February 2003 Archives

Really good article on email that got away from a person.

Accidental Privacy Spills: Musings on Privacy, Democracy, and the Internet

The email itself is very interesting as its a breathless account of a person who attended the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

While the topic of privacy, and expectations of privacy in communications and especially email is interesting, I found the text of the email far more interesting.

The following assertions were made.

"They all said that at its peak Al Qaeda
had 70,000 members. Only 10% of them were trained in terrorism -- the
rest were military recruits. Of that 7000, they say all but about 200
are dead or in jail."

If this is true, sounds like good news to me. Unfortunately, it goes on to say of course, they really don't know how many more splinter of "franchise" groups exist, or exist as a result of the crackdowns.

"The global economy is in very very very very bad shape. Last year
when WEF met here in New York all I heard was, "Yeah, it's bad, but
recovery is right around the corner". This year "recovery" was a word
never uttered. Fear was palpable -- fear of enormous fiscal hysteria.
The watchwords were "deflation", "long term stagnation" and "collapse of
the dollar". All of this is without war."

I don't like the sounds of this. This kind of stinking economic conditions, combined with any terror attack or widening of wars could prove very difficult to dig out of economically speaking. I would much rather hear the "recovery around the corner bit." Of course, if oil prices cheapen and stabilize, I think the economy will get some legs. Unfortunately, that is unlikely to happen in the short term unless the Iraq war is very short or isn't pursued. Oil is the lubricant of our economy.

I also don't really like the idea of a ruling class meeting at some relatively closed meeting to decide the fates of the rest of us. While I am not some conspiracy nut, these type of feelings give you the idea that is what is happening.

I also wonder whether this whole email was purposely leaked for publicity or as a stunt of some sort. It seems a smart person, wouldn't send something like that around expecting that no one else would ever see it. Come on, it's just too juicy.

---

Speaking of wanting to know the real story. I still can't help but think about the former CFO of VERITAS, Ken Lonchar. The reason he is no longer at VERITAS, has to do to with resume falsification. The story we have all heard tells of the board recieving an anonymous email. Who sent the email and why is what I want to know. Was it someone hired for the purpose, was it settling some old score, was it an ex, was it some ,extended office politics. I certainly have no idea.

I would also like to know if it was a relief to Ken to not have this lie hanging over him like some sword of Damocles.

If anyone knows the real story, email me. I promise not to post it to the web. (ha, ha, ha).

I notice that no one ever comments on what I have written.

I know that people look at these pages, based on the web server logs. I am wondering why people don't comment?

Please leave a comment and explain why you don't comment

Everyday I get a ton of email. Counting all the spam it's between 100 - 200 per day. I have never bought anything from a spammer, nor do I intend to in the future. I consider spammers a menace to the internet.

However, I was very interested to see that some people have real concerns about some current approaches for dealing with spam. Perhaps, better stated censoring suspected spammers (and open relays) is as bad as spam ethically. I really had never thought of it that way before. Here is John Gilmore's rant on the topic. John Gilmore is one of those unique individuals who has done a lot of interesting things like writing tar, starting EFF, working for Sun early on, etc.. He also has an interesting law suit regarding the freedom to travel in the new post-9/11 era. While I am not won over by his idea's about spam, I think his freedom to travel bit has a lot of merit.

I finally got around to installing SpamAssassin. What a fabulous bit of software that is. I am shocked at how well it works. I have had 1 spam not caught and no false positives today. Given the fact that the system is highly tuneable I should be able to make it serve all my filtering needs.

Well, I have to say that I am very impressed with movabletype. Not only is the environment easy to set up and use, it's rather elegant in places. I really like the way the formatting is all css, and can be easily modified with the supplied templates. The admin interface is attractive, reasonably easy to understand, and easy to navigate. I could really see how a person could use it for a CMS an a largeish system and really cut significant costs.

I set up Gentoo on a PC recently. Pretty neat system. I really wanted to update to a newer s/w stack and thought I would give a distro-from-source a try. I have the following comments.

• The documentation is really lacking compared to say RedHat or Mandrake.
  


• I had trouble with portage, and it wouldn't allow me to emerge to a new one. This is problematic to say the least.


• The runlevels, while easy to update seem foreign from other unix systems I have used. On the flip side, it is dead simple to say 'rc-update add portmap default' and have it do all the right things.
  


• i had another problem with no clear cause. For some as yet unknown reason devfsd stopped working, which caused a problem with the inittab, where it sets up the tty's and couldn't find /dev/tty. That took overly long to troubleshoot as it left me in a state where I had to reboot to make config changes.


• Emerge is neat, but there is no telling how long it will take to compile something. If I knew, I might line up a few things to do at night. You can emerge -p package, of course but it's difficult knowing much beyond the number of dependancies.


• I don't have a clear idea of how the compile install options are set. So when you emerge vim, it doesn't make a link to /usr/bin/vi and I don't have a clear reason why. See previous complaint about documentation.


• It's overly difficult to figure out what packagte provides what. I know you can search with 'emerge -S'. But that seems to take forever and a day. It takes less time over the web at rpmfind.


• There's more, but we'll cover it on a different day.

