Anthology of Interest

Up until recently Tamara and I have been using Nitro on Mac OS X for all our instant message needs. Nitro is a Jabber only client, so we've been using a MSN gateway to talk to people using MSN. Both jabber.org and the MSN gateway have been increasingly flaky lately, so it was time for a change. A client which could take Jabber, AIM, MSN, etc was required.

I tried out Adium a while ago, and found it kind of over done... too much stuff. I also tried Gush, but it uses a flash interface (I think) and it's too big and slow on our little iBook. Psi is another one. It runs on OS X, Linux, and Windows. I never liked the look or feel of it though.

Enter Fire. I have never seen it on Jabber.org's client list before, but it's been around since 2000, almost five years. It handles all the required networks and seems to work very well so far. It packs a lot of functionality and configurability, but the interface seems well thought out and it is entirely usable. Recommended, if you need a Jabber client that can also talk to MSN, ICQ, etc. with a pleasant functional interface.

The New York Times has an interesting article about Unintelligent Design, which mocks "Intelligent Design". The main point of the article is that if life was intelligently designed, why are some things done so stupidly? Non-functional parts, sloppy design, and inefficiencies abound, along with all the commonly cited things like eyes which are used for the justification of God, um, I mean, a designer.

Of course maybe God, er, the designer rather, is kind of a sloppy, wet-behind-the-ears, newbie engineer who hasn't quite figured out how to do things. Maybe mammals are like long running software projects, where things have been grafted on, added in, re-factored, and so on. Functionality, like the ability to nurse infants, was taken out of Human Male 2.3, but somebody forgot to remove those pesky nipples. Or maybe they were added in with the intention of allowing for males to nurse, but there were problems with the hormones and since the female's mammary glands already worked fine anyway, they didn't get finished.

Besides, how would you determine when to make males lactate? You could do something cool with pheromones and stuff, where they could sense new offspring, but that might have been really hard. Or maybe just make it happen approximately nine months after ejaculation... But that would mean that most men would be lactating all the time!

Anyway, by analogy with human designers, one can see how God, I mean, the designer (!), could make such mistakes. I guess if the designer was some kind of space alien, I could see it. But God is supposed to be omnipotent right? He (she?) should know better than to make such mistakes. Of course, maybe the mistakes were intentional, to, you know, throw us greasy little monkeys off the scent! Like the dinosaur bones! They're all planted, to make us think dinosaurs used to rule Earth! You know, to confuse us! God forbid (!) we revise our creation myths in the light of new evidence! (Hmm, maybe he did...)

Anyway, I'm about done offending my friends and family (and possibly random people on the intarwebs) now. I don't like intelligent design. It's purported to be a credible alternative to evolution, but it doesn't hold up in a scientific framework. If you believe in God and believe that God created the earth, fine, just say that. Don't try to weasel out by invoking some unknown, unknowable, irresponsible designer. At least have the courage of your convictions and say where you're coming from.

Here is an article which points out some flaws in a book which attempts to debunk evolution.

OpenSSH tunnels are so cool. I have a database/web app server I have to take care of in Calgary. Since the machine is behind a firewall and only ssh connections are allowed through, I can't connect directly to the web sever to use the web based management interface or for testing. I used to either open a graphical browser over the X11 connection ssh automatically sets up or use a text mode web browser.

It turns out that creating an ssh tunnel is a much better way to do things. I never really figured out what all the fuss was about with ssh tunneling, but I realized today why it's cool.

ssh -L 8300:localhost:80 mch@adams

That command allows me to log into the remote machine (adams is an entry in my /etc/hosts file) while setting up a tunnel. The -L switch tells ssh to listen on port 8300 on my desktop, and when it receives a connection, ssh connects to port 80 on localhost from the point of view of adams (i.e. itself).

This is really nice, since some programs only listen on 127.0.0.1 and not on an external interface, so they are practically firewalled.

Installation and testing of new versions of the web app is so much easier when I can use the browser on my desktop to do it!

AMAZING!

I helped Jamie get his wireless card working on his laptop today. He's bravely switching everything over to Linux, and he's got Debian on this laptop. It's a Satellite 2450 with a Linksys WPC54G card. That card has a Broadcom BCM4306 rev 02 chip in it, and it appears on the PCI bus at 14E4:4320.

There's a bunch of different cards built around this chip, and it seems like any one of them may work with ndiswrapper. It would be better if there were actual Linux drivers available, but what can you do. There are all kinds listed on this page, just search of BCM4306. I think is the driver that ended up working.

This trick, which is mentioned in one post on that page, is to change RadioState|1 to RadioState|0 in the /etc/ndiswrapper/*/*.conf files. Apparently 1 means off and 0 means on.

Marli: "Is it human nature to always want something more?"

Unequivocally yes! I've thought about this quite I bit... I used to wonder why we humans were using up all the Earth's resources and endlessly competing. Wouldn't it be better if everyone were happy where they were and felt no desire to increase production or make more money or have a bigger house?

Now that I'm a little older, and I wonder what I am going to do with the next bit of my life, I see goals in my future, and I know why no one wants to live in a static world. The human spirit is rooted in competition, against oneself and against others. There's always a desire to achieve and move forward. Always a desire to do something new and interesting.

