Alkahest my heroes have always died at the end

February 12, 2008

Vicarious sadness

Filed under: Personal — cec @ 11:11 am

About eight months ago, a gentleman with the same first and last name as mine started using gmail. Not a big deal except that the difference between our gmail addresses is fairly small and hard to notice. So every once in a while, I receive email intended for him and I’ll point that person in the right direction. Beyond that, my only real contact with him has been some minimal email communication, usually after I’ve pointed someone new his way.

Over the weekend, he lost his daughter in an accident and I am surprised at how much it’s affected me. Here is this person that I barely know, we have nothing in common but a name and yet, I am genuinely saddened by his grief. I’m sure it doesn’t help that a number of people have sent him misdirected condolence messages. At the same time, I am reminded that millions of people die every year around the world.

The grief that my namesake feels is felt by millions of people every day, but we are largely blind to it. A hundred thousand civilians die in Iraq each year and again, without a connection to the individuals, it’s just a number. A thousand US troops die each year and we start to feel a little connection to them and their families – a little compassion, a little vicarious sadness for their loss.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to feel personally saddened by every death that happens around the world – it would drive me crazy. At the same time, we should realize that every death causes someone, somewhere to be distraught. Every time we kill or allow someone to be killed, a family is devastated.

February 10, 2008

Moving day update

Filed under: Personal,Technical — cec @ 3:57 pm

The ISP move went reasonably well.  There were a couple of minor glitches.  One was a character set problem when I tried to take the most recent database snapshot from Linksky.  I’m not entirely certain what happened, but I wound up with extra characters after some punctuation marks.  Rather than spend too much time with it, I just grabbed the latest post and dumped it into the Dreamhost site and changed the time.

The other was a cute problem with my email.  I had done a major synchronization between the two mail systems a day or so before, so all I had to do on moving day was a periodic sync of the Inbox.  Unfortunately, in playing on Dreamhost’s control panel, I managed to delete my mailbox.   So I had to do another major synchronization and I lost any mail that arrived on Dreamhost only.  Fortunately, there was only one thing that was important and I could ask the sender to resend.

I think I’m all set now.  We’ll see how things go over the next day or two now that DNS *should* have settled out.

February 6, 2008

Moving day

Filed under: Personal,Technical — cec @ 11:05 pm

Saturday is moving day. Nope, we haven’t bought a new house. We hope not to have to do that for a long time. It’s time to change ISPs. After only 10 months with Linksky, I’ve had enough. In the past year, between working on the non-profit’s website and my own, I’ve had the following issues:

  • arbitrary version changes with no notification
  • random breakage due to “security” upgrades – like the time w e couldn’t do anything with a friend’s account or email because his last name contained the letters “curl”
  • random lockouts of service
  • insults from the security “guru” because he thinks he knows more about Unix and IT security than anyone else around
  • etc.

The last straw for me came earlier this year when a gallery page broke. I tried to login to diagnose the problem and found that they had removed my SSH access. When I emailed, I was to ld there is a “security issue” that makes sites with SSH more vulnerable and that they were looking for a workaround and would re-enable SSH by the weekend. Outside of dictionary attacks on passwords, this is really complete BS. Of course, the weekend came and nope, no SSH. Another week rolled around, no SSH. Forget this.

I started looking around for alternatives. I’m using Pair Networks at the office and they are okay. Hunter pointed me to Dreamhost. Yeah, I know they had recent billing issues, but no one can touch their current hosting offer (500 GB of storage) + 5 TB of data transfer per month, unlimited domains, Python, PHP and RubyOnRails (I don’t want to develop in RoR, but my preferred todo list program, Tracks, requires RoR), etc. With all of that and $50 off of a one year contract, I had to go Dreamhost.

Within 10 minutes of signing up, I had Tracks running on a mirror domain. Yay!

