Nifty app

Found Reader Notifier, a handy little tool that sits in your menubar and tells you when you have new items to read in your Google Reader.

Awesome

This is awesome.

Also, The List (see earlier post) seems to have died. I'm not sure why. Maybe I'll be able to revive it over my christmas break.

The News

This is going to be a rather intense rant about the news and humanity, so if you're not in the mood, feel free to skip this posting. It's also pretty sweary.

Since becoming a parent, I've started to notice a couple of things about myself: I'm starting to accept that ratings on things regarding adult content are a Good Thing; and I tend to get a lot more upset about some of the things I see on the news.

First things first: our eldest son is, like most seven year old boys, fascinated by violence. We try to keep a reasonably strong leash on his viewing, because he'd love to be watching all of the hideously violent sci-fi action films that come out these days. So many sci fi franchises (I'm looking at you, Star Wars and Transformers) that were formerly kid-friendly are starting to release M-rated films. Poor Eldest Son doesn't get to watch M-rated films, so he's missing out. The worst of it is that most of his friends are taken to watch them by their parents, leaving our poor boy a social pariah who only learns the content of movies by rumour. He's pretty good at explaining the plot of several movies he's never seen, simply because a lot of these films are Required Watching in his social milieu.

What really gives me the shits, however, is the 6 o'clock news. If the content of the news was made into a film, it would typically be M-rated, and frequently R. It's basically What's Happening In The Wars, plus the Daily Pedophile Update. Often with a side dose of gang rape. While I want my kids to be wary of the dangers adults can pose, They Don't Fucking Need To Know Specifically How Many Pedophiles Are Out There And What They Did. I don't get why they can't have a decent news update at 6pm, saying at the worst "25 more soldiers dead", with no details, and then the full R-rated parade of humanity's hideous monstrosity after 9pm. It would be so easy. I mean, really, news of one pedophile is not something that everyone in the country needs to know.

It wouldn't be a problem for me, except that we frequently have dinner with my in-laws, who insist on the daily news being watched. I frequently find myself cringing through the more horrifying news reports, talking loudly and hoping the kids aren't listening to the news. How do you answer the question "Daddy, what does 'rape' mean?" from a little boy who hasn't yet been taught the birds and the bees? Trust me, it isn't easy.

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My second, related, issue, is personal sensitivity to the events in the world. I used to be quite jaded about things - I watch sci-fi, fantasy, and horror films, and enjoy a good dose of violence and nastiness in them. But since having kids, the distinction between fiction and reality has been emphasised, and I often find myself close to tears or wanting to go and kill someone after reading the news. Some people are fucking savages, and deserve brutal, swift and harsh punishment.

I mean, fuck, there's this. Don't read it if you are sensitive to cruelty to small children. It put me off my lunch today, and it was all I could do not to break down in tears in the restaurant (I had Thai). The guy who did it is an obscene parody of a human being, and if someone told me they were starting a mob to go and kick him to death, I'd sign up straight away. I guess I lose my pacifist cred by saying that, but really, people like that don't deserve to be treated with the dignity normally accorded to human beings or animals.

And there was this. Again, not something to read if hideous injustice and inhumanity upsets you. It certainly did me. It's things like this that make me want to ban religions, simply because they give wondrously convenient excuses to psychopaths wanting to hurt and kill innocent people. I'm aware that Somalia is a basket case, and pretty much needs someone to go there, put every fucker holding a gun in jail forever, and to have the African Union peacekeepers run the place for fifty years until there are a couple of generations of people not completely shattered by the turmoil and horror that fills the place now, who can actually set up a civilised government. But even so, I can't imagine a better case study for the separation of church and state than the above. "Cautious Agnostic" should be a requirement on CVs of anyone seeking a position of authority.

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Well, I think I've got that out of my system for now. I should add a disclaimer that I'm absolutely against the death penalty. Just because someone doesn't deserve to live, doesn't mean you've a right to kill them. There's just a part of me that would join in on some mob justice now and then, when small children have been tortured to death.

Also, I'm not against Islam. Evil psychopaths crop up anywhere there are Rules Which Must Be Obeyed, and mechanisms for adding to those rules. Christianity, Communism, Fascism, and any number of other dogmas have exactly the same potential for evil; it's just that the current geopolitical situation means that those in Islam are getting the most press these days.

The Power of Lists

One nifty thing I have installed on my iPhone is Zenbe Lists. As a list application, it's pretty average, but it's got the awesome feature of allowing sharing of lists. Our shopping list is finally electronic, and I can add stuff to it whenever I think of it, rather than having to wait until I'm in the kitchen with a pen.

