I created a new law during lunch today. Well, that's not totally true; I didn't first think of it today, I thought it it a long time ago when I read Ivan Stang's book High Weirdness by Mail. But today was when I first applied some head grease to the idea and "codified" it (so to speak). Like I mentioned elsewhere, I'm not sure if anyone has come up with this before I did (these physics guys notwithstanding), so I'll put a flag in it right now and call it Wee's Law of Tinfoil Hats. It's very simple. My law states:
"The chances that a written work was authored by a crackpot increase with the percentage of completely capitalized words in the work."
Not a novel idea, I know, but then neither was the notion that things fell downward. Until they had a law about it, that information wasn't as useful as it could be. Not being one to bitch about something for which I cannot offer a solution, I decided to make a law so that this information could be applied to things such that answers can be seen and solutions derived.
Anyway, it was pointed out to me today by a nice fellow named Joel Parker that my law works just as nicely for software as it does for manifestoes (I originally got started on the idea today when I saw mention of the Unabomber's manifesto). Figuring that a concrete application of an idea can lead to definitive conclusions, I set out to see if this was true. I think I've succeeded in rigorously demonstrating that my theories are law.
I propose that I can produce, without too much effort, Wee's Tinfoil Hat Law (TFH) ratios for the GPL, the FreeBSD license, and a Microsoft license which will substantiate my law as it applies to software, and therefore any other written work. Here is my method:
Once we have all of our licenses, we can use this tiny Perl script to calcuate the TFH ratio for each one. Here's the script we need:
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
my ($count, $total, $file, $word);
unless ($file = $ARGV[0]) {
print "Which file would you like check for TFH Ratio? ";
print "(Enter filename the ctrl+d.)\n";
chomp($file = $_) while(<STDIN>);
}open(FILE, "./$file") || die $!;
while (<FILE>) {
chomp;
foreach my $word (split(/\b/, $_)) {
$total++;
$count++ if ($word =~ /\b[A-Z]+\b/);
}
}
close(FILE);print "Checking '$file':\n";
print " Total number of words.... $total\n";
print " Number of ALL CAP words.. $count\n\n";
printf("TFH Ratio: %.2f\n\n", ($count / $total) * 100);
Save it as 'tfh.pl'. Now we run it on all the files that we saved:
[wee@hostname tfh]$ ./tfh.pl gpl.lic
Checking 'gpl.lic':
Total number of words.... 4993
Number of ALL CAP words.. 217TFH Ratio: 4.35
[wee@hostname tfh]$ ./tfh.pl bsd.lic
Checking 'bsd.lic':
Total number of words.... 450
Number of ALL CAP words.. 114TFH Ratio: 25.33
[wee@hostname tfh]$ ./tfh.pl win98_up.lic
Checking 'win98_up.lic':
Total number of words.... 1875
Number of ALL CAP words.. 585TFH Ratio: 31.20
So it would seem, based on this admittedly simplistic test, that Mr. Parker was completely justified in wanting to apply my law to software. Without getting overly empirical, I believe I have shown that GPL'ed software is about one eighth as crackpot-ish as "typical" MS software, and around one-fifth as wacky as BSD licensed software. I further belive that by extension, and with applying popular opinion and common knowledge, my law adequately describes those individuals who author non-sensical or purposefully obfuscated documents in order to pass them off as rational thought. I welcome any comments.
I tried to register the username 'galileo', without any hesitation or forethought at all. I'm nearly positive that the mere attempt was offsides in some way. I could have picked bruno, but I figured that "letters from exile" worked better as a metaphorical device than "letters from a guy who got burned at the stake for trying to learn shit". I don't know... astronomy has never been my strong suit and seems, historically at least, to be something of a touchy subject.
I recently came across a game that should do for politics what Iron Chef did for food. I expect that any normal Merkin would be more than totally sloshed just from the word "nukular" alone. This is far more hardcore than watching Star Wars and playing "Luke". Could even be worse than making a pitcher of White Russians, watching The Big Lebowski and playing "Dude" -- or a much less savory four-letter word (scroll down a bit).
Don't forget to watch tomorrow night!
This might be old hat to some, but I found a fairly complete list of TiVo hack codes. Greg sent me an email about how to enable 30 second skip-ahead (which makes it easy to fast forward through commercials). I enabled it, found it handy, and thought to look around for other codes. I found the list.
