Ramblings of a Wayward Code Slave

Thanks to a link from an article on Slashdot, here's a ComputerWorld article talking about how rootkits can possibly be used to create spyware and other malware that is virtually invisible on a PC. No process information, nothing. Scary times loom ahead...

Here's an interesting read on how to do long-range WiFi (IEEE 802.11b) on the cheap. It's instructions on how to create a shotgun-style Yagi antenna using a Pringles can and some PVC to replace the cheapo omnidirectional on your WiFi box. Cost? About $6.50. Gain? About 12 db! They tested it with a 0.6 mile link but claim that with a clear line of sight it could go up to around ten miles.

For those not "in the know" a Yagi is a directional antenna that focuses antenna transmissions into a rather narrow forward-oriented beam with little-to-no energy being wasted at the sides or behind. Most people are familiar with Yagis since that's the classic TV antenna and ham radio operators love them since (if they can afford the cost) a Yagi can help make long distance contacts happen a lot easier. A Yagi commonly looks like a series of horizontaly-mounted parallel metal rods on a vertical pole. The Pringles shotgun is a Yagi antenna, but obviously not a traditional-looking one.

Since I only access my wireless network from one location, which is nowhere around the actual wireless router, this antenna should be more than able to hammer through the walls that the little vertical can't and give me a better signal strength. Of course, it's really designed for long-distance WiFi, like beaming it out over a lake to some lodge on the other side.

Hmm, I wonder if homeowners' associations would think a Pringles can on the roof would violate their CC&R lists? Three guesses...

Once again tonight I had explorer.exe die on me, this time in the middle of an iPod sync, an ftp download, and a ssh session. I hate it when that happens. For the uninitiated, explorer.exe is the user interface for Windows -- being somewhat vague and imprecise about it, explorer is what runs the taskbar at the bottom of the screen (Start button, tasks, system tray, etc.). When it dies, the taskbar goes away. Fortunately, the operating system notices when this happens and it respawns explorer which recreates the taskbar but you always lose most of the icons in the system tray. Have you ever tried to get at the settings for an application that exclusively uses the system tray icon and the icon isn't there any more? Oh joy.

Short of the dreaded Blue Screen of Death, i.e.,

there are few things worse than having the taskbar respawned. 90% of the time it's a mandatory reboot. I checked out the specifics of my particular explorer.exe failure since I have an assembly language debugger on my computer and I discovered that it was a blown pointer. Some numbskull still has code in the operating system after all of these years of having explorer.exe (since Windows 95!) that does a faulty register indirect jump, like jmp [edx], or pops a bad value off of the stack back into the EIP register. Apparently the address was outside of what the segment registers said was legal for the explorer.exe process and the operating system killed it as a defense mechanism against totally crashing. I don't see why these bugs haven't been tracked down over the past ten years and squashed.

All I know is that if "Longhorn" behaves this way then they're going to have to "Shoehorn" my boot out of someone in Redmond. The new explorer.exe could then search for customers who are still willing to buy their products...

I just saw a commercial for Cherry Vanilla Dr. Pepper. It sounds like a truly horrible concoction, especially since Dr. Pepper tastes like cough syrup, but I loved the commercial. It's a reference to a short skit from Sesame Street, which I watched religiously as an infant and small kid. The short has one of the muppets, maybe the Cookie Monster, singing "Muh-Num-Uh-Num" in a gruff voice with a bunch of muppets in the background backing him up. It's just a silly thing that was between educational skits to entertain small kids, but when I heard that commercial the memory came flying back. I hadn't thought of that in over 30 years, I'm sure.

Sesame Street was a great show. I watched it every day of the week along with the Electric Company (and they each came on twice a day) and it was the reason I was able to read when I was two. My folks weren't the aggressive get-em-to-read-quick type; they were content for me to learn how to read when I started school, so they didn't actively try to get me to learn the alphabet and other stuff that those Type A personality parents do. Don't get me wrong -- they always put my education before anything else, but they didn't want to rush things when I was a little kid. They didn't even know I could read until one day in the car on the freeway in Houston when I pointed to a truck and said "Foley's". Foley's is a local department store chain. They thought it was the symbol on the truck that I noticed, so they pointed to billboards and other stuff, asked me to read it, and were amazed when I could read it all back to them.

Sesame Street and the Electric Company were fine examples of television at its best. All of those people on Sesame Street had Ed.D. degrees and really cared about bringing education to the masses. They surely made a difference for me.

