Social Commentary

The Foundation is Eroding

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The foundation that once made this country great is eroding…

I saw on the History Channel the other day that immediately following World War II, the United States was producing 80% of the goods in the world. At that time, our population was motivated, hard-working, and just downright productive. When our veterans returned home, they either got a job or took advantage of the GI Bill to further their knowledge.  During the 50s, 60s, and 70s, technology flourished as seemingly every able-bodied man, woman, and child focused on beating our Red enemies in the east in the Space Race. There were social upheavals, but in the midst of all that, Americans were industrious and patriotic.

The legacy of the Baby Boomers and their heightened productivity is gone. The youth today, for whom I have the responsibility of educating, have no dreams and no vision: They see only what they can easily attain today. Even if they do consider greatness, they do not consider the dedication it takes to achieve lofty goals. They don’t even realize what awesome things their grandparents (or at least their grandparents’ generation) achieved. The spirit of my personal heroes of technology, the kind of people who worked in dimly lit rooms at BB&N or Xerox PARC, is gone. The Greatest Generation embraced the tedium and hard work required to do something great, while the youth today hump up and quit if they aren’t greeted with instant satisfaction. NASA put men on the moon with slide rules, but the average student that walks through my classroom can’t even subtract two 4-digit numbers confidently without a calculator. What’s worse, when I try to teach them how, they say, “This is too hard” or “You are so mean!” So, their ineptitude, according to them, is my fault.

God forbid that today’s youth get a taste of defeat. Competition, complete with legitimate reward and failure, has been abolished in the name of self-esteem.  Now, every kid that plays gets a trophy. Why? Because we don’t want them to feel bad about themselves. Most elementary schools I know of don’t cut anybody from sports teams. Instead, they create multiple teams if there are enough kids that want to play a certain sport. Kids today have no concept of training hard and trying to make the team next year. It seems like every parent tries to convince their kid that they are worthy for sports or advanced placement, when in reality, majority of them are average (roughly 69%, if you assume that talent is normally distributed). Instead of assuring their kids that they are good at something, the youth today have been convinced their entire lives that they are good at everything! Self-esteem is great, but only if it is deserved. An overly-confident fool can wreck anything!

No Child Left Behind actually measures part of a high school’s success by graduation rates. On the surface, this seems good. In reality, though, it’s only serving to dilute an already watered down curriculum. There are only two ways to increase graduation rates: a) convince students they must work hard and do as the teachers ask them to, regardless of how difficult the task may seem or b) lower the bar so more students can jump over it. Educational administrators are choosing the latter because it’s impossible to achieve the former until parents and students are forced to accept the consequences of mediocrity. That’s hard to do when one of the consequence of failure to graduate has been removed from the equation.

I’m not saying that there aren’t brilliant young people today that are striving to do something great, however, the number of people who are pushing the envelope to make America the leader again is horribly on the decline.  There is no sense of duty. The rally call today is “Give it to me easy or don’t bother.”

And so, with no vision, no tolerance for tedium, no competition, and no consequences, the foundation of greatness has turned to mush. Most of the youth today reap the rewards of an entire generation’s hard work and contribute nothing.

Tech Tips, Web Development/Programming

Introducing Phind, a simple PHP script for finding foreign keys in MySQL tables

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For years, I have wanted a way to programatically find foreign keys in MySQL tables using PHP. After a lot of thought, I have written Phind. Phind basically consists of one function getForeignKeys() whose only parameter is the table name. If that table has foreign keys, Phind returns a multidimensional array containing an index for the key as the first index, and the part of the key as the second index.

My ultimate goal is to use Phind to create a PHP CRUD generator written entirely in PHP. That’ll probably be a long way off, though. I just don’t have time to sit down and finish something like that right now.

The source code for phind is here: Simply rename the file from phind.txt to phind.php when you save it. You can also go here to see Phind in action on a table in a database on my server named ‘contacts.’ Eventually, I will add more examples to the documentation included with the phind.php file, but for now, it’s sparse. However, I’m sure there are enough PHP guys who have been looking for a way to make sense of what foreign keys are in a table and where exactly they are pointing to.

I hope this helps somebody.

