::::: : 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.

Kayaking

News ·Sunday September 30, 2012 @ 20:04 EDT (link)

I went back to Lettuce Lake regional park again—just me this time—to kayak for the first time. $2 entrance, $25 kayak rental. I had to let them hold on to my driver's license, and picked up a paddle, life jacket, and key at the entrance station. I put the paddle in the trunk but it stuck out so I used a tie-town. Walk down to the launch, unlock the kayak, put it in the water; about the same as a canoe, as was getting in: it's all about staying low and maintaining balance (after I cleared out or killed the large spiders in the back of the kayak). (This was a sit-on-top kayak.)

There really wasn't much to it: grasp the paddle with the concave edge of the blade toward you and alternate left/right strokes. Sometimes I'd double-paddle on one side to help turn, or back-paddle; but it later became easier to take a stronger stroke on one side to turn while maintaining rhythm. I was out for a couple hours; I went past most of the boardwalk, including the lookout. Saw several wading birds and ducks close-up; no gators; no other kayaks out, but a few canoes. Altogether a good experience.

Open source = ability to fork

News, Technical ·Saturday September 29, 2012 @ 15:56 EDT (link)

My response to a TED talk How the Internet will (one day) transform government by Clay Shirky:

The fundamental misunderstanding between open source projects and law is that open source projects are private property (and by that I mean the main repository, not the content) whereas law is imposed on people by force. This so extremely dwarfs how either are produced that it amounts to a red herring, a mere distraction. And it's shatteringly depressing that he almost got it, too; because if he had talked about forking (where someone takes a copy of an open source project and makes a new "main" repository going a different way, because they disagree with the existing owners), then he would have almost made it.

If you talk about open source and don't talk about forking, you don't understand open source. Even if an open source project never forks, the ability to do so—the threat—keeps the keepers honest. And even if a fork doesn't attract many people, or is entirely private, it represents ultimate control over the configuration of a project that you run on your system without having to be dependent on anyone else's vision.

So all he's really got is: law and its composition (inputs) should be more open, such that it's clear where inputs come from, and, in the other direction, what its effects are. But that doesn't change the fundamentals of democracy, which is majorities (or plutocracies) forcing their will on other individuals.

If he actually took the lesson of open source projects to heart, though, he'd be able to make a much more powerful point. First, he needs to understand that open source projects are not democratic: they are focused on a privately-owned main repository. Sometimes democracy (but not of everyone, but of people admitted to the inner circle, usually from the value of their changes, i.e., on merit) is used, but it is far from central. Linus (and other open source project leaders) are referred to as a BDFL—Benevolent Dictator For Life. But the ever-present threat is that someone can take the code and start a new "main" repository and that he'll be the dictator of a kingdom of 1, or at least that there will be kingdoms outside his control.

Now, what do you get if you apply "forking" to law? Recall what it means in the software context: if a person doesn't like the "main repository" of a program, or that their ideas are not being incorporated, they make a copy, publish it as a new "main repository" (usually under a different name to avoid confusion), possibly attract others that prefer their version, and, most importantly, use that version of the software. For example, if people thought that Apache (a web server) should instead be a mail server (silly example), then they could branch it and call it "Comanche" or something, and start working on it, and they could run their version on their computer and nothing compels them to keep running Apache. (And since Apache's changes are still being published, if they see changes they like they can incorporate them back into "Comanche", and vice versa.)

So apply that to law: if a person doesn't like the main repository of law (the state's version), or their ideas aren't being incorporated, they could make a copy, publish it as a new set of laws ("Dave's Law", which, say, strips out all victimless "crime" laws, leaving the other 12 pages alone for now), possibly attract other people that like Dave's Law, and, most importantly, only _follow_ "Dave's Law". (Note also that a person doesn't have to be a contributor to a project to use it, and similarly, a person would not have to contribute to "Dave's Law" to elect to follow it instead of the state's law.)

To answer our original question ("What do you get?"), the answer is, of course, anarchy. Possibly, just done exactly like this, anarchy in the sense of "chaos" as well as "no (imposed) masters". For example, (as written) people could opt out of murder laws and, if law is the only reason a murderer can be brought to justice (it isn't; see the Voluntaryist wiki page on Justice), there would be no penalty. So clearly that wouldn't quite work. In fact, anyone about to commit a premeditated crime would naturally opt out of the law against it! Yet this works both ways (somewhat like Molyneux describing someone dropping their DRO coverage, which you can read about in his book Practical Anarchy): it is a signal that some mischief may be planned. Others might refuse to do business with someone who has chosen to be bound to a system of law that they disagree with. And which law would the police enforce? It's easy for victimless crimes: that of the actor (if you choose to follow a law that says you can be jailed for 10 years for using drugs, then so be it, but if I don't, then leave me alone); what about at the boundaries (my law says I can sleep on your lawn, your law says you can shoot me if I try)? (Butler Shaffer's Boundaries of Order comes to mind: rights are all about boundaries.) (Especially consider if my law says I don't need to pay taxes to fund your police….)

