Herbert's Random Musings

On a general economic malaise

2010-08-12T09:33:00.002-05:00

So once again, all the economic indicators around the world show that the economy is slowing down once more. Politicians' moods have switched from stimulus to spending contraction, unemployment keeps going up, and consumer spending keeps going down. Even the Bank of England had to admit that swingeing cuts to public sector spending have prolonged their forecast period of economic depression - and the risk of sliding from depression (a period in which growth is smaller than it used to be) back into a recession (actual economic shrinkage) looms ever-larger.

This post will examine some of the reasons we're in this hole, and a few ways of getting out of it.

Economic Wrong-headedness

The most basic problem is that Governments currently don't seem to understand the concept of public revenue.

For an individual, income is entirely dependent upon assets and employment - or state replacements for employment such as benefits. When the economy tanks, you have to spend less, or you lose your home, car and creature comforts. For a business, income is entirely dependent upon customers buying services or goods from you. If nobody is buying, then you have to trim costs - but there's a point at which costs cannot be lowered anymore - and if you hit that point and still can't sell anything, you go out of business. Both can get by for a while on credit, but after a while the debt will sink them - and credit is expensive when you are poor.

For governments the world over, this equation is somewhat different. Almost all income comes from individuals or businesses, in the form of taxation. If the people and businesses of your country are prospering, then so is the government. If the economy is tanking, so is tax revenue. However, unlike an individual, during hard times costs actually go up. Unemployment benefits, health-care for the suddenly poor (who probably have more health problems due to stress), and other welfare costs spiral upwards at exactly the time governments have the least revenue.
Additionally, there is only so much that a government can trim without damaging prospects for economic recovery. If you don't spend money maintaining basic infrastructure (roads, ports, utilities), then when the world economy picks up - your region is no longer as attractive a target for growth. If you don't spend money on education, then the next generation will be less employable - and subsequently a less attractive target for growth.
Also, unlike the general public, government debt is cheap - especially for large, well-established economies. Right now, a long-term Federal US bond for $20 billion would only cost about $25 billion over 20 years to pay off! Likewise, UK gilts are incredibly cheap right now. Government borrowing is at a very high level right now, but with repayment regimes like that, it's a very different kettle of fish to a credit card that leaps to 22.5% interest when you delay repayment.

Additionally, it's often less expensive to a government in the longer-term to not make someone redundant (directly or indirectly). When employed, they pay taxes. They buy goods (paying VAT/sales tax in the process) from business (who pay taxes). When unemployed, they receive government money to assist them, and can no longer buy as much stuff from businesses, cutting tax revenues all down the chain. Make enough people redundant, and the businesses who rely on them close (causing even more redundancies) - a downward economic spiral of decay.

Taxes

What's really peculiar is the idea that taxes should not rise when governments are out of cash. As an example, extending Bush Jnr.'s tax cuts for the well-off (affecting a mere 2% of the US population) cost the United States $700 billion. That's an enormous amount of money; you could pay off 5% of the total US national debt with that amount (and that's if you were stupid enough to use it as a lump-sum payment on a low-interest long-term debt plan). You could fund the entire stimulus package with it, making it entirely debt-neutral.

Part of the reason for this is that Congressmen want to be re-elected, and raising taxes is generally bad for one's re-election prospects. However, much of this is based around a false premise; since Reagan, it has been popular to cite a chart stating that economic productivity falls as taxes rise. Certainly, at extreme levels this is true - but there is no historical evidence that it is true overall. Indeed, Clinton's record growth period coincided with taxes significantly higher (on the well-off) than we have now - and yet, we aren't even close to Clinton's economic miracle. Does that mean the model is false? No; it simply means that if you take any one economic indicator in isolation and expect it to bring about the changes you desire - you are a blinkered shire-horse of an economist.

Dogma

Accompanying the anti-tax dogma, is an even more insidious dogma: that everything government does is bad, incompetent or inept. Sure, there are plenty of inept bureaucrats, and there is plenty of waste. However, the often-peddled tales of welfare recipients with limousines are the exception rather than the rule (studies show that welfare fraud is less than 1% of the welfare budget, while incorrect payments are only around 2-3%; private enterprises lose that much all the time - HP recently admitted to paying a lady $5k per week to greet people at the door to corporate events!). The reality is, while these tales are great ways to get attention, they mask a far more insidious hatred of government providing services to the bottom end of society - the people who really need them.

It is also dangerous dogma, in that not helping people when they need it - now - inevitably leads to an increase in crime, an increase in permanent under-employment (as people give up and leave the workforce for good), and a more difficult economic recovery.

History

It helps to understand this malaise in terms of history (an admittedly unpopular viewpoint!).

Prior to the early 18th Century, there really wasn't an industrialized world. Agrarian economies were quite simple: you grew enough crops to sustain yourself and sold a small surplus, which didn't have to be very large since there were very few service industries to sustain. Agricultural work was very labor intensive, since very few machines existed to assist with the process - so employment was assured, at least for part of the year. Charities (in particular Churches) were able to pick up the slack and help the hard-cases.

Industrialization changed that forever. Agriculture became increasingly automated, causing massive unemployment. Industries appeared, and labor increasingly switched to cities. Despite this, the plight of the poor became worse and worse - people starved to death, were incarcerated in poor-houses, the Dickensian nightmare was real. It wasn't until the financial collapse of the 1920s/30s that real action was taken - and only then after a horrible death toll.

The safety-net (still opposed by Libertarians) appeared, following the most basic of humanitarian premises: let those who can, help those who cannot. Bad times hit everyone at some point, and society functions better if we try to help those at the bottom get back on their feet. Admittedly, it took the war-time economy of World War II to fix the US economy and industrial base, but between that extraordinary stimulus and a system designed to train workers and help the worst-off, life became much better.

Now, we're standing on a precipice. Much of the safety net has been worn thin, and is being continually eroded. The economy is a mess, and already the nation is going backwards. So I leave you with a basic question: do we want to invest in a future, accepting that some of us may have to pay a little more to achieve it - or do we want to let 2% of the population get richer while the rest of us rapidly approach squalor?

New Labour needs New Pragmatism

2010-07-16T08:16:00.002-05:00

So, England has its first coalition government in a very long time (and the first hung Parliament since John Major's final days). The ConLib (or ConDem, which might be a more accurate phrase) coalition's axe is shining in the morning sun of the new government, ready to fall on just about every aspect of the country's policy. Until that axe falls, the majority of voters remain blissfully unaware of the imminent bloodshed. The budgetary echoes of Thatcher's first term are clear: riding high on popularity, while the center-left press point to impending doom; and just like Thatcher's first term, it wasn't until the effects of Howe's 1981 budget hit that people started to see the real effects of a 4% (compared with Osbourne's 25% target) cuts.

In 1981, I was 6. I only dimly remember parts of it; schools suddenly couldn't provide milk at lunch, riots, rumbling discontent from teachers, police and civil servants, criticisms that the United Kingdom's armed forces were no longer capable of doing very much at all, and ruminations on industrial action. My parents (both teachers, and active in Labour) were seeing the brunt of it, and more than anything I remember the sense of resentment at the dismembering of a lot of the institutions they had fought so hard to create. I also distinctly remember seeing homeless people sleeping in London for the first time; it didn't take long for them to go from an occasional sighting (selling hot chestnuts) to cardboard cities around Waterloo station. I also remember the after-effects well; waiting lists lasting months or years in the NHS, jumble sales at school to try and pay for books, homeless Miners sleeping on our couch, rioting. I remember our local policeman gradually descending from a friendly local bobby to a shell-shocked, terrified man after he was drafted to fight miners and rioters. I remember the despair amongst my friends "up north" as they realized that there was no chance of them finding work after school, and still remaining in their beloved Northern cities.

In the past decade, I've watched much of the Midlands transform into an impressive place (especially Birmingham), unemployment decline (especially in northern England), and the NHS return to being an enviable institution.

Now, I'm 34 and living in the USA. As Osbourne's axe falls (and I wait for a similar axe here, as the US catches the austerity bug), I read about 60,000 policeman being made redundant, hospitals expecting to close, replacement school buildings (and repairs) being cancelled, University closures, and welfare-to-work programs (one of the few unemployment benefits that's been shown to genuinely work) closing. It's an uncomfortable deja vu.
Yes, spending does have to come down - but does it really have to fall like this? Cutting a million jobs certainly isn't going to help an economy barely showing growth right now, and the need to stimulate growth with low interest rates risks inflation should the economy begin to move again. On top of that, the UK government's debt is cheap right now. Many of the gilts are owned by UK institutions (or the Government itself; I'm never quite sure how that one works), the rest are on very long-term repayment schedules. Debt repayments really aren't that bad right now, and the massive cuts just announced really won't reduce the total debt very much (just as in the 1980s, the debt came down when the economy resumed growth, leading to rising income - not when Government spending cuts came into force).
(As an aside, the redundancy package cost of laying off so many civil servants will be enormous - it's a tremendously expensive way to "save" money. All of the civil servants who don't find work will also be eligible for benefits - another significant cost. Everyone who loses a private-sector job because their public-sector customers are no longer around will also cost benefits, and no longer pay taxes. It's barely a win at all.)

England needs a credible, pragmatic opposition with both a heart and a keen mind. Yes, by all means trim fat wherever it is found. Yes, some of that will be painful - albeit not 60,000 police made redundant painful. But no, spending cuts don't have to take the form of a relentless, ideologically motivated attack on Government spending. Keep the programs that help people get back to work - they work, and employed people pay taxes rather than costing benefits. Keep investing in the future - an educated, skilled, healthy workforce is essential to a healthy longer-term future. Stop spending money invading other countries (Iraq, Afghanistan), purchasing expensive floating targets (super-carriers), building jet planes designed for the previous generation of conflict (Euro-fighter), and don't re-purchase missiles you'd never use anyway in the hopes of deterring someone - whomever they may be (Trident).

The problem is, just like the 1980s, after a defeat a party needs time to become a credible alternative again. Labour, as it stands, is not up to the task. Veering to the left probably won't help (see Michael Foot), although many left-wing principles are worth defending. Labour needs to get its act together with a new leader, and fast. Unlike the 1980s, ConLib does not have a large majority - and could crumble when the axe hits and voters see how bad things are becoming. If it weren't for the Falklands, Labour would have won in 1983 - despite Michael Foot's best efforts. Let's not make the same mistake again, and head firmly back to the center-left ground, offer a principled opposition platform of sensible debt reduction, growth and social justice. Labour needs a charismatic leader with vision, one ready to pounce when ConLib risks crumbling when Osbourne's axe falls.

The 1980s were bad enough the first time around - let's not do that again.

Apples, Oranges, Intelligent Design and Evolution

2010-03-14T15:11:00.001-06:00

Today's sermon at Woodcrest really bothered me. The title, “In the beginning... god created” should have been sufficient to tell me that this one wasn't going to sit well with me, but I hoped that it would refrain from many of the more dogmatic approaches that typically render any debate between Naturalism and Theism pointless (apples and oranges rarely compare well, when in reality they are both fine fruit and can coexist nicely in a regular diet). Unfortunately, it didn't – choosing instead to reinforce a lot of the stereotypes that have ruined the debate for so many.

I'm going to allow myself the same liberties expressed my Mr. Van Waarde in his sermon, and ignore issues such as literal interpretation of Genesis, Young Earth theory, and similar specifics of dogma. They are interesting, but like Mr. Van Waarde, I'd like to focus on the more general lines drawn between the two camps.

My first disagreement with today's sermon came at the beginning, when it was expressed that differing world views cannot coexist, and a general rejection of the post-modern ideal of tolerance. Differing world views can and do coexist, every day. Not only that, but they have to, or we will live in a backwards-looking Imperial war-zone! Take a trip through London, and you'll find Churches (of many different denominations), Mosques (likewise, of different denominations), Hindu temples, Buddhist centers, and even atheist reading rooms. Sometimes, you'll even find them on the same street (Brick Lane being an obvious example). Are these colliding world-views not coexisting in the real world? With a few notable exceptions (such as the Rushdie-inspired bombing of Collets – condemned by religious leaders of all faiths), they coexist every day. People go about their business, mingle on the streets, and are quite happy to not kill one another over differences of faith. If one looks for places in which tolerance is not the norm, one finds such lovely places as Srebrenica, Rwanda, Jerusalem and lately Baghdad (which in its hay-day was a melting pot of the world). Is this the type of world we should be promoting? Or should we, as Mr. Van Waarde stated was impossible, tolerate our neighbors' views? (In my mind, there is little doubt that Jesus would advocate tolerance!)

The church then played a clip from Ben Stiller's film, Expelled. Stiller is touring a Nazi death-camp, and the tour-guide is carefully describing what happened where, and sticking to facts. It's clear that her job is to give the facts, and let the tourists draw their own moral conclusions. I've been on similar tours, and it is considerably harder-hitting to hear a deadpan “70 people died here each day” than to listen to a rant containing the words “evil” and “monstrous” repeated so frequently that you begin to wonder if there's a hidden agenda behind the tour. The guide carefully dodged Stiller's attempt to give the dissection doctor an out by being insane, focusing on him being well aware of what he did (leading tourists towards “evil” on their own, rather than insanity excuses). Then he hit her with a surprise question, “if you could say anything to the doctor, what would you say?” She was clearly unprepared for the question, and dodged it by saying that it wasn't her place to answer that question. The scene cuts, and the pastor highlights “it wasn't my place” as an example of what is wrong with post-modern thinking. In my view, the tour-guide was absolutely correct in her answer: on a tour of a death camp, it isn't her place to improvise a rant. Much of the point of the tour is to let the tourist draw their own conclusions – and only the most twisted of tourist would have anything nice to say to the doctor! This is an example of straw-man allegory at its worst; it takes a diplomatic answer, and turns its careful reticence into an attack on tolerance – when that wasn't even the question! I challenge anyone to go to the Auschwitz museum, and leave with the opinion that the museum is doing anything but condemning the holocaust. Conversely, had the Nazis been a little more tolerant, the wouldn't have executed Jews – just as tolerant crusaders would not have filled mass graves with Muslims. It's a self-defeating argument: stating that tolerating competing world views is wrong is exactly the same as condoning mistreatment of those with whom you disagree, albeit on a smaller scale (historically, though, it's usually been the start of a slippery slope into genocide).

The sermon then moved to describing Naturalism and Theism. The basic description of Naturalism was actually quite reasonable. Mr. Van Waarde described epistemology, methodological naturalism. Theories are proposed (and to count as a theory, it has to provide supporting evidence, hypotheses that can be disproved, and suggest predictions on what that theorem's effect on the universe would be, were it true), discussed, and either refined or discarded as evidence is found to support or refute it. It's an ongoing process; at no point do we say “alright then, these are the Laws of Physics” and regard them as an immutable doctrine – rather, we keep looking for better answers, with the hope of eventually closing in on some universal truths. This was moderately well explained, although it would have benefited from some examples.
The sermon emphasized the word random, again and again. “How could something as complex and beautiful as the world happen randomly?” The funny thing there is that for an infinite universe, you might as well ask “how could something as complex and beautiful not happen randomly?” ; you would get the same answer. When the size of space-time is effectively infinite, there is a probability of almost 1 that anything will in fact happen somewhere. In the absence of a God lighting up the sky with a verifiable proof of His existence, there is no empirical method that can state with certainty that the chain of events is or isn't random. Apples and oranges.

Theism, according to the sermon, is the statement that while naturalism can describe what happened, theism can describe why. The injection of divine purpose into reality. This, again, I don't have a problem with. In fact, if the sermon had summarized the viewpoint that science describes what we can provably interact with, and theology/philosophy (and many other disciplines) seek to add meaning to it, I could have agreed with the whole sermon. However, the sermon moved on to far weaker ground by claiming that science regards philosophy/theology as a “lesser” discipline, since it isn't bound by provable/disprovable claims grounded in reality. Some scientists doubtless feel this way, just like some philosophers would argue that truth is such an ephemeral concept that the scientific method can't really show you anything useful at all. Extreme views like those are nonsensical, and a brief glance at any reputable University will show you that social sciences, hard sciences, philosophical disciplines, anthropology and various theologies co-exist and are studied next to one another quite happily (indeed, many great advances occur when masters of disparate disciplines work together).

