Why Commenting Your Programming Code Is Important

    Programming is exact.  Computers (for the time being at least) only know what you teach them, and only remember what you tell them to.  They will not remember why your “func1()” is returning a “thingy” object, and neither will you.  6 months, or a year from now, you will be completely focused on some new project, and you will have to go back to that project, and you will look through notebooks, and thousands of lines and dozens of pages of code, trying to figure out what that function did.

You can make your situation better by using a proper function and variable naming convention.  Proper naming conventions tend to be language specific at least, but there are some general rules of thumb.  ConvertToCat is a much better function name than convcat for example.  All caps are typically reserved for macros / global variables.  Leading a function with _ is generally reserved for special cases, (like constructors in C#.NET).  My point is that many developers tend to be lazy and abbreviate way too often.

Even with the best naming standards, there is still a need for comments.  I was taught in my CS courses to comment every function start and end, arguments, and return values.  Proper commenting and standards are especially important if you ever plan to work with other developers on a project.  It is better to get in the habit of doing things in the proper way, than to pay the price of being lazy later.  I can tell you from experience that you do not want to spend half a day trying to figure out what some function did and why you are using it in a certain way.

What is the Future of Artifical Intelligence

     Shane and I spend most of our days as code ninjas battling swashbuckling pirates, but we take time out every now and then to ponder the important questions of life… and I believe that AI is definately an imporant question.  At the top of the perverbial food chain (or so we think anyway), what could be more important than an intelligent machine that could unsurp our position at the top?

     AI is not a new concept, it is in fact a concept that came to the forefront in the 50’s, and it was believed even then that strong AI was possible, and would be accomplished in the not so distant future. 

As AI pioneer Herbert Simon wrote in 1965: “machines will be capable, within twenty years, of doing any work a man can do.”Their predictions were the inspiration for Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke’s character HAL 9000, who accurately embodied what AI researchers believed they could create.

It became obvious in the 70’s that this was a gross overconfidence in the capabilities of technology.  AI was sort of put on the back burner for a time. 

As the eighties began, Japan’s fifth generation computer project revived interest in strong AI, setting out a ten year timeline that included strong AI goals like “carry on a casual conversation”.^bIn response to this and the success of expert systems, both industry and government pumped money back into the field. However, the market for AI spectacularly collapsed in the late 80s and the goals of the fifth generation computer project were never fulfilled. For the second time in 20 years, AI researchers who had predicted the imminent arrival of strong AI had been shown to be fundamentally mistaken about what they could accomplish.

Perhaps we can understand now why anyone in the field of AI reasearch will flat out refuse to make any type of prediction and even mentioning “Strong AI” or “As Smart As A Human” will probably cause ninja swords to come out of the shadows behind you.  The field is not dead, it has just become much more specilized. 

For the most part, researchers today choose to focus on specific sub-problems where they can produce verifiable results and commercial applications, such as neural nets, computer vision or data mining.^[16] Interest in direct research into strong AI tends to come from outside the field, from internet entrepreneurs (such as Jeff Hawkins) or from futurists such as Ray Kurzweil.

Most mainstream AI researchers hope that strong AI can be developed by combining the programs that solve various subproblems using an integrated agent architecture, cognitive architecture or subsumption architecture.

The human brain has roughly 100 billion neurons operating simultaneously, connected by roughly 100 trillion synapses.^[18] By comparison, a modern computer microprocessor uses only 1.7 billion transistors.[3] Although estimates of the brain’s processing power put it at around 10¹⁴ neuron updates per second,^[19] it is expected that the first unoptimized simulations of a human brain will require a computer capable of 10¹⁸ FLOPS. By comparison a general purpose CPU (circa 2006) operates at a few GFLOPS (10⁹ FLOPS). (each FLOP may require as many as 20,000 logic operations).

Easy PHP and Html Bar Graph

I want to show you a quick and simple way to create a bar graph using HTML.

