Getting Back Into the Swing of Things

I am happy to report that cobalt's strength is returning. She has been on the ropes for about a year now, fighting ulcerative colitis and side-effects from the drugs which fought the colitis. This weekend we dusted off the toolbox and constructed a fence around the back porch, to keep the chickens (and their slimy little poops) off of it. It was good to see her in action again -- she insisted on swinging the hammer whenever one needed to be swung, and she obviously enjoyed being out of bed and having the energy to actually do something! (And yes, I've asked her if we perhaps should just beef up the chicken run to contain the chickens better, but she said no, she wants to let them out of the run periodically anyway, so we'd still have the issue with free-roaming chickens polluting our elevated porch.)

The Remicade is definitely kicking the colitis' butt, and she's no longer on the steroids which were giving her the worse of the side effects. On the downside, she has developed some bad anemia (low red blood cell density), for which her specialist has prescribed some uber-powerful special-formulation iron supplements. If her red blood cell count drops much lower, she's going to have to get some transfusions, but hopefully we can pull her back from the brink. We're both keeping out fingers crossed. Yay modern medicine!

Professional Linkage

During my last round of job-seeking, I joined LinkedIn, one of those newfangled social networking sites. This one is optimized towards getting professionals in contact with other professionals, and it does a pretty good job. I actually got an interview out of a professional link on LinkedIn, though I actually didn't follow up on it (the NASA Archive job trumped other offers).

Looking at my list of "connections", I realized that this would potentially be a powerful tool for someone seeking to start up a new business. Many of the people I know are right there in my connection list, with their skills laid out for easy browsing. Were I to found (another) startup, it would be the easiest thing to run down that list saying "I need one of those, one of those, and one of those as new employees" and send them messages to that effect. Associates who were not interested but knew someone who might could then easily "link" me to someone in their own connection network. Nifty!

Enlightenment

For several years now I have enjoyed using the Enlightenment Window Manager to organize my computer workspace. It has precisely the features and behavior I need to manage a very large (200+) number of open windows. In particular, I have found its notion of "virtual desktops" very useful. A "virtual desktop" looks exactly like what you see when you sit down and use your computer -- a screenful of windows, icons, etc. Under Enlightenment, one can have many virtual desktops, like having many computers sharing the same screen. If I have Firefox, Xterm, and XPaint open in one virtual desktop, then I can switch to a different (empty) desktop, open a bunch of other windows, and then pop over the the other virtual desktop and there's my Firefox, Xterm, and XPaint again, exactly as they were before.

Enlightenment16 supports a 3D array of virtual desktops, multiple 3x3 "grids" of desktops which can be easily switched and shared. I have used Alt-F1, Alt-F2, etc to switch between different grids, and alt-arrow to navigate around the grid of desktops. This has enabled me to partition my workspace according to application.

Banks 1 and 2 (of 2D grids of virtual desktops) are for xterms related to programming, email, and system administration. These eighteen virtual desktops tend to be the most crowded. Bank 3 is for firefox windows (one full-screen firefox window per virtual desktop, for a total of nine firefox windows). Bank 4 is for realtime chat sessions and other "fun" stuff. This arrangement makes it easy for me to find the instance of the application I need with minimum fuss. If I want to find the open text editor window I was just using, I can just press Alt-F2 to switch to the second grid, and maybe navigate up/down, left/right one virtual desktop's worth to find the xterm I was looking for. Similarly, if I want a firefox window, Alt-F3 will get me to whichever one I was using most recently (though I tend to reserve the middle and bottom rows of virtual desktops for work-related firefox windows, and the top row for "fun" browsing).

Enlightenment16 has been getting harder and harder to install in newer systems, unfortunately (not Enlightenment itself, but rather some of the libraries Enlightenment depends on .. some of the older libraries are particularly problematic on 64-bit systems). Getting Enlightenment16 installed on my new work desktop system (replacing workstation20) proved very difficult. I eventually gave up and switched to Enlightenment17.

Enlightenment17 has dropped support for the 3rd dimension of virtual desktops, limiting me to a 2D grid of virtual desktops only. Alt-F1 through Alt-F12 now switch me between the first 12 virtual desktops, rather than between banks of grids of virtual desktops. Needless to say, after five years of using Enlightenment16, this is tripping me up and making me cranky.

At first I tried using a 5x4 grid of virtual desktops, with the first two rows reserved for xterms, the third row for firefox, and the fourth row for fun (thus corresponding the y-axis of the grid to the z-axis of the array I was using under E16), but this proved quite unsatisfactory -- lots of keypresses were necessary to navigate around and find my stuff, and I quickly became "cramped" with only five virtual desktops per category (whereas before I had nine).

As of today I am taking a different approach, turning my partitions ninety degrees into a 4x7 grid of virtual desktops, with each column of 7 virtual desktops representing an application category (columns 1 and 2 for xterms, 3 for firefox, and 4 for fun). This allows me to continue using my Alt-F1/Alt-F2/etc "muscle memory" to switch between categories (since Alt-F1 will take me to the top of column 1, Alt-F3 to the top of column 3, etc) and gives me seven virtual desktops per category.

To further facilitate navigation, I am going to try to start new tasks in a row corresponding to the day of the week, with Monday corresponding to the first row, Tuesday to the second row, etc. Thus on a Friday if I wanted to start writing a new program, I would hit Alt-F2 to go to the top of my second column, then alt-downarrow four times to the row corresponding to Friday. In that virtual desktop I would open all of my xterms related to that new programming project. Since I keep written notes about my daily operations and keep them annotated by date, finding that programming project should be even easier than it was under E16.

However, I have also gotten in touch with the Enlightenment developers, and asked why the feature was dropped from E17. Depending on how they respond, some or all of the following options may be feasible for moving forward: (1) Talk them into porting this feature back into future versions of Enlightenment; (2) Convince them to port this feature into E17 by ways of monetary donation; (3) Port the feature to E17 myself; (4) Perform the necessary coding/hackery myself to get E16 working on modern operating systems and abandon E17; (5) Suck it up and put up with E17 and its less-useful virtual desktop management featureset; or (6) Abandon Enlightenment altogether and try to make FVWM2 (another window manager) do what I want.

For now I await the Enlightenment developers' response to my emails. Perhaps in the meantime this new arrangement will grow on me. Time will tell!

-- TTK

Remicade, NASA, and the Passing of Needles

Man, things have been busy lately! And it's been a month since my last journal entry .. scowl. So I'd better write something, eh?

Remicade

My wife's condition has been getting nothing but worse for a few months now, and the steroids she's been taking to control her internal ulcerations have had a little effect, but also many negative side effects (weakness, tiredness, sleeping 14+ hours a day, loss of balance .. icky things). After much discussion with doctors (one GP and two specialists!) and our insurance company, we finally got the go-ahead to put her on Remicade. Her first infusion was a little over a week ago, and it usually takes two or three weeks for it to show effects. We're crossing our fingers real hard for this, because if the Remicade doesn't work there are only a couple of options left open to us, all of which are scary and unpleasant.

I'm looking forward to her being well enough that she can come with me to a Houseness BBQ party and meet some of my new SF geek friends. They're great people, and I think cobalt would get along with them well. Also, some of my friends who have never met cobalt may be starting to think she's my imaginary friend :-) There is a reason people invite all of their friends and relatives to their wedding -- there's something to be said about showing a relationship, and demonstrating the wonderfulness of one's life partner. It will also do cobalt some good to get out of the house and meet new people.

NASA

I was determined -- determined! -- to leave The Archive for a less dysfunctional company. I was interviewing places and even got a couple of highly generous (perhaps even overly generous) offers from some cool companies, but then something really wonderful happened. The Director of Data Collections at The Archive offered me an extremely desirable role in his newly founded NASA Archive project. We are going to be digitizing, categorizing, archiving, and making available online a huge volume of NASA-produced content, and as soon as we hire someone to take over my old role as catch-all Data Collections engineer, it will be my full-time job to help make the NASA Archive happen. If I'm being a little vague on the details of what that entails, well, unfortunately there's a reason for it. All I can say is that this opportunity is like a dream come true for me. I will own several problems which intensely interest me, will be archiving vast volumes of hard scientific content (and pretty pictures, too!), and will do it while working with people I know and like. For the past few weeks I have been splitting my hours between general Data Collections tasks and NASA Archive tasks, and not really getting enough done on either, despite working even longer hours than usual.

