::::: : 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.

Proto-Menu and Firebug

Technical ·Sunday March 22, 2009 @ 05:23 EDT (link)

Installed Proto-Menu context menu for photo system. Ran into Firebug issue where it wouldn't display styles; it said I needed DOM Inspector, which was already installed—but didn't work directly either (nothing showed in the node list pane, even after entering sites; most menu items did nothing). Some advice from the review page helped: I uninstalled, removed C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\components\inspector* and re-installed, and it worked. With that, I was able to track down the cause of the extra space on the Proto.Meny context menu: it was just default margin (highlighted in yellow in Firebug) and padding space (dark blue) for the <ul> tag; I set it to zero and set list-style: none and all's well. And it's high time to go to sleep.

Vancouver gun murder rate worse than Los Angeles

News ·Friday March 20, 2009 @ 21:37 EDT (link)

Canada vs. U.S. gun violence, and the scams they pull to make Canada look better: delusional math—how they try to fool the masses in Canada.

From a Vancouver, BC news site. I'm hoping either it's a typo, some kind of funky metric math or I am in Friday brain mode and missed something.

Apparently, Los Angeles (metro population of 17.75 million), with 54 gun-related homicides "easily dwarfs" the Vancouver area (2.37 million) murder rate with 12 gun-related homicides.
L.A. gun murder rate = 54 ÷ 17,750,000 = 0.000003
Vancover murder rate = 12 ÷ 2,370,000 = 0.000005
<Hmmm, carry the 1, face left, bow to the Brady statue, and perform a self-lobotomy….>
Vancouver rate ÷ LA rate = 1.66. Vancouver, BC's gun related murder rate is 1.6 times that of Los Angeles. Abbotsford, the small town (now ~159,000) I grew up in, has had 4 or 5.4/159,000 = 0.000025 = 8.27 times that of L.A.

—From "ex-Canadian" GD, CLAMS.

.22s get no respect

News ·Friday March 20, 2009 @ 21:28 EDT (link)

From a discussion about .22-caliber firearms in the MS gun list:

ME*: Do not buy one of these with plans to shoot at a bad guy with it. Unless you are doing a muzzle-against-their-head assassination shot (which probably doesn't hold up in court as "self defense"), a .22 will not hurt or stop whoever you fire at.

BT: I dunno Matt. If someone shot me with a .22, and I found out about it, I would be really angry! :)

* Initials "M.E.", not "me."

Programming languages exam

News ·Thursday March 19, 2009 @ 21:38 EDT (link)

Programming languages (CSE P 505) exam this evening (1830-2020). Two hours goes by really fast when you're having fun. It wasn't bad. I think on four or five of the seven questions I can be pretty sure of full marks; I had some formatting/formulaic issues with the derivation question, so it depends on how forgiving the markers are. I also may have missed one or two on the odd question about the Java null-dereference type checker that only accepts 47 programs. I have a 100.2% in the the five assignments in class; the final is weighted like two assignments, and it's out of 100 points, so each mark on the final is 2/700 of my grade, which will be (501 + 2 * points) / 700.

I have a total of 300 facebook friends today (JB from work was #300).

Puget Sound Conservative Underground meetups

News, Political ·Wednesday March 18, 2009 @ 22:55 EDT (link)

We joined a couple "We Surround Them" meetups (Seattle and Edmonds) and the Puget Sound Conservative Underground meetup. Get-togethers and protests and book clubs are all being planned. Victoria is organizing one book club, Dan another. We'll be attending Dan's for various reasons:
  1. he's in Woodinville, Victoria's in Seattle, so his will be closer (eastside);
  2. Victoria's approach is more of a lecture series, with the goal of "teaching people about the Constitution"; Dan's approach is more of a discussion (we're conservatives, we can read and think for ourselves), and
  3. Victoria's are during the day, Dan's are evenings and weekends (conservatives work during the day, remember).
Unless Victoria's a professor of constitutional law, I don't think she can teach any well-read conservatives about the Constitution: we'll learn and discuss together. If you want a cadre of followers, count me out. On the other hand, less well-read people can use the refresher that a DVD series and a lecture format will provide, judging from the vote in November and the news.

Workaholics today; fixed a decent number of bugs. Co-authoring has been working fairly well for the past week or so.

Still studying for CSE P 505 exam Thursday.