Slashdot had a great link to a paper on one of my favorite web sites, First Monday. Social Science at 190 MPH on Nascar's Biggest SuperSpeedways tells how theories of competition and cooperation are evident in nascar racing. In particular, they spend a lot of time examining drafting behaviours as it requires cooperation at some level between racers, or in some cases race teams. It was written in 2000, before Dale Earnhardt's tragic death, and reflects what might not have been written today about Dale's aggressive driving. It's a good read.

CSS or cascading style sheets have come a long way. It's amazing to me how well these pages can be formatted, with simple changes to style sheets. Now if all browsers had exactly the same bugs, everything would be great.

Writer's Almanac features Billy Collins, Moday, February 25, 2003. This is the only poet that I have spent money on, and felt I would spend more. His poems speak to me, the way others don't. He is modern, but not full of himself. You should check him out.

Really interesting paper, "Creation Myths, Does innovation require intellectual property rights?", by Douglas Clementhttp://www.reason.com/0303/fe.dc.creation.shtml. This paper summarizes another paper "Perfectly Competitive Innovation" found at http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/papers/pci23.pdf published by the Federal Reserve, Minneapolis.

This is a test of how photos look inline the blog.

How does that look?

As most of you must have figured out by now, the server has been down for several hours. Evidently, there was an electrical problem that wreaked some havoc at the data center.

Seems to be working now.

I am thinking about switching to MovableType for a blog, which would allow for far more flexibility and seems to be under development, whereas greymatter seems a bit stuck.

As much as I am not a Microsoft fan, I think the history of software is interesting. At winsupersite they have an interesting, if sketchy history of the Windows NT line.

My wife pointed me to this government ready.gov web site, run by the Homeland Security department.

The governemt appears to be augmenting their preparedness recomendations so the public has a better idea of what to do in the case of a terrorist attack. I can't help but wonder why they are doing this. Are we repeating the 1950's nuclear war scares that got folks building bomb shelters in their back yards? Is there a legitimate real threat here or are we just being ultra-cautious when there is no real threat? Does the government think that if the populace is afraid they will be better able to sway public opinion on the Iraq war or additional unconstitutional power grabs, ala the Patriot Act.

I personally, find it difficult to swallow a conspiracy, as government worked generally aren't that clever and competent.

I tend to think this is more about a few people dreaming up threats, and then trying to work out how to deal with them.

We'll see how this plays out. Hopefully, it will be something we all grimace about in 20 years, sort of like children in the 50's hiding under their desk during air raid drills.

On the flip side, as I live in tornado country, having a plan and some supplies is a good idea.

Why Nerds Are Unpopular by Paul Graham.

Great Dave Berry Column on LOTR. Miami Herald

See this proves I don't take LOTR too seriously.

Sometimes I think the web is a huge time sink, filled with spam spewing pitchmen, then I run across articles like these that really make you think about life. When the web is good, it's really good.

Some computer tools I use are so valuable to me, I can hardly believe that they are supplied to me for free. Both free in the $0.00 sense and free in the freedom sense.

Here is a list of a few of my favorites.

• Vim - a better vi

• Mozilla - a better browser

• Perl - My favorite programming language

• Linux - my favorite OS

• GNU - more s/w that you can shake a stick at, including compilers, editors, window managers, gui toolkits, etc..

• ...

The list could obviously go on, but still you get the sense that the depth and breadth of software that I like to use. I can't believe people provide it for free. That I get the source code and a license that allows me to change it to suit my own needs. Pretty great stuff.

Interesting blurb on online reputation. http://www.mindjack.com/feature/spin.html

Just wanted to take a moment and point out my son, Matthew. As of February 14th, 2003 he is a three year old. I couldn't be prouder of this guy. His mind goes a mile a minute and the rest of him is not far behind. His grasp of the english langauge is phenomenal, and he has a heart of gold. (Matthew, Jeannie, and Goldie (my mother) pictured above.)

I would also like to add that the next six months Jeannie and I will not have a two year old in the house which is kind of a relief.

I reflect on the space shuttle tragedy today.

I watched Columbia "slip the bonds of earth" early in my formative years in school. I remember the Challenger tragedy the way a different generation remembers the Kennedy assasination. The launch mishap is burned into my mind in the same way the Sept. 11 events have.

Still space flight is dangerous business. We can't gaurantee that any plane will get from location a to b on a given day. How can we be sure that the shuttle will make it to space and back 100 times without injury. I expect the manned travel to space requires injury. It's amazing that it ever works.

Although, no consolation to loved ones, I am sure that astronauts would rather die doing the thing they love than any other way. Maybe ... maybe not.

I hope that this is not another case of contractor/NASA incompetence like the Challenger explosion. I'm really not sure that the pieces that have fallen to earth will allow for a genuine answer to why this happened.

High Flight

by John Gillespie Magee, Jr.

Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth,

And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;

Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth

Of sun-split clouds...and done a hundred things

You have not dreamed of...wheeled and soared and swung

High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there,

I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung

My eager craft through footless halls of air.

Up, up, the long, delirious burning blue

I've topped the windswept heights with easy grace

Where never lark, nor even eagle flew.

And while with silent, lifting mind I've trod

The high untrespassed sanctity of space...

...put out my hand, and touched the face of God.