Saturday was a great day. The wedding started toward the evening and we were on the road back to Northern Virginia around 9:00-9:30PM. It was a phenomenal ceremony, and Rachel looked absolutely amazing. I can't even begin to describe how happy I was when I saw her walking down the aisle toward the front where we were waiting for her. We are back and taking about a week off, postponing the real honeymoon for a later date when we have had an opportunity to rest up and get things back on track. We've got so much stuff to take care of like clean up, finishing the move out at my apartment and getting caught up on the sleep that we have missed that we're saving our real vacation time for when we've gotten everything settled down.

We don't have any photos to share yet, and I will have to see where Rachel stands on that. Neither of us are big on putting that sort of information out there for public consumption, but in this case, since it was such a big and wonderful event, I think an exception might be made when we get ahold of them.

Update: I got my digital camera back, and I have some pictures of the scenery inside the church. The official wedding pictures are not in our hands at this point, but as soon as they are, I expect to post some of the good ones.

Update: Ok, so apparently it's a fake. Still, it's funny even though it's fake.

C++ is normally my least favorite of all of the major programming languages. I tend to avoid it like the plague, but I have always been fascinated by the Qt toolkit, so I bought a book on the Qt toolkit. It really is the sort of framework for writing software that makes you stand back and ask why something like it was never made the standard library for C++. If that had happened, C++ might not have ended up as nearly the nightmare that it is today. Hell, it might actually be somewhat friendly to casual developers! After a little bit of playing around, here is a quick bit of code that I threw together based on some samples. Pretty simple:

#include <QApplication>

#include <QHBoxLayout>

#include <QVBoxLayout>

#include <QLabel>

#include <QPushButton>

#include <QSlider>

#include <QSpinBox>



int main(int argc, char *argv[])

{

   QApplication app(argc, argv);

   QWidget *window = new QWidget();

   window->setWindowTitle("Testing...");



   QSlider *slider = new QSlider(Qt::Horizontal);

   slider->setRange(0,100);



   QObject::connect(slider, SIGNAL(valueChanged(int)), slider, SLOT(setValue(int)));



   QLabel *label = new QLabel("Testing!");



   QObject::connect(slider, SIGNAL(valueChanged(int)), label, SLOT(setNum(int)));



   QHBoxLayout *layout = new QHBoxLayout();

   layout->addWidget(slider);

   layout->addWidget(label);



   QVBoxLayout *layout2 = new QVBoxLayout();

   QPushButton *button = new QPushButton("Exit");

   QObject::connect(button, SIGNAL(clicked()), &app, SLOT(quit()));

   layout2->addLayout(layout);

   layout2->addWidget(button);

   window->setLayout(layout2);





   window->show();



   return app.exec();

}

To build it, run:

1) Save this code into a new directory (like qhello) as main.cpp
2) Run Qt\4.3.0\bin\qtvars.bat
3) cd to qhello
4) qmake -project
5) qmake qhello.pro
6) make
7) release\qhello.exe

The most significant feature besides the consistency of this toolkit is the signal/slot system that Trolltech created for Qt. Signals and slots allow you to bind your widgets together so that when something happens to one, it automatically communicates with another widget. No event handling code required!

Some say that revenge is a dish best served cold. I say that it is a dish best abstained from. If you wish to compare it to a meal, then compare it to Fugu. What appears to be a delicacy could in fact kill you in a very painful manner. Likewise, lashing out in vengeance or seeking revenge, can result in physical and/or spiritual death. You can seek it many times without suffering any harm, just like you can enjoy eating Fugu without getting sick. It's just that one time that can destroy everything.

Download it here. It contains a bug fix for the trackback output that generates the dates the same way that it does for the comments. Let's call this... version 1.3....

This is one of those rare, but beautiful things that happens on a forum. A total ass kicking on Slashdot:

Dude, don't categorically deny someone's assertion then go off on unrelated tangents to support your bogus view. Why don't you just say what you mean "DaTS RACIST!!!11"

Until 9/11 the biggest act of terror committed on US soil was the Oklahoma City bombing, committed by a right wing white supremacist. The act of terror that caused greatest loss of life in Europe is still the Bolgona railway station bombing perpetrated by a neo-facist right wing group.

Those are incidents. Not a count of terrorists. Those two incidents were done by a handful of people. But, that's not what's getting counted here is it. So it means nothing and supports nothing of your "your wrong, neener neener neener" type comment. If you had a magic filter, could line all the terrorists up, and count them. Most are islamic. Sure, most islamic terrorists are also pretty incompetent if you line up the piss-ass car bombs vs. OKC (a marvelous demonstration of American "can-do" attitude).

The PLO was secular

Again, so what? Or are you trying to say the PALISTINE LIBERATION ORGANIZATION is a bunch of Catholic terrorists? Wiccans maybe? Oh, so their stated purpose was secular, something about having a separate Palestine, but when that was offered they switched back to "da Jooos did it to us!!!11" That's not secular, that's just more plain muslem asshattery.

Most religious terrorism is sectarian, Catholics against Protestants, Protestants against Catholics, Sunni against Shi'ia, Shi'ia against Sunnis.

And, if you take all the "secretarian terrorists" (as you call them) and count them up, you get a few christians, some undeclared, and a whole metric assload of muslems. Again, irrelevant and not supporting your point. Which is what? Just rag on someone because you don't want pointing out the fact that most people making terrorist attacks are muslems? Face it, motherfucker, aside from the little war the US started, muslems are the ones blowing civilians up on daily basis.

And since we are on the subject of terrorism, what do you call a government that employs torture, detention without trial, starts wars, disregards international law and treaties? Perhaps the term is not terrorist, but the corrupt crew are still a bunch of totally evil bastards regardless.

That's fascism, idiot.

