I guess I owe Apple an apolology… I learned that Chrome is based on the WebKit framework, which is an Apple project that is open standard to all developers.  Chrome actually removed some of the extra cool effects that Apple included so that it would be a more lightweight web browser.  Safari was the slowest browser on my old computer which had a 32-bit Windows (Vista) operating system running on a 1.2 GHz CPU with only 2 GB of RAM.  Now, I have a 64-bit Mac OS X Snow Leopard operating system running on a 2.4 GHz CPU with 4 GB of RAM.  Safari opens to my “Top Sites” well within 2 seconds… and that’s from a cold start!

Another thing I’d just like to throw out there: I’ve been using iPhone 4 for a while now, and I have not had any problems whatsoever with reception or “Antennagap” (or whatever the sue-happy people are calling it).  I actually get better reception now than I did with my iPhone 3G.  Bottom-line, the iPhone 4 is a vastly superior smartphone in my opinion.

I must say that I am very pleased with what Apple has been doing recently: the iPad, iPhone 4, Unibody MacBook Pro, Mac Mini, etc.  My friends tell me that it would be extremely ironic if I start working for Apple once I graduate.  To be honest, I’m actually considering it…

After watching and following along with this video about the amazing power of Ruby on Rails (“Rails” for short), I realized how similar Rails and CakePHP are: the frameworks are identical in every way; only the languages differ. In other words, I only have to learn the (seemingly simple) Ruby language before I can start using Rails like a pro.

Learning C++ would give me a jumpstart into many of the other languages I would like to learn (like Cocoa and Android) since they are based on the concepts of C++. I also have the opportunity to learn this language from its inventor, Bjarne Stroustrup: I will be following the guidelines set forth in his book, Programming: Principles and Practice Using C++.  C++ will also be the primary language that I will use during my college education.  I have studied C++ in the past for Robotics, but I do not know enough to make an application for a computer… yet.

Since Ruby and C++ should be fairly easy to learn, I might have enough time to start learning one more language this summer. I’m still open for suggestions, so please let me know what you think.

I try to learn at least one new language/framework each summer. Last summer, I learned how to use CakePHP (PHP), jQuery (JavaScript), Prototype (JavaScript), and CSS3. I attempted to learn JSP with much frustration due to its complexity. However, I would be willing to try again.

As I’ve learned more about CakePHP, I have come to love the MVC setup, which makes Ruby on Rails look very appealing. That also means that I will have to learn Ruby.  Being a web developer, the server-side languages seem more useful, but I would also like to be able to make desktop applications that can be compiled to run on any machine.  I have also made the commitment to make at least one mobile app that interfaces with an online database by the end of this year.

I have more languages that I would like to learn more about, but I don’t know where to start. This is where you (the reader) can help. Out of the following languages, which would be the best, easiest, or most useful to know?

• Python
• Ruby
• Ruby on Rails (by extension of Ruby)^MVC
• JSP
• Bash scripting
• C++ (which I will learn in College anyway, but would like to get a head start)
• Cocoa (Mac OS X; based on Objective-C)^MVC
• Cocoa Touch (iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad by extension of Cocoa)^MVC
• Android (by extension of C++)

You are welcome to suggest other languages or frameworks.  Please comment below to cast your vote.  I will post the results later.

The Obama Care Health Plan has been passed with a 219-212 House vote. Aren’t bills supposed to be passed with a 2/3 vote from both houses rather than a simple majority? And one other thing: UNDER WHAT ARTICLE OF THE CONSTITUTION DOES THE UNITED STATES FEDERAL GOVERNMENT HAVE THE ABILITY TO REGULATE HEALTH CARE?!?

The only things that the federal government can constitutionally regulate are interstate commerce and taxes. In the original mindset of the founding fathers, this means that the government is supposed to ensure that trade between states stays regular. An example of an irregularity would be if Maine decided that Kansas could no longer buy its goods. In this case, the federal government would have to restore regular interstate trade.

To regulate anything except for interstate commerce would be UNCONSTITUTIONAL on the federal government’s behalf.

Hopefully America will retaliate and move to repeal the Obama Care Plan before it has any major impact on our already dying country. Obama has been the president for a little over a year now, and he’s done a surprisingly great job at running our country into the ground so far. I don’t even want to guess at what he’s going to do next.

In our declaration of independence from the tyranny of the time, we profoundly stated that every human being is endowed with three unalienable rights — rights that cannot be touched or changed in any way: “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”  Abortion most obviously disregards the unborn child’s unalienable right to life, and, as a result, denies that child his or her liberty and his or her chance to obtain happiness.  Scientific evidence proves that an unborn child is 100% purely human from its start as a zygote, to its development into an embryo, or at its fetal stage prior to birth; the DNA of that child is already present and set in stone at the moment of conception.  Since when did America, the greatest country in the world, allow its citizens to legally murder their own children?  Why can’t we show the same shock for aborted babies that we do when newborn babies are discovered in trash cans?

