bblog

Memcached Developments

bbrown — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 00:00:18 GMT

Today I discovered that there's a new port of memcached for Windows! This one reflects memcached v1.2.4, which added a bunch of new features like multi-get, append/prepend, and check and set. This is a huge release even though it's in beta and is the first pass from the new maintainer. I am especially happy because I was considering putting in some time to do the port myself; I wasn't looking forward to it since I'd have to learn C++ and it'd take me awhile.

I also found the BeIT memcached client library, which purports to improve on Enyim. I haven't had a chance to try it out yet, but I like the embeddable, lightweight nature of its code. It supports a few commands that Enyim doesn't so I'm going to give it a try. Enyim had a couple quirks that we found and worked around so I'm always willing to find a more straightforward framework if possible. I don't understand the hashing issues enough to ascertain which is using the better-performing or more consistent algorithm so I don't have a preference on that front.

All in all, these were two very welcome developments. It's never been a better time to be a memcached fan in the .NET world!

Lock-In

bbrown — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 13:48:11 GMT

Google recently announced its AppEngine initiative and I can't say I get who would want it. It strikes me as too inextricable from Google.

Amazon Web Services operates in a similar fashion but it is clearly serving as an infrastructure provider rather than a platform. While it'd be hard to migrate off of AWS if you ever chose to do that, it's not as if you're promoting Amazon by virtue of creating and running your application. At every turn, the AppEngine application uses Google products like Google Checkout and Google Accounts. Building a business so closely associated with the largest Internet company in the world strikes me as perilous.

AppEngine aspires to be a platform like Facebook has become. But it lacks the social aspects that make Facebook so attractive as an application platform. So, ultimately, I think AppEngine's main competitor is not Amazon, Facebook, or even Microsoft (which has its own cloud initiative in development) but Ning. Who's Ning? Exactly. I just don't see this market as compelling so I don't understand why Google's entered it.

Talking 'Bout My Integration

bbrown — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 22:05:36 GMT

I deployed my most recent project at work today. It's a Facebook application that allows Quick Blogcast customers to link their accounts to their Facebook profiles.

I know that bringing a blog into your Facebook profile is nothing new. There are many such applications out there right now that can do that. But I think this Quick Blogcast version is unique in that you can make it so that your friends and visitors never leave Facebook, even to comment! What's more, we leverage nearly all of the Facebook integration points. This allows the Quick Blogcast customer to publicize his or her blog to the fullest extent while still respecting the conventions and norms of the Facebook world. While that may not sound like much, it's been quite a learning experience for me.

For one thing, I had to master the Facebook API. Luckily, I only had to learn it secondhand because I had an excellent framework called Facebook.NET to lean on. After a month or so of experience, I even felt conversant enough to help others and supply patches. In so doing, I apparently really helped the developer of Thugz Passion, a game which I've grown to enjoy.

It was also a chance to get to know memcached better. I used the terrific Enyim.com Memcached framework to interact with a Win32 port of the service. I wish I knew enough C++ to move that project to the current version of the Linux original. I futilely check the danga email archives to see whether anyone's gotten impatient with progress and just did it on their own.

I was (and am) very impressed by memcached, which is an excellent (and free) distributed caching system. ASP.NET is top-notch at scaling but its caching mechanisms (namely, the object bags like Cache, Application, and Session) can easily become bottlenecks after enough usage is thrown at them. I think memcached offers a way out—it's certainly worked wonders in the Linux world.

I affectionately call this integration app Quick FaceBlogBookCast. It cracks me up every time; it's easily the most cumbersome portmanteau I've come across. (I can't believe I forgot the other Facebook app I released today: Domain Center for Facebook! It's a way to spontaneously generate domain name suggestions from the information contained on your Facebook profile. The algorithms right now are pretty coarse, but I plan to refine them each and every release until they're uncannily right some day.)

[The views expressed on this website/weblog are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of Go Daddy Software, Inc.]