Mr. Van Waarde then moved onto very weak ground by claiming that a hard, fact-based Universe could not contain morality. Unfortunately, every discipline from philosophy to anthropology to political science would disagree with this statement. A first question to ask is “does the world exhibit morality?” Outside of humans, the natural world is coldly brutal. Creatures kill and eat each other (some have even been seen to kill without eating, apparently purely for the joy of killing). Creatures die in accidents, natural disasters, and of changing climate. This is even acknowledged in Christian theology, with the fallen world. Conversely, pack- and tribal-oriented creatures display a certain “morality”, sometimes putting their group above themselves in terms of survival. This has been widely discussed by evolutionary biologists and anthropologists. Philosophers such as Aristotle and Kant have both demonstrated how self-interest can require a moral code, and the adoption of such a code can be beneficial entirely from self-interest. Christianity, or it's precursor Judaism (with a somewhat different moral code provided by the same God), holds no monopoly on the cold, hard logic of behaviors that enhance the survival rates of one's pack/tribe. In other words, once again the sermon relied upon a straw-man argument. The necessity of morality in organized social structures can be explained with or without God. The creation of a Universe in which morality is a necessity can be seen as the guiding hand of God – or as a natural development. Once again, the absence of empirical evidence of God saying “prairie dog packs shall feature a scout who risks his life with an alarm call for the good of the pack” neither proves or disproves God's role – and science merely states (after observation) that prairie dogs act that way, and offers speculation on the physical advantages of doing so (offering hypotheses that can be examined with long-term study, and predictions that may be applied to other social creatures). More apples and oranges.

Finally, the sermon moved on to Stiller's now-infamous ambushing of Richard Dawkins. Dawkins was asked about intelligent design (he claims he was tricked into giving the interview), and stated that it was possible that a superior intelligence in the past had setup the creation we see – but don't, and can't know for sure. More importantly, as he was being rudely cut off by Mr. Stiller, he pointed to the root issue of causality: that intelligence would have had to come from somewhere. He didn't say there was or wasn't an intelligence at work, simply that we don't (and possibly can't) know that based on empirical evidence. The pastor, of course, seized on his mentioning of a creator intelligence to say that even Mr. Dawkins thinks that it's possible that there's an order behind the apparently random creation. That may be true; indeed, I tend to think that it's well within the capabilities of an omniscient deity to say “bang” and start the Universe with a random seed that would eventually lead to the Universe He wants. It also misses the point: where did God come from? Can his presence be postulated in a scientific theory (focusing only on what we can measure, like all good science), and left open to specific provable/disprovable claims? No – God cannot be measured (and repeated attempts to shout “God, if you exist, strike me down at 9am!” haven't proven overly helpful). That's why “faith” is ephemeral, a philosophical subject (an apple) – and the apparent expansion and cooling of the Universe from a single point in space-time is scientific (an orange); it provides specific claims, and as we study more of the Universe we can match specific claims with observable reality.

The ultimate question here is about the teaching of Intelligent Design, Creationism in general, and Evolution in school curricula. Most scientists I know have no problem with the teaching of Intelligent Design – but in philosophy, not in science. It is not a scientific theory, and presenting it as one is doing a disservice to both the scientific method and to social studies. Evolution can be examined and possibly refuted as evidence arises, and has closely matched a great deal of the evidence we have uncovered (and been modified when evidence does not line up). For intelligent design to be taught in a science class, it would have to contain disprovable hypotheses, and specific predictions (also disprovable with real, measurable empirical data). It does not contain these elements, so it isn't science. That's quite ok, though – philosophy is a very well respected discipline (it's not an accident that the “Ph” in Ph.D is short for Philosophy!), and is the perfect home for theories as to why the empirical world developed the way it did.
Instead of arguing for biology lessons to include non-scientific theories, perhaps it would be a better argument that all schools should teach philosophy and comparative religion? After all, Mr. Van Waarde did say that in this post-modern world kids want to be presented with options so that they can select a world-view. What better way to assist them in this than to present thousands of years of thought, dedicated to just this kind of question – rather than modifying a discipline focused entirely on repeatable experimentation in the empirical world.

In conclusion, this is ultimately a futile debate. The most fervent adherents to each “side” firmly adhere to Mr. Van Waarde's theory that disparate world views can never be reconciled – and as such, they are unlikely to ever achieve such reconciliation. It cannot be empirically proven or dis-proven that the creation of the Universe was purely random, or was guided by the invisible hand of a benign creator. Rather, the educated, moderate, population of a blissfully post-modern world can accept that empirical evidence shows that a given chain of events happened – and happily relate that to their knowledge of philosophy to conclude for themselves whether there is, is not, or even might be, a God – and which of the many faiths they should listen to.
Christianity has always been at its strongest when it recognizes that science is just another way to honor God, by studying what's here now, and the physical steps required to get here – while the Church deals with the spiritual world, and the well-being of its flock. Lets not repeat the Galileo incident, over and over again. There's plenty of room down here for all viewpoints.

Sea battles

2009-11-17T17:02:00.004-06:00

If a battle at sea happened today, then yesterday the statement was true "there will be a sea battle tomorrow." Likewise, if no battle occurred - yesterday, it was true that "there will be no sea battle tomorrow."

Will there be a sea battle tomorrow?

Aristotle and Hegel both point out that this is predicated on knowledge of the future, so the answer is that we don't know. As Hegel points out, "wisdom comes at dusk".

Suppose that nobody actually wants a battle, but the ultimate universal (divine) plan calls for one. If the divine plan requires it, then surely the will of the combatants is irrelevant and they will go out and (sadly) sink one another. If the will of the combatants overrules the plan, then there will be no battle - but the divine plan will be unfulfilled. If the divine plan involves insuring that enough participants want to fight, then is the will of the combatants truly free?

The simple logical approach is to simply say that the status of a battle tomorrow is undefined until the end of tomorrow. There is no answer, and the question of free will vs. predestination is irrelevant.

An absolute predestination view is that the answer is firmly defined, unchangeable - even if we don't actually know what it is (so we can pretend it was our idea).

A weak predestination view ("foreknowledge does not mean causality") would say that since the divine knows our hearts, it knows what we will choose - but we still make the decision. In that case, if God doesn't want a battle tomorrow, but knows that we are going to have one anyway, can he do more than sigh sadly from the heavenly grandstand?

A selective predestination view (God picks the important events only) requires that the answer be important to a divine plan. If it isn't important, then we have free will. If it is important, we don't. (What counts as important? Who knows!)

Yikes

2009-04-23T18:21:00.002-05:00

Good grief. Only April, and already 82f. Too hot to enjoy anything. :-(

Mobile!

2009-03-08T08:04:00.002-06:00

I picked up a cheap moped! Given that bus prices have doubled in a year (and are likely to rise again), and gas/petrol prices are rising once more... I decided that a cheap form of transportation was needed. It's Chinese, so it probably won't last - but as long as it lasts a year, it's a saving over the bus!

So far, I've ridden it twice. Once as a test drive, and once back from the dealership (about 2 miles). Very nice smooth ride, comfortable, and I didn't feel like death was imminent. ;-)

MySQL Wierdness

2009-01-05T15:43:00.002-06:00

I don't use MySQL very often (happy PostgreSQL user), but I had occasion to use it for a client recently. A proxy server spits out log entries into a very large database table, which is then queried through a web interface. The table has an index for the date/time, and an index for a text field explaining what the proxy did. It won't permit the generation of an index for both, since that exceeds the key-size limit.

The following query runs great, and properly uses the datetime index (the limit is because it's used for a dashboard display):
SELECT * FROM log ORDER BY datetime DESC LIMIT 50;

This query runs great, too:
SELECT * FROM log WHERE what LIKE '*DENIED*%' LIMIT 50;

In both cases, the optimizer correctly picks the index - and the query runs really fast. However, when one attempts to combine the two, life is not so great:
SELECT * FROM log WHERE what LIKE '*DENIED*%' ORDER BY datetime DESC LIMIT 50;

The query takes a really, really long time to run! EXPLAINing the query shows that it uses the index correctly for "what", but then performs a filesort for the date sort! Since adding a large amount of very-high-performance temporary file storage isn't an option here, there's a problem. Digging into the MySQL documentation, it turns out that MySQL can't perform an ORDER BY using an index if a WHERE clause uses a different index! It was actually several thousand times faster to read the results into PHP sorted and perform the string comparison there. Gahh!

Electoral musings

2008-08-30T09:04:00.003-05:00

The run-up to the Democratic convention was interesting. Obama's lead faded gradually, at one point leaving national races tied (and electoral college votes likely within 4 either way). Obama had a very successful international tour, and then a vacation; while on vacation, the McCain camp apparently decided that since they weren't doing well at all on issues, it was time to fight dirty. Considering McCain's hiring most of Bush's campaign team (the most successful negative/dirty fighting team so far), that's hardly surprising. They spewed forth everything from Obama working with a former terrorist (from when Obama was aged in single digits!), to Rezko (real estate issue), and of course - youth and inexperience.

The Democratic convention initially looked like Clinton was going to wreck things, but it turned around pretty well. Obama's selection of Biden for his VP slot is interesting - and very solid, if not brilliant. Biden really is good in just about every position in which Obama is weak - and would definitely be ready (in terms of experience/knowledge/leadership skills) for the top-job should Obama vanish for whatever reason. Biden's gaffe habit could be a problem, but so far he's been very disciplined. During the convention, the McCain negative attack ads intensified - quoting Hillary Clinton against Obama, bringing up experience again, etc. Interestingly, Obama floated a few negative response ads also - such as "how many houses does McCain have?" (apparently triggering a second set of Rezko attack ads back).
The result? A convention bounce from level to 9 points ahead on some averages, 6 on others. That's a pre-Obama address bounce, so who knows what the final bounce will be... or how short it will be, given McCain's next-day VP announcement.

So finally, McCain picks Sarah Palin. It's widely reported that he really wanted Lieberman or Ridge, or maybe even Romney - but two of those are pro-choice, one isn't even a Republican, and one is a Mormon. There were rumblings all week that if McCain picked one of his choices, his base would abandon him (maybe they would, who knows?). The result is that we have a really bizarre VP pick. It's either a brilliant move, or only mildly less ridiculous than Dan Quayle talking about Mars. Snap polling today says 14% of Americans approve of Palin, 17% dissaprove, and 68% don't know who she is. Until recently, you could definitely put me in the 68% camp!

So... who is she? Palin grew up in small town Alaska, and was heavily into sport. She has a degree in journalism, and has worked in tourism, sport, and as a beauty model (runner-up in Miss Alaska, presumably the only pageant involving parkas!). She apparently hunts, fishes, and has lots of children. She's a die-hard mega-conservative who makes Margaret Thatcher look like a leftist. She was a town (of 6,000 people, give or take a few) mayor, and then usurped an incumbent Republican governor in the primaries to steal his job - which she has had for 20 months (her only state-wide experience). She obtained her first passport last year, travelling to Kuwait to visit the Alaska national guard - her first trip outside of the country. A few months ago, she admitted that she (a) didn't know what a VP does, and (b) doesn't think it would be a very productive job. Lets hope for her sake that someone explained the role to her!
In the primary campaign for governor,

It will be really interesting to see how she fares. It's tempting to dismiss her as a lightweight, but that was the former Alaska governor's fate: he tried to talk issues, she was nice (and apparently hot - there are bumper stickers around saying "Alaska - we're cold, but our governor's hot"). That may be enough to win Alaska, but I really hope that being hot isn't enough for the country...

Parmesan Round Steak

2008-07-30T18:46:00.000-05:00

Credit: Diana Rattray, About.com

An easy family meal, made with economical round steak, Parmesan cheese, and tomatoes.

Cook Time: 1 hour, 15 minutes

Ingredients:

1 1/2 to 2 pounds beef round steak, about 3/4 inches thick
3 tablespoons flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon pepper
1 egg, slightly beaten
1 tablespoon water
1/2 cup fine dry bread crumbs
1/2 teaspoon dried leaf basil
3 tablespoons cooking oil or shortening
1 can (15 1/2 ounces} diced tomatoes
1 can (8 ounces) tomato sauce
1/4 cup grated Parmesan cheese
2 tablespoons dry red wine
1 teaspoon sugar
1/2 teaspoon dried leaf oregano
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 to 1 cup shredded Mozzarella cheese

Preparation:

Cut round steak in 6 serving-size pieces. Combine flour, salt and pepper; dredge meat and pound on both sides to tenderize and flatten. Mix egg with water. Combine bread crumbs and basil leaves. Dip each piece of meat in egg mixture and then dredge in bread crumb mixture, coating thoroughly and evenly. Brown in hot cooking oil or shortening in large skillet over medium-high heat. Combine tomatoes, tomato sauce, Parmesan cheese, wine, sugar, oregano and salt. Place meat in a 13x9x2-inch baking dish and pour sauce over meat. Cover tightly with foil and bake at 350° for 1 hour and 10 minutes or until tender. Sprinkle cheese on top of meat and continue baking for about 5 minutes or until cheese melts. Makes 6 servings of round steak Parmesan.

Generational power transition, and the 2008 Presidential Election

2008-06-01T14:17:00.002-05:00

Two things have really stuck me about the run-up to the 2008 election: the ages of the candidates, and the continual voter outcry for "change." More on the former in a bit; the rallying cry for "change" is interesting in that it echoes the not-so-successful Howard Dean campaign of 2004, and had shadows (poorly portrayed) in John Kerry's eventual bid for power. It also echoes the 1997 UK election, in which Blair and New Labour heavily touted their credentials to change Britain (this is not all that surprising, as political trends in Europe are typically 10-15 years ahead of those found in the USA). Unlike in 2004, when a highly-vocal but poorly motivated young crowd support Dean, this time the changists are well-organized, and are making heavy - and very successful - use of the modern communications landscape. That said, it remains to be seen if 2008 is the year for change; it is still entirely possible that McCain's "steady as she goes" approach will defeat Obama's hungry youth.

The age of various recent presidential candidates/Presidents may provide a clue towards the "anythink but what we have now" mentality of many younger voters. President Reagan was born in 1911, meaning that World War II and the rise of the Soviet Union would mark his likely formative influences. Presient George H. Bush Senior was born in 1921; like Reagan, that would make WWII and the 1950s his formative influences. (Interestingly, Dick Cheney - to whom both Presidents ascribed a strong influence to the point that some commentators have referred to three Presidencies as being Cheney's legacy was born in 1941; more on this below.). President Clinton was born in 1946, making the Vietnam war a formative influence on his youth, as well as the assassination of Kennedy, the moon-landing, and the 70s depression. President George W. Bush Jnr. was also born in 1946.
Current candidates: Senator John McCain was born in 1936, making him only 10 at the end of WWII, rendering the 1950s his formative years, and Vietnam (in which he served, and was captured as a prisoner of war) a likely pivotal moment. Hillary Clinton was born in 1947, very close to her husband. Barack Obama was born in 1961 - meaning that his formative influences would be the late 1970s, Reaganomics, and the slow-death of the Cold War. Howard Dean, interestingly, was born in 1948 - placing him in the same generation as the Clintons.

Why is this relevant? Much academic mileage has resulted from discussions of the various generations in America. You have the Baby Boomers (1946-1958), the Echo Boomers (a.k.a Jones' Boomers; 1958-early 1960s), Generation X (1960s-1970s), Generation Y (1980s-90s) etc. Traditionally, generations have been assigned some general traits. In particular, Baby Boomers are known for fierce individualism, lack of long-term planning, criticizing modern youth (mostly regarding work ethic and achivement), sometimes for excessive feathering of their own nests, and being the first generation to be sandwiched between still-living relatives and children. The Echo Boomers are more of a bridge-generation; they suffered through some of Vietnam and the 70s, and were often quite polarized by the Reagan years. Generation X are known for being cynical, anti-establishment, and trying to find a balance between personal space and work; GenX is often cited as the first generation to say en-masse that a little-less pay is acceptable for more time with their family. GenX are also fiercely critical of many of the Boomers, often indicate resentment as to the world handed down to them, and are known for not believing in company loyalty (often stating that it is a bad thing, given that companies don't show any loyalty back).

Reagan, Bush Senior and McCain pre-date the boomers - although all three have advisors and political circles heavily dominated by boomers (in particular Dick Cheney and his neo-con cohorts). Both Clintons, Bush Junior, and Howard Dean are all Boomer-generation. Obama is somewhere between an Echo Boomer and an early Generation X. (Tony Blair was born in 1953, but is considered post-boom because the UK Baby Boom didn't last very long at all).

It would appear that there are three generations here, although the Echo Boom is more of a transitional period than a well-defined sociological period; the pre-boomers (advised by boomers), the boomers (advised by GenX), and a GenX candidate (advised by GenX and Y).

Is it possible that the mantra for "change" is really a restatement of the need for the Boomer generation to pass the torch on to their younger brethren? It will happen inevitably, but the divisive, nasty politics of the late-Boomers has left many younger generations dissilusioned, and fearful for the future.

Who says I don't like eye-candy?

2008-03-19T01:18:00.004-06:00

I've been playing with ObjectDock and Window Blinds from Stardock. Vista was, frankly, really annoying me with its look/feel. I couldn't easily tell which windows were active (title bars are too similar in colour), the inability to "roll up" a window was annoying, and the task bar is ridiculously restrictive - and tends to fill up with crap. Here's one of my two monitors (the other has a dock showing running tasks):

Portal - The Cake is a Lie!

2008-02-27T11:32:00.002-06:00

I just can't get this song out of my head! Highly recommended: http://www.hwhq.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=4323

This was triumph.
I'm making a note here:
HUGE SUCCESS.
It's hard to overstate
my satisfaction.
Aperture Science
We do what we must
because we can.
For the good of all of us.
Except the ones who are dead.

