Ethel the Blog
Observations (and occasional brash opining) on science, computers, books, music and other shiny things that catch my mind's eye. There's a home page with ostensibly more permanent stuff. This is intended to be more functional than decorative. I neither intend nor want to surf on the bleeding edge, keep it real, redefine journalism or attract nyphomaniacal groupies (well, maybe a wee bit of the latter). The occasional cheap laugh, raised eyebrow or provocation of interest are all I'll plead guilty to in the matter of intent. Bene qui latuit bene vixit.

The usual copyright stuff applies, but I probably won't get enraged until I find a clone site with absolutely no attribution (which, by the way, has happened twice with some of my other stuff). Finally, if anyone's offended by anything on this site then please do notify me immediately. I like to keep track of those times when I get something right.

How to blog? METABLOGGING Blog Madness Blog Portal linkwatcher Monitor BLOGS (YMMV) abuddhas memes alamut apathy arms and the man baghdad burning bifurcated rivets big left outside boing boing booknotes bovine inversus bradlands bushwacker camworld cheek chess log cogent provocateur cool tools counterspin crooked timber delong digby drat fink drmike d-squared dumbmonkey electrolite eschaton estimated prophet ezrael fat planet flutterby! follow me here geegaw genehack ghost glare gmtplus9 hack the planet harmful hauser report hell for halliburton honeyguide hotsy totsy club juan cole kestrel's nest k marx the spot kuro5hin lake effect lambda large hearted boy leftbanker looka looking glass macleod maxspeak medley memepool metagrrrl mike's monkeyfist more like this mouse farts my dog norbizness off the kuff orcinus pandagon pedantry peterme philosoraptor pith and vinegar plastic portage q quark soup quiggin randomwalks rip post rittenhouse see the forest shadow o' hegemon sideshow simcoe south knox bubba slacktivist smudge submerging markets sylloge synthetic zero talking points tbogg twernt unknownnews vacuum vanitysite virulent memes whiskey bar windowseat tv wood s lot TECH Librenix use perl rootprompt slashdot freshmeat Ars Technica 32BitsOnline UGeek AnandTech Linux Today Tom's Hardware DevShed

"When they say, 'Gee it's an information explosion!', no, it's not an explosion, it's a disgorgement of the bowels is what it is. Every idiotic thing that anybody could possibly write or say or think can get into the body politic now, where before things would have to have some merit to go through the publishing routine, now, ANYTHING." - Harlan Ellison JOLLY OLD PALS Other stuff of mild interest to some: unusual literature scientific software blog physical oceanography glossary computer-related tutorials and texts Friday, November 10, 2000 NARVAL The Network Assisted Reasoning with a Validating Agent Language or Narval package is an intelligent personal network assistant based on artificial intelligence and agent technologies. It executies sequences of actions (i.e. recipes) to perform tasks, with actions specified using XML and implemented using Python. A graphical interface can be used to build recipes. So just what can Narval do and be used for? According to its creators: Narval is designed to be a companion that will help you in your daily work in the information world. It runs on your machine or on a remote server, and you can communicate via all standard means (email, web, telnet, phone, etc). It executes recipes you wrote, to perform a wide range of tasks, such as prepare your morning newspaper, help you surf the web by filtering out junk ads, keep searching the web day after day for things you want, participe in on-line auctions, learn you interests and bring you back valuable information, take care of repetitive chores, answer e-mail, and much more. And just what underlies the hood, i.e. what jargon-filled concepts is it based on? Narval lies on a rules-based system. This provides bothly great reactivity as well as great modularity. Furthermore, this rules-based system has been hybridized with a plans-based system in order to afford opportunities of elementary steps sequencing. The result conceptually fits to most of the situations Narval will have to manage. Narval is built on top of several other packages, the chief of which are: Python 1.5.2; PyGTK, a set of Python bindings to GTK+; PyXML, a package containing XML parsers implemented in C and Python as well as Python implementations of SAX and DOM; and 4Suite, a standards-based suite of software for web application development that includes an implementation of the standard DOM API for HTML and XML content manipulation, an XSLT processor, a library implementing the XPath language for indicating and selecting portions of an XML, a Python front-end to the ODMG object database standard, and a toolkit and library for RDF processing. It's a bit of a trudge to get all this preliminary stuff installed, but once you do you can be every bit as confused as I am, having played with Narval for all of a couple of minutes and