Welcome to my reworked blog. This will mark the third incarnation of this blog. There was a short-lived Drupal based site, then I set up Wordpress 6 years ago.
So what’s that you say? It sounded like you said “so what”, but I know you really meant “how come?”
About a month ago I get an email from the good people at Laughing Squid informed me that I had vastly outstripped my compute cycle quota. I thought this was rather surprising given that few people ever read this blog, let alone comment. There had been a number of attempts by spammers to post comments on the site, but, at worst there were only a dozen or so a day.
My first thought was that someone had broken in and uploaded their own PHP to use my compute cycles for their nefarious purposes (this happened several years ago). But several searches for such things turned up nothing. Unfortunately, there is no way to determine what is consuming the compute cycles, or at least I presume so, as my repeated questions about this went unanswered. Furthermore the apache logs are not provided in real-time nor is the compute cycle accounting, so it was going to take a lot of guesswork to fix this. Poking through the apache logs revealed that thousands of hits every day (99% of my traffic) was to wp-login.php. The only logical conclusion was that somebody was trying to break in, and, in the process, caused wp-login.php to consume a lot of compute cycles encrypting bogus passwords. I tried a plugin to block repeated attempts, but didn’t help all that much (it reduced compute cycles by 50% where my goal was 99%). So, I tried the brute-force method, I renamed the login script so that all such attempts would be immediately refused. Viola! Everything went back to normal.
Now all of this started to make me think: why am I bothering with Wordpress? What does it give me? It lets me edit upcoming posts from anywhere on the internet (though I have rarely taken advantage of that). It lets people comment on my posts (the number of times that has happened can be counted on one hand). But the downside is that I now have to monitor the version of Wordpress and keep updating it to keep up with security fixes (failing to do that several years back earned me a break-in). I have to monitor the comments queue and reject spam. Wordpress uses up a lot of disk space, MySQL is a hassle to maintain, and people with nefarious intent can easily create havok by running me over my quotas. And on top of that there are no tools for diagnosing when this happens.
So, it wasn’t worth it. Static html doesn’t use compute cycles or can it be hacked. I started looking into static blog generators. I had considered Bloxsom many years earlier before settling on Wordpress. Sadly it hasn’t been updated since then, and it seemed that it was going to take a fair bit of programming to get it to do what I wanted. I then looked at various scripts to use Org-Mode files (which I use every day at work) to publish my blog; I tried three of them, but none of them worked: two would not compile and the third one failed later on. So, I had to search anew. I turned up Jekyll and Hugo. I goofed around with both, and I concluded both would require similar levels of effort, but on the list of languages I want to learn, Go is ahead of Ruby, so I went with Hugo.
So here we are. The site is missing a lot of things, but I’ll gradually work on adding them. If you have any experience with Hugo or any other advice to share, let me know.
There’s an old saying that I first heard a couple of decades ago:
Good. Fast. Cheap. Pick two.
I was listening to an NPR story about Moore’s Law. At first I was thinking that it gave us computers that are “fast” and “cheap”. But we never got the “fast”. The workstation on my desk 25 years ago was just as fast as the one I’m sitting at now. Ah, but that old Sun 3/50 didn’t have to do nearly as much as my current workstation, which is true. That old workstation didn’t have color, virtual desktops, animated 3d icons, streaming audio and video, bloated web and email programs, etc. But somehow I got my work done just as quickly. What’s happening here is another law is cancelling out the “fast” part of Moore’s Law: Wirth’s Law. That law basically says that software is getting slower faster than hardware is getting faster.
Case in point: 25 years ago, when I fired up Emacs (which served as my text editor, mail and usenet reader, and web browser), the 4 megs of virtual memory it used had a noticeable impact on other users. Nowadays Emacs is a lightweight. Right now my email client (Thunderbird) is taking up 1.2 gigs of virtual memory!
Moore, himself, acknowledged that his law has its limits, and some people place that 10 years in the future. Thus far, Moore’s Law has managed to just barely keep up with Wirth’s law. So what happens when the latter tops out? I seriously doubt the latter has any limits, as I have yet to see a limit on human wastefulness and incompetence.
I guess we’ll need to go back to the trinity listed above. Maybe we need to start doing something toward “good”: stop adding new bells and whistles and go back and fix bugs, make software more reliable and more informative when something does fail, and generally reduce all the frustration that everyone feels when using computers. In other words, do the opposite of what we’ve been doing. It’s a massive challenge, and, by and large, unfamiliar, virgin territory.
I know this is probably another one of my utopian dreams, and will probably never happen, but it would be nice if, for once, I could encounter someone using a computer and not feel the urge to apologize on behalf of my profession.
