Wednesday, 25 February, 2004. 05:18:30 PMNew photos of Kristiana, my progress on the bathroom, and the snow we had
earlier this month are up in the photo section, under February 2004.
Tuesday, 24 February, 2004. 05:49:11 PMKristiana has turned out to be a very easy baby. Since she was about 9 weeks
old, she has slept all night long without any problems. Now she's just over
11 weeks old and we put her to sleep at 8PM, and she will sleep in her
crib until about 7 the next morning.
Monday, 23 February, 2004. 04:07:26 PMI'm back in Birmingham, Alabama this week, working on a project for Bell South.
Monday, 23 February, 2004. 03:38:29 PMWe're looking for a new car. Alex has a Honda Civic, and I have a 2 seat
Honda del Sol. Now that Kristiana is here, we need to get rid of the 2 seater.
So, we're looking for station wagons. There's a great number of SUV models,
but we're not interested in buying a truck. The selection is basically
limited to wagons, manufactured by Subaru, Volkswagon, Volvo, and Audi. The
Subaru has nice specifications, but the styling exudes tackiness. The high
end model comes in such color combinations as gold, with gold plastic body
trim panels, and gold alloy wheels. Alex doesn't appreciate the pimp styling.
Volvo makes a nice wagon, but the report is that the handling and ride is
not up to the standard set by other luxury midsize cars and wagons. The VW
Passat wagon is a nice car, but it's too expensive compared to the Audi A6
wagon. There are some brand new 2003 Audi A6 wagons at the dealer for $6000
off the sticker price. For the approximately $7000 increase in price over
the VW Passat, the car has more refined ride and handling, better styling,
better interior design and layout, more cargo room, a roof rack, and the
four rings on the front grille. The A6 wagon is also built on the A6 platform,
while the Passat is built on the same platform as the smaller A4. Maybe in
a couple weeks we'll do some test driving before making our decision.
Friday, 20 February, 2004. 09:18:38 PMI'm back in Austin now, but will be travelling to Birmingham for the next
week or two.
Monday, 16 February, 2004. 05:44:40 PMI'm off to Birmingham AL for the rest of the week.
Monday, 16 February, 2004. 02:39:31 PMI've always thought that entomophagy (eating bugs) is a good idea. Many
cultures around the world make bugs a regular part of their diet. They
are high in protein. They convert plant material to protein more efficiently
than larger animals such as chickens or cows. There are millions of species
of insects, most of them edible and plentiful. I haven't eaten many bugs
in my life. The ones that I knew about were all accidental. The bug flew
into my mouth, and I swallowed it.
I was delighted to discover, thanks to an article on Kuri5hin, that the
American diet is actually full of bugs. As I was reading the article, I was
sipping on a bottle of Minute Maid Ruby Red Grapefruit juice beverage. The
last ingredient on the label says "Cochineal Extract (color)". Cochineal
extract is made from the crushed bodies of thousands of Cochineal beetles. It
takes about 70,000 beetles to make a pound of the colorant, also known as
carmine dye. The beetles are red because they feed on red cactus berries.
Many food products use cochineal extract for coloring, including the Ruby
Red juice already mentioned, Tropicana Orange-Strawberry juice, various
pink colored Snapple beverages, and some Yoplait berry yogurts.
There are dozens of references to cochineal extract on the web, mostly
on vegetarian and vegan sites. They seem to be against it, mostly because
food labelling tends to call it just a colorant, without specifying what it
really is. Accurate product labels are a good thing, and would benefit both
entomophiles and entomophobes. Some of the vegan websites really seem to
get worked up about it from an ethical standpoint, which seems to assume
that bugs can experience the kind of misery that a higher animal can
experience. I don't know if an insect can suffer or not, but I think it's
likely that they cannot. If that's true, then what is the ethical problem
with eating a bug?
Saturday, 14 February, 2004. 02:29:07 AMWe've got some snow coming down right now in Austin.
Thursday, 12 February, 2004. 11:28:06 PMOhio became the latest state to bring intelligent design into the classroom.
The Ohio State Board of Education gave preliminary approval to a new
curriculum called "Critical Analysis of Evolution."
Coming up on the Ohio State Board of Education's agenda are "Gravity: It's
Just a Theory" (physics), "Reasons why Ohio falls behind Arkansas"
(social studies),
"North South East West for Dummies" (geography), "The Worlds Religions:
Baptist, Southern Baptist, and Pagans" (comparitive religion), "Foniks"
(elementary reading), and "Imaginary numbers were invented BY THE DEVIL!"
(mathematics).
Wednesday, 11 February, 2004. 10:50:59 AMThursday, February 12th, is Darwin Day.
Monday, 09 February, 2004. 04:56:59 PMI'm off to Denver for a couple days to help a project out.
Friday, 06 February, 2004. 09:59:37 PMI used my lamp module, a night light, and a procmail rule to set up a light
in my living room that blinks every time I get an e-mail. In January, I
received an average of 212 mails a day, which works out to 26.5 an hour, or
about one every two minutes for the entire month. Over time, I expect to
see the light in my living room flash more and more often, due to the rise
in spam. My own mailbox has seen more and more spam each month, with over
4200 spams in just January this year.
Friday, 06 February, 2004. 03:04:11 PMNew photos of Kristiana are up on the webpage now, under February.
