2007-12-24 21:10 | fche blog politics lethality of combat
What’s the death rate of US soldiers in Iraq, as compared to civilians in the US? Make a guess, then read on.
Read more...2007-12-14 19:18 | fche blog seriously snow friends
Winter weather brings out the worst and the best in people — along the thin spectrum of normalcy in north american suburban life.
Read more...2007-12-12 12:28 | fche blog tech goodbye noise
It probably passed in one ear and out a hundred times: “Minimize noise in your working surroundings!”. I got so used to the loud fan noises from my ordinary workstation that I was no longer aware of the slight tension and dread at approaching my home office. Finally, the computer performed an exquisite, maddening, death spiral of instability, which last week resulted in its retirement.
My new workstation arrived just two days after ordering it from the other side of the country. It’s a lovely little nearly-silent machine from Anitec. There is a serenity in the room that has been missing for a long time. The downside? I listen to music rather quietly now, and it doesn’t quite block out brat noises from the rest of the house.
2007-12-03 19:21 | fche blog eric how many
Our 3.0-year-old boy stunned tonight by asking “How many things are there in my imagination?”.
2007-11-04 11:05 | fche blog eric healthy angst
Over the last few weeks, our elder boy Eric has experienced existential angst to be proud of.
Read more...2007-10-15 00:06 | fche blog seriously shad valley's ungoogleables
Nearly twenty years ago (my god — an adult lifetime ago), I attended a summer program called Shad Valley for high schoolers with an overachiever tendency. What of them/us since?
Read more...2007-10-10 09:44 | fche blog seriously happy coincidence
I’m feeling a little prouder today to be associated with the Red Hat name.
2007-10-04 16:12 | fche blog enun-dorsals princess diana
Like everyone (?) else, I thought she was an attractive woman.
Then, one day, I took a closer look at just her face – covering over her hair-do and her fashions. She looked merely average – perhaps even masculine.
How strange.
2007-09-29 20:13 | fche blog stuart first words
Stuart waved and said “bye-bye” to me tonight, a bit over nine months after he arrived.
2007-09-25 10:49 | fche blog politics columbia pretensions
New cultural simile:
2007-09-21 21:41 | fche blog enun-dorsals kid books
It will not be long now before our older brat Eric can start taking in Virginia Lee Burton’s book Life Story. It is an amazing piece of work. Predating Edward Tufte by decades, this lady managed to squish the Earth’s biological history into a beautifully written and illustrated book supposedly for kids. It displays a technical rigour more appropriately found in a textbook, while managing the tricky business of smoothly changing the time/space scales as the story moves to its personal, tear-jerking conclusion. Maybe the book is too good to share and I’ll buy another copy just for me.
2007-09-12 14:02 | fche blog tech desperately seeking attractive window manager
Perhaps some member of my huge readership can help me: I’m looking for an X11 window manager, which makes its window decorations somewhat “sticky”. Specifically, I’d like the mouse pointer to be attracted / snap to control areas like resize borders, window management buttons. I use big screens and windows with small decorations (to minimize wasted real estate), and I don’t want to spend so much effort in precisely hunting for them controls. Any suggestions?
2007-09-11 17:03 | fche blog enun-dorsals proud guilt
On several occasions, friends have related unsolicited stories about their private lives. Three of them stood out in that the storytellers were proud of what they did, even though they seemed wrong.
Read more...2007-09-08 09:22 | fche blog politics friends and osamas
Reading the transcript and some commentary about osama bin laden’s recent video clip, I can’t help but note (as many others do): how come his talking points are so close to those of many leftie folks in the USA? I assume even the lefties think of him at least as an enemy – does it not make them take pause and consider … “Can I really be right, if my enemy agrees with me?”.
2007-08-18 22:35 | fche blog eric to swear or not to swear
At great risk to me, our elder boy has reinvented swearing.
Read more...2007-08-17 21:47 | fche blog politics the secret to immortality
Ontario Liberal minister Michael Bryant has found the secret to immortality. And it involves one of my favorite toys: handguns!
Yes, every human currently alive will stay alive, forever, if guns cease to exist. Good riddance, funeral parlors, cemetaries, undertakers, and overachievers. Hello, steep medical costs for the elderly, discontinuation of automatic retirement age, and a special big hello to the impending real estate crunch.
Or maybe, Bryant is only promising to outlaw funerals, not death. Oh, that stinks.
