{ dubovsky.com rantings }

Continuing with Jono’s meme:

• Grab the nearest book.
• Open it to page 56.
• Find the fifth sentence.
• Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
• Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the closest.

My result (while at work): “DeviceRect must compute these values from those supplied.” — Design Patterns, Gamma, Helm, Johnson, Vlissides

To folks who are wondering if I’ve dropped off the face of the earth, a quick note:

Sorry for the lack of interesting updates, but a few things have gone down in the past couple months that have kept me from keeping in touch. My company is closing down our office and moving the product elsewhere, so we’ve all been doing two jobs (our normal schedule work and trying to get everything transitioned to the new development team). Add in little things like doctor’s visits, a water heater cracking open, and some travel for work, and you have one busy and tired me.

It looks like things aren’t going to calm down here until Thanksgiving week, so until then: be well, do good work, and keep in touch.

Trivial but handy utility/function to give you a subversion diff with paging and syntax coloring:

svndiff ()
{
  svn diff $* | colordiff | less -r
}

Pass it anything you’d pass to “svn diff”: e.g., “.” for the current directory, a list of filenames, or options like –no-diff-deleted.

Here in the underground bunker we have computers named after fruits:

• lime
• lemon
• mango
• cherry
• indigo - not a fruit, but replaced “indulgence”
• oreo - my wife has convinced me that Oreos are definitely a fruit

All machines run Ubuntu server or Kubuntu, and several dual-boot and/or virtualize XP.

The Wordpress RSS widget has two little flaws, in my opinion. Here are my fixes, in case they help anyone:

1. For an article the widget will provide a “title” attribute that contains the whole content from the article. Since this site implements a tooltip-like hover box for links with a title element, that can get really ugly. The fix is trivial, and involves truncating post content at 500 characters.
2. When given a feed from my Google Reader “shared items” list, the title of the blog is mashed against the end of the article title. I’ll get things like “Cat Stuck Up TreeRoanoke Times”, which is also really ugly. The fix is somewhat more complicated, and involves not including the “source” element in the article title.

Wordpress 2.6 also finally integrated the ability to log in and administer your blog over HTTPS, so that’s one less patch/plugin I need to track.

Happy hacking!

(Click through the last image to see it in a bigger size, in which I think it looks considerably better.)

John Adams continues: “The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.”

This was going to be the first year I donated money to a political candidate. The movement of this country’s national politics has become more frightening by the week, and I thought that adding campaign money to my advocacy might be another method for changing that. I was going to contribute to my national Congressional races and to that for the Presidency.

Today’s FISA capitulation, to be frank, knocked me on my tail and made me reconsider. Over the last several months I’ve called, written, and persuaded several friends to do the same. I watched politicians who had stated they would support blocking retroactive immunity for law-breaking companies turn tail and vote for this bill, a bill better for the Executive than the previous FISA bill. I’ve heard some say that voting for the bill was politically wise, a CYA move to show strength against “the terrorists” for the upcoming elections. I do not disagree; I do believe, though, that civil liberties and national security are not at odds with one another, and that true leadership should demonstrate this.

I’ve now spent much of the day reconsidering my upcoming donations. Where is the leadership standing up for constitutional protections? Where is the leadership standing in opposition to torture, kidnapping, and undermining our image worldwide? There were voices leading in the Senate and House, but they had too few friends to prevent this travesty of a bill from passing. So, I’ve decided that I’m still going to donate money, but not to whom I had planned. I’m going to see if I can get Dodd and his like some more friends.

To every Senator and Presidential candidate who failed to support the three amendments today, to every Representative who voted for H.R. 6304: you’ve made yourself an opponent. Here’s what I will do:

• I will not donate any money to your campaigns.
• I will donate money to your opponents in primaries and, if you generally vote in ways I don’t like, general elections.
• I will lobby my friends and associates to do the same; given that they generally have a limited budget, I’m willing to bet that means less money for you, too.
• Provided you’re an otherwise reasonable politician, I will not speak ill of you, but I will refrain from speaking of you. You’ve just lost a persuasive advocate.

Please call your representative right now and implore them to not pass the false-compromise FISA bill, H.R. 6304. The vote comes up this afternoon, so please hurry!

Passing H.R. 6304 would amount to a Congressional seal of approval on illegal surveillance. Even if the President and the telecoms knowingly and brazenly broke the law, the provision in the bill seeks to prevent the courts from holding them accountable. Yet, the suits against the telecoms may be our last hopes for a judicial ruling on whether the President can break the law with impunity.

This project would have fizzled at several points had Diann not been there to teach and encourage. (I can be stubborn on rare occasions.) The interior is recycled graph paper and the exterior is wallpaper from an old sample book. It was great fun and will be used as my next work notebook; one wonderful feature of this type of binding (and why Diann suggested it, despite 30-odd tiny knots) is that it lays flat when opened. Highly recommended if you have someone to teach you the stitch!

Movie at the Lyric tonight, so nothing complicated:

I made a freezer paper stencil shirt!

The instructions elsewhere are as clear as anything I’d write, but what I learned today:

• For multiple color prints, don’t paint the under layers where the top layers will go; you build up too much ink if you have layer on top of layer. A bit of overlap to make registration easier would probably be fine.
• Iron a piece of freezer paper on the inside of the shirt before ironing any pattern on the outside; it will keep the outside fabric surface from wrinkling from the paint, stretching, etc.
• If you’ve a short or long torso, adjust the height of the stencil appropriately. (Duh, but see image below.)
• Shun the frumious bandersnatch!

Design copied (with permission) from Quadro’s fabric work:

When Diann and I were in Williamsburg in 2006 we purchased some delicious cherry cognac sauce which was somewhere between preserves and pie filling. It was fabulous on ice cream and, continuing yesterday’s cherry theme, I decided to try making something like it.

