I love what I do Create ExperienceDesigners make it pretty. I make it work.
I care about one thing Good CodeGood code is clean, modular, and can mean the difference between two weeks maintenance and two months.
Bryan's role as part of the Toys"R"Us conversion team was that of converting Prototype-dependent scripts to jQuery, converting an include-based JSP website into one that leverages Tiles, and ensuring W3C validation throughout the site.
Maurices needed a dynamic Store Locator that could be integrated with Google Maps' API;
Bryan was happy to oblige.
Bryan set up fonts and flash, enabled CSS3, and played "fixer" for this fast launch.
He turned a glorified form into an entertaining user experience
Whether calculating your gasoline savings with a Vectrix scooter versus other vehicles, or determining how far you can go on a full charge, Bryan's code enables you.
A photographer's portfolio can be boring but Bryan's code can help it move you
Downtime happens. Diligence is the art of making sure it doesn't happen for long
Bryan's first experience with programming was in second grade. Dad had just bought their first computer, and Bryan spend months pouring over the GW Basic syntax manual, testing commands, breaking things, and wondering what a "Syntax" was.
Through middle and high schools, Bryan taught himself Turbo Pascal, game programming, Assembly Language, C, and ultimately HTML.
Since then, he has freelanced for a number of clients in the Philadelphia area, including The Wharton Scool, Abacus Studios, Sevens and Sixes, and I-SITE. At present, he is employed at TrueAction, Inc. – but is always looking for opportunities to innovate.
Obviously, HTML is just the start of WebDev. Start with a solid structure that is modular and repeatable, and your site's architecture is flexible enough for any client's needs.
Using that foundational HTML along with functional requirements and IADs, a backend can be built, using PHP, JSP, .Net, Node.JS, or if your server technology is something different, Bryan picks up new languages quickly, leveraging his exsiting knowledge of MVC architechture and OOP principles to ensure rock solid stability and optimal performance.
At this point, there may already some skeletal CSS going on, just to get a feel for interaction, but once the comps come in from the designers, the site will quickly start looking like it's intended – even in early browsers. One thing that Bryan excels at is leveraging technology - such as CSS3 PIE or the HTML5 shiv - to ensure that deprecated technology doesn't prevent your message from impacting a user.
While the stylesheets are being finalized, scripts are being written to define the site's behavior. Citing concerns with site performance and its correlation with conversion, Bryan has made it his mission, during his years in freelance, to eliminate Flash wherever it makes sense. With current techniques, Flash isn't needed for fonts, rotation, vector art, or animation. It's still required for video, but that is soon to come to an end as well.
Leveraging libraries like jQuery, Prototype, Mootools, Raphaël, and browser technologies like @font-face, Canvas, and VML, I can create "flash" on your site without a lick of Flash.
Bryan's ambitions are relatively simple. He would like to be able to architect innovative software from the ground up. While he's had this opportunity from time to time, not every project is new - and maintenance can be as challenging as development.
Past that, he would like to have a relationship with a company with clear goals, excellent management, and a developement team that is open to new ideas and technologies.
Although not widely known, nuclear power plants must shut down approximately every eighteen months to replace their fuel rods. The old fuel rods contain short-lived, low-level poisons as well as a highly toxic, radioactive material called Np-237, which has a half-life of more than two million years. Not counting nuclear facilities already on the drawing board, today we produce the “equivalent of one-hundred double-decker buses” of nuclear waste every year—waste that has to be stored somewhere.
The Watchman's Rattle, pg 42This is entirely true, if partial. There's a lot more toxic, radioactive stuff in there than Neptunium. Were we to reprocess our nuclear waste, as France does, the actinides - those elements that are heavier than Uranium - remain in the return fuel stream to be burned up. Depending on the implementation, we may even exclude Np-237.
It turns out that nuclear energy isn’t clean at all. We’re simply putting pollution into the ground instead of releasing it into the air.
The Watchman's Rattle, pg 42I'm not sure what planet you live on. See, I live on Earth, a planet that has a core heated largely by nuclear decay. But I was talking about reprocessing, wasn't I?
Chu smiled warmly and in a soft voice mentioned that if every roof and road were painted white, it would be the equivalent of taking eleven billion cars off the road for eleven years.“It’s a cheapie,” he added.Rather than build hundreds more nuclear power plants producing more radioactive waste, wouldn’t we rather paint our roofs and roads white? We could practically do it overnight, and the results would be immediate. Cars would remain cooler and use less energy. Cooler roads also mean less tire wear. The sun’s rays would be reflected rather than absorbed, so there would be an immediate temperature reduction around the globe. The demand for household air conditioning would drop 20 percent.
