Author: matthew

So Slashdot linked to an article about Gator, the much–hated and much-imitated adware/spyware program that many people accidentally install on their Microsoft Windows [WARNING: Strong language] operating systems. I almost exclusively use GNU/Linux, particularly Gentoo, at home and work, so I’m not susceptible to accidental installation of this program… <read more>

I say almost because the kids use Windows to play games, and I use a Windows machine through VNC at work to run some Novell administration utilities.

I work at a bank. The unfortunate fact for Gator is that, due to banking secrecy legislation, having a piece of spyware report what web sites we visit to check on delinquent customers is probably illegal. Thus, I regularly clear it off employee computers — or rather, I did before I installed DansGuardian on our proxy server and blocked all executable downloads. Go me, work is easier now 🙂

Umm, anyway, the discussion about a new study analyzing Gator’s ad-generating trends is quite animated. My favorite comment is this one, entitled “Translation of the Article”, by saintjab:

“Gator is crap. Gator is being sued by many people who think the product is crap. Gator has several competitors who are equally as shady and crappy as Gator. Gator spies on you, reports to an unknown authority about your habits and tendencies, and people still use it. These people are not quick to show themselves because they know they are idiots for using this crap. Then the author proceeds to compare this crap with the success of a legitimate company like Google. How is this a helpful article? It only states the obvious. Gator and its ilk are crap and now there is a crappy article about it all”

This faith called “Otherkin” made the front page of Kuro5hin today. I must admit that I, like probably every other science-fiction fan on the planet, occasionally play with the idea that if I just think harder I can really make that pencil on the desk move with my mind (heck, there’s a training course you can take to teach you how), or that I’m really the malevolent god Hastur. Or whatever.

But building a faith around it? Well, no accounting for taste, but stuff like this is one of the reasons I avoid religion.

So I’ve been running Gentoo Linux on my home machine for several months now, and other than one thing, I’m in love.The first thing is, why am I not in love with Gentoo? Here’s my answer: Ebuilds take too freaking long!!! OK, other than that, here’s why I like it.

1. Konqueror is incredibly fast compared to Redhat 8 or 9
2. Everything is incredibly fast compared to any other Linux distribution I’ve used.
3. I can be doing an “emerge -u world” (which pretty much rebuilds my whole system if I need it), simultaneously with watching a movie under mplayer on a single-CPU system, and other than a couple of small hiccups in the DVD from time to time, everything works perfectly.
4. When I run xmms, I never, ever have a skip on any ogg or mp3 playback. Considering that I’m in the process of ripping my entire CD collection, I’m amazed. I can be ripping, playing back, and simultaneously compiling Mozilla, and never drop a beat on playback. Occasionally the video may lag due to what a heavy load it is, but otherwise it’s amazing.
5. Rock-solid stability. I’m running the Gentoo-optimized 2.4 kernel, with everything built with some pretty decent optimizations, and the only thing that has ever locked up my system was me trying to run some stupid 3D visualization when I was running xmms under real-time priority (ergo, as root, dumb dumb dumb). I chalk that one crash up to PEBKAC.
6. Did I mention it was really fast? Neverwinter Nights plays a whole lot faster than it does under Windows. I mean, really, really noticeably faster.
7. Comparing my 933MHz Pentium III at home running Gentoo to my 2.4GHz Pentium 4 at work, the Pentium 4 feels like a slow dog out of the gate. I’m thinking it’s time to upgrade to Gentoo at work, too.

What’s not to like? Well, the length of time it takes to emerge (that’s the command you run to install a software package) is one big thing keeping me from using it everywhere. As slow as it is installing KDE on my 933MHz Pentium III, I imagine it would be sheer torture on my 366MHz Sony Vaio laptop. Then again, just leave the laptop alone for a couple of days while I’m at work, and it should be finished.The other things are that sometimes there are things I just don’t know what I’m doing wrong. Like making USB work for my Palm Pilot, for instance. The devices don’t exist under /dev/usb. The really nice thing about Gentoo is dependency handling. For instance, I have both KDE 3.1.1 and KDE 3.1.2 installed side-by-side, and can easily swap between the two if I need to for some compatability reasons. And emerge makes it simple to clean up afterward.

I’ll write a more detailed review at some time in the future. For now, I need to go play some NWN.

I made this post on Slashdot.org today, and felt like I wanted to mirror it in my weblog. I really think that an “inclusive” approach toward Artificial Intelligence, one that is multi-disciplinary, can be the key toward creating our ultimate goal, which is (basically) a new class of slave. I’ll leave the moral implications of creating our own mechanical slaves out of the discussion for now, but really, the main benefit of creating an artificial intelligence, besides having it do stuff for us, would be to give us some company…

Posting follows:

Once we can define what it is we’re trying to artificialize, maybe we can make more progress in artificializing it.

