July 2005 Archives

About a month ago I posted a message to craigslist basically asking if anyone in the metro boston area was interested in taking in an inexperienced bass player. I was tired of just noodling around, and I felt that a bass guitar is best played in a group. It's a support instrument, not a lead (except in very rare cases), and therefore needs others to play against / with. I was really not moving ahead in my playing, and I decided it was time to seek out other players.

My posting (now expired) was pretty self-effacing. I've never played in a band before, and aside from some noodling around in various folk circles, never really played the 'supporting bass' position in anything serious.

I got 3 replies to the posting. One was someone looking for a sort of glam-metal bassist. Pass, thanks. The second was from a sort of pop-C&W-folksie group in Weston. I got together with them last week, and while we played well, and did some interesting bits, it didn't grab me much.

Late last week I heard from another group. These guys were a bunch of geeks who had formed a blues band in their company, and over the years had gigged to a bunch of parties and local bars and the like, but had slowed down over the last year. Now they wanted to get going again, and needed a bass player.

Well gosh. A local geek band that plays the blues. I could get into that.

So I did. Last night I went down to Franklin and played for about 3 hours in my first full blues band. We had lead guitar, rhythm guitar, keyboards, drums, a -kick-ass- vocalist, and moi on bass.

I was EXTREMELY nervous going into the whole thing. This really was my first decent sized band, and the music being played, while more along the lines of what I like, was far more complicated than a simple root-note bassline. But, I had practiced my blues scales, downloaded all the tabs and tracks for what was on the set list, ran through each of them a few times, so I think I was ready.

And I was. We went through 6-7 tracks (sometimes repeating several times to work on various pieces). Each time we went through, my lines got clearer, and the piece sounded better. I worked well with the drummer (in small bands, the bass player has to be in sync with the drummer - we hold the beat and the rhythm that the other musicians are working around, and if -we're- not in sync, the whole piece sounds clumsy). Fortunately, the drummer and I clicked well, and he commented at the end of the set "We havne't had a bass player for so long, I got jaded - now I have to be careful what I'm doing because there's another rhythm piece in. But it sounded alright."

In the end, I was exhausted, but the band was upbeat and happy with how things came together. There's some great talent there. I didn't flub it, I didn't stand there looking doofy during bits I didn't know (only happened once where I dropped out - during "Wind Called Mary" by Jimi Hendrix. Complex little piece.) The lead guitarist came over and shook my hand at the end of the set "It was a real pleasure playing with you. You're coming back, right?"). Wow.

We played a lot of your standard barroom blues. Mustang Sally, Proud Mary, etc. The lead singer has a great voice.

They liked me. They liked the sound, the band worked well together, and we're gonna do more. Next practice is Wednesday night.

I think I'm in a band.

Trying to get back in the groove after weeks of intenseness related to selling our house, and working back in my office, Radio Paradise chimes in with Compared to What performed by Les McCann.

This song is over 30 years old, but the lyrics ring mighty true today...

The President, he's got his war
Folks don't know just what it's for
Nobody gives us rhyme or reason
Have one doubt, they call it treason
We're chicken-feathers, all without one gut (God damn it!)
Tryin' to make it real — compared to what? (Sock it to me, now)

Make sure you check out the RP Forums about this track.

I always dread setting up SSL servers. The SSL mechanism is complicated, and the terminology is not something I deal with on a day to day basis, so the openssl command line stuff is total greek anytime I need to use it.

While setting up our new server, I realized I needed a self-signed cert just for some internal use (webmail client, etc). I didn't need it signed by a 'normal' CA or anything, I just needed the connection encrypted. I had installed the Apt package for Apache2, and saw that the SSL pieces were in place, but... no cert. I spent several days just dreading doing SSL setup.

