Quoting the internets:

Oprah Winfrey, age 54, was found dead in her home residing in Chicago, Illinois at 8:21 AM on September 20, 2008. Local Police and the FBI are trying to keep it on the down low for now until further notice. From what has been reported thus far, she appears to have a bloody area around her eye, a bullet wound in her stomach and some cuts and bruises up and down her body. They suspect she was beaten while she was trying to sleep, and shot in the side with a silenced handgun. According to the FBI, she was killed anywhere around 1:00-2:00 A.M. this morning.

The assassin was indeed very stealthy and un-noticeable, as the FBI has no idea who or what could of done this. They consider that she even might of painfully commited suicide due to the lack of evidence.

“I didn’t hear a thing, I was up until 4 last night just watching T.V. and reading some books, nothing suspicious was heard or seen, I even went outside for some ‘cigs’ a couple of times and saw nothing” -Markus Julane, Oprah’s down the street neighbor.

This blog will be updated with further info on Oprah Winfrey’s death as soon as the FBI gets things straightened out.

More Linkage

Score one for power management

I came home from the gym just now to find the microwave clock blinking *18:88 which is of course never a good thing. I guess unless it's 7:28 pm? Anyway, I poked my head into my office where both my new desktop and work laptop were running. But all was quiet. Granted, these are pretty quiet machines, but it was just too quiet. Sure enough, both were off -- which means the power must have been out most of the time I was gone. The UPS probably can only power things for a half hour, but the laptop battery should have kept it going quite some time (though it's docked, so I'm not sure if it uses more power then). The laptop is plugged into the UPS, but in a "surge-protection-only" slot. Plus, both machines were largely idle.

I cranked up the laptop first, and the "resuming windows" screen popped right up. So the XP power settings worked properly -- when the battery gets low, hibernate. It did and restored just fine. Perfect.

Next I started my new desktop which is running Vista 64, which I'm not very familiar with. I just played around to enable Hibernate mode last night but only used it once. I'm not sure how the UPS software would respond or what would happen. But as it booted, I got a plain text screen saying that the battery ran low, so the system went into hibernation. Do I want to restore? Sounds good to me, let's restore. It also picked right back up where it was. Awesome -- behaved exactly as it should have.

This is such a far cry from years ago where I would shut down my desktop when I went to lunch. Back then (that was a 486-100 machine) when power would hiccup, odds were fair that as the computer blinked off it was in the middle of writing to a disk. And thus corrupting it. I can't recall how many hard drives I had to replace due to corruption, usually caused by power issues. But now we have battery backups that last at least long enough to tell the machine to shut down. I think every (non-laptop) computer in the house should be on one. Which means I need to get a new one because there isn't one upstairs -- the one for the home theater PC is really old and powers the TV and cable box too, so I should get a new on there and put the older on up on my son's machine.

I'm quite impressed how this stuff "just works" nowadays.

drip, drip, drip

We had a bit of a water issue in the basement. We'd cleaned up the puddle a couple times, but wasn't sure where exactly it was coming from. I assumed it was condensation-related from the A/C, but it's been nice here and the air hasn't been on recently. We both mopped up a lot of water before finding a small rubber tube that had been dislodged from the French drain. Tucking it back in place stopped the puddling on the floor, but there was still water dripping though the tube. It was an overflow for the humidifier that we never use. There's a spongy material that rotates through a plate of water that helps keep the air less dry in the winter when the heater is running all the time. However, we never use this -- and looking in there it's caked with mold and gunk. No thanks.

Even though we don't run this, it's still hooked up. There is a small copper tube that tabs a cold water pipe in the ceiling which was slowly feeding water into the humidifier. Of course, since it isn't running, it just drips in the plate and then overflows. Since the overflow tube on the floor was actually in the French drain until recently, I have no idea if this has always been dripping like this or not. But I almost have to believe it has been like this for a long time. Since we have very little water in the basement, the drains are just dry rock. So these drips just seep around the local area (far away from the sump area) and evaporate -- keeping the basement moist. But just how moist is the question because we do run two little de-humidifiers down there.

Watching the drips, I can ballpark their size and rate. I tried to make a similar size drop in the kitchen, but probably made it a bit smaller. I measured these at 9 drops to fill a 1/4 teaspoon measuring spoon, which is 1.25 ml. This comes out to 0.14 ml/drop, and looking at the relative sizes I think I'm underestimating the volume per drop. However, we can move forward with this value. For the rate, I figure it was about 1 to 2 drops per second. Again, estimating low, we'll go with 1 drop per second. Multiplying, 0.14 ml/drop * 1 drop/sec * 3600 sec/hr = 500 ml/hr. I have no good feel for milliliters per hour, so let's keep converting: 500 ml/hr * 24 hr/day = 12,000 ml/day. Sounds like a lot, but what is 12,000 ml? There are 3785.6ml/gal, so this turns out to 3.17 gallons/day. Wow.

I'm probably underestimating both the size and rate, but we're looking at 3 to 6 gallons per day dripping through this tube into the drains. The de-humidifiers in the basement are typically emptied once per day (though not regularly) and probably remove a combined 5 gallons per load. Which means we haven't been keeping up. So while the basement looks dry, it always feels moist and I finally know why.

I've turned off the valve now, reducing the drip rate to 0. I've also emptied the humidifier case so that even if it's still dripping a bit, it will take quite a while to refill to overflow. I have also emptied the de-humidifiers, and they are cranking away right now. I will empty them again tonight as well. By my calculations, there's probably a good bit of moisture still in the drains to take out, but staying on top of the de-humidifiers for 2 or 3 days may actually dry the basement out almost completely. Let's see.

Dwarf Fortress

Somewhere along the line I stumbled across a "succession game" thread (here). This is where people play a "round" of some game and then pass everything off to another person to pick up where they left off. This thread is particularly interesting because of the care the players have taken to write "in character" as a person in the game.

So on to the game: it's called Dwarf Fortress. It's an ASCII adventure game. Yep - colored blocks is the limit of the graphics. I've read a lot about it, but it's daunting. The learning curve is something like 5-10 hours. I'm a little fearful of just digging in because of the micro-management involved. You start with just 7 dwarves, which seems easy enough to manage. But you need to do things like dig out a home in a mountain and start managing food and defenses with finite initial resources. Like I said, it's daunting, but then you have bad guys coming in, winter 6 months away, and trading also. It's an immensely deep game. See some stories from players here (it's a blog, so you'll need to dig around for DF posts and stories).

