Reading (For Dummies)

If only I lived

In the US still. These stickers would join my UnAmerican ones.

The war

I'm glad* Doug is starting up this thread, as I'm developing more of an opinion than the normal "war is evil" thing myself. While I do admire the efforts of the Baghdad Human Shield, I worry that the liberal front is acting uninformed.

The United States learned the importance of playing the information game during WW2. The goal is having spies in on the other side, and not giving away who they are by acting like you know too much. Assuming that the Iraqis have some weapons of the evil variety (which I guess is everything but in this case I mean dirty bombs, chemicals specifically made for killing humans and little doggies in cages, etc), and the United States knows where they are, the US might have a reason not to tell the UN inspectors. There was a recent article on kuro5hin about this sort of disinformation.

What I do worry about is that the United Nations seem to think there are no weapons, so maybe this excuse doesn't apply. I mean, the US could obviously give the UN the information and evidence, with the stipulation that the UN does not tell its weapons inspection teams. That the US either has not presented the evidence to the UN, or that the UN doesn't believe it, is cause for alarm in my book. And if the US hasn't given the UN any information? Well there's a sign of a lack of trust, which is more worrying.

I'm not as politically edumacated as Doug, but reading the news these days I can only distrust everything I see. Either the has made a policy not to tell anyone what it knows, or it is lying and everything is just about oil/money/power/revenge/etc. But I don't think we'll learn what the truth is until we're all old enough to read about it in a history book. Of course, then we'll probably be dead.

I tend to lean on the side of the US lying though, for the UN security council reasons mentioned above, and also because of the clause in one of their Iraq resolutions giving them the power to interview Iraqi scientists, including the right to take them out of the country for the interview. If there is a spy in Iraq, why not move him out, protect him, have him squeak in front of the UN, and let what happens happen. And keep it all hush-hush.

But, as a Joe Citizen, I must confess that I'm not privy to all the dark room meetings that the players are, so I don't know...

*While Doug makes good points, he invoked Godwin's Law. Oops.

The Simpson's

"Now we may [never] know if ants can be trained to sort tiny screws in space." -- Buzz Aldrin (from Deep Space Homer [1F13]).

Well, okay not quite but almost. I can't believe the school I graduated from is taking part in something so silly.

Falling for Bob

Doug has given me [access to] some Dylan bootlegs recently, and I have to say I really dig 'em (thanks to the OGG Vorbis plugin for iTunes).

I never had an appreciation for the minstrel before; now I can't get enough of it. It's kind of a painful thing though. I wish I was in Syracuse still so I could sit around with dfc. I doubt my computer nerd friends here will dig it so much.

Applescript question

Here's what I want to write. A stupid applescript that does this:

do shell script "export DISPLAY=localhost:0;/usr/X11R6/bin/xterm"
quit

So it should pop open an xterm on my screen, and then quit. The quit for some reason makes the the applescript interpreter quit or something, leaving the script program "running." I'd prefer it to quit so I can click and launch it again, and open another xterm. Kind of like the little xterm button you get under gnome/kde/etc. Anybody know how to do this?

On Google

I thought of a new idea for Google searching today.

Most bloggers have some idea or see a news story and use google (or some search engine) to dig up a few links about the background of the story, so that they can present these nice links in their blog and keep readers from having to do the same search. But what if you're really lazy and don't feel like sifting through all the search results to find the best explanation of what it is you're looking for? It would be cool if google (or some search engine) included an "individualized page rank" type system. How it works? You provide a link to some key words you talk about, and it takes you to search results for the terms. The search results are specific for your particular blog/blog entry, in that a page rank is applied to your specific results. So if 500 people read your entry and click the term search, they have to weed through the search results for a few seconds to find the most appopriate article. As more people pick the same article, it gets moved to the top of the heap, until it reaches a threshhold popularity, and the term search link in your blog entry changes from linking to all search results to the specific most popular one. It'd take community blogging to a whole new level.

Or it might be kind of pointless. Who knows.

