Incomplete Archives

Due to a switch to the Blogger service, these archives are incomplete (the below entry is the last that will be added to this page). The author is in the process (the slow process) of migrating these archives to a new, more complete page, but that hasn't been done yet. For now, feel free to visit the main page; you may not find what you were looking for, but hopefully you'll find something to pass the time.

Last modified Tue Jun 20 13:07:00 2006.

Blogger Update

I've done a pretty good job so far of updating the site to use Blogger, but there's still lots to do. The med school, archives, and links pages are still using the old format until I put the work into fitting them into the Blogger system somehow. I've still got about 170 posts to convert over to the new system, and then (probably) plenty of editing and formatting to make everything look just right. Still, it's gone faster than I'd expected.

This will, however, probably be my last post for some time, at least until the archives page is somehow automatically-generated and all those posts are converted manually. For the moment, each new page I add has to be put into Blogger and my old system independently, and that's a bit annoying. Still, keep checking back, and please email me with any issues you encounter or suggestions for better formatting or behavior. Thanks!

Last modified Sun Oct 9 12:11:15 2005.

Now Using Blogger

Thanks to the fine folks at Blogger (which is, of course, in turn thanks to the fine folks at Google), this site is now significantly easier to maintain. This is following my satisfaction at having converted my ChristianJones.MD site to use Blogger; that said, this one will take quite a lot more work, if only because of the much higher number of posts to move over.

Blogger's not perfect. I don't yet have a good way to distinguish automatically between “posted at” and “last edited at” times, and I'd like the option to have some simple markup-less input nicely converted into well-formed XHTML. That said, they've put a decent product together, and I'm happy to shill for it, at least until I come up with my own alternative.

So expect some more changes over the next several days (weeks, months, years,…). I'll be manually transferring most of the posts, and there are quite a few. Thanks for reading—I'll do my best to keep writing.

Last modified Sun Oct 9 12:03:04 2005.

Bush Happy with Rita Photo Ops

Just a quick shout out to Andy Borowitz for the excellent Newsweek writeup of Bush's image work. Almost Onion-worthy. If I'd thought of it first, almost exactly the way I'd have written it.

Last modified Tue Sep 27 23:10:38 2005.

I've Survived Medicine

General Medicine I is complete. It's the first clerkship I've completed, so I'm pretty happy. I've also got the weekend off before starting the dreaded Ob/Gyn on Monday. Lindsey and I will try to catch Proof tomorrow, and I'm going to try to finish the latest Harry Potter (finally). All in all, nice and relaxing.

Medicine actually wasn't too bad—I've still had enough time to catch most of the new television shows, and I've also been taking some time to work on ChristianJones.MD, my “professional” site. I'm almost finished switching it to the Blogger engine, which is going even better than I'd hoped. There are some things I don't care for about Blogger, but all in all it's been a quite positive change. Check out the site sometime, and let me know what you think.

For now, though, it's back to relaxing. Have a nice weekend, everyone!

Last modified Fri Sep 23 21:13:04 2005.

Rumors of my departure have been greatly exaggerated

Lindsey and I went out for lunch today, and I had the lucky chance to run into Chris, a friend of mine from med school. Turns out there are some rumors going around that I left school—rumors which I'll start to lay to rest here by saying that I haven't. Oh, I seriously thought about it, but ended up just taking off most of my first rotation; two days of surgery was a rough start on me mentally, so I switched my schedule around, had almost six weeks of “vacation”, and am now done with two weeks of my internal medicine clerkship.

It's going reasonably well—I don't have as much free time as I'd like, but that's to be expected. I'm much more “with it” now. If you don't see me around school, it's only because these first three weeks of IM are my outpatient rotation—I'll be back in the hospital just after labor day. See you then!

Last modified Sat Aug 27 19:51:03 2005.

Internal Medicine

I'm spending the next two and a half weeks at a private physician's office in Alhambra, working hard for this half of my Internal Medicine rotation. The schedule's not a killer, but I'm still So Very Tired®. My weekends are off, though, so hopefully I'll have the time and inclination to post a bit more then….

Last modified Thu Aug 18 07:37:16 2005.

More power!

Don't want to write much (there's so much to talk about), but I did want to apologize for any downtime and note that there may be more.

Southern California is in a state of “power emergency”, according to MSNBC. Basically, the “independent” power companies have several power plants out of commission at the moment, and they can't keep up with record demand—a bit of which my two air conditioners, home entertainment system, and twelve computer probably have contributed. Our house has had (at least) three blackouts in the last 48 hours, and I wouldn't be surprised to have more.

I'm running relatively blind—most of my work is currently on my Mac mini and an LCD or on my OpenBSD laptop. I've also got the server, a couple of routers and access points, and the DSL modem all running. That's really not bad as far as power drain goes, as I have all my other machines, including the power-hungry Windows computer, completely off at the moment. More energy is going toward simply staying cool, as it's damn hot here in LA.

The one nice thing is that this situation's given me a chance to test my UPS systems. They've held up great, even though all the machines I mentioned before (except the laptop) are hooked up to only two of them. They're consumer models from Belkin that have been on sale at one point or another, and they haven't turned off spontaneously yet. (In each of the prior outages, I shut down the connected computers and turned off the battery backups myself.)

The other lesson here, of course, is that I really need a form of off-grid renewable energy of fairly large magnitude—or somehow tap into one of the hospital's generators.

Last modified Thu Aug 18 07:42:28 2005.

On Hiatus

I'm on hiatus—from school, posting here, and pretty much all of The Outside World®—until further notice, probably somewhere between one week and one month. I'm still alive, but this site is pretty near the bottom of my list of priorities for the moment. I'll be back, but don't hold your breath.

Last modified Thu Jul 14 22:42:12 2005.

Brief update

It's been a pretty long week, so I'll just say that (as far as I know) the USMLE Step 1 went no better and no worse than I'd expected, and it'll be about six weeks until I get the results. By that time, I'll be just about finished with my Surgery rotation. For the last few days, I've been alternately relaxing and doing a load of those errands you save up for such times, and I'm already pretty tired and in no way ready to head back to school on Tuesday. Hopefully, though, it'll be a fun weekend—Lindsey and I are headed down to the San Diego Wild Animal Park tomorrow and staying in Escondido overnight. We'll be back for some fun and relaxing on Sunday (when we're likely to catch War of the Worlds), the typical 4th-of-July-barbecuing on Monday, and then 3rd-year orientation is on Tuesday. Sure, lots of work to do before then, but I'm just going to try to relax. Still, expect more updates as I can…

Last modified Thu Jun 30 21:26:34 2005.

Test Tomorrow

In less than 24 hours, I'll be done with (at least my first shot at) the USMLE Step 1. I've basically taken today off; Lindsey and I watched Primal Fear and a lot of TV. Nice and relaxing, though I think it's safe to say this is the most nervous I've ever been about an exam. (Actually, I'm not positive of that—my last couple of exams have been pretty nerve-racking. It's like my confidence has been shot since failing GI. Nah, that couldn't be it.)

I've had time to do just a bit of computer work in the last couple of days, and I got to do my semi-annual Fry's shopping spree today. Lots of great stuff and great deals—I'm sure I'll spend the next week or so putting everything together.

On the computer/med school front, I've also had the opportunity to help a couple of friends make the transition from USC's exceedingly poor web mail service to Gmail. They seemed to appreciate the assistance, so in anticipation (and the hope) of more people doing the same, I've made up a little guide to using Gmail instead of USC Email. It's likely to be renovated (in format, not content) soon, with a reformatting of a lot of my pages already in progress, but it should still be accessible at that address.

On a final computing note, I've heard about the AdvocacyDev Conference being held in Oakland a couple of weeks from now, a meeting of using Free and Open Source Software in politics and activism. This sounds like an absolutely thrilling thing, and I'd love to take part in something like this, but that'll be the first weekend of my surgery rotation, so no real luck there. Oh, well. Something to think about for next year.

So that's about it for now. Still wondering if I'll feel great relief tomorrow or be crying in bed for a few days….

Last modified Sun Jun 26 19:37:33 2005.

Five more days

Five more, then I'm (with any luck at all) done with two years of med school. Half a doctor; I can only hope the next two (and residency, and life afterwards) are at least marginally better. In the meantime, though, it's all about going over flashcards and listening to some Goljan audio reviews. I'm starting to randomly think about medical things when I'm not studying, which is ridiculously unpleasant, but is probably a good sign. I've never been big on thinking about “work” when I'm not working, but it's happening at the moment, so I suppose I should just go with it.

A couple little interesting things I read about today: there's a Slashdot review of Darknet, a (relatively) new book subtitled Hollywood's War Against the Digital Generation. It turns out the journalist who wrote it has a blog at Darknet.com, and he's got some very interesting thoughts and anecdotes about copyright and fair use. (I particularly like—and will probably start using—his phrase “copyright cartel”. Might pick up the book, if I ever have the time and inclination at the same moment, but you can bet I'll start linking to the blog on a regular basis.

On a marginally related note, there's been talk—even though the story's almost a month old—about a “researcher” cracking Windows Genuine Advantage. It's not particularly impressive, actually, since it basically involves just using a number generated on a “legal” installation of Microsoft Windows to use products on an “unofficial” installation. (Windows Genuine Advantage is the program Microsoft will soon begin using to verify your installation of Windows is legal, and then let you download patches and add-on software based on that.)

To be honest, I don't have moral qualms about Microsoft releasing patches and add-ons only to “legal” installations. I think it's a poor choice for them and for the Net at large, but I have my single legal license, and am happy to use free software for my other PCs, so they're welcome—from a legal and moral standpoint—to add functionality only available to purchasing customers. That's fine. What I'm not okay with is that every time I download such a piece of software, or have to reinstall Windows, or whatever, they get that information. IANAL, but I'm fairly certain Microsoft's EULA doesn't include anything about me informing them every time I perform computer maintenance, and that seems like the next step. Mandatory bug reports. Obtaining permission before changing configuration. I'm not happy with that. So, despite the lack of technical impressario in the WGA workaround, it could still be useful. Or, you know, maybe not.

Last modified Wed Jun 22 20:17:24 2005.

Privacy be damned

Just a couple of quick notes today, then it's back to studying.

I'm a geek, and very slightly paranoid. I'm supposed to care about privacy issues, and I'm reminded of this every so often, mostly to the derision of my friends and colleagues. People on Slashdot (mind you, I'm in no way suggesting these are people I'm trying to emulate) rant on about the problems with grocery “club cards” and such. The essential problem, they say, is that it's not reasonable to “opt out” of the information being gathered by the programs, since they're the only way to get a reasonable price on groceries. So I was half annoyed with myself when I bought some over-the-counter loratadine at the local SavOn a few days ago, applied for a club card to get a significant discount, and didn't write incorrect information on the form. I'm supposed to care, right? Yet it didn't even occur to me to falsify the info until I'd filled out the form and left the store.

