::::: : 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.

First time cleaning the AR-15

News ·Sunday March 29, 2009 @ 21:53 EDT (link)

I finished cleaning my AR-15 for the first time today, using the Rock River Arms manual and these guides (there is also an AR15.com guide, but it's not as good, since it has small black and white diagrams and terse descriptions instead of large photos and detailed instructions).

Since it was the first time, it went somewhat slowly, but it's actually pretty easy: remove the takedown pin (or both), remove the charging handle and bolt carrier, disassemble the bolt carrier (by removing the cotter pin (firing pin retaining pin) and bolt cam pin), clean everything with solvent, clean the chamber with my pistol rod and chamber brush, and clean the bore with my rifle rod, alternating jag with patch and bore brush. I had to cut down my 9mm (2"?) patches so they'd fit. Apparently I cleaned the gas piston rings a bit too vigorously, because when I went shooting with the Microsoft group on the weekend it failed to fire because they had been misaligned; fortunately KA was able to fix it (he took it apart then and there with his knife, unsurprisingly a lot faster and easier than someone doing it for the first time; it was educational).

The birth of liberty

Technical, Political ·Sunday March 29, 2009 @ 21:49 EDT (link)

On Friday (27th) I picked up the computer I'd ordered from Hard Drives Northwest. I tried to install (Gentoo) Linux on it; it failed the same as the Costco machine.

I eventually figured out why it won't boot (VFS: cannot open root device): it needed SCSI disk to be enabled (for a SATA drive; apparently libata uses SCSI); kernel option CONFIG_BLK_DEV_SD. As I understand it (documentation is a bit scarce; the libATA Developer's Guide was somewhat helpful), libATA implements the ATA standard and translates to the SCSI command set, which allows the use of various low-level transports such as SATA and SCSI.

The new machine will be named liberty—in hope that liberty will return to this nation: that the grassroots efforts by the Campaign for Liberty, the tax protest tea parties, the various conservative and libertarian discussion groups and book clubs and the groundswell of support to overthrow creeping socialism, to fight the liberal fascism of the left, will triumph and return freedom to these United States of America. It's a grand aspiration: but these are interesting times, ripe for revolution.

Facebook chat + multiple tabs = dead CPU

Technical, Political ·Saturday March 28, 2009 @ 20:13 EDT (link)

Does it have to open the chat window in every tab? Argh. It slows Firefox to a crawl even with as few as 5 (Facebook) tabs open. It must be doing a lot of fast polling—maybe they should switch to long polling, or perhaps they are, but Firefox isn't very efficient at it.

Short Answers to Tough Questions (Libertarian Party of Minnesota FAQ). (They had "principal" for "principle" once, in "Party of princple"; I dropped a line to the webmaster and he fixed it up.)

"You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it"

Political ·Saturday March 28, 2009 @ 03:36 EDT (link)

You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy out of freedom. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is about the end of any nation. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it.

—Dr. Adrian Rogers (1931-2005)

Dr. Rogers was the senior pastor at Bellevue Baptist Church, down the road from where we used to live in Cordova, Tennessee (east of Memphis, off I-40 at exit 15B).

DVDs finished: M*A*S*H: Season Six.

From my cold, dead hands…

Political, Guns ·Friday March 27, 2009 @ 21:32 EDT (link)

Erich von Holder is trying to use the chaos in Mexico to erode gun rights. Liberals never let a crisis go to waste.

Octopus Multi-User Chat

Technical ·Thursday March 26, 2009 @ 21:56 EDT (link)

Octopus Chat, my first Facebook (web) application, can communicate between users. It's not very polished—it uses user IDs instead of user names, for example, doesn't style the chat names, and doesn't do emoticons like standard 1:1 chat, but those are easy to fix. No link, because it's still private. Also, my server isn't equipped to handle the demand for a decent multi-user Facebook chat application—and the same goes for the other Facebook multi-user chat applications (either that, or they're so bad nobody wants to use them).

My test users and I tried it out, and Honey tested it, then our friend Chelsea tested it and it didn't work. Why? Internet Explorer. Argh. Same problem when I tried it on Internet Explorer locally, so at least it's reproducible, but debugging tools for IE are really poor (or really expensive). Seems I'll need to install Visual Studio to be able to debug and fix things. It may not be worth the effort… I learned how to build a Facebook (web) application (I'd already built a proof of concept desktop application), and do inter-user chat (although I'd like to find out if there's any way for Postgres to generate events on row insertions etc.; I suspect I'll probably need to use a stored procedure). (Update: Postgres can do events, using LISTEN and NOTIFY, although I may want to use a stored procedure to generate the events.)

Blog mocking parents obsessed with their kids discovered via LJ childfree: STFU, parents.

Peter F. Conrey Fine Photography

Photography ·Wednesday March 25, 2009 @ 22:07 EDT (link)

A guy I used to work with at Hilton in Memphis (and is still there), Peter Conrey, has started a photography business: Peter F. Conrey Fine Photography. He has some great shots on the site, which is very polished; take a look. The blog has some nice pictures of the snow in Memphis.

Internally, he's using the jQuery Javascript library, which seems to be the PHP of Javascript libraries (it's not as clean and consistent as Prototype, and they made some bad decisions early on that they have to live with now for backwards compatibility; as a Word developer, I can empathize). I suggested he provide width and height attributes for his thumbnails to make pages lay out faster.

At time of posting this (early April), his site is down; I hope it's only a temporary issue. The hosting company seems to be TW Telecom Holdings, Inc., headquartered in Littleton, CO, but with a Memphis presence.

I came across a SOAP programming article by Peter while trying to find out what was up with his domain. It's not bad, but why mess with the hulking horror that is SOAP when better alternatives like YAML, JSON, or XMLRPC exist?

Outlook: miserable

Technical ·Wednesday March 25, 2009 @ 01:55 EDT (link)

Outlook, as well as hanging if you try to do something unexpected, like, say, read an email, or switch folders (one click, blue title bar; two clicks adds the "(Not Responding)" notification), also does something else really stupid: when you paste in pictures, it sends them as bitmaps. So, for example, 4 ~200k JPEGs (800k) take 8M (10x). Stupid, stupid, stupid, Outlook.

Oh, and it appears as if fetching the images from the Microsoft shoot really is killing my server (bandwidth-wise only; CPU usage is extremely low). So much for whatever bandwidth that Broadstripe promised. Back now, though; demand must have peaked. The static server registered a fair number of network timeouts.

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):

There should be an automated way to create (a reasonable number of) test accounts.
Test accounts should be able to access applications that are in development (now they can only access "live" applications, which means that test applications have to be made live and then presumably any curious people that add it are just banned).
Test accounts should be able to be friends with and see real users (they can only see other test users currently).

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.