This article in the New York Times is very serious because of the claim that two men were found bound and dead after a special forces raid in Afghanistan. I doubt that is true though, because the bodies are not available for examination having already been buried, the reporter did not specify if he saw the plastic that was used to bind the two men, and there is no other evidence other than the testimony of the townspeople. I have seen some people claiming that this is evidence of war crimes, but the article doesn't even explain how the two men were killed. It's one thing for bound prisoners to be killed by their captors deliberately, and quite another for prisoners to be killed during further combat action that takes place at the scene.
Thursday, 31 January, 2002. 05:18:22 PM
New information: I will be somewhere on Monday, but where is not certain yet. If there is space for me to work in New York, I will be there. If not, then I'm going to Atlanta for 2 or 3 days to help with a deployment at Home Depot. George also told me that there is also a project opportunity in Tadjikistan, but I know nothing about that. It's probably a deal where IBM will bring us in, because IBM does business there. Of course, I told him that I'm ready to go. It would be excellent if I could, because visiting that part of the world is on my master list of things to do before I die. Gotta remember to put that list on my website somewhere.
Wednesday, 30 January, 2002. 04:05:09 PM
Here's a great investment. This company has prospects for a great future, and anyone who invests in the company could make a large return. Too bad it's an SEC hoax designed to educate people about investment scams.
Wednesday, 30 January, 2002. 04:01:52 PM
I'm NOT going to NYC today. I left work at 1:30 to catch the cab to the airport. George called me and said Credit Suisse had no place for me to work until next week, so I'll be leaving on Sunday. I just got back to work, and I'll work on the Wells-Fargo driver.
Tuesday, 29 January, 2002. 08:44:31 PM
I just got a call from my sister Beth. She's going to have a baby!
Tuesday, 29 January, 2002. 05:46:09 PM
I'll be gone for two weeks.
Tuesday, 29 January, 2002. 04:50:33 PM
I just found out that I am needed on the Credit Suisse project in New York for about a week. I'll be leaving tomorrow morning.
Tuesday, 29 January, 2002. 04:20:36 PM
The Tao of Programming 6.3
A manager was about to be fired, but a programmer who worked for him
invented a new program that became popular and sold well. As a result,
the manager retained his job.
The manager tried to give the programmer a bonus, but the programmer
refused it, saying, "I wrote the program because I though it was an
interesting concept, and thus I expect no reward."
The manager, upon hearing this, remarked, "This programmer, though he
holds a position of small esteem, understands well the proper duty of
an employee. Lets promote him to the exalted position of management
consultant!"
But when told this, the programmer once more refused, saying, "I exist
so that I can program. If I were promoted, I would do nothing but
waste everyone's time. Can I go now? I have a program that I'm
working one."
Monday, 28 January, 2002. 11:14:40 PM
Ashcroft is once again being a complete idiot. Perhaps he would be much more comfortable with the Taliban?
Monday, 28 January, 2002. 09:08:59 PM
The photo album is working now. From now on I will be using the new scripts to maintain this website.
Monday, 28 January, 2002. 08:57:30 PM
The new mirroring script is working, with the exception of the photo albums.
Monday, 28 January, 2002. 05:01:13 PM
The word "bravo" is used to express approval of a performance. The word "brava" is used to express approval of a performance by a woman.
Saturday, 26 January, 2002. 06:54:15 PM
It appears that the reason the new script is failing is that it's trying to build a photo album as if it were a text section, and the annotation file is causing trouble
Saturday, 26 January, 2002. 06:51:50 PM
I just tried the scripts on this website (not the test site) and they failed.
Saturday, 26 January, 2002. 06:47:30 PM
I think that I've got the new site update scripts working. Initially it was supposed to be a simple cleanup and packaging of the existing scripts that I use to maintain this site, but it turned out to be a complete rewrite to make it more efficient, and to make the code better organized.
Thursday, 24 January, 2002. 03:46:03 PM
More on Dr. Weinberg: he talked about the scientific method, but he took the time to point out that it's a mystery as to why scientific philosophy isn't very useful. He said he supposed it was for the same reason that ornithology isn't very useful to birds.