So, please, if anyone out there knows a good software engineer who works well independently (by which I mean "submerged in utter chaos") and is excited at the notion of archiving hundreds of terabytes of new content, point them at this job description and encourage them to drop us their resume. It can be a wonderful company if you have the temperament for it, and I would work closely with my replacement for a couple of months before shifting entirely to NASA Archive tasks. The skills requirements isn't too much -- candidates need some PHP experience (preferably PHP5), experience with XML (parsing it, generating it, and using it in PHP5), and practical knowledge of using linux remotely (connecting to remote machines via ssh, using "df" to see if disks are full, looking at process lists to see what programs are misbehaving, simple stuff). Knowledge of another language well-suited to file manipulation (especially perl or python) is a plus, but not totally necessary as long as the candidate is willing to learn some perl (there is some legacy software written in perl that the Archive Engineer will need to maintain -- or totally rewrite in a different language, if they want). About half of the day-to-day work involves writing software that translates third party metadata (which might be XML, Excel, text files, or whatever) into Archive-compliant XML metadata. The other half tends to be more interesting, comprised of many things which we can talk about in person.

Farewell, Needles

Needleclaws, my beloved cat, had been struggling with her body for a long time (dementia, respiratory problems, arthritis, blindness, and other issues brought on by old age). On August 2nd of 2007, she gave up the struggle and passed away.

When I got home about 9:30pm she was panting and intermittently gasping for air, and would not sit or stand. She was barely responsive to cobalt and me touching her. Cobalt got a towel as I held my cat, and we wrapped her loosely to keep her warm and to contain the "nature" which would surely flow. I held her in my arms, talking to her, touching her face and head and neck.

Soon her pants faded to bare whispers of breath, and her gasps became more violent but less frequent. A corner of my mind couldn't help but count the clock ticks between her gasps. Ten seconds for a while, then twelve, then sixteen, twenty-four, thirty-two for a while .. then sixty-two, once, and she stopped breathing altogether. I still held her for a long while, with cobalt next to me. We wept, and talked about her life, and sometimes what we said made us laugh. She was a goofy cat.

She had been blind for about four years. She was a bulldog of a cat, my "battleaxe cat". She was insane in a way that made the other cats give her room when she wanted her turn at the food or water. One of her signs of affection was to rub her cheek and jowl against your hand, such that her overhanging fang would scrape lightly against your flesh. Cobalt loved it, called it "tusking". I took cobalt's hand and ran it lightly over my dead cat's tusk. Surprised, she laughed, and then cried.

Cobalt looked for something "more dignified" to wrap Needles in, while I went outside to finish the casket I had mostly built for this eventuality. I had wanted to go to the hardware store to find two more pieces of wood which were not warped and were the same length for the bottom of the casket, but there was no more time. I picked the two flattest pieces of wood which were more or less the same length, and finished building the casket bottom. Meanwhile, cobalt had laid Needles down on the t-shirt I had donated to the burial shroud (my old black "Codewarrior '96" shirts; it seemed appropriate) and snipped tufts of hair from my cat's body. It's a tradition she invented two decades ago, to make keepsakes of her dead pets' hair tufts. She would cut a tuft, lay it on the sticky side of a segment of clear packing tape, then fold the other end of the tape over the top, sealing the hair tuft in. Homespun lamination. She made three for me, two for herself.

I was very sad, but wanted to make something with my hands for her. A casket seemed just perfect. Apologies to the neighbors for the four nails I had to hammer that night. The following day I put the bottom on, put my cat inside, and nailed down the lid. It wasn't until the following day that cobalt and I were up and active at the same time, and we had a dignified but informal burial. I looped two lengths of rope under the casket, and left them in place when I buried it. The other end of the loops are showing above ground, and they will help me find the thing later and help me raise it up when we move to a different house. I want Needles to be buried on our own property. Where she is now is only temporary, like too much in our life right now.

Cobalt wrote up her own entry for this sad but inevitable passing.

I was very, very sad until I dug a four foot deep hole big enough to hold Needles' overly-large casket. The process burned away much of my grief and unhappiness. I still miss her, but not as harshly as I did before digging that hole. I surmise from this that people who hire a funeral parlor to bury their loved ones for them are doing themselves a disservice. Those who loved their deceased might find a lot of therapy in burying them themselves (or at least digging as much of the hole as they are physically able, and letting family and friends take over if necessary).

-- TTK

I said: "I love you, you know."

She replied: "And that is your saving grace."

Fourth of July at Home

Well, cobalt and I had a quiet July 4th evening at home. After dinner we sat on our front lawn and watched the fireworks. The modern fireworks are nifty, but sometimes I miss the incredibly dangerous stuff they let kids run around with when I was a kid. But there's no point in dwelling on the past .. the candle things that shoot the magnesium-splodeys in the air and the smell of cobalt's hair made for a memorable evening.

For dinner, I wanted to make something special, but still familiar enough that I could cook it up with confidence and not screw it up. I started by cutting up some potatos and letting them boil in a salted pot while I pulled out the other ingredients, preheated the oven to 500degF, and arrayed them within easy reach. The main dish would be braised porkchops, which I laid out on foil and sprinkled liberally with the pepper grinder. The head of garlic was fresh, and I cut its buds lengthwise, arranging them cut-side-down on top of the chops. Over all of this I applied a light coating of olive oil, from a hand-pumped areosol can cobalt filled with some of the snooty "good stuff" from marin county. That went into a pan in the oven, after setting a 25 minute timer.

The side dish would be stir-fry. I put some canola oil and minced garlic into a wok, and chopped my onion while letting the oil heat up. I prefer canola oil over olive oil for sautee because it gets much hotter than olive oil without burning, and getting the oil hot enough is always a challenge on our wimpy stovetop. The wok was ready before the onions were, so I threw in my mushrooms to keep it from overheating. The onions soon followed. While those were sauteeing I chopped up two zucchini and some leftover chicken breast which had been sitting in the fridge with pepper all over it for the last few days. One great thing about leftovers is that the time they spend sitting gives the spices opportunity to seep deep into the food, something that cannot be duplicated in the kitchen .. some things just take time.

The chicken and zucchini would be the last to go into the wok -- I wanted my mushrooms and onions to singe nicely before dumping in all that extra mass. It was time to drain the potatos anyway. I mashed them with a fork, put the heat-spreader down, turned my heat to low, and let them sit for a while to steam off some of their excess moisture while I added the zucchini and stirred them up to make sure they got separated from each other and in contact with the hot oil. That done, I poured a fair amount of milk into the potatos and stirred it in. Now a real cook would let the potatos continue to steam on low heat, but I always end up either burning them or overstirring them (which will turn otherwise good mashed potato into a sticky paste, suitable for posting advertisements onto brick walls), so I took the easy way out: I piled them onto a plate (which maximizes exposed surface area, and thus rate of evaporation) and let them bask in the rays of our microwave oven for a good five minutes.

In went the chicken, into the wok, and it was time to check the porkchops. They looked pretty good, with just a hint of browning on the tops of the garlic buds, but they lacked the crispy edge I love so dearly. Sticking one with a thermometer indicated a core temperature of 155degF, just shy of "medium done" (which would show up as 160degF), so I figured I had a little room to play with them without drying out the meat. Heating and oiling a high-edged teflon frying pan, I seared the bottoms of the chops, trying to use the edge of the pan to get the edge of the pork a little brown, with limited success. The bottoms got nicely roasted, though, and I pulled them off the heat and onto our plates because I was afraid of overcooking them.

