NaNoWriMo

I've decided to write a novel in 30 days. A 50,000 word novel. The folks over at NaNoWriMo are to blame. It just sounds like a lot of fun and I hope to learn some things about myself over the process. Still trying to decide where to keep the daily entries. I like the idea of using a blog to do it, but I'm not sure yet.

I've bought a copy of "No Plot? No Problem!" by Chris Baty. He is one of the guys who founded the NaNoWriMo. Lots of helpful info there. For one, setting your expectations on the quality of your work very low. It's a rough draft, the operative word being "rough".

No sure of my plot yet, but will almost certainly involve time travel. A bit of mystery has to be there as well. We'll see what happens.

How Nerdy Are You?

This was fun to do. Good to know that I'm not quite as nerdy as I once thought.

Teen Buzz Ringtone

There is a new ringtone called "Teen Buzz" that uses higher frequencies so that adults cannot hear the ring. This apparently helps them to use their text messaging devices during class when they are not supposed to. The sound was originally developed by a European company to help store owners drive loitering teenagers away from the front of their store. See article at MSNBC.

Ummm... I could be missing something here but, couldn't you just set the ringer to "vibrate"? I guess I should not make the assumption that all phones and messaging devices have a vibrate feature.

Interesting technology nonetheless. If you want to see if you can hear it, go here.

J

Finally Moved In...

Here we are, we are finally here. We moved in the last week of April and are finally getting settled. Our computer is still on a piece of plywood (old computer desk didn't survive the move) but we have window treatments up and most boxes are out of sight.

Best of all, I have my Comet pinball machine back and its in the garage. Ahhh....

We have trees!

 
They did our landscaping this week. They are also installing all the trim stuff like lights, outlet covers, etc. The sinks are in and the floors are in as well! It's getting close...4 more weeks to go. 

Siding is on!

 They've put the siding on the house. The bottom half with no siding is where a stone apron is going to go.
 

New House Coming Along

 The new house is coming along. Closing date is set for April 11. We're getting excited about having more space!
 

Stanislav Petrov

I ran across this link in the wikipedia
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov).

Having never heard of Stanislav Petrov before or the events of September 26, 1983, I was amazed and grateful for his actions. I'm not sure I would've trusted my intuition that much - I'm glad he did.

Top Grossing Movies Of All Time

I got curious the other day about what are the top grossing movies in the USA. IMDB has a great site and provides just the list I was looking for. However, they state at the bottom that the "figures are not adjusted for inflation". Bummer.

Being the guy I am though (and also that I don't consider Titanic to be all that great of a movie despite it's #1 ranking), I decided to find an inflation calculator and adjust the numbers to see what would turn up. Wow, what a difference!

Here is the top 20 from the original list that is NOT adjusted for inflation. As you can tell, with a few notable exceptions, most all of these movies are from the late 1990's and on. Which makes sense since the price of a ticket has gone through the roof. (not sure why there's a big white space here...scroll down...)

Rank	Title	Year	Unadjusted Sales
1	Titanic	1997	$600,779,824
2	Star Wars	1977	$460,935,665
3	Shrek 2	2004	$436,471,036
4	E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial	1982	$434,949,459
5	Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace	1999	$431,065,444
6	Spider-Man	2002	$403,706,375
7	The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King	2003	$377,019,252
8	Spider-Man 2	2004	$373,377,893
9	The Passion of the Christ	2004	$370,270,943
10	Jurassic Park	1993	$356,784,000
11	The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers	2002	$340,478,898
12	Finding Nemo	2003	$339,714,367
13	Forrest Gump	1994	$329,691,196
14	The Lion King	1994	$328,423,001
15	Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone	2001	$317,557,891
16	The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring	2001	$313,837,577
17	Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones	2002	$310,675,583
18	Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi	1983	$309,125,409
19	Independence Day	1996	$306,124,059
20	Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl	2003	$305,388,685

To adjust the figures, I used the Consumer Price Index tables found at ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/cpi/cpiai.txt. I took the CPI from this year (2005), divided it by the CPI from the year the movie was released and multiplied by the unadjusted amount. If this is the wrong way to do this, somebody please let me know.

