Genetic Upgrade or Perish
Posted 11:35 AM

It has long been proposed, by scientists such as Steven Hawking and many others that we must expand our species to other planets, quickly, or perish as a species. The reasons for this are many, but the most important reason is our sensitivity to global disasters. Many species would survive a massive asteroid strike, or some other natural disaster, but ours is not one of them. We simply don't have the stored resources to weather such a geological event. As such, it's only a matter of time.

There's a corollary to this however. If we must colonize... how soon must we do it? Again, there's a real time crunch. As we use up resources on this planet it becomes far more difficult, both politically and practically, for us to launch energy-hungry colonization missions. At some point we simply won't have the resources to launch. The race is between our technological ability and our resource consumption. Many experts estimate between 20-100 years.... or we've run out of time.

This leads me to a third conclusion. I don't think we have the brainpower, social will, and ability to actually colonize anything. What's more, I don't see that changing any time soon. Our pace of technological growth is fast, but not fast enough to keep up. Unless, of course, we accelerate that pace.

There are several genetic upgrades that would accelerate growth. One is to repair existing expert, but ageing brains to reintroduce the plasticity needed to adapt and improve. Another would be to improve ability directly. And finally, provided the first two are working, would be the extension of the number of productive years of labour of creative experts, increasing retirement ages and preventing the loss of intellectual capital.

Our ability to change, adapt and survive in the difficult or unusual conditions of our environment has always been our species strength. We wouldn't be here without it, and we won't survive the future without continuing down that road.
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Given Molarity and Ka, Solve For PH
Posted 5:08 AM

In water, when [H+] and [A-] are produced, [H+] and [A-] are approx equal (call it x). If Ka is very small compared to M (which it usually is), then you can usually reduce it to sqrt(M*Ka).

x^2/(M-x) = Ka
x = sqrt(M*Ka-Ka^2/4)-Ka/2
ph = -log(x)
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itoa
Posted 10:24 AM

With the same sort of mild insanity that afflicts many standards making bodies, itoa has been removed from gcc.

char* itoa(int val, char *buf, int base) {
        int m = sizeof(int)*(base >=10 ? 4 : 8)-1;
        int i = m;
        int j = 0;

        if (base > 100 || base < 2)
                return NULL;

        if (val < 0) {
                val = -val;
                buf[0]='-';
                j = 1;
        } else if (!val) {
                buf[0]='0';
                buf[1]='\0';
                return buf;
        }

        for(; val && i ; --i, val /= base)
                buf[i] = '0' + (val % base);

        for (;i < m; ++i, ++j) {
                buf[j]=buf[i+1];
        }

        buf[j]='\0';
        return buf;
}

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Detected aborted journal
Posted 1:51 PM

Got the error message "Detected aborted journal" and "Remounting filesystem read-only".

Since it was a remote server I wanted to fix it without rebooting to single user mode, or hopefully, not reboot at all.

# run fuser -v -m /home/ and shut down processes accessing drive (mounted as /home, extra slash needed)
fuser -v -m /home/
/etc/init.d/httpd stop
fuser -v -m /home/
# kill some bash process i'd left open
fuser -k -m /home/


# no more procs? ... unmount
umount /home

# ditch journal
tune2fs -O ^has_journal /dev/sda6

# fix drive
fsck /dev/sda6

# put back journal
tune2fs -j /dev/sda6

# remount
mount /home

# start needed services

/etc/init.d/httpd start
/etc/init.d/postgresql start

# pager goes off... "system back up"... yay

Labels: linux

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List all perl modules that can be yum installed
Posted 2:21 AM

I have to do this from time to time. Handy way to list all the perl modules needed to install. Useful when upgrading perl or building a new box.

List all modules needed by all code in the current directory:

grep "^use [A-Z]" * | perl -pe 's/\r//g; s/.*?:use //; s/ .+//; s/;[ \t]*$//;' | sort | uniq

Same as above, but massaged and piped to yum provides:

grep "^use [A-Z]" * | perl -pe 's/\r//g; s/.*?:use //; s/ .+//; s/;[ \t]*$//;' | \
sort | uniq | perl -pe 's/(.*)/perl($1)/' | \
xargs yum provides  | grep -E '^([1-9]:)?perl' | perl -pe 's/^[1-9]://; s/ :.*//; s/-[0-9].*?$//' | \
grep -v perl$ | sort | uniq

Suitable for piping to xargs yum install....

Labels: programming

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Convert Putty Key to OpenSSH
Posted 1:22 PM

puttygen.exe can convert to openssh.