Overall, I have to say that Portal is one of the best games I've played in years. :-)

On Free Will

2008-01-13T14:52:00.001-06:00

The conflict between free-will and fatalism/determinism is a very old one. With the traditional predicate of a being (God) who is aware of the entire future, how does an individual truly have free will if their future is entirely deterministic? Or, to put it another way, if the actions (A) of an actor (X) at a point in time (T) are predicated on entirely upon the position with time (T-1), how does one derive a function in which AX is relevant to A at any given value of T?

There are a number of approaches to date. One is to argue that the question is irrelevant, because if the actions of T require a future belief of T-1, then ad nauseum (and by golly!), X's beliefs at T-1 will match those beliefs (a simplified Aristotilian Sea Battle argument; similar I believe to Aquinas's writings also). That seems to miss the point, in that if by definition X will hold the beliefs required to perform A at T - then X doesn't have free will, and his/her beliefs aren't really relevant - the same problem.

Another argument (Bohm, and derived dimensionality theory, also Boertism/Augustine's "God is beyond time" argument) is that space/time are actually just 4 dimensions, and any being who can perceive all 4 can therefore perceive everything that has, will and is happening from the point of view of a 3.5-dimensional being like ourselves - because time is an illusion and the whole of reality as we perceive it has already happened from the perspective of 4+ dimensional being. (Logically, this could be extended to state that the activities of any N dimensional being are predetermined from the point of view of any N+X dimensional being for values of X greater than or equal to 1). Again, this leaves the rather interesting state of affairs that nothing we do in any way, shape or form is free - or even will affect the outcome of anything.

Outside of the hard incompatibilist thinkers, you find the compatibilist mode of thought. This has appeared in writings from Hobbes, Hume and others and essentially states that one is free within constraints, but that while one's activities are predetermined - one appears to have free will at the time, and therefore free will is maintained. Ignoring the glaring problem with this (illusory freedom isn't particularly free!), one could build a philosophy based on the idea that one will act according to one's will - but the outcome is determined anyway. Catholics make this argument sometimes. Calvinism presents a somewhat bizarre attempt at compatibility, arguing that God has sovereignty over wisdom/power, but only offers his way as a life-raft to free-willed individuals. They state that his followers are pre-selected, and everyone else is free to do whatever they want on the way to hell. Charming. It also seems to raise an interesting question - if a loving God hand-picked the few to not have meaningful free will, why bother with the rest of creation if its entire purpose is to burn? Is heaven short of fuel?
A more interesting (and definitely more well thought-out than Calvinism) approach is taken by the Jewish faith, who openly admit that it is a paradox and they don't have an answer. At least they are honest.

On the other end of the spectrum, the libertarian camp argue that nothing is determined in advance and that therefore free will is exactly what it says. They reject the paradox by rejecting the deterministic aspect. This does not preclude religion; some modern Open Theists, and is found in some post-evangelical protestant groups. A very interesting proposition, technically only incompatible with hard incompatibilism because it rejects the issue entirely.

An extension of the modern Open Theists (and an attempt to once-again reconcile with determinism!) draws upon concepts of quantum uncertainty, and infinite parallel universes (the last explanation of this I read drew upon an 11-dimensional multiverse with some dimensions representing possible outcomes). Basically, you have the 4-dimension frozen universe model - but with an infinite number of frozen universes, one for each possible outcome of anything. The path we perceive selects branches as we progress - but other copies of us in (3.5D)(T)(number of choices+1) perceive the other choices. Theists can then extend that with the N+X dimensional model I mentioned above (in an 11-dimensional multiverse, God has 12+ dimensions) so that God then knows every possible past, present and future for everyone. Free will is maintained for the progression through time in that all choices are actually available - but all choices will be chosen, so on aggregate you have an infinite number of deterministic outcomes. That should give anyone a headache if you think about it long enough!
(As an aside... suppose heaven/hell, and an (effectively) infinite number of Herberts, and we make every possible decision through a chain of infinite dimensions. Do you end up with different fractions of infinite Herberts in heaven and hell?)

Obviously, I don't have a solution to this. I tend towards the libertarian or hard incompatibilist groups, and find the quantum concept fascinating. More thinking to do!

Hats off to Obama - and his speechwriter!

2008-01-04T00:39:00.000-06:00

It is too early to say, but I may have guessed wrongly about Obama. If Iowa is any indication, he really is tapping into this country's desire for change in a very strong way. I still think that Clinton will prove hard to beat, because of her experience, political tenacity, and shoulder-rubbing with the bigwigs; but Obama really seems well-placed to slingshot the giant.

I really have to tip my hat to Obama's speechwriter(s). His acceptance speech was excellent. It's great to hear a speech without attacks on other candidates, just focussed on positives and campaign objectives - and while it's very populist, the populism is nicely tinged with potential reality and existing achievements (such as health-care reform in Illinois).

At this point, I hope he wins. My heart is for him, my head still fears he may not be ready.

On the Republican side, it was interesting to see how well Huckabee did. The evangelical bloc is very powerful in some states - so it will be even more enlightening to see how he does in New Hampshire. If he puts on a strong-showing there, in a state that typically isn't swayed by faith-based candidacy, then he really is tapping into the "Washington must change" vibe. If he doesn't, then it will be very interesting to see how it plays out: Bush got much of his support from the evangelical bloc, but also appealed to moderates and populists (many of whom regret their choice, I'm sure!).
I worry a little about the Republicans this time around. Huckabee seems quite pleasant these days, although his "no more income tax" (replaced entirely with sales tax) is a lot more regressive than people think. Above all, some of his comments from the past - particularly regarding homosexuality, AIDS, and women's rights (including abortion) are troublesome. He's recanted on two of those three - but do we really want a President who can't understand "Congress shall make no law..."
Romney is also an odd one. He has an odd mix of policies, and was definitely hampered in Iowa by being a Mormon. The LDS (Latter Day Saints) aren't very popular in any state they used to be based in - Missouri, Iowa, Illinois, especially. While I don't think Romney wants to overthrow the State Militia in armed struggle (that didn't work so well for Joseph Smith!), I do think that in the Midwest he is going to have a very hard time. Conversely, he might do well in Utah, Nevada, and the traditionally "couldn't care less about your faith" states. Polls currently show Romney and McCain as the only two candidates with any momentum in New Hampshire.
Finally, there's McCain. He's honest, I'll give him that. I disagree with much of what he says (particularly Iraq), but I never find myself disliking him - just his positions. He might make a decent President, although I'm not sure how well he'll do overall.

Ok, that wasn't finally. Lets not forget "Mr I.R.A.", Guilliani! He has the strangest strategy every seen in a set of primaries, seeking only to really fight the Super Tuesday states. If his gamble pays off and he does well on that day - he could win. I'll go out on a limb and say that he won't - by the time Super Tuesday comes along, other candidates will have momentum and positive press building. Super Tuesday almost always backs someone who has effectively already won...

Power outage!

2007-11-01T10:51:00.000-06:00

I was happily using the bathroom - when vooom, no power. The UPS on my computer was merrily beeping away, and I figured it would come back on its own - it usually does, there are a lot of tiny outages here. After 10 minutes - zilch! So, I called the City of Columbia - half expecting to have to argue that I had in fact paid my bill (so I went to gmail on my phone, and retrieved my payment history just in case). It turns out that a car hit a telephone pole, and knocked out power to the north side of Columbia!

First of all, I hope nobody was hurt. There's nothing in the news about it, other than the accident - so I assume everyone's ok.

Second, I have to ask - why can one motorist knock out power to a large chunk of the city? Utility companies used to be known for their reliability - in fact, much of the appeal of "utility" style computing comes from offering the kind of legendary "you flip the switch, and it works" reliability for which utility companies are known. I don't know if the woes of Columbia's electrical grid are related to their director resigning (of course they don't say that it is, but they probably wouldn't if it were! ), but it's a pretty poor state of affairs. Over the years, they have blamed squirrels, trees, motorists, and the weather (the latter sometimes being a valid excuse). One thing that is never raised, however, is the apparent lack of redundancy.
Normally, when you design a utility grid - you design it as a grid, or a series of loops - with multiple feeds available for a given area. That way, when a small-scale incident hits one area, that area can still pull power from another feed. This doesn't work on the micro-scale; it's quite expected for an incident to affect a small area around that incident. It's not ok for one car to knock out half of Columbia (including part of campus)!

Sadly, I doubt that much will be done. Investing in public services appears to not be much of a priority here lately.

Novell Netware

2007-10-29T19:45:00.000-06:00

I just finished writing Novell Netware support for Full Spectrum Backup. It was fun - ncpmount is very easy to use on Linux. I ended up storing credentials, and having the front-end invoke a shell script (also run by rc.local on boot) - and voila, it actually works!

Novell did complicate matters with their website. The evaluation version of Netware was very helpful. Finding it on their site - ouch. It's a bit like being a rat in a maze, with only the faintest hint of cheese...

Giuliani: terrorist apologist?

2007-10-22T17:31:00.000-05:00

Former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani isn't doing terribly well in Republican primaries right now. This may be a good thing, given his Irish Republican Army [IRA] connections from the past! The champion of post-9/11 terror-fighting has a long history of IRA sympathies. In recent years, he's given Gerry Adams a warm reception (even giving him the 'Crystal Apple' when he was Mayor of New York), and has even named a road in New York after an IRA bomber!

Of course, Romney isn't really that much more palatable a fellow.

I try not to post too much stuff like this...

2007-10-19T14:47:00.001-05:00

... but some kitties are just too hard to resist!

more funny pictures

Microsoft wonders why Linux developers call them names....

2007-10-10T15:41:00.000-05:00

...and yet using Volume Shadow Copy to copy an open file requires nearly 2,000 lines of C++ and an Interop assembly (in C#). The Linux world can enjoy "lvm create snapshot" or equivalent - as can FreeBSD, Solaris, and just about everyone who isn't a Mac. (Snapshots seem to be the 'time machine' everyone is excited about for Leopard... yay, a feature the rest of us have had for nearly a decade).

In honour of McCoy, sweet companion for two years...

2007-09-28T02:12:00.000-05:00

Poor McCoy passed away in my hands over the last half-hour. He'd reached quite a venerable age for a dwarf hamster (2 and a half). I heard a very sad sound from his cage and went to see what was up, and the poor little fellow was curling up and his breathing was slowing. I held him, gave him water and he managed one last sunflower seed - before closing his eyes and his breathing stopped altogether. He's been a faithful companion for a long time, I miss him already. :-(

Hopefully, heaven is one hamster richer tonight.

I forgot I modified Grub a while back!

2007-09-14T15:51:00.000-05:00

Says it all about the state of my PC right now, though...

Engaged!

2007-09-13T02:08:00.000-05:00

So, I finally popped the question to Mel yesterday - and she said yes! It's late, so I won't expound much on he topic right now - I'll try and post a proper update (along with emails/calls to just about everyone I know) tomorrow.
In the meantime, here are some pictures: http://picasaweb.google.com/herberticus/MyEngagement

GenCon Indy 2007

2007-08-20T11:33:00.001-05:00

I just got back from GenCon 2007 in Indianapolis. It was quite the trip! I'm tired, but I'll try and summarize some hightlights here - and fill out more details later. The complete photo-album for this post may be found here.

The Voyage
The trip out (Thursday morning) started poorly: the bus station was full of recently released prison inmates, and the prison guards were delaying their departure again and again in the name of prioritizing customers such as myself. Some of them had already been there 7 hours, and they were flagging badly. Rick, in an apparent attempt to earn sainthood, went to McDonald's and bought them all food and drink. My hat goes off to him for that - that was a really kind act. When the bus to St. Louis finally arrived, there weren't many spaces on it; I got on by rushing to ensure I was at the front of the line, and not budging an inch! Once on the bus, I had a slightly cramped but uneventful ride to St. Louis. The bus station there is horrible; poor air-conditioning, and the Indy line went all the way out of the queueing area, and around the restaurant! I found a spot to wait and spend an hour or so sweating. When the bus finally arrived, I didn't get a seat - but a second bus arrived within 20 minutes and I managed to squeeze onto it. Very full, but not as bad as the Greyhound of old: there was only one person sitting in the aisle, and the AC worked. I took a nap on the way to Effingham, IL (isn't that the greatest place name? It's like someone censored the real name...)

My bus, enjoying the 105F heat of Effingham, IL!

The ride from Effingham to Indianapolis was pretty uneventful. It took a while, but was pretty quiet. I began to get the feeling that things would go well. :-) Indianapolis has a great skyline, visible from the bus. It's quite a big city (2m people), and has a nice mix of old and new buildings. The bus station was a pretty typical big-city affair, albeit clean. Really, really clean! That never happens. I had no trouble finding a taxi to my hotel, an EconoLodge - with absolutely no frills, a small bedroom and bathroom. It works - and was cheap. By this time it was dark/late. This was the view from my hotel room:

Day 1 (Friday)
I got up bright and early, had breakfast at Denny's, and caught a cab downtown. The convention center is huge - and GenCon sprawled beyond its spacious confined into various hotels around the center itself. Registration was easy - wait in line for 5 minutes, fill out a form, pay, and Bob's your uncle. I then proceeded to roam the halls, getting a feel for what was going on. The vendor hall was pretty amazing - full of video game companies, game companies, card companies, the art show (not as large as it used to be, sadly), and a ton of people. I could hardly move! Here are some snapshots I took:

I also spent a lot of time with various computer game developers, and was invited to join an independent game developer's group. Yay! The people at the Warhammer Online display were especially nice, taking the time to walk me through a few graphics effects. Finally, I played Starcraft 2! It's coming along nicely, and feels a lot like the old Starcraft - only smoother, prettier, and if anything a little faster paced. Finally, I got my butt well-and-truly handed to me in a Counterstrike tournament.

Once I'd finished the obligatory tour (and looked at the city around the center - see below!), I went about signing up for things. I signed up for an evening D&D game, and a night D&D game. I also made a list of some seminars to attend - and promptly missed the first one because I couldn't find the venue! Instead, I had a nice long chat with the people at the Podcasting stand. I'm a big fan of Dragon's Landing, but it's been quiet lately - so they made some recommendations. I also decided to attend at least one of their live podcasting events to see how it's done.

I found myself with a short break for lunch, and ate McDonald's. I also met up with a girl named Eva and her husband (John?), who were up from New York - we'd apparently met online before, so it's nice to put a face to a screen-name! Then it was off to the Union Station Conference Center for some gaming. It was a pain to find! Fortunately, most other people in the event had the same problem so I didn't hold anything up. In the subsequent game, our merry party from Rasheman infiltrated the Thayvian port of Surthay, and rescued a mask maker from the clutches of a smelly wizard. Rather stereotyped, but a lot of fun - a good dungeon bash once in a while can really lighten things up! Afterwards, I played a short and silly game with a bunch of RPGA people. It was great to see some old friends again! :-)

Suddenly, it was about 3am... so I caught a taxi back to the hotel and slept.

Day 2 (Saturday)
I overslept slightly, and decided to have breakfast anyway - gaming on an empty stomach doesn't work! I started out in the vendor's hall, picking up a Dr. Who episode for Mel and being slightly disappointed that the anime shopping list I had from Stara started at $65 and went up from there. Then, it was seminar time!
The first seminar was Spin a Yarn with Ed Greenwood, something of a GenCon tradition. As usual, we made the guest Wizards' girl blush - this time in 8 minutes. The guest in this case was different, though - she's the author of Confessions of a Part Time Sorceress: A Girl's Guide to Gaming, and is a really nice gamer girl. She wants to do the seminar again next year, so we didn't scare her too badly! The theme of the seminar is that we throw plot elements at Mr. Greenwood, who then gets to write a story including them all. Elements included sentient undergarments, 75 virgins transporting poisoned wine, a royal wedding in which the bridesmaids looked better than the bride, a roving band of gay pirates who have lost their ship, a ship of gender-changing, a hobbit plumber convention, a dragon with irritable bowel syndrome, sushi, a singing sword, a narcoleptic bard, a sheath (scabbard) of rhythm (the writer girl uttered 'man, I need one of those'), and a whole host of other silliness. I laughed until my sides hurt - quite an achievement for a one hour seminar!