Finally tonight I sat down to do it, facing a deadline for a server move next week. Some googling brought me to an article on Ian Miller's site about using the apache2-ssl-certificate script installed with Debian Apache2. It automates the cert generation, placing all the pieces in the proper place. Then, following Ian Miller's directions (about 8 steps), and I was up and running with an SSL host in under 5 minutes.

Yet another in the cap for Debian.

... if there's soemthing wrong with me. I think Robot Chicken is a total hoot.

People complain about the "Left Wing Bloggers" spreading misinformation and bias, and the "Right Wing Bloggers" giving skewed and incomplete viewpoints. Ta heck with all that, here's a DC Pastor preaching that "Lesbianism is On the Rise" because "Sisters makin more money than brothers and it's creating problems in families... that's one of the reasons many of our women are becoming lesbians!"

According to this article in the Washington Blade, Rev. Willie Wilson, a Baptist Minister in DC, used these very words in a sermon delivered on July 3rd.

Some choice quotes:

"Lesbianism is about to take over our community. I ain't homophobic because everybody here got something wrong with him," he said. "But ... women falling down on another woman, strapping yourself up with something, it ain't real. That thing ain't got no feeling in it. It ain't natural. Anytime somebody got to slap some grease on your behind and stick something in you, it's something wrong with that. Your butt ain't made for that.

Lesbianism is about to take over our community. I'm talking about young girls. My son in high school last year, trying to go to the prom, he said, 'Dad, I ain't got nobody to take to the prom because all the girls in my class are gay. There ain't but two of them straight and both of them are ugly. I ain't got nobody to take to the prom.'

You got blood vessels and membranes in your behind. And if you put something unnatural in there, it breaks them all up. No wonder your behind is bleeding. It's destroying us. Can't make no connection with a screw and another screw. The Bible says God made them male and female. The Hebrew word "neged," which means complementary nature - there is something unique to man and unique to woman and it takes those two things to complement each other. You can't make a connection with two screws. It takes a screw and a nut! (shouting)."

To top it off, this sermon was titled "You've Got To Fight To Be Free". Why bother trying to put a 'spin' on a topic. Come right out with your hate, fear, and 1600-era's morals and slap them onto a crowd in a place of worship. Yeah!

Each Friday, James Randi posts a weekly 'commentary' on the rampant influence of mysticism and religion in daily thought. He has has made a lifetime career of exposing charlatans, fakers, and frauds along the lines of Sylvia Browne and John Edward (of 'Crossing Over' fame).

In this weeks commentary he steps on his soapbox and delivers masterful commentary on the rise of religious mysticism as a credible alternative to scientific theory. For anyone bothered by events such as the Kansas Board of Education deleting the theory of evolution from the science texts or the fact that our nations leader invokes an all powerful deity, from which he takes guidance daily, this treatise is an outstanding commentary on the state of affairs.

Randi also mentions an organization called The Brights, a group whose baseline philosophy I basically agree with, but I am uncomfortable with a "Join us! Do not be afraid!" attitude prevalent through the site.

For example, the site states, as a definition of it's core philosophy:

What is a bright?

• A bright is a person who has a naturalistic worldview
• A bright's worldview is free of supernatural and mystical elements
• The ethics and actions of a bright are based on a naturalistic worldview

That's all well and good, and gybes pretty well with my own philosophies, though a bit self-referential with the 'naturalistic worldview' schtick. But the site continues...

Currently the naturalistic worldview is insufficiently expressed within most cultures, even politically/socially repressed. To be a Bright (someone who fits the definition and registers on this Web site) is to participate in a movement to address the situation.

Okay, hang on a moment. Apparently this group is not comfortable with a simple definition or an ideal. You must participate in the movement to be a 'Bright'. This really gets into "If you want in the club, ya gotta do the dance, man!".

I'm going to remain skeptical of these folks for a while. The site is rampant with a 'join up on this website, and be a Bright!' sort of content, which unfortunately just makes me want to avoid it all the more. Their forums seem active and interesting, but I think I'll stick with my own self-definition. Agnostic Secular Humanist, and call it art.

