July 2009 Archives

A real recipe for disaster:

At least Angel, Anita Blake's vampires, Sookie Stackhouse, and most of the rest of them have a lot of sex. But Edward Cullen, immortal star of the Twilight books, does not have sex. Edward tells Bella, his human paramour, that they need to wait until they're married before doing the deed. In the meantime, he's fascinated by her, beguiled by her, he can't stay away from her--but he can't touch her. Instead, he lies next to her in bed and moons over her as she sleeps. Leaving aside the fact that he's a 90-year-old man, this is what stalkers do, not boyfriends.

Just as America's young men are being given deeply erroneous ideas about sex by what they watch on the Web, so, too, are America's young women receiving troubling misinformation about the male of the species from Twilight. These women are going to be shocked when the sensitive, emotionally available, poetry-writing boys of their dreams expect a bit more from a sleepover than dew-eyed gazes and chaste hugs. The young man, having been schooled in love online, will be expecting extreme bondage and a lesbian three-way.

Twilight is a great example of what is wrong with the emotional pornography that women scoop up as readily as men consume sexual pornography. It works on two levels because it denies the essence of what a vampire is relative to humans, and what men and women are relative to one another. That dueling absurdity feeds on itself, since you have a creature, Edward, who is categorically the opposite of his nature and who damn near exists to serve as some archetype of what it means to reduce a person from an end unto themselves to a means to someone else's end. If Edward were true to his nature, he would likely reduce Bella to both a cumdumpster and a midnight meal, as that would be befitting the essence of a creature designed to feed and prey on humans.

The evolution of the vampire and werewolf from creatures which blatantly sit above humanity on the food chain and hunt us like cattle, to safe and nurturing lovers should have been the first obvious clue that a lot of this modern "horror" fiction is just pornographic content in a respectable wrapping. It is no less idealized than the stereotyped female porn star who is physical perfect and pleasured by everything a man does to her, and who has no emotional needs of their own afterward. We all accept that that is ludicrous, but the idea that a creature that hunts and feeds on humans getting turned into a safe, doe-eyed, asexual companion is greeted with far less controversy.

At any rate, I don't lament the growing dichotomy of expectations. It may yet prove to be a point of return because at some point, it'll force us to confront the absurdity of our assumptions about the opposite sex. What better time than when we finally have to face up to the fact that so many of our dreams and ideas about the other are, in fact, just fantastical bullshit?

Some of you may be wondering why this blog looks very different from what it did just a day ago. Did I change the style sheet? Did I swap out templates?

No.

I got sick and tired of jumping through flaming hoops to support Internet Explorer 6, so I modified the templates to show the "printer-friendly" version of each page by default.

Don't blame me, blame Microsoft and/or your IT department for being too lazy to let you use Firefox, Chrome, Opera or even Internet Explorer 7.

If IE 6 actually made a good effort to implement web standards like every other browser in use right now (even IE 7 and IE 8), I wouldn't have to pull my hair out trying to figure how to make a stylesheet that looks right in every other browser while still working in IE 6.

Here is the default AddToAny button modified to work Movable Type's templates:

<a class="a2a_dd" href="http://www.addtoany.com/share_save?linkname=&amp;linkurl=<mt:EntryPermalink encode_url="1"/>">
<img src="http://static.addtoany.com/buttons/share_save_171_16.png" width="171" height="16" border="0" alt="Share/Save/Bookmark"/>
</a>
<script type="text/javascript">a2a_linkname="<mt:EntryTitle encode_html="1"/>";a2a_linkurl="<mt:EntryPermalink encode_url="1"/>";</script><script type="text/javascript" src="http://static.addtoany.com/menu/page.js"></script>

In the classic blog template set, you can put it in the asset-footer <div> at the bottom of the Entry Summary module. For individual archives, just put it somewhere in the Individual Archives template.

Most scientists who study the human mind are convinced that minds are the products of brains, and brains are the products of evolution. Dr. Collins takes a different approach: he insists that at some moment in the development of our species God inserted crucial components - including an immortal soul, free will, the moral law, spiritual hunger, genuine altruism, etc. -Source

If Vox Day is correct that atheists usually suffer from Asperger's Syndrome (A.S.), that would go a long way toward explaining their views on things like spiritual hunger, free will, the moral law, etc. Having to rely on logic and reason as opposed to a balance of emotion, intuition, logic and reason would cripple their ability to understand what some of these things even mean. A person who has never experienced genuine spiritual hunger and who has to arrive at an understanding of the experiences of others through a form of cold, hard logic would have no experiential basis with which to grasp the full depth of that human experience.

