Staticfree Blog

"Merry Christmas!", but what's it really mean? Christmas to many people, like other holidays, are really a time of getting together with friends and family - spending time together, catching up on life, sharing an experience together.

I'm glad we're able to do this this year - my sibling, Cole, is in from Oregon where 'e's doing AmeriCorps. My younger brother's back from school, we're all at my dad's place and it's good. Well, almost. We're missing one person - my mom. She's gone off to her own world where she's left her family for someone who has made himself unwelcome in the presence of anyone else in her family.

It makes me sad, she has a new house in southern MA, but no one wants to visit a place where he lives with her. I wish she'd be able to see the mistake she has made by being with this guy, but that's really only something she can do. He's the kind of guy who would prevent her from reading this blog if he could, as it shows him in a negative light. He's the kind of person who expresses his anger through violence, the kind who irresponsibly takes drugs of varying legality and blames his misplacing of them on others. He's the kind who threatens people and makes them lock themselves into their rooms at night. Of course, she won't see this part of him - she's hopelessly blinded by his shiny façade and has lost sight of what really makes a family.

He may treat her how she likes, but what about everyone else? What about when times are rough? Is he the kind to leave when he no longer has incentive to stay? Is he the kind to help her be a better person? Is he the kind to pull himself out of the rut he's forcing her into? From what I've seen, the answers to these questions are: no. They're both without jobs (despite her having a job doing what she liked before they got a house together) and living off alimony. What kind of life is that?

So, despite the shining Christmas tree, good music on the stereo, and plethora of Border's gift certificates, Christmas just isn't the same. It won't be, I realize, but I'd really like to see her house, her Christmas tree, her life - not theirs.

On a related note: Gah! Why does the general American idea of Christmas generally involve such wasteful glutton? I really could do without cheap plastic schlock "made in China". Polluting my life with marginally useful single-function things like wooden pencil sharpeners in novelty shapes only makes me sad at the state of the world. I'm not ungrateful for the thought of the person for getting said items, but it's akin to not being ungrateful for someone who wastes a month of their life running in circles for you. The thought is well, but ultimately it's just unnecessary.

You know you're an addict when.. you stay up until 4:30, dispite waking up at 6:30. Repeatedly. Thankgoodness for comfy couches in cozy coffee shop. Sleep...

I don't think I want to be American much longer. Does that make me a terrorist?

The Ministry of Love Department of Homeland Security has now labeled those who provide anonymous free access to the internet as "terrorists". Next thing you know, soup kitchens (which can be used to provide bodily nourishment for terrorists) will have mandatory ID checks in order to only feed Good, Honest American Citizens™. Beware those that do things without regard for profit - they could be terrorists.

I'm going to do a minor act of civil disobedience here and put online a book which every American (and citizen of any country siding with the US) should read. This book has yet to have its copyright expire, thanks to fairly recent legislation designed to keep Mickey Mouse copy protected, but I'm putting it up anyway. I imagine Orwell would be spinning less in his grave at the violation of a copyright than the reality that what he warns in the books is coming true.

If you haven't read it at all or recently, I highly recommend you read George Orwell's 1984. It's a story about a government that loses touch with the people it represents and starts waging war with other countries. At first the wars are bloody and with obvious, clear goals. As time goes on, the wars lose their meaning and become background noise that causes just enough terror to keep people worried that they won't end if they're not supportive of them. The wars are always there, but no one really knows why they're fighting the other country or if they're actually fighting at all. In fact, the only reason ever given by the government is that the countries aided a very evil (yet hard to find) person, Emmanuel Goldstein.

If this doesn't sound insanely familiar to a certain large country's recent actions, replace the name "Emmanuel Goldstein" with "Oslama Bin Laden" and try reading that paragraph again.

Finals are over! In the spirit of upcoming holidays, I've posted a list of stuff I want. I feel sorta dirty putting it up, but I figure that some people will actually find it useful. We'll see :-)

I've finally figured out how to type in japanese, hebrew, greek and a variety of other useful character sets using emacs. In emacs21, the "mule" system is remarkably powerful. Simply specify the input mode with A-x set-input-method. Pick one, then do A-x describe-input-method and it'll show you a nice mapping of the keys. This now means that I can write ひらがなと カタカナ right from within the editor :-) I can now also typeset that beautiful Hebrew phrase from the Bible (Song of Solomon 6:3)

אבי לדזדי זדזדי

In english "I am my beloved's and my beloved is mine."

And in attempting to post this blog entry, I found out the hard way that you need the mule-ucs system in order to make it so you can write those characters to a UTF-8 encoded file. Debian has a package for it suchly named.

I finally have a cell phone. It took Cingular bloody forever to actually get me going with all the services i signed up for, but all's well now (if you for some reason desire my cell phone number, contact me). I'm quite impressed at how incredibly independent of any physicality I'm becoming: Cell phone for communicating with work and family, laptop for doing work away-from-home, and a backpack for the rest :-) I'm finding home as simply being a useful place to shower, store food/clothes, do laundry, find a comfy seat, and sleep; nearly all of which (save showering and sleeping for any extended periods of time) I can ( and do ) do on RIT's campus.

Maybe i should try living on RIT's campus, using the facilities there to survive for a few days - just as a proof of concept. I know where i can find showers and there're lockers into which i could toss some clothes. Or perhaps i can just leave it at knowing that, if suddenly my house was destroyed, with a bit of work I'd have a place i could crash for a bit.

I'm presently trying to train my computer to use my cell phone's text-messaging system if it needs to tell me something important. This is a bit of a challenging task, as my computers generally don't have anything particularly interesting to tell me. Maybe i can program it to pretend something's wrong so i can race to the rescue in my secret, invisible batmobile.