IBM comes through again! It’s bad enough they replaced the ClearCase installer with their “Installation Manager” (a classic failure to follow the adage “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”). But now we get error messages like this:
The Installc executable launcher was unable to locate its companion shared library.
Very helpful. We don’t know what library it was looking for, or where it was looking. Of course, I guess I should be thankful, as it is unusual to even get error messages from the Installation Manager.
I know I shouldn’t be surprised by such things, but while researching the Dutch portion of my family tree, I ran across an organization, which had this statement on the web site: _“You may be eligible to become a member if you are a descendant in the direct male line of an ancestor who …” _
I have no interest in joining, but if that one word were not in that sentence I would be eligible. But since three women stand between me and the last male in the that line, I am apparently too tainted by the feminine for me to be in their presence. Had those three women been men, I would have no more blood connection to the ancestors in question than I do now, except I would have some remnant of their venerable surname on my driver’s license.
But this brings up an interesting point. Many years ago after reading a book about patriarchal and matriarchal cultures, I wondered what my ancestry would look like from the latter perspective. What if I could make the family retroactively matriarchal? But I quickly ran into a brick wall. I could go back 4 generations to my 2nd great grandmother, but then I had a hard time finding any information. I had a name, a birth year and state. I knew when she married my great great grandfather. That was it. Fortunately, I found a mention of her parents and was able to find a bit more information, but not much. I am again blocked. All I have is a name and a birth place for my 3rd great grandmother. The same brick wall is encountered when researching most every other mother in my family tree.
I am a newcomer to genealogical research, but it didn’t take me long to notice how little information was kept about women. In some cases, only the first name remains in the records; or worse yet, she is only recorded as “and wife”. If it weren’t for her name in the birth records of her children there would be little other trace.
This is truly sad. I never got to meet my maternal grandmother, but from the stories I am told she was a lively, interesting, and loving woman. I wish I could have met her. I’m sure that every other of my grandmothers, great grandmothers, etc, would be equally interesting. But since all that matters is the male line, almost nothing trickles into the present, depriving us all of a half of our heritage.
Imagine, if you will, a teenage boy, a utopian dreamer, always thinking about how to “save the world”, wandering through a county fair. In amongst the usual merchants he spots a booth run by an organization called Technocracy. A book with the title “Is There Intelligent Life on Earth?” catches his eye and draws him in. Being shy, he grabs a few pieces of literature and wanders off. Upon reading these it seems to be the very utopian dreams he has had, and this organization claims to have the “blueprints”. He and his father quickly join the organization and become deeply involved in it.
The boy, of course, was me. After many years I gradually drifted away from the organisation. M. King Hubbert, a co-founder of the organization and author of the “study course” left the organization in the 1940s, reportedly due to dissatisfaction with the way the organization was run, not with the ideas. I would like to think that he and I would have been in agreement on a number of points.
However, my purpose here is not to critique the organization, but rather to focus in on one of the key points the Technocrats made, their idea of “energy accounting”. Essentially they proposed replacing the “price system” (our current money/debt based system) with one which used energy measurements. The Technocrats paired this idea with the “abundance” of available resources, which seems paradoxical, since the idea of measuring energy resources becomes much more relevant in an era where energy is scarce. But when Technocracy’s ideas were put together, the resources available seemed nearly limitless. It took another 40 years for us to get our first taste of energy scarcity (I have vague memories of my parents waiting in long lines to fill up the gas tank) This is the point where we needed to start looking carefully at where our energy is coming from and where it is going. Sadly, this never happened.
The more general lesson of Technocracy is that we need to look for opportunities to apply scientific methods to everything we do. The more we can quantify things with objective measurements (whether energy or otherwise) the less prone we will be to being misled by snake-oil salesmen or vacuous politicians. This also means that if evidence is shown that what we are doing is ineffective or causing harm, we need to re-evaluate what we are doing. Sadly the Technocracy movement never figured this out, and even more tragically, we, as a culture, have veered farther from this ideal than we were when the Technocracy movement first started.
The only good thing that spammers do for us is to give us something to laugh at. The latest case was a comment in my moderation queue which started like this:
{I have|I’ve} been {surfing|browsing} online more than {three|3|2|4} hours today, yet I never found any interesting article like yours.
It continued on for quite a while, but I’ll spare you. Clearly someone screwed up their automation. Just for grins, I wanted to see if I could write a one-liner to process this input, and, viola!
perl -pe 's(\{(.+?)\})(@a=split(/\|/, $1); $a[rand(1+$#a)])ge' < spam
I’ve replaced a spammer with a one liner! If only that meant they’d go away.