Thursday, 24 January, 2002. 03:08:28 PM
Dr. Weinberg read from his book Facing Up: Science and its Cultural Adversaries and he also answered questions from the audience. I wish I had taken notes, but I can recall some things that he said.
-When asked about the resurrection of the SDI by the Bush government, he said that in science there is pure science, which is science done for the sake of science, and there is applied science, which is science done for a particular goal. He said that SDI was a sort of "pure missle defense"; a missle defense done for the sake of missle defense. This comment drew a lot of laughter and applause. He went on to talk about how the control mechanisms in the former Soviet Union are deteriorating, and he expressed concern and alarm at the amount of danger we are in from an accidental nuclear attack.
-He spoke just a bit about how the University of Texas is underfunded. This point is something he brings up every time he speaks publicly. Apparently, UT brought him to Austin mostly because of his star power. A Nobel prize winner is a nice feather in their cap. But when Dr. Weinberg arrived in Texas, he immediately started attacking the legislature for their stinginess.
-A dirty looking kid standing next to me apparently was surprised that Dr. Weinberg is an atheist. He said something like "if he's an atheist then I have no use for him" and left. I thought his display was a tour de force of a closed mind. The place was completely packed, and his departure left more room for me to stand in.
-When reading from his book, Dr. Weinberg said that he didn't shy away from controversy. The part he chose to read started with a description of the torture scene from Orwell's 1984. He spoke about freedom being free to say that 2+2=4, and that while O'Brien (the torturer) was more efficient than the current enemies of science, there are many factors today striving to stifle science. Dr. Weinberg puts religion very high up on the list, and while he didn't mince words about Islam, he was harshly critical of Christianity and Judaism as well. He read that he didn't know how much control he or anyone has over what they believe, and it might be the same as the control a person has over their heart beating. One does not take pride in the fact that their heart beats, but nevertheless, he does take pride in the fact that he does not believe in what he cannot believe in. He regards a belief in religion as an intellectual weakness that comes from an unwillingness to face up to the fact that humans are not special in any way, were not a guaranteed product of evolution, and that our situation in the universe is fundamentally tragic. He described the tragic condition of humanity as being in a state where we are not special, but we must act as if we were noble; morality is not intrinsic to the universe, but we must love and care for each other; and a couple other points that I cannot recall now.
Thursday, 24 January, 2002. 12:52:43 AM
Tonight I went to a book signing at Book People on Lamar. The author was Dr. Stephen Weinberg, a Nobel prizewinner for Physics. I couldn't get a book because it was sold out.
Tuesday, 22 January, 2002. 01:20:05 PM
My friends Bob and Deb finally got married! After only 348 years of dating! Whoo Hoo!
Friday, 18 January, 2002. 12:23:36 PM
"At Ford, quality is Job #1. Jobs #2 through #35,001 are now gone."
Thursday, 17 January, 2002. 03:59:53 PM
I've moved to cube number 309. This cube is about 1 degree cooler than my other one. The temperature right now is 73.9 degrees.
Thursday, 17 January, 2002. 02:38:11 AM
Silicon Sensing is partly a joint venture of BAE Systems, a defense contractor with a large presence here in Austin. They are known for their advanced avionics used in USAF fighters. Part of their defense work has been in building military gyroscopes. That expertise is now being used to bring the rest of us cool scooters that balance themselves.
Thursday, 17 January, 2002. 02:20:58 AM
These people make the gyroscopes for the Segway scooter. If that scooter went about 50 MPH and had a 50 mile range, I'd get one to ride to work.
Monday, 14 January, 2002. 02:44:08 PM
I will be testing the reorganization of my web scripts in preparation for publication. I will be using this site for that purpose. If things sometimes look broken here, that's why.
Monday, 14 January, 2002. 01:38:39 AM
I'm packaging the Python scripts that build this website and will release them under the name "Free Web Page Publisher". I have submitted a project creation request to SourceForge and should get approval in a couple days. These scripts have worked very well for me, so hopefully someone else can use them to maintain their site too. Of course, the license will be the GPL.
