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GRAFFITI -- January 24, 2005 thru January 30, 2005>> Link to the Current Week <<Last Week << Mon Tues Wed Thu Fri Sat Sun >> Next Week Welcome to Orb Graffiti, a place for me to write daily about life and computers. Contrary to popular belief, the two are not interchangeable. About eMail - I publish email sometimes. If you send me an email and you want privacy or anonymity, please say so clearly at the beginning of your message. |
 
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January 24, 2005
0646 - Good morning. I was reading the February issue of Scientific American last night:
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To: [email protected] Dear Editors, I am pleasantly surprised to find your SA Perspectives commentary for February 2005 is lauding Lawrence Lessig's Creative Commons and the useful Copyright Licenses available there. I smiled and nodded my head then headed on into the month's issue... only to pause briefly and thumb my way back to page 4. There on the Departments page I see that SciAm print is still using legacy Copyright protection (All rights reserved). For this reason I quote none of your article on my website, as your actions appear not to be as enlightened (yet) as your principles. I look forward to some future issue when I can see the Creative Commons symbol proudly displayed on the cover of your journal. An unpleasant alternative, you might (just might) try to explain why, while the Creative Commons licenses are "surely a welcome arrival", they aren't appropriate for your publication. Of course, you can run with the pack on that one. Personally, I'd rather see you breaking new ground. Best, .brian --
Brian Bilbrey : http://www.orbdesigns.com/
"A mouse is a device used to point at the xterm you want to type in"
- A.S.R.
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What comes of that? We'll see... Nothing's come of the letters I wrote before.
Oh, I broke training. Yeah, I watched as Tom and the boys of New England helped Pittsburg self-destruct. They played well, and if nothing else, the game was remarkable to me in the near complete absences of penalties - there were what? Three of them? Nothing like the football that I remember growing up with. Of course, I grew up watching the Oakland Raiders, where they used to get called for penalties that are felonies today. Back then, a personal foul was anything short of murder, IIRC. So, Philly against the Pats. Any bets? I don't know enough about the Eagles to have an opinion.
RIP, Johnny Carson. They don't make late night guys like you anymore. Also departed recently, a currently unidentified US soldier on patrol, Saturday in Mosul. Condi, show us the plan for making peace in Iraq and getting our boys and girls home. Oh, and about Iran? That's another wrong target, you bonehead Rumsfeld. If you haven't got the balls to go after the Saudi's, then let the soldiers come home.
I've got a cunning plan of my own... but I'm still working on it. I"m not a policy wonk, so I'll need a bit more time. But it seems to make sense to me. Anyway, it's Monday. It wouldn't be fair to spring a new plan on the President on a Monday morning. So have a great day!
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January 25, 2005
1819 - Good evening. Doug Adams, of H2G fame, supposedly said, "I love deadlines, especially the whooshing sound they make as they go by." Well, I"m guilty of that today, but I plead whacked. Last night after I got home from work, I shoveled off the 3/4" of snowfall from the fast-moving system that came through Monday afternoon. Then I paid the bills that came in Monday's mail, some of them two to three weeks past their closing dates. I guess they don't want their money on time, if they can't get the bills out in an expedient manner, right?
Wasn't much else to report, as I spent the day fighting with a formerly functioning PHP script that used to work, but in what state nobody now alive remembers. But throw an external proxy box that also applies the SSL encryption to the appropriate connections, and Bob is nobody's uncle. I finally gave up and just used a GET method for this non-dangerous but needs to be working function ... all was joy and lightness thereafter. I'll talk about today, tomorrow. Now I'm going to do something else, have a great evening!
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January 26, 2005
0649 - Good morning. I have the sense that US politicians are ignoring evidence that global climate can be affected by fossil fuel emissions in a manner detrimental to human standards of living for one reason: fear. There's only one power source to compare to fossil fuels, and the Greenies have US Politics by the gonads when it comes to building nuclear power plants. We could be at better than 50% power served by nuclear today if not for idiot fear. Nuclear-powered desalination could be providing fresh water that many places in the world lack. What other options are there?There aren't many other places for hydroelectric. We can't dam the Mississippi, it's not in the right kind of terrain and besides, it's still a hugely useful navigable waterway.
Note that I said "human standards of living" up there. I don't really think that anything that's happening to climate is going to kill off mankind, although it'll take us down a peg or two. I sure as hell wish we could get an active Belt civilization going before we get into the teeth of whatever's coming. It's entirely possible that had we not warmed the Earth, we'd be on our way into another period of glaciation one of these millenia, and that'd be a heck of a thing to cope with, worse than warming and coastal intrusion by rising sea levels methinks.