What has me fascinated about the prospects is all the logical choices you need to make. It's a game, but it's not one where you need to figure out the trick to get to the next level. You just need to make good choices to help your clan survive. Infinite possibilities.

There's a wiki to check out for more details. And some graphics packs (I'm using this one) which help get you over the ASCII hurdle, especially if you're running higher resolutions.

I want to get hooked on this game, but I'm not sure I have the time!

Firefox FTP

I love FireFox and despise it when I need to open anything up in IE. I'm also becoming more of a minimalist installing extra tools to do things other tools can (or should) be able to do.

Today I needed to upload some files to a new Sun box we have. I'm writing a demo for the Sun Grid engine, translating an older demo I did for Windows Compute Cluster Server to the distributed Java environment. So I needed to FTP from my work laptop. I don't have WS_FTP installed there because 99% of the time I'm just downloading from FTP and FireFox works fine. But it doesn't let you upload.

After 20 seconds of searching, I found the FireFTP add-on. It's an FTP client that sits inside FireFox. Clearly not as fully features as WS_FTP, but it got the job done. Kudos to the devs. Check it out.

New Car!

So our minivan, a 2004 Honda Odyssey, the daily driver of kids to school and the wife to work, is starting to show its age. It's about 4 years old with 87,000 miles on it. Now we all know Honda's could pretty much run forever, but there's a balance of investment required and trust in the vehicle versus the cost of a replacement. We've been talking some bout getting a replacement, planning to do this in the winter when the '09 models would be on the showroom floor, and probably with some good incentives if this economic downturn keeps going.

However, time was against us. First, the '04 van just went through and passed inspection, but it would need breaks soon (at least pads, likely rotors) and at least 2 new tires (after a rotation). Further we found out soon that it would need a timing belt as well. For somewhere around a $1500 to $2000 investment, it would continue on in good shape. But after these touches, it wouldn't be soon before we cross over 100,000 miles. Again, no big deal for a Honda in general, but it's psychological and its trade-in value drops significantly.

Recognizing this and with a free evening we decided to pay a visit to Apple Honda. We knew exactly what we were looking for (EX-L model, no navigation, no entertainment system). We poked around in the new 2008 on the floor and found some nice additions including:

• Rear door windows that roll down (OK, power down)
• Sunroof
• 3-zone auto climate control (old was front auto, manual rear)
• Auxiliary audio input jack (3.5mm plug for any MP3 player)
• 60/40 split 3rd row (old version was sometimes heavy to fold in and out)
• Additional 8th seat (an official seat with belt between the 2d row captains chair)
• Cylinder deactivation (drops to 3 cylinders when coasting or decelerating)

So we agreed to take one out for a test drive while they evaluated our '04 for possible trade-in. The one we drove was nice, but had a strange shimmy at 60mph. We ended up driving a second that didn't shimmy and was just fine. We were really pretty impressed overall with the car. Plus they have a $3,000 incentive plus 2.9% financing. The sales manager told us you'd usually only get one or the other, but they were doing both for the Odyssey. And after a little bickering we got a trade-in value of $8,600 (well over Kelly Blue Book's estimate). The combination of $11,600 off the top and 2.9% interest rate really made this a tough deal to pass up. It was basically a gamble of the trade-in value, interest rate landscape, incentives, and cost of '09 models (which aren't any different than '08s except a restatement of horsepower). Instead of gambling and having to invest a couple thousand in the '04, we bit the bullet and drove home the '08.

Unfortunately, I couldn't take off my PIAA 1400 fog lamps off the old car. Which means I'll need to invest in replacements soon (even though the wife doesn't think they help, I love them).

But so far, all of us a very happy with the new car. The kids just love having their own windows. I'm starting to track gas mileage to see how the cylinder deactivation helps.

Buckle Your Seat Belt!

Late last week a friend of a friend's son was in a seemingly minor car accident in northern Virginia. He was steering his pickup truck around a corner about a mile from his home. He was sober and not driving extremely fast (maybe 30-40 mph), but apparently took the turn a bit wide. It sounds like he was making a left turn, drifted wide, and the rear passenger wheel of his truck struck the curb. With it's high center of gravity and the angles involved, the truck flipped over.

Now, had he been wearing a seat belt, he likely would have been pretty well banged up -- maybe some bruises and cuts. Unfortunately, he was not buckled in. So as the truck flipped, he was ejected through the windshield (which pops out easily for safety reasons), and he struck the brick wall of house headfirst. In an effort to keep the swelling of his brain from killing him, they had to remove the top of skull to reduce the pressure. Further, about 20% of his occiptal lobe was dead. There was a slight chance of the body healing and his brain regaining some function, but today we heard they have pronounced him brain dead. He probably won't see the end of the week, and may not see the end of today.

He is 21.

There is no excuse for not wearing your seat belt, ever. Accidents happen, which is why they're called accidents. BUCKLE UP.

ZoneAlarm and KB951748 Windows Update

Like many others, applying this update has killed my internet connection. Apparently something in KB951748 upsets ZoneAlarm at which point it blocks all internet traffic. The stupid thing on my part is that I actually read about this in passing somewhere and then went an did an update this morning on my desktop anyway. This is the only machine running ZoneAlarm, so all the other computers in house still could connect which let me research the problem further.

I've never been a huge ZA fan, but like I'm always more comfortable with a program that alerts for both inbound and outbound connection attempts. I've reverted to ZA because they killed off the free version of Tiny Personal Firewall (aka Kiero), at which point I switched to Comodo. But that one wreaked havoc on my internal network traffic (connecting to laptops and the Xbox 360 became painful). So I eventually moved to ZA. Each time you install a new firewall, it goes through several days of training where it questions you about all activity. This is very annoying, so I don't really want to switch from ZA right now. But I need internet on this machine and don't want to be firewall-less.

One option of course is to uninstall KB951748. Do this by opening Control Panel -> Add or Remove Programs -> check "Show Updates". Pick it off the list. The problem is that it warned me all these other updates would stop working too. I don't really want to mess with this system's stability (it's already agining and I don't want to upset it!), so partially uninstalling various updates is one of those things that will surely break other things that are working OK.

