What does it take to raise a child?

Posted on 29 February 2012 by stuff writer

You have heard it said:

It takes a village to raise a child

The radio announcers of our national broadcaster frequently treat us to that African “wisdom”. The idea of this is that every mama and auntie out there should be looking out for your child. Also, if they are not, then there’s trouble. There’s a problem though: who is responsible for the child? In “Ubuntu”, the individual is subservient to the group, and this proverb is an expression of that subservience. The responsibility of the parent to teach their own children proper values is blithely ceded to the group, the village. In this kind of thinking, it is fine for the father to disappear for years at a time while he works up cash in the big city, and it is fine for the mother to have children without a father, especially if there is a government grant. Except, it’s not fine.

This proverb is usually quoted when there is some abject case of neglect and abuse – the mother was working (the father being absent), and some wicked person did something unmentionable to the child (or children). The village should have done something to take care of the poor little children. Maybe it should have, but actually, the father and mother should have done something.

The logical extension of this, in a global village, is that it takes government help to raise a child. The government must supply medical help for the delivery, they must give the parents (and more often, the parent) a grant to ensure that the child has some food, they must build a school for the child, and when the child graduates from that school, they must provide tertiary training for that child, and then they must give that graduated tertiary person a government job, access to loans, freedom from being blacklisted for bad debt, and who knows what else. Not a word about the responsibility of the parents. The government accepts what people say about this stuff, and they make every effort to comply – this seems to be the kind of government people want!

The trouble is, the village and the government are not very good at a whole bunch of things, like:

  • Teaching children good values: the best they can do seems to be sex education – a bizarre after-the fact attempt at fixing a fundamental problem through window-dressing.
  • Teaching children discipline: putting children through the criminal “justice” system is laughable in terms of teaching any kind of discipline. It takes years, where what is usually required can be administered quickly and swiftly and not very often by a parent that is actually around.
  • Teaching children their place in the world: children do not seem to notice that they are in a social safety net while they are busy buying drugs and engaging in anti-social behaviour. Children that have their parents around tend to avoid things like this, because they will quickly incur their parents’ displeasure.  Even the worst parents are not prepared to put up with endless trouble from their children.

You have heard it said:

It takes a village to raise a child

But I tell you:

It takes a father and a mother to raise a child

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Society versus copyright

Posted on 13 February 2012 by stuff writer

Of late I have wondered about this:

And the rest of the men which were not killed by these plagues yet repented not of the works of their hands, that they should not worship devils, and idols of gold, and silver, and brass, and stone, and of wood: which neither can see, nor hear, nor walk: Neither repented they of their murders, nor of their sorceries, nor of their fornication, nor of their thefts.

Thefts: stealing stuff. I always thought of this as everyone sneaking into everyone else’s house to pilfer their worldly goods. However, this is not the kind of theft that is actually popular in society at the moment. The two very popular forms of theft that the world simply loves are:

  • Socialism: theft of anything from the minority by the majority
  • Copyright violation: theft of labour.

Now, as to copyright violation, I have mixed feelings. On the one hand, people should be paid for their labour, and failing to pay them is not wonderful:

The wages of the labourers who have reaped your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, cry out: and the cry of them which have reaped has entered into the ears of the Lord of the harvest.

The producers of copyright content are currently hoarding their “produce”, and refusing to sell it unless you buy a whole bunch of unnecessary add-ons:

  • A physical disk – I have it already thank you.
  • Media and packaging – I don’t have space for this
  • Shipping – No, I already have it: don’t ship it to me
  • Taxes on physical goods – I don’t want to import anything
  • Extraneous advertising – I don’t want your previews of unrelated content
  • Extraneous services – I don’t want your bundled toolbar, media player
  • An “account” – itunes, some Apple or Android device, or whatever
  • Painful navigation through a tortured interface – No thanks, really, I got it by a less painful method
  • Obscene system requirements – I have the file: I don’t want to install windows
  • Display limits – I want to show this to my family, please
  • Country limitations – I already live in a perfectly good country, and just because the thing has not been on TV here is not a good reason to withhold it!

