Computers Used To Be Sexy, What the Hell Happened

Computers used to look good. And its about time we revolt. Computers had that 2001 high end keyboard (not junk today) with a slighly sloped back screen. This sexy design is epitomized by the glorious HP 87 which someday I will rebuild with modern guts. Hilarious they had big book size ROM plates for the back, four of them, just like a HP41cv's tinly little matchbook rom insertables.

But enough with the talking, on with the computer porn.

p.s. I love how they have to spell out 16 bit "word length" they never say that anymore. I bet most people when they get their 64bit cell phones have not a clue what that means.


And of course this Philco shows what people can accomplish when they try to make computers human again:

Use import static in Java to extend the language

One confusing new feature is the ability to import a class as static.

   so if you have a class Foo and it has a method p() and q()

   then if you do
      import static Foo;

   suddenly you can get access to these methods without having to specify the host static class if it were not a static import, e.g. you can just go     p(something);

   it should not be used when inheritance is tricky, but rather to extend with some "primitives" like a language extenstion

  of course, it can be a useful way to get your enums and consts without having to always de-reference them off the class name, and that is it's best application.

One way I use static imports is to handle logging. My logger class has static methods for info, debug, and severe.  Once they are statically imported all I have to do is put

     info ("this did something");

in the code. And I get it nicely integrated with logging. It's also good for math or lambda functions!

Giants in South America and the Grand Canyon, and Giant Heads in Egypt and Peru

Let me roll off some pictures first then let's get to the analysis:

OK so what is going on? 

I have two theories. First, is that earths oxygen levels are decreasing as our society builds and populates. 

The idea is that go back 4000 to even 400 years and there is much more oxygen to support larger scales of humans.  But somehow, I'm not quite sure that's it. 

Instead abiding by the precession cataclysm theory, It may be that small numbers of the prior-cycle survived in the pyramids but it wouldn't have been a great many. Perhaps 100 in egypt and 100 in Peru.  And they and their children would have the giant skulls of super intelligence. Now moderns are going to argue it is simply flat plates smashing the skull as children like the highland indians did, but a simple look confirms that they do not have this frontal face angle and flatness like the indians at all neither does that technique account for volume. No these people would have been very bright compared to modern humans. Able to remember everything and to learn at an astounding pace. One of their six year olds would best most of our adult population. 

The egyptian headdress evolved to hide the heads from the people. But the people still knew. And this has evolved into the pope's hat which yes resembles the Miter of Dogon the fish god but that goes back to a copy of the EGYPTIANS who did it first. The fact that Nefirtiri was a long skull and so well known and so perhaps too was Tut although to a lesser degree being several generations from the surviving pure genetic long skulls. 

OK now look at Nefirtiti, even MORE elongation

And finally, an original long skull for comparison which is even more pronounced

Well if this is true, then what about Akhenaten's skull? Yep it's elongated as well.

Madame Blavatsky leaves us with chilling words - "The giants of old are old are all buried under the ocean, and hundreds of thousands of years of constant friction by water would reduce to dust and pulverize a brazen, far more a human skeleton"

These descendents of descendents of the long skull race, the ruling race from the last precession cycle, Have at their origin an even that ocurred around 20,000 years ago. The time of the death of the Atlantean races and societies. Mankind would have to start again save for the secret knowlege from those who hid and sheltered in the pyramids, knowledge of immense secret and the biggest secret of all, how to survive the year long high radiation Shamash period when there are 2 suns in the sky. What does it all mean? What is the date of the end of our cycle? Perhaps in 5,000 years. But we have built so much attained so much this time, surely even the biggest cataclysm cannot erase all of our skyscrapers from the earth. And yet, perhaps its gods hand, crumbling all we thought was such a big deal such a tower of babel only to have the cataclysm sweep it all away like a pile of dust. One wonders if we dig deep enough, if we might just not uncover, the tip of the empire state building from the last civilization of man. A big guess as to why this has not occurred is that if the poles shifted or the exosphere rotated (a radical thought I know) then all of this civilization lies ten miles beneath the ice caps of antartica. We do not possess the technologies to explore there. Not easily.  But we should continue to do core analysis from deep drilling in that area and see if we discover traces of high order metals and alloys which indicate something down there of a tremendous advance. 

