willfe.com

Unborn zygotes everywhere today celebrated (however the clumps of cells can actually celebrate) the news that Kansas Governor Sam Brownback signed into law today a ban on "requiring" any pharmacist or doctor to administer or prescribe any medication that they believe might result in the termination of a pregnancy. Women's rights activists in the state are probably wondering when the next round of witch trials are going to get ramped up this season.

All the hyperbole and nonsense of the anti-choice debate manages to come crushing down on this latest trend of silliness -- otherwise qualified, supposedly competent pharmacists choosing not to dispense medicines that are prescribed to their customers because it violates their morals. That choice in itself isn't the problem -- it's the expectation that seems to flow from it that those who make it will be "protected" from repercussions. In the state of Kansas, of course, that expectation has now been made real.

I'm still a fan of letting the market settle problems like this, though. Let uncooperative busybody pharmacists refuse business and turn away customers. There are plenty of much friendlier and less judgmental, nosy and presumptuous pharmacies (and pharmacists) all over the place who will cheerfully accept the new business. It seems like this is one of those problems that will take care of itself naturally sooner rather than later.

Just imagine the "list of non-compliant pharmacies" web sites or discussion threads that'll get started once people start comparing notes...

Tomorrow I face the not-so-pleasant task of translating all the nice, shiny front-end configuration work I've done in the past year on our Cherokee server at work into the more standard, "banal" Apache style, as performance with Cherokee in HTTPS (SSL) requests has been depressingly poor.

I'm frustrated with this, though, simply because I can't find any references at all to Cherokee's support (or lack thereof) of "SSL session caching," a feature which, when enabled in Apache, suddenly made a test copy of an app we use daily fly like a bat out of hell (and that's on an Amazon EC2 "micro" instance!). Apache was just as slow as Cherokee in handling SSL-based requests right up until I flipped that session caching switch. Suddenly the "performance hit" was gone -- the first request still took a second or two, but after that things were nice and snappy.

Does anyone out there have any ideas on whether Cherokee even supports this kind of session caching? If it can, how does one actually convince it to do so? I'd rather not spend the bulk of my morning writing directives :)

I plan to write more on this subject later this week, but for now I wanted to briefly share an idea I've been kicking around in my head for awhile.

With goons like the MPAA and RIAA now colluding with American internet service providers to threaten "escalating action" against individuals merely accused of infringing on copyright, it's time for all of us (this includes you) to do more than simply boycott these companies and their products.

What we need to start doing, in addition to refusing to pay these companies a dime, is to support artists, authors, designers, publishers and other companies who do the right thing. I bought Trine 2 and The Witcher 2 today to support two game publishers because they use no Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) on these games (plus, Trine 2 now has a Linux client).

To best cut out the MPAA/RIAA middlemen, we need a two-fanged attack: eliminating their cash flow is the first step, but providing a financially stable and suitable environment for the actual creative people who make all the things we enjoy to thrive is the more vital second step. Killing the middlemen who serve as a barely-functional life support mechanism for our modern day artisans will only kill them off too unless we provide something better.

So vote with your wallets, folks -- don't just do it by putting the wallets away, do it by doing business with good people visibly so the bad ones can see you doing it.

The issue with comments is fixed (turned out to be nothing related to Disqus, which was behaving normally), but the unfortunate side effect is that since things were misconfigured, a couple of comments are now attached to the wrong URL for the site and I can't seem to move them within Disqus' admin panel. In short, they're lost :)

So I wanted to thank Nicole for commenting to offer support and encouragement for my presentation (which went really well, incidentally), and I also wanted to thank SeedM8 for commenting about how to find where their servers are located (I did ultimately decide to stick with SeedM8 for my seedbox anyway, as they are suitably offshore, which satisfied the last lingering requirement I had).

So, er, yeah, comments are working again! This time I won't misplace any :)

I've just noticed there's a template goof of some sort on this Mingus installation, so Disqus thinks every link on the site is the same conversation (whoops). I'm working on fixing it, so standby. Should only be goofed up for another couple of days at most. Sorry about any nuisance this might cause. Contact me at willfe@willfe.com for urgent issues regarding the site.

In what can only be described as much a surprise to me as it must be to anyone else, a paper I co-authored earlier this year was reviewed and accepted for publication by the Simulation Interoperability Standards Organization and I've been invited to present the paper next week at the 2012 Spring Simulation Interoperability Workshop in Orlando, Florida (I'm on page 93 of the agenda -- click the blue "Agenda" button to view it).

The paper, An Innovative Approach to Processing and Converting Environmental Data, focuses on tackling some of the challenges we've encountered while working with data sets that indirectly relate to (or work with) SEDRIS. It would never have been possible for a paper like this to be written without the stupendous amounts of support, encouragement and hard work by everyone on the SEDRIS core team, including my colleagues (part coworkers and part friends :)) at the office here in Orlando.

I'll be presenting it Tuesday as per the schedule shown on the agenda. Wish me luck!

