Yay!

Noah's Ark just called, and Bitbucket's surgery (spaying) went very well, and she's already moving around and growling at people. :-) She should be home tomorrow. Woot.

Full blog update to come later. I was just very happy with the news.
Mood: happy
Music: None

Interesting read

I just re-read The Right To Read, by Richard M. Stallman. It's not the greatest piece of literary style, but the content is good. It really bothers me that society is going this way.

More on IndyMedia: the FBI were able to get around the normal notification requirements of a warrant by issuing the warrant to RackSpace, and then hitting them with a gag order (Patriot Act, I believe). That makes it illegal for RackSpace to tell anyone, including IndyMedia, what the legal justification of the warrant was, thereby making it impossible for IndyMedia to seek legal recourse. This loophole would make it possible for police to raid any rental property, without notification of the actual tennant/lessor. This is legal according to the letter of the law, but clearly violates the spirit.

There is some good news, though. Microsoft have announced that they are fundamentally reviewing the role of Palladium/Trusted Computing in Longhorn - with an announcement due at the end of the year. All the indications are that it will be massively refocussed on corporate document control/corporate execution environments, rather than a wider DRM scheme. I might be able to live with that, depending upon the details. I will never buy hardware or software that prevents me from installing/writing software when I want to, on the platform of my choice, or with the requirement of third party consent (whether through law, or through a Digital Rights Management scheme). I urge all my readers to do the same. If a requirement of signed/approved binaries were to take even a small foothold, it wouldn't be long before it was effectively illegal (under the DMCA) and impossible (due to hardware) to run free software. Licensing/bonding of programmers would not be far behind, and the corporate stranglehold over IT would be complete.

That said, a trusted architecture could be very useful - as long as I, or other administrators - are the ones trusted by the hardware/software. Only permitting execution/installation of signed/approved binaries on corporate networks would be a very good thing: no more malware, no more crap on workstations that the users don't own, and no more worries of corrupted binaries destroying things by accident. It's a fine line.
Mood: happy
Music: Inkubus Sukkubus - Supernature

Indymedia, The Debate

Presidental Debates

The debate last night was an interesting contrast of style and substance. Kerry was on message, and hammered home point after well argued poing. President Bush was trying very hard to be humorous (it came off as rather forced, in my opinion), and was absolutely demolished on Social Security, Jobs and Healthcare - and didn't do too well on Education. Early snap polls agree with me: Bush had his strongest debate showing yet, but polls all show either Kerry winning by a large margin, or a tie (depending upon the bias of the news organization! ABC News and Fox News favouring Bush should be no surprise, and even they called it a draw). Of course, snap polls are not to be relied upon; snap polls showed Gore and Walter Mondale winning debates that were later judged a loss. There is one troubling sign from this debate: Kerry referenced Cheney's daughter in a question on Gay Marriage (I thought he did so very tactfully), and Lynn Cheney is in full-on "angry mom" mode. I've seen a couple of journalists echo her criticism of Kerry - this one needs to be spun carefully, or the mud will stick. After three excellent debate performances, it would be a shame to go down because of an angry mom who can't accept that her daughter doesn't choose to be gay.

IndyMedia.org

IndyMedia.org are an umbrella for the publishing of independent media stories from around the world. They don't currently have a Missouri section (anyone who wants to start one would have my technical support and any financial backing I can muster, by the way). A few days ago, they were contacted by Italian and Swiss media outlets and forced to redact a photograph showing local police carefully photographing faces of demonstrators in a WTO demonstration. (Intimidation tactics such as this are increasingly common from authorities in Western democracies, unfortunately) The Italian government then publically branded IndyMedia "supporters of terrorists", and used an international treaty to request the seizure of their servers. FBI agents then contacted IndyMedia's host, Rackspace, in the USA. Rackspace pointed out that Indy's servers were in the UK - so the FBI showed up at their London hosting facility (accompanied by UK agents), and confiscated several IndyMedia servers. IndyMedia were not notified, and Rackspace was placed under a gagging order preventing them from telling IndyMedia what was going on. Today, IndyMedia finally got their drives back - and are still unaware of any pending investigation/prosecution against them.

