There are several weird things about the Valerie Plame outing case. Add to the list the unusual seemingly speculative nature of the last paragraph of an article in today's NYT:
Since Mr. Novak appears not to be facing jail time, he presumably supplied information to Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor in the case. It is not clear why that did not conclude the investigation. Mr. Fitzgerald and Mr. Novak have consistently declined to discuss the matter.
—Adam Liptak, "Time Decides to Hand Over Notes of Reporter Facing Prison," New York Times, 2005-06-30
"Today, Spanish society is responding to a group of people who have been humiliated, whose rights have been ignored, their dignity offended, their identity denied and their freedom restricted," Prime Minister Josi Luis Rodmguez Zapatero told Parliament. Spain is the fourth country to legalize gay marriage, after Canada, Holland and Belgium.
—Renwick McLean, "Spain Legalizes Same-Sex Marriage," New York Times, 2005-06-30
In the US, we are stalled I think mainly by religious extremists, most of whom I believe object to gay legal marriage for one or both of the two reasons:
they equate legal marriage with the sacrament of the same name in their religion, and their religious leaders define marriage as only being between a man and a woman
they believe homosexuality to be against their god's will, and that it is their duty to force the rest of the nation to comply with their god's will
There are also people who believe that children are better raised by mixed-sex couples than same-sex ones, and who want the government to restrict or discourage the raising of children by same-sex couples. I'm not aware of a scientific foundation for that belief. I believe that mixed-sex couples, in general, can bring something to the situation that same-sex couples cannot. I also believe that, whatever the difference, factors like commitment, affection, empathy, intelligence, and knowledge are more important to the raising of children. But really... since when do social conservatives want to increase the interference of government in the rearing of children?
Zhu ChongKai's MrMathematica, which is a PLT Scheme front-end for Mathematica, has been updated.
MrMathematica has actually been hosted on my Web site for a while. Obtaining Web hosting in China is not as easy as in the US, so I host a couple projects for Chinese developers (as well as hosting SICP Texinfo for the mysterious Lytha Ayth). I'm happy to host these projects, as they're relevant to my interests, and the bandwidth and maintenance costs are nil to negligible. The Googlejuice situation probably balances out, too.
What's a little amusing is that I'm hosting software for a couple people in China, despite some aspect of Chinese Internet infrastructure seeming to block email from me and thereby complicate coordination. It's conceivable I got blocked after an action I took to discourage some Chinese Web boards that were abusing my bandwidth without asking, as mentioned on 2004-11-06.
Milton Wulei's sb-rfcview.el is now hosted on this
site and linked from the rfcview.el page.
Milton Wulei sent me a copy of sb-rfcview.el, which adds Speedbar navigation to rfcview.el, my Emacs mode for making IETF RFCs a bit more readable. I don't
think sb-rfcview.el is yet on the Web; email me if you want a
copy.
Followup to the speculation of 2005-06-18, for the questionable benefit of anyone who later does a Web search. Mul-T-Lock USA got back to me today:
[The] characters stamped on our keys are used to assist in determining the origin of the key's location, which strengthens our key control procedures.
I'm not sure what "location" means in this context, and that site's search feature has never seen the term. I've lost interest.
Amusingly, the first Google hit for "mul-t-lock characters stamped" is my weblog page from less than a week ago...
AdForum lets you pay for the privilege of viewing an ad.
Eric Hanchrow discovered a bug with the htmlprag.plt
packaging of HtmlPrag (missing documentation files), which triggers a bug in the PLT
Help Desk, and which was caused by a bug in GNU Make. I've kludged around the
GNU Make bug, and released a new htmlprag.plt packaging without
changing the HtmlPrag source or version number.
Protobj has been released, mainly to fix a pattern rule bug discovered by Benedikt Rosenau.
This version also changes the $ syntax to
?. $ is a good mnemonic for "self" in method
arguments, and is better used for that purpose. Also, as someone else (whose
name escapes me at the moment) pointed out, ? as a getter is also
a natural counterpart to ! as a setter. I used $ for
slot references in 0.1 due to loose analogues in Unix shell (variable
expansion), Perl (scalar identifier), etc., but I like the version 0.2 names
much better.