For some reason, I had no idea that Debian-Administration.org existed. It has tons of great articles on nifty tricks to do with Debian, as well as up and coming changes and suggestions for administration.

Today's gem is using the deborphan tool to tell whether any packages have been orphaned by having their parent packages removed or upgraded away. Running it once on my machine shows me 24 packages installed that aren't used by anything.

Definately a good site to add to the home RSS feed list if you administer any Debian systems.

Everyone and their brother has been making noise about the Optimus Keyboard. A keyboard that has little OLED displays in each key, letting you display what they're set for - in full color. Reconfiguring for Quake or Dvorak layout or just running pretty animations is all possible.

The problem was the original site was an art mockup of the keyboard - photoshopped to show what it might look like - basically a design setup.

Now it looks like it might actually happen. According to the article from Engadget :

A recent interview with Artemy Lebedev, founder and director of the Russian design firm working on the keyboard, sheds some light on the future of this device: they envision is as an "open source" keyboard, with an SDK and a "keyboard studio" application that lets users customize the keyboard any way they choose (sweeeet!). The company is currently negotiating with several different manufacturers to get the Optimus into production, and they"re hoping to see it getting into our hot little hands in about a year for "less than $200 to $300."

I'm so there.

According to an article in the Boston Globe, WBUR is cancelling the outstanding talk show 'The Connection', hosted by Dick Gordon. The new station manager, Peter Fiedler, states that the changes are part of a cut back program. "We decided to strengthen local focus because that is where our core listener base is", he said in a statement.

The Connection is produced at WBUR, but is heard on 66 national stations, including XM Radio. According to the press release, 'The Connection' will go silent after August 5th.

I for one am deeply saddened by this news. Dick Gordon made turned the flagging Connection flow into a truly fascinating hour of interviews and details after Chris Lydon's famous meltdown with WBUR staff. Apparently Gordon's firing was a surprise to Gordon as well, given to him after his show today.

I hope that another station will pick up the Connection and continue it's production.

You could, ya know, buy this for me.

Contribute to Planet-Geek! Yeah!

Since we've moved to the new house, our roomate, Beth, has forced upon us her menagerie of pets, consisting of One (1) long haired grey cat named Cali, One (1) shorthaired tortoiseshell named Devita, and... one 10yr old Rotweiller mix, named Jasmine.

Now, it's no secret that I've been lusting after having a dog for... well, forever. I work alone at home full time, and having someone near by I can chat with who seems to enjoy my company I always thought would be a big win. Now i'm settling into a work at home pattern that does, in fact, involve a dog. A very friendly dog who is just looking for company during the day, and is quite content to hang out under my desk while I work.

I know Jasmine is not my dog, and I'm still not sure I'm up for the long term responsibility of owning a dog, but gosh, she's nice to have around.

I posted some of the 'texture'-y pictures I've taken to the LJ community 'textures'.

The pics are here.

The community has some lovely images posted.

This is a hyper-simple game, but is great for a couple hours of killed time. It's called "Planarity" and is available at http://home.cwru.edu/~jnt5/Planarity/. A couple other folks on LJ and elsewhere have posted about it, but the nutshell is you're given an ever increasing number of vertices on a polygon, interconnected randomly. Your job is to move the vertices so none of the connecting lines overlap.

It's not unlike those earth-games human pretzel knot games.

I just finished Level 4, at 3:08 for a time.

Enjoy :)

Fun and fun. I'm having a nice exchange over on Jay Reding's blog. It really does amaze me that people still think Bush's position of pre-emption is a good and current policy.

Jay trotted out the old argument "Oh, so you think the Iraqi people would be better off under Saddam, eh?"

This argument is getting so old now. We'll never know now, will we? Since Bush decided to level the country to rubble and put us in a totally untenable situation.

