Latest News

Spammers are attempting to use the comment system here for their nefarious purposes. That's why I moderate comments. Here's the body of a comment that will not appear:

First of all, you have a penchant for using verbs in the past tense even if they should not. But hey, you're a computer geek and not a language teacher. Very good you got your things working there and cable problems are often solvedby cable bonds or cable tamers that can be easily bought in computer shops. You know that,don't you?

Here is the article this was attached to. And for the record, that HP monitor died last year, which is disappointing. The 14" El Cheapo brand is still working fine.

The point is, the grammar is fine in that post. You'll have to bait me another way, Senor Spamalot.

I tweeted yesterday about my centos 5 linux box losing sound (and frankly X, but that's another story). I tried to use the sound card detector (system-config-soundcard) to find the card again, but it silently failed (typical). The Linux sound howto is over nine years old, so that's pretty useless. What to do?

Well, I turned to my old friends lsmod, dmesg and strace. I could see tha there were kernel sound modules loaded. I could knew that I had configuration that was working. So I issued the following command:

# strace mpg123 /path/to/mp3file

I got quite a bit of output, but the relevant line was this:

open("/dev/snd/pcmC0D0p", O_RDWR|O_NONBLOCK) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)

And sure enough, this is what was in my /dev/snd directory:

[root@durgan snd]# ls
controlC0  
hwC1D2    
pcmC1D0c  
pcmC1D1p  
timer
controlC1  
pcmC0D0c  
pcmC1D0p  
seq

Oh look! There's no pcmC0D0p file. What to do. I could try to create the missing dev file, but I just symlinked the pcmC1D0p to pcmC0D0p.

And yes, this horrible, horrible hack worked like a charm.

What happened to delete this device file? Why couldn't I make the system re-detect and re-initialize the sound system? It's stupid, stupid user issues like this that have plagued linux since 1995 and show no signs of getting better today. This is why you don't see a lot of linux notebooks or games.

Welcome to the new design of Taskboy!

Over the years, I've changed the layout on this site a few times. On the great constraints on my choice of layouts is that I'm no graphic artist. I cannot product graphics that look reasonable for love or money. What I can do is try to make smart organizational choices and bring a minimalist sensability to the layout.

This redesign taught me a lot about XHTML, a standard I've pretty much ignored until now. Proponents of XHTML will tell you that there is freedom in the constraints it imposes. I do know that I gave up some functionality that seemed to be fine for 4 versions of HTML just to obtain XHTML validation.

As I've mentioned, I've lately woken up to the idea of unobtrustive javascript/CSS design. CSS 2 is so widely supported now that it is time to put the old TABLE tag in semi-retirement. The fact that I was able to re-architect The Feed Bag using only DIVs is no small victory. (Note to self: perhaps each row should be a UL?).

However, before I sing the praises of XHTML further, let me chime in very late on the quirks I encountered. These annoyances were so pronounced that my wife complained that I was getting too cranky. I'm an old man.

This list is neither complete nor exhaustive, but represents the pain points as I remember them.

Item 1: XHTML docs do not look like XML docs

The target of this rant is really the way modern browsers work and can be summed up in two words: Quirks mode. To maintain "backward compatibility" with existing (crappy) web sites, some browsers have a mode of reacting to HTML in way that isn't compliant with standards. While this may not sound like such a bad thing, there are times when quirks mode kicks in unexpectedly.

For instance, all XHTML docs are XML docs. All XML docs are supposed to start with the declaration "<?xml version="1.0"?>". Now, this declaration isn't actually required, but nearly all XML docs have it nonetheless. If you start your XHTML doc with this declaration, IE 6 goes into quirks mode. That's pretty maddening. The way to get standards complaint behavior out of it to start your XHTML this way:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
  <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8" /> 

This isn't the end of the world, but it is a pretty good "gotcha" for beginning XHTMLers.

Item 2: Nested lists don't

In caveman HTML, the following code reliably produced nested lists:

<ul>
  <li>Item1
`  <ul>
    <li>Item 1a
    <li>Item 1b
  </ul>
  <li>Item 2

That's not going to work in XHTML. Instead, you must start the inner list with a list item:

<ul>
  <li>Item1</li>
  <li><ul>
    <li>Item 1a</li>
    <li>Item 1b</li>
  </ul></li>
  <li>Item 2</li>

Again, it's not the end of the world, but it is surprising behavior.