I am about as liberal as they come and hate the bush regime as much as anyone can, but man your twisted pile of shit mascaraeding as fact really pisses me off. Do me a favor, get your stupid ass off my side, you aren't helping do anything except give the Bill O'reilly fanboys an easy target.

I saw that and knew that I had to share it and save it for posterity.

This will be of interest to anyone who is curious about playing with Linux. I must admit that too much of this rings true, and presents what is, in my opinion, the Achilles' Heel of the Linux development process. The first page is a lot of background, but the second page is where the political aspects of the Linux kernel development start to get laid out in gory detail:

Are developer egos a problem in the open source development model in general?

I think any problem with any development model has multiple factors, and ultimately, it is humans that make decisions. I won't comment on the humans themselves.

If there is any one big problem with kernel development and Linux it is the complete disconnection of the development process from normal users. You know, the ones who constitute 99.9% of the Linux user base.

The Linux kernel mailing list is the way to communicate with the kernel developers. To put it mildly, the Linux kernel mailing list (lkml) is about as scary a communication forum as they come. Most people are absolutely terrified of mailing the list lest they get flamed for their inexperience, an inappropriate bug report, being stupid or whatever. And for the most part they're absolutely right. There is no friendly way to communicate normal users' issues that are kernel related. Yes of course the kernel developers are fun loving, happy-go-lucky friendly people. Just look at any interview with Linus and see how he views himself.

I think the kernel developers at large haven't got the faintest idea just how big the problems in userspace are. It is a very small brave minority that are happy to post to lkml, and I keep getting users telling me on IRC, in person, and via my own mailing list, what their problems are. And they've even become fearful of me, even though I've never viewed myself as a real kernel developer.

Just trawl the normal support forums (which I did for Gentoo users as a way of finding bug reports often because the users were afraid to tell me) and see how many obvious kernel related issues there are. I'd love to tell them all to suddenly flood lkml with their reports of failed boots with various kernels, hardware disappearing, stopping working suddenly, memory disappearing, trying to use software suspend and having your balls blown off by your laptop, and so on.

And there are all the obvious bug reports. They're afraid to mention these. How scary do you think it is to say 'my Firefox tabs open slowly since the last CPU scheduler upgrade'? To top it all off, the enterprise users are the opposite. Just watch each kernel release and see how quickly some $bullshit_benchmark degraded by .1% with patch $Y gets reported. See also how quickly it gets attended to.

I can't even imagine Microsoft or Apple treating their customers like that. This is one of those things that will ultimately cause much of the open source movement to fail spectacularly. Once you enter the big software engineering arena, you lose the right to dismissively say, "I'm just a hobbyist." It's put up or shut up time, and Linux developers will end up driving their platform into the ground if they refuse to face the fact that they must meet the needs of their users in general, not a particular class such as "enterprise users." That is something that they clearly are not particularly good at doing.

I've had the resource and scheduling issues pop up in a bad way on my laptop too. I hate to say it, but Windows XP really is faster than Ubuntu Feisty Fawn (7.04) on it, unless I am running a stripped down desktop with Xfce... which is a little too spartan compared to KDE or GNOME. What's worse is that I can run resource hogs like iTunes and Folding@Home (which is designed to use 100% of your CPU!) while running Firefox and Eclipse on Windows with no problem. I like the way that Desktop Linux is shaping up in many respects, but it needs a whole hell of a lot of work to get it to the point where it can compete on performance.

I wrote this comment (well, here's the relevant parts worth reposting) on Dr. Helen's blog in response to a troll (yes, I feed them sometimes):

go to a feminist blog. Only there do you see many, many of the women clucking about how it's their God-given right to go to a seedy bar at 2AM, alone, downtown in a big city, get wasted and have no possibility of getting raped, mugged, murdered, etc. We're not talking hypothetical here, which we would all agree to, but rather they simply cannot accept the existence of evil men and women who would do heinous things to them in such a setting.

If a man wrote that he should be able to walk down a poor section of town wearing a high end Rolex, custom-fitted Armani and Gucci, $20,000+ of gold/diamond bling and not get mugged, he'd be lampooned as an abject moron who can't accept reality. Such is the difference that you seem to miss.

If a man ever spoke about social ills theoretical and real that affect men the way that most feminists do about ones that affect women, they'd be humiliated. The reason that bloggers like Vox Day and Dr. Helen rip on women so much is because there is a degree of stupidity and detachment from reality that is tolerated in women by society, that is not tolerated in men. Call it a throwback to the era of the sheltered female protected by the menfolk if you like, but it is real. Obviously, many women are not stupid (Rachel and the women in our families are examples from my own frame of reference). It's just that there is an undeniable tolerance in society for extremely stupid behavior that gets one into serious trouble from women (like that referenced above) that would get a "WTF was he thinking" response from most people if it happened to a man.

The big date with my most wonderful wife-to-be is getting closer and closer, so we've been scrambling to tie up loose ends like getting my apartment cleaned out. For the past few days it's been cleaning, moving lot's of stuff and a lot of crap that no one really wants to do. I wouldn't have gotten through it without her pushing me, that's for sure. She complements me in that respect (and in other ways). By the time it's all completed, we're going to look back at this past weekend and this week as one big blur, I think. Tomorrow, if we can get everything taken care of after work between 3PM and 6PM, it's off to see Transformers, finally.

In the midst of trying to rebuild my music collection which I lost, I tried to play some of the AAC files that I had ripped from my CDs. I couldn't do it without things getting so choppy that it was a total wash. I quickly loaded KSysGuard, which is the equivalent of the Windows Task Manager, and then I was greeted with an ugly truth: my Linux desktop made Windows look like a Heroin-addicted anorexic girl dabbling in bulimia with respect to memory use. About 1GB of RAM used up while running a full desktop (KDE 3.5.6), a media player (Amarok), a fresh instance of Firefox and some inconsequential server apps like Apache and MySQL. Now, that's not that big of a deal because I boosted my laptop to 2GB of RAM.

