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GRAFFITI -- September 11, 2006 thru September 17, 2006 >> Link to the Current Week << Last Week << Mon   Tues   Wed   Thu   Fri   Sat   Sun >> Next Week Search this site : 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   
September 11, 2006

September 11, 2001
Islam declares war on the United States!

Or had you forgotten?

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Mon    TUESDAY    Wed    Thu    Fri    Sat    Sun   
September 12, 2006

0848 - Good morning. Yesterday was the home opener for the Redskins. And there was a night game for the Orioles. Choosing discretion as the better part of valor, I bailed out shortly after noon yesterday, so as to not try to drive home (towards FedEx Field) as the commuters and the pre-game revellers mixed it up.

I dusted out my workstation with compressed air, as I was getting quite a bit of fan noise. It turns out, of course, that the fans are the problem, not dust. So I'm going to swing over to TCP later today and pick up a couple of Zalman widgets, replacing the northbridge cooler with something else, replacing the fan on the PNY nVidia 6800, and putting a more efficient cooler on the processor while I'm at it. Of course, I almost just talked myself into getting the bits needed to build a E6600-based Core 2 Duo system. But I really don't need that, so I won't. Really, I won't. Just because the machine I built earlier this year is now among the slowest of the slow (and it was kick-ass when I built it, for the price) ... well, that's the breaks.

Back to the grindstone. Have a great day!

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Mon    Tues    WEDNESDAY    Thu    Fri    Sat    Sun   
September 13, 2006

1006 - Good morning. According to at least one person, I'm a troglodyte. Apparently, being neolithic about me and mine is just too, too, these days. And in reply to another email about my post on Monday, September 11th:

> If so, is this not perhaps equally valid, and inflammatory  ?
> 
>                 MARCH 20, 2003
> CHRISTIANITY DECLARES WAR ON IRAQ

Surely not Christianity? Just Shrub. He couldn't put together a
coalition to save his life. All he got was Blair, a European leader
unwilling to appease his Muslim immigrant population, to help out. Oh,
and a couple hundred Italians, a few from other countries, oh, and the
Aussies, who have had a batch of their own civilians die at the hands of
Islamics in ... Indonesia? A resort bombing or three? Surely bombing a
resort is a legitimate military tactic, eh? Still, probably a mistake to
go in, but then, you and I only had the responsibility to vote, and we
did.

> 
> Probably 20/30 thousand dead innocent children by the order of the fine
> Christian chieftain, G.W. Bush.  20-50x the 9/11 death toll in total.

Far less than half of what Hussein killed, and many of the "innocents"
die at the hand of suicide bombers. Or yes, to American fire, when the
insurgents/terrorists/freedom fighters (pick your term) retreat among
the "innocents", hoping that they can gain by forcing Americans to fight
among the civilians.

But then, we didn't attack without warning. They did. Regardless of the
advisability of going into Iraq, we did. Yeah, we took out
infrastructure and lots more to take down Hussein. We've also been
trying to rebuild that stuff and give it to those Iraqis who won't just
blindly kill others (as Hussein's group did to the Shia and the Kurds.
We've been trying to rebuild and hand it back while the loons bomb each
other and us.

I simply do not believe that our forces explicitly target civilians in
the way that the islamics do. Period. Sure, there are cases of
individuals and platoons that went over the edge ... war is like that.

American combatants don't use civilian populations to shield themselves,
so far as I know.

> 
> I hold no brief for the events of Sept 11 but I certainly don't lay the
> blame at the feet of Islam ( the religion).  

Where else does the blame lie? Personally, I don't think that it had
anything to do with Iraq. But then, how does one respond to stateless
terrorism? Or is it stateless? Is the supranational totalitarian regime
known as Islam going to stop doing what their book, their mullahs tell
them to do? Conquer, convert, or kill.


> I do have problems with
> fundamentalism and extremism and nationalism and imperialism, Islamic
> and Christian and Hindi and Judaism and Rebublican and Hamas and Likud
> that exhort to violence and greed. I am so tired and frustrated by the
> lies, hyperbole and debt and environmental destruction and lost lives in
> lost causes.     Aren't you ?

Sure. What do you suggest? I think that we're going to be battling
against Islamic terrorists long after I'm dead and gone. My personal
beliefs don't require me to go, convert or kill them (if they leave us
alone). Theirs do. When we back down (and we have no heart, anymore,
we'll back down) they'll pursue us here.