Item 3: Centering anything

In old HTML, nearly any "block display" item could be centered using the attribute "align" and setting it to "center". What could be easier? Well, XHTML is having none of that. Firstly, the "align" attribute has been removed. This means that positioning must be done through CSS. CSS centers text and block elements very differently. Text can be centered using the CSS attribute "text-align". Block elements require magic like "left: auto; right: auto." Again, it sort of makes sense once you're use to it, but come on...

Item 4: ALT is required

There are lots of good reasons to put an ALT attribute on image tags, but please don't force me to add 'alt=""' every where. Not all images are that important.

Item 5: INPUT needs cuddle time

In XHTML, INPUT tags need to be in block elements like P or DIV. That's pretty lame, but I understand why this is.

For web browsers to display a web page, they must parse the HTML. This is act of figuring out what parts of the document are content and which are instructions. The instructions (HTML tags) are assembled into a tree structure according to the Document Object Model. Because of HTML's SGML roots, the browser often inserts "assumed" nodes into the tree to make sense of the given HTML. For example, if just a naked line of text is found after the BODY tag, that text is wrapped in a P node. Some of the guess work the browser needs to do for HTML isn't at all obvious or predictable. It is the reduction of these assumptions that is the raison d'etre of XHTML, by the way.

Anyway, INPUT tags used to be able to hang out by their lonesome but not anymore.

In conclusion, I'm happy I took the time to make the transition to XHTML but there was pain along the way.

Recently, my Windows Explorer under XP stopped showing thumbnails of certain movie files. I believe this may have happened during the installation of VLC. In any case, you will need to hack the registry to remind Windows Explorer how to display these thumbnails. Copy the following code into a file called fix.reg, save the buffer and double click on the file. Restart Windows and try to forget this ever happened.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.asf\ShellEx\{BB2E617C-0920-11D1-9A0B-00C04FC2D6C1}]
@="{c5a40261-cd64-4ccf-84cb-c394da41d590}"
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.avi\ShellEx\{BB2E617C-0920-11d1-9A0B-00C04FC2D6C1}]
@="{c5a40261-cd64-4ccf-84cb-c394da41d590}"
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.mkv\ShellEx\{BB2E617C-0920-11d1-9A0B-00C04FC2D6C1}]
@="{c5a40261-cd64-4ccf-84cb-c394da41d590}"
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.mpeg\ShellEx\{BB2E617C-0920-11D1-9A0B-00C04FC2D6C1}]
@="{c5a40261-cd64-4ccf-84cb-c394da41d590}"
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.mpe\ShellEx\{BB2E617C-0920-11D1-9A0B-00C04FC2D6C1}]
@="{c5a40261-cd64-4ccf-84cb-c394da41d590}"
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.mp4\ShellEx\{BB2E617C-0920-11D1-9A0B-00C04FC2D6C1}]
@="{c5a40261-cd64-4ccf-84cb-c394da41d590}"
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.mov\ShellEx\{BB2E617C-0920-11D1-9A0B-00C04FC2D6C1}]
@="{c5a40261-cd64-4ccf-84cb-c394da41d590}"
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.rm\ShellEx\{BB2E617C-0920-11d1-9A0B-00C04FC2D6C1}]
@="{c5a40261-cd64-4ccf-84cb-c394da41d590}"
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.rmvb\ShellEx\{BB2E617C-0920-11d1-9A0B-00C04FC2D6C1}]
@="{c5a40261-cd64-4ccf-84cb-c394da41d590}"
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.wmv\ShellEx\{BB2E617C-0920-11D1-9A0B-00C04FC2D6C1}]
@="{c5a40261-cd64-4ccf-84cb-c394da41d590}"

Note that the @= is just setting the default value for the {NUM} key.

Good gravy. I thought commenting out Javascript in XHTML was bad. Take a look at this:

<style type="text/css" media="print, screen and (min-width: 481px)">
/*<![CDATA[*/
@import url("/2008/site/css/advanced");
/*]]>*/
</style>

That's from the W3C site. XML has created a monster.

