Learning

To follow the path:
look to the master,
follow the master,
walk with the master,
see through the master,
become the master.

Dante has taught me (with help from Sayers)

The fundamental tragedy of life is that on some level, everyone gets what they want.

Iustus Regis Prodeunt.

Ready to race to you....

Today I developed a coherent sociological theory.

Aren’t you proud of me?

I was talking with Jon and Libby about generations and TV shows. As you may have noticed, Happy Days is a 50’s TV show from the 70’s. And That 70’s Show started in the 90’s. We should be due to emulate the 80’s any moment now. What’s up with this trend of skipping 20 years in our nostalgia?

I’ve always just kind of assumed that these distinguishing characteristics of the decades come because people realize the flaws of the last decade very clearly after it has just happened, so the next decade will know better how to avoid those problems.



New theory: people in general tend towards emulating the decade that had the most formative influence on their development in childhood. As a child, they pick up the characteristics of a culture that they don’t really participate in, yet it affects them deeply. These resurface again when they are older and think more about their childhood. Also they tend to get nostalgic later in life. But at this point, they are in a position to really make an impact on culture as a group. So two decades after a cultural phase has passed, it becomes really vogue and hip again.

The theory is that people are most impressionable at junior high age. That’s when they absorb their culture that will affect them. According to the 20-year gap observed, this means that it’s at age 32 or so that people have the most impact on society around them. Sounds about right.

That’s good—it means I’ve got 12 years before I hit my peak.

Skript Kiddi3z take II

This time it’s a little more scary.


I was looking over the referral logs to philisha.net to see who’s been visiting. I saw that I was linked to by http://www.mazfaka.ru/, which was interesting…. A Russian site, huh…. Let’s see what it is…. Yikes: Network Terrorism! Let me tell you, to have your site listed on a page titled Network Terrorism is pretty unnerving.

It turns out that the site is a listing of a bunch of sites that are vulnerable to a certain password-grabbing exploit. Basically all the links on that site point to pages that will output the contents of a filename that you give it. On certain poorly-configured servers, this can allow anyone who understands this vulnerability to access any file on the computer, including password lists. These are usually encrypted, but a brute-force attack can crack them given enough time.

I’ve realized for some time that my site could theoretically allow for this to happen, but I never imagined someone would actually try it! Thankfully Biola’s admins are smart enough to block permissions in this case, but it’s a good lesson to learn for strong security measures even when you don’t think them necessary.

The Undiscovered Country

Holy Cow!
I found the end of the Web!

Questions, so many questions

• Was Leo Tolstoy an anarchist?


• What’s VNV Nation’s best album?


• How is William Gibson’s blog?

One of these days I’m just going to start a list of little questions to ask Jon Clede....

Gondolin has fallen

Gondolin has fallen!

Before start assuming I’m about to make some sociopolitical metaphor about an ideal or institution and Tolkien’s subcreation: Gondolin was my web and database server I used to help host the forums for Cynical Studios.

Cynical Studios is the flash movies web site of my fiancee’s brothers. I had a beige G3 Power Mac running Debian GNU/Linux behind their home router. There were many problems including DHCP throwing the router’s forwarding off and their ISP blocking web serving ports, but what finally killed Gondolin was a hard drive crash. That really annoyed me because I put all this work into fixing one problem, and another would pop up, like trying to get a bubble out of wallpaper. Then there was something that was just completely gone.

In the end, it just wound up not being worth fixing, so I moved the forums to Jacob, the same Biola server that hosts philisha.net. It’s too bad, because now I’m just stuck deeper in the Biola Bubble. Before if I had some kind of problem with Biola’s connection, I could always just ssh over to Gondolin and see what things were like over there. For instance, my friend Josh Brown’s blog Expressed Thoughts is frequently inaccessible because Biola’s name servers just plain forget how to get to it sometimes. (idiocy) When I had Gondolin, I could just go there to look up the IP address, and then I’d be good to go.

Bah!

The fullness of life

You haven’t lived until you’ve operated an industrial-strength paper-shredder.

At Saint Chads, God is Groovy!s, God is Groovy!

Canon Dale Owen Th.D. speaks!

