Month: October 2003

One last interview

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I think that this should be the last of my posts regarding my recent notoriety. Tech news site BetaNews interviewed me about the entire affair yesterday, and the interview has just been posted on their site.

On October 23, Michael “Woody” Hanscom posted a picture to his Web blog, intended to garner a chuckle or two from a few close friends and colleagues.

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The reaction the picture drew from his employer can only be compared to a kind of Orwellian nightmare where anything an individual does online can come back to haunt them. That nightmare is the reality faced by an increasingly vulnerable corporate world where the Web can be used as a tool to disclose potentially sensitive and damaging trade secrets to the masses.

Thanks to David Worthington for conducting the interview.

Hey Mr. DJ!

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Yes, yes, I know. Online quizzes are so passé. But every so often they can be fun — and for the first time in about twenty years, I can describe something as “totally tubular.” Totally.

Only 69.75% — how depressing! Of course, I was kicking myself as I read the answers for the ones I didn’t get. I’m just ashamed I missed as many as I did. And I used to call myself a DJ!?

(via Nate)

And I thought the politicians were scary

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Here’s a fun little Halloween story that I’d not heard before. Apparently, the U.S. Capitol Building is haunted!

Halloween or not, the 200-year-old Capitol is said to be one of the most haunted buildings in Washington, says Jim Berard, Democratic communications director for the House Transportation Committee. Berard compiled some of the more famous ghost stories in his recently published “The Capitol Inside & Out,” a history of the nation’s legislative center.

[…]

Berard says the most famous Capitol apparition is the “Demon Cat,” thought to date back to the early days when cats roamed the building to keep the rat population down. The cat, said to appear at times of national crisis, grows to enormous size before suddenly vanishing. Legend has it that one guard fired his gun at it, and another was so frightened he suffered a fatal heart attack.

Okay…so who’s up for an overnight field trip?

(via D)

Look out! Pornography! Duck!

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I’m so disappointed that I didn’t find out about this earlier. I can’t tell you how much safer and more secure I feel about the world around me to know that our dearly beloved President declared the week of October 26th to November 1st, 2003, to be Protection From Pornography Week.

Why, just the other day as I was in the corner store by my apartment, I was suddenly assaulted by Pornography. Racks and racks of catalogs, cardboard squares just barely covering the bountiful breasts of the ladies on the covers. “BARELY LEGAL!”, they screamed at me. “JUST TURNED EIGHTEEN!” called out another magazine. I couldn’t get away — I tried to leave, but suddenly I was accosted by “THE GIRLS OF STARBUCKS!” It was horrendous!

And if that weren’t bad enough — though I shudder to recall it, dear reader, and I do hope that those of you of a delicate constitution will turn away — right next to these was an even more hideous display of Pornography. Videos! I didn’t want to look at them, but the gaudy colors, the huge type on the boxes, and the titles — my God, the titles! “HOT CHOCOLATE LOVE!” cried out one, and I tried to turn away, lest it tempt me further. But it did me no good — right next to it sat another, coyly taunting me with promises of “HOT ASIAN ACTION!”

I turned and fled — it was more than any sane person should have to bear. How can we continue to allow this filth, this putrescence, this utter degradation to invade our lives? Sure, some may try to claim that it was in a small corner of the store, that I didn’t have to look. But truly, brothers and sisters, they called to me! I was a slave to their wanton desires! This must be STOPPED!

Ahem.

Or we could just go on with our lives and spend our tax dollars on something that might actually do some good for once. Cripes.

And now, in honor of this precious and noble week, I give you…BOOBIES!

Blue Footed Boobie

Another thing that D and I noticed while we were looking at the proclamation.

We have committed significant resources to the Department of Justice to intensify investigative and prosecutorial efforts to combat obscenity, child pornography, and child sexual exploi-ta-tion on the Internet.

“Exploi-ta-tion.”

The only explanation we could come up with is that breaking the word down like that is the only way President Bush would be able to make it through that many syllables without stumbling, and someone forgot to correct that before uploading the speech to the site. But even so — couldn’t they at least break it down into the correct number of syllables?

(via Paul)

People must like my design

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One of the many things that I’ve enjoyed about the numerous comments I’ve received over the past few days is that I’ve gotten quite a few compliments on my site design. As I’m generally not much of a designer (trust me on this one — my previous attempts were not horrid, but certainly not great), that’s always a nice compliment to get.

However, there is a potential downside to this that I hadn’t foreseen — that being people ripping off your site design.

The top of the page

The bottom of the page

Even better (or worse, depending on how you look at it) is how I found out. Normally, things like this aren’t always easy to spot. I found out simply because as I was looking through my referrer logs, I noticed a link that I hadn’t seen before — not uncommon over the past couple days — only it didn’t seem to be pointing to one of my pages. Instead, it appeared to be pointing to itself. Odd.

So I bounced over to take a look. Imagine my surprise when I found my very own site design staring me in the face! I was not at all happy. Then I pulled up the source code for the site — and started laughing. Just to give you an idea:

  1. The title of the page is still ‘eclecticism’.
  2. The meta tags still hold all of my information: this site’s tagline, RSS feed, and FOAF file.
  3. The code has been mangled by Microsoft FrontPage 5.0 — always the hallmark of a top-notch site designer. ;)
  4. The trackback RDF data for my posts is still in the page.
  5. While the images in the “ad banner” at the bottom of the page have been replaced, the title arguments are still the same.
  6. It still has the TypePad statistics tracking code at the bottom of the page (which is why it showed up in my referrer logs).

