My Thoughts on Bitcoin

In today's comic, the frogs are getting in on the Bitcoin craze. I've stayed out of it personally. It seems like an interesting concept and all, but I have a few reservations at this point. I won't say that I'm opposed to it, because I'm not really. I just don't think it's for me yet.

First, it's because I'm a person. I'm not a business. I have nothing to sell, so I'm not trying to reduce the fees I pay for credit card transactions or anything. I'm not trying to get more customers who might not want to use U.S. Dollars. I'm just a person.

Second, it's because I don't need to. All the places I buy groceries still take normal American currency. I live in central Pennsylvania. I don't know where the nearest business is that accepts Bitcoin, and I don't know if there are any in the state that accept it exclusively. I'm too practical to try to use Bitcoins at this point.

Third, it's too volatile. I don't have the hardware needed to mine the coins, so to get any I'd have to buy them with my dollars. I might see their value double in the next month, or I might see their value halve. I'm just not into currency speculation. I'll take my chances with U.S. inflation.

So that's why I don't have any Bitcoins. I do have a Bitcoin wallet somewhere though - if you want to send me some I won't say no.

Amphibian.com comic for 15 October 2014

Nothing New Under the Sun

I'm sure you've heard of a "selfie." It's impossible for you to not know what one is. Everyone is using their phones these days to take pictures of themselves and share them with the world on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Old School Selfie by Vincent van Gogh

Some people think that our obsession with selfies is proof of our culture's immanent demise and our collective moral bankruptcy. Or they are just annoying.

But let's take a minute to think about this. Are selfies really anything new? Were they invented only after the iPhone got a front-facing camera in 2010? Hardly.

They're nothing more than self-portraits. And those have been around for as long as people have had a reflection and something with which to draw. People have always been self-absorbed and narcissistic. You just get access to more of them now, thanks to social networking.

Vincent van Gogh painted himself 37 times between 1886 and 1889. He spent a great deal of time on those. That's like the equivalent of taking 87.3 selfies per day with our modern technology. Be thankful you weren't on that guy's friends list. He painted himself with a bandage on his head after cutting off his own ear, and then probably carted that canvas over to everyone's house to ask them if they liked it. He needed some attention. I'm sure you have people like that in your life.

So the next time you are tempted to complain about all the terrible and annoying things people do nowadays, just take a step back and consider that the things people are doing today are probably just minor updates to the terrible and annoying things people have done since the dawn of time.

Amphibian.com comic for 13 October 2014

The List of the Worst

I know I haven't been writing much technical stuff this week. I haven't shared any code or anything, just random musings. I haven't given up on software development - I am working on an interesting project that I'll talk about in a few weeks.

But I do think about stuff other than software, and I've been typing a lot of that stuff up lately. Today I was thinking about the worst stuff I can remember.

Not like personal tragedies or anything depressing like that. Just really terrible products or software that I've lived through. It's important to remember that just because something is made, it doesn't mean it should have been.

My List of the Worst Things

Worst Video Game - Without a doubt, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial for the Atari 2600 is the worst game I ever played. Some people even say that this game is what caused the video game industry crash of 1983. E.T. just kept falling in those pits, over and over again. I was so frustrated. However, one dedicated fan has fixed most of the issues with the game and offers a patch for the ROM. It is possible to play the corrected version in an emulator and maybe hate it a bit less.

Worst Computer Virus - What makes a virus the worst? There's a lot of debate out there on which virus has been the worst by some objective measure. Is it how much they cost people? How many computers they infected? I don't know. To me, the Code Red worm of 2001 is still the worst one I can remember. It was named after Code Red Mountain Dew, which the authors were drinking at the time they made it. I also drank a lot of that particular soda back then, so maybe that's why it sticks in my mind.

Worst Keyboard Ever

Worst Keyboard - Many people believe the IBM PCjr keyboard holds this title. It was bad, but personally the worst I've ever used was on the Timex Sinclair 1000. Actually, the keyboard was the Timex Sinclair 1000. It was just a flat panel with bubble-type keys. You had to really think about what key you were pressing. Absolutely terrible.

Worst Soda - Pepsi Kona. This soda was so terrible, I have no idea how it made it out of Pepsi's test kitchen. Maybe I just thought it was awful because I didn't drink coffee at that time in my life. Or maybe it's because it was completely awful. Many people would rank Crystal Pepsi or Pepsi Blue as their worst, but I didn't think they were that bad. Just weird maybe. Pepsi has had a lot of ridiculously bad ideas, now that I think about it. Makes New Coke seem forgivable. 