You need a graphic file that’s just 1 pixel wide and 5 px tall. Make it whatever color you want your bars to be. I named mine CountBar.gif.

In my example, I have an array of data for each month, containing sales. The key part to the whole concept can be seen here: (the table was created prior to this code block, and is ended after, I am just showing you the relevant section.

Basically, we loop through each month, $arrMonths contains the string values of each month like “January”, ect. $arrResults[$i]; contains the sales values for each corresponding month. (don’t get confused by my arrays, just focus on the concept).

The Key part is here: We set the width of the graphic equal to the amount of sales for the month divided by a static variable (we use this to keep the widths in a relative range, in this case, i know my sales data ranges from 0-50,000 so I want the width of my graph to go from 0-500 pixels)

<img src=”countBar.gif” width=”<?php echo intval($arrResults[$i] / 100);
$total += $arrResults[$i]; ?>” height=”5″ class=”chart”>

<?php

$total = 0;

for ($i = 0; $i < 12; $i++) {
?>
<tr>
<td width=”15%” height=”12″ align=”left” valign=”middle”><?php echo $arrMonths[$i + 1].” “;?></td><td width=”15%” height=”12″ align=”left” valign=”middle”>$<?php echo ” “.$arrResults[$i]; ?>: </td>
<td width=”70%” height=”12″><img src=”countBar.gif” width=”<?php echo intval($arrResults[$i] / 100);
$total += $arrResults[$i]; ?>” height=”5″ class=”chart”></td>
</tr>
<?php
}
?>

And you can get something like this: ( i have marked out the  actual values on purpose)

Melting Pennies Nickels Coins For Profit

What kind of crazy government keeps coins in circulation that are worth more melted than their face value? Does this not seem odd to anyone else?  So basically, the government could use blank coins, with nothing printed on them, and increase the value of our currency by billions of dollars….sigh…

By Barbara Hagenbaugh, USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — People who melt pennies or nickels to profit from the jump in metals prices could face jail time and pay thousands of dollars in fines, according to new rules out Thursday.

Soaring metals prices mean that the value of the metal in pennies and nickels exceeds the face value of the coins. Based on current metals prices, the value of the metal in a nickel is now 6.99 cents, while the penny’s metal is worth 1.12 cents, according to the U.S. Mint.

That has piqued concern among government officials that people will melt the coins to sell the metal, leading to potential shortages of pennies and nickels.

“The nation needs its coinage for commerce,” U.S. Mint director Ed Moy said in a statement. “We don’t want to see our pennies and nickels melted down so a few individuals can take advantage of the American taxpayer. Replacing these coins would be an enormous cost to taxpayers.”

—- This section was added by Shane —-
The US Government has no control over the value of our coinage or any other part of our monetary system. This is because we have a fiduciary monetary system that is based 100% on how the individual views the value of their money. The money itself is considered fiat, or unbacked by any physical asset such as silver or gold bullion. It is worth exactly what you and I think it is worth, based on mutual trust (fiduciary means “trustee”).
To explain this a bit further: Consider that you work for $10 an hour. After taxes, you most likely take home around $7.50 an hour. At the end of a 40 hour work week, you now have a total of $300 dollars. You now have a base idea of how much $300 is worth to you and you must then decide what you want to spend this money on. If you decide somewhere along the lines that you simply cannot afford to work for $10 an hour, you will either ask for a raise or move to a better paying position. In the meantime, if you don’t have any savings you most likely will not spend the whole week’s check on a $300 television set. Assuming that you are the average American, the manufactureres of the television set is probably aware of this and are willing to provide a model within your price range.
In this manner, you decide the intrinsic value of a dollar. Those in sales are constantly raising prices to make more money and the consumers are getting raises or new jobs to keep up. This in turn causes the employers who are in sales to raise their prices and so forth. Meanwhile, the value of the dollar drops and drops until a new system is brought to bear, perhaps one that is regulated federally such as the Chinese system. Since Americans as a whole are ignorant of their monetary system despite it being taught in public schools, they continue to blame their banking system and government over their money woes. In truth, we are doing it to ourselves and only we can stop it. Not that it would ever happen.
The American monetary system has been based on trust since it began. At one point it was based soley on the gold bullion backing it, of course that was long ago when other nations required any international trades to be backed by gold or silver bullion. Once the “money” grew larger than the value of all known bullion, we quietly adopted the fudiciary system and have been trudging along ever since, waiting for the bubble to pop.
When the first coins were minted, they were of precious metals whose very own value spoke for itself. From mid 1942 to 1945, the infamouse “war nickels” were created. These coins are 56% copper, 35% silver and 9% manganese. The only other U.S. coins to use manganese are the Sacagawea and Presidential dollars. Now that we find that copper has exceeded the trust value of a penny, the federal government should call for a return of all nickels and pennies and re-issue the coinage in baser metals, which is what happened to gold coins in the early 1800s. On February 8, 2008, a bill was introduced in the US House of Representatives that will allow for changing the metal components in US coins due to the rising cost of commodities and the rapidly declining U.S. Dollar.

