Sunday, 31 March, 2002. 10:37:20 PMTomorrow I work in Austin for the first time in two months. New York City was
a lot of fun to be in, but I was missing my dogs and Alex quite a bit. I've
also got a lot of yardwork to do. Today I mowed the lawn, changed the oil and
air filter on the lawnmower, weed whacked, edged, and removed parts of several
cedars that were touching my shed. There's still a lot to do around the house,
and on my computer. I moved my website over to Earthlink for hosting, and
everything is redirected through mydomain.com so it shows up as www.pdrap.org.
I wasn't about to pay Geocities anything for something as basic as FTP
access. My DSL line is on order, so soon I'll be hosting my own website on
my own server.
Tuesday, 26 March, 2002. 04:43:40 PMI just found a big bug in the code that could be the source of a lot of our
problems. It took me about two weeks to find it. The code is about 400,000
lines long; printed on 8.5x11 paper it would be over 6000 pages - 12 full
reams. These kinds of bugs are the most frustrating to find because it's just
like searching for the proverbial needle in a haystack.
Tuesday, 26 March, 2002. 02:45:59 PMI have a new domain. pdrap.org is mine, and I'm going to use it to host my own
website and my own e-mail when I get DSL. I am sick of spammers - completely
and utterly sick and disgusted with those dirty bastards. I intend to give out
a different e-mail address to every single website that I log in to. When
those companies sell my e-mail address to spammers, I'll just shut it off,
leaving spammers without a way to contact me. I will also know EXACTLY who
those unethical people and companies are who sell my e-mail address, and I'll
expose their antics right here in my log. Companies that sell mailing lists
and otherwise do business with spammers are companies that deserve piles and
piles of scorn to be poured on their heads. As a result of this, I will no
longer have a permanent e-mail address. For anyone who wishes to contact me,
the procedure will be to load my web page at www.pdrap.org and click on the
link at the top of the page. That link will always contain my current e-mail
address, and it can change at any time that I find spam coming into my mailbox
from that address. This is the only way to deal with this growing problem. I
am now getting over 5000 spams a year, and the quantity is growing very fast.
Deleting spam takes a lot of time, and it is error prone. I could accidentally
delete a mail that is important. Furthermore, every second that I spend deleting
spam is a second that I will never get back. That time is stolen by people who
think I am interested in enlarging my penis, enlarging my breasts, getting a
PhD for $100 from an Arizona diploma mill (Janet Napolitano has ignored all
my pleas to shut down the diploma mill operating from Phoenix for over 2 years),
buying Viagra from an online pharmacy in Thailand, refinancing my home with
an internet mortgage broker (am I really going to trust spamming bastards with
my home mortgage?), subscribing to pornographic websites purporting to show
models under 18 years of age, gambling with an online casino located in
Bermuda, making money fast by stuffing envelopes, making money fast by sending
out chain mail, making money fast by buying and selling land in Florida, leasing
a time-share in Cancun, helping a deposed Nigerian despot recover his $50
million fortune in exchange for getting my personal bank account cleaned out,
learning how to find out ANYTHING about ANYBODY on the INTERNET (boy weren't
those people surprised when I found out just ENOUGH about them to have their
internet accounts revoked for spamming), purchasing large used oceangoing
vessels from a Chinese salvage company, marrying a Russian beauty who is hot
for American men and also knows how to cook and sew, buying used laser printer
toner cartridges, changing my long distance provider, having a resume service
make me a resume, having fresh breath, losing weight, getting paid to shop,
getting paid to surf, saving 70% on life insurance, locating a dentist near you
(don't EVER call that 1-800-DENTIST number - these people are the spammers. Just
use the frickin Yellow Pages.), finding a really fresh and
satisfying douch, finding an equally fresh and satisfying dildo, or getting in
on the ground floor of an up and coming business by investing in a small chain
of maggot infested restaurants. No thanks, I am not interested in any of that,
ever.
Tuesday, 26 March, 2002. 02:42:54 PMMy friend Krista DuShane left a message for me at my hotel on Sunday. She
found out that I was in New York from my website, and we ate dinner together
last night. It was good to see her. The last time that I saw her was at
Bram and Marcia's wedding back in 1997. I also saw a French Bulldog last night.
It was a really nice little dog, a little shorter tham my Bostons.
Friday, 22 March, 2002. 06:01:04 PMiostreams under AIX are not thread safe. A program with two threads that does
nothing but print using cout will not work properly.
