Nation of Greg @gregorypierce - Tumblr Blog

How to explain the election results to your kids

Today many kids in America went to school somewhat disturbed. They had been led to believe that good people always triumph over bad people and Donald Trump was a bad man that had done terrible things and he was going to lose the election because of the bad things that he had done. When they learned that he had won, they were shaken because the fundamental belief system that they'd been taught was flipped over. Their view of the world was shaken. Van Jones posed a very interesting question “How do I explain this to my children?” Well here is a summary how I’ve explained it to mine.

“I have three very important lessons that I want you to learn from everything you’ve watched during the elections as these are possibly the most important lessons that you will ever have to learn and I want you to remember them.

First, for everything you want to do in life there are going to be people that also want what you want. Most times only one person can be the winner and many times the winner will not necessarily be the best person, but the person who wants it more. In life there are many times when you will not be able to win no matter hard you try – but that doesn’t mean you stop trying. It may be hard for you to understand now, but the price for having all the things you want in life must be paid constantly. If ever you stop and rest, there will be someone who will race by you. You must always work hard; you can’t ever assume the race is over – because the race is never over unless you decide you want to stop racing. In the election there were people that didn’t want Hillary Clinton to win and they fought very hard to win – much harder than anyone expected they would and as a result they won.

Second, you must always understand the people who oppose you. Don’t assume they are wrong just because they have a different opinion from you. They may see the world differently because they live in a different place, have different friends, or just don’t like the things you like. What’s most important is to understand why they don’t like what you like. You can never truly defeat someone unless you understand exactly why they are fighting you. Only when you understand why they are fighting, can you help them see what you see. But most importantly you may find that they are fighting you for a reason that you don’t truly understand. In America there are people who are suffering in ways that you don’t quite understand so it’s hard for you to understand why they would vote for someone that you think is bad. But not everything in life is black and white. Not all of the people who voted for Trump are bad people – some of them just felt that he was the better option because he wanted to do things differently. If more people voted it is possible that Hillary might have won, but the problem would still be there. You have to understand the problem before you can work with the people who are fighting you to find a solution.

Finally, you said there were a lot of people that said they are going to go to Canada because Donald Trump won. I want you to understand that this is not the right solution. In life there are always going to be things that go wrong and times when you’re going to feel terrible about a loss but you shouldn’t run. You have to understand why you lost and fight on for what’s important to you. Every time you lose there is a lesson to be learned and it is important that you learn it. There will be times when you lose, there will be times when you fail – and that’s okay. Just like you were terrible with some of the games you are great at now, you have to learn from these losses so that you’re better prepared the next time.

While you’ve been very involved in the election and you’ve learned some very harsh lessons that perhaps would have better you learned later, YOUR life isn’t going to change much. You’re going to wake up in the morning, go to school, play with your friends, do your homework, and have fun on weekends. Don’t let other people make you believe that the world is ending – it isn’t, it’s just going to be different for a while and while that may seem scary… remember the three lessons that you learned and you’ll be just fine.”

#election 2016 #donald trump #hillary clinton #hillary2016 #presidential election

Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt: The tools used to trick you!

Fear. Uncertainty. Doubt.

Whenever someone wants to prevent you from doing something or wants to convince you that you should take a course of action without providing any evidence to support their position these are the weapons and tactics that are used to keep you firmly rooted to your current situation. Any time you find yourself feeling any of these emotions during a political campaign, that’s when it’s time to dig deeper because you aren’t being told the whole story.

In the cityhood proposal for the Stonecrest area we have seen levels of this tactic that rival the presidential race, with proponents for cityhood providing large volumes of peer reviewed data from our state Universities, economic and government impact studies, discussion on talk shows like the Georgia Gang, etc. Over the course of 4 years, the supporters of the plan have had to continuously prove their plan to the state, get support from legislators from all corners of Georgia, get approval and an affirmative vote from both the house and senate of the State of Georgia, and get support and approval from the Governor of the state. Quite simply, the cityhood proposal had to be feasible or else the state wouldn’t allow it to be presented to the people. The opponents of the plan, however, have relied almost exclusively on fear, uncertainty and doubt to convince voters that things should remain as they are, that our area isn’t mature enough to be a city, and far worse – that the proposal would not work because the area lacks diversity (i.e. is too black).