Disabling ZA of course lets me back on line, but I feel like a naked teenager stuck in the mall.

So for now I've shut down ZA and turned on the Windows Firewall. I have actually never used this on any of my machines. I know it's better than nothing, but it doesn't warn (or trap?) outbound connections. I'm not sure I feel much better, but it's like throwing a towel to the naked teen in the mall. For now, I'm on line. And really this machine gets abused a lot less than it used too and I haven't noticed any fishy calling home actions via ZA recently anyway, so things should be OK for now.

I'll need to watch for ZA updates or possibly move to something else. Maybe since I don't connect to the Xbox anymore for streaming audio (due to using the HTPC), Comodo is a viable option again. But, ugh, those training days suck.

No more training wheels?

Now that the littlest child has her first real bike, her cries of "I wanna ride my bike" echo through the house every evening and weekend. As such, we've been heading out around the block much more often again (after seemingly taking all of last summer off). But of course now Jake is big enough that he shouldn't need training wheels at all, but watching him ride, he still relies on them. I raised them up, but he would just drop the bike onto one wheel or the other and go down the street -- no concerns for balance (or the noise!) and just merrily relying on the extra wheel.

So we decided that was enough of that and he should be going without training wheels. He's taken to swimming like a little fish (piano lessons too) because he wants to do it. And these past 7 years with him have shown me that whenever he's ready to do something, he just does it. If he's not ready, it's a lot of yelling and pouting and crying and a general uphill battle until we give up, and he decides a month later that he's ready for whatever it was. This is how taking off the training wheels is going. He's afraid to fall, but won't try in the grass because it's too hard to pedal. When you're walking next to him, he just leans against you. I was convinced there was a problem with his bike until I got on it and pedaled around a bit (it's fine). The boy just leans side to side.

After an hour of explaining how the pedals go around in circles and you can't just push downwards, but need to make them go around, and also that nobody can balance on a bike while it's standing still; that it's easier the faster you go, we finally got out on the street. He was so worried about staying near the edge (as is the regular rule when going around the block) that he kept running up into the grass or else panic braking as he'd drift into the street. It wasn't a busy evening, so I convinced him to ignore those rules for now, that I'll watch for cars. Finally he did get going with me jogging along side. I still had to rebalance him several times while going, but at the top level he's finally getting it. He still needs help starting, and stopping, and turning, and balancing. But at least he was out there on two wheels with no support!

I expect he'll progress quickly from here - but it's all up to him.

York Revolution game

We went to see our first Revs game last night. The lost 6-4 against Newark, but it was a fun night out anyway. The kids hung in there through the 6th inning, when they started fading fast as the night wore on after 9 pm. My boy somewhat followed the game, but was often more interested in the various scoreboards and food. My girl of course loved following their big green mascot, DownTown, around the stadium. She had a chance to get on field after the top of the 6th to do some Turkey Hill flag thing where 3 little kids wave flags (pink, brown and white for strawberry, chocolate and vanilla) as colored cows race across the big screen. At this point she was just plain too tired and getting grumpy, so kept declining even though the stadium girls were having trouble finding kids to go down.

Even though we had free tickets, we probably blew through something like $50 to $60 in food and drink, so even though we could afford the season ticket packages, we probably couldn't afford to do that every game! But it was fun and a good experience for the kids. The between inning stuff was fairly interesting, and now I know the whole "thump, revoluSHUUUN, revoluSHUUUN" yell. Also, Pizza Hut sponsored some thing where if #28 on Newark struck out at any point in the game, everyone's tickets would be worth free breadsticks. Sounds like a neat idea, but it can't be fun for the guy, or even the pitcher, as thousands of fans change "breadsticks" at you. He did strike out his third time up though, so I don't feel that bad for the pitcher I guess.

The day started off with a tribute to Brooks Robinson. Apparently he got his start in York in the early 50s. He told a little story about playing second base and a coach making the comment along the lines of "that secondbaseman doesn't have a lot of movement, but he's going to kill your shortstop with those throws". So they moved him to third base half way through the season. The rest is of course history where he made it to the Orioles the next year and became a hall-of-fame third basement, winning 16 consecutive gold gloves. He had his wife and three grand kids there, one of whome was named Brooks (a girl around 15).

Cloud Computing and Math

I've just spent the better part of two hours now trying to figure out Cloud Computing. I'm focused of course on where my product line can fit in this latest hyped paradigm. While it's positioned right now as more of a disruptive technology than anything else, there's clearly going to be some kind of future here. There are a number of nuggets out there, but so much of what I'm seeing is based either on scalable storage (seems that this one is almost solved with things like Hadoop and Map-Reduce). Which is fine for the data center people, but what about the analysts? How do you distribute your long-running simulations in these environments?

Grid technologies have been around for a long time now. The Globus Toolkit has been around for more than a decade. I've actually set this up a few years ago on a couple dual CPU Linux boxes that have been retired to my basement - so I know it's real and works. This is certainly one avenue to the distribute math solution, but it's very different than all these "cloud" solutions. Web Services underlies the communication is many architectures, but Grid isn't about SOA or SaaS.

So if you have "real" problems to solve (beyond SQL queries and other general database/data center type problems), how do you get there? I'm just not seeing it. What's actually running on the Cloud? And how do you get there? With volatile virtual Xen images, where do my compilers live? What runtime libraries are available? I haven't found anything real here at all. One of our customers is actively looking at Amazon's EC2 in concert with our Java library and he's worried about licensing issues as the solution possibly scales out to 1000s of nodes. Of course we have pricing for this having lived in the MPI world for a long time, but this isn't your father's parallel computing environment anymore.

Apparently you can create your own Amazon Machine Image with all your software on it. But how do these images talk to each other? If you spin up 500 images to run a simulation, what are the APIs for getting your data back out? Is it really just like having 500 of the same machine sitting in the back room and you just have each one dump data to a web service running on a master node on your desktop?

I guess nobody is writing articles to address these kinds of questions, so I'll have to immerse myself in Amazon's developer forums -- but that's immensely frustrating as 99% of them are solving regular old data center things and not doing anything interesting.

