Jeff Powell's Opinion and Rant Page

Sculpture by Jeff Powell

Original artwork in stone, metal, and who knows what else

Jeff Powell's Opinion and Rant Page

Sometimes I just have to say something. Sometimes I have to quote someone that said something brilliant. This page used to be where I did that, but most of it is happening in the blog now. It is possible other things will wind up included here, but I can't be sure of that.

Use the "Contact" button above and tell me about it if anything I say here strikes a chord, one way or another.

Feb 15, 2006: I recently came across the following quote:

	"Now, by the way, any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires - a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about doing getting a court order before we do so."
	President George Bush, April 24, 2004 Kleinshans Music Hall, Buffalo, New York Knowingly lying to the American public

I think that is an impeachable offense. After all, they did it to Clinton for lying about something not nearly as serious, nor directly related to your personal liberties.

Feb 15, 2006: If Cheney had to shoot someone, why couldn't it have been Bush?
Jan 29, 2006: Gas prices are heading back up and I say "great!" To those of you with mind numbingly huge SUVs that you drive 20 miles to work, one way, alone, every day, I say it's time to buy something smaller, cheaper, less dangerous to everything and everyone around you. The same goes for the soccer moms ferrying around a couple of kids to 17 planned activities each day. You can keep the SUV. You can even drive it once a month or so when you actually need something that huge for some honest reason.
The rest of the time, please drive something smaller, safer, and saner.
Dec 27, 2005: A comment on President Bush's recent trouble with unauthorized spying on US citizens:
I was taught in high school that all governmental power comes from the people. Specifically, it comes through laws that are enacted by congress -- the representatives of the people -- for the people themselves. No one -- not congress, not the President, not the courts, and certainly not the NSA -- has any power that hasn't been explicitly delegated to them by the people via laws made by congress and signed by the President.
So, did President Bush break the law by ordering the NSA to monitor phone and email conversations of certain US citizens when they are conversing with people overseas? Absolutely. Consider: congress made a set of laws to handle that case: it's called the FISA act, and it specifies ways to perform wire taps and other things needed to "monitor" potential terrorists. If that act is not adequate now, in light of 9/11, then the President should approach congress and ask for laws to give him the power he needs, subject to reasonable checks and balances.
Did the President ask for that sort of change? No. Instead he asserted that he has the authority to do what he wants, regardless of what the law says. I say he's full of shit. The law is there to limit exactly this sort of behavior, and he must obey it. Perhaps the changes he needs are legitimate, and can be accommodated. Perhaps not. But given he took the matter into his own hands, I think the only alternative now is to impeach him. The honor and safety of the people demand that he be removed from office as quickly as possible.
Do you know you're not being monitored? Are you sure?
And another thing: the California initiative process is totally out of hand. I know the original intent was to let the people do something when their elected representatives wouldn't, but that's a trivial point now. Instead, it turns out that anyone with enough money can buy the signatures needed to get something on the ballot. Then they pay for a huge set of TV ads, and it gets voted into law. Who are these people and why are they doing this? How would you know? How would you even find out? Can you trust them? I sincerely doubt it. Yet another reason to vote "no" on any initiative you're presented with.
What is it with California and modifying the state constitution? A constitution should be a few pages of text containing only the most critical and core things that a group of people think are important. It should almost never change. The rest of governance should be embodied in laws or statutes and those should be written -- and fully understood -- by elected legislators. After all, that's what they are paid to do.
How can I possibly determine if any given set of modifications to the California constitution is going to do what it claims? I've never seen the whole thing in one place, and the contents are huge. The impacts of any given part of the constitution on another are well beyond me, and are never addressed in the voters's pamphlet. This is a fundamentally bad situation, and causes me to vote "no" on just about any initiative at this point. I think it is justified. Do you agree?
A message to the rest of the world on Nov 3, 2004: George Bush is not my President. Not all of us voted for him.
To teach superstitions as truth is a most terrible thing.
-- Hypatia of Alexandria -- Greek Philosopher and Teacher
In light of the item above, and at the risk of offending people I know, like, and even respect: religion is superstition.
Repository based development environments suck. They suck even more if they have no version control system built into them. Even more if they lose information when the source code is exported to files. Even more if they don't support a command line language that allows operations to be scripted. (Yes, there are products that have these limitations.)
GUIs are mostly evil. Not entirely -- I appreciate WYSIWYG text editors and windowed debuggers -- but in general they are evil.
Windows is a nightmare. Trust me.
Garbage collected languages are crutches for people that can't remember where or how memory gets allocated and freed in their program. That's bad, since any garbage collector will use CPU time that might otherwise go to the the application. C'mon people... learn malloc and free and buy a copy of Purify.
There is an exception for languages like Perl which were designed for writing short programs that run and exit. Memory management isn't usually a problem in those systems. If, however, you're writing huge memory resident systems in Perl (or something like it) -- systems that will run for days at a time -- you should probably reconsider.
OO is not a religion. Sometimes it's nice, but I'm sure there are flocks of unmaintainable programs written in C++, Java, and other OO languages, just like there are flocks of unmaintainable programs that were written in non-OO languages. The fix is not the language, it's getting reasonable people to write code!