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Sun Microsystems suck

Can we start over and design the internet so that not everything in the world breaks when there is no reverse DNS?

Anyone else remember when a lame radio show about slashdot was called Geeks in Space? Oh, but I guess since GiS predated the iPod it didn’t have quite the same caché as its flat-white podcast brethren.

This whole word-coinage thing is getting out of hand. Every day some “blogger” “podcasts” “mashups” while “wardriving,” or worse, “warviewing.” WTF? Back in my day we only had thirty-seven words. We would have had thirty-eight but the Kaiser stole our word “twenty.”

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Broke

What a weekend it has been. I left Thursday for some gambling action in AC and to send my buddy Scott off on a life of marriage. We arrived at the Borgata around 10pm, and hit the poker room where everyone else was already “flopping nuts” as they say. I signed up for a $3/$6 table and got my $140 in chips, then sat down when my name was called. First hand: pocket tens which matched up for a set on the flop. The turn made a pair on the board so I had my full house and took it to the bank. Unfortunately, that would not be a sign of luck to come. By the end of the night, I came back from a deficit to be just $4 short of what I started with, not too bad.

Friday was the day I decided that gambling is not for me. I hit a long string of 2s and 3s at the blackjack table while everyone else hit it big. I left after I had met about half of my pre-set loss limit. Then came back, to lose another third. After that, I went for a swim.

The Borgata is a nice hotel. The showers are all marble, the elevators play West Side Story on a loop, and music is piped into the heated pool, so that you can listen to it underwater.

I blew the rest of my money Friday night on more poker in a boring 2/4 game. In all it was a good time; I just think two days is a little much to spend in a casino and it would’ve been nice if the weather had been good enough to go outside. Never went to bed before 3, and I was always the first.

Saturday I returned, caught up on sleep a bit, then headed to Joe & Jes’ for a cookout. Played DDR and Karaoke R. My singing/dancing careers are about to take off.

Last night Angeline came down this way for dinner. It appears we are back together again, which is good, though not without a tiny bit of anxiety. Who didn’t see this coming besides me?

Today, I should’ve attended work again, but I had to wait for Ikea to drop off my new kitchen in flat box form. They finished up about 2pm and I figured commuting 3 hours to work two hours was pretty pointless. So I stayed here, made spaghetti and finished up my HDTV wiring without cutting any more holes in the wall.

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Wormy

This is one of the most interesting papers I’ve seen. Some researchers investigated the Witty worm. They decoded the random number generator used by the worm for finding new hosts, and managed to figure out all sorts of things like how many disks a compromised host had, initially targeted hosts, even the machine that injected the worm into the internet. Ed Felten’s description. One of those guys is from G-Tech.

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Book

I just finished reading The Dew Breaker. It was one of those books I just randomly picked up off the table at Borders, on the authority of some probably made-up award stamped on the cover. But it was a good pick. Dandicat paints a vivid picture of war-torn Haiti while exploring the past of a former prison torturer. The book is short, so it doesn’t go as deep as, say, QB VII or even Mother Night, but it gets a lot of mileage for its brevity. One interesting thing is that Breaker is written as a set of short stories from various points of view that all stand on their own, but still tell a complete story together. This approach is at times annoying for those of us with bad short term memory, but overall it works. I’m looking forward to reading more of her books.

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Fire… good?

Ok, here’s the deal with the Darth Vader-Frankenstein thing. It’s not a case of bad acting, it’s an homage! You see, (Doctor) Palpitane took what used to be a person — Anakin — and created this hideous, evil, but in many ways just misunderstood creature. No longer human, but very much alive. It’s straight from the pages of Shelley! Or not.

Anyway, Been there, done that.

I’m still playing with electronics despite the recent near-frying of myself. I think once I get the parts in for my next creation, I’m going to etch a board, something I’ve never tried before. So I’ve started messing around with a few of the linux EDA tools, and so far I haven’t found one that doesn’t suck. Although I say this as someone who has had a fair amount of cockpit time in several $30k+ EDA tools, and really, they all suck too.

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Influenza

I just finished reading The Great Influenza, by John Barry. This is a fascinating look at the 1918 flu pandemic: the researchers who tried, and for the most part failed, to identify and fight the virus, the conditions that fostered the massive spread of contagion, and even the dangers of a wartime propaganda machine. There are implications for today, of course, as avian flu H5N1 continues to infect humans and may adapt to us at any time. To the author’s credit, though, there is not a lot of fear mongering, just a brief few pages in the end about the possible looming pandemic and what steps we may take to limit its death toll. The only thing I didn’t like in the book was the author’s insistence on foreshadowing while unraveling the story, in the style of VH1’s Behind the Music. After the break, we will see how Lewis’ failure to isolate the influenza virus marked a downward slide from which he would never return. But in all, it’s well worth a read.