The bigger question is why do modern academics scoff at all of this. It's as if each is too concerned with being ridiculed and none are brave. Surely one academic must be excited to take this up formally. Why do we cover up evidence which throughout history our greatest writers and thinkers took up and declared to be true over and over. Blavatsky again reminds us:

Chi Ro as Anchor - New Plaque from San Sebastian Caves

So today we are going to take further our notion that when you go back BEFORE emperor Constantine when he took the stylized P-X chi-ro symbol as his standard (flag) for his armies, and go back to early christian graffitti for its origen, we see something different.

Here we see something amazing from the caves of San Sebastian.  It is a fish, and two of the anchors (or fish hooks !!!) that boats used.   The fish, and what hooks the fish.

Chi-Ro (pronounced Key-roh) has nothing to do with the first two letters in Greek for Christ. Why would the romans adopt from the Greek that makes no sense! Clearly they would use Latin!

For a long time I studied ancient anchors for the boats used on the sea of Gallilee where Christ was from and thought that these were early anchors. But maybe these are fish hooks. The fishhook on the left shows a thread going through it (or if you see an anchor, a rope for a boat). But the fishhook makes more sense really because you want to reel the fish in!

So here magically, FINALLY, we are seeing TWO views of the same fishhook which provides for and feeds so many. Oddly, the shape is a turned down tine x 4 at the end of the hook. We see it in profile on the left, the ends turning down in graceful curves, and on the right we see it again in a more 3D look, to show that there are 4 of these barbed hooks. This is the knowledge of how to catch a fish!

But I've never seen a fish hook with turned down ends. So maybe it must be an anchor. But certainly it is one of these two and NOT the first two letters of Christ in Greek as so commonly told.

Now we revisit the other coin. And we see the Chi-Ro as Shamash, the 3rd star in the sky that occurs at the end times every 26,000 years when the earth shakes itself apart. Amazing that they use the Chi-Ro symbol in place of the typical shamash (or shamash with RAYS of POWER coming out as it is typically drawn to stress more powerful than the sun).

The whole secret to the christian church is this precession cycle end times, tracked via the zodiac, and how to prepare for it (hide in great stone pyramids for a year until the cosmic radiation passes).

All of this is the basis for the Kingdom of Mei series.

We have the fish-hook/anchor becoming the shamash.  In fact on one constantine coin, a simplified shamash is used instead of the chi-ro.

So Why the fish?

Mark 1:17 "Come after Me, and I will make you become fishers of men." Matthew 12:40 "...Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth." Matthew 14:17 "And they said to Him, 'We have here only five loaves and two fish.'" Luke 5:6 "And when they had done this, they caught a great number of fish, and their net was breaking." Luke 24:42 "So they gave Him a piece of a broiled fish and some honeycomb." John 21:6 "And He said to them, 'Cast the net on the right side of the boat, and you will find some.' So they cast, and now they were not able to draw it in because of the multitude of fish."

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A 'fishy' tale?

In the years following the ascension of the resurrected Jesus to heaven, the Christian church grew rapidly. Christians soon found themselves to be the subjects of persecution by both the Romans and the Jews. In many locales, it became dangerous to be known as a Christian. Thus, when two strangers met and thought maybe they were fellow believers, one of them would draw, on the ground, the upper half of the fish symbol.

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Recognizing the symbol, the stranger would add a second curved line and complete the drawing of a fish.

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It is a very simple shape to draw - just two curved strokes. It could be drawn quickly, and erased just as quickly if there was no sign of recognition on the part of the stranger. The Battle of the Milvian Bridge took place between the Roman Emperors Constantine I and Maxentius on 28 October 312. It takes its name from the Milvian Bridge, an important route over the Tiber. Constantine won the battle and started on the path that led him to end the Tetrarchy and become the sole ruler of the Roman Empire. Maxentius drowned in the Tiber during the battle. According to chroniclers such as Eusebius of Caesarea andLactantius, the battle marked the beginning of Constantine's conversion to Christianity. Eusebius of Caesarea recounts that Constantine and his soldiers had a vision of the Christian God promising victory if they daubed the sign of the Chi-Rho, the first two letters of Christ's name in Greek, on their shields. The Arch of Constantine, erected in celebration of the victory, certainly attributes Constantine's success to divine intervention; however, the monument does not display any overtly Christian symbolism. Some more pictures of the catacombs. Notice by the Mary statue at the entrace, the X with radiant power. The explosive Shamash star which I believe to be our sun's hidden binary star on a long elliptical orbit as one possible explanation of why it appears every 6k or 26k years. the 26k precession cycle seems too long to explain our dawn of history.  The Catacombs of Saint Sebastian Via Appia Antica, 136 00179 Roma +39 06 785 0350 catacombe.org Archaeological Site Today 10:00 am – 5:00 pm