I was bored. Some time ago, I had the notion that it'd be nifty to see if I could use CSS's Real World™ length-units to measure things using the screen. "But how", you ask, "does one measure Real World™ objects with a computer screen?" "With a ruler", I proclaim! Yes, the entire thing's coded in JavaScript (using DOM, none the less), CSS and HTML. Most likely it'll only work in Mozilla though (and of course, Netscape 6.2+, Galeon, and any other browsers that use Mozilla's Gecko engine). Sad to say, they're the only graphical browsers that really support the standards well.

Today marks the official *"OFFICIAL" rubber stamp* start of fall as it moves towards winter. At least in the eyes of Geekhaus, anyhow. As most members of Geekhaus are not religious (certainly not any Major World Religion™ anyhow) we celebrate the onset of the colder months with a few ceremonies: the cider crock and the placement of the weather-shielding.

Apple cider is best either hard and hot non-exclusive-or mulled and hot. As such, Geekhaus has determined the best way to ward off the cold is to keep a constant supply of hot, mulled apple cider. It's a wonderful thing to have and makes your house smell like fall.

Never-ending Hot, Mulled Cider

• 1 Crock Pot
• An empty tea bag or tea ball
• 2 Gallons of apple cider (cheap, store brand is just fine)
• Mulling spices: Cinnamon, Cloves, Orange Peel, Nutmeg, Anise Seed, Allspice, anything else that sounds tasty

Fill the crock pot with the cider and heat up for an hour or two on high. Add the spices to taste. Use the tea ball for any non-ground spices. I recommend lots of cinnamon, a decent amount of orange peel and nutmeg, and only a small amount of the remaining spices. Especially try not too add too many cloves - they can easily cause the entire pot to become too bitter.

Reduce the pot to low and leave it running while you're at home. The spices should seep into the cider over time and a good amount of the water will evaporate. All this will increase intensity of the cider's flavour making a very tasty, hearty beverage after a few days.

As for weather-shielding, Ryan and I have been putting up shrink film window insulation over all of Geekhaus' downstairs windows. Basicly, it's shrink-wrap for your windows. So far it's working fairly well, albeit it's a bit of a pain to get it sticking to our old, disintegrating window frames. This is the first year we've used it, so we don't know how effective it is yet. Hopefully it'll work as an insulator and not just stop the drafts.

Spiced-apple air, a warm house, good music, and a small computer occupying my lap - the only things missing from this perfect scene is a fiery hearth, my wonderful Carolyn, and a cozy blanket.

I've just discovered a nifty feature over at weather underground: an image gallery. There're some rather tasty photos there.

Yet another dark moment in my life is underway: I'm looking to get a cell phone. The usefulness of one, especially as I'm away from home so very often, has far outweighed both the cost and my laziness. Just like every other highly-popular device out there, one really should do research on what you get before you get it - there's way too much rubbish to otherwise.

At Java Wally's (heh, that's Andrew, John and me on the front page!) today, I saw someone with a remarkably small laptop. One could really describe it as an organizer on steroids (perhaps it was. It looked like the person who had it was running WinXP, though). Amber noticed as well and mentioned that laptop sizes are like cars, but inversely so: the smaller they are, the more the owner's trying to compensate for. If that's the case, then iPAQ and Zaurus users must really be unendowed. I personally think it's not how small it is, but how much the size deviates from a standard laptop. I've seen some really big ones which have just as much compensation power as leetle ones.

Maybe it's not size afterall; The more I look at modern computers (laptops and otherwise), the more I'm inclined to believe that the true measure is the number of blue LEDs on the computer. Compaqs, Sony's and HP's have a very large number of the LEDs, arguably to make up for the rather pathetic nature of the machine they're on. Toshiba laptops seem to have a high count of superfluous blue-photon-emitting regions. Toshiba is currently being sued due to very poor design on the heat-dissapation front - the bloody things'll burn you! It must be the lights - just think of all the neon underlights on ricers. I can't wait to see someone who does a casemod so that they have a whole matrix of dancing blue LEDs on the front... that's the kind of compensation you can't buy in stores.

Today, I wear colors. In fact, I shall continue the rest of the week in celebration of national support-your- favorite-GLBTs-week.Or national coming-out week, whatever you preffer.

This weekend will be a wonderful trip to Umass Amherst with Faboo to visit Carolyn, Sarah, and company. We'll be going to King Richard's Faire where we'll [hopefully] be meeting up with bludroses and her new beau. We shall see :-)

Back to school; have been and will be for a bit now. I'm taking some interesting classes. Japanese, surprise, is turning out to be quite a bit of work - mostly memorization. But that's ok, as I left extra time to actually study. I've now learned most of hiragana, which is the first first step in learning Japanese. Soon enough, I may even learn some words ;-) うれしい はい!

Presently, I'm hiding under my cozy fleece on my futon-topped air mattress. This crafty combination of hardish and softish is truly the most comfy thing I've slept on. I've heard some mention it feels almost like a water bed, albeit without the waves or water. Don't let those Sealey™ sales drones let you believe otherwise, you can have a good, cheap night's sleep. So far the only problem I've encountered is that there's a minor leak in the air mattress, so I need to keep the electric pump close at hand.

It is wonderful having a portable 'net connection. Especially when it's connected to a cute laptop wirelessly. I've discovered the incredible geekyness that is hanging out with a group of friends, while 'jacked' into the 'net. Nothing quite compares to multiplexing three instant-message conversations and two Real Life™ ones. At least some of the time, thankfully, I'm not the only one geeking out so loudly. It's becoming quite the habit - a group of us hanging out on comfy couches in the school's coffee shop hiding behind LCDs.