Many vocal opponents of cityhood are quick to call the measure a trick. While they can’t (and won’t) explain why it’s a trick, they are quick to suggest that you don’t know what you’re asking for or that any position other than the status quo is a mistake. In doing so they appeal to the fear that you are going to make your situation worse. But ask yourself, who is really tricking whom? The fact is that The Carl Vinson Institute of the University of Georgia produced several studies to determine the viability of the plan as was required by the state of Georgia. Has the opposition presented an alternative plan that has been reviewed by anyone? No. The opposition has relied on fear. Fear that your taxes might go up (note that property taxes are less than 10% of the proposed city budget). Fear that your homestead exemption might go away (note that it would require the people of the city to vote for any increase). Fear that the schools would be in a worse position (note that the city has absolutely no control over the schools). No facts have been presented to support any of the fears they are suggesting, and there is ample evidence to suggest the fears are unfounded. The only thing the opposition has suggested as a plan is “wait another 10 years and then we might be ready for this.” However, if you go to any meeting where they discuss progress the only thing they will say is “we can’t find the money for improvement” or “the limited progress should be enough – stop asking for what the other cities have.”

Another tactic used is to attempt to make the people uncertain. There is an old saying that “everyone is entitled to their own opinions but not their own facts.” During the drive for Stonecrest, one of the tactics has been to make people uncertain of the facts – to throw in enough uncertainty that the people will not be certain that the facts are indeed facts. Whether it be through the suggestion that the city will be governed by an “unelected committee”, that all of the costs had not been considered, or that the numbers have been adjusted to show that it would work - attempts have been made to distort the facts to make people retreat to their comfort zones of the status quo. The simple fact is that an economic study cannot be commissioned with an end result in mind. A study will either prove a hypothesis or refute it. The first attempt at proving that cityhood was viable was refuted by the Carl Vinson Institute and as a direct result another had to be commissioned (i.e. paid for) a year later. Only after the second study was it possible to show that the City of Stonecrest could be viable. The studies that support the City of Stonecrest are derived from a numerical analysis of the area. There are no politics involved. No favors can be called in. In a study the numbers speak for themselves. If the opponents want to bring their own study and set of facts, they have had every opportunity to do so – but they have not. Instead they want to make the people uncertain of the facts – “trust them”.

The final tactic being employed is by far the most insulting and most heinous as it is an attack on the very people of the area and employs the deplorable tactic of promoting self-doubt. When I first heard the words I didn’t want to believe that they would ever be uttered by another black person, but then I attended a council meeting and heard those words from the very politicians that we are supposed to be waiting on to improve the area – the city won’t work because it’s too black. While Mr. Ed Williams was less direct in his depiction of his position on the matter, calling it ‘lacking diversity’ - the opponents (some in county political office), have had the gall to suggest that this won’t work because this is a predominantly black area. Not since Uncle Ruckus on the Boondocks or Stephen on Django Unchained have I heard black people so vehemently opposed to their own success. The suggestion that we should continue to rely on county government because we can’t do for ourselves harkens back to a time when some suggested to stay on the plantation because surely that was better than what you could do on your own.

Rather than continue to comment on the inane ramblings of a select few fools, I will simply state that business and growth follows opportunity. Business has always followed opportunity. If there is opportunity in an area, a business will enter the area to exploit that opportunity and extract profit. A business is not concerned where the opportunity is so long as the opportunity achieves the goal of extracting profit. What the opponents either refuse to acknowledge or don’t understand is that one must develop opportunities to attract business. This is one of the reasons why the area around Stonecrest has not flourished – there is no economic development plan which is specifically focused for the Stonecrest area. The plan for the City of Stonecrest explicitly focusses on opportunity and assigns money to develop the various corridors and structures within the Stonecrest footprint and in doing so makes the entire region of South Dekalb more economically viable. Opponents to the City of Stonecrest have stated that the people of the area don’t understand this, however I am certainly willing to put forth my Master’s Degree in International Business to assert that I understand it quite well and find that the people who are putting forth the plan understand it quite well as well.

All that said, I didn’t write this opinion piece to get you to support the City of Stonecrest. However, I feel that people need to make an informed decision based on the facts – not the fears, uncertainties, and doubts that the opponents want you to feel. This city has been a project in development for many years, and isn’t something that was decided upon overnight. It took considerable time, sweat, tears, investigations and approvals for it to even get to the point where it is on the ballot. This proposition is a very compelling opportunity for this area, yet it is not without risk. But as Muhammad Ali one stated, “he who is not courageous enough to take risks will accomplish nothing in life”. Are you courageous enough to take the chance?

#stonecrest #stonecrestmall #cityofstonecrest

Activiti 5.x Beginners Guide

One of the best time-savers in building enterprise platforms is the integration of BPM solutions into your platform, and Activiti/Camel are pretty much the best games in town. Since Activiti has changed a bit, I decided to read through some of the changes that have come along in the new Activiti5.x Beginners Guide ( http://bit.ly/1kna12U )

AngularJS - why you so cray (AngularJS Response Headers)

A frequent functionality of web applications when dealing with REST web services is for the server to set headers on the response that the client should use in subsequent request. Angular support this fine, but for some reason - it returns them in toLower() format. So if you send out a header that is 'X-Foo-Happy-Count', what you will get back in your header on the client is 'x-foo-happy-count'. While certainly having everything work in lower case will eliminate some of the issues that come from mixed case - that's not the expected behavior and Angular does evil stuff by making that decision for you without warning you that it has done it.

Investigating Sails.js

After investigating some infrastructure choices for Node.js projects I've finally decided to take a look at Sails.js - a neat little Rails-like MVC for Node. Its actually pretty interesting in version 0.9, but was missing some critical features - namely Associations/Relationships. However, the Sails team is nearing completion on version 0.10 of Sails which has a fairly robust implementation of Associations via Waterline. But to check this out, you have to remove your existing version of sails: sudo npm uninstall sails

and then install the version 0.10 branch:

sudo npm install sails@git://github.com/balderdashy/sails#v0.10 -g

From there you should be good to go to explore the way it handles associations.

Comment on salad post

I thought I'd try to text post this time to see what happens.

It's generally the dressing that kills you with salads --this is especially true with the Caesar Salad. I've found that getting the dressing on the side, then dipping your fork in the dressing before each bite gives you the taste and uses a lot less dressing overall.

Angular.js vs Ember.js - going with Angular

After a lot of time spent trying to determine which of these two epic frameworks I would go with I finally decided to go with Angular because it is very explicit in the way that it does things - it doesn't hide behind "convention" and it was just plain easier to read other people angular.js code and have an idea of what they were doing compared to reading complex ember.js code. Granted, both of them are strong candidates and it literally took me WEEKS to make this decision of what I was going to use atop my NodeJS stack, but its a done deal and now I can move on and do more cool stuff. It didn't hurt that Angular has a LOT of momentum, books and support from Google.

nginx - Easier to configure than apache for Node.js

After reading through some documentation I was able to get nginx (webserver) connected to node.js. Probably the easiest component I've set up in a while. I remember the relative horror that I had with tomcat and apache and all the connector crap - had none of that with nginx and node.js.

Good times...

MongoDB Aggregation Framework

Over the past few weeks I've had a chance to really dig into the aggregation framework and while I'm impressed by what you can do with it, I'm disturbed by the very scant documentation that describes all of the things you can do with it at the right level of detail. While there are good books from 3rd parties that describe a lot of the features at the right level of detail - I would have assumed that the authors of the original documentation would have created something more competent.

The hard part of dealing with node.js

Node.js has proven to be highly capable for building server applications. I have rewritten a Java server engine in Node.js and it has taken roughly a week. This old server served an API for managing mobile devices, their locations, and providing services to them. I've replaced 100% of that functionality with Node.js and its has actually been pretty easy to do. One area that has been somewhat difficult has been producing the Oauth2 server functionality. While there are some implementations out there, it is difficult to get a lot of information about them from a production perspective.

One area that has come very easily has been moving over ORM functionality for MongoDB. Mongoose is a great framework that supports validation, mapping, and sub-document population (the coolest part). Love it!

Another truly inspired framework is async which allows you to perform asynchronous processes, map/reduce tasks, etc. Doing this level of async and synchronization with Java is why so many developers who have to do this thing have moved to Scala.

Still no regrets for moving to node.js... though Javascript's duck typing for pretty much everything makes you read documentation 50 times before you truly understand what's going on.

Fun times continue....

Node.js is criminally easy to use. I've been able to port an absurd amount of server functionality over to it in hours. At this rate I will replace the ENTIRE Java-based API infrastructure in days.

It just flows like water. Every time I think I'm about to hit something difficult, I run across a module that has already solved the problem (sometimes years ago) and drop it in and it just works. Brings a tear to my eyes. Literally wiping tears from my eyes with how easy this is. This level of easy must be accompanied by bad scaling or something.

Node.js is actually pretty damn awesome :)

The first few days of messing with node.js are nothing short of liberating. While you're generally operating at a lower level in the stack than you might with any of the myriad frameworks for other platforms, the benefit is that there is nothing getting in the way of getting things done QUICKLY. No web.xml, no configuration files, no trying to grok the questionable design decisions of some API writers and working around them to get scalability, etc.

I now understand why there is such momentum behind node.js. Its extremely easy to get started and get results that are production quality in a very short amount of time. The one downside though is that Javascript has some holes as a language, but for the most part you don't have to hit those very often fairly early in development. I'm sure the seas will get rocky as I start to implement some of the business logic, but I've actually been able to refactor some of the existing codebase for services that I had in SpringMVC down to node.js in hours and have it working with the existing MongoDB infrastructure.

So far very happy.

Leaving the familiar shore...

"You can never cross the ocean until you have the courage to lose sight of the shore" - Christopher Columbus

For a great many years now I have dabled in other programming languages, playing around with other potential approaches to building server applications - but never really leaving the relative comfort and security that is Java and the wealth of services and security it provides. But for all of the safety that Java provided, a great deal of pain and suffering always came along for the ride. Today I decided that it was time to leave the familiar shore that is Java and set sail for the distant shores of Javascript and Node.js for server application development and burn my ships when I arrive so that I won't be temped to go back. After playing around with node.js for a while, I've found that it is possibly the most interesting and even FUN programming model that I've played around with and while I'm sure it will bring with it some other pain and suffering - this journey looks to be far more interesting and fulfilling than anything else that I could get from Spring/Scala/Grails/etc. Most of the things that I've wanted to do with Spring/Java/C# are so easy and even familiar with node.js and if you aren't getting the things you want to get done in a fun and fast way, what's the point :) And with that I set sail for the distant shore...

#nodejs #java script

testflightapp-blog

Hello Android developers and thank you iOS community for entrusting us with over 300,000 apps to date. Starting today, TestFlight Android is rolling out in private beta and we are very excited about this release. Developer’s now have a unified solution for managing beta-testing on both iOS...

Creating a maven repository with Dropbox

After some searching I've found a mechanism to store all of the heroku dependencies on Dropbox as opposed to paying someone to host my maven repository (though this has cost me 3 hours to get working right). It is likely that this would work for S3 or any other storage mechanism provided you set up the appropriate file structure and upload the files manually, but I was looking for something that would work automagically and came up with this after reading through some blogs and documents.

1) Have your project publish out a local directory structure for your dependency. Add this to the maven pom.xml of the project whose dependency you are trying to publish.

<id>dropbox</id>

<url>file:///Volumes/Media/Dropbox/Public/mvn-repository</url>

</repository>

</distributionManagement>

Make sure you have already create your mvn-repository directory on the Dropbox server.

Note here that I am using OSX. If you are using Windows your URL will look something like: file:///C:/Users/foobar/Dropbox/Public/mvn-repository

2) Run "mvn deploy" for that project and maven will happily create the repository structure for you. If you're using Dropbox (or similar) your repository will also be happily sync'd to the cloud servers.

For all practical purposes you now have a maven repository running. You just need to figure out how to access it.

3) Open your dropbox folder and create a file at the same level as the mvn-repository folder. Copy the public link the put in the browser/notepad or whatever.

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/8209345/mvn-repository/my_file.txt

The URL that will represent your mvn repository is all the text before my_file.txt (the link will be different for every dropbox user). In this case the url is https://dl.dropbox.com/u/8209345/mvn-repository/

4) In the project that needs to include this dependency, create a new repository that points to this Dropbox location from the pom.xml of the project that wants to include the dependency:

<id>dropbox</id>

<url>https://dl.dropbox.com/u/8209345/mvn-repository/</url>

</repository>

5) Be sure that your Dropbox session has finished synchronizing and then run the appropriate commands for your maven project. Your project will now pull the dependency from Dropbox.

Note: This is not the intended use-case for Dropbox and it is possible that this may do the service some harm so follow the same approach and push those directories up to S3 or similar and you will have a cheap/free maven repository without the nastiness of having published dependencies locally, an approach which will eventually bite you when you integrate with other tools or developers.

The diet experiment is successful. Target weight achieved and maintained for 3+ months.

After being on my diet for nearly a year now, I have been able to drop from ~217 all the way down to 175 and not have any ill effects or any disastrous impacts on being able to eat food that doesn't taste like paper.

I have found that fruit juices, soft drinks, alcohol and high fructose items were essentially maintaining a high weight and when I dropped consuming them - the weight came off, and quickly. I'm not running marathons, not P90Xing, and not exercising daily and I do still eat junk food a few times a month. I'm not eating a salad at every meal and I feel substantially better. My apnea is not entirely gone, but I am not snoring anymore (unless I'm just absolutely exhausted).

I have been able to confirm through trial that I can actually eat fast food every so often and it has negligible impact. In fact, most times that I do eat it - I'm not very hungry for the rest of the day. My body has adjusted to a new caloric intake level and I'm really enjoying it.

#diet

The experiment is working - down to 197.5 from 218.

If there was any thought that the experiment would not work, I can definitely show that it is. From the beginning of the great diet experiment to now I have lost over 20 pounds purely by changing behaviors that are relatively easy to change. I still haven't achieved my goal of reaching the target weight of 187, but I have definitely lost a lot of weight. In fact I have lost so much weight that people who see me comment on the fact that I have lost weight.

It will be another couple of months before I know whether or not the goal could be achieved within my constraints - but so far it appears that the experiment is definitely working and it is possible to lose and maintain substantial weight loss without going forward with substantial exercise or punishing changes to diet. In fact what I'm finding is that with relatively small tweaks to behavior it is possible to lose weight and keep it off.

I have not gotten down to where I want to be from a blood pressure perspective, but from a weight perspective I am succeeding beyond my expectations. Yay for the scientific process :)

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