The Discordant Mind of Jason Lawrence Duncan

Steve Gunn: Violent Criminals are "Completely Godless"

Tue, 07 May 2013 20:51:21 -0400

Steve Gunn: Violent Criminals are "Completely Godless":

As a “completely godless” atheist, this is the type of mindset that I find so highly offensive (in my eyes, this comes close to hate speech), and evidence that yes, atheists are discriminated against and looked own upon as bad people, capable of horrendous acts simply because they don’t believe in an afterlife. Mr. Steve Gunn uses the term “completely godless” to describe the only conceivable reasoning for terrorism, mass-murder, and rape.

I’m not gonna rattle off my resume of good deeds, but I would hope that anyone of reasonable intellect knows that morality and religion are independent. If you want to believe in a god or gods, fine, but don’t go around classifying atheists as the scum of the earth in a major newspaper. There’s no place for that … could he get away with this if he had singled out a particular religion, race, or social class as the “bad guys”?

"The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill..."

Sat, 04 May 2013 19:48:08 -0400

“The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

- Middlemarch, George Eliot (via stonemary)

"Mankind has achieved so much, made incredible progress in so many fields, and performed..."

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 20:19:10 -0400

“Mankind has achieved so much, made incredible progress in so many fields, and performed extraordinary technological feats. We are taught all about these achievements but rarely about man’s stupidity and the ways in which he deceives himself.”

- Charlie Campbell, Scapegoat: A History of Blaming Other People

"While the other boys wrote mere mechanical verses, Poe wrote genuine poetry: the boy was a born..."

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 17:51:03 -0400

“While the other boys wrote mere mechanical verses, Poe wrote genuine poetry: the boy was a born poet. As a scholar, he was ambitious to excel, and although not conspicuously studious, he always acquitted himself well in his classes. He was remarkable for self respect, without haughtiness. In his demeanor toward his playmates, he was strictly just and correct, which made him a general favorite, even with those who were older than he was. His natural and predominant passion seemed to me to be an enthusiastic ardor in everything he undertook. In any difference of opinion which occurred between him and his fellow students, he was very tenacious in maintaining his own views and would not yield until his judgment was convinced. He had a sensitive and tender heart, and would do anything to serve a friend. His nature was entirely free from selfishness, the predominant quality of boyhood.”

- Professor Joseph Clarke, on his former student, Edgar Allan Poe.

I had posted earlier about 3 antique postcards I’d...

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 11:07:27 -0400

I had posted earlier about 3 antique postcards I’d purchased of a house that had been in my family since before the Revolution. It is the oldest brick saltbox home in the United States. I finally got around to buying a triple frame for presenting them. Postcards themselves are roughly 100 years old.

GDI Plus Optimizations

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 10:20:04 -0400

I’m pretty excited about some huge (~90%) performance gains I’ve been able to make in our custom UI over the past few days.

Originally, our software had the typical default grey forms with drop-down menus, which was pretty much the standard in the 80s and 90s. Shortly before I started here, they migrated to our “Facelift” UI, which is really cool, uses a themed ribbon menu, shiny buttons, mouseover effects, rounded textboxes, etc.

We’re still using VFP, so we don’t have the advantage of the new .NET UI features, so we are doing all this “the hard way” by custom drawing our controls, every time the form is drawn. This slowed down the rendering of our forms by quite a lot.

So, the other day I took it upon myself to dig into that drawing code, and see if I could make some optimizations. I implemented a caching system, so that we save off each control as a PNG after we draw it the first time, and then the next time, grab it from cache. I also implemented an “ImageServer” that pre-loads all cached images on system startup.

This drastically improved performance. Forms are now back to being instantaneous, even with our UI goodies. Obviously, the downside is we now eat up a bunch more disk space for the cache, but these days disk space is cheap and plentiful. Just in case, I implemented a global “GDI Optimization” setting so the feature can be turned on or off.

I recorded a sample form opening with and without optimization and sent it to my manager and coworkers and got a few “wows”. It’s a hit!

A caching mechanism is something to strongly consider if you are doing some custom relatively static drawing of this type.

(If any VFP developers using GDIPlusX want more specific details, let me know. It takes relatively few lines of code to make this change.)

Pacific Ocean, Olympic National Park, Washington

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 19:34:51 -0400

Pacific Ocean, Olympic National Park, Washington

John Bancroft (Infamous Tory) Anecdote

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 10:58:52 -0400

A great number of my family fought in the Revolutionary War, at least 15 members of the Day family from West Springfield alone, including my direct ancestor, Luke Day, Jr. I have, so far, only found record of one Tory, Capt. John Bancroft, who married into my family, marrying one of the Day cousins, Mary/Mercy Ashley (which I can only imagine caused familial strife when the war broke out).

