Fed up with the mediocre

How could I have spent so much time here?
Sleeping with anchors
and shriveling
That screamed lasted 2 good years
and has borne shame

No more is there room for others!

Just testing

Yeah, just testing.

Single again

Hmmmmm.........

After this scene, I have to see this movie!

And make sure to watch the whole thing.

BTW, If you are not truly moved by this on some level, something went wrong in your life somewhere a long time back.

One of the best Clash songs ever

The Clash: Corner Soul

Is the music of grove skin rock
Soaked in the diesel of war boys war?
Blood, black gold and the face of a judge
Is the music calling for a river of blood?

Beat the drums tonight, Alphonso
Spread the news all over the grove
The big meeting has decided
That total war must burn on the grove

Does it mean I should take my machete
To chop my way through the path of life?
Does it mean I should run with the dog pack
Is that the way to be the one to survive?

Never need a gun says Tai Chi
Move on up to dragon snaps his tail
Fall back on still waters
Hammer with his eye on the nail

Spread the word tonight please, Sammy
They're searching everyhouse on the grove
Don't go alone now, Sammy!
The wind has blown away the corner soul

Tell the news for me, Sammy
They're searching every place on the grove
But don't go down alone new, Sammy!
The wind has blown away the croner soul

Is the music calling for a river of blood?

You know the old saying....

...."keep your friends close and your enemies closer"?

Well ain't that the truth.

And who was it? Sun Tzu, or Niccolò Machiavelli?

But it's especially sad, this situation. There was no intent to be enemies with anyone on my part.

Metal

Some people aren't going to understand this. That's OK because people seldom understand what I say it seems.

I listen to all kinds of Music. I mean all kinds of music! From Chopin to Bulgarian folk singing. I love what it all does. The open will understand what I'm saying.

But nothing makes me feel alive when I'm angered, thoughtful, or just simply busy like... Nothing makes me yearn for objective more then... Nothing makes me more happy
in the face of a storm then... Nothing centers me in my core and makes me happier to be me then... METAL!

Yeah, that loud sh1t that older people like me aren't supposed to listen too.

Yeah, that stuff that black people say white people are crazy for listening too.

Yeah, that stuff that mediocre people cringe when hearing.

Yeah, sure, just like with everything else, 90% of it sucks! But just like everything else, that remaining 10% is sweetest cream.

I'm here to tell you something. There is a goodness or attraction in every kind of sound. Every kind of music. Once you can get that kind of thinking into your head,
you'll find yourself suddenly open to a much bigger world then the one you exist in now. And once that's done, you are one step away from being in for the best f'en ride
of your life. You know what it's called? Life!

Yeah, I just implied that I don't think some of you are really alive didn't I? If you take offense, ask yourself why?

Implications aside, what are you afraid of? As a matter fact, WTF have I been afraid of?

But I'm straying.

Yeah, I'm angry. And on some levels, I want to stay angry. I want to keep looking far off. I want to keep yearning for something bigger then me. And when I'm thinking
about these things, it's good, thoughtful, huge, rich, hard as frack, Metal that I like listening too. When I get the bit between my teeth and commit, I want to hear
Metal. When the throttle is open and the boost is climbing, I want metal. When I'm deciding what I'm going to do about a generally fracked situation, I want metal.

Isn't life supposed to be granderous? Isn't life supposed to be huge. Yes, there are times when one needs to slow down and enjoy what and who is around them, but is that
all life is? Security and comfort? In a dying world like ours, when attrocity and calamity is just around the corner, do we really want to just be comfortable when there
is so little time? As if you ever really had a lot of time anyway? What we have is nothing! A short flash in infinity. Something completely unnoticed by the continuum.
And understandably, we cling to each other in tighter when we look at things that way. BUT(!), is that justification for mediocrity?

Has that been my excuse? I certainly think big and look at the big but am I doing big?

We are thinkers. We are creators. We are actors on a real stage that's a hell of a lot bigger and more interesting then the TV set. We have the capacity to do big. We
have the capacity to phathom the enormous. We have the ability to build the incredible.

And keeping that in mind, shouldn't we have a fucken' hard ass soundtrack to go with it?

Yeah, I feel like a monster. I feel like ten million bucks. Perhaps the run this morning shook something loose in my head. Or perhaps the realization that i've put on
the chains of normalcy lately has me angry at my own self delusion. Perhaps I'm finally waking up from this nightmare of knowing the way all my life but not walking it.
Perhaps I'm rebelling against something.

But yeah, I feel like a conqueror. I feel intense. I feel fast. Made of anger and objective. Kingly and knowing. Discerning. And I want a soundtrack to go along with
these feelings. A fuckin' huge and powerful, clever, intelligent, layered sound that is emotive and crushing. That ripples and shakes inward and outward. Something that
is both martial and disciplined, but providing of wonder and amazement.