Thisday I decided to wastespend being productive in ways other than my homework. So, now, I'm running a jabber server and client, my page software has been revamped a bit. (comments in the blog don't suck nearly as much anymore). One of my goals is to make the code validate W3's testing system. So far, my main code now validates - the blog and schedules. The file indexer is next in line to be poked at with a microscopic needle. .

On a more personal note: I miss care. Wish we were physically closer, as always. Hm. Should pro'ly sleep before robotics, neh?

I made it home again. Back in rochester, land of the cold, in my own room. How good it feels to have my own room again, my own house again, where I can stay up 'til late in the AM hanging out with friends. Home where hanging out in front of computers isn't anti-social, as we can all do it together.

Carolyn was by for about a week, helping me move my stuff back in. She was amazing in getting me organized in my teeny room here. Who knew how much better a little organization makes things?

Andrew moved in the other day. It's cool actually having people around the house (vs. the non-existant Kim). With him, came his wireless access point so I can now use my laptop's builtin wireless card. Mmm, roaming the house and chatting online is so handy :-)

Summer's neary gone. I've got one week of no-school left. Well, a bit more but it certainly is starting to feel like it. The sad part is that I have some friends I intended to at least hangout with this summer, but never got around to doing so. Never had a party with the old tnet/HS crew. Not that what's been done instead has been bad, but it makes me think that I should have been more assertive in trying to get them done.

On a more interesting note, I finally got my laptop. It arrived (thankbloody goodness) earlier than the date they claimed it would. After poking at the filth they ship on it (WindowsXP) and determining it all worked correctly, I put a real operating system on it. Tried Gentoo, but there were issues with the IDE stuff (which you can find info online on how to easily correct) and I was impatient and had a Debian Potato disk laying around. So, for now, it's running Debian.

Things are great! Nearly everything is working on it. Thanks to a most incredibly helpful resource, and Dyfri's kernel config, I have gotten all but the modem and front accessory buttons working. Havn't tested the firewire yet, nor then wireless adaptor, but i suspect both work just dandy. I should be able to try the wireless out today, so that should be good. Even DVD playing in linux works just dandy with mplayer.

All in all, I'm amazingly pleased with this laptop. The screen is addictively clear (I look at CRTs now and cringe a bit. ah well), I can yank it's power cord out, head off to work, listen to music on it all day at work, and still have juice to warbike on the way home :-)

Carolyn and her sister put together a fiesta last weekend. There were decorations, burritos, margaritas, and all sorts of stuff. It was good fun and I got to see a bunch of the Amherst crew for the last time this summer.

My heart monitor has been removed. I got frustrated with the electrodes making my skin break out, so I simply removed them last friday. I suppose I need to send the kit back to the co. at some point before I head back to Rochester.

In going to Rochester, I need to pack. It seems like there's so much to pack, but the bulk of it is my big workstation. Clothes are mostly packed anyway, as they're all in containers that I can dump into my suitcase :-) My dad is letteing me take the air mattress that I've been using all summer as padding for my futon. This is wonderful, as I would have simply gone out and bought my own air mattress if he didn't - it's an amazingly comfy combination. Once packed, Carolyn and I will head back to Rochester. It'll be good to just hang out there for a bit before school starts - visit with friends, get computers set up, get used to schedules.

Now all I need to do is just finish up the week at work and get paid.

it rained. i was at work, hearing word of thunderstorms all afternoon.

15:35

Coworker mentioned black clouds, so i left early

15:42

I arrived home. 15 mins since i walked in the door, it started pouring.

16:05

Got home, cooled off from the heavy biking and suited up in rain gear. I decided to leave early to avoid as much rain as possible.

16:35

arrived at train stop, bunch of people waiting.

Apparently there were delays on the tracks due to the signal electricity being out. they were trying to turn a train around on the line (switch it to the other side of the tracks and reverse its direction) but couldn't power the switchers which were apparently on the signal power lines. don't they have manual override on that kind of thing?

17:30

went to payphones in attempt to contact care tried with coins, weird tones then what sounded like a collect call system. keypad didn't work to use prompts. $1.00 was put in and returned. Telcos are severely screwed up. 14.4 on calling card, no use.

17:32

missed train as there was a wall of trains on the other side blocking crossing. made it to other side just as train was leaving. 7 cars backed up

17:50

scheduled to meet care

17:58

gave up on train, went to phones again

17:59

2/3 dialed correctly, but keypad wasn't recognised when cc service was tried

18:00

got to the "add money" prompt, entered cc num, # and said "process canceled"

18:02

tried trains again, borrowed cell from guy while waiting, got through when train came, heard care was on greenline, quickly returned phone and ran off train before it left. Almost forgot to return cell.

18:04

waiting for care at train stop

18:18

realized care might be on inbound train. fuck. Got on next train. hunted for someone with a cell.

18:48

saw someone on a cell, asked to borrow after she was done.

"I don't think so. that's sorta weird"

People are weird. Calls are not like cigarettes. People don't seem to be too open to borrowing them out, or permissive towards bumming a call off someone. Even though with high tobacco taxes, they're pro'ly worth the same monitarily. It's pro'ly because they're so personal. all calls are logged, cc's are charged, physically it's an expensive device which you bought.

Maybe it's the confrontation. the guy i successfully borrowed a call from was male. the other person i tried was female. maybe it was just that i obviously was watching her, to see when she was done, etc.

