Thoughts on Dune's banning of computers

I just finished Frank Herbert's Dune. I've previously seen the Sci-Fi 2000 mini-series and their 2003 Sequel, Children of Dune. I recommend to any Dune newcomers, read the books first, then watch the movies. The novels paint a world in Tolkien level detail, and no movie can ever do it full justice.

The ecological undertones and melange as an allegory to oil are somewhat obvious. The feudalism/corporatism type government of the known universe seems like what would occur in a situation where you had a large expanse of people, and the transaction costs of government were high. I'm sure much was written about these things. I'm sure one day I will read some of them and even write something about such things. What interests me most is the lack of AI, and computers in general.

One could react several ways to the outlaw of computers in the Dune universe. One could simply state that Frank Herbert was entirely wrong about the computer thing, despite being so right about the oil thing. You could also say it will take a long time for AI to get to the point that our leaders must declare "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind." One could also state that Frank Herbert's miscalculation was predicting how useful computers could be without any reasoning skills, and their role as communication devices.

I'm sure that Herbert was questioned on the AI questions. He published Dune in 1965 and died in 1986. So one would think I should have done a bit of research before publishing this article. However, I want to continue this line of thought without an "authoritative" answer a bit more. I'll try to write more about it though. after some research.

Steinbeck Reference in Transformers The Movie

I'm not referring to the Michael Bay film, which I do like. I am referring to the 1986 feature length animated film starring Judd Nelson, Leonard Nimoy, Peter Cullen and Orsen Welles, who died before the movie was finished.

In this movie the following dialog occurs between Grimlock, and Kup:

Grimlock: Tell Grimlock about petro-rabbits again.
Kup: I'll give you petro-rabbits.

This is obviously a reference to Lenny, the retarded brute from Of Mice and Men who often asked George to "Tell him about the rabbits." Grimlock, and the rest of the dinobots are, like Lenny, mentally lacking brutes.

I've seen this film over a dozen times, and I've both read Steinbeck's book and seen the movie adaptation that has made the line famous. I never noticed this until this past weekend.

Life without a Wallet

I have a George Costanza wallet that my friend is currently in possession of. I went to a party a few weeks ago. He drove and I placed it in his glove compartment. I forgot about it and have yet to retrieve it.

I kept my debit card, New York State drivers license and cash in my pocket when I went to this party. Hence why I have not rushed back to get my wallet. I have no immediate need for the contents of the wallet. If I need to go to a doctor, I can have him fax my insurance card.

One day I will reclaim my wallet. For now I live without it. 

And for the record, I keep it in my front left pocket. It balances out the weight from the three key chains in my right pocket. Some of the keys in my right pocket used to open doors of buildings that have been demolished.

Process Hacker: Thoroughly Awesome TaskMan.exe replacement

Process Hacker is a thoroughly awesome task manager replacement.

I have nominated it for a sourceforge community choice award. You should too.

Open source PDF utilities for Windows

Adobe's PDF format is the de-facto standard for printable read only document exchange. Adobe has added some new features to the format recently. As a result, Acrobat and Acrobat Reader, both currently at version 9, have become somewhat bloated as it has picked up these features.

That's not to say these features have no merit. My employer uses the electronic signature and form features of Acrobat for their ISO Quality Management process. And while the main feature of Acrobat is the ability to "print" any document to a PDF file, You can certainly do a lot of manipulation of acrobat files such as marging and adding form fields.

However, outside of work, I just need to be able to view PDFs and "print" documents to PDF format. I'd also like to avoid the bloat of Acrobat Reader 9. I do so via two open source utilities.

The first utility is Sumtra PDF Reader. This is an open source windows app that makes use of several open source libraries to view and print PDFs. Its very simple and light weight. It just works.

The second is PDFCreator. This is a PDF print driver. It allows you to save any document you can print to a PDF or email the PDF directly. Their is also a network feature I have not experimented with. I'm not sure the benefit of a network PDF generator. Perhaps its intended for rendering large documents. PDFCreator also exposes a COM interface for making PDFs programatically. I have not experimented with this, but it apparently comes with samples.

My only grip with PDFCreator is that it attempts to install a toolbar on Internet Explorer and FireFox. Its pretty explicit about letting you know you want to do this, and Acrobat Distiller 6.0 does the same thing. I can only assume Acrobat 9 Standard and Pro do the same.

WinCalendarTime, customize your windows clock

Have you ever said to yourself, "If only I could display the date as well as time in the windows task bar without making it take up more than one row?" Well I used to, until I discovered WinCalendarTime a few months ago. Its a simple windows C program that allows you to format the time display your windows desktop. You can chose to hide either the date or the time and there are three date formats. You can also display seconds of the minute. Unfortunately, it does not allow me to display the date in ISO format (e.g. 2009-04-18 23:34) . One day I might write a patch for that.

Education Views: Homogenity versus Heterogeneity of screwing kids up

I'll admit, its a rather wordy and pompous title, even by my standards. However I can't think of anything catchier.

I was discussing education with a coworker, and we had a disagreement over whether the federal government should have a role in it. He was all for a nationally dictated minimal curriculum. I, of course want to abolish the federal department of education and leave it as a state issue. Long term I'd like to abolish all the public schools, but the private and charitable infrastructure is not available to deal with such a radical move at the moment.

As we talked, it became apparent that similar motives and opposite views were driving us to our opposing stances. He didn't trust the state governments of other states to provide good education. I don't trust the federal government, or any of the state governments to handle education. In both cases, the concern was not for our kids (the kids he has now, and kids I might someday have), but for other kids.

The heart of his argument is that the federal government would do a good job of not screwing up kids too much. It would prevent some states from teaching Creationism. It would set reasonable achievement levels for reading and math. Individual states could hold their students to higher standards if they wanted.

The heart of my argument is any education gets something wrong. Rather than have a nation of people all with the same incorrect views on some topic, lets take steps to ensure that everyone is wrong about different things. In other words, if everyone is screwed up differently, market forces will weed out the incorrect ideas quicker.