I must confess that I am sorely tempted to switch my laptop back to Windows on utilitarian grounds. I enjoy Linux; at heart I converted from Windows to a Unix user about 9 years ago when I started dabbling with Linux at 15. That is why I am now firmly convinced that my next laptop absolutely must be a MacBook Pro. It is the only way that I can have my Unix and have a usable desktop that is written by one large software engineering team that has a common vision for how things should work.

So, in the mean time I think I will stay with Linux because it meets most of my needs, and is still usable. It's just that I am starting to yearn more and more for the days that I ran OS X exclusively in college and before that, when I could escape to BeOS (the closest thing to utopia, desktop computing has ever known). It's starting to grate on me because I use a computer so much at home. It's like being forced to drive the average American car because you can't go Japanese; it works, but you know it should be better, but can't do anything about that; I consider my 2007 Honda Civic Coupe to be the finest mechanical creation I have ever owned if that tells you anything.

I think that what is driving me nuts about this is that I am a developer, a code monkey (who would have thought from my blog) and a software engineer in training. You can ask Rachel, and she will tell you that I spend too much time hacking away at my laptop doing things from jerryrigging a work around to get Mono to build from subversion, to writing my own Java code for accessing the XML-RPC framework that Movable Type uses. The problems is, my time is running out, and my cash is getting even shorter because I have bigger expenses on the horizon... a house in Loudon County or Warrenton maybe? Car payments on a Honda Civic and an Acura RSX Type-S. Some medical stuff that needs to be done in the next year. I may have to pay my way through grad school. Doesn't leave a lot of room for making stupid, dumbass decisions on buying computer hardware. I need to get it right. My next laptop may also be my last one until it dies.

And "it" is not my interest in the laptop. So, I bide my time. I wait, patiently for the next generation of multicore laptop CPUs to hit the market. In the mean time, I cry and die a little inside as I realize that one fucking codec (AAC) is making me look askance at my Linux desktop even more than realizing my Linux desktop is sucking down RAM like a fat kid in a Coca Cola plant. When you have a 1.6Ghz Pentium M laptop with 2GB of RAM choke over a bloody AAC file that iTunes could handle easily on a far less powerful Mac, you'll understand. You'll also realize that those aren't warts you're seeing on the face of your computer, but pox marks with Clearasil on them.

Time to grab my iPod Nano and go take a stroll around the complex.

Bush once again reminds us of the freedoms we stand to lose to terrorism, by taking them away from us. It's a patriotic thing, really, since he's just giving a taste of what it would be like if the terrorists won, right?

Section 1. (a) Except to the extent provided in section 203(b)(1), (3), and (4) of IEEPA (50 U.S.C. 1702(b)(1), (3), and (4)), or in regulations, orders, directives, or licenses that may be issued pursuant to this order, and notwithstanding any contract entered into or any license or permit granted prior to the date of this order, all property and interests in property of the following persons, that are in the United States, that hereafter come within the United States, or that are or hereafter come within the possession or control of United States persons, are blocked and may not be transferred, paid, exported, withdrawn, or otherwise dealt in: any person determined by the Secretary of the Treasury, in consultation with the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense,

(i) to have committed, or to pose a significant risk of committing, an act or acts of violence that have the purpose or effect of:

(A) threatening the peace or stability of Iraq or the Government of Iraq; or

(B) undermining efforts to promote economic reconstruction and political reform in Iraq or to provide humanitarian assistance to the Iraqi people;

(ii) to have materially assisted, sponsored, or provided financial, material, logistical, or technical support for, or goods or services in support of, such an act or acts of violence or any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order; or

You would think that the United States, not Iraq, was being used as a launchpad of terrorism against the new government of Iraq based on this executive order. Given the fact that President Bush has made no discernible attack on the influence of Wahabi Islam, which is the motivating ideology for most of the terrorists, the President clearly does not deserve the benefit of the doubt. Even now, it is a known fact that Saudi Arabia is the biggest source of this trouble, period, yet nothing is being done about that.

There can be no mistaking the fact that this is just another blind power grab by the President. Not only is this not a war power, it is one that is completely prohibited by the fifth amendment, which prohibits the seizure of wealth without compensation outside of a court-imposed punishment. The only legitimate response from Congress, if they could get their hands out of the cookie jar long enough to care, would be to impeach both the President and the Vice President over this.

And as Radley Balko points out, if the President wants to get incensed about people who are undermining the stability of Iraq, he need only look to his own poor decisions. Most of the people who deserve the blame for letting the terrorism get out of hand are sitting in or politically connected to the White House.

The FBI has used spyware to get around encryption, and you know what? I think that's great. It's about time that law enforcement started finding ways to get around strong encryption rather than try to get legislators to outlaw it for private use. The only real problem that the FBI and other agencies are going to face is that such measures won't work on people who are using operating systems that the police have little or no experience with like the BSDs, many flavors of Linux and older platforms like Amiga or OS/2.

Truly the left and right do meet at times, and when they do, it can be amazing to see how conservatives will behave like liberals, and liberals like conservatives. Drivel like this shows how much of the moralizing of both sides is in fact nothing more than a form of moral relativism that romanticizes the excesses of others that by all rights it should be rebuking:

In our eyes, the islamist suicide bomber has come to epitomize "the terrorist", a modern savage.....yet in fact, this "other" is a man whose life revolves around the mosque, daily prayer, restrained dress, moderate fasting, a tight-knit family and community. When pushed to the limit, a committed muslim may decide to sacrifice his own life...for what he sees as a greater social and spiritual good. Which one of us in the west will do this now?

