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Nov 30, 2007
Out to sea (or not)
Um, no.
ROCHESTER, N.H. - Three hostages have been released by a distraught man ...
...Police rushed to the scene, guns drawn, and crouched behind cruisers across the street from the office, which is at 28 North Main St. in the small Seacoast city.
Rochester is *30 miles* from the Atlantic ocean. It is *not* a seacoast city. I suppose it's possible that you might confuse the Cocheco with an ocean if you had no sense of taste and you stumbled into it in the middle of the night, but you'd think that reporters who had to drive into the city to cover this might realize that you leave the Atlantic behind when the Spaulding Turnpike turns away from it?
Sheesh. It's a city of 30,000 people; you'd think that that at least deserves the minimal effort it would take to look it up on yagoogsoft maps.
Nov 29, 2007
Well, I'm certainly glad to see that Unix isn’t actually reliable these days
I finished up my project to move the home network over to the glowy server tonight, but since this project involved computers it had one last bit of compu-fuck-you before it finally gave up and started working.
Who would think that a little Linux-based wireless switch would need to be rebooted three times before it finally realized that part of being an ethernet switch meant that the thing had to, well, be an ethernet switch.
Part of the fun came out of dealing with goddamn isc dhcpd, but that was pretty minor stuff compared to watching the switch cheerfully blackhole everything up until the point where I pulled the Big Red Switch (at which point the changes I had previously save *magically* started to work.)
I expect that the disks will delaminate sometime in the next week, just to round out this festival of computer-generated malice.
Nov 28, 2007
Nov 27, 2007
What a surprise (2008 edition)
USA today helps me demonstrate that I'm out of touch with the modern Democratic Party.
Fun with software development!
So.
Develop a Linux distribution.
Send it to QA.
Get a defect about some extraneous error message.
Close it with extreme prejudice (“It would involve rewriting the installer, and the distribution installs despite it”)
Wait a few weeks, aaaand...
OH MY GOD THE DISTRIBUTION DOESN'T WORK! PANIC PANIC!
This is a distribution that I'd, um, successfully installed the day before. Any bets that it's the "defect" mentioned in step 3 above?
Grrr.
Nov 26, 2007
Time to warm up the old Dolchstoßlegende!
Lesse
- Military run ragged? Yes.
- Party in tatters with rats bailing out left and right? Yes.
- Götterdämmerung coming up in less than a year? Yup.
- Allies being voted out of office (Mini-Me might not notice, but it's pretty obvious that Canada -- even if it's under a nicely subservient right-wing government -- isn't even worth the time to think about when the Evil Party makes up their little lists) and replaced by neoliberals who are smart enough to see which way the wind is blowing? Why, yes, of course.
So you can see that it's fairly important that blame be passed on to someone else so the remains of the Party can rally the troops by a resounding chorus of whinewhinewhineit'snotfaaaaaair!. And it should be done in such a way that will completely surprise the Eloi crack Washington press corps the next time they emerge, blinking, from their round of dinner parties and other mutual masturbation sessions.
How fortunate for Maximum Leader Genius that Iraq has an Vidkun Quisling of its very own:
-- Iraq's leaders have asked for an enduring relationship with America, and we seek an enduring relationship with a democratic Iraq. We are ready to build that relationship in a sustainable way that protects our mutual interests, promotes regional stability, and requires fewer Coalition forces.
(Mount Doom press release, via Talking Point Memo
So, if the Evil Party is driven from office and replaced by the giant brains the control the Stupid Party, the new Stupid Party Maximum Leader will have to either (a) start a draft, (b) hire many more mercenaries, or (c) have to admit defeat and get the fuck out of Mesopotamia before the US armed forces are broken to the point where Bermuda can invade and conquer the United States.
It's a win either way. If the Stupid Party backs a draft, the US Army won't be completely crippled (at least until the point where the fragging gets to the point where the officers are the ones who go AWOL [and not just the well-connected rich cowards either],) but the Evil Party will be able to rabbit on about how *they* never had to do a draft and it simply proves the Stupid Party is incompetent; if the Stupid Party continues to hire mercenaries, it will continue the ongoing transfer of money from the US treasury to the Evil Party private armies; and if the Stupid Party admits defeat, the shrieks of the chickenhawk right-wing wurlitzer will provide the traditional background music as the right-wing sheep march -- bleating gently -- to the abattoir for the 2010 election.