The stir-fry was about done, and just needed one more touch to pull it all together. I drizzled soy sauce lightly over everything, and the water steamed away almost instantly, leaving a dark stain pattern on the chicken and mushrooms. This would add taste (mostly from the salt) and visual depth, without drawing water out of the chicken or zucchini and drying it out. I had a bowl lined with paper towels standing by, and I dumped the wok's contents out into this, for the excess oil to drain while I arranged the rest of our food for serving. The potatos had a really good consistency when I pulled them out of the microwave, and those went into a bowl (which is better for serving than the plate). That and the porkchops and our utensils went onto a tray, and I dumped the stir-fry off the paper towels into the bowl, which also went on the tray. I found many things to fault about the end result (the lack of browning on the chops, the slightly overdone zucchini, and a lack of seasoning in the potatos beyond salt and milk), but cobalt seemed happy enough. We ate in bed, while the dogs sat by and begged their little hearts out. Sorry girls, there was no way in hell you were getting any of this. I made it up to them later, after the fireworks, with a plateful of Alpo sprinkled with chicken bouillon. They love that.

And for something completely different, an old friend has been on a multi-year trip to various countries across the pond. Read all about his adventures! One of the best things about his journal is that it provides an honest perspective into life in these people and places. Every other media source is shaped by some agenda to the point of complete untrustworthiness, but Adam writes it just as you or I would experience it, if we travelled to Africa and the Middle/Far East. He recently left Lebanon, and is now in Barcelona. At the time of this writing he hasn't chornicled his experiences in Lebanon, but I'm looking forward to it.

-- TTK

My last journal entry is already "archived" :-P so I can't respond to robp there.. Might as well make a new entry while I have a minute.

The only times I've successfully collaborated with others on open-source projects, I developed something with minimum functionality first, then invited others to extend it. I've served as project lead at work, where I could communicate much and easily with co-workers, but OSS projects don't allow for the same luxury.

In that light, I'm inclined to try to develop some minimalist working/useful DVM first, and then share the source code for collaboration.

On the Python front .. I've learned some (still a lot to go), but so far I haven't seen that Python does anything better than Perl. Almost everything it can do, I can do in Perl more easily (even with my verbose, C-like Perl coding style). Also Perl is about twice as fast as Python on my system for arithmetic operations, marginally faster for other things. One nice advantage to Python is that its arrays are much more space-efficient (about the same as C arrays, which means a ~20x improvement over Perl's in some cases). Python seems gratuitously object-oriented, too. Objects can be handy, but do they really have to be the only way to manipulate files, strings, regular expressions, etc? Seems silly.

These are discouraging, but I'm sticking with it because Perl is slowly falling out of favor. People are using Python now to do systemish things, which were once done in Perl. So if I want to improve my chances of getting a job working on the kinds of problems I consider interesting, it's in my best interest to learn Python. Also, several applications I'm interested in modifying (bittornado, ccpublisher, myfile, and others) are written in Python. I'm hoping that with practice it'll grow on me.

As an aside, please check out Nick's spiffy new online game, BrainChef! It's free and a lot of fun. When you create an account, choose zombie ("THEM" when it asks you to pick between "US" or "THEM"), they're more fun to play and it needs more zombie players :-)

-- TTK

Wow, my previous attempt to keep up on this journal failed miserably.. five months since my last entry! I just haven't had time .. well, I still don't, so I'll keep this short.

The most wonderful news in my life right now is that my wife (cobalt, aka invisiblecrazy) and I are finally shopping for a house! We are looking for something in Sonoma County (about fifty miles north of San Francisco) with a large lot. An acre would be okay, two acres would be great, and more would probably be a waste. I'm hoping we will find something in an unincorporated area (outside of any city's limits). Our current rental is in an unincorporated area, and we're loving it. There aren't many neighbors, no city laws (just state + county), no police (just a sheriff), a nearby well for water, and plenty of space for our chickens.

Sonoma County allows landowners to build permanent structures of up to 100 square feet without a permit, as long as they don't have a poured foundation and aren't used for permanent human habitation. I'm looking forward to knocking a few of those together for outdoor workshops, spare storage, and a mini datacenter. cobalt's looking forward to expanding her chicken horde, putting a garden in the ground (as opposed to the wine barrels she's currently using) and getting some goats.

Some less wonderful news is cobalt's worsening health problems. Her organs continue to ulcerate, despite the medication, and we've switched to a more local specialist. Her old one was great at first, but sort of dumped us a few months ago ("you're cured! no, really! goodbye!") and we don't need to drive to San Francisco just to be given the brush-off. She'll be going in for some exams this week, and her new specialist may proceed from there to some of the more serious drugs. It's a little scary, because the potential side effects are pretty bad ("spontaneous central nervous system demylenation" is about as bad as things get). But we have to do something. She's in daily agony.

A friend and I have decided to implement some software of possible commercial merit, and sell or license it to interested parties (or possibly run it ourselves, and charge end-users directly for the service). Forgive me for not saying too much about it. It doesn't seem like all that hard of a problem, and if I blab about it someone else might say "Hey! Good idea!" and jam out their own version before we can bring ours to market. But it needs to be said here because, hey, it's significant.

I've given up on MPI. It just blows. I've started work on DVM ("distributed virtual machine"), my own message-passing system. I'm shooting for something a lot like PVM but without its drawbacks. We'll see how it pans out.

Lately I've been plowing ahead on the wikification of my MBT Resources website. I have a lot of new material, about 13GB in 180,000 documents, which I intend to "wrap" in Wiki pages and make available in a heirarchical organization which a select dozen or so trusted editors can update/modify, while everyone else on the internet is free to discuss them (every wiki page has its own discussion page). The bulk of the work thusfar has been the writing of a few thousand regular expressions. Software will look at each document's pathname and contents, and decide how to categorize the document. Then it will wrap the document in an appropriate Wiki page. A couple of days ago I wrote a mockup of a few such pages, and discovered that OddMuse's markup wasn't quite up to the task. After much pondering, I decided that the best way to go would be to rewrite OddMuse's ApplyRules function, essentially replacing their markup with my own. I'm trying to make it simple and powerful, and familiar to those with previous experience with MediaWiki (like Wikipedia) and BBCode. This seemed like the right thing to do because aside from the markup, OddMuse is a really good fit for my needs -- it allows three levels of editing (administrative, editor, and discussion), provides anti-spamming features via a blacklist which I can import automatically from other OddMuse sites, and is already familiar to me and implemented in perl. I've already modified it some to divide pages and administrators into "domains", so that different administrators can have authority over different subsections. I've fiddled with OddMuse enough that I think I understand where its bumps and warts lie, and I think after I've rewritten ApplyRules I will be happy with it. If I switched to a different wiki system, I'd have to learn its bumps and warts, and might find myself in more trouble than I already am. Anyway, my replacement ApplyRules is coming along fine. Now-dusty memories of compiler engineering are coming back and providing me with all the right solutions. We shall see how it goes.

Oh, and one more thing: I don't think I'll be writing about politics anymore. It's just too disgusting. This country's going to hell in a handbasket, and people are too caught up in it to break free of their dysfunctional misconceptions and change course. My plan is to find a nice cave somewhere tucked out of the way and try to ride things out.

-- TTK

2006-11-14: More Minor Jibber-Jabber

These Are Minor Journal Entries so don't expect too much from them, 'k?

2006-11-14: That Went Well, and Hey PVM!

My previous major journal entry, Here Comes The Old Boss, Same As The Old Boss, was well-received for all that it was hastily-pounded-out, mostly-unsupported crap! :-) I felt badly for not backing up my position with more concrete evidence, but people seem to like it anyway. Guess I'll make more!

A friend of mine who stays more informed than I do about the details of individual politicians' activities says that I'm a little too harsh on our political leaders. I've told him that I'll keep an open mind, and would like to document examples he comes up with of politicians who display noncorrupt, responsible behavior. I'd like my perspectives to be fair.

In other news, I've been working lately to like MPI, the "new" message-passing interface which has largely replaced PVM. I've been working really hard to like it. MPI makes liking it extremely difficult. It is a bloated, needlessly convoluted system with some odd gaps in its capabilities. I get the distinct impression that PVM was developed by engineers to get real-world work done, whereas MPI was developed by academicians to get their names on little pieces of paper.

Today I broke with my discipline and wrote some code for work which uses PVM. It felt so good! The coding was fun and easy, debugging was short, and the (admittedly simple) application works like a dream. I went from zero to fully-functioning service in about four hours. I whugglez my PVM.