Loving For All

Yesterday I learned a bit about Mildred Loving. It's fascinating the stuff you learn about in History and Social Studies classes in high school and the stuff they just skip right over. This is probably somebody (or an issue) that I should have been aware of. Even with all the gay marriage stuff going on now, it actually never occurred to me that it was literally illegal to marry someone from another race. Sure, it was clearly not socially acceptable for a long time there, but I didn't think there were actual laws against it.

About a year ago, Mildred Loving released a statement on the 40th anniversary of her lawsuit against the state of Virgina. The details of the case can be found in Wikipedia and elsewhere, but I've pasted her statement below (taken from the Positive Liberty web site) because it's very revealing of the culture at the time -- note the judge's comments.

As a "privileged" straight white male in America, there are lots of things I haven't had to contend with directly. Sexism, racism, and heterosexism are words and issues I know -- but I've never had to deal directly with them. It is appalling to me that people think the way the judge's comments reveal; like I said, it just never occurred to me that this kind of marriage would be illegal. I figure it's about time I become a little more vocal on these issues. I'm not sure where to begin with that, but starting off at UUCY is probably as good of a starting point as any.

I can only hope my kids someday will read something similar about this time period and be similarly appalled about today's restrictions on marriage.



Loving for All

By Mildred Loving, June 12, 2007, the 40th Anniversary of Loving vs. Virginia

When my late husband, Richard, and I got married in Washington, DC in 1958, it wasn’t to make a political statement or start a fight. We were in love, and we wanted to be married.

We didn’t get married in Washington because we wanted to marry there. We did it there because the government wouldn’t allow us to marry back home in Virginia where we grew up, where we met, where we fell in love, and where we wanted to be together and build our family. You see, I am a woman of color and Richard was white, and at that time people believed it was okay to keep us from marrying because of their ideas of who should marry whom.

When Richard and I came back to our home in Virginia, happily married, we had no intention of battling over the law. We made a commitment to each other in our love and lives, and now had the legal commitment, called marriage, to match. Isn’t that what marriage is?

Not long after our wedding, we were awakened in the middle of the night in our own bedroom by deputy sheriffs and actually arrested for the “crime” of marrying the wrong kind of person. Our marriage certificate was hanging on the wall above the bed. The state prosecuted Richard and me, and after we were found guilty, the judge declared: “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.” He sentenced us to a year in prison, but offered to suspend the sentence if we left our home in Virginia for 25 years exile.

We left, and got a lawyer. Richard and I had to fight, but still were not fighting for a cause. We were fighting for our love.

Though it turned out we had to fight, happily Richard and I didn’t have to fight alone. Thanks to groups like the ACLU and the NAACP Legal Defense & Education Fund, and so many good people around the country willing to speak up, we took our case for the freedom to marry all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. And on June 12, 1967, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that, “The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men,” a “basic civil right.”

My generation was bitterly divided over something that should have been so clear and right. The majority believed that what the judge said, that it was God’s plan to keep people apart, and that government should discriminate against people in love. But I have lived long enough now to see big changes. The older generation’s fears and prejudices have given way, and today’s young people realize that if someone loves someone they have a right to marry.

Surrounded as I am now by wonderful children and grandchildren, not a day goes by that I don’t think of Richard and our love, our right to marry, and how much it meant to me to have that freedom to marry the person precious to me, even if others thought he was the “wrong kind of person” for me to marry. I believe all Americans, no matter their race, no matter their sex, no matter their sexual orientation, should have that same freedom to marry. Government has no business imposing some people’s religious beliefs over others. Especially if it denies people’s civil rights.

I am still not a political person, but I am proud that Richard’s and my name is on a court case that can help reinforce the love, the commitment, the fairness, and the family that so many people, black or white, young or old, gay or straight seek in life. I support the freedom to marry for all. That’s what Loving, and loving, are all about.

Some recent movies

I'm not much of a movie reviewer, but here's a snapshot of some recent ones we've seen:

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull - Not bad. A little over the top with the effects in the end and the story line is a little fishier and convoluted compared to the earlier movies. However, it certainly gets back to the fanciful and adventurous theme of the first one. My expectations were a little high, and so felt a little underwhelmed afterwards. But all in all, not really bad and worth seeing in the theater.

Iron Man - Very good. Full of action with good effects. The effects were well done and never distracting. The story was very true to the version I know as well. Downey was perfect for the part -- maybe he can stay off the blow long enough to do a few more good movies. This one also opens the door for more second-string hero movies and/or more Black Sabbath song movies. War Pigs anyone??

Semi-Pro - Average. I'm a big fan of Will Ferrel's stuff, but this just kind of falls flat. Some good chuckles here and there, but this wasn't even as good as Blades of Glory - which was just above average helped by the supporting cast. I can't recommend spending money to see this, but there are worse movies out there.

Mr. Brooks - Interesting. It's a Costner movie, so is short at 2 hours. A fairly dark movie, but kept moving and in good directions. The twists weren't all that surprising, but you find yourself rooting for characters here and there. Demi Moore was not all that good, and this role was a stretch for Dane Cook -- but Costner and William Hurt were good for their parts.

The Jane Austen Book Club - Better than I thought. Yes, it's a chick flick that I grabbed for the wife. However, it wasn't overly sappy and was pretty well done. It's got a nice happy ending too, which isn't the way I'd have written it but should make Jane Austen fans happy. Maria Bello is still hot, but Jimmy Smits looks like crap.

The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything - Not good. As a family, we like a good deal of the Veggie Tales music, but I really can't stand it when they get preachy. However, most of the moral stuff is decent and, well, moral. I couldn't see how they'd make a decent move out of a song (even if it is a fun, good song). And they didn't. Weak story and very little singing. A few action scenes kept the kids involved, but the story was so convoluted it didn't really make much overall sense. Skip it.

Horton Hears a Who! - Not bad. Better than expected and Jim Carry wasn't too over the top this time. The book just isn't that long to go beyond about a 45 minute movie, but they did a pretty good job. Some of the side characters were pretty well done, but that should almost be expected with the all-star supporting cast.