Atheists commonly commit a category problem which makes this explanation likely: they confuse spiritual hunger with a thirst for immortality. Most people intuitively understand the difference, which is that spiritual hunger is a desire for relationship with a higher power and/or something approximating that in terms of spiritual fulfillment. It is not connected to the survival instinct, but rather is an intuitive sense that there is a purpose which we are supposed to fulfill. There are points where these two overlap, but then the same sort of relationship exists between the basic desire of most people for relationships and community and sex. (The mere fact that they intersect does not imply anything more profound than the fact that they sometimes come together for a common purpose).

An atheist may likewise logically build out a moral system approximating what the majority take roughly by instinct, and then from there use their ability to do that to imply that the instinct is not necessary. Assuming for a moment that Vox Day's theory is correct, that would be polar opposite from the truth for two reasons: the neurotypical individual derives morality from instinct, and without the neurotypical, the socially autistic atheist has no neurotypical mind on which to pattern itself. No input, no output; logic is just a set of rules, not a supplier of original input.

As someone who believes that our understanding of human nature can be derived from neuroscience, psychology, cognitive science and behavioral economics, among others, I am troubled by Dr. Collins's line of thinking. I also believe it would seriously undercut fields like neuroscience and our growing understanding of the human mind. If we must look to religion to explain our moral sense, what should we make of the deficits of moral reasoning associated with conditions like frontal lobe syndrome and psychopathy? Are these disorders best addressed by theology?

No serious theologian denies the fact that damage to the brain will have an impact on human behavior. The brain is either that which gives rise to the mind, or it is the mind's interface to the human body. In either scenario, no school of theology would deny that harm to or flaws in the human brain can impact human behavior.

Psychopathy and similar mental disorders are actually quite easy to explain in theological terms, at least in the Abrahamic traditions: they are clinicalizations of spiritual flaws and depravity. Put aside your biases for a moment and consider the possibility of souls, God, etc. It would stand to reason in such a scenario that spiritual good and evil would manifest themselves in both the mind and body since in that scenario the human animal is a tripartite creature composed of spirit, mind and body. The spirit influences the mind in the form of social pathologies, the mind influences the decisions which can injure the body, and the body can restrict the functioning of the mind leading it to spiritual decay.

One can only hope that these convictions will not affect his judgment at the institutes of health. After all, understanding human well-being at the level of the brain might very well offer some "answers to the most pressing questions of human existence" - questions like, Why do we suffer? Or, indeed, is it possible to love one's neighbor as oneself? And wouldn't any effort to explain human nature without reference to a soul, and to explain morality without reference to God, necessarily constitute "atheistic materialism"?

Science, logic and reason can explain questions to us like "why do we suffer" in terms of biological functioning, but they cannot explain anything beyond a crude, mechanical understanding of human existence. That limits their ability to only the simplest explanations which are of little use outside of the easy cases like understanding why someone with bipolar disorder suffers or why someone with brain damage has schizophrenia. Science cannot explain why a woman who is healthy, has a reasonably good husband, well-adjusted kids and lives in a safe, comfortable environment would throw all of that away on a divorce as part of some quest to "find herself" or "be happy." It cannot explain such wildly irrational behavior that by all rights makes a mockery of the "logic-based" understanding of human nature and behavior.

Well, psychology can explain many of them, but only in a way that is, ironically, far closer to philosophy and theology than many secularists would are admit.

The legitimate object of government, is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not, so well do, for themselves - in their separate, and individual capacities.

In all that the people can individually do as well for themselves, government ought not to interfere. -Abraham Lincoln

If Lincoln could see us today, I think it's safe to say that he would have invited the Army of Northern Virginia to join the Army of the Potomac in burning DC to the ground.

I created this for the classic blog template set for 4.X. All that you need to do to use it is to add jQuery to your templates, and then include this JavaScript into the page after the jQuery import statement.

This is absolutely beautiful. Someone should make a YouTube video of it set to some dramatic classical or operatic music like they use in comedies sometimes to highlight extreme screwups.