My own tradition has been called Christian, but since that excludes so many in today’s world, I prefer the description ‘People Who Are Open Hearted.’

License to Confuse

Libertarian arguments against the interfering inefficiency and endless paperwork of governments are much more convincing when read in that pinnacle of beaurocratic ineptitude known as the DMV.

So as I walked back from the DMV, I savoured the delicous irony (as well as the delicious artificially-flavoured fruit snacks) of being a legal driver for the first time in my life whilst having to walk to the bus stop. (Zeugma!)

Noteworthy

Look: cool things!

• 
  A guy who plays classical music with horns attached to his body


• 
  Classifying the world in terms of Pirates, Ninjas, Elves, and Dwarves


• 
  A guy who leaves strange feedback on eBay


• 
  Gatling Roman Candle launcher (wmv 3.5 MB)
  

Hungry?

Welcome to Dante Restaurant. Could I interest you in a Ruggieri Burger? No? How about some Cerebrus Pies?

Hacker

Here’s a discussion I was having in my Topics in Information Systems class:


Dave Bourgeois writes:
[Alan C.] Kay states that knowing how to program is essential to using the computer to its fullest extent. Do you agree?

Yes, I think this is true to a degree.

The function of a User Interface is to make things easier to use. Therefore the better a UI is, the less computer knowledge will be required to use a program. That’s why M$ software is so dominant.

The problem here is that you run into the Powerpoint syndrome. People who only know how to use the program and don’t know as much about computers in general will be very bound by limitations of a program. Kay also said that a good program will allow users to do things that the programmer had not thought of. This gets progressively harder the “better” a user interface is, because the UIs are specialized—ie they allow easier access to certain things.

Sendmail is a great example of this. Sendmail is an SMTP server—it is a program which will relay mail from your computer to another. The usual use for it is your email client contacts Sendmail with a message to send to a certain user at a certain computer. This is great if you always want to send email in the ways that your email client knows. However, if you want to send email in a different way, such as with different headers or headers with false information, there’s no way to do that from within the GUI. You have to drop directly into Sendmail with a command like ‘cat | /bin/sendmail’ followed by everything you want the email to contain. Thus the GUI is actually a very limiting factor in this case. It works great when you do what it wants you to do, but if you are thinking outside the box, then you are pretty much stuck—there’s nothing you can do within the GUI. You have to resort to the command line.

This is why you need an Open system. When the email client and Sendmail are integrated so tightly that the user can’t step in at any point, the user suddenly finds that once he’s progressed beyond a certain point (the limits of the imagination of the programmer), and he can do no more with his computer.

Thus my thesis: a Good system will be scalable—it will have a good GUI that anticipates the needs of beginners, but it will not be limited to that interface. Any user who develops beyond the need for that GUI will be able to do far more than the original programmers have anticipated if the system is open to the point where all its functionality is exposed to someone who displays the requisite interest. Most people think it’s inverted—the higher-level you are thinking, the better you are using a computer. Neal Stephenson’s brilliant essay In the Beginning was the Command Line solidly refutes this way of thinking.

At the risk of causing a Holy War, I’m going to use this to explain why Windows is insufficient for intelligent computer users. None of its programming interfaces are open, and when they are documented, it is often done incorrectly. But before even mentioning the programming interfaces, you are bound to the GUI, and no functionality is possible beyond it. The command line in Windows is essentially a joke—it hasn’t changed since 1993, and even then it was worlds behind where Unix was ten years before that. If you have a more creative use for your system, you have to reverse-engineer the system, as opposed to ‘emacs /usr/src/myProgram/main.cpp’ and reading the source right before your eyes.

Side note: this also explains why Mac OS X can get away with having a completely proprietary system that is still usable by intelligent hackers. (Again, I mean hackers in the Raymondian sense—creative programmers.) The part that is closed is the GUI, which hackers aren’t really interested in anyway. The functionality all lies within the FreeBSD base that it’s built off of.

Wow, that was a mouthful, but I think I have justified my epistemology of hacking, so it was worth it.

Numerology

I got the seventh job I applied to this semester.
I got the third job Apologetics job I applied to.

This is a good omen.

What postmodernism means to me

You should need a license to philosophize.