Next up, was a Q&A session with Wizards about the new 4th Edition D&D. They did a straw poll beforehand, and discovered that we were a bunch of human loving, cleric playing DMs. A primary focus of 4E is apparently to make the DM's life easier - less paperwork, and generally an easier time reading stats. No more daemons with 200 abilities (3 of which are worth having) - rather a focus on what's needed to get things going. Interestingly, a lot of things are being copied from the MMO world (someone quipped that this sounds like World of D&D-Craft; they are right, IMHO - and Wizard's statement that WoW copied everything from D&D may be true - but it's a weasle-word way to avoid the issue!). The game is being structured around party roles - your basic MMO roles of tank, nuker, healer, etc. This tends to happen in traditional D&D anyway: you pretty much want a fighter, a cleric, a mage - and the other classes risk being 5th wheels. (This is not true, IMO, for good games; many great games I've been in have featured so called 5th wheel classes as a focus!). Monsters also get the same focus, and the balancing has moved away from single monster encounters - rather, a party of five adventurers should expect five monsters in a group configuration. Powers have been completely revamped; no more "oops, I used my spell slots and now we have to take a nap" - rather, you have per-encounter, per-round, per-day and other time-based limitations, and an as-yet-unrevealed mechanism for pushing yourself beyond your limits (at a risk) to keep going. The emphasis is on keeping the tempo up, and giving players a genuine sense of urgency. I like that concept, but it does feel like a computer game. Then again, the new D&D Insider setup is almost an MMO. It's a really interesting idea. Dragon, Dungeon and other magazines are becoming online-only, and are part of a DDI subscription. More interestingly, a character generator, MySpace like setup, and virtual gaming table are also part of it - and entering a rulebook's ID number automatically populates your databases with content from that book. So all spell databases online automatically contain every spell, monster, etc. to which you have access. The Virtual Gaming Table looks pretty cool. It's voice-chat enabled, and doesn't take care of game mechanics - it's a map with highly customizable counters to move around. Modules come with preloaded table content (so no map making!), and everyone can seriously customize their virtual representation. The dice roller looks cool, too. If I can find people to play with remotely, this could be the solution to my lack of gaming; if I can't, it'll be a very pretty boondoggle for those lucky enough to have a huge screen next to their gaming tables. There was a lot of grumbling about overemphasis on online content, and the complete incompatibility of 4E with what has come before. We'll see how that plays out; 3.5E caused a gaming crash - 4E could well do it again!
I'm still deciding exactly how I feel about 4th Edition. I skipped 3.5; I may buy 4. I'll figure it out closer to the release date.

Then I played some board games in the hall, played some Company of Heroes (came 4th), and found some lunch.

After that, I went to watch Pulp Gamers perform their live podcast. What a great bunch of guys! Very friendly, and their setup is quite professional. I was impressed. I recommend giving their podcast a go - they cover everything, and seem like a good substitute until Dragon's Landing reappears (I hope!). Topics included the changes at GenCon (tons of families nowadays, not so many lonely nerds), and how amazingly big it is, D&D 4th Edition (it was the talk of the show), podcasting in general, and various board games. Twisted Dungeon sounds really interesting - well worth a look.

Next up, a seminar on web comics featuring several web comic authors. It was really amusing, but lacking in words of wisdom that need to be shared!

Some friends persuaded me to watch the costume contest. Some of the costumes were amazing, but I couldn't get a good focus on the stage with my camera - so few pics, I'm afraid.

Saturday evening was the GenCon Dance, which didn't interest me at all (although it was goth themed). I'm just not a loud-music dance type of person, really. Instead, I went to the Hyatt and found a pick-up D&D game. It was short and really, really funny. :-)

The Voyage Home (Sunday)
I checked out of my hotel, and after checking with Greyhound caught a slightly earlier bus home than planned - meaning I missed the closing ceremonies of the con. Sad, but it meant I arrived home at 9:30pm rather than 9:00am on Monday. Indy bus station went smoothly (and was still clean!), and as usual St. Louis bus station was a nightmare - I was bowled over in a crowd rush, but a huge Scottsman protected me. Yay for huge, random Scotts! I returned home, and hurried off to see Mel. You really know you love someone when GenCon isn't enough to make you forget missing them!

Server update

2007-08-04T10:54:00.000-05:00

I promised an update on the servers, so here we go. They are live! We had a few problems getting any version of CentOS other than 4.2 (x86) to see Intel's raid enclosure management software - but otherwise life is good. Between the two Port Townsend servers, we are running 11 virtual servers via VMWare Server (on Ubuntu server). Performance is very good for what we need. The only gotchas we encountered:

CentOS 4.2 doesn't support iSCSI, and some of the older patches are very flakey. In particular, SQL Server on an iSCSI drive can cause a kernel panic on the storage server. This appears to be due to an out-of-memory condition. Later releases seem more stable, but we ended up not using anywhere near as much iSCSI as originally planned.
Even on a physical host with two cores, dual-core VMs are a lot slower than single-core.
Exchange 2007 is a resource pig, but very nice once configured.

Chinese-style Lemon Chicken

2007-08-04T10:45:00.000-05:00

I fixed lemon chicken for Mel and Keri last night, and since Keri asked for the recipe I thought this might be a good way to share it. It's quite a quick meal.

Requires (for 3 servings):

1/2 large white onion.
1/2 green pepper.
2 spring onions.
1 mild red chili pepper.
5-spice powder.
Sesame seeds.
A small pack of boneless chicken breasts.
A jiff lemon worth of lemon juice.
Flour.
A little wine or cider vinegar (about a tablespoon).

Preparation:
Chop the onion, pepper, spring onions and chili into tiny slices. Cut the chicken into strips.

Cooking:

Heat oil in wok until it is sizzling, on high heat.
Throw all chopped veggies in, stir frantically to attain some crispness.
Add 2 tsp 5-spice powder, and a scattering of sesame seeds.
Stir and cook for 2-3 minutes, until onion is soft.
Remove onion from Wok, store in a container.
Add chicken to Wok (still on high), add 1 tsp 5-spice. Stir until chicken is sealed/dark on all sides.
Lower heat on Wok to low.
Put lemon juice and vinegar in a saucepan, heat to the boil. (this is a good time to start the rice, too, if you are also making it). Optionally add sugar; I usually add 1 tablespoon at most. A pinch of salt also helps with flavor.
Occasionally stir the chicken. When the lemon juice boils, gradually add flour (1tsp at a time, stir thoroughly after adding) until the sauce is starting to thicken.
Add lemon juice to wok with chicken, re-add vegetables to wok.
Raise heat to high, and stir. Sauce will continue to boil around chicken/veg.
After 3 minutes, it's ready to serve.

Total cooking time is around 15 minutes. A very simple, yet tasty and healthy recipe.

Linux - Ubuntu Feisty Fawn

2007-07-03T10:55:00.000-05:00

I just thought I'd mention that I'm doing all this work with my desktop machine running Linux, rather than Windows. I'm actually finding it easier to use, since most of what I'm doing is unixy anyway.

I have compiz running (slick), and am a Gnome user. I currently have a Mac OS X theme installed. (The screenshot is funky because my two monitors are at different resolutions)

Servers!

2007-07-03T10:47:00.000-05:00

Thoth Data Systems, LLC (my new company - more later) just received its servers. :-) Some enormous packing boxes, containing:

A 2U, 12-drive storage box. It's an Intel Compass Creek (SSR212CC), currently with 8 500gb drives (maximum 12).
A 1U, 2-servers in one box system called a Port Townsend. Pretty snazzy, two core 2 duo servers in one box, 4gb RAM each. Storage is a bit limited - but that's why we have the other server. :-)

So far, I've only worked on the storage box. Setup of the kit was very easy: follow the instructions, screw drives into holders, install RAM, and everything worked fine. Very little effort there. It takes a long time to POST (checking all the drives), but once it does it's pretty zippy. It doesn't have a CD-ROM, but can boot from a USB CD-ROM drive just fine. Drivers are proving to be a pain so far. Intel ship binary blobs for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.2 - and only 4.2. The kernel module has no source, and breaks immediately in 4.5! Of course, the RAID array works great in 4.5, but requires drivers for 4.2. Switching around thumbdrives (no floppy drive or connector on the motherboard!) is a pain, but I'm getting there.

So far, so good. I'll post more updates as I go - this is exciting.

Mediacom

2007-06-26T19:03:00.000-05:00

Today was frustrating. I woke up this morning with absolutely no Internet connectivity, and traced the issue down to a very odd set of symptoms. Every protocol except DNS worked; and any port 53 traffic was denied. I could connect numerically, but not by name. If I tunnelled DNS through our VPN to the office, that worked! Like a fool, I didn't accept that - I called Mediacom. After a while on the phone with a helpful tech, I was told that it was new modem time. Ok... then Rick tells me that he's having problems, too, and that Mediacom told him that they had done an upgrade last night and there were some problems around Columbia.

So, I went and got a new modem (and fixed Rick's network). Plugged it in, received WalledGarden (their modem registration system), registered - and boom, nothing at all. Not even a private IP address. I spent 19 minutes on hold, and another 30 talking to a tech before discovering that the problem was that walledgarden registered my system wrongly - it detected the wrong modem MAC address. How does that happen??? Anyway, it works now. I haven't managed to do any work today at all, so I'm in for a virtual evening in the office.

Cingular 8525 Synchronization

2007-06-10T14:30:00.001-05:00

I'm the proud owner of a Cingular 8525 phone/pocket PC. Overall, I like it a lot - but I've had a terrible time with getting it to synch. Under Vista (from which I have now thankfully escaped), it sort-of worked... sometimes. Under XP, I made the mistake of installing ActiveSync 4.5 - and nothing worked at all. Eventually, I found the key to removing 4.5 and putting 4.2 back on: when the device is connected, go into Device Manager, find the device and uninstall the driver. Then reboot, and finally reinstall ActiveSync.

Pain in the rear, but it worked really well.

Forgiveness

2007-05-01T18:29:00.000-05:00

I ran across this today. I found it really inspiring, so I wanted to share:

"Forgiveness is a form of realism. It doesn't deny, minimize, or justify what others have done to us or the pain that we have suffered. It encourages us to look squarely at those old wounds and see them for what they are. And it allows us to see how much energy we have wasted and how much we have damaged ourselves by not forgiving.
Forgiveness is an internal process. It can't be forced, and it doesn't come easy. It brings with it great feelings of wellness and freedom. But we experience this only when we want to heal and when we are willing to work for it.
Forgiveness is a sign of positive self-esteem. We no longer identify ourselves by our past injuries and injustices. We are no longer victims. We claim the right to stop hurting when we say, "I'm tired of the pain, and I want to be healed." At that moment, forgiveness becomes a possibility-although it may take time and much hard work before we finally achieve it.
Forgiveness is letting go of the past. It doesn't erase what happened, but it does allow us to lessen and perhaps even eliminate the pain of the past. The pain from our past no longer dictates how we live in the present, and it no longer determines our future.
It also means that we no longer need resentment and anger as an excuse for our shortcomings. We don't need them as a weapon to punish others nor as a shield to protect ourselves by keeping others away. And most importantly, we don't need these feelings to identify who we are. We become more than merely victims of our past.
Forgiveness is no longer wanting to punish those who hurt us. It is understanding that the anger and hatred that we feel toward them hurts us far more than it hurts them. It is seeing how we hide ourselves in our anger and how those feelings prevent us from healing. It is discovering the inner peace that becomes ours when we let go of the past and forget vengeance.
Forgiveness is moving on. It is recognizing all that we have lost because of our refusal to forgive. It is realizing that the energy that we spend hanging on to the past is better spent on improving our present and our future. It is letting go of the past so that we can move on.
We all have been hurt. And at one time or another most of us have made the mistake of trying to run away from the past. The problem is that no matter how fast or how far we run, the past always catches up to us-and usually at the most inopportune time. When we forgive, we are dealing with the past in such a way that we no longer have to run.
For me, learning how to forgive wasn't easy. But I did learn, and my life is better for it - even here on death row."

Michael B. Ross
Death Row
Somers, Connecticut

Secret number!

2007-05-01T16:45:00.000-05:00

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

Amazingly enough, several companies are trying to censor that number (it's in hex).
(For more about this, see: http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/01/1935250 )

And yes, I am Spartacus. ;-)

Is a Nuclear Armed Neighbourhood a Peaceful Neighbourhood?

2007-04-23T14:18:00.000-05:00

Over a decade ago, Dr. Colin S. Gray proposed that a nuclear armed neighborhood may indeed be a more polite neighborhood. His argument was an extension of the classic pro-gun lobby in the US: if people have guns, assaulting them is more difficult and therefore less likely. (The weakness of that argument is that plenty of people in the USA have guns, and the gun-related crime rate heads unerringly upwards anyway. Heck, since Missouri passed it's concealed-carry law Columbia has started to see drive-by shootings!). Anyway, I've been mulling the concept a little this morning in light of the repeated news announcements about Iran's nuclear capability.

Dr. Gray (and related theorists) are also opponents of the concept of 'existential deterrence' - that is a nuclear deterrent that you keep simply for the purpose of deterring an enemy, with questionable resolve to actually use your deterrent if pressed. This is an interesting line of thought, since supposedly having a gun deters gun-violence - but having a nuclear arsenal does not deter military action. The differentiator is intent: if you have a gun, you have to be prepared to shoot someone (in self defense) if they cross a certain line. Likewise, a nuclear deterrent is meaningless if you aren't prepared to nuke someone for crossing another line. In deterrent theory it has even been stated that not knowing where the line is helps the deterrent: otherwise you may actually have to pull the trigger.

Israel has nuclear weapons. By all accounts, they have modern, accurate, deliverable systems. Despite this, while they have possessed the capability they have been shelled from the Golan Heights, lost a war in Lebanon, and suffered under Iranian/Syrian-led Hezbollah. Israel has exercised great restraint and hasn't launched nuclear weapons at anyone; for that, they should be commended. However, Israel certainly doesn't seem to have deterred anyone.

The USA also has nuclear weapons (and a current doctrine that permits first-use in some circumstances), and despite a prima facea attack on US soil by a group housed and sponsored by the government of Afghanistan - we didn't nuke them. Again, laudable restraint - but we really didn't deter Al Quaeda or Afghanistan.

Russia has nuclear weapons, and a clearly stated doctrine permitting first-use. Despite this, there has been very little indication that Russia might actually nuke any of the parties involved in disputes around their borders and satellite nations. Again, laudable: but how deterred were the Chechen's, Georgians or Moldovans?

One often-cited example in Dr. Gray's defense is that of India and Pakistan. Since both parties became nuclear, there have been fewer incidents close to all-out war along the Kashmiri border. However, India also had a significantly more pro-Muslim government for much of that time period. The real test will come when two radically opposed governments are once again in power in the two countries. It seems likely that neither side wants a nuclear war - but doesn't that just mean that convention struggles can continue (as they do!) without regard for the 'ultimate deterrent'?

Dr. Gray could reasonably argue that since all of the countries listed above lack a willingness to pull the nuclear trigger, their deterrent is hollow - and therefore not a deterrent at all. However, for as long as that argument remains solid then it must follow that a nuclear-armed-neighbourhood is not significantly different from a conventionally armed neighbourhood. Once nuclear first-use has happened in a conflict, that may change - we simply don't know. While praying to avoid that situation has worked thus far, sooner or later there will be a nuclear strike somewhere in the world. It's entirely possible that the strike will demonstrate that while nuclear weapons make a mess, they aren't significantly more useful than conventional rounds in modern warfare - at which point, whither deterrent?

While I'm grumbling...

2007-04-20T16:50:00.000-05:00

The whole place still reeks of smoke, but it's getting better. Anyway, I just saw that Phelps is planning on demonstrating at the VA-Tech student's funerals with his usual range of unpleasant placards. I know he has a right to demonstrate; the question is - how far does that right go in terms of being an unpleasant *!@@? I mean, it's one thing to blame the disaster on your belief that God has condemned the United States (and, by some accounts, declared Phelps to be a demigod) - but demonstrating at the funeral of shooting victims is just plain insensitive. Asshole.

Sometimes, I wonder how humanity ever made it....

2007-04-20T15:06:00.000-05:00

I have a big family occupying the two apartments next to mine. They are quiet and ignore me most of the time. Anyway, today they had a barbecue. Fair enough, but when they finished they decided to:
a) Dump all the hot coals on the wood-shavings bed in front of my apartment window.
b) Not put the coals out.
c) Leave.

So I was working away, and smelled smoke. Lots of smoke. My first response was to check my kitchen (no stove on, appliances fine) and my server (it was fine). So I go outside, and sure enough - the coals have set the bed on fire. Only about a 1' patch was burning (with big, HOT flames), but it was spreading fast. Stomping on it didn't do any good at all other than make my foot smelly (safety boots rock - no burns), so I dumped a few liters of water on it. Fire went out. Now my whole apartment reeks of smoke, I have some soot around, and it's just plain yucky.

I think I'm going to talk to the landlord. Last time I tried to talk to my neighbours they were less than friendly, and I'm really not going to put up with having my place burned down by idiots with barbecue grills... GRRRRRRR.

RAM

2007-04-19T18:50:00.000-05:00

It really is nice having RAM in my server again. It let me move some RAM around and have 3gb in my Vista machine, too! Vista is actually pretty nice with 3gb. The 64-bit edition I was using was barely usable with 1.

NewEgg

2007-04-18T13:55:00.000-05:00

I had a RAM chip in my server go out this morning (not hard to diagnose - it has scorch marks!), and I need it back urgently for ongoing projects. So, I went to NewEgg, gritted my teeth and placed an order. Since I'm practically dead in the water without it, I had to go for next-day shipping and rush order... and within seconds of submitting the order NewEgg were in touch assuring me fast service.