Measuring the verocity of a worm

Today's MS-SQL worm attack has made me wonder about doing an analysis on internet susceptibility to such virii.

Like a normal human-born disease, a worm needs to have proper timing if it is to do the most damage to a network. Today's worm did a pretty good job of wrecking the 'net, with 5 of the root nameservers buckling. But it could have done better.

The problem with it was that it moved too quickly. While speed is a good way to infect the maximum number of hosts on the internet (like in real life), it has the problem that it draws too much attention to itself, especially when the cure is as easy as pennicilin. What the virus writer should have done was made it work a little more slowly for the first, say, 30-40 hours. Then on Sunday it should have started sending random UDP connections (ie to random ports, on random servers, with a big old chunky payload). That would have _really_ crippled the 'net.

Reasons my dad is cool

"Organized and hierarchal groups were able to out-compete individualists, as a matter of course. Note, some things have come out of that that are interesting, like French cooking, and sexy underwear. But in general we really fucked up."

Amen brother, amen.

I like to ride my bicycle

Today I ordered my bicycle from Generator Radsport. The dilly?

- Rotor Arsen MTB frame - 1900g
- Sr. Suntour XPC-D fork - 1960g (very cheap and about the same as my old Judy C)
- Shimano Deore component set

Total cost with all the extra junk is 860,00 €. Ow. Well, I made my down payment of 100,00€ today. I get the bike in two weeks. It's going to be damn fine to be able to ride again. Damn fine.

Great..

Yeah.

Intellectual Conversation

When did intellectual conversation die? For me it was years ago. I used to enjoy sitting around with my friends talking about the "what is?" What is life? What is consciousness? What is god (Who? Who. Who? Exactly.) Then I got tired. Nobody presents any new ideas anymore.

Maybe I got too stubborn...and that the universe is deterministic. Talk about the meaning of life, the singularity and the Omega point are ideas that I've mulled over and spat out. Doubtful we'll make a computer that survives heat death or the big crunch.

Phiniki and I drank a bottle of wine over a rehashed intellectual conversation last night. We both knew we were defeated when she said, "Yeah, but what's the point?" I mean, sure it'd be cool to have a computer/a species able to live an infinite amount of time if the universe keeps blowing up, or compute everything right as the universe collapses. But there doesn't seem much a point. They're fun mental excercises but I don't share the same science-fiction optimism that Gene Rodenberry did.

Even supposing such a computer survived what would it be? This computer that knows everything; all it would succeed in doing, though, is proving Gödel right, right?

Anyway I still like what I'm doing, I'm just getting the mid-winter "wondering what is going to happen to humanity?" blues. And I miss having conversations where new ideas were generated. Cuz there are no new ideas. Maybe I should read more...

Creepy

So a few weeks ago I read Neuromancer, and about the same time the blogging community welcomed William Gibson's blog into the world.

Now I started reading Dharma Bums and the blogging community is welcoming On the Road into the film community. I've also started reading Foucault's Pendulum...I wonder if anything will happen with that?

I didn't plan any of this, honest.

Software Patent Blues

Weird. I was just IM'ing my dad earlier this evening about Ben Stein's innovation essay when up pops another retarded tort claim. So up I hop on my podium to make an announcement.

Software patents are retarded. Especially this one. Ooh, a patent on drop-down menus (I used to use them). Give me a break. Guess what? Javascript and HTML include to the ability to create a drop down menu for navigation. Guess what else? The people who developed both standards wrote the code needed to create a drop-down menu, and they had this idea in mind when they did it. And guess what else? They tested their code! To make a computer related analogy, this is like someone writing NURB-editing software, and someone else patenting a "Non-Uniform Rasterized B-spline (aka NURB) rendered object."

Please face a wall, sit in lotus position, and chant the mantra with me, "prior art, prior art, prior art, prior art, prior art, prior art......" Repeat the meditation 103 times, or until your mind is cleansed.

8675309

Okay here's a weird phone number for everyone: +49(0)35242/444-0. I solved the equation and got 128.37387. So what do I dial?

