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Amongst the normal chaos of two parents and three children with wildly divergent views of the world, we've been dealing with (or attempting to) a serious illness issue for Sarah's mom. Perhaps we've played it too loose because I had to travel a couple weeks ago and am supposed to travel again on Monday (to Atlanta). We're also supposed to take a (very infrequent) family vacation soon. Everything has been very fluid for weeks.
Dorothy has been in and out of ICU numerous times over the last few weeks and on Tuesday things looked really grim (everyone was in tears). Finally, we had to make a move and booked Sarah on a flight back east. Incredibly, despite the earlier problems at RDU, she was only 30 minutes late getting in (her connecting flight from Newark was 20 minutes late leaving). Fortunately, things are looking up and when we called last night, we caught Sarah relaxing with the family.
Being far away from all family has many aspects.
On the positive side, there is absolutely zero chance of having random family members drop in without notice and over the years the stream has dried up. Conversely, we have never had anyone else we could ask for help when things went wrong (as they inevitably do), so we've been totally on our own. Independence was never a big issue for us, but sometimes being far away from family (like right about now) can be more than inconvenient.
Our thoughts are constantly elsewhere...
I know that a lot of people out there find using a cell phone like an old fashioned walkie talkie quite useful. As Dan points out in New Techniques in Airport Rudeness, many of us are not amused.
Maybe it's a cell phone thing, maybe not, but I continue to see people who completely disconnect from the people around them when their cell phones ring. That alone is bad enough. When those receiving calls don't excuse themselves and the conversation becomes participatory in nature (or high in volume), they should not be surprised if those around them become annoying in response. The abrupt nature of so called direct connection calls is even more difficult to deal with (How do you make them go away while being nice?)
If your phone rings and you are in the middle of something else, ignore it. Otherwise, I guess I should assume that this is more important and move onto other things myself.
I'm tired. I've been getting up early all week because of various happenings, personal and work related and just got off a postmortem conference call a bit ago that was work related. I used to be able to code in a sequestered mode for hours on end, but make me spend six hours in a day on the phone talking to people while doing random things in between and I'm beyond exhausted (I think the phrase my mom used was wrung-out; which is quite descriptive just about now).
But, I've already digressed and I haven't even talked about what was on my mind. Namely, my closet and history. For quite some time (certainly since before we moved in '99) my wife has been after me to do something about the t-shirt collection that has sort of happened around me.
As I was getting ready to go bowling this evening, I dug down into the second layer, looking for some older stuff. I ended up wearing a Peter Norton Group t-shirt from the summer picnic of '93 at Magic Mountain. Despite giving older stuff to the kids over the years (I remember one of them wearing a Hypercard t-shirt for a long time) I've still got a bunch of this nonsense that I need to get rid of but I don't just want to hand it over if it might be useful to someone. I don't know for sure, but I'm going to guess that the oldest industry t's that I still have are from '85 or so, maybe a smidge older.
Who (if anyone) is interested in this stuff?
The Smoking Gun has an interesting sample collection of letters sent to the FCC in response to the BoobyBowl incident. One of my favorites, as a practitioner of warped humor is this one which concludes with:
What are we, Europeans? I think not!
In the end, I think this letter best reflects my views on the subject. Despite growing up in an environment where sex was a four letter word, I think the whole Make Love, Not War! ethos of the sixties rubbed off on me. When it comes to being a parent and being concerned about the factors influencing my children, I have a lot less problems with them seeing nudity than I do with most of the daily television fare we consider 'normal' (note that I don't advocate an FCC war on violence, I actually know how to turn the TV off if I don't like it).
If anything from this years insipid super bowl show bothered me, it was the weird relationship to our nations flag. I don't know why exactly, but I see it as a binary issue. Either respect it or abuse it (I served in the military to protect your right to abuse the flag if you feel the need, but do it right damn it!) Doing weird things with the stars and stripes bugs me (and I'm guilty as hell too, in some family album somewhere there is a picture of me at around 14 wearing a stars and stripes Speedo and tossing aside a stars and stripes beach hat). The seventies were all about commercializing national fervor and we've never gotten past that in some ways.
George Carlin said something recently that seemed right to me (and I paraphrase here); "If you don't get offended every so often, free speech isn't working." He went on to point out that the PC movement folks were equally, if not more culpable in extending an environment in which certain things could not be said. In the end, both ends of the 'correctness' spectrum are wrong and bent on seeing that we all pay the price.
Spring is now upon us and while I'm not a huge baseball fan, I do follow it a bit. Some thoughts as the the season gets ready to ramp up.
