I'm configuring a test machine running apache. This website is currently being served by Boa, which has worked perfectly for me. I'm starting to outgrow the features that Boa provides though, so I'm switching to apache. The test website is running on a different machine, and when I am satisfied that it's working well, I'll switch the main site. The test machine is located at http://www.pdrap.org:8080.
Friday, 31 October, 2003. 01:17:54 AM
GW Bush actually said "In America, we love the fact that we are a society in which people can pray openly or not pray at all for that matter." This president seldom says or does anything that pleases me, but that statement definitely does please me.
Thursday, 30 October, 2003. 11:20:26 AM
Voting software made by Sequoia Voting Systems was left on an unprotected FTP server for anyone to download. This same sort of thing also happened to Diebold. When it comes to a fundamental act of democracy, we depend on knowing that the process cannot be corrupted, which means good computer security and processes are required. The fact that both of these voting companies made the same stupid mistake doesn't leave me with any confidence that their processes are secure. The magnitude of this error cannot be overstated. The only way that this could happen is because of extreme incompetence and total lack of security controls.
Tuesday, 28 October, 2003. 04:27:36 PM
The baby is at 35 weeks now.
Monday, 27 October, 2003. 11:59:53 PM
Resist the Right Hand Ring. The diamond industry is pushing a new diamond requirement. With the decline of marriage has come the decline of the left hand engagement and marriage rings. The marketers are just getting started on this.
Monday, 27 October, 2003. 01:23:32 PM
I started tearing out the shower in the master bathroom last night. Photos soon. We're having a new shower pan made, the walls and floor are getting new tile, new sinks and cabinets, opalescent glass window covers, and a new closet door.
Monday, 27 October, 2003. 01:19:22 PM
Also in the list of things I am working on: move the website from Boa to Apache.
Friday, 24 October, 2003. 12:07:48 AM
Personal project list: right now working on the Astroturf detector. It's a Python program that will (eventually) read the letters to the editor page of many many newspapers, saving them to a PostgreSQL database. Comparisons will be done to detect astroturf campaigns, and a webpage will be added to this site with reports from the database. At this point, all the algorithms are in place, and are generalized enough that without any assistance the program can navigate unfamiliar websites with lots of frames, tables, and other crap, and find the letters to the editor. After that, I'm going to tinker with CSS some more, and make this website a bit more visually interesting, and more compatible with certain browsers. Besides that, I've got my space battle game on pause for a while as I think through some ideas.
Sunday, 19 October, 2003. 11:55:17 PM
Now that the Pope has beatified Mother Teresa, it's encouraging to note that not everyone is engaged in uncritical hero-worship. Mother Teresa might become Saint, but she wasn't a saint.
Sunday, 19 October, 2003. 04:10:42 PM
John Ashcroft dug up an old law from 1872 and has used it against one of the Bush administration's most vocal critics: Greenpeace. The law makes sailor mongering - luring sailors from their ships with whores and liquor - illegal. I get much amusement out of wondering which law John Ashcroft will twist when he decides to put me up against the wall.
Saturday, 18 October, 2003. 10:16:40 PM
It's not just the memos that Diebold is trying to knock down. They are also trying to knock down free chapters of Bev Harris' book "Black Box Voting". That one's mirrored all around the Internet as well, including in countries beyond the reach of the UnAmerican DMCA law.
Saturday, 18 October, 2003. 09:52:57 PM
Diebold sent a cease and desist letter to IndyMedia regarding links on the IndyMedia website that point to a leaked internal Diebold memo. The memo in question can be easily located with a Google search for the appropriate terms, such as "leaked Diebold memo". There are literally thousands of people writing and posting about it, so it's not difficult. An interesting site to look at is http://www.blackboxvoting.com.
In a nutshell, the leaked memos that Diebold is so eager to stuff back into the genie bottle show that Diebold has been using uncertified software in elections, and that their databases can be altered without passwords.
Friday, 17 October, 2003. 03:43:07 PM
This Wired article details some problems with computer voting machines made by Diebold. The are suspicions that an election that put a Republican in office as Georgia's governor was rigged. After the machines were certified, Diebold technicians installed patches that were supposedly meant to fix stability problems. Even after the patches were installed, some of the machines were running with a 25% error rate. Diebold is a voting machine company owned by a Republican senator. The worrisome thing is not that this sort of tampering happened. Election fraud is as old as elections themselves. But there is no way to determine what really happened. Unlike past elections where it was possible to figure out that dead people were voting, all the records in Diebold machines are electronic. Since the software was patched after the machines were certified, there is no way of knowing if the patches were really meant to alter the results, then uninstall themselves without a trace. In my opinion, the biggest danger from voting machines is that it makes a process that is understandable and makes it opaque. The average person understands the concepts of recording a vote on a piece of paper, either with a mark or a punch, and the physical process of counting those votes to arrive at the election results. Most people are not computer experts, and they have little understanding of how a computer works, or what the risks of using a computer to vote with can be. Some people have suggested that computer voting machines should return a receipt to the voter, as a way of checking their vote. But this is bad for two reasons. First, a receipt is not proof their vote has been recorded properly. It's trivial to record an incorrect vote, and print a piece of paper with the correct vote printed on it. And, a receipt opens the possiblity that an old-fashioned type of fraud can occur. For example, an employer could demand that all of their employees vote a certain way, and then require that employee to bring that receipt as proof that they voted in a certain way.