Right now I'm sitting in the "cafe car" of an Amtrak train, heading north (from my Orlando stomping grounds) towards Washington D.C. for a nice vacation with my lovely girlfriend. It's 1:10am as I type out this sentence. The car is silent, and has been for about the last hour; except for the train's on-duty conductor and the engineer actually driving it, most everyone is asleep now. There's the occasional little flicker of activity as someone passes through the car or one of the other two people parked here wake up or toss & turn, but otherwise things are strangely peaceful and serene.

I'm taking full advantage of my Nexus S (running the latest CyanogenMod Ice Cream Sandwich nightly build) and its cheerful willingness to share its cellular data connection with my laptop via Wi-fi), doing things that just five years ago would have been considered impossible, or at least impractical. I've installed a bunch of add-ons into Visual Studio 2010 to make it less monstrous, updated the Qt SDK, downloaded the Boost C++ libraries, sqlite3, and a few other nuggets in their entirety, and transferred nearly 2GB of audio files from my NAS at home (naturally I forgot to load them onto my laptop before we left for the station!).

What's nicest about a trip like this is I get to actually enjoy the journey getting to D.C. (and back) because I'm not driving. While I was happy with how fast I managed to drive across the country to visit my parents last year (40 hours, driving straight through), I'm grateful for the opportunity to have a good 17 hours straight of "moving from point A to point B" without having to be at the helm myself, deal with the imbeciles running the TSA, fight my own nerves in a cramped airplane seat, or cope with the grim realities of an extended bus journey. There are plenty of restrooms, lots of room to get up and walk around for a stretch, comfortable seating wherever I go, and since we're firmly planted on the ground my irritating and irrational fear of flying isn't bothering me non-stop throughout the trip. It's just so nice to have someone else do the driving for once.

The accommodations are just great. The food for sale is, of course, low quality and ridiculously overpriced, but there are 120V electric outlets at every single seat, the chairs are huge (with arm and foot rests, reclining backs, leg supports, and adjustable trays. Cellular reception has been very hit-or-miss, but there have been plenty of pockets of good connectivity, and quite a few times along the way I've actually gotten better network performance than I do back in Orlando.

I've been banging out a bunch of C++ code for a project idea I've had brewing in my head for a few weeks now, and it's amazing how productive I can be just by parking myself in the cafe car with my laptop and going nuts with the compiler. I'm writing what I hope will be a cross-platform, unintrusive and flexible generic file tagging utility, with no dependencies on specific filesystem features and enough configurability to let users either stash all tag information in a centralized database file or place them as human-readable plain text files in either every directory where at least one file (or the directory itself) has a tag assigned or in key "base" directories (implying that both recursive tagging and "one text file lists tags for all files/directories near it" will be supported).

I'm trying my level best to use "best practices" for this thing; the tagging mechanism itself is being plopped into a standalone library that uses only the C++ STL and a couple Boost libraries, but that requires nothing special when simply being linked against (i.e. the header file for the library doesn't reference Boost or sqlite3 at all). I've put in lots of flexibility in terms of how the various functions can be called (if you care about specific failures in batch operations, you can pass in an extra vector that will be updated to list all failed items, but if you don't, things still work and behave sanely) and I think I've got a decent API for the thing put together already. I'll find out for sure whether it's a good interface or not when it comes time to start writing the actual GUI and command-line frontends for the thing, probably later this morning once I finish the library's functionality.

The nice thing about this train ride so far is that I can finally devote some good amounts of time to projects like this. At home, there's usually so much going on and/or more "pressing" matters to tend to that I can't sit down and give myself a few hours straight to play with this sort of thing. I'll probably get more code written in the next few hours than I normally would in a month of at-home "hobby time."

I'm this happy and we haven't even arrived in Washington, D.C. yet, where I'm quite eager about the very large number of free/cheap things that actually look/sound interesting there. I'm particularly anxious to check out the National Zoo, and of course all the various Smithsonian Institute facilities scattered around the capital. The Library of Congress is on my "fingers crossed hope I get to go see it" list too, and I'm sure once we arrive there'll be so much more cool stuff that pops up unexpectedly that we'll actually have to scramble to see it all.

Oh, and did I mention trains still kick ass? :)

After using SeedM8 for quite awhile, I decided to look around for other offerings (not because of any dissatisfaction with SeedM8, mind you, just curiosity and maybe an overzealous hope of reducing my monthly outlay a bit) to see what else was out there. A disappointing stint with Seed.st (whose rTorrent configuration doesn't appear to have DHT enabled, so no magnet links ever worked -- pretty useless for my needs) ended quickly, so I'm on the hunt for a new seedbox. What I need:

• Unmetered up/down bandwidth

  It doesn't matter much how fast that bandwidth actually is, so long as it's better than American "consumer-grade" broadband, e.g. at least 100mbit up/down or better; what matters most is that it's unmetered and truly unlimited (SeedM8 did this very well with its M.50 (and higher) slots)

• rTorrent client

  There's no better BitTorrent client, period. Sorry, Windows users, but this is yet another instance where Unix beats Windows hands down.

