Even Though You’re Gone

I’ll never know what happened,
or answer these questions,
but I know that it’s not the end,
so in these redemption's
my life is going to bend.

Perhaps life was egregious,
but the smiles you gave
were never facetious
and when needed you were brave
though a bit promiscuous

Even though you’re gone
no matter how long
your remnants live on
in lives and in hearts and in song
you’ve even left spawn.

I never thought I’d be this strong
and even though you’re gone
I promise to carry your memory on
Giving hope to those wronged,
smiling, and loving those ladies long.

Written in loving memory of Jonathan David Tribbey

beginning: work(); try { if (sleepAllowed) sleep(6); else throw new SanityCheckException(); } catch { if (sane) goto beginning; } finally { die(); }

Life is CRAZY! :P

Apparently it's been a long time since I've posted, lol... I didn't even notice. I have been running around like a madman lately trying to finish up a project for a client that likes to complicate things in order to try to make it to a graduation ceremony for someone very close to me. It's been nuts, and I'm glad things might finally start winding down a little (I could use some real R&R, even my "vacation" for this graduation started with me leaving just in time to hit rush-hour traffic in NYC in order to update a server at work). Things aren't done yet, I'm sure I'll be partially debilitated by my wisdom teeth extraction scheduled for Thursday. That'll be fun, lol; my face hurts pretty darn bad right now though, so I don't know what else it could really be like, but I'll tell you this much: I can't wait :)

I don't have a huge bit of time to talk about what little progress has been happening with my research and the projects around it, but I will put props out for the true Project Link stumbling on my blog in search of their long lost friend Link. Here's your update: The 2D Game framework is still conceptual at this point (making sure we don't have to try to redesign again and trying to figure out a truly reusable and scalable engine) but Xem has been doing some awesome work with his 2D client nFurc, all of the knowledge and super speedy rendering of which will be ruthlessly and brutally raped of it's originality to be thrown into one hardcore 2D game engine. I haven't gone without noticing the comments either guys, we'll be in touch; thanks for the love and support.

On to something really really sad:

The graduate I sought this weekend has had some very unfortunate circumstances surrounding their life. They, admittedly, did something reasonably stupid and got arrested for it. The sad part is as follows: the student had received acceptance and scholarships from an Ivy League school, valedictorian status and plenty of other things for their services of being a truly wonderful example of a great human being. The best I've ever met for that matter (which is saying something). Well said student lives in an everybody-knows-everybody town and it just so happens that they happened to oblige a friend with something atypical only to find out that "friend" was actually setting him up because that "friend" was caught doing something really stupid and didn't want to go down so he thought he'd implicate someone else instead. Now, as a result, this valedictorian has had all college acceptances (Ivy League), scholarships, awards, and the right to speak during graduation (or be mentioned for anything other than a diploma) stripped from them for a one time mistake for reasonably small potatoes compared to many of the problems in the area. The police, for whatever reason, thought it would be wise to go after a well established high-school student with public service credentials like you wouldn't believe instead of, say, the heroin dealer that was reported to them (whom they told who narced on him) or the crack dealers, or the (excessively) numerous people drinking and driving. Now their only mission seems to be to catch the graduate slipping up again so they can really ruin lives... it makes me hurt inside to see such awful treatment of such a great person for a single mistake. Worse yet, simply mentioning this to the parents would have been plenty sufficient for repercussion... trust me. Hell I've messed up plenty of times, but I've always had second chances; why do I deserve one, or why do you deserve one when somebody who truly stands for freedom and kindness to one-another, somebody who builds houses for Katrina victims and unites with like minded action-makers that peacefully express their concerns and their reasons. A true American (and I don't consider many people to be one) is being robbed of their hard work and I would easily lay mine on the line for theirs, no matter how hard I've worked I don't deserve half of what this person should receive in praise. Why?! Why rob the world of a good person? Worst case scenario this could mean prison, and prison doesn't make a good person any better... I'm beginning to lose faith; it hurts a lot.

Now that I've got that off my chest I need to get back to work, but stay tuned :p hopefully I should have at least a little spare time coming up.

-TheXenocide

Tracking Back and Moving Forward

bunnie’s blog » Blog Archive » Scritch scritch–huh?
First, thought I'd start the day off with a trackback to some unfortunate us politics that I wish would be different. Just follow the link, read the resources and formulate your own opinion, it's pretty obvious what it says.

Also, I've just recently seen "An Inconvenient Truth" the Al Gore global warming educational film. I feel that the film is a well put together, documented and scientifically backed cry for unity the likes of which is complicated by the greedy nature of our political system and it's "campaign contributions" (That's my own personal opinion, not directly expressed in the movie). This film clearly and truthfully (look up the data) indicates the insanely critical point we're at as a species and as members (the primary unbalancing ones at that) of a planetary ecosystem. I strongly suggest you watch it because I can't do as good a job as they do at stressing how important this is. Turns out scientists have had to sue to have their names removed from the report because their claims were censored and did not want to be considered supporters of the modified message. Also, Al Gore has owned share in the carbon offsetting business for quite some time. Sorry for the hasty statements.

beyond all that, in the Software Engineering and Development side of my brain I have been planning and planning more of the development of my research project and along the way I have stumbled upon several really really neat ideas for projects I'm sure other people will be interested in too. I only wish I had the time to work on them as well, but it seems I barely have enough time to work on my own commitments. This can also be assumed as a plea for somebody... anybody, to be my hero and organize these projects into being; I'm totally game for participating in the engineering process and things of that nature but I do not have enough time to be considered a significant help on actual implementation/coding. These projects, in the long run, can also be easily adapted into my infrastructure to make a distributed pervasive system who's usefulness will extend well into the era of grid and mesh computing (provided, of course, it is maintained and the same coding concepts apply :p). Enough beckoning, to the projects!