Evil? Well, yes, it is, but do you think that this is likely to discourage the Evil Party?
Nov 25, 2007
Trolley photo of the day
Portland Vintage Trolley #512 (Gomaco 1990) heads west towards Lloyd Center shopping center while a westbound SD600 approaches from the east.
Nov 24, 2007
photo of the day
One of the neighbor kids bought an IH R110(?) pickup truck last spring and has spent much of his time since then renovating it. When it's not being driven around, it spends its time parked on the street, creating a driving hazard as all of the gearheads driving by get distracted and start drifting all over the road.
Nov 23, 2007
Friday Dust Mite Blogging™
New Code!
For the past few days, I've been working over the date parsing code for at, and I've finally worked it into the point where I can set it aside and work on the rest of the code that makes at a functional batcher. I am still planning on putting at job running into cron, but I've been reluctant to modify and restart cron because I'm still waiting for the 112 day uptime rollover that has been so good at confusing vixie-cron for the last decade or so. So, instead of doing that I've pulled the guts of the time maker out and stuffed them into its own (BSD-licensed) library, which I'm going to release now so that people with other (and less-capable) at date parsers can include the library in their code releases.
The new maketime() function understands a fairly extensive list of date specifications, as (sketchily) described in the manpage:
Name
maketime - parse an at-format date
Synopsis
#include "at.h"
time_t
maketime(int argc, char *argv, int (error)(char *,...));
Description
The maketime() function parses the at-format date string contained in argc and and returns the time_t value that it compiles to.
The date string consists of an optional time, an optional date, or a time offset. The time may be HH:MM, HH am/pm, or the symbolic names noon, teatime (4pm,) or midnight. The date can be MM/DD, MM/DD/YY, DD.MM, DD.MM.YY, DD-Month, DD-Month-YY, DD Month, DD Month YY, Month DD, or Month DD, YY ( if the YY is two digits, it's assumed to b e the year within the current century .)
Date offsets may be prefixed with a time, and are of the form + quantity units or quantity units from specific-date. A specific date is a day of the week, today, tomorrow, or yesterday.
In addition, the names one through ten are recognised as the numbers 1 through 10.
Return Values
Upon successful completion returns the time_t date that the at date compiles to, otherwise 0 is returned.
Errors
When an error is detected, maketime calls the user-supplied error function to report the error before it returns. If no error function was supplied, maketime merely prints a diagnostic to stderr and returns.
See Also
at(1).
This allows me to do some pretty ridiculous at time specifications, such as
- at teatime three weeks from friday
- at one month from now
- at 11:30 tonight
- at noon next friday
- at midnight friday
- at exactly three months from now
- at 8:45am 31 July 2008
- at midnight Dec 31, 2007
This code is not exhaustively tested. It builds on MacOS leopard-1, FreeBSD 4.8, and SLS linux. I suspect it will build on Mastodon as well. It might even build on embrace-and-extend-OS but I'm not going to bet on it until I've wrapped configure.sh around it. But it is new, so it's the ideal candidate to be New Code!
Nov 21, 2007
Nov 20, 2007
decisions, decisions
For the last few days I've been working on rewriting at for Mastodon, and I've been trying to figure out whether I should just toss the atrun quasi-daemon and instead expand cron to process at jobs as well as the usual run of the mill crowd of crontabs.
An argument in favor of this is that at jobs are just another scheduled job, and if I put in a permissions file for people who are allowed to run scheduled jobs, it's somewhat redundant to have two of them (at can be emulated with a crontab, cron can be emulated with a trivially simple at job [I know this latter one because I once had an account on a computer where I had access to at, but not to cron. The PFYs who managed that computer didn't really consider that viruses are not the only self-reproducing code in the jungle.])
An argument against doing this is, um, "This! Is! POSIX!", which isn't exactly the standard I'm trying to follow with Mastodon (Unix v7, yes. Posix, no. I'm the sort of BOFH who considers Plan 9 to be an overly complex implementation of a Unixy operating system, and about the only thing Posix has going for it in the simplicity department is that it's being used as a machete to weed out some of the more offensive extensions that infest FSF-ware.)