Nothing for outsiders

Political ·Tuesday March 17, 2009 @ 03:06 EDT (link)

Tutto nello Stato, niente al di fuori dello Stato, nulla contro lo Stato ("Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State").
—motto of the Italian Fascists
Por La Raza todo, Fuera de La Raza nada ("For the Race, everything, outside the Race, nothing").
—common statement of MeChA / La Raza

Note similarities in the above mottoes. Am I saying that MeChA and La Raza are fascist groups? Their actions speak for themselves. Any group that advocates for the domination of a single race or ethnic group is racist; and if they gather together along racial lines, promote violence to achieve their idea of lebensraum, declare themselves superior, and engage the state to compel it, they're certainly headed that way. For more about their "reconquista" (plans to take over the southern sovereign territory of the United States), see this Human Events article. It's chilling stuff, and not something that makes the idea of legalizing tens of millions of illegal and unskilled Mexican and Central American invaders a very comforting idea, even without the economic and social detriment they bring.

"Since I'm a guest here, I wouldn't presume to comment on priorities"

News ·Monday March 16, 2009 @ 01:17 EDT (link)

In January 2009, U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported seizures of: Since I'm a guest here, I wouldn't presume to comment on priorities….

—BT on the "Canucks" (Canadians at Microsoft) alias.

Costco ZT computer failure

News, Technical ·Sunday March 15, 2009 @ 23:08 EDT (link)

I set up new Costco computer, installing Gentoo (from the AMD64 minimal install CD then network). Pretty smooth so far (downloading stage 3 now). Feels good to be overwriting a Vista installation. … And they gave me a bad SATA controller (ATI SB700/SB800: bugs 1 2 3). All I saw is that the VFS layer couldn't find the root partition (/dev/sda3) and couldn't find any alternates to suggest either. It wasn't until I compiled boot_delay support in that I could slow down the kernel messages enough to read the error and search for it. I'm not sure how the Gentoo install CD managed to access the disk; presumably it used an older or less specific driver. I tried two kernels (2.6.27-r8 and 2.6.28-r3). The box is going back to Costco. This was "ZT Systems Phenom II X4 920 2.8GHz Integrated ATI Radeon HD 3100" (item #384791), although no doubt a lot of ZT machines ship with this controller.

This is what I kept to cut and paste into my ssh window after I'd logged on with the minimal install CD, gotten the DHCP-assigned address with ifconfig, and started the ssh server (/etc/init.d/sshd start): 
swapon /dev/sda2
mount /dev/sda3 /mnt/gentoo
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/gentoo/boot
mount -t proc none /mnt/gentoo/proc
mount -o bind /dev /mnt/gentoo/dev
chroot /mnt/gentoo /bin/bash
env-update
source /etc/profile
export PS1="(chroot) $PS1"
grep -v rootfs /proc/mounts > /etc/mtab
Birthday card from my parents arrived today.

Books finished: The Grapes of Wrath.

DVDs finished: Friends: The Complete Fifth Season.

Javascript splitter pane

Technical ·Saturday March 14, 2009 @ 01:13 EDT (link)

Regarding my CSS splitter pane issues: I posted two questions to stackoverflow.com; one helped a little, and the other netted a suggestion to use a table, which sort of worked, but when the splitter moved too far to the right, whatever calculations were being done blew up and the thumbnail pane jumped below the main page (as in, below the viewport, causing a new top-level scrollbar to appear; the scrollbar's not the problem: overflow: hidden would get rid of it, but it'd also get rid of my content ). What I need is to be able to set width: 100% - 3px, and I finally had to go with a Javascript hack to calculate it (I also tried calcualting a percentage width, but like the tables, when the splitter was moved over too far it broke down). Setting the width in pixels rather than as a percentage (I had been using a width: 99.5% hack) meant that I had to update it when the splitter bar moves. I hope CSS 3 has better solutions to this problem.

CLAMS meet at Red Robin

News ·Friday March 13, 2009 @ 20:45 EDT (link)

Count me among those that don't like the new Facebook (I miss Live Feed, although getting rid of it probably helped their server load).

Met with CLAMS (Conservatives and Libertarians at Microsoft) at Red Robin for lunch today. No photos, since I didn't really like how they came out. A crowded restaurant with a full table is no place to take candids, anyway.

Also watched Glenn Beck's "We Surround Them" show; see The 9.12 Project (servers currently overloaded).

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