All posts by rbowen

Hats and aerodynamics

After looking for the Ideal Hat for quite some time, I think I found it.

I had my hat from Paraguay, visible in this photo, but it has the unfortunate attribute that it changes size quite significantly based on the weather. It fits *great* when it is rainy, but doesn’t fit at all when it is warm and dry.

Anyways, I got an “aussie hat”, which is a leather fedora, a la Indiana Jones, and I’ve become very fond of it. Except that it has one of those goofy snaps on the side, so that you can snap up one side for no apparent reason.

Well, last week, when it became warm enough to put the top down, I found out what it’s for. You see, when you’re driving a convertable with the top down, aerodynamics are such that the wind blows directly up on the left side of your head, blowing off any hat you happen to be wearing. But if you snap up the left brim of the hat, it decreases the lift, and the hat doesn’t blow off.

Of course, as my mother immediately observed, I’m not sure how that maps to riding a horse. And don’t they drive on the left in Australia anyway?

1994 Rwandan genocide

My faith in the basic goodness of people is increasingly weakening. I really don’t want to believe that people intentionally do horrific things. I want to think that people are caught up in a mob and do things that they regret later. I want to believe that people get drunk and stupid, and one thing leads to another. I want to believe that they lack judgement in a moment of rage, and horrible things happen. These things, while still horrific, are slightly easier to accept.

To think that a government systematically planned genocide, and even imported the implements for this genocide months in advance, is simply more than my mind can grasp. I can’t understand the kind of depravity and hatred necessary to make that happen. And, even if I could accept that one brutally deranged person could do this, the idea that a planning committee existed for this sort of thing is mind boggling. How can that happen in our “enlightened” age.

The genocide trials in Rwanda are revealing things that make it sound like a committee of otherwise reasonable men sat around a board room table and carefully planned the murder of nearly a million people, then oversaw their plan being carried out in less than 100 days.

Conspiracy To Murder chronicles this series of events, with interview transcripts and documentation. The trials seem to indicate that a huge number of people were aware of what was planned, and have kept silent about it for the last 10 years. BBC is covering the trials fairly well.

It’s all very well to blame the UN for what happened, as many have done, but that would be utterly missing the point. Even if the UN had acted immediately, on the first day, hundreds of thousands of people would still have been hacked to death with machetes – machetes which were expressly imported for the purpose – before the first soldier could have been on the ground. No, this has nothing to do with the UN, although Annan has apologized profusely for not doing enough. This has to do with the Heart of Darkness.

I can’t begin to understand what would drive someone to plan such a mass murder. I further can’t begin to understand what would compell *thousands* of soldiers and civilians to go along with orders of such obvious evil, and hack men, women, and children to death while they were pleading for mercy. These things are so far from my understanding that I can sit here and write calmly about them. I expect that if I really understood even a tenth of the horror, I would not be able to retain my composure. I presume this is why nice rational moral people denied that the Holocaust was happening (or happened, depending on your timeframe). They simply could not get their minds around such horror. And if I can’t imagine it, it must not be happening.

I suppose it’s also why people don’t like “Lord of the Flies.” Even though I choose not to imagine it, it still might be lurking right below the surface.

Behind the finer feelings
This civilized veneer
The heart of a lonely hunter
Guards a dangerous frontier

The balance can sometimes fail
Strong emotions can tip the scale

(Rush – Lock and Key )

Blue Hat

As my laptop booted up and the words Red Hat scrolled past, Sarah said, “Daddy, can you make that say Blue Hat next time?”

I found this in rc.sysinit:

[ "$BOOTUP" = "color" ] && echo -en $"33[0;31m"
 echo -en "Red Hat"
 [ "$BOOTUP" = "color" ] && echo -en $"33[0;39m"
 PRODUCT=`sed "s/Red Hat (.*) release.*/1/" /etc/redhat-release`
 echo " $PRODUCT"

Now I’m just trying to figure out what the color codes are.

