::::: : 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.

Facebook test accounts

News, Technical ·Tuesday March 24, 2009 @ 22:28 EDT (link)

Chelsea is here (we picked her up at around 1400); had dinner around 1930.

I created two Facebook test accounts, Joseph and Mary Tester (and later Robert Daniel Tester). There are a couple things that Facebook should fix with test accounts (although it's good that they at least have a way to create sanctioned test accounts):

Books finished: Liberal Fascism.

Exam results; traffic tickets

News, School ·Monday March 23, 2009 @ 23:01 EDT (link)

I got a 4.0 in my class. I was surprised; I didn't do as well on the exam as I'd hoped; but that makes two for two now, with terrific pressure to keep it up in my next class. had her last exam today, which she thought went well.

Every traffic ticket should be fought; there aren't any morally valid traffic tickets—there are already laws for results of bad driving (property damage, assault, battery, etc.). It is the moral duty of Americans to oppose any traffic ticket: make the state fight for its fascist revenue stream. We may thus symbolically resist the police that issue the tickets: "following orders" wasn't a valid defense for the Nazis, and it isn't one for the thieving opportunist minions of a repressive state, either.

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.

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