_<

I'm not really this brave yet.

connecting people

The auto-tuning the news guys people need a weekly gig on the daily show. amiright? How much do you think I would have to pay these guys to get all my news delivered this way?

stuffing, an experiment

Yesterday we tried out an idea that we've been talking about for a long time:

cheese stuffed

olive stuffed

mushroom stuffed

bell peppers, with cheese.

We took the mushroom stems and pepper tops, chopped em up, and sauteed them withworcestershire sauce, balsamic vinegar, salt and pepper, and put that on top, filled in with white wine, and sprinkled with the final layer of cheese. Baked for about 45 minutes at 325 or so.

I'm sorry I don't have pictures, but it was described by the party as "awesome," and was really not that hard to make, since the olives come pre-stuffed and all. Really just assemble and stick in the oven.

aquaponics = want

This is how the castle will grow much of its food:

A super-intensive low footprint portable farm, with no soil, no chemicals, low water requirements, and an aquarium attached that you fish out of too. Now of course it costs quite a bit to buy the starter kit from these guys, $7500 for the basic kit, but I think you could do it yourself for about 2-3k, even with high quality pumps (never skimp on pumps!) and a few mistakes along the way. You'd make your money back in two or three years, pretty easily.

I want to figure out a way to add a saltwater tank to the mix... perhaps we can grow seeweed and use it to feed the freshwater fish or something, anyway 'cause then we could have that tank of jellyfish in the castle and it would also serve a purpose in our food cycle.

Which by they way that's the whole trick of aquaponics: it's a circle, not a chain. It doesn't just go one way. Lawn care in America really freaks me out when I think about it: we plant this crop, grass, in the ground, and we water it and fertilize it, so it grows, and then we cut it, and throw away the clippings, until we've depleted the soil so badly that we have to fertilize it again.... But the grass is a really good sport about all this! It just keeps growing! It just grows back again and again and again. When you think about how unconnected lawns are to the natural order, to the circle, it's kindof mind boggling that it's so mainstream, and that it works as well as it does.

But that's the beauty of plants, after all. "Turning light into food for over 2 billion years," as they say. Erg, I gotta get my store back up....

wide eyed clean faced optimism

Every so often I'm struck by the idea that our constructed environment is critically incomplete. There's just so much work to be done, even aside from inventing new things, in just refining what we already have.

The infrastructure of our body politic is generally functional, but what I'm talking about is a layer of polish, or many layers of polish, that will make it beautiful as well.

Every bare piece of concrete along the freeway needs a fresco, every bare rooftop needs a garden, every web page needs another layer of smartness and connectedness, every mobile phone needs to be as capable as an iPhone, and then we need to improve the software further to make it more respectful and responsive to us as human beings... Every intersection needs a smart traffic light, and then we need to improve ALL of the traffic light algorithms together, so that we sense approaching cars and eliminate red lights almost entirely...

We can see all the work that needs to be done just by opening our eyes and looking around, and sometimes it staggers me that, with everything that we've done so far, we've only scratched the surface, we've only begun to learn and build, and lay the foundation of the way our grandchildren will live. What a great time to be alive.

prequalified

Exciting times. Annie and I are prequalified for a home loan. We're not in a super-hurry, but we've started looking, mostly in the South Bay.

Here's the thing: as soon as you have a number in hand, the first thing you do is start looking to see what you can get for it. The next thing you do --if you're me-- is see what you could get if you could scrape together just a bit more.

Anyone want to go in on this house? 4 bedroom, big lot, great neighborhood, close to the freeway, but not too close...

Heh, failing that, there are a bunch of houses around that actually are in our price range, and it's kindof exciting. I'm angling for the fixer-uppers, with lots of land and lots of bedrooms (for roommates to help with the mortgage). With our price range, and where we'd like to live, we're likely going to have to make a couple of compromises. But that's ok! The idea is that this is just a starter house. The castle will come later.