06 Feb 2010
As Promised

Pictures of the newest member of our flock. Note the hand crocheted sweater - this breed doesn't have much wool at birth, and with the temperature on the way down to the single digits, Lorraine thought a bit of extra wool wouldn't be a bad idea. Baby doesn't seem to mind at all, and neither does Momma.

 


 

21:19 /Home | 1 comment | permanent link

Lazarus

I've been a user of Delphi for quite a few years now, mostly in it's C++ Builder incarnation. Because of this (my "C-weenieness") I've not done a tremendous amount of coding in Object Pascal, But I have done some, mostly at a very low level in components and libraries as the base (the Visual Component Library or VCL) of C++ Builder is all written in Delphi Pascal.

I noted with some interest last year that Codegear was working on a cross platform product, bringing Delphi to the Mac (and back to Linux). This was pretty exciting to me, because there's an increasing pressure at work to develop Mac solutions (and I'm sure they'll catch on to Ubuntu eventually). This would be an ideal solution, as it would leverage our existing codebase to new platforms.

The problem is that Codegear is taking their sweet time. And we needed a solution now - products have to ship! And I found a solution - Lazarus.

This isn't a "write once, run anywhere" environment (like Java promised to be), nor is it a cross compiler (exactly). It's a "write once, compile anywhere" RAD IDE for Object Pascal, with a component library that mimics the VCL but ties to an underlying widget set that's platform specific. Carbon (and some Cocoa) widgets are supported on the Mac, QT and GtK on Linux platforms and Win32 (or WinCE) on Windows. Processor support includes PowerPC, Intel and ARM. And it works.

I can write a program on a Windows box that compiles on my Mac - and on Windows it looks like a Windows app, and on the Mac it looks like a Mac app. There are a few platform specific ifdef's in the code, to be sure, but remarkably few. Most of the OS dependent stuff is handled transparently under the hood, including the crazy stuff like path separators for file access. It's really quite amazing.

I'm finding myself becoming quite enamored of the language itself, too. Sometimes my fingers move faster than my brain (especially on things like the equality operator - in Pascal, it's := as opposed to just =, which is the comparison operator) but overall the syntax is strikingly similar to what I've been doing with C++ Builder. This is mostly due to the nature of the underlying framework.

The developers of Lazarus have done one heck of a job with the LCL (Lazarus Component Library) and the FCL (Freepascal Component Library). These do much more than merely mimic the VCL - they extend it in very logical and useful ways. Unicode support, graphics support, even compression support are all built in. It's actually fun to write code in this thing.

And they did a smart thing with licensing, too. While the IDE and compiler are GPL, the frameworks and libraries are all LGPL. Which means no restrictions on us in commercial programs.

In short, I'm throughly impressed. If you need a cross platform dev tool, don't let the "Old School" rap of Pascal put you off. Check out Lazarus - you'll be amazed at what's possible today.

11:48 /Technology | 0 comments | permanent link

05 Feb 2010
Snow Day Surprise

Well, it's about 9pm and we have about six inches on the ground. Heavy, wet, thick. At least it won't blow (much). But the snow was expected.

What was not anticipated was having a new lamb on the ground! Scarface had a single, a ewe, early this morning. We'd bought her off of Tim after her accident, and she's become quite the pet. Tim must've had her bred before she got here last September, and was unaware the ram had found her.

She'd already had her by the time I got out there about 8:30, but she was just starting to clean her up. So I guess she was probably born about 8. Tried to get a picture, but it was pretty dark in the barn and the batteries or something was funky on the camcorder, so those'll have to wait.

Lorraine wanted to name her, so we settled on "Bonnie". Lorraine's thinking of the Scots phrase for "pretty", but I'm sticking to the gangster motif - if she'd have had a twin ram lamb, I would've named him "Clyde"...

21:13 /Home | 0 comments | permanent link

04 Feb 2010
Snow Is On The Way

They're predicting up to a foot - we'll see. I only hope it chills down quickly and we miss any ice. We're stocked up and settled in, cause if it starts blowing like they're saying it's going to we'll be here for a few days.

23:35 /Home | 0 comments | permanent link

03 Feb 2010
This Nation's Devolution from Quality to Convenience

An important and interesting theory, that goes a long way towards describing America in the first decade of the 21st century...

