Orb Designs Graffiti, a Daily Blog - March 20, 2006 thru March 26, 2006

GRAFFITI -- March 20, 2006 thru March 26, 2006

>> 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.

MONDAY Tues Wed Thu Fri Sat Sun
March 20, 2006

0817 - Good morning. It would appear that Big Media found a "new" talking head to speak of civil war in Iraq. Yeah, Ayad Allawi, who refers to "God", not "Allah" in his calling the confict "civil war". Allawi, former Prime Minister who called Shia throwing shoes at him an assassination attempt. Allawi who provided MI6 with some of the WMD information that Bush used to justify his war. Allawi, the discredited. I've got four letters for Allawi: STFU.

Plenty of work for me this chilly Monday. So I'd best be about my business. Ciao!

Top / Email Brian

Mon TUESDAY Wed Thu Fri Sat Sun
March 21, 2006

0656 - Good morning. One of the gems from our trip west back in January was a set of transcriptions from assorted letters home and diaries, from our family trip to Europe, August 10 to November 10, 1974. Mum painstakingly retyped all of this stuff from aerograms badly scribbled on jouncing trains and bouncing planes. It's really quite nice to have that written record of those times. I remember much of that trip, having been 13 at the time. I wasn't very communicative, though. The only bit that survives from that time by my hand is a two sentence missile to one of the sets of grandparents, noting that I was having fun. My sister wrote quite a lot, and kept a diary to boot. But it was mostly the parental units who kept up the literate end of our bargain with civilization, and a good thing that is, too.

That trip started off with a charter flight from Oakland to London, then a drive out to the Buckland Manor (just outside Broadway) in the Cotswolds. There we stayed for 6 weeks, playing cricket and squash and helping out with an ass show (get out of the gutter, I meant donkeys) and gadding about to assorted castles and ruins and beaches and churches and whatnot. Marcia and I have a couple of church floor brass rubbings that we made, on our foyer walls. From there to London by SeaTrain to Amsterdam, which was dirty, but pleasant. Then we were on our Eurail Pass time, and headed down through Belgium and France into Spain. A week, perhaps, in Madrid, then a few days in the Spanish Riviera (after the season was over), then Italy (Florence, Nice, Rome, Pisa), and back to France, where we stayed a few days before hopping a hovercraft back across the choppy channel and into our digs abutting Kensington Park for the final three weeks of the trip.

That was great fun, as was reading those memories over again last night (and looking at some of the pictures from that trip in the photo albums while visiting in January).

First full day of Spring, so of course we're expecting snow later today. Lovely. The traffic lady has been promising me hell on the beltway for the last hour and a half -- I'd better go see if she's telling the truth. Bye...

Top / Email Brian

Mon Tues WEDNESDAY Thu Fri Sat Sun
March 22, 2006

0822 - Good morning. I read yesterday that the OpenBSD project is in financial straits, and has been operating at a loss for the last two years. Now I've only been on the bandwagon for a couple of years now, having purchased CD sets for the last three releases, and the next one coming out in May. This time around, I added a $100 outright donation to the project in addition to my regular t-shirt plus CDs purchase. Now, Marco says that OpenBSD needs to generate about $100K to meet development and hackathon goals. It's not clear whether that's gross or net (net being after costs of CDs, tshirts, posters are factored out). But if there were just 1000 people like me who gave $100 once a year, then the budget would be met. If 5000 people jump on the bandwagon, there's $20 apiece to meet the goal. You say you don't use OpenBSD? Well, you use OpenSSH, don't you? That's money coming out of the same bucket. I could no more survive in my job without OpenSSH than I could without Google. Google does ads. Open(BSD|SSH) needs my help (and yours). Support OpenBSD today!

There's this bloke who is being paid by the Nationals, our new-ish local baseball team. Team Manager Frank Robinson told him to play left field. Alfonso Soriano, this waste of skin in a uniform, refuses to play except at second base. I've got an idea. Send him home. Jerk is getting paid big bucks to play baseball! Do what you're told, dude, or get the hell out of the league. Lenny Harris of the Marlins put it right: "A guy makes $10 million a year, that guy's got to play," Harris said. "You go out there and have fun. That's why I play the game. I come back for $25,000 a year raises. For that money, I'll play anything." (Thanks to the Salt Lake Tribune for that quote.)

Top / Email Brian

Mon Tues Wed THURSDAY Fri Sat Sun
March 23, 2006

0840 - Good morning. So far, so good, anyway. That teapot containing the tempest has calmed, Soriano went to work in left field yesterday. Of far greater import is the issue Bob Walder brought to my attention: There exists the possibility that police officers may be prosecuted for their shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes in the Tube last July, believing him to be a suicide bomber. A confirming story is here, there are others. I'll be very interested to see the results of the investigation, and know whether the brits are going to charge their own police for doing their best to protect and serve.

Sometimes I just love technology reportage. Witness Jerri the Gizmo Girl from The Sun Online. No one ever actually gets to work with girls that look like that, except their photographers, makeup artists. But she should be popular with the Slashdot crowd, if they can tear themselves away from the Alienware site. Now, time for me to get back to work.