Why is the server so important? It's currently running all the development versions of our new backup product. Ouch!

Jingos and the Gila Monster!

2007-04-14T15:48:00.000-05:00

Last night was nice. Mel & I went to a new Chinese place, Jingos (it used to be the Mandarin Express). The food was really rather good, and heaped on the plate. We talked, ate, and other than it being cold in there - it was a good time. Then we watched a 50s monster-flick, Attack of the Giant Gila Monster. Utterly cheesy, but fun because of it. Finally, we fell asleep on the couch... only for me to wake up and do my taxes.

Overall, a good night!

PostgreSQL Connection Pooling

2007-04-13T11:35:00.000-05:00

I use npgsql for quite a few projects, and it performs really well. I ran into an interesting error today, though. Sometimes a transaction dies while incomplete, and all subsequent connections will fail with "current transaction is aborted". It turns out that the connection pooling in Npgsql is a bit optimistic, and will keep trying to re-use the connection with the aborted transaction on it!

I solved the problem by adding Pooling=false; to my connection string.

LOTRO Tonight

2007-04-13T00:56:00.000-05:00

I spent some time playing LOTRO tonight. So far, it really is a great game. It does have shades of World of Warcraft in its design (primarily crafting and the quest system), but overall it's a fine game - with much more involving content (for me, at least) than WoW.

I think I've figured out the crafting system. Endemonia is a scholar, Feltspar an armourer, Gooseberry a tinker, Leafwyn a Woodsman, and Eleanor an Explorer. That gives me all of the major professions, and the ability to mail resources back-and-forth and not depend upon the auction house. I'm never a fast leveller on the crafting scale, but I'm having fun with it!

So far, my characters:

Endemonia, level 7 human loremaster. I haven't really played her enough to comment on the loremaster, but she seems solid enough.
Gooseberry, level 9 hobbit burglar. I'm not a big fan of burglars, so far - sneak and inflict damage doesn't really do it for me. I think it will pick up when I take some more time to learn the class.
Leafwyn, a level 7 elven huntress. She's the classic elf with a bow, and quite a lot of fun. Hunters (archers) are much better balanced in LOTRO than they were in other Turbine games; they are very good at range, but weak if surprised.
Eleanor, level 10 human captain - complete with a herald following her around waving a flag. She's a lot of fun. Captains are a hard class to solo at first, but every time I've been in a fellowship (group), I've felt really useful. It's a lot like the Paladin of Diablo 2: mediocre damage, mediocre buffs to oneself, and great buffs when you have friends along. In particular, after the fellowship slays a monster there are various battle-cries you can issue - providing buffs ranging from heal-over-time to everyone, to attack bonusses. She can also make the whole fellowship run faster.
Feltspar, level 12 dwarven guardian. Guardians are a pure melee tank class, and play like one: you can take an absolute beating, and still ask for more. Damage output is on the low side, but when you can take the slow'n'steady approach and know you can outlast most things - it doesn't matter. I've had a blast with Feltspar, so far. I've discovered that Guardians are in high-demand for groups - their aggro control is really good, and with a bit of effort you can keep everyone else safe. Poor Feltspar has died once, when the healer in the group decided that melee was more fun than healing. :-

So overall, very much worth the pre-order. If anyone wants to join me, I'm on Elendimir.

Porting my blog

2007-04-11T01:50:00.000-05:00

As you may have noticed, most of the entries from my old blog are in here - and yet, I'm running Blogger. No, I'm far too lazy to type them all in - instead, I used Google's C# API to pull my posts from the database and post them. I ran into a few issues; Google have a rate-limiting feature (to stop spammers, a noble goal) that cut me off a few times mid-post, and I forgot to flag which posts I'd added the first time and ended up having to delete a lot of stuff and repost it.

You can get the API from this site: http://code.google.com/p/google-gdata/

My import code is neither pretty nor very well written, but if it helps anyone here are some snippets: (Note that the URI is the address of the atom feed of your blog)

To Retrieve a Feed (all entries are in Feed.Entries)
private static AtomFeed getFeed(out Service service)
{
FeedQuery query = new FeedQuery();
service = new Service("blogger", "DataMigrate");
NetworkCredential nc = new NetworkCredential("user", "pass");
service.Credentials = nc;
query.Uri = new Uri("URL");
query.NumberToRetrieve = 500;

AtomFeed feed = service.Query(query);
return feed;
}

To delete an entry
service.Delete(e);

To add an entry
static void InsertEntry(string title, string body, DateTime date)
{
FeedQuery query = new FeedQuery();
Service service = new Service("blogger", "MyProgramName");
NetworkCredential nc = new NetworkCredential("user", "pass");
service.Credentials = nc;
query.Uri = new Uri("URL");

AtomEntry entry = new AtomEntry();
entry.Content.Content = body;
entry.Content.Type = "html";
entry.Title.Text = title;
entry.Published = date;
service.Insert(query.Uri, entry);
}

Seems to have worked!

Lord of the Rings Online

2007-04-10T20:20:00.000-05:00

I've been playing Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO) a lot recently, and thought I'd make a post about it. This is really just an excuse to try out the editor a bit!

Anyway, so far - I love the game. Character generation is moderately flexible, it's visually gorgeous, and the quests are wonderfully written. While occasionally running into people with names like 'killa' in Middle Earth is disconcerting (especially when that's a hobbit!), the GMs are doing a great job keeping things under control.

Here are some screenshots:

Trying out Blogspot

2007-04-10T20:18:00.000-05:00

There are probably a few million posts like this one! Anyway, I'm trying out Blogspot. My old site hasn't been updated in ages - partly because I let the codebase suffer a terrible case of code rot. When I get some free time (ha!), I'll set it up - with this blog embedded if I like it.

Bye, bye, Rumsfield.

2006-11-08T13:05:00.000-06:00

So long, Rumsfield, and thanks for all the fish. I hope Mr. Rumsfield is happy with achieving his short-term wish of becoming a sacrificial goat (given how often he's tried to quit, it's a fair bet that he is not too upset). Please, please don't resume your career of being a neocon shill for Defense Studies departments.

Mood: cheerful
Music: None

Checks and balances start to assert themselves....

2006-11-08T09:54:00.000-06:00

Yesterday's election is over, and only a few votes remain to be counted. I was sadly delinquent in posting my private predictions, but I almost called it this time. The Democrats have won the House of Representatives - by a slightly larger margin than I expected. The Senate is currently 49-49, with counting ongoing in two states (and a possible recount in Virginia). My prediction was for a 50-50 split; it currently looks like the Democrats will manage to reach 51 and control both houses of the Legislative branch.

Exit polls say that this is a referendum on Iraq. It's good that checks and balances are finally asserting themselves with regard to this unpopular, poorly thought-out war. However, that is potentially poor news for the Democrats and their next Presidential campaign. Now, it would seem, they actually need to have a policy (beyond "hey guys, we're not Bush!"). Bad news for their spinmeisters, possibly, but good news for Americans; the next Presidential election should be wide open with no incumbent, so maybe for once policies can play a role? Maybe I simply haven't woken up yet.

Mood: happy
Music: 69 Eyes - Feel Berlin

Vista RC1

2006-10-08T17:13:00.000-05:00

My copy of XP Pro recently started behaving very badly (regular blue-screen), after some development tools went awry. This meant that I needed to reinstall everything (fortunately, everything was backed up) � so I figured I�d give Vista Release Candidate 1 a try. Doubtless, my clients will use it, so I have to know about it in advance. After my experiences with Betas 1 and 2, I feared the worst�

Installation was painless. The 64-bit version downloaded reasonably fast, burned easily to a DVD, and the installer was very easy � on par with Ubuntu. It found all of my hardware except my printer/scanner/copier, a re-branded Lexmark. The installer looked great, and didn�t seem to take very long. I was very pleasantly surprised that support for my nice nVidia card worked out of the box, as did sound (both problems with prior betas).

Logging in, joining my domain, and playing around was not only painless � it was slick. Very fast, smooth, and the eye-candy has been made painless but nice. Office, Visual Studio, Internet Information Services, World of Warcraft, Oblivion, VersaCheck, Money 2006 � all installed and worked perfectly. I had to enable compatibility mode (and run the process as an Administrator) for Microsoft Small Business Accounting � but it works fine once I did that.

Performance is very good, about equal to XP Pro (64-bit). Network performance is notably faster under heavy load � equal to Linux and FreeBSD on this system. Memory management has definitely improved; I filled up all my 2gb of RAM and swapping was less obvious. Sleep finally works.

Best of all, TPM (Trusted Computing � aka Treacherous Computing) doesn�t work on my motherboard� and I appear to have not lost anything for it! That was my main �I won�t buy Longhorn/Vista� argument, and now it�s gone. The system seems pretty secure, and while being prompted for administrative rights whenever I do something requiring them is odious, I think it will help in the long-term.

In other words: I take back all of my previous gripes. It�s really nice!

Mood: cheerful
Music: None

Whew!

2006-09-21T00:15:00.000-05:00

I've made it 31 times round the sun. Quite a fun ride, so far. :-)

Mood: accomplished
Music: None

Scary conversation on the bus....

2006-08-08T16:06:00.000-05:00

I overheard a wierd conversation on the bus. Two older fellows, one complaining about moving back to Columbia.
"It's not such a bad place"
"Only place that'll take me! I have a felony, and I'm proud of it!"
"Proud of it?"
"Yeah, I did 10 years for murder, but those girly-man liberal judges didn't understand - he needed killin'!"

Meanwhile, Mediacom are claiming to have lost the tech who was supposed to be here at 1pm to fix my cable!

Mood: tired
Music: None

Moved...

2006-08-05T00:26:00.000-05:00

I'm now moved into my new appartment (email me if you'd like my new address). Overall, I like it. The neighbourhood is very quiet, the neighbours are super-nice, and it's quite comfortable. It's not the apartment I originally viewed, but it's more-or-less identical and once some issues are worked out, I should be very comfortable.

The move itself went both very poorly and rather well; nothing important has broken, and everything is packed up pretty well. Unfortunately, my appartment wasn't ready when I moved on Monday (despite promises over a month ago that I could move a few days early!), so I ended up moving into a storage apartment (and camping out at Mel's), and then moving again on Wednesday. I had help on Monday from a moving company, but was largely on my own on Wednesday (Rick helped a bit, and Mel helped towards the end when she finished work). I'm a tad sore, but amazingly enough - I did it! Moved 90% or so of my stuff myself. I also received a rent reduction and a big apology, which works.

Now for the big downside. The folks in the neighbouring apartment moved out just before I moved in, and left a horrid bug problem. It was bug-bombed yesterday... and now I have roaches. I haven't even lived here long enough to make a mess, so I know it isn't my fault - but the buggers are coming through the walls from next-door. Tomorrow I'll purchase bug-war supplies, and try to make the landlord pay for them.... worst case, my law degree is armed and ready. Fear my legalistic might!

Mood: aggravated
Music: The 69 Eyes - Lost Boys

Productivity....

2006-06-21T19:57:00.000-05:00

I somehow managed to do all the dishes, bleach the kitchen floor, and only in 3 hours! Unfortunately, I still have the living room, office, bathroom, and bedroom to go....

Mood: accomplished
Music: None so far

England vs Trinidad and Tobago

2006-06-15T13:25:00.000-05:00

I just spent a couple of hours watching England vs. Trinidad & Tobago. The result was no surprise: England 2, Trinidad 0. However, I don't think England really deserved such a big margin. Trinidad very nearly came out ahead in the first half, England only being saved by Terry's amazing defending. England had problems, too. For the first hour, their build-up was ponderously slow, and crossing was terrible! Gerrard gave the ball away a lot, Crouch kept trying fancy shots when simple kicks might have gone in, and Lampard was solid... until he tried to shoot. Michael Owen did a decent job, but didn't look fit. Rooney came on and the pace picked up; Rooney wasn't playing amazingly well, but I think simply having someone up front who wanted to launch all-out attacks made the difference. He also held the ball up well for others, and layed off well for Lampard to miss a lot.

That said, there are some positives. The England defence were very good, Terry especially. England's midfield fed the ball around well, and once they sped up were top class. Beckham's passing was brilliant; when he had a moment to aim, he was spot on. Rooney made a big difference. Crouch and Gerrard's goals may give them some confidence for later matches. I hope so - they need something!

Mood: happy
Music: None

Still alive....

2006-06-05T12:21:00.000-05:00

I'm still alive! I've been really bad at remembering to blog lately, but that's mostly because I've been somewhere-beyond-excessively busy. One of our clients decided they wanted their whole website revamped in three weeks (for good pay plus a timely completion bonus), so I've been working stupidly long hours on that. So far, so good - it's AJAX/.NET 2, fast, and largely works. I should be done on time (touch wood). I've also been writing case reports for attorneys/private investigators, which is good money but quite time consuming. I've signed a lease on a new appartment, and will be moving at the end of July. Unfortunately, just as all this money comes in and my credit starts to repair itself... the student loan company in England decide I owe them money. So, it's more poverty for me* while I make monthly payments on that. :-|

Other than busy busy, I've been spending some time with Mel - only an evening or two a week, but that's a lot better than nothing. She took me to see Nickel Creek last night, and while Bluegrass isn't entirely my thing I still had some fun. It was great to listen to a Bach Sonata played solo on an electric mandolin.

* - Livable poverty, at least. I negotiated the payment plan pretty carefully. If a deal I'm working on comes through it's more like the Life of Reilly. :-)

Mood: tired
Music: None right now

Election fraud

2006-05-12T10:21:00.000-05:00

I've been banging on the 2004 Election Fraud drum for a while, and really wish that there was a snowball's chance in hell of anyone who matters listening. The latest round of concerns - predicted by just about every security-minded techie out there - is reported by security maestro Bruce Schneir. In his blog, Schneir talks about the latest security problem found in the Diebold machines used in many precincts, including much of Ohio. Basically with a piece of commodity hardware (probably a PCMCI card and a USB pen-drive) and a few seconds to press a switch on the voting machine, you can reprogram a Diebold voting machine. Given that it's already been revealed that you can alter results using a specially prepared results storage card, Diebold engineers performed maintenance on some machines prior to election day (after machines were certified/sealed, and they were not re-certified), we have a serious problem: voters can alter the machines, election workers can alter the results, and engineers could change software after a machine has been "sealed".

Proving conclusively that fraud occurred in the 2004 Presidential election is very difficult, made more difficult by partisan tribalism. Bush's ardent supporters don't want to look too closely, while the anti-Bush forces are inherently biased (I hesitate to say ardent Kerry supporters, since he was very much the "not-Bush" candidate). Despite this, evidence keeps appearing that indicates that fraud was even more widespread than 2000 - but was swept under the carpet rather than being investigated thoroughly. For example, let's look at this article. I'll be the first to admit that whatreallyhappened.com is not an unbiased source, nor is it an overly well respected one. The sources cited in this particular article, however, are relatively strong. Cuyahoga's census data, and reports of problems by precincts to voteprotect.org are independently verifiable - and the correlation between African-American dominated precincts and electoral problems is very clear. CNN's exit poll (in line with other exit polls) states that 84% of African Americans in Ohio (9% of the population) voted for Kerry. The BBC News investigation into Republican Party electoral blacklists (people whose votes they hope to render inoperative) showed that all targeted precincts in Ohio were primarily African-American, and problems in the predominantly ethnic minority regions were numerous, including lack of sufficient voting machines (there were fewer than there were in 2000, despite a 17% increase in voter registrations), and reports of machine errors - leading to a statistically significant increase in spoiled ballots. The same pattern (with equally verifiable sources) occurred in Franklin county. In Cincinatti, voting machines made by Triad were used. In sworn testimony, Triad have confirmed that they had remote access to these machines - introducing the possibility for unaccountable alterations on election day. Secretary of State Blackwell's statements, and actions in "locking down" polling stations on December 10th - stating that voting results would not be public record (contrary to Ohio law) are also verifiable.

In short, regardless of who actually won in 2004, the election fell short of minimum standards for a free and fair election. When the US reacts to allegations of a deeply-flawed voting process in other country's elections, it demands a re-run. Why the hypocrisy?

Mood: tired
Music: The 69 Eyes - Devils

I'm less frightening than an angry house cat

2006-05-11T01:13:00.000-05:00

I was walking back from the gas station a few minutes ago, having realised that I needed toilet paper. As is usual for nighttime jaunts around here, I saw a few members of the local wildlife contingent. Notably, I ran into a possum! They are really cute creatures, and normally run away when they spot humans.

Not this possum. This possum was evil. It was a little albino, giving its eyes a reddish tint. It was drooling, had its fangs out, and slowly waddled towards me. I truly didn't think a possum could be sinister, but I think this one was hoping to reincarnate as a hell-hound.