Worst Operating System - If you thought I was going to say Windows ME, you would be correct. Why did I ever upgrade to this disaster? It would crash on the loading screen regularly, on a computer that had run Windows 98 just fine. I've never understood why this thing was so bad. After a few weeks with it, I formatted my hard drive and went back to good old '98, where I stayed for many more years.

Worst Fast Food Item - I had McDonald's pizza. It was strange. I'm not even sure why McDonald's thought they could sell pizza. I first tried this in one of the early test markets in Ohio before it made its way to my local McDonald's here in central Pennsylvania. I think it was better before it went national, as I can remember being disappointed with it the second (and last) time I ordered it. These days, I won't eat anything from McDonald's.

Those things were all pretty bad, but I'm sure worse things will happen. But the good thing about being the worst is, at least you are remembered for something.

Amphibian.com comic for 10 October 2014

A Beautiful Prison is Still a Prison

One of the biggest criticisms of the iPhone is that it is too closed. There is only one way to get new software on an iOS device, and that is through Apple. Android devices, by comparison, can be plugged in to your computer and have whatever software you want loaded on them any time you want.

They call the iOS experience a "walled garden." It's beautiful, but you are trapped inside. In my opinion, a beautiful prison is still a prison.

You don't have to stay in prison, however. There's always a jailbreak.

I'm not talking about tunneling from your cell with a spoon smuggled out of the cafeteria and hiding in the laundry truck. The process of removing the lock Apple has on your iPhone is called jailbreaking. It gets you out of prison. Out of the walled garden.

The problem is, at least here in the United States, that the legal status of jailbreaking your phone is questionable. For a long time it was actually illegal. Then maybe it wasn't. Now maybe it is, or maybe it's not. But why should it be illegal?

According to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, jailbreaking is illegal because it circumvents a technical measure that effectively controls access to a protected work. What is the "protected work" in this case? Presumably the phone itself, or maybe the software on the phone, as Apple claimed copyright protection over it. Copyrighting a phone? Seemed like a bit of a stretch to me. But for a while at least, the courts upheld that questionable notion.

I don't agree with that policy. If I purchase a phone, I believe I should be able to do whatever I want to it. If I can't, then what is the point of purchasing it? Am I really just renting it from Apple? I don't believe I will go to jail if I replace the control knobs on my toaster, so why should I face a penalty if I want to put Windows 95 on my iPhone?

Fortunately, the US Copyright Office came to their senses, more or less, and updated their policies concerning exemptions to the law. In October 2012, it became legal to jailbreak your phone. But just your phone...they refused to grant the same exemption to tablets. So you can jailbreak your iPhone but not your iPad. Weird.

The whole mess is just ridiculous. Certainly, it should be against the law to hack someone else's device. But your own device? I believe this situation exemplifies two problems with the laws in the United States. First, the laws are written by lobbyists on the payrolls of large corporations and are designed to empower those corporations at the expense of the rights of the people. Second, the laws do not keep pace with technological advancement.

The second problem is always going to be a problem, but the first problem can be corrected. Just do what I do, and always vote against the incumbent. Elections are next month.

Amphibian.com comic for 8 October 2014

Reflections on Android

I used to have an iPhone. I purchased the 3GS the day it was released and used it for 2 years. It was a great phone. I wrote a game for it and everything (although I never published it to the App Store). But when it came time to upgrade, I switched to an Android phone.


The iPhone/Android thing is like the Mac/PC debate from my childhood. Macs were extremely expensive (and still are, I guess) and less common. They couldn't run all the games I wanted. PCs were everywhere. They were cheap, and I could even build one myself. Since they were more common, they got more software written for them.

You'd think it would be like that today. There are tons of Android phones out there. Everybody can get one. They give you one for free with a cell phone contract. There's no waiting in line outside an Apple store for a week to get one. Android should be the first platform for which anyone develops software.

But it's not like that at all. Everyone develops for iOS first, and then maybe Android later. It's not as bad as it used to be, but it's not that great either.

What's wrong? Most people will tell you, and I am forced to agree, that it is harder to develop for Android. There are just too many devices with too many hardware-specific quirks. There are too many versions of the OS out there as well.

It's unfortunate that it has to be this way. Back in the Mac/PC days of yore, the fact that there are 1.34 bazillion hardware configurations for PCs didn't matter. Well, maybe it mattered a tiny bit, but for the most part we didn't worry about it. The OS took care of most of that for us. The PC ran DOS or Windows (depending on what year we're talking about) and that's all you had to worry about. New versions of the OS weren't released that often, so you had a longer cycle to catch your software up to the latest version. But if the operating system is supposed to abstract away all the difficult parts of working with a variety of different physical hardware, and Android app developers are having a less-than-ideal experience with that, does that mean that Android is a bad OS?

