Journal of Omnifarious

10:57 - My main workstation has died

It died before, when I moved, and that was the power supply. It's died again now, and I suspect this time that it's something more serious like the video card or possibly one or both of the CPUs frying from overheating. The fans all turn on but the BIOS screen never comes up.

I want to replace it. The newer dual core AMD CPUs generate even less heat and are a lot faster. But replacing it with technology that mirrors the level of current I sprung for when I bought what I have now would run me about $3000, and I don't have that and won't have it anytime really soon. :-(

My monitor also needs replacing. It's a pretty nice LCD monitor from 2003, but it has problems. The main problem is that it gets muddy when things are moving or changing quickly because the pixel change lag is fairly high. The pixel change time is 25ms or so which means a maximum effective frame rate of 40 frames a second and anything faster is muddy. It's not even that great for watching DVDs. The secondary problem is that it is very slow (often a minute or more) to recognize that the video card is trying to bring it out of sleep mode. I usually get frustrated and push the signal select button to force it, but it's irritating.

Actually, scratch that, a pixel change rate of 25ms means an effective frame rate of 20 frames per second. This is because a pixel should be at the color it's supposed to be for at least half the time in order for it not to be muddy. 20 frames per second means a possible change in pixel color every 50ms leaving a pixel that takes 25ms to change to be at the new value for 25ms before changing again.

Current Mood: worried

11:58 - This makes me sad

This is a really excellent article on why our birthrate has been falling: The Baby Boycott by Stephanie Mencimer.

Sadly, I think the article is pretty close to correct. I've been really sad to notice that women who are smart and capable (the ones I'd most like to have children with) are generally not very interested in having children.

One reason I've become interested in polyamory is that I feel it offers a partial way out of this problem by distributing some of the burden of raising children over more people. But it still is a real issue.

I'm not so much for all the government mandated stuff since I generally feel that lots of government mandated stuff is both inherently unfair and tends to backfire in unexpected ways. But I am interested in changing this situation in some way.

Current Mood: sad

12:56 - I'm powerful sick

I haven't had an upper-respiratory illness hit me this hard for awhile. :-/ I hope it goes away soon, this is very irritating. I do not like feeling miserable.

Current Mood: sick

22:46 - It has come to my attention...

That someone made up a reason out of thin air why I was having a hard time finding an apartment and subsequently has been telling people this reason as if it is fact. The supposed reason is that I do a lot of pot, which is an idea that would cause most people who know me at all to give you a really strange look and fall down laughing. It's really interesting to me that someone is willing to make up a reason out of thin air and spread it around as truth.

So, yeah, if you don't know the reason for something in my life, please don't tell people random garbage you just sort of randomly find in some deep dark stinky place in your own soul. You can just report what you do know and let me tell my own story if I so choose. That will be just fine, thanks.

Current Mood: annoyed

11:35 - Because I expect this post to disappear

I expect this post to be made friends-only and/or this comment on it to disappear. I'm tired of this sort of garbage so I've prepared this post as an eventuality.

In a post by mle292, she says this:

An epiphany!

---

It has recently been brought to my attention that it may be too over-simplifying to say that Libertarians are just Republicans who want to smoke weed.

Libertarians suck, but they do suck in their own unique and special ways.

F'rinstance: Libertarians genuinely believe that everything that's theirs is rightfully earned, and everything that belongs to someone else has been given, and is probably rightfully theirs.

Sort of like a six month old with voting rights.

My response which is, to put it bluntly, downright mean... But then again, I was de-friended over mentioning that Chez Guevera was a torturer and murderer (which are labels I also apply to George W. Bush) in a post she made about "The Motorcycle Diaries". Thereafter she has enacted a policy of selectively deleting responses of mine in her journal that she found objectionable because they had an opinion she didn't like. So I feel that I'm a bit entitled to be mean.

And, also unsurprisingly, I've been banned from commenting in her journal now, which is just par for the course for someone who wants to be able to spout of her opinions and vitriol without ever having to listen to any dissent.

Current Mood: angry

16:27 - More Java ranting

Today I needed to find a Java class. Much easier said than done.