He openly tried to aid the British from his home in Westfield, helping POWs to escape, passing along intelligence, etc., and was placed under house arrest. There is an entire book about him called Captain John Bancroft, Westfield’s Foremost Tory.

There is a very funny anecdote about him, probably fabricated. He was a very pretentious man, and built a huge brick mansion. It is said he used to sit by the window, to be able to yell out to the street, gloating over passersby about his beautiful home.

One such time, he asked an onlooker “Did you think you had reached paradise?”, to which the onlooker replied “Yes, I did think so, until I saw the devil looking out of the window!”

Lincoln Brick Factory Ruins, Grand Ledge, Michigan

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 19:55:48 -0400

Lincoln Brick Factory Ruins, Grand Ledge, Michigan

Whitecaps on Devil’s Lake, Baraboo, Wisconsin

Sat, 23 Mar 2013 20:06:34 -0400

Whitecaps on Devil’s Lake, Baraboo, Wisconsin

SQL 101: Join vs. Where Clause

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 10:55:45 -0400

I just ran across a rather complicated instance of this, and thought I’d post about it. It’s the kind of thing that is obvious after the fact, but easy for newbies to screw up and cause confusion, especially with monolithic queries with many joins and clauses, that get edited and extended over time.

SELECT *
 FROM a LEFT JOIN b ON a.pk = b.fk AND b.somefield = <value>

vs.

SELECT * 
 FROM a LEFT JOIN b ON a.pk = b.fk
 WHERE b.somefield = <value>

The difference here is that the first query will ALWAYS return all the rows from table a, along with the matching data from b where the foreign key links and the field equals the value. This is probably what you mean to do in most cases, or you wouldn’t have the OUTER JOIN in there to begin with. The second query will only return the rows from a that link to b AND that have the field equal to the value. This is because b.somefield will be NULL when there is no match in b, and NULL doesn’t equal anything, even NULL itself. If this is really what you want to do, you may as well make it an INNER JOIN.

That is pretty obvious here, but if you have 10 joins and 15 WHERE conditions, and 3 years down the line, you want to add a new query parameter, it can be pretty easy to add to the WHERE clause instead of the JOIN, and not notice you introduced a bug.

White’s Bridge, Keene Township, Michigan

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 19:26:26 -0400

White’s Bridge, Keene Township, Michigan

Former Employer #1 on Forbes' "Cool Office Spaces"

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 16:06:00 -0400

Former Employer #1 on Forbes' "Cool Office Spaces":

I just learned that my last employer was recently selected #1 for “Cool Office Spaces”, above Google, Microsoft, and Facebook by Forbes. The image they use in the article is the hallway I walked down every day on the way to my office. I worked in Fomalhaut, which had a New York theme (thus the subway hallway). I was on the mission-critical Orders team.

Also, Judy is now up to #736 on the list of richest people in the world. I can now provably say I’ve been in business meetings with a billionaire.

Dead Fish (band) Wikipedia Article

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 16:01:41 -0400

Dead Fish (band) Wikipedia Article:

I wrote up/translated the article for Dead Fish, a Brazilian melodic hardcore band. It’s mostly a translation, although I moved some things around. It could use some more sources. Feel more than welcome to copy edit and improve the article.

Photo

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 08:01:33 -0400

Discarded Toy Snake, Almelund, MN

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 08:01:10 -0400

Discarded Toy Snake, Almelund, MN

CMTN Wikipedia Article

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 08:01:37 -0400

I wrote up an article for Brazilian rock band Canto dos Malditos na Terra do Nunca yesterday, mostly translated/adapted from the Portuguese version, which lacked sources and wasn’t very encyclopedic. Feel free to edit it. I especially need sources … only got one so far.

Escrevi um artigo na Wikipédia inglesa sobre a banda, Canto dos Malditos na Terra do Nunca, mais ou menos traduzido do português. Se alguém quer expandir o artigo, ou corrigir qualquer coisa, seria ótimo. Preciso de referências, especialmente. Obrigado!

Black-tailed deer at sunset, Olympic National Park

Mon, 11 Mar 2013 08:01:00 -0400

Black-tailed deer at sunset, Olympic National Park

A few pictures of my former restaurant, Sabor à Brasileira, in...

Sun, 10 Mar 2013 17:02:00 -0400

A few pictures of my former restaurant, Sabor à Brasileira, in Bauru, São Paulo, Brazil. These were taken by my brother, Rick. That’s me, dressed in black, in the 2nd photo.

If you’re unfamiliar with Brazilian restaurants, it’s common to pay “por quilo” (per kg), so you take as much as you want, and then pay by weight, thus the buffet style.

Unfortunately, the new owners gave it a hideous makeover, putting bars on the windows and repainting it bright orange, with advertising all over. It’s now called Tadano’s.

Lincoln Brick Factory, Grand Ledge, MI

Sat, 09 Mar 2013 16:01:00 -0500

Lincoln Brick Factory, Grand Ledge, MI