Before I look at the type of the government and the name of the government, I examine how it treats people. The correct treatment of a country’s citizen is conveyed through the upholding of human rights norms. Therefore, from my perspective, any government that seeks to uphold the norms of human rights in terms of its dealing with people meets the criteria of being legal and acceptable. And likewise, if any government, whatever it calls itself, whether secular or religious, seeks to trample human rights, then that regime does not meet the criterion of being legal or acceptable in my eyes. The name of the government is not important for me: the government’s upholding of the standards of human rights is.

— Shirin Ebadi

Thrush is an organization that believes the world should have a two party system: a master, and slaves.

— The Green Opal Affair

Today's options:

• laptop with XP: not really an option soon.
• laptop with Vista: it sucks.
• laptop with Linux: it sucks in different ways, plus you can't get drivers! and it eats your hard drive!
• laptop with OS X: it probably sucks the least, but it's not cheap nor the best hardware. plus, your mom gets to learn what exec 2>&1 is!
• laptop with NetBSD: even fewer drivers than Linux.

<annh> i'm slowly realizing that i'm going to have to hear this bizspeak again
<annh> *shudder*
<annh> once at a meeting someone told me to go make a matrix of what we'd been talking about
<annh> so i asked her what she meant. what would this document look like
<annh> and she mumbled and left
<annh> i'm glad 'matrix' isn't so popular anymore
<self> i hope i never have to deal with biz speak
<annh> it pisses me off
<annh> reminds me of sitting in meetings where they're like, let's name our product
        phoenix or poobah and i said "how about naming it "mail" or "calendar"
<annh> and they'd stare at me
<annh> you know, put that on the icon
<self> let's name it pony express!
<self> because who doesn't want a pony!
<davet> i don't
<annh> you don't want a pony?!
<davet> no
<annh> fine. i'm sending it back
<davet> i want a bag full of gold bars

Trembling, you fire the heavy arquebus. You hear its loud report over the
roaring wind, yet the dark figure still approaches. The gun falls from your
nerveless hands.
   “You won’t kill me,” he says, stepping over the weapon. “Not when I am the
only protection you have from Jean Lafond.”
   Chestnut hair, tousled by the wind, frames the tanned oval of his face. Lips
curving, his eyes rake over your inadequately dressed body, the damp chemise
clinging to your legs and heaving bosom, your gleaming hair. You are intensely
aware of the strength of his hard seaworn body, of the deep sea blue of his
eyes. And then his mouth is on yours, lips parted, demanding, and you arch into
his kiss...
   He presses you against him, head bent. “But who, my dear,” he whispers into
your hair, “will protect you from me?”

[Press RETURN or ENTER to begin.]

% mpg321 -v Judas\ Priest\ -\ Entire\ Discography/13\ Judas\ Priest\ -\ Ram\ It\ Down/Ram\ it\ Down.mp3

Reporter: “Mr Ben M'hidi, isn't it cowardly to use your women's baskets to carry bombs, which have taken so many innocent lives?”

Larbi Ben M'hidi: “Isn't it even more cowardly to attack defenseless villages with napalm bombs that kill many thousands of times more? Obviously, planes would make things easier for us. Give us your bombers, sir, and you can have our baskets.”

— The Battle of Algiers

<udon> holy crap, a co-worker just found one of our 3 machine mysql clusters in a slaving loop
<udon> how is that even possible?
<neuwave> what is a slaving loop?
<gp> slaves -> plantation -> sugar -> rum -> slaves ... ?
<neuwave> got it.  thanks.

I moved my work site's Zope app server to a faster box earlier this week. I noticed it had some trouble authenticating users after that — a user would login, everything would look good, but then they'd click on a link and the server would act as if they weren't logged in. I used the Live HTTP Headers extension, and set Firefox to "ask before saving" cookies, so I knew the server setting cookies properly. Strange.

The authentication cookie was named __ac, and its value was base64'd. I decided to decode its value, and much to my dismay, saw that it was in the format

username:password

in plain-text. Argh! I read the code for the authentication product (exUserFolder), and found a "secure" cookie mechanism. I remembered that I hadn't tried it out when I set up the software because I thought it required SSL or something. It doesn't. So, I simply changed the knob in Zope, and now my server was happily caching authentication data on the server and sending unique opaque cookies to the browser. The cookies even changed on each request — can't get more secure than that!

Today, I ran into another problem with the new setup. Apparently exUserFolder doesn't cache the authentication foo in the database. It caches it in memory. This means that every time I restart Zope, people are logged out. Argh!

When Larry Pinczower switches on his cellphone, the seal of a rabbinate council appears. Unable to send text messages, take photographs or connect to the Internet, his phone is a religiously approved adaptation to modernity by the ultra-Orthodox sector of Israeli life.

More than 10,000 numbers for phone sex, dating services and the like are blocked, and rabbinical overseers ensure that the lists are up to date. Calls to other kosher phones are less than 2 cents a minute, compared with 9.5 cents for normal phones. But on the Sabbath any call costs $2.44 a minute, a steep religious penalty.

— Israel's ultra-Orthodox drive a thriving kosher economy

There are drugs that block the formation of memories temporarily. They're used during medical procedures where the patient needs to be awake. Can they be used (are they being used?) by torturers?

The story.

Bonus: quiz!

I found a guide that describes how to do encrypted rsync-like backups to Amazon S3.

Situational comedy? Why, you must be referring to one of the serialized japes that periodically cloud the opticrex on the tele-visomatron.

— David Malki !

For someone standing on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon on a moonless night, the brightest feature of the sky is not the Milky Way but the glow of Las Vegas, a hundred and seventy-five miles away. To see skies truly comparable to those which Galileo knew, you would have to travel to such places as the Australian outback and the mountains of Peru.

— The Dark Side: Making war on light pollution

I started firefox, and got the profile selection menu. At that point, top said

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND                                                               
 4534 me        15   0  451m  31m  19m S    0  1.6   0:00.51 firefox-bin

No extensions loaded, no page displayed, nothing. Just the profile selection window.

Update: on my home box:

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND                                                               
30535 me        15   0 98260  23m  16m S  0.0  4.8   0:00.53 firefox-bin

The difference? The first output is from a system that runs x86_64 (they're both Ubuntu 7.04).

Missile To the Moon — comments on imdb claim it might be public domain now.

I spend a lot of time thinking about the futility of life. It's not really so much futile, though. It's more like you're in a brick that's supporting part of a huge building that reaches to the sky... except the building keeps sinking, so it never reaches the sky, and they keep building onto the top, so every brick eventually gets all crushed up and turned to mud by the weight of the building. Then they take the old mushed-up earth and make bricks out of it. That's how I think of life. Bricks to bricks. It sucks but someone has to be the brick.

— Drew

Movies:

• Babylon 5 - The Lost Tales
• The Deceivers

Completing my collection:

• Choke — Chuck Palahniuk
• Diary — Chuck Palahniuk
• Haunted — Chuck Palahniuk
• Invisible Monsters — Chuck Palahniuk
• Lullaby — Chuck Palahniuk
• Stranger Than Fiction — Chuck Palahniuk
• Survivor — Chuck Palahniuk
• The Big U — Neal Stephenson
• The Cobweb — Neal Stephenson
• Interface — Neal Stephenson
• Dark Templar #1: Firstborn — Christie Golden

Other:

• Confessions of an Economic Hit Man — John Perkins
• Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years of Lockheed — Ben Rich and Leo Janos
• Software Engineering for Internet Applications — π, Philip Greenspun, and Andrew Grumet

Now I get to wait a month or so for them to show up.

I finally got around to restoring from the last backup of my home desktop, and began the task of importing about 2.5 years of email into gnus.

During this period, all my mail was piling up on my mailhost, in both maildir and mbox formats (I'm paranoid about losing email). I'd been reading email using mutt -R because I figured that I'd import my email into gnus at some point in the future. Unfortunately, the amount of spam I received during these 2.5 years had grown massively:

-rw-------  1 me       luser   977K Jan  1  2004 Mailbox-20040101.bz2
-rw-------  1 me       luser   6.3M Jan 25  2004 Mailbox-20040126.bz2
-rw-------  1 me       luser   4.4M Jan 18  2005 Mailbox-20050118.bz2
-rw-------  1 me       luser    12M Oct  7  2006 Mailbox-20060107.bz2
-rw-------  1 me       luser   2.8M Jan 18  2006 Mailbox-20060118.bz2
-rw-------  1 me       luser   8.6M Jan  1  2007 Mailbox-20070101.bz2
-rw-------  1 me       luser    17M Jan 15  2007 Mailbox-20070115.bz2
-rw-------  1 me       luser    14M Jan 29  2007 Mailbox-20070129.bz2

Each file has about 2-4 weeks of email.

It's only late last year that I began taking anti-spam measures at the SMTP level. I added something like sendmail's greet pause (with a five second delay), began using the bl.spamcop.net rbl, and blocked certain email addresses that received nothing but spam (old email addresses used for mailing lists that I no longer subscribe to). Yesterday, the checks caught:

I also began verifying SPF records and DomainKey headers, but the checks are either not rejecting any email or my mailer isn't logging those rejections.

So. A lot of spam. Fortunately, gnus now has the ability to filter using external apps, like bogofilter, crm114, ifile, and a few others. I set up gnus to filter all imported email through bogofilter first, and I set up group parameters on almost all my groups to automatically train bogofilter with ham/spam messages when I exited the groups.

This worked well for all the email I imported from August 2004 to late 2005, and then the training process began slowing down massively. The other night, it took about two hours to train bogofilter on some 800 spam messages. Vacuuming the wordlist database (it's sqlite) helped some, but it's still pretty slow. It takes less than a second to classify email as spam, ham, or "unsure", but I need to train it with more ham messages, and training bogofilter takes over a second per email.

Right now, it's trained with almost three times as many spam messages as ham (12,159 vs 4,313). Given the amount of spam I have in the unimported mailboxes, it's only going to get worse. I can throw about 5,000 or so known "good" email messages at it, but it's going to take all evening.

After I'm done importing all my old email, I plan to upload the trained bogofilter wordlist to the mailhost, and begin rejecting email that it thinks is spam at the SMTP level.

Update: <mcmunn> you forgot to put the part about "all because i'm getting married!"

Yes, that explains the urgency in dealing with this.

me@ultralisk:~$ /usr/bin/time bogofilter-sqlite -s -v < 1187082720.88294.utralisk.internal
# 182 words, 1 message
0.01user 0.01system 0:02.89elapsed 0%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 0maxresident)k
0inputs+0outputs (0major+782minor)pagefaults 0swaps
me@ultralisk:~$ /usr/bin/time bogofilter-sqlite -n -v < 1187080595.87997.utralisk.internal
# 345 words, 1 message
0.02user 0.03system 0:08.83elapsed 0%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 0maxresident)k
0inputs+0outputs (0major+889minor)pagefaults 0swaps
me@ultralisk:~$ ls -lh .bogofilter
total 35M
-rw-r--r-- 1 me me 35M 2007-08-14 14:16 wordlist.db
me@ultralisk:~$ bogoutil-sqlite -w ~/.bogofilter/wordlist.db .MSG_COUNT
                                 spam   good
.MSG_COUNT                      11553   3869
me@ultralisk:~$ 

I don't know if it's always that slow, or if the -sqlite version's a lot slower than the db4 version. This is on a 1.86GHz T1350 (core solo).

i know what i talking about when i talking about the revolution
the people who read the books go to the people who can't read the books
the poor people and say we have to have a change so the poor people make the change, henh?
and then the people who read the books they all sit around the big polished tables and they talk and talk and talk and eat and eat and eat ask (as?) for what happened to the poor people
got that?!
that's your revolution
shh. so please, don't tell me about revolutions
and what happens afterwards? the same fucking thing starts all over again!

Jay Leno likes to try out his TV jokes each week at the Comedy and Magic club, Hermosa Beach, California. Last Sunday he started with his standard family entertainment routine, but then suddenly launched into a rant about how fat Americans have become. He ended up telling a story about a kid who was "so fat it would take Michael Jackson an hour to molest him."

The audience went deadly silent.

<per> some asshat has registered me on a spice girls mailinglist, is that you?
<self> no
<per> just checking
<per> i guess i have to ask everyone i know
<self> i am so blogging this
<per> lol
<per> i actually saw the spice girls movie
<per> BLOG THAT
<per> in a cinema!
<per> there was a bunch of teens, pre-teens, and this weird guy in a trenchcoat on the front row
<per> and me
<per> i didn't wear the trenchcoat

<beers> how can one misread man pages?  they're so clear and concise...
<self> it was probably a linux man page, beers
<glen> linux only has "boy" pages

I just watched Children of Men (in glorious HD — I tell ya, I never want to go back to DVD-quality!). I can't check right now, but it certainly seemed like they misspelled the translated Arabic word for "The Uprising" in the refugee camp. They could get a hundred or so South Asian/Arab extras to wave guns and chant Allah Akbar, but they couldn't spell one word correctly?!

On an unrelated note, I'm annoyed that doof.us is taken by a squatter.

Update: I needed lunch, and walked outside for about fifteen minutes at this time:

The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words. George Orwell made this clear in his novel 1984. But another way to control the minds of people is to control their perceptions. If you can get them to see the world as you do, they will think as you do. Comprehension follows perception. How do you get them to see the reality you see? After all, it is only one reality out of many. Images are a basic constituent: pictures. This is why the power of TV to influence young minds is so staggeringly vast. Words and pictures are synchronized. The possibility of total control of the viewer exists, especially the young viewer. TV viewing is a kind of sleep- learning. An EEG of a person watching TV shows that after about half an hour the brain decides that nothing is happening, and it goes into a hypnoidal twilight state, emitting alpha waves. This is because there is such little eye motion. In addition, much of the information is graphic and therefore passes into the right hemisphere of the brain, rather than being processed by the left, where the conscious personality is located. Recent experiments indicate that much of what we see on the TV screen is received on a subliminal basis. We only imagine that we consciously see what is there. The bulk of the messages elude our attention; literally, after a few hours of TV watching, we do not know what we have seen. Our memories are spurious, like our memories of dreams; the blanks are filled in retrospectively. And falsified. We have participated unknowingly in the creation of a spurious reality, and then we have obligingly fed it to ourselves. We have colluded in our own doom.

— How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later, by PKD

Kate Beckinsale might star in the remake of Barbarella: news