While I am on my bike …

1) I make eye contact with you not as a challenge but so you do not run me over.
2) Yes, in city traffic I frequently move as fast as you and in congestion faster. Please don’t honk at me because I am in front of you. If I go any further toward the car in front of me I will be in its trunk.
3) Please don’t yell at me and threaten to run me over. You have 4,000 lb. of steel I have 20 lb.
4) When I signal to get over don’t feel like you have to cut me off.
5) In Ontario, bikes are not required to ride in the bike lane. I move far faster than most other bicyclists and, generally, at the speed of traffic. Relax take a deep breath and don’t threaten me in your native tongue. I may not know what you are saying but I get the point. I will get back in the bike lane after I pass others.
6) Please please, look before you open your door.
7) Be nice. I am just trying to get to work like you.

Hello bicyclist!

I know you have not climbed on your bike in 3 months but please remember ….

1) Sidewalks are not for bikes unless you are walking them. In fact you might think it is safe but it is the most dangerous place for you to be. Every driveway is an intersection.
2) Cross walks are for pedestrians.
3) Please don’t move in front of me while we are stopped at a red light. I have already passed you twice.
4) Stop for the damn street car doors. You are going to kill someone someday.
5) Don’t pass a right turning car on the right even if there is a bike lane. What the hell is wrong with you!
6) I know you think you can stop on your shinny new fixed gear with out a brake but one day $30 leather toe strap is going to break.
7) Be nice. I am just trying to get to work.

I am a US citizen, always have been, and Dan is a Canadian citizen, with a slight paranoia about borders. I, being a US citizen living in Canada, am accustomed to crossing the border by air and land. The act of crossing that government-drawn line evokes little reaction in me other than boredom. That was a mistake.

I picked up Dan, who had packed a duffel back full of clothes so that I may drop him off at his parents for Easter. The drive was nice, a beautiful unseasonably warm day, 24C/76F. It was uneventful. With little traffic the city was a scenic drive and even Hamilton, with its smokestacks, a fire and smoke illuminated by the filtered light of the sun, was a sight that made me happy to be alive. As we approached the border Dan pointed out the street he grew up on. I was surprised he grew up both so close to the highway and the border. Dropping him off for Easter would be simple and quick.

The border was an odd mix of busy and empty. The newer customs stalls were packed 4 cars deep, the older ones without the large overhanging structure were mostly empty. I picked the familiar, those booths that have been there as long as I have been crossing the border.

“You have your passport?” I ask Dan. He hands me his passport. Holding both the familiar eagle and unfamiliar seal of Canada in my hand I approach the customs booth. Just before the booth, crowned by a stop sign, is a walkway that the agents use to cross between booths. Previous to driving over the walk, an agent had used that walk to cross. I stop before the walk and proceed to the booth. handing both our passports to the agent.

“What is you citizenship?” The agent says.

“I am American and Dan is Canadian” I say. The agent’s reaction is strangely sceptical. It does not appear that odd to me, US agents frequently act strangely.

From here he asks all the normal questions, “Where do you live?”, “How long are you going to be here?”, “How do you know Dan?”, “You work together, where?”, “Who owns this car?”, and he specifically asks Dan some questions. Then I hear, in another voice, “Please open your trunk.” Glancing in my side view mirror I see who it is, the border guard who crossed the walk before I pulled up.

“Sure,” I state, reaching for the button to opens the trunk. Pushing the button I have a moment of fear that the button will not work, but I hear the distinctive pop of an inexpensive car’s trunk springing open.

The voice behind the car asks “Whose car is this?”

“Mine,” I say. He responds “Whose duffle bag of clothes is this?” Dan explains how his family is in Fort Erie and he is visiting for Easter. Somehow I assumed this was a satisfactory answer.

“When did you last register this vehicle?” The border guard from behind asks.

Now, I was born in December and it is April. I did not renew this last year. Woops. Why the fuck I have not been pulled over yet is anyone’s guess. I suddenly realize these plates are three months out of date.

“Would you please step out of the vehicle?”

Now, like I have stated before, this is not my first time crossing the border. I had once crossed over the border with a moving truck in a non-truck border crossing (again another story). I was then asked to get out of my vehicle and its rear storage facility, while considerably larger, was inspected as well. I still assumed that this would be over soon after we cleared some things up. However, at this point what are you to do but to submit to the men with guns?

“Give me your keys.” The man in the kiosk says. What option do I have? I am a US citizen, I love my county, it’s just a car, what the hell is this about, an expired tag?

