Alex and I refinished our front door and tonight I put the last of the hardware back on it. When I opened it up this evening there was a tarantula waiting for me. I caught it and took some photos. The digital photos are in the photo section.
Sunday, 29 September, 2002. 01:26:19 AM
Scariest news article that I've read this decade:
ISTANBUL, Turkey (CNN) -- Turkish officials said Saturday they have seized 34.6 pounds of uranium and arrested two Turkish men in Urfa, a town in southeastern Turkey. U.S. officials are in touch with authorities to get information about the seizure.
Saturday, 28 September, 2002. 10:57:48 PM
"The more Christian a country is, the less likely it is to regard the death penalty as immoral. Abolition has taken its firmest hold in post-Christian Europe and has least support in the churchgoing United States. I attribute that to the fact that for the believing Christian, death is no big deal." - Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia
Friday, 27 September, 2002. 11:20:47 PM
Friday, 27 September, 2002. 01:23:02 PM
The Cobb County Georgia Board of Education voted unanimously to allow the teaching of creationism in the public schools. This is a tremendous mistake for at least a couple of reasons. Teaching creationism has been thrown out several times in various locations because it violates the 1st ammendment which requires that government stay out of the religion business. The ACLU has been involved in this situation, and hopefully they will be able to get the Georgia Supreme Court to disallow it. The biggest reason why the schools should not be teaching creationism is that it's utterly false, and inappropriate for a science class. CNN reported Larry Taylor, who has three children in the schools as saying:
"Evolution has not been proven," said Taylor, who joined the debate over what should be taught in Cobb schools after reading about the ACLU lawsuit. "There are a growing number of scientists who are skeptical about Darwinism."Mr. Taylor is wrong. Evolution is a fact, and does not need to be proven. Just as any other fact is self evident, so is evolution. It has been observed, in the laboratory, and in nature, on countless occasions.
At least part of the controversy is fueled by ignorance of just what evolution is. Evolution is simply the change in gene frequency over time. The famous example of this is the moths in sooty London, observed to turn black to blend in with the background.
On the other hand, the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection, distinct from the fact of evolution, hasn't been proven, and never will be. It is the nature of scientific theories not to ever be proven. But a scientific theory isn't the wishy-washy thing that the common understanding of the word "theory" implies. A scientific theory has the full weight and backing of observed facts and scientific opinion. A scientific theory makes predictions that can be tested, and either confirmed or refuted through experimentation. Better theories are the ones that make better explanations and stand up to experimentation over time.
Darwin's Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection has stood that test of time, with no major problems that would cause someone to doubt it. Creationists like to point out "flaws" in Darwinism, but under close scrutiny each and every criticism of Darwinism fails to show any merit. When Mr. Taylor claims that a growing number of scientists are skeptical of Darwinism, he is quite honestly wrong, and I suspect that he's merely parroting the distortions that are taught by those promoting creationism. The fact is that within the scientific biological community there is no dissent from the position that evolution is a fact, and that the mechanism of evolution is well described through the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection.
Tuesday, 24 September, 2002. 02:31:35 PM
I updated my bookmarks list.
Friday, 20 September, 2002. 08:44:26 PM
I'm on the plane back to Austin. Just got the 'for' statements working in my compiler.
Friday, 20 September, 2002. 12:56:31 PM
We're all done here in Virginia. Mantas is happy, and I'm getting on a plane back to Austin this afternoon. It'll be nice to see my dogs again.
Thursday, 19 September, 2002. 08:55:02 PM
My little sniper utility (Bidwatch) just got me an Argus C3 camera for $9.50. Should be a lot of fun to use this old 35mm rangefinder.
Tuesday, 17 September, 2002. 06:00:29 PM
I got back from the post office about an hour ago. It's right under the landing pattern for Dulles. There was a Beech Starship coming into land. Never saw one of those before.
Monday, 16 September, 2002. 04:11:37 AM
I just built a very crude spam statistics page. It's updated every hour from the Exim logs on my mail server, and it shows the amount of spam that I'm rejecting every day. There's more that I have to add to the spam graph generator. I want to roll up previous months so that old statistics don't take as much space on the page.