There’s the rub. I don’t think we can begin to understand how the brain works until we build stuff that approximates its operation enough to create working theories. The Wright Brothers didn’t have a full understanding of flight dynamics prior to building their first aircraft. We’ve come to that knowledge through a lot of trial, error, and testing.

The main problem is that intelligence is such a nebulous thing. The Wrights had one goal: “make it fly”. Now when engineers design, they use that basic goal and expand it with “faster”, “safer”, “more manueverable”, “more fuel-efficient”, “able to carry this weapons loading”, “lower stall speed”, “stall avoidance in low-speed turns”, etc. We need to come up with some basic rules on what capabilities we expect out of an AI, then expand on it.

We have some pieces of that now. Like the little round vacuum-cleaner thing. The goal is for it to vacuum floors. Great, it does that. Now make it navigate stairs. Once it can do that, then make it learn to pick up stuff on the floor, rather than vacuuming around it. Then maybe create an attachment that allows it to load a dishwasher.

You get the idea.

I think the point of view of people that think AI has “failed” is a bit skewed. Yeah, we don’t have any AI that can reason at human level yet. But we have devices that can easily beat the intelligence of roaches. And we’re working on things that can exceed or augment the intelligence of small mammals at this point. We’ll get there, but incremental progress is the only way it’s going to happen, IMHO. And we’ll arrive at the goal from several different directions, probably including analog (mechanical approach, responding to stimuli using non-digital means), emergent behaviors (colonies of processes), neural net, and hybrids of these, each of which can complement the other in creating reliable systems that use different logic depending on the context of the item they are analyzing.

This discussion really, really makes me want to go back to school and get a doctorate specializing in AI. I feel like such a goober noober discussing this stuff in public, but my gut feeling is that competent, ubiquitous AI will be the catalyst toward improving the human condition around the world.

Just picked up a cheap PC desk ($120) from Fred Meyer, but it actually looks pretty nice! I’ll post pics later. Just finished getting it together, and that is always a pain.

I’m working on a special blog with my take on the MPAA and RIAA enforcement actions against P2P users who blatantly violate copyrights, but I have to get a lot of attributions done before I feel like it’s "ready". So I’ll blog about Ballroom Dancing.

Christy and I arranged a date tonight. We’ve been pretty good about making sure we have a date every single week for the last few years; it’s a tradition I really enjoy. Lately we’ve been looking for more interesting things to do than the traditional dinner or movie thing. Last week Christy suggested we go dancing, so I said let’s do it this week. We did it.

We went to the Midvale Somethingorother. They have two buildings, one with a really big dance floor, the other with a smaller one. We showed up at 7:21, in time for the 7:30 lessons. It costs $6 to get into the dance, and an extra $1 if you take the lesson. Great deal. Tonight they spent an hour teaching us a half-dozen Tango moves. Tango is pretty cool. Although you can Tango with someone you’re not married to, you’re close enough that you really probably should know and trust one another very much before attempting it 🙂 The instructor was, apparently, impressed enough with our basic dance ability that he repeatedly suggested to us that we attend his lessons. I suspect, however, that it’s a pretty standard sales pitch line. I mean, at a buck a student, even with the 30-odd people there they are not exactly making a whole lot of bank, you know?

Following the Tango lessons were two-step lessons in the other ballroom. These were quite forgettable, but still fun basic steps that really improved our dancing ability and taught us a few new things about leading. Shortly after the lessons ended, at which point we’d been there about two hours, we went back to the ballroom dance room, danced to “Unchained Melody” performed by a one-man band, then decided to go snag some food and head home.

Taco Time. Fear it. I had the Veggie Burrito, and I can tell I’ll be paying for it in gas all night long…

Anyway, if you have a significant other, I heartily recommend taking him/her dancing with you. Go to the lessons if they have them (most do), and you just may love it.

From the keepen-dem-mittengrabben-offen dep’t:

Polly Harris is a woman of many talents. Search and rescue worker, computer game programmer, intensely physical martial artist, and (reserve) police officer. To top it all off, she has a great sense of humor and has become the ad hoc discoverer-of-hilarious-quotes-on-weblogs for a small mailing list I participate in. Read the original article at the National Review (careful, due to one exceptionally-long sentence, the whole page ends up really, really wide), or Mean Mr. Mustard’s excerpt, reprinted here almost in its entirety.