Top / Email Brian

Mon Tues Wed Thu FRIDAY Sat Sun
March 24, 2006

0621 - Good morning. Yeah, well, for some people, anyway. There's always a black-and-white way to look at anything, isn't there?

Subject: London Shooting From: Peter Smith Hi Brian, If a suspect is down and under control, shooting him in the head is murder. End of story. Regards Peter

Yeah. But if you're in the midst of attempting to defend yourself against further bombing attacks, where the perps got away the first time, and someone screws up, targeting the wrong bloke, is it the shooter who's to blame for being definitive about making sure the suspect can't take any further action? The team that was activated and sent after this guy was trained to shoot. All he had to do was appear to try to slip his hand inside his clothing.

Look, if you're too afraid of society to allow gun ownership, and too afraid of society to allow poeple to protect themselves (like most of the world today, then you're going to have to have cops who will, when unleashed, take fast, final action, and that's the beginning and end of that story. Is someone "responsible" for de Menezes shooting death? Sure, if I had to lay blame, it would be on the person or persons who mis-identified him as a probable perp in the bombings that had been executed previously. That does happen, however, no matter how hard one tries not to fuck up. Then when the tiger team is set loose, they do what they are trained to do. Walder makes an excellent point: When the guys at the pointy end of the stick are there to make a decision, let them not worry about whether they'll go to prison for doing the best job they can. This is really not just cops and robbers - in a very real sense, they were in a wartime mental zone. Please do remember that our protective services have to be catch the bad guys everytime, while the bombers only have to get through once. Put yourself in the role of the cops: Your job, your authorization, is to shoot to stop and kill a guy who might set off a bomb. Yes, the controllers identified the wrong guy, and the team took him out. Still, it was surgical - they didn't kill or even injure any others in the process of executing their orders. This doesn't smack of out-of-control cops to me. Who knows, though? I could be wrong about everything. The man is still dead. The Wikipedia article is interesting, and the IPCC report will be, when it is released.

I put myself in the shoes of the cops there, instructed to shoot the identified suspect in the head rather than risk accidental or purposeful ignition of body-borne explosives. It's the day after four bombs go off. I have to choose between shooting the guy I've been told is a primary suspect and thus likely to be carrying more explosives, or hesitating, and letting him maybe blow a tube station into next week. Guess what? I'd have to choose the same as the on-scene guys did. You may call it murder, the dead guy's family may call it murder, but I think the cops made the right choice there, with the information they had at the moment. Enough for now. More when the IPCC report is out.

Bob recently noted that a correspondent had disparaged Magnatune, citing lack of quality. I would suggest that the writer hold up all of the music available on Magnatune against all of the music put out by the RIAA and their evil bretheren around the world. He'd probably find (as I have) that the signal-to-noise ratio (or perhaps the joy-to-crap ratio) is much better at Magnatune than in the world of recordings at large. I'm equally sure that there are recordings out there that put the best Magnatune has to offer to shame. But when a million A/R dweebs are out there pounding away, the occasional musical equivalent to Hamlet is bound to turn up from time to time. Besides, there's some really, really great stuff on Magnatune, the artist gets HALF of the proceeds, and it's a pleasant, DRM-free experience. For example, I just picked up Book 1, CD1 of J. S. Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier executed with grace, soul and precision by Daniel Ben Pienaar. I'll be getting the other three CDs shortly. It's just wonderful! By the way, here's the script I use to convert a group of Magnatune WAV files to my preferred format. Enjoy!

#!/bin/bash
#
# wav2ogg.sh
#
# Designed for Magnatune-formatted WAV downloads
# where the files are in Track-Title-Artist.wav format
# Unzip the download, then cd into the directory where the
# .wav files are.
# This script takes the Genre and Album name (put it in quotes)
# as arguments, eg:
#
#  wav2ogg.sh Classical "Well-Tempered Clavier"
#
# it prompts in return, and waits for confirmation before executing.
#
# Dependencies: renamexm, oggenc

echo Genre is set to $1
echo Album is set to $2
echo Press enter to continue, or CTRL-C to exit...
read palms  # Heh. palms is a throw-away variable.

# Get rid of the spaces so that the for loop works right
renamexm -s/\ /_/g *wav

ls *wav > myfile

for JONES in `cat myfile` ; do
    TRACK_NO=`echo $JONES | cut -d'-' -f1`;
    NEWFILEb=`echo $JONES | cut -d'-' -f2`;
    ARTIST=`echo $JONES | cut -d'-' -f3 | sed 's/.wav//' | sed 's/_/ /g'`
    TRACK_NAME=`echo $NEWFILEb | sed 's/_/ /g'`
    # I WANT the track number to be part of the filename, so that 
    # directory order sorting gives you album order sorting
    NEWFILE=${TRACK_NO}-${NEWFILEb}
    oggenc -q8 -a "$ARTIST" -o $NEWFILE.ogg -t "$TRACK_NAME" -l "$2" -G "$1" $JONES
done

I sent out this warning last night...

