Author: matthew

The following story, while based on facts, has had details embellished in the interest of readability.

Thin fog hung gray and trembling over the barren landscape. Short trees, no taller than a man, squatted thirstily like unmoving dwarf sentinels watching the dawn rise over the low, cracked hills. The scent of sulfur lay reluctantly in the hollows, wishing for a breeze to scoop it out, while blades of grass clung tenaciously to small patches of wind-deposited soil in the gaping cracks of hard lava rocks.

In the midst of this wasteland is an oasis of civilization braced against the dawn’s early light. The most prominent feature of this city is a swift, wide river neatly bisecting it, its banks paved to prevent erosion into the tightly-packed houses beside it. Rows of neat red brick homes, steel-sided factories, gardens, and open-air shopping malls stood side-by-side on the streets of this bustling city.

It was not bustling today.

From a distance, it would be difficult to see what’s wrong. It would be difficult to notice the lack of people in the streets; at this time of day, the sleepy town would normally have few pedestrians, anyway. It would be difficult to discern that school was not in session, for the children would usually be indoors. It would be difficult to point out the gaps between houses where rubble lay instead of factories. It would be difficult to see the bloodstains in the streets where men, women, and children lay dying the day before.

It is not difficult to hear the crack of gunfire, droning of tank engines, and explosions of mortar fire.

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The city’s name is Division. The name came from a different era, when the single river that flowed through the town divided at that point. Over time, development altered the flow of the river and confined its banks to the set course which it has followed for the past hundred years. The city has since been noted mainly for its profusion of cathedrals: over 200 for a population of nearly 300,000. One very large church for every 1,500 people.

That’s a heck of a lot of cathedrals. And they’re not cookie-cutter boxes, either. Each is a work of art, with a rich history and intricate design.

Whether the population is religious due to the profusion of churches, or if the large number of churches is due to an extraordinarily religious population is a matter of some debate for the residents. What is a fact, though, is that the city is at the heart of worship in the area, home to large contingents of several major religious factions.

Located 49 miles from the capitol of the state, the city has long been overshadowed by its larger neighbor. It enjoyed quiet prosperity under the governor, and boasted that several of the governor’s advisors were raised in the area.

Division has had troubles over the last thirteen years, though. A bomb set by foreign nationals, intended to destroy a bridge spanning the impassable river, instead killed dozens of people shopping in a marketplace nearby. The town’s largest employer was shut down when it was discovered that, in addition to the normal consumer goods it was supposed to produce, it was also manufacturing illegal weapons. Loots and rioting in the wake of a regime change in the capitol had left much of the city’s infrastructure in shambles.

But the city was recovering. Locals elected a new mayor, who was known to be on good terms with the current regime. They hoped that this election would prevent the new power’s mostly foreign police forces from occupying the city.

Their hope was in vain. The new police moved into the former headquarters of the old regime, and, if rumors were to be believed, immediately began harassing residents, paying residents to spy on their neighbors, and making life difficult for the townspeople. Neighbors began disappearing without warning, then resurfacing with stories of uncomfortable interrogations, and more of the locals became very concerned.

Several hundred residents held a meeting at a local school to decide what, if anything, they should do about the occupation. Most walked out of the meeting deciding to do nothing to interfere. A few, many of them well-known local leaders and religious figures, decided to stage a protest.

Unfortunately, some of them decided to conceal firearms under their clothing for the demonstration.

The new police forces, of course, were interested in the proceedings and in maintaining order at the demonstration, smoking and jabbering at one another in their foreign language as they lounged by their jeeps.

Predictably, either an armed protestor or an armed policeman drew a weapon.

Predictably, someone pulled a trigger.

After the smoke cleared, fifteen protestors lay dead or dying on the ground. Most of the dead were unarmed. None of the trained and battle-hardened police soldiers were injured, while sixty-five protestors were hurt in the firefight.

Outraged residents didn’t know what to do. To stage further protests seemed folly, and would invite more killing. To do nothing would be to approve of the actions of police. A few decided to take matters into their own hands.