Another list I've got is my Home Projects list, which is basically just non-work stuff I've been meaning to do for ages but haven't gotten around to. Now that they're on the list, they're getting done. Some things that I've done since they've been added to The List:

• restructured home network completely, to take use new ADSL 2+ modem (which has been in its box for 18 months
• converted video on DV tapes to movies we can watch on the computer whenever we want (some movies date back to 2000)
• fixed the broken soap holder in the shower
• set up a new Mac for my mother (nearly finished)
• arranged to do our tax less than 8 months late (we usually do it in February, and it's only August!)
• bought new chairs for the kitchen, and started painting them
• booked in to get my full licence

I've never been so organized in my life. It's kind of scary.

Bloody Blood!

I'd like to donate some blood to the Red Cross, but it seems like they don't want it. They keep sending me letters and SMSes asking me for blood (they want my blood in particular - I'm O negative, which means they can use it for anything. It's good to know there's one thing I'm useful for).

They've sent a letter and a couple of emails asking me to donate this week at Sydney Uni. Can I book a time online? No, of course not. After all, it's 1998 and not everyone is online yet.

So I called up to book a time (which is a big thing for me. I hate calling call centres, so I only do it if I really have to). But it was shortly after 5pm, and they'll be buggered if they'll wait around until people who have jobs have time to call them.

So I called them back today, in business hours, I get a rather surly sounding gentleman. Telling me they're busy. He doesn't mention that he'd appreciate me waiting, or act in any way grateful. After all, he's doing me a favour by telling me they are busy. After he's told me that three or four times (and the phone line is silent in between, so I'm not sure if I'm supposed to wait or not, especially since he hasn't asked me to wait), another recorded voice comes on and tells me to leave my name and number, and they'll call back. They could've told me that when I first called, but they kept me on the line for ages instead. Odds are, when they call back I won't be at my desk, so I won't get their message.

So, no blood for them. Even though I'd quite like to give it to them.

Anyway, donate some blood to the ARCBS. It's difficult, but I've found in the past they'll occasionally let you.

Totalitarian Olympics

I'm usually pretty annoyed when the Olympics come around - 2 weeks of tedious blather about overly fit people doing things slightly faster or better than each other. But this time it's being hosted by a totalitarian regime that kills, oppresses, and censors its citizens, so there's even more reason to boycott anything Olympics-related.

Amnesty International are running a campaign to try to raise awareness about the censorship that's going on (which has been increased for the Olympics, to ensure that as few people as possible get worried about the police state they're running).



Have a look, and try to do something to support them.

Fedora Shenanigans

I'm still debugging my Fedora Core 9 upgrade. It doesn't help that I've got about a bazillion old RPMs installed, from the Fedora Core 4 I had before the upgrade, plus remnants of a previous Redhat 9 install, plus some old Ximian stuff that might be from the RH9 era, or might be even older (I remember using it in the RH7 era).

Also, Red Hat were very silly with Fedora Core 9, and seem to have shipped a dodgy version of the X11 server (well, a pre-release version), which meant that getting the right drivers for my NVidia card was impossible - all sources of RPMs, and the driver direct from NVidia didn't work. I eventually found worthwhile advice: install the Fedora Core 8 version of Xorg.

Now I have a working X which lets me see stuff on my TV and my monitor properly. Next thing is to see why Terminal won't run...

WWDC

Oh, and as mentioned in the last post, I went to WWDC this year! It was fantastic. I'll post about it sometime soon.

The Big Giant Upgrade

(Warning: big giant geeky post ahead. Stop now if you're not interested in home networks and junk)

I've been on a bit of a geek diet over the last few years, not upgrading any of my personal IT equipment except where absolutely necessary. It got to the point where I was a bit down about my home IT setup - it did a bunch of stuff, but it wasn't too shiny. So, in the last year or so I've started improving stuff - getting new stuff throughout that I can actually enjoy and makes life better.

It started with a 24" LCD monitor for my main home computer, a linux box in the lounge room. Much nicer, and less likely to kill the kids when it falls on them than the previous 21" CRT monitor. Then I upgraded to ADSL 2+ and bought a new ADSL modem, which I ended up not successfully installing (it didn't like long ethernet, and the machine it connected to was in the lounge room, and the phone line in the kitchen). Plus, it turned out that my old modem could kind of handle ADSL 2 (5 megs connection speed vs. 7 megs on the new modem).

But recently we've ramped up the speed. To replace Ye Olde iMac in the kitchen (purchased december 2000) we bought Mac Mini and a cheapy 24" LCD monitor. This has turned out great - the kids love being able to watch the various kids movies we've ripped to the Mac, and using Front Row makes it really easy for them to control. Jen got herself a new MacBook on the cheap - it was a bargain, direct from Apple, and her work laptop is getting rather long in the tooth. Since I was heading to WWDC, I got an iPod Touch so I'd know what an iPhone was like. The other week I finally got sick of our crappy old wireless router (it had forgotten that networks should have a password, and it didn't with with the iPod Touch), so we bought a shiny new Airport Extreme router. We've now got working Wi-Fi, throughout the whole house! We also moved an external drive off the Kitchen Mac onto the Airport Extreme, to make it shareable even when the kitchen mac is sleeping.