Do I think they'd be better off than the current situation? I don't know, it's pretty bad. Do I think there were better ways of doing it than Bush's 'shoot now, make plans later' scenario? Absofuckinglutely.

Reinforces my latest summary of US politics:

Liberals think, then act.
Conservatives act, then justify.

This is just wrong. Why was this changed in Linux-land, I have no idea.

Use 'man ls' or any other man command.

Hit space a few times to get down into the document.

Now try to go back. 'b' or '^u' do not work, because it's a pipe, not man's built-in pager.

This is a HUGE problem when trying to find a specific command option. For instance, do 'man man', then type '/pager' to search for the word 'pager'. Great, it shows you it, but it's buried in text. So you'd like to page up to see the context for it. No dice! Can't backscroll!

Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

Update - Apparently this is an issue with the default '/bin/more' program installed with Debian Sarge. apt-get install less replaced /bin/more with 'less', which does backscrolling properly.

One of my quasi-joyous tasks in life is bring front-line tech support for my Mom. Fortunately, she's been a Mac user ever since there was such a thing as a Macintosh (yes, we spent $4k on one of the original 128k Macs. Copying a SINGLE floppy disk on that machine required 4 disk swaps. And used video RAM for temporary storage. Fun :)

Anyway. There's an expectation with the Mac platform that "they won't do something dumb". That's sort of a given with Windows ("Oh yea, that happens. Reboot"), but Macs are supposed to be more sophisticated. Smarter. Not easy to screw up.

This weekend, in the midst of our move, my Mom calls me and says "The screen is blank on the Mac Mini. I reset it, nothing happens, I'm stuck. The screen says 'OUT OF RANGE'."

No amount of fiddling caused it to come back, so I schlepped over there to figure out what was wrong.

All indicatations were that Mom had set the Mac to some video resolution that the spiffy LCD monitor we had could not support. "No problem", thinks I, "I'll just reset it... somehow."

And that Somehow became the problem. No amount of fancy keyboard shortcuts, such as resetting the PRAM via a complex keystroke combo via Cmd-Control-P-R, nor starting into 'single user mode' and deleting the library preferences files for the user cleared the condition. Upon reboot, it would show the grey Mac screen, the spinny dial, then go to OUT OF RANGE.

I had 3-4 fairly competent Mac geeks on IRC and the phone working on this, and nothing we could try worked. In the end, I had to haul out an old Sony monitor (in fact, the one we had discarded in favor of a new LCD monitor), and hook that one up. Now that we could see the desktop, a simple click on Monitor preferences reset it to 1024x768 at 72hz (it was NOT set to that once we got the Sony hooked up. It was something... else).

My issue here is that a novice user completely crippled her machine, with no possible recourse, and she didn't know how she did it. A malicious app may have reset the resolution, or she may have mistakenly clicked somewhere she shouldn't have. This sort of crippling is almost expected behaviour in the Windows world, let alone Linux land, but on a Mac? ALso note, this problem would not have been able to be fixed by calling tech support. It took external hardware to bring the machine back to useability.

How hard would it be to have OSX have a 'safe mode' - something that Windows world has had for ages - that brings the system up under common default configurations. A sane video resolution, etc? I've tried the 'no extensions' boot key combo on the mac, and that didn't work at all.

If there is a fix for this problem, is sure wasn't obvious, easy, or found in a simple doc. I'm disappointed. Apple should know better.

The move is basically complete. 99% of the activity happened yesterday, in one of the longest and most exhausting moves I've done (granted, I haven't moved in 8 years, so maybe I forgot what it was like).

Cat was up around 5:30, and I was up by 8... we worked all day long, with the big moving truck leaving the Natick house at 9:15pm at night. We did one full 25' truck load, and then had to make a second run for some of the large furniture left over.

All in all, it was exhausting, wearing, and a little sad, but I'm glad it's primarily done. We have 3 weeks of cleaning, tidying, and other mishmash stuff still to do in the Bolton house, not to mention a complete unpack and re-construct in Natick.