Several veterans of the protest massacre were hungry for blood. Only a few were desparate enough to attempt revenge for the atrocity, however, and planned a bold move.

The occupying police force was accustomed to hiring mercenaries to guard their supply caravans. These mercenaries, though armed and many ex-soldiers, were easier targets than the regulars responsible for the shootings at the school.

They decided to take some of the mercenaries hostage in exchange for release of their disappeared neighbors, and an apology from the ruling regime. It seemed a simple plan: drop a couple of hand grenades beneath a parked mercenary truck, disabling it. Surround the truck, force the men inside to come out, film them using a hand-held video camera, and present demands. It was desparate, but the men saw their situation as being desparate. The outsiders were destroying their way of life, providing easy liquor for the youth, promoting acceptance of pornography, and getting away scot-free with shooting nearly a hundred people at a peaceful protest rally.

Word of their plan leaked out, and they found themselves followed by others who claimed that they “wanted to help”. The plan worked at first, but the grisly end of that episode has been widely publicized. Even teenagers participated in the gruesome murder and mutilation of the four mercenaries in that vehicle, while thousands more looked on and either did nothing, or approved of the atrocity.

The name of the city of Division, in Arabic, is pronounced Fallujah.

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Today, the city is under siege by U.S. forces. Roads into and out of it are blocked, and U.S. officials are demanding the surrender of those responsible for the killings. The U.S. has lost around sixty soldiers in attempting to retake the town as of this writing; around 600 residents of the city of Division are now buried in mass graves as a result of the fighting. Townspeople had to convert soccer fields into graveyards to handle the dead, and more dying are piling up every day.

The question of the moment is: what to do? Conservatives are screaming for blood, some demanding that the city be carpet-bombed into oblivion after leafletting the populace to instruct them to leave and go through U.S. checkpoints for inspection on the roads out. Liberals are demanding we leave the country, calling it “ungovernable”. Many moderates think we’re in for a lengthy occupation, on the order of the next 30-40 years, similar to that required to subdue Germany after World War II.

What do you think?

I ran across an amazing article bringing light to new developments in technology enablers for disabled people. Doctors map out brain activity as patients “think about” performing a certain function: moving an arm, for instance. After isolating the brain area patients use for various functions, they can then implant electrodes into those areas of the brain to monitor when the brain is active in that area, and set up machines or computers to perform the requested task.

It’s misleading to say such technologies “read minds” … What happens is you provide the brain with the opportunity to develop a new skill.

–Dr. Jonathan Wolpaw

I still think it’s an amazing advance. We now know enough about brain activity to be able to map certain types of activity to actions outside the body. Mind over matter, indeed! Although I think that, as mentioned at the bottom of the article, outside-the-brain monitoring may eventually be as effective as implants at reducing thought to action, for the time being this is simply an awesome advance towards enabling handicapped people to live a more normal life.

Now that we can translate some thoughts into action, the next step is to translate actions into a direct-feed into my brain, so that I can learn Kung-Fu in seconds instead of a lifetime…

Sorry to be slow posting here this week; the Timing Belt on my 1994 Mercury Villager broke. It’s my own fault, really. When we bought it, we received no user’s manual, and I didn’t purchase one. We were supposed to have replaced the timing belt at 105,000 miles, and our odometer is now somewhere north of 160,000 miles.

The engine and transmission are the same as are found in the Nissan Pathfinder, with a difference: they are mounted over-under and sideways to facilitate front-wheel drive. What it means in practice is that in several areas, I have less than an inch of clearance to remove parts trying to get to the timing belt. I subscribed to AllDataDIY so I could get the technical specs on my engine, and it’s slightly helpful, but definitely no silver bullet to figuring it all out.

While I’ve got it open, I’m hoping to replace the water pump as well. I’m feeling like a mechanic; I should have taken a picture of myself up to my elbows in black grease last night! What it means in practice, though, is that I’m pushing slightly late on my workday getting this blog entry up, and probably won’t be posting more until Thursday. In the meantime, anybody feel like picking up the slack?

