This coming Tuesday, April 2, marks our state’s Republican presidential primary. Have you decided which candidate to support?

Three of our candidates (and our current president) are agitating for yet another war in the Middle East, despite never having been attacked by Iran.

Three of our candidates (and our current president) are happy that the government claims authority to imprison you indefinitely, without trial or lawyer or any recourse whatsoever, simply by accusation that you are a terrorist.

Three of our candidates (and our current president) are willing to take that further and kill you, anywhere in the world, without trial, based purely on accusations.

Three of our candidates (and our current president) are fine with snooping into your spending and reading history, without a warrant and in secret, just to check if you are a criminal.

Three of our candidates (and our current president) think the best place to make intrusive, controlling decisions, is in a body governing more than three hundred million people of incredibly diverse cultures, beliefs, and personal circumstances.

Three of our candidates (and our current president) believe the government always knows best, even while the government is blatantly violating basic principles we all learned as children (do unto others, don’t live beyond your means, admit mistakes and accept the consequences).

Three of our candidates (and our current president) believe that more government is always the answer, regardless of the problem, and regardless of whether a problem even exists.

Now is the time to vote for the one candidate who considers you to be a human being, in full possession of your faculties and your own opinions and beliefs about how your life should be lived. Now is the time to vote for Ron Paul.

Just dropping in to commend iA Writer for their keyboard. I absolutely love that they have forward and back cursor controls (letters by letter or word by word), and the other extra bits up there are useful, too. I wish this was the default onscreen keyboard for the iPad; it would make my life so very much easier. The single worst thing about the iPad, so far, is placing the cursor for editing… This takes all that pain away.

TDD is no replacement for good design and architecture. I shouldn’t have to say this, but the more I read about TDD, the more I see people saying they aren’t sold on it, because even when they use it they discover their app is designed wrong for the actual requirements, and now they have to tear it apart and start over.

This is not the fault of TDD.

TDD should be irrelevant to your design process. The only demand TDD puts on your design is the same demand any testing-heavy process would: extensive use of dependency injection to make unit testing with mocks easier. You should already have architected your module to match your requirements, before you ever write one line of code. Take the time to do your design in a deep way, before you start coding, and you will save yourself much time later.

TDD is not there to make your design better or to show you where your architecture needs to be rethought. TDD is there to ensure as you go that you are fulfilling the plan you already came up with, and not introducing other factors. TDD is a check, not a solution. Use it right, and you will reap the benefits of more stable code, more reliable extensibility, and fewer bugs getting to your users. Just don’t expect it to do your work for you.

I finally did it. I resisted through the first two generations (not entirely voluntarily), but I am now the proud father of a third-generation iPad. Having spent the last three days in essentially constant interaction with the device, I consider myself well-prepared to review it.

Mine is the 32-GB, wifi-only model, in black. I see no need to spring for the 4G version; if I’m using the iPad, I’m probably near wifi anyway.

All in all, I am incredibly satisfied with the iPad. My previous computing environment has been my iPhone, a Dell Mini 9 netbook, and a homebuilt desktop PC back in my study, running Ubuntu. Since I got my iPhone in October, the netbook has increasingly been relegated to a closet, as much of its utility has been usurped by the phone. The iPad puts the nail in the coffin, doing everything the netbook could and more, without being saddled with the comparatively tiny screen of my iPhone.

I mainly used the netbook for couch media consumption (catching up on feeds and social media while watching sitcoms with my wife, etc), and went to the PC in my study for production (coding, writing blog posts, and so on). This weekend, that dynamic changed a bit. The iPad does all the media consumption activities adroitly, of course. Between the browser and activity-specific apps (Netflix, Feeddler RSS, and such), my infovore habits are well-fed. At the same time, the iPad is perfectly workable for production. I wrote multiple blog posts on it this weekend, with no real hindrances. The on-screen keyboard is surprisingly easy to get used to, and the iOS spellchecker is good at catching the few mistakes that get through; I feel like I have not lost any speed at all, compared to a full desktop keyboard. One complaint is that it could have more punctuation on the primary keyboard, under long-presses or the shift key; writing HTML tags was painful, since < and > are two layers deep in the symbols menu.

The screen is beautiful. I saw little to no pixelization; only in a few apps that obviously used raster graphics and fonts instead of vector (SpringPad, I’m looking at you!). Even the few iPhone apps I have installed look quite nice in the 2x zoom.

The battery lasts a suitably long time. I opened the iPad’s box at about 2:30 on Friday afternoon, and used it straight through without charging until I went to bed at 1:00 am, when it still had 10-20% charge remaining. Saturday and Sunday brought similar experiences. The downside of such capacity, though, is in charging time. I can plug my iPhone in over lunch, and it will fully charge from nearly empty. The iPad only gained 10-20% charge in that same time; it will need charged every night to avoid the hassle during the day. This is expected, especially if you look at iFixit’s teardown and see that the tablet is essentially a giant battery (see step 21) with a touchscreen strapped to it, but it needs to be a consideration.

One huge downside of iOS is the lack of user accounts. I can understand ignoring that feature for a phone OS, but the iPad is advertised as a post-PC device; one thing that all PC OSes (including OSX) do quite well, is separating concerns by different users. I can install the apps I want to see, and my wife can install hers, and we don’t have to step on each other’s toes to do it. No such luck on the iPad. For instance, we are both caught up in the Draw Something craze, and both want to use the iPad to play it (due to the far larger screen than our iPhones), but there’s no easy way to do that. We ended up installing both the paid and free versions of the app, and each signed into one version to use it.

