Brave New World?

The article referenced above has inspired me to post today. Why? Think about how competitive our world has become, as reference in the article.

I have always been competitive. I think it's in our human nature. I also support competitiveness. I believe that it can inspire others to also strive to be their best. It started with sports in my younger years, but now it's in business and programming. I want to develop the best products and offer the best service.

But I have great disgust for athletes who use performance enhancing drugs in their sport. I think if an athlete is found to have been using drugs at all that their records should be wiped from the books. I believe that people should accomplish great things on their own.

So why should brain enhancing drugs be any different? Why should I loose out to someone who is perfectly normal by all psychiatric points of reference yet takes Ritalin to be able to focus more clearly, to retain attention and to ultimately out perform me in my job? But let's jump into the sports relation again.

Do you think that if the public did not scrutinize it so, that owners and managers of professional sports would care whether or not their athletes were doping to win games? I bet that most wouldn't. To them, for the most part in what I can see in sports today, it’s all about them winning and the monetary windfall they receive from that. If the US government had not gotten involved with baseball as they had this past year, then we would still have a lenient punishment for those who dope.

McGuire? I watched the Senate hearings, and by no means did he ever say that he had not ever used steroids. Did he learn his lesson? sure, but along the way he made millions because of it, and has his name in history. Should he? I would say no way. Why should he when most of the people he beat out those years were not doping (just an example, I am sure that there were those who were).

So, let's now take a look at Corporate America. Are we really any different? The Knowledge Athlete (as I like to call myself LOL) does not make near the money that these guys do, but generally they are some of the most highly paid and highly skilled in the company, so I'll make the relation. Generally, if they are successful then so is the company. Think about it, if you write the killer app and get it to market faster your company makes a killing off it. So why wouldn't your boss want the sharpest minds in the industry working for them, doped or not? But is it right?

If I as a computer scientist can achieve more by taking a mind enhancing drug, then why wouldn't I. There is benefit from it, both directory and indirectly. Directly because I achieve more in my career, and indirectly because I can develop the killer app that man kind may benefit from. But should I?

Did Einstein? Did Packard? Did Jobs? I don't know, did Jobs? Anyone know? Maybe he did. :)

My point is that if we feel as a society that is is wrong for it to happen in sports, then why would allow it in our every day life? If we want to be better humans then it should be up to our guts, glory, drive, passion, dedication and will... Not the drug of the week.

New Laptop!

I got a new Compaq nx9600 from my employer this week. Of course they were thinking that if they got me a laptop then I wouldn't have to work the 80 hours I put in each week, right? :).

It's the single most robust development computer I have worked on. It has 2 3.4 Ghz P4. 1 GB RAM, 80 GB HD. DVD Burner. Firewire, built in 802.11g, S Video, 4 USB ports, 100 MB Ethernet, modem (like I'll ever use that) and a media drive (something that is super cool[SD, MS/Pro, MMC, SM, XD]), and a USB external drive bay. Ohyeah, it also has a 17" widescreen super-rez screen and an ATI Mobility Radion X600 128 MB graphics engine.

I have also been working on a new Agent Scripting subsystem. It's really pretty slick, conceived by the president of my company and myself. We are using pure XML documents that represent a script and several different flows that act as a Rules Engine. We are passing xml back and fourth via a webservice (in a farm), which acts as a gateway to rendering engines. The rendering engines take care of converting the XML into what ever UI it needs to (in our case it will be an ASPX page, but we also have a client doing Terminal Screen emulation).

Another cool feather we are implimenting is an XML based "solid state" service. Basically, the scripts will stay cached on each server. When a request comes in we check to see if the key sent back with the request matches the one for that user in the local cache. If the key is different, or missing in cache, then we attempt to load the XML file from the filesystem. As the request is ending and generating the XML for the response to the user, we generate a new key and place it in with the XML and then write the session data back as an XML file to the file system. There's an internal thread running on each server that is using a FileSystemWatcher, watching the session state folder. While the call is in progress then the session filename is the sessionid.TMP. When the call is complete, or timesout, then we change it to .DAT, which another process picks up and shoves into a database logging table. The FileSystemWatcher then cleans up all of it's objects for that session, making each server self healing.

I really wanted to use the EE Caching Application Block, but I could not find any good examples of using it to span/sync cache objects across servers. Kindof dissapointing.

Another use that we are looking into is a web based survey system. It has all the plumbing that would make it work.

At some later point we are going to write a UI designer that will render the XML.

Happy 4th!