(Don't even get me started on the hoops I had to jump through to get a hospital ID badge. Presumably the school already can prove I'm who I say I am, but here we go giving out driver license numbers, social security numbers, and even fingerprints. Gah.)

Okay, to try and make up for that a bit, I'm writing just a short bit about privacy policies and information collection. You know those policy statements we regularly get from banks, credit card companies, and so forth, describing the limits they go to not to archive information about you, to protect it from others, etc.? Well, it turns out those are all but meaningless. The information, apparently, passes through a number of other systems, some of which seem to have fewer scruples about how they manage where you just spent that $19.95 on the web. This weekend, it was announced that one of these providers (CardSystem Solutions) was hacked into, and a brief scare about the exposure of info of 40 million credit card users exposed was announced. Now the company admits it wasn't supposed to be storing the information, yet we've heard no announcement of an investigation or lawsuit to remedy the situation.

Part of that may be because the government's a bit busy with similar matters closer to them. It turns out the TSA and its contractors have been keeping databases of passenger data even after they've been specifically told by Congress not to. Yep, the government is keeping tabs on you—but it's not the FBI or CIA, it's the people who can't even get you through a metal detector in less than two hours. Nice to see who has “secured” my privacy.

Last modified Tue Jun 21 08:07:59 2005.

Year III, Baby!

(Yes, I'm aware I can't really pull off saying “baby” like that, but I'm excited, baby!)

Got my Year II Comprehensive Exam results today—I actually did well. Not just passing, mind you, but even above average! (I'm as shocked as you are.) Wow. Almost hard to believe that I'm half a doctor at this point. Technically, the only remaining thing I have to do before I can begin Year III is take the USMLE Step 1, but I only have to take it before the beginning of third year, not necessarily pass it. (To be honest, though, my surprising performance on this test has convinced me that, in fact, I can pass the boards, and may even do okay.)

So I've got a week to finish boning up on everything I was supposed to learn over the last two years. I've got forty hours of audio to listen to, (only) about a hundred and forty pages of notes to review, and somewhere in the neighborhood of four hundred flashcards to memorize—oh, and I need to make some for pharmacology. Not bad for a week's studying, eh?

So, no real fun for a week, but I'm having pizza, beer, and champagne (hey, who said we're not classy?) tonight, and I've already seen Batman Begins, so I'm all set until War of the Worlds comes out next week. (Oh, by the way, Batman was good; easily the best since the 1992 Batman, but I'm not exactly sure which I liked better. Christian Bale does brooding well, but Michael Keaton pulls off the dark humor better. Three stars; worth a viewing in the theater, but it wouldn't hurt to wait for the DVD.)

Last modified Mon Jun 20 14:23:02 2005.

Treo 650

After a great deal of thinking about it, I bought a pa1mOne Treo today, the “smartphone” that's a Palm OS PDA and cell phone in one. I got a great deal on it, and it's been hinted that we'll need a Palm (or some other PDA that runs ePocrates) for next year. I did a lot of research, and decided to conglomerate the two devices.

Problem is, the thing isn't all that great. I'm returning it. There are a huge number of things that my Zaurus does that the Treo doesn't do—or at least doesn't do free and/or easily—and the interface just isn't what I'd like. It is a nice cell phone, but as far as PDAs go, it seems that I'm just paying for it being a “Palm” because it's a “standard”, not because it does anything special. And paying a lot, I might add—it's just not worth $300 to $400.

So I'm returning it, and it looks like it's back to the Zaurus. That's not bad, but I've never been satisfied with certain aspects of the Zaurus. (The PIM, actually—all the non-PIM things are great, but what's the use of a PDA without a PIM?) I don't like any of ROMs I long ago learned to install on the device to replace the default one. So it looks like I'm back to making a Linux distribution—interesting how these things come back to haunt you. Let's see what we end up with, in all my copious free time.

Speaking of which, I'll take off a couple of hours to see Batman Begins with a couple of my friends. If it's as decently dark as it could be, I should be happy.

Last modified Wed Jun 15 19:45:54 2005.

epguides.com

Just a follow up on a previous complaints about the change at TvTome: I'm now using epguides.com for the basic purposes I mentioned in that entry, namely determining where an episode with a particular title falls into the series. It's far from perfect, as all the links to episodes point to the old TvTome page for that episode, and many (or maybe all) don't work correctly. There's also no news or list of available and upcoming DVDs for most shows. The biggest worry, however, is that the site seems to be fairly closely affiliated with TvTome (or TV.com), and it's not clear how long it will be around or how often it's updated.

No, nothing important, just more complaining. On the good side of TV, though, Toon Disney has started showing The Tick most nights. Excellent—check your local listings. It's not really mentioned anywhere on the site, but the TiVo seems to think it's on every night at 8 PM (Pacific). If you haven't watched this show, and want to see one of the places that the not-just-for-kids animation thing started, check it out.

Last modified Tue Jun 14 13:16:00 2005.

Blogging and Journalism—the new verbiage

There's a new discussion on Slashdot about how much blogs suck. Most of the topics stem from one of two ideas:

One writer, in reference to the second point, had what may be the best description I've read of the difference between a “blog” and a “journal”—the relevant summary is: At least to my mind, a "journal" is an online diary, intended primarily for yourself and your friends. A "blog" is a soapbox or editorial page directed at the outside world. The difference is the size of the target audience..

The only issue I have with this is that it ignores the root of the word “journalism”, which is most often used to describe traditional media. Still, I think it's particularly clear that this is an important distinction. What I'm writing is a journal—I honestly don't expect anyone other than my acquaintances to care what's written here, and quite possibly not even then. I may make editiorial rants from time to time, some of which may even be topical, none of which should be considered newsworthy—this site's more cathartic than informative, I have no doubt.

Why does Google need to archive what I thought about the Repro exam, or why I don't really like LA? It doesn't, and I can only barely imagine anyone finding it useful—but it's still information, it still should be accessible, and if it makes searching for relevant items more difficult, then perhaps it's the search technology that needs to change. If it were a matter of somehow tagging a site or page as “editorial”, I'd be happy to do so. Come to think of it, maybe that's the next step for the “priority” tag in Google Sitemaps. I can even imagine the new query:

(openbsd OR netbsd) "cd audio" priority:+0.7

Last modified Tue Jun 14 10:56:26 2005.

TvTome is dead

A few weeks back, CNET acquired TvTome, which was an excellent resource for TV watchers who were a bit anal about it. Personally, I found it great for cataloging anything I downloaded from the TiVo. Alas, it is no more. CNET has apparently changed the name (and URL) to TV.com, and changed the format into one that makes it inordinately harder for me to use. No longer do half of my “Episode List” bookmarks work, and those that do take me to an area that lists different seasons on different pages, with no clear way to change this. Want to find out which episode of The Simpsons is entitled “Marge be not Proud”? Well, now it seems you already have to know that it's in season 7, or browse through all sixteen until you find it by hand. (For this specific show, I'll now be using The Simpsons Archive Episode QuickList instead, but that's not really the point.)

So, yeah, they changed a site with a huge userbase to actually get rid of what some people (like me) consider features, made it look nicer, and broke at least one element of the W3C Style Guide (“Cool URIs don't change”). They've flash-ified it, and basically made the site all but useless to me. You'd think I'd be used to the corporate annexation of the web, right?

Maybe the problem is that this isn't always what happens. A few years ago, Amazon bought IMDb. The biggest change I noted was that after several months imdb.org stopped working, and you had to go to imdb.com instead. Since then, IMDb has added features, but the basic layout has remained the same; even the links I have from around 2000 still work. (IMDb did change their address style at one point, but that was well before the Amazon takeover.) It seems like a no-brainer: buy something successful, make small changes to avoid alienating those who made it successful and in the hopes of attracting others.

For better or worse, it's not all about eliminating competition—I know I'm an idealist, but there really is still something to be said for content.

Last modified Mon Jun 13 18:27:54 2005.

Shakin' & Quakin'

For the first time I can positively identify, I felt an earthquake this morning—I suppose that's what I get for waking up early and studying. There have been times before I've thought I've felt a quake, only to realize that it's just a large truck driving by or the laundry on a spin cycle. In all the false-positive cases (and this real one), I'm sitting at my main computer. The monitor's a hefty 19-inch CRT on a little stand built onto the desk. It starts jiggling a little, and I think “I wonder if that's an earthquake”.

Well, this time it was. The Pasadena office of the USGS is reporting a magnitude 5.6 quake out in the inland empire. Seemed a little different this time, too—it lasted much longer than I thought it would, probably around ten seconds or so. I got up to see if other parts of the house were shaking, and, sure enough, some of our little knicknacks were rattling around a bit. Somewhat surprisingly, the cats didn't seem at all frightened, or even surprised. The quake didn't even wake Lindsey, so she's not too scared, either.

In any case, an interesting new experience. Speaking of which, there are rumors (which I picked up from a Slashdot article) that Mac OS X for x86 has been leaked. Ah, if only I had the time and energy to start playing with that instead of studying. (Okay, to tell the truth, I just haven't been able to find it yet, and figured I shouldn't waste any more time this morning.) Let me know if you try it out—as usual, I'm curious.

Last modified Sun Jun 12 09:21:57 2005.

The Smiths

Mr. & Mrs. Smith may be the best movie I've seen this year. (For nostalgic purposes, I'm having a little trouble reconciling that possibility against my love for The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.) An easy and enjoyable four stars; see it if you have the chance. I'm not much of an Angelina Jolie fan, but I've liked just about everything Brad Pitt's done, so I was at least happy to give it a try—and it's an absolutely hilarious action movie. Lindsey even really liked it. There are only three or four more movies I'm really motivated to see this summer, so I'd say it's a good bet this one would be a good bet for you.

In unrelated news, the first person I know to have taken this summer's USMLE finished it today. My friend Kelechi left me with the impression he wasn't overwhelmed by it, and finished in less than four hours. That bodes well for me—I don't work nearly as hard as Kelechi, but then I don't expect to get nearly as good a score. As I've said before, I'm happy getting above the mean. Still, keep wishing me luck—I've got just over two weeks left to prepare.

Last modified Sat Jun 11 22:27:59 2005.