The agent behind my vehicle states “We are going to do a seven point inspection.” I guess I am supposed to know what the means. I feel like taking out my iPhone and Googling for it.

We are asked to stand in very specific places, Dan on the passenger side of the crosswalk, me on the other. We stood there for a minute while I notice them bringing over another border guard. At this point we are asked to follow the border guard that was standing behind the vehicle, now in front of Dan, while this newly introduced border guard closely followed me from behind.

We are escorted into a small room with two ticket booths similar to what you might see at Money Mart or a bank in a very bad neighbourhood. These booths are covered from the inside with white vertical blinds and it becomes clear this is not our final destination.

The border guard that was following me uses his keycard to enter the door that leads to behind the booths. We enter another small room with a door to the west and a hallway to the south. The hallway terminates quickly with a room on the right. We are taken through the door to the west and told to walk straight thought to the door ahead of us. I lead, walking slowly. I try to take in as much as I can, looking all around. It becomes clear to me that we are behind the customer counter someone might see if their car had not just been confiscated. I pause, and one of the guards walks in front of me, opening the door out the main seating area.

On the east side of the area is a room segregated by rows of seating, and on the west, just right of the door, is a room separated by glass. In it sits a girl, who might be 20, crying. Her blue eyes red with tears and her blond hair still in the style of someone who is not about to be arrested. I imagine her parents or boyfriend being taken away from her, being deported to some foreign land. Leaving her all alone in only world she has even known.

“Walk to your left, down by the TV,” The border agent states. I feel relief. I did not want to be in that glass room.

We sit, we wait, my name is called: “William” (no one calls me that but my mother), I approach the counter. I am asked to remove my jacket and hand it to him. I oblige. I empty my pockets, turn them inside our and lift up my pants legs as instructed.

“What is your friend’s name?” I am asked.

“Daniel.” I say. Now, I have never called Dan Daniel but they continued to call me William so I figured I would go with the flow.

We sit, again, and wait.

I hear “William.” I respond politely with “Sir” and approach the counter.

“You are a US citizen and I am not allowed to deny you entry but I am denying your vehicle.”

“Can I take it back?” I respond. For the first time in my life I can’t wait to get the fuck out of my own country. I just want to take my shit and my friend out of this place and back into the safety of Canada.

He explains to me that my car is free to go back to Canada, he is careful in his verbiage to talk about my vehicle and not me. He then tell me to follow this other officer and receive further instruction. This officer, with both my keys and our documents in his hands, returns my keys to me but not my documents.

I could not believe it. My passport is being held as hostage. He escorts us outside, points me to where my vehicle is, and tells me to pull the car out of its space and follow him. After I stop at the place instructed my documents will be returned to me.

On US soil, as a Citizen of the USA my passport is being withheld from my possession because of an expired vehicle tag.

His car’s emergency lights go on and he pulls in front of me and escorts me to a road the only goes one way, back to Canada. I am given back my documents, told to go up the road and to “Have a nice day.”

I crossed back over to Canada to a border guard that was a bit surprised at what just happened to us, dropped Dan off at his childhood home, and had a pleasant, uneventful drive back home.

Thank you Canada for not treating me like a criminal.

With the transition to the web we took a lot of those tools and the methodologies that built those tools with us (the good, the bad, and the ugly). We learned a lot of new mistakes, forgot the mistakes we already made, and created a lot of great things. I wonder if the methods we use today are based on good sound design or just lazy default based on lazy defaults. I have a lot of opinions on the matter but they are based on logic and gut feel, hardly scientific. But one thing bothers me:

What ever happened to the event loop? GUI applications use to start up, do some set up, draw the UI, and wait for the user to do something. Most web applications start up, look around, figure out why they were created, do something, and shut everything down. Using this model, doing complex things become a total mess. Model dialogs become hundreds of lines of code, complex state becomes a burden, it becomes easier to just pull everything from a database all the time, and we spend most of out time doing the same thing over and over.

Bring back the event loop.

Doing it over would allow you to do everything right but support would have to be dropped for most of your customers. That is suicide. Migration is a useless and demoralizing process that will leave most programmers (including this one) slipping back into bad practices and hacks to fit the existing methodology, in an attempt to get work done.

So with staring over being suicide and migration fixing essentially nothing, what do you do? Compromise, I guess. Isolate the existing code-base via and API and services giving the option to rewrite some essential pieces.