In fairness to the FBI and UK authorities, they probably had to comply with the Italian/Swiss request. Treaties are pretty clear on required cooperation with signatory countries. What is not acceptable in this case is the Italian violation of European Convention on Human Rights on a number of counts: Freedom to demonstrate (free of legal encumberance), freedom of the press, and freedom of speech. Privacy rights do not apply to the officers taking photographs: they were doing so in public, and thus cannot reasonably expect anonymity/invisibility.

A more important issue is at stake, though, and that is the freedom to report - whether from a biased or objective standpoint - what's going on in a Western democracy. There are already curbs being placed on this; limited media access to campaign events (and restricted coverage of "first ammendment zones", the only spaces in which protests are permitted at rallies for either political party), media abstention of negative coverage in Iraq, the complete lack of media coverage of police oppression of demonstrations, and so forth.

We need an independent media, and it's important that we protect IndyMedia as best we can. I'm open to suggestions, and would be willing to help setup mirrors and similar as needed.
Mood: accomplished
Music: My PC fan pretending to be an aeroplane

Great website

I just happened across this site. It's basically an ugly version of a site I was thinking of making.

Back to setting up a new FreeBSD server.
Mood: happy
Music: None

Interesting

I had a few troubles with my new video card tonight - distortion in SWG, and the occasional lockup. Research indicated that it's a problem between my motherboard and GeForce FX (any chipset) cards. Apparently, the nVidia card asks for a ridiculous amount of power in AGP 8X mode. Switching it down to 4X confirmed this - it actually went faster, and all the problems went away. Yay.

I'm glad that the gigantic hack that is AGP is finally going away. PCI Express looks like a much saner solution, and should let RAID arrays and gigabit ethernet benefit from increased bandwidth rather than hacks such as PCI-64.
Mood: accomplished
Music: None

New toys

A certain game I'm not allowed to talk about is really hard to play without a joystick, so after being paid I ran down to Best Buy and picked up an Extreme 3D Pro joystick. It's great - twist handle, twelve buttons, very stable. It's not quite as smooth as the old Sidewinder 3D Pro - but unlike the Sidewinder, it's available and affordable ($39.95). I can't recommend the joystick enough for games that benefit from one.

Today, I had a forced upgrade. I took a very short nap, and when I woke up WinXP was in 640x480x16! A message informed me that my Nvidia card had stopped responding (amazingly enough, no bluescreen for something as major as the video hardware stopping!). I tried rebooting - and text mode was really distorted, and graphics modes wouldn't display at all in Linux or Windows! A quick power-down and strip of hardware indicated a problem: the video card fan had stuck, and there was a bit of scorching on the circuit board. Yikes. I can't really do without a working PC at home, so I headed out to Best Buy again (they must love me!), and picked up an nVidia GeoForce 5500 FX for $150. It has 256mb video RAM, 8x AGP, and a 240mhz internal bus speed. The difference (once I finished wading through BIOS settings) is startling: everything is brighter, crisper, and smoother. The colour handling in particular is much better - composite armour in Star Wars: Galaxies is really smooth, and the lighting in Doom III is even smoother. It is also a lot faster - I can play Doom III smoothly on High Detail with nothing turned down. SWG was fast, even in downtown Coronet with Anti-Aliasing enabled. Wow.

In other news, Bitbucket went into her first heat - quite a bit earlier than we expected. The common advice is to wait until 6 months to get a kitten spaid, particularly if there have been health issues in the young kitten (Bitty was something of a runt, and was pretty malnourished when we got her - she's fine, and chubby, now!). Unfortunately, the poor dear is rubbing everything that might be friendly, meowing all the time, and is really quite desperate. It's off to Noah's Ark for a quick snip this week...
Mood: relaxed
Music: Inkubus Sukkubus - Supernature

Oh boy!