It's pro'ly that i didn't have enough confidence.

19:19

after many more unsuccessful attempts with the pay phone, went to red line. gave guy singing there money as at least i could attempt to make his day better in a little way. plus, he wasn't too bad.

19:24

will just go to porter and wait there. not enough time to risk missing the 19:45 train to waltham by stopping at central to check pearle. She should be there eventually.

19:48

called kate (which i should have done before). told her to call care and go as planed to waltham i'll call kate as soon as i get to waltham. there'll be a 5 min window between getting off and a train back to porter when i can try a call to kate and sort stuff out. Walked to pink stucco and enjoyed the rest of the evening partying.

I finally got myself a laptop. It's been many years, but a company has finally made one i deem worth buying :-) I decided on the one that dyfrgi found - fujitsu's p2110. it's happy, long-life'd (~10h), has onboard eth/802.11b and a high-res screen ( 150DPI ). all i need to do is have it exist in the physical, install linux on it and find a way of carrying it around with me *happy steve*

On a more fun note, i get to wear a cute little wearable ECG recorder. The device monitors the last 30 seconds of my heart in a continuous loop. when i press the little red button on the bottom, it freezes that loop and starts recording an additional 60 seconds. it can store 4 "events" of 90 seconds each, which then gets transmitted - real time - via phone to the company that maintains the devices via a little pizo electric speaker when the "send" button is pressed. it's sorta modemy, but without the need of an acoustic coupler as it's not really digital (or i hope it's not. it certainly doesn't sound it).

Oh, and i get to wear it for a month (got a week or so down already). thankfully, it's just an event recorder, not a monitor. that means i can take it off when it pisses me off, or when i need to do things like shower or sleep.

Anyone who has never heard of Palladium (in the context of Microsoft, anyway), should check out the TCPA / Palladium FAQ by Ross Anderson. It gives a very good overview of what the concepts are and some perhaps paranoid extrapolations of what it could be used for. It'd be nice if all of what he says could be tossed off as paranoia, but in the long run, if all the companies invested in this technology had their way it would be quite non-fictional.

The catheterization went well. I'm alive and they couldn't find anything terribly, horribly wrong with my heart. SVT was pretty much ruled out, as they couldn't find any superfluous pathways. They tried inducing tachycardia in a variety of ways with the catheters and couldn't. All in all, it turned out nicely. They now know many things it's not (thankfully so far, dangerous is one of them).

A couple amusing things about the operation: the table broke. After they put me on the operating table, got me partially sedated (enough so i remember and could talk), and wired up, they determined the table was stuck on one axis. So, they called in a technician and had him replace the missing bearing (or whatever it was) and continued on. Always good to have techies on hand :-) Also, the defibulators were stickers. They put one big sticker-electrode on my front, and the other on my back. Gives a whole new meaning to the term "sticker shock" ;-)

I'm back on Atenolol. It's an under dosage, but who knows - maybe it will help some. With such a small dosage, and such infrequent incidents of tachycardia, it's hard to tell.

As for recovery: I'm pretty much back to normal. Except for two bandaids near my groin (where they inserted the catheters into large arteries and veins), and one on my wrist where the IV was, i'm rather unscathed. Life goes on.

The next step is to put another halter monitor on (wearable ECG recorder) which is designed for longer-term use. The idea is that it records an ECG for a small amount of time, and continuously overwrites that data until i press a button on it. It'll then write the recorded segment to memory, and monitor for a few minutes after i press it. That way, it will (hopefully) record some tachycardia or other abnormalities so they can be further analyzed.

The MRI went well this morning. If you've never had the honour of having an MRI, the idea is simple: put you in a giant magnet/electromagnet and tinker with radio waves. It's a big, scary machine which they have to give you earplugs for, as the various magnets in it are very noisy. Of course, being so big and scary, they have to put you smack in the middle of it (and there's barely room for more than you in the middle).

Thankfully, they had a cool breeze flowing through the middle, so i could just close my eyes and pretend i was laying on a beach with my dear while loud electromagnets buzz and pop around me. Ok, so it took a lot of imagining. The most work i had to do was hold my breath while they imaged my heart, so i managed to get a tiny bit of rest in it.

After the MRI, i got yet another blood test (thankfully done with a butterfly needle, which is less painful and smaller than the one that went straight to the tube [which i had the day before at my primary doctor's place]). Much more doctor bouncing ensued, and i got around to finishing up my reading of the principia discordia. What an enlightening book.

Tonight i stop eating anything after midnight. Tomorrow, the fun begins and I go in at 11:00 or so for the operation. All the stuff going on recently, the MRI and whatnot, is a precursor to determining if i have SVT, VT, or some other flavour of arrhythmia.

In order to make the diagnosis, they put me to sleep and put catheters in me. With them, and a bunch of electrodes, they'll poke and prod at my heart, trying to induce the tachycardia. They can then monitor what's going on electrically as well as monitor the blood flow via some dyes. If they determine it's in fact SVT, that means that there's most likely a pathway that electrically connects chambers of my heart in ways they shouldn't be connected (sorta a short-circuit). They could then find that pathway and using RF ablation, essentially burn the pathway out. Hopefully, this is the case and they can treat it with the ablation. If not, VT is much more confusing than SVT (as there's more variety to the causes of it) and more things would have to be tried to manage or get rid of it.

Hopefully, things will all go well and I'll be able to post a followup to this tomorrow after the operation. We shall see.

