Just me, myself, and Irene!
The growing rift between Puritans and Entenders didn’t stop on the street. It was in the media. Which each side having their set of supports. New outlets didn’t pretend to be unbiased any more, but planted their feet squarely on one side or the other. Some might argue it was the baiting of media and their talking head hosts and guests that whipped up the population.
It was the media that coined the terms each used today, Cyborgs or Anderthals.
Mark picked his way along a side street. He hated coming down to the city these days. It seems like every time he came, there were more new shops for Cyborgs. He mostly walked with his head down. Not wanted to see the stores or the people with who showed off their flavor of augmentation.
As he approached the corner, he heard the distinctive buzz and whirr of mechanical legs from the cross street. His anxiety raised with each step. He slowed his paced, like was he expected someone to jump out at him. As if around that corner lied in wait an hungry lion. He stopped just before the corner, and listened, as the buzz and whirr got louder.
Mark waited tensely. Soon a woman turned the corner and walked passed him. She greeted hime warmly. But he didn’t make eye contact and grumbled “freak”. In return she calmly said “idiot”. She must have been used to these kinds of insults.
His thoughts returned to how much he hated this place now. What it was becoming. How the Puritans were being pushed out, they were losing more and more of what they loved. This was is home. He lived with his mom in a small two-bedroom house on the edge of town. He used to love coming down here to meet here.
Being enhanced was nothing new. Depending on how you looked at it, humans have been enhancing themselves and their environment the moment they used a tool. While enhancements to the human body was nothing new, there were still people who won’t accept this as the norm.
The people who happily embraced the augmentation of the human body, were called Extenders. They saw it as just the next natural thing. Keeping in the line of corrections and fixing of the human when or where nature had failed. Just as glasses are used to asses the far or near sighted, so too were eye implants or stem cell sight correction used to give sight to the blind.
Extender argue, that people have been using shoes for centuries to protect their feet. Humans weren’t born with shoe on, so why stop there. What was wrong with having an artificial heart that lasted longer, beat stronger, never caused its owner an heart attack, they asked?
While all of this is happen and everyone saw the changes coming. Some people are just resistant to the idea of humans being fixed or augmented. Even for people who were in an accident or who were born physically handicap or with medical issues that could be corrected with augmentation. These people call themselves Puritans.
Puritans had not religious affiliation. They just felt very strongly that medicine was fine to help make humans healthier or to heal them. But there shouldn’t be any augmentation inside of or on the body. So no artificial lung if you had a bad lung, or need one after a crash. No prosthesis if you lost an arm or was born with a deformed leg. Corrective lens were ok, but don’t get an artificial eye that could see in the dark or infrared.
Over time, a rift developed, between Puritans and Extenders. The rift started long before each side would ascribe labels to themselves or each other. Long before the name calling and hate crimes. Long before laws had to be made to protect the rights of one side from the other. As more people extended, the more extreme the Puritans became.
Puritans saw Externders as nothing more than cyborgs. Cyborgs just happened to have a few human part, it didn’t matter it which was more. Whether there was more human than machine in a body. The same any form of internal or external extension as cyborgist.
Extenders too, had a name for Puritans. Extenders saw Puritans as Simpletons, uninformed and unevolved. Extenders argue that it was the goal of humans to be the best there is, and using technology to aid us in lifting a rock to crushing nuts. Was all the same thing, and today we take humans to the next level by bring the technology closer to the human, by adding to the human.
Mark was a typical Puritan. He was the shinning example of a Puritans. He hated everything about the idea that one would even want something the was artificial as part of them. Something you couldn’t part with, you couldn’t take off as easily as you shed your cloths, shoes, or glasses. Because, having extension and augmentations like prosthesis was more. They need permanent anchors on your body, protrusions to a fix to. It was simply not the same. Even hearing aids of the 21st century, didn’t need anything that you weren’t already born with. Same with glasses, you just put them on your nose, not drill a hook into the sides of your head.
Of course there is going to be hell to pay when Mark woke up and found that he had been fixed to save it life. He had an awful accident, an accident he doesn’t remember. He had always thought that if it came to saving his life thought augmentation, he would rather die a human than live as a twisted version of what nature intended.
I will assume that not everyone who happens to read this entry is a programmer or familiar with computer technology.
In order to get a computer to do “anything”, you have to give it instruction, telling it what to do. The set of instructions, is called a program. Naturally, the way in which you write the computer program, is called programming language. There are many programming languages. A new one shows up just about every week if you can believe that. Most are niche and not intended for wide adoption. Some, try to make it mainstream, but fail for one reason or the other.
One programming language that have been around, and may still be in use whenever you read this, is the C programming language. I can say with some level of certainty, that if the Linux Operating System is in use, then C is still being used.  Sometime after C, well, quite a number of years later. Someone, Bjarne S. for now, created another language to make programming for C programmer “easier”. That language was called C++.