Tuscany Villa Style House Plans

Tuscany House Plans offer amazing exteriors and the Tuscany Style House Plans really stand out in a crowd! If you want to view a great collection of Tuscany Villa House Plans check out House Plans by Nelson Design Group.

Rubberbands made out of urine…

Rubberbands made out of urine… What I really want to know is…why in the world are people providing grant reasearch  funding for this?  I mean.. ok, you made a rubber band that can “repair” itsself in minutes…it probably cost $10,000 to make one.  This is just like Shane says… The US spent millions of dollars making a pen that would write in zero gravity…and the Russians used a pencil.  Don’t you people have some diseases to cure?

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Anyone who has heard the snap of a rubber band breaking knows it’s time to reach for a replacement.

But a group of French scientists have made a self-healing rubber band material that can reclaim its stretchy usefulness by simply pressing the broken edges back together for a few minutes.

The material, described on Wednesday in the journal Nature, can be broken and repaired over and over again.

It is made from simple ingredients — fatty acids like those found in vegetable oils, and urea, a waste compound in urine that can be made synthetically.

The material would be an asset to industry and might even help shed light on the physics of elasticity, wrote Philippe Cordier and colleagues at the Industrial Physics and Chemistry Higher Educational Institution in Paris.

Standard rubber bands, which can stretch up to several hundred percent then snap back into shape, are made from long chains of cross-linked polymers.

The new material is linked by short chains of a type of molecule called ditopic, which can associate with two other molecules, and multitopic molecules, which can associate with more than two molecules.

This network of molecules is strengthened by hydrogen bonds that allow the material to stretch up to several hundred percent, then snap back into shape.

If severed, the material mends itself when the ends are pressed together at room temperature, allowing these bonds to re-form.

“The mended samples are able to sustain large deformations and recover their shape and size when stress is released,” Cordier and his colleagues wrote.

The material can “withstand multiple fractures, needs no catalysts and is otherwise straightforward to produce,” Justin Mynar and Takuzo Aida of the University of Tokyo wrote in an accompanying article.

“A final blessing is that it can be broken down with heat and easily recycled — so it is environmentally friendly, too.”

Breaking Moore’s Law Nets Computer Industry 10-20

First a Snippet From The PC WORD Arcitcle 

 In anticipation of Moore’s Law becoming irrelevant in the next 10 to 20 years, the National Science Foundation (NSF) wants funding for research that could lead to a replacement for current silicon technology.

The NSF last week requested US$20 million from the U.S. government for fiscal 2009 to start the “Science and Engineering Beyond Moore’s Law” effort, which would fund academic research on technologies, including carbon nanotubes, quantum computing and massively multicore computers, that could improve and replace current transistor technology.

Moore’s Law states that the number of transistors that can be placed on silicon, and its attendant computational capability, doubles every 18 months. The formula is credited to Intel cofounder Gordon Moore.

