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Thatcher's rants and musings 2003

A place for random thoughts that I must express, to no one in particular.

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"The Democratic Party that I think should be leading the opposition has come down with a bad case of political laryngitis." -- Al Sharpton

Check out this handy list of reasons to like Sharpton (courtesy the RNC!) : http://www.rnc.org/Newsroom/RNCResearch/Research030303.htm

From here: http://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/

Nice.

http://www.johndoe.org/cyrano/25june01.html

That might be the best thing I've read all year. It turns out this guy is a firefighter, and has a treasure trove of intense stories on his site, many having to do with rescue work and firefighting etc. Not everything did it for me, but some of it is great:

http://www.johndoe.org/cyrano/

The latest batch of worms had been really annoying Julie & me. I have upped the ante on SpamAssassin though, so now most spam never even enters my ISP mailbox. If you get your mail via Pair Networks, it's pretty easy to do:

• go into your account control panel

• go to Mail | Mailboxes

• pick the mailbox you want to filter

• select "Enable filtering for this mailbox", and in the blank that says "Save junk email to a folder", enter:

    /dev/null
  

• commit changes

• In "Junk Email Filter Settings", I use "Forgiving" (which is 5.0 on SpamAssassin's scale), which will let some spams through, but virtually everything it rejects actually is spam.

Ah...

A Little Rant On Security

Another thing on my mind is whether GNU/Linux users really do have a leg up on this security stuff. Obviously, we don't get infected with SoBig and the like. But, is that because Linux is inherently secure? Or is it just because comparatively, so few people run Linux, that a worm like that finds it hard to propagate? I think the answers are "Yes".

Yes, there are many fewer people who use Linux to read their mail, and there is a very wide variety of email clients that are used. So it would be relatively difficult for an email worm to multiply by targeting Linux machines.

On the other hand, it is emphatically not the case that Linux email is inherently immune from viruses or worms. All it takes is a buffer overflow in something that is used to process email. If I were trying to do this, I would focus on libjpeg, libpng and/or zlib. Or any number of other libraries that handle media files. Imagine an infected .jpg file that when viewed, could grab user rights on your machine. Stick the exploit in the "Why Brazil Beat Turkey" image that circulated after World Cup 02, and that could be pretty nasty.

Same thing applies to Flash animations, mpeg video and audio, etc. In fact I'm surprised those file types aren't targeted more heavily. I know the code that handles that stuff has bugs, and where there are bugs, there are probably some exploits.

And yes, while Linux isn't inherently immune to viruses, I'm convinced the overall code quality and susceptibility to exploits is far better than Windows. For one thing, Linux web servers do get attacked constantly, since there are a lot of them out there, and they are valuable hacker targets because they tend to be connected to lots of bandwidth. So there is a tremendous level of effort focused on reviewing Linux code and removing security holes.

There's the argument that proprietary code is better quality. But that argument is totally wrong. I've worked on proprietary code my entire career, and for the most part it's at least as crappy as the open source code I'm familiar with, and definitely doesn't get reviewed to the extent that open source code does. (Admittedly, I wrote a lot of the crappy code I've worked with, so maybe it's just me.)

So the nice thing for desktop Linux users is that the mechanisms for reviewing and updating server code also help fix application code. For example, I run Debian on my own machines, and Debian regularly issues security updates for everything, including games. The advisories show up on the same mailing list, right in there with Apache advisories. The same automated updating system that gets me new kernel patches and fixes to zlib covers all the software in the entire system.

This is light-years ahead of the situation on Windows. MS will only be able to equal this when they are in control of all Windows software distribution (which I gather is in their plans...).

On the downside, Debian is only the second most-popular Linux server OS (behind Red Hat), and it's probably further behind other distros among desktop users.

http://pages.emerson.edu/students/Timothy_Correira/tim/tim.html

Also this funny bio:

http://www.gowildisland.com/vineyardshorts/Tim%20Laursen/Tim_Laursen.htm

I wrote a little rant here about garbage collection, i.e the problem of automatically reclaiming unused storage in a computer program, and then decided that's a little too nerdy for a general audience. If you're interested, here it is.

A few years ago I saw the writing on the wall, and jumped ship. Since then I've used 'mutt' (see http://www.mutt.org/) for all personal mail, and lately for work email as well. mutt has a few annoying features as well (it's awkward to edit multiple emails at once), but overall it's God's gift to technical email users.

Unfortunately I haven't weaned Julie off of OE yet. Which means I have the recurring pleasure, a couple times a year, of backing up her message repository and moving it to a different machine (when we go back & forth between NY and Oak Bluffs).

This year, she's on OE 6, which apparently has an impressive new feature: it can't import messages from its OWN MAILBOX FORMAT! [Actually the problem was that it can't read from read-only files (!), for instance, in my case, backups on a CDR. Instead of giving an error message like "can't read from a read-only file", which is absurd enough, but at least helpful, it gives some generalized "can't deal with your database" message.]

This illustrates one reason I go out of my way to use free software: each new release of a free software package generally tries very hard not to annoy its current users. When the motivation for updates comes directly from user demand, the software tends to start modest, and slowly but surely get better, without changing things that already work fine. When a software package is updated in order to extend a lock-in (OE) or promote some other service (WinAMP), it tends to start out flashy and nice, but antagonize its users with each update. Sure there are exceptions, but this is the general trend I see.