So two things would come from this: distributed law (see, e.g., Hasnas' "The Myth of the Rule of Law"), and an appreciation that justice (right to restitution and retribution) does not come from arbitrary words on a page. We'd be getting into an anarchist private law (DRO, private protection agency, rights enforcement agency, etc.) system.

That is the parallel to distributed version control, not merely that people can see where the bits of text come from and who contributed. The guy misses the forest for the trees.

Upgrading the Myth box

News, Technical ·Friday September 28, 2012 @ 17:32 EDT (link)

The "Myth box" is what we call the computer connected to the TV that we use to play most shows and movies, because it runs MythTV (and XBMC for movies, with a planned cut over to XBMC for both shows and movies when I get around to it); its "official" machine name, is (following the theme of mythical locations) cirith-ungol. Anyway, a little over a year ago, while we were still in Washington state, the old case fan gave up the ghost, causing some overheating issues with the motherboard (including some visibly burst capacitors) before I replaced the fan (records indicate in July 2011).

However, the machine still ran well for the most part, so there was no need to replace anything else. But lately it had been acting up again: freezing up at boot, or not detecting disk drives, stopping at other points in the boot, or, when it did manage to boot, losing contact with the disk drives at a later point. For a while, connecting the disks to different SATA ports made the problem go away; but eventually the machine was so unstable I took it to Genie Computer Systems, a local computer place, for evaluation. I paid them $50 for diagnosis, and they told me it found the disks just fine and that my "Linux install was corrupt". OK; we developers have all seen "not repro" bugs before—it fails for the tester but works fine on our machine, either because the steps aren't quite right or the environment is different. So I can't fault them for that. And they did some work, so I don't resent paying them. But the "Linux install is corrupt" diagnosis was weak and unwarranted. If you don't know, say so! (It also took them a day or so longer than expected to come up with this useless conclusion.)

So, it was time for a new motherboard! I decided to stick with MSI, and did a little research and decided to go with the 990XA-GD55. I found out that neither the memory nor CPU were compatible, so to that I added an AMD Athlon II X2 (Dual-Core) 270 and 8 Gb of memory; I was going to go with some DDR3 1333, but Newegg (online retailer) had a sale on Team Xtreem Dark Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) for a little less than the other. All told, just over $200 for am upgrade that was rather long overdue anyway. We anxiously awaited the package from UPS….

The Newegg box arrived, packed with their usual care; so I set out removing the old motherboard (an MSI K9N Platinum): I took some pictures in case I had trouble remembering what went where, but I didn't end up needing them. Power, USB, power/reset switches/LEDs, SATA cables; all removed, then unscrew the board and ease it out. Replace the rear connector cutout. Install the new memory and CPU in the new motherboard; easy enough; don't get any thermal paste on you! Now, ideally I should have been powering on the board at each step to check for failures; but I didn't; so I had everything attached—SATA cables were a bit awkward since they were at the far side, but I could get to them through the other side of the box. The 12V power connector I had was 4-pin and the board had an 8-pin socket, but apparently it was fine to connect it up where it fit. (Tom's Hardware Forum was one of the most frequent hits with good information, plus a few overclocker forums (even though I wasn't overclocking the CPU).)

I connected the power cord and a video cable and flipped the power switch.

Nothing: no fan, no buzz from the optical disks, no LEDs.

Great, what did I break? Did I kill it? I didn't see any magic smoke escape!

I even pulled out the multimeter and checked the voltages from the PSU (Power Supply Unit): all within tolerances. I was all set to RMA (return) the motherboard as a dud—after all, the old motherboard came right on when powered on—when I had a thought about checking if it required a power switch… and so it did, so I shorted pins 6 and 8 of "JFP1" and the thing whirred to life. My fault for not knowing that first, the board could be powered on without anything attached (even memory or CPU) (although it wouldn't be happy about it), and not incrementally testing it with each addition, and, second, knowing that the power switch connection was required on in this board. (Later I was able to set the system to automatically start when powered on, through the BIOS.)

The system booted past GRUB, loaded the kernel, but was unable to find any disks. The new motherboard didn't have an IDE connector, so I couldn't boot from a LiveCD/DVD; but fortunately, it could boot from a USB stick; so I made a Gentoo 12.1 LiveUSB from a LiveDVD ISO (just dd it!), and built and installed a new kernel with AHCI support (fortunate educated guess) via a chroot; and then it got a good deal further, but failed to bring up the network interface.

