One idiot's blog

A Simple Mistake

I think someone didn't realize that the name of the famous actor from Law & Order is Waterston, not Waterhouse.

Waste Not, Want Not

Well, I'm sorry to say it was a wasted day. I had decided to get all motivated to take my car to get its oil changed and somehow kickstart my day that way... except the oil change never happened. As happens so often on my Saturdays (I'm well aware today is not Saturday, but it's a day in my vacation with nothing planned, so it's equivalent to a Saturday), I got on to the (this time, my folks') computer, "just to check my mail". Somehow I noticed (again) that they didn't have Real Player installed, so I thought I'd remedy that "real quick". And, of course, it all went downhill from there. Thanks in no small part to Real Networks' breathtakingly long License which I tried to scan.

6,000 some words, IIRC (I copied it and ran wc on it, but it copied funny and ran a lot of the words together for some reason, but not such that it would seriously affect the count, I figured... but I did that on the Windows, and the Windows is not booted up ATM, so I can't check). If they're going to make you "agree" to these excruciatingly long licenses, I submit that there should be a law requiring each agreement to be prefaced with a word count of the agreement, and an estimated amount of time required to read the license (say, a range going from the 5th percentile to the 95th percentile in terms of reading speed for legalese). That might be a start to bridging the reality gap between what you are supposed to do and what is actually feasible.

Not as Easy as I Thought

Ooh, yah, I forgot one extra wrinkle (still haven't uploaded my updates, though I will have done by the time you read this). I have to do some sed magic on the files I upload so they use relative links instead of absolute URLs. I guess that's pretty easy, actually; the main difficulty is finding a good place to put the modified files while they wait to be uploaded. OTOH, I guess there'd be no harm in editing the actual documents. The edits will still be valid in the context of my laptop with its 66.92.blah.blah address, and more significantly, they will be overwritten anyway next time I add a new entry.

The other thing is that I found that Linux networks don't always go down when you tell them to, or when they say they have. I spent about 10 minutes scratching my head trying to figure out why ifconfig showed eth1 (my wireless card) having the address 192.168.1.3 (which is what I normally use on my LAN at home), even though my config file told it to use DHCP. The general principle I worked out is that, for Gentoo, your /etc/conf.d/net file has to be in the same state when you shut down an interface as it was when you started it up. So if you want to change your network configuration, shut down first, then edit, then start back up. Even this bit of wisdom doesn't give you all the answers, however; I still don't fully understand it, but I scanned the scripts and figured out how to use ifconfig to just kill the stupid interface. Everyting was pretty much peachy after that -- except that the startup script for Apache for some reason wants to start eth1 up, even though eth0 is already running. Well, whatever makes you happy, Apache.

Crack in the Dam

Well, like the time when I was all busy trying to fight The Man with the rent business, I've had lots going on, which means lots to write but no time to write it. I don't even know where to begin, but I realized that the longer I wait, the harder it will be to begin and the less hope I will have of getting a substantial amount of it on paper. So to speak.

The difficulty in finding time is compounded with the fact that my blog is away from its usual mooring. To make an entry on my blog that will be immediately available to the public, I have to:

1) assign my laptop its usual IP address. This means it is at odds with the reality of the Internet, so it means I can't use the Internet while I'm doing my blog. This is not really such a big deal, since the only way I've bothered to get my laptop on the Internet here so far has been through some unidentified and very weak WiFi connection, so the laptop has been effectively without Internet.

2) edit and save my blog. This is what I'm doing right now. The fact that I've temporarily assigned my laptop its usual IP address, even though that means nothing as far as the real Internet goes, means my Movable Type software can work the way it was designed, and accept my new entries and archive them, etc.

3) unassign that usual-but-currently-invalid IP address, so I can

4) get it back on the Internet somehow, so I can upload the latest entries to my Geocities site.

Think I'll try steps 3 and 4 (and the latter part of 2) right now.

iraqilinux.org

Maybe you have to be a Linux user to find this as funny as I do.

The flag is missing the "God is great" text that Saddam added during the Iran-Iraq war. I don't think that writing will be gone after the new government is formed.

AFA Gay Marriage Poll

(Note: there I go with my "searchable titles" again.) I got a mass e-mail from my activist sister including the following:

The American Family Association has decided to try and "prove a point" by having a poll on their website for folks to take about their opinion on gay marriage. They intend to present the results of this poll to the United States Congress in an attempt to instate a federal law against Gay Marriage. It's obvious that they think that this poll will come out in their favour, and that the vast majority of people will vote to keep marriage for traditional couples only. I ask you all to please visit http://www.afa.net/petitions/marriagepoll.asp and let your opinion be heard. It takes about 45 seconds, and it is SUCH an important topic. Whether you are gay or straight, conservative or liberal, your opinion matters, and you NEED to vote here.

Part of this appeals to me a lot: getting fairness and truth out there, rather than allowing a poll purporting to represent the American mainstream to be conducted among an essentially pre-screened segment of the population.