Overheard in the alcove:
Postmodernism is the philosophy of relationships and emotions. This is different from modernism, which is based totally on reason and makes science out to be a God. Postmodernism is more of a female way of thinking, and modernism is more male.

Beaurocracy is the mother of ineptitude

I’ve had this fact reinforced over and over as I talk to more people who are working in large organizations where political power trumps competence.

As my friend Josh Brown said:
Innovation always stops when some idiot behind a desk looks at the genius and says…”I don’t understand, maybe later.”

In conclusion, people are dumb.

More than all you ever wanted to know....

....about Alchemy.


For years people have been trying to use science to enhance their lives. Using what they have known of the properties of everything surrounding them, people have looked towards science to help them accomplish such goals as making everyday tasks easier, saving lives or simply finding new ways to amass personal wealth. This has been going on for years, and still is. During one period of history (c. 1400-1650), alchemy sprang up as another way for people to harness science for their goals.

The traditional way of looking at alchemy is to picture a wild-haired medieval sorcerer-type scientist in a tall stone tower mixing various potions from assorted glassware, trying his best to change everyday common metals into gold. While there were certainly some of those stereotypical alchemists, the study of alchemy consisted of much more than that. Although alchemy began out of the desire to change metals into gold and to produce a mystical “elixir of life,” it was more than that. Alchemy was a way of looking at various elements in the earth and what they were made up of.

According to alchemy, all matter is composed of three main “principles:” mercury, sulfur and salt. Much of this was borrowed from Arabic science. It was similar to Aristotle’s idea of the four elements. (earth, fire, wind and water) Alchemy was a step ahead of the four elements in one thing: the alchemical principles were actual elements or compounds, still recognizable on a modern periodic table. Aristotle’s elements were abstract, and nobody could ever find a sample of pure earth or pure fire.

Alchemy theorized that metals were formed slowly within the earth when the right amount of these three principles came together. This idea seemed to make sense, because most naturally occurring elements were found in the earth as metal sulfides. Alchemists could easily identify sulfur due to its unique smell when burned.

The different proportions of these three principles in elements would supposedly account for some of its physical properties. An abundance of mercury would make the substance be volatile and easily melt, while sulfur would bring with it combustibility.

Under this system of thought, it was perfectly reasonable for scientists to believe that they could turn any metal into gold. By their theories, gold formed in the ground slowly from other metals. If the alchemist could speed up the process by controlling the amount of sulfur, mercury of salt that the metal came into contact with, chances are that somewhere along the line the metal would change into another metal.

Looking back on this, one may begin to wonder why it was not completely obvious to alchemists that their entire system of thought was flawed. They spent 200 years trying to transmute metals into gold and never did. Do they never give up? One reason they kept going is that some metals they actually did succeed in transmuting.

Lead sulfide (called galena) occurs naturally in the earth. In its natural state, it is metallic and looks little like lead. When heated in the presence of oxygen, however, it gives off gasseous sulfur oxide and leaves behind pure melted lead. An alchemist observing this reaction would interpret it as the metal galena being transmuted into lead by taking away some of the sulfur that was in the lead.

Sometimes, small amounts of silver or gold would exist in the ore samples that alchemists would use. Alchemists would heat these ore samples, removing the predominant metal in the sample and ending up with a small quantity of the valuable metal. This also lead alchemists to believe they were transmuting metals into silver or gold, only serving to further more research in the field.

As time went on, probably due to a lack of results, interests in alchemy began to erode. With new advances in science, most notably the acceptance of mass as an important factor in an experiment, research was conducted that proved alchemy’s basic principle theory to be false. There was a small revival of interest in alchemy when radioactivity was discovered to change properties of elements—some saw this as true transmutation—but this subsided as knowledge in modern chemistry and physics progressed.

Although alchemy never saw its primary goal of turning an ordinary metal into gold accomplished, much of the studies that alchemy did left behind useful knowledge. Even though the period of alchemy was considered a dark age scientifically, it saw strides forward and led to some important studies.


-Phil Hagelberg, 2000

My robot is better

Jon thinks his robot is the best, but he’s wrong. Mine is better.




It has a rocket launcher.