Microsoft Windows, OS X, Personal Updates

A Welcome Old Feeling

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Recently, I’ve been feeling something I haven’t felt in a really long time: A sense of excitement about technology. For the past 8 years or so, it seems as though innovation and competition in the tech industry has slowed to a trickle. Microsoft killed Netscape and left us with the dead Internet Explorer 6 code base for nearly seven years. In the wake of the ever-exciting browser wars, we’ were left with what felt like a wounded soldier with a wooden leg. Then, the wizards in Redmond heap Vista on us, which did absolutely nothing to excite me. (In fact, it lead to a great deal of screaming and renting of garments in the Smith household.) On the hardware front, Intel and NVidia thwarted the lackluster AMD/ATI combination. Sure, we got faster CPUs and GPUs out of ’em, but who cares…Speed does not equal more fun or innovation. What’s a geek to do?

Thankfully, there are plenty of reasons to celebrate these days. For the first time in a long time, nerds everywhere are buzzing about a choice of quality operating systems. Apple has done a great job continuously improving OS X, which, for my money, is very stable and user friendly at version 10.6. In the wake of Apple’s ever-improving market share in both the laptop and desktop segments, Microsoft has gotten its act together to bring us Windows 7. The interesting thing to me is that neither OS X 10.6 nor Windows 7 are revolutionary products. The improvements are small on both fronts, and at first glance, it seems as though the OS upgrades are nothing more than marketing fodder. But, in the midst of all this, it’s easy to tell that both Microsoft and Apple are seriously trying to one-up each other by making systems more stable and user friendly. In short, end users are being treated to the fruits of healthy market competition. (On top of the OSs that are here now, rumor has it Google is launching its own low-power OS soon!)

Even more exciting to me is that the browser wars are back. Thank God for Mozilla, which delivered the first stable version of Firefox in 2003 and hasn’t looked back since. Again, Microsoft had to wake up and do something. Out of this panic, we were treated to Internet Explorer versions 7 and 8, which actually do a pretty good job at following standards.  But the fun doesn’t stop there: The WebKit folks have given us Safari and provided Google with the foundation it needed to launch Chrome. What we’re left with are fast, secure, standards-compliant browsers. And, more importantly to me, we have several choices in browsing for the first time in a long time!

There’s less to be excited about on the hardware front, but notebook makers are doing a great job making specialized laptops for just about any purpose. The buzzword soup actually has a lot of differentiated products behind it: notebooks, business-class, ultra-portables, netbooks, media stations, and desktop replacements. No matter what your personality or needs, there’s probably a sweet little portable out there to suit you.

To sum up, I’m simply pumped about all this competition. If I don’t like one thing, I can jump ship to another option. Now, if we can only keep the lawyers from stifling all this…But that’s a rant for another day.

Personal Failure, Personal Updates, Physical Fitness Challenge

King-Sized Comforter on a Queen-Sized Bed

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Beck recently put a king-sized comforter on our queen-sized bed. I’ve enjoyed it greatly because now we no longer fight for the covers as there is plenty of the cheerful, pastel-colored material to go around. It occurred to me a few minutes ago that if we both could lose a few pounds (*cough* 30 or so is a few) then we could use our other comforters comfortably. It takes a heck of a lot more material to cover us than it should.

We have started walking/jogging on our treadmill. Beck’s doing a lot better than I am, though. Today, I walked at 3 mph and nearly had a stroke…It’s pathetic to be so out of shape. But I guess, my stroke-inducing steps tonight are as good a start as any toward not being so pathetic.

I’ve decided to do something rather drastic: Tomorrow morning, I’m going to weigh myself and post the results on here, and continue to do the same once I week.  Maybe public scrutiny and the fear of ridicule may motivate my fat ass to take action…Who knows, I may actually start feeling better about myself along the way, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

On a final note, I apologize to the world for letting this blog become a fat blog. But, as I’ve said a million times, the Internet is a big place and I’m sure you can avoid it if you really want ;)

Political Commentary

A Follow-Up on Obama’s Speech to America’s Students

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Now that the speech has happened, I’ll post my follow-up to my issue with the attack on President Obama for addressing the nation’s students. I didn’t get to watch the speech (since I’m at home with no choice but dial-up) but I did read the transcript.

