In Other News

This is going to be a busy year for me, oh yes indeed. My "Instant Family" takes up all the time you'd expect and sometimes more. Of course, who am I to know what to expect? I went from being child-phobic to having two young step children.

I'm meeting with my Professor on Thursday. We've got to decide on what classes I'll be taking, and start familiarizing me with the model (CANOPY) that I'll be working on. I think that I'm going to be adding a light model similar to that of SORTIE. Beyond that, I'd like to extend the model to understand that the world is not flat. Also, if I haven't worked myself into the ground by then, I'd like to add the capability to consider UV exposure profiles in the modeling.

Just like with my research at work, I'm wondering how anyone expects to get accurate data about outdoor phenomena without considering the weather. Now, we can't predict the weather into the future, but being able to enter UV profiles as input would probably help a lot WRT calibrating the model. I think. I -really- need to get myself up to speed on the biological basis of this process.

IE Redux

Apparently some other people are also losing the Faith with respect to IE being worth anything.

Weekend Update

Have I complained lately about Internet Explorer? I've been doing some freelance web development stuff for family and friends of late. Two of the people I'm working for are running small businesses. So ignoring IE, and just putting a warning for IE users on the front page isn't an option. OH, how I'd like to.

Recently I was added to the Fink Project as a committer. I've been sending packages in for a little over a year. I wanted to eventually be a committer, but I wasn't going to make myself annoying by asking for it, and I didn't expect that it'd be offered so soon.

I saw Chronicles of Riddick this weekend. It was an ok movie, but not all that impressive. The plot felt rather thin and rushed. It felt like there could have been an interesting background that this story was painted on, but we didn't get to see much of it. Expect it to be a shallow action flick, and you'll enjoy it.

I discovered the most adorable little desktop: xfce. I've been a loyal fvwm user for the past three years or so. I've tried a few other desktops and WMs, and not found any that I like quite as much as fvwm. I found KDE to be very bloated and slow. I found GNOME to be better, but still rather slow on my 800MHz PIII. After trying those two, I generally stayed away from "Desktops". But after reading a good review of xfce, I figured "Why not?" and tried it. I think I'm actually going to keep it. Old dogs can learn new tricks.

IE

I have recently had the distinct displeasure of trying to write web pages that work in IE. The issue comes about because I recently taught myself CSS. I knew before that IE was just flat -bad- at standards support, but I had no idea how bad.

I can understand why people write rants about IE now.

Let's just ignore IE's poor security track record. MS Apologists will say that the existence of patches proves that MS is fixing problems. This may be true, but to me the sheer number of "critical security patches" out there for IE would indicate that they released a crappy product which has more holes than a screen door.

Let's also ignore that IE's CSS support is buggier than a beehive. It is interesting to compare Microsoft documentation, with actual standards. Notice how the MS docs conveniently ignore some property values, in this case "fixed".

IE doesn't even support HTML 4.01. This is insane.

IE is the only browser so buggy and generally crappy that it provides its own special tag, that web authors use to work around IE's bugs.

I just can't take it anymore. My personal websites will no longer support IE. Trying to write web pages that are actually functional, that comply with standards, and that render in IE is just too much of a pain in my ass to bother with unless I'm getting paid.

Solutions

I've been having a few problems with calvin of late. First, he says "calculating..." forever instead of guessing how much battery I have left. Second, he has been crashing a lot.

The second problem was actually pretty easy to solve, once I got off my butt and read the discussion boards. Apparently some other people have also had the same problem. One of them even posted a panic.log that looks -exactly- like mine. The problem? Loose Airport Extreme card. Easily remedied.

The first problem seems to be both more subtle and more common. Though apparently some people have found a solution.

I recently wiped my hard drive and reinstalled Panther (and fink (that was a -lot- of compiling)) from scratch, which -might- have fixed the battery problem. I don't know, since the various knowledge base docs about it suggest that I need to drain the battery to 0% before it will recalibrate itself. I've just started draining the battery now.

However, I'm a much happier person now that calvin doesn't shit on me every few minutes. Maybe I just need to learn not to type so bloody hard.

In the beginning (or was it?)

This is part two of my attempt to maintain a weblog. Part 1 seems to have failed. I got this bright idea that I wanted to build and maintain my weblog as a part of my website. This would be well and good if I were motivated enough to come up with my own content management system. I am not. So I went and found blogmax, which is a system to maintain a weblog using everyone's favorite editor, EMACS. It works fairly well. However it seems geared toward someone who uses a single machine most of the time. I do not.

