Okay, so I just had a panic moment, I booted my machine back up (long story why it was down, I may write that up after), and had no sound. I’m at a total loss here, it was working fine before rebooting. Note, this is the first reboot since having converted from Ubuntu to Debian. I look at the modules, everything seems fine, but I’m getting a snd_ctrl_open error which I have no clue what is, but looks like a kernel module error to me. So I poke around loading extra modules, no luck. I start googling, and one guy asks about the output of alsamixer. Now, I have an alsamixergui, but no alsamixer; what’s up with that? Its very weird, that’s what it is, Linux always comes with a command line client before a graphical one. So just for kicks, I install alsa-utils, and guess what? it’s pulling alsa-base and several other packages I’d have sworn I’d had. Apparently in the conversion from Ubuntu to Debian, they were uninstalled. So a second reboot later (that being the easiest way to make sure the modules and alsabase and everything are all in sync that I know of, though I’m sure the reboot wasn’t necessary), I again have sound. :-)

The double standards in society are absolutely amazing. Michelle Malkin gets on the main stream media’s case for their discussion of Condoleezza Rice’s attire here. David Limbaugh does also, but I think Malkin’s post is better.

According to “When paying with plastic, why swipe? Just wave,” the credit card companies are looking at switching from magnetic strips to RFID tags. I imagine these will be similar to those that the State Department wants placed in passports now, which has significant privacy and security implications. In “Schneier on Security” security expert Bruce Schneier addresses some of the concerns with the RFID tags in passports. Apparently, despite government assertions to the contrary, with the right equipment, these tags will be readable from some some distance away. Schneier’s report is somewhat misleading from what I have gathered, he talks about the chips broadcasting continuously, where I have heard from Andrius that they only do so when they are powered by a certain radio frequency. The difference is slight, but significant to keep in mind when reading the more official reports on these tags. Even assuming they need to be powered by a radio frequency, a directional transmitter/receiver would be able to read an unshielded passport from sufficient distance that you would not necessarily know it had been read. The implications for credit cards are clear. In an age where credit cards increasingly do not need a signature (think amazon.com or other online vendors), someone having your credit card number is equivalent to that person being able to buy things in your name. “Potential ID Theft Victims Eye Information” is simply the most recent article I have seen about identity theft, there have been many many others in the past year. This also goes right back to the concerns I discussed on Wednesday, 16th of February 2005.

You can sense how much some of the Church’s hierarchy are hoping for a different pope in some of the anonymous comments in “Pope Breathing on Own Again; No Infection.” It is not as overt as some articles are, thankfully, but it is still really sad to hear about people hoping to capitalize on our Pope’s death. The BBC has a slightly different article on this, “Pope ‘is breathing for himself’,” which thinks there are “ethical problems as to whether and to what extent his life should be preserved by artificial means.”

We are releasing gaim 1.1.4 today, just a week after 1.1.3; we found a couple crashers (one a security risk) and are now working around a bug in glib 2.6.2 (on some platforms). It always gives me a thrill to release even for something like this, that I’d rather have caught for 1.1.3.

In other news, its been snowing all day, but not really sticking to the roads until recently, it has been too warm of late. It made for a slow and boring day at work, consistently wishing it would snow enough to justify going home. Thankfully I’d gotten in early and skipped lunch, so I was able to leave at 4:30, I can’t imagine having stayed till 6 as I usually do. I found out last night that Andrius is engaged, yay! :-) I had an a fairly good talk with Vincas at Pub Quiz (one of our teams won!), nice and geeky, on Unicode and the text replacement plugin. Oddly, hyphenated isn’t able to reproduce the wide character bug that has been reported, and I am unable to find the report. Ah-well, such is life.

This is rather interesting, apparently they have software now that approaches translating by learning from the efforts of other translators. “Software learns to translate by reading up” talks about this development. This sort of learn from experience approach works exceptionally well at recognizing spam, which I realize is not quite related, but it is the same sort of language recognition problem that the traditional hard coded rule sets have been failing at. It will be interesting to see how well this sort of thing works.

Michelle Malkin has a good run down of the No Child Left Behind Act in “The Revolt Against No Child Left Behind.” This bill is being challenged in all sorts of ways, which I think is good, as I do not like the idea of the Federal Government meddling with our schools and our children’s education. Local control is far better, with local control you can occasionally get good things going, as for instance somewhere in southern Virginia the kids are being bussed to the local churches for religion classes during the school day. Can you imagine a federal program doing that? In this era of “separation of Church and State”?

I wonder if the global warming article I mentioned on Friday, 18th of February 2005 took into account microbes that shouldn’t exist, as documented in “Microbes survive deep permafrost.”

Pat Buchanan has come out with something rather … odd. In “Democracies & double standards” he argues that President Lincoln’s behavior during the American Civil War justifies Putin’s behavior in Russia now. What right did Lincoln have to

suspended habeas corpus, sent troops to prevent a free election in Maryland, sought to arrest Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, shut down newspapers, shot down rioters on the streets of New York and made himself dictator of the Union

or any of the other egregious actions he took during the Civil War? How does having a failure in our own history excuse the failure of others? If the south had managed to find allies, how would that have been different from France aiding us in our revolt from England? (On a side note, this is exactly what the Emancipation Proclamation was about: keeping England out of the war.) How can we NOT call Putin on his retreat towards totalitarianism? What sort of credibility would we have if we failed to? Basically, what in the world is going on in this article‽

“Alaska Woman Charged in Genital Amputation” would simply be bizarre if I had not heard of a similar going on before. One wonders what is wrong with that guy, that he would want to be intimate with someone he is breaking up with. One also wonders how exactly she thought this wouldn’t put her in jail. I don’t want to even consider why he was tied up. What is wrong with people‽ On a similar note, “The new youth craze: Self-mutilation,” by Michelle Malkin, boggles the mind.