Friday, 06 February, 2004. 02:04:15 AMI've hooked up an X10 Firecracker module and an X10 appliance module to
my computer. Every once in a while, my Linksys router will crash and take
down the network. The solution to a crash is to pull the power on the router
to reset it. I used a Python script and the bottlerocket X10 controller
program to make an auto reset mechanism. The firecracker module is an RF
device that attaches to a computer serial port. It's about 1 inch square and
a half inch tall, and draws its power from the serial port. The X10
appliance module is an RF controlled device that can receive radio commands
from the Firecracker device. The appliance module can turn a power outlet
on or off, or it can pass commands over the house wiring to other X10 devices
in the house. The bottlerocket program works on the command line, and can
send on/off X10 commands to any device in the house.
My Python script runs from cron every 10 minutes. It tries to load the
front page of big websites like Google and CNN. If it ever encounters a
situation where it cannot load three big websites, it assumes that the
Linksys router has crashed. It sends the off signal to its X10 controller,
waits for 30 seconds, then sends the on signal to the controller. If for
some reason the network doesn't come back up, the next chron job will run
10 minutes later, and the reset sequence will be tried again. I plan to
add another controller for my DSL modem too. If the first reset sequence
doesn't work, the program will be able to reset the DSL modem. Finally,
after the reset is complete, the program sends me an e-mail to let me
know that the network went down, and the router was power cycled.
Wednesday, 04 February, 2004. 02:30:16 PMMassachusetts' Supreme Court has upheld gay marriage, which is good news.
They still have to face a constitutional ammendment to define marriage as
a union between a man and a woman. If that passes, they sure are going to
look stupid in 10 years when there will be a lot of married gay people.
The Chicken Littles predicting the downfall of society from gay marriage
will be disappointed when their moral doom scenarios fail to pan out.
Wednesday, 04 February, 2004. 01:21:15 PMSeen on Slashdot in an article about user enhancements to the Linksys WRT54G
network routers. It is a simple matter to upload custom Linux kernels to
these consumer level devices, and some people have been building a new
open source firmware that adds enhanced features to these routers. This
comment talks about the possiblity of adding IPv6 tunneling support, and
what it would enable.
-----
It's really great to see people finally enhancing these boxes. These routers have ideal form factors compared to, say, a dedicated router PC running Linux, but their default firmware has always been very poor.
I didn't see one feature mentioned that I'd really, really like to see added to these boxes: an IPv6 6to4 tunnel. This is an ideal way to penetrate a NAT so you can establish direct TCP connections (and speak UDP) to any servers on your LAN from the outside. IPv6 support has been in all of the major operating systems for some time now, including Windows XP, Linux and Mac OS X, and while not every application is IPv6 ready, the important ones (like SSH) already are.
If 6to4 tunneling could be added to these consumer routers alongside IPv4 NAT, IPv6 stands to really take off without any help whatsoever from the ISPs. In fact, I almost prefer that my ISP not implement native IPv6. I like the fact that they now carry my encapsulated IPv6 packets without any ingress filtering, port blocking or other end-to-end-wrecking nonsense, and that they are oblivious to (much less control) the IPv6 address space. If or when the ISPs do implement native IPv6, you can bet that they'll exercise the same degree of arbitrary control that they now do over IPv4.
Monday, 02 February, 2004. 04:12:31 PMThe whole country is in a tizzy about Janet Jackson's nipple, which she showed
during the Superbowl half-time show. Some have doubted that there was an
actual nipple shown, since it appeared to be covered with a piece of
decorative jewelry. I have seen high resolution enhancements of the
particular area, and I am satisfied that the jewelry did not completely
obscure what lay beneath. CBS has been flooded with thousands of complaints,
because this partially obscured body part, unresolvable at regular TV
resolutions, supposedly will have some sort of negative impact on the
youths of the nation. The half-time show was on during the West Coast dinner
hour, and presumably all the children were watching.
According to Danielle M. Soulliere (citing others) at the University of
Windsor, two thirds of the prime-time programming criminal
offenses were murders
or attempted murders. Rape is common in daytime programming. Adolescents
who watch crime shows actually rate lower in their knowlege of how the
criminal justice system works. The motivation for prime-time crime is also
depicted in a distorted manner. Rather than explaining murders as a result
of a problem social structure, they are explained to be the result of greed,
jealousy, or insanity.
It seems to me this commotion is due to a serious misalignment in priorities.
Nobody floods CBS with mail when a bloody body is shown sprawled on a bathroom
floor; but when Janet Jackson shows a nipple, undiscernable with 525 scan line
televisions, all hell breaks loose. Nobody's shown any reason to be concerned
about either dead bodies or violence. All the inquiries into the matter show
that violent TV doesn't cause violence. I'm sure that further inquiries will
reveal that sexy TV doesn't cause much sex either. I know that I'm not much
worried about any damaging effects that either might supposedly cause to the
consumers of the material. Shakespeare didn't invent literary violence, but
he raised it to a very high standard indeed.
Monday, 02 February, 2004. 02:42:00 PMMy friend Joe and his family came over to visit yesterday. He lives at
the Southern tip of Texas, but I haven't seen him for years. When
Kristiana gets a little older we'll go down there to visit. We've never
seen that part of Texas, and we've also never visited any of the Mexican
border towns.