Did we make it worse going into Iraq? (I say we, because Bush stole that
election fair and square, and we let it happen) Yeah, we probably made
it worse. Is it possible that Bush has good intentions surrounded by
lean and dangerous men who advised him badly, but in a way that gave him
what he thought he wanted? Yeah, that's possible too.

I think religion ought to be abolished, I guess. What replaces it?
Consumerism? Conversation? Self-reliance?

The environment is a red herring. A little hotter is better than a
little colder. Growing zones move. A lot more will die when the Ice
returns. And in the meantime, those who say we're ruining the planet
mean that we're ruining the planet for those who get grants to say we're
ruining the planet. Earth is a big place, and species come and go. We'll
go, too. Things change.

 . . .


Yes, I blame Islam. Islam will fight Western Civilization until the end
of human time, I believe. There are, I admit, times when I don't think
much of us, but I think far better of us, than I do of them. And if I
must choose, I choose us. For I think you nor I would consider getting
on a plane and flying it into a building or two full of civilians. They
do. Not all of them, surely. But they do.

  . . .

In the long run, the Universe is an immense and wonderful place, and
will go on, with or without us. I'm content with that knowledge, too.

I didn't make it to TCP yesterday. Traffic and a foreshortened day did me in. I'll try again today. Ciao!

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Mon    Tues    Wed    THURSDAY    Fri    Sat    Sun   
September 14, 2006

0957 - Hello? Yeah, another busy day. I did get out for a bit yesterday, around noon. I picked up a Zalman cooler for the CPU, another cooler thingy for the northbridge, and an Asus-manufactured silent nVidia PCIe graphics card. About an hour of futzing to to get it all installed, including some metal modifications to get the northbridge cooler installed. But when all was said and done, I've got a much quieter system that has the CPU hovering at 40° C. That's not too shabby.

Today, among other tasks, I'm setting up an Ubuntu system to use for getting backup data off of the Exchange server and into some easily parsable formats. That just seems like a good idea. Now to figure out why OpenVPN seems to not be available from the Ubuntu repositories... Have a great day!

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Mon    Tues    Wed    Thu    FRIDAY    Sat    Sun   
September 15, 2006

0955 - Good morning, and Happy Friday! Last night, after watching The Six Napoleons from The Return of Sherlock Holmes series, I finally figured out a persistent problem. That is, when playing Unreal Tournament 2003 on Vimes, I would get persistent game crashes, with the single error, "Negative Delta Time!". I've searched for the answer to this problem multiple times, and finally found the answer: set the processor affinity for the running program.

The program that does the deed is called taskset, and it is installed as a part of the Debian (or K/Ubuntu, etc) package called schedutils. Here's the command summary:

taskset - retrieve or set a processes's CPU affinity

So, in the shell script that calls UT2003, I changed the call to read: taskset -c 1 ut2003 ... the game then played happily for quite a while, until I quit, sans crashing. There is one other issue with UT2003. In a fit of careful planning, the game only measures the processor speed once, at game startup. That measurement calibrates all of the in-game timers. That's fine, except that my smart, almost new AMD X2 4400+ processor ramps it's speed up and down based on usage. So the engine is barely idling when UT2003 measures things. Then the game starts rolling, the processor speeds up, and gameplay progresses like coked-up gerbils! The answer to that is to pre-load the processor. I found the solution to that a while back. Here's the loading script:

#!/bin/sh
# busy.sh ... spins up the processor

( while true; do true; done ) &
sleep $1
killall busy.sh

And here's the latest iteration of my startup script:

#!/bin/sh
# utb.sh - makes the processor busy, then fires up UT2003

busy.sh 4 &
sleep 2
taskset -c 1 ut2003

With that, I'll bid you a good day. Enjoy!

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September 16, 2006

1125 - Good morning, more or less. It helps to be listening to John Hiatt. I slept really badly, many weird dreams. I really only remember the last, which was really science fiction-ish. I was trying, by bicycle and foot, to get to the teleport terminal before it closed for the day. Somewhere on the tortuous path I took, I managed to lose all my gear for a while. When it reappeared in someone's hands, returning it to me, my wallet had been looted. Panic and distress. So, anyways, a restless night, and I'm having trouble focusing.

I read about banks, phishing, and responsibility yesterday. Let's see if I can't track down the article... Ah, Netcraft: Bank, Customers Spar Over Phishing Losses (thanks, Slashdot!). My thought is that a "customer" of a bank should have defenses in place to protect against trojans, etc. and not be gullible enough to follow emailed or off-site web links to "enter" his online banking account credentials. This is the customer's responsibility. Perhaps a training program that requires a passing score before activating an online account, with refresher questions that precede each login attempt, perhaps that would be good. How about an anti-trojan program that must be downloaded from the bank site, installed and run, to generate part of the credential needed for successful login? Sure, there's less convenience in it, but convenience and security are on separate axes ... and besides, it'd be bloody inconvenient if your money got transferred to a Latvian bank, eh? Onscreen dynamically generated keyboards would be another good defense against keystroke loggers.