Subject: Unpatched IE vulnerability exploited, on the loose. Recommendations: 1. Don't use IE. As far as I know, everyone has Firefox installed. Use it. 2. Use Plain Text to preview messages in Outlook. Otherwise you're invoking IE to render the HTML in the messages you get from J. Random BadGuy. Better: Don't use Outlook. Oh, yeah, unless you're on the Exchange server. Then you're stuck. 3. Turn off Active Scripting. Yeah, that breaks manual Windows Update. Grrr. Be bloody careful, and make sure your data is backed up. You've been doing that for a long time anyway, right? Right? best, .brian

And on that note, I really must be on my way to work. Happy Friday.

Top / Email Brian

Mon Tues Wed Thu Fri SATURDAY Sun
March 25, 2006

No Post. Whacked.

Top / Email Brian

Mon Tues Wed Thu Fri Sat SUNDAY
March 26, 2006

1008 - Good morning. Important things first: a moment of peace and quiet to honor our fallen in Iraq and around the world.

Sgt. Amanda N. Pinson, 21, of St. Louis, Mo., died in Tikrit, Iraq, on Mar. 16, when a mortar round detonated.
Spc. Carlos M. Gonzalez, 22, of Middletown, N.Y., died in Tikrit, Iraq, on Mar. 16, when a mortar round detonated.
Cpl. Nyle Yates III, 22, of Lake Odessa, Mich., died in Bayji, Iraq, on Mar. 16, when he came under small arms fire by enemy forces during combat operations.
Staff Sgt. Ricardo Barraza, 24, of Shafter, Calif., died in Ar Ramadi, Iraq, on March 18, when they came under small arms fire by enemy forces during combat operations.
Sgt. Dale G. Brehm, 23, of Turlock, Calif., died in Ar Ramadi, Iraq, on March 18, when they came under small arms fire by enemy forces during combat operations.
Pfc. Amy A. Duerksen, 19, of Aberdeen Proving Ground, Md., died in Baghdad, Iraq, on March 11, from a non-combat related injury.
Staff Sgt. Brock A. Beery, 30, of White House, Tenn., died in Habbaniyah, Iraq on March 23, when an improvised explosive device detonated near his LMTV followed by enemy small arms fire during combat operations.
Spc. Antoine J. McKinzie, 25, of Indianapolis, Ind., died in Baghdad, Iraq, on March 21, when his HMMWV came under enemy small arms fire during combat operations.
Sgt 1st Class Randy D. McCaulley, 44, Indiana, Pa., died in Habbaniyah, Iraq on March 23, when his dismounted patrol came under enemy small arms fire during combat operations.

The tulips are coming up.We got these, perhaps 100 bulbs in all, from Brecks last fall. The three groupings shown are in a mound at the left of the front yard, on the other side of the driveway from the main beds. There I've got two large groupings from the same order, you'll see those some other day, probably after they start flowering.

The grim little area on the right side of the front yard is an area I've done exactly nothing with since we moved in 2-1/2 years ago. Oh, I may have lightly mulched it in year one, but that's about it. There ~~are~~ were a couple of struggling builders boxwoods that either the first owner, or George (the second owner) put in when the fence went up a few years ago. They ~~are~~ were flanked by stumps of their fallen cousins. Then, at the left of that area, right up against the house was a grim little (10' tall) non-descript tree-like thing, three trunked and primarily a multi-level condo for the Japanese beetles that so like our neighborhood. It was ugly, bug prone, and had to go. So it went. Marcia and I went to our favorite local nursery (Patuxent) and picked up some red cedar mulch, some leaf compost, three gallon containers of dormant grasses, and a reasonable-sized Forsythia. I first hoed the weeds out of the area. Then I chopped out the tree and the boxwoods, cut out some extensive root systems, and turned the soil once with the rototiller. Then I turned the leaf mulch onto the bed, and tilled it back and forth for a while. Then I dressed the bed with rake and shovel.

Finally, planting time. I remarked to my neighbor Chet, across the street, that by the time I was finished preparing a bed for planting, I really didn't have the energy left for the planting. But of course in large part that's due to all the pick-axe work that I do to cut out the old material. I put in the grasses spaced along the fenceline, roughly aligned with the posts. They should see about 5' by the end of the growing season. And like most of the decorative grasses, they're perennial, just needing to be pruned back before the spring growing season each year. The Forsythia went into the ground approximately where the tree had been, just a bit further out from the house. Then I put back in the downspout drain extenders and started mulching. The first bag went out fine, as you can see around the Forsythia. However, bag two dropped out of the plastic with a thud. Still frozen ... sigh. As were the rest of the bags. So those are spread out in the back of the garage for a few days, I'll finish mulching next weekend.

When we get around to the annuals, I'll put in some strong color in between the grasses. But once the mulching is done, I've very little to do for the next few weeks until the main planting and gardening season opens in May. Before then, a late frost could undo lots of hard work and I'm just not up for that anymore.

Time for shopping now. I hope your weekend is going well. See you tomorrow.

Top / Email Brian

Last Week << Mon Tues Wed Thu Fri Sat Sun >> Next Week

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.

Home

Graffiti

About

Sitemap

Visual

DevWork

Email Brian

GPG Key

GRAFFITI -- March 20, 2006 thru March 26, 2006

>> Link to the Current Week <<