For the interested, here’s the text of the declassified August 6, 2001 PDB (Presidential Daily Briefing). This was the “hot-topic” subject of some of testimony by Condoleeza Rice before the 9/11 commission.

Here are some interesting quotes by Rice on this doc:

• “Commissioner, this was not a warning.”
• “It did not warn of attacks inside the United States.”
• “…this was not threat-reporting about what was about to happen.”

I’ll let you decide. My goal in posting this is to create an online HTML archive of the release, which has only been available as a PDF up until now. However, it’s interesting to me how fuzzy the definition of truth is in politics…

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Declassified and Approved
for Release, 10 April 2004

Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US

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Clandestine, foreign government, and media reports indicate Bin Ladin since 1997 has wanted to conduct terrorist attacks in the US. Bin Ladin implied in US television interviews in 1997 and 1998 that his followers would follow the example of World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef and “bring the fighting to America.”

After US missile strikes on his base in Afghanistan in 1998, Bin Ladin told followers he wanted to retaliate in Washington, according to a <censored> service.

An Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) operative told an <censored> service at the same time that Bin Ladin was planning to exploit the operative’s access to the US to mount a terrorist strike.

The millennium plotting in Canada in 1999 may have been part of Bin Ladin’s first serious attempt to implement a terrorist strike in the US. Convicted plotter Ahmed Ressam has told the FBI that he conceived the idea to attack Los Angeles International Airport himself, but that Bin Ladin lieutenant Abu Zubaydah encouraged him and helped facilitate the operation. Ressam also said that in 1998 Abu Zubaydah was planning his own US attack.

Ressam says Bin Ladin was aware of the Los Angeles operation.

Although Bin Ladin has not succeeded, his attacks against the US Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 demonstrates that he prepares operations years in advance and is not deterred by setbacks. Bin Ladin associates surveilled our Embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam as early as 1993, and some members of the Nairobi cell planning the bombings were arrested and deported in 1997.

Al-Qa’ida members — including some who are US citizens — have resided in or traveled to the US for years, and the group apparently maintains a support structure that could aid attacks. Two al-Qa’ida members found guilty in the conspiracy to bomb our Embassies in East Africa were US citizens, and a senior EIJ member lived in California in the mid-1990’s.

A clandestine source said in 1998 that a Bin Ladin cell in New York was recruiting Muslim-American youth for attacks.

We have not been able to corroborate some of the more sensational threat reporting, such as that from a <censored> service in 1998 saying that Bin Ladin wanted to hijack a US aircraft to gain the release of “Blind Shaykh” ‘Umar ‘Abd al-Rahman and other US-held extremists.

Nevertheless, FBI information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.

The FBI is conducting approximately 70 full field investigations throughout the US that it considers Bin Ladin-related. CIA and the FBI are investigating a call to our Embassy in the UAE in May saying that a group of Bin Ladin supporters was in the US planning attacks with explosives.

In the ‘applying-old-ideas-to-new-stuff’ category, I present to you: Mohammed Bah Abba. He invented the “Pot-in-Pot”. Haven’t heard of this revolutionary device? Read on…

Bah Abba, child of a long line of potters in rural northern Nigeria, struck upon the idea while hunting for a solution to the problem of refrigeration in hot, dry, impoverished rural areas of Nigeria. For millenia, people have been storing water in un-glazed earthenware pots. This allows the water to “wick” through the pottery, evaporating on the outside, and thus allowing the water to remain cool inside.

By creating a glazed pot within an unglazed pot, Bah Abba realized he could use the same idea to keep produce and other foods cool. The inner pot is filled with produce. The area between the outer pot and inner pot is filled with sand or mud, and kept wet. In this extremely hot climate, the Pot-in-Pot has extended edible lifetimes of produce, in some cases, from only three days to three weeks.

This has freed many young girls from the daily task of taking fresh produce to market before it spoils.

Thus they can go to school and gain an education.

With education, they can improve their lot, and that of their immediate family.

And Bah Abba has seeded much of southern Nigeria with his pots for free, at his own expense.