Services in the new house aren't totally up to snuff yet - we have cable modem service, but not all the computers are up on it yet. Folks waiting to hear from any of us, be patient, we're very tired :)

Thanks to everyone who showed up to help - I'll itemize thanks shortly, for fear that I'll leave someone out if I try to remember everyone now.

I sat down and read the Declaration of Independence document that Adam Shostack posted on Emergent Chaos. It's a fascinating document, and I don't believe I've ever read it straight through beginning to end.

Along those lines, Will Frank has created the Declaration of Repudiation, which summarizes, ala the Declaration of Independence, the injustices performed by our government over the last 5 years.

A wonderful piece of work.

... when on the last day of a week of intensive packing, cleaning and throwing out of stuff, we get the remnants of a tropical storm coming through, dumping a ton of rain on us. This causes one of our gutters / deflectors on the roof to overflow, and dump water into the house. The water wicks through the walls, down 2 stories, and drips on the servers in the office.

Quick thinking by Cat saved things from a big mess, but I really didn't need to be bailing out buckets of water in the house we're moving out of, the night before we move.

Really.

This is pretty interesting. A 400lb man was tired of the way he felt, looked, and was living, so he decided to walk from California to the East Coast. His site has a daily blog of everything going on in this walk. It's pretty fascinating reading.

I enjoy listening to America Right on XM radio. It's populated by the more rabid, but well spoken of the right wing pundits (folks like Michael Medved and Laura Abraham), but it brings into focus where the right is, and what they're thinking. It helps me get perspective on my own positions in politics, and how they relate to the rest of the world.

For balance, I also listen to Air America Radio. There's some wonderful commentary there, and well stated positions that for the most part I agree with, but I have to admit - though Al Franken is a helluva writer, and I love his views, he's boring as dirt to listen to in free-form commentary. He just doesn't have the pace needed to keep folks latched onto the conversation.

At any rate, America Right had Medved prattling on as he does, and banging the drum in his usual tunnel-vision way. He was taking a series of callers on the topic of the Iraq war, and caller after caller kept commenting "The democrats and the left just whine and complain no matter what! Why don't they come up with a concrete solution to win the war, instead of just bashing the right personally, and saying what a bad idea it was! What have they come up with? Nothing! Not a single concrete plan to win the war on terrorism". Medved, predictably, kept the rah-rah's going, with "You said it!" supportive chitchat.

What boggles me about this is... well, it's missing the point. Of course there's a lot of complaining about the war. It was unjustified, pigheaded, and disasterously executed. At the moment absolutely NO ONE, not on the right, nor on the left, has a plan to get out of it with anything approaching dignity or sanity, and cut right to the chase, the 'war' is completely, directly unwinnable.

"Unwinnable?!" you cry? Yes, unwinnable. The president has stated we are in the middle of a "War on terrorism". You can't declare war on a concept or an idea. Terrorist tactics have been around since the dawn of conflict, and will continue long after Bush has planted this country's reputation in the toilet (oops, too late). No matter how much money is spent, no matter how many troops die, no matter how many countries are invaded, you can never 'win a war on terrorism'. What exactly are the terms of victory? We kill every last terrorist? Okay. Define for me who a terrorist is, and we'll line 'em up and shoot them. Gosh, that may make some other people unhappy, and they may consider bombing one of our embassies. Okay, they're terrorists too, kill them as well. See where this is going?

The right is doing a wonderful job of whitewashing the public about the 'whining democrats', while still avoiding the main issue. Bush has no clue what he's doing, or how to get out of what he's created. He's spending a billion dollars a day fighting something he created, with no plan for an end. In fact, when confronted with this seemingly no-win scenario, his number one answer, his prime defense is "Stick it out. Don't give up now. We'll win in the end."

The cold clear facts here are that we are in an unwinnable war. A war of Bush's creation, and his only. The reasons for going to war were thin at best, and now things are worse.