"We're not supposed to tell people where it is, unless they're family members or guests," said one Quansoo key owner, who spoke on condition of anonymity because she feared retribution from other beach-key owners.
—Donovan Slack, "For $415,000, you get the key to a Vineyard oasis," Boston Globe, 2005-06-18
The article is accompanied by a photo of a key. The photo credit is "Globe Staff Photos / Barry Chin," and the key is an unusual Mul-T-Lock Interactive key, so the photo very well might be of the actual beach key of the anonymous source. Assuming for a moment that it was, as an amateur security exercise while we sip hot cocoa on a cold Saturday afternoon...
My first question regarded an attack against one element of beach security: whether or not the key's cut pattern as visible in the photo would be sufficient to fabricate a duplicate (which would help an unauthorized person gain vehicle access to the beach without telltale damage to the lock or property). Turns out, the Mul-T-Lock Interactive key blanks and cutting machinery are reportedly available only to authorized dealers, who reportedly are given strict rules for the circumstances under which they'll cut a key. Moreover, the "high precision moving insert" in the blank sounds expensive to fabricate independently. Cheaper to use some means of beach access that doesn't involve driving a vehicle through an unlocked gate.
My next question regarded the more serious issue of whether or not the photo inadvertently disclosed the anonymous source's identity to the other beach-key owners from whom she reportedly wished to remain anonymous.Could the visible cut pattern or the stamped number could be looked up to identify the particular key out of the set of keys that worked in that particular beach lock? This is as much a journalism issue as a security one.
I suspect that all normal beach keys (as opposed to administrative keys) for the particular core have the same pattern, or at the least that numerous beach keys for that particular core have the same pattern as the one shown in the photo. I've emailed Mul-T-Lock a question about the stamped number, so I might get an answer back on Monday. I don't have high hopes, though, since the locksmithing industry as a whole seems to favor a degree of "security through obscurity."
For now, we disregard the distinctive hand model used for the photo, since it could be the photographer rather than the key owner, for example. And, unlike key patterns and numbers, hands aren't something that can be looked up in records. To identify the hand, we'd have to already have familiarity with the hand, to make inferences (e.g., age, doesn't have manicure, might do rough work such as gardening with hands), or to inspect people's hands at social encounters. One approach would be to instruct the security guard who already sometimes checks beach keys to surreptitiously inspect people's hands for likely matches and report back.
If the hand does indeed belong to the anonymous source, she might be well advised to get a manicure, and on the mainland, avoiding any gossipy manicurists on the Vineyard. Two can keep a secret, if the manicurist is dead. But that's a classic escalation pitfall: the coverup being worse than the original crime. Ahem.
HtmlPrag version 0.14 has been released. Alejandro Forero Cuervo requested parsing of XML CDATA sections, so HtmlPrag now tokenizes them as strings, like any other character data.
Incidentally, Alejo is another user of HtmlPrag, and this time in Colombia:
I use it to power the website at http://bachue.com/, a small community of web loggers. We are parsing RSS/Atom feeds to generate aggregates and do other stuff.
To other people using HtmlPrag: especially now that I'm job-hunting and need to be thinking more about "promoting the brand," I'd appreciate a link or mention on your project's Web page. Or drop me a quick email, if you like.
Was reminded of this while scanning old paper documents...
A couple years ago, I was looking into law school, so I attended the Boston Law School Forum (which is like a college fair). One of the schools I was considering because a certain close female friend had a personal connection to the school's town, but I was apprehensive about it being a Christian school.
I waited by the school's table until all the other prospective students' questions were answered, then I introduced myself to the rep and asked the key question: I was interested in the school, but had a question about the environment; I had a Christian upbringing, including 10 years of Catholic school and being an altar server, so I was familiar with Christianity in general, but I was now a "Cambridge liberal secular humanist"; my question was whether or not I would be out of place in their environment.
The representative answered the question thoughtfully but not directly, and my understanding was that a non-Christian would indeed be out of place in the program.
To give you a better idea what is meant by "Christian law school," here's scans of two letters they sent: letter #1 page 1, letter #1 page 2, letter #2 page 1, letter #2 page 2. Yellow highlighting and red redaction added. I redacted some identifying info not because the name of the school is any big secret, nor is there Christian bent, but rather to focus on the religious references.