Balance? I think it's impossible to achieve perfection in any form (although I keep trying for it with certain projects). The best you can do is compromise, which is a balance, and be happy with the result. Or at least learn from it.

Part of moving beyond the safety phase of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs is finding your footing in the world. Like balancing on a ball, but being stable enough not to fall off when the world throws something at you. I don't know how this relates to the temporal balance you mention about being both able to live on an island and enjoy it, but it's what I think of as balance in life.

There are people who live in VW vans and live on noodles and live to climb or surf or whatever. They've given up everything in their lives to pursuing one activity to it's fullest. Do they lead balanced lives? If they are happy and are able to deal with what the world throws them, then arguably yes. (As long as they have safety.)

If you are so single mindedly driven toward a goal that you neglect everything else in your life (drug addiction, working 80 hr weeks even when there is no firm near term deadline), do you have balance? It's like balancing a hockey stick upright on your hand (or like a control system for an inverted pendulum). If you make slow careful and considered movements, you can walk or even run and still keep the hockey stick from falling. If you move too fast or lose your concentration, then the hockey stick will fall over and you'll have to stop to pick it up.

In general, I think having balance and happiness is avoiding looking for the greener grass, or at least carefully considering why the grass is greener. Obviously there are times when a change simply has to be made though. Perhaps because your hockey stick keeps falling over.

This started as a comment to Marli's blog and got a little out of hand. I hope it has some relevance to what Marli was trying to say.

I was browsing Dave's blog the other day and stumbled across his notes about referrer spam and what to do about it. The "recent referrers" lists on our blogs have recently been filling up with poker sites, among other things, so much so that we decided to taken them off because they were getting embarrasing! I checked my logs this afternoon and was pleased to see "client denied by server configuration" messages for the referrers I had blocked.

w00t!

The Gmail hype seems to have died down a bit, or at least I learned to tune it out. With the realization that my UVic email account will expire when I graduate (hopefully sooner rather than later), I logged into Gmail today to see if my account was still active. Indeed it was, and even better, the pop interface finally works, so I can send and receive email with Thunderbird. Mail sent from Thunderbird even ends up in your Gmail "sent items" folder, if you use the Gmail smtp server. Nifty!

Anybody need an invite?

I recently decided to give building Phred with Python support on a Westgrid SGI machine today. This turned out to be more difficult than I really wanted it to be...

In the previous entry, I talked a little bit about the difference between self-guided and tour vacations. Most of the stuff we did was tour-guided, aside from our trip to Havana and our somewhat unplanned excursion to Matanzas. Self guided tours can be far more interesting when you get to know the locals a bit, which is not something you really get to do when you are on a tour-tour. This gives a lot more insight into the people, the place, and the culture. For us, we got to go where (resort) tourists normally wouldn't go, and it ended up being one of the most interesting and memorable parts of the trip.

With every intention of going snorkeling, Cathy, Andy, Mary, Tamara and I arranged for Oliwa, the same driver who took us to Havana, to drive us to Coral Beach for the day. Unfortunately for our snorkeling ambitions, the weather had turned ugly and the sea was quite rough. It's not fun to try and snorkel when the waves are tossing you against the coral and when you can't see anything anyway due to all the sand being stirred up.

While in Cuba, Tamara's brother Jamie pledged to set up a web site to host the various pictures people took. I haven't uploaded any of mine yet, but they are available here already.

Alana got much better pictures (number two) of creepy Jesus than I did.

Proof of SCUBA (I'm on the left).

Marli mentions an unusual armed robbery in Vancouver: some teenage girls held up a gas station and stole a handful of chocolate bars. Armed robbery, for chocolate bars! I could maybe see it if they were ten years younger. Thats about the age I was when I did my chocolate thievery, but between my parents and the shopkeeper, I got tuned up pretty good and learned my lesson.

Wacky!

There are two major forms of vacation: self-guided, and tour-guided. Of the two, I can't decided which I would prefer. The only two major trips I've ever been on have been tour-guided. The first was to Italy with my high school. The second is of course this recent trip to Cuba.

The advantage of the tour-guided trips is that you don't have to think. The downside is that you don't necessarily get to do what you want to do. Self-guided trips can be very stressful to arrange and organize, as we found out during our trip to Havana. There are a couple of different tours offered that go to Havana. One is a day trip, where they take you to old Havana and other touristy things. The other does some touristy things, but the focus is on the Tropicana cabaret show, which doesn't start until 10:00 pm. Some of our group really wanted to see the Tropicana show, others weren't so enthusiastic about it. One came only for the cigar factory tour. Unfortunately, the factories were closed for holidays.

We ended up renting a van and a driver to take the ten of us into Havana. Tamara found herself appointed tour guide for the day, a position which she initially embraced enthusiastically, but which wore on her as the day progressed. It turns out that steering nine family members around Havana is about as much fun and just as difficult as trying to herd cats.

Our local family run video store has a nice 3 older DVD's, 3 days, for $3.75 deal. Our recent selections were The Birds, The Peacemaker, and The world is not enough. Of these, I think The Peacemaker was my favorite.

If you like Tom Clancy style thrillers like Clear and Present Danger (Harrison Ford is soooo dreamy!) then chances are good that you'll like The Peacemaker. This movie was made in 1997, but it's surprisingly relevant in a post 9/11 world. It probably has a greater impact now than when it was made.

Spoilers follow...