Thanks to Don Knuth's website at Stanford, I just found a link to INTERCAL, probably the most obscure and nonsensical programming language ever devised. It was designed in 1972 by two people at Princeton University as a language that was as much unlike anything else in existence as possible. One can see FORTRAN roots in it, but everything else is like randomized characters. Originally posed as a joke, a lot of professional programmers got taken away with the insanity of the langauge and a compiler was created for UNIX and eventually ported to an Atari of all things.

And computer science students today waste their time with Xbox games and first-person shooters. The shame...

By the way, Don Knuth is a fellow who looks like Peter Lorre, is personally responsible for about half of what we know in computer science, and plays an organ with eight-foot high pipes in a two-story room in his home. His magnum opus, The Art of Computer Programming, is a three-volume tome that's been translated into a dozen or so languages and is on more geek bookshelves than the K&R C book. He also gave up e-mail as of January 1, 1990, saying "it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime." This man has a 34-page curriculum vitae. He's the definitive computer science badass.

I somewhat recently posted an entry on vehicles and GPS devices, forecasting their abuse in a future society. I finished it off with a link to an article where California and Oregon were contemplating taxing drivers by the mile. It now seems that California, not to be outdone by its northern neighbor, is mulling it over more seriously than ever. Their argument is that hybrid gas/electric vehicles are cutting into taxes for road maintenance and since these hybrid cars use less gas per mile then eventually the quality of the roads will suffer. While I can certainly understand and sympathize with the predicament that would come with a significant percentage of hybrid cars on the road, I think that this vision is way off in the future and that government-accessible GPS -- for taxation or anything else -- is a serious privacy concern and a potential end-around on our civil liberties.

Government-accessible GPS would likely cause the Dept. of Justice, Homeland Security, the NSA, and the CIA to close shop early that afternoon and pop corks in celebration. I don't like the looks of a future society where my every move can be tracked, taxed, scrutinized, archived, analyzed for trending information, and otherwise mined and exploited to divine various things about me. It's not that I have secrets to hide -- I don't -- but I still don't want the government looking over my shoulder every time I drive my car. Also, given the big business lobby it won't be long before GPS data will be available to insurance companies, advertisers, and other corporations with an interest in knowing where you go, when, and how.

Before you dismiss this as idle paranoia, consider that kids are already getting RFID tags in some places so people can track them. Data mining of financial records, RFID tags, GPS in vehicles, what's next? Pretty soon government and/or big business will know everything about you and thanks to predictive software can reduce you and your future to a statistic. Don't see it? Forget I said anything and wait twenty years. Shoot, wait ten.

What can we do now? Support the people who fight against this kind of infringement. Even if you don't agree with a lot of what these folks take on (I sure don't) they're on the front lines defending our Constitution and way of life. The irony is that to defend it they often have to defend people whom most consider reprehensible and grossly offensive. So be it. If our way of life is to survive then we must defend with intense passion the rights of all people to express themselves and be supported by the Constitution, doubly so for those we'd like to relegate to a dark hole somewhere. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is another civil liberties organization who has greatly shaped the landscape of the digital world. Given the nature of GPS tracking and RFID-tagged people, these folks will likely be at the forefront of any effort to curtail or limit this use of technology.

Before you dismiss all of this as the idle ramblings of some paranoid conspiracy theorist, remember that this is exactly what the people pushing this use of technology are expecting you to do. They're banking on your apathy or your desire for security to get what they want.

Those who give up liberty for the sake of security deserve neither liberty nor security. -- Benamin Franklin

The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it. -- Albert Einstein

Someone from Great Britain e-mailed me yesterday, asking me why my domain name was theeds.net. I don't think I've ever explained that, so here goes...

When I met my wife, she didn't like calling me Edwin. She said that Edwin sounded so formal and I'm too informal a person for it. She also has this habit of adding Mr. or Mrs. in front of a person's first name as a sign of affectation, e.g., if your name is Bob then she might call you Mr. Bob. Well, I became Mr. Ed, no relation to the talking horse.

When we married, I jokingly started calling her Mrs. Ed. So when it came to be time to get our own domain, I got "The Eds" -- theeds.com was taken, so I got theeds.net instead. I could have gotten the-eds.com or the-eds.net, but since I also envisioned the domain as hosting a site where I could do consulting work I thought that theeds.net was obscure enough to prevent potential clients from thinking that they were hiring multiple people named Ed.

Thus ends the story and, hopefully, your perplexity and consternation at my domain name. At least we didn't name it something hideous.

This is an interesting read. I approach the paranormal -- telepathy, telekenesis, etc. -- with a certain amount of skepticism, not so much because I don't think the human brain capable of such things but because I don't think the ordinary human brain at our stage of evolution capable of such things. Nevertheless, this gives pause for thought.

http://www.rednova.com/news/display/?id=126649#121

Fans of the sitcom Seinfeld will no doubt remember the hilarious Soup Nazi episode, where this fellow who owns a soup kitchen acts incredibly rude to his customers and throws them out of the shop if they order the wrong way. Ironically, this is based off of a real-life situation so both the Soup Nazi and his rules are real and you can even inquire about his return policy.