Now, I share my home directory and most of my files across my machines using CVS. This is really a nice thing, but it doesn't play well with the kind of structure that blogmax likes to use for storing files. Also, the longer I thought about it, the less sense it makes to store a weblog as flat text files. Something like blogger (do I really need to link that), where they store the entries in a database and use some dynamic voodoo to generate indexes does make a lot more sense.

So I'm switching. And I'll be honest, it's mostly because I'm lazy. There's nothing wrong with the system I was using before, it just requires more motivation than I have.

The project for later tonight: see if I can transfer my old entries from the flat text files they live in now over to blogger. Shouldn't be hard, provided that I am allowed to create blog entries that predate my creation of this blog. We'll see. :-)

CVS Homedir

One of my stupid new-years/birthday resolutions was to not let my weblog go un-updated so long. It makes me look like I've got something to do on weekends when I don't update it, and we all know
that isn't true *wink*.

Inspired by Joey Hess's CVS Homedir I merged together all the files from home directories on my various machines and put the resulting mishmash into CVS. After a bit of re-writing for .bashrc and the like, I'm very pleased with the result. I'm using the CS Department machines for my CVS repository. They back those up like mad, which makes me feel better about not actually backing up my machines in several months.

I can foresee this being very nice for when I start school again. Not needing any special voodoo to synchronize the various papers I'm working on between calvin (my laptop) and hobbes (my desktop) will be delicious.

Various Pointless Musings

I know, it's been quite some time since I made an entry. It's not that I haven't had much to talk about, though that has something to do with it. More than anything I have had a lack of motivation. But, so it goes.

It was a relaxing new year, I played pool with a small group of friends. For the most part, we relaxed in a group, It was nice.

My application to grad school seems to be almost done. I've been in contact with some of the people in Forestry, and apparently the only thing that we're waiting on right now is an
approval form to admit me even though my GPA is a bit low. I might even be accepted officially before classes start. I've got all the classes I want picked out. I think I'm going to do band again next semester, I keep talking about how I want to.

My project to build a DVR based on the freevo project has been a complete success. It's impressive what you can do just by putting something on the Internet and sticking a computer in it. It makes a stupid TV into a device that seeks out shows you want and snarfs them for you automagically. The people at IBM who said that four computers would be sufficient to run the world must be going nuts to see what people are doing with computers today.

I was trying to figure out, for a while, what purpose the 'news' section on my website would serve now that I'm attempting to maintain a weblog (Jerry Pournelle says that the pseudo-word "blog" is ugly. I agree with him.). I've come to the conclusion that the 'news' section will talk about updates to the site, and my weblog will continue to be mindless
chatter.

RotK

I saw Return of the King twice today. This is amazingly dorky of me, I know. But it was fun. A lot of fun. I very much liked this movie.

The visual effects were really nothing short of amazing. The Battle of Pelennor Fields was... wow. just wow.

The Dead were very, very well done. Doesn't Orlando Bloom ever get tired of being in movies where he sails on a ship crewed by the damned? Oh, and Shelob is very cool.

The plot follows the books fairly well. They add a few things, none of which were terribly offensive. They left out the Scouring of the Shire. This annoys me, as the Scouring of the Shire expresses Tolkien's belief that isolationism isn't a viable policy for international relations. They modified the Pyre of Denathor a little, but I like the change they made. The palantiri aren't really mentioned much at all. The romance between Faramir and Eowyn was glossed over. Oh, but other than that :-)

Did I mention wow?

Elegant Universe

Earlier this year, I read Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe, which I really enjoyed. I'm a sucker for pop-physics books, you see. Much to my delight, PBS made a series based on that book. I actually marked my calendar (ok, I wrote it in my PDA) for it. How dorky of me. But I missed it. Sadness.

Luckily, they've released it in Quick Time and Real-Video formats, so anybody with a broadband connection (or a slower one and a lot of patience) can watch the
PBS Elegant Universe miniseries. The miniseries doesn't go quite into the depth that the book did. Also, the miniseries brought up a few other issues. One that stuck out in my mind: if gravitons can leave the Brane, wouldn't that violate mass/energy conservation?

I probably just need to read more string theory.

Packaging: Victory

I finally got packages for libgpg-error, libtasn1, libgcrypt, and gnutls that compile and run happily on my fink box. I'm using the 10.2-gcc3.3 distribution. I've had a report from a friend that these info files do not work on a 10.2 box. I'm not sure if that has something to do with 10.2, or if it means that I forgot a dependency somewhere.