(You might ask why I'm reimplementing at? Well, my "teatime" extension to koeneg-at is nice to have, but in the decade or so since I contributed that feature to the mainline I've grown impatient for a richer date language. "at teatime next friday" is closer to what I want, and it gives me an excuse to build a language via yacc+lex and bathe in the lap of huge automatically generated parsers.)
Nov 18, 2007
An embarrassingly large pile of junk
When the wave of Chinese toy recalls rolled in this fall, we went through the big pile of toys(tm) and binned every "made in China" toy that we couldn't find a "we don't contain lead" disclaimer for. All of these toys were stuffed into shopping bags and stored in the back room while we decided whether to do lead testing or not ("not" won when we found that lead testing swabs cost about US$2.00 EACH) and finally made it into the garbage can this afternoon.
Good lord, this is an embarrassingly large pile of stuff. And since we couldn't be sure that they were actually *safe*, we couldn't give it away, but had to throw it out. It's just our part in the grand plan to destroy the ecosystem on this planet. Our grandchildren will thank us for this. Not.
Nov 16, 2007
It must be winter …
... because the winter round of things that go wrong has begun. Today, the thing that went wrong was 2-3 gallons of diesel oil deciding to escape from the storage tank in the basement and scamper across the floor towards the pile of scrappy parts I've got stacked up to do art with. It didn't reach the art -- the best cut it off at the pass and thwarted its escape by the simple expedient of dumping 40 pounds of kitty litter onto the nasty stuff -- but *my god the smell*! It smells -- after opening all of the doors and windows, setting up fans to blow clean air out, and scrubbing most of the floor with orange cleaner -- like we're living in the middle of the locomotive refueling racks at the Milwaukee Road roundhouse in North LaCrosse Ca 1975 (the RSC-2s were still around back then, so I spent a lot of time growing familiar with the stench of spilled diesel oil.)
I'm thinking of taking a bottle of Dr. Bronner's soap (“Dilute Dilute OK!”) and spreading the concentrated form around the offending spill. Pepperment-diesel might be a pretty nasty combination, but it's not any nastier than plain old diesel.
Friday Dust Mite Blogging™
Dust mite decides to participate in the computer case mod craze, but doesn't seem to quite grasp how it's supposed to be done.
Nov 15, 2007
Waiting for a barge
When I took the bus home at lunch there were about 8 tugboats (and the Portland fireboat) standing around by the west side of the Ross Island Bridge. As the bus went across the bridge, I took pictures of some of them, but didn't realize until I returned to work why they were there; it turned out that the shipbuilding company was launching their latest boat today, and all of the barges were there to make certain that the barge de jour didn't take out either itself, the crane barge, or one of the piers of the Ross Island bridge (the fist two would be incredibly annoying, the last would be Very Bad Indeed.)
I'm not sure how I would have arranged to get down by the water when the barge was being launched, but I'm still sorry that I missed it. Perhaps when they finish the next one (and there probably will be a next one now that the rolling disaster known as measure 37 has been clarified to be a zoning giveaway to small landholders and not the “screw you unless you're a rich developer!” mess that the supporters intended it to be.)
Trolley photo of the day
One Astra trundles down towards the south end of the downtown streetcar line as another one approaches the Gibbs St. station.
Nov 14, 2007
Preach it, brother
95 THESES ON
THE RELIGIOUS RIGHT
Out of love for the truth and the desire
to bring it to light, the following propositions will be discussed on
the internet, under the presidency of the Peter Ludlow. Anyone
wishing to debate with us, may do so by e-mail at ludlow@umich.edu.
In the Name
of our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
----------------------Redistribute
Freely--------------------------------
(from The Leiter Reports, via a bofh-net post by Zebee Johnstone)
Nov 12, 2007
I hate daylight savings time
It's officially winter when I walk out of work at 5pm and it's already dark. If not for daylight's savings time, this would not be so much of a problem, but as it is it makes for a pretty depressing three months in the middle of winter.
Trolley photo of the day
The trolley loop south of Gibbs St. has been pulled out of service, presumably because of construction on the highrises at the south end of this latest festival of insider politics (a festival that I, reluctantly, see some good reasons for; the Oregon tax code is biased in favor of businesses, so it's good policy to replace businesses with residential properties which -- even with the ridiculous package of tax giveaways the city gives to developers that set aside even a single utility closet as "low-income housing" -- will bring in more property tax revenue) which means I get to occasionally catch pictures of multiple streetcars laying over at the Gibbs St. station.
