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.

Gun cleaning: a use for the River Current

DVDs finished: Perfect Stranger, Underworld, Star Trek: The Next Generation - Season 7, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers.

Letters to the editor

I was upset by your interview with Congressman Thompson (D-MS). Perhaps he and his committee allotted $3Bn to secure the border, some to hire more border agents, but what good does that do when those agents go to jail for defending that border (Ramos/Compean)? I am tired of all the problems caused by illegal immigrants. We need to build the border fence now so that Americans are safe and the needless deaths and other crimes stop.

The war against illegal plunder has been fought since the beginning of the world. But how is… legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime. Then abolish this law without delay… If such a law is not abolished immediately it will spread, multiply and develop into a system.

... On the facing page [of the March 31 copy of the Weekly] is an article about Larry Phillips, King County Councilman (D), wanting to have the public pay for county campaign finances. Do you realize who the "public" is? It's you! King County has only the money generated by the taxes you pay and they collect (at the point of a gun).
    Then two pages later is an advertisement by the City of Woodinville. It states it's offering free tree chipping services. That's a lie. Someone is paying for this, and if you look further the event is paid for by grants from Washington state and King County. Where does the state and county get grant money? From you, the taxpayer, and from the one time homeowner in Duvall who is now homeless [more about that later]. On top of this we homeowners with wood debris and tree branches could be done disposing of our own branches in one day if we were allowed, by the Democrats, their bureaucrats and special interest groups, to burn. If we were allowed to burn, it wouldn't cost you any tax dollars!
    Please, people, get a grip, who and what you vote for affects all aspects of your day to day life!" —Kathy & Dennis Peterson, Woodnville

I agree with the Petersons' letter of April 14 that, where the government is concerned, there is no such thing a "free": it's paid for by we the taxpayers, under threat of violence.
    However, I take issue with the implication that it is the city or county's responsibility to absolve this woman of her taxes because she couldn't pay them: it is not, regardless of how long she lived there, just as I have no right to demand that the taxpayers give me money to pay my bills.
    I am sympathetic if the inference was rather that the woman would have been able to pay if taxes were lower. Far too often politicians and voters argue over how tax money should be spent, rather than first considering if tax money should be spent. It should be the first duty of any one that has spending authority over my money to consider how to return that money, and with it the power and freedom to choose for ourselves, to the taxpayer, and, to paraphase de Saint-Exupéry, what can be removed, rather than what can be added, to the tax burden of the American citizen.

DVDs finished: The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.

A LINQ to the future

    // attributes copy their parents' workflow bugs (for filtering)
    bgw.ReportProgress(0, "Assuming parent element workflow for attributes...");
    var qAttrDev = from dev in m_pldev
        join attr in m_ecmadc.Attributes on dev.docID equals attr.docIDattribute
        where (DEVT)dev.type == DEVT.Attr && m_mpWkf.ContainsKey(attr.docID.ToString())
        select new { docID = dev.docID.ToString(), docIDparent = attr.docID.ToString() };
    foreach (var monkey in qAttrDev)
        m_mpWkf.AutoVivify(monkey.docID).AddRange(m_mpWkf[monkey.docIDparent]);

    public static class Extensions
    {
        public static U AutoVivify<T, U>(this Dictionary<T, U> mptu, T t)
        {
            if (!mptu.ContainsKey(t))
                mptu.Add(t, (U)typeof(U).GetConstructor(new Type[0]).Invoke(null));
            return mptu[t];
        }
    }

smb_proc_readX_data: offset is larger than SMB_READX_MAX_PAD or negative!
smb_proc_readX_data: -59 > 64 || -59 < 0
smb_add_request: request [ffff8100092d3e00, mid=1208] timed out!

DVDs finished: Star Wars Trilogy, The Riddick Trilogy, Æon Flux.

Stuff happens, it's not that interesting

DVDs finished: Live Free or Die Hard, Blade: Trinity, The Matrix Revolutions, Battlestar Galactica, Doctor Who: The Complete Second Series, Kiss the Girls, Dirty Harry, John Travolta Triple Feature.