Of course, first I had to find out that I needed to find the class. I get a very unhelpful message from ant when it tries to run an 'email' task
     [mail] Failed to initialise MIME mail: javax/mail/MessagingException

After digging through (of all things) the ant source code in order to figure out why it might say such a cryptic thing, I discover that the only possible way it could is if these lines of code fail:

            mailer = (Mailer) ClasspathUtils.newInstance(
                    "org.apache.tools.ant.taskdefs.email.MimeMailer",
                    MailLogger.class.getClassLoader(), Mailer.class);

For the unenlightened, this means that it needs to find a class called 'org.apache.tools.ant.taskdefs.email.MimeMailer' (gotta love the horribly long convoluted class names) and instantiate a copy of it using a no-argument constructor. (And I'm not going to explain what that means because I know many of you aren't programmers.). So, in order to figure out why this isn't happening, I search the web. I find out that it may be because of a missing ant-javamail.jar file in then $ANT_HOME/lib directory. I have one there though, and not only that, it contains the appropriate org/apache/tools/ant/taskdefs/email/MimeMailer.class file.

In order to dig further then, I write myself this Java program:

import org.apache.tools.ant.taskdefs.email.MimeMailer;

public class jm {
    public static void main(String args[]) {
        Object c = new MimeMailer();
    }
};

This class does (in much plainer fashion) what the previous code does. So it should fail and give me the exception that the wonderful ant has been so helpfully hiding from me (even when I turn on verbose, debug, diagnostics and every other 'show me stuff' flag I can find, what kind of person writes code like that?).

So, I track down the various jar files I need in my javac -cp argument in order to compile the thing. Then I run it and get the error I want:

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: \
org/apache/tools/ant/taskdefs/email/MimeMailer
        at jm.main(jm.java:5)

Yay! Now, to find the mysterious missing class. It will be in no obvious place, clearly. The wonderful find and locate tools will be of no help whatsoever here because it will be hidden inside one of the ubiquitous jar files lying around.

sudo locate -r '\.jar$' | tr '\n' '\0' | \
xargs -0 sh -c 'for file in "$@"; do \
  if jar -tf "$file" | fgrep MessagingException; then echo "$file"; fi; \
done' fred

This tells me that it's found in mailapi.jar. There are about 50 of them (literally) lying around all over creation. This is because there was never a standard place to install jar files where Java would automatically find them. That might require some kind of *gasp* dependency on something not Java, or something. Of course, running a Java program at all requires depending on something not Java, but Java people are very weird that way and like to pretend they live in a universe that contains nothing but Java. Forget the turtles, it's Java all the way down! Honest!

I finally pick one of the mailapi.jar files to copy into a place where they should be found by ant. *rolls eyes* Which of course is a different place than any of the other 50 locations they're in. The stupidity never ends when Java is involved.

Edit: Well, that didn't work. But at least this time I was able to convince ant to print out an exception for me. But that was only marginally helpful as the exception was this:

javax.mail.NoSuchProviderException: smtp
        at javax.mail.Session.getService(Session.java:768)
        at javax.mail.Session.getTransport(Session.java:708)
        at javax.mail.Session.getTransport(Session.java:651)
        at javax.mail.Session.getTransport(Session.java:631)
        at javax.mail.Session.getTransport(Session.java:686)
        at javax.mail.Transport.send0(Transport.java:166)
        at javax.mail.Transport.send(Transport.java:98)
...etc

I was somehow supposed to mysteriously divine that what that really meant was that I needed com.sun.mail.smtp.SMTPTransport from some random jar file called smtp.jar, which I found by repeating that whole bletcherous find trick up above. Aigh! And I only found that that was the class I needed by searching for the exception on the Internet and finding someone who had gotten farther down in the stack trace because they did have smtp.jar.

In Python this would never have happened for any number of reasons. First, there is a standard place for .py files to go. And they're left as .py files so you don't have to use a stupid tool to find them inside of some mysterious container like .jar. Then, the source code is there so when something throws an exception you can always find out why. Lastly people typically do not hide as much information from you when handling exceptions as was hidden from me by the writers of these Java classes.

The only thing that would've saved me this much work in Java is encyclopedic knowledge of ant internals and the Java mail API. So stupid!

Current Mood: annoyed

21:52 - Mixed political news

From Slashdot: Dodd's Filibuster Threat Stalls Wiretap Bill

So, the bill won't go through just now. The act has been tabled until January, to work out a 'compromise'. *sigh* I hope there isn't any sort of weakening of resolve on the two key issues involved, the immunity being the more important of the two, even though I think the other has more potential for huge long-term damage.

Current Mood: optimistic

14:51 - Warrantless domestic spying, and telecom immunity

Just in case any of you aren't on the ACLU watch list...