It seems my spam filter has been very aggressive lately. If I haven't responded to your email, I probably only just fished it out of the trash.

Apparently, monkeys are not the only animals in rebellion. Keep your shoe laces tied and watch the marshes and swamps closely.

In the turtle's defense, that shoe was totally asking for it.

Is this all part of Global Warming?

As readers of this blog know, I've long warned of the dangers of keeping monkeys near urban centers. Now, another tragedy underscores the urgency of the danger:

A male chimpanzee in a Swedish zoo planned hundreds of stone-throwing attacks on zoo visitors, according to researchers.

Keepers at Furuvik Zoo found that the chimp collected and stored stones that he would later use as missiles.

How many more years does humanity have until the dreaded Chimp Infitada?

WaPo reports:

The 200-pound chimp who was fatally shot this week after a vicious attack on his owner's friend also bit a woman in 1996, the woman said in an interview broadcast Thursday.
...

Travis's owner, Sandra Herold, who raised the chimpanzee from its infancy, has said he was a loving pet whose behavior Monday was out of character. She said the chimp combed her hair each night and slept in her bed.

Finally, a meaningful survey on the web (via classicaljunkie).

Don't let their size fool you: these critters are dangerous in numbers.

One of my former O'Reilly colleagues has passed away. Erik T. Ray died last week from complications due to a biking accident. He was 38.

Erik had many interests aside from his chosen profession of programming. If you've watched The Gameshelf, you've probably seen him (he was on twice as a player). Erik wrote two books for O'Reilly, Learning XML and Perl & XML. At some point in the last five years (all of which are somewhat hazy to me now), Erik approached me to co-author a Ruby on Rails book. Unfortunately, my schedule wasn't amenable to book writing at the time.

Erik was a sweet guy. A man of his dimensions could easily have bullied his way through social interactions, but that wasn't his way. Intellectually curious, Erik was frequently cobbling together things, whether through coding, writing or more substantial media.

Erik, you will be missed.

Dear Internet,

Because I'm currently homeless, I do not have regular access to my taskboy.com email. If you need to reach me, please use a different address. If you don't know what that address is, I'm not telling you here.

That is all.

UPDATE Because of this fabulous article, I can read taskboy email again! I'm at the cutting edge of 1991 tricknology!

Even though I would prefer Mr. Obama, I'm reasonably sure now that John McCain will take the White House in November. And I don't think the race will be close.

The Democrats are now polarized into two camps. One of those camps must loose in the candidate selection process. That loss will embitter the other camp, who will not vote on election day. Thus, the Republicans, who would not have had enough support to take the election, will find that their smaller base will be enough for victory.

I believe now that Ms. Clinton will get her party's nod and will fail miserably in the general election. I think Mr. Obama would do only a little better.

The only way for the Dems to win in November, short of McCain eating a baby on live national TV, is for a Clinton/Obama ticket. This conclusion is glaringly obvious, but egos are likely to prevent it from happening.

Fortunately, there's not a big policy difference between the Dems and the GOP in this election. However, there's a lot of house-cleaning that needs to be done that the Dems could do easier than the GOP (who caused a great deal of chaos in DC from 2000-2008).

«Now, you have to understand the way she said that, because it's the key to the whole project. The spirit of everything was formed within those nine words - and if she'd said them shyly, as though having her breasts touched by people was something to be endured or afraid of, the Open-Source Boob Project would have died aborning. But she didn't. Her words were loud and clearly audible to anyone who walked by, an offer made to friends and acquaintances alike.

Yet it wasn't a come-on, either. There wasn't that undertow of desperation of come on, touch me, I need you to validate my self-esteem and maybe we'll hook up later tonight. There was no promise of anything but a simple grope.

We all reached out in the hallway, hands and fingers extended, to get a handful. And lo, we touched her breasts - taking turns to put our hands on the creamy tops exposed through the sheer top she wore, cupping our palms to touch the clothed swell underneath, exploring thoroughly but briefly lest we cross the line from 'touching" to "unwanted heavy petting." They were awesome breasts, worthy of being touched.

And life seemed so much simpler. »

These fourteen-year-olds sure have a lot of moxie. I mean, going to a convention, blogging, meeting girls and everything...

What? HE'S THIRTY-EIGHT?!

