::::: : 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 field test of portable shooting frame

News, Guns ·Thursday September 10, 2009 @ 21:46 EDT (link)

I went shooting at SVRC today and Tuesday, using just the Glock (34). Groups are a little left of where I'm aiming, so I need to figure out what I'm doing wrong or (less likely) fix the sights.


When I went today, I was mainly going to test the portable shooting lane; the test went well, but it takes longer than I'd like to set it up (maybe 10 minutes, a bit long during a cease-fire) but I have some ideas to shorten it. Fortunately, I had the place to myself today.

I only needed one of the stands; I tied the other end of the rope to an overhead beam in the covered shooting area. I also shot the thread (used to move the target back and forth); I knew it was hanging down, but figured it was highly unlikely that I'd hit it. But it can be gotten out of the way with some minor design tweaks. It was a good first field test; gives me some ideas on what to change. The binder clips tend to come unglued from the metal hangers, too; I may try again to drill through them and screw them to the hangers. But overall the fundamentals are good.


Excuse the pictures—the light was running low, should have increased the ISO-equivalent or used a tripod.

One worry is that I or another shooter (even someone shooting extremely wildly from another lane) might shoot the frame, but it's cheap ABS pipe and can be patched with duct tape. The diagonal bar in the frame did very well to stabilize it, and I never had need to weigh down the frame.

Planned improvements: Still a work in progress, but it was great to see it working live for the first time. Suggestions for improvement are of course welcome.

DVDs finished: Coupling: The Complete 3rd Season.

Webmail, timely defenses, dishonorable sellers

News, Technical, Political, Work, Guns, School ·Wednesday September 9, 2009 @ 19:19 EDT (link)

Great (libertarian) article about homeschooling, emphasizing how well homeschooled children do, and how the state hates letting them out of their indoctrinating clutches.

Someone finally came to pick up the side tables/cabinets (from our old bed) that we were giving away via Craigslist (and the MS Free Stuff list); after several people missed appointments to pick them up, a guy named Don that was moving from Boise, ID came to get them in his truck on Monday.

I've installed Horde and its web mail client, IMP, an IMAP client. Wasn't too difficult; I used the Gentoo packages (I hope version 5 stabilizes soon and is available since the UI looks much improved). I use IMAP for authentication, and PostgreSQL as the database for preferences. This will allow me to decommission my oldest machine, running Gentoo and KDE, which Honey used for mail (kmail) and wasn't being used for much else (I've used mutt for a while). I looked at the various web mail systems and found that most of the good ones unfortunately run on PHP. So I had to reinstall PHP, which is sad but perhaps they've worked out most of the security issues by now. Many other clients either don't support IMAP, or are insufferably ugly, or unmaintained. Horde is setup only for SSL (https).

As a University of Washington graduate student I get a lot of emails with the subject "[UW Safety] Timely Warning Notification of Criminal Incident - Seattle Campus":
Timely Warning Notification of a Criminal Incident 09/02/09 Attempted Robbery - Seattle Campus

…

Prevention tips for incidents such as this:
One thing they should add to the list as a last but important resort: arm yourself. Criminals don't like it when their victims can shoot back.

I will not be going to the company meeting tomorrow; I was too disappointed by the last ones (long, boring, and cold up in the nosebleed seats, although apparently we had better seats this time).

Finally, two thumbs down for Mario Kosmiskas of Bellevue, who sold me a Wii Guitar Hero package (drums, guitar, two games) (via Microsoft's Sell/Buy alerts list) with a broken guitar: the strum bar sticks. He refused to do anything about it; I'd've been fine if he'd just taken the guitar back and refunded me the money. It doesn't seem advisable to buy from him.

DVDs finished: Broken Arrow.

MythTV and Comcast

News, Technical, Media ·Saturday September 5, 2009 @ 18:23 EDT (link)

Adapting MythTV to Comcast wasn't terrible; the hardest thing was having to control the set-top box that's now required. First, I had to go to Schedules Direct and update our cable package, and remove the channels we don't really get or never want to see or record from (e.g., Spanish channels), run mythtv-setup (and remove the second tuner, until we get a second set-top box), and run mythfilldatabase --refresh-all to update the program database.

The second part was more difficult: controlling the set-top box. Fortunately the Windows Media Center remote comes with a couple of IR blasters (little red lights that look like LEDs that connect to the remote receiver via long wires), so I checked the model of the set-top box (Motorola DCT700) and found a couple of lirc remote configurations to add to /etc/lircd.conf: two here (a primary and a raw one that fixes the zero problem), and a post about it. Also some information about using the MCE IR blaster from the MythTV wiki (near the end of the page).

Once that was setup, I still had a problem: I could use irsend to change channels (send both digits and the OK button using the raw codes; I eventually added the Exit button to dismiss the channel info, since MythTV has its own), and it worked fine from the computer in the other room (ssh) but not so well when using the remote (which runs the channel change script). Turns out the universal remote was interfering with the set-top box, so I blocked it in so it wouldn't see arrant pulses and all was well.

Books finished: Robert E. Lee and the Road of Honor, Robert E. Lee: Duty and Honor, Team of Rivals.

DVDs finished: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine - Season 5, Coupling: The Complete 2nd Season.

Last looks at Duvall

News ·Tuesday September 1, 2009 @ 23:03 EDT (link)

We finished packing everything out of our house in Duvall tonight, and cleaning (vacuuming and some scrubbing; the bed had a lot of fluff from our blue heated blanked under it… Honey was rolling it into balls). Although the house had some annoyances—having to mow the lawn and take care of weeds and bamboo, for example—it was a peaceful and spacious place to live in a nice neighborhood and we had a good three years there.

We closed on the house in December 2005, but didn't move in until February 2006: we rented the place back to the sellers, James and Heather Morris (and family) for a few months. Moving in took a single small Penske truck, and we were helped by LukeWill, WillBr, and MRScott (none of whom work in Word any more), ordering pizza to the house afterwards. We were moving from apartments near Microsoft (4850 156th Avenue NE; I think they're now Onyx, although they used to be Ravenswood at the Park). Leaving took a couple trucks and several car trips; most of what we picked up came from the damage we suffered in the 2006 windstorm, since damage items were replaced by insurance but we kept most of them anyway (just recently getting rid of a damaged wardrobe and some bedside tables).

We closed on the sale September 2, without losing too much in this down market (although closing costs are killer… why should the state get any percentage of a house, or any other good, when it's sold?). We moved to an apartment on Avondale Way, cutting down the commute considerably (no more Novelty Hill, and Avondale isn't so bad). We've shuffled things around so that we have room to move now, too. Change happens; this change is a good stepping-stone.

Farewell, 27303 NE 155th Place, Duvall, WA 98019.

Books finished: Danny, the Champion of the World.

DVDs finished: Sliders: The First and Second Seasons, M*A*S*H: Season Nine.

Setting up the new place

News, Technical ·Monday August 31, 2009 @ 21:05 EDT (link)

It's been a long weekend, even without taking Monday off.

Almost everything is moved out of our spacious house in Duvall now, with only a few items remaining in the freezer that we'll collect tomorrow.

On Saturday we got a Penske truck (same as the week before, but a 16-footer this time, 10' shorter and perhaps 2' lower, and gas, not diesel) and packed it with the remainder of the "big but I can lift by myself" things: the TV, its stand, some old side tables that we're selling, boxes of kitchen items, clothes, chairs, desks, etc. We picked up the truck at 1000, started packing at 1040, and finished at 1530. We drove to our new place on Avondale in Redmond and unpacked from about 1630-1900. We dropped the truck off at 1945; since it was after hours we stopped in Sunday to get our receipt, and ended up talking with the owner for a while, about guns, training, storage, etc.: he used to be a federal police officer in California.