I believe this applies to the big publishers:

He that withholds corn, the people shall curse him: but blessing shall be upon the head of him that sells it.

However, at the moment, society is not answering failure to sell with curses, but with theft.

It’s not cool. Of course, many of the songs, movies and books copied are full of the ills condemned together with thefts: sorcery, murder and fornication. In these cases they have received full payment in this world, along with the praise of men, and all payment that is outstanding is their hard-earned eternal condemnation.

It would not be hard for content producers to provide a method for payment. It would not be hard for them to provide a reasonable price for their goods either. They are just not willing: in part because they don’t understand, and in part because they hope to yet make filthy profits from their past labours.

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Twin paradox

Posted on 24 January 2012 by stuff writer

I was at meeting, and one of the ladies, was feeling rather off. This was on account of her identical twin sister having been slightly injured in a minor car accident. She explained that her neck was sore on account of this – her own neck feeling her twin’s pain. She further explained that this had happened before, when she was out of the country. She had a pain, and went to a doctor, who diagnosed her with whiplash, and asked about the car accident she had been in. She hadn’t been in a car accident, but her twin had – unknown to her.

After the meeting, another lady, also a twin, sympathised. She mentioned that she had been flat on her back in pain when her twin sister had given birth – such that she knew the time of the delivery before she was told about it. Later when she had her own first child, she recognised the pain.

So, what does it mean? Two relatively reliable witnesses telling similar tales. You can find plenty of this kind of stuff around – look for “twin pain” in your favourite search engine.

Possible explanations:

  • Coincidence and myth – One explanation is that there is nothing going on, and that in a sufficiently large population, such things will happen all the time, and have no real significance or meaning. This is not very interesting, and does not appear to fit the evidence too well, but it is possible.
  • Meaningless malice – In the UFO world there is a lot of testimony about the malice of alien/spiritual forces towards all men, and the deceptive harm with which they trouble people. To inflict pain and fiddle with the minds of twins merely because they are twins does fit rather well with this consistent pattern of malice: lies and deception for their own sake. To check this, I spoke to the two twins, and they say that they perceived the phenomenon as being a fact of life, rather than being an ominous and oppressive thing, which does suggest that malicious outside interference is not the cause.
  • Hidden natural principle – Perhaps there is some natural principle causing the communication of pain from one person to another based on some or all of their kinship, shared emotional state or shared physical history. There is no known method by which one nervous system can transmit to another, but this does not mean that such a method does not exist. If it does exist, it should be possible to employ it in some other less complex system. (If you were able to build a communications device on this underlying principle, you would probably only be able to transmit bad news.)
  • Crossed lines to the soul – Perhaps almost identical bodies or minds get their wires crossed under extreme conditions? There are countless stories of husbands who get morning sickness, or other pregnancy type complaints when their wives are pregnant. Twins also share a definite emotional bond. The transmission of twin pain could indicate that the spirit of a person is objectively separate from their physical bodies.
  • Something else – All and/or none of the above – this point intentionally left blank.

The most interesting possibility (but not necessarily true, mind you!) is that there is a hidden principle of nature to be discovered here: something that could be used for a communication device (and, naturally, a weapon of mass destruction while we are at it). Failing the discovery of this principle, it remains impossible to distinguish between whether this is a natural principle, or a pointer to the nature of man.

Einstein, in his special theory of relativity, proposed the twin paradox, which says that if a twin manages to take a really odd and pointless round trip to nowhere in particular, they will arrive younger than their twin (travel keeps you young). However, he never did the experiment, especially not with real twins. He only thought about it. As a speculation: perhaps there is something that can be discovered from twins which goes beyond the realm of speculation? Once all the sane and palatable possibilities have been eliminated, only the insane and tasteless possibilities remain.

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Java is dead

Posted on 19 December 2011 by stuff writer

Java is dead.

