Posts

I’m glad the future of my personal finances doesn’t look like this.

I hate watching the news on TV for a simple reason – you can’t skim. I like to take in news at my own pace, reading articles that are really interesting carefully, skimming others, and abandoning any story when I lose interest. With the TV news, none of those options are easily available to me. Google is trying to fix that problem by letting people search television transcripts. For a test, I searched for “sarbanes oxley,” and the results were useful. Not bad at all. It also landed the transcript of a recent controversial bit of video when I entered the search term Judy Bachrach. ...

The Economist has a thoughtful article on the UN report on poverty that I mentioned last week.

In the New York Times Sunday Book Review, Andrew Sullivan reviews two recent books on torture, and reflects on it himself. The article is a must read.

Departing the State Department along with Colin Powell is his deputy, Richard Armitage. As you might imagine, he has some interesting things to say about his time there. The key quote is this: The biggest regret is that we didn't stop 9/11. And then in the wake of 9/11, instead of redoubling what is our traditional export of hope and optimism we exported our fear and our anger. And presented a very intense and angry face to the world. I regret that a lot. And in that you have the contradiction that is impossible to account for. From the mouth of President Bush we hear about spreading the gift of freedom, about how liberty is the birthright of every man, and about how the overarching goal of his administration is to free people from tyranny. And yet even former administration officials admit that neither our vision nor our execution of it are sources of hope and optimism to the people who need it most. Both the link and quote are taken from Karl Martino. ...

I know that we live in a world of misery, pain, and random, unjustified suffering, and that in the greater scheme of things, nice pictures of outer space are not that important. That said, the fact that NASA (or, more properly, the White House) are going to let the Hubble Space Telescope go away just fills me with rage and indignation. Let’s hope that this is the budgetary chicanery that’s described in the article and not a concrete decision. ...

So this week I read an article about the Rails web framework for the Ruby programming language that aimed to illustrate how you can build Ruby applications 10 times faster than you can build them with your favorite Java framework. The idea of saving 90% of my programming time is pretty compelling, so I eagerly jumped in. There’s only one problem – I followed the instructions in the article as closely as I could, and the demo didn’t work. When I tried to start up the Web application and access the database, I just got a stack trace. If I knew more Ruby, I could probably figure out what’s going on, but for now, I’ll have to keep wasting 90% of my time. What a bummer. Update: With some help from the Ruby on Rails IRC channel, I figured out that the problem is that I have my MySQL 4.1 installation set up to use old-style passwords to remain compatible with PHP. So it’s PHP’s fault. That makes me feel better. ...

Security researcher Matt Blaze infuriated the locksmithing community when he published a paper on safecracking for public consumption. Interestingly, a friend of mine wrote an article on picking locks back in our g-file BBS days that I’m sure would have annoyed the hell out of lockpicks had more people been online back then. The Informatik article was written in October, 1992 … interest in physical security among computer security types is nothing new. ...

Dave Johnson has a funny item about a “snowstorm” that paralyzed the Raleigh area yesterday. I returned from a trip to Miami at about 6:30 PM, having flown out that morning at 6:30 AM, and so I got to experience the worst of the traffic. It normally takes me about 20 minutes to get from the airport to where I live, and I was stuck in traffic on the road out of the airport and every radio station said it was taking at lleast 3 hours to get anywhere. Rather than get on the freeway, which wasn’t moving at all, I chose to take potentially iced-over side roads all the way home and made it in about an hour and a half. I felt really bad for the people who stuck to the main thoroughfares, because every time I crossed one of them, the traffic was just stopped. Incredible. We’ve had much worse storms in Raleigh, and I’ve never seen the traffic so fouled up. ...

Boy do I regret even mentioning the stupid blogging for dollars scandal the other day, because now I feel like in order to give the people involved a fair shake, I have to pay an inordinate amount of attention to it, long past the point where my interest has faded to nothing. Anyway, Rogers Cadenhead is doing a better job than I ever did of covering this.