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.
Welcoming atheists to the mountain state
Theology ·Friday December 12, 2008 @ 22:19 EST (link)
Someone has posted a sign to welcome atheists to West Virginia. It makes a nice reply to recent events (Christmas display follies) in Washington state.
The sign says:
Attention: Lunatic Atheists & their Lawyers
Anti-God is Anti-American
Anti-American is Treason
Traitors lead to Civil War
Rev. E. F. Briggs, PO Box 9066, Monongah, WV 26554
A modern parable
Political ·Tuesday December 9, 2008 @ 13:16 EST (link)
A Japanese company (Toyota) and an American company (General Motors Corporation) decided to have a canoe race on the Missouri River. Both teams practiced long and hard to reach their peak performance before the race.
On the big day, the Japanese won by a mile.
The Americans, very discouraged and depressed, decided to investigate the reason for the crushing defeat. A management team made up of senior management was formed to investigate and recommend appropriate action.
Their conclusion was the Japanese had 8 people rowing and 1 person steering, while the American team had 7 people steering and 2 people rowing. Feeling a deeper study was in order; American management hired a consulting company and paid them a large amount of money for a second opinion.
They advised, of course, that too many people were steering the boat, while not enough people were rowing.
Not sure of how to utilize that information, but wanting to prevent another loss to the Japanese, the rowing team's management structure was totally reorganized to 4 steering supervisors, 2 area steering superintendents and 1 assistant superintendent steering manager.
They also implemented a new performance system that would give the 2 people rowing the boat greater incentive to work harder. It was called the 'Rowing Team Quality First Program,' with meetings, dinners and free pens for the rowers. There was discussion of getting new paddles, canoes and other equipment, extra vacation days for practices and bonuses. The pension program was trimmed to 'equal the competition' and some of the resultant savings were channeled into morale boosting programs and teamwork posters.
The next year the Japanese won by two miles.
Humiliated, the American management laid-off one rower, halted development of a new canoe, sold all the paddles, and canceled all capital investments for new equipment. The money saved was distributed to the Senior Executives as bonuses.
The next year, try as he might, the lone designated rower was unable to even finish the race (having no paddles), so he was laid off for unacceptable performance, all canoe equipment was sold and the next year's racing team was outsourced to India.
Sadly, the End.
* * *
Here's something else to think about: GM has spent the last thirty years moving all its factories out of the US, claiming they can't make money paying American wages.
Toyota has spent the last thirty years building more than a dozen plants inside the US.
The last quarter's results: Toyota makes $4 billion in profits while GM racked up $39 billion in losses.
GM folks are still scratching their heads, and collecting bonuses… and now wants the Government to bail them out.
Books finished: Trade Your Way To Financial Freedom, Trade Your Way To Financial Freedom (2nd Edition).DVDs finished: Legends Of The Fall, Thomas Crown Affair.
Tumultuous MythTV upgrades
News, Technical, Work ·Saturday December 6, 2008 @ 23:38 EST (link)
20081128: Fixed DVD scanning system to use Michael's Movie Mayhem instead of the defunct DVDSpot.com. Works fine; I wish MMM had the runtime on the page, since the lack means an extra request to IMDb to fetch it. But I'm happy I can get all the fields I was using previously, and the cover images. I did some refactoring of the code; it's all very tidy.
20081129: Upgraded PostgreSQL to 8.3 and ported database over. Went to Woodinville library with Honey. Finished my last two peer research paper comments for Accessibility. Fixed IMAP server: /etc/ssl/certs had some dangling links to which courier-authlib objected (and I removed the authpipe library since it couldn't find its program; it wasn't necessary anyway).
20081202: Still have turkey left; had it every day except yesterday, so far. (It ended up lasting us about six days.)
20081203: Finished colloquia reviews for school (4, plus 4 watched and rated but not reviewed). Bit of a rush at the end, oh well, no harm.
20081205: Holiday party. Parked at 6th and Oliver. Left work 1830, arrived about 2000, about 30 minutes to walk to the Space Needle (turns out we could probably have parked closer, but I didn't know how busy it would be); left around 2200 (much faster going home). Honey wasn't wearing very comfortable shoes, so she actually took them off on the way back, although I offered to pick her up at the Needle.