The picture quality suffers when it's drizzling, but this is about as good as the view from human eyes was.
The documentation lags the product. So what else is new?
The machine has been finished for about a month now, but I've finally written up a brief description of my new glowy server case. Now I can start thinking about how I'm going to build a mini-companion cube for the pico-itx motherboard that's sitting on my "needs to be encased" shelf.
Nov 11, 2007
The 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month
|
Anthem for Doomed Youth
What passing-bells for these who die as cattle? --Wilfred Owen Breakfast in hell
The yolks are jungle green or bloody,
Breakfast in hell, three days soaked-loping
We're happy for a moments peace to swill dry mouths
Patriots all, we huddle, ready to salute death,
There's Tex from Arizona who rode a bus
We swear in feigned joy we'll reunite
Some will go home to beat their wives again, --Oswald LeWinter |
State of the Union, 2003
I have not been to Jerusalem,
The children have seen so much death
Soon, the President will speak. --Sam Hamill Come up from the fields, father
Come up from the fields, father,
Lo, 'tis autumn;
Above all, lo, the sky, so calm, so transparent
Down in the fields all prospers well;
Fast as she can she hurries,
Open the envelope quickly;
Ah, now, the single figure to me,
"Grieve not so, dear mother," (the just-grown daughter speaks through her sobs; (nor may-be needs to be better, that brave and simple soul;) While they stand at home at the door, he is dead already; The only son is dead.
But the mother needs to be better; --Walt Whitman |
Pinning together a VGA cable
I sat down with a multimeter and traced the pins on the iMac video circuit back to the motherboard, so I can make a (short) iMacga to VGA converter cable. fortunately for me it's just a simple remapping of pins and I don't have to wire together another circuit to remap levels.
| 1 RED ground | 9 RED |
| 2 BLUE ground | 10 BLUE |
| 3 GREEN ground | 11 GREEN |
| 4 N/C | 12 Hsync |
| 5 Sync ground | 13 Vsync |
| 6 sense 1 | 14 Sync ground |
| 7 sense 2 | 15 Comp. Sync |
| 8 Sync ground | 16 N/C |
| iMac | VGA | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | ↔ | 6 |
| 2 | ↔ | 8 |
| 3 | ↔ | 7 |
| 5 | ↔ | 10 |
| 6 | ↔ | 11 |
| 7 | ↔ | 12 |
| 8 | ↔ | 10 |
| 9 | ↔ | 1 |
| 10 | ↔ | 3 |
| 11 | ↔ | 2 |
| 12 | ↔ | 13 |
| 13 | ↔ | 14 |
| 14 | ↔ | 10 |
VGA pins 4-7 are all tied to ground (some diagrams tie them to pin 8 [Sync ground]); pins 9 & 15 are not connected; ping 12 is claimed to not be connected, but if my translation is correct here the Mac links that one to the (grounded) sense 2 pin.
I'm taking bets over whether the g3 will physically explode out of the socket when I wire up this cable and attach it to a monitor.
Nov 10, 2007
The machine that goes *boing!*
About five years ago, while I was in the middle of being unemployed, I traded some PC hardware for the processor board out of a rev. B Apple iMac. I'd read some of the "how to salvage your iMac after the stupid power supply sheds its container" articles and thought it would be a fun was to get a non-Sun non-intel machine running on my home network.
Well, this grand idea went nowhere and the iMac rotted away in the project pile, only emerging once when I worked out the power supply pin assignments, until this fall when I cleaned out my workroom and started working on building the glowy server case. The glowy server case cleared enough layers away so that the iMac processor board rose to the top, and I dug out my list of pin assignments and started assembling the power supply adapter.
After a few mishaps (I had also grabbed some howto pages off the net, and managed to start wiring the processor board connector with the power filter board pinout. I cut that connector off, then broke off a pin on the ATX side of the connector when I was re-stripping the wire ends. And when the ATX sockets I ordered came in, I mislabelled the pins and wired the ATX connector backwards, so I had to cut that end off and solder in a third socket with the correct wiring. And after I did that, I accidentally connected +5VSB to ground while I was checking the circuit and ended up killing the ATX power supply (I'm not sure why I wasn't using one of the junk big-box power supplies that litter the basement, but I suppose I have to sacrifice useful hardware every now and then to preserve my reputation as Death of electronics.)