Wednesday, 20 March, 2002. 04:34:56 PMThe Sector 7 team here in New York just got a look at our new Power 4 box. It's
installed in the machine room on the 2nd floor of the next building. That room
has hundreds, maybe thousands, of rack systems. Our Power 4 is a big black
machine, and it's very fast. On Slashdot there was news of a benchmark
performed on an 8 processor Power 4 machine - a Linux kernel compile in 7.5
seconds. Our machine has only 4 processors though.
Tuesday, 19 March, 2002. 05:21:04 PMIn C and C++, sizeof is an operator. Most people write it like a function:
sizeof (int). But those same people would not write an expression like (2)+(2),
they write it 2+2. Likewise, the sizeof operator should be simply 'sizeof int'.
Sunday, 17 March, 2002. 09:51:17 PMI'm ready to give my review of the Helmsley Park Lane Hotel. I've stayed here
a week already, and while it is a nice hotel, it suffers from a couple fatal
flaws. First the good stuff. The staff is exceptionally well-trained.
Everything is done with efficiency with an obviously high standard of quality.
The hotel has a good location, but not perfect. It's right next to Central Park
and many rooms in the hotel have great views. The nearest entrance to the
subway is about 50 yards away, but that entrance is open only during the day,
and not at all on Sunday. The other entrance is all the way across 5th avenue,
about 5 minutes walk. The restaurant serves a good breakfast, which is
included with the room. Now for the bad. The room's decor is truly horrible.
The carpet is red, and the wallpaper is pink. Every piece of furniture in the
room is tastelessly ornate, with painted gold frames around the mirrors,
paintings, and headboard on the bed. The window treatment is gold with a big
fluffy rose pattern. I could excuse all of that, except for two very annoying
things. The telephone costs $1.00 for the first 5 minutes, and $0.10 a minute
after that for local calls. That makes it completely unusable as an Internet
connection that has to stay up for a long time. The other flaw is that the desk
is completely unusable. It has a good height, but it contains a drawer and
decorative structure (what do they call that - gotta look it up) that extends
well below the level of the desktop. So far that is is just about impossible
to pull up a chair and sit with my legs under the desk. For someone who would
like to get some work done, this is a terribly uncomfortable position to sit
in. No matter how nice a hotel might look and how well trained the staff is,
I expect a certain amount of efficiency and convenience. I cannot recommend
this hotel to anybody travelling on business. Two stars out of five.
Friday, 15 March, 2002. 11:01:17 PMI can barely stand to read the newspaper anymore. I used to read it every day
in college. I'd pick up the Detroit Free Press for a quarter and take it to
the cafeteria. I never ate lunch with others, I always sat at a table by
myself so I could spread it out and read while I ate. I always ate dinner
with my friends though. The news in that paper wasn't that bad. Mostly it
was about a murder here and there, an arson, theft, or other local crime.
Here's what's in the New York Times today: Israeli tanks are pulling out of
Ramallah after their deadly suppression of the Palestinian uprising; Israelis
are purchasing handguns because they are fearful of their neighbors; there are
more reports that the Catholic Church has covered up pedophilia and abuses
against nuns; a fanatical Hindu mob is headed for Ayodhya to consecrate the
land in preparation for a Hindu temple to Ram to be built where the 16th
century Babri Mosque stood until just a few weeks ago; Mugabe fraudulently
won his
election, and observers feel that Zimbabwe will continue to lose; Amnesty
International says that many of the 1,200 people held after the Sept. 11th
attack have had their civil rights violated, including the right to know
why they are held; states all across the U.S. are sharply cutting University
budgets. I hate to read about these things because they are so petty, short
sighted, and just plain stupid. All societies around the world have at least
a few serious things wrong with them, and some of them seem to be irreparably
terminal. Individually, we can be decent to each other, but collectively we
treat each other brutally.
I think a well-fed people are a moral people. It's an
unprovable assertion, but it's difficult for me to see how a conflict between
Israelis and Palestinians could continue if both societies were at least
middle class or better. In that case, fighting would cost much more than any
possible gain. That same situation would apply to nearly any conflict based
in nationalism. The unfortunate situation is that nationalism sabotages both
cultural and economic growth. Even if a society is relatively affluent, that
affluence would evaporate because nationalism is inherently a wasteful and
inefficient system. It generates no wealth and destablizes trust in
relationships. It goes hand in hand with the sort of corruption that plagues
institutions and governments that hold unchallenged and unchecked power. I
don't see any particular happy ending to this story. The newspaper I read
today is filled with the same themes that newspapers have always held. Fifty
years from now I'll be 83 years old, and I will be writing these same sort of
depressing commentaries in my journal.