20081206: (Early hours.) Upgraded kernel on cirith-ungol (MythTV box) to 2.6.26-gentoo-r3. A lot of things broke, cascadingly: LVM now wanted baselayout-2, which put a lot of things in the wrong runlevels: networking wasn't included in default, so it didn't get started; checkfs was put in default (instead of boot), so it kept failing to check the root filesystem since it was already mounted and couldn't be remounted read-only. I tried to set the hostname in /etc/conf.d/hostname to localhost to appease Apache, but apparently MythTV stores its configuration by hostname, so to appease both I set the hostname back to cirith-ungol and ensured cirith-ungol was in /etc/hosts (as an alias 127.0.0.1, localhost). I still plan to do an emerge -Duav world… optimistic or foolhardy, I don't know. Time to kick back and watch survivor, I've been at this for five hours.
20081207: More updates to cirith-ungol: some conflicts (had to apply a patch from the Gentoo bug database to xine-lib so it would work with current ImageMagick, due to an API change; other programs depended on the new version, so there was a slot conflict); the LIRC update clobbered the numeric keys for my remote (since it used "One", "Two" etc. rather than "1", "2") but I'd backed it up and just restored my aliases. E2fsprogs and E2fsprogs-lib replaced ss and com_err, so I removed those, and broke wget (so I couldn't install packages any more; it also broke ssh and links). Fortunately Samba was still running and I could download the E2fsprogs packages on another machine and copy them over (to /usr/portage/distfiles).
I also had to apply a linux-headers patch to ivtv-utils (download patch, cd to /usr/portage/media-tv/ivtv-utils/files, apply patch to create a .patch file and patch the .ebuild to use it, and run ebuild <path to .ebuild> manifest to update the manifest file).
Oi… now MythTV comes up with a blank screen. The theme background is there, but no text or selector. Probably freezing rather than a font issue, since the background graphic is there. Eventually turns out that it could have been a number of things, one of which is that WindowMaker was reparenting itself to mythfrontend (!) and then mythfrontend was waiting for it (strace showed it in a wait4 syscall). Stopped that by removing WindowMaker from .xinitrc, but it'll need to come back if I want to use various emulators that need window widgets.
(By the way: this is certainly all a pain in the rear. But it's all diagnosable and fixable. If I was running Windows or another closed system, I'd be completely and utterly screwed.)
… Now mythfrontend can't talk to mythbackend (readStringList/writeStringList errors in the log). That seemed to magically go away. Had some log directory access permission issues; fixed. Also some database permission issues: apparently MythTV can't use an empty password, and if you set one, it acts as if you asked it to kindly make up a completely random password and pass it in.
On books: I'm reading Weis and Hickman's Death Gate Cycle, a heptad of books about a universe sundered into four elemental realms; great series; we got all the books at Duvall Books (used bookstore) or Half Price Books.
Technical Analysis by Kirkpatrick and Dahlquist is an excellent book; very rigorous treatment of the various technical indicators, although it doesn't go much into candlesticks (but there are plenty of other good books for that).
Books finished: Technical Analysis, Fundamentals of the Stock Market, A Bold Fresh Piece of Humanity, Elven Star, Fire Sea.DVDs finished: The Untouchables, Girl, Interrupted, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Friends: The Complete First Season, M*A*S*H Season One Collectors Edition.
Catching wild pigs
Political ·Friday November 28, 2008 @ 05:05 EST (link)
A chemistry professor in a large college had some exchange students in the class. One day while the class was in the lab the Professor noticed one young man (exchange student) who kept rubbing his back, and stretching as if his back hurt.
The professor asked the young man what was the matter. The student told him he had a bullet lodged in his back. He had been shot while fighting communists in his native country who were trying to overthrow his country's government and install a new communist government.
In the midst of his story he looked at the professor and asked a strange question. He asked, "Do you know how to catch wild pigs?"
The professor thought it was a joke and asked for the punchline. The young man said this was no joke. "You catch wild pigs by finding a suitable place in the woods and putting corn on the ground. The pigs find it and begin to come everyday to eat the free corn. When they are used to coming every day, you put a fence down one side of the place where they are used to coming. When they get used to the fence, they begin to eat the corn again and you put up another side of the fence. They get used to that and start to eat again. You continue until you have all four sides of the fence up with a gate in The last side. The pigs, who are used to the free corn, start to come through the gate to eat, you slam the gate on them and catch the whole herd.
"Suddenly the wild pigs have lost their freedom. They run around and around inside the fence, but they are caught. Soon they go back to eating the free corn. They are so used to it that they have forgotten how to forage in the woods for themselves, so they accept their captivity."