Sunday, 13 January, 2002. 01:46:49 AM
Hypatia
Sunday, 13 January, 2002. 01:05:27 AM
I looked up a history of all the mainframe computers that were used at Michigan State University. The CDC 3600 that I worked with a bit in 1986 had been installed in 1963! It was an all-transistor design, and it was the second computer installed at Michigan State University. The first was MISTIC, an ILIAC compatible machine built for $150,000.
Friday, 11 January, 2002. 02:51:44 PM
I did a bit more digging in the GC mailing list and it seems that the problem with finalization under Linux is to be expected. It's also preferable not to use finalizers because it can interfere with circular reference handling.
Friday, 11 January, 2002. 10:25:19 AM
The memory error in my parser is fixed. I was deriving objects from the gc_cleanup class in the garbage collector. The intention was to have the destructor execute when the object was collected. Unfortunately, that is failing somehow. I've derived the objects from the gc class instead, and it won't be a big deal to work around the object finalization.
Thursday, 10 January, 2002. 03:55:19 PM
The movie "Beautiful Mind" directed by Ron Howard was good in the theater, but in retrospect wasn't so good. A large part of the story revolved around a love story between John Nash and his wife. The real Mrs. Nash divorced John Nash after he was diagnosed as a schitzophrenic. The John Nash in the movie went around muttering "governing principles" as he scribbled equations on glass windowpanes. The real life John Nash invented game theory, probably one of the most influential pieces of higher math invented in the 20th century.
Thursday, 10 January, 2002. 02:09:02 PM
The temperature went all the way up to 75 degrees in my cubicle, but it's fallen back to 74.8 in the last 20 minutes.
Thursday, 10 January, 2002. 12:30:55 PM
At work I often listen to the NPR archives on the internet with RealPlayer. It's slow right now because the project hasn't quite started up, so I can take a long lunch. Diane Roehm did a show last week about keeping a journal and how to do it consistently. For me, the best way to tackle the consistency problem was to make the mechanical process as simple as possible. There could be absolutely no use of a stylus. The only time I pick up a pen these days is to write my name on a credit card receipt. My handwriting has become so terrible lately that anyone who reads it would think that I have Parkinson's disease. One thing that particularly bothers me about my bad handwriting is that my first name is getting shorter and shorter as I write it. Once when I was a kid, I wrote a letter to Kodak requesting information about their infrared emulsions. They very kindly sent a nice little pamphlet (that unlike today's marketing nightmares for the intellectually non-curious addressed the technical details that I was interested in) addressed to Ms. Pat Draper. From that point on I swore that I would always write my first name fully as 'Patrick' so that there would be no confusion that I was a BOY. I had no such problems with people calling me 'Pat', because someone speaking to me would know my gender from my appearance or my voice. To bring this back to my handwriting, I find that I want to use a pen as little as possible, and to do that I will write very quickly to get the process over with. Unfortunately, as writing speeds up, something has to give. At first, the last letters of my first name degraded to a vague squiggle. Sort of a 'Pat----' if you can imagine that as cursive. The last few times I signed a credit card receipt I actually left the squiggle at the end completely off, reducing my name to the three letters P-A-T. The strangest part of it to me is that I don't care. I type everything now. I have computers all around me at work and at home, and they are always on. When I want to put an entry into my journal, I just sit down and start typing.
The guest on the Diane Roehm show is talking about how personal and private journals are. What does that say about me? My journal is on the Internet. Hey! Look at me! I guess I'm not worried about people reading my totally unedited writing. I'm also not much into writing gossip either, so there won't be too many entries of the form "so and so is a bitch".So, no reason NOT to keep my log on the web where it's most convenient to me.
Wednesday, 09 January, 2002. 10:58:58 PM
"Always use leading zeroes on decimals. That way your readers can tell the difference between fractions and fly shit."
Wednesday, 09 January, 2002. 12:08:17 AM
I'm making a branchname of jan_2002_bughunt in CVS. Don't forget.