A Modest Proposal: Let USA and Russia Unite to Guard Palmyra

    by Gianna Giavelli

Sometimes it's the simplest things that vex us. America's mad dog force Al-Quaeda, I mean Al-Nusra, I mean ISIL err wait I mean ISIS is now at the gates of the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra. 

Remember Indiana Jones Part III and the ancient city with the fountain of youth? That's what Palmyra looks like. Beautiful columns carved into the rockface from our ancient dawn of pre-history. And it's all about to be lost forever like the giant Buddha statues in Afghanistan. 

Now, while the Koran may say not to have any pictures of Muhammed, it says nothing about destroying everything of every other religion. But these fanatics are clear - they will tolerate nothing not even mans greatest historical legacies. If they could, they would destroy even the pyramids. 

So we are faced with a dillema. And I would like to submit a modest proposal. Clearly Assad does not have the forces to protect the most important historical city in his country. So what to do? 

And then it came to me. For so much time America and Russia have engaged in a synthetic war when really our people should be closer than ever. Russia has embraced capitalism in their own unique way, new freedom and prosperity, and while like us they don't have free elections or government and still have a security chekka state (just like us!) heck, its like America and Russia split the difference and merged in the middle. So why are we fighting? 

Instead, we should each send a battallion to Palmyra. 50 tanks, artillary, air support (maybe some of those AC-130s with rail guns they can take out 1000 men over lunch) and camp out there. Maybe our military will recognize that we aren't such different people. Maybe the friendships they form will work their way up the chain of command until finally this silly fake but all too dangerous war stance abides to peace and prosperity.  

We would show the russians our great new modern weapons that we have bankrupted and starved our country to produce, and they will show us their great new modern weapons that they have bankrupted and starved their country to produce. Heck, maybe our colonel can take a ride in a MIG-29 in exchange for some VTOL action. Let ISIS try a skirmish when suddenly the roar of Russia's newest 120mm tank blasts them to smitheens. "Ha ha ha foolish dogs" laughs the russian. "When McCain funded them, they seemed so much better groomed and polite" says the American launching another drone strike from a squadron of predators. "Dis drone stuff, is cool eh? But it lacks the human side. We still like to squish our opponents by hand" says Vlad. "You're being old fashioned!" says John the drone pilot, swigging back more vodka. 

I say give it a go. It's time for peace in the world and its time to show the ISIS pipsqueaks what happens if they dare attack a real army. 

UPDATE 3/21/16: Palymra is now reduced to tiny rubble. The great temples are forever gone, destroyed by the mad dog insantity of Islam. No one listened. sigh.

Falling in Love with activeWeb and activeJDBC Frameworks (or why I'll never J2E again)

CrossMyPath, the iGIS system, was originally developed using J2E technolgies, DAO layers of anotated POJOs following the repository pattern and EclipseLink hosted in TomEE. At the time it seemed like the sexy new stuff.  But three months in there were problems. Conflicts deep in EclipseLink and TomEE began to surface that were not resolvable and then a long slew of tech evaluations later I started getting worn out. I also was trying to find a solution for GUI designing and autogenning my entities like Linq for Entities on the Msquish side and again just wasn't quite getting there.

The worst part of J2E and it's always been the worst part was the long click to clunk cycle to update code on the server (forgetting JRebel and other such) and moreover the horrific exception swallowing that was going on. Instead, it was just piles of gibberish exceptions with nothing you could use to resolve the problem. That violated some deep rule of coding for me and I wondered just WHO were the programmers that allowed such things to happen. J2E took the right path with J2E 5 and simplified annotations based get up quickly approach. But the deployment  model and inter-vendor issues were still rife and annoying. Sure you could go whole Oracle and do a bit better but you'd miss a lot of the exciting new stuff.