Clearly the author is not one, nor has he met one. In fact there are many people in the West who would sacrifice themselves, however they often belong to religious groups, or if irreligious, come from families that highly value civic virtue. Christian missionaries from the West who even now are suffering and dying in less hospitable environments as well as atheist, civic virtue-minded men like Pat Tillman who sacrificed wealth and advancement for service to his nation. However, the question itself is a stupid one, as most people will never have an opportunity to find out exactly how far they are willing to go to stand for what they believe in and cherish, since they will never have a gun to their head demanding they abandon it.

On the surface this archetypical Muslim man seems like the antithesis of the corrupt and decadent West. He is religious, tries to obey many strict rules governing his behavior and in the abstract values his family. However, it does not mean that at heart he is any different from a "corrupt, materialistic Westerner." In fact, any rational human being would have to question the heart and nature of a man who could live by such strictures, and then make it a moral duty to murder people who have never met him and done him harm. If it is legitimate to say that he was harmed by decadent, sexualized Western media, then it is also legitimate to say that the West has been harmed by the poisonous filth spewed by much of the Islamic clergy and media in the name of their religion.

There is a tendency among conservatives to see these things as dichotomies like religion versus secularism. However, this ignores the fact that there are irreconcilable differences between many of the groups that are to be lumped together as one big happy family. One need only compare the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the Koran of Mohammed to get a feel for how radically different Christianity and Islam are. In fact, Western secularism itself has been traditionally informed by the former; there is far more common ground between many Western secularists and born again Christians than there is between born again Christians and Islam. Many PCisms, such as the Cult of non-Judgmentalism are descended from Christian religious errors.

One can only conclude that anyone who has a soft spot for "pious Muslim men" who turn radical and sacrifice their lives in battle against the materialistic West is at heart a fellow traveler of the Islamists and is guilty of treason at heart. That they cannot be convicted in court for aiding and abetting the actions of our enemies is beside the point. Their sympathies lay with men and women who commit acts that are, objectively speaking, immoral to the point of being violently depraved. While some understanding can be had for those who sympathize with elements that want to forcefully remove us from Iraq, there can be no mistaking that anyone who generally sympathizes with the portrait painted above is in a category that deserves derision and contempt.

Today I turn a ripe old 24 years old. In one more year, my car insurance will go down a lot, I'll be able to rent a car from any rental place in the United States and I'll be a quarter of a century old. In the mean time, I'm off to work.

Web services are all the rage today so I figured that I would try to figure some of that stuff out since they're very popular around here in Northern Virginia. So I got to playing around with some XML-RPC stuff today. I figured that since my blog software already exports some functions, that I would take advantage of that for testing some stuff out.

Note to other Movable Type users, your XML-RPC script, mt-xmlrpc.cgi, uses a different password than your account's password. It's automatically generated. To find it, and/or change it, go to the Authors page in the admin console, click on your username and scroll down to the bottom where it says something about a web services password.

import java.io.*;

import java.net.*;

import java.util.*;

import org.apache.xmlrpc.*;

import org.apache.xmlrpc.client.*;



public class MovableTypeTest

{

   public static void main(String[] args)

   {

      try

      {

         XmlRpcClient client = new XmlRpcClient();

         XmlRpcClientConfigImpl config = new XmlRpcClientConfigImpl();

         config.setServerURL(new URL("http://www.testing.com/mt/mt-xmlrpc.cgi"));

         client.setConfig(config);



         Vector parameters = new Vector();

         parameters.add("0123456789ABCDEF");

         parameters.add("USERNAME");

         parameters.add("PASSWORD");



         Object[] response = (Object[])client.execute("blogger.getUsersBlogs", parameters);

         System.out.println("Blogs:");

         for (Object o: response)

         {

            HashMap map = (HashMap)o;

            Iterator it = map.keySet().iterator();

            while (it.hasNext())

            {

               String key = (String)it.next();

               System.out.println("\t" + key + " = " + map.get(key));

            }

         }

      } catch (Exception ex) { ex.printStackTrace(); }

   }

}

UPDATE: This is one of those stories where I should have known to not give the party making the complaints the benefit of the doubt. Turns out, they had to eat crow and admit that it was their Cisco hardware that was causing the problems, not Apple's iPhone.

It would seem that Apple's new iPod doesn't like to play nice with wireless networks:

The Wi-Fi connection on Apple's recently released iPhone seems to be the source of a big headache for network administrators at Duke University. Other stories on this topic

The built-in 802.11b/g adapters on several iPhones periodically flood sections of the Durham, N.C. school's pervasive wireless LAN with MAC address requests, temporarily knocking out anywhere from a dozen to 30 wireless access points at a time. Campus network staff are talking with Cisco, the main WLAN provider, and have opened a help desk ticket with Apple. But so far, the precise cause of the problem remains unknown.

I can't say that I am surprised by this. A lot of wireless networking software is still largely immature since the technology is not as old and established as wired ethernet. My wireless software on Kubuntu often has a hard time figuring out what networks are available when my laptop comes out of hibernation, for example. Hell, in Windows getting it to reliably connect to my wireless network when I used encryption could be a fun-filled hour of trouble-shooting sometimes!

Something tells me that if Apple cannot get its act together and get this routing issue fixed, the iPhone is going to become gadget non grata on Duke's campus. One can only imagine how quickly it will get in trouble on campuses where there is less money to spend on bulking up the wireless infrastructure like many state schools. If it is struggling to safely jump between networks that badly (retaining routing information between networks) it should be banned. If it is already causing trouble during the summer, it'll only get worse during the school year to the point that the network will be unusable for everyone else.