The Vet is now rubble
Greg (the Bull) Luzinski pushed the button that began the demolition of Veterans Stadium. After Connie Mack (where I'd seen my first pro baseball game), The Vet was an enormous (some later called it cavernous I believe) place.
It was functional and a bit ugly but I'll still miss it.
The Cubs as favorites?
ESPN's Peter Gammons and Howard Reynolds named Chicago as the odds on favorite to not only win the central, but to represent the National League come fall. What's up with that?
(Mc)Courting disaster
One of the pleasures I look forward to each week is page three of the Saturday LA Times Sport section. I get a feel for what's happened this week in sports and don't have to worry about bumping into Simers on page 2. Yesterday the page was full of invective towards Jamie McCourt, wife of the new Dodger owner Frank McCourt, vice chairman of the organization and completely clueless about the business of sports ownership (and PR for that matter).
She said he was unavailable to answer questions despite the fact she was being interviewed while they were driving back to Dodgertown together. "I can't speak for Frank. No one asked me if I thought we should get a hitter or not," she said. "You probably have to talk to Frank. This is bad because you guys remember everything and you write everything down."
Yes, I'm piling on but I just can't believe these people are that stupid. Given Jamie's ability to handle the press, it's little wonder that Derrick Hall ran away in terror.
The team has no offense (even on paper), they were middle of the road last year and appear on the way toward repeating. They did the right thing the wrong way with Gagne (a PR gaffe). They have a bright new GM with little experience and yet are driving away all the senior executives they did have and the new owners don't seem to know how to communicate with the staff they still have.
Meanwhile, Jamie was whining about ticket sales and attitudes. You can't sell high priced boxes to a crappy product (which would you buy if trying to impress clients, a corporate box with the Dodgers or Angels?) and your sales staff attitude isn't going to change because you demand that it must do so. It's only a guess, but I'd estimate that the attitude took a serious drop this week with the statements made by the ludicrous vice-chairperson.
Like him or not, Mark Cuban provides an interesting example of an owner who is spending the money, living (and dying) with the fans and players day to day, and fights his own peculiar PR battle on an ongoing basis. As Cuban pointed out in his interview with Dan Gillmor, sports isn't business the way business people are accustomed to doing it.
Morbus was recently bashing my long term mail application Eudora and it seems to be about time for someone to take them to task. Since my yearly contract (that's how the pay version works now) is just about up it's time to start spanking them a bit about places they've fallen significantly behind.
I've been using Eudora since the 1.1 (or so) versions in 1992. I've tried in the last few years to move to other mail applications, but they've all adopted the idiotic (to me) three pane interface that makes me insane. I need my multiple windows just to keep things moving (I'm never working on one thing in one place at any time in mail, just like in the Finder). Perhaps it's just me, but what others see as chaos I see as orchestrated organization.
That said, the filtering rule sets in Eudora are pitiful. As Iff pointed out, you get only two conditions for each rule (and those have relatively limited wiring). Search has had a 'More' button to add conditions (rules) to searches for quite some time now, just how freaking hard would it be to add that to filtering? Yes, they'd need a new filtering resource format (well golly gee!) but let's just do it, OK?
Let's see, what else can I whine about? How about the fact that they still use an mbox format with legacy Mac line endings (\r versus \n which made a lot of sense back in 1989)? Would it be that hard to customize for OsX after three years? If I want to shuffle around mbox files I have to do a line ending conversion (not a huge deal, but a pain in the arse non the less).
Finally, let's talk about attachments. The simple fact that they don't leave the attachments with the message in the mbox means that the mail I move elsewhere is incomplete, not to mention the fact that I've got all kinds of crap strewn about in an attachments directory. The interesting thing is that they deal with mbox files which have attachments in the message if I bring them in from elsewhere (and do the line ending shuffle).
I don't know. Maybe I ought to give Apple's Mail.app another shot, especially since PGP support might never again show up in Eudora. If I can find a way to use it without ever touching the mouse it might be OK.
Occasionally I look around and realize that maybe I ought to kill off some applications that have been running unused for quite some time eating resources and generally contributing to system sluggishness.
The nice thing about MacOS X is that we can do this and it's stable enough that it just works but I do seem to have a bad habit of developing a significant amount of what you might call application debris. I was lazy about leaving a lot of apps running under MacOS 8/9, but this is getting pretty silly.
The bad thing is that this list doesn't include all the background applications and server processes that normally run (Apache, JBoss, a couple perl apps, a python server app that I'm playing with, mysql and so forth).
I've been doing a performance comparison of 3DES versus AES over the last couple of days and for the java code the best solution seems to be the Java Cryptography Extension (JCE) library from Cryptix since the Sun AES code does not seem to be available in all versions of JDK 1.4+.