🙂

More about Kosovo

The stuff in the news continues to be perplexing. The Telegraph claims that Albanians posted as Serbs to commit some of the acts which sparked the violence. If this is indeed the case (and why would they lie, right?</sarcasm>) one would have to greatly mourn a society where people utterly indistinguishable in any other way, hate one another so greatly. In most of these kinds of situations, a member of one of the groups can clearly distinguish a member of the other group by characteristics that would be all but invisible to those of us outside the situation.

Regarding my remarks yesterday: Yes, I can see how they could have been taken as being callous, on another reading, and for that, I apologize to anyone whom I may have offended by those implications. I did not intend to deny the events. If anything I was acknowledging that they had surely happened, and was marvelling at their absense from news reports.

Yes, I did miss the remark acknowledging the retaliatory destruction of the mosque(s).

I suppose I don’t find it at all unusual to have one, or the other, or, more commonly, all parties, in any given situation, somewhat color the truth in order to make a horrible situation seem horrible only on one side. The media, then, will pick the bits of the story that they think will sell papers. I really don’t have any illusion that the media tells me the truth even as much as half of the time. It is for that reason that I don’t watch television news, don’t listen to radio news, and get my news by reading a selection of sources from news.google.com. Even then, it’s hard to miss that *most* of the stories come from the same sources, and most of the time even have the same phrasing. One comes to believe that it’s the news articles that contradict everyone else which are the true ones. And that, undoubtedly, leads me to some pretty radical views. Truth in media seems like an oxymoron most of the time.

And, inevitably, this skepticism extends to everything I read online. If it is on the internet, I question its veracity. I suppose that means I’m pretty much skeptical about everything I read. That’s pretty sad.

To a smaller extent I’m also questioning the interpretations of the motivation. Hatred, which was caused by religious differences centuries ago, has, in many cases, just become hatred, devoid of any religious motivation. Perhaps these people hate one another because they hate one another, because their parents hated one another, because *their* parents hated one another. This, combined with large groups of people that have the same history, leads to explosive events. Granted, this idea comes from out of US culture which is increasingly secular, and so may have nothing at all to do with what’s going on. But it was one of the ideas I was trying to air. The things that are happening certainly seem to have nothing to do with correct religious practice, on the part of either of the sides in the conflict. Yet it is happening. And, so, when people speak of a systematic, strategic, and planned destruction of particular targets, that smacks of conspiracy theory. Looks more like angry mobs to me. Angry mobs seek targets for their anger, and they do things that they regret when they are older.

The idea that Albanians posed as Serbs certainly supports the conspiracy theory. On the other hand, it could be teenage kids that got drunk, thought of a prank, and it got out of hand. I and always tend to attribute to stupidity, youth, and drunkenness things that many other folks tend to attribute to malicious planning and conspiracy.

What’s happening in Kosovo

Although various of my friends have mentioned that there’s widespread killing, and destruction of monasteries and churches in Kosovo – the Albanians doing this to the Serbians – I can’t find anything about this in the news.

There have been a couple vague mentions of violence and that 28 people were killed. I can’t find *any* mention of destruction of religious buildings, although I have looked in more than 4500 news sources.

Furthermore, the vague references to what’s going on all suggest that NATO is doing everything in their power to prevent further bloodshed, while the article referred to by the OCA folks seems to suggest that they are doing nothing.

I find all of this very odd/suspicious/strange/troubling. While I have come to mistrust – well, most of the time, actively disbelieve – the mainstream US media outlets, it would seem that looking at news.google.com on a regular basis would give me enough of a spread of new sources that the overall effect would be that I’d get at least most of the truth most of the time.

So, what’s actually going on over there, and who is putting the spin on things to advance their own particular agenda? Is the conflict primarily the latest incarnation of the ongoing ethnic war that’s been going on for a few hundred years (or since Ishmael, depending on how you count) or is this an organized Jihad?

ReBug

I rediscovered ReBug this week. It’s a *very* shiny little app that shows you how Perl’s regular expression engine works on a partular pattern and string. Wonderful for explaining how regexes work, and even better for assisting in crafting just the right regex for the right occasion.

