Bracing against the wind

ASP for Linux

2008-07-05T05:09:00.000-07:00

Whew! I wanted a version of ASP for linux.

Chili!soft's version was the "expensive brand name" - it's incredibly profitable product line was bought out by Sun and is apparently "no longer for sale" directly. You have to use Sun's even more incredibly expensive "development platform" instead of just licensing an Apache ASP plugin from them.

Halcyon's version had better reviews, but the company was apparently gone. I found out it was bought out by Stryon. Researching Stryon, I found that it went out of business in a fraud investigation. The CEO had apparently suicided, his assets seized by the government. They even sold off his wine collection. Researching this has been weirder than a television drama, with rumors of links to the Chinese government, and more. But who bought the code?

After all that craziness I found a beta version of a product called arrowhead asp.

Is it possible that owning a solution to "getting off Microsoft" is somehow inherently dangerous? I wonder if I should warn the developer about what he's getting into. Or maybe he's safe, since he's using Java as the source base, tying him to Sun's protection base.

Well, at least my blog article will help aimless people (such as myself) searching for Stryon, Chilisoft and Halcyon find the available Arrow ASP solution.

The thing is ... I could write a better parser and apache module - in nice portable ANSI-C - with 90% compatiblity for ASP in about 3 weeks. Should I? Dare I? Although I like coding, and it seems fun.... it actually seems scary to me after reading all that.

More of Those Annoying Captcha Images

2008-06-22T16:14:00.000-07:00

I just built a service captcha.cc which makes it easier for people who build web forms to paste code in that will block form spam. Not that there aren't other people who do this, but the popular ones are often weird or insecure. Recaptcha is too easy to break, tesseract and a bit of gaussian scrubbing and dict-guessing makes short work of it, makes me wonder what OCR engine they are using in the first place that fails so often.

Nifty features include server-validation without requiring a callback (md5 hash does the trick), ajax-friendly javascript code to prevent unnecessary form reloads on failures, ability to block proxies, and support for English, Spanish and French languages.

Comprehensive list of all Senate votes which Barack and John disagreed on

2008-06-18T11:03:00.000-07:00

I think the list is very telling and allows you see a clear difference between the candidates. You can click on the bills to view details about the bill, and what it was for.

Bear in mind, the title of the bill very often is "loaded", and is can be quite the opposite of what the bills effect will be. (Help America Vote is one that comes to mind). So you should at least glance at the bill if it looks interesting to you. Links are provided.

Click here to see the full list.

Why not pay your doctor a monthly fee?

2008-06-12T12:03:00.001-07:00

If you paid your doctor a monthly fee, and then, if you get sick the fee doesn't change, then that would be equivalent to insurance, but your doctor would have incentive to keep you well... instead of the other way around.

Same for hospitals. You should pay a monthly fee to your local hospital, and your doctor, etc. There can be "networks", so paying for your local hospital also gets you in to other participating ones - but there would always be a benefit to being the chosen doctor/hospital.

If it was done this way, hospitals would be competitive - patients could choose from any of their local hospitals to support as their "primary" hospital. And the medical/pharma industry would be busy trying to keep people healthy... instead of trying to keep them sick and on meds (which is what their job is now, essentially).

Providing national taxed and mandatory healthcare - like some people advocate - would only reduce incentive on the part of providers to keep people well. We need to increase that, not reduce it.

Articles of Impeachment

2008-06-10T21:30:00.000-07:00

I like the list, with the exception of the "Establishment of Permanent Bases" clause. Another big thing that's missing is that we went into Iraq *seemingly* for the purposes of inflating global oil prices in cooperation with OPEC.

Now I say "seemingly" since, well, that's what it seems to have been done for. Saddam was leaking oil at half-market value. Opec hated him. He's gone. Oil went through the roof. Bush's oil buddies get to laugh all the way to the bank. And we all get stuck with the bill.

Of course, since Bush & Co.'s buddies are in control of all the resources, he'll just have to lower the prices before the election, finger "new gains" in the war in Iraq as the cause, and then McCain will win... followed by 3 and a half more years of record-high oil.

IMHO, Americans won't be fooled in 2012. By then, a trained dog will be able to win running as a Democrat. Which is unfortunate. Because the socialist nutjob who will be winning in 2012 will make Obama look like a right-winger.

Solar Prices going Up

2008-06-10T06:11:00.000-07:00

With natural gas prices tripling, and oil heading to $200/barrel, you may be thinking of investing in solar power for your home. If you do it yourself, a solar system costs far less than the retail cost of electricity. Most solar industry reports claim that solar "will never" compete with wholesale natural gas electric generation. That's because it doesn't have to. Solar only has to compete with retail. And at 10-cents per KWH, it does.

The time to buy a system is now. Solar prices are also going up with the costs of energy, and a system bought 2 years ago is already worth more (watts per dollar) than a system bought today.