Today the senate is going to be looking at a couple of bills dealing with the whole warrantless spying issue.

Now, some of you might think that this just involves traffic analysis (i.e. who called whom, when and for how long) for calls starting or terminating in a foreign country, and so is in the not-so-illegal realm. You would be wrong in thinking this. One should always expect government to abuse any power it has, and this one is no exception. It has recently come to light that the NSA wanted Qwest to give them access to communications switches that dealt primarly in domestic calls. And they not only wanted call traffic data, they wanted the contents of the calls. Discussions surrounding this request included no mentions of any sort of limits confining data collected to international calls.

Additionally, other documents and sources reveal that all this data is being used in run-of-the-mill drug cases, not just for terrorism as we were originally assured.

The bills that are before the Senate right now grant the telecommunications companies immunity to liability for having granted the NSA the access they requested in violation of the law. They also grant the power to the government to continue this behavior indefinitely. They must be stopped.

Please look up your Senators and call them to tell them that you do not want these bills passed. The website I pointed at will give you a helpful script to use. The main issues are granting retroactive immunity and legislatively permitting the behavior to continue.

Current Mood: worried

10:21 - Bizarre networking issue

Packets appear to be being dropped between the time pcap gets them and the time they're seen by the raw:PREROUTING table. Does anybody have any ideas on why this would happen?

Current Mood: aggravated

23:35 - Need to find a home for Zow

rainonthewind won't be able to take him because her fiancé is allergic and her hoped for house with plenty of outdoors space for him fell through. She's pretty sure she can find a home for him, but I figure it can't hurt to ask here either.

I'm looking for a temporary home for this cat. He doesn't have any bad habits. He scratches his scratching post, not furniture. He uses his litter box. He doesn't have hairballs. He gets along pretty well with other cats. He's friendly, but not obnoxiously attention seeking. He's neutered and is about 2-3 years old. I'd be willing to foot vet bills if need be.

I hope to be able to take him back within 12-20 months. I will be moving from the place I just found unless they change their minds about letting me have him.

Current Mood: sad

15:51 - Uncharitable description of ant

Well, some Java guy was annoyed with 'make' not for any of the many reasons people get annoyed with make, but because every time it compiled a Java file it started up the JVM to run the compiler. Starting the JVM ended up taking 4 or 5 times as much time as the compiler run did, so it was very slow. And even worse, make required something other than the most holy and perfect Java!

And this Java guy, being a Java guy, decided that it couldn't be Java that was the problem in this case, it must be make. So he wrote a build tool in Java called 'ant' that used a programming language based on XML (a bletcherous abomination if ever there was one) and invoked the Java compiler by just calling methods on it from within the same JVM ant was running inside so no JVM startup cost was incurred.

Now this horrible spawn of Java, XML and a declarative language for dependencies married to a procedural language for describing how they are updated is called 'ant'. And it's what Java projects everywhere use by default. It is one of the many reasons Java should be shunned.

Current Mood: annoyed

15:02 - I will be offline for awhile soon, backup MX anyone?

My servers will be offline for nearly a week starting on November 30th and ending on December 6th (hopefully). This means that http://www.omnifarious.org/ will be down, and no mail to omnifarious.org addresses will be delivered.

*sigh* This is the part about moving that I hate almost as much as packing.

Anyway, if anybody who is online and running a mail server is willing to be my backup MX and store messages for the duration I would be very grateful. Especially if you have fairly good spam filtering that always blocks spam before accepting delivery so people who send legitimate mail that's accidentally blocked are given a decent bounce message.

Current Mood: annoyed

23:32 - Re-instate HUAC, now there's a good idea!

From wealhtheow, we have this post in which she links to an article about how a US House Democrat from CA wants to re-instate HUAC. Though she of course doesn't say that directly as HUAC has a very deservedly bad name.

Current Mood: disappointed

07:58 - Housing

I think I may have this problem solved. But the solutions are a bit problematic.

One place I looked at has a basement to live in with very little light and oppressively low ceilings. I would feel as though I were living in a warren. I don't think I could do it long term. But she does have a room available upstairs. I'd have to put a lot in storage, but that could definitely work. It's also reasonably cheap.

The catch is that the woman renting the place would be living there, is someone I think is extremely attractive and tells me (and it feels like this is a good thing in her mind) that I remind her of her ex-husband because I've worked with computers since I was a small child. This could be great, awful, or simply very awkward.