While watching the news after the event, they claimed that police officers had to form a buffer between the pro-life crowd, the pro-choice crowd, and the capitol building.  This statement is completely false.  Police officers were present at the event, but they were on bicycles and only served to stop traffic for us as we marched through the streets.  We were not rowdy or violent at all; we did not have any buffer between us and the capitol even as Governor Rick Perry gave his speech about how he and the senators are working to pass pro-life bills.  I did see a small amount of pro-choice people, but they were scattered around throughout the pro-life crowd, not in a separate location.  We coexisted peacefully and were even talking with them!  We were not a mob as the news says we were.  Rather, we were a group of peaceful protesters wishing to make our motives known by following the examples of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mohandas Gandhi.

As a faithful Catholic, I do my best and let God handle the rest: We should embrace the challenges we face and use them as opportunities to grow in patience, humility, and faith.  I take pleasure in making myself a better person (which, in turn, makes the world a better place) because I know that I am becoming who I was meant to be–the best person I can become.  Therefore, I can proudly say that I enjoy English class because I enjoy making myself a better person, challenges give us the ability to better ourselves, and English is challenging to me.

I also like English because I never know what profound sermon Mr. Beeler is going to give.

Merry Christmas to all!

I recently watched the following two movies and found them quite intriguing:

• The Last Sin Eater
• Knowing
• Hidalgo

Both movies are extremely good stories that describe humanity and its tendencies to stray from what God originally intended for Creation and his plans to make good come from the evil that we have twisted. I do not wish to give an in-depth analysis on the four layers of meaning (literal, figurative, tropological, and anagogical), but they are easy to interpret for one’s self.

I must warn you that Knowing offers a very skewed, but thought-provoking, view of the eschaton/apocalypse as foreseen by a young girl in 1959. Recall that Jesus tells us to, “stay awake, for [we] know neither the day nor the hour” (Mt 25:13, NAB). In the movie, a few chosen children are removed from the earth before it is destroyed and are taken to a different planet. This act of “rescue” from the tribulation is commonly referred to as the Rapture. However, the Rapture is never mentioned anywhere in the Bible, nor is it alluded to by any of the prophets, by Jesus, or in the Pauline letters. The answer to why there will not be a Rapture can be found in reason: Human suffering is redemptive by nature if united with the sufferings of Christ as an offering. This is why euthanasia is wrong: it provides an “easy death” (from the Greek eu + thanatos) without any suffering and no chance at redemption. To suffer through the tribulation would be the ultimate sacrifice and the ultimate redemption. Would God really deprive us of that opportunity by taking us from it? The only human person who did not need redemption is Jesus: He came to be our redemption through is life, passion, death, resurrection, and ascension and established His Kingdom on earth to guard the seed of faith and pass it down to all generations. Jesus’ dually human and divine nature (hypostatic union) explains that He was, in fact, God. His name literally means “God saves” and thus he is our savior; he does not need to be saved.

I believe I have written enough to provide plenty of fuel for thought: it seems that I have written an essay while trying to avoid writing an essay. Watch for how grace is at work in the movies, and I hope you will get as much out of them as I did.

Please pray that our robot performs to the best of it’s ability (pun not intended).

Google brings up a good point: email has been around for 40 years, which is older than the World Wide Web!  Therefore they posed the question: ‘What would email look like if it were invented today?’

Enough introduction, let’s get to the good stuff!  Waves start out as a shared document: when you create a wave, you put some initial information (text, pictures, and attachments, etc.) on it and invite people to view it.  You can invite as many people as you want, and it will show up in each person’s inbox.  People can then add pubic comments or replies, send direct messages to certain users, make changes to the original text, and “instant message” with other users in real time (online users can see other people typing on a character-by-character basis).  In this sense, a wave becomes more than a shared document: it can take on the role of an email, a blog post, a chat room, an instant system, and a photo/file gallery.

A user can choose to make a wave public by posting it to Blogger or embedding it on a website.  Embedded waves have all of the same features that they would if they were on the Google Wave site: users can see real-time updates and all edits are immediately synchronized with all places where the wave might be located.

Google Wave is currently available to invited users only.  One may request an invite on the Google Wave homepage, but don’t expect any immediate reply.  Wave is supposed to go public by the end of the year, and I look forward to using it!

If you have any suggestions or comments, please let me know.

AT&T had originally promised to release this feature to the public in late summer… It’s a little late, but better late than never.

The feature that I am most excited about is the iPhone Internet tethering release. AT&T still hasn’t released a date; they say that it will be “coming in the future.” This feature used to be hackable, so iPhone users know that AT&T has the ability to support Internet tethering. So why don’t they allow us to access it? My theory is that the current cellular network would not be able to withstand the load that tethering would create.

The only thing that we can do at this point is wait for AT&T to upgrade their hardware.

Remember what happened in the past, but don’t obsess over it. Rather, focus on what is happening in the present, be optimistic about it, and trust that God will take care of the future.