I also believe that nothing we do today is going to have much effect on the outcome. For that belief if for no other reason, I'd rather follow Pournelle's line and spend some money on learning more about what's really going on, and figuring out how best to adapt to it, instead of pauperizing the developing world in probability of accomplishing jack-all.
I'm looking at UMUC to complete a degree. While it'd be possibly prudent to power through the thing and take the most expedient course, I'm more likely to go after Information Systems Management. Even more challenging would be to finish up the original track from all those years ago -- a CIS degree. The downside there is that I'd be likely to suffer from age bias, while the IfMS degree can build on my prior experience to lead into more positions of responsibility without totally abandoning geek creds to something like an MBA. I'll get that ball rolling shortly with a plan to pick up online courses starting in the Fall semester. I'll finish when I finish. But I'd best get started finishing, or I never will...
Latest DoD reports:
My heart goes out to their families. My thanks go out to all of our troops, following their orders and trying now to make peace in a place where the people count civilian lives cheap. You men and women make me proud to be American.
Current listening: Peter Gabriel, In Your Eyes.
Good day!
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January 27, 2005
0652 - Good morning. Some snaps from last weekend...
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On Saturday the snow started falling in earnest shortly after we got home from the vets. Marcia had headed out to her emergency hair appointment, and I let the dogs out to play. Marcia had told me that the occasionally skittish Molly was a hoot the previous Wednesday, trying to dodge snowflakes. That didn't happen this time. Molly seems to enjoy the snow - it makes everything smell different, too, I guess. But clearly (as you can see in the above left shot), Molly doesn't hold a candle to Lucy in the enjoying snow category. She rolls in it, dives in it, scrubs the top of her head in it -- she fills her nostrils and then sneezes hugely. But it works for her.
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Once the girls were in and dried off, they got a special midday Saturday snow day treat of a rawhide chew stick. Lucy, being a little dainty dog except when she's biting faces, props hers up and works away at it. Molly wolfs hers down in three great chomps to break it up enough to swallow, though, then looks up at me ... why isn't there more, Dad? She doesn't try to steal food from Lucy though (no fool her), and soon both dogs are casting about looking for more treats. And the snow kept coming down for a while. But not nearly as much as expected, and by now it's mostly gone.
A bad day in Iraq for US troops, running up to the elections on Sunday. Between the chopper crash and enemy action, 37 souls died in service to our country yesterday. Latest DoD reports: Sgt. Brett D. Swank, of Northumberland, Pa., died Jan. 24 in Baghdad, Iraq, from injuries sustained when an improvised explosive device detonated near his position.
Dan Seto wrote to me a bit more about Lt. Hoe (whom I mentioned yesterday). A native Hawaiian, he was married to his bride on the beach right before shipping out to Iraq. Dan says he's likely to post more about this young soldier when he can.
And out in California, some useless suicidal maroon decided to kill himself by having a train hit him while he sat in his SUV. Oh, wait, no he didn't. Now fearing for his life, he ran from the vehicle just before the full commuter train struck it, derailing, knocking over freight cars onto the tracks in front of yet another full commuter train. With ten dead (twelve by some reports) and near 200 injured by the idiocy of this waste of skin, they're going to charge him with murder. I dunno ... how about just letting him have some private time with the families of the dead?
Current listening: Murray Perahia playing something nice by Handel.
Life is a bummer sometimes. But it goes on. Ciao!
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January 28, 2005
0633 - Good morning. Here's a present from Wynn Frazeur:
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New Viruses
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Latest DoD reports:
Our soldiers were dying 60 years ago yesterday in Europe as some of them liberated Auschwitz. Our soldiers are dying in Iraq in the fight to bring freedom there. Hussein and his puffed up cronies wanted the world to believe that he had weapons of mass destruction, that he would use them, (and we feared that if he did have, they might get into the hands of those that would bring the battle to our shores), so we went. Hussein lied, and we fell for it. Hell, the world fell for it, they just wanted to keep sending in inspectors to be shuttled around in vans and choppers, being kept out of imperial palaces where Saddam was counting his Oil for Food program kickbacks. Okay, but we're there, and apparently have the responsibility to stay long enough to stabilize the situation before we bugout. Can the people who want the Americans out of Iraq simply not understand that until things become calmer and more stable, we can't leave? Is it really so hard to understand? Chill out, let the process work, and we'll help build and leave Iraq in better shape than when we came in. We're stupid that way... But our troops are doing the good work, and we honor them!
I suspect that what the insurgents really fear is a strong Iraqi government not run by them. Because once we leave, it's likely that what happens to prisoners who set car bombs and IEDs will have happen to them in prison things far worse than were going on in Abu Ghraib. I'm just guessing, of course.