Open Source “Community”

It seems like that “community” word has been coming up more and more lately. Yeah, I consider that a good thing (lower case), if only because I generally consider “community” a Good Thing®. I went to undergrad in what I would consider the closest thing to a real community that I've ever lived in, and I've been desperately trying to get back to it ever since—that sense not just of camaraderie, but of people truly considering others in their actions, caring about others in the community, and doing what they can to make everyone's experience worthwhile—not just their own.

Yesterday, I read a NewsForge editorial about the lack of community in open source, or at least the apparent lack, but doesn't go into any real depth. Today there's a Mac Observer editorial chastising the community of “Mac evangelists”, those who actually drive others away from wanting to buy a Mac because of their zealotry. (No, the irony that I was apparently wrong about “how cool” the Intel Mac was a couple of days ago is not lost on me.)

Finally, though, is a topic that's been coming to a head for a while now: OpenBSD. The benevolent dictator of the project has a fairly well-known temper. Some say he has an attitude problem, arrogance, and so forth—I'm not one to judge him on that aspect. The general consensus among developers and long-time users is that he's in charge, the developers develop for themselves, not for the users, and the users offer intelligent feedback and questions; if a user wants something that's not there, they can mention it, but they aren't generally to get upset if developers say “That's not a priority for us”. I've only been an OpenBSD user for about a year, so I don't know if it's always been this way, but it seems to work for the project.

Lately, perhaps because OpenBSD has been getting more publicity, there seems to be a greater number of questions on the mailing lists from people who clearly don't get this concept. It's not exactly the type of community I was talking about before, but it is a group with a common goal and a reasonable way of doing things, and it's been disrupted quite a bit lately by people who may or may not be well-intentioned and who seem to care less about OpenBSD and more about their own problems. Not surprisingly, a large number of people who have been around a while take issue with this, and this all lead to a misc@openbsd thread about being nicer on the list—which does absolutely nothing to quell the actual problem.

No, I'm not suggesting being dictatorial is a great way to get your point across—only that those who disrupt a community can't expect to be invited and welcomed graciously.

Last modified Fri Jun 10 15:06:46 2005.

Developer Transition Kit

Just a quick update (during a rare break in my studies) to my comments a couple of days ago about Apple's Developer Transition Kit, the system designed for developers to start building Intel binaries: it turns out that for $999 you get a lease of the hardware, not keep it. That's not yet been confirmed (I sent an email to Apple but haven't yet received a reply), but it at least makes a lot more sense.

That's actually a Good Thing®, as I have neither the money nor the time to pick one of these up and start screwing around with it—but probably would have done so, anyway.

Last modified Wed Jun 8 10:47:25 2005.

Back to studying

After a nice long weekend off, it's back to the grindstone. I've got just under three weeks until I take the USMLE Step 1; at this point, I'm hoping for just over the mean. (By this time next week, I may just be hoping to pass.) Yesterday and today have been concentrating on embryology; I'm almost finished with that, then it's on to several days of pathology.

The only actual news I wanted to mention today was yesterday's announcement of the demise of DVD Decrypter. The first DVD ripper I ever used, DVD Decrypter has always been easy to use, and set the bar by which I still measure capabilities of software that lets me copy a movie from disc to hard drive (still the most convenient way to watch a movie on the road with my laptop). As it turns out, I downloaded the last version ever to be released (3.5.4.0) a few weeks ago, and had considered posting it here, but I don't have the fight left in me today. Yup, it's slackers like me who have apparently let the studios win another one….

Last modified Tue Jun 7 11:37:33 2005.

When did I become Steve Jobs's butt-boy?

So I'm taking a break from studying, and I see that Apple has just announced that Macs will soon be using Intel processors. What's more, a “Developer Transition Kit” is now available to members of Apple Developer Connection; it consists of a 3.6 GHz Pentium 4 running Mac OS X 10.4 for $999. What's particularly frightening is that that excites the hell out of me. This is the same reaction I had to the Mac mini. I want one.

Also somewhat disturbing is that depending on the quality of the machine (which, honestly, can't be bad coming from Apple), and including the $500 fee for joining ADC at a sufficient level to buy, tihs is actually a good price. The absolute cheapest I can get a Dell 3.6 GHz P4 is $1,099, without much software or hardware (comparable to what I'm expecting). Mind you, I'm not a paying member of ADC, so it's quite uncertain what the specs are on that machine, but it's clearly not the outrageous markup we've come to expect from Apple.

Last modified Mon Jun 6 12:39:48 2005.

New Server

I spent the weekend migrating this site (along with all of aleph0.com, christianjones.md, and norightsreserved.org) to a new server. Well, “different” server would probably be a better term, as I've had the hardware for years. It's an AMD Duron 1.3 GHz with (only) 96 MB of RAM and a 40 GB hard disk. This might seem a bit underpowered for a server, but it's only a low-traffic http server; the most popular stuff on it is my friend Deb's med school notes and such. Besides, the computer this site has been running on for years is Pentium MMX 233 MHz with only 64 MB of RAM; this is definitely a step up, and I have, somewhat surprisingly, been able to tell a difference in performance of the server.

I also took the opportunity—in fact, the real reason for the upgrade—to upgrade to OpenBSD 3.7; OpenBSD only makes patches for the last year's worth of systems, and the old 3.5 machine was ready for bed. Expect the same thing next year around this time.

For now, though, it's back to studying, at least until I find out if I passed the comprehensive exam….

Last modified Mon Jun 6 07:43:58 2005.

Freer speech

Well, more free, if only slightly so. The EFF (of which, by the way, I'm now a proud member) is reporting that offering a copyrighted work is not the same as distributing it; those who wish to sue someone for copyright infringement must actually prove that the work was, for instance, downloaded illegally, rather than just being posted on the web or listed in an index. This means (I believe), that sites listing where to go for copyrighted content or making indexes of BitTorrent files is not infringement. (Hosting a tracker, however, will remain up in the air for some time, of course.) This is a Good Thing®

Keeping with the whole free speech thing, I'm consistently amused that one large group is as active as it is about speech and privacy: librarians. I still have the image of every librarian I've ever known as a semi-retired woman with graying hair who's very pleasant, but seems very conservative. Whether this is an accurate picture or not, they tend to get anxious about little things like the “PATRIOT” act's seizure of library records; the American Library Association even has an Office for Intellectual Freedom. It may be a bit easier in the near future to deal with such requests for information from the government: Information Today is reporing that anonymous library cards may be on their way. Yeah, I've got to respect that.

So my exam went fine (probably), and I'm more-or-less taking the weekend off to recuperate; I'll start studying for the boards again on Monday. I'm also doing a bit of behind-the-scenes work here on the web server, including adding support for Google's new Sitemaps service, and upgrading to a new machine running OpenBSD 3.7. I'm sure I'll mention more about these changes over the next several weeks, so stay tuned.

Last modified Sat Jun 4 17:46:56 2005.

Deep Throat

(No, not like that, you sick bastards!) In what's sure to be the most-read story of the day, Bob Woodward describes meeting Deep Throat and their subsequent relationship (which sounds far more racy from this brief description than is probably intended). It's very interesting to read about all this, but Keith Olbermann still doesn't think they've got the right guy, and he asks some good questions.

Off that subject and on to some computing. Good news, and bad. First, the EFF has declared victory on the broadcast flag issue, or at least has come as close as I'd like them to. Digital television, if it ever is actually mandated to be the only television, is unlikely to require the broadcast flag at least at the beginning. No, my pcHDTV card is no longer necessary (and, for that matter, still not set up properly), but it's nice to have the support of a good manufacturer if it's needed later on, anyway.

The bad news (from my perspective) is really only a warning—the threat of power outages this summer seems to be on the rise for the southeast and southwest US. Oh, Southern California seems to be used to them at this point, but my servers likely only last for a few minutes on their UPSs; if “rolling blackouts” take an hour or more, I'm likely to see some downtime. Sure, that doesn't hurt my bottom line as though I run some commercial server space—but it still hurts my pride.

Okay, so back to studying. I'm currently only averaging about 60% on the Kaplan practice tests I'm taking, but I'm getting the impression they're much harder than the comprehensive exam I'll be taking tomorrow, if not harder than the USMLE itself. I'm just starting to be fairly confident I'll go on to third year, but wish me luck anyway—I can always use a little more.

Last modified Thu Jun 2 07:55:04 2005.

Still studying…

Not a lot of news today, but I took the evening off to watch a couple old episodes of Dead Like Me and relax with Lindsey. It's a shame the show's been cancelled, but at least that means I'll have the entire collection when the second season is released on DVD in a few weeks. I suppose it's not that surprising, either—I've noticed smart, funny, vaguely disturbing series being cancelled on TV for years. The first I remember was also one of the funniest sitcoms I can remember, Stark Raving Mad. I'm sure, though, that such a thing was happenning long before I was born.

Studying's going surprisingly well, even as it's quite unpleasant. I've finished reading First Aid for the USMLE Step 1 and moved on to Princeton Review's Cracking the Boards: USMLE Step 1. I'd love to have it done well before my comprehensive exam on Friday, but I don't know how likely that is. Still, I've read several hundred pages over the last few days, so hopefully I'll be able to keep it up.

Oh, and if I can actually pull off a decent boards score and pass the comprehensive, I might just have to write a little guide about how best to procrastinate and cram for the USMLE.

Last modified Tue May 31 20:47:18 2005.

Gaming (not gambling)

I'm not much of a gamer. I've got friends who spend their extra hours playing World of Warcraft, Vice City: San Andreas, or whatever the current games are. Personally, I'm looking for another decent version of Civilization (or Freeciv) or another turn-based strategy I can play reasonably well. To be honest, I'm just looking for something a little interesting that not everyone kicks my ass at. (I remember being great at Descent, and horrible at Doom, for instance. Haven't played many 3D games ever since.)

It's this search for something a little different that made A Gamers' Manifesto such a nice (and funny) read. Twenty points unlikely to be addressed by the Xbox 360, Playstation 3, or Nintendo Revolution—and right near the front, at number 2, is “Give us a genre of game we've never seen before”:

Why isn't a there a spy game where we actually get to be a real spy rather than a hallway-roving kill machine? You know, where we actually have to talk to contacts and extract information and tap phones and piece together clues, a game full of exotic locales and deception and backstabbing and subplots? A game where a gun is used as often as a real spy would use it (that is, almost never)?

Where's the game where we're a castaway on a deserted island and the object of the game is to find food and clean water and build a shelter, a game where we can play for one month or six months, because whether or not we get rescued is randomized? Where every time we restart we get a different island with different wildlife and vegetation and water sources?