So what does C and C++ have to do with this post? Well, nothing really. Except just as C++ was a “better” or improvement on C, so too is Human++ an “improvement” on Human. Hopefully I haven’t lost you. Stick with me a minute.
I heard a few stories on NPR (this is just one) recently about advancements in prosthesis. And there have been more than a few stories in the media about 3D printed jaw, wind pipe, arm, and other body parts. So this is when I started thinking about how a human being twenty years from now and beyond, will have quite a bit of augmentation options. Those will be for the wounded and those born with physical issues.
But the technology, meant to aid the handicap, would get so good and the procedure routine, that it will be marketed to the fit and healthy. It will be marketed as options to make their human parts more durable or stronger or faster. Older people already have hip replacement surgery, so it really isn’t that much of a stretch. What if athletes start having metal implanted in their bones or along it to strengthen it? Why? Because the sports they are in, it is likely to break. If you are an American football player, why not have rods installed in our neck and along your spine? Neck injuries no more or very little.
Sounds crazy now, but these technologies will get better. And it will only be time before there will be people who will have augmentations that not only allows them to live a normal life, but also gives them certain advantages. An artificial eye might not be better than a human eye at first, but 100 years later, that artificial eye might also add infrared vision. If you have to drive at night, guess who is seeing the road better? So now, a human with an artificial eye can see in low light and better than a someone with just human eyes.
When those options are available, how many won’t wants those enhancements? We do breast implants, wear glasses, use hearing aids, nose adjustment, cheek lifts, etc. The process has already started.
Enter Human++, the “better” human. “Better” here just mean technology enhanced. And this is not that different that what we have today. If you live in a developed nation or society. You are already technology enhanced. You use a mobile phone with GPS and many more tools which offloads a lot of what you had to do without it. You no longer need to look at a printed map before you planned your route. You don’t need to remember any phone numbers.
You can talk to your devices, giving them simply commands. It doesn’t always work perfectly, but it will get better. It doesn’t have to be better than a human or as good as a human, before we roll it our or accept in mass. Like telephone automated systems which were pretty simply and frustrating at first, but now quite acceptable, so too will the voice recognition system on your phone.
All that technology needs too do, is to be consistent and good enough.
So the idea of Human++, got me thinking of an idea. An idea I will hopefully flesh out and be able to share one day. Considering that I am always distracted by new projects and old ones, I hope I can see this through. What would the dawn of Human++ be like?
In Human++ post, I ended with this idea that has been playing in my head since hearings those stories.
Let me start by asking a question. Imagine a time when the technology for prosthesis, artificial jaw, eye implant, etc. are widely available to the general public? Today, that technology is expensive, an so your insurance company  will only pay for it if it is absolutely necessary. Even then, they may still give you a hard time. But if getting some “enhancement” actually made you cheaper to insure, then the insurance companies will definitely go for that.
So imagine that time. Now what might be happening is such an environment? Or on the cusp of that time? I imagine that there could be friction between people who don’t believe in enhancing the human body and those who are all for bioengineering advancement.
From those set of questions was born the idea of a book. Well, I have had many book ideas before and even started writing. The challenge is always in the organization. Trying to write thing coherently and a story line that seems to make sense is not a non-trivial task. The difference now however, is that I don’t want to attempt that. I will instead write a bit at a time as I get the inspiration and even if I want to change the story, I will do that. Since it will all be documented here, if I want a complete story, I can pull together the pieces I that fit the story I see at that time.
Because I will be free from the pressure of organization, I can instead be more creative. The first installment of my book idea for “Cusp, Dawn of the Human++” will be posted very soon.
After a very very long hiatus, I am back. I will, again, try to post more often. To do that, the post will be much shorter and kind of random.
My motivation to getting back to the blog is quite simply. If I want to get better at writing, I have to write more. It is really that simple.
I have been thinking a lot for a long time, may be a good decade or more, about writing a book. Yes, a book. Even if it is a short story. But I never get around to doing so. Instead, I have all my ideas in my head. Sometimes, I would would jot things down or start to write something, but nothing fleshed out.
But how will this blog fix that?
Well, simple. If I start writing more, even a little bit. Eventually, that I can start writing about my ideas as I get them. And I will have a place to job down a bit here and there, even it I don’t have time to sit down to writing say an entire chapter.  From these pages, I can pluck my short story. Since I won’t have to worry about finding the time to write it all coherently or even sequentially. I can choose to write any part of any story and even change it completely.
So that is that plan. Write often, write about anything, and even if it is short.
So I have written about Single-Page-Applications (SPA) frameworks like Ember before. I have even mentioned that there were others like Backbone and AngularJS. Recently, I have been doing more and more AngularJS, and I have to say, I love it. I know, I said that too about Ember too. 🙂 Color me silly.
But what I thought was so easy with Ember, that remains true, is even easier in AngularJS.