...once it starts, tomorrow, at 08:00, that is. It looks like I'll be going in for an MRI tomorrow, bright and early. I've been a bit worried, as i had a spinal fusion sometime back in 1997 (basically, I've got two stainless-steel metal rods holding up my spine now). MRISafety.com ( username/password: "cypherpunk", if you don't want to create an account ) seems to imply that it's safe, but i don't know how much i'd trust a site that forces you to log in to see the information. I'll ask the MRI techs tomorrow, hopefully they'll give me a useful answer.

after the MRI tomorrow, i'll get to have a much more invasive exploratory surgery the following day. i'll write more on that once i find out about it.

One and Two
me and you

Three and Four
More, MORE, MORE!

Five and Six
Will this fix?
seven, eight, nine
your place or mine?

My learning of lojban is coming along well. It really is amazingly easy to learn. The best part about it, is that all the tools to speak / write it (and most importantly, write it well) are freely available on the web. I mean, there're grammar checkers in debian's apt (jbofihe) which let you verify your sentences against the grammar and see what it thinks you were trying to say. So far i havn't even tried to understand arbitrary spoken lojban, but i need to learn quite a bit of grammar first. I have a lot of respect for languages that essentially build emoticons into the language.

My tests at Children's the other day went well. I had a fun echo cardiogram (honestly fun... i could see my heart beating and stuff) and a rather unfun stress test. Stress tests consist of running on a treadmill, with an increasing level of difficulty, while you have many electrodes stuck to your chest. You walk/run until you can't any longer. So, out of shape as i am, lasted only 18 minutes. ah well, at least i bike regularly.

I've also just put my GnuPG public key on a public keyserver, as well as my own page. Now i'm all 1337 and crypto-enabled. I should really learn more about how public-key encryption works, though - it seems quite nifty.

mi nelci la latci'o .u'i ("i like kittens :-)")

Well, there's nothing more fun that wearing an ECG all day than getting a call at work from your dad saying that you have to be at Childrens' Hospital at 08:00 to have your heart poked and prodded. As much as one can really poke and prod a heart without getting too bloody, that is. Tomorrow's (er, today) looking Really fun, hopefully culminating in some more definate resolution whether i'm going to spontaniously combust or die a horrible, painful death of heart failure. Or maybe live normally in a secret underground government research facility as i'm studied studying aliens who study humans. Yeeees... the aliens...

Save internet radio! Spread this site to your friends... you'd be suprised how unpublicized this all is. Perhaps the media giants are, in fact, giant?

Kate told me i HAD to watch Forbidden Zone. So i did, without reading anything about it at all and with my grandparents and younger brother in the room... my, what a twisted movie. The best description i could come up with is Alice in Wonderland smoking crack while watching amature soft-core porn.

I think the everything 2 node summarizes it best.

well, tomorrow (er, today), i get to go into children's hopital bright and early to have my heart checked out for palpatations. It's sorta weird: tashari had mentioned that she was going to have her heart checked out for similar things, and it brought me to researching what kind of things there are in the way of heart conditions. which then lead me to realizing that there might be a reason for the weirdness i had been experiencing, and yes - the symptoms of palpatations (as well as my guess as to what was going on with me, compared against what a palpation is) seemed to be what i had. so, maybe i'll have such... hopefully i don't. most likely, i do, but very minor. i wish humans were easier to debug...

I've always been interested in constructed languages (conlangs) and how languages evolve and interplay. Some day, i might even try and learn something of linguistics. Until then, I can be amused by Lojban and such. Maybe i'll try and learn some of the grammar, although a potentially spoken language based on predicate logic sounds a bit ... convoluted. At least they claim it's easy to learn.

exploding dog is a happy site. This one should be the motto of all livejournal and blog writers out there: all my favorite people...

Well, I safely moved back to Newton for the summer. It's a bit crowded here in my dad's 2-bedroom apt., but hey - at least it's not rochester. The sun actually dares to come out here as well as almost all my good friends are around here.

Work begins again tomorrow. With any luck, I'll get the project done soon and move on with bigger and/or better things. Maybe I'll actually finish the code for this blog...

D00d... check out the 1337, VB-writing h4><0rz.. the Digital Underground. (Wasn't that name taken back in ... the 80's?) It's sorta sad how poor a S/N ratio they have. I mean, where're the über 1337 "hacker tools"? Their "tools" are just a few lines of shell script. Oh well, I guess you need some source of entropy for the script kiddies to suckle on.

I've recieved some strange spam in my day, but never this strange. Often, you just get one email that almost makes some sense in some manor, but really must be spam. The first email looked sorta like some things I've seen before: someone either with a confused understanding of the electronic world seeking assistance or some sort of scam under a very weird cover. That's well-and-good, *files into interesting-spam folder* but there was a follow up. A second email from someone else (this time in HTML as well as text) appeared in my inbox. I guess it's just one of those things that happens when you have a heavily-connected world.

I've been thinking up a way to hear the doorbell better from downstairs. No, I won't simply run a wire with a bell at the end - that's too easy. Instead, I'll come up with a network-level event system (top-quality name there) so that i could build a system that would wire the doorbell to a server and have the server broadcast messages to a given set of peers.

Anyhow, I thought it might be useful to think this one through. Or has this been implemented already in some manor (I'm thinking XML::RPC, SOAP, or something like that). Like it? hate it? have no idea what i wrote but are interested? contact me.

I just found a very cool digest that goes all the way back to '85. Risks is a "Forum On Risks To The Public In Computers And Related Systems". If you design software or hardware that may be used in a way that effects the real world (ie: you don't just write games) you should read this. Good design is highly underrated.

Kate and Meredith, Ari... mm. I need to get paid so I can get more tasty albums.