So here's the summary.

• Company copies a horrible testing script around to many projects
• Company knows that the script SSHs into every server remotely related to the development teams.
• Company is blissfully unaware that, among other things it has a command in it like rm -rf $var1/$var2 (imagine what might happen in a typical scripting language if $var1 and $var2 are undefined (yeah...))
• Company learns the hard way why you never let a script like that run as root on a server which is using SAMBA to connect to most of the company's shared Windows volumes.
  

On the Movable Type forums, someone asked at one point how to create an archive template which breaks down the monthly archives by year. I thought it was an interesting and novel experiment, so I modified my archives template to do that.

Just download the file linked below, and merge it into your archive template if you want to do that. All of the content inside the alpha-inner <div> tag is for handling that use case. The only other thing that needs to be done is to publish yearly archives. Go to your monthly listing archives, in the template manager, and add a new mapping to them for yearly archives and save that change.

month-by-year-archives.tmpl.txt

Though it may not appear to be so, there is a common theme that underlies the entitlement mentality that many Americans feel and the notions of liberty that they possess. It is as close as sociology will ever come to a grand unified theory of behavior. It connects issues ranging from health care costs and socialized medicine, to copyright infringement and intellectual property in general. To understand why so many Americans feel the way they do about liberty, rights and economics one need only understand that underneath it all there is a great illusion that we are all entitled to the maximum consumption of anything which is legal that our hearts desire.

It is consumption and the reduction of all things to material consumption which has dulled and nearly destroyed American liberty. It is largely unquestioned whether or not an increasing quality of life as defined by the ability of people to buy more products and services with the same income is even possible. It's taken for granted that the inexorable advance of progress means that what is accessible to the elite today will be accessible to the middle class tomorrow, and sometime not long after that accessible to everyone. And by God if the markets don't deliver that promise at the scheduled time, then the government will just have to step in, won't it? That is why we are impatient with health care costs and driving them up in the name of controlling costs. The ignorant and impatient cannot countenance the thought that bankruptcy instead of death is actually fundamental progress. They cry out, "you have a duty to preserve our paychecks, so that we may consume more!"

Now it is true that health care costs are rising, but it's also true that there are things which can be done to mitigate those costs. There are tax-free savings and expense accounts for health care costs which only a minority of people utilize. They could simultaneously lower their taxes and have a large chunk of money that would have been sent to the government to their personal and familial health care costs. However, even if they were fully cogniscent of these benefits, it's unlikely that the vast majority would take advantage of them because that would reduce their take home pay and make it harder for them to buy more fun things. Consumption is a jealous god which won't tolerate any interference with its tithe.

When the economy took a down turn there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth in the middle class. More specifically in the "la-tee-da, how bourgeois are we?" class. Their inalienable right to organic foods bought at upscale grocery stores whose classier facades intimidated the working class was called into question. Someone even said that they might have to car pool to save money on gas as they commuted from far away into work in the cities. Can you believe that someone would dare suggest that they create ad hoc mass transit? I know, right? Government action was, of course, demanded in the name of reducing oil costs, driving out those dastardly oil speculators and to pave the way for alternative fuel cars (which would also receive a fat government subsidy to make their consumption affordable).

High gas prices cut deep into the consumption-provided sense of autonomous living that passes for bonafide liberty. They are more immediate than the possibility of high health care costs which many people could avoid altogether through long-term saving in tax free health savings accounts and living a healthy lifestyle. The higher the gas prices go, the more imperative it becomes that factors other than "I like it" drive the decisions behind buying a car and what to do with it. When gas tops out at five dollars per gallon, those beastly, intimidating and comfortable luxury SUVs start to look more like gilded cages than expressions of individuality and chariots to fun living. Just to be safe, let's impose price controls to intimidate OPEC into keeping oil prices down.

On the issue of housing it may certainly be true that some of the market manipulations of the last several years were done for the benefit of investment banks and mortgage lenders. It is also true that there was a strong ideological motivation the part of a number of politicians, and by extension, many of their constituents, to enable the consumption of real estate by those who others did not have the means to buy it safely. This debacle was created in no small part because representatives like Barney Frank could not imagine a free America in which whole swaths of the public were deemed "too risky" by sound mortgage lenders, and so they used the crowbar of state to pry open the mortgage door that had slammed shut in the face of millions of Americans who probably never had more than a vague thought about trying the door knob. And so, as risk piled on risk, and consumer and producer conspired to operate beyond their means, we found ourselves caught in a mire that was actually our ideological and spiritual shit. We also discovered that it stinks as badly as rumor would have it.

