::::: : the wood : davidrobins.net

My name is David Robins: Christian, lead developer (resume), writer, photographer, runner, libertarian (voluntaryist), and student.

This is also my son David Geoffrey Robins' site.

Microsoft's Terminal Server needs improvement

News ·Saturday July 28, 2007 @ 23:16 EDT (link)

20070723: WA 673 VMY red Chevrolet Camaro cut me off near the Avondale and WA-520E—not coming from the exit as often happens, but changing from the right to left lane.

20070524: Played croquet (morale event). I volunteered to set up and referee, which was a lot of fun.

20070530: Things to do.

20070614: Started reading the Vanishing American blog.

20070628: From the aforementioned blog:

And as for the WSJ's arrogant assertion that the growth in the Hispanic population will continue regardless of what happens with immigration from now on: I am afraid that they may be right. I am not sure where that leaves those of us who do not want to live in a Spanish-speaking banana republic, but I see little to inspire loyalty in the country the WSJ and the Senate elitists are preparing for us. And it looks like they have declared war on us, by their own words and actions.

20070711: Windows command-line needs to understand about interrupts so I don't have to wait for the drunken gnomes to stop writing before I can kill a runaway console application. Take a hint from Unix already! (you weren't shy about stealing anything from it in the past).

20070714: Frequently when I'm terminal served into one of my work machines, it gets stuck thinking that the Windows key is down, which I don't discover until I've typed a few characters. Depending on what I'm typing, I might minimize all my windows, open a few Explorer windows, and lock the computer.

20070728: (Somewhat similar to the Windows key issue:) Microsoft's Terminal Server has a real problem with control sequences when it gets bogged down—e.g. save is usually "Control + S", now it's "hold down Control, wait, press S". Typing in mixed-case passwords is a lot of fun, since it's necessary to pause for a second when changing the shift state to let the remote machine catch up (broadband, not dialup!)

20070724: scheduledirect.org is the MythTV and open source community response to Zap2It's announcement that they'll stop providing TV guide data to MythTV users in September (because of abuses from companies building systems hardcoded to use one login; they want people to create their own (free) login and renew every 3 months, occasionally taking a survey, which is a small price to pay for the data).

20070727: Office Friday Fest (food and drink on the playing fields, and some games like mini-golf and a rock wall). No T-shirts this time. Working on checking in.

20070728: Garage sales again! 2 ties, 1 (level!) wooden stool, DVD (Pirates of the Caribbean), 2 puzzles, 1 book, 4 wine glasses, total $15.50.

Hacking NEStopia

News ·Wednesday July 11, 2007 @ 20:51 EDT (link)

Various hacks:

20070520: I wrote a short cron script to prefix season.episode (e.g. "04.02") to TV show episode names on the MythTV box—one of the benefits of being open (schema and hardware), and thanks to epguides.com.

20070608 Sometimes, when you watch Warcraft replays, you prefer to watch only certain replays. We prefer to watch replays where the heroes get their "ultimate" (most powerful) spell, so I wrote a perl program using LWP::UserAgent to find only those replays.

20070701 I was looking for a decent NES emulator for Honey, to run on our MythTV box; I wasn't having much luck with FCE Ultra, which is supposed to be decent (it's not), so tried a few others, eventually found NEStopia, which did almost everything I wanted, except that the controller didn't work (keyboard did). I started hacking the source, figured out how to setup the buttons for my Xbox controller (and added an Xbox .nstcontrols file for others to use), and added support for quick save and load, and the ability to exit the emulator by pressing a button (previously Escape was hard-coded to quit the game only, not the program, which made things difficult when playing the game in MythTV without a keyboard handy). In the process, I completely refactored the key handling code. I posted my patch to the forum (here); it should be in Linux overlay preview release #6 (1.37R6).

20070702: I wrote a utility to interactively generate the input configuration file, which may be merged into the GUI by the maintainer.

20070704: Added support for Game Genie cheats, toggled by a user-configurable key/button, and posted the patch. Watched fireworks from our lower deck in the evening.

Distributed Re-imaging:

2007-07-08: Khazad-dûm, my Linux desktop/mail machine, shuts down for the last time, after backing up all files of interest to the server (minas-tirith).