But... online polls are bogus anyway. The congress members have no way of knowing how they conducted the poll (software-wise), whether the poll gathering software was well-coded, maliciously manipulated, or even whether it takes all the input and sends it to the Great Bitbucket in the Sky while the American Family Association reports any numbers it likes (as long as they're plausible; anything above 79% opposed to gay marriage will sound too suspicious). And this poll is probably pretty hackable. I could see someone with spamming skills writing a votebot to vote repeatedly the way they want, though they may have made this impossible.

I submitted a "real" answer (using [email protected] for the email). I *think* I voted "in favor of gay marriage". But maybe I hit the wrong button. What I got back was the same poll, with a slightly different URL. I voted again, this time definitely voting against gay marriage (still thinking I had voted for it the previous time). I used different info, and a different mailinator address (check out what this Mailinator thing is; it's great), and it came back with, "could not verify this email address". Strange, because, up to now, I haven't gotten an email at the [email protected] address. How could it claim that the second address was invalid when it hadn't verified the first one?

Using this same form (the message was at the bottom of a repeat of the same polling form), I tried again, with the same vote and info, but with my Hanmail account. That time, it seemed unambiguously to accept my response, and showed me a results bar chart.

I would be tempted to accuse them of rejecting votes of those who voted for gay marriage, but 1) it just doesn't make sense to have the observable result be different, even assuming you are trying to run a completely bogus poll, and 2) it appears that I voted against gay marriage the first time anyway. My browser seems to be retaining each version of the form I submitted; I can click on the back button repeatedly and see all the info I filled out each time -- and the first one shows me having voted "I oppose legalization...". So unfortunately I have no idea what's going on, other than that this poll behaves pretty unpredictably.

Rectitude

Shoot.

I just had one of those moments where I thought of a statement -- an "Idea" (i.e., something worthy of the "Ideas" category my blog currently has) worth mentioning, that sounded at least halfway thoughtful. So what do I do? Instead of writing down the wonderfully eloquent sentence I had just composed in my head, I start writing about what I was thinking of that led up to that thought. And then I start thinking of other stuff. And, by the time I realize I'd better write it down before I forget, I've forgotten it.

As an aside, I hate when I switch from past tense to present tense as I'm writing. I always end up having to decide which way I want to go, and then go changing half of it. I'm just not going to bother this time.

Well, here's my "thought", in a very blunt form. A lot of political plans are decided upon because they sound "right" -- they have an air of rightness or justice about them... but this has nothing to do with whether they will actually work. I initially thought of this in relation to the Iraq situation (how quickly do we hold elections? Do we let the Iraqis try Saddam?), but another good recent example would be the recent anti-spam legislation. The consensus among non-politicians seems to be that it is more of a pro-spam bill than an anti-spam bill.

Blah. If it weren't 2:30 in the A.M., I might have written that more cogently and publish-worthily.

Joho Resolution

Joho's author replied to me. He didn't know what had happened, and suggested I repost. I tried, and I got an immediate response that it didn't like the fact that my linking URL was a GeoCities one. I guess he activated spam-proofing software sometime after I posted, and it looked through old comments as well as preventing new spam comments. So I reposted with this URL (66.92.171.57); hopefully that should make it stick. Was it worth all the effort? Don't know. He said he has now told his spam blocker that not all users from GeoCities are spammers. What this means, exactly, I don't know. But maybe, just maybe, it will prevent someone else from having this problem in the future.

Joho's Blog rehash

Just happened to run across this old post, and I thought I'd check to see how it was doing. It's a link to a post on Joho's Blog, where I left a comment that I thought worthy of linking to for posterity. Imagine my surprise when I found my comment gone, though other familiar ones are still there.

Google cache to the rescue! I remembered some words I used, threw in some other words that were still on the actual page (including the obscure-and-thus-incredibly-useful "Baldur"), threw it into Google, and found a cache of his page, luckily with my comment still in it.

Here it is:

It would be nice to think that the confusion of singular and plural involved a different way of perceiving these concepts, but I taught English for three years in Korea, and the truth is really rather disappointing. East Asians simply don't understand plural at all. In the cases where they actually use the plural form, it is because that is the form they are more familiar with for that particular English word. So, units of measurement are always plural ("one inches, two inches", so they get it right most of the time), as are things that come in pairs (socks, shoes, eyes, and the "feet" you mentioned), and a few other incidentals, like "sports", for obvious reasons, and oddly, "shirts" and, sometimes "donuts" (I have theories for these latter two, which I won't go into here). Everything else is singular. I don't mean singular in their minds, I merely mean that the singular form of that noun is, in their mind, the sole English translation for their word, and it doesn't even cross their minds to consider whether to use the singular or the plural.

Noodle? If you were to believe my assertion, you would think they always say "noodles", even when speaking of one noodle. What can I say. My guess is it's probably not a common word for them to use when speaking English, so they've learned the singular form -- the form found in the dictionary -- in that case.

I sent an e-mail asking what caused certain comments to disappear, but haven't heard back yet.

Happy Feast of the I.C.!

Immaculate Conception, that is.