My usual "talk calmy while retreating" approach to animals didn't work. DevilPossum continued his inexorable advance, and I was beginning to wonder what I had handy to beat a probably rabid (any other reason a possum would pretend to be an attack dog?) critter when my savior arrived. The neighbourhood cute little black cat meowed and ran over to me! Upon seeing the situation, she bared her fangs, hissed, gave the most terrifying "mrrrooooowww" noise... and the possum ran for it. Cute cat then purred, rubbed up against me, and vanished into the night.

So, I'm happy to say I didn't have to fight a possum. I'm not sure if I should be proud of the fact that a tiny house-cat scared away my assailant more effectively than a 5'10" Englishman, though. I'm also very relieved that the cat was smart enough not to get close enough to risk catching rabies.

Cats rock.

Mood: thoughtful
Music: Steve Morse - Guitar Solo

Yick

2006-03-06T14:53:00.000-06:00

Woken at 4am by automated "server needs assistance" alarms (thanks Nagios - worked perfectly), disk space problems. Fixed it. Went to sleep. Accidentally missed most of work day (2pm wake up!). Fever, sore throat... yup, I've got the bug everyone seems to be complaining about.

Wanted: One immune system, immaculate condition, one previously very healthy owner.

Mood: tired
Music: None

New company: Bracket Productions!

2006-03-01T15:42:00.000-06:00

I thought I should share the good news that Bracket Productions is now officially a business. The license is on the way, and the State of Missouri has approved the name. I hope to get a domain/website setup pretty soon (I need a logo!), but in the meantime work will be much the same as before with a different name.

So much paperwork!
Mood: accomplished
Music: None

Sigh

2006-02-22T11:35:00.000-06:00

I really hate it when a coworker arranges everything for a server purchase, installs it, and then realizes "hey, do clients need client licenses?"

5 licenses, 30 PCs. Way to go.
Mood: amused
Music: None

Avian Bert Flu

2006-01-11T12:12:00.000-06:00

I'm sick, and have been since Saturday. Fever, aches, nausea, a little dizziness and the occasional gastric symptom. It's wierd, though. Every time I don't eat for a while, my fever comes down and I start to feel better. Shortly after eating, the fever powers back up! I could just not eat, but that seems like a poor idea. It's as if I'm a furnace, and every time I run low on fuel the flames die a bit... but fueling up fires things back to the boil.

Ugh.

All of zero1tek is now out with it!
Mood: sick
Music: None

Again, not too surprising!

2005-12-22T14:09:00.000-06:00

You are the Lone Wolf. Dark, silent, mysterious you
stalk the hidden corners of the night. You
avoid the living and the undead, preferring the
high roofs of the city and the low tunnels of
the streets.

What Fictional Vampire Archtype are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

Mood: tired
Music: None

sigh

2005-12-19T21:48:00.000-06:00

Sometimes, a day happens that really makes me wish I didn't have clients. I admit, life without clients would be rather poorly funded - but today is one of those days.

Mood: tired
Music: None

Is anyone surprised?

2005-12-19T13:06:00.000-06:00

You are The Hermit

Prudence, Caution, Deliberation.

The Hermit points to all things hidden, such as knowledge and inspiration,hidden enemies. The illumination is from within, and retirement from participation in current events.

The Hermit is a card of introspection, analysis and, well, virginity. You do not desire to socialize; the card indicates, instead, a desire for peace and solitude. You prefer to take the time to think, organize, ruminate, take stock. There may be feelings of frustration and discontent but these feelings eventually lead to enlightenment, illumination, clarity.

The Hermit represents a wise, inspirational person, friend, teacher, therapist. This a person who can shine a light on things that were previously mysterious and confusing.

What Tarot Card are You?
Take the Test to Find Out.

Mood: tired
Music: None

Plum pudding disaster

2005-12-13T21:55:00.000-06:00

My Christmas pudding mix is really good: the taste is just right. My first attempt at cooking one (thankfully, a 'test' mini-one) was a horrible disaster. The steaming water got into the mix, making a soup rather than a pudding. Tasted ok, but not right - yuck, threw it out.

Next try will involve greaseproof paper and a linen cover for the pudding... and 10 hours of cooking time. Yikes.

Mood: sad
Music: None

Figures...

2005-12-02T10:35:00.000-06:00

If I were a Springer-Verlag Graduate Text in Mathematics, I would be Robin Hartshorne's Algebraic Geometry.

My creator studied algebraic geometry with Oscar Zariski and David Mumford at Harvard, and with J.-P. Serre and A. Grothendieck in Paris. After receiving his Ph.D. from Princeton in 1963, he became a Junior Fellow at Harvard, then taught there for several years. In 1972 he moved to California where he is now Professor at the University of California at Berkeley. My siblings include "Residues and Duality" (1966), "Foundations of Projective Geometry (1968), "Ample Subvarieties of Algebraic Varieties" (1970), and numerous research titles. My creator's current research interest is the geometry of projective varieties and vector bundles. He has been a visiting professor at the College de France and at Kyoto University, where he gave lectures in French and in Japanese, respectively.

My creator is married to Edie Churchill, educator and psychotherapist, and has two human sons and one daughter. He has travelled widely, speaks several foreign languages, and is an experienced mountain climber. He is also an accomplished musician, playing flute, piano, and traditional Japanese music on the shakuhachi.

Which Springer GTM would you be?
The Springer GTM
Test

Mood: tired
Music: None

Grrrrrr!

2005-12-01T11:13:00.000-06:00

Looks like I'm in for my 3rd 12+ hour day in a row. *EXPLETIVE*
Mood: annoyed
Music: None

A somewhat belated update

2005-11-29T07:16:00.000-06:00

Holiday Season
Thanksgiving was good - lots of food, good company and a generally fun time. I missed Mel (she was out of town), but overall: very high marks. My mince pie was really yummy, too! I've managed to find a source of suet, and will be making real mincemeat pie and Christmas pudding soon. I can hardly wait!

My One Month Game
My one-month game has 5 days to go, and is in surprisingly good shape. You can play a basic game of football (soccer), players roughly keep their formations, and the basic rules are in place. Graphics are cheesy but work, and I like my alpha-blended pitch radar. There is currently no sound at all - I may manage to squeeze that in, but I doubt it. I'll settle for a playable game without niceties!

Quitting Smoking
I've concluded that I need to quit smoking. I was planning on gradually cutting down, but extensive research shows that cold turkey and cutting down have identical failure rates - and withdrawl tends to be about the same. So, my plan is to gradually reduce my smoking (yes, that's inconsistent) until Friday (5-10 per day max)- and then quit cold-turkey. I anticipate some crankiness, sleep issues, and other withdrawal symptoms, so I'd very much appreciate support from friends and loved ones in this endeavour. I've seen a bunch of specialists recommending keeping a quit-smoking blog, so my efforts will be documented here!

Why am I quitting? First, I've never wheezed before in my life, and now it happens after a hard day. I don't like it, and I want to stop before I really mess myself up. Second, it's expensive. Finally, I'm fed up with addictive symptoms: feel crappy? Smoke! Feel good? Smoke! Work break? Smoke! Etc. Etc. Ad Nauseum.

My research shows that there are a few things I need to do to pull this off:

Drink bucketloads of water. Apparently most cravings are caused by toxins in the blood resurfacing, and your body knowing that if you smoke the toxins' effects will be suppressed. Water helps flush it out.

Don't guzzle quite as much caffeine for a month. That will be hard, but nicotine withdrawl significantly enhances the effects of caffeine - and I'd like to sleep.

Don't be too harsh on myself if I slip up and smoke once or twice - just try not to do it again. Apparently getting into a state about it doesn't help!

Take breaks whenever I would normally smoke.

Keep myself occupied.

Have friends willing to put up with me (and talk to me!) when I feel crappy*.

Doesn't sound like fun... but it needs to be done.

* - Any volunteers?

Mood: awake
Music: None

The game, bloody noses

2005-11-14T11:31:00.000-06:00

I took Friday and Sunday off from game writing (I need time off from programming, nano or not!). Saturday, however, I managed to get all the players to start in roughly the right place, kick the ball, and put in a sembleance of early AI. It's getting there.

I have a nosebleed. It's cold. I hate nosebleeds.

Mood: cranky
Music: None

November 11th

2005-11-13T12:25:00.000-06:00

This post is a little late, for which I apologize. November 11th is Remberance Day, in my opinion one of the most important holidays on our calendar. While I'm largely anti-war, the importance of some conflicts cannot be understated: without the sacrifices of our forefathers in some past conflicts, we wouldn't enjoy the lives that we have now. We should bow our heads and remember those who gave their lives (both literally, and those who returned broken) for what we have today.

My great-grandfather (on my father's side) fought through most of World War I, in the thick of the fighting. WWI may have been largely preventable, unnecessarily bloody, etc. - but it laid the backbone for the transition to the modern system of European organization. His sacrifice (he survived, with only minor injuries - but even sixty years later his anguish when remembering the war was evident) is one to remember with pride. My grandfather (on my mother's side) was Royal Air Force ground-crew in Africa, World War II. He had many fond memories of events in the war, but nobody could deny what he went through to defeat the Axis.

Noncombatants deserve recognition, too. My grandmother served in the Land Army A friend of my mother's told me harrowing tales about surviving Auschwitz. Their contributions may have been small, but were also important. We should remember both the tail and the teeth.

Unfortunately, none of the people I've mentioned in this post are still with us. Increasingly, there are very few veterans of either World War to share their experiences. That places a responsibility on us to share the memories, good and bad, with the younger generations. It also leaves us with a deep responsibility to enjoy the freedoms we have by voting, campaigning, and continuing to work for a better world.

Mood: tired
Music: New Model Army - Family

I knew it!

2005-11-08T13:53:00.000-06:00

You will take over Armenia using only a hot-fudge chocolate sundae

Take this quiz at QuizGalaxy.com

Mood: accomplished
Music: Arnold Rimmer Song

LJ Surveys Like Me, Today!

2005-11-02T16:33:00.000-06:00

The Classic Lover
40% partner focus, 47% aggressiveness, 50% adventurousness

Based on the results of this test, it is highly likely that:

You prefer your romance and love to be traditional rather than daring or out-of-the-ordinary, you would rather be pursued than do the pursuing and, when it comes to physical love, you concentrate more on enjoying the experience rather than worrying about your performance.

This places you in the Lover Style of: The Classic Lover.

The Classic Lover is a wonderful Lover Style, and is the closest it comes to the classic images of the princess in the tower, or the romantic and chivalrous knight, or the hero/heroine from a Disney film. The Classic Lover is a treasure to find, though it can be difficult to do so because they sometimes tend to be shy and/or difficult to successfully court.

In terms of physical love, the Classic Lover again can be shy, and often needs more in terms of emotional security to feel comfortable than some of the other Types. Given the right setting, and the right lover, the Classic Lover can be a delight in bed.

Best Compatibility can probably be found with: The Romantic Lover (most of all) or the Devoted Lover, or the Liberated Lover.

Congratulations!

If you enjoyed this test, I would love the feedback! Also, you might want to check out some of my other tests if you're interested in the following:

Nerds, Geeks & Dorks

Professional Wrestling

Buffy the Vampire Slayer

America/Politics

Thanks Again! -- THE LOVER STYLE PROFILE TEST

My test tracked 3 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender:

You scored higher than 11% on partner focus

You scored higher than 33% on aggressiveness

You scored higher than 30% on adventurousness

Link: The Lover Style Profile Test written by donathos on Ok Cupid, home of the 32-Type Dating Test

Mood: crappy
Music: Tori Amos - Everybody Else's Girl

Yay, thanks Kat!

2005-10-29T02:24:00.000-05:00

Decker
You scored 33% stealth, 13% combat, 7% magic, and 86% tech!

They say you're not a fighter, but you manage in your own way. You're idea of combat is a battle royal with a security program. You're chances of dying are just as high, but you don't even have to leave the comfort of your own chair.

My test tracked 4 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender:

You scored higher than 99% on stealth

You scored higher than 0% on combat

You scored higher than 0% on magic

You scored higher than 99% on tech

Link: The Shadowrun Class Test Test written by k4tn1p on Ok Cupid, home of the 32-Type Dating Test

Mood: tired
Music: None

Monster Bert!

2005-10-26T18:05:00.000-05:00

Mood: relaxed
Music: None

Mantis SOAP

2005-10-24T16:55:00.000-05:00

I was whining about the lack of SOAP support for Mantis last week. I was all ready to code it (NuSoap makes SOAP in PHP quite easy - still not as easy as .NET, but close), and I found a solution: MantisConnect, from FutureSoft. It works really well - our old bug system now posts bugs straight into Mantis.
Mood: impressed
Music: None

What a surprise...

2005-10-21T08:47:00.000-05:00

Wizard
40% Combativeness, 36% Sneakiness, 100% Intellect, 13% Spirituality

Brilliant! You are a Wizard!
Wizards are spells-casters who study powerful arcane magic. While Wizards tend to be pretty fragile, some of those spells can pack quite a punch. Unlike Clerics, Wizards aren�t as good at fixing people as they are at breaking them, so watch where you toss that fireball�
Your most distinctive trait is your intelligence. You're probably well learned and logical, if perhaps a bit fragile.

My test tracked 4 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender:

You scored higher than 21% on Combativeness

You scored higher than 49% on Sneakiness

You scored higher than 96% on Intellect

You scored higher than 5% on Spirituality

Link: The RPG Class Test written by MFlowers on OkCupid Free Online Dating, home of the 32-Type Dating Test

Mood: tired
Music: Dio - Not About Love

Bug tracking systems

2005-10-20T14:48:00.000-05:00

I've been looking into bug-tracking systems. Trac looked very promising (SVN integration and all), but doesn't handle multiple projects very well at all - and the code is a mess. Bugzilla is huge, bloated, and confuses end-users. I ended up with Mantis for now.

SVN integration is messy as all hell, but seems to work. The interface itself is good, and manages to be both simple enough for end-user reporters and full enough for developers/managers. Downsides: no SOAP/XML-RPC support for external bug writes, no easy external/remote API at all.

One day, an open source bug system will come out with a good API, SOAP support, db-neutral database support, a good interface, and good scheduling support. I guess I could add to Mantis...

Mood: accomplished
Music: Dio - Holy Diver

My travel map!

2005-10-20T12:01:00.000-05:00

create your own visited countries map or vertaling Duits Nederlands
Mood: happy
Music: Nefilim - Chaocrisy

Clock drift ate my email!

2005-10-13T17:02:00.000-05:00

I just spent a bizarre two hours trying to find out why mail would be delivered into inboxes very quickly, but not appear on POP3 for about 10 minutes. The answer really surprised me: clock drift. It turns out that Qmail's POP3 client won't acknowledge the existence of mail with a filesystem timestamp in the future (as soon as the clock reaches the file timestamp, the message is downloadable). We have one server storing all mail, and several POP3 daemons pointing at it over NFS. Server clocks drifted, with the NFS server in the future by about 10 minutes. The result? Mail arrives quickly, but isn't downloadable until the other servers catch up to the delivery time.

Wierd.

Mood: accomplished
Music: None

Not who I would have expected!

2005-10-05T10:05:00.000-05:00

You scored as The Operative. You are dedicated to your job and very good at what you do. You've done some very bad things, but they had to be done. You don't expect to go to heaven, but that is a sacrifice you've made for a better future for all.

The Operative

75%

Simon Tam

69%

Capt. Mal Reynolds

63%

Zoe Alleyne Washburne

63%

River Tam

63%

Inara Serra

50%

Hoban 'Wash' Washburne

50%

Kaylee Frye

50%

Shepherd Derrial Book

50%

Jayne Cobb

25%

Which Serenity character are you?
created with QuizFarm.com

Mood: happy
Music: The Who - Behind Blue Eyes

Bad doggie, SOA, Message Busses

2005-10-04T14:06:00.000-05:00

Last night was odd. Walking home from the gas station (around midnight), a door on Hinkson opened and a black dog rushed out at me. Growling, snarling, and making a bee-line for me! I did my best "bad dog, shoo" mean yell (which stops most dogs) but it continued right at me. Fortunately, stealth was not its strong-point, so dodging it's first attempt at biting me was really easy. It's second bite was aimed at my ankle, and I (not entirely deliberately, in all honesty) ended up kicking the beast as it bit at my steel toe-cap. It yelped, and a man ran out of the house, restrained the dog, and started yelling at me. I politely asked him to desist and left. Noone hurt, but it sucked.

SOA
I've been reading a lot about Service Oriented Architecture in trade journals lately. This got me thinking about what, exactly, SOA is. Like most buzzwords, it seems to represent a number of things. Most important are loosely-coupled components (something programmers have aimed to achieve for decades). These seem to have to be remotely invocable, probably via SOAP (although this seems to be more the lingua franca of the moment than a necessity). Most SOA discussions refer to using business rule engines/orchestration engines to abstract connecting code together - almost abstracting it out of the programmer domain altogether, and into manager-level "join the dots". (This is a good thing: business types can focus on business logic, programmers on implementation.) Finally, there seems to be a requirement to invest in a Message Bus.

