Bracing against the wind

Genetic Upgrade or Perish

2010-02-05T11:35:00.001-08:00

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.

Given Molarity and Ka, Solve For PH

2010-01-30T05:08:00.000-08:00

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)

itoa

2010-01-20T10:24:00.000-08:00

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;
}

Detected aborted journal

2010-01-18T13:51:00.000-08:00

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

List all perl modules that can be yum installed

2010-01-15T02:21:00.000-08:00

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....

Convert Putty Key to OpenSSH

2010-01-12T13:22:00.000-08:00

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.

ENOM DNS Outage Why and How

2010-01-11T09:18:00.000-08:00

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.

Thermohaline Thrash

2010-01-11T05:52:00.000-08:00

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.

Mom Lets Me Carry A Blaster!

2009-12-14T11:03:00.000-08:00

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.

Hanukkah 101

2009-12-11T14:34:00.000-08:00

# 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.

VI Command Reference

2009-12-04T07:31:00.001-08:00

VI commands. Undo/Redo, mark, indent, repeat commands, moving words forward, and all the things I forget.

Tarp Repayment and Investment Monitor

2009-12-03T10:17:00.000-08:00

Click on the Tarp Repayment and Investment Monitor. It's updated daily. You can use changedetection.com to email you when it changes ... for a daily TARP feed.

Verizon Issued Patent For Google Voice

2009-12-03T05:43:00.000-08:00

Verizon has managed to obtain a patent which provides "one number" to access multiple calling services. Nevermind that this is what OneBox.com has offered for 10 years or so, and what hundreds of other companies offer to various degrees. The timing of the patent "August, 2009" coincides too neatly with the attack, by AT&T on Google Voice.

Conspiracy? Hardly. Verizon is deliberately putting some cards into play to make it more expensive for competitors. I thought Verizon would keep itself above the fray. Droid is going to be a big hit. Why bother with frivolous patents? What reviewer approved this and why is he still being paid?

Now it seems like a two pronged assault. Verizon's patent is strikingly similar to Amazon's "One Click" - a service possibly worthy of a trademark. It is a broadly worded document that covers the "idea" of combining multiple telephone services. Specifically it mentions "generating textual information based on the received voicemail message"... a service provided by PhoneTag and Simulscribe for many years.

In other words, the patent should not have qualified... at all, because everything in the document was already publicly available at the time of the patent. It's all open source too... ala Asterisk and Freeswitch. It flouts the purpose of patent law... to protect inventors, and rather seeks to punish true, prior, inventors with corporate fueled legalese.

This is another sign of weakness and fear in the big telcos. The fear is of internet calling and the weakness is that the only person that can protect them is the government. If they had any ability, they would use it to out-feature, out-price and/or acquire these upstarts.

Is there something we don't know about? AT&T is doing very well with iPhone subscriptions, right? Why are they begging the FCC to regulate Google? Verizon boasts the hottest mobile network... and at the same time is filing for junk patents like a litigious California tech startup?

Kermit Karzai

2009-12-02T06:36:00.000-08:00

More Money for Health Now!

2009-11-20T03:07:00.000-08:00

Radiologists still say women should be doing lots of mammograms. Other research shows that frequent mammograms either cause cancer or cause over-treatment of benign tumors.

That's why we need to spend a LOT more money on healthcare for ALL americans NOW.

So we can get those people more MONEY. Because that's what's been stopping them from making good decisions.

They just don't have the cash.

In the United States, approximately 600,000 hysterectomies are performed each year. Think of all the millions of women without healthcare still walking around with their uteri! And that's according to the government ... I imagine the real number would be lower considering how these things are probably over-reported.

Thank goodness we're about to authorize an extra 800 billion dollars for these people.

Google 2009 is between 22 and 28 times larger than 2006

2009-11-07T16:40:00.001-08:00

Based on an informal word count analysis that I was doing for other reasons, Google's English web index is from 22 to 28 times larger in 2009 than it was in 2006. That's some big growth for 3 years.

Economic Recovery is Here at Last!

2009-11-07T11:29:00.001-08:00

The CEO of NuCor Steel was on Squawk Box this morning. He said actual unemployment is 13-15% if you calculate it the way they did prior to the 80s when they changed it for obvious political reasons. The radio guy that tells you employment lags behind economic recovery hasn't looked at a graph. There is little-to-no statistical correlation between the stock marketand employment because a) public companies employ a fraction of people and b) public companies and private company employment aren't correlated. Experts have no idea what's going to happen. Our prior experience does not apply to the current situation. Have a nice day.

Try SMX, a true 5GL

2009-11-06T22:33:00.000-08:00

I keep trying to like PHP, but, honestly, it's completely awful. Please, world, try SMX for some website stuff.

If you need a huge community, or a facebook api ... use the %perl module.

After about a week of using it, you won't look back. Built-in image creation support, sqlite support, odbc, all the good stuff you need for decent interactive websites.

I just debugged an old blog program I wrote. In only 779 lines... it's way better than Blogger, IMO. Support for templates, multipart blogs, image uploading, multi-user, RSS, everything... in a terse 779 line program. I bet Blogger's like 100K lines or something.

