Jonathan’s Universe

Could someone please tell the celebrities to STOP dying?

Ed McMahon
March 6, 1923 – June 23, 2009, Collection of health difficulties
I never had the pleasure of knowing you since by the time I got old enough to appreciate people, you were already out of the show-biz. Recently you were a spokesman for a few products and that’s sadly all I will ever know of you. It’s a shame that’s all it was. Rest in peace, Ed

Farah Fawcett
February 2, 1947 – June 25, 2009, Cancer
You were in the movie Man of The House, which is one of the very first movies I remember watching growing up. I’ve seen that movie at least 150 times. You’ve had a long battle with cancer and you are very brave. You’ve always had a charming smile on your face — and I know you still do. Rest in peace, Farah.

Michael Jackson
August 29,  1958 – June 25 2009, Cause of death currently unknown
Another one of my early childhood movie memories was Free Willy. While you were not an actor in the movie, you were pretty much the soundtrack. I remember watching it for the first time like it was yesterday.. I was very young (4 years old maybe?) and watching it with my mom. Many of things have changed in the last decade in your life, but you are no longer in pain. Rest in peace, Michael.

Billy Mays
July 20, 1958 – June 28, 2009, Apparent heart disease
I’m now sad to admit that I didn’t like your commercials that much. But honestly, I don’t think it was because of you. I think it was because they were over-played by networks which made them so annoying… plus, most of my viewing was done when I was not old enough to buy any of your products anyway. But that doesn’t matter. You loved what you did and you had a very recognizable voice which made you a powerful spokesman. Paid advertising will never be the same. Rest in peace, Billy.

I’m getting to the age that famous people I’ve grown up knowing are dying. It’s sad.

Google has just announced the release/rolling out of Google Voice. Expectantly they are slowly rolling it out to people who’ve requested an invite previously. I don’t know how long it will take for me receive an invite, but I’m super excited.

I’m tempted to request the phone number of (xxx) VRY-SEXY.

Dude, I so totally should.

My employer (which has remained nameless, thus far) has chosen to go ahead and dissolve the physical position (and by extension, my employment) of web developer.

A certain high-powered person has made the decision to sub-contract a company (for now, nameless) to take care of the work for them. Completely. This will obviously render the posistion of staff web developer completely pointless, which is why I will be shown the door.

I think it’s a pretty dangerous thing when you start empowering third-party entities to control your assets, which is exactly what my employer is doing.

The way I found out about this master genius plan is what really gets me. I was sitting at work minding my own business when a teacher I know asked me “Hey, so I heard they are taking the web-site away from you. What happened?” — you see, this guy likes to joke around, so I didn’t take it seriously. Then a teacher came into my office asking for A/V help. I told her I could not help her since “I’m just the web guy.” Her response was, “oh are you that new web guy they just hired?”… my response.. “just hired? new? I’ve been here.. for 2 years.” At this point I knew something fishy was going on.

Apparently, this huge decision was made by one man, who then proceeded to petition for approval from the board of directors…. and because this man is among the most powerful persons with the company, he has inherent leeway with things he wants to do. Assuming the board is comprised of people that aren’t up to par with today’s technology, which does not enable them to make informed decisions about something as severe as this. Does the company not realize they are forfeiting majority control of their biggest public relations asset? Whenever they want something done, they have to submit that and it’ll get done “when it get done.” They won’t have things instantly done when and how they want. Anytime the director of public information had something for me, it was up within minutes. If it was something more involved, it was up within a day. I surely hope this company knows they are in for.

What also ticks me off is now this explains why they kept blocking my projects. I had a project in place that could have theoretically saved the company quite a bit of money per year. I already had the stuff started off, but the implementation of it would’ve required policy change in each building within the organization — which is more work than its worth if they knew for a while they were planning on getting rid of my work. Which is exactly what they are doing. Everything that I have worked on will be meeting the recycling bin and go down the drain.

When I took this job, the website was a barren waste land. I turned it around and developed a brand new innovative content management system specifically for the district. I took the liberty of setting up a testing/development environment server to take care of the development/code changes before they get rolled to the production public server — something that was never down before — something that known of the previous web developers knew/bothered to do. I fixed up errors and the “growing pains” that occured with moving the website to a new server that was due to shotty code written by the first group of web masters. All by myself. What do I get? Nothing. Not even benefits. No paid time off. Just crappy treatment from my co-workers and continous obstacles that are placed to prevent me from doing what I need to do.