On Eudaimonia

bbrown — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 22:09:32 GMT

"… eudaimonia is the human entelechy." — Leonard Peikoff, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, p. 349

I can vividly remember the first time I read those words back in 1991. I was still in high school and I immediately went to the dictionary to find out the meaning of the two words I didn't know. That phrase solidified my desire to study philosophy in college. (There wasn't enough courses that fit my schedule to get my bachelor's in philosophy, so I had to minor in it and major in history.)

Eudaimonia, Aristotle's idea of happiness or the good life derived through rational living, has informed my entire life since then. Ayn Rand's Objectivism is, I think, the perfect realization of his conception. Lately I've gotten it into my head that I need to write on the subject and bring their ideas into the self-improvement, self-help canon.

If you've read that genre to any degree, you'll know that it invariably takes emotion as a given, such that the goal of it is to feel better about yourself. It's almost as if the authors regard the subject of virtue and reason as irrelevant. Even the cognitive psychologists like Seligman and Beck emphasize the centrality of emotion, though they're immeasurably better because they understand that thought precedes emotion.

I'm working on my outline but I'm not going to get into it just in case it fizzles like so many of my grandly-started ideas. I'm really enamored of the central idea, which I think could be the start of something big. We'll see. I will, of course, keep this blog updated with any progress.

ReSharper IS All That

bbrown — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 13:10:14 GMT

Longtime readers may already know that I am a big fan of JetBrains' ReSharper add-in for Visual Studio. I recommend it highly to any .NET developer, but especially to any of those who are interested in being more productive. You'd think that that'd be everyone, but I've found it not to be the case. Many developers I recommend the tool do don't want to learn a new tool, aren't particularly keyboard-enthusiastic, or mistakenly believe that ReSharper is superfluous. On that last point, I've stumbled upon a nice comparison chart showing that that is not the case.

There's overlap, to be sure, but in nearly every instance I've encountered ReSharper's implementation is more thorough and more thoughtful. It's worth every penny.

Earth Hour Can Bite My Ass

bbrown — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 06:32:55 GMT

Today is the day of Earth Hour, where everyone is supposed to turn off their lights for an hour tonight in a pointless show of support for global warming. Global warming is currently under such an attack that, like deities in every religion, it must be constantly re-assured that it is foremost in everyone's mind. Also, don't look too closely at the tenets of the cult of climate change. I'll save the similarities between environmentalism and religion for another entry.

Google adopted a black theme for the occasion, though they had the courage to admit that it doesn't save an ounce of energy to do so. It's probably to promote "awareness" and demonstrate their environmentalist chops. Did they power down any of the hundreds of data centers they run in a show of solidarity? Of course not. It's still a business, and that sop would be expensive.

The thing that most bugs me about Earth Hour is that it celebrates darkness. The light bulb is perhaps the greatest invention ever and we're told that we need to turn it off in order to save the earth. The position is clearly us (our technological way of life) versus nature. It's Rousseau for the modern man.

If you think that Gore et al. don't really want to turn back the clock or rollback the economic progress, then consider his recent plea to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from the United States by 90% by 2050. 90%! In the best case, where we switch from coal to nuclear power and internal combustion engines to electric ones, I doubt that we could get down to 10% of our current emissions and the dislocations in trying would be absolutely astounding. Worst case, we'd have to just shut down.

All of this just leaves me speechless, but I mustn't avoid speaking out. I will most likely be alive in 2050 and I do not want to live a "nasty, brutish, and short" existence. If the global plan to turn Earth Hour into Earth Year succeeds, I'm afraid that my future will be exactly that.

[UPDATE (4/2/2008): Keith Lockitch puts it well: "But during Earth Hour we see the disturbing spectacle of people celebrating those lights going out—of people rejoicing at the sight of skyscrapers going dark. If anything, what Earth Hour represents is the renunciation of civilization."]

