Well, I decided to treat myself.

My 20 month old son had destroyed the ribbon drivers in my Carver Amazing Silver Edition Loudspeakers. It would have cost $550 plus shipping and insurance to get them repaired. And, unless I obtained some socks for them (which, AFAIK, don't exist in that size), it would be likely that the problem would repeat itself. (The drivers are VERY exposed, and to curtail his activities in the house to the extent necessary prevent a repeat would either be cruel, or require boxing up the speakers). So, I went shopping and picked up a pair of Bohlender Graebner Radia 520s for $1075 on ebay. Yay for me!

With luck, they should be delivered today (seller was local and agreed to deliver -- payment upon satisfactory demonstration of operation). I just have to decide what sub I want to cross them over to: they cut off at 80Hz and warrant a subwoofer. I'm torn between the Velodyne SPL 1200 or HGS 12, but unless I can find a cheap HGS 12, I'll probably have to settle for the SPL 1200.

Funny... looks like some of my entries got edited. Not that there was anything controversial in them, but whole paragraphs are missing. Oh well.

I got my income tax refund last week, so I can now fix the A/C in my wife's car. I found out that, yes, you can kill tresspassers after dark, but it must be "justified", i.e. they're armed and endangering your life, or they're trying to make off with your property, and the only way to stop them is shooting them.

Wierd Texas Law: purple lines eight inches long, one inch wide, on trees or posts, with the bottom three to five feet off the ground serve as "No Trespassing" warnings. I guess that solves the language problem (i.e. "No habla english"), or does it? I'm still debating surveillance camera types, but am leaning toward fixed cams (no pan-tilt-zoom) with IR illumination. I also want to raise a fence to discourage crossing my yard to the alley behind as a shortcut to the middle school -- I don't really mind kids doing that, but if one of them gets hurt, I'm liable. The trouble with the fence is that it would have to cross an easement to the utility company, and would have to be shared with a neighbor (two gates with locks, maybe?... with a removable centre section across the easement?)

Wife's car got vandalized early Friday morning (March 29): driver side window was shattered and run channel deformed, most likely by having been struck by a blunt object like a baseball bat.

Of course, the geek in me is considering all sorts of security surveillance systems now, though I hadn't considered the expense worth it before. I'm told you can kill trespassers here, after dark, though I wouldn't undertake that course of action without checking with a lawyer first. While I usually garage the cars, this was the one time I had them out because I was rearranging the junk inside. Though garaging them solves the immediate problem of a repeat occurance, other acts of vandalism (spray painting, etc.) would not be deterred by this, and excessive night lighting would disturb the neighbors.

Time to think about a surveillance system. Hopefull, I can rig one up for a not too exorbitant sum.

Obviously, I've been busy (at work), and haven't had time to write. I'd like to share some information about what I'm working on, but that would not be appropriate without the approval of my employer.

I think that I'd get it, because it isn't that earth-shattering, but the trouble to get it would impact on other people's schedules (who are also busy) and would not be a nice thing to do.

I have been thinking about a filesystem utility on my own time, and coding it up, that involves trees of symlinks to permutations of paths in a master tree (think of having several alternate rearangements of a filesystem hierarchy) and might describe that later.

Like I said, busy, busy, busy.

I worked from Tuesday 8:30 AM to Wednesday 5:30 PM, with about 4-1/2 hours off for food breaks. Finally got some sleep from Wed 8:00 PM to Thu 8:30 AM.

The marathon session was productive, and, suprisingly, rather refresshing. There's something to be said for seeing the sun rise after an all-night hacking session.

I did get a chance to read the RMS biography by Sam Williams last weekend. I rather liked it.

Oh geez, I see I've got two +5 main topic posting ratings in a row. Time to watch to see if I get modded down -1 Overrated and see my karma drop to 49 again. I've got to learn to post things not so insightful and/or interesting that reviewers get carried away and overmod me up.

I haven't been writing here because I've been very busy at work. However, my copy of Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software" arrived today. I read it from cover to cover in one sitting. This is definately a book worth buying from O'Reilly: I was pleasantly surprised when I found that the $22.95 price (plus shipping and handling) provided me with a hard cover edition.

Oh, yeah, it is licensed under the GNU FDL, so you can share it, and it appears that an on-line electronic copy is or will be available here.

I had submitted news of the publication of this book to slashdot, but, alas, my submission was rejected.

I haven't been writing here much lately, partially because of work-related project deadlines. However, I have been thinking a lot about SSSCA and the kinds of "anti-circumvention" devices that might be remotely acceptable. Search /. for my postings on the subject.

It does look like I won't have to work this weekend though. Yea! I get to clean the house. Er, maybe !Yea.