Although this is actually old news, first publicized in 2000 when he won the Rolex $100,000 award, I applaud his efforts. It may seem but a small thing, but improving the quality of life in an area that lacks the essentials of life is critical to advancing the cause of humanity, life expectancies, health and welfare, and helping humankind achieve greatness.

Another notch in the belt of “Bad Technology Decisions in action”…

Air America Radio was dead in the water up through 11 AM yesterday. They went from people being able to visit the home page, click a link, and listen, to requiring “registration” in order for people to get to the stream. Around 11 AM Mountain Daylight Time, they went back to their “old” setup (heh, the network is only a few days old) because their servers crashed and burned.

Consequently, my link to their stream was broken as they went to a “private” URI that you had to log in to see. I registered for an account (or tried to) in hopes I could see the stream URI and be able to update it on my block on the right-hand side of this page, but with everything totally borked, that was just out of the question.

But the biggest mistake is this: they made, IMHO, some poor technology choices for what appears to be an incredibly high-demand site. They are using Cold Fusion running on Microsoft Internet Information Server for their content management system. While these are nominally fine choices for small-to-mid-scale configurations, you have to throw a lot of hardware at the problem in order to handle the massive loads they appeared to be experiencing. You’d need to hefty back-end to drive it regardless of operating system and Content Management, and Cold Fusion is definitely no lightweight. There’s obviously either a few programmatic issues or else a severe lack of capacity at work there.

Bandwidth isn’t their problem: systems management is. They didn’t provide any informative message to users that the system was experiencing high load and unable to service requests, and their registration system was borked (probably) due to load during this big downtime window. My suggestion would by some dynamic offloading of registration through the use of a proxy-caching front-end: figure out the maximum load the system can sustain, track that using a reverse-proxy-caching front-end, and when load exceeds some arbitrary threshold at a point where the designers know it can handle it, throw up a message saying “unable to process your request at this time”, rather than allowing the system to try to process requests until everything’s timing out and nothing is happening.

* Sizeable farm of servers able to handle multiple millions of hits using dynamic content and proprietary technology like Cold Fusion, Oracle, and Microsoft Windows: $2,000,000+.

* Radio personalities to populate your new radio network: $$unknown millions$$/year

* Watching your web servers and streaming audio crash and burn due to poor technology decisions:

Priceless.

Kenny Hess, a student at Spanaway Lake High School in Tacoma, Washington, has been barred from producing any more videos in his broadcasting class. He failed to recite the phrase “under God” during the school’s Pledge of Allegiance, which is seen by all students and faculty on classroom TV.

He has been restricted to reading books during his broadcasting class, rather than learning broadcasting, for the rest of his high-school career.

Of course, he’s a senior, and it’s April, so that’s not too long 🙂

State law in Washington is aligned with judicial review in the 1945 case where the Court ruled that no person can be required to say the Pledge. In that case, pledge recitation took a back seat to freedom of religion, because Jehovah’s Witnesses cannot pledge fealty to any nation. School administrators suggest the 18-year-old should have written an editorial or prepared a televised opinion piece, rather than disrupt recitation of the pledge in its current form throughout the school.

“Our interpretation as a school district is that the law says we say the pledge,” said Greg Eisnaugle, Spanaway Lake principal. “‘Under God’ is still in it. If the court says it comes out, that’s what we’ll do.”

What do you think? Did the school administrators do the right thing? Did Kenny do the right thing?

(Side note: if Kenny’s an atheist, would he dislike the traditional epithet used in South Park when Kenny dies in each episode?)

My thoughts: Although I sympathize with Kenny, at the moment the law and school policy are not on his side. Acts of in-school civil disobedience are extremely disruptive, and I think, the wrong forum for them. He’s entitled to vote (since he’s 18), and it will be his responsibility to vote for candidates sympathetic to his cause. He’s also old enough to bring suit against the school district over the issue if he chooses, and were he younger, his parents could bring suit on his behalf.
On the other hand, he’s already apologized and agreed not to perform a similar stunt in the future. Prohibiting him from participation in his class for the rest of the semester seems an unusually harsh punishment. I’d think a day of in-school suspension would suffice.