Creepy.

update:

I tried to reply to Springheel Jack's post about this, but he's got aggressive comment filtering on. That's a shame as that reduces the quality of the discussion. And as arguing on the Internet makes us all dumber, I'll just note I had some dynamite stuff to add that's now gone.

lj: 1
jjohn: 0

The cost of the Iraq war in American servicemen lives has crossed the rubicon of 4000. This appalling number does not factor in Iraqi or American civilians.

This hideous war that began with fiction cannot be won, denied or escaped. It is a cancer that will consume our American society to the same degree as the Vietnam war, although it will take more time to do so.

America is in Iraq primarily because of our energy policy has failed to change since 1953. Our dependence on oil gives other nations the tools to harm us. Our failure to plan sustainable long-term economic strategies mean that we need a choke-hold on energy supplies to stop "old" Europe, Russia and China from getting too uppity with us.

There was a time when America was respected by the World as an example of hard work, innovation and decency. But that was a long, long time ago.

Although I warmly welcome a change in American leadership, I do not think anyone but the Iraqi people can extricate us from our national hubris.

See you again at 5000.

Musicians are endless sources of comedy.

Bloggers of liveJournal unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!

Or something.

Personally, I think every blogger (including me) should take a break from clogging the Intertubes with chatter. The idea that blogging is anything but vanity is dishonest.

As for the reasons for the strike, they are misguided. The users of LJ feel some ownership of the system which they were never promised. If you want content freedom, rent your own server.

On that time off from LJ, consider making a sort of P2P community blogging systems that's distributed and under no central control. I think the openID system is a start in that direction.

The problem is that bandwidth isn't free. Nor are the servers that run the software nor the people that keep those machines running. The piper needs to be paid so that you can continue to broadcast your pirate signal. And the consumers of the system have no right to the resources other people have paid for. What, are we all Americans now?

As for my content on LJ, I've been on strike for quite some time.

I'm waiting at SFO for my flight back to Boston. I'm about 6 hours early. Well, I wasn't that early until my flight got delayed. Then I switched flights. bah.

As I'm on a business trip, I'd like to note how badly business folk get ripped off on trips. After health care, it's America's most important crisis.

Also note that I'm blogging this from my XO laptop. Apparently, it works with tmobile just fine. The keyboard is pretty unusable for any serious work.

Wish me luck.

UPDATE: Given the time on my hands, I started playing with this XO laptop. Amazingly, I was able to install the pptpclient from Fedora without too much trouble. That means, given a more solid net connection, I could use this laptop for business as a thin client! Wow.

I also installed Doom and SimCity. Where's my O'Reilly interview?

It's 2008 and I'm full beyond the questions "is America ready for a black president" or "is America ready for a woman president." I'm dismayed that old feminists and old civil rights activists are lockstep in their support for candidates based on race and gender. It's just dumb. These United States so desperately need adroit and wise leadership that the old battles of race and gender should seriously be put aside.

I would like to see Barak Obama as the Democratic candidate. Further, I'd like to see him elected president because I believe all the other candidates are far too tainted by special interests to make the hard decisions that will face the next administration.

Today I am 36 years old. As has been my tradition, I jot down a few thoughts for the public and the future on passing these ordinary milestones of life.

To say that this year saw significant changes in my life is a gross understatement. Not only did I move out an apartment that I had occupied for 12 years, I moved in with the woman I was to marry. I wore a kilt for the first time this year. The company I work for, Leostream, moved to larger offices. I had my first vacation in Jamestown this summer.

Not all changes have been good though. I lost a cat, Tempest, and my mother, Pat Johnston, to cancer. A second cat (of the original three) also has cancer. There was a host of other deaths of important family and friends this year too. All of which has put me in a reflective mood.

As a remembrance of things gone by, I post this picture from 1953 of my mom with her siblings and who I suspect are her maternal grandparents. I was very close to not only my mom but her sister and brother. As of December 2, everyone in that picture has passed on.

The fifties where the formative decade for my parents (who weren't hippies or beatniks at all). In many ways, they attempted to inculcate that same culture to my brothers and me. Most of those lessons could be boiled down to:

• The Golden Rule
• Don't be burden on others
• Mind your own damn business

More than ever, I feel the responsibility of being an adult more acutely than ever before. I've got more than my personal budget to deal with now.