The most banal, and easiest to understand, of the entitlements is the one felt toward intellectual property. It has a respectable veneer and a relationship between the haves and have nots that at first blush would make Robin Hood larcenous to the nth degree. The common refrain is that it costs nothing to transmit in digital form, and that when someone copies the work of another without their permission, that doesn't deny them the enjoyment of their property. Those points are completely true, but then it is also true that it is far cheaper for a counterfeiter to build a knock off of any given product, and it is not a violation of someone's physical property rights to use their property with neither their knowledge nor damaging it. Traditionally, we protected the rights of creators for different, non-utilitarian reasons just like we protect physical property from all non-authorized use. After all, it does not deny someone enjoyment of their property if someone has a party by their backyard pool while they are gone, provided that no damage is done. Likewise if their car is discretely taken to the grocery store and back, and the gas tank refilled, where is the outrage?

Setting aside those basic flaws in the arguments for why no harm is done with systematically violating the intellectual property rights of others, the entitlement mentality is present in spades. It finds it an unbearable imposition to have to spend actual money for a movie that may or may not be any good, or for a video game that may still be buggy. Quality isn't even a consideration in many cases, as a lot of people find it absolutely absurd to suggest that they should have to buy it from the creator, rather than downloading it from someone else. Underneath it all, it's the same mentality that looks at the doctor and scoffs at the "absurd notion" that one should actually have to pay for his time. It's a cost that should be avoidable without avoiding the benefit from the cost. After all, $60 for a new game is a lot of money that could be spent elsewhere.

So really there are two main sides to the issue of consumption: enabling and avoidance. We pass laws which enable us to consume everything from health care services at someone else's expense, to laws which enable people to get mortgages when some lenders might prefer otherwise. It is the government's job to play bad cop to the market's good cop on these matters. Likewise, it is our social right to avoid having to spend our own money on things which we can by simple fact avoid buying like copyrighted goods. Enabling and avoidance apply equally to expenses like health care and gas where we don't want to strangle the goose that lays the golden egg, but rather scare it into restocking Fort Knox and our 401ks of its own volition.

The maximizing of consumption is not limited to just the acquisition of goods and services, but sadly carries over even into the way that we view each other. Subconsciously, it affects our social relations even down to sexuality where many seek to consume the greatest variety of experiences they safely can. The desire to consume more and more, while minimizing the cost to ourselves has even undermined our social relations. It has made us greedier and more selfish, and it should come as no surprise that neither of those things, in any form, have made us freer. There is, after all, not a whole lot that a selfish, greedy person won't do to maintain their wealth and position. That is why so many people are willing to sacrifice essential liberty for a sense of financial security today.

For many reasons, the consumer culture is self-defeating. Both the left and right routinely rail against it, but often without understanding why it is so immediately harmful to the material well-being of society. A culture which is concerned more with the ability to eat out at a restaurant than the freedom and autonomy to run a restaurant is a culture that will have less disposable income and fewer restaurants. Likewise, one that sequesters doctors to public service is one where cost-cutting measures will reduce the ratio between pay and stress which makes the medical profession attractive for so many intelligent, hard-working people. Finally, one that manipulates the entire financial market to enable more opportunities to buy real estate and investments at "minimal risk" is one that will never know stability, but will routinely suffer catastrophic valuation bubbles.

After some experimentation today with various jQuery features, I noticed that in a "single sentence" it was possible to rapidly build up the contents of a table row. That's nothing particularly profound in its own right, but it's an example of why I like jQuery so much:

<html>
<head>
    <script type="text/javascript" src="jquery.js"></script>
    <script type="text/javascript">
    $(document).ready(function() {
        table = $("<tbody/>");
        thead = $("<thead/>");
        theadtr = $("<tr/>");              
       
        $("<th/>").text("Field 1").appendTo(theadtr)
        .clone().text("Field 2").appendTo(theadtr);
       
        theadtr.appendTo(thead);
        thead.appendTo(table);
        table.appendTo($("#container"));
    });
    </script>
</head>
<body>
    <div id="container"></div>
</body>
</html>

David Coursey wants affirmative action for Apple's competitors:

But, does this justify Apple being essentially the sole source for iPhone and iPod touch applications? I don't think so.

