Kris Jordan

Based on very little fact or reason I am going to propose and assert the law of very short layovers. It goes as follows: layovers which are an hour or under in length cause the probability of your first outgoing flight to be late and subsequently for annoying problems to arise. Problems such as losing luggage, stress, sprinting through an airport, and missing your flight. Luckily I checked no bags so in my flight to Brown I only experienced the latter three. I don’t want to harp on it but lets just say US Air’s system for handling exceptional cases is poor at best. Poor is even giving it credit.

Today’s handling at the special services desk was terrible. Inconceivably bad. When I got in-line after running from one terminal to another after being told by the pilot of my first flight that “all connections are still good” and “flights are being held” (an utter lie, as I was in aisle 4, sprinted, and didn’t even see it pulling out of its gate) it was 4pm. There were about 20-25 people in front of me in the line. 1 or, sometimes, 2 service representatives lacking any sense of urgency manned the station. It took me until 6:15 to finally get to the front of the line. Two and a half hours for 20 some people to be taken care of. It was just bad all over. I’ll be e-mailing US Air when I have more energy and hope to get a free ticket out of it.

In more exciting news I finally made it here. 11:30pm verses 5:30pm. Only a few hours and a missed dinner away. I’m really not as bitter as this probably sounds. Just fatigued after a long week. Two more mornings of early awakenings and then its cruise time.

(#21) Duke lost to State in OT. Clemson lost to Florida State. Miami beats (#20) Maryland. Holy ACC. What a turbulent place to be. Hate to miss the game vs Florida State tomorrow. Go heels! (Will Hansbrough rock a mask??)

Finally I have some bab-eh pictures to share. Ava at 1 day old. Why are babies so cute?

Phew, that was a heck of a week! Finally, 2pm Thursday my Spring Break begins with a trip up to Brown University for their PhD recruitment weekend. I’m looking forward to seeing what Providence is like and getting to know more about their Computer Science Department. I’ve heard only good things. Also, beautiful weather: 22F with sunshine!

Saturday I fly from Providence to Jacksonville to intercept Aubrey in route to Delray Beach. Time to meet the family. Then its on to Fort Lauderdale on Sunday to get on board the Radiance of the Seas, a member of the Royal Caribbean fleet. It is the first Spring Break I’ll actually be “Spring Breaking” and I can’t wait. A week of sun and relaxation is well in order.

Lots of pictures to come after all of this from the birthday, Duke game, Brown, and cruise.

Also, talked to Rory last night. Everything came out alright ;) Ava White was delivered around 5pm, weighs 6lbs 14oz, and by Rory’s un-biased account is a cute baby. Congratulations on the new addition to the family!

Now, I should probably be studying for the algorithms mid-term tomorrow morning.

My picture is on SportsIllustrated.com. I’m kind of a big deal. Check out this picture. It’s a capture from before the Duke game started. That is why I’m still wearing the glasses and look like I don’t know what’s going on. Real pictures soon. If I can make it through these midterms… good eyes Dan. In other news, Hansbrough’s nose is broken. I wonder how he’ll look in a facemask?

A new addition to the White family is being delivered this morning. Miss Ava White. I’m sure she’ll be a beautiful and lively little’n. Unbelievable to think my close friend is already a father. Thoughts and best wishes to the Whites today.

The monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam resemble each other when compared with the teachings of Buddhism. The three monotheistic religions contain similar propositions and share many prophets but contrast each other in practices and the central prophetic figure. Buddhism, on the other hand, shies away from the concepts of monotheism by focusing on the importance of self.

My difficulty finding resonance with Christianity as well as Judaism and Islam, I believe, is rooted in the assertions of who prophets were and who prophets weren’t. Jewish followers do not see Jesus as a prophet. Christians and Muslims do. Christians do not consider Muhammad a prophet. Muslims do. By disputing who delivers the word of God, the true word of God is also disputed which gives rise to other fundamental differences. There are subsequently many practices which also uniquely characterize each religion, such as Islam’s Five Pillars, but essentially the dispute lies at the question of ,“Who did God really really send to deliver his word?” My difficulty with these religions lies in my question of, “How do I know and how can I rely on the collective decision of the people who originally declared each prophet a prophet?” The nature of these two questions, which I have yet to see an unbiased answer for, also highlights the absurdity of each religion’s absoluteness.