Where's the game where we play a salty Southern lawyer who has to piece together evidence to exonerate a black man falsely accused of murder, breaking down witnesses and spotting inconsistencies in testimony?

In what universe are these games that wouldn't sell, games that can't even get made? One of the author's other suggestions is a game were we actually play as Dr. Greg House “diagnose mysterious illnesses while crushing the patient's spirit with cruel insults”. Honestly, if there was such a game announced for one of the new consoles (and it didn't appear to suck as ridiculously as those “Emergency Room” games), I'd preorder the console today.

Of course, it's not going to happen. Looks like I'll stick with searching Freshmeat for open source games.

Last modified Tue May 31 20:48:35 2005.

Blogging journalism

I've mentioned before some of the issues I have with treating bloggers and journalists differently. I'm in no way claiming to be a journalist; I'm more of an editor. I don't do any real investigating, I usually just gather information and pass it on, often with editorial comments. I'm not claiming to be a journalist, but I see no reason to be treated differently from a legal standpoint. Speech is speech.

The reason I'm mentioning this is because of the apparent state of those who society does consider journalists. Google News linked to an article today entitled Microsoft-Netscape Conflict Leaves Firefox. I read tech articles quite frequently, but this one caught my eye for a different reason: even the short blurb in the Google News summary sounded ridiculous:

To the average user, Microsoft's recommendations to either uninstall the Netscape browser or fix a specific code in the registry makes no sense.

Most computer users have no idea how to install or even uninstall software. Trying to fix something foreign such as the registry is like reading Greek in Latin.

Ignoring the one- and two-sentence “paragraphs”, let's look at the only real “fact” reported here first: “Most computer users have no idea how to install or even uninstall software”. First, the topic is about uninstalling, and that's generally considered slightly more difficult than installing software, so let's at least switch which verb is next to the “even”. Next, let's make a simple note: if a user is confronted with the numerous conflicts between Netscape and Internet Explorer, then they have by definition already installed Netscape—this latest version with all the reported problems wasn't present on their computers when they bought them. Oh, and let's not forget the suggestion that the registry is “like reading Greek in Latin”. I'm no fan of the registry, and I wouldn't want to explain editing it to much of anyone, but “like reading Greek in Latin”? I don't even know what that means.

Mind you, these are just the first three sentences. Steve Sabludowsky, the “reporter” who submitted this piece goes on later to such hard-hitting writing as “That is a big WOW and it doesn't take a degree in foreign archaic languages to understand the significance”. This guy (I think) would commonly be considered a “journalist” (if only because his story's linked to on Google News), while I'm not. Whether the site this story is on (BayouBuzz.com) is a blog or not, Mr. Sabludowsky's also apparently active in local media, including the New Orleans Times Picayune Newspaper, the Greater Baton Rouge Business Report, and so forth. (His “About this Author” actually starts with the line: “Attorney, Writer, teacher, and Publisher of Bayoubuzz.com Mr. Stephen Sabludowsky is an attorney, writer and teacher.” If I had any indication this sentence was intended to be funny, it would be. Instead, it's just sad.)

So Mr. Sabludowsky is probably considered by the world at large to be a journalist, while judges are more interested in making sure I don't have the rights to protect my sources (or wouldn't have the rights, if I had any sources). I'm not complaining about Mr. Sabludowsky's success in the face of what is surely great adversity, nor about society's view of his being in some way superior to me. (Well, okay, I suppose I may be complaining a bit about the latter.) My real complaint is that if we make some distinction between journalism and whatever the alternative is, it would be nice for that to be based, at least marginally, on writing.

Last modified Tue May 31 20:49:18 2005.

Why smart people defend bad ideas

Thanks to Slashdot, an excellent article (or even “essay”) was brought to my attention. I haven't finished it yet, but it's really impressive so far. “Why smart people defend bad ideas” by Scott Berkun is not only an insightful look at how to keep from defending your choices to others when the ideas are wrong, but also how to defend yourself against those people who are doing so. More importantly to me, however, it's about not trying to win stupid arguments with yourself, like whether to study or edit a show you've downloaded from the TiVo. A brief excerpt:

From what we know of evolution it's clear that we are alive because of our inherited ability to think quickly and respond to change. The survival of living creatures, for most of the history of our planet, has been a short term game. Only if you can out-run your predators, and catch your prey, do you have the luxury of worrying about tomorrow.

It follows then that we tend to be better at worrying about and solving short term issues than long term issues. Even when we recognize an important long term issue that we need to plan for, say protecting natural resources or saving for retirement, we're all too easily distracted away from those deep thoughts by immediate things like dinner or sex (important things no doubt, but the driving needs in these pursuits, at least for this half of the species, are short term in nature). Once distracted, we rarely return to the long term issues we were drawn away from.

Last modified Sat May 28 23:02:22 2005.

Lindsey's Birthday

Studied some this morning, but I'm trying to make as much of today as possible about Lindsey. After she got up, we went out to see Madagascar (which was pretty poor—2 stars), have a decent lunch at Chili's, and then got her an ice cream cake at Cold Stone. She openned a couple of presents (just some games I got her), and then we took a nap. Pretty lame, if you think so, but damn if it's not a good day for us. Still, I'm really tired (we just got up a few minutes ago). She's on the phone with her sister now, so hopefully some cake will wake me in a few minutes.

Probably little more studying to do today—I really hope I'm not falling behind too much, but I swear I'm going to have to start studying hard Real Soon Now®.

Last modified Sat May 28 19:24:48 2005.

Excellent doctors

There's something to be said for being personable. My doctor, Todd Forman, is undoubtedly one of the most excellent physicians I've ever met. He's intelligent, reassuring, and friendly. He has one outstanding skill, though, that I still can't put my finger on, one that's shared by only a handful of other people I've met in my life. Without condescending, even requesting, he makes you want to do better.

My undergraduate advisor had the same skill; I remember missing a day of class in the second semester of my first year or the first semester of my second at Harvey Mudd. Ran Libeskind-Hadas was the instructor, and he was outstanding, so it was unusual to miss his class. Still, I was tired, so I stayed in. Less than an hour after class was over, Ran sent me an email “wanting to make sure everything was okay”, and made me feel like going to class every day thereafter whether I was tired or not, without even hinting I'd done anything wrong.

Todd's the same way. Nope, don't worry about starting any new medication until you're finished with boards. Sure, exercise, eat better, but don't stress out about it. And you know what? It actually makes me want to exercise and eat better, and I'll be more than happy to see him to start on an ACE inhibitor shortly after finishing the USMLE in a month. Wow.

Oh, and completely off-topic (as if I consider that a problem here): Today's Penny Arcade had me laughing like crazy.

Last modified Fri May 27 17:29:53 2005.

USMLE makes my BP rise

Alright, I have no reason to think that it's a causal relationship, but as I approach the USMLE Step 1 (not to mention my Year II Comprehensive next week), my blood pressure keeps climbing. I'm already taking a regular dose of hydrochlorothyazide; an earlier trial of a beta blocker (atenolol) is what I consider my primary reason for failing the GI system originally, so I'm desperately trying not to start any new meds. Oh, it could be stress, it could be anxiety, it could be anger, it could be (gasp) my obesity—but none of these are likely to be resolved any time soon, despite my best efforts. At the moment, my focus has to be on the next month's worth of hardcore studying; I'm just trying to make sure that it doesn't compromise the next several years of living which I hope to come after the exams.

In any case, I've got the first appointment with my doctor today in a few months, so we'll see what he has to say (other than “lose weight and here are some more beta blockers”, of course).

Last modified Fri May 27 09:48:16 2005.

4 8 15 16 23 42

Lost is over for the season (I finally got around to watching the season finale), and in the true The X-Files we're left with more questions than answers. In quite a little marketing coup, however, the writers have incorporated the above sequence of numbers into the show nicely enough that entire web sites have sprung up around different occurrences of the numbers. Oh, there are plenty of coincidences (as I'm sure the writers take every opportunity to create them), but no really good theories. The On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences lists the numbers only as “The Lost Numbers”, and I haven't come up with anything better than this: if you convert the numbers to base three, then all the resulting numbers contain only 0, 1, and 2! (Yep, pretty impressive.) Still, numbers are pretty fascinating, so I won't be giving up any time soon. Who needs to study?

Last modified Thu May 26 21:51:00 2005.

Sitting in the airport

Thanks to the Orlando International Airport's complementary (or otherwise unsecured) wireless access, I've got my first taste of high-speed Internet access in five days. Phew. So much better.

We're about a half hour from boarding our flight to Atlanta (where we'll connect to LA). Sitting, surfing, and being incredibly tired, Lindsey pointed out a nice new quote to me:

Mrs. Schroedinger to Mr. Schroedinger: What the hell did you do to the cat? It looks half dead!

People are only just starting to get on my nerves again—I wonder if it's because Orlando tends to have more people who aren't from Florida, or if it's because people are just never happy in airports. Either way, I'm really just wishing they'd sit down and shut up. Okay, so it's not like that's a particularly new (or helpful) idea of mine, but that doesn't stop it from occurring. The only benefit I see at this point is that it's not quite summer, hence there aren't yet a ton of families here visiting The Rat.

Time to log off. I'll be back on the west coast before 2100, and hopefully home shortly thereafter. Doesn't look like we'll get to watch the season finale of Lost tonight, but that's what the TiVo's for, right? Dear god, don't even think about telling me what happens before tomorrow evening....

Last modified Wed May 25 11:41:46 2005.

Encrypters are child pornographers

According to CNET news, a Minnesota court has ruled that the presence of encryption software is evidence, much to the uproar of some online groups. In an appeal decision, a judge upheld a ruling that said the presence of PGP on the defendant's computer can be used against him. (I assume, then, that so can open-source solutions, like GnuPG.) The disagreement among privacy advocates, I assume, is based mostly on the “but I use encryption, and I'm not a criminal” argument.

Hey, so do I. I use Mac OS X's FileVault, which is specifically mentioned in the article as only possibly related; I use SSH and SSL for a decent amount of internet traffic. I've meant to set up GnuPG a number of times, and have never gotten around to it. Does that make me a criminal? Not yet, at least.

So why am I not outraged? Because we're not talking about probable cause or even anything vaguely related. We're talking about evidentiary rules, the claim that the presence of the software is relevant—and it is. The defendant wasn't found to have much incriminating evidence on his computer, but was found to have several encrypted files. There's most certainly a reasonable doubt that those files were porn; I know plenty of people who encrypt their bank statements. But that's not what he was convicted of—his conviction was based mostly upon the words of the nine-year-old girl he made pose for him.