Rick, Rick, He's Our Man

bbrown — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 23:50:02 GMT

Over at Found on the Web, I've made my first April Fool's joke. As you might expect, it's Rick-Roll related.

Here's the Javascript I used:


<script type="text/javascript" language="javascript">
  var links = document.getElementsByTagName("a");
  for (var i=0; i < links.length; i++)
  {
    links[i].onclick = function()
        {
          location.href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHg5SJYRHA0";return false;
        };
  }
</script>

It gets every hyperlink on the page, loops over them, and adds an onclick event handler that performs the redirect.

A Future of Architecture

bbrown — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 00:52:47 GMT

Tonight I attended a lecture on "Algorithmic Architecture" by Kostas Terzidis at Taliesin West. Terzidis, a Harvard professor and former software engineer, is interested in the intersection of architecture and technology—mainly the role that computers play in automating much of the design aspects of architecture.

He spent much of his lecture philosophizing about this crossroads we find ourselves approaching. In contradictory fashion, he opined that there is nothing new, only recycled ideas and forgotten truths, while arguing that computers have enabled us to realize designs that were impossible just decades ago. That increase reliance on computer power has divorced us from the practice of architecture while bubbling over the inevitable supplanting of the creative process. Honestly, it wasn't terribly different from some of the incoherent rhapsodies of Frank Lloyd Wright.

The idea of automating the creative process intrigued me greatly though. At first, I was troubled by the mechanization of design. On the surface, it seems to obviate the individualistic architect, the creator of greatness. But upon pondering it more, I think that there's no reason why the stamp of the architect has to go away.

The future of architecture as programming is one where a program is written that takes all the variables and constraints of the architectural problem and devises thousands of buildings that solve it. Site topography, materials, budget, number of rooms, central plant, and so on are just inputs to be considered. While this seemingly diminishes the role of the architect, I think it could easily maintain his part.

Perhaps each programmer qua architect would codify his aesthetic sense in different ways or assign different weights to the various considerations. In so doing, the designs his program generates might look all of a same piece and his particular theme shines through. His job, then, becomes one of practiced selection of the best design combination.

It's going to be awhile before such a transformation of the trade takes place due to the massive increase in computing power necessary to effect it. But it seems inevitable and inexorable.

Bill Goes Capsule

bbrown — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 00:26:27 GMT

With credit to Diana Hsieh for the inspiration, here's some quick reviews of movies I've recently watched:

