Enigmastation.com

Recently, a fellow I know on Facebook mentioned unfriending someone (for very good reasons), and it got me thinking a little more on the rules on how I use the site. I find that I have four fairly simple rules. Rule #1: Add People I Might Respect as Friends I add people who I think [...]

I find I have a difficult relationship with [Facebook](https://wwwfacebookcom/josephottinger) I think Facebook has a lot of potential value, but with so many people using it so differently, it ends up taking almost as much as it gives. It not only gives me a neutral environment to interact with friends from my distant past – people from middle school whom I still remember fondly! It’s given me a chance to see old friends’ lives – as their careers and their children mature. It’s given me a chance to vicariously participate in the things that matter to them – graduations, successes, failures. I’ve had closure for things from years and years ago – conversations with people who had tried to bully me, whether ignorantly or not. It’s given us a chance to see each other as people, actual adults, as opposed to the caricatures created by first impressions of strangers. Facebook is excellent at fostering light connections, but such connections do a poor job of representing actual *people* – including me. On Facebook, an offhand statement, meant mildly and in context, appears as a core belief, a statement I am willing to defend to the death and because of the nature of first impressions, no amount of context changes that impression. Incidentally, I think libertarians who advocate anarchy are wrong, although I do think a society composed *solely* of people with decent rational self-interest could exist and prosper in pure anarchy. But Facebook readers *tend* to not recognize that continuum and its potential for growth and refinement. ) But at the same time, in America we advocate innocence until guilt is proven – and Facebook ignores the potential innocence. I’m tempted to filter Facebook quite a bit – spend a few days looking at who posts most often on my feed, and what they post.

In a world where Donald Trump has a semi-realistic chance at the Presidency… I figure that he, and his supporters, are all the fools we need. Happy April, folks.

I’ve recently put together a new Maven archetype, based on something I saw in Freenode’s ##java channel a few weeks ago. Basically, someone had built their own archetype for “standard projects,” with a few sensible dependencies and defaults, and while I thought it was a worthwhile effort, it didn’t fit what I found myself typically [...]

Right now, it looks like Donald Trump is going to be the Republican nominee for President of the United States. This will have the effect of punting the Presidency straight into the Democratic Party, even if they nominate Hillary Clinton – who is, for better or for worse, one of the less likable candidates they’ve [...]

Grappa is a parser library for Java. It’s a fork of Parboiled, which focuses more on Scala as a development environment; Grappa tries to feel more Java-like than Parboiled does. Grappa’s similar in focus to other libraries like ANTLR and JavaCC; the main advantage to using something like Grappa instead of ANTLR is in the [...]

One of the things I’ve been carrying around with me for years is the concept I call “teams” — like, how I more or less rank my peers. It’s sort of an evaluation tool. I don’t tell people where they are in my rankings, because some people might feel that they should be ranked higher [...]

Back in November, I noticed that I was getting a lot of MySQL crashes, with MySQL’s logs saying that it had a log sequence error. It was actually MariaDB, the community-managed version of MySQL (as opposed to Oracle’s “MySQL proper“), but for all intents and purposes, it was MySQL. I tried everything I could think [...]

I started playing with Meteor – a Node.js and MongoDB framework – last week as a toy app to help some friends, and it is actually really nice. I don’t know yet how serious it is – I’ve only got maybe five hours playing with it – but one thing it has over almost every [...]