Buddhism, disparate of the others in the importance of self does not have a prophet. Rather, Siddhartha Guatama (Buddha) is a model figure for how to live. Stress is placed not on the past and afterlife, but rather on the perfection of human existence. Its axioms create a self-powered cycle of thinking, saying, doing, understanding, and thinking again. More simplistic in design, I find appeal in Buddhism because it emphasizes so little on the belief in historical peoples and figures of imagination.

Why have the greatest religious hatreds been felt between three religions who disagree over the authenticity of some prophets but all agree on the actuality of others? I do not know. One would think the biggest problems would arise between the monotheistic and Buddhist or Hindu. There is hope, however, in the one theme shared by every religion. A theme of love and compassion for others. I have hope that, with time, the focus on an absoluteness of an unprovable past and unprovable future will loosen up and shift to a heartfelt focus on a provable power, the power of love.

Birthdays are times to celebrate, if you ask me. So celebration is what I did. On Wednesday, the 28th, my actual birthday I kept things low-key. Quite a nice surprise came about when I picked up my Duke tickets. I was randomly selected to have risers! So two firsts in the last home game of the season and of my undergraduate career: being in the risers and being at a Duke game. It is going to be crazy! Pretty high likelihood of being on TV at some point.

Last night was the designated night of festivities. Dinner was held at 411 West. The group of 14 was made up of a variety of friends. Everyone got dressed up and it was a delicious meal. After dinner we headed back to the house for a cocktail like party. The title was: Kris Wine & Grind 2007. With the help of Aubrey and some friends we stocked up on Kris Wine. The goal was 22 bottles for 22 years but we fell short at 16. If you haven’t had the joy of consuming Kris Wine I highly recommend it. No bias with regard to the name or anything. We also had a pony of Carolina Brewery’s Amber Ale. Between the card games, garage pong, and dancing in the living room it was an extremely fun event. I should have pictures up shortly.

As an aside, my graduate school choice has been narrowed down to either Brown University or UNC Chapel Hill. I am flying to Providence this Thursday and look forward to meet their department and get a sense of the school. It is definitely relieving to have a better sense of what life is going to be like as this chapter closes out.

Computer Science has a tendency to spin in circles. Paradigms are like the ocean tide. What started with mainframes went to distributed terminals. Then distributed terminals became personal computers. Then PCs became smart clients and powerful PCs servers. Finally, the internet and the web browser transform our PCs into thin, dumb clients.

I had an interesting conversation with Gary Bishop yesterday regarding Adobe/Macromedia’s upcoming Apollo Platform. Apollo is noteworthy because it bundles AJAX, Flash, Flex, and HTML into a cohesive unit that allows rich internet applications to run as desktop applications.

Gary seemed to be disappointed or stunned by one of Adobe’s major selling points being ‘apps can work off-line!’ Why in the world would a bleeding-edge development platform care about off-line? In a number of years wireless will be ubiquitous! Joel and I have had a similar discussion. Joel, like Gary, feels off-line doesn’t make sense because it is simply not the direction the world is moving. I agree on many counts, but I disagree on others. I believe there is a very interesting space in web applications that can run on the desktop off-line.

“I’m never off-line, what would it matter?” I feel the words ‘off-line’ convey the wrong sense of where the power lies. The power is not in being able to use G-Mail when you don’t have internet access. (Although, it would be nice on rare occasions to not use Outlook as a surrogate client.) The power is in being able to have your e-mails and attachments cached locally. The power is in being able to open 500 meg video attachments instantly. The power is in being able to archive your old mail in files you can store on your own machine(s). To me the argument is, if we have the capability to utilize local persistent storage in trusted web applications why in the world would we not?