Sunday, 15 September, 2002. 10:22:05 PM
Here's a really good idea from the CRYPTOGRAM mailing list:
From: Ric Woodson (e-mail address removed)
Subject: Arming Pilots
In response to the guns in cockpits debate, I would like to suggest an
alternative to which I have not yet had anyone come up with a better
solution. Mount along the full length of each side wall of the
passenger area, a tube within a tube. Each tube has openings down its
length approximately 1/3 of its diameter. The outer tube is
stationary, the inner tube rotates to an open position only at the
command of the cockpit.
Inside the inner tube, are 1/2 size baseball bats laid end to
end. Once the tubes are open, the window passenger has access to the
bats in the tube. These can be used offensively or defensively. Each
row of seats would then have something like two bats per row. More
than enough to use for re-acquisition of control of the craft. There
would be too many bats to be collected and managed by the "terrorists"
(did you ever try to pick up more than four bats at a time?). No
chance for a misfire. Nothing to take the pilots away from their
jobs. Too small to be used to bash in security doors. Easy for
authorities to inventory and reclaim after the landing.
Cheap and relatively easy to install. After all, who has more
experience with a Louisville slugger than an American passenger? How
about giving the passengers a chance if a revolt is necessary. Send
the marshals home and save the money. Forget the high-tech solutions,
this is not a high tech problem. I know it sounds radical at first but
think about it a while.
Saturday, 14 September, 2002. 10:27:45 PM
I have a bid on a Bioflex twin lens reflex camera, manufactured by Tokiwa Seiki, the same company that made the Firstflex TLR that I am working on. Tokiwa Seiki appears to still be around making hydraulic fittings for ships.
Friday, 13 September, 2002. 05:25:22 PM
John Engler is a fucking idiot. Sell the Porcupine Mountains to a lumber company to preserve them? Total insanity.
Friday, 13 September, 2002. 01:31:10 PM
Dave Barry on the Florida voting screwup.
Friday, 13 September, 2002. 12:47:17 PM
I received permission from Mr. Wright to reproduce an image of one of his posters here. There's many more of them in a gallery on his website, and they can be purchased online as well.
Friday, 13 September, 2002. 10:33:31 AM
Micah Ian Wright is writer for television and animation who has modified some old propaganda posters to update them for modern times. He is selling prints on his website. This slideshow contains all of the images, including those not for sale as posters.
Thursday, 12 September, 2002. 07:24:01 PM
From the comp.risks digest:
Florida Primary 2002: Back to the Future
"Rebecca Mercuri" <notable@mindspring.com>
Wed, 11 Sep 2002 03:14:39 -0400
Well, Florida's done it again.
Tuesday's Florida primary election marked its first large-scale roll-out of
tens of thousands of brand-new voting machines that were promised to resolve
the problems of the 2000 Presidential election. Instead, from the very
moment the polls were supposed to open, problems emerged throughout the
state, especially in counties that had spent millions of dollars to purchase
touchscreen electronic balloting devices.
Florida voters, including Gubernatorial candidate Janet Reno, experienced
delays (ranging from minutes to hours) due to touchscreen machines not
working properly or at all. Reno, and others (including Duval County
officials) reportedly sought court orders requesting additional time for the
day's voting session. Governor Jeb Bush granted a two hour extension, but
some of the polling places did not receive notice and shut down their
machines at 7PM, only to discover that restart was impossible because of the
way the machines had been designed.
In addition to polls and machines that opened late, many precincts reported
problems with some electronic cards voters used to activate their ballots.
A few machines in Miami-Dade County reset themselves while voters were
trying to vote. Even the mark-sense ballots proved troublesome -- in Orange
County many votes will have to be hand-counted because defects made them
unreadable by the optical scanners.
Lest readers think that Florida is alone with these election problems, other
states, including Georgia and Maryland, have also reported similar
difficulties with touchscreens. Problems in MD led 4 counties there to
commission a report from UMD, which revealed serious reliability concerns,
due to "catastrophic failure," "malfunction," and "unusability" of one of
the two machines they were given for testing. The Association of Computing
Machinery's Special Interest Group on Computer Human Interaction (ACM
SIGCHI) offered to perform similar evaluations on Palm Beach's new voting
equipment, urged by U.S. Representative Robert Wexler, but the offer was
declined by the County's Board of Elections.