I expect even more changes personally and professional next year.

Duty now for the future.

*blink* *blink*

Wha-haup-pinned?

Also see:

From Urbaniak's liveJournal.

U of Rochester reports:

Scientists at the University of Rochester and the J. Craig Venter Institute have discovered a copy of the genome of a bacterial parasite residing inside the genome of its host species.

You'll never believe this, but I've been pondering a scifi story that features parasites that do exactly this. It's not fair that science as stolen my cruddy idea and I expect to be compensated for it.

Here is a long-winded scare comic about the dangers of the Dungeon and Dragon's role-playing game. It's from 1984. The main gist is how playing around with fake magic diminishes one's faith in Jesus.

A few things:

• Although boys are shown playing the game, they are not part of the comic's plot, presumably because they're not prime witch material.
• Kudos to the author for taking a swipe at the Olde Timey cult of Diana, the Goddess of Willful Girls. It's good to see a grudge can last two thousand years.
• Double kudos for making the DM a black-clad woman named "Ms. Frost". Why not have called her "The Ice Queen" or "Lilith"?
• D&D is a game. There's no magic in it, outside of marketing. It's hardly a gateway to adventure, let alone Satanism.
• If your religion is in competition with a game, you need a new religion.

This is the danger of magical thinking that many Religions rely on. If what draws you to a faith is magic, then you'll always be seduced by the latest witch doctor in town.

I don't play Pen and Paper RPGs anymore (but I did in 1984), but I continue to be irritated by bible-thumpers who still villify the game. I never summoned a demon or "mind-controlled" my parents while playing this game, but I did improve my SAT English scores.

Is D&D worse for Christians than, say, Doom, in which you stalk humanoid monster in the dark and slay them by the hundreds? Perhaps the masturbatory Tom Clancy games of counter-terrorism are more Jesus-friendly? After all, you get to kill the non-believers by the dozens.

(P.S. Marcie, sorry about the death of Black Leaf, but if she couldn't find a simple poison trap, she was no damn use to anyone. Consider not playing Thieves with DEX scores less than 17.)

If Charles Bukowski wrote Peanuts, it would look a lot like this.

HTTP ERROR 584:
YOUR BROWSER IS TOO GHETTO FOR OUR SITE
PLEASE GET A REAL USER AGENT, HIPPIE

Sigh...

In what is sure to become a fan-favorite blog game on taskboy, let me introduce: Collectible, Racist or Both. It's the game where I post some bit of obscure art and you comment on whether what's presented is collectible, racist or both. Ready? Let's start!

The Black Americana selection of kitchen oddities for the modern home offered by Texas Belles is, in the only word that comes to mind, stunning. I have seen such knick-knacks before as a child while being dragged around to various antique stores by my mother in the Northeast. However, I'm gobsmacked to learn that such effigies of racist folklore are apparently still being produced.

It does occur to me that there is a weird way in which one could view this collection that's not wholly offensive. I have read several Viking romances and in them, real nationalities are often portrayed as non-human. The Lapps are usually some hairy dwarfs and the Permians are all witches and wizards, it seems. I wouldn't feel too bad about having a grotesque Lapplander dwarf statue on my lawn because the image is so ridiculous that it cannot be taken to refer to real human beings. In a similar way, the very outlandishness of the Black Americana stuff can only be taken to refer to antebellum mythology rather than current racial attitudes.

However, this admittedly fine distinction might not be entirely clear to the casually viewer of such trinkets and so I eschew them.

What do you think? (The correct answer will appear soon!)

(Originally found through Substitute's blog)

UPDATE: The answer to this question is (highlight to read):

With this report of a possible NASA gunman at Johnson Space Center, let me officially publish my theory (that belongs to me) that global warming is driving people out of their minds.

While my evidence for this is slim, I find the frequency of alarming reports unsettling.

I posit that climate change has reached a noticable level and that our ancient monkey minds are screaming mad trying to warn us to flee. Of course, there is no where to flee, thanks to our broken space program.

Doomdoomdoomdoom.

Yet another school shooting has happened and obligatorily the suggestion that we all strap sideirons to our belts is proffered as the solution to protecting ourselves from danger.