Message Busses
So the question that comes up is "what the heck is a message bus?", and how does it differ from message queues, remoting, object brokerages, WSDL, sockets, and every other method of passing messages? The answer is both that it doesn't, and that it is more formalized while being more loosely coupled. Huh? More formalized and more loosely coupled? That makes no sense!

Sadly, it does. By sticking to a formal message format (in theory transport-agnostic, but they all seem to be XML-HTTP-SOAP right now), and serialized objects, the message bus can offer MQ-like guaranteed delivery, broker services, and asynch. processing of messages without any understanding of the content. Routing, priority, and similar become a purely messaging problem, while each component worries about working with the nicely de-serialized objects.

Revalation
And then it struck me, in a blinding flash of incorrect grammar: I've been doing this for a while. The entire Thoth architecture is based on format-agnostic message passing (with routing, guarantees, etc.), componentized business logic (with some scripting, but not quite as much), and the capacity to scale each component section to different servers if necessary. I made an SOA without knowing what one was!

Mood: tired
Music: All About Eve - More Than This Hour

Former education secretary suggests aborting black children!

2005-10-01T13:46:00.000-05:00

William Bennett was education secretary under Reagan, and is still held
in high regard by many in the neo-conservative camp. His outburst today
is inexcusable, unless he has simply lost his mind:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1582356,00.html

Mr. Bennett said on a radio show: "If you wanted to reduce crime, you could, if that were your sole purpose; you
could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go
down."

Sometimes a statement is so heinous as to make it hard to even know
where to start refuting it. I'll merely inject the suggestion that if
we aborted all children born to lower socio-economic strata, we could
probably achieve an even larger temporary decrease in the crime-rate.
Temporary? Why yes - sooner or later, wealth redistribution in this
country would simply make a new class of poor.

Mood: tired
Music: None

Post-birthday party hangover

2005-09-26T13:06:00.000-05:00

I had a lot of fun last night. At least, what I remember was great fun. I know I shared chocolate and Indian food with people, drank vodka (thanks William & Sarah!), and had a lot of fun. I hope I didn't offend anyone, my memory is a bit hazy. I haven't drunk that much in a while, nor have I had a raging hangover like this in a while.

Ah well, until next year!

Mood: happy
Music: The Who - Behind Blue Eyes

Army refers to looting as an "insurgency"!

2005-09-03T21:00:00.000-05:00

All I can really say here is "what the hell?" I don't know if this is the result of an Army press person being too used to writing Iraq stories, or if the Army really is viewing this as an insurgency, but either way I'm flabberghasted that it got the editorial green light. Here is the primary source:

http://www.armytimes.com/story.php?f=1-292925-1077495.php

Referring to domestic lawlessness as an insurgency generally requires that:
a) The insurgents seek to overthrow some or all of the government, and
b) The insurgents are well enough armed and equipped not to be classified as rioters.

Insane.

Mood: cynical
Music: None

Intel server boards - ICK

2005-09-02T19:49:00.000-05:00

It's 7:33pm on a holiday Friday, and I'm still working. Why? Because an Intel motherboard BIOS upgrade failed. Simply figuring out what's wrong is quite a challenge - Intel helpfully supply four 2-colour LEDs. Each can be red, green, or off. These represent a bytecode (the 80 POST code), wherein red LEDs represent the high nibble, and green represents the low nibble. A red and a green next to each other represents a state known as amber. The result is a puzzle, wherein you try to figure out WHY Intel even bother to invent a third colour on a 2-colour LED.... and eventually you get a hex code that tells you where things didn't work.

If you read a different document, it actually tells you how to fix it - on a page that isn't in the document. Arrrrghhhh.

Mood: angry
Music: None

Stream redirection in C#

2005-09-02T11:28:00.000-05:00

I figured out that you can use System.Console.SetOut() to redirect console output to a text file. That really helped out: a client's ASP.NET application insisted on sending errors to the console, even though in a web console there isn't one.

Mood: accomplished
Music: None

Ups and downs!

2005-09-01T13:11:00.000-05:00

We pitched a $12k website to a client yesterday, and they came back today asking if $18k would be enough to make it better. Yay!

I'm also utterly disgusted by the looters in New Orleans. Looting for food, water, and even clothes I can understand, and it's inevitable that opportunists will grab everything potentially of value. Shooting at rescue workers, however, is inexcusable. Such actions justify the policy in many cities of authorizing troops to fire on looters and gangs, and the imposition of heavy curfew laws while rescue work/cleanup begins. It looks like Army and National Guard units will need to impose such restrictions on the ground, if any headway is to be made in the race against dehydration and disease.

Mood: nerdy
Music: Stairway to Heaven (!)

Hurricane Katrina

2005-08-31T22:59:00.001-05:00

I'm a really long way away from the disaster area (thank goodness), but after reading news channels today I felt the need to post, even though it is hard to find words to express just how wretched things are down there. I'm dismayed that looters have fallen to attacking hospitals (and aren't being shot by the national guard/police for trying), saddened that so many people seem to have died despite an evacuation order, and annoyed that New Orlean's flood/hurricane defence shore-ups were issued just 1/6th of the requested amount by the current administration last year. Months ago, there were reports that if a hurricane hit before a huge investment was made in flood defences (including wetland renewal, dyke infrastructure, and so on) this would happen - and funds were used for the Iraq war, and domestic counterterrorism instead. That's disgraceful, and really should be impeachable. I'm also disappointed in Homeland Security. Their evacuation plan completely ignored the poor and sick, or those without vehicles. Amtrak were even allowed to get away with leaving passengers at New Orleans stations (with transfer tickets, no less), before driving the empty trains to safety!

Anyway, this is probably not the time for recriminations. I hope the death toll is lower than currently feared. :-(

Mood: tired
Music: None

Asheron's Call 2 is officially dead

2005-08-26T00:59:00.001-05:00

I just saw the news that Asheron's Call 2 is closing its doors for good in December. I can't say I'm surprised that it is closing, although I expected Turbine to cling onto the game to avoid the bad press of a closure before releasing D&D Online and Lord of the Rings Online (assuming they have the funding to still release these games). I played AC2 from beta until about seven months, was part of a pretty decent guild (when not overrun with annoying powergamers and uber-leet speakers), and thought the game had potential - but was almost a case study in mismanagement.

In late beta, and around launch, a lot of basic functionality was broken. Rubber-band lag when you moved, chat didn't work, and there wasn't much balance between classes. Crafting was nerfed, un-nerfed, and then forgotten about with promises of a revamp (ever fading into the future - apparently it arrived late last year). Levelling was a treadmill, and repeatedly doing the same quest over and over again was considered content. Microsoft and Turbine clearly didn't work as a team, and would blame each other when bits didn't work. Ken Karl and Ken Troop - the two architects of the game - left after a few months. Ken Troop moved on to head D&D Online (where he is being flamed left and right for what looks like a truly innovative - and utterly unworkable - game design), while Ken Karl quit the industry altogether. I gained a lot of hope when Jessica Mulligan joined the team to turn AC2 around. She managed it with Anarchy Online, and was very important in Ultima Online; that, and her Biting the Hand series showed great insight. Jessica made a lot of promises, some things changed - and suddenly the game worsened. Content patches became every other month (despite montly content being the differentiator of the AC product line over others). Gross revamps and skill resets hit everywhere, and it was obvious that the game lacked the manpower to make the sweeping changes required. We were promised everything from storage (banks, as found in every other game), vendors, NPCs who talk/move, buildings with interiors - the sorts of things that one might expect to find in a modern game. We received nerfs, constant bouncing between ideas, and the constant hope of promised changes. I left the game, but kept following it much as one might watch a train wreck as it progresses. Citan took over as leader of AC2, with Jessica suddenly in charge of AC1 and 2. She quietly (unannounced) moved to AC1 only, while Citan struggled to turn the game around. Things did actually improve; Hero 2.0 (flawed but better as an end-game), Crafting 2.0 (much like WoW's crafting system), a fair chunk of content, and some nice engine fixes. The developer team kept shrinking, and when the expansion was announced - all monthly patches were suspended to let them work on it. Apparently the expansion was a Hail Mary move: all or nothing, the game sinks or swims based on sales. Unfortunately, Turbine demonstrated an inability to market themselves out of a paper bag, and sinking became the only option. Citan is now working on Star Trek Online, Ramen (my favourite developer at Turbine) is manning the AC2 helm - she seems to have been elected to guide the ship into the depths, and the others are silent. I really hope Ramen finds a good job, she's a great developer, and really nice. It helps that she looks like Arwen, too. ;-)

I think seven months from expansion to close is a record. Horizons and Shadowbane have outlasted AC2! I wonder if this will spell the end for Turbine? MMOs closing is relatively new territory, and has been really bad for every company to go try it. Closing before two 'blockbuster' titles seems suicidal - and they aren't even offering those who stay to the end freebies in the new games.

Mood: tired
Music: Iron Maiden - Fear of the Dark

Not too bad...

2005-08-19T10:58:00.001-05:00

I've been sick a lot lately, but that seems to be improving. I'm not
quite as broke as I was, although I still have some debts to pay off
(the IRS being the biggie!) before I can be truly comfortable again.
Work is hectic, but rewarding - some fun web development, and I'm
pretty confident that my Persist/Horizons framework is about to hit a
major breakthrough point. The PDF reporting system in particular is
taking shape nicely, and my MVC/plugin architecture works really nicely.

I've been playing a lot of World of Warcraft. Wydgette is now a level
20 warlock (not bad in 1.6 weeks!), and can handle most PvE quests
really well. I've yet to end up in a PvP battle with anyone remotely my
level, which makes me feel better about all the PvP deaths I've
accrued! I actually brought down a (level > 26) in a one-on-one
fight, but I died seconds before my various Damage-Over-Time spells
killed him. Still, I'm not really seeing why Warlock is regarded as
gimped yet!

I need to squeeze more hours into every day.

Mood: relaxed
Music: None

On fear of change in game development: my modest proposal

2005-08-13T11:17:00.001-05:00

Gabe Newell of Valve recently gave a really interesting interview, available here: http://www.next-gen.biz/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=510&Itemid=2

The funny thing is, I disagree with him completely. His basic premise is that multi-core systems mean that game developers need to throw away their existing code base, and many of the threading issues in game development are unsolved or only exist in Doctoral theses at present. Finally, he states that "Really good engineers are going to be much more valuable and engineers who used to be valuable writing game code in the previous generation may end up becoming thorns in the side of key programmers who can write multi-core game code."

First of all, my comment on the last sentiment: GOOD! It really is about time that good software engineering came to game development, rather than the backwards hackery seen so often. I'll expand on this throughout my discourse.

There are several fundamental problems with game development at present. The first is gradually being solved: a bad mixture of Not Invented Here syndrome, and wheel reinvention. Far too many games bake their own engine from scratch (often focussing on graphics to the exclusion of all else), when all they need to do is implement a similar rendering pipeline to other x generation setups. Innovation is needed, but for developers who aren't focussing on a new engine, this is wasted effort. Worse, many, many games are still written in C, with a gradual move to C++. Until recently, it was still common to see arguments on Flipcode and Gamedev against OOP design and established design patterns on the ground that vtable lookups are slow (they are really fast on modern compilers). Java, C#, and other modern languages are relegated to the status of laughing-stock because they abstract the hardware a step further away from the programmer with a VM (virtual machine). This is the first reason why moving to multi-threaded programming is difficult for many game developers: they are using ancient paradigms, while the business and scientific community has long since moved on.

The second fundamental problem of game development is an obsession with close-to-the-metal code, even when it can actually hurt your system! I've seen many cases in which assembly language is used, even though the assembly produced is actually slower than CPU-targeted compiled code. In a world of out-of-order execution, smart compilers, and different optimizations working better on different architectures (such as branch misprediction killing performance on the P4, but not the Athlon), compiled code � particularly high-level compiled code with high-level optimizations � is frequently more efficient than hand-tuned assembly. There are exceptions, but these tend to be special cases such as vectorization � and the compilers are catching up. Most fundamentally, micro-optimization abounds when the correct solution is to pick a sound algorithm in the first place.

The third fundamental problem in modern game development is an insistence on linear execution. Almost every piece of game code I've seen assumes a single message loop (the badly written ones eat 100% CPU when idle by polling for messages in a busy loop!), and tacks game logic in a neatly ordered loop. If you do this for server code, you may as well give up on ever serving more than a handful of clients at once � as server designers have known for 20 years or more. Games are no different. Even on a single CPU, this gives disadvantages: the scheduler cannot pass messages to your program while it performs actions prior to polling the message queue (meaning your program can appear to lock up hard, taking the system with it if you didn't clean up exclusive DirectX locks), IO requires a hard pre-empt from the kernel (meaning an unpredictable context shift � possibly in the middle of a frame calculation - if you fill the disk cache), and any other programs the user has running have a difficult time remaining usable. For hyperthreaded systems, it is likely that the second execution thread will actually slow such setups down; the game is probably using most of the execution units, and doesn't play nice with addition processes that desire some CPU time.

In other words, game development is (outside of graphics research) stuck in the early 1990s. Multi-threading is not difficult; if it were, I wouldn't use it in every Windows application I create, nor for simple tasks like separating data collection from display in a traffic monitor under FreeBSD. The key is a very strong design, isolating thread contention for resources as much as possible. There are many, many, books on this topic. Admittedly, most don't talk about games directly, but it doesn't require a Ph.D. to extrapolate basic computer science principles! Hopefully, the move towards hiring �really good engineers� will mean that code design will catch up in game development! It isn't hard to lock shared structures (via critical sections, spinlocks, etc.), it just requires that you think about access patterns.

The funny thing is, multi-threading is a shoe-in for most games. Physics should run independently of rendering � and I've seen many timer hacks to achieve this. Why not just put the physics engine in it's own thread, and render snapshots of the world? (Some physics problems are parallel in nature, and could even use multiple threads themselves!) Likewise, user interaction is a naturally threaded problem. Why should you only care about the keyboard (or other input device) status at a certain point in the loop (and revert to using DirectX's buffered input mode if you are concerned about missing events)? You might get a considerably more responsive game by checking IO in a timed thread, and feeding instructions to the phsyics engine. It might even be worth switching to an event-based IO system, in which the main process passes events to relevant threads; it works for every other interactive system out there! Even Ultima Online recognized that mouse input belonged in a thread. Likewise, sound really belonds in a thread with a priority that requests activity frequently enough to ensure that sound doesn't skip even if something else has slowed down (I believe some iterations of the Quake engine separated sound for this reason). Graphical rendering is often linear in nature, but could also be its own thread, so as to separate it from the main execution thread (ensuring that a bug will not freeze the main application thread).

How does one separate all of this game data to avoid contention/locks? Have each thread work with local data, and place data ready to be rendered (essentially a snapshot, although for IO it could be a queue) into a shared area when ready. Yes, you will need to lock this, but a copy should be a fast operation relative to the actual calculations � and you can start work on the next frame while the renderer lets the user know what's going on.

In a single-core system, this may not offer much advantage � but is unlikely to seriously slow you down. Modern schedulers are very good, and give the illusion of simultaneous execution rather well; if your graphics thread is waiting on a vertex buffer upload (handled by the GPU over AGP/PCIx), why not let the scheduler keep another part of your game running? On future multi-core systems, it is very likely that you can significantly improve the state of AI, physics, and general responsiveness with this strategy. Tim Sweeney of Epic has indicated that the Unreal engine will benefit greatly from multiple cores fo this very reason � there is no reason for other game developers to fear them.

Finally, the great language debate. Recent benchmarks show that languages contained in virtual machines (VMs) are very nearly as fast as C++, sometimes faster depending upon just-in-time (JIT) optimizations. Garbage collection, while occasionally slow (usually slowness in GC is an indication that you've done something wrong) makes cleanup very easy. Study after study shows that for most logic, higher-level languages make programmers considerably more efficient; no more re-inventing basic structures, for one thing. More importantly, modern languages are built for the multi-threaded world. Managing Windows threads in C++ with the Windows API is painful (but quite manageable). Managing them with the C# threading library is very, very easy. The same could be said of pthreads in C versus Java threads on a *nix box (although pthreads is pretty straightforward). I stopped using C++, except for assemblies that really need features that aren't available in C#, a few years ago. Some game developers have done the same, but they are a tiny minority. The move towards multi-core systems can only encourage the adoption of modern languages.

Footnote: C# and Java are both far behind academic languages such as Haskell in terms of innovation, and haven't even caught up with LISP and Smalltalk in terms of features. I'm not proposing a widespread move to the bleeding edge, just a step forwards to where the business world has been for a few years now.

Mood: relaxed
Music: None

Heh, oops

2005-08-11T12:33:00.001-05:00

I was brainstorming for a project I'm working on, and came up with a nifty idea... researched it, and it turned out to be NP=Complete, meaning that there is no way to determine when a solution can be found, or even if there is one (I don't believe the NC Complex=NC Complete arguments). Unfortunate for a routine that could be initiated by any user.... fortunately, a simpler version of the same thing runs in around 200 cycles. It's amazing what trouble overthinking can get you into!
Mood: accomplished
Music: None

Bad science joke!