I should have honestly figured this out sooner. The company is not taking my employment seriously, because I made myself into an expendable asset by not fighting for what I deserve. I work full-time hours for this company, but they insist on having me officially labeled as a part time employer, which legally means they have less responsibilities — they don’t have to give me benefits or any honors and treatment they give to full time employees. You remember the black mold issue and how long it took them to fix that.. and how much office-political bull crap I had to put up with just for THEM, my employer to deal with a severe health concern in the workplace. Seriously, they knew about the incident before I was an employee here, and I sent my own  requests in (filed them with the building administrator’s secretary) Obviously, I was not important to them, but I should have figured this out back then. But I guess hindsight is always 20/20.

As for my timeline — I have no idea. They still need someone to maintain the website right now. The contract is not finalized, and it will take a bit of time for them to construct the new webpage. But see, any new enhancements I make will all be done in vain… as by the time it’s implemented the system will be erased from existence. I was working on a YouTube-style video system  that would’ve been very innovative for my company’s website.. but now I don’t see the point in exerting myself. But hey, it’s their company. Whatever the hell they want.

See this is what happens when companies choose the easy way out of things and make it someone else’s problem. The little people get screwed.. while the big people get six figure salaries and sport cars can sit back. Niccceeee.

You guys remember that unannounced fly-over New York City? You know, the one the Obama Administration decided to perform so they could update their publicity photos (oh, the irony) based on the Air Force One flying around national landmarks? Yeah, the one that caused public on the ground to fear the worst and run for their lives fearing another 9/11 attack.

Turns out, hey, we won’t even be seeing the photos. Obama’s administration (possibly Obama himself) has ordered that the “photos taken” to not be released to public view.

It’s kind of funny. This president has no problem revealing photos of the “abuse” of known terrorists, closing down Gitmo bay and making previous presidents’ dirty laundry be known… but what about his own? Not a shot.

So not only did they not tell anyone (not even the mayor!), they spent almost $329,000 on this operation. That’s OUR tax money, on OUR plane, flying over OUR city. Does anyone else find something fishy about this? A supposed super secret operation to get new press pictures of the president’s plane over national landmarks, but the pictures aren’t being revealed. Also, the plane was being escorted by a fighter jet… since when are fighter jets mounted with high-resolution, high-quality cameras? Something really fishy. By all means, I am NOT a conspiracy theorist, at all.. but stuff isn’t adding up here.

I’ve sent in a Freedom of Information Act to obtain more information. These photos are not “classified, but being kept from public view.” Well, since they aren’t classified, I’m invoking the FoIA. Here is my request:

“Please disclose any documents relating to the Air Force One “landmark fly-over photo-op” on the day April 27, 2009, including but not limited to, photographs (color) taken, flight manifest, fighter escort aircraft camera specifications, operational directives and all correspondence with the FAA & Flight Traffic Control before and during this operation in regards to all operational notification, planning and commission.”

It’s short and sweet, but to the point. We’ll see how much executive cooperation I receive.

So much for the transparency we were promised.

Thanks to Insignifcant Thoughts and New York Post

Wow, It’s been a while.

I’ve been extremely busy the last couple weeks.

First off, the most recent thing. My dad had a pretty bad fall on Sunday. He fell about 22 feet off of a tree (doing maintenance). He ended up shattering a vertebrae and fracturing another. The possibility of him being paralyzed was very, very real. Luckily the doctors and nurses at Christiana Hospital took good care of him, and the surgery was a success. He will walk again! For the next couple months he will need a back brace to give his back some support while walking. If he does well these next couple days walking around the hospital, he won’t even need a wheel chair… which is good because the apartment he will be living in is not handicapped-friendly. There is an elevator but you still need to go up (or down) one flight of steps to get to it. It’s silly.

Also, in the hospital rooms they had these computer touch screens (running a modified version of linux!!) which allowed you to watch TV, go on the internet and watch a movie pay-per-view/comcast-on-demand style. The TV feature took signal straight from a standard coaxial cable (from what I could tell). The internet was a standard ethernet connection, but I couldn’t use this feature, because you had to plug in a USB keyboard, and I think the USB slot was broken since it didn’t work. The movies.. well.. meh. You were allowed one free movie if you filled out a survey about your stay. So I did that (for my dad! ) and I selected to watch Hancock, since I hadn’t seen that in a while. The quality of the movie was horrendous. There were lines through the picture — old VHS tape quality; this was still watchable though. The sound was even worse. Even at full 100% (40% audio on the TV feature was really loud) it sounded like they were whispering. About 30 minutes into the movie, I got bored and fell asleep. Oh well, it was free.