AOL Wooden CD Case

Note: I feel like getting a high Google rank for this entry, so I formulated the title as a likely Google search, rather than saying, "What's AOL up to now?" or something else less search-friendly.

So, how many of you have gotten an AOL 9.0 CD in a wooden CD case? Actually, I didn't. But roommate and I found one on the floor in front of the mailboxes, and roommate was impressed enough to pick it up and bring it back to the apartment. We discussed what we thought AOL was trying to do (well, marketing, of course, duh), and whether they were doing a good job of it.

The case, as mentioned about twice already, is wooden; not really something you'd give as a gift, it appears to be made from some sort of cracker plywood, and it is not finished, so you could conceivably get tiny splinters if you rub it the wrong way. The best feature is probably the opening/closing mechanism: little magnets embedded into the wood on the inner surfaces of the opening edges. But if the magnets are the best feature, the worst feature is the stickers pasted on both sides of the case, in a dreadfully untasteful aquamarine (and if it's gotten me talking about taste, you don't even want to think about how bad it really is), taking up most of each side.

Henry's argument: their purpose is to get people to take the case to their rooms, into the house, or wherever, rather than throwing it into the trash can conveniently placed by many mailboxes in this day and age, and actually use it. Therefore, they should not have the large stickers, just a small sticker in the corner with the minimum information necessary. For a while I thought I was with him, but now I don't remember why I thought so.

My argument: yes, they want to make it nice so people are more hesitant to throw it out, but they also don't want to make it too easy to abuse ("Cool, nice Free CD case, just peel off this little sticker or ignore it, and I can still send the CD to those who want it"). So the large stickers are smart, because they're harder to get rid of, but they could have done much better in creating a design (esp. color scheme) that didn't look so cheap and commercial, and went well with the wood, so people would feel like they're getting something of class.

I'd like both of my readers to give their thoughts: what do you think AOL hopes to get out of sending its free CDs in wooden cases?

Open the Cover

In an earlier post I made a reference to "a (white) South African space tourist". That space tourist is Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Thawte, one of the early pioneers in the field of digital signatures and authentication (as opposed to the late pioneers, I suppose). This is marginally cool, but... his favorite programming language is... Python! And, he has put out "bounties" asking for development of certain features he wants to see in Open Source software, specifically Python and Mozilla.

So, he's pretty cool in my book. There was definitely a subtle undertone of scorn when I mentioned this "space tourist", and I don't doubt that he has a bit of an ego, but at least he got his dough by creating something useful for society, rather than by inheriting some diamond mines or winning some lucky contracts, and he can definitely relate to lowly techies like me.

Finally Works

I must have spent a total of about a day trying to get my recently installed Linux system at work to accept remote X connections. I didn't know if it was because the Linux box was on a DHCP connection, the firewall or xinetd was blocking that port, or what. Finally found that gdm.conf had a setting called "DisallowTCP", which was set to true by default. I hesitated to look at that file, because I would have thought that only affects things when gdm is actually running; e.g., it would determine whether you could to an XDMCP query to the box and see the gdm login screen. But what this flag does is to¹ tell... crap, I don't really want to use that construction after all, but I've already gone and written the extensive footnote you see below, which has some potentially interesting but totally unrelated content about that very grammar construction, so I'm just going to have to leave that partial sentence there. Anyway, starting over: if this flag is set to true, then gdm spawns any X processes with a -nolisten tcp, so you can pretty much tell what that does.

I edited it (setting it to false), logged out, and logged back in, and it still didn't work. Finally I rebooted, walked off to the bathroom, and chewed myself out for spending so much time on this unapproved activity, and wished things were simpler. When I came back and logged in, I almost wanted to see the usual failure that had dogged my attempts to run "xterm &" from a telnet session. But, as you know by now, up popped that xterm. I couldn't believe my eyes.

Of course, if it had worked that way the very first time around, I wouldn't have even blinked.

[1] Back when I was a professional English teacher, I taught that you don't have to use a second "to" in a sentence like "All you have to do is to write a letter..." I suspected the second "to" might be more grammatically correct, but I decided to veer towards conventional usage for that one. I'm now starting to feel a little more comfortable using the second "to", and am not sure which I would support were I to go back to teaching.

Baked Fresh Yesterday

Was grocery shopping today; saw a wooden, wheeled rack with baked goods strewn on it. The paper sign affixed to the rack said: "Baked Fresh Yesterday". I guess I'm glad to know they don't bake their stuff stale...

Power of Blogs Part II/Misc

1) Good news: Google search for "Krullers" shows my entry on Krispy Kreme Crullers as the number one entry. Doesn't seem like a popular search, though.

2) I managed to get through my e-mail and various administrivia in just a half hour or so this morning (even helping an old and distant friend with a sed command), and it just seems way too soon to start actual work, so I thought I should at least stall by adding a new blog entry.

3) As the male (and the older party), the ball's probably in my court to send another e-mail to the nursing home chick. Maybe that's what I could waste time on today. So far there's been a single exchange, virtually content-free, pretty much "I'm here, see you after Thanksgiving" from both sides, so will have to start injecting some substance into the dialog.