Thankful that the turkey turned out well
News ·Thursday November 27, 2008 @ 22:14 EST (link)
Cooked Thanksgiving dinner: turkey and the works. Not as hard as we thought. Ended up doing the stuffing on the stove, since most (online) sources advised it (bought some Mrs. Cubbison's, added fresh celery, and peanuts; turned out very well). The turkey we thawed out about a day and a half before; the removables were in a bag, which made them easy to take out; we used an aluminum throwaway roasting pan, and put it in for I believe five hours, occasionally basting it with an oil, water, and herb mixture, and covering it with a foil tent at the end. No problem cutting it with my electric knife, either. Everything (as well as the turkey and stuffing, we had Brussels sprouts, (boiled) potatoes, corn, and cranberry sauce for the turkey) was delicious!
Technical trading and charts
News, Guns, Trading ·Thursday November 27, 2008 @ 20:34 EST (link)
20081106: Went shooting at Wade's with Philip P. from work @ 1800; I paid the lane fee, he let me shoot his AR-15 modified to shoot .22LR. I'd never shot a .22 before; recoil was negligible; it was a lot of fun. Definitely plan to get an AR-15.
20081107: I've been steadily absorbing information about trading (skimmed the For Dummies book below; didn't learn anything new, but it is what it is). Good series on reading candlestick charts from StockCharts.com's ChartSchool.
Technical trading is trading based on market data (price and volume and derived indicators, such as moving averages); oppose fundamental trading (which uses company financial statements and news), although that's not to say that both can't be used together. Technicals appear to lend themselves well to automation.
20081110: Ordered a Rock River Arms AR-15 (Elite CAR A4, with lightweight chrome-lined barrel). The place I got it from (in NH) is so backed up that I won't get it until February 2009, sadly, but I got a decent deal (also, no tax). Still debating whether I should order a second one; their value will go up immensely when that socialist Obama and his bleeping Democrats violate the 2nd Amendment and pass an assault weapons ban. Molon labe!
20081110: Read more about candlestick charts during class; it was interesting, but each presenter managed to say in an hour and a half (their half of the three hour class) what could have been said in fifteen minutes.
20081118: Sears guys came to fix our dryer, which died last week. Turns out it's a stuck button (not our fault), which they couldn't even temporarily unstick, so they're ordering a part and a repairman will be coming back December 2 (sooner if the part arrives and we call and get an earlier appointment). Fortunately, and very surprisingly, we're covered under some warranty we bought.
20081124: Presentation day in Accessibility class. Presentations had to be short (we had 16+ people in three hours, meaning about 10 minutes per person, with maybe one or two questions; the TA managed time and showed time left). I felt my presentation went well (and someone told me they liked it in the CSE lounge before next class), although I was somewhat nervous. The class was somewhat interesting because of the range of topics. Afterward, for the rest of our grade, we have to comment (on the class discussion forum) on at least two final reports (final reports were also due today), e.g. ask a question or explore an avenue.
Books finished: Investing Online For Dummies, Dragon Wing, Financial Freedom Through Electronic Day Trading, Liberalism is a Mental Disorder, Frankenstein.DVDs finished: Pleasantville.
A sickening development: socialism in our time
News, Political ·Wednesday November 5, 2008 @ 12:33 EST (link)
20081104: All hail the Soviet States of America (SSA), and their glorious leader, that one!
20081105: Home sick.
Books finished: An Inconvenient Book.
Random stuff leading up to the election
News, Bad Drivers, Political, Guns, Trading ·Monday November 3, 2008 @ 16:08 EST (link)
20081010: Mowed lawn.
20081012: Went shooting at SVRC (EMP).
20081013: Accessibility class at UWa.; my project will be mathematics for blind users.
20081015: DVDSpot(.com) is no more. This is sad because my automated DVD scanning system used data from DVDSpot. There are no good potential replacements, except perhaps Mike's Movie Mayhem (which has less data and DVDs) and possibly the new DVD Crate, whenever it's up.
20081016: Voted (absentee). There are two choices, bad and horrible.
20081017: Computers went down (desktop mail machine and server); both are fine, looked like the UPS died; it smelled funny and was emitting a continual beep, even after being reset. APC's reference page has a link to the manual; verdict of a long beep with a green light is a low battery. Amazon has a replacement ("APC RBC2") for $30 with free shipping
20081018: Talking to people on bulletpointreview.com about a DVDSpot replacement. Some of them managed to grab a site-scrape which can be processed to recreate the database.