The flowery religious language comprises familiar Christian idioms. I shy away from comment, since religious criticism is culturally taboo in the US — a sort of social contract that I think goes hand-in-hand with the intended separation of church and state.
However, I think Christian and non alike might see humorous potential interpretations of the following sentence, in the context of a rather pragmatic discussion of financial aid:
We firmly believe that if God has called you, He will provide a way for you to complete your legal studies.
More anecdotes from the Forum, to be blogged later.
I'd like to disrecommend the Canon LiDE 30 scanner that I mentioned on 2005-06-01.
The 20-second calibration delay (?) at the start of every scan occurs with the Canon-supplied Windows software. The contributes to a scan time of 50 seconds for one letter-size page at 75dpi grayscale. The 50 seconds does not include time for putting the next sheet on, but that could in theory be done while the scanner head is returning to its start position (but avert your eyes, because they don't turn off the illumination while returning).
If there were a way to disable the calibration step when scanning a series of pages, that would cut my scan time from 50 seconds down to 30 seconds.
My next scanner will probably be a pre-Fiorina HP.
Update: Within a minute of posting that blog entry, the scanner's motor started trying to rip the scanner apart. The Canadian who initially warned me away from the LiDE series finds this humorous.
I spent hours redoing a document in OpenOffice.org for the sole
purpose of exporting it in Microsoft Word .doc format. Despite my
pretty conservative and consistent use of formatting constructs, the resulting
MS Word format was lousy.
The fault for .doc incompatibility lies with
Microsoft, but that doesn't change my impression that OpenOffice.org is still
not viable for moving formatted documents in the OOo->MSWord direction.
As of today, the 13th, I'm job-hunting. I'd like to stay in Cambridge/Boston. Please email me for my resume or my Swiss bank account number.
I haven't seen it in the news yet, but there was an explosion in Central Square (Cambridge, MA) this afternoon, and police cordoned off Mass. Ave. from at Prospect to approximately Windsor for hours. A police officer guarding one of the quieter side streets said that an electrical transformer in a manhole had exploded. At least two office buildings were evacuated. Big turnout of emergency personnel and three helicopters.
Snapshots I took include the center of the excitement, an atypically clear rush-hour Mass. Ave. from Prospect St., "There's Something Happening Here," and a new Police motorcycle on Columbia St.
(Jasmine says the bike's a "police R1150GS," but that they don't have such bikes there in London since said bike "tends to remove legs." Nevertheless, she's expressed interest, and her birthday's right around the corner.)
I also photographed a small parade of Quest Diagnostics people,
wheeling their task chairs and lab coats from the back of their building on
Mass. Ave., across the street, into a garage. I decided not to post those on
the Web, because it stretches the newsworthiness exception to my rule against
photographing people without permission. People emailing from
questdiagnotics.com are welcome to the photos.
Fortunately, the Monday afternoon Farmer's Market was just outside the cordon (and naturally was unaffected by the power outage). I bought a parsley plant from two lovely young ladies from Keown Orchards.
Scant minutes after the January 20th flare, a swarm of high-speed protons surrounded Earth and the Moon. Thirty minutes later, the most intense proton storm in decades was underway. "We've been hit by strong proton storms before, but [never so quickly]," says solar physicist Robert Lin of UC Berkeley. "Proton storms normally develop hours or even days after a flare." This one began in minutes.
—Science@NASA, "A New Kind of Solar Storm," 2005-06-10
What terrible Earth-threatening force could have triggered this?! What sheer evil?!
I canceled my Netflix. A few days ago, I told Netflix customer service that they'd gone from turnaround time of 2 business days to 4-5, and asked them to look into the cause and let me know whether or not we could go back to 2. When Netflix got back to me, it was with unhelpful boilerplate.
In cities like Cambridge, where every day one walks past brick&mortar video rental places offering instant gratification, a Netflix with one-week turnaround time should expect to lose many customers.
A third of American biomedical scientists have engaged in questionable research practices, according to survey results released yesterday [...] 0.3 percent said they had falsified data, and 1.4 percent said they had used another's ideas without gaining permission or giving credit. In addition, 15.5 percent said they had changed how they conducted an experiment or its results in response to pressure from a funding source [...]