The project at work I’ve been working on for the past couple weeks is getting some nice opinions about it. I made this web application that allows authorized users (school board, senior officers, their secretaries, etc) to post documents and reports that are normally submitted to the district monthly. For example, a personnel report, finance & budget report, et cetera. The system is pretty cool and due to the sensitivity of some of these documents, I made sure the security was tight, too.

At the moment, I’m updating my work development server to the most recent release of Debian. I started the update process via remote SSH, which was kind of stupid. I don’t like performing big system-wide updates remotely. Last time I updated (from debian 4 to debian 5) remotely, it was updating the ethernet drivers, which broke the connection I had.. so I had a halfway updated operating system. It wasn’t pretty. Thank God it’s linux. If it was windows, the hard disk would be permanently corrupted or something (hint hint, Microsoft!).

That’s really about it. I’ll try to update more often, I’ve just been busy with helping my parent’s move and such.

Oh yay, alliteration.

Since last night, I have not been able to use Twitter via my mobile device. When I send a tweet, my phone immediately says “Sending Failed, Message in Outbox to be sent later” [paraphrase].. after about 5-10 minutes, I get another message box that says “Message #NUM cannot be sent, see outbox for message status.” Checking the status of the failed message simply says “Sending failed.”

I can still receive tweets, but I cannot send them via SMS. Is this a temporary problem? Or is T-Mobile playing god and blocking Twitter again?

I have been apart of FIRST robotics since I was in the eleventh grade. During my twelfth grade year, I was asked to help as an emergency volunteer at the New Orleans Regional. They were extremely understaffed and it was their inaugeral regional. I found that volunteering was very interesting. I was part of the field reset/repair crew. Whenever a match was over, we’d quickly reset all the game pieces for the next match. This was great, not only did I get to help (and get free lunch!) but we got to be up close & personal with game field – best seats in the house.

Well since then I’ve volunteered at any regional I can. I was volunteer staff at New Orleans ‘07, Philadelphia ‘07, Atlanta ‘07, Philadelphia ‘08, Atlanta ‘08. This year I will be volunteering at the Washington DC and Philadelphia regionals. I will not be able to attend the Atlanta championship.

Starting with Philadelphia last year, I was a scorekeeper. This means that I am responsible for the commission of the scores to the database at the end of every match. I don’t do anything during the match, I just start the match when all robots are placed and everyone is ready. There’s only one point of authority too. As a scorekeeper, you only take directives (in relation to the final score) from the head ref – no one else. You don’t even answer to any one about the internal score, that’s the head ref’s job – easy peasy.

Unfortunately, at Washington D.C. there was already a person lined up for scorekeeping. Instead, I am being placed as an official scorer, which is considered to be an officiating position. Yay. This involves keeping track of the game as it is happening. I take tally of every point scored in real time. The score I input is placed on the screen for the audience. It’s an intense and high pressure position. Yikes. Luckily at Philadelphia, I’ll go back to being scorekeeper.

I will be leaving Wednesday the 25th. We’ll be staying at a hotel in Virgina and have a 20 minute-or-so drive to DC every morning. We’ll be returning that Saturday night.

The organization I participate in is called FIRST Robotics. And no, it’s not like battlebots.

So, let’s say that you’re writing a function or some sort of script. and you need to sure you’re only getting a certain datatype as a value. Then you realize that PHP has no actual datatype enforcement like C or C++. You can set any variable to contain any kind of structure (strings, integers, arrays, etc) and you can later change it to any other structure later on the fly. This can be problematic depending on what you need to do.

With the function you’re supposedly writing, let’s say you wanted to make sure a argument you’re accepting via the PHP call is an integer. Well you could perform and is_int() function call by yourself, but thats not the point. The point of functions is to reduce tedious/repeated code. I made a class that has a function inside it that does all the testing for you depending on what  you, as a coder, is expecting. So passing “hi” into the validator when you specify you’re looking for an integer wouldn’t pass. It would pass if you stated you were looking for a string, though.

What’s also nifty is that i wrote it to accommodate for the event of expecting multiple kinds of datatypes. Like let’s say you want either an integer or a double (a decimal), you can simple combine them when you call the validator. If the value you give the validator is an integer or a double, it’ll spit back the datatype.

