2003-11-02: Settlement casserole
I, like most people who have followed international politics at all, have
been hearing for years about the issues surrounding the Palestinians and
the Israeli settlements. I'd still always made the assumption, though,
that there was some sort of distinction between the Palestinian territories
and the Israeli settlements such that one could actually draw some sort of
vague border.
More fool I.
Mother Jones printed a map of the actual settlement picture and the areas
of control in the Palestinian Territories, and then I found
similar maps with a quick Google search. This is ridiculous. I agree
with some of the sentiments of the person who put up this page -- I wonder
why these maps aren't shown every time this situation is covered.
The actual maps of the settlements make it painfully obvious that the
Israeli government and some portions of the population of Israel have tried
to do everything it could to prevent any sort of easy compromise situation
and to complicate the situation of these territories as much as they can.
(Note that they're not the only ones; as near as I can tell, many elements
among the Palestinians are trying to do exactly the same thing in different
ways.) The really depressing part is that it looks like it's rather
successful.
2003-11-04: Who's listening?
This is from a Salon
article on the current feel of the street in Iraq:
When I ask these men whether they can see today's deprivations as
a tradeoff for the new freedoms they have, especially the ability
to openly criticize the current situation, I often get the same
answer: "Yes, now we can talk," they'll say. "But what does it matter
if no one is listening?"
I've never heard a more poignant and cutting condemnation of the theory of
democracy. That short statement captures much of what I think is
completely missing from the naively optimistic attitudes about "making the
world safe for democracy."
So many institutions are simply not listening. Corporations are not
listening. Politicians are listening in only a very limited and
constrained manner largely driven by money. The rest of the population is
not listening when life is fundamentally okay, or if they've gotten fed up
with the process.
An open democratic process is meaningless unless someone is listening.
Legitimacy is not produced by simply adding a vote. Legitimacy is produced
by making life better for people in a tangible way, and not only is that
not the exclusive territory of democracies, democracies don't somehow
magically do this. Neither does capitalism -- ask the "illegal" aliens
currently being rounded up and deported, most likely back to miserable
economic conditions, after having been cheated and exploited by Walmart or
its subcontractors.
Do you think we're actually building a government in Iraq that will listen,
and giving the population of Iraq the means and background to be able to
listen to each other?
I'm pretty skeptical. But hey, Haliburton is making a ton of money. Go
us.
2003-11-05: This Wiki thing...
...is kind of cool. We've started using
MoinMoin to track and record various things at
work with a fair degree of success, and I've started playing around with it
a little myself.
I now have the beginnings of a wiki only writable by myself (at least for
right now) for making notes about
system administration. Maybe someday I'll make it writable by others.
Right now, I'm just trying to remember to use it to write something down
each time I encounter something interesting.
After a while, I'll link it off my regular web pages, but I'll probably
wait until I get a bit more content into it first.
2003-11-07: Annotated jacket
I think this is just really cool. Several of us were admiring all the
patches on the jacket of a co-worker of mine, and she pointed out that she
has a web page
explaining all of the
patches (at least on the front).
It's nice to see someone using image maps for the sort of thing they were
originally intended for. *heh*
(Note the domain name, too. It's one of my favorites.)
2003-11-07: More wiki
There's a variety of additional stuff over in my wiki now, including the
beginnings of a collection of information on compiling software and notes
on how I (mostly) post journal entries.
So far, it looks like the experiment in using a wiki to enter more
information faster and get past the overhead in creating a new web page
(and the blank page syndrome) is fairly successful. Tonight it occurred to
me that I could probably put together a little Perl or Python script and
some elisp linkage that would let me write new pages in a real editor, and
I'm now pondering that (although I doubt I'll act on the idea any time
particularly soon).
2003-11-11: CVS home directory
Many of you have probably already seen this since it was on
Slashdot, but for those of you who haven't, I
think this is really cool. Joey Hess, who's one of the Debian developers,
keeps his whole home
directory in CVS.
I keep lots of things in CVS, but I've never gone that far. I do solve the
skeleton file problem that he talks about using a little utility that
pushes my configuration files out from a CVS-monitored directory, but my
home directories tend to be different on different systems.