Two factors I don’t usually harp on are at the root of this. Efficiency and performance. If our network hardware were perfect we would be limited in transmission speeds somewhere approaching the speed of light. It is simply impossible to move bits any faster. It takes light a little over one tenth of a second to travel around the Earth. Furthermore it takes a processor at the other end of the wire acknowledging the request, switching contexts, processing the request, loading the data from its persistent store, and then pushing it back down the wire. Yes, the data may be cached remotely and yes, Google is placing data-centers strategically around the globe so the distance light must travel is shorter. It would thus be difficult to argue that an application with user-driven data can perform on the same level or better than when that data can be found locally even if our data can travel light speed.

The second factor, efficiency, is tied to the performance but is more compelling. It is simply nonsensical to transfer the same data from server-to-client from server-to-client from server-to-client, …, when the client has a 200GB hard drive and plenty of ram. Just the same as it is nonsensical for the server to do perform simple computations when the client has a fast processor with multiple cores looping idle. File sizes and content are getting larger, networks are routing amongst increasing numbers of nodes, etc. I wonder how many terabytes of data Google has wasted retransmitting the messages in users’ G-Mail accounts multiple times to the same computer. The amount must be incredible. In another context, who would argue L1, L2, and main memory should be purged from our computer systems because disks are cheap and can store so much more? It’s simply a matter of caching and distributing some computation back to the client.

There is no other way for Google to do it right now, though, while remaining web based. Or no easy way, at least. One can imagine the development of a client G-Mail application ported to Windows, Linux, and Mac. The problem is it would be a pain in the butt and a waste of human resources. If, on the other hand, the development hurdles were not monumental and it were actually easy to have a client executable running the same code-base as the web app, why not?

Adobe/Macromedia’s Apollo platform, Firefox 3’s upcoming off-line application support, and Google’s GWT* are all steps in the ‘off-line’ direction. I haven’t tinkered with the newer .Net’s but it is converging this way as well. The reason for all of this ‘off-line’ hype is not because you’re going to be ‘off-line’ more in the future. It is because we will be able to do more much interesting things with on-line than in the past.

*Note: GWT does not advertise or currently support off-line modes but let’s be honest about how perfectly set-up for off-line applications it could be with some additional cleverness from Google.

Newton once said “If I have seen further it is by standing on ye shoulders of Giants.”

I noticed on Brown’s home page that a professor of Computer Science, Stan Zdonik, was recognized as an ACM Fellow.

This sent me crawling through the ACM pages regarding fellows and then onward to ACM Turing Award Recipient’s such as UNC’s Dr. Fred Brooks. The ACM Alan M. Turing Award is the Nobel Prize for Computer Science. Recipients are the biggest movers and shakers in the field and are recognized for incredibly significant contributions to the field.

Some of the recipients I have heard of, most I have not. Brooks, Dijkstra, Knuth, Cerf were the names which stood out to me. Regarding the accomplishments of the 36+ other recipients I would like to learn more. I am sure in many cases it will simply be putting a name with a concept I am already familiar with. Reading about these scholars and gaining a deeper understanding of where the field has come from is something I will be doing between now and graduate school. Neat findings will be kept track of here along the way.

The first tidbit which I found interesting was Dr. Allen J. Perlis’ “Epigrams on Programming.”

Some of my favorites:

• Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.
• It is easier to change the specification to fit the program than vice versa.
• Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.
• A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.

I’ve finally taken the plunge and installed an open source weblog content management system on the server. Wordpress is the package of choice.

There’s something to be said for having a database backed content management system. This may be a bit fancier than I need but as I don’t have time to write one I figure I’ll go with the best of what is free and available.

I have done my best compiling content from writings I have done over the past couple of years. I will likely try to dig up other things I have written to expand.

The best thing about having a back-end to work with is being able to drop in content without any hassle. This should translate into more frequent posts, which I have always hoped to do, but no guarantees.

Inspired by Justin Timberlake.