The only answer here is for Bush to take 30cc's of humility and admit "okay, there were no WMD's. There is no tie between Iraq and 9/11. Maybe this was a bad idea, and I'm not sure how to get out of it. Help?"

Fat chance of that, eh? In the meantime, servicemen are dying or being maimed on a daily basis. And can anyone tell me...

Why?

Chicago Sun-Times article...

While acknowledging it might be "unfair for [Barnaby] to suffer the stigmatization of being labeled a sex offender when his crime was not sexually motivated," the court said his actions are the type that are "often a precursor" to a child being abducted or molested.

Apparently now, it's not a matter of committing a crime, nor a matter of planning to commit a crime, but now if you behave loosely like someone else who MIGHT commit a crime, you are now guilty of that crime.

The court system marches on, and more and more civil liberties are lost. What was lost here? The man did nothing wrong, and now he is labelled as a sex offender, and has to broadcast to everyone that he is a sex offender. Do you think the reactionary mobs who like to pillory 'sex offenders in the neighborhood' are going to read about the details of this man's case before throwing bricks through his window? I doubt it.

I threw together a tool last year to help with big giveaways on Freecycle-like mailing lists like Craigslist and, on a far smaller scale, Greaterboston-Reuse. The problem was dealing with large lists of things, and who gets what, and if stuff is still available or not, and the inevitable long exchanges of emails about where things are, if such and such is around, and can you hold on to something for me...

Enter Claimit, where I've been postings piles of things we're giving away as we get ready to move out of this house. I just did a code update of it, adding some new functionality and cleaning up some rough edges, but so far it's helped us manage dozens of items being given away, out of lists of a few hundred, and more are going up each day.

It's been a good test of the concept, and while it's not quite ready for the volume of traffic Craigslist would generate, it's slowly maturing into a great little tool.

(And, if you're -in- the Boston area, and want any of the stuff we're giving away, feel free to check it out :)

... a more magnificent piece of music than Beethoven's 9th Symphony, played in it's entirety, I don't know what it is.

XM Radio Classics did a wonderful 1/2 hour introduction / lecture on the piece before hand, and then presented the entire symphony, on period instruments, beginning to end. I ended up driving past the house and up the highway again to catch the 4th movement without having to pause to put Zach to bed (we were on our way back from Maine).

During the intro, I had forgotten this bit of history. When the piece was first performed in Vienna in 1824, Beethoven's hearing had deteriorated completely. He was completely deaf, and therefore never actually heard his masterpiece performed. As related on the wikipedia entry for the Ninth :

At the conclusion of the performance Beethoven had to be forcibly turned around to accept the audience's cheers and applause According to one witness, "the public received the musical hero with the utmost respect and sympathy, listened to his wonderful, gigantic creations with the most absorbed attention and broke out in jubilant applause, often during sections, and repeatedly at the end of them."

Can you imagine being in the theater and hearing this piece performed for the first time, not knowing what was to happen next, and being blindsided by the masterful 4th movement? And there, in front, the composer himself, not hearing the public's jubilant reception of his final work, not knowing of it until one of the members of the orchestra stood up and turned him around to see the audience's applause and cheering.

One of the finest general purpose database access tools, dbVisualizer has been updated to version 4.3. A full release announcement including new features is available on Minq Software's website.

I've been using dbVisualizer for the last year or two for accessing MySQL, Oracle, and Hypersonic database instances. It's cross-platform functionality, rich user interface, and excellent price-point (free for evaluation version, $99 for 3 licenses that enable some of the more advanced functions) has made it my primary choice for a database client.

I should be doing a review of the new version shortly.

The Deep Impact mission went off without a hitch this morning. NASA's Deep Impact probe smacked into comet Tempel 1 after the probe parked itself in the path of the oncoming comet. The other half of the probe photographed the encounter from a safe distance.

Many very good images and details are on the Deep Impact website at NASA