Even with the hand cart, that was a lot of packing and lifting. And afterward, there was even less space to move around than before, if that was possible. Sunday was spent trying to move things to their place, putting our bed together, setting up a desk in the spare bedroom (it was a bit like solving one of those sliding block puzzles, except to start with we didn't have the empty space). Mattresses were moved, desks were assembled, etc. I also put the TV up, with all the cables that entailed. Since we ended up being up until about 0630, I decided to take Monday off. The cable guy came at 0830, so we couldn't sleep until after he left. We ended up sleeping until 1430. There was still plenty to do in the kitchen (mostly Honey), and setting up computers (me). The TV and computer both have a perfect rat's nest of cables behind them.

The place still has pretty tight corners, but we can move around in the kitchen; we both have computers set up, and I'm able to RAS into work; the TV works, and the Wii is set up. As we put things away/sell or give things away/downsize/pack or throw away boxes, the place will become more a normal apartment and less a crammed warehouse.

The new Internet (Comcast business, instead of Broadstripe) seems faster, but the setup is massively braindead. Instead of giving me the static IP, I was given a local (10.1.10.1) address, but it required JavaScript and frames, so I couldn't see it from the server machine and had to temporarily configure a machine with a GUI (liberty) to connect to view the settings: completely braindead. They should realize that not everyone using their service is going to be a twit with a sole Windows box. Nor do people want to be forced into using their NAT, but fortunately it and DHCP can be turned off; there's a good article about how to fix it up so a machine (or router) can be configured to run on the static IP without interference.

Books finished: The Politically Incorrect Guide To the South.

DVDs finished: Coupling: The Complete 1st Season.

Downsizing and optimizing

Technical, Media ·Wednesday August 26, 2009 @ 20:12 EDT (link)

Going from a (fully furnished) four bedroom house into a two bedroom apartment is like trying to fit quarts into pint bottles. Right now the living room is full of couches and a few stacked coffee/end tables, and there are piles of books, DVDs, and boxes everywhere.

Minimalism has been one of my goals for a while (ideas from herbalcell): yet we still have more furniture than when we arrived in Duvall. Part of it was due to the tree falling, and insurance only covering actual replacement goods: although I still could have considered a store with more separable (disassemblable?) items such as Ikea. It's somewhat academic when there's plenty of space—do it for the clean look, do it to know you only have things you need and use—but shifting to a small apartment as we are, downsizing is vital. It's also important if we ever pack a truck again for a longer distance move: far more important than this move, where we took advantage of the ability to make multiple trips, since we only moved nine miles.

We always take the opportunity of moving to go through our stuff and see if we still need everything. A few things we've done to help with the clutter: I'm sure I'll think of more things to give us more livable space, and maybe even give us enough room to throw a party or two (or at least have guests).

Windows retrieves data from crufty old disk

News, Technical ·Wednesday August 26, 2009 @ 14:16 EDT (link)

I was unable to access my old SyQuest SyJet 1.5Gb removable cartridge drive using Linux (the drivers are no longer maintained) but my Windows machine at work (no parallel port at home except on one Linux machine) was able to access it, after I followed a suggestion about enabling the parallel port interrupt (I didn't need to switch from ECP to EPP, and Device Manager detected it as an ECP port, whatever that is). Far be it from me not to give credit where due: in this case Windows proved superior to Linux.

I actually had two of the removable disks: one was apparently given to me by Gerian Sloetjes, since it contained some of his assignments such as a biography of Agatha Christie, some book journal entries, and a few POD and Skillet MP3s. The other is mine, and contained some old games, MP3s, and a backup of my old BBS, Death's Vortex, and a few issues of the Christian newsletter I used to produce and edit, The Firm Foundation. I copied it all over to my USB drive (to be backed up at home to my external USB drive and to DVD), and plan to sell or give away the SyJet drive.