I don't think I'd want to go as far as this, but it's worth thinking about
a little bit. The backup properties really are nice.
2003-11-11: Best MMORPG ever
Stirge pointed me at this. He described it as the best MMORPG ever. I
have to agree. If MMORPGs have turned you off, look at
Progress Quest! No need to give
yourself carpal tunnel with tedious battling -- let your computer do what
it's good at! Death is just a statistical decrease in your experience
anyway... so the game takes care of that! No tedious hiking to quest
locations! And best of all, you don't have to interact with all of the
morons!
It's just my speed. Such a shame that they don't support Linux.
2003-11-13: Less Moore
This is not, in fact, a journal entry to note that by and large judges
still respect the law and don't think highly of their colleagues who don't,
regardless of the reason. Although that's pretty cool. But lots of people
are talking about that, and I don't have anything particularly
perspicacious to add.
However, seen in the discussion of the thorough and impressive
spanking of former Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore (do read the
actual opinion if you have a chance) is the following line:
"Greg Sealy, head of the Sitting at His Feet Fellowship in Montgomery"
Really, I have nothing that I can add to that.
2003-11-17: Computer chess
Yesterday morning, I happened across the third match between Kasparov and
X3D Fritz and got to watch some of it live (although they cut away for
women's basketball). That ended up being fascinating to watch, so I've
since gone through the web site and read
through the previous games with commentary.
Apart from making me wish I knew more about chess, I also find it really
interesting how computers have developed into excellent chess players, but
of a completely different kind than human players. The fundamental chess
playing algorithm is still the same as it was back when I studied computer
chess programs some ten years ago -- develop an algorithm to rank board
positions and then do a search to find the move that stands the best chance
of achieving the top-rated board position that you can see. This makes
computer players absolute tactical wizards, and masters at playing the
endgame, but it means that they can only plan as far as they can analyze.
They really play nothing like a human (and chess really isn't that good of
a proof of "intelligence" because of its partial susceptibility to pure
brute-force search); they're excellent at springing on any mistake and
pursuing it relentlessly, but long-term planning escapes them.
The third game of the match is a masterpiece of a human grand master
playing against a computer and completely trapping it in its flaws. The
computer had no idea the long term plan that Kasparov was developing until
far too late, as Kasparov patiently played into a closed, restricted
position and then set up for a long-term strategic push. The second game
of the match was also an excellent example, as Kasparov was in a good
position until he made a human blunder and the computer pounced
mercilessly.
I expect that as our sheer processing power becomes stronger, eventually
chess computers will outplay the best humans because their planning horizon
will slowly get far enough ahead. It may take years, since I think an
exponential increase in processing power is required, but I'm sure we'll
see that.
It's sort of disappointing in a way, though, that the basic algorithm
remains so simple and we keep just throwing more processing power at it.
The small computer science researcher in me would be far more interested in
trying to understand better what a human player does and teach the computer
more about how to do that, rather than just relying on its obvious
strengths.
Anyway, I recommend taking a look at the games, and the fourth game is on
ESPN2 tomorrow.
2003-11-27: Spam hole in MT
Just in case there are people who use Movable Type and read my journal but
don't follow Movable Type development that closely: there's a hole in the
mt-send-entry.cgi script that comes with Movable Type that can be exploited
to send spam, similar to the formail bugs that have been around for quite a
while.
See the Movable Type announcement for more details. The easiest solution
for most people is to just delete that script entirely unless you've
started using it for something.
2003-11-27: cvs2xhtml 1.8
While doing other things, I noticed that
cvs2xhtml produced
warning messages with the current version of Python. Turned out that I was
including a deprecated module that I wasn't even using, so I made a new
small release fixing the problem.
2003-11-27: bundle 2.26
This is the first release of bundle that I've made publicly, but we've been
using it extensively at Stanford for many years. It's a bit of a hard
program to explain, but its primary use is as an installation tool for a
set of files. A bundle, or file containing commands for the bundle script,
is like a simplified installation shell script with special commands for
all the common actions and enough smarts to know what changes have already
been applied and to show what will be done before doing it.
You can get a copy from
bundle's web page. I
haven't quite finished bringing it up to the coding standards that I use
for most scripts, so there may be a few more minor releases coming up
shortly.
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