Was the Old West safer because of pervasive gun toting? Was Rome, Athens or Sparta safer because daggers were everywhere? Surely, medieval Europe is the very model of personal security?

The very ease which the psycho at Virginia Tech obtained a weapon is a large part of why this disaster happened. The other, more omnious reason is simply that the dude wanted to kill. There's little that can be done to stop the lone gunman.

If you think that you would have been able to "drop" the gunman had you been there with a weapon, I'd take odds that you would have failed. It's very difficult to perform security under fire. Trained police and military forces have a hard enough time doing it.

Gun advocates implore us not to trust the government to save us. To an extent , I agree with them. Citizens need to do a certain amount of disaster preparation (see Katrina). However, you don't need to worry about the odd gunman/terrorist/revenuer.

Events in which you are faced with an armed opponent are outliers. Worry instead about drunk drivers and bad weather.

[Note: personal gun ownership does not scare the government into following the Constitution (they have much bigger guns), but voting sure does.]

Dear Red Sox Nation,

Try to enjoy Opening Day without me. I know it will be difficult. My thoughts are with you.

That is all.

From the L.A. Times:

«Los Angeles has the largest intact, though now dormant, movie theater district in the nation, having lost to the wrecker's ball only three major palaces: the cavernous Hill Street at 8th and Hill; the Paramount at 6th and Hill, a glorious Crypto-Egypto-Mesozoic pile of poured concrete with a Spanish exterior so solidly built that the contractor hired to tear it down lost his shirt in the process; and over on Main Street, the California, its elegant Beaux Arts facade never altered, not even its marquee, until it was replaced by a parking structure.»

Where to begin? Kudos for using a colon to denote the start of a list and using semicolons as list markers for long, comma-containing phrases. However, this technical achievement has produced a train-wreck of prose that's so dense and unwieldy that only sex-starved matrons from the Victorian era would enjoy teasing the content out from this mess.

If a writer cares a wit for his reader, he will not subject them to long, streched-out sentences so chocked full of complex descriptions of list items that the original sentence is utterly obliterated. Let's see if we can clean this up a bit.

Try as I might, I cannot fit in the additional information about these ancient theatres into the new paragraph in good conscience, since this article attempts to review the movie Grindhouse, not give a survey of L.A. movie houses. It's true that some fascinating details (and word count) are lost in my version, but I think it reads better.

What do you think?

I saw the following image while looking at google news today. Very appropriate for the subject. The U.S. needs a multi-billion dollar space-based missile defense program as much as a fish needs a bicycle. Still, I enjoy cold war imagery as much as the next person of my mature stature.

In the space of barely three months, I have finished reading all six of the currently published Harry Potter books. I must say that the series is impressive.

At the end of the sixth book, I do wonder how younger readers will take the very dark turn in the story? Perhaps, this is another case of "the old underestimate the young."

I'm curious how the story will resolve in just one book, but it should be entertaining.

You can find more of these tasteful icons of 9-11 rememberance here.

Terrorism strikes Boston again, but this time it's the children who are the targets.

I'll just link to Sean Burke's blog since he's got the whole AP story.

No, I wasn't hurt. And no, I didn't get any of these electronic ads. If I had, you can bet I would have placed these items on eBay by now.

Update: Mooning is not a crime.

Update:

Get the shirt here.

It amazes me that spamers target random HTML forms, such as those found on this site and others that I maintain. I believe I've mentioned this before, but still, WTF?

Right now, the form in which users can suggest an RSS for the feedbag is getting battered with bullshit suggestions for viagra. Sigh.

Fear is a potent weapon. Animals use fear both as a defensive tactic (by growling, shaking a rattle, bearing teeth, etc.) and as a defensive strategy by running away from things that scare them. Fear, in itself, isn't a bad thing at all. Fear is our first line of defense against danger.

However, irrational fear is a crippling affliction. The world is full of potential harm and to attempt to protect yourself from all of its dangers will paralyse you. Anyone suffering from clinical anxiety will tell you how damaging irrational fear is.

When politicians promulgate irrational fear, my upper lip starts to twitch and sweat. Weaponizing racism and xenophobia corrodes our national character and turns us against one another. Fear has never bred decency.