So I scrounged around. People were using Ruby on Rails EVERYWHERE I mean almost as much as PHP (CRAP!). OK PHP just isn't object oriented and while you CAN make web sites with it, I've never seen anything BIG that was maintainable for this very reason.  I looked at Ruby. But it's RUBY for chrissakes! ICK! It wasn't that I couldn't learn Ruby. But non compiled non typed languages give me the willies. And there has to be a performance hit. So then there's Grails. The java Rails for the rest of us. But when I looked at it all and the docs somehow it just seemed big and unfriendly. Not the lean MVC framework. What about Sails? Its great, but wheres the ORM tooling? and on it went.

Then at 5am one night I ran into Igor. Yes thats his name. "Here is ActiveWeb. Watch the 5 min video"  and ... there was no video.  5 minute quick tutorial to Active Web. I clicked. Nope nothing there either. grrr. So then I said OKOK I'll just look at the docs. Let's see. And the docs were ...  amazing. Amazing in that it was so simple, so brief you've never seen anything quite like it. About 12 pages on ActiveJDBC (the db orm to java stuff) and another 12 on the web framework. Each page might have another 4 to ten sections.

It wasn't the framework per se that was so inviting, but the GOALS of the framework. Igor was saying HEY why doesn't this stuff just WORK for chrissakes. Why do I have to specify out a POJO or DAO if my DB already has all that.  Granted, having every datamember to annotate with validations is useful, but you can do that in activeweb if you wish. but if you don't wish, its so much faster.

In fact, it's a strict MVC approach, but creating a Model for a new table is as simple as copying the six lines of code from another model file and then just changing the class and table name. Poof done. What? How can this be done? What if you have One to Manies?  If you want the child "many" tables included, simply refer to them using a column named Child_id and poof its included. For a many to many you do have to specify the endpoints but its just 2 lines.

The secret is that ActiveWeb has an inspection process so that each time it saves it embeds class information about the database tables directly into your models class files. Brilliant. Now yes, everyone grumbles a bit on the config of this but after an hour or two and reading you get it solved.

Now you can fly with the click to clunk being 6 seconds for code compile and inspection on a fairly large project, 5 seconds for Tomcat to recognize that theres a code change and 2 seconds for Tomcat to reload. Magic. I'll take 12 seconds over 120 seconds any time. And that was it. I could never again easily go forward on J2E.

Wait what about entities and caching that J2E supports? It's available by adding a cache annotation to your model and poof it uses Memcache. What about complex transactions? OK, here its not as robust and flexible as J2E but I wasn't building a banking application so it really wasn't necessary. And like Hibernate you can specify how agressively to load (with default being lazy loading).

One gotcha is freemarker ('so you can automate your tests of the frontend' says Igor). And really all you need to know is how to do an ifdef, how to load a partial page, and how to bring in and reference a variable. If you want to go deep into freemarker it's your business but I just use the basics. The rest is tooled around JQuery (and if need be a more robust beast like Angular or KnockoutJs).

And some of the best is the REST support and how easy it is to link up AJAX calls with all default routes.  The MVC calls follow simple naming so that by default the controllers index() method is called (you can specify/direct to others) and then that calls the template with the same name as controllermethod.

The framework supports translation and also specifying different data for dev and production and test setups.

They have support for managing links to controllers with their LinkTo keyword which also support inserting returned HTML or JSON into your page. Building a full REST controller with CRUD is fairly simple with all CRUD paths being by convention of the framework and mapping to your controller. So follow the convention, and all your REST functions just work without having to code paths anywhere. Cool!

But why FreeMarker templates. Ugh Freemarker! Igor points out that it was hard to write regression tests with JSPs and that FreeMarker made that much simpler. I'm not sure I followed WHY but ok I'll just nod and someday I'll figure out more details. Still the amount you have to use freemarker other than if then else and loading partials (of html) and iterations doesn't take very long, and if you want to go deeper that's up to you.

There is always a learning curve, but you really can wing it and just search around the groups or docs for the next piece you need. Oh and that intro video is now there along with the 5 minute getting started. It's coming along. Apparently Igor has been using this framework on many large projects so it's really a work of love and to make for him what the other frameworks should be. And I support that.

ActiveWeb and ActiveJDBC can be found at http://www.javalite.org