Melissa pointed it out to me, as I don't use hotmail, but if you try and edit your preferences with Mozilla (perhaps the most standards-compliant web browser out there), it gives you this cute message: Browser not supported. While at the same time, with lynx you get the following:

                                              MSN Hotmail - Browser Limitations

   Browser Limitations
     _________________________________________________________________

Your Current Web Browsing Software Will Limit Your Ability to Use Hotmail

   As you know, Hotmail is web-based e-mail. If you are seeing this page,
   we have detected that you are using a web browser that Hotmail does
   not support. Hotmail supports the following web browsers:
     * Microsoft Internet Explorer - version 4.0 or higher. 
       We recommend that you upgrade your web browsing software, and
       invite you to download Microsoft's Internet Explorer 5.0.    
     * Netscape Navigator - version 4.08 or higher.             

   If you continue to use your current browser software, we cannot
   guarantee that Hotmail will work properly.

                        Continue using Hotmail
                                              
    © 2002 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. TERMS OF USE
   Advertise   TRUSTe Approved Privacy Statement   GetNetWise       

Someone's playing favorites here, while trying not to get blamed for being unaccessible. I bet the only reason that mozilla's blocked out is because it's got so much control of what you can see and do. Or perhaps because it's open source? <sarcasm>"If anyone can view the source code, including hackers, how can it give me the security I need to prevent hackers from stealing my information?"</sarcasm>

Finally: some good words on accessibility in an easy question-answer form. Web Accessibility Myths. If you've ever made a "designed for " website, you should read this. The web isn't what it was 3 years ago.

TMBG + Suzanne Vega & Patti Smith + good friends @ The Boston Hatch Shell == a very happy Steve. I'm so very much looking forward to school to end.

Yeah, this link is straight off /. but it's still cool. How would you design a way of marking radioactive waste buried underground? Some very smart people thunk it around a bit and came up with this (and maybe this summary. I dunno, there were a bunch of typos...)

Also, recently, William McDonough gave a very interesting speech on design, environmentalism, and how to not destroy our world. I'm glad there're people who realize it's not enough just to go hug trees, you have to show other people why hugging trees can be such a fun and profitable activity.

Well, the robotics competition went well. We got second place out of the two entries into our league. ah well, at least it wasn't an honorable mention or something. Our robot, after many hours of coding, actually followed its way to gps coordinates. Sadly, the robot's chain kept getting loose, the laptop's battries kept dying and the thing couldn't turn very well on the grass. After not sleeping since friday, I decided to get some rest. 14h of sleep still isn't enough, i think.

Well hopefully it's us crunching on getting everything finalized, not the robot crunching small children. Although the later might be nifty depending on how annoying they are.

The code is almost complete! Well, by complete I mean mimimally functional. Which is useful as the competition is a day or two away and we've not yet tested the bot as a whole. Let's hope the unit testing works out as well as it is supposed to. Andrew, Zac and I pulled an all-nighter in the labs, tossed the code into CVS (finally!) and just coded as much as we could.

"It may sound simple to have some absolute rule that no foreign citizen may have access to certain fields of science, but in fact America has benefited enormously from talent that comes here from other countries to study in the United States," said [George Leventhal, policy analyst with the Association of American Universities]. "There's a long tradition of groundbreaking discoveries made in the U.S. by researchers born in other countries."

Apparently our President took inspiration from 1984 - in the entirely wrong direction. this article is frightening. Remember kids: if they don't teach it in schools, you'll never ever ever be able to learn it, no matter how hard you try. Especially if you have ulterior motives.

So's this one. ug. Canada's looking like a mighty fine country these days.

On an entirely less stupid note: We have robot pics! Physically, it's pretty much done. Now if the software were only the same...

Dyfrgi posted a link to a rather well-written and thought out article on genetically-engineered food: Playing God in the Garden. It focuses on Monsanto's NewLeaf Potato. I find it endlessly amusing that with the potato, comes a "shrink-wrap" license agreement that limits your rights to grow more than one generation of potatoes and other such things. *sigh* will it come to needing to create open-source biotech too?

if you are connecting to the internet via a modem click here to see if it has the the +++ATH0 bug or not. You can read more about this sillyness at this respectable site.

Why does this still work? Because people were stupid and did not provide an escape for the escape sequence '+++' which would be used on all transmitted data. This is common knowledge: if you want to make '+++' mean something special, you have to make it so normal applications can still transmit '+++' without having that special meaning activated. Ug.

SGML and HTML do this: if you want to write a '<' symbol (which normally would be interpreted as meaning a tag) you write &lt;. And to write the '&' in &lt; you write '&amp;. It's messy, but it works.

Here's an interesting article on why working for Wal-Mart is evil. Essentially you're disallowed unions, work for more than 28 hours a week and other such obvious benefits.

Ryan posted an article written by a representative of the HFA. Scary stuff. It rather amazes me how cruel the entire system must be: not just for the animals involved, but the humans who have to work in the system. If you take a random person in the world and told them do the things that the workers of these companies do, I bet over 99% of them would not comply.

The workers have been desensitized to a level that I've seen in video game players: you don't want to just kill the bad guys (or animals, as the case might be) you want to destroy them. You want to see how far you can go, how much damage you can do, and most importantly: show your superiority to them. After all, they're just dumb animals right? Who cares if you take some pleasure or fun in beating them instead of just going through with the standard routine; they end up dead no matter what you do.

The problem I see is that you can't solve this with regulation. You can try, but it'd take an enormous amount of effort to impose the level of regulation that would actually be effective — obviously not something that couldn't be done without a great deal of federal funding.