I have been involved or witness to a number of debates which have led me to the conclusion that the word “natural” should be considered a weasel word.
Being vegan I have people tell me that it is “natural” to eat animals, and on the other side I see vegans claiming that not eating animals is “natural”. People argue that the paleo diet is “natural”, or that a raw food diet is “natural”. On the civil rights front, people argue that homosexuality is not “natural”, and, in the past, people argued that interracial marriage was not “natural”, or that slavery was “natural”. People arguing against GMOs will say they are not “natural” and people on the other side will say the opposite (I’ll get into that one in a future post). I’m sure everyone can think of other examples of these, possibly coming from one’s own mouth.
Since everyone’s definition of “natural” varies so widely, it is not a useful word and introducing it into a debate simply confuses the issue, and misdirects the debate down a “natural/unnatural” rabbit hole (weasel hole?) and away from the actual issue being debated. We’d all be better off not using the word at all, though I’m sure there are those who would argue that would be unnatural.
I’ve seen an increasing number of articles which make a point to put “vegan” in the headline even when the article is only peripherally related to veganism, or not at all. But regardless, the headline always points out how wrong vegans are. It seems to me that this is a clickbait strategy. The word “vegan” has become clickbait, luring both vegans and anti vegans to click the link. But I am confused, where does that place us on the GandhiCon scale? Are they laughing at us or fighting us?
Case in point, I just ran into this article Can vegans stomach the unpalatable truth about quinoa?. This sad piece of “journalism” goes off the rails very quickly. This could have been an enlightening article about how globalism, and its father colonialism, destroys poor countries by making them produce cash crops for export. Perhaps the author’s next article will be about how vegetarians caused the Irish Potato Famine. One wonders why the author didn’t also point to people following a gluten-free diet as culprits as well. Oh, that’s right, gluten free is trendy right now, and many more people are doing that than going vegan. It’s easier to attack the little guy.
If one carefully reads around the irrelevant vegan bashing, there is an important point being made: we need to be careful to avoid buying products that resulted from exploitive or destructive practices. Unfortunately, this is rather difficult, both because such practices are the basis of global capitalism and attempts to fight that often get co-opted, as can be seen in the case of fair trade or organic food.
The article makes a single reference to a single failed attempt to grow quinoa in the UK, a useless bit of anecdotal evidence to show that the crop is incapable of cultivation anywhere else. This is simply laughable and an insult to clever farmers around the world. It can be cultivated in many places (including the UK) and further breeding can produce varieties which can further expand its range of cultivation as has been done with several other Andean crops. I will be doing my part by growing some myself.
Anyway, I suspect that this is GandhiCon 2, as vegans were pretty much ignored up until recently. I’m looking forward to GandhiCon 4.
I spotted this today in a discussion about Subversion, and a workaround for a situation which ended up corrupting the workspace:
Arr… the reason I’m trying to get us to switch to Git. Less of this funny business.
I will admit, I’m not a big fan of Git. But my biggest problem with it is the born-again fervor of some of its fans like the one above. I will freely admit that Git has some advantages over Subversion (but there are disadvantages as well). But to claim that workspace corruption and the attendant workarounds is something Git (or any version control system) is immune to is an indicator that someone drank too much kool-aid.
Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve been working with computers so long that I believe that every piece of software that has ever existed (or ever will exist) has its share of “funny business”. But salesmen and evangelists could never admit such a thing.
The original issue I ran into had to do with the dysfunctional practice of checking in enormous binary files. Every version control system is going to have issues with this, though to varying degrees. In the course of researching the issue, I found this passage about Git:
The primary reason git can’t handle huge files is that it runs them through
xdelta, which generally means it tries to load the entire contents of a file into memory at once. If it didn’t do this, it would have to store the entire contents of every single revision of every single file, even if you only changed a few bytes of that file. That would be a terribly inefficient use of disk space, and _git is well known for its amazingly efficient repository format.
I was with him up until that last phrase. We were having a serious technical discussion, and suddenly a salesman crashed the party! This “amazingly efficient” repository format is largely thanks to xdelta. The salesman neglected to mention that xdelta is the same mechanism used by Subversion. We could certainly have a serious, quantitative, technical discussion about the tradeoffs of various mechanisms for storing versioned data, or about the ways to manage those deltas. But something tells me that the salesmen and evangelists will crash that party as well.
That last phrase could have been more accurate and less obnoxious had it been phrased “and any modern version control system worth using would not do so.”
Here’s an error message I first remember seeing a few decades ago. Sadly I just ran into it again. It seems guessing games never go out of style.
Error while changing the NIS password.