—Gareth Cook, "Surveyed scientists admit misconduct," Boston Globe, 2005-06-09
Those numbers actually seem very low to me. I've heard of prestigious organizations at which reported rates of 50% would be entirely believeable.
I've had trouble finding information on the Web about how to encode
a video that can be played by a stock Mac OS X machine (without add-on plugins
and such). Reportedly, Apple's QuickTime player supports the MPEG-4 Simple
profile, so the closest i've gotten so far is to use ffmpeg with a
QuickTime .mov package format, MPEG-4 video codec, and AAC
audio:
ffmpeg -i infile.mpg \
-hq -f mov -vcodec mpeg4 -acodec aac -s 320x240 \
outfile.mov
I'll have to wait til I have use of a Mac to make sure that
ffmpeg isn't using MPEG-4 features that Apple doesn't yet
support.
The Boston Pride Parade is this Saturday. I'm planning to photograph, if the weather isn't too bad. Current forecast is 78F, mostly cloudy.
csv.scm version 0.4 has been released, mainly to get a PLT 299/3xx package of it into PLaneT.
When I first joined Netflix, I was receiving a 2-business-day turnaround from the time my old DVD when out in the mail to the time the new DVD arrived. For example, if I put the old DVD in the mailbox Monday morning, Netflix would receive it Tuesday morning, send the new DVD that same day, and I'd receive the new DVD on Wednesday afternoon. For the past month, however, I've been getting turnarounds of 4 to 7 business days.
At the current rate, I'm better off renting from my local bricks&mortar. I've asked Netflix to look into the cause of the delays, and to let me know whether or not we can return to 2-day turnaround.
If you've similarly started experiencing large Netflix delays in the last month, please let me know. Better yet, let Netflix know.
I loathe tan lines.
Today's good weather afforded an opportunity to test my new supposed "tan-thru" suit from LifestylesDirect.com. Thus far, it seems to have served as an excellent sunblock.
Unfortunately, the US got the Puritans, so we're all generally uptight about nudity, and in New England even more so. The few textiles-optional beaches in the US are generally either gay meatmarkets or dominated by weirdos— er, people who seem perhaps a little too deviant from the norm in general. Oh, and gawkers with telephoto lenses who post photos on the Internet and sell DVDs of the videos. I think all that is discouraging, if your only purpose is to enjoy a little peaceful sun and get a light tan without ridiculous-looking untanned patches and stripes.
A few photos from a walk the other morning: lit stairs between the Carpenter Center and Harvard Faculty Club, an unidentified video transmit van out of Out Of Town News, a proud mannequin, high-contrast under a Harvard Square street lamp, contrasted with somerville trash.
No word yet on why the mannequin hasn't cut the glass and made her way to freedom.
Regarding shooting back at media, see 2004-04-15 for an earlier episode in the thematic series.
In case you didn't think the unmasking of Deep Throat was big, this event marks the first time I've ever seen a released DVD have a Netflix availability other than "Now".
Perhaps I'm the first one this morning to notice that the New York
Times unwittingly (we hope) used a photo of one Anil Dash wearing a goatse.cx T-shirt. I suspect this is a clever stunt by Mr. Dash, but he hasn't
yet updated his blog today.
I got a used Canon LiDE 30 on eBay for about $26 shipped. To get it to work with my
Linux-based IBM ThinkPad X20, I simply had to plug in the USB cable, make sure
the scanner kernel module was loaded, and fire up XSane. And I was in business.
Pros: the LiDE is light and compact for easy storage when not in use, is powered over USB so doesn't use up a precious AC outlet, and has a convenient "Z" lid hinge for scanning books and such.
Cons: the LiDE 30 doesn't have the best scan quality ever, and there's also an annoyingly long delay of mechanical gyrations before each scan that I suspect is a calibration step (or maybe the works were damaged during shipment, since the seller neglected to lock them).
Summary: seems like a good home scanner for occasionally importing paper utility bills and such, but graphic designers and high-volume users are of course better off spending a lot more money on something else. A friend who'd owned a LiDE 20 that spontaneously self-destructed believes them to be shoddy, but I was willing to take the chance because I liked the design.
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