There is another place that I think will take me. And they have tons of space. But I don't actually like them. They live in LA, so that might not be much of a problem. But also Zow couldn't live with me because they want him declawed or with those little claw sheathes on. :-/ I couldn't do that to poor Zow.

They are also a lot more expensive. I would be doubling my rent to move there.

Current Mood: worried

08:34 - I can't find a place

I haven't been able to find anybody interested in having me as a tenant. I can't find a place to move to. I've looked at 5 or 6 places now north of lake union and the canals and west of I5. They all turned me down. :-(

Current Mood: depressed

15:30 - This is for all those "It's online, it's not real" idiots out there

Young girl dies after rival's parents create fake MySpace boy to woo, then slam her.

I know of quite a few people who think that being a verbal bully online is just fine because, you know, it's "just words" and it's "not real". I always found that attitude really horrible, especially since it often came from people who were bullied physically when they were children.

My attitude towards this behavior just got a lot worse.

Of course these parents will probably get off a lot lighter than a pedophile would. That is if they even ever get charged with anything.

Current Mood: angry

23:13 - Well, the roommates don't want to move with me

They all want to move on and do their separate thing. *sigh* So I'm on my own mostly. If you know of a 1000 sq/ft or so 2 bedroom for less than $1000 that's in the city of Seattle, or a 1400 sq/ft or so 3 bedroom for less than $1600 (I may move in with lycaenidae) I would be most pleased.

Other living arrangements are possible. I have about 6 bookcases full of mostly books, a futon a bunch of computers, a computer desk, a bed and a dresser that I need space for. It is mandatory that the bed be in its own room. Closet space in that room would be most helpful.

Oh, also, I have a cat named 'Zow'. :-) He's a pretty nice, easygoing cat though. rainonthewind, would you be willing to take care of him for awhile (possibly a couple of years) if absolutely necessary?

Current Mood: disappointed

18:23 - We need a new place in December

Our irritating landlord has decided to not renew our lease because we paid two bills (once rent, and once utilities) a few days late over the course of our 12 month lease. *sigh* Stupid git. I also suspect that he doesn't like that we've always paid on the 5th of the month.

Anyway, Collin, Meggan and I will all be needing a new place on December 1st and we would like to be able to stay together.

Current Mood: annoyed

19:56 - Slightly edited reposting - I am so sick of fundamentalists

I'm mostly copying this excellent post by meowse. But I'm editing it slightly because I never use profanity. :-) You may be amused by my edits, but I do hope they don't dilute the original intent.

I am so sick of fundamentalists of any stripe. Any religion. Get off my planet, you sick, twisted monsters.

Fundamentalist religious nutbars (of, in this case, the Jewish variety) burn down a crematorium in Israel.

You know my standard for detecting fundamentalists, nowadays? People who think that their beliefs give them rights.

Hello, you unconscionable fools. Beliefs do not give you rights. Beliefs give you funny little ideas in your heads that you walk around intellectually masturbating to. Beliefs give you things to talk about at cocktail parties, and have shouting matches with other fundamentalists about when they differ.

But they do not give you rights.

• They don't give you the right to shoot abortionists.
• They don't give you the right to crash airplanes into buildings.
• They don't give you the right to burn down crematoria.
• They don't give you the right to teach your mythology to my child.
• They don't give you the right to lock schoolgirls inside burning buildings because they aren't wearing veils.
• They don't give you the right to stab peaceful gay pride parade marchers.

They don't give you any rights.

You can believe whatever foolish things you want to believe. You can talk about your beliefs to any adult you can persuade to give you the time of day. You can even, because I haven't figured out a way to stop you yet that isn't a cure worse than the disease, indoctrinate your own poor children into believing the same damned things.

But you don't get any special rights for believing them.

Think you do?

Then you're a fundamentalist.

And you are sorely testing my patience and ability to leave you to live your lives in peace.

Current Mood: angry

16:10 - 9/11 hooplah

I was talking with daisykitten about all the stuff surrounding 9/11, and I started thinking about it. Hardly anybody cares anymore about the people who lost their lives. All they really care about is what kind of political hay they or others can make of it.

Personally, I don't care about any of it. Or rather I do, but 9/11 isn't the time for it.

2000+ innocent people lost their lives needlessly and senselessly. That should be remembered, and I don't care who did it or what we should do about it. That fact remains.

Current Mood: sad