Good coding music

A list of good stuff to listen to while writing code:

• Aimee Mann's 2002 album Lost in Space, disk 1.
• Dire Straits' first album, the eponymous 1978 Dire Straits.
• Mazzy Star's 1993 album So Tonight That I Might See.
• Pinkback's 2004 album Summer in Abaddon.
• Sufjan Stevens' 2005 album Illinois.
• JS Bach's Six Suites for Unaccompanied Cello.

The glory of the fifth amendment

Here's the text:

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the militia, when in actual service in time of war or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

and here are eight reasons to never talk to the police, not even if you're innocent and have only God's honest truth to tell.

Sigh

I hope he writes code better than he writes English:

Now a Day's informing the Clients about the successful updation of data or sending other automated information form your Java Programs, either from your Servlets or from your Applications has become a requirement, more than a feature.

Getting gnus to send email

Problem when sending mail from cvs gnus/emacs in a fresh ubuntu 8.04 installation:

Debugger entered--Lisp error: (error "Sending failed; SMTP protocol error")
  signal(error ("Sending failed; SMTP protocol error"))
  error("Sending failed; SMTP protocol error")
  smtpmail-send-it()
  message-send-mail(nil)
  message-send-via-mail(nil)
  message-send(nil)
  message-send-and-exit(nil)
  call-interactively(message-send-and-exit nil nil)

Solution:

sudo apt-get install starttls

The secret gyration

How to get vmware server 1.0.6 working under ubuntu 8.04:

[Fri Jul 25 14:13:00 CDT 2008] [billw@billw-desktop vmware-server-distrib]$ vmware
/usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware: /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libgcc_s.so.1/libgcc_s.so.1: version `GCC_3.4' not found (required by /usr/lib/libcairo.so.2)
/usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware: /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libgcc_s.so.1/libgcc_s.so.1: version `GCC_4.2.0' not found (required by /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6)
/usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware: /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libgcc_s.so.1/libgcc_s.so.1: version `GCC_3.4' not found (required by /usr/lib/libcairo.so.2)
/usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware: /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libgcc_s.so.1/libgcc_s.so.1: version `GCC_4.2.0' not found (required by /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6)
/usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware: /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libgcc_s.so.1/libgcc_s.so.1: version `GCC_3.4' not found (required by /usr/lib/libcairo.so.2)
/usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware: /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libgcc_s.so.1/libgcc_s.so.1: version `GCC_4.2.0' not found (required by /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6)
[Fri Jul 25 14:13:25 CDT 2008] [billw@billw-desktop vmware-server-distrib]$ cd /usr/lib/vmware/lib
[Fri Jul 25 14:14:29 CDT 2008] [billw@billw-desktop lib]$
[Fri Jul 25 14:14:31 CDT 2008] [billw@billw-desktop lib]$ sudo mkdir bak
[Fri Jul 25 14:14:40 CDT 2008] [billw@billw-desktop lib]$ sudo mv libgcc_s.so.1/libgcc_s.so.1 bak/

The Prophecy of the Obamessiah

Fun satire from Gerard Baker at the Times Online. I'm starting to think the Democrats are on track for another landslide loss.

What do Quaker maids wear?

"I remember them fondly," she recalled.

Switching to OpenDNS

UPDATE: here are some details from Dan Kaminsky.

From my email summary to some friends:

Most folks' dns servers have a vunerability (cache poisoning) discovered by Dan Kaminsky. The vulnerability is due to a design flaw in dns itself. Based on his work, network people have been working secretly on a patch for months. ISPs need to patch their dns servers immediately, but it won't be done instantly, and some probably won't patch at all. Meanwhile, details leaked out and an exploit has been published. Kaminsky himself recommends switching to OpenDNS, which, by the way, is free and has many cool features. And it seems that trustworthy people trust OpenDNS.

Switching was an easy change in my router, which is running open-source dd-wrt.

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cache_poisoning
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Kaminsky
• http://www.doxpara.com/
• http://news.yahoo.com/s/pcworld/148854
• http://www.opendns.com/
• http://www.dd-wrt.com/dd-wrtv3/index.php

Boris Johnson on homemade jam

Here's a delightful article in the Telegraph from the then-MP from Henley, now (if I recall correctly) the mayor of London.

Days With My Father

A website by Phillip Toledano recording his father's last days, or perhaps years.

These photographs are a record of my father, and of our relationship, for whatever days we have left together.

Gah!

Alrighty then - that's enough of the old grotty King Crimson. I made it up through the 4th track of Islands and just snapped. I may return in a few months. Meanwhile, let's try some 60s-quintet Miles Davis.

Slave Nation

Jim Lindgren takes a look at the historical antecedents of Service Nation.