I guess that is the only option. *sigh*

Canada is careful. No sudden moves. Banks have not suddenly had a huge shift in the way they are regulated. The Government has not taken huge risks with deficit spending, wars, rapid shifts in regulation, or spending amounts. I am sure that, at times, Canada has made sudden moves. Certainly provincial insurance would be considered a sudden move by some, but by and large in my, admittedly, limited experience with Canadian government has been one of caution.

Thank you Canada be being careful and for putting thoughtful action above emotional reaction.

So we have a dozen eggs, 12 hours in a day, 60 minutes in an hour. These number are divisible by a much larger set of numbers than 10. 12 has 1, 2, 3, 4, and 6. 60 is devisable by 1 through 6! Moving the world to a base 12 numerical system would, of course, be folly but I think 10 was a bad initial decisions. Like so many bad initial decisions, made by ourselves or some person hundreds of years ago, we are stuck with it.

I sure would like to have a third of a meter.

On second thought duration is a bad example because it is a mixed radix system. We have 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, and than it falls off the tracks. 24 hours is a day, 7 days in a week, …. woops backing up …. 28-31 days in a month, 12 months in a year, 365 (1/4 (unless your year is devisable by 100 but not if it is devisable by 400) ) days in a year, and lets not forget about leap seconds.

At least I get my bagels by the dozen.

It was not easy. There was a lot of effort put in both in code and in interpersonal relationships. There were battles both internal and external to get this thing out there. Everyone who worked on the project in any way should be very proud. I am.

No language is good at everything. I would not want to write web applications in C but I would not want to write system drivers in PHP either (or just about anything BUT a web application).  It appears that a disturbingly high number of developers are very hesitant to go out side their comfort zone. They know Java or PHP. That that is all they ever want or think they need to know.

Not everything is like this. One of the core ideas behind UNIX was small simple applications that work together with each other over a standard form of communication. Applications could communication with each other over a “service” (hot word now a days) in plain text. This was and still it great for text processing but does not excel at complex hierarchical data. Developers need a quick, simple, standard, and language neutral way to communicate complex data in a stateful manner across languages and the network.

Service oriented architecture with SOAP at its helm is supposed to solve all this. But … well … SOAP is not ideal. The protocol is unnecessary verbose, it uses HTTP as its transport mechanism (why?), XML as its format, does not handle state well, and no two language implementations are compatible out of the box. To me it just seams like more of the same. Developers familiar with technologies applying them in non-optimal fashions (SOAP uses HTTP!!!).

Thrift is interesting. Thrift is protocol natural they supply a few transmission protocols in the distribution. Thrift supports a whole heap of languages, versioning, and a API definition language that is meant to be read and written by actual human beings. It’s not perfect. It does some things I don’t like like code generation and it does not support stateful communication between client and server but these are details.

Systems should be built small and interpretable. Languages should be chosen on a task level not a project one. System should be built so small that if they need to be entirely ditched and written again this can be done with out it being a huge financial burden. If someone make the mistake of writing a subsystem that needs to be fast in Ruby, than that developer can learn from his mistake and it can be rewritten in something more suitable.

Not having done this sort of thing before and sort of intentionally staying ignorant of how others have done it I am unaware of how things are typically done. A ball bouncing off a corner of a square is an interesting problem. I decided that a ball bouncing off the corner of a square behaves a lot like a ball bouncing off a very small ball. So that is what I do. Check if the ball contacted one of the flat sides and simply invert the momentum of the ball and cut it in half (why not). If the ball hits a corner I create a little ball on the corner of that square and than impact the ball on to the ball. It looks great.

Math is not my forte. I have always taken the attitude I will do it if I have to (not a bad attitude for a programmer I will note). Circle on square collisions are easy as long as everything is square on the cartesian axes (the bottom left corner’s x value is the same as the bottom right’s). Adding rotation into the picture and the math quickly goes over my head. Not wanting to learn any more than I have to I come to the conclusion that moving the ball relative to the square’s center of rotation would be much easier. Convert the ball’s coordinates and momentum to polar with the center being the center of rotation of the shape it is colliding with, add to theta, convert to cartesian, do the collision detection, convert back to polar, take away from theta, and finally convert back to cartesian. It works super.

You might be thinking (if you are stil reading this) all that math it must be slow. I thought it would be and I am sure there are faster ways but rotating a glyph on screen takes way more CPU power than doing the collision detection. It seams plenty fast for me.

These things might be normal, wrong, or a new and brilliant way of doing things. At this point I don’t know but damn it sure is fun.