given up in frustration to move on to the next shiny piece of software. Apparently patience isn't an inevitable consequence of aging. posted by Steven Baum 11/10/2000 04:05:47 PM | link FREESCO ROUTER FREESCO (i.e. FREE ciSCO) is a one-floppy Linux mini-distribution that can be used as a replacement for or alternative to commercial routers. It can support up to 3 Ethernet, ARCnet, Token Ring or Arlan network cards, and up to 2 modems. FREESCO can be used to make: a simple bridge with up to 3 Ethernet segments; a router with up to 3 Ethernet segments; a dialup line router; a leased line router; an Ethernet router; a dial-in server with up to 2 modems; a time server; a DHCP server; an HTTP server; and a print server (with additional TCP/IP printing client software. Additional functionality and features include: a configuration utility for easy and fast system set-up and maintenance; a web interface for system administration via any browser; and incorporation of the firewalling and NAT features available in the kernel. For less advanced users, this is an interesting alternative to the more complex Linux Router Project or the more limited Coyote Linux. The best all-purpose limited distribution is still tomsrtbt, which has pulled my ass out of the fire more than once. There are quite a few mini-distributions from which to choose, a few of which I've found useful when tomsrtbt has proved to be insufficiently specialized for a given task. posted by Steven Baum 11/10/2000 03:09:52 PM | link ArsDigita Community System What all started with a travelogue (whose opening chapter brought tears to these jaded, canine-worshipping eyes) has metamorphosed into Phillip Greenspun's ArsDigita, one of the most consistently interesting sites on the web. Greenspun is a great fan of the open source concept, a fact that's led to the development and open sourcing of the ArsDigita Community System (ACS), the 4th version of which is available for downloading. The ACS is "a suite of fully-integrated (via a common data model) enterprise-class applications for supporting `purposeful' online communities." The ACS software is separated into modules, which in turn are grouped into five categories based on the fundamental requirements for supporting online communities, i.e. publishing, site management, personalization, collaboration and transaction. The publishing modules include: Adserver, a system for adding banners (commercial or otherwise); Banner Ideas, something placed on a page to entice readers to move to another page; Dynamic Publishing System, a substrate for team development of web apps that maintains a strict separation between data processing and presentation; FAQ System, a system for collaboratively creating and maintaining FAQs; New Stuff, a central facility for identifying and advertising new content; News, a module for presenting and expiring news items; Poll, a module for presenting and collecting and processing the results of polls; and Redirects, a module for ensuring that legacy URLs pointed to by bookmarks or search engines will still work. The personalization modules include: Curriculum, allows a publisher to establish a curriculum at their site that identifies up to a dozen or so areas of content they want visitors to see; Email Handler, a gateway for handling incoming email messages pertaining to specific applications; and Portals, for creating personalized portals for users based on what they might like to see. The collaboration modules include: Address Book, a contact manager and reminder service; BBoards, a discussion forum system to allow the usual horde of flame wars to continue into the 37th century; Bookmarks, for sharing bookmarks with others and accessing your own from any browser; Chat, the usual capabilities for pretending to be someone or something you're not; File Storage, for collaboratively maintaining a set of files on a server via secure web pages; Ticket, a system for recording and tracking isssues; and WimpyPoint, for building and viewing slide presentations from any web browser anywhere without the bloat of similar commercial applications. The site management modules include: Data Warehouse, a tool for data warehouse-style queries; Directory, allows a user to get a sense of the size and character of the community, and to find specific members; and Site-Wide Search, a method for performing full-text site-wide searches. The transaction modules include: Classifieds, a module for creating and maintaining classified ads; E-commerce, a comprehensive module implementing all of the functionality needed for secure and stable transactions; and Neighbor to Neighbor, a repository of user experience with various kinds of merchants, i.e. a sort of collaborative Better Business Bureau. The hardware and software requirements for ACS aren't terribly tricky, although the commercial Oracle 8i RDBMS is required for the basic package. For those without the scratch or desire to use a pricey commercial product, the OpenACS project provides a version of ACS that swaps out Oracle for PostgreSQL as