All this is bad, but I don't know if it's really going to make a difference. More than half of us don't vote. That means that they don't participate in democracy; they have decided for themselves that democracy as a political system doesn't work. At the very least, this means that the country will be running itself on autopilot, or by the direction of just a few people, and that's going to be just fine with the majority of Americans.
Wednesday, 15 October, 2003. 12:46:00 AM
I calculated the visibility of Shenzhou 5 from the two-line orbital elements from Ted Molczan, and the best visibility will be at 06:28:15 tomorrow morning. Unfortunately, it will only be 11 degrees above the horizon, so I think I'll stay in bed.
Tuesday, 14 October, 2003. 11:07:17 PM
China has launched its first Taikonaut into space on the Shenzhou V. News reports have downplayed the achievement, saying that the spacecraft was just a knockoff of the Russian Soyuz. I am of the opinion that NASA should also be flying knockoffs of the Russian Soyuz, so in that regard China is doing quite well. The name of the first Taikonaut is Yang Liwei.
Tuesday, 14 October, 2003. 12:55:44 PM
Reuters redesigned their website and are checking for the agent identification strings sent from browsers. When I load the site using Mozilla, it tells me that I need to download a proper browser, and they suggest Mozilla. This sort of browser checking is idiocy. Websites should be set up so that they can be viewed on any browser, despite the fact that there might be some differences in how the site is rendered. When Reuters incorrectly decides that my Mozilla browser isn't good, and they suggest running Mozilla instead, it just makes them look silly.
Monday, 13 October, 2003. 05:26:35 PM
This is an actual AP photo.
Monday, 13 October, 2003. 12:13:25 AM
Bed bugs are in the news again. Since September 25th, there have been a spate of articles in newspapers around the country detailing the growing problem of bed bugs in America.
Using Google to look up bed bugs in the news, and sorting by date, reveals that a new pesticide announcement for Gentrol on September 24th - marketed as effective for bedbugs - precedes the first online news mention of bed bugs by a single day.
Saturday, 11 October, 2003. 04:52:32 PM
From the Utica Observer Dispatch
Area native sends home a message from Iraq
Thu, Sep 11, 2003
Sgt. Edwin Gargas
This letter, postmarked Sept. 1, was received Wednesday at the Observer-Dispatch. The writer, Sgt. 1st Class Edwin Gargas Jr., 34, is serving with the U.S. Army in Iraq. Gargas, a 1987 graduate of New York Mills Junior-Senior High School, is the son of Edwin Gargas of Yorkville and Carol Gargas of Clark Mills. His wife, the former Deborah Kupiec of New Hartford, and daughters Amanda, 9, and Emily, 6, are living in Vicenza, Italy, while he is deployed. Here is his message:
I have been serving in Iraq for over five months now as a soldier in the 2d Battalion of the 503d Airborne Infantry Regiment, otherwise known as "ROCK."
We entered the country at midnight on the 26th of March when 1,000 of my fellow soldiers and I parachuted from 10 jumbo jets (known as C17s) onto a cold, muddy field in Bashur in northern Iraq. This parachute operation was the U.S. Army's only combat jump of the war and opened up the northern front.
Things have changed tremendously for our battalion since those first cold, wet weeks spent in the mountain city of Bashur. On April 10, our battalion conducted an attack south into the oil-rich town of Kirkuk, the city that has since become our home-away-from-home and the focus of our security and development efforts.
Kirkuk is a hot and dusty city of just over a million people. The majority of the city has welcomed our presence with open arms. After nearly five months here, the people still come running from their homes, into the 100-degree heat, waving to us as our troops drive by on daily patrols of the city. Children smile and run up to shake hands and in their broken English shout, "Thank you, Mister!"
The people of Kirkuk are all trying to find their way in this new democratic environment. Some major steps have been made in these last three months. A big reason for our steady progress is that our soldiers are living among the people of the city and getting to know their neighbors and the needs of their neighborhoods.
We have also been instrumental in building a new police force. Kirkuk now has 1,700 police officers. The police are now, ethnically, a fair representation of the community as a whole. So far, we have spent more than $500,000 dollars from the former Iraqi regime to repair each of the stations' electricity and plumbing, to paint each station and to make it a functional place for the police to work.
The battalion has also assisted in re-establishing Kirkuk's fire department, which is now even more effective than before the war. New water treatment and sewage plants are being constructed and the distribution of oil and gas are steadily improving. All of these functions were started by our soldiers here in this northern city and are now slowly being turned over to the newly elected city government.
Laws are being rewritten to reflect democratic principles and a functioning judicial system was recently established to bridge the gap between law enforcement and the rule of law. The quality of life and security for the citizens has been largely restored and we are a large part of why that has happened.
The fruits of all our soldiers' efforts are clearly visible in the streets of Kirkuk today. There is very little trash, many more people in the markets and shops, and children have returned to school. This is all evidence that the work we are doing as a battalion and as American soldiers in bettering the lives of Kirkuk's citizens.