But after all this, I got the power cord all wired up (including the little circuit that converts the iMac +5V PWR-ON to the ATX 0V PWR-ON signal,) attached it to another junk power supply and an Apple->VGA monitor converter, pressed the power button, and watched the cpu fan spin up and the processor board power light turn on. But nothing showed up on the monitor (which wasn't that surprising because I've never been able to get any Mac to put a signal through that horrid thing. And without the little sad Mac face (or whatever Apple put on their powerpc machines) I couldn't be sure that the thing was actually booting or if I'd managed to lobotomize the machine and all I was seeing was the hindbrain reacting to the presence of power on the +12V pin.
No disk, no blips of activity on the cdrom drive, nothing to indicate that there was anything here aside from an inefficient resistance heater. Except, maybe, for the headphone jack. I scampered upstairs, grabbed my headphones, plugged them into the (not marked, because this iMac is sans case) headphone jack, and pushed the power button. *boing!*
Sounds like victory to me. Now I need to wire VGA to Apple video connector and then I'll be able to actually see the poor little sad Mac face.
Update: I plugged a cd-rom drive into the box and dropped a Slackware linux cd into it. When the mac boots, it attempts to read stuff off the cd, then sits there glumly and lets me turn it off by poking the power switch lines on the motherboard. If I could actually see what it's doing, I'd be set.
Nov 09, 2007
New Code! (let’s make gcc less whiny! edition, part 2)
Postoffice has been pushed up to version 1.4.5a with the completion of the project to make it compile without complaint with gcc -Wall on more-modern systems.
Gcc is really a horrible piece of work, and the FSF coding standards are appalling. One of the places in the code where goddamn gcc complains is the area around the milter code, where, if I don't build with --with-milter, I simply stub out the modules with integer constants reflecting success.
0; (what mfto() expands to when postoffice is not built with --with-milter) is perfectly legitimate code. Gcc doesn't like it. register c is also perfectly legitimate code. Gcc doesn't like it either. So I've added the --with-gcc-patch flag to configure.sh, which tells it to apply a gcc bowlderisation patch as part of the configuration process. If you attempt to build with gcc, configure.sh also sets a few horrible #defines to further make gcc -Wall happy with the code, and mf.h includes a truely horrible inline function that converts 0; into f(0); (where f() is defined as int f(x) { return x; }.
So it's New Code!, but you might want to scrub your brane with lye soap if you download it.
Nov 08, 2007
New Code! (let’s make gcc less whiny! edition)
Postoffice has been pushed up to version 1.4.5 to fix a minor bug and make gcc -Wall produce less terrifying output.
Bob Dunlop reported the bug, which was that spam=bounce wasn't setting spam=bounce, but was instead comparing the current spam setting to bounce and not doing anything with the result.
The code scrub was also suggested by Mr. Dunlop, who is trying to build postoffice on an ARM-based system; I decided that I'd do a sweep across the code myself to see what I could clean out. It was pretty easy to make gcc 2.7.2 stfu;
- Some simple housekeeping made gcc stop whining about variables being clobbered after longjmp() (I added a configure check for the volatile keyword, then plastered volatile prefixes on everything that gcc complained about; on systems that don't support volatile it #defines that keyword to an empty comment,)
- some minor code rework (forcing an assignment to a variable that wouldn't be set if a loop failed; previously I was failing the condition when loop counter==max,) and
- adding a test to configure to have it append -Wno-parentheses to CFLAGS if you're trying to build with the FSF compiler.(I combine assignments and tests by doing if ( var = setter() ), but the FSF style manual disapproves of this. So -Wall means that the silly compiler whines bitterly about this unless I add -Wno-parentheses to CFLAGS.
Newer versions of gcc, like the one that Apple uses on MacOS 10, have many more things they get hysterical about (the flux of const vs. non-const in headers is annoying enough, but newer perversions of C freak out about signedness as well. Sigh.)
But it's still New Code!, and it's New Code! where gcc -Wall is a little less chattery about things that don't fit the FSF programming stylebook.
Nov 05, 2007
Vicious inhuman predator photo of the day
The orb weaver spiders around the house have started to reach the point where they become ridiculously menacing. This is exhibit A: it's as tall as a Lego minifig and it still seems to be enthusiastically building webs and consuming flies, bees, and small yapping dogs.