Working on making Ubuntu my desktop O/S at the office. Seems OK. The computer there was completely useless (hanging/crashing, didn't matter what Vista service pack I installed), now it's not (fast).

We'll see if I run into a situation where I need windows. I doubt it. The OpenOffice apps work way better than MS Office, etc.
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ENOM DNS Outage Why and How
Posted 9:18 AM

There are 2 reasons why ENOM is down.

The first is that it's easy to spoof UDP packets because consumer and commercial provider routers (botnet sources) don't filter inbound packets based on the list of expected subnets for that interface. Sounds confusing?

How about this: Anyone can easily fake the IP address they are coming from and their ISP won't notice because they are lazy about configuring things.

Routing involves looking at packets and sending them places. Safe routing ASLO involves looking at source addresses and refusing to accept them if they come from somewhere unexpected. After all, how much harder is it to do 2 lookups in 2 dynamic tables? Only twice as hard. But companies are lazy, and only do 1. Saving them very little money, but costing the world in reliability.

There was a class-action lawsuit that charged it was CISCO's responsibility to provide this by default (ddos-ca.org). The suit was dropped because of related concessions and developments by Microsoft. But CISCO/Linksys/Netgear failed to respond - and they still have failed. Their devices will all, by default, faithfully route spoofed botnet packets all day long - and so will most major ISP's with high end routers.

Tell me, is that ENOM's fault? No. It's the people who route spoofed packets fault - both router vendors and ISP's.

But the second is that ENOM fails to hand out DNS servers correctly. For 5 million domains, they should hand out about 100 ip's in groups of 5 IP's per user. Also, the servers should be "lots of inexepnsive" dns servers, not "a few big servers", which are an easy target.

Please read this for more information on properly distributing risk.
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Thermohaline Thrash
Posted 5:52 AM

Back from Hawaii, and it's so cold on the mainland!

Got me thinking it's a thermohaline thrash.

The "thermohaline cycle" allows warm, low density, low-salinity water to flow north while cold, dense and salty water flows south. This is why England, even though it's so far north, isn't frozen.

"Thermohaline thrash" would be a new wrinkle where carbon warming causes Greenland melting, which slows down the thermohaline flow by reducing the salinity of the arctic water, this makes for a cooler arctic air winter, but this then increases salinity by causing more freezing, which fixes the slowdown, causing a hotter summer further down the line. These seasonal waves of hot/cold can overlap and interact chaotically, causing extreme seasons of hot summers and cold winters.

Thrash (rapid chaotic flipping between two states) is typical of dynamic systems undergoing transition to a new stable state.

Just like the stock market, prior performance is not a good indicator of future.

My bet is that this Anthropocene period will have a lot of unique features. Thermohaline thrashing might be one of them.


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Mom Lets Me Carry A Blaster!
Posted 11:03 AM

Out of 10 5-year-olds I asked, 3 of them believed that the Death star was real, and 5 of them believed that if you concentrated hard enough you could move something with your mind. Kind of a weird world to live in as your brain is developing.

Labels: costumes, humour

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Hanukkah 101
Posted 2:34 PM

# How to Light on the First Night
On the first night, place one candle in the Menorah's far right (as you face the Menorah) candle holder. Another candle is placed for the Shamash (helper candle). Say the below blessings and then light the candle using the Shamash candle.

# First Blessing to Recite
Borukh Ato Adoynoy Eloyheynu Melekh Ho-oylom Asher Kiddeshonu Be-mitsvoysov Ve-tsivonu Lehadlik Neyr Shel khanuko.

Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the universe, who has sanctified us by His commandments, and has commanded us to kindle the lights of Hanukkah.

# Second Blessing to Recite
Borukh Ato Adoynoy Eloyheynu Melekh Ho-oylom She-oso Nissim La-avoseynu Ba-yyomim Ho-heym Ba-zzman Ha-zze.

Blessed are you, Lord our God, King of the universe, who wrought miracles for our fathers in days of old, at this season.

# Third Blessing to Recite (only on the first night of Hanukkah!)
Borukh Ato Adoynoy Eloyheynu Melekh Ho-oylom She-hekheyonu Ve-kiymonu Ve-higgi'onu La-zzman Ha-zze.

Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the universe, who has kept us alive, and has preserved us, and enabled us to reach this time.

# How to Light on the Second through Eighth Night
The second night, place two candles in the Menorah's far right (as you face the Menorah) candle holders. Another candle is placed for the Shamash (helper candle). Say the first two blessings above and then light the candles using the Shamash candle. Light the left-most candle first and then light in order, from left to right. Follow this procedure for each night of Hanukkah.
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