An old man's guide to King Crimson

I'm deep in some programming for work, and to drown out the kids' noises I like to play music through my gun muffler headphones. What to play? I found that my usual Mozart divertimeni were annoying with the work I'm doing, so I cast around a bit and stumbled across the complete works of King Crimson. I discovered them in their early 80s incarnation - Fripp, Belew, Buford, Levin - thanks to my friend Dan Largent, who had no use for his KC cassettes, and I realized this evening I'd never listened to the old pre-80s KC.

So I spent this afternoon coding with "In the Court of the Crimson King" and now I'm trawling through my boss's code with my first-ever listen to "In the Wake of Poseidon".

Nall on Starbucks

This sums up Starbucks for me:

Once upon a time America drank coffee. And America was strong. An America that drinks tall skinny soy lattes — one just a tad cooler than the other — is an America that is, dare I say, French.

Tornado History Project

Wolfram Research co-worker Josh Lietz has a cool website devoted to tornados at the Tornado History Project. Here's the one that hit my hometown of Findlay, Illinois, on June 2, 1990 - the track on the map comes from the Storm Prediction Center's records, and it's about a mile too far south. It was one of 66 tornadoes that day.

Ye olde blogg

I've been blogging for six years tomorrow.

91%

How can this be? I haven't watched teevee news for a decade and haven't read national news in a newspaper for five years or so, but my Pew News IQ is 91. The only answer I missed was the number of US troops killed in Iraq since 2003 - I guessed a little high.

Guerilla math

Underground teaching at home, a.k.a. homeschooling.

Special for emacs groupies!

Wow - TV Raman, Bubbles and Carsten Dominik together on stage at Google, where Carsten gave a Google Tech Talk about org-mode.

Imagine that

A complex bloated half-century old government bureaucracy can't get things done on time and under budget. Who'da thunk?

Hey, I know - let's put a complex bloated government bureaucracy in charge of health care!

Findlians in the news

From the July 18, 1969, Findlay Enterprise:

- Mr. and Mrs. Roy Bass [Mom's half-brother] of Tulsa, Oklahoma have returned to their home after spending a 10-day visit with Mrs. Alva Bass [Grandma] while his father [Grandpa] was in the hospital. [I've seen pictures from that hospital stay - I think it was surgery for skin cancer on his temples.]

- Mr. and Mrs. Bob Owens and son, Don, of Bloomington, Indiana, were recent visitors of Mr. and Mrs. Charles White [Mom and Dad] and Billy [That's me. I don't remember that visit at all. Don Owens was a police officer in Bloomington, Indiana, and was killed in the line of duty six years later.]

The Heaven Tree Trilogy and Moby-Dick

Edith Pargeter, a.k.a. Ellis Peters, author of the Brother Cadfael series, on her The Heaven Tree Trilogy "the best thing I have done. The best piece of writing, the story best worth telling, the characters most formidably alive, the theme best worth pursuing to the end: The work that came nearest what I wanted it to be."

Meanwhile, I'm engrossed in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick and the great good humor therein. See, for example, this delightful bit of damnation:

Yet Dives himself, he too lives like a Czar in an ice palace made of frozen sighs, and being a president of a temperance society, he only drinks the tepid tears of orphans.

Write better emails, make more moneys

Heh:

The 3rd Annual Nigerian EMail Conference

I am Mr. Laurent Mpeti Kabila, a senior assistant leader of the Revolutionary United Front of Sierra Leone.

I present to you an urgent and confidential request: I request your attendance at The 3rd Annual Nigerian EMail Conference. This is an excellent opportunity to meet your distinguished colleagues, learn new marketing techniques, and spend your hard-earned money. Attending this conference demands the highest trust, security and confidentiality between us.

A final B-17 mission

84-year-old Marvin Skubick, a B-17 Flying Fortress pilot in World War II, took his final flight on a B-17 last month. According to wikipedia, "of the 1.5 million tonnes of bombs dropped on Germany by U.S. aircraft, 500,000 were dropped from B-17s."

The capacity for contemplation explained?

Perhaps men are natural contemplatives.

Good for buyers

I'm no economist, but it seems to me that there will be some nice bargains for home shoppers coming up real soon now.

The Italian Meat Bowl

I need to try this, and I have just the recipe for the meat - a meatball recipe in an old Food & Wine pasta cookbook (a relic from my Rich Young Bachelor days in the early 90s). It makes a great Italian meatloaf.

Hey Britons...

Get 'em while you still can and put them to good use. See especially:

• Popular Basis of Political Authority
• Right of Revolution
• Rights
• Equality
• Property
• Constitutional Government

Now that's American

Not a prancing Euro-wuss in sight - this here is by-God American soccer!