Traffic lights

Dear City Council member,

Just wanted to let you know how much I enjoyed the brief outage of the traffic lights around Lexington, following the ice storm of the past weekend. As you know, these intersections operated as 4-way stops while the lights were dark, and, in almost every case, this vastly improved traffic flow. In particular, at the intersection of Reynolds and Shillito, which is on my way to work most mornings, yesterday morning I waited about 12 seconds, as compared to my usual 3 minutes. Most mornings, I sit at that intersection anywhere from 2 to 4 minutes, while 3 or 4 cars drive through the intersection in the other direction. I then have about 25 seconds to get through the light before it change again, so if there are more than 3 of us, someone has to wait another light. But, while the lights were out, it was like old times, back before the unneeded and unwanted traffic light was added to the intersection.

Unfortunately, this morning the light was back in operation, and, once again, I sat for 4 minutes while 3 cars went past on Reynolds. The light on Clays Mill, however, was still out, so I managed to get right throught that intersection without the usual 2 minute wait. Yesterday, it took me 6 minutes to get my daughter to school, whereas, when the lights are working, I almost never make it in less than 12.

I noticed a number of other intersections, also, where traffic flow was a lot faster than usual, because the lights were out. I had always assumed that lights were intended to facilitate traffic flow, not hinder it. Clearly I was mistaken.

So, if you can arrange for the lights to be out more frequently, this would save me a great deal of time and frustration. If you could bring this up at the next city council meeting, this would be a great service to our community.

Thanks for your time.

More ice

It was quite interesting driving around today. There are a bzillion icecicles on everything. Cars are encased in an inch or more of ice. Trees are giant ice sculptures. The roads are not particularly bad, but every few miles there’s a branch hanging right down into the road, and this always seems to happen just as someone is coming in the other direction.

There was almost nobody on the roads today, which is just as well, and is probably the reason that I saw not one single accident. However, a small plane went down near somerset, and from the pictures, it was because of ice.

I need to get my printer working again, so that I can print some of the pictures I’ve taken. Although the printer was detected immediately, it does not seem to be printing anything but plain text correctly, and I just don’t have the patience to wrestle with it right now.

Ice Storm

There was an ice storm last night. Left quite a mess. There are a number of trees in the road, or branches that are overhanging the roads so low that I can’t drive under them. I took some pictures.

IRC Quotes

I’m pawing through old IRC logs, to see if I can find useful recipes for the book I’m working on. I say some really strange things on IRC.

Here’s some samples:

(Someone asking for help with Linux on a Sparc. Don’t ask me why.)
<DrBacchus> ok. I don’t use Sun stuff. I hardly even ever see the sun. I’d make a bitchin vampire. I would not have to change my schedule …

Regarding someone who wanted to write an IRC bot in PHP:
<DrBacchus> A php bot? That’s just wrong. That is evil. Sick and wrong. You’ll go to hell for that. Writing a client/server application in php is, I believe, mentioned by Dante in one of the levels of the Inferno.

And then, later …
<Drizzt321> hey Gunnsi, what would you say to the person that created a php irc bot?
<DrBacchus> Hint: They are going to hell for it. It’s like writing a web server in Word macros

There’s more, but those particularly caught my eye.

It also occurs to me that it would be very nice if MT had something built-in so that I could paste in IRC things, and have it format them correctly.

Russian Apache book

I just received a copy of my book in Russian. Now I know what my name looks like in Russian, although I have no idea how to type it here. The book has a picture of the Apache helicopter on the cover. I would expect that this would be confusing to potential buyers, but perhaps very few people actually make that name connection – particularly outside the US. Or maybe it’s just me.

Key signing

Key signing this evening. Some folks coming in from out of town, and, hopefully, folks from in the area that we don’t get to come out very often.

Perhaps I take it a little too seriously, but I feel that attending these events is one of my obligations to the Apache community, so that folks can verify distros. And I’m pretty well linked to anyone that is ever likely to do an Apache release. Of course, by proxy, I’m pretty well connected to people that will do releases of other software too, so it works for that too.

Using the script at http://www.cryptnet.net/fdp/crypto/pgp_party/party-table.pl to generate sheets to take to the signing, for easy verification of keys, and reduced chances of mis-copying keys as they are read off. The trick is getting people to read off of their own copy of their key, rather than just reading off of the sheet, and thus proving that they can read, not that the key is the real one. 😉

Note that the default behavior is to output a sheet for your entire keyring. If you replace the line:

@fps = `gpg –fingerprint –keyring $ARGV[0]`;

with

@fps = `gpg –fingerprint @ARGV`;

then you can just type a list of keyIDs (or names) that you wish to appear on the sheet, and get something more customized to the event in question.

On a related note, you might want to look at the GPG key with key ID 1234 5678. Just kinda funny.

How do I log out?

For many moons, I’ve been complaining about the fact that no browsers allow you to log out of BASIC HTTP auth. Seems that Mozilla is finally considering implementing this.

http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=55181

So, eventually, the “how do I log out” FAQ in the Apache auth tutorial will have to include this information. And maybe some other browsers will follow suit. You’d think that after 10 years of people asking for this feature, it could have happened a little sooner.

See also this page about how to do this in IE. But I don’t really understand that one.

Columbia, revisited

After a little more reflection, and particularly after reading Ken’s comments, I’m still feeling a little distanced from what happened, but I can certainly see that this is more than just the death of some people I didn’t know.

Indeed, every man’s death diminishes me. Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee. And in that sense, I tend to feel much more affected by the horrible disasters that happen in Africa every day and are a bullet point, or not even mentioned at all, in the western press. On the day that the WTC fell, killing more than 3000 people in the worst disaster on US soil, more than 5000 people died in gas line explosions, and subsequent fires, in Nigeria. One was not worse than the other at the time, but one has clearly had wider repurcussions in the lives of every living human being.

So when a space vehicle crashes, what are those wider repurcussions? Last week, I was doing Apache training, and one of my students was connected with NASA via her work, and she remained confident that the space program will not lose funding, and will not lose steam. Accidents happen, and this is not the end of the line. Finding out why it happened, and not letting it get in the way of future discovery, is the goal of the moment, as evidenced by the detail being given to going through the evidence even at this very moment.

The death of one individual is not more tragic, or less tragic, than the death of another. Every time an individual dies, be it spectuacularly, or quietly at home, we are all affected in some way, and those close to the person will grieve whether the person was a prince or a pauper. But some events, like this one, are genuinely tragedies of national, and perhaps international scale, because of the lasting effects that they will have on policy, discovery, and our future.

Ken, thanks for your comments, and for putting things into a sensible perspective.

The Margin Is Too Narrow