Not that long ago, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that reading a list of websites you visit without a warrant is legally indistinguishable from a normal pen register search. Ars Technica has some analysis of the issue. Orin Kerr of Volokh Conspiracy doesn't really know what to make of it because the search methods described in the court briefing apparently are ambiguous. However, there is something that both he and the other professor cited by Ars Technica missed that is very important to consider: HTTP addresses do often contain transactional information!

Consider this CGI script, for example: http://www.codemonkeyramblings.com/lookup.cgi?Name="MikeT"&LookFor="HomeAddress"

If the government retrieves information like that, which is not unlikely, they are going beyond a pen register into the domain of finding information that shows specific actions taken. It is a quasi-search at that point, not merely a listing of who went where, and when they did it. In a case like this, it would show what the person was actually looking for by preserving the HTTP GET variables in the recorded URL.

Professor Shaun Martin of the University of San Diego School of Law agrees. Writing recently about the case on his blog, Martin notes, "Once the government records that I'm going to the IP addresses for NAMBLA and High Times and Bondage.com, the fact that they won't (initially) know which particular page of those sites I choose to view hardly matters. They've already invaded my privacy and know a boatload about me that I'd rather not reveal to the government."

What is not clear here is why legal experts would expect their ISP to only record broad and essentially useless information like the domain names of sites you visit, but not the actual pages themselves. Each ISP may have its own logging policies, but it is a safer bet to assume that they are going to be recording the full URL that you access, not information as vague and generic as just the domain name. With many sites, that would be literally useless information as the "incriminating" hits would be to subdomains or particular pages hosted in a small hierarchy of directories on the server.

As with data retention in general, it's not a simple issue. This needs a more nuanced, technically savvy ruling.

(I wrote this with Erik in mind since he has been thinking about switching to Linux when it's time for an upgrade.)

It took me a while to get to the point where I could go back to using Linux as the exclusive operating system on my PC. What made it easier was getting busier with wedding preparations, preparing my apartment for moving out and finding a renewed interest in the joy and simplicity in console gaming.

It must sound strange that someone would choose Linux because they have less time--not more--available to them than they used to have. Granted, I'm pretty familiar with Linux; my first experimentation with it happened about eight or so years ago when Mandrake 6 was coming out. I'm neither a newbie, nor am I a true guru or anything like that. For someone who is pretty comfortable with Linux already, it takes a lot less time to get up and running properly, and to maintain.

Now that I am using Kubuntu (a KDE-flavored version of Ubuntu), maintaining everything is a lot simpler. The most important thing for newbies to understand about using *Ubuntu is that it's slick and gotten a lot easier to use. However, a lot of the cool things about it will require you to learn how it works. It's the price you'll have to pay to take advantage of it. Think of it like learning how to drive a manual transmission car (which I am starting to do soon). It's a pain-in-the-ass at first that will allow you to drive many really, really cool cars that you could never drive if you only know how to handle automatic. The price is, it requires you to learn a lot about the car you're driving and to work closely with it.

If that's not for you, there's no shame in that. Stick to Windows or buy a Mac (preferably this option). Both of them are extremly mature, useful platforms in their own right. It's not that Desktop Linux is not ready for you yet, it's more of a question of whether the two of you belong together in the first place. If you want absolute simplicity, don't require anything beyond utilitarian functionality, then Windows really is right for you. Pushing Linux on you would be like pushing a Porsche onto a soccer mom who really needs a sedan or a minivan to take the kids to their activities. Doesn't make much sense, does it?

In the past, before I made peace with my increasingly simple needs, I struggled to use Linux over Windows. I'd find myself lusting after a game or something like that that couldn't be coerced into working on Linux with WINE. If you want to give it a shot, the best thing you can do is to download the Kubuntu LiveCD and try it out. It'll be slow because it's running off of a CD. Sometimes you'll find it jerky and spasmatic because it's having to spin the CD back up and access data. Ignore that in your evaluation of how well you like it because that won't happen if and when it's running on your hard drive.

That's a mirror of the file I put up so that I wouldn't be stealing their bandwidth. For more foamy... go here.

Says the Tubby Riefenstahl:

"There is nowhere in the four Gospels where Jesus uses the word 'homosexual.' The right wing has appropriated this guy ... and they have used him to attack gays and lesbians, when he never said a single word against people who are homosexual. Anyone who professes to be a Christian and does that is certainly not following the teachings of Jesus Christ."

Jesus says:

It is easier for heaven and earth to disappear than for the least stroke of a pen to drop out of the Law. --Luke 16:17

The Law says:

Do not lie with a man as one lies with a woman; that is detestable. --Leviticus 18:22

Jesus upholds the law-->true
The law declares homosexuality to be a sin-->true
Jesus therefore says that homosexuality is a sin-->true

Case closed.

Linux takes another bold step on the desktop:

The next release of the Linux kernel will apparently gain an all-new scheduler said to deliver better desktop scheduling. Ingo Molnar's CFS ("completely fair scheduler") implements a fair scheduling approach long advocated by Con "Conman" Kolivas, a practicing Australian medical doctor specializing in anaesthesia.

Molnar, a Red Hat employee who maintains the kernel's scheduling subsystem, describes CFS as follows: "Eighty percent of CFS's design can be summed up in a single sentence: CFS basically models an 'ideal, precise multi-tasking CPU' on real hardware."

This will prove to be a God-send for Linux desktop users if it works out properly. One of the biggest performance hindrances that Linux has faced has been from a scheduler that was focused more on server performance than on desktop performance. The two are pretty mutually exclusive. With a server you need a scheduler that is more balanced and conservative, whereas with a desktop you need a scheduler that is capable of being very discriminatory in how it assigns resources to processes.

For more on scheduling, take a look at this Wikipedia page.