Well, New York City might have the Soup Nazi, but Ruston is home to the one and only Cheese Nazi. She works at the McDonald's up on the hill by Tech, and it is apparently her mission in life to regulate all cheese consumption on the premesis. How did this person achieve Cheese Nazi status, you ask? Ahh, here is all the proof you'll need:

Observation
About two months ago, I went through the drive-thru and got two double cheeseburgers. When she handed the bag to me, she mentioned "That's a lot of cheese you have there." This shows her burgeoning obsession with cheese and identifying consumers of said product.

Condemnation
Last month, I went through the drive-thru and got two fish sandwiches. They come with cheese on them by default. She was taking orders this time and, when I ordered the fish sandwiches, she asked if I wanted cheese on those. I confirmed my desire for cheese, to which she replied "I don't know why people eat cheese on fish, it's just so yucky together." This demonstrates her prejudice against cheese and the lengths to which this bias can affect her professional attitude.

Regulation
This month, I went through the drive-thru and ordererd a Big 'N Tasty on special, which is neither big nor tasty, but I digress. This time around, she was managing the person taking the orders who apparently was a trainee. I asked the trainee for cheese on the Big 'N Tasty, but the other woman answered. In an authoritative tone she said "The special is for the sandwich without cheese. You can't add cheese to that. If you want cheese you'll have to order the sandwich at regular price." She had finally taken her prejudice against cheese to its logical but tragic conclusion: discrimination. Yes, you heard it here first, actual discrimination against people ordering cheese. As I only had $1 on me and the regular sandwich with cheese is $1.89, her flagrant discriminatory attitude oppressed me to the point of withdrawing my request for cheese.

This shows anti-lactism at its worst. Today it might just be some cheese on a hamburger, but what about tomorrow? One day you could be refused cheese on your pizza or that crucial grating of parmesan on a Caesar salad. Would anybody actually want macaroni by itself? Heresy! We must band together to stop the Cheese Nazi from her mission of world cheese domination. So go to your local McDonald's and say "extra cheese, if you please!" Stop the insanity.

Despite the humor, this is actually a true story and the Cheese Nazi really exists. By the way, the Soup Nazi has animated GIF banners which are so hilariously inane that I'm breaking my policy of no animated images on my website. I just gotta for this one...he's an angry man serving soup.

After the previous post I made on that poor sap from Google who blogged his way to unemployment I started thinking about how I got the job I've got right now. It's one heck of a story...

Prologue
Around the time I graduated, which was in May of 1997, my dissertation advisor forwarded an e-mail to me from this guy named Mike O'Neal who, I discovered, was a USL graduate who did his Ph.D. work under him as well. He was the program chair for Computer Science at Louisiana Tech and they needed a replacement for Donald Schwartz, who was migrating to Millsaps College in Mississippi. Don, incidentally, was another USL grad who was only a couple of years ahead of me, so we knew each other and occasionally dined and played cards together with a common group of friends. Anyway, getting back to the story, I already had a good job as a software engineer in Lafayette but I had been interested in a teaching career for some time. As a result, I decided to go for the interview and just see how things went. Little did I know the adventure I was about to have that day...

A Slow Start
I showed up for the interview on Memorial Day, which was the only day I could get off due to my work schedule at ICON. I got to Tech around 10 AM to meet Barry Kurtz for the beginning of the formal interview. Unbeknownst to me at the time, all seven of the entrances to Nethken Hall were locked. So here I was, large person that I am, wearing a coat and tie and walking around the perimeter of the building, trying door after door. By the time I made it to the front again the sweat machine was in full gear and Barry was running across the street from Bogard Hall with his hand up in the air, calling my name. Since my body was now slowly baking in my suit I decided to dump the coat in my car and just go shirt and tie for the interview. Big mistake. About 5 feet from the front door I felt a sting on my left shoulder and instinctively swatted at it. It was a mosquito. A rather sated and somewhat bloated mosquito. And now I had this red blob about two inches in diameter on my left shoulder which I had to explain to everyone I met during the day.