This was also obvious: the new motherboard has different on-board network hardware—old was nVidia nForce "forcedeth", now it was a Realtek chip needing the "r8169" driver (as you may guess, I build a custom kernel and don't build random stacks of modules). Even after setting that up, it wanted firmware (according to dmesg), so I emerged the linux-firmware package from the chroot; and (modulo a tweak so that udev didn't reassign the interface as eth2), finally it boots correctly!

And it's been stable for the last few days. It's nice to be able to watch shows again (I hear that too much reading rots the brain).

Lettuce Lake

News ·Sunday September 23, 2012 @ 10:01 EDT (link)

We just got back from walking at Lettuce Lake Regional Park; small, but has some scenic boardwalk trails through the swamps, with great old trees, hanging moss, and a few gators. There's a lookout, too, and canoe or kayak rentals, which we may take advantage of next visit.

Books finished: A Feast For Crows, Counter-Clock World.

AAA x2, new battery for the Solara

News ·Thursday September 13, 2012 @ 20:57 EDT (link)

Had to call AAA yesterday morning (dead battery); they charged it with a portable battery pack, but since there was no reason for it to be low (no lights left on or anything like that) I had my doubts about its long-term survival. I managed to start it to drive home from work, but barely—it was clearly Not Happy—the drive in isn't really long enough to charge it; and this morning it again wouldn't start. (I should say it wasn't actually dead; there was enough juice to turn on a few indicator lights and make a clicking sound.) So this time I bought a battery from the AAA guy—about $120 with a few forms of state extortion added in (obviously if it would hold a charge I didn't want to buy one, but as I said, I had little hope).

Both of the AAA guys said that Florida heat killed batteries—they had a couple pallets of dead ones each of the past few days. And maybe it was just time; it's been a couple years. Waiting on them made me a little late to work (around 1030) but I logged in remotely a little to make up for it.

Code Visions technical blog goes live

News, Technical ·Saturday August 25, 2012 @ 21:51 EDT (link)

I decided to split off a technical blog on software development, with an eye to improving software quality (for customers) through better software methods (the code we write, how we write it, how features are designed, test methods, etc.). It's called Code Visions and I hope to be contributing to it frequently. (And now I can keep my technical and political/personal posts separated.)

Books finished: The Honest Truth About Dishonesty.

Hurricane Isaac: batten down the hatches…

News ·Saturday August 25, 2012 @ 05:59 EDT (link)

Hurricane Isaac is approaching; we just went to Wal-Mart to get some "emergency" bottled water—it wasn't busy and had plenty of supplies.

At work, they put up some metal storm shutters over the high windows and had us all drape plastic over our electronics (computers, mainly, and any of our peripherals intended for blind users), and ensure electronics were off the floor.

It's expected to hit further north—Alabama or Louisiana—but time will tell. First hurricane, it's a little exciting; don't really know enough to be worried (ignorance is bliss).

The state extortion machine, hard at work (II)

News ·Saturday August 18, 2012 @ 17:09 EDT (link)

Honey writes: (continued from part 1)

On August 18, 2012 I had to go to court for the supposed seat belt violation that took place on May 31, 2012 on the way to my doctor's office. There is a separate write-up for the events that took place on May 31 and a write-up of my complaint of Officer McKenzie to his supervisor Sgt. Leschick.

David and I went to the court house at my specified time (around 4:00 p.m.) on August 18, 2012. I went in to the courtroom armed with my photos and notes about the incident that took place on May 31, 2012. We sat there and waited until we were called into the court room and the names of people that were going to "trial" were called alphabetically by last name. Several people got off and according to my memory most of them were in fact men. The women tended to be treated unfairly by the judge in my honest opinion.

Finally they got to the R's and the man who went before me was there for a seat-belt violation as well. He told how he was wearing his seat belt and taking his kid to school. He mentioned how he had never gotten a ticket before and the judge let him off. Then my name was called and I went up and told my side of the story. I didn't notice until it was too late that the police officers changed their stories from what Officer McKenzie had told me at the stop to what they told the judge during court. Office McKenzie had told me on scene at my stop that he saw me putting on my seat belt while being pulled over. However, in court he said that my seat belt was not seen and then he and Officer Jacobson (the actual "witness" to the violation) both said that my seat belt looked as though it was on, but tucked under my arm while I was driving. I missed the change in story (mostly because I didn't think they would lie), and told the judge that I had been wearing my seat belt the entire time and that I am just too short to see the seat belt from outside of my vehicle unless you are right next to me. I proceeded to show the officers and the judge my pictures showing how difficult it is to see me with my seat belt on (unless you are looking closely). The judge didn't even bother to look at the pictures, he just flipped through them as though he didn't care. I also mentioned that the officers didn't bring their "evidence" to court with them (the video tape and the audio recording) and the judge didn't care. The officers mentioned that my seat belt was not visible from behind the vehicle, but that it didn't matter because they had both seen me from the side and I didn't have my seat belt on (or it was tucked under my arm).