Postgres Replication

2009-11-03T06:32:00.000-08:00

There's a lot of talk about the lack of built-in replication for postgres. I have been using the "pg_comparator" method for slave updates.

This is essentially similar to an "rsync" for database tables. It works extremely well and has a low configuration overhead. You can use it to scale a single table out to dozens of servers, even choosing which fields to replicate.

It's also easy to install, configure and maintain - even code for.

Personally, I like it better than the builtin solution that they are discussing on postgres's lists. I wish a diff-patch shipping solution was in the running. For a lot of us, that's exactly what we need.

AT&T Scared By Google

2009-11-02T03:36:00.000-08:00

Google has shown itself to be a competent player in many areas, but not every. Picassa is still a pretty lousy web album, and who hosts web sites at Google? But in some arenas, Google shines, and Google Voice is proving to be one of them.

About Google Voice:

I've been using Google Voice to manage phone routing for a couple weeks now. It is an efficient, high quality and non-nonsense service - exactly what you'd expect from a company who has refused to fill their home page with more than a little - very useful - text box. I use Google's service to route calls for my small business's 800 number to a half-dozen cell phones and land lines where customer service reps answer them.

Google's transcription service, though useful, is oddly worse than PhoneTag's ... the company they bought. But it is far better than having to listen to every message. An operator can quickly delete dozens of hangups, no-message calls and wrong numbers in a few seconds, rather than listening to every one.

The FCC, Google and Traffic Pumping:

Google has run into some small hiccup with the FCC because it identified that some rural phone companies were "traffic pumping". The FCC allows some rural companies to charge *inbound* callers an "access fee". That means you pay to call numbers in those locations. Small rural phone companies were quick to exploit this ruling, giving a kickback to "free sex lines" and "free teleconferencing services" that set up shop there. Callers are rarely informed that they they are secretly paying up to 25 cents a minute for these services.

Google Voice blocked these numbers since some companies were buying Google voice accounts and routing calls to sex lines to make money and milk Google for profits. The FCC is probably going to let them do it, and it might open up some room for litigation to get rid of these people who are abusing and ultimately harming rural phone systems.

The FCC has really screwed up even allowing this to happen. Google's action has called attention to a little known area where all the kickbacks and bribes are likely not something that the well-heeled boys at the FCC really want investigated.

AT&T's Response & Weakness:

You would think the big phone companies would line up behind Google and demand action on this area which costs them money and does them no good. But AT&T's response was to go on the attack and blame Google for not routing calls to a convent and an ambulance service. (Who would use Google voice to route calls to an ambulance service rather than calling the direct number? And exactly what kind of convent receives hundreds of calls per hour? Dial-a-prayer?).

This is an enormous blunder on AT&T's part. It has revealed, at least to me, that AT&T is either afraid of Google or afraid of someone looking into the FCC's rural access fees. Either way, it's revealing weakness, and my dollar's on AT&T stock price reflecting that weakness in the years to come.

Yay! It was an easy one, but I'm still happy

2009-11-01T19:09:00.001-08:00

I won an "enigma puzzle" at New Scientist. Wrote a perl program to show how I solved it too. Click for source code.

Facebook Search for Old Posts

2009-10-27T08:22:00.000-07:00

I made a feature for Facebook that allows you to archive and search all the old posts that were in your news feed without having to scroll to the bottom and click "view older posts" over and over until you're eyes are blurry.

(I use it to play a couple of the games where I've hidden them from my regular feed because they are annoying but I look them up while I play.)

www.fbarchive.com

Feature I Want in GMail/Tasks

2009-10-26T09:09:00.000-07:00

I want Google to add "shared tasks". So, I can add a "Family" shared task, and that means that the task can be seen by Yvette and I both (or anyone who is subscribed to that shared task label). She can do the same (since I set her as an owner/admin).

Any editor can mark a task as "done", or update it.

Also I can create a filter than anything that comes to support@mycompany.com gets marked as a "Support Task", which then any support person can see/edit. Same with sales@mycompany.com, etc.

The nice thing about shared tasks is that when someone else reads it or acts on it, it saves that info, so you can see what happened to all the tasks.

ASAP. Thanks.

Dow is Up, Profits are Up

2009-10-21T04:38:00.000-07:00

Small businesses employ more than half of the workforce, and generate more than half the GDP. They do this without substantial tax breaks and government payoffs while competing successfully with the giant corporations that do. And yet... as our government continues to pour money in to big business....

Bureau of Labor Statistics Unemployment Graph as of Oct 2009

Maybe it's time for a few small business tax incentives this year...if only to be fair.

How Much Is A 3-letter Domain Worth?

2009-10-05T08:40:00.000-07:00

While testing my nifty interactive name-suggestion tool, I decided to quickly scan all the 3 letter tld's.

Obviously they are all taken, but "cqc.com" is "pending deletion". That means it'll be up for grabs soon. So I jumped over to NameJet, just to see what the current backorder auction price was. The current sticker price for "cqc.com" is $10,000 ... and rising.

Whoever owns it really ought to wake up and smell the money. Letting a $10,000 name expire should be grounds for a Darwin award.