The list above has some pretty nifty features. I also turned on the clock and elapsed time display (press Select Play Select 9 Select to toggle it). I think I might have to enable a bash shell pretty soon. I hope I don't break the TiVo...
Update: I decided to archive the TiVo hack codes form that message board on this site. The power went out recently, and I couldn't seem to reach tivocommunity.com. It was panic; I just can't live without 30 second skip. So now they're all here where I can get to them.
I recently re-imaged my "main" PC at home. I put Windows 2000 Professional on it. I got software for Christmas that will make exact, bit-by-bit copies of DVDs. Found out it only runs on XP or 2000 and so my 3 year old, rarely-used Windows 98 install on my tiny second drive had to go. I only had games on it anyway.
One thing I instantly started missing when using Win2K was virtual desktops. Virtual desktops are really common in the Unix world. Essentially, you get four or 8 or however many desktops, each with their own windows and apps running and taskbars and widgets and so forth. Usually they have hot keys to switch between desktops (on KDE, it's ctrl+tab to cycle through them, for instance), and you can label them, change their wallpaper, etc. Anything you can do to one normal desktop window you can do to virtual ones. It's a great way to do lots of stuff at the same time.
This morning, I found a full-featured shareware app that does just about all of this for the Windows desktop. It's called Cool Desk. Dumb name, nice app. I'm using it now, actually. I've got Winamp, explorer, and a putty window on desktop two, a bunch of WinSCP and putty windows on number 3, and my browser and editor on desktop number one. The taskbar on all the desktops is nice and clean.
It's got a little strip that lives in the quick launch bar that lets you click to each desktop. There's a floating toolbar that allows you to manage windows and desktops, like by sending windows to the other desktops or minimizing them or whatever. You can have different wallpaper and settings for the various desktops as well. You can even change resolutions for each desktop if you want.
My one complaint is that you have to manage windows by using that little floating toolbar. I'd like to be able to right click on a windows's title bar (or it's taskbar button) and do desktop things to it. But it's a small issue, and probably reflects more what I'm used to than any real problem with the software's design. If you find yourself using Windows, it's worth a look. Even though the shareware version isn't crippled in any way, I'll probably end up paying the $25 for it.
I've been thinking about the economy lately, especially the economy of the world and how it relates to the U.S. I read that Germany, in particular, is currently experiencing a 10% unemployment rate. I was wondering how much higher it has to go before we get Hitler 2: Electric Bugaloo.
I had a dream the other night that the U.S. went tits up and we were invaded by the Chinese. What's worse: another Hitler or the Chinese invading the U.S.? How much do we owe China anyway? They make about everything we use, so we must owe them something (or we will before too long). What do they do with all the money we send them? Does anyone care about our trade deficits with China? Hmmm. I don't... and I speak way better German than Mandarin.
I'm pretty sure I have no solutions whatsoever for either situation. But if I had to pick, I'd relate more to the Germans than the Chinese. And so therefore, really still for no reason at all, I present the Circle Jerks' smash 80's hit "When The Shit Hits The Fan", auf Deutsch:
In einer trägen Wirtschaft.
Inflation, Rezession,
Schlägt das pland auf dem freien.
Standed in den Arbeitslosigkeitslinien.
Tadeln die Regierung für harte Zeiten.
Wir gehen entlang,
Jedoch können wir.
Wir müssen ducken,
Wann die Scheiße den Ventilator schlägt.
Zehn Kinder in einem Cadillac.
Standplatz in den Linien für Wohlfahrtsservice-Geld.
Lassen Sie uns alle auf der Regierung saugen.
Ach! Des Geldes wirklich groß!
Wir gehen entlang,
Jedoch können wir.
Wir müssen ducken,
Wann die Scheiße den Ventilator schlägt.
Suppelinien.
Freie Laibe des Brotes.
Fünf Pfundblöcke Käse!
Beutel des Lebensmittelgeschäfts!
Sozialversicherung...
Hat für Sie und mich weggegangen.
Wir tun, was auch immer wir können,
Wir müssen ducken, wann die Scheiße den Ventilator schlägt.
Wir gehen entlang,
Jedoch können wir.
Wir müssen ducken,
Wann die Scheiße den Ventilator schlägt.
Suppelinien.
Freie Laibe des Brotes.
Fünf Pfundblöcke Käse!
Beutel des Lebensmittelgeschäfts!
Sozialversicherung...
Hat für Sie und mich weggegangen.