Take for example, the dependencies you need for Backbone or Ember, there is none, absolutely none for AngularJS.
And there is more, quite more. With AngularJS, you get 2-way binding automatically can easily defined your won directives (elements, attributes, classes, and comments). None of the other SPA frameworks offers 2-way binding or directives like AngularJS. To see how useful those things are and why they are so awesome, I will show two every simple examples.
One key concept in AngularJS is a “directive”. A directive is what you use in your HTML just like you would an element, attribute, class, or comment. One of the easiest to use ‘directive’ that comes with angular is the ‘ng-model’ directive. This directive is used to create 2-way bindings, so let’s see how it is used.
<input type=”text” ng-model=”myVar” />
<h1>{{ myVar }} </h1>
That is it, you now have an input textbox, into which anything you type will show up between h1 tags. How easy was that? Why is this 2-way binding? If you change ‘myVar’ anywhere in code, then the UI will also update in as many places as you are using ‘myVar’. Similarly, if the UI change, that is the input textbox, the ‘myVar’ is updated. So your UI and model is always in sync automatically by AngularJS.
He is a full example you can put in a text editor and load up in your browser:
<html ng-app="">
<body>
<input type="text" ng-model="myVar" />
<h1>{{ myVar }}</h1>
<script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/angularjs/1.0.8/angular.min.js" />
</body>
</html>
If this is exciting to you, then come back soon for my next post on creating your own directives. You will see just how easy it is and may be start to see why AngularJS is different from the rest.
In the last post Ember JS – Single Web Application, we jumped right in. We downloaded Ember JS and fired up our own modified version of the application.  So let’s go a bit deeper.
Ember JS take a lot, a whole lot, from Ruby on Rails and other Convention Over Configuration (CoC) Web Application frameworks.  It is important to note just how important CoC is.  For one thing, you code faster and less, because you dont’ have to think about configuration and since you use a convention over and over, you don’t even have to think about what to name certain things.  All of that, mean you save time, and can be more productive.
In the last post on Ember JS, we saw one of the most minimalist application.  We have a .js file (app.js) which created our Ember JS application and added a Route (more on route later). That file looked like this:
The function ‘model’ in the IndexRoute is there from the original Ember Starter Kit code.  We didn’t change that.
Then we had our .html file which included the app.js file and several other js files before it.  Those other js files are a constant in your Ember JS application, because they are the dependencies (jQuery and Handlebars) and Ember JS itself.  This was all we had in the HTML file, index.html:
<script type=”text/x-handlebars”>
<p>{{input type=”text” value=name}}</p>
This is my name: {{name}}
</script>
I don’t know if the title correctly captures all that Zookeeper is. But, I think it is close. Zookeeper is not a Message Queue or Message Broker like Apache ActiveMQ, RabbitMQ), Mule, Active Camel, etc. Actually, there is quite a long list there, ZeroMQ could be added to the list too.
But but Zookeeper is something that fits a nice itch one might have when writing distributed applications and wanting to share information amongst them. Surely, a MQ can be used, but what if the data is just configuration or changes to values? A message queue seems a bit heavy. And that is exactly why Zookeeper limits the size of messages.
I like the idea of Zookeeper for apps that have to present life data or share state changes. For example, you have several distributed applications and you want them to know what the other is doing. Or you want them to synchronized on some work, Zookeeper makes this very easy. I don’t know a lot about it yet, but I am getting into it now for my current task.
I will be looking Spring XD and Spring Reactor projects too, so look forward to even posts soon won my adventures in these new technologies. Hopefully I will get my hands on Hadoop too.
Last week, our manager called the entire team into a meeting. His charge was, a Web Application, using any technology we want, that implemented a portion of the OpenStack Horizon Dashboard UI. He had a set of pages he wanted developed.
What was really challenging about this task, was that he wanted it about 5 business days later.
Generally, out team develop web applications using Spring MVC and PrimeFaces JSF library for UI. Unfortunately, with the very tight deadline of just one week, I didn’t think we could pull off all that XML UI editing.
Instead, I decided to do a prototype of the UI to be implemented in WaveMaker after the meeting. Not surprisingly, after about 20 minutes, I had about half of the UI completed. Of course, I didn’t have data in the UI yet, since that would have required making RESTful calls to the OpenStack Keystone service.
One of my teammate saw what I was doing and was immediately impressed. The only thing left to do I told him, was to figured out how to make the rest calls. Here too, WaveMaker was surprisingly easy. When it comes to making RESTful API for get, WaveMaker couldn’t be easier.
Soon, I showed the rest of the team and we decided that same day, that WaveMaker was the way to go. The only problem we had, was doing RESTful API post calls and of course, trying to integrate Web Services token based API authentication into WaveMaker Spring Security. We eventually, opted to just not use Spring Security and just do the authentication checks ourselves.
WaveMaker saves the day.