I am proud of the work we are doing here in Iraq, and I hope all of your readers are as well.
Saturday, 11 October, 2003. 04:50:52 PM
From the Charleston Daily Mail
Commentary:
Sgt. Shawn M. Grueser
'The Rock' does fine in Kirkuk
The majority welcomes us with open arms
Wednesday September 10, 2003; 07:35 AM
KIRKUK, Iraq -- I have been serving in Iraq for over five months as a soldier with Company A, 2nd Battalion of the 503rd Airborne Infantry Regiment, otherwise known as "The Rock."
We entered the country at midnight on March 26.
One thousand of my fellow soldiers and I parachuted from 10 jumbo jets (C-17s) onto a cold, muddy field in Northern Iraq. The parachute operation was the Army's only combat jump in the war and opened up the northern front.
Things have changed tremendously for our battalion since those first cold, wet weeks spent in the mountain city of Bashur.
On April 10, our battalion conducted an attack south of Kirkuk, the city that has since become our home away from home and the focus of our security and development efforts.
Kirkuk is a hot and dusty city of just over a million people. The majority of the city has welcomed our presence with open arms.
After nearly five months here, the people still come running from their homes into the 110-degree heat, waving to us as our troops drive by on daily patrols of the city. Children smile and run up to shake hands, and in their broken English, shout: "Thank you, mister."
The people of Kirkuk are all trying to find their way in this new democratic environment.
Some major steps have been made in these last three months. A big reason for our steady progress is that our soldiers are living among the people of the city and are getting to know their neighbors and the needs of their neighborhoods.
We have also been instrumental in building a new police force. Kirkuk now has 1,700 police officers. The police are now ethnically a fair representation of the whole community.
We have spent over $500,000 from the former Iraqi regime to repair each station's electricity and plumbing, to paint each station, and to make it a functional place for the police to work.
The battalion also has assisted in re-establishing Kirkuk's fire department. New water treatment and sewage plants are being constructed. The distribution of oil and gas is steadily improving.
All of these functions, started by our soldiers, are slowly being turned over to the newly elected city government.
Laws are being rewritten to reflect democratic principles. A functioning judicial system was established to bridge the gap between law enforcement and the rule of law.
The quality of life and security for the citizens have been largely restored. We are a large part of why that has happened.
The fruits of all our soldiers' efforts are clearly visible in the streets of Kirkuk today.
There is very little trash in the streets, many more people in the markets and shops, and children have returned to school.
This is all evidence that the work we are doing as a battalion and as American soldiers is bettering the lives of Kirkuk's citizens.
Sgt. Grueser is from Poca.
Saturday, 11 October, 2003. 04:40:50 PM
Try this search on Google for the phrase "I have been serving in Iraq for over five months now". The results reveal a disgusting form of astroturfing: the identical letter sent to different newspapers written by different soldiers. None of the soldiers wrote their letters, but some remember being asked to sign the letter if they agreed with it. Others don't remember the letter at all.
Friday, 10 October, 2003. 02:12:20 PM
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Vice President Dick Cheney said Friday that terrorists are "doing everything they can" to get weapons of mass destruction that could kill hundreds of thousands of Americans "in a single day of horror."
I agree with Mr. Cheney on this, and that's why I am wondering what we are doing in Iraq, instead of dealing with Saudi Arabia and North Korea.
Wednesday, 08 October, 2003. 12:21:24 PM
October 15th looks to be the day that China sends up the first Taikonaut for one orbit of the Earth.
Tuesday, 07 October, 2003. 03:25:05 PM
The measure of a good government is not how well that government cares for and responds to the voice of the powerful, but how well that government responds to the voice of the minority. Every government, free or nonfree, good or bad, listens to the powerful. A pure democracy implemented as a simple majority rule system would be a terrible tyranny, because the substitution of a million dictators for one dictator does not make a country free. --me
Monday, 06 October, 2003. 06:10:39 PM
I think that I'm going to be changing my web server software. I've been running Boa since I first started self-hosting this site, and I have no complaints at all with it. I am thinking of switching to Apache because there are some features that I want to tinker with.
Monday, 06 October, 2003. 06:09:29 PM
To mess up a Linux box, you need to work at it; to mess up your Windows box, you just need to work on it, writes SecurityFocus columnist Scott Granneman.
Monday, 06 October, 2003. 05:36:04 PM
The three industries that receive the most government subsidies are agriculture, steel, and soft lumber.
Monday, 06 October, 2003. 12:32:45 AM
Saw some really neat things this weekend. About 11 AM four F-16's flew over my house at low level. Then Alex and I went to San Marcos. On the way back there was a Suburban driving down the highway at 80 MPH with two cups sitting on the back bumper and they didn't fall off for over 10 miles. When we got home There was a tarantula waiting on the front door for us. Photos are in the photo album. And today, I saw a B-25 flying around.
Thursday, 02 October, 2003. 11:09:06 PM
I was looking through music on Amazon.com and I noticed that the Tubes have White Punks on Dope in mp3 for free download.