Wir tun, was auch immer wir können,
Wir müssen ducken, wann die Scheiße den Ventilator schlägt.
It loses something in the translation (and not just because of my crappy German). It doesn't rhyme too well, for example, and the words don't match the music. But I'm pretty sure that you can't find this info anywhere else even if you had wanted to -- economic hard times be damned. Further proof that I'm just one of Wilensky's monkeys I guess.
I was at SDRIW yesterday and happened to see that one of the public PCs had a web browser open and was displaying some pretty cool stuff. It was opened to the home page of the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis, or CAIDA. After clicking about for a while (we were there about a half hour early for our monthly meeting and I was just killing time at the San Diego Supercomputer Center -- an activity I don't don't mind in the slightest) I came across the CAIDA's Walrus galleries. That is some incredibly cool stuff. I found one image particularly fascinating.
Today Tess and I went up to see Luke Carter Smith, my new nephew. Mom is doing fine (thankfully), as is baby. Tess and I got a bunch of really good whiffs of baby head smell (she got many more since she held Luke for most of the time we were there). Nothing smells better than one-day-old baby head. It's rainy day in the desert smell raised to the power of puppy breath multiplied by morning coffee and added to freshly cut wood. Yep, nothing better.
I sitting here watching error messages scroll by fast and furious. And that's OK. It's all good. The errors are fine. Which in a way is a bit refreshing.
I had a disk fail in the RAID1 array of my main fileserver this morning, and I'm rebuilding the mirror. But Linux's IDE drivers on my Asus SD11 motherboard can't handle UDMA66, and so I'm getting a lot of dma_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error } and dma_intr: error=0x84 { DriveStatusError BadCRC } errors. It's not bad, per se. Not good, certainly, but not bad. The data will be there in the end; it'll just take a lot longer to rebuild the mirror. I'm at 56% now, and have been at it about an hour:
[wee@server wee]$ cat /proc/mdstat
Personalities : [raid1]
read_ahead 1024 sectors
md0 : active raid1 hdb1[2] hdd1[1]
78148096 blocks [2/1] [_U]
[===========>.........] recovery = 56.3% (44044372/78148096) finish=27.5min speed=20653K/sec
unused devices: <none>
I went and found a couple old 40pin, 40 conductor IDE cables which I'll use instead. That will force the drives into DMA33 mode, and prevent the errors. That'll mean lessened performance, but when you consider that this machines's sole purpose is to safely store data sent to it over NFS and Samba, the bottleneck isn't the IDE controller and having slower disk access won't matter in the slightest. I'll put the new cables in later. Now it's time for bed.
RAID1 is terribly cool.
When my get-up-and-go has got up and went, or when my ten gallon hat is feeling 5 gallons flat, I hanker for a hunk o' ramen.
I hanker for a hunka, a slab or slice or chunka. A snack that is a winner, and yet won’t spoil my dinner. I hanker for a hunka ramen. Yahoo!
I happened to see on fark that the homeless are using mouthwash as a beverage in great numbers lately. I don't know why, but this sort of astounded me. You have a mouthwash that's basically 58 proof liquor, but it's really cheap, can be bought at any hour of any day even in dry areas, and is hardly ever locked up. It's like schnapps without the sugar. No wonder the hobos are downing Listerine! I was really curious (enough to forgo sleep, at any rate) as to why it is this loophole exists.
Apparently, the alcohol in mouthwash is a certain type of denatured alcohol. The BATF calls this specially denatured alcohol (or "SDA"). There are apparently 50 varieties of and formulas for denaturing alcohol into SDA, according to this page (whose authors seem to know what they are talking about). SDA for mouthwash has no component considered all that harmful for drinking (ie, no methanol, unlike paint stripper or the like), but the whole product meets the requirement that "no potable alcohol cannot be derived from it" -- and so gets no liquor tax applied to its sale.
Now I had a thought: why not produce a mouthwash that is basically the same as all the others (inasmuch as it can still be called "mouthwash" as far as the ATF and FDA are concerned), but make it such that you can sell it at half the cost? You don't need all the "special" ingredients of the "real" mouthwashes since you aren't out to remove plaque or prevent gingivitis. You don't need Methyl Salicylate, Thymol, or any of those others; adding things that will actually wash one's mouth will only drive up the cost. What you want is water, SD alcohol, Minty Freshness ExtractTM, and coloring. That's as close to mouthwash as you'd need to get, and it'd be really cheap to make. A feasibility study would need to be done in order to make sure that you can beat the competitor's price. I think it could be done.