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We English-speaking peoples should keep hold of the essential fact about foreign languages: they exist to make us laugh. It is considered exquisitely polite in Thai for a gentleman to end every spoken sentence with the otherwise-meaningless syllable krap. (The equivalent for ladies is ka.) Sawat-di will do for a greeting, but Sawat-di krap is much classier.

“Eyebrows on fire” say the Chinese when they’re in a tearing hurry, and one common Chinese term for “homosexual” is “chicken-rapist” (derived from the position, not from the object of desire). Latin has been making schoolboys snicker since the Middle Ages: as late as the 1970s, British TV ran a sitcom, Up Pompeii, about a Roman family whose elderly patriarch bore the name Ludicrus Sextus.

German has a word for the hollow space behind your knee: kniebeuge, pronounced “k-nee-boy-geh”. German is, in fact, a language rich in hilarity, difficult to speak for long without giggling. The German for “constipated” is verstopft; “rhinitis” is Nasenschleimheit (literally “nose-sliminess”). An excursion is of course an Ausfahrt, while auto exhaust is Auspuff. I even, for reasons I cannot explain, find the German word for “elbow” difficult to utter with a straight face: Ellenbogen. (The large bone of the forearm is the Ellenbogenknochen. See what I mean?) The sound and length of German names is a staple of British comedy: recall Monty Python’s interview with that strangely neglected composer "Johann Gambolputty de von Ausfern- schplenden- schlitter- crasscrenbon- fried- digger- dingle- dangle-dongle- dungle- burstein- von- knacker- thrasher- apple- banger- horowitz- ticolensic- grander- knotty- spelltinkle- grandlich- grumblemeyer- spelterwasser- kurstlich- himbleeisen- bahnwagen- gutenabend- bitte- ein- nurnburger- bratwustle- gernspurten- mitz- weimache- luber- hundsfut- gumberaber- shonedanker- kalbsfleisch- mittler- aucher von Hautkopft of Ulm"?

And of course there that weird business of the verb at the end of the sentence putting is.

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Not to be outdone, John’s Olsen’s response to Polly’s reprint of this to the list was short and to the point:

‘Plain old English is fun too. Dad gets a book for a bedtime story, and the kid says: “What did you bring the book that I don’t want to be read to out of up for”‘

In the “Yet Another Repost” category, here’s one of my old articles examining the differences between GNU/Linux and High-End UNIX out of insights gathered from a Slashdot discussion. Yeah, I know a lot of people slam Slashdot for the technical ignorance manifested there, but if you’re familiar with the territory, it’s not that treacherous.

Repost follows — There was an interesting Slashdot discussion today regarding what’s missing from GNU/Linux systems that high-end UNIX systems possess. I made a comment myself (which I’ve pasted in its entirety inside, hey, it’s my web site!), and gleaned some interesting information from the discussion.

Before you get to my cut & pasted entry, here’s some of what I gathered from the discussion…

A) The Price. At first you think “hey, ok, this is a big positive”, but wait a minute: if you install GNU/Linux for free, it’s only free if your time is worth nothing. If you pay for professional installation of your operating system, you don’t lose as much time. Curiously, when I worked at Talk2 a year ago, they had HP/UX systems there that were the original factory install and had been for years. They had patched them regularly, of course, but still, they saved a TON of time by never installing a “fresh” HP/UX system. They simply created a system image when the system was new, and restored from that. It appeared to lower their management costs; at least, they decided they didn’t need admins anymore and canned the two of us 🙂 Meanwhile, Solaris is free on Sparc hardware. Guess you pay that cost up-front.

B) There’s a good summary of the difference in security features between GNU/Linux and conventional UNIX here.

C) Curiously, nobody could seem to come up with any high-end UNIX systems that were microkernel-based. They are all monolithic, with modules, similar to Linux (or, in the case of HP/UX, simply monolithic and you recompile the frigging thing if you want any new hardware). The only good examples of microkernel-based systems anybody could conjure up were GNU/Hurd and BeOS. I’m eager to see how well Hurd penetrates the OS market.

D) Man pages. GNU/Linux seems to have almost abandoned them entirely in favor of Info pages, text READMEs, HTML documentation, or the most popular choice: no documentation at all. Apparently you can get around this in the case of info pages with:

info –subnodes –output – | less

Alternatively, use Debian, where every binary requires a man page, or is considered broken. Interesting, that, didn’t know that before.

