I hate Windows. I really really do. So I am particularly displeased that I spent part of Friday installing Windows 2k, only to find out that it is too old to be able to handle my processor, and so spent part of today installing Windows XP. All of this because 3ware is too lazy to port the program they wrote for getting the backplane lights to work correctly to either freedos or (better) linux. UGH. I was working with XP for all of 15 minutes (messing with drivers then running the utility) and even in that short period it managed to refresh my hatred of it.

I spent some time with the wp-randomquotes plugin today. I noticed a few months ago that it was not displaying every quote in the database, and this has been increasingly annoying me.

It took me longer than it should have to track down what was up. The problem was that when I delete a quote (which I have done a few times, because there have been times I have entered in one poorly), it does not backfill the quote ID number. So my quote database goes 1 4 … 17 18 20 … 102. The plugin, when it goes to display all quotes, does an sql query to get all quotes into a single array, which it then counts. Naturally enough, as you can infer from the above, it finds 99 quotes. It then iterates from 0 to 100, attempting to find a quote for each $i. If there is no quote at a given $i (such as $i=2), it skips it. It gets quote 100 because it increments $i after the test but before it tries to pull the quote. But it misses quotes 101 and 102 because $i is now larger than 99.

The solution is to have two iterators, both of which start at 0. Iterate $i from 0 to 99, when you reach $j = 99, stop. Inside that while loop, there was already a test for an empty quote, have that increment $j instead of $i. Then make sure you increment $j after a successful query after displaying the relevant quote. If you increment it too early, you’ll skip the quote you just found. If you fail to increment it, you will find the same quote repeatedly. This way $j will grow faster for $i, with the difference between them at any given time being equal to the number of deleted quotes that have been reached at that point of the process. So that when $i = 99, $j = 102. Then all the quotes display.

According to coupons.com it does.¹ Mr. John Stottlemire figured out that deleting some files and registry keys off of his computer would allow him to print unlimited coupons from coupons.com, and posted instructions on how to duplicate the effect, and a program to do so automatically for those unable to follow the instructions.

He had to expect that he would be sued, the idea that they would see this as a reason to give him a job is ludicrous. That being said, I agree with Mr. Kravets that the idea that the DMCA considers this hacking a program to circumvent copy protection is worrisome. I should have the right to delete anything on my computer without fear of suit.

A year or so ago, HP came out with an RFID chip the size of a grain of rice.¹ That provided a significant step towards ubiquitous localizers. Today, we have the next big step: wireless power.² Now both of these just need to be miniaturized to nano-technology scales.

Over the weekend, Vincas and I made a series of breakthroughs that have resulted in a working setup to replace server1. We got xen, ldap, and ocfs2 each to work, and to play nicely with the others. We chose ocfs2 after realizing that gfs does not work in debian etch right now, and probably will not till debian unfreezes and starts to look at new kernels again.

This has been an interesting process, fraught with much trouble. I think we now have all of server1’s content migrated over to the various vhosts that are replacing it, and are finishing up the final few tasks that remain. It remains to be seen how much work it will be to get my family seeing, as nearly as possible, the same mail setup they previously saw.

It is in question because I have chosen to force the use of Maildir for the inbox, while I allowed debian’s default /var/spool/mail/ mbox to remain unchallenged on server1. I believe the version of pine I installed will handle the resulting setup adequately, but, as I said, time will tell.

It also remains to be seen how well this solution scales. The host it is on is significantly beefier than server1, so it should handle the schierer.org load without much trouble, though it might take some tweaking of the various vhosts to get resources allocated appropriately. Vincas and I would like to see it be able to grow significantly beyond schierer.org though, and to take on much of the work our joint boxen are currently hosting. Again, time will tell how well it works.

If all goes well, we will almost certainly make the other box a xen host also.

Hitachi announced^[1] a significant step towards localizers^[2], with tiny little dust-like RFID tags. Next they need to develop tiny little antennas to match, and then little Diamond Age^[3] nanoprocesors.

Today, as I was updating the software on my iBook, I noticed that metacity was installed. I do not use metacity at all, much less on my iBook running MacOS X, so my natural reaction was to remove it. I was rather surprised to find that doing so was not all that straightforward. This is one of the things that I find inadequate in darwinports, that when I am trying to remove software that things depend on, I have to remove each manually and in order. It cannot sort through the list of packages on the command line and sort them appropriately for me. But I am going down a tangent here.

Returning to the topic at hand, I found that I had to remove the gnome python desktop stuff. Since nothing appeared to depend on it, I assumed that it must be something I installed by mistake, and removed it.

Then I go to see if gramps is installable yet. A significant number of ports have been upgraded since I last tried, so this is a reasonable experiment. What is the first package it pulls as darwinports tries to install it? Metacity.

Again, I do not use metacity at all. Gramps runs just fine on my linux desktop. Metacity is clearly not a dependency of gramps. Why is it being pulled then?

The problem with many GNOME programs (of which gramps is one), is that the authors consider the case of using the software with something other than the default GNOME environment as an afterthought at best. Thus to require a window manager for a graphical program makes some sense. But I do not use that window manager, and any of a number of other ones work perfectly well with gramps. So why in the world must I have metacity? Only because the authors of GNOME are infested with a lets-take-over-the-world attitude.

Those of us developing gaim are not like that. We know full well that gaim is not and never will be the best client for everyone. That is why we are working on the core/ui split, so that others can write their own interface, one that better fits their needs, without duplicating all of the work that goes into making that interface run. Open source is, or at least should be, about choices. We ought not to forget that.

note to self, there is a patch to add maildir support to pine at http://www.math.washington.edu/~chappa/pine/info/maildir.html

Mr. Steven Warshak appears to have all the hallmarks of a total slime ball.^[1] The fact that he certainly appears to deserve being locked up does not justify violating his civil rights though, and that is why the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) are defending him. I feel for the guy, I really do. Nearly every email user out there has this mental picture of email as a replacement for paper letters that you get in the mail in envelopes. The sort that you have a legal and even realistic expectation of privacy, that no one except you and the recipient might possibly find and reveal the information in them.

Unfortunately this conception of email is utterly wrong. Worse, everyone who is actually understands how email works knows this. That our users do not is in some cases an example of willful ignorance and in others a failure on our parts. Most people using email never had any real explanation of it, only in a few cases has its relationship to postcards been explained and ignored.

For this reason, a good number of computer people use the PGP^[2] or GPG^[3] (equivalent, compatable systems created by different groups) to encrypt their email. A smaller group, not fully trusting that system, but wanting equivalent privacy, use Tiger Envelopes.^[4] Either of these provide reasonable levels of privacy, effectively enclosing your email in an envelope.

Without that, your email really is like a post card, and when stored on a server that is not your own, why should you expect that no one else would read it? You do not have that level of control or security when it comes to real post cards. People need to learn this. They could handle encryption, it really is not that hard, especially in the relatively non-authenticating forms (that is, forms of encryption that ensure that only you and the sender can read something, but do not tell you who the sender is).

Ignorance is no excuse. For reference, my public key is here.

I have been filing bug reports against this for months now. Well, really only two bug reports so far, but that is because so little has changed in that time. If you think Gaim development is slow, you should see how closely the macports guys mimic the properties of cold molasses. This is very frustrating, and an ideal example of why linux continues to be my operating system of choice for my desktop. Now if only ssh forwarding across the vpn was a little faster…