Bee Movie (Netflix): dreadful. We didn't watch the whole thing, which is exactly what we set out to do in order to make sure it was appropriate for our daughters. It's not, but only because it is so mind-numbing that we wouldn't inflict it upon them.
The Browning Version (Netflix): excellent! Michael Redgrave gives an exemplary performance. I'm a fan of Rattigan's work, so I must locate the play version of this.
Real Women Have Curves (Netflix): passable fare about the struggle between what you want and what others want for you.
Persuasion (Netflix): I'm a sucker for Jane Austen and this was a great production. I like the plot and theme immensely.
Enchanted (Netflix): Amy Adams is wonderful in this clever film. The songs, though improbable, are catchy. My girls loved it from the get-go and I can't say that I blame them. Not at all schmaltzy, it offers a more sane version of the princess mania that's raging right now.
The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid (Netflix): 70s camp and utterly ludicrous. I honestly can't remember why I added this to my queue.
Premonition (Netflix): a little confusing and I'm pretty sure that it's internally inconsistent as well. I fell asleep a couple times during it but woke up enough to catch the deeply unsatisfying ending. Sorry, but I'm not a big fan of fatalism.
Eight Below (Netflix): I'll admit it—I added this to my queue because it was a drama with Jason Biggs. I wanted to see whether he could pull it off. Not particularly, but he's supporting cast. Eight sled dogs are left to fend for themselves in Antarctica when a huge storm hits. Their sled guy feels really bad about it. Several months later, they are rescued. This one rates an "enh."
Control Room (Netflix): documentary about Al-Jazeera and the second Iraq war. I thought it let the network off too easily; they are clearly fomenting anti-American sentiment.
Scotland, PA (Netflix): Christopher Walken is great, but I'm a little tired of Shakespearean adaptations set in modern times. This time, it's Hamlet set in a 70s burger joint. Uh yeah. Maura Tierney is lovely, but a little hard to bear in this one.
In the Heat of the Night (Netflix): good look at Southern racism. Poitier seems a little wooden in this role as a northern homicide detective drafted into the investigation of a murder in Mississippi. I'm happy to have finally seen "They call me Mr. Tibbs!" in context.
One, Two, Three (Netflix): a real groaner. They pulled out all the stereotypes for this one. Cagney plays a fast-talking Coca-Cola executive in Berlin. Horst Buchholz, magnificent in a later movie, is horrible as a card-carrying East German Communist.
The Name of the Rose (Netflix): exciting enough medieval thriller set in a monastery. Monks are dying and only Sean Connery has the guts to claim that it might not be demonic possession to blame. Great if you're into asceticism, which I am not.
Payback (Netflix): I avoided this Mel Gibson flick when it came out, but I was surprisingly captivated by its twists and turns. Nothing here but dark fun.
District B13 (Netflix): notable only because a) it stars David Belle, creator of parkour and b) it's a French action film. If you like Jackie Chan movies for the action, you stand a good chance of being able to sit through this.
GoodFellas (Netflix): gritty, hard-to-watch mob movie. There's really no point to the film other than maybe anti-recruitment for the mafia. Good if you like mob movies, which I sometimes do.
Fido (Netflix): I absolutely adore the alternate universe posited by this movie—nuclear war has created millions of zombies and an inventor has developed a collar that renders them obedient (as in not out to eat your gray matter). These newly-useful zombies become free labor for those who survived. Fido, in this case, is the companion to a lonely boy. It's thinly-veiled social commentary but the premise is novel.
The Ref (Netflix): I can't stand Denis Leary. I decided to give him one last chance on this one, but he blew it. Leary stars as a burglar who holds a dysfunctional family hostage and becomes their mediator and therapist. Oh, and he makes snide, facile comments non-stop.
Saving Private Ryan (Netflix): I avoided this movie in reaction to the hype and fawning. I deeply regret it. It suffers the same fate as nearly every Spielberg movie, but damn if this isn't the best-looking war movie I've ever seen. Glory runs a close second.
The Prince and Me (Netflix): prosaic comedy about a girl who falls in love with a guy who turns out to be royalty. It follows all the standard sequences and revelations, but it's cute and worth it if you want something light and fluffy.
After Innocence (Netflix): documentary about people serving life sentences exonerated by DNA evidence. It changed my mind about capital punishment. No, really. Like I was on the fence about the matter before watching it and wholeheartedly against it afterwards. The problem with capital punishment is that there's no restitution if you're wrong. And the death penalty then becomes murder.

I'll try to make the next installment considerably shorter. If you're a Netflix customer and want to be my friend, I'm game.

The Shotgun Approach to Recommendations

bbrown — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 23:28:41 GMT

I went to Netflix just now to rate a movie I watched. On the front page, the image at right greeted me.

You may or may not know, but Netflix is offering a $1 million prize for a 10% improvement in its recommendation algorithm. I honestly don't know if the recommendation at right is what they're trying to improve but if it is then 10% better shouldn't be too difficult.

I mean, because I liked a documentary about capital punishment, a 80s puppet children's show, and my children liked an insipid phonics teaching program they think that I'd really dig a pseudo-martial arts exercise video. Sorry, but WTF?!

They just completed a big ol' upgrade but I think they missed a spot. Yeah, over there. See that recommendation engine-sized dark spot over there. There you go, you've found it.