Florida was forewarned about problems with some of their new machines when,
in local municipal elections held back in March 2002, anomalies surfaced in
Palm Beach County. Some voters submitted sworn affidavits to the state's
15th Circuit Court, attesting to problems ranging from a lack of privacy at
the voting booth, to machines "freezing up" until rebooted or reset, and
voter cards being rejected.
During this past summer, as part of an investigation into Emil Danciu's
contest (one of two lawsuits for the March Palm Beach County election), the
court permitted me to perform a "walk through inspection" of the County's
Board of Election warehouse where the machines were being stored and
prepared for this Fall's primary. To my amazement, I learned that the
devices would not be tested to see whether they would register a vote for
each candidate that appeared on the ballot face. Rather, the tallying
system was checked by transferring data between cartridges, (circumventing
the ballot face on each machine) and only one vote, for the first candidate
in each race, was cast using the touchscreen. This essentially meant that
most of the new machines would get their first real use only at the actual
election. (Not only does this testing lack rigour, but it only marginally
complies with Florida election law.)
The Palm Beach County machines were running new software too, since the
firmware on each of their 3400 machines was reprogrammed just weeks before
the Fall primary. (Such firmware reprogrammability represents a major
security and auditability risk.) A thorough inspection of the machines,
requested by Danciu's legal team, was denied by the court, on the grounds
that the purchase contract with Election Supervisor Teresa LaPore made it a
felony violation (for her) of the vendor's trade secret clause if any
devices were provided (Danciu had even offered to pay for one) for an
internal examination. This trade secrecy also apparently prevents
disclosure of the program code files and testing reports maintained by the
state of Florida as part of their certification process.
But there's more. Further problems may begin to surface after the
tabulation results are analyzed. Although if any candidate wishes to seek a
recount, the only one they will get from the touchscreen machines is a
printout of the same electronic data residing inside of the machines -- not
an independent tally from human-readable ballots that were examined by the
voters who cast them on election day. Even Brazil, where 400,000
fully-electronic voting machines were first deployed nation-wide in their
2000 election, deemed it appropriate to retrofit their machines to produce
recountable voter-verifiable paper ballots, and they will begin to institute
this by modifying some 3% of their machines for their next election.
Sadly, many US communities seem to feel that it is necessary to rush ahead
with voting equipment procurements, while reliable systems, appropriate
testing, usability, security, and auditability procedures, and other
safeguards, are years away. Florida 2000 woke us up to what many already
knew -- our voting systems and laws were flawed. Florida 2002 lets us know
that expensive computers can not and will not provide the answer to our
election troubles.
For the short run, communities that have purchased malfunctioning equipment
should return it to the manufacturers and request refunds. There should be
an immediate moratorium throughout the United States (and world) on the
procurement of electronic voting systems that do not provide
voter-verifiable paper ballots. In other words, if your community is
thinking of buying touchscreen or other fully-computerized voting equipment,
don't let them do it! Candidates and voters who believe they may have
evidence of ballots being lost or foul-play with voting systems, should
contact me, as soon as possible, at mercuri@acm.org in order to learn how
data could be secured before it may be deleted. Those seeking additional
information on voting systems can refer to the numerous articles linked on
Peter Neumann's website and on mine (at www.notablesoftware.com/evote.html).
Please let your voice and concerns be heard. Democracy is at stake.
Rebecca Mercuri, Ph.D., Bryn Mawr College
*This article is copyrighted property of Rebecca Mercuri (c) 2002.
All rights reserved. Reprint permission is granted only in its entirety,
with this notice intact. This article can be distributed but not sold.
For any other uses, please contact the author for permission.*
Thursday, 12 September, 2002. 11:58:52 AM
Hindsight is 50/50.
Wednesday, 11 September, 2002. 05:44:28 PM
In the code for the Xerces XML Parser there is something interesting. The XMLScanner.cpp source code file has a double nested while loop with a try/catch block. The nested while eliminates the need to set up and tear down the exception handler on every loop iteration. The code looks like this:
while (true) {
try {
while (true) {
}
} catch (...) {
}
}
Tuesday, 10 September, 2002. 07:27:01 PM
Overview of changes to legal rights:
By The Associated Press
September 5, 2002, 11:44 AM EDT
Some of the fundamental changes to Americans' legal rights by the Bush administration and the USA Patriot Act following the terror attacks:
* FREEDOM OF ASSOCIATION: Government may monitor religious and political institutions without suspecting criminal activity to assist terror investigation.