As for Music Store, yes, I have bought a song or two from Amazon that are now happily loaded onto my iPod. I guess that's competition.

Yet, the tight linkage between iPod/iPhone, iTunes, and the Music Store is a big wall for potential competitors to climb. And if Amazon can't compete head-to-head with Apple, who can?

Of the two, App Store and Music Store, I am more concerned about music and other content. Suppose Apple were required to publish an open API for iTunes and support all models of players and phones? And multiple content vendors?

That would dramatically increase competition in smartphones and players as well as between the Music Store and its suddenly compatible competitors. Customers might choose music stores in iTunes the same way browser users select a default search engine.

If it had equal access to iTunes and the Music Store, the Palm Pre, among other devices would immediately become more interesting. And Apple would have to compete more on features and price than the exclusive access its devices have to its online retail ecosystem.

Apple has gotten to where they are because they are the only vendor willing to offer customers a complete package that just works. Amazon has not tried that yet, and Microsoft's attempts have always been lackluster at best. Apple's competitors could have worked together to create an open standard for buying and selling content and transferring it to media players, but they're all too fiercely competitive to do that. They all want to be like Apple with their own complete stack, but none of them are either willing or able to take the steps to achieve that.

To force open the development process for the iPhone would actually be illegal for the Department of Justice because it would violate Apple's intellectual property rights and force them to change some of the security APIs on the iPhone. They'd have to set up an independent certificate authority for signing iPhone applications, give outsiders access to the development kit without any control over it, and even then they'd run into competitors who would whine that they did maintained secret hidden APIs that help them. It's not even necessary, since a meager $300 fee is all that a developer has to pay to get an enterprise license of the iPhone SDK which is what allows them to distribute their application without using the App Store.

Even if the majority of Apple's competitors had full access to its stack, that wouldn't change the fact that their software is just inferior. Most of them don't even have a mobile web browser which is capable of rendering a web page like a normal desktop browser. The only platform that can compete there at all is Android. If they aren't willing to even do that, then that is indicative of the level of effort that they are willing to put into their products in general.

This whole argument is reminiscent of the situation that Microsoft found itself in during the antitrust trial. They had a product which was good enough, and their competitors didn't offer products which provided any compelling reason to switch. In particular, Netscape Communicator was so mediocre that there was literally not a single good reason to prefer it over Internet Explorer and Outlook (that should be quite revealing to those who never used Netscape's products). What we have here is similar. Amazon, Microsoft, etc. are not willing to invest whatever it takes to make a stack that is every bit as capable as Apple's stack. Instead, they want us to believe that if only they could force Apple to open up, we'd all be better off.

Excuse me if that argument sounds to me a lot like the whining from Netscape and Sun in the late 1990s.

This is a good explanation of the theory behind the "rule of law" as we know it today. In fact, it is an excellent set of points which shows how clearly off the United States is from the "rule of law, not men" that is so often claimed.

The sovereign immunity enjoyed by the police and many other government agents is one of the many assaults on the rule of law. By allowing them "good faith" protection when they injure private citizens or damage their property in the performance of their duties, the law and courts have carved out a special class of citizen which is not routinely held to the same standards as the rest of society, let alone accountable to the general law itself, in many cases.

The civil asset forfeiture laws, which allow the government to seize property with minimal due process protection also serve to undermine the rule of law by depriving private citizens of a constitutional presumption of innocence, adequate means to fund their defense in criminal proceedings, and empowering the police to carry out a punishment under the guise of a different type of proceeding. These laws and the precedents which support them allow the government to seize large amounts of cash carried on a private citizen on the assumption that the cash is to be used for a crime, and they do not require a trial to prove the matter.

Hate crime laws, while not inherently an attack on the rule of law, are in practice an attack on the rule of law because they are enforced without consideration for equality or consistency. Setting aside the philosophical issues regarding the merits of punishing crimes in part on the motive, the fact that hate crime arrests and prosecutions are highly politically driven is inherently problematic. This also serves to provide an example of how the government's monopoly on bringing criminal charges undermines the rule of law. Government prosecutors are generally quick to bring hate crime charges against whites who victimize minorities, but not the other way around. In fact, it is extremely rare to ever see that sort of prosecution, no matter how blatant the violation of the law.