Nevertheless, I really should learn MPI. Why? Well, a few reasons. First, nobody's hiring distributed system engineers for their PVM skills. Everyone wants MPI. At The Archive I'm left to my own devices, but I might not be there forever, so getting some MPI experience under my belt could improve my chances of working with distributed systems for my next employer. Aside from that, PVM has some shortcomings which MPI addresses. MPI passes messages directly between individual processes, which incurs less overhead than PVM's process->master->process relayed path (or process->master->master->process when communicating between servers). Also, PVM is intrinsically limited to 4096 nodes per virtual machine, is vulnerable to decapitation (the PVM "master node" represents a single point of failure which cannot be failed-over), and provides only a very limited means of incorporating new nodes into the virtual machine (rsh or ssh connections made from the master node to the new node, over which pvmd handshaking is negotiated).

I would like to work with a virtual machine framework that lacks these shortcomings, and so far my best idea is to implement one on top of MPI (which is just a message-passing system, and not a virtual machine like PVM). If MPI proves too annoying, I'll implement my own message-passing system, but would rather avoid that. (Well, sort of. I'd love to implement a nice message-passing system, but have limited time and too many other projects, and should put MPI on my resume too.)

Okay, enough blather for today.

-- TTK

2006-11-12: Here Comes The New Boss, Same As The Old Boss

So the Democrats have taken control of the House of Representatives and of the Senate -- barely. On one hand this could be a good thing, as control of our government will be closely divided and it therefore might get less done. On the other hand I'm somewhat distressed by the attitudes of the people around me (most of whom are Dem-aligned), who show great faith that "their guys" are the champions of all that is good and just, and that they can be trusted to do the right thing. Some give lip-service-level recognition to the idea that maybe the Democrats are as corrupt and given to graft and bribery as the Republicans, but in general the dissatisfaction with our government has dropped tangibly.

I remember the same thing happening in reverse, when the Clinton administration went out and the Bush administration came in. Republicans, who had been foaming at the mouth at the evils perpetrated upong the american people by their government, suddenly started thumping each other on the back and singing the fed's praises, as if anything had meaningfully changed. Of course the Bush administration picked up where the Clinton administration left off, and americans' civil liberties continued their free-fall. On Clinton's watch we saw the expansion of police powers (re-interpretation of RICO to permit massive increases in Civil Forfeitures, no-knock searches, warrantless searches), abuse of eminent domain, weakening of posse comitatus, the Clipper Chip, and the deployment of face recognition technology to airports and bus stations. Bush picked up the ball and ran in the same direction, giving us domestic spying programs, institutionalized torture of suspects, intense weakening of habeas corpus (qv the Military Commissions Act of 2006, aka "Quisling Act", aka S3930), further police power expansions under the PATRIOT Act, and the creation of massive protest-free zones around political presentations.

Politicians are not champions of freedom or justice, whether they align themselves with the Democrats or Republicans. Partisans who believe either party will work to make life better for the american people are deluding themselves.

I'm reminded of a conversation I had with a friend who identifies as Republican. When I mentioned that the Republicans only give lip service to the right to keep and bear arms, he stated that he was a Republican, and that he supported the right to keep and bear arms. It didn't occur to me until then that for most people the demarcation between politicians and their constituents is fairly unclear. Republican constituents by and large believe in less governmental intervention, fiscal responsibility, the right to keep and bear arms, a stiff national defense, and free trade. Democratic constituents by and large believe in civil liberties, education, checks on corporate abuses, religious and racial tolerance, development of communal resources, and a robust health care system.

If Democratic and Republican politicians upheld the same values as their constituents, the world would be a much better place. As it is, however, politicians of every stripe value getting elected, first and foremost. They give lip service to their constituents in order to gain their votes, and when elected they will make a big show out of enacting some piece of legislation or policy which seems to further their constituents' agendas. But underneath this veneer of goodwill, politicians are not interested in upholding their constituents' values, or even doing the jobs they were elected to perform. They consistently work against the interests of the people in order to further their own political careers, and to enrich themselves, their families, their friends, and their political allies.

After six years of Republican domination, we have a government which is more intrusive and controlling, less fiscally responsible, less capable of defending the country, and more hostile towards entrepreneurship than ever before. They did allow the so-called "assault weapons ban" to die, but have otherwise done nothing to reduce the obstacles piled up against the citizens' ability to obtain and responsibly use firearms. It wasn't that they tried and failed to improve the state of the nation -- they deliberately neglected opportunities to make the government better and instead prioritized the acquisition and consolidation of wealth and political power. Bush and his administration, for instance, deliberately passed up multiple opportunities to capture or kill Osama bin Laden, both before and after the 9/11 attacks, putting the country's security at risk, because it was politically expedient to do so.

This is from Jeffrey Clair's book, Grand Theft Pentagon , in which he documents actual events illustrating the irresponsible behavior of the Bush and Clinton administrations (pp22-26, copied without permission, mistakes are probly my typos made in transription):

Kabir Mohammed is a 48-year-old businessman living in Houston, Texas. Born in Paktia province in southern Afghanistan, he's from the Jaji clan (from which also came Afghanistan's last king). Educated at St. Louis University, he spent much of the 1980s supervising foreign relations for the Afghan mujahiddeen, where he developed extensive contracts with the US foreign police establishment, also with senior members of the Taliban.

After the eviction of the Soviets, Mohammed returned to the United States to develop an export business with Afghanistan and became a US citizen. Figuring in his extensive dealings with the Taliban in the late 1990s was much investment of time and effort for a contract to develop the proposed oil pipeline through northern Afghanistan.

In a lengthly interview and in a memorandum supplied by his lawyer, Kabir Mohammed has given a detailed account and documentation to buttress his charge that the Bush administration could have had Osama bin Laden and his senior staff either delivered to the US or to allies as prisoners, or killed at their Afghan base. Portions of Mohammed's role have been the subject of a number of news reports, including a CBS news stroy by Alan Pizzey aired September 25, 2001. This is the first he has made public the first story.

By the end of 1999 US sactions and near-world-wide political ostracism were costing the Taliban dearly and they had come to see Osama bin Laden and his training camps as, in Mohammed's words, "just a damned liability". Mohammed says the Taliban leadership had also been informed in the clearest possible terms by a US diplomat that if any US citizen was harmed as a consequence of an Al Qaeda action, the US would hold the Taliban responsible and target Mullah Omar and the Taliban leaders.

In the summer of 2000, on one of his regular trips to Afghanistan, Mohammed had a summit session with the Taliban high command in Kandahar. They asked him to arrange a meeting with appropriate officials in the European Union, to broker a way in which they could hand over Osama bin Laden. Mohammed recommended they send bin Laden to the World Criminal Court in the Hague.

Shortly thereafter, in August of 2000, Mohammed set up a meeting at the Sheraton hotel in Frankfurt between a delegation from the Taliban and Reiner Weiland of the EU. The Taliban envoys repeated the offer to deport bin Laden. Weiland told them he would take the proposal to Elmar Brok, foreign relations director for the European Union. According to Mohammed, Brok then informed the US Ambassador to Germany of the offer.

At this point the US State Department called Mohammed and said the government wanted to retain his services, even before his official period on the payroll, which lasted from November of 2000 to late September, 2001, by which time he tells us he had been paid $115,000.

On the morning of October 12, 2000, Mohammed was in Washington DC, preparing for an 11am meeting at the State Department, when he got a call from State, telling him to turn on the TV and then come right over. The USS Cole had just been bombed. Mohammed had a session with the head of State's South East Asia desk and with officials from the NSC. They told him the US was going to "bomb the hell out of Afghanistan". "Give me three weeks," Mohammed answered, "and I will deliver Osama to your doorstep." They gave him a month.

Mohammed went to Kandahar and communicated the news of imminent bombing to the Taliban. They asked him to set up a meeting with US officials to arrange the circumstances of their handover of Osama. On November 2, 2000, less than a week before the US election, Mohammed arranged a face-to-face meeting, in that same Sheraton hotel in Frankfurt, between Taliban leaders and a US government team.