Nov 04, 2007
Welcome to the Evil Empire!
The CIA has confessed (again) that it tortures prisoners, and the reaction from the mainstream press is to whitewash the news. Everything that Hannah Arendt said about the banality of evil is being put onto full display right now in America.
Part of it might just be outrage overload. I've found that after almost seven years of watching the United States careen from being a flawed superpower down towards the pit of depravity that so many of our self-proclaimed moral leaders desire that about all I can summon up is some sort of vague horror instead of the spitting outrage that I was feeling a few years ago. Some of that is that it's easier to feel outrage when there might be an alternative (my two alternatives of hoping that the Democratic party would gain control of part of the government (and developing an idea of how to govern) or fleeing the country have been quashed by (a) the Democrats continuing their now-generation-long streak of reflexively cowering whenever a Republican says “boo” and (b) the Tories taking over the Canadian government as well as my family refusing to leave this sinking ship) but I think it's more that my body is just tamping down the outrage to keep my heart from exploding. But in any case it's pretty shameful that I just watch this without grabbing tar, feathers, and an warehouse full of rail, going to Washington DC, and setting up a *free* rail-ride outside the capitol building.
(via Micheal Froomkin)
Nov 03, 2007
Idle hands make the devil’s at-at
Lego is selling a new AT-AT model, which, to Russell's great dismay, we have neglected to purchase for him. The best went out for a while this afternoon, leaving me here with the bears, and Russell took advantage of that hour and a half to design and build this model. It might not have “Power Functions™”, but he's got it now instead of having to save up his allowance for 40 weeks.
Occasionally my instincts are good.
Normally, I'm very good at seeing a trend, getting scared by it, and doing exactly the wrong thing about it (the whole .com bubble? I spent all of it avoiding the entreaties of various bubblerific startups, and ended up unemployed for two and a half years when the bubble broke. If I'd worked for a bubblerific startup, I would no doubt have ended up unemployed, but (a) I would have made a shitload more money before that happened, and (b) I would have maintained contacts with enough people to get me out of the unemployment hole long before my money ran out. It didn't help that my other instinct was to stay in Portland. Sure, it's “nice” that the value of my house has almost trebled (but since we're not selling it the only effect of that increased valuation is that our property taxes have gone way up,) but when the .com bubble popped it the tech economy up here flatlined along with my bank account.
I even backed the Democratic Party after they did that whackjob on Howard Dean's campaign. So, as you can tell, my non-technical instincts are dubious at best.
But when the Democratic Party folded on S. 3930, that was enough for me and I started returning the torrent of solicitations from the Democratic Party either blank or with a curt "please take me off your mailing list" comment. This scared off some of the fishermen, but others were more stubborn. The DSCC, chaired by Charles Schumer, was one of the stubborn ones, and it managed, as if by magic, to arrange it so that every time the Stupid Party did something particularly idiotic I'd get Yet Another solicitation under Mr. Schumer's letterhead.
This went on a long time, until the idiotic thing de jour was Mr. Schumer coming to bat to protect the tax loophole that his good friends in the financial parasite community were using to not pay any taxes on their hundreds-of-million-dollar incomes. *The* *very* *next* *day* saw the next solicitation from the DSCC, asking for my money to help “protect” the country from the Evil Party.
I snapped, wrote “FUCK OFF AND DIE” on every page of the solicitation, stuffed it back into the business reply envelope, and mailed it back posthaste.
Yes, this was a bit immoderate even for me, and I occasionally wondered if I had maybe gone a little bit over the top. Until today, when I read a news release stating “BREAKING: Schumer and Feinstein Will Vote For Mukasey”.
You know, if I wanted to support a party that was in favor of absolute monarchy, I would have voted for the Evil Party. If I wanted to vote for a party that would allow the Coward in Chief to continue torturing and murdering under the cloak of the law, I would have voted for the Evil Party.
It was not excessive to tell the DSCC to fuck off and die. It was perhaps a bit restrained, and I guess I should have used a smaller font so I could list all of the reasons why the DSCC should go commit anatomical impossibilities on itself. And my decision to not contribute one red penny to the Democratic Party until they reverse all of the horrible Evil Party policies that have been enacted since 1980? It's looking smarter and smarter every day.