The guy uses encryption. Hey, that's what it's there for. Is it relevant that he uses it? Of course. It's exactly the reason why police didn't find more evidence; the evidence was encrypted. That's why it's relevant for the jury to hear.

Here's the only problem I have: it may be considered inflammatory. “Why does a fine, upstanding citizen need encryption? He must be guilty.” This same logic isn't applied to locks on our doors, safes in our homes, or even guns in our nightstands—computer technology not used by the masses scares people a little. This is where education is probably a good idea. Get people to use encryption, to understand the value, or just say your client is worried about identity theft. But don't say it's not relevant.

Last modified Thu May 26 16:05:22 2005.

Leaving Gainesville

“Vacation” is almost over; we're leaving Gainesville for the airport (in Orlando) in a couple of hours. Lindsey's up at the Math department right now, catching up with friends and staff members. I stopped by yesterday, and even got to run into my old advisor, Miklos Bona. In general, all happy wishes all around.

Oh, I miss a lot about Gainesville, most especially the way receptionists, servers, and generally everyone you deal with on a daily basis actually has some kind words and a smile. This basic community aura is something you just don't find in Los Angeles, and reiterates my desire to eventually “settle down” in a nice little college town somewhere.

On the other hand, I can't recall at the moment how much worse it will get when the students are back in town—only a small fraction is enrolled for the summer session. Also, it's really freaking hot (though I doubt that has as much to do with the university as with the sun).

On a final note, I passed GI (finally), so it really will be all about working my butt off for the next month or so. First the second-year comprehensive exam on 3 June (only a week and two days from now), and then the USMLE step 1 on 27 June (a month and two days from now). Nah, no pressure at all.

Last modified Sat May 28 23:04:07 2005.

Gainesville

Well, after a couple of days of rest, I'm finally once again self-aware enough to begin blogging. Gainesville's almost exactly as I remember it, which is at once disturbing and comforting, considering it's been right at about two years since I left. All the great (from my point of view) restaurants are still in place, all the buildings are where I remember them, and the only real changes are even more new and developing apartment complexes.

I should also say that my fear didn't pan out—people aren't the same everywhere. Oh, there are people who are the same everywhere, but populations do in fact differ—I'm much happier with the more-regularly smiling faces, the “Southern hospitality”, and so forth in Gainesville. Certainly, though, that may have something to do with the fact that the spring semester at UF is over and most of the students are out of town.

We're off to St. Augustine this afternoon to hear some guy play in some bar there. I've been trying to get some studying done, so I'll keep reading my Princeton Review USMLE book until then. After the first day of exhaustion (we flew out on the red-eye Friday night), that's pretty much all I did yesterday. Meh.

Last modified Sat May 28 23:03:44 2005.

“Vacation”

Yeah, the quotes are supposed to be there. Lindsey and I are leaving for a 5-day trip to Florida tonight; one of her friends is getting married in Gainesville. It should be a nice trip, except that I'm behind on my studying and so will be taking a couple of books along with me. Still, (and sadly the highlight of the trip for me) we'll have a chance to go back to all our favorite restaurants, including Carrabba's, Sonny's, and last-but-certainly-not-least Five Star Pizza. Lord only knows what other places we'll fit into our schedule, but that should be a nice change of pace. (Nothing like getting “back to the status quo”.)

I'm going to try to blog a bit while we're there, as well as a little more leading up to and into third year. I took my GI make-up exam about a week and a half ago, but it could still be some time until I get the results. Should be sometime before June 3, when I'm scheduled to take the Year II comprehensive. That's two weeks from now (today's when the non-failures had to take that exam), and hopefully I'll be well-prepared for the comp, and well on my way to being prepared for the boards, by then. I'm taking the USMLE step 1 on June 27, so there's still plenty of work to be done.

For now, though, packing….

Last modified Fri May 20 12:41:09 2005.

Computing

So I think I know why I spend so much of my “free” time doing computer stuff, programming, building machines and setting up software on them, installing strange things to play with and uninstalling them fifteen minutes later. I use a lot of time doing it that I should be using for studying, getting other work done, and the like. Unsurprisingly, I think a large portion, if not all of it, is due to one thing: control.

Sure, it may be fairly typical among ENTJs to enjoy control (not to mention typical among computer geeks), but I think it's a little more than that. It's displaced control, as in “I'm nervous about this exam, and I should study—or I could install the latest CVS of OpenBSD and see if it works on this old laptop.” It's what I feel like doing when I have runs-in with the neighbors, or am annoyed at the crappy way everyone in LA seems to drive. It's not that I like controlling computers, it's that I like having some major part of my life that I can control.

Which, I suppose, is why I start to get inordinately frustrating when the computers aren't working right. Especially if I can't figure out why. One of the first things that drew me toward programming and basic hacking was the first “meta-rule” I remember: GIGO, Garbage In, Garbage Out. Something doesn't work? It's because I did something wrong—figure out what and exert more control over your domain. Spend time on it, don't, whatever, but don't complain—it was my garbage in that caused the problem.

Except, it seems, more and more often that't not particularly true. That's why I'm consistently (and somewhat unsuccessfully) trying to get away from Microsoft Windows, and why I get particularly frustrated when things don't work like they're supposed to, or like documentation (if it exists) says they will.

So, any advice for better hobbies to use as surrogate control mechanisms? Nah, I got nothin' either. (I've tried games, but am really only interested in the kind that you play with other people—and there's a real headache when it comes to lack of control.)

Last modified Fri May 20 12:30:53 2005.

Making a DMG

I've been experimenting a little with Mac OS X Tiger, and in doing so have started a Mac OS X Recommended Software page that simply lists the add-ons I've chosen to install. Unfortunately, it becomes apparent on downloading them that not everyone is well-versed in how to properly package software for OS X, so I had to repackage a bit. First, though, I had to figure out the best way to create a .dmg package; it turns out to be exceedingly easy, but I wanted to take the opportunity to link to a DMG for Panther tutorial (which, unsurprisingly, works just as well on Tiger. Have a read if you're going to distribute any software for OS X; it should give you some nice pointers.

Last modified Wed May 4 15:42:33 2005.

Tiger

I haven't installed it yet, but I picked up Mac OS X 10.4 (“Tiger”) today from the USC Bookstore computer store. As it turns out, it's just slightly over half-price ($69) with an academic discount, and I can justify that much for “fun”. As I said, I haven't installed it yet (not a lot of free time), but plan to soon, and I'm sure I'll have some observations then. For the moment, I'll only mention that I'm a bit surprised it doesn't come with iLife, which was included with my Mac mini. No problem, of course, but I had thought Apple included it with all their products. The only thing remaining is to see if I can install Quicken from my 10.3 disc.

Last modified Tue May 31 21:03:17 2005.

Hitchhiking

I was just hoping it was going to be reasonably good, and desperately trying not to expect too much. As it happens, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was very well done, indeed. Lots of excellent English humour, plenty of decent Douglas Adams in-jokes, and enough new material to justify laughing with the film and its characters. The only reason I'm only giving it three stars is that I probably won't see it again—I'll just read the books (which are still more entertaining). Still, very much worth a look.

Last modified Sat Apr 30 19:47:47 2005.

Enemies beware…

(Frighteningly enough, I almost wrote “enemas beware” entirely by accident.)

Thanks to Slashdot, I saw that Time is reporting that the Bush Administration is keeping Kerry supporters out of negotiations. Specifically, a few delegates to the Inter-American Telecommunication Commission, which sets spectrum regulations and the like, have literally been kicked entirely because they supported the Dems in 2004.

The White House's take? Yep. They “wanted people who would represent the Administration positively”. They're not denying the facts in any way. The Bush administration, in fact, says that you don't take part if you didn't support them.

There is an argument here. They won, so why should they cater to those they beat? Because that's what you do. When you're governing the entire country, you don't prevent those who didn't support you from participating. Sure, 55% voted for you—that's not a reason to piss off the remaining 45%.

There's no reason to think that these reps wouldn't have represented the administration positively. There's no evidence they've ever done otherwise, except by participating in the democratic process. I would expect that these people, were they to decide not to “represent the administration positively”, wouldn't participate in such an event in the first place. The way to bring down a politician has very little to do with “Oh, sure, I think we can open up the 5GHz range. By the way, can you believe we voted for this guy?”

And here I thought the worst problems were going to be the “Town Hall” meetings….

Last modified Mon Apr 25 17:37:06 2005.

Hard at work, but gotta see Tiger…

I'm nine weeks away from taking the USMLE step 1, and I've got three other exams in the meantime, so I'm working pretty hard (for a change). Still, I took the time out to pre-order Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger” from the USC bookstore—with a student discount, it drops from $130 to $70. Sure, I don't generally buy software, but I'm giving Apple a chance. It really looks like I'm shelling out almost entirely for eye candy, but wow, what eye candy!

A few stores, apparently accidentally shipped the OS early, and I'm really impressed by one thing I didn't know was in there and wouldn't have been all that impressed by, anyway: an RSS screen saver. That all changed, however, once I saw the RSS Screen Saver Video. Very cool—maybe I'll start using RSS after all….

Last modified Sun Apr 24 13:57:20 2005.

New Aleph0.com

A reformat of www.aleph0.com has been completed. Not that it took much—this is a “return to simplicity”, designed to further separate structure from content, with the intent that plenty of structure can be defined with only an external stylesheet.

The only additions are some bits of humor and the creation of a separate Aleph 0 users page. For any comments, complaints, or concerns, please feel free to email me.

I'm likely to be doing something like it on the Aleph 0 Computing Project pages, and eventually here, as time allows. (Yes, that means it may never happen.) Let me know what you think.

Last modified Fri Apr 15 16:51:23 2005.

GI Failure

No, my health hasn't had a severe turn for the worse, but it's official: I failed the GI system. I'm not one for excuses—the reason I failed was that I didn't work hard enough leading up to it. Tons of dumb mistakes that I don't otherwise make, like choosing answers I'd never heard of, second-guessing myself, and so forth, may be attributed to having been on beta-blockers for a week, or may not, so I won't bother with the excuse.

I'll take a makeup exam, pass, and move on with medical school with a nice fail to explain to residency committees. That's fine—what I'm worried about now, though, is below. Bolding is mine; some lines (phone numbers, emails, and such) have been removed or ammended to protect the innocent:

Essay format. Wow. Don't get me wrong, I can write, and charm and bullshit could work almost as well on an essay as in person, but how do I prepare for an essay exam? I honestly have no clue. It will, however, be interesting to see how much I'm graded off for penmanship….

Last modified Fri Apr 15 16:44:12 2005.