2007-07-10: Finished rebuilding as Lothlórien: it used to run LFS (a good learning experience but hard to upgrade) to Gentoo, like my other machines. It was long overdue for an update; the KDE upgrade especially looks very slick, although Kmail still crashes if I'm not careful. I also finally moved from POP3 to IMAPv4 (I already had Honey on IMAP), and shut down the POP3 server. Since both the server and client were using Maildir format, it was pretty simple to make my old local folders into IMAP folders; the only differences were how Kmail and the IMAP server treats directories (which are an extension to the Maildir standard); a short perl script converted them over easily. When building everything, since the machine is an old 400Mhz Pentium II, I installed distcc, an open source distributed compilation framework, and had it use a few of my other machines to help compile, a huge time savings.

A free society is necessarily dangerous

News ·Sunday July 8, 2007 @ 13:03 EDT (link)

Some from the vault:

20070303: Back in March there was a discussion in the Christians at Microsoft forum about an admitted pedophile posting (public) photos of children to a web site. Naturally nobody was happy about this, but there were a few people that wanted to convict the guy without a trial, saying they wanted to take the law into their own hands etc. I replied that those people should be locked up for murder, along the same lines, which one person didn't understand as the rhetorical device that it was and called out as a contradiction. My final reply to the thread was:

The contradiction was exactly the point; of course I don't want to lock either of you up, and nor can you execute or jail this depraved specimen of humanity because of what he may do. Furthermore, this freedom must be afforded not only to people you like, but even, nay, especially when you are emotionally involved.

What law would you create that would target him, but could not be abused to wrongly convict the innocent? It's not a trivial question. One extreme is to make it illegal to publish photographs of any child, but I don't believe society wants that. Would you make it illegal to publish photographs of any child of which you are not the guardian? How do you verify it? Or do you tie the illegality to how the image is presented (e.g. in a sexual context), also a fine line to judge (does publishing the results of a teen beauty contest cross it?) Would people have to cut other children out of pictures of their child playing team sports? Is great-aunt Bertha allowed to publish photos of her grandniece?

How does society enforce preventative measures without government? If you mean taking the law into your own hands, the bottom of that slope is anarchy. This man is not physically harming children as far as we know, so there is no "cost of a child" to wave around, and again, we do not punish people for what they might do (cf. Minority Report).

In a free society, it's very difficult to prevent some offenses without making the society less free, and that cost must always be weighed.

20070417: Started reading the Get Rich Slowly money management blog; one entry had a link to Living on $12,000 a year.

20070508: I can see a counter-argument for school tax being "let the businesses figure out how to get labor themselves, and if it costs more because there are e.g. no schools and no pool of kids to draw from as labor, and they have to pay more or provide bus vouchers to attract employees, etc. then they can reflect it in their prices." (See 1 2.)

Downfall of democracy

News ·Friday July 6, 2007 @ 05:00 EDT (link)

A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury.

From that moment on, the majority always vote for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship.

The average age of the worldÂs greatest civilizations from the beginning of history, has been about 200 years.

During those 200 years, those nations always progressed through the following sequence:
From bondage to spiritual faith;

From spiritual faith to great courage;

From courage to liberty;

From liberty to abundance;

From abundance to complacency;

From complacency to apathy;

From apathy to dependence;

From dependence back into bondage.

We appear to be somewhere in the 5-6 range, moving to 7.

—attributed to Professor Alexander Tyler, University of Edinburgh

The above came from a Fark discussion about a survey stating that "nearly 70 percent of Americans now believe the government has a responsibility to take care of people who canÂt take care of themselves." Most of the discussion was around the difference between "can't" and "won't" take care of themselves, and most agreed, as do I, that we don't have a problem providing necessary food and shelter to those that can't, while we deeply resent providing toys for those that won't. Anyway, nice quote.

Imlib, a Unix image library, looks for some curious symbols in its configure script: blumfrub, buttox, and buckets_of_erogenous_nym. Nobody seems to know why.

On Thursday we had Word's two development interns, LM and JY, over for dinner (roast beef, potatoes, corn); I made apple crisp for dessert, first time; it was astoundingly easy and got good marks. We played some video games on the NES and SNES emulators and GameCube and I took them back to MS around 2200.

Malum prohibitum? Solum restituere

News ·Sunday July 1, 2007 @ 07:21 EDT (link)

Twit cut me off on WA-520 heading east near Avondale Road on Friday at around 1830: WA 496 UXS, white Honda Civic LX.