In the trade-off between quality and convenience, Americans now expect convenience in everything but healthcare, with disastrous long-term results.

(link) [of two minds]

20:48 /Politics | 0 comments | permanent link

02 Feb 2010
The Chess Master and the Computer

I strongly suspect that Gary Kasparov's review of the new book Chess Metaphors: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Mind by Diego Rasskin-Gutman may be better than the book itself.

This is our last chess metaphor, then—a metaphor for how we have discarded innovation and creativity in exchange for a steady supply of marketable products. The dreams of creating an artificial intelligence that would engage in an ancient game symbolic of human thought have been abandoned. Instead, every year we have new chess programs, and new versions of old ones, that are all based on the same basic programming concepts for picking a move by searching through millions of possibilities that were developed in the 1960s and 1970s.

(link) [New York Review of Books]

via MyAppleMenu:Reader

08:07 /Technology | 0 comments | permanent link

01 Feb 2010
All You Need Is Love

Why was I born? To some extent, this is not a question at all. A question usually implies a choice - why is it x and not y? There is no choice here: asking "Why wasn't I born?" is a contradiction.

Yet this question has been considered at some level by every human who's ever walked Midgard. Some are seeking a purpose, some are seeking enlightenment. I'm looking for an answer.

So let's get physical and rephrase the query. My real question isn't "Why do I exist?", but rather "What is it about me that makes me unique? Why am I 'me', and not somebody else?"

I remember when I was a little kid, it had to be when I was 6 or seven, the girl next door - was her name Becky? - insisted that her mom and dad had "made" her. I was equally adamant that God had made me, and her and everybody else. My Sunday school teacher said so! But she asked the obvious (and pretty perceptive for a first grader) question: if God made her, why did she look like her mom?

We are, biologically, our ancestors. Here's a thought that'll blow your mind: fifty thousand years ago, somewhere in Eurasia or Africa, two humans mated. If they had not done so, you would not exist.

On a biological level, it's safe to say that you were born because of all of your ancestors that successfully mated, and raised their brood to maturity. Sounds kinda sterile, eh? But take a look at the emotional side...

What's the primary motivation for human mating? Is it mere attraction? Availability? Lust? I think it's probably safe to say that the primary motivation for mating, across cultures and across the centuries, has been an emotional desire. This may be for security, or to please one's family, or it may even be a violent outburst, but commonly the emotion that motivates us to make the beast with two backs is love.

I think it's probably a safe bet to say that the vast majority of your ancestors felt an emotional bond with their mates, and I guarantee that they felt an emotional bond with their children (because unloved children typically do not thrive). Those bonds are what we today would call love.

You were born because your ancestors loved. They loved each other, and they loved their offspring.

This love - this desire to mate and raise children, is the basis for our survival as a species. If we are indeed children of the universe, then love is the universe insuring it's own propagation.

From the perspective of the universe, the Beatles were right.

21:46 /Asatru | 0 comments | permanent link

For the Love of Culture

When law becomes an impediment to history, it's time for it to get out of the way.

Her project faced two challenges, one obvious, one not. The obvious challenge was technical: gathering fifty years of film and restoring it digitally. The non-obvious challenge was legal: clearing the rights to move this creative work onto this new platform for distribution.

(link) [The New Republic]

19:40 /Copywrongs | 0 comments | permanent link

31 Jan 2010
Indiana budget cuts tap meat inspectors

Basically, the State of Indiana is going to eviscerate the state program for inspecting meat. There are roughly a hundred state inspected abattoirs in Indiana. There is only 1 USDA inspected slaughterhouse that's open to appointments (as in not owned by Cargill or ConAgra) in the state. If meat is not slaughtered in an inspected facility, it cannot be sold.

Other states that have closed or reduced their inspection programs have seen a reduction of better than two-thirds in the number of slaughter facilities operating in the state. That means that we can expect to see about 33 inspected facilities operating here after these cuts.