In fact, there's a case to be made that early investment in solar, with the rising costs of energy, will pay for itself twice over whereas late investment will be worth little.

The John McCain Short List

2008-05-31T20:46:00.000-07:00

Some talking points you may want to have in mind in case your Republican friend starts to argue with you:

McCain said, "I do not support Roe versus Wade. It should be overturned."
He voted against the children's health care bill last year, then defended Bush's veto of the bill.
The pastor McCain calls his "spiritual guide," Rod Parsley, believes America's founding mission is to destroy Islam.
John McCain voted against establishing a national holiday in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
While claiming he is opposed to torture during his campaigh, McCain voted against a bill to ban waterboarding, and then applauded President Bush for vetoing that ban.
He's one of the richest people in a Senate filled with millionaires.
McCain, the owner of 8 homes, said the solution to the housing crisis is for people facing foreclosure to get a "second job"
Senator Thad Cochran, a Republican said of McCain: "The thought of his being president sends a cold chill down my spine."
McCain's campaign manager and top advisers are professional lobbyists, he has 59 lobbyists raising money for his campaign.

Phoenix and Venus

2008-05-31T20:11:00.000-07:00

This image of ice on Mars may become an icon of our future relationship with that red planet.

( Of course, just as Mars shows it's stuff, I've started thinking Venus is the best place to go ... based on the excess of easily harnessed energy, which could be redirected to support comfortable, productive, protected airborne-bubble habitations. I mean ... it's just so cold on Mars.)

Clinton's Veiled Assasination Threat

2008-05-23T21:56:00.000-07:00

When America saw Bill Clinton get red in the face and talk about how he tried to kill Osama Bin Laden, we were watching a man comfortable with issuing death threats in general. You may not remember, it but I do.

Hillary Clinton's mention of the RFK assassination, in connection with Obama, left him and his supporters "visibly rattled".

This country is getting creepier and creepier. You don't toss around thinly veiled assassination threats on prime time. It's uncouth.

Image Cannot Be Displayed

2008-05-21T03:43:00.000-07:00

Ever get "This image cannot be displayed because it contains errors." when viewing an image? The reason is, 99% of the time, that the image uses CMYK as its encoding. Here's a fixcmyk perl program, that resolves this issue for all the files in a given directory.

Bookmark this Electoral Poll Site

2008-05-15T06:17:00.000-07:00

Since it's been slipping in Google's ratings, and I had to wade through a couple pages of crappy results, I'm writing myself a blog post to remind myself that electoral-vote.com is the best site as far as accuracy, coverage and depth of information on the presidential election in the U.S. It's like the "Craig's List" of voting.... clean, simple, and without pop-ups, videos or runaway opinion getting in the way of simple facts.

Perl Round Function

2008-05-08T16:16:00.000-07:00

Yes, you can't find this easily on the web. What you get is people telling you to import posix, or do some wacky one-off thing that works half the time. This is the only solution you'll ever need... it should be a builtin.


# round to any decimal place
sub round {
        my ($n,$d) = @_;
        return int($n/(10**$d) + .5 * ($n <=> 0)) * (10**$d);
}

Useful Line for Quoting Shell Arguments

2008-05-08T10:25:00.001-07:00

Safely pass "@*" to ssh without having to worry about the remote shell re-expanding variables.


qa=`perl -e 'for (@ARGV) {s/(["\\$])/\\\\$1/g; $_="\"$_\"";} print join(" ", @ARGV)' "$@"`
ssh remote-server "cd /some/where; do something; $qa"

Single quote version is safer, but is harder for me to read.


qa=`perl -e "for (@ARGV) {s/'/'\\\\\''/g; \\\$_=\"'\\\$_'\";} print join(' ', @ARGV);" "$@"`

Latest Barack Obama News, In My Opinion

2008-05-05T06:50:00.001-07:00

In North Carolina, Republicans paid good money for an Obama attack ad, only 1 week before the primary. This meddling in the opposing party's election is an encouraging sign that can *only* mean that Republicans have decided that Hillary will be easier to beat. Meddling in another party's primary may or may not be seen as "ethical" or "fair game". But, IMO, NC voters should be smart enough not to be swayed.

Sure, the media is having a field-day with Obama's charismatic former pastor, and it's obvious that his radical sermons make great prime-time viewing. I have relatives in my family who would make Wright seem *boring*, and I'm sure Hillary's cocaine dealing brother in law, Roger Clinton won't turn up in the press, but it seems like white American's are "fixin' for a lynchin'" this year and just aren't ready for a President who grew up with controversial figures that they don't understand.