Riding around with the car top down and the radio on

I love spring.

Yesterday was my first top-down day, and it was sweet. Of course, Sarah usually wants me to wait a little longer to put the top down, so we compromised and put the roof back on, but left the doors and windows off. 🙂

It was just a little chilly this morning, but I left them off anyway. That’s always a big hit at the bus stop, with the kids wanting to climb up on the Jeep and through the missing windows. 🙂

Did I mention I love spring?

Somewhat out of context …

I’m just a little disgruntled. I’m not sure if I was quoted out of context in an attempt to make it appear I was saying something I wasn’t, or if I’m making too much of it, or if my remark was really so imprecise that he didn’t know what point I was trying to make.

I felt that the question was intended to make me say that the security fix was applied only to 2.0 because 1.3 is intrinsically more secure. That’s not really the case. If anything, I think that 2.0 is probably more secure, simply because it is more thoroughly designed. But on both versions, security holes are fixed as soon as they are found. So if we thought that one was more secure than the other, that would be immediately rectified.

I dunno. I’m probably making too much of it.
.

@author tags

When the @author tags issue came up, I refrained from comment, because it seemed to be an issue only with the Java folks. And it’s clear to me that I don’t understand the Java folks, on a number of levels. They seem to be motivated by entirely other things than I am, and so we seem to have a number of disconnects on things that they appear to consider very important.

The things you think are precious I can’t understand
(Steely Dan, Reeling in the years)

So, for those joining late, the ASF board has suggested that @author tags in Java code should be avoided. Not, you should understand, saying that they MUST be removed NOW NOW NOW, but that they are deprecated — not recommended.

This upset a lot of people.

You should read Ken’s remarks on it (here and then more here) for a more in-depth analysis. After all, he is on the board, and I am not.

To me, however, this all begs the question, why are these folks involved in Open Source? I do not mean to imply that this is a simple question, or even one to which everyone knows their own answer. I have thought a great deal about my answer, and I still don’t know that I have one simple answer. Certainly, part of it is for the adulation and glory that comes along with it. And part of it is just the joy of doing something that really matters – something that has significance beyond myself. I’d like to think that the latter has more weight than the former, but the scale slides from one day to another.

But should we have author tags in files? There are docs in the Apache HTTPd documentation that state “this doc written by”, and those have always irritated me. Having thought a lot about it, here’s the reasons that it irritates me.

1) Code ownership is BAD. This is one of the tenants of the eXtreme Programming folks. Yes, this is dogma, not a reason, but I tend to agree with the XP folks more than half the time, so there’s likely good reasons behind it, in addition to my reasons.

2) Why is code ownership bad? One reason is: Because people get their feelings hurt when “their code” gets changed. They take it as a personal affront.

3) Another reason: People are reluctant to touch it. Why has the mod_rewrite documentation remained unchanged for so many years? Because it is Ralph’s document. Has Ralph stated that he doesn’t want it changed? *Of course not*. But people seem to be reluctant to change that one doc, when they tromp all over other docs. I suspect that the same is true to some extent for “my” howto docs, which is why I went back and purged my personal information from them.

4) And another: It reduces the community’s pride in a document. When everyone has contributed to a document, they all feel that the’ve done a good job. Same with code. But if people are keeping score – I wrote 28 lines, and you only wrote 12 – that gets to be more of a self-aggrandizing contest than anything actually productive. The person with the most lines of code is seldom the most important contributor. Often the one-line patch is worth more than 100 lines of broken code.

I didn’t feel that it was worthwhile piping in to the @authors argument, I suppose, because it was clear to me that the board decision was the right one, in the overall goal of improving community. And that it was not dictatorial, so that if an individual project wanted to say, no, we want to keep them, well, then, they can. Also, because the Java people baffle me on the best of days, I was sure that I’d unintentionally step on toes and call someone a self-aggrandizing pompous stuck up fame-seeking gold digger, or something like that. 😉