This lesson can be learn, once again, from Virginan Representative Virgil Goode, whose last name is so ironically villainous as to be a clichè. Goode isn't what one would call a multiculturist.

«"I do not subscribe to using the Koran in any way. The Muslim Representative from Minnesota was elected by the voters of that district and if American citizens don't wake up and adopt the Virgil Goode position on immigration there will likely be many more Muslims elected to office and demanding the use of the Koran."» [1]

Goode is referring to his counterpart Keith Ellison ("now they are taking our last names to blend in with us!"). Ellison insisted on taking his oath of office on the book of his faith, the Koran. Goode is pissed about it. However, Ellison's request isn't without precedent. Goode is making political hay of it, though, and that's disgusting. We do not insist that Jewish representives swear oaths on a Bible.

If I had my way, I'd do away with the the holy books in oath ceremonies entirely and make people take oaths on the Constitution. If a congressman doesn't consider that document important enough for oaths, I don't really want them to have his job.

Goode considers Ellison the vanguard of some Muslim conspiracy, it seems:

«"[Ellison is] a serious threat to the traditional values of the nation"» [2]

I don't exactly know what threat Goode is referring to. I assume he has a lot of time on his hands to be looking for new, hidden conspiracies since all other problems facing Congress have apparently been resolved. Oh wait, no they haven't.

We've been told many, many times that our war on terrorism isn't a war on Islam, but many in the Middle East aren't so sure about this. Presentative Goode's comments make it hard for the U.S. to engage and pursuade the rational Muslims of Iraq, Iran, Syriah and the rest of the Fertile Crescent that U.S. foreign policy is really in their best interests too.

What's worse, xenophobia turns our backs on this nation's defining characteristic: cultural pluralism. We can argue about what's the right number of immigrants to allow into the country each year. We can argue about how to deal with illegal immigration. We should not be talking about what creeds or ethnic groups to exclude from our national life.

We have always benefited from the "brain drain" of other countries who chose to make the lives of their educated middle class difficult. Immigrants from Europe, Russia, Iran, Turkey, North Africa have all contributed to the American way of life. We should be slow to shut door on those who can help us make a better country.

I would ask Mister Goode to stop pandering to our basest fears of "the other" and wake up to the reality of globalization. Unless "globization" is just a stand-in for "American economic empirialism." In that case, you can count me out.

I'm not a pagan, but due to the meager daylight budget afforded the Northeast in the autumn, I'm positively deLIGHTed that today is the shortest day of the year. From now on, I can expect more light even if that also means more snow.

Note to Druids: collect your holly leaves tonight for maximum efficacy.

Team B was a group of U.S. policy wonks that focused on the Soviet threat from the 1970s to the mid-1980s. I suspect that they would have happily continued focusing on the Soviet threat even after the fall of the U.S.S.R. because Soviets are just so much fun to hate.

You will probably recognize many of the technocrats involved in this group: Richard Peale, Don Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and Ed Teller to name a few. If you said that this group prefigured the neocons of the twenty-first century, you wouldn't be far off. Team B was that shadowy group lurking in the backrooms of D.C. whispering doom into the ears of Republicans like Ronald Reagan.

Do read this Boston Globe piece on the memoirs of former Team B leader, Richard Pipes ("you don't need to be a Dick to be on Team B, but it helps"). Pipes had lived through Nazi-occupied Poland and was rather down on totalarianism. And yet in 2003, he didn't think highly of the plan to democratize Iraq:

«Democracy requires, among other things, individualism -- the breakdown of old clannish, tribal organizations, the individual standing face-to-face with the state. You don't have that in the Middle East. Iraq is tribally run.»

This from a man whose group advocated a nuclear first strike against the U.S.S.R.

Team B was fed highly sensitive intelligence about the Soviets capabilities and intentions for atomic warfare and were convinced that Ivan was ready to lauch a first strike against an admittedly hostile and aggressive NATO. They were also convinced, without a gossamer of evidence, that the Soviets had a kind of stealth atomic sub that was invisible to sonar and, presumably, waiting off the coasts of the U.S. for their launch orders.

Team B was charged with thinking "outside the box." Apparently, that box was the one that included verifiable facts. Paranoid, sci-fi fantasies based on real U.S. black budget military projects seem to have been well-trodden territory for this thinktank.