Agoraphobia

I'm really hoping that I'm not developing some form of agoraphobia. It seems that every time I go somewhere, I get annoyed and frustrated at people, both in specific and in general. Ended up not going to the movies and to a “new owner seminar” for the car Lindsey bought in December basically because I was a little down and in a very bad mood. Sure, I feel like I have a right to get pissed at people, but that's kind of the problem, isn't it?

I think I'm actually more concerned at the fact that it's not completely alleviated when I'm at home. I'm still getting angry at the neighbors, at pizza delivery people, at pretty much anyone I have any contact with other than Lindsey and my few friends. I write it up to the idea that my anger stems from my disappointment with mankind, my frustration that these people are looking out for themselves and not for others, but maybe it's just anger.

I honestly don't understand why it's so difficult for people just to leave one another alone, and in those cases where there's (valuable) interaction, why people tend to not care whether they keep their promises. Yeah, I'm pretty naïve that way, I know.

Last modified Sat Mar 12 17:45:11 2005.

No need for freedom of the press, move along…

The AP is reporting that journalists have no right to protect sources who obtained information illegally. This is a case of a few web news sites (some call them blogs, but in this case that's not within my definition) who published information that Apple and the judge in the case consider trade secrets. They're probably even right about that moniker. Seems some Apple employes gave the info to the sites, Apple chose to sue the employees, and subpoenaed the names of the sites' sources. As journalists are wont to do, the sites declined.

The judge has apparently chosen (somewhat thankfully) to decline deciding whether the site writers count as journalists. My argument would be that it really doesn't matter, but as that point's moot, I won't make it right now. Instead, the judge suggests that the sites did something wrong by publishing the trade secrets.

Okay, here's the problem I have: yeah, I think the employees did something wrong: they violated the nondisclosure agreements they have. Actually, I should say that they thus broke their contracts, and should be found to have done so in a civil court, not that they have actually done anything wrong, and certainly not that they have done anything criminal. But they did it, and while I may have made the same choice, I would expect to be held accountable for it. But the sites? They were given information, verified it with numerous sources, and published it. It's true, it's not slander, and all they did was write it.

I'm well aware that most people follow “Information wants to be free” with a “well,…”. This case, however, is about whether or not you're allowed to pass on information that someone gives you outside of contractual obligation—the idea of this now being a trade secret which can't be mentioned is making the distribution of information criminal. And for those Republicans who may be reading (I know, who am I kidding?), we're not talking national defense here.

Last modified Fri Mar 11 18:02:32 2005.

All that work for nothin'…

Well, maybe. I may have just failed my GI/Liver exam; I won't know for sure for a couple of weeks. It's been a pretty crappy afternoon, and will probably be a pretty crappy “spring break” for the next week. (Yes, I'm aware it's not yet Spring, but the school is getting better about it—our “spring break” last year was the last week of February.)

At its best, this should motivate me to start working my ass off for the boards (USMLE Step 1 for anyone keeping track). I was hoping to have a nice relaxing break, but that doesn't look too likely now. I'll still get a decent amount of computer stuff done, if only because it's the only real chance I'll have for a while. Believe it or not, I picked up three olde-tyme VAXservers at a police auction, so we'll see if those work and I'll write a bit more about them when I pick them up. I've also got to reformat and reinstall everything on my Windows computer, as it's really starting to act up again. Finally, I'm planning to replace this server with OpenBSD 3.6 (it's running 3.5 at the moment) on a higher-end machine (I haven't decided which one yet), but that should be fairly seamless to any of you loyal readers (as though you'd even notice if it were down for days).

Oh, and I got a free laptop. Decent one, too. More at some point in the near future.

Last modified Fri Mar 11 17:39:21 2005.

Time to get to work…

This past Sunday marked four months until I'm scheduled to take the USMLE Step 1 exam, so it also marks one of the many times I told myself I had to start working hard again. So far, not bad, not great. I resigned as director of Chorda Tympani, the med school a cappella group which wasn't progressing particularly well this year, anyway. Some of the time I used to put into that will certainly be spent studying, but I was also just appointed to the school's admissions committee, so that will offset some of the gains as well.

Overall, most new studying time will come from where it probably should: television watching, game playing, and computer tinkering. Oh, I'll still be doing more than my share of each, but will feel more guilty about it. (In fact, I've already had to reduce all of them quite a bit—it's a good thing February sweeps are over.)

Unfortunately, the extra study time also means I'll have to pass up some nice opportunities, like the California Medical Association's Legislative Leadership Day in Sacramento next month. I'd like to do it, but since it falls near the end of our final system of the year, I'd better be here instead.

Last modified Tue Mar 1 09:51:16 2005.

Gmail adds basic HTML support

Ah, how glorious are standards! I've raved previously about Gmail, and you've certainly read plenty about it. Before recently, however, I wasn't able to do quick checks from a terminal window or “unsupported browser”. This wasn't a huge complaint, as Netscape, Internet Explorer, Mozilla, Firefox, and Safari are all supported. Now, though, I can even check, send, and delete email from within Lynx—excellent if only because it's the only browser in a standard install of OpenBSD or just about any other UNIX-like system. Gmail now has a basic HTML page, requiring only HTML and cookies to work. Who knows how useful it will be? Who cares? It's just a new little nicety.

What do you mean, you can't try it out? Don't you trust me? Oh, I see, you just need a Gmail account. Feel free to drop me an email just to ask for one. Sure, I'll probably make some pathetic attempt at small talk, but you don't even need to reply. No one ever does.

Last modified Sat Feb 26 14:51:43 2005.

Outrageously Expensive Speech

As part of the “free speech doesn't even have to come close” series, there's a great (and short) writeup at RollingStone.com on FCC fines. Mid-February, the House passed the “Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act, which increases penalies for violations of deency laws by television and radio broadcasters. The idea is that a single violation (for instance, airing a tape of the word “fuck”) could cost a station half a million dollars. Much more interesting, though, is Rolling Stone's comparison to other federal fines: turns out airing that tape carries exactly the same fine as testing pesticides on human subjects. But that's not all:

And for the price of Janet Jackson's “wardrobe malfunction” during the Super Bowl, you could cause the wrongful death of an elderly patient in a nursing home and still have enough money left to create dangerous mishaps at two nuclear reactors.

Okay, I'm not really a blow-things-out-of-proportion type (okay, I am, but for the sake of editorialism, let's say I'm not); these are the maximum fines the House resolution may impose. Several things will be taken into consideration upon a violation, including size of the audience, whether the program was scripted or improv, live or tape, and so forth—but also the violator's ability to pay. This is where I get really confused—something's less decent for a successful company than for a skel on public access? I'm sure that it's important to have putative damages to keep our innocent children from being exposed to such filth in the first place, but is a real standard punishment so difficult to find that the same act carries two different weights? Ahh, the old syllogism about arbitrary government comes to mind….

Last modified Sat Feb 26 09:15:49 2005.

Movie Reviews

Thanks to a long weekend that coincided with a Starz! free preview on DirecTV, Lindsey and I had the opportunity to catch a few flicks this weekend:

Constantine
Surprisingly good. Keanu Reeves is no worse than usual, and is actually building quite an image for himself as the super-strong 98-pound weakling. This is certainly one of the more entertaining and original comic-based movies I've seen in a while; watch if you're in the mood for some typical Vertigo humor and action. Three stars.
Trainspotting
One of the “new classics” for the drugged masses that are we. Not Ewan McGregor's first film, but certainly his first memorable one. I won't comment on how realistic the movie is, but it is quite entertaining, and even a little thought-provoking, but not for those with a weak stomach. Original, worth a watch, but probably not worth a second. Three stars.
The Fisher King
Touted as a decent look at mental illness and the homeless, this film doesn't quite live up to my expectations. Both Robin Williams and Jeff Bridges perform well, but I'm left “too satisfied” by the story, certainly not something expected from any story about mental illness or the homeless. Still, an entertaining film that's worth seeing once. Three stars.

Still have several movies (some of them likely to be crap) sitting on the TiVo to watch. More later.

Last modified Tue Feb 22 08:11:59 2005.

Rain and blackouts

It's been raining in Los Angeles for the past few days, and looks to continue. There's flooding, there are mudslides, and now, there are blackouts. Even though I live on a hill, I think it surprises no one that the latter are of the most concern for me. We lost power about five this morning for several seconds. (I was awakened by the beeping of one of my UPSs.) This afternoon, it was out for around half an hour or so—just enough to again make me realize how ridiculously dependent I am upon the grid.

Oh, I've had thoughts of going off-grid, but it continues to be infeasible, mostly because of lack of cheap options for large (relative to other residences) power consumption and a conspicuous lack of funds on my part. There was even an article in the Harvey Mudd College Bulleting alumni rag about a alumnus who had done just that, living in some of the California farm country and utilizing mostly solar power, but if I recall correctly he didn't own a television and his “information infrastructure” was composed of a single laptop.

So, for the moment, I'll rely upon inexpensive battery backups for my primary machines and server, and apologize in advance for any downtime. Still, it's better than handing control over to a server farm or even colocation site—I'm convinced that the lack of apparent server compromise on www.aleph0.com is the simple result of three things:

Thanks for not visiting!

Last modified Mon Feb 21 18:23:52 2005.

Vioxx and Patients' Rights

By now you've quite possibly heard that Vioxx will be returning to the market. This has promoted understandable shock about the FDA's role in public protection, and physicians are denouncing the decisions.

Why do they consider this a bad thing? The Food and Drug Administration is expected to protect the public by banning dangerous pharmaceuticals, or by disallowing them in the first place. The current outrage suggests that they're simply catering to the drug companies, to industry that stands to make more money if they can sell they're drugs. I have no idea if that's what they're doing, or if that's what they did when they approved Vioxx and other COX-2 inhibitors in the first place.

I do believe, however, that this is in fact a success for patients and their physicians. The fact remains that there are patients who respond better to COX-2 inhibitors than to any other drug available, and there are those who should heed the risks of cardiac complications discovered in the recent studies. It's called an informed decision, and it's what people should be making with the help of their doctor, rather than having the decision made in advance by the government. (It may be noted at this point that some of these are the same activists who said the FDA should be dissolved back when Vioxx was originally pulled from the market.)

There are physicians who aren't particularly interested in patient education, and certainly some of those would rather have the excuse to simply say, “I'm sorry, but the federal government has decided you can't take Vioxx. Have some ibuprofen.” Personally, I'm happy that I have the opportunity to discuss a patient's choices instead of simply forcing one.

Last modified Sun Feb 20 09:42:32 2005.