  Note: I don't care all that much about whether ruTorrent (the de-facto standard web UI for rTorrent) is available, but if it is, being able to install plugins unfettered is preferable (again, SeedM8 did this well).

• Magnet link support

  Technically speaking, Seed.st supported magnet links, but they never actually connected to anything or managed to fetch the actual .torrent files they pointed to. This was presumably because DHT wasn't enabled, but I couldn't verify this as there's no way to check.

• Shell access

  I don't want/need root, of course, but it's certainly handy to have "raw" access to my account's files (both torrented data and config/hosted files). Again, SeedM8 provided this. Seed.st did not.

• VPN

  I haven't actually used this much just yet, but given the current climate in America (with the MAFIAA effectively driving the government's behavior concerning "intellectual property") it's becoming clear that it'd be a good idea to start using one.

  This is another spot where SeedM8 did well.

• Offshore

  You're probably wondering at this point "why not just stay with SeedM8 since they were so perfect?" The answer is simple -- their domain name ends in .com, and while their whois information is a "DomainsByProxy.com"-guarded one, the provided address is an American one. This concerns me for two reasons.

  First, the .com domain could easily be seized by the American government, essentially on a whim, solely based on accusations from MAFIAA organizations or agents, disrupting my access to the services provided. Second, there's no way for me to determine whether the seedbox itself is located outside America or not, or whether the company providing it to me is located outside America.

I can't in good conscience make use of American-based hosting services of any kind, including the .com, .net, and .org domains I currently hold (but will be letting expire this year after the near-disaster of SOPA) given the United States government's generally hostile attitude towards net neutrality, free speech online, and even basic internet connectivity and technology in recent years, so I worry about using SeedM8 without confirmation that they're an offshore operation that just happens to use a domain in a US-controlled TLD.

So, any ideas/suggestions, folks?

Recently I bought two of these little guys and have been spending some quality time getting them set up and running. In fact I do them a disservice, as "getting them up and running" is a matter of sticking a bootable USB flash drive in them, installing an OS, and rebooting.

These little machines are quite simply the best "bitty boxes" I've ever had the pleasure of working with. They're absolutely tiny (you could hold a stack of them in one hand), they're surprisingly fast (dual-core AMD E-350 CPUs running at 1.6GHz, and can handle up to 4GB of RAM), and they just work.

I slapped a 32GB SSD in each of them for "holy crap that's fast" performance, and installed XBMCbuntu on them both to make them into media centers that can play absolutely anything I've thrown at them and that happen to be running a stable, bloody useful Linux distribution underneath.

At $170 for the barebones kit, these things can be outfitted for less than $250 if you forego the SSD, or $300 if you don't, and you've got yourself a miniature beast that fits in the palm of your hand -- 802.11n WiFi and gigabit wired ethernet, 6 USB ports (two of them 3.0, four of them 2.0), HDMI and DVI outputs, a 5-in-1 card reader, audio in/out ports, and a warm fuzzy feeling as you marvel at how fast something so small can be. Oh, and they come with a VESA mount to let you bolt the suckers to the back of an LCD monitor quickly and easily too. Plus a driver DVD that actually contains useful drivers.

Linux is always the better option anyway (for myriad reasons, from its low cost and freedom to its technical superiority to its competition), but these things even run Windows admirably. Ubuntu supports all the hardware in these things out of the box, including the Radeon HD 6310 integrated video (you won't be gaming much on these, but that's about all they won't do).

They're just neat. You should buy one. Because owning neat stuff can make you smile. :)

P.S.: I feel compelled to point out I was not compensated by Foxconn (the manufacturer) or Newegg (the vendor I linked to) for this post. I really do just like the little buggers enough to gush about 'em.

...of llama excrement. I have never before worked with such an insanely idiotic, badly designed, horribly broken, desperately fragile piece of software, and I've worked with LILO before.

Pray to whatever god(s) you worship if your root disk starts throwing SMART errors signaling it's taking a turn for the worse, because when you get to work actually swapping disks out, you're signing up for a road trip through a valley of insanity populated by insane Microsoft Windows developers and guarded by their demented friends in the marketing department.

Only Microsoft could devise such a devilishly incompetent boot loader mechanism, one so brittle that its own tools, designed to repair the miserable thing, mind you, routinely have to reboot the affected system several times before getting things "right." Only Microsoft could develop and sell an operating system whose boot loader, so very trivial to break even on a good day, can somehow convince it that a fully licensed installation is actually pirated.

... my Ubuntu installation remains unharmed ...

Rant completed. Carry on.

I got tired of trying to resurrect the existing content properly from willfe.com prior to the move to a new VPS; all I had to work with was a backup snapshot of the old VPS and it just didn't want to cooperate on the new one (64-bit vs. 32-bit is a bitch sometimes :)). I'm leaving the old site up the way it was on a new subdomain, old.willfe.com, in case the web crawlers (or the occasional humans) want to take a look.

More junk on the way as I get things set up again.