And a few more one-liners:
Rambo 2008 -- good action ending, but a bit rough. If you like Stallone/Rambo, it's really not that bad.
Bee Movie -- yes, Jerry Seinfeld's voice gets annoying, even as a bee, but this is a cute well-done movie worth renting.
Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium -- the kids didn't get a lot out of it, but it's an imaginative and interesting movie. Dustin Hoffman was excellent, and Natalie Portman looked pretty good too.
Sweeny Todd -- not as good as I though it would be and I love Helena Bonham Carter and Johnny Depp.

Freedom From Religion

I just ran across the following essay in a corner of the web today. A lot of it sounds familiar, so I probably have read it before. However, it's fairly dated now and a quick search didn't find the text in other places as readily as I think it should have. While the message is clearly atheistic and specifically directed towards Fundamentalist Christianity, there's a good deal of Universalism in there as well.

This piece was written by Dan Baker of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, Inc. The date of the post I copied it from is 1987, but it could have been written earlier. I have not done any research for the original source.

However, I find a lot of value in the essay and will reproduce it here for posterity. This is not my work and I make no claim of authorship, but the version I found did not contain a copyright notice. I do not know if it is in the public domain or not.

Dear Christian:

I have heard the message of salvation many times: we are all sinners, and we can have forgiveness and eternal life if we confess and accept Jesus as Savior and Lord. I have heard that there can be no morality outside of God's laws, and that no one can be truly good without being transformed by the Spirit. I have also heard that there is no peace, love, joy, or meaning without Christ. Christians feel that unbelievers are empty slaves to carnality and selfish pride, unable to grasp the truth, and must humble themselves before God's plan.

I have heard that the bible contains the "inspired word of God" -a message of ultimate importance- and that many scholars claim to have proven its uniqueness and reliability. Some Christians say that they have verified the truth by personal experience.

This is all very interesting. I want the best for my life. If there is an eternal paradise, I would hate to miss it; and I definitely would not want to roast in a literal hell. It would be unwise to ignore something like a god, especially one who takes interest in my life. I would ask a thousand questions of an all-knowing mind.

You and I breathe the air of the same planet, and truth should be the same for us both. The basic question which should be asked about any religion is: is it TRUE? If the basic claims of theism, sin, miracles, and revelation are true, then maybe your "good news" is truly good.

However, I am an unbeliever. It's not that I particularly want to doubt; it's just that I have no choice. I have examined your claims and I am not convinced that they are true. I may even wish them to be true (or I may not) -but I am not so naive to think that something can be true or false just because I desire it. There must be some reason, beyond wishful thinking.

I'm sure you agree. You certainly doubt that thunder is caused by the anger of Zeus, or that Allah is the one true god. Like myself, you see them as myths created to explain the unknown, to give life some kind of meaning, to enhance culture, or to empower the ruling caste. They are born in human imagination, and can be explained without reference to a supernatural world. There are many gods which Christians reject. I just believe in one less god than you do. The reasons that you might give for your atheism toward Roman gods are likely the same reasons I would give for not believing in Jesus.

You and I are alike. We have minds which perceive, analyze, integrate, and react. Our only difference in this regard is that you have judged (or assumed) the premises of your religion to be factual, while I have not. You would not want to commit yourself to an idea of which you were not convinced, would you?

You are welcome to try and convince me that Christianity is true, but you should know that I am not going to "just believe" by faith. I will demand substantiation. If you say that the bible is reliable, I will ask you to prove it. I may ask why the bible contains so many errors and contradictions. If you are not familiar with the findings of critical bible scholars with diverse points of view, I will view your conclusions with suspicion.

Neither will I believe because millions of others do. Truth is not determined by vote. If it were, the earth would still be flat.

I will ask if your conclusions are logical. If you want me to consider your beliefs, then be ready to tackle questions like these:

• Is there a higher judge of truth than reason?
• After centuries of bitter religious fighting, why is your mind suddenly blessed with the true way of thinking?
• What is morality, and is it possible without a deity?
• Is the violent history of the Church consistent with a message of love?
• What is a contradiction, and what would the bible have to say in order to be discrepant?
• Why did your god create evil? (Isaiah 45:7)
• Is there anything wrong with skepticism?
• Why should inner religious experience point to anything outside of the mind?
• Historians must assume natural regularity over time, so how can the bible be completely historical when it contains miracles, which violate nature?
• What is a god, exactly, and why do you think one exists?

What could be said about Christianity which, if true, would make it false? If you can't answer that question, then your conclusions may be based on something other than honesty. You can't expect me to respectfully listen to you if you are closed to full, honest inquiry-if you are unwilling to allow, theoretically, that you might be wrong. I am open-minded and willing to change my position, if warranted. Can you also be fair enough to follow the facts, wherever they lead?

Many unbelievers have carefully considered these questions, perhaps even more deeply than you have. And some of us were at one time just as religious as you are now. After honest examination, I am convinced that the bible is primitive mythology, that there is no evidence for a god, that Christians are not more moral or tolerant than atheists, and that religion has caused more harm than good. Why should my conclusions be less valid than yours?

You feel that the complexity of life demands a designer; but the mind of such a creature would be at least as complex as the rest of nature, requiring a designer itself, wouldn't it? If everything needs a cause, then there can be no first cause; and if you nonetheless assert a First Cause, I will ask how you know (assume) that there can be an uncaused cause. If a deity can be thought eternal, so can the universe. God-belief does not answer any question; it just replaces a mystery with a mystery: if god made anything, who made god?

If the mind of a god is the measure for morality, then there is no way to measure if god's actions are "good." The murderous, sexist, intolerant activities of the biblical deity and the presence of chaos, ugliness and pain in the universe portray your "supreme" god as supremely immoral, by my standards. I could invent a nicer god than that, and so could you.

If you have new concrete evidence or rational arguments, then I will be glad to hear them. But please don't waste my time preaching the same old sermons I have been hearing for years.

I am quite happy with life. I have purpose and peace of mind -I prefer goodwill over repentance. I don't want to die, but I accept death as natural. I sense no need to worship, confess, or apologize to anyone. I feel no guilt, and therefore no desire to be "saved" from anything: sin is a primitive idea, and salvation is religion's offer to solve a problem of its own making.

I happily admit I am a skeptic; and I am proud of the way I think. Although humans are not perfect, I respect the human mind and I am optimistic about our abilities to continue to solve life's problems, with reason and kindness.

I don't claim to have all the answers; but if you want me to hear your message than I will ask you to listen to mine.