Updating the classics

Countdown with Ken Olbermann and tons of other places are reporting on a new television program this fall: Loonatics, an update of the Looney Tunes characters with “newer” art, a setting in the year 2772, and superpowers of some kind. This includes the possibility of “Buzz Bunny” and more. Wow. I honestly didn't know where to start.

Here's the problem with such updates, at least from my point of view. See, one of the quotes from Warner Bros. Animation President Sander Schwarz is meant to alleviate concerns from us old-timers: “[T]hese are cartoons. Lighten up! They're fun and the existence of one doesn't preclude the existence of another.” Sure, that's true. Unlike the Starbucks v. Kahlúa issue I mentioned earlier, no one here is trying to take away any real kind of market share, and if nothing else I can revel in what's likely to be a ton of Golden Collection volumes.

The problem I have here is merely one of ego, quite related to the Kicking and Screaming issue I mentioned a while back. Quite simply, on the off chance that this new show is a minor success (but really sucks), some kid's going to ask me at some point who my favorite cartoon character is. I suggest Bugs Bunny (or, more likely, Daffy Duck), and the naive child takes me to be a hip adult who knows what's cool and gets it more than any other adult in the world.

Come on, am I really going to have to put up with that?

Last modified Thu Feb 17 22:22:20 2005.

Starbucks to begin ruining Kahlúa

I'm always amused when an entirely successful, even ubiquitous, company decides they need to branch out. According to MSNBC, Starbucks will begin selling a coffee-flavored liqueur. They're smart enough to really only use the brand, not multiple-per-intersection stores; Starbucks Coffee Liqueur will be sold in liquor stores, bars, restaurants, and, I assume, anywhere you can pick up ridiculously overpriced goods.

Let me be fair. Back in the day when I used caffeine, I'm sure I contributed more than my fair share to Starbucks's rapidly ascending profits. That was, however, more to do with convenience than quality, mostly since they run the “coffee shop” on the medical school campus. When there was a long line for the main cafeteria (which contained the unsurprisingly better “school-branded”—and thus cheaper—coffee), or I was out of decent coffee for the pot in my lab, I'd pay for my humongous cuppajoe and get out of there. Oh, it was swill—I commented on more than one occasion about it being “the worst cup of coffee I'd ever had—but it was caffeine, and I took it.

I don't drink much liqueur. Well, any. Never really liked the whole “dessert drink” idea of a drink sweeter than it was alcoholic. That said, I've had the occasional coffee or hot chocolate with some schnapps (not really liqueur, but meh) or (gasp) irish creme. Lindsey has white russians, so she's the Kahlúa drinker in the house. I think it's just a shame that a generation of college-age pansies are going to end up thinking it's called “Starbucks” (and that it tastes terrible but you're supposed to like it) instead of Kahlúa—not to mention starting to refer to a double of anything as a “venti”.

You have to wonder if I'd dislike Starbucks so much if their wireless internet access were free….

Last modified Thu Feb 17 06:41:13 2005.

More on Microsoft AntiSpyware

So I've downloaded and started using Microsoft AntiSpyware Beta 1 (apparently the only beta they're going to have). It actually seems to be a fairly complete project, though it does seem to contain just a few interface bugs. (From the little I know about Windows GUI programming, actually, these are bugs that should actually be difficult to make, like the vertical scrollbar not performing quite right. You have to wonder if Microsoft inserts these just so people will remember it's beta.)

Overall, a much more satisfying product than Ad-Aware Personal. A while back, Flexbeta's comparison of MS AntiSpyware, Ad-Aware, and Spybot Search & Destroy was touted as showing MS's product as not up to par; in fact, it compared more than favorably with the other two. Each of them found spyware the others did not; AntiSpyware found more that the others didn't, and I'm guessing that those who leave the “send information to Microsoft” feature turned on are the same who will get a decent amount of spyware, further closing that gap (if it hasn't closed already). The article does, perhaps wisely, go on to suggest that no matter which tool you use, you should also use another; I'm not sure that's warranted for the more conscientious user.

PC World also has a review of MS AntiSpyware, which they compare to Webroot's Spy Sweeper, a non-free program with a limited trial. They did half the test that Flexbeta performed, running Spy Sweeper after AntiSpyware, and found (surprise) Spy Sweeper to find extra “infections”; no mention of doing the test in reverse.

I've never used Spy Sweeper or Spybot S&D, though I'm beginning to wish I'd replaced Ad-aware with Spybot earlier. Still, Microsoft's product is looking reasonably good to me, and I have little reason to use another on my Windows system. (To be honest, if there were still a no-cost AntiVirus from Microsoft, I'd probably use it, too; the interface for ClamWin just isn't quite up to par. MS is supposedly working on an anti-virus solution, but it looks unlikely that it will be free to download. If only they still made the version that came with Windows 3.1….)

Last modified Wed Feb 16 10:00:47 2005.

Microsoft to release free antispyware

An MSNBC story reports that Microsoft AntiSpyware's final version will be free to download. This is a good thing (lower case, that is), and it should bring some nice light to the question of spyware and adware. The article very appropriately gives quotes from Bill Gates's speech today, including his note that the capability is “a burning need for [their] users”. Very good.

The article then goes on to talk about the beta testing that went into it, along with how, even in the final version, “[t]he program also includes a feature where users can submit information back to Microsoft so that it keeps up with the latest threats.” Hey, that's great: Mr. Gates, I think someone may be spying on me—can you take a look at my computer for me? Oh, and don't look in the folder labelled “Chris's Private Stuff”, okay?

Yeah, I know what they're getting at, and it's really a necessary part of a good operation like this—but I hope the irony is as clear to everyone else. Wouldn't want to beat anyone over the head to make a point. Hell, I'll probably even download the final version for my last remaining Windows install; at least I can hope that if there's not a for-fee version they won't obviously cripple the free product like Ad-aware does.

Last modified Tue Feb 15 12:59:04 2005.

LotGD, cont.

All right, it seems my endorsement of Legend of the Green Dragon was a bit premature. As I mentioned yesterday, I was concerned about the constant begging for funding, but was willing to deal with it for a short time. After playing last night, however, I began to notice that there were actually areas of the game I couldn't access without making a “donation”. So, meh.

Please note that I'm not suggesting people providing a service (as those at lotgd.net are doing) shouldn't charge—they have every right to. My only reason for mentioning my displeasure with it is that it wasn't what I expected, and I had previously mentioned it as being a fun thing. Now, not so much.

So, I decided to take a look at the LORD incarnation I mentioned at lord.nuklear.org. All well and good, but it turns out that it's just a Java telnet program into their BBS, not really a web version. Again, meh.

If I get motivated enough, maybe I'll take the LotGD code and install it on this site just to play a nice little game or two. To be honest, that seems rather unlikely, as it doesn't (by itself) seem like a good enough reason to install PHP and MySQL, but we'll see. It's not like I really need extra things to take up my time….

Last modified Tue Feb 15 11:17:25 2005.

LotGD

Back in the day, when men were men and 1400 baud modems roamed the InterNet, I first came close to getting “on-line”. In actuality, I visited a dozen or so local BBSs in and around Winter Haven and Lakeland, Florida; I was Hrothgar (or maybe it was Heremond—I can never remember which was which), and didn't even know what the InterNet was. Usually I just tried in vain to save up download time in the Time Bank, just enough so I could get an uninterrupted hour to download that one megabyte bitmap file that just had to be hot, but turned out to be yet another hand-sketched fantasy dragon princess. Actually, the only time I had any real contact with a network that wasn't between a grand total of two computers was when my friend Jonathon got a list of free ftp sites. We learned the very basics of how to use the command-line client, and when one of the sites stopped responding we thought we had shut down the government of Ecuador and maybe we'd better stop while we could.

I never got into chatting with people who lived a local call away; in fact, I still don't chat or ytalk or “instant message” or whatever they're calling it these days. What I did enjoy, however, were door games. The king of them all was Legend of the Red Dragon, or LORD. (In fact, a few years later I found that there are BBSs you can telnet into to play LORD. Did it a couple of times, but telnet is so 1995.)

Yeah, it's still around, but a new, web-based, open-source clone is now available. Appropriately named, Legend of the Green Dragon (which they abbreviate LoGD; I prefer LotGD since I can then remember the website) retains the charm of the original—I've been putting in half an hour to an hour for each of the last couple of days. I think the worst downside of this particular incarnation is the apparent need of every server to solicit funds; to be honest, I'm not usually much of a community participant in places like that. I understand the need to pay for bandwidth, but the constant begging just starts seeming trite after a while.

One other option I should therefore mention is Nuklear LORD. From first glance, it's another web incarnation of LORD, though not open source. (The sysop—wow, didn't think I'd ever need that term again—actually addresses this issue reasonably well in the Nuklear LORD FAQ.) I haven't tried it, but may just switch over to that at some point if lotgd.net ever becomes too annoying.

And now, back to the realm…

Last modified Mon Feb 14 21:36:24 2005.

Medical malpractice

No, I'm not being sued just yet. Today, however, was the first seminar of the GPSS (Graduate and Professional Student Senate) Malpractice Series, in this case a physician, pharmacologist, and Ph.D. of some kind who planned to discuss medical malpractice. The seminar itself was a total bust—it's safe to say that the only thing I learned was that the average settlement for a “nuisance” lawssuit (malpractice or otherwise) is twenty to thirty thousand dollars. (Not that anyone discussed what was considered a “nuisance” suit, but meh.)

The whole concept did get me thinking, though, and a letter to the editor in this month's Southern California Physician magazine had some interesting information: five percent of physicians are responsible for 80 percent of malpractice awards. This first bolsters two of my concerns about malpractice reform: that it makes it easier for incompetent physicians to keep practicing, and that by supporting such reform physicians will be seen by the public as trying to evade responsibility.

What the letter doesn't note, however, is how many physicians are sued without having to pay an award—maybe this is the “nuisance suit” mentioned earlier. Do I believe that physicians are sometimes sued for no good reason? Yes. Do I believe that given any hypothetical “cap” on malpractice awards, there is some sort of malpractice a physician can perform that should be awarded more than that cap? Absolutely.

Is there any possibility that it's the legal system, and not the specific issue of malpractice, that needs to be reformed?

Last modified Mon Feb 14 20:29:25 2005.

Day Off

Took the day off today. Slept in, edited some TiVo video, played a lot of The Battle for Wesnoth, and watched a few episodes of The West Wing from the end of the second to the beginning of the third season. It was the latter that made me think about making a quick post.