Wednesday, 09 January, 2002. 12:04:04 AM
Alright, I'm sick of having this memory bug in my parser. I'm going to start a tag in CVS for a version that I'm going to tear limb from limb searching for that pesky bug.
Tuesday, 08 January, 2002. 02:12:54 PM
A century is 100 soldiers. A cohort is 6 centuries, or 600 men. A legion is 10 cohorts, or 6000 men.
Monday, 07 January, 2002. 06:34:32 PM
Photos of Pepper and Darwin as newborns were added to the photo section.
Monday, 07 January, 2002. 02:04:08 PM
The United States is encouraging proxy wars against terrorism. This sort of activity against Cold War foes is at least partly responsible for todays terrorism against the United States and Israel. Backing repressive governments such as the imperial government in Iran was only one of our most serious mistakes in the old days. Another mistake was to give arms to those who are allies of expedience. Fighting terrorism in that style isn't necessarily fatal. Many of these countries that we are aligned with right now have the potential to become more friendly than they have been in the past. Pakistan is a good example. For many years, Pakistan was aligned with the United States in the Cold War struggle. They were important because of their position in Asia, and also because they countered a not-so-friendly India right next door. But the ties didn't run very deep. Instead of developing permanent ties that would survive a change in the political climate, the two countries drifted apart after the Cold War ended. Now the United States has rediscovered the importance of having a friend in the region even if no other superpower opposes us. I would like to see the United States government make and maintain stronger ties to all of the allies who have helped us in this fight against terrorism. Instead of just sending guns and training to these distant places, there must also be a program of continued improvement in relations and in the standard of living of the people in partner countries. A well-fed people are a moral people. Permanently removing the threat of terrorism involves removing the reasons that people subscribe to extremeist views. These reasons revolve around money and self-determination. A truly equal relationship between the United States and other countries would attack both problems at the same time by raising the standard of living in both countries, and transforming the perception of the relationship for the better.
Friday, 04 January, 2002. 06:56:15 PM
ingle: an open fire in a fireplace
Friday, 04 January, 2002. 06:41:03 PM
Here's a photo of the Sony FD-92 camera. When it reaches the top of my priority
list, I will buy it.
Friday, 04 January, 2002. 02:20:49 PM
Evil corporation tries to take over domain. Unicom received the trademark for their name in 1997. Chip Rosenthal registered his domain in 1990. Is there any question that Chip should win this court battle?
Thursday, 03 January, 2002. 06:31:58 PM
I've got a pesky interaction with the garbage collector and the STL (I think). I've fixed all the STL allocators, but there is still a problem causing a core dump. I'm going to have to track it down by tracing through the garbage collector finalizer routines.
Wednesday, 02 January, 2002. 04:54:57 PM
fark fark fark fark fark fark FARK
Wednesday, 02 January, 2002. 02:55:41 PM
I've finally picked out which digital camera that I want to buy. The Sony Mavica FD-92. This camera has a reasonable resolution, plus it supports both a memory stick and a floppy drive interface. Since most of the photos that I take will be meant for web page presentation, 640x480 will be the most used image resolution. Floppy disks can handle these files pretty well, they are cheap, and they will completely bypass any issued with Linux compatibility. I am not at all eager to boot Windows just to get at the photos on my camera. And I am not interested in having to move images from Windows to Linux just to get them into my Python web page construction scripts. This camera looks like it will be exactly what I need.
Wednesday, 02 January, 2002. 01:46:14 PM
If we can't get access to AT&T's secure VPN by the end of the week, then the entire team might have to go to New Jersey. I just left the cold weather behind, so I'm not eager to go back to it.
Tuesday, 01 January, 2002. 03:15:50 AM
Google has no references to "Hecht's Hill" on the Internet. That means that mine is the first. Hecht's Hill is the local name for a large hill East of Ionia, Michigan on M-21. My parent's house is located at the bottom of that hill.
Tuesday, 01 January, 2002. 02:13:29 AM
A story: A rancher willed his ranch to his three sons. They named it the Focus Ranch, because that's where the sons raise meat.