Okay, how do I have it check for datatypes? Every datatype that I could look for is assigned a number in base 2 (1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, etc) . I assign them base 2 values in hex, simple because I felt like it.

define(“SCRAPBOOK_DATATYPE_STR”, 0×01); // STRING
define(“SCRAPBOOK_DATATYPE_ARR”, 0×02); // ARRAY
define(“SCRAPBOOK_DATATYPE_INT”, 0×04); // INTEGER
define(“SCRAPBOOK_DATATYPE_DOUBLE”, 0×08); // DOUBLE

SCRAPBOOK_DATATYPE_STR is set to 1, _ARR is 2, etc etc. You get the point. When I call the function, the first argument/parameter is the value I need to test. The second is the (possible) datatype(s) I’m expecting. What you may or may not know about bit addition is that its very easy to figure out what bits are included. For example, the value of 6 is ONLY made up of 2 and 4, which in  this are the bits that are assigned to _ARR and _INT. Using this logic, we can pass multiple datatypes we might get (for example, we want a number which might be an integer or a decimal) and the function can check to see if the datatype of the value I’m checking for matches one of the datatypes I’m looking for.

Here is an example of looking for one datatype and then two datatypes:

//first instantiate the object
$validate = new Validator();

//would return SCRAPBOOK_DATATYPE_ARR
print $validate->validateDatatype(array(), SCRAPBOOK_DATATYPE_ARR).”\n”;

//would return SCRAPBOOK_DATATYPE_INT
print $validate->validateDatatype(5, SCRAPBOOK_DATATYPE_INT|SCRAPBOOK_DATATYPE_DOUBLE).”\n”;
//would return SCRAPBOOK_DATATYPE_DOUBLE
print $validate->validateDatatype(5.3, SCRAPBOOK_DATATYPE_INT|SCRAPBOOK_DATATYPE_DOUBLE).”\n”;

As you can see, the pipe (|) is used to add multiple of these bits together. The function would return the bit of the dataype found. this way if you’re expecting two datatypes, you can validate it and then see the exact type that was actually sent in.

Now how do i actually do the tests? well in the function I have something like this:

function validateDatatype($value = NULL, $expectedtypes = SCRAPBOOK_DATATYPE_STR)
{
//are we testing if this datatype exists?  ||   now we test!
if ( ($expectedtypes & SCRAPBOOK_DATATYPE_STR) && (is_string($value)) )
return SCRAPBOOK_DATATYPE_STR;
if ( ($expectedtypes & SCRAPBOOK_DATATYPE_ARR) &&  (is_array($value)) )
return SCRAPBOOK_DATATYPE_ARR;
if ( ($expectedtypes & SCRAPBOOK_DATATYPE_INT) &&  (is_int($value)) )
return SCRAPBOOK_DATATYPE_INT;
if ( ($expectedtypes & SCRAPBOOK_DATATYPE_OBJECT) &&  (is_object($value)) )
return SCRAPBOOK_DATATYPE_OBJECT;

Essentially, i’m testing to see if we’re asking for each datatype, if we are asking for that datatype, i perform a function call to see if it actually is. If it’s not it keeps going until it returns something. if  it gets to the end of the function, that means it didn’t validate, so false is returned. The (x &  y) test basically checks to see if bit y exists within value x. So again,  for example, lets say you have a number 13. The only way to get a number 13 through this method is  with numbers 8, 4 and 1 (8+4+1 = 13). So if you did (13 & 4) it’d return true.  So on and so forth.

Ok, now that I gave you little snippets, check out the entire script so you can see how it all blends together.

So this Saturday, there was a relatively huge slip-up/oopsies done by Google. They updated their definition file that contains a list of potentially bad sites that host malware and somehow (by human error) a single ‘/’ get entered as an entry. In terms of a file path in this context, the / is interpreted as a wildcard – so every site. Essentially, every single result was marked as a “This site could harm your computer” kind of website in the search results. It even flagged its own sites as dangerous:

Now you see, this is causing web-masters and companies ALL OVER THE WORLD to call foul. Apparently because of this slipup are causing “potential visitors/customers to be steered away from our site because we have been labeled as a malware provider.” Uhm. That’s just stupid. I think anyone with half a brain could see that every single result is being flagged as dangerous… will realize that there must be SOME mistake. I mean it’s kind of obvious. I mean, before this glitch, I’ve only come across a few of these flags… so if all of a sudden every single result from Google starts displaying this flag, especially with a legitimate search string (ie not “cracks for photoshop”, “movie torrents”, etc),  it’s obvious there is a problem.

No doubt some idiot is going to try to initiate either an individual lawsuit or a class-action suit against Google for something along the lines of “defamation of character” or some bogus claim. And I hope it gets shot down.

Accidents happen. Get over it. Get over yourselves.

Though I will say – the guy that made the typo – is probably jobless right now.

This would probably be the new storefront logo.

Biggest laugh i’ve had all week!