Unfortunately, Cryptix has been off the air for the last couple of days (their DNS provider cryptohill.net has been unreachable). I was able to find a snapshot from last March on the Wiretapped security code mirror, but I'm reasonably certain that there ought to be something newer.
It's not really well documented, but if you decide to put their JCE libraries in the extension directory, you'll need to edit {$JAVA_HOME}/lib/security/java.security and add the provider class:
security.provider.[next-number]=cryptix.jce.provider.CryptixCrypto
Finally, although the documentation suggests that the "AES" cipher is available, you'll have to use the name "Rijndael" to access it using the March 2003 version of the Cryptix JCE libs. Having the code available made it quite a bit easier to figure that part out.
I didn't have any available time to attend Software Development Conference (despite being pinged as always by Dr. Dobbs) up in Santa Clara. I do wish I'd been able to drop in on the Programmers at Work reunion.
I'm old enough to have bought and found the book very interesting while making a career change. I poked around out in the garage and it seems that I let the paperback version I had slip away which is too bad. It's been nearly 19 years since I read it, and I'd kind of like to compare their advice (a good set of guiding principles) to my advice today.
And yeah, I've still to meet Dan.
I sure hope so!
I had turned off comments before doing the update the other night but I think MovableType 2.51 had issues. It's been more than 40 hours since the last porn based comment so I've opened things up again and will see how it goes. Worst case, I have to close comments (rather than just turn them off).
If things settle down with these changes, I'll have to take advantage of some things I was planning on doing before I became a target of porn comment folks.
A couple items about MacDevCenter, the Mac oriented article site run by the folks at O'Reilly. If you use a Mac and haven't been there, go fix that now, I'll wait.
The first thing I noticed today (it may well have happened months ago, but I didn't catch until now) is a 'Blog this' link on all the stories. I checked on a few other properties and it's there too (not on XML.com yet though). It's such a neat little hack and oh so useful (popping up a small window with copyable HTML for cut and paste blogging). If I wind up there and it wasn't because of an aggregator link, I don't have to resort to pawing around in the page source. It's a little thing but I like it a lot and used it to grab the item below. It does have some quirks (bugs?); the link to Apple's site wasn't encoded so I had to do that manually. They'll fix it I'm sure.
Are You Talking to Me? Speech on Mac OS X by François Joseph de Kermadec -- Apple's recent announcement of Spoken Interface has moved speech recognition to the forefront. However, Mac OS X has included speech recognition and synthesis technologies for quite some time. In this article we delve into the often misunderstood world of talking to your Mac.
They're also running a survey. Go take a peek...
I don't really know what I might have broken, but it doesn't matter in the long run, it had to be done. An escalating number of stupid comment postings (mostly porn based) on important messages (mostly old, some newer) forced my hand.
I've finally upgraded to MT 2.6x mostly out of desperation. In the process, I've moved away from port 8096 as an admin port for everything and might have broken links along the way... I'll have to adapt as things happen (for now, it's sorta open). I should have done the config change a long time ago, but I was busy and there was always something else going on.
In the last couple of weeks, as I remained the final vestige of entry based comment flag setting ignorance (pre 2.6 I think), I went from half a dozen useless comments (mostly porn based) per week to 20 or more per day. While the spornographers adapt to my changes here, I'll adopt MT-Blacklist and see about making the changes I want to make (mostly based on Sam's ideas about forced preview and server generated Nonce datums).
Joshua enjoyed the security article I linked to on Sunday and in his write up he mentioned Port Knocking.
I've never used port triggering, which is available in most (all?) consumer NAT boxes for the reasons outlined in the paper (PDF) but I like the idea of needing to provide a cipher of some kind to actually force the lock (using S/KEY or some other one time pad wrapped around some other data seems like a possible approach). Neat stuff.
About five years ago, there was a parody of the Harry Chapin song Cat's in the Cradle that floated around the net as an MP3 file (I think it was called Peking Moon). It was quite popular and over time I had several people email it to me.
Someone liked it so much that they added animation and created a flash rendition called chowmein.
Thanks to Jeff for pointing me to it.
Christopher Allen has written an interesting essay on the stagnating state of the digital security industry, pointing out the places where things are moving forward (SAML for example) and offering some insight on why it has happened.
He also has some ideas on how the industry might re-invigorate itself including work on reliability (I can see people being interested in technology employing multiple keys where all keys are not required for data access) and federated identity (I believe this is desperately needed).
Well worth reading.
Sean Gallagher has written an interesting roundup on the current state of the free java movement which seemed to gain a bit of steam with Eric Raymond's Let Java Go message last month [thanks to Mir for the pointer].
I'm somewhat ambivalent on the subject.