The NIS password has not been changed on somenisserver.
On Facebook someone posted an article about gardening tasks for March. I thought that was, at first glance, a cruel joke. Here’s what my garden looks like right now:
Nothing is going to happen there for a while! Of course, I did just get out my soil blockers in preparation for seed starting. That and dreaming are about the only garden-related things taking place just now.
This is probably the first time I have shared anything about my garden. I have generally avoided doing so because I feel I am usually fumbling along, making lots of obvious mistakes, and generally not exhibiting the kind of skill I should have. Perhaps I’m just being hard on myself. I’ll try to share more here, maybe my posts can help one or both of us to learn something, or, if nothing else, it will give you something to laugh at.
I spotted this in a comment thread. This is argument is a tired bit of nonsense, but I’ve never seen it argued with such verbosity.
To anyone saying we should all become vegans because of the inhuman way animals are being treated. You are not thinking things through. Say we all become vegans. Eventually farms all over the world would go out of business. And do you think they would just let all the cows and chickens or all livestock go free to roam where ever they please? No, you would be condemning millions of animals to a needless death because their would be no use for them. Are you going to take the 500 head of cattle at the farm down the street and take care of them? Are you gooding to make sure they are kept healthy and well fed? I think not. Becoming vegan is not the answer to the inhumane treatment of animals.
Of course the problem with this argument is the premise that everybody will become vegan at about the same time. I don’t think any person can seriously say that is going to happen. Over the last 15 years, the number of vegans in the US have gone from less than 1% to about 2.5%. Let’s assume an outlandish scenario: that this continues to double each year. Given that, it will take about 55 years for everyone to become vegan. I’m sure everyone would agree that this is plenty of time for supply and demand to take care of things without widespread panic.
But given that faulty premise, the logic is correct. If, tomorrow morning, every single person woke up and decided to be vegan, we would have billions of enslaved animals that would need to be dealt with. It’s plausible that, in that scenario, countless animals would be left to wander across the land.
But wait! This is a fantastic premise for a post apocalyptic sci-fi novel! Get this: An advanced alien race comes to earth, and seeing our violent tendencies bestow upon us what they think is a tremendous gift: they manipulate everyone’s brain so that they are now vegans and pacifists. Suddenly the world is a peaceful place, no person ever harms another person or animal. But the farmers who, in their shame about what they had done to the animals, open the gates and give them their freedom. Billions of cows, pigs and chickens spread upon the landscape in ever increasing numbers. The highways come to a standstill due to wandering animals, the streets awash in their excrement, contaminating rivers and ground water. People begin dying of cholera and other new zoonotic diseases. The rag-tag remnants of humanity abandon the now overwhelmed landscape, drifting through the oceans in derelict cruise ships.
But the alien’s manipulation is not perfect. Eventually, mutations occur which weakens the changes. The selfish gene, indeed. Centuries pass. Our story follows a teenage girl who has visions of the circle of life, and that we are really supposed to be fierce predators (look at these canines!) She begins a new religion which preaches this and advocates for respecting the animals’ spirits by liberating them from their earthly bonds (by stabbing them) and eating their corpses. This becomes a mass movement. The animals are, once again, confined, enslaved and killed in increasing numbers. People retake the land from the marauding beasts, and all is right in the world again.
We’ll write this for a young adult audience, a cautionary tale about the dangers of veganism! It’ll be a bestseller!
I am deeply saddened by the news that Leonard Nimoy has passed away. Some of my earliest memories of childhood were watching the original series. The show was on every weekend and I watched it religiously. Spock was my childhood hero. I wanted to be just like him: incredibly smart, calm and unflappable in the face of any catastrophe. When being smart and idolizing such a character earned me the scorn and ridicule of my peers, he taught me not to let my emotions get the best of me. Though I never so much mastered my emotions as bottled them up. But I think Spock grappled with that as well.
I remember when Star Wars came out, and, like the other kids my age, I was infatuated with it. But when Star Trek: The Motion Picture came out 2 years later I began to see that the beauty of science fiction is not in the fancy gadgetry or the heroic space battles, but rather it is a way to put people in alien circumstances and explore what that does to one’s humanity (for better or for worse). See humanity and the world in a different light, and, hopefully, think about how to make each a bit better. I think Star Trek did that better than any other sci-fi franchise.
I lived for a number of years without a TV, and just recently started watching some of the various Star Trek series (my favourite being Voyager) with my wife. I started noticing a theme that runs through almost every part of the Star Trek franchise: there is always a character who is trying to come to terms, in some way, with what it means to be human. Data, Seven of Nine, The Doctor, T’Pol, Odo and the original template, Spock. Like all of us, Spock had to grapple with a part of himself that he wasn’t comfortable with, but, ultimately turned out to be an essential part of who he was. What is more human than that?