E) Great quote from Zeinfeld, and spot-on in my opinion: “The man issue points to the real limitation of Unix which isn’t really a lack of features, the problem is the quality of implementation.” Completely true. Feature-for-feature, GNU/Linux really competes well on all fronts. But the quality of the implementation on GNU/Linux systems lacks considerably, particularly in the first iteration. Yet, over time, they evolve to a point where they are superior to the earlier tools. Witness the 10+ year old GNU tools… they are far, far better than the corporate implementations. Bash, cshell, and ksh are all awesome compared to the posix SH that ships with HPUX or Solaris. GNU’s grep, awk, sed, and other command-line utilities are so much better than the vendor-provided ones that vendors are abandoning their own in favor of GNU. It’s definitely getting there.

My original observations from the Slashdot discussion follow. —– A few things that are very nice about some commercial UNIX variants you don’t have on GNU/Linux systems:

1. Integrated systems management, ala “Sam” in HP/UX. Although I’m first in line to say that systems administration should never be handed over to imbeciles, Sam is easy enough that non-professionals can use it, yet it covers all the bases of systems administration from your hosts file through recompiling a kernel. It seems to be what Linuxconf wants to be, but isn’t quite yet. It also does this without royally screwing up particularly hard-fought configuration files. Just use Linuxconf to configure network interfaces after you’ve set up a beautiful five-lne config and see what it does to /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-ethX. Red Hat’s config tools are getting there, and YaST seems to have nailed it — but it’s not free software.

2. Transparent X configuration w/3D support out of the box. When the installers get it right (about 75% of the time), Linux + X-windows is just fine. When it gets it wrong, the iterations are ugly: XFree86 -configure (blah blah blah) XFree86 -xf86config /root/XF86Config.new (dumps out, some obscure error) vi /etc/XF86Config.new (ad nausem)

I miss how trivial it is to adjust X on my old Sun. Then again, there, instead of hacking a config file, you had to hack some obscure command options. And setting up dual monitors on XFree86 is much better than on Solaris (or was, back when Solaris 8 was the standard, haven’t mucked with Sun equipment much since then).

3. More on the X server: FAST X services. I’ve run XFree86 on really new, top-of-the-line Nvidia, ATI, and Matrox hardware, and not one of them can even touch the performance of X-windows on my old SGI O2. IRIX X is just amazingly faster. I’m not talking so much about 3D performance, but multi-head, full-window drag type stuff. Watching the ghosting as I wiggle this very screen I’m typing in back & forth on my RedHat 8.0 box at work right now on an Nvidia Geforce4 @ 1280×1024 is just painful. I know people are going to say “it’s the configuration, stupid!” but if optimizing for decent X-windows performance isn’t easy enough for a UNIX veteran of 7 years to do it without serious pain, it’s not easy enough for an admin to want to deal with it. NOTE: I optimized all 686 at home on Gentoo with Nvidia’s drivers. It’s considerably better, but still doesn’t compare. Then again, I don’t have an O2 anymore for real head-to-head comparison, so maybe my memory is playing tricks on me. On the other hand, identical hardware in MS Windows gives immensely better 2D performance.)

Then again, that’s just a graphics professional feature, more than a server-type feature. Comparing any other UNIX to SGI’s IRIX for graphics work is just no contest.

4. Memory fault isolation. On Solaris, I’ll actually get a message telling me which DIMM is bad, and which slot it is in. Admittedly, this is a failure not only of the operating system, but also of the hardware design. When you have 30-some-odd DIMMs in some E10K server, if you didn’t have this kind of isolation, trying to find the bad stick of RAM would be beyond time-consuming. Ditto for HP/UX when replacing faulty RAM. Once again, though, IBM seems to be adressing this with their higher-end servers, and I look forward to about a year from now when it becomes more of a common feature on GNU/Linux servers.

5. Something like “OpenBIOS” or Sun’s OpenBoot (I think that’s the name? Been a while, I forgot). This is great to work with, for instance, on Alpha systems. Fairly complete diagnostics before the OS even boots, and it all gets shucked out the serial port. You can compensate for this by installing some kind of lights-out management board in your PC, but if you ask any UNIX admin that has used the non-PC-BIOS stuff on pro UNIX systems, a PC BIOS just doesn’t compare. For instance, on the Alpha I have at home, I can hook up fibre channel and enumerate all the available partitions, flag one as bootable, mount some filesystems and make changes, force boot to HALT temporarily rather than boot to full, stop the OS, do a memory dump, sync the filesystems and reboot… a whole lot.

GNU/Linux on Alpha/Sparc inherits these benefits, and so it is a non-issue. GNU/Linux on X86 still really, really sucks in this dep’t.