Birthday, Ho!

Friday was the Volkswagen plant tour. Ours was lead by a Yank, a Central New York guy whose name I forget.

Photos not allowed

Unfortunately we couldn't take pictures of the factory floor. But it did look pretty nice...hardwood floors with little robots running around with parts for the workers.

I celebrated my birthday finally this weekend with new friends. It was a multi-cultural dinner round-table.

Clockwise from left: Syria, China, Russia, Cyrpus (Greece), Malaysia

After dinner we went to shoot some pool, and Finiki's American roommate, Skyler, joined us.

The American

He's a bit young at 19, but we hit it off right away. How couldn't we? We both read Preacher. And we're both here for the same reasons. And we both play guitar. So all is good.

Finiki, hustler

We all stink at playing pool. Being Finiki's first night, she showed off her classy shooting.

A new flight home

I found a new flight home for when i go back. I always wished that Lufthansa would do that. Imagine blogging from a plane...Well, this will annoy my parents as they'll have to drive to DC to pick me up :).

Fighting the Information War

Wow. Iraq and North Korea seem to have learned how to fight the United States really well with words, and convincing the country itself that it has pretty shitty foreign policy. Let's see the tally:

The day before I left the USA, I heard on NPR two news stories, one after the other. The first was a United Nations statement that Iraq has been throroughly checked, and they could not find any weapons of mass destruction. The second was a Bush speech demanding that Iraq stop producing weapons of mass destruction or face the wrath of Papa.

Now we know North Korea has nukes. We know they want to use them on us...they're itching for it. I think the timing was just right on N. Korea's part to make their announcement. It is playing on this lingering mistrust of the man, and pointing out a blatant contradiction in his policy. Now a member of the so-called, "Axis of Evil" is making threats, and we're offering them money (Note: CNN is a wholly untrustworthy news source, sorry for linking to them :)). Meanwhile our pals in Iraq may or may not have such weapons, and even if they do all the top experts say they won't use them. Who should we be going after?

Ohwell, I'm saying things everyone already knows again.

Picture

Random Self-Portrait

Hey look, my town is famous

And not for being blown to hell during WW2. It's because of the AMD plant.

Anthrax

I can't say this surprises me at all. When I was back in the US, my dad got a whole bunch of Christmas cards. Some of them were delivered by mail and had no return address on them. How quickly the post office forgets these things...

Putting the Christ back in Christmas

Tonight I joined the Dresden Debating Union. They have debates once per month in English (the rest of the weeks they do them in German). It is done in British Parliamentary Style. The night's topic was, "This house believes Christmas presents are bad for society." I was Government Whip. *crack*

Because I'm a stickler for winning arguments, and because most of the people around here are Christian, I was agreeing with Government that Christmas presents detract from the celebration of Jesus. Our main arguments seemed to be economic...I was driving my teammate (Ferri, the one and same Austrian that I climb with) to talk about economic policy. I mean, hey, he's an economist, and my former roommate once dubbed me, "Honorary Jew," for being so cheap at Christmastime.

So yeah, I'm washing my mouth out with soap now over the Jesus thing...I'll burn all my clothes and claw my eyes out later. But I do anything for a win in a debate.

I think I will go back though. It is good to increase my public speaking skills. Maybe I will be president when I grow up.

More Bush Bashing

Someone did a fabulous editing job on Bush' State of the Union Address, cutting out all the words that didn't matter, and boiling the speech down to its very essence. Kudos.

Batman

Have you heard of Batman: Year One? Supposedly it's being being directed by Darren Aranofsky, but now some dude named Enrique Garcia is doing his own adaptation. I hope Enrique's version convinces Warner Bros. to put out a legit version. While I enjoy his trailer, complete with music from Requiem for a Dream (*shudder*, thinking about the soundtrack leaves me unable to masturbate for weeks...if you want to be disturbed try the movie), I'm not sure that he could pull off the first year of Bruce Wayne's return to Gotham. There exists a definite degree of vulnerability in the Batman character that Aranofsky could pull off well. And, well, the picture quality of Enriques shoots don't look so hot (a little bit low-budget, though these are just proofs, not the finished product).