Plant-animal subsistence ratios and macronutrient energy estimations in worldwide hunter-gatherer diets

My summary of this article: "Nobody has ever done a good direct measurement of the nutrient composition in hunter-gatherer diets in general, and furthermore there aren't any completely un-Westernized hunter-gatherer societies left on the earth that we can go study. Nevertheless, we will look at data from Murdock's Ethnographic Atlas and take some wild guesses."

Read the article if you want detailed results; it's pretty interesting. Then read this commentary:

Hunter-gatherer diets -- a different perspective

Basically the article authors argue that hunter-gatherers ate a lot of meat and fish on average, although not surprisingly their data has huge variance. The commentary, on the other hand, points out the myriad problems with trying to analyze diet using Ethnographic Atlas and then goes on to explode the "caveman diet" argument from an evolutionary perspective. Nutshell: we're decended from a very long line of herbivores/omnivores; the hunter-gatherer mode is relatively recent from an evolutionary perspective, and the diet of the hunter-gatherer mode is extremely variable but probably more plant-focused than the article suggests. I.e. we're very adaptable omnivores.

In that spirit, here's my non-scientific recommendation: eat a balanced diet, try to eat whole foods, get some damn exercise.

17 March 2003

Let's Talk About Me

I'm in Wired, see here: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.04/play.html

Dig the nautical theme. One of these days I'm going to write up some game-design notes, and I'll maybe talk a little bit about the 19th century whaling sim I've been pondering for a while now. (Which is a totally different game idea from the solar sailing thing.)

16 Feb 2003

Who Would Jesus Bomb?

Yesterday I went to the peace rally in NYC, with Julie and my sister Amy and some other friends. It was great to finally be surrounded by (hundreds of thousands of) people who were willing to stand up in the freezing cold (it was really cold!) and say “No War!”. A reaffirmation of sanity.

We took the 6 train uptown to 49th St, on a train packed with protesters. We arrived around noon, and slowly filed out onto Lexington Avenue, which was jam-packed with people. The offical rally was three blocks east, on First Ave. Apparently the police had closed off the streets leading to the rally site due to the extremely large crowd in the area. But there were still so many people left on Second, Third and Lexington Aves that they filled the streets and blocked all traffic. We never got any closer to the “official” rally than Third Ave, which had turned into an informal march. Over the next hour we moved northward for a dozen blocks with the mass of protesters filling the streets. At that point the cold got the better of us and we peeled off to get something to eat and go home.

The protesters were a fairly diverse bunch. There were a lot of activists who came in from out of town, but there were also a lot of average joes & janes. The mood where I was was peaceful and affable. People were politely obeying the police directions, and the police for their part were polite and friendly.

There were some good hand-made placards:

• Beth Against Death

• Imperialism is Passe

• Freezing for Peace

• and my personal favorite, Who Would Jesus Bomb?

1 Jan 2003

Jamaica

Happy New Year!

Julie and I just got back from vacation in Jamaica. We stayed in "Treasure Beach", which is a conglomeration of small fishing villages on the South Coast, at a fabulous guest house called Siwind. While we were there, I helped create a web site for Siwind, along with Julie, Evelyn and Michel (a couple of German guests we met there), and Celeste (property manager). Check it out; all the photos were taken during our week there. If you want to get reeaaaallly relaxed, I highly recommend Treasure Beach, Jamaica in general, and Siwind in particular.

Some impressions of Jamaica:

• It's gorgeous. My vacation photos show the beachy sunsety stuff pretty well, but a lot of the rest of it is stunning as well. The parts of the interior we saw, during car rides to/from the airport or the Bob Marley museum, were very hilly, very green, and very pastoral. I also took a bike ride up into the coastal hills behind Treasure Beach, which was awesome.

  Anyway, the little shacks and houses in Jamaica often are beautifully painted, either with two or three colorful horizontal bands plus accents, and/or (on businesses especially) murals and catchy slogans. Unfortunately on our car rides we didn't have time to get out and take good photos of houses so I guess you'll have to take my word for it. I did get a semi-OK picture of some incredible lighted Christmas decorations on a house near where we stayed.

• The food was great. Tons of fresh fruits and vegetables, creative spices, really fresh fish, goat, breads, cakes, and the world's best soft drink, Ting. (South Africa & Botswana had some great soft drinks too, like Appletiser, Sparkling Grenadilla, etc -- why do developing countries have the best sodas?)

• Everybody speaks English, and people are generally open and friendly. The accent is different, but people are good at adapting to Americanese for the tourists. For the most part I had an easier time communicating in Jamaica than when I was in Scotland, for example. There was definitely that developing-country experience of being constantly beseiged by people wanting to sell stuff, but vendors tend to be responsive if you're clear when you don't want to buy something, and don't act like it's a personal offense against them. Also, unlike some places, people seem pretty willing to just chat with stranger tourists.

• Parts of it reminded me of Botswana. The appearance of the people, the heat, the red dirt, the rustic architecture, the donkeys, goats, cows, dogs. Parts of it were totally different, like the hilliness, the general friendliness of the people, the spicy food, the ocean.

• People really do walk around saying "Hey mon".

rants index: current | 2007 archive | 2006 archive | 2005 archive | 2004 archive | 2003 archive | 2002 archive