Ben Perry

Mon, 09 Oct 2006 22:11 EDT ~ On an average day, if I were to be held up by some dude with a gun, he'd be pretty disappointed. I could offer him some pocket lint, but I wouldn't have a single greenback on me. I was among the early adopters of a cashless society several years ago, and today I only go to places that accept credit cards.

Credit / debit cards offer conveniences both to the consumer and to the merchant. For the [more]

It's that time of the year!

Mon, 02 Oct 2006 17:21 EDT ~ null [more]

neat toy

Thu, 21 Sep 2006 15:15 EDT ~ null [more]

Emergency Broadcast Overhaul

Wed, 13 Sep 2006 11:43 EDT ~ null [more]

Musically emotional experience

Sun, 03 Sep 2006 13:09 EDT ~ null [more]

x11 forwarding and localhost

Fri, 01 Sep 2006 13:45 EDT ~ null [more]

Linux requires PhD in Astrophysics

Thu, 31 Aug 2006 10:43 EDT ~ null [more]

You are what you search

Thu, 10 Aug 2006 07:10 EDT ~ Your thoughts, your intentions, your desires, your very self is truly expressed in what you search for on the internet. The average person, according to AOL's "screwup" data, searches for help, advice, or current events. And porn. Lots of it. But we'll overlook that. AOL recently published three months' worth of data on what people searched for, albeit with the identities changed to anonymous [more]

Score One for Humanity

Wed, 26 Jul 2006 13:55 EDT ~ Andrea Yates found not guilty by reason of insanity. Postpartum psychosis is no joke. Combine that with other mental illnesses, and you get some really bad news. I am so relieved that a Texas jury could actually find someone innocent. Not only innocent, but innocent by reason of insanity. Andrea will be committed to a mental hospital for a few years--perhaps longer, perhaps shorter--but she [more]

Second Life Casinos Cheat

Sun, 02 Jul 2006 16:16 EDT ~ If you're into chat rooms and online social stuff, you might want to check out a massive online somewhat-RPG called Second Life. Second Life has a lot of potential - you can build things, hang out with interesting people, run a virtual business, .... and yes, you can even gamble.

But there's only one small problem: in Second Life, the house really does always win. There is absolutely nothing [more]

By the corporations, for the corporations

Tue, 27 Jun 2006 18:57 EDT ~ Instance after instance of US government secret monitoring programs keeps surfacing, all of which were authorized by the Bush administration, and all in the name of national security. Terrorists. Threats. American lives. Danger. Paranoia.

Why exactly does the government want us on a constant state of paranoia and terrorist alert?

One of the more recent programs monitors financial records of [more]

junk science? i think not.

Thu, 22 Jun 2006 15:41 EDT ~ It's officially official, especially since Fox News is covering it - global warming is real and humans are at fault.

Something I had predicted:

"Other new research Thursday showed that global warming produced about half of the extra hurricane-fueled warmth in the North Atlantic in 2005, and natural cycles were a minor factor"

"The Bush administration has maintained that the threat is not [more]

A grave mistake...

Fri, 16 Jun 2006 11:43 EDT ~ One of my wife's friends had a birthday party the other day and I somehow got suckered in to going to this party. Now don't get me wrong here - I like Jessica's friend and I would have gone regardless. But still, I ended up going even though I'm not much of a party goer. I'm not really that much of a social butterfly. I would put me somewhere closer to a social rolley-polley. So when the [more]

Big Oaks Camping? More like Big Oaks Scamping

Fri, 02 Jun 2006 13:31 EDT ~ Every once in a while, Jessica and I like to go camping. We're not really outdoorsy-types, at least I'm not, so camping is really a big deal. And when we camp, we really don't rough it that much.. several camp sites have electrical hookups and we just go to have fun, which usually involves some electrical toy.

So we've been planning for the past month to go camping at a place in Rehoboth, DE [more]

Welcome to Gattaca

Sat, 27 May 2006 22:14 EDT ~ Wow. According to a news story, republican New York mayor Bloomberg wants to keep DNA dibs on every single US worker. That idea is so bad on so many fronts, it's hard to know where to begin.

Your DNA information tells a lot about you. Your health, your ethnic background, insight into your genealogy, your life expectency... it gets kind of silly. Sure, the idea would be to prevent DNA from [more]

Neural Network craziness

Sat, 27 May 2006 21:07 EDT ~ Neural networks are a cool tool for what amounts to regression of data. In implementing a simple feed-foward, three-layer neural network and trying to get it to learn the majority function (are more than half of the inputs active?), I made a few interesting observations. I still have a lot to learn about neural networks, but in my novice jump into them, I've found that:

- The simple [more]

Sorry, you can't live together.

Thu, 18 May 2006 21:00 EDT ~ Why anyone would grant the government power to determine who can and cannot live together is beyond me. According to a few stories out there, the people of Black Jack, MO have vested in their government the power to evict groups of three or more people living together who aren't related by blood or by marriage. I'm all for people getting married before popping out kids and moving in together for logistical and good-ole-fashioned religious reasons, but we'll save that story for another day. The issue at hand here is letting our government determine at will who can live together. [more]

Get the ill out of illegal

Tue, 02 May 2006 21:00 EDT ~ Illegal Immigrants are a hot issue today, but I really don't see what the fuss is about. To be fair, though, I'm a white american male and that probably sums it up. But still, it seems pretty simple. On the one hand, illegal immigrants are simply that: illegal. So naturally, a law that makes being here illegally ... illegal ... makes sense. I'm actually surprised that the lawmakers from Texas didn't try to throw in the death penalty for good measure. [more]

Rebates are industry's best scam.

Sat, 29 Apr 2006 21:00 EDT ~ Rebates suck. Plain and simple. They are industry's best scam. It's a win-win-win-win-win-lose scenario, and guess who's on the losing side... that's right, it's the consumer. First of all, you pay an inflated cost. The salespeople win out on commission, the store wins out on profits, the store and the manufacturer wins out because a product appears to be a lot cheaper and thus more attractive to a consumer, and the governments win out on taxes. You lose.[more]

Breaking news: Fox Is Conservative

Wed, 26 Apr 2006 21:00 EDT ~ Sources have confirmed what we've always known: Fox is in bed with the republicans. Fox has brown-nosed the republicans so much that the white house finally gave in and brought one of Fox's top commentators on board. Tony Snow, known for his conservative rants, has accepted the press secretary job in Bush's team. This was all done in a shakeup to improve record low approval ratings for dubya.[more]

Jade just doesn't quit.

Tue, 25 Apr 2006 21:00 EDT ~ No, really. Jade doesn't quit. Jade is the java multi-agent platform that follows FIPA specs pretty tightly and it actually isn't too bad of an agent platform. But the stupid thing refuses to shut down. You'd think it'd be really easy, like invoking a single method call called "shutdown" within the Runtime instance. That doesn't kill the VM for whatever reason.[more]

What not to say in a tragedy

Sat, 22 Apr 2006 21:00 EDT ~ Wow.[more]

Hollywood does it again. And again. And again. And ....

Fri, 21 Apr 2006 09:42 EDT ~ Hollywood financers are brave. They love to earn money by sticking their necks out on untested waters. Their extremely mind-boggling creativity has resulted in the amazing summer lineup of Rocky 6, Indiana Jones 4, Superman 4, Mission Impossible 3, X-men 3, and probably Harry Potter 5 (or is it 6 by now? I've lost count).

A quote by Joel Siegel wraps it up:

"The average budget for these [more]

Creativity in Programming

Wed, 19 Apr 2006 09:12 EDT ~ null