Sun Microsystems, when they were still Sun, made hardware. It worked. Then they made software. It also worked. Together these were great systems. Then they made Java. It was a fantastic masterpiece of design and coding, with the promise of “write once, run anywhere”, which included the following unnecessary and fatal design parameter:

  • A Java virtual machine shall run only from compiled bytecode

The effect of this criterion is that everyone that distributes a Java application distributes it without source code, and without the opportunity to tinker.  To change a Java application, you need a string of development tools and special parts.  It’s like a French car, and screws with one-way heads.  Bizarrely they also mandated the zipping of libraries.  The message is clear: everything in Java is final, and you need not look under the hood. In fact, sit back and relax, and Sun will ship to you the best and optimal libraries of everything. (Okay, maybe they’ll pass it to some open committee, but sit back and relax anyhow.)

Along with this, Sun brought the corporate culture of absolute control to Java, so that only they could produce official versions of Java, Java libraries, and Java implementations.  If you like Java, please drink only official Sun Java.  Not to worry: Java being a great language, a free version was forthcoming, first under the watchful eye of Sun, and more recently and more independently as OpenJDK. Then they sold out to Oracle. Now where Sun had a waning culture of control, Oracle has a culture of ruling the world, and they have had enough of developing Java, except when it concerns suing Google for putting the Java language (but not the Sun implementation of it) in Android.

While there were two main distributions of Java, namely Sun/Oracle Java and OpenJDK, Ubuntu thought they would make things easier for their users, and obtained a licence to distribute Sun Java. All the Ubuntu users were happy, and merrily used web sites and applications that crash horribly under OpenJDK.

And then Oracle revoked the licence for distributing Sun Java. Not for evil reasons, but simply to hand over to OpenJDK, because it’s the evil version. That should be fine.

However, there is now a security problem in Sun Java. If you run Sun Java in your browser, you’ll git pwnd. So what did Ubuntu do? They disabled sun-java. Good solution. So, sun-java on Ubuntu is dead. This means that the run-anywhere promise of sun-java is dead. This means that sun-java is dead. Instead of the sun java plugin for your favourite browser, you must use the iced tea plugin. Did you get that? Time to switch from coffee to tea. Who is going to do that? There is no way tea will give the caffeine boost you get from Java! This means, effectively, that Java in the browser is dead.

When parts start to drop off the body, software rot has set in, and the end can’t be far off.

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Byteswap in socket.gethostname or something

Posted on 23 November 2011 by stuff writer

Something weird and unresolved for today:

So this automated process gets server host name, and sents it as part of a HTTP POST to another server.  The data was encrypted with SSL in transmission.  When it arrived, it was changed from:
jrepublic.somedomain.com
to
jrepbulic.somedomain.com

I ran it again manually, and it behaved normally, without the byteswap. Now, the way to generate this error, in software is something like this:

xchg al,ah

But there is nothing like that …

The source system:

  • CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Quad CPU Q8400 @ 2.66GHz
  • Motherboard: Intel DG43GT
  • Temperature: 40 degrees C
  • Ethernet controller: 8086:10ce: Intel Corporation 82567V-2 Gigabit Network Connection
  • Client: python 2.4.3

The target system:

  • CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 CPU 4400  @ 2.00GHz
  • Motherboard: Intel DG33BU
  • Ethernet controller: 8086:294c: Intel Corporation Gigabit Ethernet Controller (rev 02)
  • Temperature: 42 degrees C
  • Server: python 2.4.3

The traffic traversed the following systems:

  • 4 Cisco switches
  • Fortigate firewall (two of these)
  • Cisco backbone stuff
  • Possibly 1 Netgear switch

I suspect a CPU error on the originating server, since it is likely that SSL would stop if there was an error …  but really don’t know.  A byteswap on the network that just happened to pass the checksumming in SSL is not beyond belief. Oh well.

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Climate stasis

Posted on 6 October 2011 by stuff writer

It’s time to drop in my 2c on the topic of the moment: climate change.