After a rocky start on the first day of the Frankfurt session, Mohammed says the Taliban realized the gravity of US threats and outlined various ways bin Laden could be dealt with. He could be turned over to the EU, killed by the Taliban, or made available as a target for cruise missiles. In the end, Mohammed says, the Taliban promised the "unconditional surrender of bin Laden". "We all agreed," Mohammed tells us, "the best way was to gather Osama and all his lieutenants in one location and the US would send one or two cruise missiles."

Up to that time Osama had been living on the outskirts of Kandahar. At some time shortly after the Frankfurt meeting, the Taliban moved Osama and placed him and his retinue under house arrest at Daronta, thirty miles from Kabul.

In the wake of the 2000 election Mohammed travelled to Islamabad and met with William Milam, US ambassador to Pakistan and the person designated by the Clinton administration to deal with the Taliban on the fate of bin Laden. Milam told Mohammed that it was a done deal but that the actual bombing of bin Laden would have to be handled by the incoming Bush administration.

On November 23, 2000, Mohammed got a call from the NSC saying they wanted to put him officially on the payroll as the US government's contact man for the Taliban. He agreed. A few weeks later an official from the newly installed Bush National Security Council asked him to continue in the same role and shortly thereafter he was given a letter from the administration (Mohammed showed us a copy of this document), apologizing to the Taliban for not having dealt with bin Laden, explaining that the new government was still settling in, and asking for a meeting in February 2001.

The Bush administration sent Mohammed back, carrying kindred tidings of delay and regret to the Taliban three more times in 2001, the last in September after the 9/11 attack. Each time he was asked to communicate similar regrets about the fairlure to act on the plan agreed to in Frankfurt. This procrastination became a standing joke with the Taliban. Mohammed tells us, "They made an offer to me that if the US didn't have fueld for the cruise missiles to attack Osama in Daronta, where he was under house arrest, they would pay for it."

Kabir Mohammed's final trip to Afghanistan on the US government payroll took place on September 3, 2001. On September 11 Mohammed acted as translator for some of the Taliban leadership in Kabul as they watched TV coverage of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Four days later the US State Department asked Mohammed to set up a meeting with the Taliban. Mohammed says the Taliban were flown to Quetta in two C-130s. The US team issued three demands:

1. Immediate handover of bin Laden;

2. Extradition of foreigners in Al Qaeda who were wanted in their home countries;

3. Shut-down of bin Laden's bases and training camps.

Mohammed says the Taliban agreed to all three conditions.

This meeting in Quetta was reported in carefully vague terms by Pizzey on September 25, where Mohammed was mentioned by name. He tells us that the Bush administration was far more exercised by this story than by any other event in the whole delayed and ultimately abandoned schedule of killing Osama.

In October 18, Mohammed tells us, he was invited to the US embassy in Islamabad and told that "there was light at the end of the tunnel for him", which translated into an invitation to ocupy the role later assigned to Karzai. Mohammed declined, saying he had no desire for the role of puppet and probable fall guy.

A few days later the Pizzey story was aired and Mohammed drew the ire of the Bush administration where he already had an enemy in the form of Zalmay Khalilzad, appointed on September 22 as the US special envoy to Afghanistan. After giving him a dressing-down, US officials told Mohammed the game had changed, and he should tell the Taliban the new terms: surrender or be killed. Mohammed declined to be the bearer of this news and went off the US government payroll.

Towards the end of that same month of October, 2001 Mohammed was successfully negotiating with the Taliban for the release of hostage Heather Mercer (acting in a private capacity at the request of her father) when the Taliban once again said they would hand over Osama bin Laden unconditionally. Mohammed tells us he relayed the offer to David Donohue, the US consulate general in Islamabad. He was told, in his words, that "the train had moved". Shortly thereafter the US bombings of Afghanistan began.

In December Mohammed was in Pakistan following with wry amusement the assault on Osama bin Laden's supposed mountain redoubt in Tora Bora, in the mountains bordering Pakistan. At the time, he said, he informed US embassy officials the attack was a waste of time. Taliban leaders had told him that bin Laden was nowhere near Tora Bora but in Waziristan. Knowing that the US was monitoring his cellphone traffic, Osama had sent a decoy to Tora Bora.

From the documents he has supplied to us and from his detailed account we regard Kabir Mohammed's story as credible and are glad to make public his story of the truly incredible failure of the Bush administration to accept the Taliban's offer to eliminate bin Laden. As a consequence of this failure more than 3,000 Americans and thousands of Afghans died. Mohammed himself narrowly escaped death on two occasions when Al Qaeda, apprised of his role, tried to kill him. In Kabul in February, 2001, a bomb was detonated in his hotel. Later that year, in July, a hand grenade thrown in his room in a hotel in Kandahar failed to explode.

He told his story to the 9/11 Commission whose main concern, he tells us, was that he not divulge his testimony to anyone else, also to the 9/11 Families who were pursuing a lawsuit based on the assumption of US intelligence blunders by the FBI and CIA. He says his statements to the 9/11 commissions were not much use to the families since his judgement was, and still remains, that it was not intelligence failures that allowed the 9/11 attacks, but the political negligence of the Bush administration.

I wish there were authors who were willing to turn their critical eye (and pen) to politicians of both parties, rather than criticising one party's leaders while overlooking the abuses and incompetencies of the other party's leaders. Unfortunately they all seem to have cast their lot in with one side or the other, and selectively demonize only the members and actions of the opposition. In so doing, I feel that they undermine their own credibility, and foresake opportunities to analyze and discuss political corruption as a whole. I think we could learn a lot by looking at what all political dysfunction has in common, without focussing unduly upon the liberal or conservative manifestations of it. It seems to me that the similarities of Democratic and Republican corruption are more important than their differences, and that there are probably common social factors underlying the promotion of all government corruption. If we learned more about what we, The People, are doing to enable dysfunction and abuse, then we might be able to do something about it. Unfortunately a necessary prerequisite of this analysis is the recognition that both sides suffer from the same affliction, and that is something people are simply unwilling to do. It would reveal the belief that "if we just vote Our Guys into power, it will solve all our problems", as a sham. This belief is the foundation of partisan political activity among the constituents of both major political parties.

So now the tables have turned, and the Democrats have "Their Guys" in control of the legislature. Doubtless the Democratic constituency will turn a blind eye to the incompentence, corrpution, and abuses which will follow, while the Republican constituency will strive to eradicate this corruption by voting "Their Guys" back into power. All the while pretending that the corrupt practices enacted by "Their Guys" before the Democrats gained power, never happened.

I fear that the country will only sink deeper into a quagmire of financial, industrial, and social ruin as long as people cling to their delusions and keep voting in the same rotten lying self-serving aristocrats, election after election. Will the american people ever wake the hell up?

-- TTK

These Are Minor Journal Entries so don't expect too much from them, 'k?

2006-11-11: Yet Another Critter (Sorta)

My wife really loves me! I know this because she caught a big, nasty spider and gave it to me, even though she fears big, nasty spiders. (I mean, really and truly fears -- she isn't your stereotypical girlie female most ways, but when a spider emerges from the dark corners of her critter-room she screams and has me come in to dispose of it!)

I've named her Sil, and we set her up in a spare critter-keeper with some moss and a twig. She's happily hanging out in one corner of it in her web, occasionally feasting on the crickets and flies we put in there with her. I got into the practice of catching flies in the early morning stumbling-around still-waking-up hours when I had my first spider, and it's coming back pretty easily now. I'm using the Too Much Coffee Man method of waiting for a fly to land on a flat surface, then putting my hand edge-down over that surface, and sweeping it quickly through the air just an inch above the fly in a grasping motion. The first thing flies do when they sense danger is leap straight up and then get their wings going, so they fall into my hand quite nicely.

-- TTK

2006-11-05: Stray Political Thoughts

It seems to me that the basis of "progressive" ideology is the idea that human beings have not yet lived the best life they possibly can, and that we can progress into a better life, one that has never been lived before. Liberalism is a type of progressivism, but with a (IMO) fucked-up idea of what "better" means, and of what constitutes "progress".

Along these lines, the basis of "conservative" ideology is that the best life humanity can hope for is either already here, or was lived at some time in the past (or at least, that the life humans once lived was better than what we have today). It can express itself in the form of wanting to preserve what is good about the status quo, which is (IMO) understandable and laudable. Unfortunately there are also some really messed-up, evil elements in modern conservatism which I cannot overlook.