I want it all!

I think one must be possed at times to write code

I wrote this the other day.

$clean_time=(int) (trim(str_replace('pm', '', $raw_time))); $clean_time+=12;

This wasn't two days ago right. But I looked at it just a moment ago and had to laugh at how alien it looked. Now of course, it makes sense after just a moment of looking, but geez. Am I in some altered state when doing this crap?

Where is that geek switch again?

Holy crap! Can someone get this stuff out of my head. I can't stop thinking about boundary layer maintenance over weld seams in exhaust headers. I love this stuff but sometimes I really need to shut it off.

Same thing goes for the battle of Leige at the start of WWI. Being in a quandary about which historian to believe has me up 4:30 AM comparing sources.

I've really got to do something about this collection of facts swirling around in my head. Perhaps on the other side of that "doing" I can get get an 8 hour sleep in!

It's occurred too me....

After doing some testing of an application I'm working, I realized there are things that I don't want to and shouldn't be saying. For example, "OK, that's working. I don't know how, but it's working".

Yeah, that's not good. LOL

Sometimes it's nice just to...

...sit back and be happy with where you are, who you are, and what you've got. I'm totally inside my head here right now. I could be upset on multiple fronts, but you know f'en what? I don't want to be, so I'm not going to be.

Instead, I'm thinking about the fact that I'm sitting here right now with a brand new computer getting paid money to write code while I listen to music and wear jeans and boots and drink a cup of coffee. Yeah, I like what I do. I like my faculty! Everything can fall apart around me, but that will remain for some time. And once that's gone, what's the point?

On Running (Did I cover this before?)

Running this morning was absolutely @w3s0m3 (awesome). Just simply idyllic.

But even better is the fact that I feel like I'm getting stronger. Running 3.5+ miles has just gotten easy. Almost too easy. I realized this morning that in order to hit the 45 minute mark, I need to do just about another mile. My pace this morning felt fast, but it must've been better then I thought.

Fortune quote of the day

Fortune's Real-Life Courtroom Quote #32:

Q: Do you know how far pregnant you are right now?
A: I will be three months November 8th.
Q: Apparently then, the date of conception was August 8th?
A: Yes.
Q: What were you and your husband doing at that time?

Do you ever get that feeling that something close to you isn't right?

I'm still tired, but energized at the same time
for I see the warning and it's no longer in my hands

"Yes, see? They're empty!"
I am now free to work.
Free to endeavor.
Free to labor.
Free to put my head down and go forward.
Free to build as someone would want me too.
And to do all for that someone.

We'll meet in eternity
where I'll see that ear and know
that I never deserved what was offered

To the wanderer: I love you, but go and do as you please.

Afternoons

Afternoons, yes, ages even
in an already dead city in a now dying country
and a contentious HQ
The flyers around me with straying eyes lie too me
and have lost control of their own sticks.

To them, I am bound.
And here we fly incestous fights
caught in Luftberry Circles wondering when one will break out

"There is no death in bugging out here, fellow wingman, consort, stable mate.
There is no shame in honesty. Just let go. I won't fire on you. I'll
just leave, my love, my partner in war."

The grey clouds lazily inbound
The cool breeze caressing
The fine mist, most pleasent
My resolve settled

So where is that potential that trembles the worlds foundation?
That rage beating in my chest?
That cold calculation behind my eyes?
Those heels that could crack the mantle?
I've shelved my rage for too long,
Investing my drive in diffuclty and uncertainty.
I'm tired of being tired.
I'm tired of being bound to unstable elements.
Tired of unilateral ministrations.

Stunned! In a geek kind of way that is.

Taking a little break in my work today, I did some reading about yet another MVC framework that has exceptional performance yada yada yada. That framework is DooPHP. I'm pretty impressed with the performance actually though this is based on what they stated on their site. I couldn't get it to run on my system!

This prompted me to test against my idea of how an MVC approach should work. I ran apache bench (AB) against a fresh install of Codeignitor 1.7 as well as a local copy of Turbine Dump. I was only slightly surprised to find that the The Dump was a bit slower, but then it's connecting to a DB, performing sessions checking, and all kinds of other mumbo jumbo a completely written and functioning application would.

That said, I copied the app to a different directory and disabled all the bells and whistles. I was still doing all the needed includes, but instantiating nothing other then the base Pavelow factory class as well as the sessions class. Just enough (I felt) to have the Dump kick out a ye ole familiar "Hello World" line.

Benchmark time! I ran ab against each framework for 1000 request and a concurrency level of 5.

