I am a computer programmer by trade and a long time computer user. I’ve had a Macintosh Performa 405, a Compaq Presario, a poorly build hand made computer, a Macbook Pro, a Dell Vostro 1000 laptop, a better built custom computer, a toshiba touchscreen tablet pc, 2 kinds of iphone and a sony vaio that I am writing on now. I’ve administrated several linux servers remotely and run both red hat and ubuntu on home computers (deciding finally it’s not worth the work to run linux at home). Suffice it to say I’ve used a lot of computers.

In using dozens of different computers over the years I’ve noticed one thing, they are all computers. All of them do the same things. You can write documents, connect to networks, install programs, print, and browse the internet. None of this is particularly hard to figure out on a Mac but across the board I have seen IT departments that flatly give up when asked to do any of them using a non-windows computer.

10 years ago you could get away with acting like macs were a foriegn language and not supporting them but not today. Apple is the biggest company IN THE WORLD. It actually just beat oil in that competition. Every company is vying to get iPads pointed at their website or app and every consumer is either using or wishing they could afford a mac.

I know it’s easy to administrate for a group of windows pcs over a network but when it’s time to do your job it doesn’t matter what’s easy it matters what needs to get done. Figure macs out and be ready to work on them or someone else will and your value will fade away.

It’s been a while since I wrote anything. The last post on programming languages was a bit difficult and the break was nice. I’m always open to topics people are interested in learning about and you can submit them via comments here. I have been more active lately exercising and doing parkour. In fact my group got an article in the paper for doing parkour in Memphis. I’m pretty happy with it and its done a lot of good for letting people know parkour is available here.

I’m also running a lot to get ready for Luv Mud, a dirt and obstacle 5k race. I’m really bad at running so I’m doing a lot of it. I want to be competitive but that may be unrealistic. I guess that’s all for now. I’ll be working on another tech article soon, till then stay happy.

This is it, the new jonathanmccarver.com. It’s not fancy (yet), I don’t really plan on making a pretty looking site because that’s not what I do. I make things work but in this instance I am trying to spread some of the knowledge that is natural to me. I’m making a technology blog as the mainstay of the site. I work at a newspaper and they just don’t have any tech news. I don’t blame them because it’s local to Memphis TN and there’s just not a need if your focus is the local market. Of course there are articles on tech happening here in the city but those will be sparse.

If you have any questions then comment them here (or anywhere). What do you want to ask a programmer, a scientist, a computer engineer, a phone designer, an internet architect. I can give you answers to all of these things if you want them so let me know.

This is a work in progress. Once it’s done I’ll add it to wikipedia. Please add any you know of by commenting.

• 4 elvis statues downtown
• Nathan Bedford Forrest
• Buddha
• Religious statue of liberty
• Ramses
• W.C. Handy
• E. H. “Boss” Crump
• greek statues at the courthouse facing adams
• Tom Lee (in tom lee park)
• Soldier in overton war memorial

Someone reccomended going through elmwood for all the ones there. Also CBU campus and theatre memphis.

People often claim that every idea out there has been done. TV and movies, books and stories it all seems repetitive. When you’re brainstorming new ideas you always think it’s been done before, it’s too much like ____. Well I’m here to prove you wrong.

Lets take movies. I will tremendously oversimplify the example case to make it possible to comprehend. Film now is usually digital and shot at 1080p24 that is 24 images a second each of which is 1080 pixels tall by 1920 pixels wide but you don’t need that much to convey meaning. In fact a 10 x 10 grid can show an image and while color is the norm lets further simplify by brining it down to black and white.

_  _  _  _  _  _  _  _  _  _
_  _  _  _  *  _  _  _  _  _
_  _  *  *  _  _  *  *  _  _
_  *  _  _  _  _  _  *  _  _
_  _  _  _  _  _  _  _  _  _
_  _  _  *  _  _  _  _  _  _
_  _  _  _  _  *  _  _  _  _
_  _  _  _  _  _  _  *  _  _
_  _  _  _  _  _  _  _  _  _
_  _  _  _  _  _  _  _  _  _

There you go, 10×10 grid, either underscores or asterisks. Lets give it 5 frames per second too. Thats plenty to convey movement. Did I mention that we are ignoring sound completely? So since all the good ideas are taken lets see how many things our 10 by 10 black and white movie can display in 10 minutes.

Thats 10 pixels times 10 pixels = 100

at 5 frames per second thats 500 pixels per second

60 seconds times 500 pixels is 30,000 per minute

10 minutes times 30,000 a minute is 300,000 pixels shown in our 10 minute film

We aren’t done yet. I’m sure there have been 300,000 stories told in the time of humans but to know how many things total our tiny movie can display we have to account for the ability of each of the 300k pixels to be independently different from each other. That is done by raising the number of possible states (2 for black and white) to the number of pixels.

2^300,000 = 9.97.. x 10^90308

If you aren’t familiar with scientific notation this means a number that starts with 9 and has over 90 thousand digits. So a silent film that has a 10 by 10 resolution and lasts 10 minutes has millions of times more possibilities to it than there have been human beings since the start of time.

Don’t be afraid to be original and don’t ever ever think that there are no new ideas left.