Shawn Stratton

My 5 cents on Gun Control and Mass Shootings

2013-04-02T14:21:59Z

So I've been doing a lot of research on NFA and BATFE laws and it just so happens that you can't really research much in these areas without crossing into proposed legislation so I actually sat down and read the pamphlet of Senator Feinstein's proposed Gun Control law. I couldn't help but to respond to her, here's what I wrote:

Senator Feinstein,

In your bill booklet you mention that Assault Weapon Bans work:

The use of assault weapons in crime declined by 70% nine years after the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban
took effect, according to a study conducted for the Justice Department.
o Source:Christopher S. Koper, “An Updated Assessment of the Federal Assault Weapons Ban:
Impacts on Gun Markets and Gun Violence, 1994-2003,” University of Pennsylvania (June 2004).

http://www.sas.upenn.edu/jerrylee/research/aw_final2004.pdf.

however, you do not mention that the murder rate declined after the assault weapon ban was listed, further, there have been several mass shootings without the use of assault rifles such as the shooting that occurred here in Atlanta during the assault weapons ban http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_O._Barton

While I understand your motivation to ban what you believe to be assault weapons (unfortunately there is no clear, widely agreed upon definition of this term aside from plastic or bare metal receivers and potentially pistol grips which have a clear use in sporting and home defense scenarios,) I'm highly concerned that the main deterrent to these types of shootings is being clearly overlooked. I realize I'm not one of your constituents, however, I would gladly back any bill that deepens background checks, including imposing waiting periods. Further, I feel that we as a nation need to focus on making mental health and mental health care a priority, following that up the media needs to be pressured to not glorify the actors in crimes to remove the last bit of motivation to these types of killers.

I heavily base my opinions on the fact that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold did not use assault rifles, violated purchase laws, and NFA law (sawed off shotgun) followed by attempting to improvise explosive devices with varied success. The problem I see with these shootings isn't necessarily based on the tools available, but the motivation to commit these crimes. Further, if I recall correctly the shooter from Newton attempted to purchase several weapons in the weeks preceding the shooting and was denied the ability to purchase these weapons; it's my opinion that additional laws and regulations on firearms will do little to decline these shootings and that by giving the nation gun control laws and heated debate immediately after such an event that we lose the ability to talk about how to fix the motivation and the situations leading up to the fact of an event like Newton happening. Please don't mask the real issues that we need to address by utilizing these situations to act on a personal belief or grudge but rather to get at the root of the real problem and cause, your constituents and the citizens of the United States deserve no less.

Sincerely,

Shawn Stratton

edit: disabled commenting on this article, leaving an open comments box on this type of article just strikes me as a very bad idea.

Recipe: Mojito

2013-02-03T22:52:18Z

This is a slightly sweet and refreshing drink that's awesome in the summer months.

Being direct and clear

2012-11-07T21:21:50Z

In my new job I get requests on a daily basis. Some are simple requests that take a minute or so to complete, some are lengthy multiple hour requests, etc. A request by itself is perfectly normal and acceptable to me, however, it seems to some that they can make whatever request without telling me (or my group for that matter) what they actually need. These are not my favorite.

One example, someone that's not a developer sent us a request to install a specific daemon (application/http) on a specific machine type, without any rationale as to why. My job is to decide, provision, configure, and maintain servers and daemons, my team prefers Apache HTTPD to serve static files for various reasons, as we're digging into this request we're finding out that the request is to serve static files but this person feels qualified to make a request for a Java application server (Tomcat) without any further rationale than "I need tomcat".

Another example, we got a request a few days to enable a project in our automated deployment console, the problem is that this project hasn't been configured in apache, uwsgi, php-fpm, etc at the time of the request, somehow we're supposed to magically know that this was supposed to have been done prior to this request with an unknown due date.

The point I'm getting at here is a simple one:

Know what you're asking for and if you don't try to describe it, also please don't expect us to be psychic.

In the above case instead of asking for Tomcat, ask for a webserver to host static html files. It's my teams job to figure out what best suites your needs, configure, and manage it. Please don't try to dictate what we need to run unless you have an actual reason for it (no, you wanting tomcat for tomcat's sake is not a good reason.) Further, when you talk to us about asking for something make sure we have all the information at hand, it makes life a lot less difficult if we know at least the basics of your request so we don't have to hunt you down to ask questions, or worse guess.