Now, here's the list adjusted for inflation. Now we're talking! Classics all the way down the list. And only ONE (Titanic) was released after 1983. In fact, the first movie from the 2000's that enters the list, does so at number 31...and it's Shrek 2...ugh...grossing $443M

Rank	Title	Year	Adjusted Sales
1	Gone with the Wind	1939	$2,744,015,350.79
2	Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs	1937	$2,465,673,133.33
3	Star Wars	1977	$1,460,390,225.74
4	Bambi	1942	$1,210,862,134.97
5	The Sound of Music	1965	$994,829,933.71
6	One Hundred and One Dalmatians	1961	$982,474,916.39
7	Jaws	1975	$927,881,040.89
8	The Exorcist	1973	$884,605,405.41
9	E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial	1982	$865,391,669.72
10	The Jungle Book	1967	$815,388,428.26
11	Titanic	1997	$718,689,882.92
12	The Sting	1973	$690,162,162.16
13	Doctor Zhivago	1965	$680,972,190.48
14	Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back	1980	$676,098,060.58
15	Mary Poppins	1964	$633,600,000.00
16	The Godfather	1972	$619,277,865.65
17	The Graduate	1967	$600,127,053.41
18	Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi	1983	$595,904,402.89
19	Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid	1969	$535,240,021.80
20	Grease	1978	$534,066,257.67

Just thought this was interesting. Also, if you do the numbers, each successive Star Wars movie has made less and less money when adjusted for inflation:

Star Wars - $1.492B
Empire Strikes Back - $736M
Return of the Jedi - $590M
Episode I - $491M
Episode II - $330M
Episode III - ?? (so far, it's $191M)

I guess this is why I get a little irritated when they say a movie had a "record breaking" weekend. It's only record breaking because a ticket cost $8 now instead of 50 cents (or whatever it cost it 1939). Oh well...it's interesting nonetheless.

Accessing Private Fields

I had read an article about unit testing private methods. As the article states, there are several approaches to this and also several reasons why you should consider NOT doing it (such as considering your design more carefully and testing public methods will indirectly test private ones). And while I'm still thinking about the merits of when you really need to test private methods, one thing did stand out to me and has proven very useful for my Monopoly Simulator.

I found that my Player objects should not expose their amount of cash as a publicly accessible field or method. Players in the real game of Monopoly, need not reveal how much money they have on hand. However, this presented a problem from two standpoints:

1. The Bank (or some other aspect of the game) might need to know how much money they have left in order to properly control the flow of the game - I have yet to actually run into this scenario yet, so I'm going to employ the principle of YouArentGonnaNeedIt - and not worry about it until I need to.
2. During unit testing, the cash level of a player indicates a successful test or not. This I have ran into and have used reflection to solve the problem.

Here is a method that accesses a private int field of any object:

private int getObjectPrivateIntValue(Class clazz, String fieldName, Object object) throws SecurityException, NoSuchFieldException, IllegalArgumentException, IllegalAccessException {
   Field field = clazz.getDeclaredField(fieldName);
   field.setAccessible(true);
   return field.getInt(object);
}

This is my first time bypassing the security of a class like this, so I'm not sure of all the ramifications yet. One thing I've noticed though, is that I'm tempted to put this kind of method into my actual application. This seems like a really bad idea. But, for unit testing code, it seems ok.

My next challenge, which is along these lines, is going to figure out how to make it so certain methods on Players (such as sendToJail() and pay(int amount) ) are only accessible to authorized classes (such as the Bank or Board objects). I can't make these methods package protected because other Player objects should not be allowed to call these methods. I need either some sort of SecurityManager. Maybe this is another place that aspects could help?

Monopoly Simulator

I have been working on a Monopoly Simulator for the past week or two. It's turning out to be an interesting project. At first I thought it would be interesting to simulate games to see if I could glean any strategic points, but a quick Google search turned up all kinds of Monopoly statistics. But, the more I thought about it, the more I thought it would be interesting to have a "pluggable" architecture so that different "players" could have different rule sets. Of course, because of my competitive nature, this quickly leaped to having people develop their own players with their own set of behavior rules (e.g. when they buy property, which properties they go after, trading, etc...) that could play against each other. On the other hand, I have a hard enough time finding people to play the regular Monopoly board game with me, much less code their own player rules in Java.

So, now I think I'm resigned to develop it just for learning's sake - which is sort of freeing.

I started out ok last week and identified which objects I would need and came up with what I thought would be a working model. Things were going ok, but then in typical form, I got a little excited about the whole thing and threw TDD out the window. Several lunch hours later, I had a Monopoly simulator that was "working" in that it actually simulated games and had a winner at the end, but I had no idea if it was working properly because I had no unit tests. The design also ended up in a rather unsatisfying mess with little room for expansion or flexibility. I need to refactor, but looking at it again I think I need to start over and just pull bits and pieces out as I need them.

I'm really interested in trying to integrate AOP in here somehow. I think in the area of generating statistics this will be great because that is certainly a cross-cutting concern. Each action in the game should be able to register some statistic of what just happened. Also, I'm thinking of using a rule engine for the player rules. That way, it's much easier to modify the player behavior using pseudo-english and, who knows, may even help get someone else to develop their own player.

More on this later.

God's Abundance

The following is an essay I wrote last year (10/13/2003) and decided to publish it here. Comments are welcome.