The fascists next door

• 9th, 1 minute down (0.07%)
• 10th, 119 minutes down (8.26%)
• 11th (today, until ~2000), 185 minutes down (12.85%).

• Any handgun is a restricted weapon (the only "unrestricted" (that doesn't mean what you think it means) firearms are some shotguns and rifles)!
• All firearms must be unloaded during transport (concealed carry? What's that?) or storage; non-restricted firearms must be locked in the trunk, restricted firearms must also be rendered unable to be fired with a secure locking device and locked in a heavy-duty opaque container
• Want to transport a handgun? That requires a form which takes about two weeks to get. Don’t even think about trying to get permission to carry.

  This particular license is almost impossible to get. It's issued to armored car personnel and occasionally to trappers and other workers in the bush. Authorizations to Carry are unique is that there is no appeal from a refusal of an application for an ATC; "no" means no.

• So, what can you get? The Possession and Acquisition License (PAL), $60 ($80 "restricted"), renewable every five years, and here are the hoops you need to jump through to get it:
  
  
  1. a passport-sized photograph, certified to be of you by some other person
  2. signed permission of your current "domestic partner" and all previous domestic partners within the past three years (The US just requires that you not have felony or domestic violence convictions, whereas in Canada you can be blocked by the whim of an irrational ex)
  3. signed permission from two other individuals who are not family members (is this a joke? "Please, Joe, can you sign this so I can get a gun?")
  4. you must pass the Canadian (Restricted) Firearms Safety Course (you need the Restricted course as well only if you want to be able to possess something more dangerous than a rubber band); each is 12 hour class and an examination, or you can skip the class and "challenge the examination" directly
  5. said course also has a practical part, which includes the operation of various actions, gun safety (to the point of using a cleaning rod to check that the bore is unobstructed)
  6. you need to tell them what firearms you intend to possess (while you're in the zone, tell yourself the upcoming winning lottery numbers)
  7. you'll need to get your local police to do a background check on your and send it to the Canadian authorities
  8. register each firearm you intend to bring into Canada: $18 is the most recent fee I can find, but it may have gone up since then

Traffic lights high above in the wood-railed marshes

[Margulies] plays Elizabeth Canterbury, a reckless and rebellious defense attorney who isn't averse to tweaking a few rules to secure justice for her clients. In her legal playbook, the ends definitely justify the means. From "House" to "The Shield" and beyond, flawed lead characters are all the rage on television, and Canterbury fits right in. She drinks too much. She cheats on her husband (Aidan Quinn). She abuses her underlings and she taunts witnesses with an almost malicious glee.

The whiteness of the whale

I'm working on some C# XSD-processing tools, and an ASP.NET site, backed by an MS SQL database. I haven't done much C# previously but it's a pretty decent environment (the lure of the dark side...), except sometimes I wish I could trace into the System libraries and I can't₁ (although a 3rd-party tool called Reflector lets me at least see what's going on in there). The tools were written by a "technical PM" (program manager), so while it's great that he got them written at all, they're not terribly efficient (one tool that imports all the OOXML XSDs into our database used to take 10 minutes, now down to about 2 seconds, for example, although fixing bugs is the main task, not making it faster).

Part of the code is to find parent-child relationships; the old code went through each schema element and then walked the entire schema and checked if that element was a child; the new code just traverses the schema once, pushing parent items on a stack. Anyway, C# isn't bad, .NET isn't bad and is getting better (we're using 3.0, 3.5 has some nice things though and DML in 4.0 looks interesting). It may be useful to have C#/.NET/XSD stuff on my resume, too.

Liberals write essays like kids making up a melody

Liberals write essays like kids making up a melody. They meander along, issuing contradictory snide remarks about Bush, until they run out of energy and finally conclude with some incongruous, throaty peroration.

Model railroad exhibit

Wheelhouse

Prototype/Scriptaculous chosen as Javascript library for new photo site

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