What Channel's Got Judge Wapner?
The one-on-one interviews went well despite the red blob, and lunch was uneventful as well. We went to Anthony's, an Italian restaurant, which might have been a disaster if I had ordered something with red sauce; however, I knew better and got a salad instead. Then came the presentation, a mandatory item when interviewing for an academic position. While they were setting up the projector in the conference room, I went into the bathroom to comb my hair and wash my hands. Being the butterfingers that I am, I dropped my comb on the floor. When I bent over to pick it up I heard the worst sound imaginable. RRRRIIIIIIIIIIIP. It was the sound of five inches of my pants deciding that the left side and the right side had irreconcilable differences. It was also the sound of my interview immediately flying south for the winter. I then proceeded to go into the conference room and give what I'm sure will stand out in the annals of academia as the absolute worst presentation of all time. Dustin Hoffman couldn't have held a candle to my Rain Man tour de force. I just knew that everyone could see the huge rip in my pants, so the sweat machine came back for an encore performance and I was talking like Dan Quayle at a debate. As I left the interview and headed home, I was just glad that it was over and that I could quickly and quietly return home in disgrace where I could nurse my utterly deflated ego back from the brink of annhilation.

Say What?
You can imagine my complete shock a bit later at the realization that I got the job. After the red blob, the sweat machine, the ripped pants, and the Rain Man presentation I was wondering what they had been smoking to have decided to hire me, but I was thankful for whatever chemical compound it was. Later on I shared this story with Mike O'Neal amidst some well-deserved laughter and, as it turns out, they didn't notice the rip. They just thought that I was really nervous during the presentation. If I ever get nervous like that normally, I think that the men with the butterfly nets will come around to bring me to my brand new padded cell.

Epilogue
So thus ends the story of my Interview from Hell which, ironically, landed me the job. To this day I'm not certain whether they just had a keen eye for talent or whether that smell in Nethken Hall on Memorial Day was desperation at the possibility of being short a faculty member, but it really doesn't matter. The past eight years have been a blast and I've come to realize that I was born to be a teacher. I am and always will be thankful to Mike and Barry for giving me the opportunity to make a difference in this world and to discover the joy of being able to help others. I tip my hat to you, gentlemen...

The recent ill health of Pope John Paul II has resulted in a news story courtesy of the Chicago Tribune on the actions of the various networks in preparation for the Pope's eventual shuffle off of this mortal coil. Apparently, this started way back in 1996 with some networks (CBS, ABC, CNN, etc.) renting out prime hotel balcony rooms on St. Peter's Square for the past nine years.

Perhaps James Earl Jones, in his Darth Vader voice, should re-record that immortal line, changing it to "This is GNN."

Apparently people are getting more and more inventive with weapons for assaulting others. The question is, should this person be charged with assault with a deadly weapon?

http://www.desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2004406070315

Well, CNET is reporting on Mark Jen, a new Google employee who "is no longer employed at Google" apparently thanks to comments he made in his blog. I guess the world is full of wide-eyed idealistic fools who think that they can make public comments on their job with no ramifications, but employers have a different idea of what's suitable for public consumption than these folks do. A world where one can speak out on any topic without fear of reprisals is certainly an attractive concept, but this utopian idea is nothing more than vaporware in the current corporate environment of trade secrets, cutthroat competition, and top-down hierarchies. While a part of me sympathizes with Mark Jen and his dreamlike theory on blogging, I can definitely understand where employers wouldn't want company financials or less-than-glowing comments about the company blogged by their employees.

If anyone has been paying attention to my blogging history, they've probably noticed that I don't make many comments at all about my employer or what's going on there. This is deliberate. Be it good, bad, or indifferent, the goings on at my place of business are best left there; to do any differently for any employer is to risk one's reputation and possibly one's career. And consider that I work for a university, the last bastion of idealistic dreamers. There are just some things that aren't done, some lines that aren't meant to be crossed. Part of being a professional is knowing when to speak and when to shut up, and this is learned through observation or experience. Fortunately for me, I've learned through observation; folks like Jen have learned the hard way.

I wish Mr. Jen the best with his future employment and truly feel bad for his current predicament, but perhaps through his bad fortune others can be educated and something good can come from his present hardship. I will leave it to others to decide into exactly what he put his foot, but I for one certainly hope that he extricates it quickly and gets back on track with his life.

A while back my wife and I were out in the truck heading to Monroe and on our way we passed by a church which, here in north Louisiana, isn't a rare occurrence. Most of these churches have catchy sayings on their signs to make passers-by think for a moment; these are usually things that go in one ear and out the other for me (or is it eye?). One caught my attention, though, and I thought I'd share it. It's an idea that transcends religious denominations and can be appreciated by almost everyone except the most cynical. For me, it's been rattling around in my head and pops up at those times when I'm complaining about how hard life is, or feeling melancholy at leaving the university and the students I've grown to love, or just whenever I have to face something I'd rather not consider. I don't know if this will have the same meaning for you as it's had for me, but here it is...