Good news: the zombie immigration bill was turned by, well, everyone's claiming responsibility, so let's just say the American people, whom the political elites still listen to them now and then. The very idea of combining a security bill and an amnesty bill is ridiculous; pass a security bill (a well-guarded wall, employment verification and penalties, removal of any tax-supported benefits for illegals, prohibit renting, getting driver's licenses, etc.), and then we'll talk.

There are (says the supreme court of Washington state) two types of crime: malum in se (wrong in themselves, e.g. assault, rape, arson, theft), and malum prohibitum (wrong because they are forbidden, e.g. speeding, prostitution, drug crimes). There is a large subset of malum prohibitum crimes which are also victimless. I delved into my book of Latin verbs to come up with restituo and its present infinitive, restituere (conjugated like constituo); solum restituere means "only restore". If there is no victim and no damage, then there should be no penalty. Speeding tickets are a huge source of revenue for many locales, and the "crime" causes nobody any harm. It's likely that some speeding drivers will, in certain circumstances, be more likely to get into an accident, but let's punish that crime (by making the offender pay for the damage, not by assessing some vague ticket for harm to society, i.e., a random town revenue tax).

House prices seem to be declining; this isn't good for anyone looking to move (unless the market they're moving to is declining faster, and one could still be caught "upside-down"). Builders will build new houses until they run out of land or run out of money. A moratorium on new homebuilding would be a good idea, or if that seems unfree, just hike the cost of permits; land that allowed building can be rezoned to no longer allow it. Of course, that would be very much against a free market, but it's horrible to watch builders pave the land as the population continues to climb, when population should really be leveling off or even decreasing. We don't need more bloody people, and it'd help if every random twit would stop thinking that their genetic material needs to be preserved. You're not a unique snowflake, and your best contribution to society would be to not breed; this goes double for illegal aliens and their anchor babies.

It is a terrible thing to inherit a garden; you don't know the plants, because someone else put them there, so you have a whole array of them whose growth patterns and care you have to find out the hard way.

MDM went and changed their channel lineup; Zap2It, where our MythTV box gets its program listings, took about a week to respond. For the interim, I fixed our existing channels with a small perl script; it was slightly tricky because I wanted to keep the channel IDs the same so that we'd continue to record the same programs on the moved channels. Speaking of the Myth box, we added a new 500 Gb SATA HD about a month ago; it integrated nicely into the LVM video partition, although on a later remount it the names of some video files, but perl again came to the rescue: I used the MythTV database to match files and programs and fix the filenames. About a week ago we installed a second DVD player; just a reader this time. It didn't come with any rails so I stole them from the floppy drive holder.

Learning new things: building managed C++

News ·Monday June 18, 2007 @ 22:13 EDT (link)

Managed C++ and OBuild (NT build.exe), neither of which isn't so bad after all but is a little scary to jump head first into (for Word Server).

Random politics musings

News ·Sunday June 17, 2007 @ 12:37 EDT (link)

Mostly politics; you probably don't want to read if you have high blood pressure, because it's pretty much guaranteed you'll disagree with me somewhere, and you'll think it's personal, and you'll get upset, and when people get upset their blood pressure goes up, which is especially bad if it's already high; you have been warned.

Let's start with some libertarian philosophy:

The libertarian refuses to give the State the moral sanction to commit actions that almost everyone agrees would be immoral, illegal, and criminal if committed by any person or group in society. The libertarian, in short, insists on applying the general moral law to everyone, and makes no special exemptions for any person or group. ... The libertarian insists that whether or not such practices are supported by the majority of the population is not germane to their nature: that, regardless of popular sanction, War is Mass Murder, Conscription is Slavery, and Taxation is Robbery. The libertarian, in short, is almost completely the child in the fable, pointing out insistently that the emperor has no clothes.

Libertarian philosophy has a lot going for it; libertarians are fiscally conservative (you pay as you go), and socially liberal (which is where we disagree; they're usually for gay rights, unrestricted abortion, etc., but not always). They have very radical ideas about privatizing, well, pretty much everything (including emergency services and courts), but rational explanations for how things would work. Naysayers say these ideas have never been tried, but nor had many aspects of the republic that would become the United States of America before it was founded.