2005-08-11T10:05:00.001-05:00

Heisenberg was driving down the Autobahn whereupon he was pulled over by a policeman. The policeman asked, "Do you know how fast you were going back there?
Heisenberg replied, "No, but I know where I am."
Mood: tired
Music: None

Feeling better

2005-08-09T13:31:00.001-05:00

So I'm feeling much better today. My fever broke around 10pm last night, and while weak, I more or less instantly felt much less like a corpse.

World of Warcraft is going quite well. I changed server (to play with a coworker), and levelled Wydgette, my gnomish Warlock, to 7 in about three hours. I simply did every quest I could find. I haven't died yet, so the ghost system is still a mystery to me. I was actually wondering how some of the corpses I found in the newbie areas managed to get themselves killed; I could take 2-4 newbie mobs at a time, and escape if things got bad. I'm also known for glacial levelling speeds in MMOs, and for not having the strongest play in the world. Ah well - maybe I'll last more than 10 minutes in PvP in WOW!

Work is going better. We moved our servers to the new office (hence the downtime - New Edge messed up the line move), and everything is working smoothly now. We've landed a bunch of really big contracts recently, and when they finally start paying us (cheap bastards!), the money problems should be over for a while. The IRS are paid off (at work - I still owe them some cash), we've cut our costs substantially - so I'm pretty sanguine about the future.

Back to the Code Mines for me....

Mood: relaxed
Music: Dio - Holy Diver

Various

2005-08-08T13:10:00.001-05:00

I have a fever of 99.8F today. It sucks.

I've picked up World of Warcraft, and am playing around with a gnome warlock named Wydget. 5 levels in two hours was fun, and I think I could really get into this game! Everyone was really friendly, which is nice.

I put a new drive in MythTV, and it has a good 70 hours of recording capacity again. Woot. Very smooth with JFS on the drive, too; latency for large AV files seems much better than ReiserFS was.

Mood: grumpy
Music: None

Scotty

2005-07-20T11:51:00.001-05:00

The actor who played Scotty passed away today. He was quite a character, and has been the recipient of honourary degrees in Engineering from several schools for raising the profile of the profession. I remember talking to him at Gen Con (in 1995, I think), hearing his war stories (he lost a finger in WW2), and chuckling at how Canadian he sounded when he wasn't faking Scottish.

Rest in peace.

Mood: relaxed
Music: Sisters of Mercy - 1959

Fixing my PC - part 1

2005-07-15T19:25:00.001-05:00

The first batch of parts (two fans and a sticker!) arrived from NewEgg today; I have to wait until Monday for the power supply, large case fan, and HD fan. I popped open my case (I love my case - one screw to open it, fan housings are largely screwless), popped in the fans - after carefully considering how to orient them (see below) - and powered it up. The new fans are UV reactive, and glow a cool blue with my case light - the system is now quite radiant! Much more importantly, case temperature dropped from 55C normal to 50C - and 5 minutes at 100% CPU usage only raised the temperature to 53C, rather than the nasty 65+C it was reaching.

Case fan orientation is a pain. You want approximately as much air coming in as going out, and being routed over the hottest components - the CPU, bridges, video card, and RAM. The fans that arrived are regular 80mm case fans, and shift about 32.5 CFM of air. I pointed them both outwards - one in the side of the case (glowing in the window!), and one in the front. Currently, this creates a vacuum of about -63CFM in the case; this is not ideal, as it forces the fans to suck outside air in, for a rather slow cool. However, I'm planning on the new fans; the 120mm fan will blow about 78CFM into the case (right over the important areas). That changes pressure to positive 15CFM, meaning that air is constantly being expelled from the case. The new power supply adds a bit more fan power (internal suck fan, external expelling fan), but not much - I'm hoping for about 15CFM to give me a zero-pressure system.

Mood: accomplished
Music:

PC Problems

2005-07-13T00:27:00.001-05:00

I really hate it when I have computer problems, and they aren't software related (i.e. they aren't really my fault!). Since moving rooms, I've been having a few heat problems with my PC - and now I have power supply problems too.

To give you an idea, while the idle CPU is a respectable 37C, it hits 60 or more when I really stress it out. The chassis remains at 55C most of the time, but hits 65C or more when the system is stressed. This means one thing: there isn't anywhere near enough airflow in my case right now. The CPU fan can only do so much when it is sucking warm/hot case air over the CPU - and it's a wonder my video card still works.

To make life worse, my power supply is in a really bad way. The 2V line is at 1.61V, the +12V at 10.75V, the +5V varies between 3.37 and 5.16, and the 5VSB is wobbling around 3V. It's a miracle that the system is running at all like this!

So... I bit the bullet, hit NewEgg.com, and ordered some parts. A big, cool power supply (highly rated, with alarms and a good warranty), some better fans, and a drive cooler. Now I just have to hope my PC lasts until the goodies arrive - and that I get paid on time, so as to not go broke over keeping my PC alive.

Mood: anxious
Music: None

London

2005-07-08T01:22:00.001-05:00

I woke up this morning, checked Slashdot, and was jogged from bleary-eyed to awake by the headline "six bomb attacks in London" (it turns out there were only four, but early reporting is always tricky). An as-yet unnamed group, probably an extreme Islamicist group, had killed 37 people, and wounded 700 more. My first reaction was great concern - family and friends in the area, and from 4,500 miles away it's hard to know for sure if anyone's okay. I freaked out for a bit, and then started emailing/calling around to check on everyone. The good news is that nobody close to me was hurt. That's a big relief, although I'm still shocked by the attack - and also glad to see that the London spirit in the face of terror remains the same: business as usual, otherwise the terrorists have won. Now, if only some of our leaders would realize that this applies to liberty-destroying laws, also!

The sheer cynicism expressed by some in the Slashdot article, and also in some Livejournals really makes me sick. That an attack was likely was well known, but that does not reduce the horror of the loss of life and injuries sustained by the victims (although it did wonders for handling the aftermath; it seems the emergency services were fantastic). That the attack was probably the end-result of Western foreign policy is also well known, but again that does nothing to reduce the overall tragedy. It is always a terrible thing when human lives are ended needlessly through violence, whether in Iraq, Africa, London, or New York. Self-proclaimed Liberal pacifists who argue anything else are neither Liberal (respect of the individual's right to pursue happiness being a central tennet), nor are they pacifist if they do not recognize that lives are of equal value, and all premature loss of life is tragic.

That said, as a Liberal (but not a pacifist) I'd still lay my life on the line for their right to be morons.

Mood: depressed
Music: None

Live8 / Make Poverty History

2005-07-02T10:34:00.001-05:00

I'm not much of an idealist anymore, so I'm not entirely hopeful that the Make Poverty History demonstrations today - accompanied by Live8 - will really change things. I'd like to believe that they will, and that this mass outpouring is the start of a move towards genuine social change. Currently, 90% of the world's wealth is concentrated in just 10% of the people's coffers. Large corporate entities routinely pay billions of dollars to each other, just to keep a consumerized, environmentally unsustainable culture churning forwards in the West - while people die in abject poverty in Africa, parts of Europe, Asia, South America, and even sections of the USA (itself subject to 80% of the wealth in the hands of 20%). As an almost-comfortable professional, it's very hard to see what I can personally do about the situation: I definitely can't afford to give chunks of my paycheque (meagre by US standards, but very substantial in most of the aforementioned areas), except maybe in redistributive taxation (an unpopular concept these days, despite it's prevalence in the Western world). Something really needs to be done on a far larger scale - something I'd gladly participate in, rather than funding illegitimate wars in the Middle East with my tax dollars.

What we need are massive forgiveness of debt (itself a wealth-concentrator in the West), significant changes in the pharmaceutical industry (accept that human wellbeing is a social good, and not a profit centre; change patent laws to allow cheap access to drugs quickly; distribute drugs to needy areas as a social benefit, not a source of revenue), an acceptance that globalization is only meaningful if it applies equally to everyone (with social benefits, a smooth market, and strong international policing of corporate exploitative practicies), and most importantly an acceptance of the brotherhood of humanity. The latter doesn't need to be a religious concept (although most major religions espouse it), a Socialist/Communist concept (human equality underpins most post-Mill/Locque Liberalism!), or an anti-capitalist concept (even Adam Smith, often cited by neocons, stated that the invisible hand of the market can only help if monopolies are checked, innovation abounds, social goods are treated differently and the burden shared, and market distortions in terms of both social policy and economic policy* are to be eliminated). Equality of opportunity, a level playing field, and the fundamental understanding that ultimately, we're all human, and share this tiny planet are pretty basic concepts - it would be nice if they were paid more than lip-service.

Of course, in a world that slides between Mercantilism, Globalism, and Bloc economic theories, achieving this is very difficult. The US has strong Mercantilist tendencies: collect as much wealth as possible (somehow hoping to avoid the inflation that really killed the Spanish empire!), and play bully on the International stage. The US also has Globalist tendencies (alternating between Globalism and Isolationism, really), largely driven by corporate interests - but gradually leading to a redistribution of money and power away from the USA. The US generally really dislikes Bloc theory, and if anybody could make it work they could make themselves quite rich - at the expense of the rest of the world. Arguably, ASEAN is the world's most powerful trade bloc currently, with the EU gradually (maybe!) working on becoming another. The US probably counts as a bloc itself.

The only optimistic route I can see here is for wealth to gradually spread itself out as corporations outsource, dilute, and the world becomes considerably more interconnected. That doesn't help war-torn Africa for now, but with development it could in the future. Unfortunately, I'm really pessimistic in general. I'd love to think that the world will change for the better, but I'm not sure that it will in my lifetime.

* - Unfortunately, the largely illiterate neocon & modern Libertarian club tends to regard "distortion in social policy" as meaning "eliminate social policy, particularly safety nets." We saw how well that worked in the early Industrial Revolution, and it isn't what Smith said at all.

Mood: tired
Music: Black Sabbath - Live Evil

You've got to love it when non-technical people try and troubleshoot...

2005-06-21T16:40:00.001-05:00

... a 1,300 person listserv. A recipient calls to ask why they haven't been receiving posts from the listserv, so rather than (a) asking the friendly administrator who has access to all the logs for past year, or (b) actually checking to see if the user is on the list, they choose option (c). Option (c) doesn't make any sense:

Assume that Person A normally posts to the listserv, but is out sick. Normally, Person B posts in A's stead. This time, Person C has been charged with the job. Now, Person C has been posting to the listserv for over a week, and Person B (as well as the friendly admin) has received the mail from the listserv just fine. So, option (c) is to assume that if Person C posts, Something Bad Happens - and it's a fluke that Person B, Person C and the Friendly Admin have all been receiving the mail. So, Person C sends out a test message (received by Friendly Admin and Persons B & C). Person C sends it again (again, received fine). Person B sends a forwarded copy of Person C's email, just to find out if Person C Has Bad Things Happening. Person C then decides to send out all 7 of the last week's mailings again, just in case (presumably because Nothing Bad Is Happening).

The funny thing is, for every one of these posts, as well as the 7 previous daily postings, the log file reads: smtp completed for 1393 recips, in XX seconds.

So now everyone has 3 test messages, and two copies of every message from the last week, for a total of 23,681 message deliveries in 30 minutes.

Mood: contemplative
Music: None

Nuclear power

2005-06-16T10:41:00.001-05:00

We definitely live in interesting times; the president of Greenpeace just testified to Congress that nuclear power is the best environmental option for now - and the Hydrogen option is finally being debunked. The big lie in the Hydrogen debate is that it reduces greenhouse emissions. Like all straw-man arguments, it is true that Hydrogen does not contribute to warming, and a Hydrogen-fuel-cell approach to delivering power (for example into cars) is very clean. What this misses is that Hydrogen itself is not a great source of energy - but does a fine job of storing it. You still have the charge the things - which requires a large quantity of electricity. In effect, a Hydrogen economy moves the polution burden up the chain to the power producers rather than the consumers. A good start, but far from a silver bullet given how much pollution comes from coal/oil/gas burning power stations. This is where nuclear power comes in; modern designs are safe, efficient, and non-polluting. A significant increase in nuclear power generation would make a lot of the emissions problems from fossil fuel plants a thing of the past.

There are two large downsides. The first is that nuclear power plants require a finite resource, Uranium (enriched to a certain degree). Recycling (such as Selafield) can extend the life of Uranium, but not indefinitely. In other words, if we don't continue to look for future options we are robbing Peter to pay Paul. The second is that it is relatively easy to convert a nuclear power program into a weapons program (both depleted Uranium and nuclear bombs, depending upon what you do). This tends to be a thorny issue when it comes to non-members of the IAEA Nuclear Club. Nuclear weapon proliferation is already a problem, and is likely to get worse as nuclear power is ramped up. This may or may not be a bad thing (compare and contrast Gray's contention that a nuclear armed world is a polite world with almost any non-proliferation text!), although a nuclear attack on a major conurbation would be a high price to pay for being wrong.

Overall, however, I think that nuclear power is the way to go for now. We need to continue to pursue fusion (probably more energetically, and both lunar and terrestrial), extra-terrestrial solar, and anything else (hamsters?) that might work. We already live in interesting times, and I'm inclined to think that small countries with a few short-range nuclear weapons would be a good deterrent to rabid imperialism from the major powers. There is always the risk of something horrible happening, but if India and Pakistan can behave responsibly, I tend to have some hope for humanity. In many ways, non-use of nuclear weapons is our best hope for this: when word gets out that they aren't even very effective weapons of war (let alone terror, compared with readily available biological compounds), nuclear use may lose some of the stigma that has prevented it.

I'm rambling. :-)

Mood: happy
Music: Nefilim - 24th Moment

Much happier

2005-06-08T11:17:00.001-05:00

My day definitely improved after my last blog entry. My boot is a bit
mangled/scuffed after having the truck run over it, but my foot appears
to be okay - one toe is slightly discoloured, but otherwise it feels
pretty normal. Our electricity was reconnected sometime in the evening.
Best of all, I got to hang out at the Artisan and Lakota and work on
Kris's new website with her. The site is PHP/MySQL on IIS6 - and seems
to work pretty well. I bumped into Sarah, too, which was nice. We
talked for about 10 minutes, smoked, agreed to have dinner either
Thursday or Friday, and got whistled at by a homeless guy when we
hugged goodbye. Stupid homeless person. Anyway, it was nice and
relaxing, and definitely fixed my day!

Mood: happy
Music: None

Gahh, Cingular are sucking badly!

2005-06-06T16:20:00.001-05:00

Last month, my phone bill was wrong. About $80 in Internet usage
charges were applied, even though I'd paid for a plan that included
Internet use. Latest bill - the charges are back, with the same dates.
I pretty much had to jump through flaming hoops of fire to get it
changed last month, and my attempts thus far indicate that the hoops
are now guarded by attack leopards.... someone should tell them that
impolite customer service reps and incompetent billing staff are not
the way to keep business customers.

Mood: aggravated
Music: None

Herbert's Random Musings

On a general economic malaise

New Labour needs New Pragmatism

Apples, Oranges, Intelligent Design and Evolution

Sea battles

Yikes

Mobile!

MySQL Wierdness

Electoral musings

Parmesan Round Steak

Cook Time: 1 hour, 15 minutes

Ingredients:

Preparation:

Generational power transition, and the 2008 Presidential Election

Who says I don't like eye-candy?

Portal - The Cake is a Lie!

On Free Will

Hats off to Obama - and his speechwriter!

Power outage!

Novell Netware

Giuliani: terrorist apologist?

I try not to post too much stuff like this...

Microsoft wonders why Linux developers call them names....

In honour of McCoy, sweet companion for two years...

I forgot I modified Grub a while back!

Engaged!

GenCon Indy 2007

Server update

Chinese-style Lemon Chicken

Linux - Ubuntu Feisty Fawn

Servers!

Mediacom

Cingular 8525 Synchronization

Forgiveness

Secret number!

Is a Nuclear Armed Neighbourhood a Peaceful Neighbourhood?

While I'm grumbling...

Sometimes, I wonder how humanity ever made it....

RAM

NewEgg

Jingos and the Gila Monster!

PostgreSQL Connection Pooling

LOTRO Tonight

Porting my blog

Lord of the Rings Online

Trying out Blogspot

Bye, bye, Rumsfield.

Checks and balances start to assert themselves....

Vista RC1

Whew!

Scary conversation on the bus....

Moved...

Productivity....

England vs Trinidad and Tobago

Still alive....

Election fraud

I'm less frightening than an angry house cat

Yick

New company: Bracket Productions!

Sigh

Avian Bert Flu

Again, not too surprising!

*sigh*

Is anyone surprised?

You are The Hermit

Plum pudding disaster

Figures...

Grrrrrr!

A somewhat belated update

The game, bloody noses

November 11th

I knew it!

LJ Surveys Like Me, Today!

Yay, thanks Kat!

Monster Bert!

Mantis SOAP

What a surprise...

Bug tracking systems

My travel map!

Clock drift ate my email!

sigh