Either way, though, it will be one hell of a movie. Batman has to be my favorite superhero...combine the world's best fighter, the world's smartest detective, no superpowers, and a sense of vengeance that can only be described as insanity, and you have the makings of a great character...

Oh my

Frodo has failed

Save the Church!

A very sad email came today. My Church is closing down. Luckily this means that it will be re-opening under a new leader (not that the old leader was bad, he was great), and incorporating (this is a really good thing imho). So now the church will be even more official and protected against idiot xtian pastors burning down buildings in our name, attempting to sue the church head.

I have also recently been assigned as a grader for the church essay competition, which is open to high school Juniors and Seniors. So if you fit the description, check it out...there's a cash reward and all that jazz.

Friends

This post is dedicated to Doug Calvert -- let's start remembering people while they're alive.

The other day I mailed Doug a huge long rant about what to do; I'm sitting in Dresden and I'm restless. He mails me back with a quotation concocted while under the effects of America's finest tobacco and it is good. Maybe that's why Googlisms says "dfc is accessible". Just ignore the "dfc is dead" remark on there...

HAL 9000

23 years old

I cropped the picture to spare everyone the view of my chest hair. I think I will take a photo like this every year, and later on in life create a morphing picture of me over the years. The end product would probably be startling.

Today is my day of birth, for those that don't know. I would normally never tell anyone that, but why not. It's easy to remember, since HAL 9000 booted up on January 12th, 1996. I guess it was destiny that I should study logics and programming, and have an interest in consciousness and artificial intelligence.

Finding my group

I think a huge part of my failure to love Germany has not been finding the right crowd. That finally changed.

Look at me go

I guess one of the signs that I'm comfortable with a group of people is my ability to drink with them. Normally paranoia (or better judgement) gets in the way. On Friday, however, I went to Plaka with Phiniki, Maja, Boon-Chung, Iman, and Wei-Wei, and drank quite a few Uzos. Iman and Maja weren't drinking any of theirs so I helped them out a bit.

Then it was wandering off with Phiniki to meet up with her Cyprian friend Huseyin. We went to a government-run furniture facility, reminiscent of the Salvation Army but not religiously affiliated, and free. This small house on the northern outskirts of town has furniture and household goods. You can take what you want, and leave whatever donation you think is reasonable/you can reasonably afford. Not much was left, but Huseyin reports that a shipment comes in Saturday morning...

They are an interesting pair; Phiniki is a Greek Cypriot and Huseyin is a Turkish Cypriot. So last night, the Christian, the Muslim, and the Boddhisatva talked politics and religion from 6:00pm until 3:00am. It was an eye-opening experience, as I've never had a candid talk with a Muslim about his religion. I also learned quite a bit of the history of Cyprus. I've done some poking around last night and have come across a pretty informative article on the "real" history of Cyprus. Once again, the United States can be at least half-blamed for troubles there; our plans were to keep the island divided in case of invasion by Russia or a Greek Cypriot socialist church leader. Both possibilities would have lead to the loss of a key American base in the Meditarranean.

Ohwell. Phiniki and I went back to this place this morning, but it was closed. I need to go this week, as they have a kitchenware section with some pots, pans, plates, and glasses, all of which could help minimize my moving expenses...

William Gibson

I started reading Neuromancer last week and whaddya know, William Gibson has a blog. COOL.

Battle Lines are Drawn

AMI today announced something extremely disturbing, their first computer with a bios that ensures your bootloader is "trustworthy". I guess lots of the nerds who read me aren't nerds of computers (yeah, I've been talking not your jive lately). But don't buy one of things, please. I see one of two things possible happening, but before I go into that, I should give the non-techies a little background on the TCPA.