BVTs: infrastructure from the stone age

News, Technical, Work ·Tuesday August 25, 2009 @ 19:18 EDT (link)

Whenever I get assigned a "BVT Blocking" bug (BVT is some sort of test—maybe Basic Validation Test?), I assume I'm going to lose a day of work. The infrastructure for investigating is so baroque and poorly coordinated that even if test is kind enough to hand over a held machine (or two, in the case of co-authoring client-server tests), if it's not possible to verify the problem on that machine, the window is gone, and it'll take another few hours to hold another one. Of course these bugs never repro deterministically on a regular machine (or at least test doesn't attempt to do so without encouragement).

So it was unfortunate that I got assigned two BVT bugs today (one of which I passed on to EB; he was in later than usual), plus another "half" bug which involved a memory leak that another group whose name looks a lot like UEX was trying to pin on us (nice try; investigate your own object leaks, until you can show Word's leaking it; this object had a reference count in the 300s under normal use, so finding a missing Release is a needle-in-a-haystack exercise; I had AddRef and Release dump callstacks whenever they were called, and it didn't seem like co-authoring was doing anything untoward so I passed it back with my compliments). Anyway, back to the original bug: it did at least have symbols, but no sources. And apparently they can't hold crash bugs. So it was just sitting in WinDbg with a "trace" file, whatever that is. I can certainly understand using gdb or dbx in a Unix command-line environment (I'm familiar with both), but in an environment where most developers' standard environment is Visual Studio, for the !@#%ing love of all that is holy, provide a Visual Studio remote debug connection at the crash or assertion point, with the correct sources and symbols: that's all I ask. For now. Later on, they can work on making a "scenario" a less inscrutable pile of opaque excretions and make it easier to run and debug on a local machine.

I do hear interesting things about something called iDNA, though, and plan to see what I can learn about that. (There doesn't seem to be much else about it on the web, so I won't go into detail about what it is in case it's proprietary.)

Since I'm ranting, a certain project area with which I am involved (mentioned once already in this note) has turned into a real pig's breakfast. Word is a cranky old application to begin with, but it doesn't help to add to it a horrible mess that rhymes with Smirkspaces. I pray this whole kit and caboodle doesn't go the way of past attempts at collaborative authoring.

I was happy this morning. I was envisioning plowing through a stack of bugs, since finally the broken servers started to work better (than last miserable week); I had a decent build on both machines; things were looking up, bugs were to be slain, progress was to be made, and… a BVT bug landed on my plate and I lost a day.

All pigs saddled and ready to fly. May tomorrow be a better one.

Duvall to Redmond with a truck

News, Bad Drivers ·Sunday August 23, 2009 @ 11:09 EDT (link)

WA-203 at Big Rock Road, at 2020. WA 496 YPK, small black car (Geo?) Sahara Pizza deliveryperson stops for a while, sees no cops, drives through the red light. It doesn't go green for another 30 seconds. They're RTB, not trying to get someone's pizza out (not that that would excuse it). Pretty silly.

Saturday was the day of the big move, that is, I wanted to get all the items I couldn't move by myself from our house in Duvall over to the Redmond apartment. We were up fairly late disassembling our bed, taking drawers out, and ensuring there was a clear path to move everything out. I'd also offered our old wardrobe on the Microsoft free stuff alias, and someone picked it up Friday evening around 2000; I helped carry it out.

We left 0830 Saturday morning: Honey dropped me to the Redmond Penske pick-up (at Willows and 87th), and then went to pick up Tim at his place in Bellevue (at 0915) and Ali at the Redmond library (at 0930). I got the truck back by about 0930—it wasn't too hard to drive; I may have even had a 26' truck on the Memphis to Boston move. Honey arrived at about 1000 as expected, and Amani and Thomas showed up about 1030.