This study yields some obvious results. Well, obvious to people who aren't ideological Marxists, anyway:

"Most of the research literature in psychology has suggested that women have less power," Vogel told LiveScience. "They have largely based that on the fact that traditionally men earn more money and so therefore would have the ability to make big decisions in the relationship." That wasn't the case in this study.

It never occurred to these august bodies of scientific research that since those funds are being transferred into a common pool of money for the family to use that the wife has a great degree of freedom to dispose of them as she sees fit. It shouldn't come as a surprise that this obvious fact did not occur to them because it blows apart their assumption that mere possession of wealth is a form of social power, something that they get from their left-wing bias.

Trained volunteers coded the videotapes using a scale that rated couples' interactions based on words and behaviors associated with blame (blames, accuses and criticizes the partner); demand (nags, pressures for change, requests); withdrawal and avoidance (avoids discussion the problem by hesitating, changing topics, diverting attention or looking away); and discussion.

Wives were more demanding--asking for changes in the relationship or in their partner--and were more likely to get their way than the husbands. This held regardless of who had chosen the issue.

Using "science" to prove what is pretty obvious if you do a random, honest survey of men from any given generation still alive in the United States. Women do tend to make much greater demands in terms of behavior from men than vice versa. I can't believe that someone actually needs a formal study to believe that this is the case.

What would have been interesting would have been for the researchers to make the men find honest faults that they want to change in their wives, when the researchers detected signs that the woman's complaints weren't well-meaning, honest concerns but rather just bitchy nagging and demanding behavior. I'd wager they had more than a few of those in their study if they had built up a large enough pool to make their study credible. I think it would be interesting to see this done because they're already using science to prove what is obvious to most people (that women tend to expect more behavior changes from men than vice versa) so why not prove with "science" that there are plenty of women whose natures are to be controlling and nagging individuals?

Inspirational hat tip to Triton.

Fortunately me, my wife-to-be has a pretty solid understanding and agreement with Ephesians 5. She is also lucky that she is marrying a man with a generally type B personality, and thus will generally let her do whatever she wants when it isn't a "life decision."

Since I referenced something Triton wrote about Debbie Maken, I will note in passing that when you think about how much these women demand, and the fact that women initiate 72% or more of all divorces, it puts the lie to the suggestion that even most Christian women are just waiting for men to step up and be men. Rather, I think it clearly shows that many of them probably are much better off being single.

The FBI loves their databases:

WASHINGTON - The FBI is gathering and sorting information about Americans to help search for potential terrorists, insurance cheats and crooked pharmacists, according to a government report obtained Tuesday.

Records about identity thefts, real estate transactions, motor vehicle accidents and complaints about Internet drug companies are being searched for common threads to aid law enforcement officials, the Justice Department said in a report to Congress on the agency's data-mining practices.

In addition, the report disclosed government plans to build a new database to assess the risk posed by people identified as potential or suspected terrorists.

Justice spokesman Dean Boyd said the databases are strictly regulated to protect privacy rights and civil liberties.

This is the same FBI that has proved that actual legal and policy restrictions are no barrier to it breaking the rules when it comes to National Security Letters. Hey, the tell us that we should just trust them because there are safeguards in place to protect privacy, even though that hasn't stopped agents in the past from committing thousands of violations in the past!

What they should be a lot more afraid of are embarrassing security lapses like this one where the GAO was able to scam the Nuclear Regulatory Commission into selling them the fuel they would need to build a dirty nuclear bomb. If the FBI's goal isn't to create an environment of more surveillance, but rather to fight terrorism, then why are they focusing on things like datamining instead of undercover operations like this? Why was it the GAO, and not the FBI, that conducted this operation against the NRC?

Halfway through Saturday I came down with almost everything that Rachel had. From that point on until about this morning I was pretty damn sick, and my brain was mushy enough from that illness that I could barely pay attention long enough to play video games let alone write blog posts and such. Went from a sort of sinus infection/cold to something in my chest that gave me coughs that sounded an awful lot like having a cross between emphysema, bronchitis and what some people get after a lifetime of smoking. Ugly.

Well, today I feel a lot better. Now I am off to work, aka sitting on my ass reading the Bible and a book on Web Services until they can get me a PC to use. In the mean time, check this out. It's another funny and happy case (not for the guy caught) of a criminal getting his ass busted by a private citizen who was better than the criminal.

Update: and this. Now that is one hell of a knitting job!

One thing I have noticed for a while about human nature is that people love extremes for no good reason. Sometimes I think we tend to binary natures in that respect. For example, look at feminists like Amynda Marcotte. She epitomizes the extremes of feminism. Then you have some of the voxisti who are the exact opposite, almost doing to women what Amynda does to men. I'm not talking about those who merely advocating disenfranchising women, but some of the others like one guy whose name was Patriarch something or another.

In cases like this, what both sides refuse to see is the fact that they have become the very monster that they are trying to hunt. Many of the feminists who want to "smash patriarchy" and other such nonsense are so bitter toward men that their behavior would preclude any mentally healthy man respecting them as a woman. At the same time, some men are so concerned about control and leadership that they come off as cowards and tyrants that make any sensible woman worry about what she is signing up for. I can't fault the men who wouldn't lead or even respect in the former, nor could I fault the women who wouldn't submit in the latter.

For me, this goes back to my almost visceral disrespect for and disgust with sociology. A lot of this rubbish comes from attempts to systematically make one half of the human race out to be worse than the other. In fact, if anything is the case, it's that it is impossible to systematically blame such arbitrary groupings for society's problems. Rather, I would go so far as to immodestly suggest that the reasons for the failure of such institutions as the family and church today are to be blamed for millions of stupid, individual choices and personalities. This is the hard truth: the troubles of today are the result of a male-female stupidity feedback cycle hitherto unknown to mankind and made possible by pseudoscience and modernity fetishizing.