The other option is to change the people or more specificly: the way that people interact with the system. If you can somehow take those workers and let them be more sensitive, then you should end up with workers more like the rest of the population: where you treat the animals with more respect and not something that you must destroy. This could be done by means of having them do less within the system (or at least the parts that breed desensitization). Hopefully, automation will get to the point where this is feasible and where the automation can be designed to deal humanely. Of course, as we all know "mechanically-separated chicken" is something to be avoided and thus, technology isn't there just yet.

When it is, though: that's when the regulation is useful: regulating the technology. Technology is dumb and will never get pleasure from killing animals in ways that amuse it. Technology can't be desensitized: it already is.

Tashari posted a link to whatsbetter.com. Cute idea riding on hotornot.com and the like. I hope they compile some fun data with graphs and stuff. I want to see how certain things rank, like Vi vs. Emacs and Coke vs. Pepsi, or George Bush vs. Jesus.

Ooh... you can. Nifty.

I decided to add a few.

I'm not too fond of flash, being a fairly closed format and all, but some people can create some rather impressive art with it. i love it, it's free to watch and donation ware. I like this idea, as it lets me give money Straight to the people who produce it. $5 goes a long way that way.

"If you are using a new Macintosh running OS X then you probably have these "daemons" on your computer, hardly something a good Christian would want! This clearly illustrates that not only is Macintosh based on Darwinism, but Darwinism is based on Satanism."

Oh, the joys of the ignorant and close minded. At least people like this provide decent web design and good entertainment value.

Bad Rob. Don't send me links to really interesting etymology pages when I have assembly homework to do.

I've written up a paper on our current SME robotics project. Now if we can only get it functional like the paper says before the competition.

Hm. I've been up since 10:00 wednesday. I should sleep.

Tonight, I indulged in information. a good:

# dd if=/dev/hda bs=1 | tee /dev/dsp | hexdump -C&
# dd if=/dev/hdb bs=1 | tee /dev/dsp | hexdump -C&
# tcpdump -w - | tee /dev/dsp | hexdump -C&
$ say bible.txt&
$ say pi.txt&
$ for a in $(find . -name '*.wav'); do play "$a"; done&

always makes for some interesting visuals and mind-numbing audio. Tonight, I was not staticfree.

Si tu poter leger ce ci, tu [can read interlingua]. Ok, so it's easier to read than it is to write. I wonder if babelfish or Google will make a translator for it. You can use Google with it, anyhow.

Oh and artists who toy with society are cool.

Rob just showed me Interlingua. It's not quite french, not quite spanish and fairly distant to english... yet it's oddly readable. Cool.

On a related note, I have recently installed a barrage of Unicode fonts on my system. One particular one, Microsoft's TTF Arial, is 23MB in size. Sadly, X 4.1's modular TTF renderer gets quite slow when reading from it. It doesn't crash, but expect 10 seconds for a page to display that uses it.

this is the god of barcode scanners. It reads 1D and 2D barcodes. It even reads postal codes and those nifty 2D barcodes that UPS uses. Too bad a high-density USB model costs about $1547.

My power supply on my main workstation blew. This is never a happy thing, especially when futile attempts to replace its fuse result in funny smells and little popping sounds. It's always strange: I leave, on vacation or somesuch, and Just after I do, some computer vital to our network (or more importantly: vital to me getting at my information) dies. I think they must get lonely without either Ryan or myself.

Ah well, thanks to my generous neighbor, Bitch, I have a replacement power supply to borrow until I can scrounge enough money up to buy one.

Well, I finally got around to getting UTF-8 to work in Debian. Now I can have nifty things like runes, cyrillic, and all sorts of other fun characters in my terminals. See!

"Your score was 181 out of 512, that is 35.4% of the Hacker points, making you a Nerd."

Considering the test is from before I even started using computers, I'm quite impressed.

Well, I've taken Neil Gaiman's advice and removed the rest of the copyrighted work from my text collection. (well, the ones that are copyrighted in such a way that I shouldn't be distributing them. IIRC, ESR's work is copyrighted to him, but he permits it to freely be distributed).

In my continuing email discussion with Neil Gaiman concerning the above collection, I put together what turned into a rather long delude of my beliefs when it comes to information and intellectual property. I'm still thinking a bunch of it over, so this is just my opinions at present (isn't that always the case?).

Anyhow on to the rant:

Well, although my implementation seems a bit misguided, the idea is this: information wants to be free. Not necessarily free as in no money, but free as in accessible. This is the nature of information on computers today: if possible, the information will move towards being unrestrained, unencrypted, and often duplicated. You see this all over: if there's a copy protection scheme that can be bypassed, someone will try and bypass it. This happened with DVDs, adobe's e-book format -- once it's been bypassed, there's no putting it back.

Now, books intrinsically prevent this type of behavior. Not that it's impossible, but it's (usually) impractical. Their physical nature prevents it.

Now the key here is why information wants to be free. It's not that people are out to steal intellectual property when "liberating" information, it's that the benefits of having information that is free are amazing. Blind people can have books read to them without having to hire someone to read for them. Someone could copy a book to a PDA and read the book wherever they are. People can play DVDs on computers that don't run commercial operating systems. People can listen to music in ways they never could before.

These are just a few examples that have been used in a great deal of arguments concerning intellectual property rights, and more specifically the (evil) DMCA. Personally, I think that the DMCA, SSSCA, and other such legislation is misguided (and horribly designed/implemented). This legislation and potential legislation assumes that people want information to be free so they can steal it. Most often, this is not the case.