Nov 02, 2007
No good deed goes unpunished.
A while ago (and knowing that it would likely do no good because of the shrieking cowards who control the Stupid Party caucus would fold as the first opportunity) I signed an online petition requesting that the Stupid Party tell Maximum Leader Genius to take his horrid post facto spying bill and ram it up his ass. Since it was an online petition, it needed an email address, so I gave it one, then went around clicking every “I don't want any of your stinking email solicitations, thank you very much.” button I could find.
The petition made no difference (of course) but what was worse than that was that very soon after that I started to get “personal” messages from Jane Hamsher and Matt Stoller (“personal” as in “sent through a lefty-affiliated bulk emailer. aka “not personal at all&rdquo) asking for me to contribute money to some doomed liberal cause or another. And what address were these stinking email solicitations sent to? Why, surprise surprise, it was the address I used for the petition and the address that I clicked all of the no-email buttons I could find out about.
Now, I'm sure Ms. Hamsher and Mr. Stoller are wonderful people (The firedoglake weblog was an enjoyable read back in the days before it became a big business with groupies; I'm not sure which weblogs Mr. Stoller are affiliated with, because the only ridiculously popular lefty weblog I read is the pale blue Satan and I can't be bothered to even remember the names of most of the others,) but this business of selling your good names to spammers is icky, and if I had been stupid enough to provide my permanent mail address I would have ended up kicking myself for my stupidity (I provided my email address to the MoveOn people back before the coup in 2000, and got easily a mailing a day for the next two years (even after I'd blacklisted the fuck out of every moveon server I could find.)
As it stands I can easily remove the offending address (postoffice aliases are very useful at times) and chalk this up as yet another reason to cultivate a passionate dislike for the whole online lefty establishment. And the next time an online petition is passed around, I'll pretend I'm Nancy Reagan and just say no; if it's important enough for a petition, it's important enough for me to get on the phone and politely request that the congressional representatives who are supposed to represent me actually represent me instead of the crowd of inside-the-beltway courtiers that they run with.
It won't be any more effective than the internet petitions, but at least I won't get more spam.
Friday Dust Mite Blogging™
Dust Mite helps me dismantle some usb cables to build a connecter for a Berkshire Products watchdog card.
A horrible horrible sight.
It's the Sun. And it's coming up, not going down. I'm surprised that I didn't burst into flames on the spot.
Apparently someone hasn’t been paying attention to the value of US currency
I've tweaked the spamcatcher on pell so that it shovels all incoming spam into a spam trashcan instead of summarily rejecting the daily crop of nigerian 419 scams, Cantonese-language advertisements for the latest pirated software from Hong Kong, urgent pleas for money for one stupid liberal cause or another, or offers to infect my now-100% Unix network with windows rootkits. Occasionally a real piece of mail falls into the spam trashcan, so I've taken to browsing it every day or so to see what's there.
The nigerian 419 spam can be amusing, particularly when they're just a cut and paste botjob. This one deserves special attention:
ATTN
THIS IS TO NOTIFY YOU THAT YOUR OVER DUE INHERITANCE FUNDS HAS BEEN GAZZETED TO BE RELEASED, VIA KEY TELEX TRANSFER (KTT ) -DIRECT WIRE TRANSFER TO YOU OR THROUGH OUR CANADA OFFICE BY THE SENATE COMMITTEE FOR FOREIGN OVER DUE FUND TRANSFER.
MEANWHILE, A WOMAN M/S JANET WHITE CAME TO MY OFFICE FEW DAYS AGO WITH A LETTER,CLAIMING TO BE YOUR TRUE REPRESENTATIVE.
HERE ARE HER INFORMATIONS:
NAME JANET WHITE
BANK NAME: CITI BANK
BANK ADDRESS:ARIZONA, USA.
ACCOUNT Number: 6503809428.
PLEASE,DO RECONFIRM TO THIS OFFICE ,AS A MATTER OF URGENCY IF THIS WOMAN IS FROM YOU SO THAT THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT WILL NOT BEHELD RESPONSIBLE FOR PAYING INTO THE WRONG ACCOUNT NAME.IF THIS WOMAN IS NOT YOUR REPRESENTATIVE ,YOU ARE REQUESTED TO FILL AND SEND THIS INFORMATIONS FOR VERIFICATIONS PURPOSES SO THAT YOUR FUND VALID $13.5 US DOLLARS WILL BE REMMITTED INTO YOUR NOMINATED BANK ACCOUNT INFO.THIS FUND IS AS A RESULT OF INHERTANCE ON YOUR BEHALF.