Dan Baker

Awesome Dinner!

I found this recipe in a cook book my wife's best friend published as a fund raiser for the hospital she worked at in Rhode Island. (keep in mind that this was from a book with a hospital's name on the cover)

Here's the recipe from the book:

• 4 boneless chicken breasts
• 3/4 cup sour cream
• 1 lb bacon

Yields 4 servings

• In a heavy skillet, fry bacon, remove to a paper towel lined plate to soak up the grease.
• Chop bacon into pieces and set aside.
• Leave the bacon grease in the skillet on medium-low heat.
• Add chicken and cover.
• Turn the chicken occasionally until cooked through, about 30 minutes.
• Remove chicken from skillet, add 3/4 to 1 pint of source cream to skillet and mix.
• Add chicken to mixture, coating generously and remove to plate.
• Drizzle some of the source cream mixture onto chicken and add chopped bacon on top.
  

I've adapted the above a bit. I just use a pound of chicken from the grocery store and a pound of center-cut bacon. There's less grease then, but there's a bit less chicken too. Then I just use 8 ounces of sour cream. But in the end here's what you've got: BACON, CHICKEN, FAT. Who could ask for a better dish?

I can feel my arteries clogging already!

Smelling Ammonia

A couple weeks ago, I set a PR bench pressing (150% of my body weight). Right afterwards, I stood up exhausted but satisfied and started to help clear the weights off the bar. At that point I felt a little light headed and noticed the distinct smell of ammonia. The light-headedness is easily explained as a lot of blood was redirected to muscles for the lift. But the ammonia smell really caught me off guard. I mentioned this to my trainer, and he started to explain, but got a phone call, then got sidetracked. So I left the gym that day feeling really good, but wondering about the smell.

Searching online didn't give me any real answers at all. There are lots of reports where people are sweating and smelling like ammonia, but this was not happening here. What I experienced lasted only a couple seconds, but it really seemed like I was actually exhaling ammonia. I couldn't find any real information about that. I also read where people sometimes smell like this when on the Atkins's Diet and their body starts breaking down proteins because they have no carbohydrates left in their system to burn for fuel (i.e., they've entered ketosis).

It will typically take several days or longer for a healthy person to enter ketosis on a no-carb diet. I am far and away nowhere near a low-carb diet. I try to eat a lot of protein, but low-carb is NOT me. Plus, you don't instantaneously go into systemic ketosis.

A bit more reading, thinking and discussing, and then talking to my trainer today has let me piece together a little more of the story. Turns out your body has only a limited amount of energy on hand for immediate use. You'll burn through this in 3 to 5 seconds of sustained maximum exertion. Once you've pushed through and burned that available energy out, your body switches modes to continue supplying energy as quickly as possible. The easiest thing for your body to break down is protein (basically amino acids), so this is where it goes first in the reserves under this condition of maximum exertion. (Still following?) Amino acids all have an "amino group" which is NH2. Ammonia is NH3 - see the connection now? So this nitrogen group is not going to be used by your body in it's strive for more energy, so it's a waste product. In ketosis, it'll probably be blood-born and eventually re-used or flushed away by the kidneys. In the short-circuit version of the cycle going on here, I guess it's just exhaled.

This bench press I did probably lasted 4 to 6 s4econds. My body was probably entirely energy starved and started breaking down proteins to keep me going, at which time I exhaled ammonia for a few seconds (surely less than a minute). After the 100% exertion stopped, my body quickly stabilized and went about it's normal activities.

DISCLAIMER: Even though I have 2 graduate degrees, I last took biology in 10th grade. I took 2 semesters of Chemistry in college, but it was "chem for engineers" and not bio-chem or anything that rigorous. I may have all this completely wrong. In this case, I welcome any and all corrections. However, let me again point out that it was not my sweat that smelled like ammonia, but it was "inside my head", hence my assumption that I was exhaling it. This explanation seems plausible enough to me to put forward.

Discussing this today and given my workout history, that day I was probably exactly at 100% of what I could do. Not 2 pounds either way, but right there. I had already done squats with about 200lb on the bar (I'm told you have to add in your body weight for an accurate measure there, but it's easier to track the bar), and felt good and strong. All the pathways were open and my body was rested and ready to work. I imagine that having done one more lift earlier in working up to that weight, or adding a few more pounds to the bar for that attempt, probably would have resulted in a crushing defeat where I just couldn't get the bar moving upwards. But that day I was able to do it. Probably with my body using every bit of energy it had available to it. Good job, body.

At least nowhere on line did I find "if you smell ammonia in your head, it's probably brain cancer"!

Back On Line!!

So, I transferred all my old Yahoo content over here. After crossing some threshold of posts, I started to have to enter one of those cryptic anti-spam phrases. But I kept going, and finally migrated all the old posts. And then logged in the next day to find a message that my blog was blocked. The robots thought I was a "link spammer" and locked my blog.

To get it unlocked, I just had to request it. They'd review and unlock in 4 days. Well, 6 days later, it was still locked. After that, every couple days I would re-request an unlock because there was a dire message that if I did nothing, it all gets deleted in 20 days.

I finally posted a google groups message asking for help and was told there was a long back log. I guess if their bots are going to be this sensitive they should expect a huge list. Anyway, FINALLY today I am unlocked again!

Now I just need to remember all the things I wanted to blog about in the last month....

Flashing and Flickering

Since its creating a couple years ago, our C# charting product has had an issue with flashing and flickering. Several of us have tried several different ways to enable double buffering. This seemed like the solution, especially drawing from our experience in Java. But no matter how we set it, nothing ever changed. So I figured we must just be calling some Paint() method somewhere too many times. I dug through our source again with a debugger trying to figure things out. On occasion, Paint() methods were being called twice, but this didn't seem to correlate with flashing at all. And it was probably part of the setup as well to make sure things appeared correctly.