20081020: Started doing some trading this week, just MSFT, using Fidelity. In retrospect (writing this later), I was fortunate to get out with my shirt (I had no live feeds, and no understanding of either technicals or even fundamentals), but I actually ended up up a good bit for a few hours of work.
20081023: Bad drivers: WA 986 LJR, green Nissan Quest van; twit (cut me off), at about 1008.
20081027: Class was boring (socialist "activist" guest lecturer talking about disability law). New ABC battery for APC Back-UPS 500 arrived; connected it and it set the UPC on fire. Oh well, at least it didn't burn anything else.
20081028: Learned about interactivebrokers.com (IB); nice site, $10/month (waived for $30+ in commissions) for trading data, and it has a (multi-language) data feed/trading API.
20081030: Made IB-provided Windows C++ client build in Linux; had to tweak it some, but it works. The IB demo account has some limitations which I'd thought were problems with my conversion, but weren't; the paper trading account has some issues too, according to the IB forums (their own and the TWSAPI Yahoo group); there's also a wiki (which isn't updatable, which rather defeats the purpose).
20081031: Went shooting at Wade's (.40 S&W, 50 rounds, and with my Glock 34). Handled an AR-15 at the store (first time).
20081102: Why Obama is Wrong For Our Country.
20081103: Doing some reading online about trading, and specifically day trading. Really like Trader Mike: the concept of "R" to measure risk/gain and position sizing (which he in turn got from Van Tharp), the details about his setup, and his Trading 101 series. A fundamental point that helped: the money used to buy equities isn't what's being risked: the risk is the maximum that can be lost (i.e. shares x (buy price - stop loss)); good trades have good reward-to-risk profiles.
Highly recommend Laura Ingraham's books Shut up & Sing and Power to the People (links below). I've also started reading Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series again (12 books so far, all very long).
Books finished: Shut Up & Sing, The Eye of the World, Power To the People, The Enemy Within, The Great Hunt.DVDs finished: Zodiac, Liar Liar, That '70s Show: Season Six, Ultraviolet, Final Destination: Thrill-ogy.
More than just a piece of paper
Political ·Friday October 3, 2008 @ 19:08 EDT (link)
It only stands to reason that where there's sacrifice, there's someone collecting the sacrificial offerings. Where there's service, there is someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice is speaking of slaves and masters, and intends to be the master.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
—Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime where of the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
—Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution
It should be illegal, or at least unconscionable, to elect anyone but a libertarian to any position of authority in these United States, from President, senate, and house, on down. Any time when these representatives decide to take the people's money and redistribute it, to use it for any means not either paying for the workings of (minimal) government or constitutionally mandated uses (e.g. defense, which doesn't include wars in Iraq or Afghanistan), or for something that every single individual contributing has agreed voluntarily, they violate the Constitution, and such behavior should merit a recall.
Neither democracy nor direct voting not even the answer (you still have the problem of the majority stealing from the majority, i.e. two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for dinner): the only true direct voting is to let people opt in individually: the choice should not be "Shall we force people to pay for X?" but "Do you personally want to support X? If so, send your money here; if not, do nothing." Congress should have to persuade people to support their so-called social programs, and if they can't persuade enough individuals to give money, let those programs die.
The fourth amendment (anti-seizure) and the thirteenth (anti-slavery, specifically anti-involuntary servitude) amendments should make use of taxes for redistribution of wealth unconstitutional (despite the sixteenth amendment allowing their levying). Paying taxes to support others (no matter how legitimate or moral the cause) is seizure of goods and involuntary servitude, under threat of forcible confinement. If anyone asks you when slavery was abolished in these United States, the answer is "Not yet."
Beginning my Master's degree at the University of Washington
News, Bad Drivers, Political, Work, Guns, School ·Wednesday October 1, 2008 @ 21:20 EDT (link)
On TV today a Democrat pointed out that when Obama holds a rally 25-30,000 people show up, whereas when McCain holds one he only draws 10-15,000.
The Republican spokesman replied, "That's because McCain's supporters are at work."
—Seen on CLAMS
20080918: Microsoft company meeting. Very blah; only saved from being a total waste of time by the paper airplanes and the co-authoring demo, which wasnÂt really long enough to be worth wasting so much time.
Found a way to fix my Hauppauge PVR-150 capture card when it goes wonky (black and white video, no sound, kernel log says that it's still in "detecting" state): this message helped; the soft reset advice didn't work at all, but bouncing the audio input did: v4l2-ctl -d 1 --set-audio-input=1 then back to 0. The v4l* utilities are handy, although in this case nothing interesting showed up using v4l-info, but the kernel log (v4l2-ctl -d 1 --log-status) did show the audio detection hang.
