Garbage In, Garbage Out

I just put up on my alvigra.com website the first reasonably useful beta of Alvigra. This is the first release I’ve extensively tested and debugged, and it actually seems to be working pretty well. Unfortunately, the user interface is still pretty rough and users will have to figure out how to use it on their own. Also, all it does so far is simplify expressions (no solving or graphing yet). Still, it definitely has its uses and it can now solve somewhere around half of the problems in my “Algebra Workbook for Dummies” book that I’ve been using for testing.

Anyway, if you’re interested in such stuff, go check it out. If you want to know what Alvigra can’t do yet but what I hope it will do some day, check out my Alvigra To Do List

This morning I broke the two hundred pound barrier again. Oddly enough, the last time I did this was about a year ago at this same time of year. Maybe October just happens to be an easy time to lose weight - after the summer doldrums and before the dreaded holiday temptations.

Anyway, last time I broke the two century barrier I think I stayed below 200 pounds for about 5 minutes. This time my goal is to make it below 190 before my next birthday. Since I was born in early February, that means I need to lose about a pound a week to make my goal (with a few weeks slack available for backsliding).

I’m interested to see if having a goal will actually be a better weight loss strategy than my usual “let’s try to eat right most of the time and exercise and we’ll see what happens” strategy.

I’ve changed the name of Algebra Explorer to Alvigra (ALgebra VIsualization and GRaphing tool). I wanted to call it Alvi, which sounds like a furry Disney character thereby making it kind of cutesy and easy to remember, but alvi.com was already taken by some incredibly lame website that does nothing useful other than redirecting people to a bunch of other really lame commercial websites. So, Alvigra it is. Yes, Alvigra sounds a little bit like Viagra - I don’t know if that’s going to be a help or a hindrance. Maybe it will help with marketing to the older male math teachers.

Anyway, I now have an alvigra.com website and I put my latest release up on it. Alvigra can now display fractions and can do a little (teeny tiny) bit if fraction simplification, but I have a lot of room to improve in that area. Also, the user interface is pretty sucky and display and animation options are pretty much non-existent - but at least it displays equations and animations pretty much the way I want them displayed.

Now that most of the basic parts are in place, I’m going to try to spend the next couple of weeks or so trying to make Alvigra a pretty decent tool for simplifying basic algebraic expressions. That means filling in a lot of holes in the math processing and then doing a lot of testing and then filling in even more holes. However, once I get all that done, Alvigra will actually qualify as a pretty useful tool as is - even if it only functions in a pretty limited area.

Then after I have Alvigra working reasonably well as an algebraic simplifier I’ll add in solving for variables and then (maybe in early January) put in some simple graphing.

Pretty exciting, eh? Well, anyway, it kind of is for me at least.

Yea me…

I just put the second pre-pre-test-release of Algebra Explorer up on my website.

It’s still does just a small fraction of what I hope it will do eventually, but what it can do is starting to become a little more meaningful. That is, it’s actually sophisticated enough now to help someone do a homework assignment or demonstrate a problem in a lesson (but only if it’s on a very early chapter in Algebra I). If you want to see what I mean, open up Algebra Explorer and try entering something like “(x+1)(x-1)” and select “execute/simplify” and you’ll see what it can do.

Anyway, the next thing I want to add to Algebra Explorer is the ability to handle division. This is going to require some serious work on the GUI in order to show “x +1 over y - 1″ the way you would on a white board (as opposed to showing it as “(x+1)/(y-1)” - which is how people typed in equations on computers 20 years ago). Then I need to add in all the logic to simplify fractions, find common denominators, etc.

The next release is going to take a while.

Anyway, I think I’ll take a little break and catch up on some other work - maybe post about something besides programming for once.

Roughly 3 years ago I predicted that Sacramento home prices had probably reached their peak and would probably soon start declining. Well, little did I know how big the crash would be.

If you want a good look at what Sacramento real estate prices have done in the last 20 years, check out this graph.

Holy Crap!!

I thought prices would drop maybe 10 or 20 percent, not 44 percent. But then I also didn’t realize that before the crash of 2005 the median home price had tripled (!!!) in less than 9 years.

What I don’t understand is why the “wise old men” who were financing all these mortgages couldn’t see what a total clusterf*%# this was going to be. Offering zero percent down loans on houses that sold for one third the asking price less than a decade ago - how grossly incompetent does a banker have to be to do that?

There are probably some people who should go to jail for this.

This is what I think the government should do about the current financial crisis instead of spending 700 billion dollars to buy bad loans from poorly managed mortgage companies:

1. Give every taxpaying, mortgage paying homeowner $3000. Only instead of sending the taxpayers a check directly, send the money to their mortgage company to pay down principal on their home loan.
2. Just in the name of fairness, give taxpayers who don’t owe a mortgage a $1500 check that they can spend however they want.
3. Anyone who has recently defaulted on a loan won’t receive any money. Instead, the company that holds the defaulted loan will get $3000 to help pay down their losses.