Carbon nanotubes could be the future, as I spoke about in my Nanotechnology article.  These carbon nanotubes could allow for smaller transistors  to be created,   research into Quantum Computing is also producing some interesting results, which I will write about in a future article.  There also are thoughts on improving software to allow better networking of thousands or millions of computers that act as one single processing unit.  Whatever the future holds for this industry, it will be interesting to see what happens in the next 10-20 years.

PHP Quick Reference Study Guide

Comments In PHP

#this is a comment, to EOL

//this is also a comment, to EOL

/* This is also a comment

For multi lines

*/

Variables

Must start with (A-Za-z) or _(underscore)

like:

$blah

$_blah

$H4×0rs

Illegial Variables

$7337

$*UCK

Variables in PHP are loosely typed, and do not need to be declared prior to use.

So the following are all legal statements

$shane = “Shane Is Leet”;

$shane = 10 * 4 + 3;

Variable types in php are interchangeable, so I used the variable $shane as a string in one line, and then as an integer in another, and php dosen’t mind at all.

PHP does support indirect variable references, but I personally don’t use them. Here is a brief example:

$var1 = “Shane”;

$$var1 = “Who Is The 7337″;
print $Shane; # this will output “Who Is The 7337″

You can use as many levels of indirection as you can stomach.

Variable Management

• isset()
• unset()
• empty()

isset() example:

if(isset($shane) {

print ‘$shane is set’;

}

unset() example:

unset($shane);

if(!isset($shane)) {

echo ‘$shane is unset’;

}

empty() is typically used to check form values, the variables value is converted to a bool, then checked for true/false, example:

if (empty($shane)) {

print ‘Error: $shane is empty’;

}
This prints the error message if $shane dosen’t contain a value that evaluates to true.

Data Types

PHP Suports, Integer, Hex (like 0xABCD) - Values (-100)

Floating Point like: 3.14, +0.1e-4, -1600.3, 22.6E42

Strings:

PHP supports strings, beginning and ending with single or double quotes, and allows embedding of variables like in the previous examples.

When using single quotes, you lose some of the escape characters support when using double quotes

Double Quote Escape Characters:

• \n #newline
• \t #Tab
• \” #double quote
• \\ #backslash
• \0 #ASCII 0 (null)
• \r #linefeed
• \$ #the character $
• \(Octal # ) #ex \70 would be the letter 8
• \x(hex #) # like \0×32 is the letter 2

Single Quote Escape Characters:

• \’ #single uote
• \\ #backslash

Null

Null is a data type with only one value: the NULL value. Use it thusly:

$shane = NULL;

Arrays

Straitforward, array(1, 2, 3) or array(0 => 1, 1 => 2, 2 =>3)

$var1 = array(”name” => “Shane”, “age” => “28″);

echo $var1[”name”]; #prints “Shane”

There is quite a lot to arrays in php, so for more info check Arrays In PHP

To Iterate across the array, I typically use foreach()

$players = array(”Shane”, “Craig”, “Sandra”, “Meme”);

foreach($players as $key => $value) {

print “#$key = $value\n”;
}

Output is:

#0 = Shane

#1 = Craig

#2 = Sandra

#3 = Meme

You can also traverse the array using list() and each(), which I will not go over here.

More to come later.

Clinton vs. Bush

I had a bit of a hard time when I first read this in an email, however the original author was good enough to point to a respectable authority on the subject which could verify their information. Today, most Americans think that their current President is one of the worst in history, while the one before that was the best ever. So, which of our past two Presidents had more of a positive effect on our Nation’s economy? The answer may surprise you. How about a side-by-side comparison:
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Why is Nanotechnology Important?

First, you need to know what the term means…I will reference wikipedia for a proper definition.

Nanotechnology refers broadly to a field of applied science and technology whose unifying theme is the control of matter on the atomic and molecular scale, normally 1 to 100 nanometers, and the fabrication of devices with critical dimensions that lie within that size range.