God's Abundance

This is a short essay to dispel the notion: "If we do not need something, God does not need to give it to us." Or stated another way: "God only gives us what we need, and only if we really need it."

John 6:1-15 - The feeding of the 5,000

A great crowd was following Jesus "because they saw the miraculous signs He had performed on the sick". They were drawn to Him because He was blessing and healing.

He had them sit down. There were 5,000 men; Mark records that they sat down in groups of hundreds and fifties. Matthew notes that this number did not include women and children. He had "five small barley loaves and two small fish". How much food do you think it would take to feed 5,000 men? Philip thought it would take 8 months wages just for each to have one bite.

Consider the magnitude of this miracle. If each man was just given 4oz. of fish and a piece of bread - that would amount to 1,250 lbs of fish and 5,000 rolls. For simplicity, let's say there were 50 groups of 100 men apiece. How long do you think it took to distribute 25 lbs of fish to EACH group of 100 men? This was a large scale miracle.

There are some who would say that people in the crowd had food to eat already. But that does not bear out when you see their reaction to this event. John, in verses 14 and 15, tells us that the people reacted so violently that they tried to take Jesus by force and declare Him king whether He wanted it or not.

Later, Jesus tells the crowd why they really followed Him. It was not because of the miracles, but because they were FILLED and SATISFIED (John 6:26 - "I tell you the truth, you are looking for me, not because you saw miraculous signs but because you ate the loaves and had your fill.") It is easy to dismiss when the blessing happens to somebody else. It is easy to be the skeptic when you are not the one being healed. But, you cannot deny when you are the one being touched; being filled. You feel the satisfaction in your belly, you see the hunger go away, you feel the energy return to your bones.

Look at the latter half of John 6:11: "and distributed to those who were seated AS MUCH AS THEY WANTED." He was not being stingy, He was not saying "take only what you can eat" or "make sure to leave enough for others". On the contrary, He was saying "Is that all you are taking? Here is more. Take more. Take more." Can't you hear the promises of Malachi in this? "Test me. Test me. I'll open the windows if you'll just trust me at my Word."

When Jesus was convinced they were satisfied, wanted no more and couldn't eat another bite -- He still poured out more. (Another parallel to Malachi 3:10 - "so much blessing that you will not have room enough to contain it") Verse 12 shows us that He instructed the disciples to gather up the fragments that remained so that nothing was lost. They filled twelve baskets.

It's important to note that there was nobody, at least not indicated in the scripture, that was believing for this miracle. Abraham was not there standing on a promise. Moses was not there with his rod. Elijah was not there interceding on his knees. The disciples were counting their money, wondering how they could feed these people. The disciples even had a backup plan: Mark 6:36 says the disciples wanted to "send the people away so they can go to the surrounding countryside and villages and buy themselves something to eat."

And here's the funny thing. That would've been a good plan. That would've worked. The people could have left and went to villages and other people's homes and bought something to eat or relied on the hospitality of the people. And even if they didn't actually get a meal, it's unlikely they would have starved or suffered a whole lot of hardship. There wasn't really a NEED to feed them, was there?

But, Jesus decided different. He decided it was time to show the Father's heart and desire to bless "above and beyond all we could ask or think". And the result so moved the crowd, they lost control of themselves and Jesus had to perform another miracle just to escape their frenzied attempt to make Him their king. What was so great about this miracle that caused such a response? You can't say it was just the act of multiplying the food that caused it, because they would've responded right then and rushed Him without even partaking of it. It was the fact that they partook of the meal He provided and were SATISFIED in their souls. Jesus touched a hungry point in their spirits that had never been touched before. The meal was simply a vehicle for imparting grace.

One last point. Jesus instructed His disciples to gather up the fragments that remained so that "nothing is lost". With the overflow blessing comes stewardship. Blessings are precious to God, He wants good stewards of them. To whom much is given, much is required. While this is true, it should not be used as the proverbial bucket of cold water on the flames of being satisfied in the blessing of God. It can be used as a deceit of the enemy to convince people that God will only bless them if they have a calling worthy of a blessing. If He does not bless, then they must not have a worthy work to perform. The argument misses the whole point and hence that is the trap. Our fixation should not be on the blessing or the calling, that's God's business. Our fixation, our passion, should be to simply love God. Ephesians 3:17-19 states that when we love God, when we know the love of Christ, we are filled "to the measure of all the fullness of God". When we are filled, we are satisfied. When we are satisfied, we will, like the crowd, pursue God.

The Joy of Shopping - Home

The Joy of Shopping - Home
This is the new site that WCG has produced using our new Arkdom Commerce Affiliate service.

Give it a look and do some shopping!

Jason

Welcome!

Just started this blog to capture ideas and thoughts. Also thought it would be a great place to share family info and photos.

We'll see how it goes!