Update

Boo. I got more work from my boss. We've all been working a lot lately (nights, weekends) so I'd feel guilty if I didn't come in and get started on this latest enhancement to my previous work while others were here. Still, I was hoping for a weekend off for a change.

We moved into our new home in August, but only yesterday did I manage to get some paintings up on the walls.

Got the lawn care contract established for this year too.

<rant>

... sheesh! That's what my wife told me today, after having set the alarm clock for 8:45 instead of 8:30. It had been set at 6:45 and I really didn't want to hold down the semi-busted 'minutes' button for an eternity, so I just advanced the hours -- she had to go to a Baha'i meeting at 10:00, so 8:45 was fine. I don't take too kindly to those type of direct death threats, but the've been going on for a while. Perhaps I should start to take them seriously.

If I don't work, I'm a cheap, lazy bastard. If I do work, I'm an asshole for not cleaning the house (she stays at our home on which I pay the mortgage). If I don't cook (after a rough day at the office), our kids don't get a hot meal other than something out of a can. But arguing over domestic responsibilities is something I can stomach - direct death threats aren't. Perhaps I should seek a lawyer and catch her good and get her sent up the river, as it were.

</rant>

So, I am in a rather bad mood. Perhaps it will improve.

Feh.

I wanted to write here daily, but I got caught up at work in a "friendly sysinstall" project.

On the home front, I've tried a new approach for a PayMyBills reader applet: have it render the documents directly. There's three basic types: html (no sweat -- write to a document window), jpg (again, just write an image), and pdf. PDF is the tough one because I just can't figure out how to feed a PDF mime type into a browser window and have the browser bring up either a plugin or helper app to deal with it -- document.open("text/pdf") and the like in javascript just don't work.

Today is a company holiday, but I'm at work cleaning up a few things, and generally trying to get a bit ahead.

I think I've figured out how to get an applet to write into a browser window non-html data (like images, but more importantly MIME types like application/x-pdf) to get existing browser plugins to render them. This will be handy for my PayMyBills reader applet.

Well, a lot of the things that I wanted to do yesterday, got done today instead: cleaning bathrooms, vacuuming, shampooing the rugs, etc. I'm about to start making chicken tikka masala for dinner.

We even had a bit of time to take the kids to a local fair, though I don't like such things. The token venders here were rude, calling me a liar when I pointed out that few rides were available to our 20 month old son (he stamds 36" tall). All I was trying to figure out was how many tokens to buy. The "games of skill" operaters were worse -- hassling us to try for a stuffed animal (our kids have way too many stuffed animals). I tried a game to win a goldfish, at my daugher's request, knowing the game was rigged and the chances of getting the fish were slim (a risk which suited me fine). I failed, but the damn idiot gives her the fish anyway, so I had to buy a tank, food, water treatment, etc. I wish we could've stuck to the rides, or played the games for tokens and not bulky and awkward stuff.

Gotta... clean the cat's litter box, pick up dry cleaning, get groceries, stop by the office, do lunch with wife'n'kids, think about rendering PDFs from an applet (I gave up on the proxy http server idea in an applet because of security policy hassles -- anyone got a PDF rendered in Java?)

I got busy yesterday. Hope this isn't the start of a trend of ignoring my journal.

pmbread and RMS

Well, RMS has found my GPL restriction on pmbread not to his liking (as it adds a restriction). Personally, I think that restricting Paytru$t to not benefit from this work unless they free everything else that they aggregate with it would increase freedom (as defined by RMS) and not decrease it. However, I don't feel so strongly about this that I'd mind doing what RMS asks in this case. I'll change it shortly.

Java applet web proxy server

In my attempts to make the PayMyBills reader more portable, I thought to do the image and summary data decryption in a java applet instead of a local standalone application (which relies on a JRE installed -- something the browser provides for applets). The trouble is that applets can't open connections to their local host without running into security problems (unless they are loaded from that host). So, do I require the applet to be downloaded, or do I find a way to share the information using something like LiveConnect? Basically I need to feed .html, .img, or .pdf files into a browser window. The first two are easy, but the latter would be a problem -- I can get the browser to render pdf if it has an appropriate plugin (not my problem), but then I need to provide a URL and not raw PDF.

GNU friends looks cool. I submitted my PayMyBills reader to them (because it provides a free workaround to reading their archival CDs under [GNU/]Linux). Dunno if it will get featured.

It looks like I can make a client-side Java decrypter for the CDs, at least for .jpg images and summary data. Serving .pdf files would be a bit harder. The idea is to use a Java applet to pull the images and data from the server, decrypt them, and pump them to the browser via the DOM with a Java to Javascript interface.

I've been hacking BSD's sysinstall to pass environment changes to pkg-add and installation scripts from entries in the INDEX file. So, I can make "virtual" packages this way.