The TCPA was created to, well, create a Trusted Computed Platform. It has a bunch of projects, but the one on everyone's mind is this BIOS thing, called the Trusted Platform Module. The BIOS of your computer is what tells it how to boot, among other things. It says, "Okay, I see this stuff in the computer: A hard disk, a CDROM drive, a network card, a video card. What do I boot off of? Okay, my settings say to boot from the hard disk. Here goes..." It then loads what is called a boot loader from the front of the hard disk. This is a little program that makes magic happen: it loads your operating system into memory and gets it to a point where the operating system can do the rest of the work.

The BIOS in a TPM-equipped computer will instead look at your computer and see all the hardware, but will not boot off the hard disk yet. It will check out this boot loader and see if it can be trusted, by doing a little cryptographic checksum on it. Basically fancy math on the data that makes it impossible to trick the TPM BIOS*.

The rest of the story isn't really related to the BIOS, but I'll tell it anyway, because it's important. The boot loader should, it is assumed, only load an OS that is TCPA-certified, and in turn that OS will only run software that is TCPA-certified. It's kind of a good idea, at the heart: Your computer makes sure that no nasty software is running on it, for you. But there's a pretty big problem that a lot of people, and that's Microsoft.

Microsoft, of course, is looking for money. All the companies on board are. But Microsoft is the only one in the alliance whose primary product is software. I smell monopoly. And yes, Microsoft is on the board, have a look

I see one of two things happening:
1) Microsoft tries to bully the Alliance into making a Windows bootloader the only trusted bootloader.
2) The hardware companies (who all pretty much like Linux), calling Windows an untrustworthy platform and excluding its bootloaders from the list of trusted ones.

Of course, this problably means that the third option will happen:
3) Both of the above. The alliance will dissolve, and bye-bye to our worries.

Okay, so confession. I'm a linux-lover, and a Microsoft-hater. But if either 1 or 2 happens, that's Really Bad. Competition is good. No competition is like creating a wonderfully stagnant pool for the mosquitoes.

The whole TCPA thing would be kind of useful, actually, but not for a consumer market. I envision it being used in large networked data centers, and other places where security is a big deal, and you want to be sure nobody's tinkered with your operating system while you weren't looking.

But, I must reiterate, don't buy these for home use. If you do, you may end up being stuck in (in fact, sticking us _all_ in) situation 1 or 2 above.

* Well, fancy math that nobody's proven yet, but nobody's disproven either. Funny that we rely on it so much.

When Nature Strikes Back

The locals are a little bit nervous about the weather this year. I guess after the floods last summer you can't blame. You also can't blame them because, well, Terrassenufer has never looked like this before.

The Terrassenufer

The Elbe has never been this high in the winter; it usually only covers the street in the Spring, and even then it only happens once every few years. It has the natives worried about what spring will bring this year.

Ice flows down the street

The floodwaters, combined with the crippling cold, provide a nice little punch. The temperature when I woke up this morning was -18C (-1F). My beard had ice chunks in it only a few minutes after walking out the door. It was cloudless precipitation most of the day; fine ice crystals falling out of a sunny sky, as the dew point was reached and frost claimed the last bit of humidity in the air.

No More Frustration

Yay. I managed to fix it. For anyone reading that cares, or runs into similiar problems: If you install the Apple X11 SDK first, _then_ remove your fink x server, that's bad. The SDK replaces some files from the fink xfree86 versions, and when you remove the fink versions it deletes those files. Then when you install the dummy X11 server in fink (system-xfree86), it complains because it needs the SDK files. So re-install the X11 SDK fixes the errors. So in conclusion, what you should do to switch to apple's X11 server:

1) Remove whatever x server you have installed by fink (dpkg -r --force-depends -- do this because it'll prevent you from having to reinstall all your packages that depend on X).
2) Install Apple's X11 Server
3) Install Apple's X11 SDK
4) Install system-xfree86

If you do things out of order, don't panic. Take a deep breath, and follow the instructions exactly as above. They'll work even if you partially screwed your system.

