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Everyone knows that I love coffee… but that’s not the kind of Java that i’ve been into recently. I’ve been doing alot of reading and some experimentation in Java programming. I can see some of my friends and C-enthusiasts cringing behind their keyboards right now. Two projects that i’ve been really interested in are Jmonkey and Project Darkstar. They might give you a hint about what I’ve got floating in my head this holiday season.

I was reading skudd’s blog today and he mentioned a music service called pandora. It uses the “The Music Genome Project” to classify music mathematically based on over 400 attributes. It is very interesting and I’ve never heard of it before his post (yes, I live under a rock). Now it has become my primary means of listening to good music. I just type in a few artists that I enjoy and it automagically creates a line up of similar music. This is an excellent way to get exposed to new music.

I’ve created this easy listening station that I have been listening to. Enjoy the service and let me know if you share my taste in music or even share a station that you’ve created.

For the last few days I have become submerged in another world. I have been playing World of Warcraft pretty frequently. As a rule I am a cheap person… maybe frugal is a better word and this frugality has kept me out of the Warcraft experience. Now however I have found a decent private server for WoW and so I’ve decided to give it a try. So if you game but won’t sign up for that monthly fee download the official client and sign up on Inner-Realm. Make sure that you follow the installation instructions on Inner-Realm (the client must be 3.0.9).

Give me a shout if you do. I play a dwarf hunter named Meagher.

I don’t know if you’ve read the recent discussion about the ethical implications of “Designer Babies” ( cbs story here ). If you haven’t it is really interesting and for me it is eye-opening to see how far we are getting with technology. This technology does beg the question on whether it would be ethical for the Christian. Is there anything in scripture that prohibits the use of this technology?

On what authority does man exercise control over his natural environment? God has given man dominion over the world since the beginning (Gen. 1:28 – 30). This is especially asserted in Psalm 8:6:

You made him ruler over the works of your hands; you put everything under his feet

So it is with authority that man can change the physical world. It is with the authority that man does research into genetics, even if it involves embryo research. The stronger religious objection results from the idea that a person is a person at the moment of conception. That life begins at the moment of conception is inferred from Psalm 51:5 and Jeremiah 1:5.

Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me.
…
Before I formed you in the womb I knew you.

The problem here is that scripture does not assert that every embryo is human. If you read Jeremiah then it is clear that God knew us before we were formed in the womb. According to scripture, human life is identified as something other than this human body and our existence in time is eternal but our state in time is changing and subjective. As a Christian I know that even if I die and my body deteriorates I will still be human and I will still be alive.

I do not believe that equating human life with an embryo is sound hermeneutics nor sound reasoning. While it is true to say that all humans were once embryo’s I do not see any evidence to support the assertion that all embryos are or will become human. On the contrary, it is not the human form that makes us human and gives us life but it is the breath of God (Gen. 2:5, Eze 37:5, Acts 17:25). Consider especially that we will soon have the knowledge and ability to grow our own embryo’s from non-embryonic stem cells. We will soon have the technology to create a full human body. Will we consider our creation human?

So we see what Scripture does not positively assert. Let us look in the other direction. Scripture positively asserts that God is Omnipotent and Omniscient. It also asserts that he is unchanging and completely good.

Is it evil to create a human only to allow it to be destroyed in the embryonic stage? Are miscarriages evil? Are abortions evil? If you accept that in each of these instances the victim is human then yes. But this position forces us to call into question God’s culpability. He allowed a human into that situation. He knew that innocent baby, not even fully formed was going to be destroyed. Even if you do not allow for human intention (an unintentional miscarriage) this idea still seems to offend my conscience.

Indeed, even David was held accountable for murder when he allowed his soldier to be in a situation where his death was inevitable. Shall we charge God with Murder? This whole perplexity is side-stepped if you take the simpler position that scripture does and assert that human life is something other than an embryo. If you take the other position, that human life begins with every embryo, then you have a lot to work out.

So, with the belief that a human being cannot be defined as any part of the human body, embryo or otherwise and that man has a divine-given authority to exercise dominion over creation I do not see how this could be declared unethical for a Christian. It may offend our western familial senses but I do not think that it is immoral.

When i purchased my aspire one i purchased the Windows XP Version. After using it a bit i decided to download the linpus linux and install it on my laptop. I had the restore discs for my laptop so i figured if I got tired of windows XP then i could just bootstrap the discs onto a usb drive (I don’t own an external CD/DVD) and reinstall. This weekend I found out how bad that assumption was.

I decided to reinstall windows on my machine because I wanted to continue coding when and if i go on a brief trip. My projects are exclusively for windows as they are usually used at work or given to someone else to solve a problem they are having. I enjoy seeing my code used. This isn’t possible with linux. I loved the Linpus distro. It was fast, expandable and uniquely adapted to my little netbook but i couldn’t continue my hobby coding on it so it had to go.