Personally, I wanted the books I put up to be free (note again: free unbound-free, not beer-free) just for reasons I cited. I have had my computer read excerpts from books to me when I got tired of reading my screen, I have copies of books that I own in print on my PDA so that I can read them wherever I am. This is why I have them. I had them online so that others could do the same or use them in other such ways. Now, the problem here is: certainly not everyone who would download them from my site has paid the royalties to the authors that they deserve. And as you've noted, I do not have the legal right to do such.

Why do I want information to be free? Well for one, I run a free operating system, with free software and software I've written or enhanced. The only way to prevent information from wanting to be free on a computer is to lock it up, from screen to keyboard. The entire computer has to have information "security" built into it to in order to entirely prevent the information from being free (think of it as a ship that will sink if it gets a single hole in it). This is not the kind of computer I want to use. I hope that it is not the kind of computer anyone else wants to use, but apparently there are politicians and their corporate supporters that would love to see it common place.

Intermediately, if you cannot lock up the entire computer, you have to lock up a piece of software that the information can live in securely. Again, this is not something you'd ever see an open source advocate considering a viable option for a commonly-deployed system. Locked software means true security or security through obscurity (ala DVD). Sadly, the latter is easier and is the way that most "copy protection" ends up getting done. This means that corporations have the legal right to protect you from "abusing" the intellectual property you have purchased right to. (as trying to circumvent "security" is a violation of the DMCA).

Well, I got a letter from Neil Gaiman this evening. I had a copy of one of his books on my server and he, as all copyright holders should, respectfully asked it to be taken down. Sure, why not?

It's good to know there're people like Gaiman out there who don't immediately lash out when they feel they've been defamed / disrespected / violated / etc. with a large legal hammer. It gives me hope for the world.

There need to be more Jewish A Cappella groups that don't suck. Sadly, they also need to have accompanying non-sucking websites, too.

Our robot works! well, when we connect power to the motors, it drives anyway. Unfortunately (or maybe it's not unfortunate), when we designed it we didn't do too many calulations as to how fast we were making it go. Well, we ran it at half power and it's going (we guess) about 5mph. That's quite a speedy autonomous robot.

Coding + trance + coke == happy steve

Last year, RIT's SME club made a robot for the SME competition being held in pittsburgh that year. I've now written a paper on it, detailing how it worked and some other fluffy goodness. This year, the competition is being held here at RIT (May 4th) and I'm leading the the team that's building the new bot. This new one uses a GPS to navigate its way around a given terrain autonomously. It'll be really cool when we get it working, as the hardware is practically a tank. No, it is a tank

If you happen to be in the Rochester area, are looking for a place to live next year (or this summer even) and you don't suck, you might want to try your hand at applying for a position at our Geekhaus. Of course, you could simply email Ryan or myself if you're interested as well.

well, i generally believe that web portals are going entirely in the wrong direction, and RIT's my.rit.edu is no exception. They have wonderful things, like buttons that run away from the cursor on Netscape 6 (which work fine in IE, of course ), to RSS feeds of "opensource news" powered by some marketing company that links to zdnet, cnet and businuess magazines. Ug. If RIT only let the public have direct access to their news RSS feeds, I'd be happy.

My computer successfully did not wake me up again when it was supposed to. I definatly need to add pain receptors to it, and maybe make a daemon to add mutations to the code. I suppose I could just go debug it, too.

One should never be forced to copy an assembly program from a painfully hard to read gif to 400 lines of code. Ug. At least I can say I know how to type: I only typo'd twice and both required high-magnification to see if i was wrong or not.

I've come to the conclusion dish racks and the process of washing dishes by hand, are incredibly flawed. (dishwashers also have this problem). You have generally two buffers and one processor: the first buffer holds dirty dishes, the second holds clean ones that are drying. The processor is the act of washing the dishes.

Now, normally, when you do buffer->processor->buffer, you would use buffers that will handle everything flowing through them. Dish racks do not do this. A dish rack does not scale. Usually, they're under-powered for the given load of perhaps two meal's worth of dishes. Problem 2 is that they're not FIFO. You put a dish into the dish rack, it takes a specific amount of time to dry while in the dish rack, then you remove it. But, as you're washing, if the rack can't hold enough dishes, your're forced to either remove the dishes from the rackand dry them by hand or stack others on top of the dishes already in the rack. If you dry them by hand, the entire functionality of having a dish rack is lost. If you stack them, the same problem occurs as the wet ones drip onto the dry ones and make it so you can't take the dry ones out before the wet ones.

I truely hope there's someone out there, designing a dish rack that doesn't suck.

Well, it has been a long time needing such, so I finally gave this site a new look. Now it uses CSS extensively, with a dash of oldskool formatting so old browsers don't entirely suck. Not only does it have a new look, but i've a preliminary blogging system in place. XML is your friend.

Hopefully, Blogml will come up with a good XML DTD for storing of blogging data fairly soon. At present, I'm using a heavily stripped down version of one of the proposals until something better comes along.

I was using a computer in one of RIT's labs and discovered a rather scary thing: a spyware program called Ezula was installed on the workstation. It parses through the text of any website you browse looking for keywords, then highlighting and inserting links to advertisers inside your text. This is Not Good™.

Why is this scary? well, if it isn't blindingly obvious, having all the text you view parsed for keywords by a close-source third party with ulterior motives, perhaps even extracting keywords, is a great security risk. Perhaps you're using some corporate internal software and it decides that some of your private information is a keyword? I really need to stop using insecure public terminals... they're potentially more hazardous than a bathroom at a truck stop in NJ.

Much of the site is now W3C-compliant HTML 4.01 + CSS. Much, much prettier.