Loading went pretty much as planned (I'd worked out the larger items in a scale diagram in Word). The hand truck was very helpful for items such as the washer, dryer, and treadmill. Tim rode in the truck with me to Redmond, Honey took Ali, and Amani and Thomas drove themselves. Unloading went faster than loading: no steps (ground floor apartment), plus a few of Tim's friends lived at the same complex and came by to help. All told we finished by 1400, a total of four hours, which is what I had estimated. It's a huge amount of work and I appreciate those that helped very much. And next time, I expect I'll hire people, even if I do have to pay for their truck to sit around (since I'll be loading a long-distance Penske truck and most movers charge for their truck).

We hung out for a while—Amani and Thomas left since they were fasting and I'm sure they were very tired: they couldn't even have water. Then we went over to Tim's place, parked the truck in a side street, and Katt returned from jogging. We watched a few episodes of the BBC show Coupling and then headed to All Purpose Pizza for dinner (it opens at 1600). We got a large sourdough pizza with caramelized onions, basil, garlic, and bruschetta, and a smaller regular pepperoni pizza.

I had a small headache at Tim and Katt's; after we got home, it was worse and I was also feeling nauseous. I lay down for a bit but eventually had to throw up, and then slept several hours and felt much better. I'm not sure if I got some sort of food poisoning (I hadn't last time); I don't seem to have the stomach virus; perhaps I just ate too much (5 slices of pizza). That put the kibosh on plans for making one or two more runs with the truck.

I got up at 0715, swept out the truck, folded and stacked the furniture pads, wrapped the straps around the hand truck, and filled the tank with diesel on Avondale. Being mindful of the warnings posted at the Penske office about getting stuck in narrow turning areas and $300 towing fees, I made sure I had plenty of space to turn around, using the Arco down the street and parking the truck where I picked it up. It's the mileage charges that get you ($0.99/mile, we went 82 miles); the truck itself was $79.99, 12 furniture pads $10, hand truck $10, came about $210 overall. Perhaps hiring a truck and movers wouldn't have been much worse. I plan to get a 16' truck Friday to move everything else, and will probably take the day off work.

Books finished: Who Killed the Constitution?.

Holes in the "Anti-libertarian FAQ"

Political ·Thursday August 20, 2009 @ 22:16 EDT (link)

I happened across this "anti-libertarian FAQ" and noticed where the main problems lie, so thought I'd make a note. They're fairly early on: most of what follows derives from the first, and the picking apart of quotes is just a red herring.

#5 "Taxation is theft" contains the core of the error, although it has one escape hatch: no property (his "property is theft"). If people want to go in that direction, that'd be fun (the anarcho-capitalists might be in favor of it too), but I doubt that many people do. But it is an out.

If we can agree that people can validly hold property, then we could start a libertarian society with property ownership as it is now (if you want to use something other than the status quo as a basis, you'd need to justify it, like libertarianism does for its precepts; for example, you could argue that inheritance is an unfair way to get anything, so anything inherited, and any gains thereby, should be returned to a common pool; there would be practical issues with that step of course).

The next attempt to justify taxation is as a "social contract" which later points (#6-20) attempt to uphold. The video "The Social Contract Defined and Destroyed in Under 5 Minutes" is very helpful to debunk the validity of said "social contract" in most ways. The remaining excuse is that parents have accepted it for their children, who can leave when they reach the age of majority (who gave parents that right, if it exists?… yeah, the government), or that naturalized citizens (or military) have sworn to uphold the Constitution, and, well, the government is the Constitution so you must serve them until end of days. No, no, not really. The Constitution is accepted, not a particular statist interpretation thereof. Certain things are axiomatic (e.g. property ownership can be derived from ownership of self in various ways, e.g. Rand's 'A=A' formation).

Without a voluntary contract, the whole rest of the "FAQ" unravels like a cut-through ball of string. (For example, if the government then has no contract, they have no right to taxes, or at least redistributionist taxes—if they provide services that you use or have contracted for, they should be paid fair value—so they are then initiating force to take them—not retaliating by enforcing a contract, etc.)

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