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Next stop, prime factorization

Judging from my web server logs, I’ve achieved infinitesimally minor fame by being enshrined in the gallery of stupid XSL tricks for my square root nonsense. Recently, some guy emailed me:

Bob,

I don't know if you are still interested in a set of XSL stylesheets for standard math functions but I wrote several before I found the exslt.org website. I have: Square Root (similar to yours), Log, Log base 10 (calls Log), Sin, Cos.

Bruce

I bow before superior XSL greatness.

Aside: Does paid LJ have some decent search-my-own facility? I find myself having to grep backups from time to time since Google doesn’t index many of my entries.

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Kitchen

Yesterday I went to IKEA and bought a new set of cabinets (Adel medium brown, with rockdots over the a) for my kitchen for the cost of a couple of computers. And so begins the glorious kitchen remodeling process. Subject to budget of course, but I’m considering Pergo flooring and new appliances and all that. Now the anxiety over whether I picked the right cabinets is beginning to set in. Oh well, anything is better than what I had before. If anyone wishes to weigh in on wall/floor/countertop/appliance colors, or can recommend a local installer to put it all together, I’m all ears. The cabinets are a somewhat cherry color.

After the IKEA trip, since Angeline happened to call, and since I was already halfway to Baltimore, we met up for dinner. Ah, dinner with the ex. But it was nice and not too awkward. I’ve had better meals at the Cheesecake Factory than the blackened chicken pasta, but their cheesecake cannot be denied.

I received in the mail this week a copy of the Codetalkers show I had blogged about earlier. I received the copy by way of B&P; that is, I found a guy who taped it and sent him blanks (B) and return postage (P), and he sent me back the CDs with the songs on it. A great recording. At some point I’ll upload it to archive.org so all peoples of the world may enjoy it.

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Star Wars

I saw Episode 3 last night at the local Gigantiplex where they had ten midnight showings. It was good. The Cinema Delux did a nice job of crowd control by seating everyone hours before the movie started, so there was no pesky waiting in line.

As for the movie itself: it works pretty well. The top notch action scenes (finally CG doesn’t look totally fake) more than make up for the trademark Lucasian horrible dialog. However, is it me or does Vader look like a second-tier late-night local cable wrestling persona? Maybe he just isn’t as scary to me now as he was when I was a kid.

There were a bunch of Obi-Wans and Leias (or Padmes?) in the audience, a yoda or two, and a Vader. I dressed as nothing. Best costume of the night was Napoleon Dynamite who even did The Dance in front of everyone in the theater.

Sleepy.

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V=IR, A Cautionary Tale

My Marshall amp has been sitting unused for a long time because it doesn’t make any noise. Recently I’ve been wanting to get it going again so that I can play electric guitar from my couch instead of walking all the way downstairs (i.e. ten feet). Any old amp will do this task as I can use my POD for effects. But I have the Marshall so why not put it to use? Incidentally, I can just connect the speakers directly to the POD’s headphone amp, but that’s no fun.

Vacuum tubes are notorious for being flakey, so I figured a new set of tubes might make it work again. I ordered a new set, plugged em in, no go. The power tubes heat up but the preamp tubes do nothing. That’s about the extent of my expertise on amplifier repair, so the only other thing I can do is open it up and look for cold solder joints or blown fuses. Alas, I found nothing obvious when I did this.

Working on any high power AC gear is dangerous. In fact, today while discussing my broken amp with a coworker, I said that despite my many hours logged in EE labs in school, I was not at all comfortable working on it myself. Perhaps I should have listened to me.

I was smart enough to unplug the amp, and careful enough to keep a hand in a pocket. But still, I was sloppy when putting it back together and managed to discharge a high voltage cap with my fingers. Holy hell that hurts! I dropped back a couple of feet and let out a loud scream. Youch. I will not be doing that again anytime soon. Luckily, I don’t have any permanent damage: I got a tiny electrical burn on my middle finger (that probably would be worse if I didn’t already have a half-inch callus on it from playing guitar). And I earned a healthy fear of high powered electronics.

So, people of the internet, don’t do what Donny Don’t does. Discharge those caps!

You pretty much have to buy vacuum tubes from the third world or eastern bloc these days since they aren’t much in demand over here. The ones I bought were all Sovteks. I love the Soviet iconography on the box: