Notes and Jottings

How NOT to Talk!

First, we have the Ad Hominem Variants where you attack the person as a way to avoid truth, science, or logic which might otherwise prove you wrong. Next are the Sleight of Mind Fallacies, which act as “mental magic” to make sure the unwanted subject disappears. Then, we move on to Delay Tactics, which are subtle means to buy time when put on the spot. Then, the ever popular Question as Opportunity ploys, where any question can be deftly averted. Finally, we have the General Cheap-Shot Tactics and Irritants, which are basically “below the belt” punches.

Damned worms and their damned works. The Internet is foobarred today, and Dan has had two machines taken offline because of a worm called SQLSlammer, which has been doing the rounds. It attacks MS SQL Server, and if it successfully takes over the server, it starts pumping HUGE numbers of UDP packets against random IP addresses to try and take over more machines. It’s a huge network DDOS really. TCD is unavailable - I wonder if they plugged out the cables, or if some machine in TCD really is affected.
Dan swears he applied all the patches - not the first time a security patch from Microsoft has failed to work for him. Extremely extremely frustrating. Another story about the attack at Yahoo News.

Our work “Christmas Party” is over. Photos uploading to here. I avoided spilling anything over myself all night at the party, but I almost had a most severe accident with a bottle of blue mouthwash after I got home… a very normal end to the night, I must say
Solpadeine - is supposed to be good for hangovers, if taken the night before. Time to try that out. Kampai! With a lot of water, which is another potentially good thing for a hangover. O’course, John McCann says that distilled water is really good for hangovers, but be careful or your stomach lining will explode. Something like that! Something to do with stomach lining cells being able to absorb distilled water really quickly, but not able to distribute it to the rest of the system as quickly. Think blowfish…

Ireland of the welcomes opts for two-tier citizenship (free subscription required)

THE Supreme Court decision yesterday that the non-national parents of Irish citizens do not have the right to reside in their children’s country of citizenship deserves strong criticism.
[…]
They ruled however that although the citizen has a right to reside here, the citizen does not have the right to the care and company of their families in this State. This right is overridden by the need to protect the integrity of the asylum and immigration process; by the sovereign right of the State to dictate its own immigration policy.

Doesn’t this sound very like the behaviour of the Supreme Court in the US over the constitutional challenge to the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. Id est, that the end justifies the means? I have seen it suggested (can’t find the link yet) that the differences in how the Supreme Court acted in restricting Congress (or is it Senate?) powers in the Commerce Act differed from that when confronted with a challenge to the CTEA occurred because the Justices perceived at some level that Disney et al. were good for the US, and acting against that would be bad. It would just be a background motivation, but…
And then here in Ireland, the Supreme Court appears to act in a way which is obviously constitutional (since they say it is), but which seems to act on the side of supporting what is currently considered “common opinion” in Ireland against the common sense view of the Constitution.

GNOME/Bitstream agreement (compatible with DFSG?) - Debian Planet

Debian has quite strict rules about what constitutes a free package which can be part of the main distribution of GNOME. There has been a lot of fuss recently (most of which being inside my head, I haven’t seen other reactions, but I am sure most would think similarly) over Bitstream’s licensing agreement with Ximian.

I never imagined that the licensing might not be free, until I found a commentary about it at Debian Planet. And it does appear that they can’t appear in your favourite distribution.

The licensing is obviously meant to allow the fonts to be used in a software distribution, but not sold just on their own - people just looking for new fonts for their system ’should’ purchase them from Bitstream. But it does as a result mean that the fonts cannot be packaged on their own.

So the result is: it’ll either go into non-free, or else Bitstream will need to reconsider.

Well, now that my week’s training on HP-UX has been confirmed, I’ll be off to San Francisco next Thursday. Cruising the districts. Visiting my favourite haunts. Ah - the old Tenderloin… (note: I stayed at the YMCA for nearly a week, so I know it better than I need to). Really looking forward to seeing Palo Alto, you’ll see me hanging out in the Quad at Stanford U if the weather is at all appealing
And then I shake my head - I forgot - it’s still January! Last time I was there, it was the height of summer, not a cloud in the sky, an inspirer of envy to an inhabitant of Ireland, a pretty damp place!

Meeting Juraj and Mitch and a few others from my time there in 2000. One would hope that as much of the (former) Embarcadero gang as possible will be around!

And on the weekend after, fingers crossed, we will head to Tahoe for a weekend of roaring log fires and skiing. Sounds amazing… The only thing left to decide is whether I should buy my ski boots in the US or in Livigno next March. Hm. US prices and ski boot fitting expertise versus tax-free… suggestions welcome

A Long, Painful History of Time

Time and its long, sordid history.

New Scientist

Damage caused by multiple sclerosis could be repaired using stem cells extracted from a patient’s bone marrow, new research suggests.

As it says, trials are years away, but drugs aimed at slowing the progress of MS have been at best a stop-gap measure up until now. Hopefully they will be successful, and many people will receive a renewed life.

VTK Home Page

I haven’t talked about VTK before here. It’s a toolkit which can be used to take scientific data (such as many-dimensional data), and render it in an interactive window, or to a graphic file. With axes and translucency and lights and all sorts of cool things like that.
An example:

This particular image shows spheres which are not touching any other spheres as translucent, and the spheres further in are saturated with red based on the number of spheres they touch.
That was created after less than 2 hours of playing with the Python scripting interface to VTK (to get used to various VTK features). A testimony both to the ease of use of Python for interfacing to VTK, and to VTK’s flexibility.

idleworm: games - gulf war 2

“Let’s make allies in the region by donating them some of our surplus bacon”