Before I get into further details, let me first say that the Safari 4 interface looks strikingly familiar. As a web developer, I have to make sure that my websites look the same across all web browsers. That means that I have most of the browsers in the world on my computer: Mozilla Firefox (my favorite), Flock, Orca, Opera, Chrome, Safari, Internet Explorer (why Is that piece of junk called a web browser anyway?), Konqueror, Epiphany, and so on… Now I’ll get to the point: Safari is basically Google Chrome under a different name. Chrome introduced the minimalistic user interface (back and forward buttons on the right side, an address/search bar in thr middle, and only two menus–”Page” and “Settings”–on the left. The rest of the screen was devoted to displaying web page content. Apple’s Safari 4 looks identical to Chrome except the search bar is a separate text field in Safari. The only thing that Apple did to make it different was throw in a couple of glitzy effects: Chrome’s “Most visited sites” page has been given a 3D effect and has been renamed to “top sites”. I must admit that the bookmark management is better in Safari than in Chrome, but I’m just mad that Apple had to steal another idea and call it their own. Don’t even get me started on the fact that Apple stole Compiz from Linux…

On a more positive note, Apple’s new release of Safari 4 has full support for many new and exciting (for developers like me) web features like JavaScript, CSS 3, HTML 5, etc. In fact, Safari scores a perfect ’100′ on the Acid3 Test, and it is the first web browser to do so. However, Apple proudly boasts that Safari is the “World’s Fastest Web Browser,” but I still have yet to see their speed stats hold true on any machine: Gmail runs faster on Chrome and Firefox than Safari; Safari takes the longest to load on my machine at (28 seconds–22 more than Firefox); and Safari takes up the most RAM of all browsers on my computer.

Safari has jumped from it’s position next to Internet Explorer up next to Chrome on my browser ranking scale, but it still has to get through Opera and Flock before it has even a remote chance of replacing Firefox as my favorite browser. If Safari were truly as fast as Apple says it is, did not take up so much RAM, and had a huge database of add-ons that enable you to do anything, then it might have a shot at being my favorite.

Send an email to: matthew[at]komputerwiz[dot]net
The [at] and [dot] prevent spamming robots from getting my email address

As an overview, many have drawn the following conclusions about this act. I wish to state what the law says and to show how some of these claims are true:

• All hospitals, including Catholic hospitals will be required to perform abortions upon request. If this happens Bishops vow to close down all Catholic hospitals, more then 30% of all hospitals in the United States.
• Partial birth abortions would be legal and have no limitations. (“Freedom of Choice Act” §4.a)
• All U.S. tax payers would be funding abortions since abortion facilities would be a government institutions.
• Parental notification will no longer be required.
• The next step from this act is to allow forced abortions or a regulation on how many children a woman is allowed to have.

To begin, such “Legal and practical barriers” include:

• parental consent,
• liability forms,
• medical institutions that will not provide abortions (such as Catholic Hospitals), and
• laws enforced by state legislature (states’ rights).

By extension, all medical offices must provide abortions on demand. This raises two problems: First, abortion is immoral and wrong, and Catholic hospitals will not encourage or provide immoral behavior/practices; second, this denies the freedom of institutions to enforce their own rules. If a hospital does not wish to provide an abortion, it should not have to. Instead, Big Brother Government (see 1984 by George Orwell) makes some of the rules for every medical institution. Catholic hospitals, in spite of this act, will continue to deny abortions to women. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) has decided that all Catholic hospitals (totaling about 30% of all US hospitals) will be closed if lawsuits become an issue.

Next, the act states that the barriers listed above “endanger women’s health and lives” because “access to abortion care is extremely difficult, if not impossible, [to obtain] for many women across the country.” First of all, abortion clinics do not provide “care;” they usher you into a room, perform the procedure, and kick you out when the dirty work is done. I can speak from secondhand experience that a young woman walked out of a local abortion facility crying and clutching her stomach, then vomited as she walked to her car. If the abortion clinic actually cared for the health of a woman, the least the workers could do would be to make sure that the woman remains comfortable. The best they could do is to close the doors of the facility for good and never offer abortions again. Interviews have proven that abortion hurts a woman both physically and emotionally. Access to an abortion is extremely difficult for a good reason: abortion does not help any situation. The fact that 87% of all US counties do not have an abortion facility is not a cause for any concern. Such a statement is comparable to saying that 98% of all US states are not California (thank goodness!). If the people of a county do not wish to have an abortion facility, then they should not have one.

One might consider abortion to be fine when a woman is pregnant as a result of rape. I, however, strongly object: The child, whether conceived “normally” or by rape, is human. If an embryo’s DNA is human, then it is a human embryo! For nearly all cultures, life begins at conception, and science can prove it. Since abortion “disposes of” a human embryo, abortion is murder.

This act seems to slowly be leading up to communism in America. George Bush vetoed this act several times during his two terms, and now a new president is going to usher in a new era of change. This change is exactly what I warned about in my election-day post.

“Freedom of Choice Act.” Library of Congress. 19 April 2007. Accessed 19 Jan. 2009. < http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c110:H.R.1964.IH:>

On a different note, several internet legends claim the following about the inauguration:

• Obama will be assassinated before he can get sworn in
• The people will not allow Biden to be put in office
• George Bush will manage to continue being president for another term
• After George Bush’s 3^rd term, Bill Clinton or Al Gore will get elected
• The tribulation period will begin, and Jesus will come in glory at the end of it.