My Contribution

bbrown — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 05:10:49 GMT

I've finally contributed something original to the Internet. I've chronicled many interesting things over at Found on the Web and I always felt like I needed to make something that others would use, get a kick out of, and then blog themselves. At last I've done it!

I call it the Meme Obfuscation Machine, which I just now noticed can be shortened to MOM—which I will not do. I had a spare domain that I've been paying for since 2003 (bridgeforsale.com) so I decided to donate it to the cause.

I created it Friday, February 29th. I've been intrigued by the phenomenon known as the Rick Roll for a couple of weeks now but on Friday it struck me that at some point it's just too obvious that you're being Rick Rolled. I remembered the serpentine redirects they used to use in the Slashdot community to land people at Goatse and suddenly it all just clicked.

It took me an hour to get all the necessary mod_rewrite rules down pat and then another hour to write up the Web site and hand-rolled feeds. The basic idea is that you craft a URL to suit your mark. For example, if your friend is a woodworking enthusiast (and who isn't), send him a link to www.bridgeforsale.com/articles/stunning-cabinet-plans-for-free.php. He'll gleefully click it and find himself on the business end of a Rick Astley.

I decided to make Rick Roll the default behavior for now so that any extension not already mapped (.aspx for Goatse, .jsp for Just Google It) would go to the campy video. But if you want the link to work forever, use ".php" or leave off the extension since those will be future proofed. Future meme additions will take up undefined extensions.

I hope this serves you well. Either way, I had a blast making it.

Contributing to the Growth of the English Language

bbrown — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 10:12:55 GMT

I think I just coined a new word today—encomp (verb): the act of getting an application to match the comprehensive design provided by the designers. Usage: "Oh, I just got the slices from Andy so now it's time to start encomping."

I can't find any usages of it on Google, just confusion with encompassing. I claim this neologism then.

Web.config and Virtual Directories

bbrown — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 09:49:57 GMT

At work today, I ran into some trouble trying to set up a virtual directory as an application in IIS. My two applications, the parent and the child, occupied different locations in the filesystem, had separate app pools, and different app names. Due to the inheritance of Web.config, though, the HTTP modules defined in the parent app were throwing configuration exceptions in the child app even though the child app never referenced any of the HTTP modules.

I thought about adding an httpModule section to the child app's Web.config with a remove call, but that seemed klunky to me. Frantic Google searching wasn't giving any better solutions. Following the link chains from blog entry to blog entry to comments to more blog entries, I stumbled upon the answer:

<location inheritinchildapplications="false"> <system.web> <httpmodules> … </httpmodules> </system.web> </location>source

Of course! This breaks the inheritance chain and it only touches the parent app's Web.config.

The Things I Do For Money

bbrown — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 23:32:59 GMT

Pardon me while I vent for a few minutes. I'm doing some contract development work for a non-profit—cleared long ago through my company's legal team to make sure that I wasn't running afoul of my non-compete clause—and to say that the conditions are sub-par is to put it mildly.

First, they've got a custom CMS that they've licensed from a local design house but they don't have rights to the source code. So it took me forever to set everything up because I'd keep hitting little errors that stymied me because I couldn't go code spelunking. But I persevered (barely) and now I've got a local instance of the CMS running. (The custom CMS, it must be said, is overly complex and often inscrutable. Even the design house's lead developer had trouble explaining how it worked.)

The only way for me to develop what they need is to inject custom user controls into the page lifecycle. That's no big deal, just an annoyance. But if I want to see how something looks, I have to copy my DLL from one directory to another each and every time.

Second, the CMS is written and hosted in .NET 1.1. That means Visual Studio 2003 (retch) and trying to remember what subset of C# isn't available. A task which would be much simpler if I had a copy of my trusty ReSharper, which I don't. $149 is a lot of money to spend but I'm getting close to throwing in the towel and ponying it up. (I would never even think of pirating it.)