Now the good news is that the Harvested Framework I use (that i've been calling Leonidas) had an average test result of 4.20 seconds. Cool! 1000 returns from the site in 4.2 seconds? Yeah, I was feeling good.

Codeignitor (CI) turned out the same test with an average result of 8.58 seconds. Now this really isn't that bad when you consider two things.

1) Turbine Dump / Leonidas is actually a procedural MVC approach that relies on a OO Framework I wrote called Pavelow for it's DB, pagination, and error logging processes. CI OTOH is fully OO. That means a good deal of difference in instantiation overhead alone.

2) CI is about the best performing MVC framework out there with the exception of DooPHP (which or course prompted all of this). Others such as Symfony and Cake are positively behemoths. If you remeber or know what RISC and CISC stand for, Cake and Symfony are clearly CISC frameworks.

Anyway, I decided to start reloading and turning things back on to see how these affected performance. Here goes....

1) Just including Pavelow increased the average of the same test to 7.18 seconds! That's significant overhead for simply loading and parsing the files.

2) Including and instantiating the Pavelow Factory brought the test results up to 7.41 seconds.

2) Now it starts to get ugly! Adding the DB Sessions class alone (but no instantiation) shot the average test result up to 12.65 seconds!!!!! This doesn't even include instantiation. Just parsing overhead! Thankfully, instantiation overhead only resulted in additional 1 second (13.86 to be exact). And thankfully yet again, an op-code cache is going to kill this kind of performance penalty.

To put a point on how significant the penalty of the DB Sessions class is, my inclusion of it is essentially my including just one file. OTOH, when including the Pavelow core, it also includes 7 other classes! That said, the up front penalty of parsing all 8 classes is still far below that of DB Sessions. It really does look like I'm going to have to write a db sessions component into Pavelow.

But all of the above said, I can now see that if I ever formalize Leonidas into a package fit for distribution, it'll stomp the OO frameworks in terms of performance.

A Song of Kings

I am I!
Alone in the night time of life
and hurdling forward
faster then all others

I entered alone
and shall die alone
I shall only live once in this earth
and die only once on this earth in this earth
so I shall rule this earth
till the end of this one time.

Business certainly is business

This is a rant about those of you doing web development. In particular those of "US" who code more then we design and like to work with others that do the design part. I'm sure there are a good number of you out there that are aware of what I'm talking. I'm also sure that fewer of you are fully aware to the fullest degree of just how much pain this can entail.

In my particular case, the issue has everything to do with being unequally yoked. LOL. I, the developer code geek type guy (yeah, right) working with someone that is a designer first, and in spite of whatever he claims to be after that, is still a designer. Now that by itself may not be such a bad thing, but we're not talking about "by itself here". We're talking about a semi-official business partnership where the result of our work is money right?

So let me just get straight to the heart of this issue. This guy doesn't know enough about anything to call himself a web developer or web designer. He just isn't . He can make some pretty pictures. I'll certainly give him that, but the buck stops hard right there.

You know what, I'm just just going to create a list of things that suck.

• Knowing Dreamweaver DOES NOT MAKE YOU A WEB DEVELOPER!!!!!! This is by far the most important thing on this list. Positioning in this case is important.
  


• You don't start work until the specs and design are set in stone! Doing otherwise is nothing short of lunacy.
  


• The client has no business being able to screw around with stuff while you are building it. None whatsoever. All this does is send the signal to noise ratio through the roof.
  


• Nobody works on the code while the developer is building it. Doing so is, yup, you guessed it. Lunacy!
  


• Programmers DON'T TASK SWITCH!!!!! Expecting them to do so shows ignorance and a general lack of experience.
  


• If you made the design, YOU FIX IT!! Don't expect me or any other programmer that knows better to come back and try to dig through that Dreamweaver crap. It's your creation. Handle it!
  


• And don't ever try to tell a programmer how long things should take. For those of you out there that think web sites take two weeks, pull your head out of your arse. It's clear that you don't know enough to realize that you don't know enough. Those sites that have been thrown up in two weeks, all smelly and stuff, are based on huge, slow, kludges called frameworks. Very difficult to extend and they don't scale well. You won't find one site out there that is doing significant traffic and relying on crap like Joomla. And when I say "significant", I'm referring to sites that are running load balanced and fault tolerant clusters.
  

Moral of the story kids? Always make sure you are dead certain what you're getting in bed with.

The sow harvest gap

It certainly is a tough thing when you can see the goodness of things to come, but they aren't coming fast enough to help. I'm in this gap right now. It sucks!

Juxtapositions

As low so high Elvaleethia
I chatted today with the Dragonfly
and hints of those old things reappeared
Paintings by those azure scopes
That starstruck glance
Those days will not come again
fleeting, watery, and long cherished
The sun caressing us
The ocean soothing us
The sand cradling us