As abe points out, today your body belongs to the state, not you. However I think that democracy can make this fun for men. Here are a few facts and a wonderful conclusion for many men:

• The state owns your body today.
• In a democracy, the state is the people.
• In a modern democracy, hot women are part of the state.

Therefore in a modern democracy, every man owns every hot woman. Let's just hope that we don't have a rehashing of the Tragedy of the Commons.

Makes sense to me:

"The best way to staff your SWAT team is to get your department together and ask for volunteers. Then you write down the name of every guy who raises his hand, then you make sure those guys are never on the SWAT team. Not only that, but you keep an eye on them. Guys who are attracted to that kind of thing shouldn't even be cops, much less SWAT guys.

One could try to apply this to the military, but that is a false analogy because the military is by definition outfitted to fight wars where you need people to engage in controlled behavior that is generally unacceptable from law enforcement. That said, I think this former police chief's words bear repeating. Anyone who enthusiastically wants to be a SWAT officer is likely to be unstable, especially in ways that will get him in trouble as a police officer. Hell, you have to worry about someone who likes the idea of donning military armor and weapons and storming into civilian homes on a regular basis. You want people who are reserved about that because they're the ones who will act responsibly in that capacity. They're a lot less likely to make mistakes that will get innocent people hurt or killed.

That's why this recruiting campaign will end up backfiring. Police work shouldn't be exciting on a daily basis. If it is, you have a serious crime problem in your community. The people who are going to be attracted by that campaign are liable to create a crime problem all of their own, just one that won't be prosecuted because it'll be hiding behind a badge.

We laugh at crap like this from the 1950s. It seems like something out of a bad episode of Leave It To Beaver. It may be a joke to us, but how many people back then took this sort of thing seriously? How many men seriously thought that their wives should treat them like this? Probably a lot more than we'd like to think in retrospect.

Those "how to be a good wife" guides revealed quite a bit of naivete on what office work is like. Most of it is no more difficult or stressful than housework. There is simply no reason for the average man to come home to the average housewife and act like he's been run through the mill everyday, while his wife got it easy all day. Especially if there was homeschooling involved.

Personally, I look at stuff like this and see a direct correlation with the rise of the feminist movement. The role shown in that "how to be a better housewife guide" is not one of submission, but one of serfdom.

On top of it, the emphasis is on allowing the husband to stop at simply being a provider, rather than a source of authority. Notice how it says to not bug him with your troubles. Suppose the kids have been raising hell all day? Sorry pop, that is your responsibility to get off your ass and discipline them for your wife. She'll probably be in a better mood to fluff your pillow and take off your shoes if she sees that you don't think your responsibility for the day ends when you come home for the evening because under this set of rules, hers sure as hell doesn't end there.

Some highlights from the first few minutes:

1) Equivocating between legalizing drugs and legalizing murder. As if legalizing drugs were anything in the same ballpark as legalizing murder. I'm sure they'll not be too offended when atheists like Richard Dawkins argue that raising kids in a religious home is tantamount to child abuse. Even though both comparisons are equally moronic for the same reason: they are irredeemably stupid.

2) Calling legalizing drugs unamerican, while providing a forum for people to argue for a militarized response to drug use and trade. Remember, it is far more unamerican to use pot, than to have a team of men in military gear break into a house at night like they're in the middle of a warzone, kids. Our founding fathers would be running those SWAT units themselves if they were alive today.

3) Suggesting that if we can choose to use drugs, then it should be okay for us to butcher our children.

I couldn't watch all of it. Too painful. However, I will note the irony that Ron Paul snapped at him that tobacco products are the most dangerous drugs on the market today, that he scoffed at that like he was an idiot, then ended up dying of lung cancer caused by smoking.

It's about damn time:

Researchers in the Netherlands say they have come up with a way of using lasers to speed up magnetic hard drives by a factor of 100.

Hard drives are the single biggest bottleneck that modern computers face. They provide one heck of a deal when it comes to cheap, reliable storage, but they're so slow that it's almost not worth it. We need speed here big time or they'll risk hanging like a millstone around the necks of near future PCs.

Apparently getting shot in the head while trying to commit armed robbery doesn't count as getting into legal trouble in these old farts' book:

But Gadson's grandmother, Rosa Jones, said: "He ain't no hero. He is a murderer and God will serve justice."

She and her husband, Ivory Jones, pastor of a Fort Lauderdale church, sat on their front porch in Fort Lauderdale on Thursday wondering how a man could shoot two people and not go to jail.

They said their grandson sometimes hung with the wrong crowd but never got into legal trouble. According to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, he has no arrest record. They said Gadson, who never finished high school, got tired of low-wage jobs and was pursuing his GED.

Arrindell, friends said, found himself in a similar situation: no high school diploma and working odd jobs. So he went back to school. He was a man with past troubles, including a 2004 arrest for carrying a concealed weapon, but he was improving his life, they said. He recently bought a car and had a girlfriend.

Stories like this are painfully predictable. Family members rush to the defense of a slain young family member who would be described at best as a feckless loser. It doesn't matter that their young relative was shot in the head in the middle of an undisputed armed robbery where he made an old man think he was going to be dropped onto his knees and given a double tap to the back of the head. He couldn't possibly be to blame for his very timely demise. The man who was acting in defense against the wild-eyed beast they call a son/grandson/nephew/cousin gets called a criminal.

I also find it interesting that they say that he had no legal problems, yet was arrested for illegally carrying a concealed weapon. Either the grandparents never knew their grandson well enough to know about his personal life beyond generalities, or their definition of being an otherwise "good kid" is big enough to allow a whole pack of wolves to run through in sheep's clothing.