If Obama's pastor was a white conspiracy theorist, who talked about the 911 attacks being coordinated by the Bush-Bin Laden cartel (did you know there's Bin Laden airfield in Texas), we would have understood. Maybe some of us would have even been sympathetic. But, instead, he was a black conspiracy theorist. Ouch! When my white brother mails me a conspiracy video about depleted uranium exposure in the Iraq war, I can choose to think "harmless hobby" or "maybe there's something to it". But when I see Jeramiah Wright claiming that HIV could have been bioengineered as an assault of blacks and gays (yes, there's a gene that whites have gives them resistance and immunity to AIDS), I'm supposed to think "my god I can't vote for someone who hung out with this guy".

Sure, Hillary's mentor was Saul Alinsky, who was analogous to a secular, white Jeramiah Wright, a rabble rouser and conspiracy theorist from Chicago. But that actually gives her credibility among liberals... any news about that and Democratic voters would cheer.

The downturn in polls for Barack reflects white liberal America's misunderstanding of what Wright represents. He's a charismatic kook, but really, a lovable one... and among those who are struggling to get by in Bush's economy, he is one that is more to Obama's credit (in a political-street-cred sort of way) than to his disfavor.

Trip Insurance

2008-04-28T17:02:00.000-07:00

We're going to Vancouver for a month. Any time we travel, and we plan on renting a car, we buy trip insurance.

Why? Because the collision insurance provided by car companies is usually very expensive, wheras the insurance provided by travel insurance agencies is cheap, just as good, and also covers any medical expenses, baggage delays, etc. IE: I save money, and I get full coverage.

We use InsureMyTrip.com (no, I don't get paid if you click on it). It's a model website for what medical insurance *should* look like ---- but doesn't. I don't understand how travel insurance for 1 month, which includes a half-million dollars in medical claims, is 8 time cheaper than regular medical insurance. Also, I don't understnad how any time we've made a claim (thrice, a damaged stroller and 2 foreign doctor's visits for my son), they pay, and pay quickly and without much fuss.

What I am sure of is that the medical insurance industry is extremely profitable, and is probably guilty of the biblical sin of usury.

The Story of Stuff

2008-04-28T07:05:00.000-07:00

Costume Armor

2008-04-24T11:28:00.001-07:00

I tried to cobble together all the reference material and information I had on making costume armor into a Squidoo lens. I guess we'll see how that works out.

Stop Biofuels Now!

2008-03-12T03:16:00.000-07:00

US, UK and EU politicians, including Bush, Clinton, McCain and Obama, and their well-meaning activists are wrong in their promotion of biofuels. Biofuel subsidies have to stop as soon as possible. There is a global economic and environmental collapse that is being hastened by this self-serving agricultural lobby.

The price of food is increasing as farmland becomes a higher-yield economy
More of the earth is being converted to farmland, which damages ecosystems, and increases greenhouse gasses
In some countries, rainforests and peat bogs are destroyed to increase biofuel farm acreage
Biofuel farmers in 3rd world countries have miserable working conditions
Biofuels are far, far worse than oil in CO2 emissions and environmental impact

Instead.... try solar:

Solar energy can be made in "dead zones" where little natural plant and animal life thrives
Solar farms do not deplete the soil, generate runoff, or ruin our natural resources
Modern solar systems can last 20 years, requiring no maintenance, and little energy investment besides the original production, which they make up for in 5 years
Solar industry employees are paid well and earn good living.
Solar energy needs only 150-300 billion in worldwide installations for economies of scale to make it competitive with oil.
A 9000 acre solar farm can produce enough energy to supply all of the energy used by the entire U.S.

How can we justify continued advocacy for biofuels versus alternative energies like solar - which isn't damaging our planet?

More references on the damage caused by biofuels: Wikipedia , IHT

Canadaian Conservatives help Clinton

2008-03-04T06:32:00.000-08:00

The sly contact made by conservative Canadian ministers with Barak Obama, and then the "accidental" leak of a memo to the associated press 2 days before the Ohio primary was far from an accident.

So now conservatives in Canada, pleased with "politics as usual", have chosen meddle in America's elections. And it worked. Clinton leaped on the bone offered by the Canadians and has been doing her best to smear Obama in Ohio.

The worst part is, though, that Obama's economic adviser fell for it.

Logo Maker

2008-02-25T11:19:00.000-08:00

MkLogo allows you to generate an image of some text in any font chosen (or uploaded). The "effects" are essentially parameterized shell scripts of ImageMagick examples. I used CoolText for a lot of quick site logos, but I got tired of the "glitzy" styles. Fonts aren't all categorized yet. Maybe I should make them editable, see how that plays out. Don't ask me why I seem to need to get a new domain name every time I write a small program. Habit borne of dotcom days.

FormLite instead of FormMail

2008-02-18T20:12:00.000-08:00

Created a simple FormLite program for saving an HTML form to a database file in a generic way that should be portable to most systems. IE: Anyone can paste it into the cgi-bin dir of nearly any hosting provider. It allows data to be exported to excel or to an html table. This was a frequent request of friends, etc. There are probably other things out there like this, but it was fun to write.