I think the essence of "neo-conservatism" is that the "past" which is held up as the ideal towards which humanity should strive is actually fictional, and never actually existed. So in a twisted way, neo-conservatives are actually progressives, but they appeal to conservative sensibilities to dishonestly further their agendas.

As a libertarian anarchist, I consider myself a progressive. I have some ideas of how mankind might live in a better world than any we have yet seen. Unfortunately in this hyper-polarized modern America, idealism is often overlooked. People are preoccupied instead with the struggle between liberals and conservatives to control the resources and people of the world. Both sides have taken a position of "you're either with us, or against us", and see me as just another wasted vote, helping the other side by not pitching in with their side.

That doesn't bother me, though. What bothers me is that so few people are keeping their eye on the prize. What good is it if "your guy" wins the election, if the ideals your guy upholds are antithetical to justice? I believe I have my priorities straight, by putting my ideals first.

-- TTK

2006-11-01: The Joys of Semi-Rural Living

I live in a semi-rural area, where neighbors are far away, the streets are unlit, and the wildlife runs pretty wild. This combination provides ample opportunity for hillarity.

One neighbor has a halogen light in their front yard, which is so bright it hurts my eyes from our own yard, a couple hundred meters away. Fortunately there are some trees and bushes between us, so the light only shines through in patches. I have never liked this light, cursed it constantly, and have considered asking them to change it somehow, or "change" it myself with a rifle. But all that changed last Monday.

I was taking out the trash Monday night, in a bit of a mood, when I saw a dark shape slinking across the unlit street. It was about the right shape and mass for Sam, our big doofus "gorilla-cat", and I thought maybe I'd get behind him and shout "boo!" or something, and watch him levitate up a tree for my amusement.

So I crept up on the shape, and had raised my arms and filled my lungs with air just as it was passing through one of those patches of light from the neighbor's halogen to reveal not Sam's grey hair, but black hair. Black hair marked by two white stripes. Stripes pointing directly at me. It looked something like this.

I froze in my tracks as surely as the breath froze in my lungs. I backed away sloooooowly, not daring to make a sound. Making good my escape, I reflected that should I ever meet the neighbor who installed that halogen, I just might kiss them.

-- TTK

2006-10-31: Never, Ever Do This

I like my soda cold and flat, so I opened a diet 7up and put it in the freezer. I forgot about it, and it froze solid. So I put it on the stove to thaw it back out. Soda was forgotten, and I heard it start to boil. Soda was pulled off the stove, and when it had cooled slightly I put it back in the freezer. When it was cold again, I chugged it.

I think the boiling did something to it.

Something horrible.

It tasted normal enough, a little stronger than usual, but soon afterwards I grew nauseous.

The nausea grew. Oh dear gr0d, it grew.

I'll spare you what came afterwards. Anyway, take it from me, don't ever, ever do that.

-- TTK

And now for something a little different..

Last saturday I had a chat with a long-distance friend who says I don't write enough in my journal. This wasn't exacly news to me, but he said something interesting. When I observed that most days there isn't much more to my life than "woke up, worked hard, came home late, went to bed way too late", he replied that that was okay, he'd like to read it.

So I mulled that over, worried a bit that the dozens of "crap" journal entries would drown out the occasional "quality" entry, and realized I could remedy that with a new format. I'd make an "Everyday Life" journal entry, and then reply to it on the days that followed with the latest "Everyday Life" report. Then when I got around to making a quality entry, it would be a new entry on its own, so it would stand out from the "Everyday Life" entries, and then I'd start a new "Everyday Life" journal entry after it, so that all entries would logically remain in chronological order. (If that didn't make much sense, that's okay, you'll see.)

So, it's two days later and still no journal entry. WTF? Well, there's another problem -- one of timing. When do I talk about my day? Not in the morning, because my day hasn't happened yet. Not during business hours, because I work my ass off trying to get stuff done. I'm buried in enough work to keep two engineers busy -- there is no chance of my getting ahead of the workload, all I can do is try to minimize the number of projects that get dropped entirely. Not after I get home, because I prefer spending time with my wife over the computer (this journal entry you're reading now being an exception; she is currently engrossed on something on her own computer). Also, that's really the most interesting part of my day, and little of it if any would get put in the day's entry. It lasts until we're both too outrageously tired to really enjoy being awake any longer and we drag ourselves to bed. Then it's too late, and memories of the more interesting bits of the previous day are swept aside by the hectic new day.

So, where does that leave me? It leaves me with the option of putting something else into my "low-calorie" journal entries, something other than a few short words about my day. And there is plenty of material to draw from -- I have a rich internal life, and my three hours a day of commute gives me much time to ponder. I just don't usually like to put it into written words unless I'm going to do a proper job of it -- and I seem to get around to that maybe once every few months. So I'll just have to practice doing an improper, half-assed job of it, so I can post entries more often.

And that's the plan. We'll see how it goes.

-- TTK

Gaaah! Too long since last journal entry!

Six months, and no journal entry .. how utterly pathetic. In the meantime cobalt (aka "invisiblecrazy") has been writing up a storm. Well, here's a new one.

Chronicles of The Beast, Part One

A friend of mine was getting rid of a computer cabinet, and asked if I wanted it. Naturally, I leapt at the opportunity. I've been meaning to build a server rack from wood for a while now, and I had a place set aside in our shed outside for just that.

So I woke up at 6am, borrowed my wife's truck for the day, and picked the beast up. And it was quite the beast. I'd been expecting something like the cheesy minimalist computer racks we use at The Archive, but this was anything but. The steel load-bearing structure was completely encapsulated in aluminum walls, with a locking tinted polycarbonate door. I could barely fit it into the back of cobalt's little truck! But that was really the easy part.

After work, I took the beast home, where it stayed for another day before I found the time to get it into the shed. And this is where the story really begins.

Getting the beast into the truck was made relatively easy by the caster wheels on its bottomside, and the nice flat pavement from my friend's carport to his driveway. The grounds around my house are not paved, but rather dirt covered by a four inch or so layer of pebbles. Nor are the grounds flat, the soil is too marshy for that. It flows around and makes little slopes everywhere. Nonetheless, I figured I had a pretty clear shot from the driveway through the side yard and into the shed, and I figured our handcart's 12-inch wheels would be up to the task of transporting it across the rocks.

So I got the casters off, lowered the beast onto the push cart, strapped it to the cart for good measure, and started down the side yard. I didn't get it very far. The ground had a distinct slope to the left, away from the house and towards the fence that separated the side yard from the drainage ditch. The pebbles were mostly navigable, but when the cart got stuck anywhere I couldn't jar it or rock it out or the entire cabinet would try to topple downhill. I worked at it for about an hour before rethinking my approach. If I kept it up, the cabinet would end up crashing through the fence and getting stuck in the ditch, where I would surely never dislodge it. So I laid down some wood to give myself a flatter surface, and used different thicknesses so that the cabinet would be more level in its trek.

Did I mention it was heavy? At seven feet tall and two feet wide, this thing was really damn heavy. Keeping it from toppling over was like wrestling with a poltergeist-infested coke machine.

Anyway, I finally got it to the shed, which I had prepared carefully to make room for its passage, and only then realized that I'd committed a grave oversight: Though I had carefully measured the space in which it was going, I had not thought to measure the entrance to the shed itself, which was far, far too short to allow the cabinet's passage. In the end I had to tip it over so it was laying down flat, with my body underneath it, then lift it straight up and push it through the shed entrance. Damn it was heavy.

After that, it should have been smooth sailing, but once again I fell prey to the hazard of unlevel surfaces. The floor of our shed was made of shipping palettes, and they were not all the same height, so the cabinet listed somewhat to the left. I had carefully measured the width of the shed's central aisle, and even at its tightest points it was a few inches wider than the cabinet -- or at least, a few inches wider than a *perfectly upright* cabinet. The leftward list was sufficient to close this slim margin, and a few items got knocked over before I again used tactically-positioned pieces of wood to give the cabinet a level surface on which to ride.

After that, it was smooth sailing. Three hours of hot, back-breaking tedium was all it took to get the beast into place. And now it is mine, and I have a newfound appreciation for level paved surfaces. :-) Time to start rackin' up those computers!