I got the cut-up trash dealt with in the garage. Then I prepared to go out and harvest out a big chunk of the garden... it's raining, again. A good thing for green lawns, but depressing since it was supposed to be only Wednesday/Thursday this week. Each day the rain got a special extension permit, so it rained yesterday and now today. No heavy frog-choking stuff, though.

Since I can't seem to focus on Programming Python, 3rd Edition right at the moment, I guess I'll give another cut at the garden. The rain appears to be easing a bit. Have a good day!

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Mon    Tues    Wed    Thu    Fri    Sat    SUNDAY  
September 17, 2006

1717 - Good afternoon. More yardwork, some shopping, a bit of computer maintenance. So goes the weekend. And in the Middle East, our service members take risks and make sacrifices ...

• Sgt. Luis A. Montes, 22, of El Centro, Calif., died on Sept. 7 in Brooke Army Medical Center, San Antonio, Texas, of injuries suffered on Sept. 1 in Abu Ghraib, Iraq, when an improvised explosive device detonated near his vehicle during combat operations.
• Cpl. Johnathan L. Benson, 21, of North Branch, Minn., died Sept. 9 from wounds suffered on June 17 while conducting combat operations in Al Anbar province, Iraq.
• Staff Sgt. Nathaniel B. Lindsey, 38, of Troutdale, Ore., died on Sept. 9 in Shajoy, Afghanistan, of injuries sustained when his HMMWV encountered undetermined ordnance from enemy forces during patrol operations.
• Sgt. 1st Class Merideth L. Howard, 52, of Alameda, Calif., died in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Sept. 8, when a vehicle-borne improvised explosive device detonated near his HMMWV.
• Staff Sgt. Robert J. Paul, 43, of The Dalles, Ore., died in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Sept. 8, when a vehicle-borne improvised explosive device detonated near his HMMWV.
• Sgt. John A. Carroll, 26, of Ponca City, Okla., died on Sept. 6 in Ar Ramadi, Iraq, of injuries sustained when he came in contact with enemy forces using small arms fire during a dismounted security patrol.
• Pfc. Anthony P. Seig, 19, of Sunman, Ind., died on Sept. 9, in Baghdad, Iraq, of injuries sustained when he encountered indirect fire from enemy forces while on base.
• Cpl. Alexander Jordan, 31, of Miami, Fla., died on Sept. 10 in Baghdad, Iraq, of injuries suffered when he encountered enemy forces using small arms fire during combat operations.
• Sgt. 1st Class Michael T. Fuga, 47, of Nuuli, American Samoa, died on Sept. 9 in Kandahar, Afghanistan, of injuries suffered when he encountered enemy forces using small arms fire during combat operations.
• Sgt. Jeremy E. DePottey, 26, of Ironwood, Mich., died on Sept. 11 in Asadabad, Afghanistan, of injuries suffered in a single vehicle accident.
• Capt. Matthew C. Mattingly, 30, of Reynoldsburg, Ohio, died on Sept. 13 in Mosul, Iraq, when he encountered enemy forces using small arms fire during combat operations.
• Sgt. David T. Weir, 23, of Cleveland, Tenn., died on Sept. 14 in Baghdad, Iraq, of injuries suffered on Sept. 13 when he encountered enemy forces using rocket-propelled grenade and small arms fire during combat operations.
• Spc. Harley D. Andrews, 22, of Weimar, Calif., died on Sept. 11 in Ar Ramadi, Iraq, of injuries suffered when an improvised explosive device detonated near his vehicle during combat operations.
• Spc. David J. Ramsey, 27, of Tacoma, Wash., was medically evacuated from Iraq on Aug. 24 and died from a non-combat related incident on Sept. 7 in Spanaway, Wash.
• Lance Cpl. Ryan A. Miller, 19, of Pearland, Texas, died Sept. 14 while conducting combat operations against enemy forces in Al Anbar province, Iraq.
• 2nd Lt. Emily J.T. Perez, 23, of Texas, died on Sept.12 of injuries sustained in Al Kifl, Iraq, when an improvised explosive device detonated near her HMMWV during combat operations.

More work to do. I've got a mailbag from Jerry to get formatted, and a column inbound shortly. Hasta!

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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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