I then embarked on another search of the Internet trying to find out how to really enable double buffering in .NET. I stumbled upon an answer that was slightly different than anything I've tried before. Specifically, I've always been trying to use various versions of

this.SetStyle(ControlStyles.DoubleBuffer, true);

in various different places. There seemed to be a lot of potential places due to the object hierarchy we have in place. But the latest suggestion I found this morning was to set

this.SetStyle(ControlStyles.DoubleBuffer | ControlStyles.AllPaintingInWmPaint | ControlStyles.UserPaint, true);

and set all those bits on the Control object in its constructor. Well, this was new to me and actually points to one specific object in the package - the Panel that holds the Charts. I added this line to each of its constructors, rebuilt the package and ran our tests. Everything not only passed, but there was no more flashing! Then I ran our demo gallery (a set of examples and much more demanding than the simple tests) and everything looked great!

So thank you to random forum poster somewhere!

Ubuntu and WEP

I installed Ubuntu Linux on my old work laptop. I'll probably have to give this back to work at some point, but I have the option to buy it too. It's an old Dell Latitude (D600) that's a bit banged up from lots of time on the road. But it still works.

So I grabbed Ubuntu 7.10 Desktop and installed it. The LiveCD runs fine, but slow as it's all off the CD. Installing to hard disk is really straightforward, but it kept hanging at 90% when it was detecting hardware (or configuring hardware depending on when it actually hangs). Googling around a bit lead me to the answer to add "-noapic" and "-nolapic". It took me a minute to figure out where to do this, as the launcher for the installation program clearly wasn't the right place since these are basically options for starting Linux rather than an application. But the boot screen options from the LiveCD lets you add parameters then, so I stuck these on to the end of the initial startup command. The OS loaded OK again, and this time the installer completed. Reboot, everything looked good (better than "Error with OS" or something when rebooting after the stalled attempts).

The next step was to get wireless networking working. I've been working with Linux off and on for years, but never on a laptop. I'm very familiar with tools like "ifconfig" and "netstat" to get network bearings, but this doesn't help with wireless. I finally found "iwconfig" but couldn't get it to accept any settings -- just telling me it couldn't do the "SET" operation. The installer let me set up my username and password, but not the root password (I still need to figure out what that is!). Without the root password, I couldn't run "su" and test it as a permissions issue.

So I dug around the Internets a bit more and eventually hit somewhere and clicked the remnants of Linux days in my brain. The key of course is to use "sudo" which then just asked for my user's password (super user rights, without actually using root).

To cut this to the point, the key is to use "sudo" with "iwconfig" to set the key pieces of your wireless setup, as follows:

sudo iwconfig eth1 essid mysid

sudo iwconfig eth1 key a1b2c3d4e5

Just set the ID and the WEP key. And I just use 64-bit WEP, which needs just 5 hex bytes. Finally you need to set it up to use DHCP:

sudo dhclient3 eth0

Now, in theory all of this could be done in Ubuntu's Network Manager thing, but for some reason whatever I set there just wouldn't stick. I confirmed the Internet existed through Firefox, then rebooted and everything still worked. Wonderful.

I'll probably let the kids use this for a while for their Webkinz stuff and general email (how may 4 and 6 year olds can say they use Linux??). We'll see if it's actually worth buying from work, since I'd need to replace the battery to make it at all worthy.

Resurrection Eggs ?!?

OK, I have lots of issues with Easter to begin with. Like any other Christian holiday, much of the themes are from much earlier pagan or local traditions. You bring fir trees inside at the winter solstice to celebrate life through the cold bleak winter season. You celebrate the rebirth of the earth in spring using symbols like eggs and bunnies. But Christian Easter jumps in here with their version of the resurrection story.

Of course, many grade school children who are forced into Sunday school eventually question what eggs and bunnies have to do with Christ being crucified and then apparently rising from the dead. Plus, if it's a Christian holiday, why does its date follow the Hebrew calendar? Except for "educated Christians" who have done their share of reading and comprehending the history of such holidays, most people would probably create some kind of kludgey circular answer.

Now in an apparent attempt to close this gap, some marketing genius has created "resurrection eggs" where you take plastic Easter eggs and fill them with little Christian symbols and hide them around the yard. Now you can turn that fun time into a "fun faith-filled Easter egg hunt". Woohoo - just what every kid wants is more brainwashing while hoping for chocolate goodies.

But just be sure to re-read the gospels before hand and highlight anywhere in there where eggs (plastic or otherwise) are mentioned. (hint: don't spend too much time on this, as there are zero references)

For another year in my household we will be celebrating the coming of spring. This will be via the American traditional Easter basket with colorful fake grass, various egg-shaped objects (plastic or jelly beans), and a chocolate bunny or two.

Happy Spring!

Book recomendation

The God Delusion
I just started reading this book, but already can tell it will be a winner. It's extremely well written with a very logical style. Of course logic doesn't matter that often when speaking of religious topics, but it's necessary when "discussion" turns to "debate". It is also a wonderful source for finding other sources. The varied sources and references are very wide and thorough, so those interested in going deeper have lots of places to start.

I've always loved a good quote, and this book is full of them too. I usually dog-ear the bottom corner of a page where something catches my eye or there's a quote that I want to come back to later. My copies of books like The Moral Animal and The Doors of Perception are full of a dozen or more bent corners, sometimes with margin notes or underlined sentences. I was of course tempted to start doing that while reading this book as well but quickly realized almost every page of the first two chapters would be marked! There are too many good examples and applicable quotes to start marking anything. Plus, I look forward to loaning this book out, and I don't want to bias future readers.

I'll close with the quote with which he opens the book:
"Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?"
-- Douglas Adams
(Adam's books)

Highly recommended - the paperback version can be found in any bookstore or ordered online.

A good day for the kids

As my wife picked up our daughter from school yesterday, the Headmaster (Headmistress??) pulled them aside for a moment to show off what happened today. She showed our daughter a couple flash cards of short words with short vowel sounds (beginner reading words like CAT, MAT, BAT) and Audrey actually read them! Then they set out a string of words to make a sentence: SAM IS A MAN. And she read it. We worked some more after dinner last night writing more of those short beginner words and she was doing really, really well. Sounding things out properly, though not quite squishing the sounds together efficiently yet. Of course, her brother was constantly hinting as well, so sometimes it was hard to tell where her attention lies. Still, I'm impressed - at just over 4 years old she's picking this up very well!

