I ticked the wrong box

I’ve been struggling for a long time to find a party, or ideology that I agree with politically. I have strong beliefs but I have struggled to find a ideology that they fit within. Today, I discovered it.

I reckon I’m a Libertarian.

The central tenet of libertarianism is the principle of self-ownership. To libertarians, an individual human being is sovereign over their body, extending to their life, liberty and property. As such, libertarians define liberty as being completely free in action, whilst not initiating force or fraud against the life, liberty or property of another human being. This is otherwise known as the non-aggression principle.

That’s exactly what I believe. I like free markets, and non-aggression, and consideration for others liberty (as defined above), and a belief that an individual is responsible for their own actions, and can make their own decisions. I like the concept of “user pays”, and I disagree with taxation to fund long term unemployment.

Yep, I’m a Libertarian.

Today, thanks to one of the mailing lists I subscribe to, I learnt about mojax.

mojax is a j2me based AJAX framework for mobile devices. Essentially the moblets (mojax applications) run within a j2me environment, and are not limited to the usual constraints of mobile web applications brought about by the usually dodgy HTML, CSS + JS support within most mobile devices (barring of course the fantastic Opera browser).

The mojax environment exists as an Eclipse plugin, and I’m downloading it right now. I plan on blogging a bit about my experience with it. I’ve previously developed applications in j2me environments, and Symbian, and haven’t really enjoyed the experience with either. I find the Symbian model virtually impossible to get my head around - the resources available on the web for learning fundamentals about it don’t really exist. There is not much around that tells you how to structure a mobile application (apart from the split between your UI and your business logic DLLs). With J2ME, I actually didn’t mind developing for it. But I now use a mac, and no vendors seem to be producing development environments for it, and that to me is 1) astounding and 2) unacceptable. So, I’m looking for something else.

If mojax proves to be as simple to use as I hope (check out the sample apps - simple stuff) then it might become the environment that Tomas and I use for the application we are developing. More on that later hopefully.

I’ll keep you posted.

I just had my most pleasant experience with Singletons ever. I had a little problem I was trying to solve in ruby, and I contacted a friend of mine who is quite a good developer. He suggested I should be looking at global variables, to static (class) variables, or singletons. I gave globals a go, and they didn’t give me the love I expected, so I said “bye bye” to them - probably never to be used again. I next tried Singletons.

Ruby defines a Singleton module. This is mixin’d with your code thusly:

class Lonely
include Singleton
end

Easy peasy.

That, creates a singleton of Lonely for you. The include modifies the signatures of the new and allocate Class methods (Lonely.new and Lonely.allocate) to be private, and creates (or modifies) some other methods to provide some loveliness (gory details to be found at http://www.ruby-doc.org/stdlib/libdoc/singleton/rdoc/index.html).

Basically, then all you need to do is call the instance method of the class you have created.

m = Lonely.instance

And then you can use m as you like. You can create more

m = Lonely.instance
n = Lonely.instance

And m and n refer to the same instance. Nice Singleton. No need for me to check out class variables. I think my Singleton will be more portable. BTW - Don’t try to .new your class - you’ll get a NoMethodError thrown as the new method has been made private by the mixin.

Ruby rocks.

Taking the Vietnam out of Iraq

Jenna sent me a link to this story on the BBC web site - it’s interesting. The parallels between the conflict in Vietnam and Iraq are clear to me. However, an exit strategy for this current conflict needs to be carefully executed. A cut-and-run is not an option. The country will be left open, and crippled. I personally would like the US out of there as soon as possible, not because I have any specific alliance to Iraq, but I just don’t think they should be creating and sustaining an unjust and illegal war. I am an advocate of a medium paced exit, with creation of stability within the country, and leaving it in a state so that it has a good chance of sorting itself out with a positive result. I don’t fancy the chances of a positive result if they just up and leave.

One thing that is very interesting from this story is this quote:

Second, there is a policy of trying to hand over responsibility to the local government in the midst of battle, not after it - this happened in Vietnam with the policy of Vietnamisation

I agree there is that parallel, but I don’t think that can be helped with the current conflict. With such a small, radical, underground enemy as the US have in Iraq, it’s going to be next to impossible to end the conflict, and then hand responsibility back.

I don’t believe another push by the US to destroy the insurgents is the way forward. That will breed more hate and contempt for the US in the country.

Any comments?

This is a device I was excited about, but now, meh. iTV becomes Apple TV

No 1080 High Def???

Only 40Gb HD???

I like that you can connect computers to it to pull the media, but why a restriction of 5? Seems arbitrary to me (similar to the restriction within the Airport Express). A big question I have is does it stream media out, or does it support file based access over the wireless? I’d rather it just acted as a big hard drive for your computers, and streamed out (played) to the TV. But 40Gb? I can’t get over that. That’s nothing.

— EDIT —

Reading the keynote, it appears that the 5 computers are used as a source for Apple TV. And it appears you can sync data to it like an iPod (supporting smart playlists and everything). $299 USD, shipping in Feb.

How about that. The rumours were right. At MacWorld today: The Apple iPhone

It looks like it will be supporting Wifi, EDGE, camera, GSM, iTunes and has a camera (if you look at the screen shots carefully). It DOESN’T mention any 3G service, so it looks like video calling will be out, and I assume the camera is on the back (which means it’d be not so cool for video - it’s good to have picture in picture so you can ensure you’re actually in frame).

I do like the screen size, and the fact that it’s touch screen. Well, I’m actually torn on that - touch screens have a habit of getting very messy, and I’d be concerned about the scratchability. But all in all it looks like a very sexy device.

Any word on availability???

The BBC say:

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | REM gain rock Hall of Fame place

Damn straight. Finest rock band ever. All I can say is “about time!”

I’m off work sick today. It really hit me yesterday, I was feeling so crappy last night, and today is sort of on par, but I get the sense I’m getting better. Although this does give me the opportunity to catch up on some feeds that I haven’t looked at in a bit.

I seem to be sneezing a lot, and have runny nose, and a headache, and blocked sinuses. I put getting sick down to my last couple of weeks of drinking a lot, not eating well and not sleeping much. I think being generally run down has taken its toll on my immunity, and now I’m paying the price.

I wonder if I’ll ever learn.

I just installed the VerseLogic wordpress OpenID plugin. This means that you guys (if you have an OpenID already) don’t have to explicitly register on my site to comment. You can just log in with your OpenID, and an account will be created here for you. No more passwords!

You can get a free OpenID at http://myopenid.com/

To find out more about OpenID, check it all out here.

Now, I don’t actually read or subscribe to Martha Stewarts web site, but I found on del.icio.us a link to a Wall Calendar. This is a calendar that you paint on you wall with blackboard paint (mixed with a number of greys), so you can write on it. I want to have a blackboard door or area in my kitchen in my new house, so I can write notes up, but a wall calendar is such an excellent idea.

Check it out.