So last night I decided to bit the bullet and reorganise everything. I was getting annoyed with the Linux box running Fedora Core 4 (I'd tried upgrading previously, but was stymied by some foul whining to do with disk labels in the fstab), since I couldn't run any new stuff on it - there aren't any decent remaining RPM sites for FC4, and I didn't really want to compile Firefox 3 from source on that old box. I started installing Fedora Core 9, and while I was doing that (waiting for disks to be fscked, etc) I re-arranged the entire house network to use the new network equipment properly.

The old layout was:

Old ADSL modem linked via 20 metre ethernet to linux box, which did NAT and shared the connection to the rest of the house. 2 hubs (100 meg and 10 meg) shared connected all the machines, the wireless devices, etc.

I've had roughly that layout for the last 10-15 years. Linux does a good job of NAT. But, so do modern ADSL routers, so the new layout is:

New ADSL router does NAT for entire internal network. Several devices connected to ADSL router, some to the airport, and some to the old 100 meg switch. Old 10 meg switch is gone. Linux box is now just another machine on the network.

Which is much cleaner, if a little alien (I've had a proper Linux machine NATing for so long that it feels weird and scary to trust a little white box to do the same job). I've still got to do some optimising. I might even have enough ports on the ADSL router and Airport to drop the 100 meg switch as well. It's all working nice and quickly.

Meanwhile, the poor old linux box is having a hard time with the upgrade. Didn't like the partition map on one drive; couldn't figure out the monitor (it's sticking to 800x600 for now), wouldn't let me log in (some dodgy old bonobo config needed purging, and most of my old gnome settings as well). Updating the thing is painful - there are a heap of old RPMs that aren't getting along with the new RPMs, so I'm doing the old RPM conflict dance. I had to give it up for the evening at about 2:30am last night, and I'll be back into it again tonight after all the guests are gone (big family dinner tonight). Hopefully I'll soon have a nice shiny new Fedora Core 9 box that still does all its old jobs properly - movie watching (piping to the TV), file serving, DAAP serving, etc.

But it feels good to have a more modern setup, even if there is a bunch of work involved. Still pondering getting an Apple TV (very nearly bought one in the US), maybe a Mac for the lounge room (moving the linux box into the Study for working and file serving on), hooking up the old kitchen mac in the library, and getting a decent machine for upstairs.

Dan's Great Ideas: Corporate Responsibility

In the world as it stands now, corporations get away with a lot of nastiness. Because they are legal entities set up specifically with the purpose of protecting their owners from legal responsibility, and with the sole goal of making a profit, they are effectively actively encouraged to break laws and exploit people when they can get away with it.

My solution:

The Shareholders Should Be Responsible

Since the measure of a company's success is its share price, and since people should be held responsible for evils at their request, then if a corporation kills someone, then the shareholders (who are the ultimate beneficiaries of the killing) should be the ones that go to jail. If a corporation deliberately poisons a town, the shareholders should be the ones to serve any prison terms (along with employees who made the decisions).

This would have the immediate effect of making corporations start behaving better, because any misbehaviour would have the effect of destroying the company's share price. Proper corporate crimes like monopolistic behaviour could be handled as they are now, but actual felonies would result in people being responsible.

Dan's Great Ideas: Justice

While chatting with a friend who is studying law, I had an epiphany. It's currently the case that people who can afford better lawyers have justice tilted in their favour. What needs to happen is:

Lawyer Handicaps!

The way this would work is that every lawyer would have a rating, initially based on his/her university marks, but as his/her career progresses it would be more based on his performance as a lawyer in court. When two lawyers go head to head in a case, the one with the lower handicap (ie. the weaker lawyer) would get less time to talk, be allowed to call less witnesses, etc. If the handicap difference was really large, then the better lawyer would get more interruptions from the judge, or might have to wear a funny hat or Groucho Marx disguise, to even things up. Objections from the weaker lawyer would carry more weight. If one side had more lawyers, you'd add up their handicaps according to some clever formula.

In this way, the current system whereby you just the best justice you can afford would be made fairer.

