L-P Huberdeau

A friend of mine sent me a link to a fairly long video. At first, I thought it was humor, because it really made no sense. The problems came when I realised 30 minutes later that the guy is dead serious and the crowd takes it seriously. To keep things simple, the guy attempts to explain the bible does not go against the existance of dinosaurs and explain the bible’s timescale. Think it makes no sense already? Wait until he tells you they still exist among us. If you have 2 hours to kill, you should watch this one.

The whole thing fits very well in the context of southern american’s Intelligent Design, where science is trimmed out, taking the arguments and using them as they fit inside your theory, ignoring everything that goes against it. The most interesting part is probably that the two hour argumentation does not lead to any formal conclusion. Let’s summarize it all:

1. Stories all around the world mention dragons (which is the old word for dinosaur right? except the fire breath parts) and the Bible also mentions them.
2. The Bible is always right, so the stories have to be true.
3. Recent stories mention giant monsters and natives from uncivilised regions of the world mention them, so they still exist.
4. Since dinosaurs still exist, they couldn’t live 70 million years ago, therefore, evolution theory is wrong.
5. Since evolution theory is wrong, Bible is right.

The last 30 minutes of the video are dedicated to reminding the audience that, since they are right, they must feed the mind of the child with Bible stuff, remove evolution from public schools and so on.

Science might not be right about everything, but at least the approach to forming a theory is based on real facts. Even if all the stories he talk about were true about descendants of dinosaurs still being alive on Earth, it does not prove Bible is right in any way, it only proves a few specimens survived. It you take away the fact that the bible is always right from the theory above, what you end up with is much closer to the bible being a book filled with stories from doubtful sources than evolution theory being wrong.

The video does place a few thigns in perspective and remind us that not everything fits in the evolution theory as it is. After all, it’s built from pieces of information across the ages. The main difference is that science keeps trying to find more information and demonstrate elements of it’s theory instead of fitting in a God who solves all problems.

Different civilizations believed in different cults over the centuries. Greeks believed gods lived on Mt Olympus. The day they walked to the top of it, they realised there were no gods. Nowdays, gods live everywhere and within us. This way, we can be certain never to find them. There are multiple religions active now. Since none of them have facts to support their cult, how can any of them claim they are right and others are wrong?

Let’s say my rational atheist mind is wrong and God created us all in seven days, who created God? If we are too complex to be the result of random events in this universe, how can God (which has to be more complex than us) come to existance?

Sorry for the rambling.

We used to have this problem with Apache FOP using loads of memory while processing documents containing too many SVG graphics. Until now, it was only an annoyance. We could let the rendering run over the lunch time or overnight. If we needed the output fast, the illustrator’s dual Xeon did the job without too much trouble. Simply allow 1.5 gig of memory to the virtual machine and the problem was solved.

That was until the amount of illustrations doubled and their complexity as well. It got to the point where the processing would die after eating up nearly 2 gigs of ram. The obvious solution was to buy more ram, the other one was to look deeper into FOP’s code to find the problem. Not having any time to waste, we obviously opted for both options: looking into the code until the additional ram arrived. Luckly, it didn’t take too long before the problem was solved. While Apache Batik, the SVG renderer, is actually eating up most of the memory, the problem was in the way FOP would handle the memory.

I used version 0.20.5, which is the current stable release. I could have tryed the new beta version, but since a large part of the code has been rewritten and XSL-FO is sensitive by nature, I didn’t feel like having to go back and play in the XML file to fix formatting issues. These memory issues are probably going to be fixed in this new release. The details of the fix will be given in the rest of the post.

This code hacking adventure really demontrated how useful HyperThreading could be. The main problem you have when a process dies of memory shortage after 20-40 minutes of processing is really that you actually have to wait that long to test if the fix actually worked. On a single CPU system, waiting that long could be considered a waste of time, since no more ressources are actually left to perform any work. But with HyperThreading, which for some unknown reason Dell turns off by default (which caused quite a waste of my time), it’s possible to actually code on some other projects while the document is rendering, without having any of the processes affected in speed… or at least… not in a significant way.

I’ll also have to take off all those bad things I said about Eclipse in the past. It’s quite a good environment to develop Java in, because Java is one of those languages that requires a complete IDE to be any usable. I could navigate in FOP’s 26K lines of code with ease. Thanks to that search function that scans for method signatures. I also found a nice metrics plugin that gives a bunch of useful information about the code. On the other hand, I was surprised to see Data Tools does not seem to work with MySQL (on stable release for Eclipse 3.1).

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