If Listerine sells for $3.99 per 50-ounce bottle, then you'd need to undercut them by at least a buck. Selling those 50 ounces at $1.99 would be best. You'd need to figure out how much it would cost to make in bulk and how much it costs to set up the whole operation before final pricing can be determined, but since you wouldn't advertise or do any marketing of any kind (word of mouth would surely sell your product) then you could certainly undercut a national name brand like Listerine.
Once you have the formula down, you get all the ATF permits in place, set up a producer/packager (Mexico would work), line up a distributor to open the retail channels and then sit back and facilitate the winos' need for non-seizures. You'd be doing them a favor by preventing them from ingesting all that other crap that goes into real mouthwash. They'd get better a SDA, so that would help their livers. Since the product would cost dramatically less, the merchants would experience less thievery and other related offenses -- which in turn frees up police to tackle other, certainly more serious crimes. Bums would need to beg less change and therefore panhandling and general loitering would go down (it goes without saying that you would have to find that magical price point where a hobo would rather panhandle the money for your product than risk stealing it; I'd bet that price is very close to that of a 40 ouncer of malt liquor). Since they'd only need to spend half as much to get their freshness groove on, the homeless might also get a taco or whatever in addition to the hooch. And if they wound up doubling up on their supply of your product instead of buying food, then so much the better for you. Anyway you look at it, it's a win-win for everyone.
I think it's clear that there is a definite need for such a product. If I had a more entrepreneurial bent, I'd write it up and head out in search of funding.
I came across a really easy way to resize a bunch of images in one shot:
mkdir reduced
for i in *.jpg; do convert -resize 640x480 $i reduced/$i; done;
That'll take care of a lot grunt work all at once. It's pretty fast as well.
I also learned another cool trick last night. It's apparently pretty easy to make thumbnails (or resized images, as above) with Windows XP. You need to install the Image Resizer app from MS's XP Powertoys package. Then do the following:
I'm going to install this on Tess's PC and see how she likes it.
I found the buzzing which has been plaguing my A/V receiver ever since I hooked up a TiVo the other night. If I turn my amp kinda up a lot (at a level which would not be too loud for a party, let's say) I can hear the buzzing really badly. If I unlug the coax going into the cable decoder, it goes immediately away. I watched the last episode of Band of Brothers last night in glorious "silence".
I'm going to head to Radio Shack tonight to see what they got. After I take back a router that went bad. Heh heh...
I made a New Year's Resolution. It's 1600x1200.
I'll make a decision about what else needs to improve on my birthday.
Thanks to Eric and Todd, I now know what a ground loop is. After a little googling, I know how to get rid of them as well. I'm going to try changing the signal cables to Monster brand ones (which have better sheilding) and then I'll re-route the power and signal cables away from one another, making sure everything is plugged into the same outlet. The hum only started when I hooked up the TiVo, so that has to be related somehow. I did a little plug-switching when I threw everything together so maybe it's just that.
Eric mentioned a new power strip deal that can get rid of the hum as well. I'm going to try and spend less than $200 if I can (although I could probably use the power conditioning). If moving cables and whatever doesn't work, I'll build a capacitor-based isolator from Radio Shack parts since it's the next-cheapest solution. The F-61A connectors are a $1.49 each and the 500WVDC rating .01Uf ceramic disc capacitors are $1.29 for a packet of two. About 5 minutes with a soldering iron and it's done. I don't have a multimeter to test with, although I think there's little room for error -- and hardly any risk of fire!
Tess and I spent pretty much all day (what I saw of it, anyway) on the couch, being tubers. VH1 had an all-day 80's flashback thing on that was mildly captivating (or, depending on how you look at it, not annoying enough to make me want to grab the remote or move).
Anyway, they had the same 7 commercials in rotation all day, and one of them was for some program they are going to show later. I don't recall the name, but the ad had a catchy song playing in the background which I'd never heard before. I wound up searching for the song lyrics to see if I could find out who it was made by and I now have Paul Oakenfold's "Starry Eyed Suprise" stuck in my head pretty much for good.
The song is on a CD called "Bunkka", which apparently also has a song called "Nixon’s Spirit" which features vocals by none other than Hunter S. Thompson. Other tunes have Ice Cube and Perry Farrell doing vocals. Sounds pretty diverse. I might have to buy a copy.