Anyways, to the point. I spent all weekend trying to restore this thing with the restore discs. When I was finally able to bootstrap the Restore CD (a Vista based PRE) it just wouldn’t offer the restore option and only allowed me to exit. At that point I almost broke down and bought an external DVD/RW drive. Instead I stepped back and looked at the imaging technology used by Acer’s eRecovery program… imagex.

Restoring from imagex is a breeze. It is well documented and Acer provides all of the tools you need. get the copy of imagex off of the recovery cd: \PATCH\TOOLS and get your image off of the windows XP CD: \IMAGES *.SWM and you are good to go.

What i did was boot into my acer using ERD Commander from a thumb drive and then opened up the command prompt to build the wim image and then restore that to the built in SSD.

imagex /ref *.swm /export POP01021P2EN3C21.SWM 1 d:\acer.wim "aspire"
imagex /apply e:\acer.wim 1 c:\

of course i had to fix the master boot record with mbrfix (a sweet replacement utility for the recovery console’s fixmbr tool) and then I had to mark the partition as active (using ERD’s disc manager). I can honestly say that I have never been so happy restoring windows. Really.

Well, as promised I’m back with some more in-depth technical musings on Windows 7. Now that I’ve had a few days to get acclimated with the new operating system I’d like to share the details with you so that you know what you have to look forward to.

Once your system is loaded you are sure to notice the enhanced taskbar. The new Windows 7 Taskbar features interactive thumbnails and preview windows for minimized applications. Progress is shown directly on the Taskbar so you don’t need to restore the minimized window to see that your application is working. The Taskbar also has a preview feature that allows you to preview the window on the desktop. It has a much smoother almost Mac OS design and feel to it, so it has the cool factor working in its favor also.

Jump Lists are another new feature of the redesigned taskbar. These lists serve as frequently used functions for the program in your task list. For example, if you look at the Jump Lists for your favorite word editor you are likely to see a list of recently opened documents or if you examine explorer’s Jump List you will find a list of frequently opened locations.

Vista users might notice a change in the UAC in Windows 7.  It UAC seems far less annoying and provides more visual clues (it dims your desktop when prompting for your input). Windows also has an improved privilege model. Even if you are a user of the Administrator Group most tasks are run with regular user privileges (even with UAC turned all the way down). The Action Center also helps you maintain performance on your computer by gathering all system notices into one place.

As I noted in my previous post, you will experience better performance over all with Windows 7. One of the reasons for this is that the Service Control Manager can now start and stop services based on specific system events or triggers. Now, when you are not using a service, it won’t take up resources. This helps speed up load time as the SCM has less to start up when your system loads. 

Improved graphics are another reason for better performance. Aside from the introduction of WARP10 they’ve also increased the video pipeline, introduced better DirectX / GDI Functionality and added new DVXA Video Processing capabilities (for HD Video Formats). Videos look crisper in Windows Media Player when compared to other media players that I’ve used on the platform (VLC).

As Windows 7 have been built for the immediate future we see that Microsoft is on the way toward dropping the mouse and keyboard as the primary input method in favor of multi-touch devices. This isn’t suprising given the success of the iptouch and this new direction and shift is one of the reasons I think for the immediacy of the Windows 7 release. Microsoft must launch a system geared toward multi-touch and Windows 7 is it. Even without this capability you will see the effects of this new direction. Bring a window to the top of the screen and it maximizes, bring it to the side of the screen and it prepares it for side-by-side comparison. I find the prospect of having a multi-touch computing in the immediate future is really exciting.

That about rounds up the features I’ve noticed on Windows 7. Here are some other things to look forward to as it continues to develop and come out of beta.

• Focus on devices (the Device Experience Platform).
• Focus on distributed computing (Federated Search and Windows Web Services).
• Support for Open Packaging conventions (Office Open XML File Formats).
• Gadgets on the desktop (the Sidebar is gone but Gadgets remain).
• Powershell 2 by default.

If you’re interested in a more in depth look at the operating system, check out this interview with Mark Russinovich ‘Inside Windows 7′ on Channel9.

Well, I downloaded Windows 7 ealier today just to give it a test run and I must say that I am impressed so far. Setup was remarkably smooth and I’ve not had any issues. It also comes off as a little more perky when compared to Vista or even XP; reminiscent of Windows 2000. My test box (which I also development on) is a Dual Core 3.4GHz P4 with 1.5 GB of RAM so I deserve some if this perkiness. As with most programs I’ve tried, Chromium (Version 1.0.156.0) runs just fine.

I’ll be posting some more in-depth technical musings on Windows 7 in the future i’m sure but for now I can only say that I like it. I also think if you haven’t upgraded to Vista yet I would wait until you can upgrade to Windows 7. Treat Vista like most treated ME and pretend it didn’t exist.

You can download Windows 7 Beta here.