My final thoughts are much what I said in my initial post: President Obama is doing a great thing by telling our kids that they are ultimately responsible for their own futures.

The speech, in my opinion, was pretty straight laced and to the point. I’m sure opponents will say it was too multicultural, but there’s not much anybody can say to refute these (paraphrased) points made in the speech:

  • Being successful takes hard work, which often times isn’t easy.
  • You won’t love everything you learn or study in school.
  • Most of us won’t be a pro athlete or reality TV star.
  • People in far worse circumstances than yourself have refused to give up and ultimately succeeded in life.
  • At the end of the day, what you make out of your circumstances depends on the choices you make.

I may criticize the President for numerous other things, but his telling our kids to wake up and get educated is not one of them!

Political Commentary

Obama’s Addressing Students on September 8…What’s the Big Deal?

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I found out a few days ago that President Obama is going to address the students of the United States on September 8. The Yahoo story I was looking at when I found out the news quoted several people who are outraged. Among other things, they are accusing Obama of trying to brainwash the youth of the nation for some twisted purposes.

I think this attack on the President for trying to tell American students to stay in school and take every advantage they can in getting their education is ridiculous. I’m not a fan of President Obama. For the most part, he’s a snake oil salesman who’s good at giving speeches and making promises. But, in the interest of fairness, I think it’s a good thing he’s actually trying to get our kids to do better in school. I teach high school students, and I really, really worry about this country’s education system. From my daily observations, it’s pretty clear that functional literacy is on the decline. Furthermore, the liberal arts educational ideas popularized in the 1920s that aim to make every educated person have some awareness in several subjects have all but disappeared. My students see no point in knowledge they feel they will never use, and as a result, most have no zeal for knowledge. This lack of zeal is what’s wrong with the country: Too many people want to take the easy route while too few are pushing the envelope in newfangled noble pursuits.

I have reviewed both the lesson plans for the pre-K to 6 grade students and the 7 to 12 grade students which have been released by the US Department of Education.  The verdict: I find no attempt to brainwash students. The only real bias I found was in two pre-speech critical thinking questions in the 7-12 grade plans:

  • How will he inspire us?
  • How will he challenge us?

This is biased because it should pose the questions, “Will [the President] inspire us? How or not?” and “Will [the President] challenge us? How or not?” That being said, it is clear that these plans are just a resource and teachers are encouraged to use and tweak them as they see fit. Aside from the biases above, the plans are solid from an educational standpoint and encourage students to recall and reflect on what the President says in the speech.

My entire opinion may change after the President gives his speech. If he goes off on some liberal tangent and tries to influence children about issues like gay marriage and abortion, then I’ll probably be really upset. I seriously doubt he’ll do this: That would be political suicide, especially considering the honeymoon is over and his approval ratings continue on a path of slow and steady decline.

As it stands right now, though, opponents of this address to students are barking up the wrong tree. I applaud any public figure with some influence who is willing to challenge our students to do something great. If someone doesn’t wake our youth up soon, there may well be no greatness left.

OS X

Here, Kitty Kitty

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So, I just installed OS X 10.6, aka Snow Leopard. So far, I feel about like everybody else: There are some neat new UI features, but it’s mostly more of the same, only a little faster.

So far, I like the icon resizing slider in the Icon view. Unlike a lot of reviews I’ve read, I think I’ll use this feature a lot. When I’m searching through a folder of pictures, I think this will make me pretty happy, since I like to be able to make the preview icons bigger without having to use Quick Look (which I’m not really a fan of….I know. Everybody else on the planet is, but not me.) Also, the new Expose view that pops up when you click and hold on something in the Dock is absolutely awesome. I never really used Expose much, since I prefer to click and hold on the icon of the program I’m really interested in to see multiple instances. Now that Expose is a function of doing this, I think it will have much more utility for me.

The reports that iLife apps run faster under 10.6 are correct as far as I’m concerned. Granted, the improvements aren’t that noticeable, but some of the pauses that were present before are gone. I’m pretty sure Apple has tweaked the Color LCD color profile. The colors on my October 2007 MacBook seem more vibrant. This could just be me, though. No one else I know has mentioned this. I stand corrected: Straight from Apple, the default gamma settings have been tweaked by +0.4, so the colors are brighter.

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