Wow! Last night at 2140, when I put the dogs out for the last time of the evening, it was 15.2° F. Twenty minutes later, when the dishes were done and the coffee set for this morning, it was 13.8° F. Right now it's 9.6° F. For us, that's bloody cold. It's probably a shorts and sandels day for the Syroids (how are you doing up there, friends?), but for me, this is cold.
I've go a long day ahead, and best be about it. Have a great day!
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January 29, 2005
1033 - Good morning. I had some MP3 files which I'd ripped long ago from a couple of our CD's, before I got Marcia a MS-compatible Ogg Vorbis player. Well, those CDs are packed away someplace and I was looking for a way to get them into Ogg format. After a bit of searching, I came across a useful Bash script (it requires late-model Mplayer and Vorbis tools to be installed)
#!/bin/bash
if [ ! -f "$1" ]; then
echo "Usage: $(basename $0) [Album name]"
exit 1
fi
IN_FILE="$1"
OUT_FILE="${IN_FILE%%.wma}".ogg
TOC_FILE="${IN_FILE%%.wma}".toc
mkfifo soundpipe
oggenc -b 192 soundpipe -o "$OUT_FILE" > /dev/null 1>&2 &
mplayer -quiet -ao pcm -aofile soundpipe -vo null -vc dummy "$IN_FILE" \
2> /dev/null | grep -e author -e name > "$TOC_FILE"
rm -f soundpipe
TITLE=$(cat "$TOC_FILE" | grep " name:" | sed -e 's/ name: //g')
ARTIST=$(cat "$TOC_FILE" | grep " author:" | sed -e 's/ author: //g')
ALBUM=""
[ -n "$2" ] && ALBUM="$2"
vorbiscomment -a -t "ARTIST=$ARTIST" -t "TITLE=$TITLE" -t "ALBUM=$ALBUM" "$OUT_FILE"
rm -f "$TOC_FILE"
It works like a charm, by creating a fifo, connecting oggenc to the output, then using mplayer to read the original, do the first part of the conversion (to PCM format), then feed the front end of the fifo. Very cool. I found that on a site entitled Tiago Cogumbreiro. The writer on that site (known cryptically as s1x) is also writing a Gnome-ish audio CD authoring tool called Serpentine - nothing I need right now, but it's worth knowing about.
Latest DoD reports:
Sigh.
On tap for today, I'm going to get the vehicles serviced, they're both due. Beyond that, I'm unplanned. More later if appropriate, or I'll see you tomorrow.
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January 30, 2005
1013 - Good morning. It's a crap weather day out today, light snow tending towards sleet and icy rain. The good news is that not all bands have their heads up their butts. I speak, of course, of the String Cheese Incident. Yes, yes, yes, they do have some of that über-evil Flash shite on their site, but still. Why, you ask, do I enthuse? I followed a link to the Business Owners Blog from our very own Frank McPherson, showing how SCI has built themselves into a multi-million dollar business by embracing the Internet and the best of Fan Appreciation as once practiced by the Grateful Dead. It's a good article on the Business Owner's site, and should make any small business owner think about how to make their business dance to the new music in ways that their competition can't and or won't. Thanks, Frank!
Ah, just one car got in for service yesterday. The Jiffy Lube that I frequent was busier than Sin at Mardi Gras. Heather (the manager) was short two bodies, and had to fire someone else, so things were just at a crawl for yesterday. I'll take the Santa Fe in next Saturday, instead.
It's Iraq's election day. Good on them. "Absentee" balloting has been going on since Friday at a number of international sites, and that hasn't been made easy for exiles. Here, for instance, people had to come to the polling sites (just five in the US) one day, in person, a week ago to register for voting, then return Friday through Sunday current for actual voting. Much was made of that in the news, with nary an explanation of why. I could make up some reasons, or ... no, almighty Google didn't provide quickly that time, and I suppose it doesn't matter much. The news from Iraq this morning is relatively good, with Reuters reporting that voting is going well, bombings kiling just 22 so far (I expected a bit higher number).
Latest DoD reports:
We have snow on the ground again It started last night, with about 1/2 inch down by bedtime. There was about an inch more overnight, and it continues to snow lightly. However, the temperature is rising through freezing as I write this, so we'll be converting to sleet and/or rain soon enough. Just as well, since we have the weekly shopping to do as soon as I get this posted. Have a great day!
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Visit the rest of the DAYNOTES GANG, a collection of bright minds and sharp wits. Really, I don't know why they tolerate me <grin>. My personal inspiration for these pages is Dr. Jerry Pournelle. I am also indebted to Bob Thompson and Tom Syroid for their patience, guidance and feedback. Of course, I am sustained by and beholden to my lovely wife, Marcia. You can find her online too, at http://www.dutchgirl.net/. Thanks for dropping by.
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