**Update**: This post is more of a reflection of anxieties and such that range from how to be a Christian father/husband, to how work has to be distributed to raise a family in or near Northern Virginia. It is thus neither a serious theological position, nor is it a shirking of responsibility. It is just a look at how things will/may/might have to be to make them work.

More and more I have been thinking about what it means to be a good Christian father and husband. I know all about Ephesians 5, and I have read a lot beyond that that people have thrown out at me. Thing is, to me they are just words right now. What does it mean for a wife to submit and a man to lead? I don't know, to be entirely honest. I grew up in a household where most of the "administrative" stuff was handled by my mother. From cleaning, to making sure the bills are taken care of, to keeping me in line, a lot of that was done by her. That's what I know.

To be even more honest, I don't like the idea of submission and leadership (it seems like a lot of responsibility and that it requires a lot of maturity and insight, which scares me). I actually like the idea of working together more as equal partners, which is where things seemed to be going in the Garden of Eden before the infamous duo royally screwed things up. In fact, the few Christian marriages that I have seen that have lasted are more of partnerships than the typical rhetoric that comes out of Ephesians 5. The husband does lead, sure, but the husband also works as part of the greater whole. Servant leadership.

My mind has been all over the place on this because a lot of different sources have pulled me in different ways, most of them entirely wrong, others at least partially wrong. I think that there is a lot of knee-jerk reaction to efforts to feminize the male population in the Christian community. There is an over-emphasis on leadership in a more "masculine, authority-based" way rather than in the servant leadership that Jesus clearly displayed. Notice those quotes. They're my way of saying that there is a lot of machismo that is masquerading as revealed truth...

Machismo... You know, I have always hated that and in some respects I have found myself falling into that trap. Thinking like that, anyway. Not falling in whole hog, just getting my feet wet. I know that it's caused me to be a jerk as I have tried to understand Ephesians 5 and other teachings in the wrong light, and for that I am ashamed.

We--I--have focused (in comments and such here and elsewhere) too much on things like "duties." Stuff like "wifely duties" to perform for a husband, a husband's duty to all but throw himself in the way of his wife like a human shield, and all that. Just my perception, anyway. My perception from reading what others and myself have written on the matter. To paraphrase the words of someone smarter than I am (due primarily to age differences, so don't get cocky), that sure does tend to take the spark out of things.

Go ahead and call me a wuss. I really don't care too much right now. Maybe in a few days I will break down and have a good cry (probably coinciding with Rachel cooking something with onions...) but not right now. Ok, I'll shut up now.

Check this out. It's an uncommonly blunt opinion piece written by a self-described former radical Muslim in the Daily Mail. The simplest way to describe it would be to say that it is nothing short of a broadside attack against the entire left-wing establishment's ideological denial of flaws in Islamic theology and culture that lead many Muslims around the world to sincerely believe that it is right to commit acts of violence and depravity against others. It's the sort of thing that one is not likely to find in an American paper.

I have said for a while that there is something fundamentally wrong with allowing lawyers to be elected to public office where they can draft legislation. Nothing proves that point better than the new traffic law that was passed in Virginia:

The self-described "chief architect" for this bill is Delegate David Albo. Albo boasts on his website that he's worked for 20 months to bring this bill into law. What his website doesn't mention is that when Albo isn't legislating tough new laws aimed at Virginia's motorists, he's representing those same motorists in court.

That's right. Albo's a lawyer. And not just any lawyer. The firm that bears his name specializes in traffic law, particularly in representing people charged with DWI and reckless driving. And yes, that's the firm's actual URL: virginiadui.com.

Lawyers are in a unique position to enrich themselves at the expense of the public if they are allowed to run for public office where they will be able to draft the laws. No other profession benefits from legislation to the same extent that they do. The broader the laws, the more employment opportunities there are. The higher the fines and prison sentences? The more people will pay them to not have to suffer through that. Draft whole new areas of laws? Again, more employment opportunities.

Legal codes are not something you need a rocket scientist to properly draft. All you need are men and women of decent conscience and willingness to think before they put pen to paper. There is no reason why we need lawyers to make good laws, and there is much to be lost in conflict of interest cases like this by having them involved.

As tempting as it may be to take them up on their request, it would not be a good idea for humanitarians and those who believe in human rights in general to give in to this siren call:

ZIMBABWE'S leading cleric has called on Britain to invade the country and topple President Robert Mugabe. Pius Ncube, the Archbishop of Bulawayo, warned that millions were facing death from famine, unable to survive amid inflation believed to have soared to 15,000%.

Mugabe, 83, had proved intransigent despite the "massive risk to life", said Ncube, the head of Zimbabwe's 1m Catholics. "I think it is justified for Britain to raid Zimbabwe and remove Mugabe," he said. "We should do it ourselves but there's too much fear. I'm ready to lead the people, guns blazing, but the people are not ready."

The temptation might be to give in and liberate them from their oppressor, but that would be a cultural pressure release that Africa doesn't need. It would be essentially letting the people of Zimbabwe off the hook for allowing the man to come to power and stay there in the first place. As citizens, everyone there shares a responsibility in this because it is their government. Even if it means that millions would die, Mugabe's government must not be touched by outsiders. If it is overthrown from without, the people will never be forced to take responsibility, risk their lives and bring their own government back under control.

What should instead be made clear is that in the even that the Mugabe regime is completely overthrown from within, that the first world nations will respond immediately with a peacekeeping force sent in with food and medicine for the people, to be administered by the peacekeepers. If Zimbabwe shrugs him off, we'll help Zimbabwe get back on its feet.

Dealing with African political culture is like dealing with a drunk who has had every excuse made for his or her behavior. The only way to beat the disease is to force them to stare at the naked truth that they have a problem, and that they have to fix it themselves.