There is no way those slaughterhouses with reduced schedules for inspection can handle the number of animals currently processed for sale by family farms in Indiana. If you buy meat or poultry from a farmer, or at farmers markets, you will be impacted by this. Probably to the extent of having to settle for factory meat from the supermarket. It will simply be impossible for family farmers to get their animals inspected at slaughter, and illegal for them to sell their meat if it's not.

If you care about family farms at all, please contact the governor and your legislators and get this situation rectified.

While taking strategic measures to slash the state budget, Gov. Mitch Daniels turned his attention to the Indiana State Board of Animal Health (BOAH) Meat and Poultry Inspection Program (MPIP) to cut its already fragile budget by 50 percent.

(link) [Farm World]

(link) [Pasture to Plate]

via Masson's Blog

Update: They're backing off.

19:38 /Agriculture | 0 comments | permanent link

26 Jan 2010
Menifee USD pulls dictionaries due to explicit word

If you wonder about the reasons for the dismal state of the American educational system, just remember this formula: zero tolerance = zero sense.

A parent complaint that a dictionary in her son’s classroom at Oak Meadows Elementary contained the term and definition for “oral sex” prompted school officials in the Menifee Union School District to pull all copies of the book from its fourth and fifth grade classrooms last week. Copies of Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Tenth Edition (published in 1994), were taken from a recommended reading list and put into use in district classrooms a few years ago to accommodate higher level readers, said Betti Cadmus, spokeswoman for the district.

(link) [Southwest Riverside News Network]

15:31 /Politics | 0 comments | permanent link

25 Jan 2010
US to lift 21-year ban on haggis

Just in time for this years Burn's Supper.

Smuggled and bootlegged, it has been the cause of transatlantic tensions for more than two decades. But after 21 years in exile, the haggis is to be allowed back into the United States.

(link) [The Guardian]

via Overlawyered

19:02 /Agriculture | 0 comments | permanent link

23 Jan 2010
Whew! Back up...

Well, blogging is about to resume on something resembling a normal schedule. We had a server crash (at home) on the 14th, and it's just way too much trouble to rebuild it and set up another box. I did a bit of searching to see if I wanted to move to a different blogging platform, but I really like Blosxom, and just couldn't find anything else out there that can do exactly what I want it to do. So I've moved my entire setup onto the webserver, including some XML-RPC stuff for posting, and will be moving my aggregator up as well sometime in the next week. The only concern I have now is maintaining a reliable local backup, but I can just setup rsync to do that once a day from one of the Mac's we have running at home. Not impossible, just annoying and time consuming. But I've really missed blogging - and I have quite a backlog of posts. So stay tuned ... I'll get it all squared away eventually.

19:16 /Home | 0 comments | permanent link

13 Jan 2010
Organ Damage In Rats From Monsanto GMO Corn

I've often disparaged those who claim that GMO's represent a direct health risk to humans. I've never before seen a credible study that suggested such a thing. I've always believed that the greatest threats such engineered lifeforms present are the danger of market monopolization of food via patents, and the implicit possibility of their spreading to other organisms by cross pollination (also known as the superweed prognosis).

This study, which seems pretty stout as such things go, makes me think I might have been wrong about GMO's direct impact on human health.

A study published in December 2009 in the International Journal of Biological Sciences found that three varieties of Monsanto genetically-modified corn caused damage to the liver, kidneys, and other organs of rats. One of the corn varieties was designed to tolerate broad-spectrum herbicides, (so-called 'Roundup-ready' corn), while the other two contain bacteria-derived proteins that have insecticide properties. The study made use of Monsanto's own raw data.

(link) [Slashdot]

20:13 /Agriculture | 0 comments | permanent link

12 Jan 2010
US Youth Have Serious Mental Health Issues

I'm shocked! Not...

Google News and The Canadian Press report that 'a new study has found that five times as many high school and college students in the United States are dealing with anxiety and other mental health issues than youth of the same age who were studied in the Great Depression era.

(link) [Slashdot]

22:53 /Politics | 0 comments | permanent link

Google may quit China over activist attacks

It's never too late to undo evil...

AFP - Google has vowed to defy Chinese Internet censors and risk banishment from the lucrative market in outrage at "highly sophisticated" cyberattacks aimed at Chinese human rights activists.

(link) [Yahoo! News]

22:29 /Politics | 0 comments | permanent link

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