Then I started trying to migrate my current domains off of Linksky and onto Dreamhost. This turns out to be more than a little tricky without SSH access! I finally told it to create a backup. The backup turned out to contain all db, email and file data – great! That’s sort of easier than tar-gz directly. Unfortunately, the file was 1.5+ GB. I tried ftp-ing it from Linksky (ironically, the great security gurus have disallowed SSH, but allow/require unencrypted ftp with your main account and password). Unfortunately, ftp is apparently rate limited. At times, I was getting only 1 byte/second and it failed after downloading about 50 MB. Fine, I tried to use the web file interface to move the backup into webspace where I could wget it from Dreamhost. Oops – the web interface doesn’t move, it copies then deletes. After copying 420 MB, it failed. I couldn’t SSH into do a soft link or a move, the web interface had no softlink capability. I finally punted and wrote a 1 line php script that created the softlink into webspace. After all of that, I was able to download to DH (though it seemed to temporarily fail at 1.5 GB).

You start to see why I might be looking to change ISPs. The great irony to cap it all off: importing the gallery db, moving the files into place and updating the config to point to the new db completely resolved the gallery problems. There was nothing to diagnose, nothing to fix, on DH it worked, on Linksky it didn’t. It was probably another silent “upgrade” or “security fix” Linksky applied that broke it.

Hopefully I won’t have to change from DH any time soon. In the meantime, most everything seems to be up an running on the DH mirror domain. I’ll change the DNS servers on Saturday, so there may be a little weirdness until that settles out. If I can get GoDaddy to lower the TTL on the authoritative DNS servers for the domains, things may resolve even faster.

January 30, 2008

Edwards

Filed under: Personal — cec @ 9:41 pm

So, John Edwards dropped out of the Democratic primaries today.  It’s a shame.  In one sense, I was more excited about Obama or Clinton as president(ial candidates).  Their candidacies would be a) history making for their race/gender respectively; and b) about freaking time!  Hell, Turkey and Pakistan have had female heads of state for well over a decade, it’s just embarrassing that the United States hasn’t had a viable black or female candidate until now.

But in spite of the history making potential of these two candidates, I’m just not as excited by the policies/rhetoric of either Clinton or Obama.  Don’t get me wrong.  In a coma, either would make a better president that any of the republican candidates; however, their positions are still very mainstream (I would use “conservative,” but I don’t want to suggest Republican).

The fascinating thing about the Democratic primary this year is that the policy framing and the best ideas came from the two middle aged white guys: Chris Dodd and John Edwards – both of whom are out of the race.  On issues from health care (Edwards), to care for the poor (again Edwards) to preventing illegal, warrantless surveillance (Dodd), these guys were leading the discussion on what it should mean to be a Democrat.

So both Edwards and Dodd are out of the race now.  I just hope their ideas continue to influence the remaining candidates and the country as a whole.

January 27, 2008

Possum pictures

Filed under: Personal,Wildlife Rehab — cec @ 10:48 pm

Back in August I wrote about a rehab possum that K was taking care of – she was very much a cutie.  I was looking through some pictures on the camera and realized that I had a few more of her.  Now that she’s all grown up and has been released, I thought folks might like to see them:

Here she was back in August:

A month later, in September:

And then after she had been outside and right before release in December:

  

The last two were from the night we started leaving the outdoor cage open so that she could leave when she wanted to.  It took her a bit before she left.  Hopefully she’s doing well.

Work blogging

Filed under: Personal,Technical — cec @ 10:37 pm

Last week at work was pretty interesting. On Tuesday, L and I flew up to Dayton for the day to meet with our sponsors. That meant a 6am flight out and originally a 11pm return flight. Fortunately, we wrapped it up a bit early and landed home back around 8:30pm. The meeting went well. We were presenting some ideas that I had to the sponsors and they seemed to like them. Strangely enough, in talking to L, he said that he hadn’t really understood what I was proposing until the meeting. Not bad for a guy who wrote a short paper for the sponsors that described what he didn’t understand! But then, I guess that’s why L’s a full professor 🙂

Wednesday was largely recovery. Thursday, I met with the other modeling guy on the team who was in from New York. We discussed what I wanted to do and he seemed to have a good handle on it which was good because later in the afternoon L came in and wanted to discuss it in more detail. He had been stuck in an airport and had time to think through some things. The bad news is that he didn’t think my proposed modeling would work. The good news is that he thought he had a fix.