Hah! Tricked yah (not really, but there's a little bit of background information first :p)

If you haven't checked out IKVM.Net you should. It's a Java Virtual Machine that can dynamically interpret (JIT compile) and statically compile Java bytecode to .NET CIL (supporting both Mono and Microsoft's .NET Framework). I see this project as a tremendously important idea because it would bridge the gap of the oh so similar next generation programming languages and environments currently separated by a great chasm only vaguely crossable using J#. I haven't taken the opportunity to check into support for JRuby, Groovy, JACL or Jython but I do know that it is currently aimed at support for Java 1.4. Honestly I feel this project would get some tremendous headway if it were taken seriously and contributed to by the Java/Sun and Microsoft communities. There are other projects like Phalanger that do similar managed interoperability support and I love it, but Java is the one we really need guys. There's no reason for us to constantly be reinventing the wheel on different languages and platforms when we can just bridge them together in an efficient manner and let everyone use the language that will benefit them most without making it so nobody outside their little inner circle can use it. Anyway, this rant went a little long :p, my ideas:

I feel that IKVM could use help in the following areas:
-Migration to a J2SE 5 model
-Support for bridging the existing Java/Sun written runtime instead of the GNU Classpath (this is more of a political venture) since IKVM supports JNI this should work relatively well; in retrospect another option is to bridge the awt packages and native control libraries to .NET GDI+ (System.Drawing/System.Drawing.Drawing2D) and System.Windows.Forms base classes (System.Windows.Forms.Control). Note: it seems like this is further along then i remember, which is great, but it's still incomplete.
-Support for App.config settings to support local classpath definition for applications that don't use IKVM directly.
-Attributes to apply to .NET code (ie [IKVMPackage("something.whatever")]Something.Whatever) that would allow IKVM to better translate .NET code to Java calls and to allow things like making Java stubs of classes written in .NET that don't use a cli.* package so as to be able to replace existing Java packages with native .NET ones easily. Perhaps this should include other things like the ability to rename classes and interfaces (to support different naming standards, ie: [IKVMName("SomeInterface")]public interface ISomeInterface.
--I believe that the generated property accessors should also be more like standard Java bean definitions (void setProperty(type value); type getProperty()) instead of the standard CIL set_Property and get_Property.
--MulticastDelegates (events) should function more like Java events;

Thus C# event System.AppDomain.ProcessExit is the static Java function cli.System.AppDomain.add_ProcessExit().

This should translate to
cli.System.AppDomain.addProcessExitHandler(
new ProcessExitHandler() {
void ProcessExit(Object sender, EventArgs e) { /*blah*/ }
});
or a derivative that doesn't use an anonymous inner class.

I think this would be great especially since, with full swing support and JDK 1.5 support alongside better .NET support we could fully write .NET applications using things like NetBeans IDE and even potentially add debug support, hell maybe even J2EE. The reason I consider IKVM one of the best solutions to this is that a complete implementation for interoperability requires direct communicatioon/translation between virtual machines, not just service oriented architecture (as great and important as it is). After running some simple computational tests you find that running Java code that has been statically compiled to CIL runs tremendously faster in the Microsoft.NET and Mono CLRs than it does in Sun's own JVM. Unfortunately the complications of translating from one object base to another wind up slowing some things down a little bit (Like IComparable to Comparable conversion) but still IKVM runs much faster than I could ever imagine .NET running in the JVM. This would allow Java developers to leverage and take advantage of .NET benefits without losing the cross-platform (Mono) and language specific features they love.

Other than IKVM, another great project/standard to look at is JSON which is gaining popularity. There is currently a project to support JSON-RPC for .NET called Jayrock that is pretty full featured, but I had a great idea that would be a truly impressive and usefull .NET implementation of JSON-RPC. A JSON Serialization Formatter and JSON-RPC based remoting channel would be a much more applicable approach that would make JSON totally usable with .NET applications without having to modify any code (assuming they use App.config based remoting configuration).

If anybody were to create these projects I would certainly be able to leverage the technologies in my research which I aim to be able to run services, consumers, and even desktop environments on everything from ARM mobile processors to x64 breeds simply by using a very simple base extensibility framework that is currently .NET specific but I would love to bridge support to Java with. I've even considered using db4o databases with both (if they're still language compatible) the Java and .NET libraries as a means of providing a standard consistent persistence model that requires arbitrary conversion for the storage of objects. I haven't done a full architecture review on this though, so I'm not sure what part IKVM will play in relation to db4o (ie, running Java db4o with IKVM for Java apps and running .NET db4o with native .NET or using .NET db4o for both with IKVM stubs for Java and saving Java db4o for native JVM implementations).

I'm also desperately interested in information on how well Mono runs when compiled against Linux 2.4 and 2.6 for ARM/MIPS/SH processors, including how well Mono's WinForms run on it and if there are any Mono based "Compact Framework" builds. If there aren't any Compact Framework builds it's not really that big of a problem, but a windowing toolkit for mobile devices would be much appreciated :p.

Anyway, those are my ideas/requests/plans 8) people should learn to reply sometimes, lol.

-TheXenocide