These packages work well enough for me to build and link gaim with them, and login to MSN without a segfault. That's my acid test of most of my fink packages. It's pretty disturbing, actually, just how much packaging I do just to get an extra feature or two

If anybody is interested, here are the links to the info and patch files:
libgpg-error
libtasn1
libgcrypt
gnutls

Hopefully these packages will get the blessing of the fink Core Developers (note the reverence) soon.

Packaging Woes

I've been trying for the last few weeks to put together fink packages for libgcrypt and gnutls. There was probably something else I packaged as well, in my quest to get fink's gaim to work with MSN and Yahoo, but those are the two packages that give me
trouble.

For some reason, libgcrypt build cleanly, but doesn't pass its own 'make check'. I've contacted the libgcrypt developers about this (via the libgcrypt-bug email address), but so far they haven't gotten back to me. It's very annoying. Without libgcrypt, there will
be no libgnutls.

I noticed that gaim supports the Mozilla NSS library. So I downloaded the tarball to see if building that was any less painful. The directions aren't even quite clear about what to
compile, much less where to compile it. I'm digging through the documentation in my free time to see what I'll need to build, but NSS seems to be much more annoying than libgcrypt/gnutls.

Oh well. The quest continues.

MSN Messenger

So, as some of you have been lucky enough to discover, Microsoft changed the login method for Messenger on 15 October. In and of itself this is annoying, because they didn't actually document the new method. Never underestimate the power of geeks in large numbers. The new login method has been reverse-engineered, and most of the open IM clients are smart enough to use the new login method. (plug: I use gaim).

The annoying part about this, is that the new login method requires some TLS/SSL silliness. So to get it to work in gaim, the developers used gnutls. Now, on my Debian box, this is no problem. But on my OS X box, it's a bit annoying. No package exists for gnutls. gnutls requires libgcrypt, which also is not package. libgcrypt requires libtasn1 and libgpg-error. Hey, wow. they're not packaged either.

So lately I've been making a lot of fink .info files for these packages. Some of the libraries, libgcrypt in particular, aren't amenable to compilation under OS X. I think that this might have to do with the way that the compiler chain on OS X is an unholy marriage of BSD, GNU, and Apple's own tools.

On the bright side, this is good practice for me, and eventually (it'd better be soon, dammit), I'll have MSN working on my laptop again. Stuff like this makes me want to convert my friends over to a sane messenger, like jabber.

Irony

Sometimes it requires a finely honed sense of irony in order to be able to keep up with current politics and not run screaming from the roof of the nearest tall building.

In his article Ask not what telemarketers can do to you of 31 Aug, Dave Barry published the toll-free number of the ATA, a large telemarketing association. This organization is one of several that is opposed to the National Do Not Call Registry. The registry is, to my mind, a neat and good idea. If you're on it, telemarketers cannot call you. If they call you anyway, they have to pay an 11,000$ fine.

The telemarketers claim that this registry is somehow a violation of their constitutional rights. I find this argument hard to swallow. Remove the telephone from the argument; now the telemarketers are asserting that salesmen have the right to walk into your home at any time they please.

In any case, the ironic part: after Mr. Barry published the ATA's number, their phone began ringing off the hook, at inconvenient times. It got so bad that they disconnected their phone number.

If this were all, it would merely be funny. But no, it doesn't end there. Apparently the ATA wrote a rather nasty article about Mr. Barry in a direct marketing journal. Highlights from that article can be found in Mr. Barry's column of 05 Oct, So what's their hang-up?

Take home message: telemarketers want to be able to call you whenever they feel like, but it's inconvenient for them and unpleasant when we return the favor.

PowerPoint

I had the distinct pleasure of needing to prepare yet another presentation in powerpoint today. In addition to all of the entirely accurate points in Edward R. Tufte's book, "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint" ( a summary can be found on Aaron Swartz's Weblog), there are a number of other things that bother me about powerpoint.

Microsoft continues to ignore every sensible precept of interface design. Their 'personalized menus' particularly annoy me. How is one supposed to remember where things are in a menu when the bloody things keep re-arranging themselves in a futile attempt to be helpful?

I'll never be happy with the way Microsoft handles including other sources in a document. I want something like C's #include. I want to be able to change the source document and have Word or Powerpoint or whatever else actually notice the change. Sadly this ancient concept seems beyond the grasp of MS software engineers.