Although I wish that it were easier for various vendors (be they the various linux distro folks or even higher end OS vendors such as Apple) to provide up to date java distributions, I surely don't want to see massive forking. That was really what the whole Sun vs Microsoft java suit was about.
I believe the Eclipse folks want SWT to be a core part of the system and that has led to this particular push. I want that too, even if it has some drawbacks. Where I draw the line on external innovation is somewhere just above the language byte code and VM layer. I think Sun is concerned about changes that wind up modifying either, in part because they define the Virtual OS which has helped to make java a significant player on the server side.
Write once was a client side mantra that most have decided is beyond silly, but it remains a significant server application concept (with good reason). Despite Sean's reservations, portable J2EE based applications are really quite easy to create. The application developer simply needs to understand where local extensions are needed and wrap them appropriately. Failure to do so today is a developer level issue (in the same way that OS level modifications in every other language have been platform, rather than language specific). In some respects, cross-platform java based server applications have become more difficult to create and maintain in the last couple years; but the complexity is not even close to the previous C/C++ based application mechanisms (while retaining relatively high performance characteristics).
Java is ultimately a (virtual) platform and unlike many others in the same category, it has gained significant attention outside of the primary development community. While I'd like to see the java platform grow and expand, I'd prefer not to see it run in multiple directions (OSS or not, the J2ME thrust seems wrong because it had limited server and client capabilities). Should java go wandering at a low level, the community will also go wandering and the result will not be useful.
Our pilot today (Southwest, flying back into Burbank) announced the following as we lined up on the end of the tarmac:
Tighten your seat belts folks, we're about to go really fast.
I can't say exactly why, but that certainly cracked up the people sitting around me.
Speaking of Burbank, the Bob Hope name change is happening. They make a pretty big deal about it these days when doing airport announcements.
I don't generally watch commercials, but I did watch this American Express spoof of Caddyshack featuring Tiger Woods because someone told me it was funny.
And because it's online.
Susan was trying to find some reasonable live map alternatives for the LA area. Her experience with the Caltrans Realtime Freeway Speed Map is interesting (yes, it's hard to use, but I think it might make a nice standalone application). I'd recently wandered into the LA/OC forum on DSL Reports (Broadband Reports? make up yer mind!) where I found some interesting map links.
Wondering what else was out there, I checked @LA, a long lived collection of LA regional links. I still go there when looking for data in hard to define categories hoping to find off the beaten track information sources (while looking for traffic information I found a nice example: Ventura Gas Prices where I wasn't surprised at the list of cheapest stations in town starting at $2.15 and working upward).
Both sites feature Sigalert.com. Another useful link is surface street traffic should you need to get somewhere specific.
I wonder why the sensor data isn't more easily available? If it is and I'm just having a hard time finding it, I apologize (and would appreciate a link). It does seem odd that I can find the raw data purchased from commercial satellites for public imagery more easily. I get the feeling that someone set up a fee system somewhere and now we're all stuck with it because the state found a profit point.
I also wonder if the instrumentation detail is high enough. Half a mile seems like a long way to go when waiting for new data on a fluid (like) system that can have eddies that last less than 200 yards. There isn't sufficient information to determine whether the loops can detect lane by lane traffic differences (important &mdash snaking lane behavior is common here in SoCal).
This is disappointing. We had 41.7% voter turnout for this weeks election. Sure, it was only a primary but there were important statewide and local issues on the ballot.
How can we have a participatory democracy where the voice of the people is heard if a significant percentage of people can't take ten minutes twice a year to provide their input? You might not like the process but if you don't play the game then you don't get to have complaints later.
I've had Python on my list of things to learn for quite some time. Having finally taken the plunge, I have to say that I find myself generally impressed.
Python and Ruby had both been on the list for quite a while but I finally knocked about with Ruby at Christmas. Over the last few weeks I had downloaded a bunch of samples including some of the more recent stuff using the Twisted framework but I hadn't actually written anything. Last Thursday, I had a need to write a tool and finally decided to give Python a whirl.
While not terribly complicated, the tool reads in long file full of comma separated data treating each line as a record, fills in an arbitrary XML template from the CSV data and calls a SOAP based Doc/Lit XML API to perform an operation (with a read afterward for verification). I went from being functionally lost to having a working tool in five hours (quite a bit less than I was expecting). Color me quite impressed.
Among all the documents linked from python.org, I found Instant Python the most useful followed quickly by the built-in functions from the library reference.
I'm definitely going to keep using Python and I might even eventually become accustomed to some of the more offbeat language features (indentation and loops have both caught me in the last week). Lots to learn here but thus it's more enjoyable and approachable than I found Ruby to be (I think my lack of experience with Perl hurts there).