The only thing to watch out for is
that these are unusual times in the narrow sense knowlege is expanding at
an exponential rate, and has been doing so for at least the last 150 years.
Growth like that truly has no parallel anywhere in history, with the exception
of the pre-Cambrian explosion 450 million years ago. The religious among us
are quick to say that science and knowlege have no power to affect the
human spirit - that some things are unfixable by technology. It's not such a
wild thought, in my opinion, that if anything is going to break ancient
cycles it is this amazing growth of knowlege. It's true to say that thousands
of years of religious tradition have given us little progress at all. It's also
true to say that exponential growth of knowlege has not proceeded very far
at all, has not been disseminated equitably, and has given us all good reason
to be very skeptical of its apparent promise. But it is also true that
exponential growth is unstoppable in the sort term, and some would claim
unstoppable in any term. I'm not a believer in the singularity - the idea
that exponential growth will eventually lead to an infinite sequence of
ever increasing knowlege and returns on knowlege - because the real existence
of something infinite, even something based on the immense capabilities of
the human mind, hasn't been demonstrated to my satisfaction. But I do think
that there's a possiblity of a growth in a sustainable way. The margin
of error is very slim though, because very small disturbances, a war here,
a war there, could disrupt progress everywhere. So, that's why the news that
I read disturbs me so much now. There's a lot more at risk than which
government holds power or whose holy buildings stand on what piece of dirt.
Thursday, 14 March, 2002. 01:11:34 AMWorldCom is in the crosshairs of the SEC. Anderson is mortally wounded and
they deserve to go out of business if they are responsible in part for the
Enron mess. WorldCom entered my personal list of worst companies ever when
they demonstrated that they had no control over their network and the
spammers that live there. When WorldCom chokes on their house of cards built
on indefeasable rights of access (Qwest too) I won't miss them a bit.
Wednesday, 13 March, 2002. 08:09:53 PMMohammad Atta and one of the other hijackers just had their student visas
come through from INS. It's nice to know that everyone in the government is
doing their jobs.
Sunday, 10 March, 2002. 09:13:33 PMI'm using my power inverter on this flight. I had wanted to use it on the last
flight, but that was TWA and their planes don't have power outlets under the
seat. Tonight I'm on the normal Austin to Houston to New York flight, and
American has power outlets under the seat. So this flight I can use my
laptop for the entire 3 hour flight.
Sunday, 10 March, 2002. 09:08:22 PMI'm back on a plane headed for NYC. The weekend in Austin was a lot of fun. I
got to see Alex, and my two little dogs. When Alex picked me up at the airport
on Friday, she had the dogs in the car. As soon as they spotted me they
started freaking out, jumping around, and barking. This week is Alex's spring
break, and we had wanted to go to Houston for a day, but that's been postponed
until I'm back in town. Hopefully, I'll be coming back next Friday or Saturday.
We should be getting things wrapped up in just another week, but that time
is not certain because the problems we are having with memory bugs cannot
be nailed down. Nobody can estimate how long those bugs will take to fix -
they just have to be looked at until the problem is found.
Wednesday, 06 March, 2002. 06:06:37 PMthe -qmkshrobj command under the AIX compiler doesn't call CreateExportList
properly. It calls it after it does it's braindead garbage collection, which
won't help resolve linker errors.
Wednesday, 06 March, 2002. 06:04:10 PMThe magic command for making export lists under AIX is CreateExportList.
Saturday, 02 March, 2002. 10:20:36 PMBilly Graham is in trouble over things he said that were recorded on Nixon's
tapes. Same old thing we've seen over and over from TV preachers: intolerance
of anyone not Baptist.
Saturday, 02 March, 2002. 09:56:55 PMI found out that DSL is now available at my house. The best deal that I've
found is with DirectTV. They are the same price as everyone else, but they
include a static IP and allow any servers. This is a good thing, because a
modem is fast enough for me. The cable companies and most DSL providers
provide a fast connection, but nothing that will allow me to run my own
web server and mail server. For that reason, they don't get my business. I
need to run my own mail server because I am sick of spam, and most of the
effective techniques for blocking spam can only be implemented at the mail
server. Since most ISP's don't do anything about spam, I need to run my
own server. I need to pick a domain and register it.
Saturday, 02 March, 2002. 09:54:28 PMThis is my last weekend in NYC, and this time it might be true. We're trying
to wrap everything up by next Friday. Tonight Chris and I went down to
Chinatown and ate dinner there and a place called "Big Wong". Tomorrow I'm
going to the Museum of Modern Art, and I'm also going in to work.