Not happy with definitions like “the climate is what the weather is usually like”, climatologists have defined climate as something more like this:

The average weather measurements over a 30 year period

This is an amazing definition, because it forgets that weather is a continuous phenomenon. This means that the climate is a continually changing target, because weather does not follow an entirely predictable pattern. The weather would have to be entirely predictable for the climate to remain constant by this definition. The definition of climate incorporates climate change.

Now, it is a matter of straightforward observation that over any period of time the weather is almost completely unpredictable. If you want to know the weather tomorrow with almost as much certainty as the forecasters, you can:

  • look out of the window: what is the weather like now
  • look at your journal: what was the weather like last year

If the weather tomorrow is not like the weather last year, then maybe something is up … but what could it be?

This brings us to: climate change.

The climate, she is not what she used to be. Of course, the climate has never been what it used to be – but don’t let that bother you — that the random numbers representing weather trend upwards and downwards for no particular reason, depending on what particular measurement you are looking at. We’re talking about climate change here. The fact that there has never been climate stasis is irrelevant. What matters to the mathematical geniuses is that there’s a change now.

In case you don’t know, to be truly paranoid about climate change, you have to believe in evolution. True believers in evolution hold that for millions of years carbon has been “safely” accumulating in fossils. They don’t believe anything about where it came from so that it could accumulate in fossils. All that they know is that burning all that carbon is going to put that carbon back into circulation. When they think of a coalified pine tree being burned in a power station, they are filled with trepidation that the ancient spirits of evolution will be angered by this travesty of carbon gasification. They know that the angry carbon, once released, will smite them with vengeance and something truly random and unpredictable could happen. They have read the tea leaves and other trace elements in the ice cores, and of course, it has shaken them to their core.

If you do not currently believe in evolution, you may be interested in figuring out if you can derive evolution as a conclusion from climate change, since belief in climate change is a natural by-product of belief in evolution. Perhaps it works both ways? Maybe if you believe strongly enough in climate change, you can use that to justify belief in evolution.

If you don’t believe the carbon has been building up for bzillions of years, then the prospect of getting it back into the atmosphere is really not so scary. The plants sucked it up in the past before they were buried. There’s nothing stopping new plants from sucking up the new CO2 and converting it back into solids: they can grow a bit taller and broader — like the bigger and taller plants we see in fossils, and the happy plants grown in a controlled atmosphere.

And here is the answer to climate change:

Neither will I ever again strike down every living creature as I have done. While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.

So we’re done with global cataclysm then. Sorry folks, nothing to see here. Please move along.

Of course in political terms, climate change is a English conspiracy: they have nothing better to do than talk about the how dull the weather is. As the dying gasp of the British Empire, they want the whole world to talk about the weather.

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Dead birds

Posted on 28 September 2011 by stuff writer

The cat has long been a formidable hunter of winged wildlife that happens to visit our property. Ever since we have had a cat, we have had more fruit on our trees, as the winged wildlife know to stay away. The cat catches rats and mice too, occasionally leaving us gifts like a severed head in the kitchen.

The dog seems to have caught some bad habits from the cat. He has caught rats for a long time, but this week he caught some kind of large bird – a pigeon perhaps – it might have been a hadeda, but there was no beak. Having caught it, he ate it (somewhat) and threw it up all over the garden.

So today just before lunch I was in the kitchen and the wife was outside. I called to her with that voice that you use when your child has just deposited something stinky where it won’t easily wash out. “There’s a dead bird in here.”

“Oh no!” she cried, and rushed over to have a look. “Where is it?”

I showed her. She threw up here hands in despair. There, in the slow cooker, right where she had left it, was the dead bird: a chicken. (I should mention that when we had been married for a year or so, she got anti-glare glasses. They didn’t work.)

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English as she is spoke

Posted on 19 September 2011 by stuff writer

Some usage that has entered modern Engleish, and can be heard on SAFM and other fun radio stesshins in the land of .za:

  • Refute: to deny a statement, without providing a shred of evidence that would prove it wrong. It is not an assessment of an argument, but a standalone statement that says no, ur wrong:

    We entirely refute ActionAid’s allegations that we do not pay our fair share of tax in Africa

  • Fin Nance: the girl who looks after the money. She took over from Phi Nance.
  • The price is trading at: Goods do not trade at some prices, nay, prices for goods are traded. These prices can be bought in barrels, apparently. Want to buy a barrel of prices?