* FREEDOM OF INFORMATION: Government has closed once-public immigration hearings, has secretly detained hundreds of people without charges, and has encouraged bureaucrats to resist public records requests.
* FREEDOM OF SPEECH: Government may prosecute librarians or keepers of any other records if they tell anyone that the government subpoenaed information related to a terror investigation.
* RIGHT TO LEGAL REPRESENTATION: Government may monitor federal prison jailhouse conversations between attorneys and clients, and deny lawyers to Americans accused of crimes.
* FREEDOM FROM UNREASONABLE SEARCHES: Government may search and seize Americans' papers and effects without probable cause to assist terror investigation.
* RIGHT TO A SPEEDY AND PUBLIC TRIAL: Government may jail Americans indefinitely without a trial.
* RIGHT TO LIBERTY: Americans may be jailed without being charged or being able to confront witnesses against them.
Tuesday, 10 September, 2002. 05:13:48 PM
The command to cause AIX to forget about all the shared libraries that it has cached is slibclean.
Tuesday, 10 September, 2002. 08:54:09 AM
Under AIX, dlopen can fail if the LIBPATH is too long. The fix is to make the libpath much shorter. The exact failure I saw was a nested set of shell scripts that all set the LIBPATH by appending to the existing one.
Monday, 09 September, 2002. 02:14:58 PM
The dirty fortunes are a hit. According to my weblogs, I've had 8% of all the hits to my site coming from people looking for a sophomoric thrill.
Sunday, 08 September, 2002. 08:33:14 PM
I was in Austin for the weekend, and now am back on a plane flying out to Washington. At the airport I ran into Sheila and Robert headed out to a project, and Chris was on his way out to Sacramento for CalWIN. There was a tropical storm in the gulf, so it rained all weekend in Austin. That's good because the lawn really needed the water. I received my FirstFlex twin lens reflex camera in the mail on Saturday. The seller discovered that the camera was broken partway through the auction, so he cancelled it and asked if I was still interested. I was, so I bought it for $12 which was what he paid for it. I took the whole thing apart last night, which was a difficult job. Taking a camera apart is an interesting thing because they can be assembled in sneaky ways. They like to hide screws under film advance levers. I managed to get the shutter assembly out of the camera and loose from the front panel - the viewfinder assembly is stuck. The entire shutter assembly was held together from the pressure provided by a very thin strip of spring steel wedged into a crevice in the assembly. It took a very close examination to find it. The shutter assembly is quite broken. It looks like the lubricant dried out, or something became jammed, and someone forced the mechanism for cocking the shutter and setting the film speed. That means that some parts inside are bent out of shape. One of the leaves in the leaf shutter is also loose. This is an early Japanese camera, probably manufactured in the 1950's before Japanese products earned their reputation for elegance and precision in manufacturing. The shutter mechanism in this camera is relatively crude in construction, and the quality of machining evident isn't really all that great. But on the other hand, the big clumsy crude parts should bend back into shape much easier than if they had been built with Swiss Watch precision. The lens has three elements which is not as good as a 4 element lens, but still should deliver some very sharp photos. I'm going to have to put a lot of work into this camera to make it functional again, but I think I can do it. This will be my first working 120 film camera capable of taking really sharp photos.
Friday, 06 September, 2002. 09:29:33 PM
I'm on the plane back to Austin, with about 40 minutes left to go. I just got the if/then/else statements working perfectly. This part of the compiler is fairly easy compared to setting up the calling frame on functions, as well as the details of passing by value or reference, etc.
Thursday, 05 September, 2002. 11:29:17 PM
I just realized that my return ticket home from Virgina is for next Wednesday - the 11th of September. Yow!
Thursday, 05 September, 2002. 08:09:02 PM
My latest bookmarks file was uploaded today.
Tuesday, 03 September, 2002. 12:59:50 AM
I've been working very long days here in Virginia, so I haven't had any free time to work on my compiler. It'll wait until I get back to Austin.
Tuesday, 03 September, 2002. 12:48:54 AM
Expanding a VMWare virtual disk:
Make a new disk and attach it to the virtual machine image.
do a xcopy /H/E/R/C/Y c:\*.* d:\*.*
Mount the second disk as C:/ and that's it.