The judge told me that he was going to fine me for not wearing my seat belt but that as consolation, that this wouldn't go against my driver's license and would not increase my insurance (as if that should console me) and that he would not make me pay court costs either.

The real reason that Officer McKenzie did not want to bring the video/audio tapes in is because it would show him to be the liar that he is. It would show how rude he was to me and how judgmental and how he just dismissed me without bothering to care how I felt about things. It would also shed light on his statement that I was lying about wearing my seat belt because he saw me put it on while I was driving. He didn't want his lies to be shown for what they were so he conveniently did not bring the so called "evidence" with him because he didn't want to be seen for the villain that he is.

Officer McKenzie had a vendetta against me because I filed a complaint against him and he was getting his revenge by having his buddy Officer Eric Jacobson (I think that's his name) lie for him and back him up under oath.

This entire situation has made me realize how totally unnecessary traffic cops are under most circumstances and how voluntaryism is the answer! I have been extremely angry for almost a year now and nothing can ever give me my innocence back about this. I truly believed that if the truth was on my side that I would not be treated this way, but in the end it was a money grab and they (the officer's and the judge) did not care at all that I was wearing my seat belt, they just wanted to get their money.

What is more, I had to sign a paper in court admitting to the violation and then I had to go pay the fine. I had to lie in court on a piece of paper handed to me by the state and I was told that if I didn't sign it that I wouldn't be allowed to leave. I was forced to lie and pay the fine when I should never have been in that situation in the first place.

Today, I love Windows

News, Technical ·Sunday August 12, 2012 @ 20:32 EDT (link)

I take back most of the mean things I've said about Windows in the past, and some of the kind things I've said about Source Insight.

So, when you tell Source Insight that a project does not share the global config file, it creates a brand new one (as opposed to, say, letting you base it on the global one, which would be sensible). Then when you change your mind, it clobbers the global one with the brand new one, wiping out all your customizations. This is possibly the first insanely stupid thing I've seen Source Insight do, but it's a doozy.

I remembered seeing this interesting looking "versions" tab on a Windows explorer file properties page, so like a drowning man clutching a straw I brought up the page for the lost GLOBAL.CF3 configuration file—and joyfully, it had a backup from last week it could bring back! All my customizations (some from BryanK, I think, from Office, and many local ones) were back! I still lost a few changes (which I just restored); but nothing to the months I'd otherwise lose. (Yes, I'm aware Unix can do this and probably did it first. The SunOS machines at Waterloo did these sorts of automated backups, for instance.)

Today Windows (and perhaps the IT people who set it up?) gets a point.

Do anarchists "cheat" more on their taxes?

Political, Economics ·Wednesday August 1, 2012 @ 20:05 EDT (link)

Another book I am reading is Dan Ariely's The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty; in it he describes the SMORC, or Simple Model of Rational Crime, wherein, for example, people might suppose that those with the opportunity to cheat might make a cost-benefit (expected value) calculation, and (as a few implication) cheat more when the payoff is larger, or when it is believed they are less likely to be caught: experiments, however, indicate this is not necessarily the case. Rather (he concludes from a series of experiments), "[W]e cheat up to the level that allows us to retain our self-image as reasonably honest individuals."

"Well," I immediately leaped, "surely that means that anarchists must cheat on our taxes more than statists (people that adore or tolerate the state), and thus, education about the state will help more than originally thought to starve the beast!" In similar vein, it is more important than thought that the state retain control of the educatory apparatus; for if it cannot bedizen itself and indoctrinate the masses, then they are less likely to give it what it demands.

(How did I get there? An anarchist understands he owes the state nothing in taxes—they are understood to be mere extortion; thus it is not wrong to withhold and refrain from paying any of them demanded, even through violent self-defense if possible—although such is not advisable, even through a method of deceit, for it is of the same morality as deceiving the storm trooper when he asks if there are any Jews in the house, differing only in degree.)

But the thought is then: what sort of honesty are people concerned with: local honesty (did I honestly report my income?) or a bigger picture (even though the truth is that there are three Jews in the attic, deceiving evil people so they do not do unjust harm is, as it were, a higher form of honesty)? Well; if you had read Ariely's other books, where people are shown through experiment to easily distracted and not to retain abstract concepts well when making decisions (preferring, e.g., associated emotion), you'd guess that the "local honesty" would triumph, as would I, and that it would take considerable training to not actually feel bad about lying even to the Nazi troops at the door. For anything less serious, one would likely not make the effort to rewire one's brain, as it were; and so, alas, it does not seem that the revolution will be brought about along this wise.