Little Black Car, Revisited

Soon after my previous blog entry, I got my little honda's tires more fully inflated and its oil changed, and now it's regularly getting 35 miles to the gallon -- one mpg more if I drive it nicely, one mpg less if I abuse it mercilessly. I have to admit to be getting 34mpg more often than I get 36mpg, because half the joy of having a stick-shift transmission is abusing it mercilessly.

I also settled on a bumper sticker, but have yet to put it on my actual bumper. The sticker itself was a row of three anarchist circle-A symbols (in the old style, not the Anarcho-Punk style made popular in the 1970's), but I cut it into three pieces so now I have three square-shaped anarchist circle-A stickers. One I put on the back of my laptop. One I will put on my car, but haven't yet. I haven't decided what to do with the third.

That rear bumper is not completely unadorned, however; my beloved wife found a "duct tape is like the force" sticker and stuck it on my bumper while I wasn't looking. :-)

Falling Prey to the Wiki Meme

I have been writing a little software for importing masses of data into a MediaWiki, an online resource which generates and manages webpages which anyone (or a whitelisted userbase) can update or edit. This is in response to two problems which I think Wiki-hosting material might address.

First, the system I have been using to manage my MBT Resources pages is woefully inadequate. One of my passtimes is researching battletank technology, and resources which seem rare or of scientific or engineering value get saved to my home workstation's hard drive. I then have a tool which can be used to curate this content, and export it into a simple webpage format.

This system has problems. It is tedious and time-consuming to sift through all this content, the resulting web pages are rather sparse and featureless, and once the content is cast into this web format it is difficult to update. As a result I have updated my site little in the last couple of years, even though I have amassed enough new material to easily triple it in size.

Second, Tank Net, a vibrant and valuable online forum for tank enthusiasts, has problems of its own. People there like to talk about tanks, but they don't like to read old discussions. This results in a lot of newbie questions and myths being posed over and over again, and the old regulars are getting tired of repeating the same answers and rebuttals. There are members who are visibly at odds with the disorganized and transient nature of BBS content, and I get the impression these members would appreciate a more organized and longer-lasting medium to target with their online muse.

I think a Wiki would address both, my problems with my website, and the tanknetters' frustrations, with a little help from software I have been developing at The Archive to sort disorganized content. I can automatically organize my new content into something approximating the right layout (tanks here, other afv's there, armor on its own set of pages, and munitions in their own, etc), and then use MediaWiki's powerful content curation tools to reorganize misplaced content and add descriptions to them in an ad-hoc fashion. The resulting documents would be nicely cross-linked (one of the features of Wikis is that when a term shows up in a document, and that term has its own document associated with it, that term is made into a hyperlink for its document).

Furthermore, since MediaWiki allows users to discuss the content of Wiki documents (each page has a "discuss" link attached to it, which leads to a forum interface, sort of), users can pose their questions and observations about the material, and a FAQ in the content page from which the discussion is linked might cut down on the repeatedly posed newbie questions. I would whitelist a select body of users (mostly tanknetters) and allow them to contribute to the Wiki in general. Hopefully this will lead to a more generally useful and better put-together resource than my current MBT pages.

Anyway, that's The Plan and the theory behind it. Execution of that plan remains to be seen.

Postscript

Those of you who are familiar with what's going on with my life lately might be surprised that I failed to mention a few important developments. This is not because I do not consider these developments meaningful, but rather it is because I do not want to talk about them in my public journal.

-- TTK

General Rant

Lots has happened .. and I haven't had time to write. Where to begin?

Work! Work is familiar territory. I spend enough time there. I will start there.

My long, dark midnight in the Collections Department is breaking. We have hired a Manager of QA, who has kicked some major, major ass, and freed me from the constant firefighting which has consumed all of my time for the past few months. I'm spending about half my hours actually developing software (ooooh!). :-) It feels wonderful.

It's just in time, too -- John, the Director of Operations, came back to work after a short (but all too long!) leave of absence. He takes the problems facing the organization very seriously, and pulls resources from anywhere and everywhere to solve them. Since I'm one of the resources at his disposal, he has assigned me some solutions to work on. Wow, now that I've written that out, it doesn't seem like such a wonderful thing, but really, truly, I am elated -- he "owns" the problemset in which I am most interested, and for which I applied to work at The Archive in the first place.

For instance, I've been developing new functionality into the software I use to track the data "items" on the three data clusters, so that I can answer questions about what's where, and what isn't where it's supposed to be, how quickly we are filling up the servers with different kinds of items, and (perhaps most importantly) what is supposed to be the same between the clusters which isn't. I haven't been using my ItemTracker system to do this; that system is still not in production. I've been using an ad-hoc collections of perl scripts which operates on flat files of columnated data, which build up different perspectives of the data, starting from raw "manifests" -- simple lists of all of the items on each host in every cluster (as generated by the dy utility) which are automatically generated every night and uploaded to a central server.

Right now I'm building these perspectives and generating reports as needed, but at John's request I am automating it, so that these reports are generated every week without human attention, and made available via a web interface. Once that's working, I am hoping to spend some time working on ItemTracker, which will not only make new kinds of information available, but also allow users to describe the kinds of reports they want, and have them generated on demand without me.

Switching gears a bit, Brewster sat on a panel at last Friday's Commonwealth Club of California meeting, where he and other relevant individuals talked about the future and present of book digitization. I didn't deliberately time it this way, but I happened to get out of work and into my car (my car! more on that later) to go home just as the meeting began, and got to listen to it on the radio on the way home.

He was a little muted, which surprised me at first, but as the meeting progressed I started to see why it might be a good idea for him to withold some information and conceal some of his zeal. Some people are really upset about book digitization, and view it with suspicion if not outright hostility. Publishing industry professionals see it as a threat to their future profitability, authors are concerned about potential infringements on their copyrights, and the lawyers are circling like sharks smelling blood in the water. Right now those lawyers are making their passes at Google, and I don't blame Brewster a bit for not wanting to attract their attention. Furthermore, most of the books The Archive has available for download are from the Million Books Project, which was a huge learning experience in how not to scan books. The quality of most of these is horrible, and I can understand him not wanting to give people the wrong idea about the books we're scanning today. The quality we're getting out of the Scribe is nothing short of amazing.

Oh yeah, my car! I finally, finally, finally got a car, to replace the 1999 Toyota Corolla I totalled last November. The main reason it took so long is because it had to have a manual transmission. I'm addicted to the stick. But manual transmissions are getting really hard to find! Moreover, I wanted a car with a maintenance record that Consumer Reports liked, and that got good gas mileage for my commute. I finally found what I wanted in a Fremont used car lot -- a black 2001 Honda Civic.

I've been driving it for a couple of weeks now, and I'm really happy with it. It's a bit noisier than I would like (lots of engine noise, and no room between the engine and the firewall to add soundproofing -- still pondering this), but it gets 33 miles to the gallon (vs, the Corolla's 35), has more than enough zip, and has a toy I've never enjoyed in a car before -- a cd player.

So, I dug out the dusty binder that contains my entire cd collection and put it in the car .. there isn't much to it, since I've always had tape players in my cars, and most of the music I like is on tape, and tape players are less expensive than cd players anyway, so why not take advantage of my existing investment and buy a tape player to replace a broken tape player, rather than buying a cd player? So I haven't bought many cd's.

Here's what I do have: NIN: pretty hate machine, NIN: broken, NIN: downward spiral, Stabbing Westward, Gravity Kills, Eagles: Hotel California, Pink Floyd: The Wall, Sisters of Mercy: Greatest Hits, Ministry: Filth Pig, Aerosmith: Get a Grip, Faith No More: King for a Day, Ozzie Ozbourne: Ozzmosis, Depeche Mode: Violator, Psychedelic Furs: Midnight to Midnight, Duran Duran: Decade, Tears for Fears: Tears Roll Down, Led Zeppelin: II, Pet Shop Boys: Discography, Pet Shop Boys: Very, Garbage, Def Leppard: Vault, No Doubt: Tragic Kingdom, Alice Cooper: Hey Stoopid, Blondie: The Best of Blondie, Berlin: The Best of Berlin 1979-1988, Roxette: Look Sharp, White Zombie: Astrocreep2000, White Zombie: La Sexorcisto - Devil Music, Rage Against the Machine: Evil Empire, Marylin Manson: Coma, and Eurythmics: Greatest Hits.