• 4 c. sweet cherries
• 3 Tbsp. lemon juice
• 2 tsp. almond extract
• ¾ c. sugar
• ½ c. black currant vodka
• 4 Tbsp. cornstarch dissolved in 2 Tbsp. water
• ¼ c. brandy

Cook the cherries, lemon juice, almond extract, sugar, and vodka in a saucepan for 20 minutes. While stirring, add the cornstarch mixture. Cook until thickened. Remove from heat and let stand 10 minutes. Thoroughly blend in the brandy. Spoon into jars and cool. Store in the refrigerator; serve over vanilla ice cream.

I may have used too much brandy above, but it tastes good so far. We’ll see how it turns out after it sits for a day or so.

From the Blacksburg Farmer’s Market, buy:

• one Weathertop Farms pastured chicken
• five cups of sweet cherries
• one loaf of sesame and wheat bread
• one head of leaf lettuce

Spatchcock/butterfly the chicken, brine it with garlic, sugar, pepper, and rosemary. Chuck it in the refrigerator for the afternoon.

Clean and pit the cherries. Add a little lemon juice, cornstarch solution, almond extract, and butter. Cheat and buy a couple pie crusts from the store (I hate making pastry dough). Pour in the cherries and cover with the second crust, cutting a few slits in the top. Throw it in the oven for about an hour.

Fire up the grill and drain the chicken. Baste it with an olive oil and rosemary mix and throw it on the grill (the half that isn’t on), breast side down and legs toward the hot center (dark meat needs to cook more). Close the lid. Flip and re-baste it every 15 minutes until done. Remove from grill and let stand 10 minutes before carving. Eat with a fresh green salad and tasty bread (not pictured, because by the time they were ready, we were too hungry for pictures).

The pie should be cooled enough to cut by the time you’re done with dinner.

Today, on this father’s day, my creative work is dedicated to my father; he taught me that doing is fun, and that I can learn to do anything.

Diann and I spent the time between breakfast and shower making potato stamps. I’ve cut a few linoleum and eraser block stamps for her over the last year or two, but hadn’t used potatoes since I was in high school art class. There’s something satisfying working with a stamp base that costs pennies, has limited resolution, and won’t last the week.

My friend Paul is raising money for his local Muscular Dystrophy Association and would greatly appreciate any donations that you could send his way.

The latest VMware Server 1.0.6.91891 will install in Hardy (v8.04), but wouldn’t run for me. A short page on HowtoForge gave me the pointer I needed to get it to run: sudo cp /lib/libgcc_s.so.1 /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libgcc_s.so.1/libgcc_s.so.1.

If you find your control, shift, alt, and caps lock keys suddenly stop working outside the guest OS, run setxkbmap to get them back. The bug report indicates uninstalling VMware Tools from the guest will solve the problem, too, but I haven’t had to take so drastic a step.

My output from history|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’|sort -rn.

58 dir
49 cd
44 svn
40 ssh
25 cat
21 sudo
21 make
18 telnet
18 svnmerge
18 rgrep
18 man
18 cvs
17 svndiff
14 scp
9 grep
8 route
7 kate
7 ifdata
6 kdesu
6 echo
5 ping
5 less

I’m ashamed that sudo is so far up there, but I just upgraded this box to Hardy and it took a bit of package juggling (proprietary video, VMware, etc.).

Competition is good for everyone! Well, everyone save the entrenched leader. Help Firefox set a new record for most downloads in a day.

Boing Boing recently mentioned an EFF article Protecting Yourself From Suspicionless Searches While Traveling. The article is interested and well-researched, and it mentions using disk encryption to secure your data. The problem, as noted:

We don’t know what a border patrol agent will do when confronted with an encrypted machine. One possibility is that the agent will simply give up and let the traveler pass with her belongings. Other possibilities are that the agent will turn the traveler and her machine away at the border, or that he will seize the laptop and allow the traveler to continue on.
[...]
If you don’t want to comply, CBP cannot force you to decrypt your data or give over your password.
[...]
If, however, you don’t respond to CBP’s demands, the agency does have the authority to search, detain, and even prohibit you from entering the county.

The article offers a few ways of dealing with this problem, such erasing your sensitive data and downloading it from a secure site once you’re safely across the border. Good idea, but a bit cumbersome and possibly prone to error (erased data may not really be gone). One great tool that makes the encryption process trivial (as well as free, as in speech) isn’t mentioned, though: TrueCrypt.

All disk encryption software makes it (at least somewhat) obvious that you’ve encrypted something. An agent may see that your email is stored an encrypted volume and ask for your password. TrueCrypt has a feature called hidden volumes which allow you to have two passwords for a single encrypted drive: each one will unlock (decrypt) different content, both hiding in the same file. You put all your sensitive data in one and some junk files in the other. So, the agent asks for your password, you type in the junk one, and they see an encrypted volume with a few family photos, maybe an old bank statement, etc. The wonderful part here is that, due to the random appearance of encrypted data, there is no way to tell if there is a second, hidden, volume. The agent cannot demand the “real” password, because there is no way to prove that the first one isn’t the only password (i.e., you’re just using TrueCrypt in the normal single-volume mode).

If you want the gory details of how it works, read the above link on the TrueCrypt site. Whether you understand it or not, it is worth knowing about if you need to secure your data against prying eyes.

In case you missed it, yesterday brought us a new release of Ubuntu, Kubuntu, and family. The version is called “Hardy Heron”, version 8.04. New features of interest are desktop 3D effects (compiz), the ability to use a KDE4 desktop (which I’ve tried from the LiveCD and it’s shiny), and some bug fixes to packages like kpdf.