1. YOUR NAME:...
2. YOUR FULL ADDRESS:....
3. YOUR TELEPHONE ......
4. FAX...................................................
5. AGE...........
6. SEX:....................................
7. YOUR OCCUPATION
8. YOUR VALID ACCOUNT DETAILS:...................................
AS SOON AS WE RECIEVE THIS, WE WILL COMMENCE WITH ALL NESSCCARY PROCEEDURES IN OTHER TO REMMIT THIS MONEY INTO YOUR ACCOUNT. THE CENTRAL BANK GOVERNOR, BOARD OF DIRECTORS AND THE SENATE COMMITTEE FOR FOREIGN OVER DUE INHERITTANCE FUND HAVE APPROVED AND ACCREDITED THIS REPUTABLE BANK WITH THE OFFICE OF THE DIRECTOR, INTERNATIONAL REMITTANCE / FOREIGN OPERATIONS,TO HANDLE AND TRANSFER ALL FOREIGN INHERITTANCE FUNDS THIS FIRST QUARTER PAYMENT OF THE YEAR.
HOWEVER,WE SHALL PROCEED TO ISSUE ALL PAYMENTS DETAILS TO THE SAID MRS.WHITE, IF WE DO NOT HEAR FROM YOU WITHEN THE NEXT SEVEN WORKING DAYS FROM TODAY.
WE ARE SORRY F OR ANY INCOVINENCE THE DELAY IN TRANSFERING OF THIS FUND MUST HAVE CAUSED YOU.
YOURS IN SERVICE,
DR.JIMMY KOFI
(FORIEGN OPERATION DIRECTOR ECOBANK)
Invite your mail contacts to join your friends list with Windows Live Spaces. It's easy! Try it!
So DR.JIMMY KOFI wants me to mail him all of this information so he can wire a US$13.50 inheritance into my bank account? Given the exchange rate of the bubbilicious US dollar that wouldn't even be enough to cover the wire charges (the last time I wired money abroad it cost me US$30 for the wire charges, and that was back in the days when a UK£ wasn't up to US$2.10.)
And furthermore, the last inheritance that came into Chateau Chaos was delivered in the post, and it was worth *ahem* a little bit more than the beer money that DR.JIMMY KOFI is using as bait here.
Points for a less ridiculous amount than the US$30 million (== CA$4.75) that the last 419 letter was offering. It almost makes up for the points off for it being so ridiculously tiny that it wouldn't even cover the bank charges.
Nov 01, 2007
Fun with zoning, Oregon-style
A few years ago, some sleazy developers spent a whole bunch of money pushing an attempt to gut the zoning laws in Oregon (laws that actually worked at keeping the malignant growth of Oregon cities down to a low rumble,) and finally found the right mixture of sob stories and outright lies to convince the voters to pass a “Zoning for thee, but not for me” bill over the anguished cries of the Oregon citizens who correctly recognised it as an open invitation for big developers.
It didn't take very long after that bill was passed before a large fraction of the people who voted for this turkey realized that they'd been duped, and a great cry went up demanding that something be done about it. Well, eventually something was done; another bill was brought up to clean up the wording of the first measure (by basically saying "if you want to build up to a dozen houses, go for it") and was plopped down for a special fall election. You'd think that this would be a simple fix, no? Small landowners can lay waste to their own property, but large holdings (which had been taxed as a favorable rate for quite a long time as return for the zoning) would not be allowed.
Wrong.
There's a massive campaign trying to get this bill turned down, based on the usual crop of lies ("Oh, there are only a few huge developers" [like the one that's putting out land claims against a quarter of Washington County] and "small landholdings won't be able to be subdivided" [which is exactly not what the new measure says.]) You'd think it wouldn't pass the laugh test, but this *is* Oregon.
I predict the new measure will fail 75% to 25%. And about two weeks after it's buried the outcry that "SOMETHING MUST BE DONE!!!!" will come up again, but this time it will come up to the refrain of massive residential development of the coast range.
I will just laugh. It's not my county that's going to be paved over.