Turned out that I had forgotten that the underlying model we are using is a Markov model. The basic requirement of the model is that the software agent can only be in one state at a time. I was essentially proposing that the agent could be in multiple states simultaneously. As we talked more, I realized that L’s proposal was to generalize what I was getting at. Essentially, I described the special case of m=1. Before my proposal, we had been working with m=n. L’s proposal was to let m vary between 1 and n. This bugged me at first since I thought m>1 wasn’t necessary. I was also concerned since L and the other modeler, N, had theoretical objections to m=1. I pointed out that really for any m<n, their theoretical objections held true, so nothing was really more wrong with m=1. Everyone agreed with that and we further agreed that a varying m would still have some theoretical problems, but would be more effective, more realistic and more tractable than m=n or m=1.

Wrapping that up, I received a short email from L on Friday thanking me for the work, saying that was a good white board session and that he could see how my thinking was influencing his for the better. That was nice 🙂

p.s. if y’all are really nice, I promise not to write a blog post on Markov decision processes

January 15, 2008

K wins!

Filed under: Personal,Social — cec @ 9:56 pm

Okay, slight confession time.  I’m something of a closet political junkie.  Not so much the “who’s up, who’s down” campaigning politics, but the questions of policy, who supports what, what makes sense kind of thing.  If I were involved in politics directly, I suppose that would make me a wonk, not a hack.

Anyway, K and I were having a discussion last week about the presidential primaries.  K’s position was that if Huckabee wins the GOP primaries, we’re all in serious danger because the man holds positions that are bad for women, minorities, basically everyone that’s not a middle class white heterosexual male.  I, on the other hand, maintained the position that a Huckabee win in the primaries would be hysterical.  🙂

To a large extent, our positions were based on different contexts.  K is concerned that the republican would win the general election since, hey, it’s been a while since they haven’t – no matter how bad their candidates and policies are.  I was thinking “hysterical” since it would break wide open the GOP coalition of money, guns and religio and I have a hard time picturing any republican winning this time, since they are all so awful.

So, that said, I think K wins this one based on this short article:

“[Some of my opponents] do not want to change the Constitution, but I believe it’s a lot easier to change the constitution than it would be to change the word of the living God, and that’s what we need to do is to amend the Constitution so it’s in God’s standards rather than try to change God’s standards,” Huckabee said, referring to the need for a constitutional human life amendment and an amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman

I’m more than a little terrified that a presidential candidate would talk about amending the Constitution in order to suite his own religious beliefs.  Where do you even start with this?  This country was established to intentionally and explicitly keep religion from controlling the government.  While the phrase “separation of church and state” is not in the constitution, the concept is one of the founding principles of the constitution as a whole and of the first amendment in particular.  The founders saw first hand the damage that could be done when a particular religion dictated to the government.  This is why the establishment of religion was explicitly forbidden.

Beyond the 200+ years of tradition, beyond the very heart of our government, there’s the whole other issue of which “word of the living God” to you plan to establish? There are over a dozen major religions represented in this country.  Even within the largest, there are literally hundreds of Christian denominations (side note, why are splits among Christian beliefs called denominations and those of non-Christian beliefs called sects?) each of which has there own special interpretation of the god’s word.

Perhaps Huckabee was just pandering to republican christians, many of whom can be counted on to support certain positions.  But to make the claim that these republicans speak for all christians, let alone for god or all religions is crazy.

So, yes – K wins: Huckabee winning the GOP primary would not be hysterical, it would in fact be scary.

Is this thing on?

Filed under: Guitar,Personal,Security — cec @ 9:25 pm

<thump> <thump> Is this thing still on?