2007-08-17 21:18 | fche blog seriously lousy is worse
The adage perfect is the enemy of the good, and its friend worse is better are well established. They have a pearl of truth, and pearl of evil in them.
Read more...2007-08-13 11:41 | fche blog eric kid games
A few months ago, Eric invented a little word game.
Read more...2007-08-03 18:21 | fche blog tech systemtap safety
Sun’s Bryan Cantrill still pulls out this old chestnut about why dtrace is supposed to be the one true way of instrumenting a system.
Read more...2007-07-24 12:45 | fche blog tech ICFP '07 contest
Like in a few previous years, I dabbled in the annual ICFP programming contest. This year’s was the least enjoyable.
Read more...2007-07-18 15:27 | fche blog tech closed open source
The gall … EnterpriseDB may be a fine product, but open source it is not. Press releases like this one simply lie, as it is clear from elsewhere that source code is not available to their customers. It is as if Microsoft called Windows an “open source” operating system, merely because it contains some old BSD network code. Appalling.
2007-07-17 15:20 | fche blog tech linux i/o elevators considered harmful
My home server has a LSI megaraid_sas (Dell PERC 5/i) card to manage its stable of hard drives. It should be given more credit for its smarts.
Read more...2007-06-30 06:32 | fche blog seriously political genius
Roseanne Barr is getting into the act of amateur punditry. She clearly needed more cranial engagement when she wrote this:
IMPEACH THE PRESIDENT AND THE VICE PRESIDENT, THEY ARE TRAITORS TO AMERICA, . . . SAVE THE DROWNING PEOPLE IN NEW ORLEANS! ANYONE WHO MENTIONS PARIS HILTON ONE MORE TIME MUST DIE!
With that extra cup-o-joe that morning, or with some psych counselling, she might have skipped that last part – where she calls for her own death.
2007-06-26 19:11 | fche blog tech bind9 views considered unharmful
An extreme web performance bug with my new gallery2 setup is new evidence that bind9 views are a good idea.
Read more...2007-06-22 20:08 | fche blog eric tropria eht ot emoclew
The subject exclamation is heard frequently during our afternoon family walks around the block. Eric yells out this phrase (or one of a few similar others), syllable by syllable, when he wishes to track down the sources of an echo. Confused passerbys just tilt their heads in wonderment. I guess they can’t hear backwards.
2007-06-22 14:19 | fche blog enun-dorsals time travel
In another late night grocery shopping outing, the usual 70’s / 80’s muzak played on the PA system.
Read more...2007-06-05 12:07 | fche blog tech big disks, little bios
My x86-64 home server box has 4TB of raw storage capacity, recently doubled from 2TB. That could have been more trouble than it was worth, as we start hitting limits.
Read more...2007-05-22 13:32 | fche blog tech how not to use linux dm-raid5
Here’s an excellent way of losing hours of work for an officeful of people.
Read more...2007-05-10 09:56 | fche blog seriously ultimate "in joke"
I can’t quite believe what I’m reading on BoW Today.
What’s a Six-Letter Word for ‘Humidor’?
“Bill Clinton Pens NY Times’ Crossword Puzzle”—headline, Reuters, May 7
2007-05-07 15:59 | fche blog politics endangered species
On election night, scattered violence was reported across France. Police reported that 270 people were taken in for questioning and that 367 [actually, 730] parked vehicles had been torched. On a typical night in France, about 100 cars are burned.
2007-05-07 13:13 | fche blog tech unused software
Here is a little Fedora-oriented shell script to tell how long it’s been since any program included in a given RPM has been accessed, i.e., used. Packages that show no usage in many days might be considered for deletion.
Read more...2007-04-04 16:16 | fche blog politics biker gang
Something tells me that, had this bike rage incident taken place in a town where defensive firearms use was more popular, we would have had a lot less carnage and a valuable learning experience for the bike gang.
Confusion, however, quickly turned to terror, she said, when the swarming cyclists began wildly circling around and then running into the sides of her Toyota van.
Filled with panic, Ferrando said, she started inching forward until coming to a stop at Post and Gough streets, where she was surrounded by bikers on all sides.
A biker in front blocked her as another biker began pounding on the windshield. Another was pounding on her window. Another pounded the other side.
“It seemed like they were using their bikes as weapons,’‘ Ferrando said. One of the bikers then threw his bike — shattering the rear window and terrifying the young girls inside.
2007-03-28 21:26 | fche blog eric better bee
The elder brat dropped our jaws today. After his bath, I casually asked him … “How do you spell ‘submarine’?”. In about fifteen seconds, he calls out every letter correctly. “biplane?” “brantford?” “welcome?” “yellow?” “bravo!”. At most, one error per word.
The little guy is 28.5 months old. Somehow, he’s related to this.
2007-03-22 16:10 | fche blog seriously thank god for the thesaurus
Case in point: the judging scorecard for the “Red Hat Challenge”.
2007-03-20 22:55 | fche blog eric, stuart updates on parenthood
The last four months have been a turning point in my home life, and it’s because of the brats.
Read more...2007-03-11 19:43 | fche blog enun-dorsals sesame street oldies
Great minds think alike. For the last few days, the mystery performer of two lovely little Sesame Street songs has been on my mind.
Read more...2007-03-10 07:02 | fche blog flying, tech bad ILS
Who knew the Instrument Landing System had a nearly undetectable failure mode?
Read more...2007-03-07 20:02 | fche blog flying hooray for digital television
Canada’s Discovery Cvilization channel has a new show on. Aviation people will love it, if they pony up the few bucks a month for a subscription.
Read more...2007-03-04 16:52 | fche blog politics news according to beijing
This afternoon, drudge points to an AP article about China’s military buildup. One little sentence caught my eye.
Read more...2007-03-02 13:56 | fche blog seriously carbon offside
One of the purported ways of fixing one’s “carbon footprint” is by buying “emission/offset credits” as penance for one’s sins. Whether at the personal or national level, this is wonderful stuff. One can either cash in or laugh in.
Read more...2007-02-27 16:06 | fche blog seriously work chat
Geeky electronics humor at work.
/foo/ Samsung’s serial connection is also female
/foo/ I am so stupid, so I right now have female with female
/bar/ wups
/bar/ go get a straight-throu male-to-male adapter
/fche/ in san francisco?
/foo/ fche: yeah in one of those places “rainbow flags” are flying high ;)
2007-02-22 20:32 | fche blog flying understatement of the day
One ‘David’ on Bruce Schneier’s weblog:
Sure, there was a major security issue on September 11, 2001…
He was responding to me.
2007-02-22 12:58 | fche blog seriously tasty fried toddlers
From Australia, comes a breathless report about global warming and toddlers in hospital.
Read more...2007-02-22 08:31 | fche blog tech Genie's Frame Problem
I figured why it is that, in every story where the a character gets “three wishes” from some agent of the supernatural, it always ends up badly.
Read more...
2007-02-11 14:47 | fche blog seriously recycling bullshit
An 30-minute long fisking of 20 years of propaganda.
2007-02-05 20:53 | fche blog eric, stuart two timer
Parents: never trust tiny people in skirts with your sons.
Read more...2007-02-04 10:00 | fche blog seriously green gas
It’s not hard to vent on the subject of “global warming” and the hysterical reporting thereof. But it’s hard to do it with style. Plus … isn’t it somehow strange that the IPCC releases its executive summary (”... for policymakers”), months before it releases the science versions? This makes the current document way harder to check than a normal science paper. It’s almost as if it’s intended that way.
2007-01-26 21:29 | fche blog seriously stunted vocabulary
secretist: (n) one who secretes secrets
with thanks to colleague David Lloyd
2007-01-24 11:44 | fche blog politics dangers of fox bashing
Among the many lefty people of my generation, at least two tasty little media attitudes appear popular.
Read more...2007-01-21 22:17 | fche blog politics venezuela
Hugo Chavez has officially been elected dictator in Venezuela. Chin up though – while Hitler got started in much the same way, Chavez is unlikely to fill the destructive britches of that older dead megalomaniac.
2007-01-21 17:07 | fche blog tech powerless
Note to self. When your computer starts behaving weirdly – hanging at the slightest provocation, screen flickering artifacts when it’s busy, check for the health of your power supply. One of mine started dying, and I blamed the failures on the video card, instead of the real culprit. Just two years young, one more ATX power supply bites the dust.
2007-01-13 18:17 | fche blog seriously north korea
Oh my god – I don’t know what’s funnier:
- the songun blog is a satire, and has smuggled out DPRK-internal propaganda videos
- the songun blog is real and is officially posting DPRK propaganda videos
Please sit down securely and consume all beverages completely before following this link.
2007-01-04 14:07 | fche blog tech does the GPL really cross library boundaries?
For many years now, I’ve taken it as an article of faith that the GPL’s authors have been on firm ground when discussing the relationship of derived work, a legal concept, and of libraries, a software modularity concept.
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