the database backend. This open source option will probably work just fine for small- or even medium-sized online communities, although it may be a year or two until PostgreSQL is able to scale to handle larger sites as well as the heavily optimized Oracle. Some guidance on the database issue can be found in a Slashdot item "What database is the best for a web site/small business?". One of the responses contains the following summary from someone at the Cambridge University Engineering Dept. who researched the options for replacing their Windows database systems with a UNIX-based solution: Commercial databases: For our purposes, these are totally unnecessary. Sure, all the management tools that come with Oracle are nice, but if you can write Perl, you can achieve the same, albeit with some more work. mSQL: MySQL is derived from this, and it offers no advantages over MySQL. MySQL: There's one reason and one reason only to choose this: Performance, especially reading performance. However, the cost of this is very high - none of the features that make databases usable with complex data structures, etc. In particular, the lack of transactions verges on criminal negligence. PostgreSQL: This is the one we're going for. It supports everything you'd expect from a modern database. In particular, inherited tables allow you to do many things that the commercial databases have, such as per column access control. Performance is adequate, but not fantastic. In our application, this isn't terribly important - but I wouldn't want to run Slashdot on PostgreSQL. I've recently read (although I can't pinpoint exactly where) of a concerted effort to remedy the problems mentioned about MySQL, although it's a moot point until OpenACS supports both PostgreSQL and MySQL (which will probably happen sooner rather than later, though). Other views can be found in PostgreSQL vs. MySQL: An Unbiased Comparison, MySQL and PostgreSQL Compared, and A Comparison of Four Databases. It should also be noted that commercial database companies tend to actively discourage - via legal means - the publishing of benchmark results for their products. posted by Steven Baum 11/10/2000 10:45:57 AM | link NEW LINUX DISTRO FOR WIRELESS NETWORKING FlyingLinux was ... ... started in October 1999 in the Telecommunication Systems Lab at Teleinformatics KTH with the objective of studying the possibilty of using MobileIPv4 and standard DHCP wireless access for student labs. The first FlyingLinux versions started with Bambi 6.1, which was modified to create the first Linux distribution designed for secure network mobility. The various bits and pieces that go towards fulfilling this design goal include: KTH-KRB, an improved and expanded version of Kerberos V4 based on eBones; Heimdal, an expanded and modified version of Kerberos 5 designed to be compliant with MIT Kerberos V5 and backwards compatible with V4; Arla, a free implementation of AFS (although it should be noted that OpenAFS is now available); Hut Mobile IP, a scalable, dynamical and hierarchical Mobile IP package for Linux; OpenSSH, a free version of the SSH suite of network connectivity tools; StarOffice, the office suite for those slackards insufficiently talented or motivated to use vi, LaTeX and Gnumeric (as well as insufficiently rude or powerless to return all RTF-based attachments to sender with the message "message garbled, do not repeat" until it sinks in); the Linux driver for Lucent's WaveLAN/IEEE wireless LAN card; the Linux wireless extensions, a set of kernel mods and programs for dealing with wireless LAN cards; and Lynx with SSL support. The FlyingLinux distribution is available from both KTH (Sweden) and Stanford (U.S.). posted by Steven Baum 11/10/2000 09:46:56 AM | link Thursday, November 09, 2000 VOTE EARLY AND OFTEN According to Salon, some Florida residents were sent not one but two absentee ballots. The ballots were sent to both Democrats and Republicans, but there are quite a few more of the latter than the former. So just what did Jeb mean when he called his brother - who was very concerned about the results in Florida - that "It's a done deal."? posted by Steven Baum 11/9/2000 05:50:34 PM | link GOODMAN INTERVIEWS CLINTON Don Hazen at AlterNet has written an article about and included a transcript of an interview of President Clinton by Amy Goodman and Gonzalo Aburto of Democracy Now on Nov. 7 (with a RealAudio version also available). Clinton had called WBAI to drum up support for Gore in California and agreed to be interviewed. Goodman and Aburto got under his skin a bit but (as Hazen says), it sounds like he enjoyed the verbal duel. And while we're on the topic of Amy Goodman and her show, you might want to peruse a memo by her entitled Crackdown on Democracy Now in which she outlines a series of "policies and work rules" that the management of Pacifica is attempting to force her to abide by. The most disturbing of their demands is that Goodman submit a list of possible shows for the following week and a short status report on each for review by