It is simply technology of the smallest kind. Why is that important? The laws of physics as most of you know them don’t function in quite the same way when you talk about things this small. But you may be surprised to know that this is not “new” technology.

The first use of the concepts in ‘nano-technology’ (but predating use of that name) was in “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” a talk given by physicist Richard Feynman at an American Physical Society meeting at Caltech on December 29, 1959. Feynman described a process by which the ability to manipulate individual atoms and molecules might be developed, using one set of precise tools to build and operate another proportionally smaller set, so on down to the needed scale. In the course of this, he noted, scaling issues would arise from the changing magnitude of various physical phenomena: gravity would become less important, surface tension and Van der Waals attraction would become more important, etc.

This technology is making leaps and bounds. Quantum physics, quantum mechanics, nanotechnology, all of these are related terms. You could ride an elevator into space because of nanotubes.  Nanofiltration will bring water to rural areas who otherwise could not properly filter drinking water. There are ideas in the works that would allow nanomachines to deliver medicine directly to specific types of cells in the body.  For example, an injection of nanobots with a chemotherapy drug for cancer could deliver the dose directly to the cancer tissue, reducing the damage to other tissues, and the quantity of medicine needed for treatment.  There are nano materials that you can wear just like your shirt, that can change instantaneously into bullet and pierce proof material.  There are literally thousands of other applications out there, but what is important for you to know is that this is a legitimate, and worthwhile thing to study.

These ideas are no longer science fiction,  they are real.

Wal-Mart Drops HD DVD

Friday, February 15th 2008 is the day that will live in infamy. Or maybe we’ll have forgotten all about it by this time next week: Wal-Mart announced their decision to stop carrying HD DVD Players. The following has been posted on Wikipedia’s HD-DVD page:

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A Memory Of Light Finished By Brandon Sanderson - Wheel Of Time - Robert Jordan

TOR has announced that the final book in the Wheel Of Time series written by the late Robert Jordan will be finished by Brandon Sanderson. I think many people including myself are going to be running out (or going to amazon) to pick up a few of Brandon’s titles to see what kind of author they have chosen.

The fantasy series (Wheel Of Time) has sold over 14 million copies in the US alone, so Brandon has some very large shoes to fill.  I can not make any comments on his style of writing yet, but I have already ordered a few of his titles, and will update my thoughts on his style and how he will fit into such a rich and established world as the Wheel Of Time.

Robert Jordan’s wife had this to say:

Harriet Popham Rigney, Jordan’s beloved wife and editor, said of her decision to have Sanderson complete the last book in The Wheel of Time series: “I have chosen Brandon Sanderson to complete Robert Jordan’s great work, and I am absolutely delighted that he accepted. I will of course be editing this book as I have all of the other books of The Wheel of Time.”

Sanderson credits Robert Jordan as a large influence in his writing, and if Harriet has chosen him, then I will believe based on her faith that he can deliver the goods and do Robert Jordan justice in the 12th and final book in the Wheel Of Time Series.

Microfiber Fabric Makes Electricity From Your Body….The Matrix Has You

This is great technology.  My only concern is how long before the machines figure out they can power themselves?

 From Reuters:

CHICAGO (Reuters) - U.S. scientists have developed a microfiber fabric that generates its own electricity, making enough current to recharge a cell phone or ensure that a small MP3 music player never runs out of power.

If made into a shirt, the fabric could harness power from its wearer simply walking around or even from a slight breeze, they reported on Wednesday in the journal Nature.

“The fiber-based nanogenerator would be a simple and economical way to harvest energy from the physical movement,” Zhong Lin Wang of the Georgia Institute of Technology, who led the study, said in a statement.

The nanogenerator takes advantage of the semiconductive properties of zinc oxide nanowires — tiny wires 1,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair — embedded into the fabric. The wires are formed into pairs of microscopic brush-like structures, shaped like a baby-bottle brush.