2012 Goals

2012-01-16T17:49:58Z

So I don't really do New Years resolutions, but that doesn't mean I don't have goals for myself. I've been pondering what my goals for this year are and I've got a pretty healthy list for 2012 (oddly all work/technical) so here goes:

1. Publish an AWS Consumer Application on Android.

So as part of my new role we're transition a lot of traditional hardware to EC2 instances, we'll be needing to monitor those instances and keep up with what's going on with our infrastructure. We have a graphs solution that one of my co-workers wrote many moons ago, but, with EC2 CloudWatch becomes a target, since it records at what would traditionally be the hardware level. CloudWatch has a fairly decent API, the only thing I'm not seeing yet is the ability to send CloudWatch alarm notifications over SNS (Push the alarm to a mobile device.) My goal is to write a service consumer that will pull instance and aggregate metrics and then graph them, further I intend on doing a background process to monitor for alarms (until SNS notifications become possible.) I hope to have this done by May, we'll see.

2. Transition to Programming in Python

What? Why? Well I'm no longer an Application Programmer, I'll be working on system level tools and processes and some of these will grow rather large so it's only logical that Python has better hooks than PHP and is more maintainable than BASH (personal opinion.) Don't get me wrong I still love PHP, but it just doesn't make sense for what I'm working on here and I don't want to go as low as the C level with CLI tools and build tools.

3. Write a PECL Extension

So yeah, another lower level task (and no this doesn't contradict the Python statement from above.) We have a jsmin based PHP Extension that allows us to dynamically minify js, however, we've toyed around with the idea of writing a wrapper around Google's PageSpeed api and switching to it, rather than sit here and spin the wheels at some point I'm going to do exactly that and my intent is to publish it to the PECL repository.

4. Contribute to Docblox

I had been doing work on phpDocumentor2, however, I kept getting demotivated with it since it was basically me and another guy and we could hardly ever agree on much. Mike Van Riel introduced Docblox last year, however, it's still actively being extended and I had some ideas that mvriel has yet to even hint at so this may well be the time for me to contribute.

5. Replace the DI container in ZF2

So I'm a big Zend Framework fan and Zend Framework 2 shows major promise, but, I have a few gripes with complexity and in some cases inflexibility. One of those gripes I have is about the DI container that Matthew implemented and the static mappings that it requires. Years ago I worked with a guy, Sean Crystal, at this little shop in Knoxville; Sean had written a DI container that used reflection, a year or two later when he came out to Nashville to work for a new company that I had moved to he wrote an Open Source implementation called Wires which I wound up forking and trying to prepare for PEAR2. Sean and I had a falling out because I made a slight mistake and Sean thought that I was trying to remove the attribution to him, hence I deleted all copies of Wires from my machine and removed my fork from Github and withdrew the PEAR2 RFC, however, between the work we did in Knoxville and the implementation of Wires and my evolution as a Computer Scientist, I have an idea for an implementation with adapter classes that will allow me to drop into ZF2 and other frameworks. I don't know when I'll get to this but something tells me soonish as we're already building out our Zend Framework 2 implementation at Discovery.

I'm sure I'll have other goals before years end, there are also other things that are not so much goal driven that I'll be doing this year, like next week I'll be setting up Cisco routers in our data-center to handle the tunnel between it and the AWS Virtual Private Cloud, but I think this is going to be a good year and the changes are going to be vast but helpful. Here's to hoping that everyone has an awesome 2012!

PHP Gearman for Unfortunate Souls running Lucid Lynx

2011-11-30T16:07:19Z

I've been helping a friend setup gearman on his box; unfortunately his box happens to be running Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx LTS which has some packaging problems with gearman. This post is a quick list of the things we did to fix the pecl installation of gearman-beta and to get it running.

First, the Ubuntu dependencies

sudo apt-get install gearman libgearman2 libgearman-dev \
php5-dev php-pear

Second, Edit a file

(This is due to packaging changes that occurred in Lucid.)

sudo vi  /usr/lib/libgearman.la

replace dependency_libs=' -L/usr/lib /usr/lib/libuuid.la'
with dependency_libs=' -L/usr/lib -luuid'

Third, Pecl

sudo pecl install gearman-beta

Fourth, Add Configuration to PHP

(optional if you have pecl configured to your php.ini files)

sudo echo 'extension=gearman.so' > /etc/php5/conf.d/gearman.ini

To verify

Run:

php -m |grep gearman

If this doesn't return anything you have a problem somewhere. If it returns gearman than you're good, just restart apache and you're done.