the management, and the imposition of two new producers on the show. Both of these are nothing more than not even thinly disguised attempts to establish a censorship hierarchy in which the long-time host of their most popular and vital show will lose editorial control of that show. posted by Steven Baum 11/9/2000 05:02:15 PM | link MANDATE? From the 1996 post-election RNC Talking Points, i.e. the GOP's attempts to downplay the fact that they'd just lost their second presidential election in a row: Clinton received less than 50% of the vote, and it should be noted that he is the first president since Woodrow Wilson and only the third president in American history to be elected twice on a plurality. His low percentage, coupled with the fact that he campaigned as a moderate Republican, shows he has no mandate. So what kind of a mandate does someone who doesn't even receive a plurality of the votes have? It looks like drug use and military service are going to receive a new guest into the Home for Things That No Longer Matter. posted by Steven Baum 11/9/2000 03:51:46 PM | link SERIAL INSIDER TRADING From an article in the Guardian: The drunken driving arrest is not the only character evidence from Bush's past that has been suppressed or glossed over. On October 2, the Center for Public Integrity [in "Bush's Insider Connections Preceded Huge Profit on Stock Deal" and "Bush Violated Security Laws Four Times, SEC Report Says"] Washington and Bill Muntaglio and Nancy Beiles in Talk magazine revealed that Bush not once but repeatedly missed the legal deadlines for reporting his insider stock trades when he was a director and member of the audit committee of a ropey Texas oil company, Harken Energy. In 1991, three years before he ran for governor, the Wall Street Journal headlined one instance when Bush sold near the top of the market before the stock plunged, pocketing nearly $850,000. He was eight months late in reporting this coup. He claimed he had but that the SEC had "lost the paperwork". But neither the Journal, or anyone else, has asked Bush if the SEC "lost the paperwork" when he was derelict on three other newly-documented insider trades he did not report in the way required by the anti-corruption laws. The 1991 SEC investigation, criticised for being run by friends of then President Bush [e.g. James Doty, the SEC's general counsel at the time, would become Bush's lawyer when he purchased his share of the Texas Rangers], ended inconclusively. Bush, it was said, could not have known of the magnitude of Harken's impending loss when he sold out. But the SEC never interviewed Bush and documents obtained last month under the Freedom of Information Act clearly show that Bush had more knowledge than he admitted. At least twice during the month he cashed out, he received memos showing the company was in financial peril. posted by Steven Baum 11/9/2000 02:44:39 PM | link A DEITY VOTES IN MISSOURI From a Kansas City Star article: At Oakwood Manor Elementary School in Gladstone, voters could pick up their ballot, read the sample ballot and then decide how to vote from a stack of brochures advising them. The brochures were the Christian Coalition's voters guide. When voter Dane Dingerson complained to the election poll supervisor, Sara Manichia, she told him: "God wants Bush to win." Dingerson was outraged. "I couldn't believe she said that to me as I was voting," he said. "When I became angry, she told me there was nothing wrong with her informing the voters the right way to vote." Manichia said she has been a polling supervisor for 13 years. "Yes, I told him that God wants Bush to win. I'm proud of my beliefs, and I love the gospel, and God hates abortion....He wants Bush to win." Clay County election officials said they would investigate. Electioneering is against the law within 25 feet of a voting precinct. posted by Steven Baum 11/9/2000 02:08:04 PM | link RECOUNTABILITY Xavier Suarez - a prominent member of the ultra-conservative Cuban-American community in the area - sits on the executive committee of the Miami-Dade GOP and was heavily involved in the election this year . In an interview with Feed yesterday, he said that he ... ... helped fill out absentee ballot forms and enlist Republican absentee voters in Miami-Dade County. Xavier also used to be the mayor of Miami, that is until his last election in 1997 was overturned because of charges of voter fraud and falsification of records. According to Feed: The charges in the mayoral race centered around allegations that addresses and names of Florida voters were falsified and altered by campaign staffers shared by Suarez and then city commissioner Humberto Hernandez. The case was originally reported by the Miami Herald, which won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage. Hernandez -- along with thirteen other volunteers and city officials -- was found guilty of the charges and received a 364 day prison sentence for his crimes. Suarez escaped conviction and sentencing, although he fared less well at in an ensuing civil suit