This way the taxpayers who are funding the bailout will receive the primary benefit because their mortgage debts will go down. This will also make it less likely for them to default on their loans because they won’t be quite so far underwater, and if they do default on their loan the bank won’t lose quite so much money. Also, the banks will receive hundreds of billions of dollars in immediate cash which will help their liquidity position, and those banks that hold a lot of defaulted loans will get money to offset some of their losses. Finally, people who don’t have a home loan will have cash in hand which they will probably spend fairly quickly thereby boosting the economy.

In the end, this won’t really make taxpayers any richer, because they will eventually have to finance their own payout through taxes. However, at least it could potentially avert this whole crisis in a reasonably fair manner rather than paying a bunch of money to the companies that got us in this mess in the first place.

I’ve uploaded to my website a very early prototype of the programming project I’ve been working on for the past couple of months. This is the project I plan to spend most of my “work time” on up until maybe July of next year - then once next summer gets close I hope to use it as an example of my skills to help me land a new job.

I won’t try to explain the project here because I’ve already done that on my Algebra Explorer web page. So click on the link, have a look, and maybe see if it will run on your machine (it runs in a “Java sandbox” and it should only take one click to get it started if you have Java installed - which most people already have because your browser uses it).

Progress has been kind of slow, but I think I have a pretty good start on some of the hard stuff (mainly the user interface). Now I plan to take a break from GUI stuff and work on some things that are more directly under my control. User Interface programming is the absolute worst - especially when you are trying to do an interface that is some ways outside the norm. I’m still not totally happy with how some of the components in my program are aligned and sized, but I felt like if I kept fussing with it I would go completely buggy.

Anyway, check it out.

Two people (okay, two very rich people) reaching for a little moment of joy in their lives:

Apparently we’ve got to put a stop to that sort of thing. Their happiness imperils our sanctity or some such.

Yeah, whatever.

I think one of the most difficult tasks I do on a semi-regular basis is pick out a book at the bookstore.

It takes several hours at least to finish a good sized book, so picking out a book isn’t a commitment to be taken lightly. Plus since I only have time to finish a few books each year, I don’t want to miss out on a book that I would really, truly love, that I would cherish forever and that might change my view of the world, just because I spent the time reading something that was just - meh, whatever…

Therefore I want every new book I purchase to be just the right book.

It should have drama and depth so it keeps me absorbed, but not be too depressing or heavy so I dread picking it up again each time I take a break. I want it to have clever language and characters that are interesting and multi-dimensional, like the critically acclaimed stuff in the “literature” aisles. Unfortunately, I also like the escapism of stories that are at least a bit fantastical - although I’m bored out of my mind with the same old poorly written retreads of Tolkien that you find in the fantasy and science fiction aisles.

In the past I’ve found a handful of authors that have met all my criteria for both literary quality and entertaining escapism (Jonathan Stroud, Gregory Maguire, Neil Gaiman, to name a few of my favorites), but it seems like the best authors only write one or two books a year at most, and waiting for their next work can be excruciating. George R.R. Martin has only completed 4 books in his extremely well written (and huge) fantasy epic in the last 12 years. In other words, I’ve spent a fourth of my life waiting for him to finish one damn story!

Then there are the authors that I fell in love with that have for one reason or another broken my heart. Phillip Pullman wrote one of the best fantasy trilogies ever (”The Golden Compass”, etc) then seemed to drop off the face of the Earth; Douglas Adams died right when he was finding a voice beyond his “Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy” series; and Stephen King just plain got bad. Not to mention the authors that I liked well enough at the time, but I got kind of bored with what they had to say - like just about any author in the science fiction genre (I started on that aisle in the bookstore when I was around 11 years old, and after a decade or two I’d pretty much been there, done that).

So every so often I make a pilgrimage to my nearby Barnes and Noble, hoping to find my next literary guru to follow. Sometimes I’ll expand my horizons a bit beyond my usual fare and find something surprisingly enjoyable - like the entertaining and surprisingly clever office novel “Then We Came to the End” by Joshua Ferris, or Diablo Cody’s funny and gritty book “Candy Girl” about the year she spent as a stripper before she wrote the Oscar winning screenplay for “Juno.” And sometimes I get overly ambitious and pick up something I doubt I will ever finish (does anyone actually read an entire book by William Faulkner - and if so, why did you put yourself through that much misery?).

Sure, picking out books is an individual journey of discovery full of twists and unexpected surprises, unique to you and no one else - but what I wouldn’t give to have just one damn shelf in the bookstore labeled “Hey You, in the khaki shorts and the juggling t-shirt. Yeah, you - the guy who looks overwhelmed and kind of lost. These are the books you want. Just start at the left end and work your way to the right.”

Damn, now that would be sweet.

I shot some more video on Friday of the Damentos (Kim did the shots with me in it). Then I used Movie Maker to edit a bunch of the shots together. The result can be viewed by clicking the link below(warning this is a 7 MB file - see below if you want to see the smaller YouTube version):

Damento Mashup Video (7 MB)

I have to say that Movie Maker was pretty intuitive to use, and since it comes with Windows Vista I didn’t have to buy anything. Maybe next time I’ll try adding some music and effects - or maybe I’ll use Linux next time.

If you have a slow connection, you might be able to download the youtube version of the video a little faster: