Holyjeez

My wife Janet has been sick/in the hospital with a pretty serious, and as yet unknown, illness since 2 Wednesday’s ago. In order to streamline the update process, I wanted to throw up a quick blog where I could post her status. At first I just added a page on my current blog called Janet’s Status. I did this because I already have wordpress installed, and it was just config changes. Then I got to thinking about it and decided because most of the people wanting her status were religious, I should create a new blog so that they wouldn’t wander on to my blog and see my posts that were derisive toward religion.

Let me repeat that. Because I was afraid to make a page showing Janet’s recovery status anywhere near my religious opinions, I spent an extra effort setting up a new domain name, new wordpress installation and new database. Now granted, that stuff took maybe 20 minutes so it’s not like I moved a mountain, but still I am a little disappointed in myself for giving deference once again to religion. If I had posted anti-nascar or anti-baseball (check) then I wouldn’t have had any problem if someone stumbled on my opinions.

That being said, most of the comments (greater than 90%) referenced god/jesus/religion in one form or another. It still surprises me how much religion comes to the forefront during times of crisis. I knew most of our friends/familly considered themselves christian, but I was still amazed how the focus of most comments was praying, etc.

Apparently Jesus hated Janet for a week and a half and, only after enough praying, was convinced to finally stop punishing her. Everyone prays for Jesus to heal, but no one acknowledges the fact that if Jesus exists and controls illness, then he is just a flat out asshole for making her so incredibly sick for over a week.

Don’t get me wrong, Janet and I both very much appreciated everyone’s comments and nice, encouraging words. We have a large and supporting network of friends, family, family friends, and friend’s families. So many people offered to help any way they could/we needed. Fortunately things went smoothly enough that I didn’t have to take too many people up on that offer. It was just a snap back to reality in seeing so many references to religion.

I don’t think I really have a point here, just wanted to voice my surprise at the pervasiveness of religion. I guess I had been living in my own atheistic world, and having religion affront me so blatantly was unexpected and almost offensive. I guess I just found the point I thought I didn’t have - now that I have rambled on so much - so here it is:

I went out of my way to hide my atheistic religious views so as not to accidentally offend people, and those exact people were very quick to voice their christian religious opinions without a second thought. Why the double standard? I guess that it usually the way it is with majority/minority opinions. It’s ok to voice your opinion as long as it is in the majority.

Feel free to comment and let me know if you would have handled it any differently.

1. PT Cruiser:
   
   The only things worse than the guy who designed this car are the people who signed off on its production and the 9 people who bought one.
2. Baseball:
   
   This is by far the most boring sport (golf has Tiger Woods so they’re ok) and to top that off, they stretch the game length out by having short bursts of activity (10 seconds) surrounded by guys standing around for 5 minutes. The shortest baseball game on record was 7 hours and 10 minutes, look it up. In order to play you can be overweight, and only succeed at your job of getting a hit 20% of the time. If you fail a little less than 2/3rds of the time (even after taking performance enhancing drugs) you are considered a god.
3. Dick Cheney:
   
   This one probably could have just been ‘The Bush Administration’, but this guy is a bit of a stand out. Somehow while he was heading up the committee to find a VP for GWB, he failed to think it would be a conflict of interest if the guy they chose for VP was a CEO for a company that would get $10 billion in government contracts thanks to the war he helped start by spreading false information. Oh, by the way, his committee decided to choose himself. While his Halliburton illegal-ness (I’ll quit as CEO for $20 million and then give you $10 billion in no-bid contracts where you can fail and get even more contracts) is somewhat (like barely) hearsay, his refusal to obey the law isn’t. He refused to release documents required by congress while fighting to extend the power of the executive branch by challenging laws put in place by congress to oversee the president (bye bye checks and balances, hello dictatorship). He also supports forms of torture considered illegal in U.S. laws and international treaties. Even though he likes to start wars so much, he doesn’t like to fight in them, just make money off of them. He dodged the Vietnam draft 5 times saying “I had other priorities in the ’60s than military service.” I bet this guy did too. I’ve also heard he likes to eat babies while shooting his friends in the face.
4. Spandex:
   
   Not a whole lot needs to be said here. Maybe I’m being too harsh on the fabric, maybe its more an issue with people’s decision making skills. Either way, its like locking up your guns to protect you child from shooting himself. If that guy didn’t have access to spandex, he would have chosen sweat pants. Now I’m not trying to be rude to fat people, I am also too fat to wear spandex. So I don’t wear it. I wear t-shirts.
   
   
5. Standard Units:

This is the division of countries for/against Metric before and after World War II.


This is now:

At least we are still measuring things against sizes of a human body part. Can someone please tell me what the length of 1 Rod is? One time the US wanted to be a leader in the scientific world, so we shot the Mars Orbiter 4x too fast into the atmosphere of Mars because we use ‘US Customary Units’. Awesome.

6. Catholicism:
   
   Catholicism has a long and sordid history of supporting the Nazi’s, molesting young children, covering up the molesting young children, moving to another parish and molesting more young children, making up ‘edicts from god’ that are politically and personally motivated, oppressing people, brainwashing children and adults, resisting critical thinking, resisting scientific progress, swindling people out of their money, and controlling people through fear. Now those attributes aren’t all unique to Catholicism, but I just chose it among other religions/denominations because it stands out for its achievements in these areas.
   
   

So these things are in no particular order, and I actually had about 2-3 more that I wanted to include, but this post is long enough already.  Not long like too much reading, long like it took me longer than 5 minutes to make.  Also, I just previewed it in my current theme and it looks like a blind 2 year old cut things from a magazine and pasted them on my webpage, so this thing might be unreadable until I get a new theme.

In case you don’t know, antlr (ANother Tool for Language Recognition) is a parser generator framework.  It lets you specify a language using a grammar and then it can output the source code for actually compiling and executing that language.  I won’t go in to too much detail about how ANTLR works or how languages and grammars work, one because I’m not an expert (CS classes were a long time ago) and two because google can easily tell you the answer.  The main point of this is that ANTLR can then output that source code in a number of different target languages.

It has support for several (Java, C, C++, ruby, javascript, etc.), but is lacking support for Objective-C in the most recent version.

Well I have started trying to update the Objective-C target stuff.  This has and will be a learning experience, but here are the things to note so far:

1. I don’t know Objective-C
2. Objective-C is used mostly by Apple devices (Mac, IPhone) and I have no Apple devices
3. Adding a target language implementation to ANTLR3 is pretty straight forward except for items 1 and 2

Ever seen this error:
com.google.gwt.user.client.rpc.SerializationException: Type ‘your.class.Type’ was not included in the set of types which can be serialized by this SerializationPolicy or its Class object could not be loaded. For security purposes, this type will not be serialized.

Or this error:
Error: Type ‘your.class.Type’ was not serializable and has no concrete serializable subtypes

It can be caused by multiple reasons, but if you feel like you have done everything correctly (included source in GWT’s classpath during compilation, implement Serializable, google searched, prayed to the god of your choice) then you probably have the problem I had.  your.class.Type doesn’t have a default constructor.

So if your class has no default constructor (one that takes no arguments), add it and try again.  If that doesn’t fix it, and you find out what else is wrong, please post it as a comment here.

Also as an added bonus tip, when google searching for errors, your error usually is of the pattern: “something common to all errors of this type” “something specific to my project” “some more common stuff”.  Like in this error you have common stuff:
com.google.gwt.user.client.rpc.SerializationException: Type

Then specific stuff: 
‘your.class.Type’

Then more common stuff:
was not included in the set of types which can be serialized by this SerializationPolicy or its Class object could not be loaded. For security purposes, this type will not be serialized.

The way to search for that is take your stuff and replace it with an asterisk (*) and put the whole thing in quotes and google will wildcard your specific stuff and you will get better results.  So a good way to search for this error would be (trimming because google only lets you search 32 words):
“com.google.gwt.user.client.rpc.SerializationException: Type * was not included in the set of types which can be serialized by this SerializationPolicy”

Hope either of those things help someone.