One of the fibers in each pair is coated with gold and serves as an electrode. As the bristles brush together through a person’s body movement, the wires convert the mechanical motion into electricity.

“When a nanowire bends it has an electric effect,” Wang said in a telephone interview. “What the fabric does is it translates the mechanical movement of your body into electricity.”

His team made the nanogenerator by first coating fibers with a polymer, and then a layer of zinc oxide. They dunked this into a warm bath of reactive solution for 12 hours. This encouraged the wires to multiply, coating the fibers.

“They automatically grow on the surface of the fiber,” Wang said. “In principal, you could use any fiber that is conductive.”

They added another layer of polymer to prevent the zinc oxide from being scrubbed off. And they added an ultra-thin layer of gold to some fibers, which works as a conductor.

To ensure all that friction was not just generating static electricity, the researchers conducted several tests. The fibers produced current only when both the gold and the zinc oxide bristles brushed together.

So far, Wang said the researchers had demonstrated the principle and developed a small prototype.

“Our estimates show we can have up to 80 milliwatts per square meter of this fabric. This is enough to power a little iPod or charge a cell phone battery,” he said.

“What we’ve done is demonstrate the principle and the fundamental mechanism.”

Wang said the material could be used by hikers and soldiers in the field and also to power tiny sensors used in biomedicine or environmental monitoring.

One major hurdle remains: zinc oxide degrades when wet. Wang’s team is working on a process that would coat the fibers to protect the fabric in the laundry.

Reuters Photo:

Our Computer System Won’t Let Us…

    When did it get to the point that our computer systems became our masters?  After recently moving, and being assured by the technician from my local cable company that all was well at my new residence, I find that my digital cable is not working, and port 80 (thats the one that does your web browsing) is being forwarded to the now infamous “Walled Garden” landing page.

I call the automated (ugh) phone system, click through 15 different steps in 3 different languages, wait on hold for an hour, wait on hold again, talk to a “senior technician (he finished the ENTIRE 7 day training program) only to be told there is a problem with my account.  They send out another technician the next day.  This guy is actually smart enough to figure out what is going on, and after some discussion with my local cable office, I find out what has happened.  The previous resident did not officially disconnect their telephone service through the cable company, and since this service is not scheduled to be turned off for another 4 days, the COMPUTER SYSTEM won’t let the “senior technician” turn my service on.

The tech that actually came to my house was nice enough to bring me what he called a “hot box” that allowed me to have all the channels the cable company offered until they get this resolved, (supposedly in 4 days) but in the meantime I am without internet.  (I mean.. i can go through a proxy to get around their walled “garden” or VPN into work, or use one of the open wireless connections from some surrounding houses), but the service that I pay over $140 dollars per month for is not working.

I am amazed that the computer system is actually in total control of the cable system…maybe Skynet is not such a far fetched idea after all.

How To Control Immigration

First a short excerpt from the news:

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Immigration will drive the population of the United States sharply upward between now and 2050, and will push whites into a minority, projections by the Pew Research Center showed Monday.

“If current trends continue, the population of the United States will rise to 438 million in 2050, from 296 million in 2005,” an increase of nearly 50 percent, the study by the Washington-based think-tank said.

More than 80 percent of the increase will be due to immigrants arriving in the country and their US-born children, who will make up nearly one in five Americans by 2050 compared with one in eight in 2005, it said.

Think about that as your stuck in a traffic jam later this afternoon…. twice the population… twice the traffic.  How do we control this insane level of illegal immigration?

Do we systematically execute illegal immigrants? Hmm…while that could work, I really doubt many people will agree to that.

What if we take over Mexico, and make it part of the US?  Think about that for a moment… there would be no need to illegally immigrate to the US if you are already in the US now would there?  But where does that mentality end?

Do we impose harsh taxes as penalties?

What do other countries do in this situation? What would China do if I illegally immigrated there? How about Lebanon? or North Korea?

Has the US government become a global sissy?  Is there any agreeable solution?