Anyone with passing familiarity with Russian history should not have been surprised by the Soviet's aggressive defensive posture. Getting invaded repeatedly over the centures seems to make people a little touchy about their borders.

Of course, there's a fine line between a siege defense and expeditionary force. You have to imagine that there was a Soviet counterpart to Team B who would have been the kind of loonies that the American Team B were afraid of. It's not hard to see how this paranoia can become amplified by a hall of mirrors on both sides of the Cold War. Each shadowy group would have been convinced that the other was ignoring détante policies based on Mutually Assured Destruction and instead was planning how to win the ultimate zero-sum game.

Although Team B has long since disbanded, it's members and even it's paranoia continue to poison our "post-9/11" world. History is important, since it is the only guide we have to the future. Know who told me that? Newt Gingrich. No joke. If that's the case, old Newt would surely agree with Pipes's criticism of Paul Wolfowitz:

«Paul didn't have much education in history. It's not his field. He was educated as a military specialist, a nuclear weapons specialist. Like most scientists, he doesn't have a particular understanding of other cultures.»

Fortunately, Paul now has a job without touchy-feely problems like "culture." He's the current head of the World Bank. I'm sure his noted cultural sensitivity will used as successfully there was it was during his tenure as Don Rumsfeld's Deputy Secretary of Defense.

We are all doomed.

Here's a story that's an new twist on a familiar news story, but instead of "dog," think "motherboard,", replace "man" with "jjohn" and "bites" with "destroys." That's right after years of replacing my own computer hardware, I have destroyed my main Windows PC. I lay the blame for this incident on a power supply with a soft switch. The bastard sprang to life as I was removing a video card. You say "why didn't you unplug the machine before opening the box?" To which I reply, I did the other 99 times. Actually, I thought I had unplugged it that time. I was very surprised to see the CPU fan start moving!

Anyway, now I need to decide what I'm going to do about this. My Window's box was both my gaming platform and my TV. I will try to use one of my linux boxes for TV and I might have to content myself with Atari 2600 games, which is ok by me. Should I replace that box with a MacOS X box? A new Linux box? Another Windows box?

Have you got a really bone-headed hardware story? Do share!

[update: This incident forced me to finally get one of my TV tuner cards to work under Linux. I'm using xawtv and it works ok. It's unstable in a completely different way than the W2K version, so that's new. I think I can live with this for a while. At least until Farscape comes back on the air.]

[Original use.perl.org post and comments.]

Spice Girls do not corrupt young girls, research finds.

[Original use.perl.org post and comments.]

Thanks!

[Original use.perl.org post and comments.]

Not to get preachy but...

Acid attacks, mainly against women, went up to 338 in Bangladesh last year. The world is full of truly fucked up things, but I never thought that the problem would grow to the point where it would be necessary to organize a march against maiming women with acid. What kind of society engenders that kind of horrific violence? Here's a PSA for all my readers in Bangladesh: "Throwing acid on people is bad, m'okay?"

[Original use.perl.org post and comments.]

Given that I have no experience with a successful startup, you should listen to me when I say:

Now is a very, very good time to create a startup.

Why? Life continues and VCs still need to invest cash. That's what they do. They need startups as much as programmers and young businesses need cash. It's a fatal attraction.

There's a lot of interest in Bioinformatics - the awkward marriage of biology and information manipulation. Rather than have programming biologists, Biotech firms ought to consider pairing up biologists and programmers. The right tool for the right job, I say.

Microsoft, IBM and Sun are very interested in developing Web Services (.NET, Sun ONE, etc.). If you haven't looked into SOAP or XML-RPC, now would be a good time to do that.

Cringley points out in his column this week that many hi-tech companies are trying to provide anti-terrorist solutions. I'm not sure that such devices will ultimately succeed, but there's to be made money in trying.

Let's not forget that many companies will probably be upgrading their dated PC hardware this year too. Companies like Dell and, well, Dell, should do well. (Compaq and HP are hosed, I think).

I feel the US ecomony is about to gush back to life. 2002 should end very strongly. Now, if only I didn't enjoy being unemployed so much...

[Original use.perl.org post and comments.]

UPDATE: [11/27/2007] HA HA! Was I wrong about this or WHAT?