I want: more Ministry, Ozzie, LedZep, Marylin Manson, .. and I want my Foetus on cd! I have been missing Foetus a lot during my commute. I've been listening to No Doubt, Garbage, and Ministry instead. I'll see what I can find on Amazon!

There's something else, too -- this is the first time in something like ten years I've actually owned my car. My last two cars, I got on finance, and totalled them just as they were getting paid off. But this one we simply bought outright. It's not the bank's car, it's my car. I own it, I can drill holes in it if I want to, and I really, really want to put a bumper sticker on it.

Preferably a bumper-sticker with an Anarcho-Capitalist message, which has proven remarkably difficult to come by. I've poured through Cafe Press and similar sites looking for one, but mostly I've turned up stickers being sold with Anarcho-Syndicalist or Anarcho-Communist messages. (Which is pretty entertaining, if you think about it!) I wouldn't mind a more generic anarchic message, and found a few which resonate with my personal convictions (like, "There's No Government Like No Government"), but none which would go over very well if seen in The Archive's parking lot -- we rely a lot on government contracts and grants, and certain important persons working there are of the conviction that our government is the only means by which certain charities may morally or pragmatically be provided to those who need them. This may sound out of character for a self-proclaimed anarchist, but I am loathe to ruffle any feathers.

That's all the time I have for tonight, but I hope to get back to this journal soonish. There's much more on my mind.

-- TTK

Minor Life Notes, 2006-01-07

My mouth is finally starting to heal up, again, after this, the third surgery in two months .. my diet is still mostly soup and eggs, and I'm still popping ibuprofen every six hours, but at least I'm not waking up early in the morning in agony anymore.

As of Friday, I was still spending ten hours a day at the office trying to do three people's jobs in the Collections Department of The Archive, and doing it somewhat poorly as a result. A new hire starts this Monday, though, dedicated to QA and technical user support, which is terrific. I'm hoping that with a little training, she'll be able to take a large load off my shoulders. Also, John Berry is back as Director of Operations, which means I get to perform some tasks for the Data Repository group again (which is really the job I signed on to do, and what I want to spend more of my hours doing). I'm really glad he's back.

One of the consequences of the new hire coming in is that I had to pack up some of my personal machines which I had stashed in the Collections office and take them home. Fungus, Dusty, Rooikat, and Dragon all got taped up and tucked into the closet. I kept hoping to have some time to work with them at the office, but aside from running Fungus for a couple of months as a secondary archival storage box, and firing up Rooikat a couple of times, they remained neglected.

-- TTK

ARRRRRRRRGH, take two

I woke up this morning around 5am to absolutely excruciating mouth pain. I stumbled into the main room and thought I only took two fioracet and went back to bed, but when cobalt woke me up to take her to her morning MRI I was extremely stumbly. My balance was off, I was very clumsy, and my speech was slurred. It's a miracle I got us there without killing us.

Near as we can tell, I got up sometime before 5am and took two fioracet, and then at 5am took two more, because I showed all the signs of overdosing on the stuff. Cobalt ended up driving us from the MRI to my oral surgery, and from the surgery to home. While I was waiting for her MRI, I drank a cup of coffee, which turned out to be a mistake, because suddenly I was both fioracet-drunk and nauseaus. Very bad day!

At the oral surgeon's Dr. Louie explained to me that the tooth socket pain was something called "Referred Pain", whereby the socket adjacent to the empty socket was being served by the same nerve, so the damage from the emerging jawbone was creating the illusion of both regions being in pain. His assistant numbed up the region with lidocaine (which, they she me, was the active ingredient in Oragel -- good to know! Anbesol uses benzocaine, which is related but I think not as powerful), and Dr. Louie explained that they were just going to grind off the top milimeter or two of protruding bone, and then surture it closed. He gave my jaw two injections of topical anasthetic, and then reached into my mouth with some horrible metal thing and started yanking at the jawbone, asking "does that hurt?" At my frantic affirmative, he injected me again, and started the surgery. I was crying out in pain, so he gave me one more injection of topical, which finally did the trick.

The procedure didn't cost me a dime (which is good, because The Archive doesn't provide dental insurance), and I thanked Dr. Louie for doing this for me. He replied "Don't mention it, I enjoy the opportunity to inflict pain," which made me laugh. Love that Dr. Louie.

After the surgery, he explained that while my jawbone was much thicker than normal, my left jawbone was even thicker than my right jawbone. I was feeling neanderthal enough, but even he uttered the phrase "caveman jaw". He wrote me a prescription for antibiotics, and another for fioracet. Yay! I get to reimburse cobalt for the fioracet of hers I used the two days previous (she doesn't have much on-hand).

I'm going to be eating soup for the next few days. Dr. Louie admonished me to not eat "hot foods", but since I'm a nekojita any soup I eat will not be particularly hot. After getting home it was all I could do to drag myself to bed, and here I stay.

Okay, in much pain now, took two more fioracet, and going to try sleeping again. Unconsciousness is good for pain. Poor cobalt asked me to carry something heavy outside, just now, and I had to tell her "No". She's not used to that. Hopefully I'll get better soon, so I can lift heavy things again without feeling like my jaw is going to explode in a paroxysm of blood and core.

-- TTK

ARRRRRRRRGH

About two months ago I had my wisdom teeth extracted. A month later, my right jawbone emerged from my gums. Apparently this happens sometimes, when the gums shrink faster than the healing jawbone. It was painful, but I got through it.

Three days ago, the same thing started happening on the left side. "Oh, I know what this is, I'll get through it" I said to myself, and took ibupofen to control the pain, like last time. Yesterday the jawbone emerged, and the pain became too intense for ibuprofen to suppress, and I moved up to ibuprofen and anbesol (a benzocaine product, targetted at OTC topical oral anasthetic application), which was sufficient (if barely). This morning, I woke up to excruciating, unending pain. About half an inch of jaw emerged, and the pain became so intense as to be unbearable, despite everything I tried -- salt/listerine washes, icing, anbesol, ibuprofen, whatever. It wasn't just the emerging jawbone, it was also the entire socket just forward of the socket where the wisdom tooth had been removed. On a scale of one to ten, with "ten" being the worst pain I've experienced, this was a "nine". Around 1997, I had a really bad ear/nose/throat bacterial infection, and one of the medicines they gave me was codeine. I had a bad reaction to the codeine, resulting in intense waves of pain wracking my entire body, leaving me screaming and writhing on the floor for about an hour. That was "ten". This morning wasn't quite that bad, but it left me casting about in a borderline panic, wondering what I could do to fix it. (cutting a slit over the bone? finding the nerve and severing it? searing the entire area with a soldering iron? yanking the tooth with pliers?)

Normally, one fioracet is enough to leave me with no pain, suspended in a dreamy haze for about an hour, before dropping me into blissful unconsciousness. They're what cobalt takes for her migraines. Well, four fioracet later the morning's pain was reduced to tolerable levels. Cobalt chased down the chain of dentists and oral surgeons, who kept referring to each other (of all the reasons to loathe the christmas season, all of the nation's professionals taking their vacations all at once ranks way up there) and finally got ahold of Dr. Louie, the guy who extracted my wisdom teeth in the first place. He could squeeze me in tomorrow, to remove the emerging bone (and maybe give me a topical, oh please oh please). In the meantime, he said, fioracet was a good idea (he called in a subscription for me, which is nice because cobalt doesn't have many). So I'm drugged to the gills on fioracet ("blue pills") until then.

Thanks for putting up with my bitching. I really needed a way to vent my frustration. I took another four fioracet a little while ago, and my eyes are having trouble focussing, so I'll stop here. I will say that cobalt has been remarkably understanding and caring. She's been really good to me, and I'm grateful.

Merry @#$%^* Christmas. This season sucked for many reasons, which I'll address in another journal entry, but this topped the cake. I hope the rest of y'all had a better one.

-- TTK