The final abomination is that the database is hosted on SQL Server 2000 and that means Enterprise Manager/Query Analyzer. SQL Server Management Studio, part of SQL Server 2005, is so much nicer than that combo. Every time I fire up this suite of blast-from-the-past apps, I feel so dirty and ghetto. I'm hoping that someday soon they'll have the budget to allow me to convert over to an open-source CMS built in .NET 2.0.

The relationship with the non-profit and my belief in the rightness of its mission is what keeps me going on this when every fiber of my being says, "Go elsewhere, youngish man!" They got screwed with this custom CMS—the peril of being non-technical—and I wonder how the design firm sleeps at night seeing some of the atrocities I've come across. (If I ever feel spunky or get to migrate away from their CMS, I'll have some excellent horror stories to share. I should probably write them down somewhere for that eventuality.)

PayPal Pwn3d

bbrown — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 23:12:40 GMT

I was balancing my checkbook this morning when I discovered two charges I didn't recognize. My wife does her fair share of online transacting, so I asked her what they were. She couldn't remember so I did what I normally do: investigate. Most of the time, my research jogs her memory and I can dutifully assign the transaction the appropriate category in Quicken. This time was different.

I went to PayPal and discovered two illicit transactions in euros to RapidShare. On my online banking site, I found a charge from Yahoo Small Business Hosting. Crap! The guy had changed my email address to a Yahoo one (the same one, incidentally, used to register a domain and set up hosting) and I promptly changed my password. I completed the PayPal dispute form.

I went to Yahoo and tried to login for the guy (hoping he had used my compromised password—a guy can dream, y'know). From my attempt to reset his password, I determined that he had my debit card number! I reported the card stolen and I think all of his attack vectors are closed off. I had only used my PayPal password once before with a wholly unrelated email address so I'm not worried about him ruining my online life.

Sandi and I were trying to think of how we got compromised. It seems like a textbook case of phishing, but Sandi is pretty aware of that and her computer has nothing stored in Keychain for that PayPal account. I'm very aware of phishing and I haven't been to PayPal in a very long time. What's particularly confounding is the Yahoo account, which was definitely established with a credit card number and not through PayPal. Very strange, but all is being resolved now.

The moral of this story is to balance your account regularly—I last did it on February 8th. If I had waited longer, there's no telling how much more damage this a-hole could have done. I'm truly surprised at how little he did—maybe he's a slacker—so I guess I lucked out by not being violated by someone with ambition and drive.

The Royal Treatment

bbrown — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 09:36:48 GMT

Apparently, Prince Andrew is visiting my workplace today. They've cordoned off a huge swath of the parking lot and there's some signs for media parking, so I expect it's going to be a zoo. I'm really not a fan of monarchy, but it's pretty exciting for such a high-profile visit. It sure beats J.D. Hayworth.

[UPDATE (2/14/2008): Here's the definitive article on the matter with a photo of our president looking thoughtful and the prince looking quite princely—at least that's how I'd imagine a prince to look.]

[The views expressed on this website/weblog are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of Go Daddy Software, Inc.]

Presidential Complications

bbrown — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 16:47:49 GMT

I just read John McCain's remarks to the Conservative Political Action Conference and I'm conflicted. I had written off John McCain nearly my entire political life: he's my state's senior senator and I've watched him side with Congressional Democrats over and over again. Maybe it was his formative years with Dennis Deconcini but I always assumed it was due to an inner contradiction that he had embraced.

That contradiction is altruism. While many of his most disagreeable actions seem to be motivated for the greater glory of John McCain, I've come to realize that he is sincere in his support for self-sacrifice—to others, to the nation, to whomever so long as it's not self-interested. I saw his willingness to commit troops for incessant intervention and his insistence on mandatory service as indicative of a core ethic of altruism. It didn't hurt that he says stuff like "[t]o sacrifice for a cause greater than yourself, and to sacrifice your life to the eminence of that cause, is the noblest activity of all."