Okay, it’s been about three weeks since I’ve blogged anything.  As I’ve stated before, this tends to happen when I’m too involved in living life to actually write about it.  Fortunately (unfortunately?) it’s nothing terribly exciting.  Let’s see:

  • Guitar: my guitar playing has been scientifically shown to have 10% less suck than it did a month ago.  However, with such a large amount of suck to begin with, we’re still not at anything that looks like good.  I’m getting more fluent with the open chords and can switch between them reasonably well.  I’m just starting to learn barre chords – the E barre chord to start with.  There are still vast tracts of untouched suck in the barre chords.  Also, I’m actually thinking of picking up some lessons – the ones at jamplay.com seem pretty good.
  • Work:  still going well.  There’s enough to do.  I’m still not entirely used to billing by the (tenth of an) hour.  Also, not really looking forward to flying to Ohio next week.  I’ll only be gone for a day, but, ugh – who wants a 6am flight to Dayton!
  • Break-in update:  nothing much new here.  Still looking to make it harder for someone to break in.   Had a neighborhood watch meeting last weekend – that’ll be good.  Turns out this may be neither contractors nor kids.  There are apparently some professional (stretching that word a bit) thieves working this area.  There have been some eight different break-ins near by.
  • Non-profit work: I’m convinced that whomever coined the phrase “academic politics are so sorted because the stakes are so small” never worked with a non-profit.  It’s just amazing the degree to which politics enters into the smallest damned thing.
  • New year’s resolutions: didn’t make any – never do.  That said, I am trying to exercise more and cut down on my use of vulgarities.  Profanity and cursing can wait until another year 🙂

I think that’s about it for now.

December 26, 2007

Chop wood, haul water

Filed under: Personal — cec @ 10:04 pm

“Before enlightenment, chop wood, haul water.  After enlightenment, chop wood, haul water,” is one of my favorite zen aphorisms.  Okay, so no hauling water for me – at least not unless the drought gets worse, but there’s going to be a lot of wood chopping in my future.

On Saturday, margaretc’s husband, ‘A’, came by and took out two of the trees that have been worrying me.  They border our drivway and both had holes in their bases.  Since they’re not small trees (40-50+ feet tall), I was worried that they would either come down on the house, the 500 gallon propane tank, the cars, the well, the power lines – you get the idea.  It seemed better to take them out on our own terms.

The removal went well.  It’s a great comfort to have a certified master arborist doing the work 🙂 .  ‘A’ climbed the trees – rope climbing the one and spiking the other (impressive!) and sat up top cutting the major limbs.  After that was done, he rigged a multi-pulley system so that we could pull the trunks down to a location that wouldn’t  cause any harm.  It went perfectly.

Now I have to finish cutting up the two trees and chopping the rounds into firewood.  Looks like we won’t need to buy wood for a year or two.  Surprisingly, chopping wood isn’t as bad as I thought it would be.  I need to work on my technique, but it could wind up being fairly enjoyable.

Next tree project – order and plant some replacement trees.  I’m thinking a couple of walnuts might be nice.

December 23, 2007

Break-in Update

Filed under: Personal — cec @ 4:43 pm

It’s been about a week and a half since the attempted break-in.

On Tuesday, I replaced the window they broke out.  I called around to a couple of different places and everyone said that they could send someone out to give an estimate, but it would take a few days and then the part would be on order for another 3-5 days.  Fortunately, on local glass shop said that if I brought them the sill in the morning, they would be able to replace the glass that afternoon.  So I spent the morning taking apart the window.  It turned out to be easier than I thought, but I did have to take off the lower sill to get to the upper.

I got the sill to the glass shop and they managed to replace the glass by the 5:15.  I brought it hope and replaced the window in just a half hour or so.  Yay!

Today I found out that the same morning someone was broken into down the street on the same day as our attempted break-in and in the same way.  For a variety of reasons, they suspect contractors at the two construction sites in the neighborhood.  They’re chasing down the details of who was on site, etc.  Hopefully they can track down enough information to identify the burglars.

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