Late night quiet

One thing I don't get a lot of these days is quiet. It's weird right now. Nearing midnight, and it's officially quiet. The revheads down the street aren't revving, the kids and Jen are asleep, the TV, movie player and stereo are off (rare occurences), and I'm noticing how noisy the quiet is - tick-tocking clock, whir-hum of computer fans with an occasional grumble of hard drive access, high buzz of distant crickets and low buzz of a child monitor , and the occasional cheep-cheeping of birds of some description. And the clatter of a keyboard being used for indulgent reflection. And yet, I'm feeling a pressure on my ears, unused to the lack of noise after a day of work and children and life.

Big Ol' Update

Birthday Season is over, and D's was a big one. He turned 7, and his mum reckons it'll be his last big party for a few years (we'll see about that...). It was a Superhero party, so crime was fought and was evil vanquished. There was much silliness, three Ben 10s, an exceedingly self-satisfied Captain Underpants, plenty of food and games. All the kids had a grand time.

Little Bell is now walking up a storm - she's not a crawling baby any more - she's walking all the time, chasing cats. Starting to talk more. A partial vocabulary:

Buh = Bird
Bih - Biscuit
More = More
Bah = Bath
Ssshh = Fish
Dada = Dear Father
Mama = Mama
Nana = Banana
Nana = Nai Nai (milk from mama)

And it's growing all the time.

A is no longer The Angriest Toddler. He has mellowed out quite a bit and can be quite a delightful little boy. He has The Cutest Laugh In The World. His language is improving a lot, and he's starting to follow his brother's hobbies more. Both of them love their cheap $2 shop knockoff pokemon cards. Dante's into the Bionicle stuff - he's got most of the latest batch of bionicle, which he lugs around the house in a big tangle and defends valiantly from the depredations of his siblings.

I've been reading more; recently finished Tim Powers' Declare (awesome) and Neil Gaiman's Smoke and Mirrors (good in many places; a short story collection, so it's expected to be uneven). And I've got a pile of books to read.

I've also been liking my Macs more and more. Of the three machines I use on a regular basis, two are now Macs, and the other will become one once the budget can be stretched that far. And I'm keenly awaiting the release of the bloody iPhone in Oz. It's getting to be a rather tedious wait.

Well, that's enough bloggage for one evening. I've got Foot Cat craving attention, and a pile of Easter Eggs that aren't going to eat themselves and bunch of TV that isn't going to watch itself.

Toodle Pip.

Party Etiquette, Second Grade Style

D (the eldest kid) and I read "Where Did I Come From" last week, and I've been impressed with the maturity with which he has taken this new information on board. He's been quite sensible about it, and is yet to embarrass us publicly and hideously with his newfound knowledge. Though this evening he did suggest that Mrs. B and I have a bath together this evening so he could have another little sister.

But this morning I found out his thoughts about birthday parties, and invitations. We walked into school, and bumped into one of his friends, who he had invited.

D: "Are you coming to my party?"
Friend's Mum: "No, sorry, we're going away that weekend."
D: : "Well, can I have the invitation back?"
FM: : "Ummm... I didn't bring it in today, sorry."
Me: "Dante, you're not supposed to ask for invitations back."
D: "Well, you can bring my present in to school before you go away."
FM: "..."

So I explained to him that people who don't come to the party aren't expected to bring presents. He seemed disappointed. But I could see that somewhere in his head there was some equation that read:

INVITATION = PRESENT

and a notion that there was a finite store of invitations, which he had given out, so they needed to be recycled to ensure he got the appropriate number of presents.

PS. I've decided to drop the Primus, Secundus, Tertia thing on this blog. Annoyed me too much. They're D, A, and E.

PPS. E is walking! (A more precise description would be shambling, but it's still very exciting).

Sad news

Well, I'm about 3 months behind the news, but I found out today (by pure chance, while random web browsing), that Erick Wujcik is dying of cancer. I only met him once, at Necronomicon a couple of years back, and he ran a fantastic game about Pi that we didn't get to finish, but even so it was one of the more memorable games I've ever played. Apparently we (well, I) got more mathematical theory into the game than most other teams had.

It's sad news. He seemed like a really nice guy.

Spoiler: I had a grand time busily theorizing about the set of all possible machine languages that would be able to execute Pi as a program that actually does something, and cheerfully expounding about the various different infinities. I played a character called Alain Connes, named after one of my favourite mathematicians (for whom I had to completely invent a biography, because I know only of his mathematical work).

Stayin' alive

Decided to take fridays off this month. I've been taking Secundus in on the train to childcare each day is hard work. Uncy Joe's nom de crimefighting for him, The Angriest Toddler, is quite apt. He doesn't like people lookin' at him funny, or smiling at him when he's cute (and when he gets cross he's still being cute, which can become a bit of a vicious circle).

Been working on a secret software development project at home, which is lots o' fun. It's gotten to the point when it looks like it might just be useful.

Also, 30 Rock is very funny. I've been watching a lot of it lately.