Ron Paul is a presidential candidate; he has a history of voting against taxes (which, of course, as a libertarian, he would see as theft), and also opposes illegal immigration (from his Wikipedia page):

Paul's desire to secure U.S. borders remains a key topic in his 2008 presidential campaign. He opposes the North American Union proposition and its proposed integration of Mexico, the United States of America, and Canada. Paul voted "yes" on the Secure Fence Act of 2006, which authorizes the construction of an additional 700 miles of double-layered fencing between the U.S and Mexico. Paul opposes illegal immigration as well as amnesty for illegal immigrants. He also introduced legislation that would amend the Constitution to stop giving automatic citizenship to babies who are born in the United States to non-citizen parents, which has been in effect since the 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868.

Perhaps not quite so staunchly as Congressman Tom Tancredo, who has made illegal immigration a key component of his platform. As Tom himself says, regarding his candidacy,

It's delusional to suggest that this would not be anything but a David and Goliath situation, but after all, David won.

Which brings us to the amnesty bill, which, although shot down once, is rising like some gross zombie at the urgings of our pandering President Bush and Senator Harry Reid. If this amnesty passed it would be a tragedy for so many reasons: massive influx of a culture that's so wretched that, after destroying its own country, has to destroy ours; further deflation of the wages of the poorest Americans; increased taxation to support increased welfare and other services; more crime and drugs; eventual elimination of the two-party system; etc. etc.

There should really be two (or several) bills: the first needs to close the border, repeal the fourteenth amendment, deny services (taxpayer-funded or otherwise) to illegals, and do all necessary employment verification to make it a hostile environment for anyone trying to work here illegally, and then we can talk about work visas on an as needed basis. Tying anmesty to security is like discussing sobriety over cocktails.

And an old (June 2005; cleaning out my inbox) article tying lack of kids to happiness:

Get married, but don't have kids. According to Andrew Oswald, an economist at the University of Warwick in England and something of an expert on the intersection of money and happiness, getting married adds a happiness factor that's equivalent to having $100,000 added to your household income. This is not true of having children, Oswald says. His surveys have found that adding kids to your life (or not having them at all) didn't seem to change people's happiness one way or the other. Which is good. Kids are expensive, and since most rich people just send theirs away to boarding school anyway, you could argue that the best thing for your Live Cheap, Look Rich lifestyle is not to have the little darlings in the first place.

And then a commentary on the Duggars, who at least can afford it: God does not want 16 kids: Arkansas mom gives birth to a whole freakin' baseball team. How deeply should you cringe? by Mark Morford.

And lest you think I'm too fond of libertarian views to the extent that corporations should be able to rape and pillage the earth (as they are now):

To defend Wal-Mart for its low prices is to claim that the most perfect form of economic organization more closely resembles the Soviet Union in 1950 than twentieth-century America. It is to celebrate rationalization to the point of complete irrationality.

from Breaking the Chain: The anti-trust case against Wal-Mart. We already have a new McDonald's down the road, and a Jiffy Lube even closer; of course, our twit of a Mayor (Will Ibershof) is elated; strip malls are popping up all over, can a Wal-Mart of our own be far behind? (fortunately the closest one right now is in Lynnwood). (Why don't I like Wal-Mart? Kills the smaller businesses, attracts a skanky crowd, they underpay and mistreat their workers, and they import most of their crap from China and it breaks shortly after you buy it.) Discussion.

Craigslist is great, but it's even better when you use listpic, which groups pictures of items by category and location; here's the link for the eastside. Just a public service announcement, nothing political to see there.

And finally, some numbers: 13256278887989457651018865901401704640 = 09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0h = 2⁶ * 5 * 19 * 12043 * 216493 * 836256503069278983442067. Article. (Hint: it's a key that helps bad people lock you out of something you already own, to deny you legitimate fair use.)

Honey's appendectomy

News ·Saturday June 16, 2007 @ 15:48 EDT (link)

Honey had pain in her lower left side all day Thursday, so I took her to Evergreen Hospital emergency room after work around 1900; they eventually got her into a room and took blood and urine samples and then did a CT scan and determined that it could be her appendix. The CT scan came back around 0100. They decided the surgery could wait until morning, so I went home to get some sleep, and came back Friday morning after the appendectomy, which they did around 0700; it went well. They kept her for observation overnight; I stopped in Friday night too, and then took her home Saturday just after noon. She can walk but isn't supposed to exert herself, or lift very much or drive.

We'll make random things happen to your document

News ·Monday June 11, 2007 @ 20:16 EDT (link)

A collection of random things (heading refers to Word co-authoring "slogan"; I forget who said it originally but I printed out copies for the feature crew).