The laws, policies and precedents which restrict the right of self-defense are onerous and dangerous to the rule of law in that they are neither something that a reasonable person can abide by, nor are they something which the courts show mercy on when violated. For example, in many states private citizens must retreat before enjoying the right of self-defense, regardless of the violence being prepared against them. In other cases, private citizens do not enjoy a right of self-defense against the police when being placed under arrest for reasons incompatible with the law, or when the police either use unnecessary levels of violence or raid the wrong house. If the police show up at your door to execute a warrant for a drug dealer that used to live there, and you shoot at them thinking that they are criminals, you have no legal claim to the right of self-defense. That is completely unreasonable.

These examples, and the general point of the post could be accused of making the adequate the enemy of the good, or the good the enemy of the perfect (depends on how much you respect the system). On the surface that may appear to be true, but generally that charge is used as a means of defending an imperfect system or approach from reform or scrutiny. It's like the charge that people should just lay off the state of government and laws because we're better than China, Saudi Arabia, Cuba or Russia. That may well be true, but it's an invitation to more decline to be satisfied with your mess because it is less of a mess than someone else's mess.

I am enough of a cynic to have no expectation that the myriad flaws in the legal system will ever be meaningfully addressed because that's not sexy and it doesn't win elections. No one won an election in the United States by promising to focus on writing legislative patches to fix the buggy code of our legal system rather than grafting on "new features." A politician that promised to focus his or her efforts on debugging the law and processes would be greeted with the same sort of acceptance that a circus freak would get at a country club.

In which we are reminded how uniquely qualified sociologists are to fabricate new race issues out of thin air:

It's downright sobering to me that after 2 weeks of nearly shutting down my blog, the number of hits I get per day has remained basically unaffected. Most of them are Google hits, and always have been, but still.

Everyone knows that most women love seamen. This seamen story may make a big splash on the headlines, but it won't stick in the public's mind for long. 

At least they have an excuse now to create a movie that is entirely focused on special effects and that has absolutely no discernible plot:

Proving that there is no relic from our childhood that cannot be turned into an expensive event movie bearing almost no resemblance to the original artifact, The Hollywood Reporter says that Universal has acquired the movie rights to Asteroids, the bleeping, blooping 1979 video game in which crude line drawings were used to represent rocket ships and gigantic space rocks.

No doubt it will be written by Uwe Boll and directed by Michael Bay, what could go wrong with this? Super Mario Brothers was such a tour de farce that this is sure to be a box office smash (like bugs on a windshield at NASCAR). Hollywood has long been clamoring for a movie that could focus entirely on technical features, and now they have it.

Installing Movable Type over SSH may not be everyone's cup of tea, so here is a graphical approach that should be possible with most decent hosting services. It uses CPanel, and CPanel's file manager, to upload a fresh copy of the Movable Type zip file or tarball to a host, extract it and configure it without going through the painful process of uploading every single last file by FTP and praying that everything will work out right.

Figure 1: Open CPanel and click on the file manager.

Figure 2: Navigate to public_html (or whatever directory corresponds to "/") and click the upload button.

Figure 3: Choose the zip file or tarball (tar.gz) and begin the upload.

Figure 4: Click the checkbox next to Movable Type zip file, and then click the extract button. You may have to click the "go" button in the top left corner before you can see the MT zip/tarball.

Figure 5: You will now see a dialog box. Accept the default values.

Figure 6: Once it reports that it is finished, close it.

Figure 7: Click the MT file folder (may have to refresh to see it again). And click the "Rename" button. Rename it to "mt" or "mtos."

Figure 8: Double click the Movable Type directory. Select mt-config.cgi-original, and rename it to mt-config.cgi. Some versions of CPanel have a problem editing a file after it's been renamed, so refresh the directory view again.

Figure 9: Click the checkbox next to mt-config.cgi, click the "Edit" button, and when you see the dialog for the text editor, choose edit.

Figure 10: Make the manual configure changes needed (CGIPath, StaticWebPath and database information) and click "Save Changes" in the top right corner.

Everything should be ready now to run the Movable Type installer to configure the database, so load mt-check.cgi in your browser and get started!