Universal Pharma? Education or Oil Profits? You Choose.

2008-02-05T01:43:00.001-08:00

When you vote for a president, are you really voting for one person? In some ways, yes, and only by reading policy papers and examining voting records can you really understand what they will do when in office.

Or you could follow the money. OpenSecrets.org allows you to view campaign contributions by industry. It's a quick way of showing which kinds of people are in of support which candidates, and IMHO, it's the most telling.

Hillary Clinton tops the list of health-industry donors with her plan to federally subsidize the medical industrial complex.

Barak Obama is tops among (you guessed it) education and computer people.

Giuliani had a lock on the gambling and oil industries, before he dropped out. Now it's split. McCain's got casinos and Romney's got oil.

And you can guess who the Washington lobbyists love...

Evolution of Social Unity

2008-01-19T21:51:00.000-08:00

Ever since I can remember thinking of these things, it was clear to me that the medical industry is genetically damaging our species. By keeping people alive who would have otherwise died of, say, a heart attack or a bacterial infection, we are promoting their "weaker" genes.

Recently, in speaking with a heart surgeon, his answer was that most of the people we keep alive are elderly, past breeding age. My response was to point out the grandmother effect is well-documented. Couple this with the fact that minor selection influences, in absence of competing influences, can rapidly cause long term genetic changes.

Indeed, I would propose that all tool usage results in evolutionary physical weakening in the area supported by the tool - and in favor of the tool itself.

The moment we picked up a stick and used it as a lever, our arms weakened. We wore animal fur, and our own fur devolved. We rode horses which weakened our legs and our stamina. We wear contact lenses, which is generically weakening our species eyesight.

What has always surprised me is that so few people talk about it and so few articles are written about it. Recently, I have discovered that this is because the subject is "taboo" and is swiftly connected to eugenics. When I discuss it with people they often angrily reply, "What should we do, just let sick people die". Anyone reading this might be prepared to label me a eugenicist, but please read on.

All of this "weakness" is actually our strength in disguise. I am this weakness, and I'm proud of it. I take a pride in mankind's intelligence and social strengths, not it's ability to run long distances, or lift heavy objects.

By evolutionarily weakening our physical forms, we are continually forced to be more dependent on a stable society. It helps us recognize that we need each other, and we need the "system" to keep working, or else.

Vaccination is a probably the sneakiest example of genetic tampering. Because of vaccination programs, genetic vulnerability to disease, especially in wealthy countries, has probably skyrocketed. Even if you, the reader, on the surface, seem healthy and strong, you are probably fatally dependent on continual multiple vaccination programs. Given the rate of deaths due to polio, rubella and German measles before and after mass-vaccination, anyone living in the US most likely has one or more ancestors with fatal genetic vulnerability to these diseases.

I only wish this sort of knowledge were more thoroughly researched, published and talked about. If we all realized how mortally dependent we were on a globally stable society, we might be less willing to engage in globally destabilizing conflicts.

NOTE: This article was rejected at Kuro5hin apparently because the intelligent-design enthusiast over there don't believe that relaxed selection pressures can cause evolutionary shifts - a well documented process. Shows how how far something good, like Kuro5hin, can fall.

SMX, MySQL and ODBC

2007-11-20T13:08:00.000-08:00

It took me a little while to figure out why SMX wasn't working with MySQL when under apache, but worked fine from the shell. MySQL's odbc connector, by default, is installed with the "not thread safe" libraries. This also breaks PHP, and Python and any other Apache module that tries to call SQLExecDirect on a MySQL connection. The result is a "Segmentation Fault" for the program using that ODBC driver - not nice. To fix, simply edit the /etc/odbcinst.ini file and replace libmyodbc3.so with libmyodbc3_r.so.

While searching for the solution to this problem, I found dozens of bug reports, and unanswered threads littering the internet. So I hope this page gets indexed well enough to be useful, since I nearly wound up patching the odbc-connector drivers to fix it.

Installing a "thread-unsafe" driver by default seems to be in the best interests of nobody, and MySQL should probably stop doing that. Safe settings should be the default, and "overclock" settings should be something advanced users do.

TrackJump Durham

2007-09-28T09:28:00.000-07:00

I've been meaning to post a list of favorite things I like about Durham, NC. Including the fact that we have a place that makes the best falafels in the US (Baba Ganoush in Erwin plaza), the best science museum and the best paletas shop, and the best restaurant for a date.

But the list grew too long, and I didn't feel like looking up links to things anymore, so I spent the rest of this morning making a site called TrackJump. It allows me to more easily embed tracking links in shipment notification emails to my customers, and in links on web pages, etc.

Feel free to try it, use it, and let me know if it's OK or needs work.