Maybe I'm being too hard on Android. When I think back, sure MS-DOS 6.22 would allow any game designed for MS-DOS 5+ run on my computer, but if I didn't have one of 2 supported sound cards I would hear no game music. I didn't blame that on DOS then, and I guess I shouldn't blame Android now.

Who do I blame, if not Android? Do I blame the hardware manufacturers for poor drivers? Do I blame the application developers? Do I blame it on the rain? Maybe my whole analogy is just flawed. Phones today are computers, more or less, but perhaps I am drawing unrealistic parallels between my Galaxy S3 and my 486SX Packard Bell.

I better stop typing now before this turns into a crazy rant or something. But I might buy another iPhone someday.

Amphibian.com comic for 6 October 2014

Don't Break the Chain

The Amphibian.com web comic is maybe the only personal project I've ever really completed. I've certainly completed projects at my day job, and I don't know if I could call anything really completed since I continue to make upgrades and changes...but Amphibian.com shipped. It made it. It's there for you to read.

I've started a plethora of personal projects at home over the years. Some new technology comes out and I want to play with it. My list goes way back. In 1996 it was WorldGroup BBS game modules. In 1999 it was web browser games using ActiveX or Flash. There was a bunch of little stuff in the aughts.  In 2009 it was iPhone games. In 2010 it was HTML5 canvas games with multiplayer capabilities using Websockets. In 2012/2013 it was OUYA games.

You might notice the pattern. When I tried to apply a new technology, I usually tried to make some sort of casual game. But that's not the point.

The point is that very few of those projects ever shipped. And by shipped I mean they got released to the public. They rarely got finished to the point where they could be publicly consumed.

What did I do differently with the web comics that enabled me to actually launch?

I made a chain, and didn't break it.

"Broad chain closeup" by Toni Lozano
Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0
via Wikimedia Commons

Not like a chain for towing a car, or holding back a dog, or attaching to your wallet. A chain of days on the calendar where I checked in some code. It was easy to track using GitHub's contributions graph. I wrote some code and checked it in every day for 52 straight days. Then I was on vacation so I missed a few days, but I went back to it and did 19 more. And it was ready.

It was a challenge to see how long I could make the chain. It kept me motivated, and it got the project done. I was impressed with how well this method worked.

I didn't invent this technique myself. It was discussed on Lifehacker as a method recommended by Jerry Seinfeld.

A friend suggested I try it after I was lamenting over how I can never finish a project at home. I am totally sold on it. It works. Try it yourself.

Get a calendar, get to work, and don't break the chain. You will achieve your goal!

Amphibian.com comic for 3 October 2014

A Problem Nothing to do with Software

I'm not going to talk about software today. Or frogs. Or even cookies.

As much as I love writing code and drawing frogs, there are more important things in this world.

Children.

I am a foster parent. We have a teenage foster daughter that we hope to adopt soon. Teenagers are not always easy to love, especially ones that come from difficult backgrounds. Taking one into your home is challenging. But nothing good ever comes easy.

One particularly troubling thing that happens to teens in foster care is "aging out" of the system. That's what happens when the state fails to reunite children with their families or find permanent homes for them. When they become too old to remain in the system, they are sent out into the world - in many ways completely on their own.

According to Children's Rights, more than 23,000 young people aged out of foster care in 2012. The percentage of youth that age out is increasing. The older the children are, the harder it is to find permanent homes for them.

Without some kind of support system in place, it is not reasonable to expect these teens to succeed. By age 26, only 4 percent of youth who age out of foster care have earned a college degree. The number is 36 percent in the general population. Okay, so maybe college isn't for everyone. But 80 percent of these kids are unable to support themselves just 4 years after leaving care. Less than 50 percent have graduated high school, and 25 percent have been homeless (source here).

These numbers disturb me greatly. We as a society have a responsibility to our children, and we are failing. Even one child aging out is too many. The system is not working. We need to fix it.

What can be done? Sure, we can contact our state representatives and demand change. We can give to organizations that help foster children (I like the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption. Dave Thomas was adopted, and he also worked with my hero Colonel Sanders before starting Wendy's). Those things are good.

But the only thing that is sure to make a difference is you getting personally involved. Become a foster parent yourself. Adopt a teenager.

I won't lie to you. It's not all smiles and sunshine. It's hard. You will cry. You will question your own sanity. There are probably a million reasons why you shouldn't do it. I used to tell myself all million of them, but I can't anymore.

I can't bear to see one more child slip through the cracks of our society.

It's not easy. But nothing good ever comes easy.