The new iPad is, of course, very fast and smooth-feeling. I haven’t noticed any slowdowns, even compared to similar tasks on a desktop PC. everything just works, and it does so quickly.

As a final negative, the audio is very quiet. Even in a silent room, alone, I have trouble hearing some things. The speaker does seem designed to take advantage of acoustics if you have the tablet laying on the right kind of surface, but on my couch that isn’t always available.

Verdict: I am pretty much in love with my iPad. My netbook has become completely superfluous, and I am even less likely to sequester myself at my desk for production. I now have instant access to nearly any data source in a manageable form-factor on a beautiful display and with little regard for outside power sources. What’s not to love?

Today is Super Tuesday! Today, several states will be holding their primaries and caucuses, as we work to select the next Republican candidate for President of the United States. This year’s crop: Georgia, Idaho, Massachusetts, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Vermont, Virginia, and Alaska. Given that great excitement today and the importance of the results from this day’s voting, here is a rundown of why I fully support Ron Paul.

Subsidiarity
This concept holds that government should be handled at the lowest level possible; higher levels of government hold a “subsidiary” position, dealing only with those things the lower levels couldn’t handle. This is reflected in the Constitution itself; the Framers chose those things they doubted a state’s ability to handle (inter-state commerce, foreign relations, military defense from foreign invasion), and a few that were too important to allow the states to decide (protection of natural rights from government interference). These things were given to the federal government to administer; everything else was given, in the 10th Amendment, to the states to deal with. Ron Paul is the only candidate with a bold plan to actually begin returning the federal government to its Constitutional authority, and allow the states to resume their responsibilities.

Ron Paul is one of the outstanding leaders fighting for a stronger national defense. As a former Air Force officer, he knows well the needs of our armed forces, and he always puts them first. We need to keep him fighting for our country. – Ronald Reagan

Just War
This doctrine holds that the only just war is a reactive war – a just government shall never be the aggressor. Unfortunately, American politicians tend to disagree: Every other GOP candidate, and even our nominally anti-war Democrat president, are in favor of preemptive war against Iran, or any other country they think might have nuclear weapons, or that they think might, maybe, attack the US (or Israel). Ron Paul is the only one who thinks that maybe, just maybe, it would be intrinsically morally wrong to attack a people who have yet done us no harm. This is probably one reason Paul gets more donations from active duty military service-people than all the other candidates combined; our soldiers know they shouldn’t be where they are, and don’t want this trend of senseless, illegal wars to continue. Ron Paul is also, quite rightly, in favor of a strong military for national defense; in the occasion where we must defend ourselves, we should be able to do so.

Right to Life
Ron Paul is a career OB-GYN. He has delivered over 4000 babies. He is staunchly pro-life, and has actually legitimately worked to end abortions, and return the power regarding them to the states. Abortion is a criminal issue, just like any other murder, administration over which the Constitution says goes to the states.

Government out of Marriage
Ron Paul personally believes in marriage between a man and a woman. However, he also recognizes that the government has no business interfering with an inherently religious institution. What business is it to Washington who you “marry,” regardless of who recognizes the marriage? If government must have some record for taxes, or HIPPAA, or what have you, then fine: there are ways to do that without interfering in this institution.

Racist Drug War
The US incarcerates more young black males than any other country. In fact, the US incarcerates more people of any type, in proportion, than any other country (this includes authoritarian states like China). This stems from the fact that the US prison population is about 75% made up of non-violent “criminals,” guilty of “crimes” in which there was no victim at all. Drug crimes. The federal government’s 4-decade-long “War Against Drugs” has wasted billions of dollars. It has swelled our prison population to the point our prisons cannot handle it; California recently just let a bunch of people go, since there was no room for them. It has directly given rise to violent inner-city gangs, who could not support themselves if there was no black market in drugs. And finally, it has produced no reduction in drug use whatsoever, while giving rise to ever-more-unhealthy drugs as the safer ones are made illegal. Ron Paul will work to end this senseless “war” on substances, reducing government expense and waste as he reduces the pointless prison population, increasing your personal freedoms in the process.

Economics
I confess: I am not an expert in economics. I could not sit down to a debate about the finer points about Keynesian and Austrian economics. However, I can see that Ron Paul predicted the housing collapse way back in 2003. I can see that he is the only candidate who convincingly argues against living beyond our means (and backs it up with his voting record). This is what the American people have been seeking for decades, and politicians have paid it mere lip service. Ron Paul is the first one who shows a history of actually trying on this subject. He’s on to something – note how any economics questions in debates have the other candidates parroting the things Paul has been saying for years.

Electability
This is the lowest of my priorities, but luckily it favors Ron Paul as well. Of all the GOP contenders, Ron Paul consistently polls the best against President Obama — he has the best chance of winning the general election of them all. He pulls in important issues for Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians, and Constitutionalists, rather than meekly toeing any one party line for the votes. He can be trusted to act according to his principles and stated beliefs, because he has already been doing so for decades (check his voting record). He won’t drop his campaign promises on the floor as soon as he wins the election, like so many presidents seem fond of doing.

The bottom line is this. If you love everything our presidents have done for the past twenty-plus years (Clinton, Bush, and Obama), then by all means vote for Romney or Santorum or Gingrich. If, on the other hand, you would like to see meaningful change in the way your government deals with you, if you want to see a visible decrease in government interference with your natural rights, if you actively want a smaller government, and the lower taxes and increased freedom that entails, then you must, in good conscience, vote for Representative Ron Paul.