First, some rants:

I'm annoyed at the state of Linux NES emulators: most are about 5 years abandoned and horribly documented. (I suppose the closed source crowd will crow something about free lunches.) FCE Ultra is supposed to be one of the best, but it looks like it died and then an attempted revival in 2006 also died. In its current state, very few games work; most fail with a gray screen. I'll try one of the better-supported Windows versions (perhaps Nesticle), but that of course means I can't play using the TV, just my laptop, my only Windows box (actually dual).
Windows is an intolerably lousy piece of software for requiring a reboot after changing the domain/workgroup. True, it has gotten much better in that it requires a reboot for far fewer things than, say, NT 3.51, but that's faint praise. Changing the domain should be a minor change to the system. It's personally annoying since I have to switch between my work domain to work remotely and my local workgroup to share files over my internal network.
Speaking of working remotely, IT Connection Manager, the software I use to connect to my work VPN, is also intolerably lousy: it frequently gets "wedged" into a state where it can't connect any more (even after being restarted), and (this I've mentioned before) the "smart" access card needs to be removed somewhere between 2 and 4 seconds into the "checking password" phase, or the password check will count to infinity.

Here's a fun story about personal responsibility (from July 2005, because I dredged through my 'to log' email archive):

Recently a woman called me and said she had no idea who I was but she had been told by someone—she couldn't remember who—that I give money to people like her. The woman said that she and her husband had nine kids and had moved to a desert in the Middle East. Now they were having difficulty supporting themselves because, well, they had nine kids and had moved to a desert. She figured the best solution was to call me and ask if I would support the entire family indefinitely. If you have nine children and think it's a good idea to move to the desert it is fair to say that you are not a good decision maker. So the question I had to ask myself was this: If I gave her money, would she be more likely to a) use it to feed and educate her children, or b) grunt out nine more children and move to a dislodged glacier floating in the Arctic Ocean?

The interesting part of the conversation came after I politely declined her invitation to fund the nonstop production of doomed babies. She got mad at me. Apparently she analyzed her situation and came to the conclusion that the root cause of her problem was the unwillingness of total strangers in other countries to give her money. And her solution to that problem was to get angry.

(Yes, of course it's probably a scam, but if it is it's a particularly stupid one.)

And finally something I only wanted to jot down here so I wouldn't lose it again (from December 2005), about fixing the NTLM authentication on Apache. Also remember: only \ ("\\") works in domain\user (not /; the LWP::Authen::Ntlm module doesn't like it); use keep_alive => 1; the proxy messages in the log mean nothing; LWP::UserAgent needs to be fixed to have $realm set to '' if it's undef in get_basic_credentials; credentials() must be called with 'server:port(not optional)', '', 'domain\user', 'password'; the "Negotiate" protocol warning can be ignored. Term::ReadPassword is nice for password input.

House is done, grass is mown

News ·Sunday May 13, 2007 @ 17:02 EDT (link)

Our home repairs were finished last Saturday, May 6, 2007. Our contractor, Jim Cameron (Cameron Construction), with whom we have been very happy, stopped by to touch up some paint and remove some planks his people had left in our back yard. We're still re-purchasing some interior items (e.g. bedroom furniture, which we've ordered), and will not be completely whole until we submit receipts and get our depreciation back from the insurance company, but the house repairs are done. I was demotivated to mow the lawn while our garage was full of carpet and furniture, and had to make up for the hiatus by mowing it twice afterwards, but it's short again now and should stay that way for, oh, two or three days at least.

Office 14 vision meeting was last week; long boring PowerPoint presentation at the Meydenbauer Center in Bellevue; afterwards I wished I'd stayed at my desk and read the deck, but at least I brought two magazines (latest Spectrum and Communications of the ACM). Despite the lackluster gathering, the new work is interesting and I'm glad to be working on two major Word components and administering a third smaller one which my intern will be working on. Yes: I'll be mentoring a Word SDE intern this summer, should be fun. BH who is now full-time was an intern last summer; we definitely want good interns to become full-time.

I heard that Scott Meyers, author of well-known (in our circle) books Effective C++, Effective STL, and More Effective C++, was giving a presentation for the Northwest C++ Users Group on the 25th, which was being hosted on campus, so server group headed over after eating at Quizno's (visiting ex-Word-dev JB's office on the way out, and, in his absence, drawing liberally on his whiteboard). He was entertaining and interesting, although it's not likely we'll incorporate his abuse of C++ into live code any time soon.

I picked up Honey from the airport on Saturday the 28th.