So his advocacy of limited government, reduced taxation, and welfare reform rests alongside restricting free speech, criminalizing abortion, and demonizing the rich. He has taken my side on a number of positions, but his support is practically coincidental. If you believe that Americans should sacrifice themselves for the good of everyone—which in practice means sacrifice for whatever the state decides is good—then how can you make a compelling case for capitalism, for freedom?

Most of my disdain for McCain stemmed from this tenuous agreement. My position derives from a thorough defense of the morality of capitalism; his, as best as I can tell, from the notion that capitalism is the most practical means of serving others. Time and again, McCain has sided with the liberals whenever their bill or idea proved more sacrificial or utilitarian. I don't need that in a president or, frankly, a legislator.

But McCain's remarks have me questioning opposition to his candidacy. He's said some really great things:

I am proud to be a conservative, and I make that claim because I share with you that most basic of conservative principles: that liberty is a right conferred by our Creator, not by governments, and that the proper object of justice and the rule of law in our country is not to aggregate power to the state but to protect the liberty and property of its citizens.

This is something the Founding Fathers could have said. It indicates an understanding that the Constitution is not so much a governing document as a limiting document. The founders believed that the Constitution defined what the federal government can do and anything it doesn't enumerate is beyond its purview. It's a great statement; I sincerely wish that he (or his speechwriter) actually grokked the underlying theory.

While I have long worked to help grow a public majority of support for Republican candidates and principles, I have also always believed, like you, in the wisdom of Ronald Reagan, who warned in an address to this conference in 1975, that "a political party cannot be all things to all people. It must represent certain fundamental beliefs which must not be compromised to political expediency or simply to swell its numbers."

I couldn't agree more. Further, his actions—the ones that earned him the brand of the maverick—underscore his words. I believe that he is a man of integrity and sincerity, even though I don't agree with him a lot.

Those are my beliefs, and you need not examine only my past votes and speeches to assure yourselves that they are my genuine convictions. You can take added confidence from the positions I have defended during this campaign. I campaigned in Iowa in opposition to agriculture subsidies. I campaigned in New Hampshire against big government mandated health care and for a free market solution to the problem of unavailable and unaffordable health care. I campaigned in Michigan for the tax incentives and trade policies that will create new and better jobs in that economically troubled state. I campaigned in Florida against the national catastrophic insurance fund bill that passed the House of Representatives and defended my opposition to the prescription drug benefit bill that saddled Americans with yet another hugely expensive entitlement program.

I do take added confidence in his contrarian views. I have not seen McCain pander at all—and his campaign has lacked the religious overtones that nearly every other one has featured. He has had plenty of opportunities to kowtow to the religious right and he has largely avoided it—earning the considerable enmity of evangelicals everywhere. I can appreciate that.

I intend to reduce [the size of the federal government]. I will not sign a bill with earmarks in it, any earmarks in it. I will fight for the line item veto, and I will not permit any expansion whatsoever of the entitlement programs that are bankrupting us. On the contrary, I intend to reform those programs so that government is no longer in that habit of making promises to Americans it does not have the means to keep.

Oh hell yeah! Given that I believe his sincerity and earnestness, I ascribe tremendous value to his pledge to veto any bill with pork in it. I guess it means that a pork-free socialized medicine bill could conceivably be tendered and signed, but I'm confident that the other people's money flaunters in Congress couldn't put forth a pork-free bill.

They will offer a big government solution to health care insurance coverage.

I intend to address the problem with free market solutions and with respect for the freedom of individuals to make important choices for themselves.

This is heartening even though it's not wholly in his control to effect. He's got some decent ideas on this subject. At the least, they're head and shoulders above those of his opponents, whose main premise appears to be enslavement of doctors and medical personnel and an insistence on Canadian-style waiting lists. Oh, if only they were that explicit in their intentions! Instead, they focus on the consumer side of socialized medicine: everything is cheap and the same. They just don't talk about the fact that it's cheap if it's available at all and everyone gets the same dismal care.