That’s about all I can think of for now. The difference between managing UNIX systems from Sun & HP, versus PC-based GNU/Linux systems, is still large but shrinking. As evidenced above, a BIG chunk of what still sucks about Linux is due to hardware & hardware integration, not the O/S itself, really. GNU/Linux is definitely getting there; I love running it on my Alpha at home, because I get many of those benefits mentioned and still use the operating system I love.

To skip ahead to what I’ve figured out is the best knot on the planet, go to the bottom of this blog entry.

On the bus, we had a discussion of how to properly tie a shoe. I’ve had problems with my shoes coming untied my whole life, and just assumed it would always be that way. Since I was about six I’ve double-knotted them to keep them from coming untied unexpectedly, and that’s worked great for the last twenty-three years.

Richard, my neighbor, noticed the double knot, and commented that the reason they were coming untied was that I was tying them wrong. He said this vital information came to him from a former Math major at the University of Utah, who in turn had claimed that was the most important piece of information he’d learned in college. The way Richard explained it, I was simply crossing the laces backwards in the very first step of making the knot.

Try out this much better explanation of the difference in knots, and how to keep your shoelaces from coming untied at all the worst times. This is definitely one of the most important pieces of information you’ll use in your life if you wear lace-up shoes. However, if you read to the end, you’ll find that properly tying your shoes in a square not is not the best way to keep them from coming untied! The ultimate solution is probably cowboy boots or loafers, but until then, the Freedom Knot link at the bottom of this page comes pretty close to the perfect knot.

Do you think you know all there is to know about lacing up shoes? Then check out the mathematical proof for the most efficient lace-up patterns. Spoiler: Turns out man has already selected the strongest patterns through trial and error.

And in case you really want to build the better bow, try this shoe-tying link.

Update 9 May 2003: Since I wrote this page, I’ve come across several more useful shoe-tying links. Since this seems to be the only page on my blog people come for, here is the link list!

• Zen Elightenment and the Art of Tying Your Shoes. Warning! Pop-ups! My take: I don’t entirely get Zen, but if you’re into it, now there’s a Zen reason for you to appreciate shoe-tying more.
• Shoe-tying poetry and stories. No, I’m not kidding. These are mostly poems and stories to remind you of the steps to tying your shoes.
• Understanding Robotic difficulty tying shoes. Yep, it’s hard for robots, too, and this page will help you understand why.
• The Freedom Knot. Now THIS is the best shoe-tying knot I’ve ever found. Period. This knot does not come undone!. No lie, no joke. This is a 7-step, amazing knot. Click the little feet images to get the step-by-step procedure. It looks confusing at first, and it’s really hard to do if your laces are too short, but man it rocks. This beats the "Build a Better Bow" knot because it is easier to do, particularly for small fingers, and it’s easy to remember which lace to pull — you just pull them both!

Unfortunately, I don’t have any links yet for one-armed shoe-tyers. I’m still looking for the perfect one-handed shoe bow. If you have suggestions, mail me at matthew at barnson dot org.

EDIT by matthew: Since the day I posted this on May 5, 2003, I finally received several links to one-handed shoe-tying information. The best one I’ve found is Jenny Stemack’s Guide to One-Armed Shoe-Tying (scroll to the bottom; she includes directions both for one-handed and one-armed shoe-tying). It’s really quite excellent, and based on the number of requests I’ve received via this site for one-armed shoe-tying information, will probably be helpful for those of us who find ourselves temporarily or permanently one-handed.

Well, after a good deal of toil and head-banging, I finally got the php “gallery” package up and running. This provides some pretty cool image viewing functionality that I really like. Unfortunately, there appear to be a few problems running Gallery in “embedded” mode like we’re doing.

• Non-authenticated users cannot add comments to pictures
• Sometimes the photo album stuff works weirdly on some browsers. Think that’s a problem between Gallery and the browsers, though.
• Navigation links sometimes take user out of Drupal framework. Grr.
• Can’t use the “Goofy” theme with it. This really bugs me, because I really liked that theme! But it prints out strange “\n” characters and form elements all over the screen when you use it — ugh.

That’s about it. Hopefully it’s convenient for family and friends coming to visit. If you’re a registered user (register using the link below the Log In link on the right-hand side), know me personally, and want some gallery space, then just email me (matthew at barnson dot org) and I will happily create an area for you to post your photos or drawings, too!

Peace, out, look like my Redhat 8 machine is almost finished an apt-get dist-upgrade to Redhat 9 here at work, so I can go home! Woo! It was a slight pain; I’ll talk about it more in my next weblog I think. However, apt-get has made it possible to easily upgrade my computer from one version of an operating system to the next without losing all my settings and files; this is a HUGE win in my book.