filed by absentee voters: However, a civil case was later brought by eleven Dade County absentee voters and resulted in overturning the Suarez election. In that case, the jury found that Suarez and his staff did engage in vote fraud, specifically tampering with 5,000 absentee ballots. And what has Suarez been up to during this election? According to him , he ... ... helped fill out absentee ballot forms and enlist Republican absentee voters in Miami-Dade County. That's right, the fox is guarding the chicken house. Kendall Coffee, the lead attorney in the successful suit that removed Suarez from office, also has a couple of things to say: Suarez was found to have taken part in systematic and massive absentee ballot fraud. He was found to have done significantly better in absentee balloting than in the general vote. No one watchdogs absentee balloting, other than the campaigns themselves. The election commission has no authority to oversee the distribution of coordination of absentee ballots until they are counted. At this hour the recount has Bush leading by less than 800 votes, with absentee ballots not yet counted, although any possible fixing of the estimated 30,000 absentee ballots probably isn't going to be needed if more than 19,000 confusing ballots remain invalidated. posted by Steven Baum 11/9/2000 10:27:27 AM | link Tuesday, November 07, 2000 QUANTUM::SUPERPOSITIONS Damian "That Sumbitch Is So Clever He Makes My Brain Hurt" Conway (who occasionally talks shop) is so clever that if you put a tail on him you could call him a weasel. He's such a grand imperial royal whomping Perl deity that they recently renamed the "Larry Wall Award" at the annual Perl Conference to the "Damian Conway Award." He won it in 2000 for his Text::Autoformat module that formats text by analyzing its structure, although his real neuron stretcher as of late is his Quantum::Superpositions module. I'll let the Perfesser describe his creation: The Quantum::Superpositions module adds two new operators to Perl: any and all. Each of these operators takes a list of values (states) and superimposes them into a single scalar value (a superposition), which can then be stored in a standard scalar variable. The any and all operators produce two distinct kinds of superposition. The any operator produces a disjunctive superposition, which may (notionally) be in any one of its states at any time, according to the needs of the algorithm that uses it. In contrast, the all operator creates a conjunctive superposition, which is always in every one of its states simultaneously. Superpositions are scalar values and hence can participate in arithmetic and logical operations just like any other type of scalar. However, when an operation is applied to a superposition, it is applied (notionally) in parallel to each of the states in that superposition. ... A disjunctive superposition is true if any of its states is true, whereas a conjunctive superposition is true only if all of its states are true. He goes on to offer an example concerning primality testing: The power of programming with scalar superpositions is perhaps best seen by returning the quantum computing's favourite adversary: prime numbers. Here, for example is an O(1) prime-number tester, based on naive trial division: sub is_prime { my ($n) = @_; return $n % all(2..sqrt($n)+1) != 0 } The subroutine takes a single argument ($n) and computes (in parallel) its modulus with respect to every integer between 2 and sqrt($n). This produces a conjunctive superposition of moduli, which is then compared with zero. That comparison will only be true if all the moduli are not zero, which is precisely the requirement for an integer to be prime. I can see it now. A quantum supercomputer running a Perl 18.0 based operating system with fundamental discontinuous probability function data types. posted by Steven Baum 11/7/2000 12:27:58 AM | link

Comments? Archive LISTS Books Software uPORTALS cider crime lit drive-in fake lit hurricanes os scripting sherlock texas music top 100 weirdsounds wodehouse LEISURE abebooks alibris amazon bibliofind bookfinder hamilton powells all music guide best used cds cd bargains second spin raven's links ampol arts & letters atlantic art history attrition bibliomania bitch bizarre bizarro bloom country bob 'n' ed bob the angry flower callahan chile pepper classical music cnnsi crackbaby cult films culture jamming discover disinformation dismal scientist electric sheep espn exquisite corpse feed fine cooking fishbowl fluble fried society fry and laurie hotel fred hotendotey hypocrisy network jerkcity last cereal leisure town logos london times mappa mundi miscmedia mp3lit mr. chuck show mr. serpent national geographic new scientist no depression not bored obscure store onion on-line books parking lot is full pearly gates phrase and fable probe red meat rough guides salon Simpleton sluggy freelance spacemoose spike straight dope strenua inertia suck superosity tawdry town too much coffee man toon inn verbivore vidal index yes minister you damn kid