The best part of all of those, though, was that he’d not altered the CSS stylesheet at all — so he was hotlinking the banner image of the Seattle skyline that I use (while it was displaying on his site, he was still pulling it off of my images directory here on TypePad)!

So, in an effort to be polite, I searched around the site for an e-mail contact link so that I could ask him to take my design down. Unfortunately, he hasn’t provided one. So I’ve been forced to resort to slightly more drastic means.

A quick recode of my stylesheet to replace my banner image here on this site with an identical one, so that it won’t be disturbed, and a little bit of quick and dirty Photoshop work on the image that he’s linking to, and instead of my skyline graphic, he now has a banner proudly displaying to the world that ~~his site design was stolen from me~~.

Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery. But this — this was just clumsy, stupid, and poorly executed. I hope he finds another design soon. Just watch your referrer logs — his next design just might be yours!

(In addition to my screenshots, Phil has provided .pdf screencaptures on his site — thanks!)

'Big Mac' details

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Dr. Srinidhi Varadarajan, the head of Virginia Tech‘s recent construction of a 1,100-node Power Mac G5-based supercomputer (currently tentatively ranked as the 3rd fastest supercomputer in the word) gave a presentation at the O’Reilly Mac OS X conference this week. Lots of interesting little technical tidbits in the article, detailing just how they were able to get the project up and running.

If you’ve ever sat with a TiBook in your lap, you understand that there is a further significant issue. As hot as a G4 runs, a G5 runs hotter. With a traditional air-conditioning setup, the calculations showed that instead of emptying out the air three times an hour as would be typical, they would need to empty the air three times per minute. Computers tend to each cool front to back. So the plan was to arrange the computers in rows back to back and pull the hot air out of the hot aisle. This would have required wind velocity under the floor of more than 60 miles per hour and still would have resulted in some hot spots. They decided instead to use a refrigerator-like system. Chillers cool water to 40 degrees to 50 degrees, which is then used to chill refrigerant, which is piped into a matrix of copper pipes. Effectively, you have a distributed refrigerator.

Is Boing Boing broken?

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As I start to get caught up with my e-mail and get back into the swing of things, I’ve been bouncing around my usual haunts. What in the world happened to Boing Boing? While the current page is certainly friendly and cheerful, it’s not quite the Boing Boing I’m familiar with.

Odd. I just hope everything’s okay over there.

Are you on the blacklist?

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The NRA has a 19-page ‘blacklist‘ of groups, associations, companies and individuals known to support gun control legislation posted on their website. Feeling left out ’cause you’re not on it? Sign up to be added!

(via MeFi and Dad)

Bonus link: The truth about the Second Amendment.

As a matter of law, the meaning of the Second Amendment has been settled since the ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court in U.S. v. Miller, 307 U.S. 174 (1939). In that case, the High Court wrote that the “obvious purpose” of the Second Amendment was “to assure the continuation and render possible the effectiveness” of the state militia. The Court added that the Amendment “must be interpreted and applied with that end in view.” Since Miller, the Supreme Court has addressed the Second Amendment in two cases. In Burton v. Sills, 394 U.S. 812 (1969), the Court dismissed the appeal of a state court ruling upholding New Jersey’s strict gun control law, finding the appeal failed to present a “substantial federal question.” And in Lewis v. United States, 445 U.S. 55 (1980), the Court upheld the federal law banning felons from possessing guns. The Court found no “constitutionally protected liberties” infringed by the federal law.

In addition, in Maryland v. United States, 381 U.S. 41 (1965) and Perpich v. Department of Defense, 496 U.S. 334 (1990), cases not involving the Second Amendment, the Supreme Court has affirmed that today’s militia is the National Guard.

Since Miller was decided, lower federal and state courts have addressed the meaning of the Second Amendment in more than thirty cases. In every case, the courts have decided that the Amendment guarantees a right to be armed only in connection with service in a “well regulated Militia.” The courts unanimously have rejected the NRA’s view that the Second Amendment is about the self-defense or sporting uses of guns. As the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit wrote, the courts “have analyzed the Second Amendment purely in terms of protecting state militias, rather than individual rights.” United States v. Nelson, 859 F.2d 1318 (1988).

(via [fold_and_mutilate])

More E-voting issues

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Wired has two articles worth reading on e-voting machines and the security issues (specifically, the frightening lack of any) involved with them.

E-Vote Protest Gains Momentum

Swarthmore College students embroiled in a legal battle against voting machine-maker Diebold Election Systems have received a ground swell of support from universities and colleges nationwide.

The memos suggest the company knew about security problems with its voting machines long before it sold the machines to various states, including California, Georgia and, most recently, Maryland. The memos have popped up on numerous websites since August, despite attempts by Diebold to force ISPs and webmasters to remove them from the Internet.

E-Vote Software Leaked Online

Software used by an electronic voting system manufactured by Sequoia Voting Systems has been left unprotected on a publicly available server, raising concerns about the possibility of vote tampering in future elections.

The security breach means that anyone with a minimal amount of technical knowledge could see how the code works and potentially exploit it. According to a computer programmer who discovered the unprotected server, the files also contain Visual Basic script and code for voting system databases that could allow someone to learn how to rig voting results. The programmer spoke on condition of anonymity.

Electronic voting can be more secure and accurate than the systems that we’ve had such trouble with over the past few years, but only if the companies can be trusted, the systems are verified secure by a third-party review, and if there’s an additional printed “receipt” that can be tallied in case of recounts. The security breaches and known vulnerabilities of the current E-voting systems make it clear that in their present state, they cannot be trusted — and I, for one, would greatly prefer it if I could be sure that my vote in 2004 goes to the candidate I intend it to.