Why is there no sane way to enter a formula?! I don't want to have to draw the bloody thing in MS Equation (which is the saddest attempt at an equation editor I've ever encountered). I don't want to have to pretend it's a picture, I want to be able to put the entire thing, symbols and all, inline with my text. I want to be able to change its size with font size buttons. In short, I want what lyx does out of the box.

  Sadly, powerpoint is the standard. So I and everyone else must suffer with it. But that doesn't mean I won't complain.

Blaster

Ah, how I love that Microsoft sells such quality software. Around three weeks ago security researchers discovered a problem with the way Windows 2000 and Windows XP handle RPC (Remote Procedure Calls). Today the first virus to exploit this problem started to spread. You
can read about it at a number of places:

Information Week - Newly Discovered Worm Attacks Vulnerable Systems
BBC News - Worm Blasts Across the Web
The Register - Blaster Worm Spreading Rapidly
Security Focus - RPC DCOM Worm Hits the Net
Also useful is Black Viper's Blaster FAQ.

Cnet even has an analysis of the worm's structure: 'MSBlast' worm a piecemeal monster.

People are even starting to throw blame around: Worm Exploits Weak Link: PC Users (Of course they're going to blame the users, if they blamed the programmers, they might have to admit that programmers make mistakes).

Researchers found that the MSBlast.exe program contains the following text: billy gates why do you make this possible? Stop making money and fix your software!!.

Spam Filtering

Paul Graham, for those of you who don't know, was the gentleman who first proposed the Baysean spam filter in his article, A Plan for Spam.

He has recently written a new paper, Filters that Fight Back. He proposes in this paper that the next generation of spam filters should, on detecting a spam, follow the links in the body of that spam and download a few copies of the web pages that that they point to. If enough people were using filters that did this, it would have a number of positive effects. Firstly, spammers bandwidth usage would skyrocket, likely costing them lots of money. Secondly, this would probably be enough to crash (or at least slow down so much that they might as well have crashed) the spammer's website, denying people everywhere those extra three inches.

This is an interesting idea. The first thing I thought after reading it was: bandwidth. Depending on whose estimate you read, spam accounts for around 40-60% of all the email on the Internet. This is a huge chunk of bandwidth, and it's starting to choke the servers of some small to medium sized ISPs. Writing a fighting filter would only make this problem worse.

Yes, eventually this technique would probably make spam unprofitable. If spam did become unprofitable, spammers would start to go out of business and the bandwidth devoted to sending and fighting spam would tail off. From the ISP's point of view, relaying a web page from a
server to a customer is a much lower-overhead operation than relaying an email. So maybe my concern is unjustified. Mr. Graham does respond to this very issue in his FFB FAQ, but to me his response seems a bit flippant.

Bandwidth concerns or not, when such a filter becomes an option, I'll use it.

BCC

Apparently not very many people know what the BCC field is for on email. BCC stands for Blind Carbon Copy. Anyone you list on the BCC field will get a copy of your email, but will not be listed as a recipient.

BCC is the only polite way to send mass email, short of a mailing list. I understand that when you're moving, it's simpler to dash off a quick email to everyone in your address book than it is to deal with us all one at a time. However any mail where the To: field is nearly as long as the body of the message is inherently rude.

So please, people, be polite to the people you correspond with. If you're going to send mail to more than one or two people, just bcc us all, and leave the To: field blank.

SCO

If I were curious, I would google to see just how many people are posting anger in the direction of SCO right now. For those of you not geeky enough to be following this corner of the news (how did you get here?), SCO is suing IBM claiming that IBM shared SCO's intellectual property inappropriately.

As always, there are miles and miles of details I could go into about this. However, I'm lazy. The short version is that SCO doesn't seem to have a case. Some people have expressed the opinion that SCO only began litigations to inflate their stock price.

Well, the other shoe has dropped on SCO. IBM has filed a countersuit. If this was an attempt to boost
SCO's stock price, it would seem to be failing.

SBC: Not so bad as I thought

Apparently most of the problem with SBC when I talked to them earlier didn't have much to do with their policy being strange. It had more to do with the rep I dealt with forgetting to mention a detail to me. The detail he failed to mention: if I pay for the one additional month of DSL service, regardless of if the DSL is connected, they won't charge me a termination fee.

This makes much more sense than what I was told before. I guess the moral of the story is that it's worth calling back when things just flat don't make sense.