So I have the gimp running accelerated under Jaguar, all pretty. It runs a little slower than it did under linux though...looks like things aren't quite optimized...

Frustrations

I'm meaning to type meaningful entries with more pictures, but my computer isn't cooperating. Really. After I installed Apple's X11 server and tried to install the gimp in fink, everything barfed. Fink thinks I have no xserver, and won't install the xserver placeholder placeholder package due to a preinst script error. So no pictures until I completely re-install fink and hopefully get it to play nice, and get the gimp working. iPhoto is nice and all, but it doesn't know how to compress jpeg's worth a damned...photos that the gimp makes 12k, iPhoto makes 120k. I just don't have the bandwidth for big files like that....

But stay tuned....I took pictures of the Elbe flooding again, this time there are ice flows on the streets. Amazing stuff!

Apple is on a Roll

Mad props to Apple lately. While my ibook battery still sucks, they've been putting out hella good software. And now we're even getting a real X11 server. I'm glad I bought a mac again. Even if it's worth nothing less than 6 months after I bought it. Again.

My biggest complaints about the MacOS now are:
1) No LaTex. Booooooo! I type everything in tex nowadays.
2) X11 server, how the heck do you use it? It doesn't install any docs, so I'm stuck using unaccelerated xfree86 from fink.
3) No multiple desktops. My 12 inch laptop screen is simply too small for the 70 or 80 program windows I like to keep open.
4) Lack of debian-like centralized package manager. I do use fink, but I mean a centralized package manager for MacOS software. Apple's software update only keeps track of the core OS. It doesn't tell me about new free Apple software or anything.

Yeah I'm a whiner, so sue me.

Today while doing errands I caught snowflakes on my hands. The snowflakes are, dare I say, beautiful. Not like in America. They're actually snowflakes, intricate crystal lattice structures. Very mathematical. Most of the flakes I see in the US are icy chunks, more to do with ugly randomness than Koch. It's been snowing constantly since I got back, always this very slow drifting down. I suppose the flakes stay so pristine because they aren't moving fast. It reminds me of the people around here...they take their time getting where they're going; there's no rush to be first. I'll take a movie of the snow tomorrow.

Paranoia and other emotions

So here I am thinking more about paranoid lunacy and system security. I found a neat little device that's actually a very cool idea I had a few months ago. A small USB solid-state drive that needs to scan a fingerprint for access. I'm not entirely sure how it works, like if it's just a drive that requires OS support, or if it has the whole biometric check and everything built into it (I hope that's the case, then it will work under Jaguar, which I'm now running full-time on my ibook). I sort of wonder if they pulled it off right...

Also on the list of items to mull over is my continued stay in Dresden. Two things influence me heavily to leave: one, it is highly unlikely I can finish the program in two years. The average student here takes 2.5 to 3. The second is wondering if staying here that long would be badness between Annie and myself. Only getting to see each other 2-3 times a year would be very bad. And she's someone I really don't want to lose to stupidity now. So that's the thing to mull over these days. Yeah, a little different outlook than even a few months ago

Smells like Teen Christmas

What have I been up to during my Solstice *cough* break? Lots of stuff. Annie met me at the airport and her and my dad drove me home. It was much good snuggling time and was a really sweet way to come back to the US. We hit up Kat's house, did a little solstice festival on the 21st. Annie left for Virginia on the 22nd. Bummer. We did another solstice fest that night.

Me, Dec 22. No substances are currently affecting my brain

I did the usual disfunctional family Christmas...breakfast at dad's, lunch at my Aunt Mary's, dinner at mom's. We took a family photo at my mother's house...

The fam (mom's side), Christmas night

Two days later I went to Madison, Virginia to be with Annie some more. It was cool. I fixed lots of stuff, and got to actually meet her mom and spend some time talking. We also went hiking.

Old Rag Mountain the Sunday after Xmas

Then back to New Jersey. Magically, my website came up somewhere in there. Cool. Now I can update again. That's all for tonight. Tomorrow I leave for Germany again. Boo. I'm going to miss my girlfriend.