Wow, so much to blog about. JTLS beta (which I can't talk about), SpaceShipOne wins the X-Prize, Doom 3 for Linux, VP Debate tonight.... overwhelming kitteny goodness!

Ansari X-Prize

I've had a dream since I was a little kid of going to space, and wanting to explore. We've explored most of the frontiers of this planet (the exception being some ocean regions in which the pressure is so high that submersibles implode), and at the rate we're wrecking things we need an exit-option to survive. That, and we simply don't know what's out there - we have pictures, but as the various Mars missions have shown, without actual presence, it's amazing how little we know. SpaceShipOne is a big step on the way to Low Earth Orbit; it's roughly equivalent to the Air Force's X-15 Demonstrator (Rutan also worked on the original X-15!), meaning it has a very short exo-atmospheric loitering time and nowhere near the velocity required to eachieve Low Earth Orbit. Rutan indicated that LOE is his next target; it's not an easy feat by a long shot (you need to go faster, be able to maneuver/decelerate, and survive re-entry), but given that he exceeded the X-15 requirements in a few months, I'm very hopeful. As Heinlein once said, once you are in LOE, you are half way to everywhere. So, fingers crossed!

Doom 3 For Linux

It's good that Id Software have finally released Doom 3 for Linux. I'm a little dissappointed that it uses OSS and not ALSA for sound, but otherwise it's a Really Good Thing. I can now play Doom 3 in my favoured OS at home, meaning less rebooting. Woot.
Mood: happy
Music: New Model Army - Space

Woooooooooooooot!

I just received my invite to the Star Wars Galaxies: Jump To Lightspeed beta. The download has started, I've signed the NDA, and that's about all I can say!

The amazing thing is that I still came to work. Wanna play. I'll still watch the VP debate tonight, but otherwise - wanna play, wanna play, wanna play!
Mood: happy
Music: Distillers - Liberated

Taking my own medicine

I just replaced Bind with "dnscache" by Daniel Bernstein on our home firewall. So far, it's a lot faster at name resolution - and no glitches. Bind really is the 800lb gorilla of the DNS world! I also setup a Squid proxy (non-transparent), and am giving it a go. I've used it to speed up client's LANs before - never for a small network. So far, so good. It's cacheing seems to speed up a lot of sites, particularly ones I visit a lot.
Mood: accomplished
Music: Iron Maiden - No More Lies

Interesting...

Apparently, something has been rotten in the Bush clan for quite a few years. Given my audience, there isn't much need to harp on about Bush Junior's faults here. Bush Senior - as VP - helped setup Saddam Hussein's regime, supported the Taliban, and is widely alleged to have been in the pocket of Arab industrialists. Now, it turns out, President Bush's grandfather helped Nazi Germany, at least until he was stopped by the US government in 1942.

Admittedly, IBM, Hewlett Packard and others also had nazi ties. I just think it's interesting that the Bush rot apparently goes back yet another generation....
Mood: tired
Music: None

Yay

I feel a whole lot better. After a nasty night's sweating, I suddenly had no fever - and my head is clearing up. I slept through the morning, and then worked my arse off for the afternoon - and still had energy to watch the Daily Show's Debate Special (it was great - highly recommended), clean the front room, play some SWG, play with the kitten, and gently whine that SpamAssassin 3.0 isn't available for FreeBSD yet.

I also found myself thinking that I wish my programming efforts directly helped people. Persist.net (about to be GPLed on my new website!), firewall work, and helping on MLUG/the various FreeBSD lists are good and all - but do they really make the world better? I mean, it's nice for programmers to be able to (somewhat) efficiently access SQL data as objects, even if some relational-theory purists scream that accessing relational data in an object metaphor is evil. It's great that clients keep nasties out, and it's great that I've helped a few newbie-geeks out - but does that really make a difference overall? Part of me really wants to do something that genuinely makes life easier for the less privileged.

