Kyle Brady: A Blog

Well, since I’ve mentioned that I’ve been relatively busy, both on and off the computer, recently, I thought I’d make a list for anyone that cares about what my life may have involved.

• I left California on Dec. 18th, and have spent the majority of the time in the Baltimore (actually, Towson) area of Maryland.  That’s on the East Coast for you geography failures.
• I leave tomorrow night to return to the epic awesome that is California.  Be ready.
• I spent a week in the Palm City area of Florida (a little bit north of Miami), right around Christmas, visiting lots of family I hadn’t seen in awhile.  Something like 21 of us.
• mySHOUToutLOUD has been the apple of my eye for the last few months, and we finally launched the Consumer side on January 1st.  Since then I’ve put the programming on hold, and have been trying my hand at PR/Marketing, with mixed results.
  • Facebook Advertising gets you alot of ad views, very few clickthroughs, and even less active users on whatever you’re advertising.  Just FYI, it sucks and isn’t worth it.
  • If you pick up an issue of the METRO (Silicon Valley newspaper) from last week, or this week, turn to the back page.  You’ll see an ad for mySHOUToutLOUD.
  • I’m supposed to have one interview today, and another tomorrow, to have articles in some Towson/Baltimore area newspapers, with the twist that I’m a “20 year old from Towson with a tech startup in California”.  I’ll link when they come out.
• I’ve decided that Shell Scripting sucks.  I needed a script that would generate entire server backups, and then download and distribute them to different locations.  Since it’s easy to do this via command line SSH and FTP, I assumed Shell would be good.  It’s not.  I’ve spent a large handful of hours on it, and it’s not done yet.  Next time, I’ll just do it in C, thank you very much.
• I got some feedback on my book from teachers I like/respect from my high school Alma Mater, Loyola Blakefield.  Apparently “Whispers Into Shadow” isn’t a load of crap, and I should continue with it.  Writing resumes tomorrow on the plane, hopefully completing it within the next three months.
• Finally, I actually go back to school starting Monday at San Jose State University.  This is my first real semester of school since last June, when I decided to leave Santa Clara University and transfer to SJSU… not knowing it would take 6 months to do that.  It’ll be interesting, so we’ll see how it goes.

And, as if that weren’t enough, I’ve also spent alot of time being:

• awesome
• egotistical
• amazing
• a rockstar
• sick programmer
• your worst nightmare

Words to live by?  How about… “Keep the demons inside you.  It makes you more real.”

posted on January 17th, 2008 at 9:32 am by Kyle - Comments

Tags: Business, C, Christmas, Code, Education, Me, My Future Book, Programming

Wired recently covered “Hancock”, a new programming language developed by AT&T used to spy on telephone customers and “graph” the results. Alot of people are up in arms over this, decrying the end of privacy… but I, at least, think they’re misguided, if not totally wrong.

“Language”?

I think that the use of the word “language” here is not the write way to describe Hancock. If you look at the code sample provided on Wired’s post, it should look familiar. It appears to be a very close cousin of C, with some procedural and syntax changes. At what point does a language change from and “adaptation of” to a new language? The obvious point in C vs. C++ is OOP… Should this be called a “security oriented C adaptation”? Or “C, using different libraries”?

In this case, however, it would appear that “different libraries” is an understatement, and “new language” is an overstatement.

This is completely unrelated.

Uses

AT&T developed this language with security monitoring and “community of interest” goals in mind, but when you read about how it works, and the end results… does anything else come to mind?

This language has huge potential. Looking for groupings of habits, traits, and connections between items (in this case, “people”) is a programmatical way to describe what Hancock does. Now imagine what search engines do. Or Facebook with their “social graph”. Or statistics’ processing.

If Hancock were to become more widely used, complicated things like searching for data and returning the most relevant results would become very easy… and, in the case of Google, perfect an already near-perfect system.

Maturation

Hancock is more than just an added library or two to a pre-existing language (kind of like C++), or a modification of one (Ruby)…. I believe it is a “maturation” of the language. As I mentioned before, it has many similarities to C, but makes some things much quicker, more efficient, and simpler than C. C++ was supposed to do that for C, but the end result was a more complicated language.

Iteration and data sorting is a huge part of any “real” language (LOLCODE does not count). Take another look at the sample provided by Wired, and then meditate on the code.

i can has SHUT YOUR MOUTH

Evil? Maybe.

Yes, maybe Hancock is currently being used for “evil” deeds like sorting through very private data to find “terrorists” for the American government. But take a step back from your emotions…

Elvis made “devil music” in his time… what’s he considered now? I’m pretty sure he can’t compete with Slayer…

posted on October 31st, 2007 at 8:21 pm by Kyle - Comments

Tags: AT&T, C, Code, Hancock, Programming, Spying