Every morning at the breakfast table while I referee the kids, I'll read the morning paper over my cereal. On the weekends, I do the puzzles - Sudoku on Saturday, and Kakuro, Sudoku, and a crossword on Sunday. Of course the weekday papers have Sudoku as well, but they range from Very Easy on Mondy through Medium on Friday - the weekends are the only days with Hard puzzles. So every morning recently when I get to the end section, the kids are watching alertly for the number grid and then point out the difficulty and gauge how fast I could solve it. Yesterday, Jacob asked if he could start doing the easy ones. This morning's paper had a Medium puzzle, but Monday's paper was still in the recycling bin. I pulled it out and folded the paper up so he could work the puzzle. I told him the rules and started him off with a couple obvious entries. Then I jumped in the shower to return to a completed puzzle, but a mildly disappointed boy. Seems that towards the end he transposed a 6 and 7, throwing off two other numbers. He was frustrated because "there needs to be a 9 in this box, but this 9 is blocking it." But considering he worked through 90% of it alone and only goofed a bit at the end, I'm pretty impressed. He won't settle for the slow pace, but I'm planning on letting him do the Monday puzzles for a couple weeks before moving him up to Easy. I'm sure he thinks he's ready for Medium tomorrow, but I'm very proud of how well he did today!

High Def Resolutions

While setting up my new Home Theater PC (HTPC) the past week or so, I've been doing some reading online and some comparison of different resolutions. There's quite a bit of confusion floating around out there about the differences between 720p, 1080i and 1080p. I decided for my own reference to jot down some numbers and clarifications. As usual with this blog, this is 90% for my future reference, but maybe somebody else will find it useful too.

Let me go through the basics of the math I'm using here with an explicit example, then I'll report various numbers of a number of different resolutions. Starting with the standard HD resolution of 720p, in counting pixels we have a resolution of 1280 x 720 pixels = 921,600 pixels on the screen. This is a progressive scan resolution, so each pixel is updated every refresh. In speaking of standard resolutions, this means 60 Hz for the NTSC world. (The PAL world is 50 Hz, but I don't want to introduce that confusion here -- just know the US is NTSC.) So refreshing at 60 Hz (60 cycles per second) means we're looking at 1280 x 720 x 60 = 55,296,000 pixels/second. This is a number we could use to compare all different resolutions, but let's take it a step further to get into more familiar units, even though the values just change linearly. To get more information, consider 24-bit color - this is where each of Red, Blue and Green values are defined by an 8-bit number. Since 8 bits are 1 byte, we have 3 bytes of color per pixel, so we can multiply the pixel/sec number by 3 bytes/pixel and get a number in more familiar bytes/second unit. Since the numbers are large, we divide by 1024 to get KiloBytes/sec or again by 1024 to get MegaBytes/sec.
For 720p, the whole calculation is 1280 x 720 x 60 x 3 /1024 / 1024 = 158.2 MB/sec.

With all that verboseness out of the way, a 720p display pushes through 158.2 MB/sec. One more word on progressive scan versus interlaced to have the following numbers make more sense. In an interlaced world (standard TV resolution is this), every other row of pixels are updated with each scan, which requires exactly half the bandwidth of a progressive scan at the same resolution. Standard TV is 480i and you'll see "progressive scan" DVD players that have been available for a long time that output 480p pictures. On even a low-end HDTV, you will see a nice difference here - basically twice the resolution from the same source. This translates to 30 Hz in the numbers above - 30 frames per second is standard interlaced display.

On to the numbers. To standardize more, I'm using 16:9 wide screen resolutions here.

480i = 853x480@30Hz = 35.1 MB/s
480p = 853x480@60Hz = 70.2 MB/s
720p = 1280x720@60Hz = 158.2 MB/s
1080i = 1920x1080@30Hz = 178.0 MB/s
1080p = 1920x1080@60Hz = 356 MB/s

Some conclusions:

480i sucks. At least play all digital content (DVDs, etc.) on an HDTV in progressive scan mode if possible. The difference is clear to just about anyone on any TV - we are talking a full factor of 2 here.

1080i versus 720p is a judgment call. Lots of people claim one is better than the other, but these numbers show 1080i is only slightly better than 720p. So don't bash your neighbors 720p HDTV compared to your 1080i -- hardly anyone will be able to see much difference. Exactly, there's a 12.5% difference. When talking about what's noticeable and what's not, 40% is usually the key minimum value.

1080p rules. It's literally twice as good as 1080i. You can argue weather upscaling a standard resolution DVD to 1080p versus 1080i is much different, and that's really kind of a judgment call there. HOWEVER, 1080p sources (Blu-Ray, HD-DVD, .mkv files, etc.) carry twice the amount of information as a 1080i source and 10 times that of standard TV. Incredible.

Finally, for the rest of the internet out there -- YES both 1080i and 1080p can be characterized as 1920 by 1080 resolution. However, the difference between an interlaced and progressive scan display is a factor of two in true resolution, giving a much smoother picture at 1080p.

Personally, I've been keen on 1080i because that's what my TV and cable box both support. Hooking up the HTPC, I've got both 1080i and 720p running well, but have to say that I'm probably going to stick with 720p almost all the time. First, as shown above, upscaling standard DVDs to either is going to result in almost the same quality. Since I can do both, 1080i makes sense -- but there's the pragmatic side too. At 1920x1080 my icons and text are TINY. Even on a 52" screen, it's really hard to see. Plus, with so many pixels and a trackball/keyboard setup it takes a long time to scroll across the screen. at 1280x720, the icons and text are much more visible, and navigation is a lot easier too. Finally, most of the true high-def content I've been downloading is 720p already. It does look good at 1080i, but not worth dealing with tiny icons. I will of course set things up to switch between, but unless I see artifacts or am working with 1080i sources, I think I'll be sitting at 720p most of the time.

Looks like it's Blu-Ray

I was holding out for HD-DVD. I'm not sure why, but it's probably because I'm still fairly anti-Sony. But lined up against each other, even I would admit the Blu-Ray spec sheet looks a bit better (old info, CNET info). Recently the producers making both having been choosing sides, as Warner Brothers just announced. And now Microsoft says they might support Blu-Ray on the Xbox. Another reason I was hoping for HD-DVD was that my XBox 360 would be the inexpensive move to this technology for me - but if they support Blu-Ray, there's no motivation left for HD-DVD as everyone moves aways. I'm just glad I kept waiting to see who would win. Sorry to anyone who's invested in HD-DVD. Time to store that next to your BetaMax stuff