The Watchman's Rattle, pg 43I applaud efforts at conservation, but as you had mentioned just pages earlier:
When I show up at the local water board meetings and attempt to explain why conservation is not a permanent solution but rather a short-term mitigation, everyone’s eyes roll back in their heads. “Get rid of your grass and replace your landscaping with drought-tolerant plants,” they say.
The Watchman's Rattle, pg 17Anyway, that's as far as I had gotten before electing to weigh in. I'll continue reading, and likely comment as I see fit. I have high hopes for the book, especially if it manages to nail down what you mean by "insight" as a process beyond the symptomatic "eureka" moment.
Nuclear power in the United States has the potential to reduce our carbon production by half. First, by supplanting electricity production. Right now, nuclear power has spent the last thirty years producing about 20% of our power, and hasn't had a single radiologically induced fatality, and very few injuries as a result. There's been only one significant release of radiation, and fast action by the plant owner and the surrounding community quickly saw to it that there was little harm, if any. If we were to increase our nuclear buildout to replace our coal generation industry, we would reduce our carbon production significantly.
There are other targets for nuclear energy. One is to ape the U.S. Navy. They have been running nuclear-powered ships for the last 50 years and have not suffered a radiation release. If we were to enable a move of our commercial fleet of ships to nuclear power, in addition to the gains from electricity, the United States would get an overall carbon reduction by around half.
There is a lot of fear surrounding nuclear power. One is that of coal unions; their opposition to nuclear power is that it eats into Coal's demand budget, thus putting a lot of people out of work. While I don't think that's a convincing argument from an energy perspective, I do think it may have teeth from an economic one. This post is an attempt to provide a path to avoid such job losses.
It is true that a greater dependence on coal for energy budget will reduce the generation demand for coal. If mining companies are smart, they will quickly move into alternate areas of coal consumption.
"Clean" coal
"Clean coal technology" refers to a mix of chemical tricks - the most important one being coal gasification. This is the process of converting coal into a mix of carbon monoxide and hydrogen, called "synthesis gas", or "syngas". While this is a good substitute for natural gas - reducing the need for fracking and oil drilling - there are other uses for syngas.
Further processing via Fischer–Tropsch synthesis yields diesel fuel. You can also convert syngas to methanol - a fine stand in or filler for gasoline. Syngas can be the source for plastics production. Generally, with the demand for electricity covered by nuclear power, coal companies can concentrate on replacing oil. This may not reduce carbon production from the coal industry, but we gain energy security benefits and reduce our dependence on foreign oil. Additionally, if we're never burning coal directly, we're not pouring SOx and NOx emissions into the air. If we're mining coal more smartly, using in situ processes - which we can do if we don't need it in solid chunks - we can reduce the water pollution that goes into coal mining.
Unfortunately, this plan does not solve mountaintop removal.
Overall, there are a lot of targets for coal without being our primary production avenue for electricity. The question is: does the coal industry have the wherewithal to eat the lunch of the oil companies?
The primary benefit to consumers, of course, is that without OPEC manipulating prices, there will be a natural reduction in the cost of diesel, gasoline, and natural gas. It's been a while since they had any real competition in the market for these three fuels, and it's about time we gave it to them.
The coal industry will eventually slow to a crawl - that is inevitable - but this path enables a smooth transition while reducing our carbon output. Moving to a syngas-based economy has other migratory advantages. You can also produce syngas via carbon sequestration, Sulfur-Ioidine hydrogen synthesis, and waste heat from high-temperature nuclear plants. You can start building cars that run on electricity, using direct methanol fuel cells, and get much higher efficiencies as a result. Betavoltaics built using Strontium-90 from spent nuclear fuel (present at ~6.5% in U-233 fission, ~6% in U-235 fission, and ~2% in Pu-239 fission) can later be dropped into the same electric vehicles, only requiring a "refueling" (or overall recycling) every 30 years or so.
But replacing coal-based electric consumption and diesel shipping with nuclear power should be our first-order goal as a nation. During that time we should finish development on LFTR and the IFR, so they can be deployed on greater scales.
I've never understood why the mind-body dichotomy is considered coherent.