It occurs to me that the Horizons project does just that, in a way. It massively streamlined a mental health charity's operations, meaning they are helping more people than ever, and can quickly get the documents they need in crisis situations. It isn't exactly charity work on my part, though - I'm paid for it, and we're looking to resell it to other mental health agencies. Does the fact that I make money off of it invalidate the fact that it does make a difference for the mentally ill? Part of me feels good about it (even if I bitch and moan about the gruntwork sometimes!), but I wonder if that counts as civic service. Maybe I need to make a Linux live-CD that talks to screen readers/brail TTYs, and provides a blind-person accessible interface to Links, Mutt, and other excellent text-based (and therefore screen-reader friendly) tools. Maybe I need to lose my middle-class guilt and accept that what I'm doing is already making a difference, and keep focussing on the projects I love.

Lastly, my condolences to the family/loved ones of Hans Bakker/Mclight. He was killed in a car wreck in France, after driving Richard Stallman to the airport. Two other proflific geeks were injured, one seriously (but not critically). I met Mclight in an IRC discussion once. I don't even really remember what was being talked about, but it's a shame that he's no longer around. :-(
Mood: awake
Music: Iron Maiden - Afraid To Shoot Strangers

First Presidential Debate

To my shame, I felt really sick and slept through the actual debate. I watched it on FoxNews webcast a few hours after it happened. I'd completely forgotten to get MythTV to record it - I've corrected that, and the VP debate and next Presidential debates are now scheduled for recording.

I've been researching context/importance of the debates. The first thing to note is that in previous elections, the debates have been very important in persuading swing voters. Polling shows that a theoretical 100% capture of swing voters who say the debates will largely make up their mind would put either candidate 18 points ahead; this isn't going to happen, but it's a good snapshot. The second thing to note is that immediate reaction isn't necessarily what matters; every immediate reaction poll showed Gore winning the first 2000 debate by about 8 percentage points, but after 48 hours he was widely judged to have lost it. Interestingly, he wasn't judged to have lost it on the grounds of substance, but rather because of "reaction shots" showing him sighing, looking angry/impatient, and his demeanour. This gels with earlier debate polling showing that style is often more important than substance, unless you have both in spades - Ross Perot, Clinton, and Carter all benefited from substance and passable style. Reagan won entirely on style, as did Bush in 2000.

I enjoyed the debate. Kerry did a very good job of staying on message, on the offensive, and of giving good counter-arguments to every Bush jibe. President Bush really did badly; the all-important reaction shots showed him grimacing, flinching, clutching his stomach, and at times looking like a 7th-grader being told off for throwing stones. He often had a hard time filling his time slots, and kept going back to repeating the same phrases over and over (much like the "lockbox" from Gore's much ridiculed 2000 debates). His substance was generally lacking, although he did at least seem to largely know what was going on. I really liked his gaffes; "Of course we are going to catch Saddam Hussein - I mean Osama Bin LAden", referring to terrorists as "folks", and when asked about the Iraq threat stating "they, the enemy, attacked us". When it was pointed out that Al-Quaida attacked, he replied "urrrrm, I know that Osama Bin Laden attacked us! I knew that."

Kerry's oratory was interesting. He used short sentences, and made sucinct points - but still layered facts in a very convincing way. He was also studiously calm, keeping a perfect poker face, merely nodding and taking notes during the debate.

The initial reaction was very interesting. Snap online polls on "who won" showed Kerry averageing 70% and Bush 30%. Polls of undecided voters also concluded that Kerry came out ahead by a large margin, and several voters said they would now vote for him - and most said they now felt more favourably towards him. The morning press was full of Kerry praise, with even the Houston Chronicle and the Arizona Wildcat grudgingly praising Kerry. It is interesting that even Republican spinmiester Roe was only able to say that the debate "left things about the same, us with a small advantage".

We won't know if those initial reactions are relevant for another few days. I hope they are, and I hope that Kerry can keep the momentum up. We need the Comeback Kerry right now!
Mood: tired
Music: Queen - Tie Your Mother Down