20080919: Bad driver: blue Acura RSX, WA 359 MZF, UMass. license plate holder (massive inferiority complex because he couldnÂt get into Harvard or MIT?); cut me off (the twit was dangerously close; had to slam on the brakes) on WA-520E at 1823.
20080925: Drove into Seattle during the day to get my UWa. Husky card and parking pass ("short term night permit" for Mondays; came to $17.xx). Getting the Husky card was quick: they looked at my photo ID, took a photo right there, and gave me the card a few minutes later. I returned my U-Pass in the same room (the U-Pass is a transit pass mailed to everyone—which is evil, since if you don't return it they charge for it, but at least they provide a postage-paid envelope). They had complimentary parking outside Parking Services to get my parking pass, but I had to pay $2 to park and get my student ID ($12, then $10 refund for being 0-30 minutes).
20080927: Logged in remotely and submitted some Chart object model Office 12 SP2 bugs to triage.
20080929: First class at UWa. I arrived early: I left work at 1630 and arrived at 1700 (which is better than leaving 1730 and arriving 1830), and sat in the Allen center and logged into the CSE wireless network and then VPN'd to work for a while. Class was in EEB037 (1830-2120); typical classroom; tiered seats; power (for the laptop), but only at the ends of the rows; still, I didn't need my extension cord. First class wasn't super-interesting; it was a nice overview, but I got a lot of work done on my Scotland Yard simulation.
20080930: Read the assigned reading (handouts) for CSE P 590B (590 is a "new course" designation, so it just means it's the second such course over some period; it also isn't necessarily all that new; courses that seem fairly well established are still 590s on the PMP web site).
20081001: Went shooting after work; shot the EMP; much improvement; slow and steady wins it.
On the financial industry bailouts: I agree with
Ron Paul, and an article by Greg Zehner, found at, of all places, the the Huffington Post, which is usually deep far-left wingnut territory (after reading the comments, I see the nuts are still there, fear not). Quoting from Paul's article:
Laws passed by Congress such as the Community Reinvestment Act required banks to make loans to previously underserved segments of their communities, thus forcing banks to lend to people who normally would be rejected as bad credit risks. … The solution to the problem is to end government meddling in the market. Government intervention leads to distortions in the market, and government reacts to each distortion by enacting new laws and regulations, which create their own distortions, and so on ad infinitum.
Overdosing on political correctness (and pandering for votes) led to the Community Reinvestment Act, which was a fundamental cause of the housing crash. Banks were coerced into making loans they wouldn't have made in a true free market, and they usually got to offload those loans to GSEs like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac anyway, privatizing profit and socializing risk. From the Zehner piece:
In the classic, Atlas Shrugged, [Ayn Rand] wrote about governmental powers manipulating markets in order to advance political concerns. Like the book, we do not seem to have the political will to take the correct, but painful, road to recovery. By propping up the financial system with the band-aids of trading restrictions and an explosion of the government's already untenable balance sheet, the necessary adjustments to the financial system are prevented from occurring. … What the Fed, Treasury, and SEC should have done was to let the chips fall as they may by allowing healthy financial institutions survive and the weak ones go bankrupt or be forced to merge. They should have let free markets function while protecting the innocent by raising the FDIC limit of deposit insurance from $100,000 to something significantly higher.
…
Our strength as a country, has always been to address problems head on, take the medicine no matter how distasteful, and emerge stronger than ever. Sadly, times have changed. Our government has shown that it will change the rules of the markets whenever it seems expedient. Simply put, it will curtail the free markets when it doesn't like what the free markets are saying. In the long run, this will lead to a disaster of unprecedented proportions. It would not be surprising to hear people walking the streets of New York asking "Who is John Galt?
DVDs finished: 28 Weeks Later, The 13th Warrior, Entrapment, That '70s Show: Season Five, Stargate Atlantis: The Complete First Season, Unforgiven, Coyote Ugly.
<Previous 10 entries>
It should be illegal, or at least unconscionable, to elect anyone but a libertarian to any position of authority in these United States, from President, senate, and house, on down. Any time when these representatives decide to take the people's money and redistribute it, to use it for any means not either paying for the workings of (minimal) government or constitutionally mandated uses (e.g. defense, which doesn't include wars in Iraq or Afghanistan), or for something that every single individual contributing has agreed voluntarily, they violate the Constitution, and such behavior should merit a recall.