The mind body dichotomy, quickly stated, is the idea that there is a nonphyiscal phenomena, called the mind, whose attributes and behavior are distinct from the body. A practical consequence on, say, a doctor is that he must determine whether a cause is physical or mental.
I suppose it all comes down to definitions - i never saw the mind as much more than software running on the brain, with the body as a host of attached peripherals. I'd built up this model long before I'd read anything about the MBD, and immediately thought, "why is it a dichotomy? The mind is the behavior of the brain. if it's mental, it's also physical. I can understand how that's a little unhelpful, but it's no big mystery."
What I find even a bit immature is this: the body, while distinct from the brain, is intimately integrated with the models the mind generates to interact with the world. that means that, fundametally, the mind _is_ the body - at least, in part.
so i suppose I'm taking issue with the word 'dichotomy'. the practical problem still stands - does a doctor treat the physical aspect, orr the mental?
since the two are intimately tied, I think the answer must be "both". a physical issue may have mental repercussions, and a mental issue can cause real physical problems.
for the former, think of amputees with phantom limbs. for the latter, consider someone who has phantom back pain, causing rsi's on his major joints from comensating for his pain.
in both cases, it's incumbent on a doctor to clear away the symptoms as best as he can before focusing on the real causes - it's best to have as much of the bullshit out of the way when getting down to business.
still, the concept of the mind is a tricky one, but i believe i can describe a theroetical emergence in a plausible manner:
the mind started out as a simple decision maker. this was the fish brain. all it could do is figure out: eat, kill, both, or run.
as we grew more complex, so did the mind. new featues included goal searching ("i'm hungry; let me look for one of those things that made me less hungry before"), prediction ("that thing over there looks as though it could eat me; i'd better stay clear"), agent detection, ("that odd shadowy thing over there could be a predator"), and feedback ("hey, here's a scenero that i've formed with my predictive models; what do you think?")
i believe that between feedback, predictivity, and agent detection, we form the basis for what we internally experience as 'mind'.
but i'm probably just imagining it ^_^
I wanted to help out Suzie Hobbs at PopAtomic get nice open-sourcable images for her 'rocks' campaign. So... uh... here ^_^.
Thumbnails are images, links are in SVG format. If you're using a browser that doesn't suck, you'll be able to view them natively. They're Suzie's stuff, so respect her authoritay.
Additionally, I created a couple of my own inventions in similar veins. They are protected by Creative Commons.
Blueberry Pancakes recipe, engineer style, made for 3"x5" card, in raw HTML:
| Blueberry Pancakes | ||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Electric or stovetop griddle | 1/2 tb unslt butter | 1 c AP flour | 1 t baking powder | 1/2 t baking soda | 1/4 t kosher salt | 4 t sugar | 1 lightly beaten egg | 1 1/2 c buttermilk | 2 tb melted sweet butter | 1/2 c blueberries |
| Preheat griddle to 375°F, or over medium-high heat | ||||||||||
| Whisk together in medium bowl | ||||||||||
| Whisk just to combine. Do not overmix. | ||||||||||
| Sprinkle water, if the droplets bounce, it's ready. | ||||||||||
| Brush butter onto hot griddle. | ||||||||||
| Pour batter onto griddle, 4oz drops, 2" apart | ||||||||||
| Drop blueberries in cooking batter | ||||||||||
| Cook for 1 minute, or until underside is golden brown | ||||||||||
| Flip and repeat | ||||||||||
Adapted from Smitten Kitchen's Pancakes 101
Concept shamelessly stolen from Cooking for Engineers
Added a neat little trick to the site: Now, when you come here having searched from Google, the site automagically notices and calls out the words you were searching for within its content.
Simple trick, I know. I'm going to add similar functionality for other engines soon; this was just a proof of concept. Anyway, test it out; search for "Code Monkey Bryan" on google and check the call-outs.
I also added support for my Twitter status to be in the nav bar area of the About section.
Lastly, I migrated the blog to Blogger, with the site being populated by its RSS feed. Saves me the trouble of actually implementing a blog.
Meanwhile, I still have to break off the time to improve IE support. It's presently not there.
I've finally gotten around to building my portfolio site. It's only been seven years.
A chronic problem, I think with developers, is that we don't usually think that a portfolio site is necessary - and this is probably true. I think, however, that if on my next interview, this site is visible and available, I will be far more likely to be asked, "What was your role in Project X", rather than, "What projects have you worked on?"
I find the former to be an easier question to address, as it's a specific description of things I like to do, rather than a nebulous inquiry into the haze of past accomplishments.