This is expressed the best in Kirk’s eulogy: “Of all the souls I have encountered in my travels, his was the most… human.”
Reposted from my BlurBlog: The Vegan Book of Permaculture
By Meghan
Graham Burnett has published a new book called the Vegan Book of Permaculture. This book combines ethical vegan recipes with permaculture principles for ecological living and gardening.
“Long time permaculture practitioner and activist Graham Burnett has written a very practical guide to living lightly using permaculture design within the ethical constraints and opportunities of a vegan diet. Based on lived experience rather than ideology, the strong focus on food, complete with recipes, helps vegans and omnivores alike make better use of the diversity of plant based ingredients in cool temperate climates. For vegans wanting to reduce their ecological footprint, maintain nutritional balance and increase their autonomy and resilience in a rapidly changing world, this book is the ideal introduction to permaculture living and land use.”
- David Holmgren, Co-originator of the Permaculture concept
More information and reviews are available on Graham’s website.
Graham is also the author of numerous other publications, including Permaculture: A Beginner’s Guide, which is available in French, Spanish and Croatian.
It’s great to see a book combining these two important ideas.
February 2, 2015 at 06:03PM
via Veganic Agriculture Network http://ift.tt/1wgSleL
Here’s a sad story from the Van Bunschoten book, which would be a great premise for a tragic love poem (like The Highwayman)
Sarah, b. Jan. 8, 1786; d. Sept. 5, 1803. She was to have married John Greene, … He came up from New York to his home near Hyde Park with an illness that proved to be yellow fever and she nursed him. He died; she caught the fever from him and also died, and they lie side by side in Hyde Park church-yard.
Sarah’s page can be found on WeRelate
For many years I was forced to use Windows on my work computers. I almost always listen to music as I work, so I needed a music player. I quickly grew dissatisfied with Windows Media Player, and after some searching I found Foobar2000, which I really liked. A utilitarian, but capable, interface which did most everything I needed and did it pretty well.
A few years ago I switched my desktop machine to Linux. Hurrah! But now the music player again became an issue. I tried Rhythmbox, Banshee and Amarok. None of them were very good. Nothing close to Foobar2000. All seemed to suffer from the same issues: lots of pointless graphical flourish, confusing and/or dumbed down interfaces, poor functionality, and lousy error handling. By process of elimination, I ended up with Banshee. A grudging choice which I regret on most days.
A main source of pain is the Podcast extension. It suffers from my usual pet peeves: no indication what, if anything, is happening and poor to non-existent error reporting. Here’s a prime example: I hit the button to check for new podcasts. Nothing seems to happen for a few minutes, but then some new episodes pop in. But they don’t download. I right click on a new episode, and select download. Nothing. I wait. Still nothing. So I go digging. After several minutes of searching I find a log file buried under my home directory, it contains this:
[Warn 09:24:14.993] HttpDownloadTask The Permaculture Podcast - Honeybees with Dr. Dennis vanEngelsdorp Error: System.Net.WebException: The remote server returned an error: (404) Not Found.
So, it actually did attempt to download, but didn’t bother to say anything. When that download failed, it quietly tucked the error into an obscure log file, and on top of that labeled it as “Warn”. I tend to be of the opinion that when I ask for something to be done, and it cannot be, that is an “Error”, not a “Warning”. But even so, the error message doesn’t mention the URL or whether it was going through a proxy, without those I still don’t know why it happened. As I recall I continued experimenting with settings until I figured out that the proxy was the issue.
I didn’t become a software engineer so I could spend my days pushing upstream against issues like this.
Years ago one of my co-workers complained that my code had “too much error handling”. I was astonished, but said little in defence since I was the new guy on the team. Looking back on this, years later, I am bothered by this attitude. It is easy to write code that works correctly when everything it depends upon works correctly. Given the complexity of modern software and hardware, there are an endless number of things which can fail.
Therefore, error handling becomes the most critical part of the code. We have to code with the assumption that anything can fail. In my experience, it will, sooner or later. When the failure does happen, it must be dealt with in a reasonable manner. Ideally that would be some sort of self-healing, retrying in the case of transient issues, and, failing that a useful and comprehensive error message.
I first started writing this post at least 4 years ago, and in the meantime it has become apparent that my point of view is the minority amongst programmers. Silent failures, incomprehensible error messages, and, crashes are a daily part of life amongst the recent wave of gadgetry. But I guess the plus side is it gives me something to complain about here.