After September 11, 2001, The West Wing showed what they called a “play”, delaying the start of their third season. The episode was called “Isaac and Ishmael”, and dealt with a lot of questions popular among those of us who felt impacted by terrorism for the first time. It talked about “why” Muslim extremists and others perform terrorist acts, a bit of the history of such, and so forth, but also began addressing the question of civil liberties in a society that's trying to stay safe. The show doesn't suggest any real answers to most of it, but re-watching it this evening did have an impact on me.

I'm not a particularly soft-spoken guy. People around me are generally aware of my views on a variety of issues, though almost as often incorrectly assume my opinion before I've mentioned it. (In fact, on multiple occasions I've been mistaken for a Republican. Hell, I used to be a Republican—ideologically, not registered—and maybe that's one reason for confusion.) However, there are some things I don't tend to speak out about, and there are other things I'm happy to talk about with just about anyone who will listen, but would rather not mention in writing.

One of those was the staggering decline in civil liberties we've been experiencing over the last few years. I didn't want to talk about it directly, because I'm honestly scared to be identified as any sort of “troublemaker” in that area. It's a vicious cycle: failure to protest leads to more problems which lead to more fear about speaking up.

Once again, though, Aaron Sorkin has shown me the error of my ways. As far as I'm concerned, I'll be mentioning plenty about the decline in free speech that's currently going on in the United States, and will do all I can to change that trend.

I'm quite aware that my parents' generation has botched the job quite nicely. It's starting to look like students who are now in high school aren't going to do any better: a poll over the last several months shows, among other travesties, that “when told of the exact text of the First Amendment, more than one in three high school students said it goes ‘too far’ in the rights it guarantees.” How will I deal with that? By making the most of the speech I have available to me.

Don't despair. This site isn't undergoing any major reformat of content. I'm simply adding a new policy: I'm not going to keep from stating opinion because of my fear of its unpopularity or government support. When I can't do that anymore, I'll either be on my way out of the jurisdiction of whoever's doing the oppressing, or I'll be detained beyond my control—hopefully the former.

To be honest, I probably already would have moved, if I weren't trying to finish medical school and if there were Chili's restaurants in Switzerland.

Last modified Fri Feb 11 20:30:56 2005.

Two site updates

Just a quick note to point out two smallish updates. The first could actually be considered a pretty big deal: I've registered yet another domain: norightsreserved.org. Kinda surprised it wasn't already taken. I've moved the old No Rights Reserved project (such as it was) to the new site, and hope to add quite a bit more, like information about why and how to dedicate works to the public domain. For the moment, still just an example of it in use.

I've also now added a Mac OS X section to my computing project. At the moment, it's just a small collection of tips, things I've spent some time figuring out. With luck, it will save others some time. Expect it to grow as I keep playing with my new toy.

Last modified Mon Feb 7 20:37:20 2005.

These kids today…

Won't bore you with much this afternoon, but I should mention that I did fine on the Repro exam I had yesterday. Not well, mind you, but fine, just fine. And, yes, I worked harder than usual so I'll entirely blame my lack of superiority on the remarkably bad faculty we had for this system. Back in my day we had outstanding, passionate instructors like Ran Libeskind-Hadas and Francis Su, instructors who would regularly blow your mind before telling you how great you were, even though you had to walk around Harvey Mudd at seven in the morning in a olde-tyme El Niño near-freeze.

Okay, I'm in an odd mood. Most of that nostalgic talk comes from reading a couple of items: an article on Kuro5hin talking about dead technologies and a comment on Slashdot about how bad kids have it today. Sure, technology and progress can be great—but that really depends on how you define your terms.

Last modified Sat Feb 5 16:46:53 2005.

Repro exam

So I'm sitting in the school's computer lab, kinda bored, while everyone else around is madly cramming for this morning's reproductive system exam. It's not that I know it all, or that I'm not a crammer; it's that I generally don't tend to stress and freak out during the hour or so before the exam. I've already looked at today's Fry's ad, I've played a game of Text Twist (despite the fact that it only works on Internet Explorer in Windows), checked my Gmail and Slashdot a few times, and still have eighty minutes before exam time. So, I figured I'd do the only other pointless thing I can think of, update this page.

I've actually been working on it quite a bit (and planning even more) behind the scenes; expect some new stuff over the next week or two. Nothing mind-blowing, of course, but a slightly updated layout and a much cleaner operation in general. Stay tuned.

Alright, I just remembered that I should take a look at Kuro5hin and a few other sites. More later, I'm sure….

Last modified Fri Feb 4 08:31:39 2005.

MGM Class Action Lawsuit

I don't generally have a problem with frivolous lawsuits. They make for entertaining reading and writing, and they usually keep lawyers busy enough so that I'm not the one being sued. However, I read today that MGM is settling a DVD class action suit. After the initial panic from reading that several of my discs may be corrupted in some way—some rumors were that MGM was just taking pan & scan transfers and slapping letterboxes on them—I was able to read a long thread on DVD Talk that describes that's not what's going on at all. Turns out this was a lawsuit filed a couple of years ago which just alleges MGM's description of “widescreen” was deceptive. I've seen the diagram in question, which clearly shows that “fullscreen” versions are cut off on the sides and “widescreen” versions show all of the picture that's available. Unfortunately for this case, that's not always the way it works. In some movies (The Princess Bride was the first one I knew about), the camera actually shoots in 4:3, a “fullscreen” aspect ratio. However, the director composes the shot so that it will look good in, say, 1.85:1, and ignores stuff that would be off the screen in that smaller picture. Then, at the theatre (or somewhere in between), the film is shown with the top and bottom cut off a bit, as the director intended. This technique is called “matting”, and it turns out that some movies on DVD have both the letterboxed and unmatted versions. Therefore, technically, the unmatted versions show more picture, but what every director expects you to watch is the letterboxed film. Phew.

So why does this suit bug me? Because this gives the studios more incentive to not release letterboxed movies at all, and to stop even trying to educate the public about the different formats. MGM is one of the few who has explained any reason why letterboxing is better; if a distributor tries to change that to “because it's what the director wants you to see”, then someone's going to cry about Greedo shooting first, and everyone's going to hate widescreen. Grr.

Oh, and not to mention the fact that I've wasted like an hour on this issue this morning….

Last modified Fri Jan 28 07:55:36 2005.

The Mysterious Mac Mini

So I was certainly one of the first “regular people” (yes, I do sometimes define myself as such) to pick up a Mac mini. The thing's quite cute, and full of surprises. Personally, though, I really don't know how much is the machine and how much is OS X. Oh, they're both quite good, I suppose, and it's going to take me a little while to get used to each of them.

The only overlying downside (“overlying downside”? That's got an interesting ring to it.) is that the machine itself is quite clearly made of laptop parts, and operates as you'd expect a laptop to. I generally haven't been discouraged by performance, but the optical drive (a CD-RW/DVD-ROM) sounds horrendous and is quite slow, pretty much identical to the DVD-ROM on my Dell laptop. The only other performance issues I've had so far is the occasional video stutter in the included “MarbleBlast Gold” game.

There are a few other things I haven't figured out, yet, like how to set a host alias. For instance, I want to refer to a machine on my local network as “dante”, but doing so simply goes to dante.aleph0.com, which DNS resolves to the same address as my externally-available www.aleph0.com. One choice, of course, is changing the DNS record, but that really shouldn't be necessary (if only because I do want people outside my network to think dante.aleph0.com is the same as www.aleph0.com).

On Linux or OpenBSD I'd only have to change the /etc/hosts file to refer to dante (and dante.aleph0.com) by the proper internal IP, and I'd be done. That doesn't seem to work here. Okay, technically I'd also have to make sure that /etc/resolv.conf properly searches “file” before “bind”, but according to OS X's resolver(5) man page (and can I even possibly express how thrilled I am that there are man pages?), the lookup keyword doesn't even exist. So no luck there. I heard something about using NetInfo instead, but, quite frankly, need a little more documentation on that before I can figure out what's going on.

But enough bitching. This is a nice system. In the Windows-centric world from which I'm coming, some things are done differently, and there are thus things I'll have to relearn. I'm happy to. The one advice I can give Apple is this: you want people to switch. some of us are fairly Windows-oriented, and already quite knowledgeable. Give us just a little more guidance, and you'll have switchers in droves.

Last modified Sun Jan 23 18:04:34 2005.

One day more…

It's officially confirmed; my Mac mini will be available for pickup from the USC Computer Store tomorrow! I've only been waiting for a little over a week, but it seems like much longer—and I'm giddy as a schoolgirl. (Though, no, I'm not wearing any sort of jumper.) At this point, the thing would really have to suck to disappoint me.

Mad props to the store, too. While all the Apple Store locations around here went out of their way to be annoyed that I wanted to buy something from them, the USC Computer Store not only reserved one for me (so I don't have to wake up early, though I probably will anyway), but they even gave me the Apple student discount. Sure, it's a paltry $20, but it'll go towards a decent Apple keyboard, iWork, or the like. Turns out I don't need to buy a wireless adapter (yet, at least); I just set up an OpenBSD box as a gateway to the rest of my network. I'll still have to shell out for a keyboard and mouse, though, since I only have one set that have USB adapters and they're on the “main” computer. I don't want to move those, so at least it gives me an excuse to buy a nice Apple set.

I've decided to try something new with this little box—treating it more-or-less professionally—maybe “respectfully” is another word. I'm going to try not to open it, but take it to an Apple Authorized Service Center for upgrades. I'm going to try not to hack it, but just run OS X as it is. (Oh, sure, I'll add software, install X11, and run plenty of development-type apps that most Mac users don't, but that's not what I'm talking about here.) In all, I'm going to try to treat it with the deference a nice piece of engineering deserves, whether others consider it “just a tool” or not.

In about three days, ask me if that's still my plan. Who knows….

Last modified Fri Jan 21 16:52:13 2005.

Worst Day of the Year

No, not today, but according to the BBC, it will be this coming Monday. It's not entirely clear if that only refers to Britain or whether it will be the same for everybody, but it's not like I was going to be looking forward to a Monday, anyway.

In the meantime, I can only hope for the best. We had our second “career day” yesterday, in which various hospital departments attempt to describe their specialties and recruit interest. It wasn't like I was doubting Emergency Medicine as an eventual specialty choice, but I do like to keep my options open. Besides, visiting some others before ending up with the ER docs always makes me that much more certain of my choice. Really, no question at this point—call it 98-99.5% sure for now, though that tends to fluctuate by a percentage point or two.

There are a few little things I have been wanting to mention. First, it turns out that California's working on a law to ban the development of peer-to-peer software that would allow copyright infringement. I can only assume they're getting around the Betamax case by making this criminal<