The rest of the speech is of varying quality and generally reinforces his commitment to sacrifice by his listeners and the American public. While that is damning, it's altogether too common. Every candidate would agree with his statements, as would most every candidate in the last hundred years. So it's not enough to torpedo him in my eyes.

In conclusion, I'm re-evaluating my assessment of John McCain as president. I thought it would be damaging in the short-term and disastrous in the long-term but now I think it might only be damaging in the long-term and positive in the short. I'm working on an entry about how I evaluate candidates and I'll cover the internal debates regarding McCain there.

Priorities

bbrown — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 06:12:51 GMT

My wife and I were discussing politics today as we often do and I discovered that while we agree on the issues—surprisingly almost entirely—we really differed on our hot buttons.

Her big ones are illegal immigration and health care. She will pass on a candidate that advocates restricting immigration or wants to socialize medicine. She asked what my priorities were and I had to confess that I'd never thought about ordering them. To me, when nearly every candidate's position on nearly every issue erodes liberty and reduces freedom, it's hard to say which sop is most important.

Thinking on it more, though, I realized that that is really only true in the longer-term. In the short-term, I judge candidates mercilessly on the degree to which they'll likely hinder my life. So here's my top five:

Health care: wrecking our health care system by adopting the public systems of generally-socialist countries frightens me greatly. It's ironic that many of these same countries are moving towards privatization due to the serious problems they've encountered. This is literally a matter of life and death to me. And once the health care system goes socialized, its vestiges will be with us for many generations to come.
Global warming: I think that greenhouse gas emission reduction is, at once, the most grievous threat to our economy and the least in our control. The march towards some sort of "solution" seems inexorable and Senate ratification of whatever dreck the global community spews means that it's the law of our land. I'm pretty sure the Supreme Court can't second-guess international treaties.
Welfare: entitlement programs represent a blank check on my wages. What's worse, as the rest of the economy suffers under the inevitable interventionist policies of presidents and Congresscritters the welfare rolls swell. The money's got to come from somewhere people and that somewhere is the labor of the successful.
National service: the call to required sacrifice chills me to the core. I'm way past the age where this would be a personal issue, but I do have kids and I would hate for them to be pressed into service against their will at any point in their lives.
Stem cell research: I hate that such fundamental scientific research is funded and controlled by the government. The sad fact is that it is and there's no way around it at present. Stem cell research, from what this ignorant layman can gather, represents the future of medicine. This could easily be a life or death issue at some point for me and mine. I hate that it is being held up because some people feel like a freaking embryo is a person with rights.

To be sure, I care about a lot of other issues but these are the big ones. Soon I will write up how I plan to appraise candidates through the filter of these priorities. Hint: it ain't easy because there is no candidate that matches for me.

Back to Lesser of Two Evils

bbrown — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 05:31:34 GMT

Great. My man manages to blow an early lead by adopting a strategy of focusing on one state for most of the primary season. I guess there was some sense to that because of the need to prioritize, but he essentially wrote himself out of the press for several months. And I think that is what killed his chances. *sigh*

On a ReSharper Kick Lately

bbrown — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 15:09:40 GMT

I've been tweaking ReSharper something fierce lately. I've talked about it before, but some day I'm going to write up all the things that make me love that little Visual Studio add-in. I know some suggest you should learn to love defaults, but others argue for knowing thy editor.

One of my favorite features are live templates. If you can get used to them, your productivity will soar since your hands will never leave the keyboard. I have gotten used to them and regularly create new ones when I find myself repeating.

Today I created an awesome template for doing StringBuilder.Appends. Now all I type is sb and it expands to actualStringBuilderObject.Append("MESSAGE"); with the cursor replacing the "MESSAGE" string and the enter key dropping the cursor off at the end of the line. That description doesn't do the template justice, so just make one using the screenshot below:

You can get to that dialog by clicking ReSharper > Options > Live Templates and then clicking on the + icon.