Myon in the Peg!, originally uploaded by ghostmonk.

We were threatened about 5 times the day Myron and I walked around the streets of downtown winterpeg

Building in Den Haag, originally uploaded by ghostmonk.

Standing at a busy intersection of a major city, allowing the light from the bright-red flashing advertisements to assail my retinas. What goes through the minds of each tunnel-visioned pedestrian as he or she scurries through the crowd?

The cacophony blur of roaring motorists trickles through the mind. Brief snippets of cell phone conversations, emergency sirens and the general din of the city shivers through my physics. It’s a rogues gallery of pungent meat vendors and inconvenient beggars. (more…)

It’s taking me about 3 months to finally come up with a strong opinion about single line conditionals, but I now have a firm position:

“In the long run, it’s a bad idea to drop the brackets and put a conditional or iterator on a single line.”

Essentially sort of thing:

public function testResults(score:Number):void
{
    if(score < MIN_PASS) sendNotification(YOU_FAIL)
    else sendNotification(YOU_PASS)
}

Should always be this:

public function testResults(score:Number):void
{
    if(value < MIN_PASS)
    {
        sendNotification(YOU_FAIL)
    }
    else
    {
        sendNotification(YOU_PASS)
    }
}

Even when writing in a language that doesn’t use brackets, i.e. so called pure block languages like Python and Visual Basic, proper formatting should be used rather than single lines. If a language does use brackets, there is no excuse not to use them.

My argument follows this logic:

“Since debugging code is 20 times harder than writing it, by that definition you won’t be smart enough to find errors in clever code.”

(more…)

Here’s an online conversation with a good friend of mine on IM!

oculart:      hows it going with you these days
ghostmonk:  good man
ghostmonk: busy
oculart:     that’s the word on the streets isn’t it
ghostmonk: Myron and I are making this crazy ass site
oculart:     sweet, for who
ghostmonk: same one we’ve been working on for the last 8 months
ghostmonk: for this at risk women’s group in Winnipeg
ghostmonk: funded by ***
oculart:      ah cool, is an interactive story?
ghostmonk: no
ghostmonk: it’s a content site
ghostmonk: interactive story would be awesome
ghostmonk: nice idea
ghostmonk: I can show you
ghostmonk: beta.**********.com
ghostmonk: runs completely off a cms
ghostmonk: that’s why there is dummy content in there right now
ghostmonk: there is still a ton of work left to do
oculart:     alright let me check it out
oculart:      i like the resizing browser animation snap thing
ghostmonk: There’s more there than meets the eye
ghostmonk: the content is completely managed
ghostmonk: there is a back end
oculart:     do they have a lot of content they are going to be adding
ghostmonk: I guess so
oculart:     i don’t really believe in having cms for a lot of sites
oculart:     seems like a waste of programming time unless content is updated hourly
oculart:      I think it’s foolish when more resources are used on building a back end application when its just as easy to republish updated content unless it needs to be dynamic content (more…)

I recently found out my second child is another boy. The sonogram shows he’s healthy, has a strong heart and is growing well. It’s powerfully overwhelming to be a father, and having our second child brings a torrent of emotions and worries that punctuate my sense of being human and mortal. Most importantly, I am re-affirmed in the position that there is no more important issue than the ones our future generations will have to face. My biggest worry is the type of planet we are leaving for my two sons, the most recent addition below.

It's a Boy

A colleague calls them Heroes… and though I wouldn’t go that far, I have to admit the boys of Pirate Bay (Fredrik Neij, Peter Sunde, and Gottfrid Svartholm) must be the bravest most admired characters on the internet.

In my opinion they basically represent the small fraction of the world population actually worthy of breeding. For those of you who don’t know, Pirate Bay is currently embroiled in a major court case in Sweeden over file sharing.

Will someone please open their god damn eyes already… these guys are just plain right. The cartoon says it all.

For the vast majority of us, there is little we can do but watch the rising and falling power struggles between juggernaut corporate forces and just duck and cover when the beast rolls too close. So it is pretty amazing to see a couple smart asses pull down their pants and piss all over the party.

The best part is even when these bullies aim their cannons directly at our buoyant buccaneers, they just keep on saying “Go Fuck Your Self”.  I bought a T-Shirt because my Bad Religion one got ripped up in a fist fight, and this is much more bad ass anyway.

This is what they had on their home page today… I assuming they won’t mind if I republish it here. Click the picture and check out their site.

Fuck The Man!

For more amazing Pirate Bay antics, check out their Legal Threats section.

This is something I would love to be proved wrong about, but upon reflecting on the leadership in the United States I’m under the strained opinion that our county (Canada) is severely lacking any sort of positive force in our elected government. There is a some-what lukewarm consensus in the country that our current Prime-Minister, Stephan Harper, is getting something done, and that we “could do worse”.. but he often seems petulant, authoritative and certainly does not inspire vision or confidence in the general populous. (more…)

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

Information about major social events are passed down through the generations using systems of communication that are flawed and full of noise. (Oral communication, written word… etc) However, as the example above illustrates, we are getting better at communicating, and the ability for humanity to quickly and accurately assess problems and then convey those problems into a social narrative will enable future generation to benefit from our experience.

This amazing video was created as a thesis by an art student, Jonathan Jarivs, from Pasadena California. This is an excellent and concise explanation of the Credit Crisis the world is currently facing. It also helps illustrate a point about the information economy, and human communication/information evolution. It is one of the major reasons I am so optimistic about  the future of humanity and why I am happy to have and raise a family in a world that appears to be going into uncertain and maybe ominous times. (more…)

The desktop snapshot you see below is the result of a few unexpected twists and turns.

This photo of my son, taken by my girlfriend, after some family fun with a gigantic canvass and some acrylic paint.

Thanks to a few tutorials on Lynda.com by Deke McClelland and Chris Orwig I was able to achieve some interesting color effects in photoshop.

I’ve had little Lucas on my desktop for the last 5 months or so, and just yesterday stumbled upon the Tartan designer…

Using Kuler, via the Flickr functionalilty I extracted some of the more interesting colors, and dropped them into the maker.. PRESTO! A comforting desktop based on one of my favorite pictures.

Amazing app called Wordle… created using the words from this blog post.

Amazing tag cloud app

As terrible and cheesy as it is to start a post this way, I have to admit that I have not exactly been the paragon blogger I once thought I would be. It has been months since my last post.

At any rate, I have a pretty good reason. I have been overworked! However it has been good work… really good work.

As of right now I’m juggling a couple of projects, (three ActionScript projects and an html/css/javascript/php/cms one). It’s been extremely challenging finding ways not to loose my head, and to be honest I think I have a couple times.

On an easy day I’m working nearly 12 hours, and I haven’t taken a complete day off since Christmas, which I almost completely worked through. Before that it was the same pattern.

The great thing about all of this, is that I am starting to reach the light at the end of the tunnel (or the end of my rope depending on which way you look at it), and by that I mean light in two very distinct ways.

ONE: I’ve resolved to myself that I will not be taking on any more freelance work. This is mostly due to financial comfort, but also because I am pretty much sick of not having spare time to myself and my family. However, I still have two very time consuming projects to contend with, and god knows how long it will take for those to tail off. Either way… no new work. (Except for personal stuff of course)

TWO: I am starting to grasp the concept of Managing Complexity. Right now I am engrossed in a very compelling programming book by Steve McConnell called Code Complete – incredibly well written, with a loose, clean-flowing and imperative tone. (more…)