    The price of Brent crude is trading at $44.55 a barrel …

  • Suspect (emphasis on the Sus): An entirely unknown person who definitely committed a crime, about whose identity nothing at all is known:

    One of the suspects shot the man, and is still at large.

  • Alleged: something nasty that someone said, for example in a judicial decision. If anyone said anything nasty, it was alleged. Irrespective of the strength of the evidence, it remains an allegation. You know, after the whole court case and all that, we really can’t be sure about anything:

    Alleged serial rapist Michael Christian Clay was found guilty on all 10 counts he was charged with.

  • Critical: Someone is injured. Saying “in a” and “condition” is clearly the only possible meaning:

    Advocate critical after being dragged by taxi

    I suppose you can’t really expect the advocate to approve.

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The core is secure

Posted on 24 August 2011 by stuff writer

In the documentation for that wonderful content management software, joomla, you can read the following statement:

Although the Joomla! core is secure when configured correctly, third party extensions come in all flavors of age and quality. Unless you absolutely trust the extension developer, always review the code should before installing.

The core is secure (but please don’t run a version before 1.5.23 at the time of writing, since there are serious security problems in the core of those).

Microsoft said the same kind of thing about their products by getting an impressive security rating for their Windows NT operating system:

As of August 1995, National Security Agency (NSA) granted the C2 security rating for Windows NT Server and Workstation version 3.5. As a result these operating systems are on the Evaluated Products List (EPL). Windows NT Server and Workstation version 3.51 has been granted the security rating of E3/F-C2 though a similar evaluation process in the UK.

Indeed, their core was secure. (Well, not if you threw random inputs at random unprivileged functions, but nobody thought of that for a few years.)

Both Joomla and Microsoft’s claims to good fundamental security do little to alleviate the actual causes of insecurity seen in practice:

  • The system doesn’t do anything interesting without add-ons
  • The add-ons are the cause of weaknesses
  • It is well-nigh impossible to upgrade an add-on, since no core mechanism is provided for this unlikely task.
  • The add-ons are written by folks that are not half as bright as the people that write the core. You don’t need to break the core: just break the weakest link in the security chain.

Experience shows that people prefer functionality over security until well after the moment that that functionality causes them trouble. The security of the core is of academic value only, unless the core does something remarkable to insulate the system’s users from the kind of software they will install to make up for the lack of core features.

A few projects seem to be doing updates of their plugins with some flair:

  • Linux distributions – the whole concept is updating the plugins for the Linux kernel
  • Firefox – and for good measure, they occasionally introduce incompatibilities in their core code that nuke unmaintained plugins into irrelevance (like the VMware remote desktop plugin).
  • WordPress – well, unless you go to woothemes and install something pretty with obfuscated junk with a forked version of timthumb incorporating what may as well be backdoor code.
  • CPAN and look-alikes for other languages

Security that relies on the core is rotten.

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Windows Apps for Linux make Linux horrible

Posted on 17 August 2011 by stuff writer

InstallShield is a wonderful tool … on Windows.  In a previous decade, I used it to install some bloatware I wrote that wasn’t about to be installed any other way. Since Windows has no standards and no proper scripting (especially in older versions), InstallShield is the only way of getting through the mass of incompatibilities and surprises between versions and installations.

Today I learned that there is InstallShield for Linux too, but, well, it’s not good.  It is sadly lacking in wonderfulness. In fact, it is a reminder that the good old days were only old, and not all good. Having InstallShield for Linux is wonderful for people who want to distribute their applications without thinking too hard (including the windows DLL’s for example), but it has the unfortunate effect of making Linux horrible like Windows has always been.

SuperMicro, in their wisdom, decided to publish their IPMI and KVM tool as a Java Applet.  You can download it from the on-board IPMI thing thang … it just doesn’t run, because it relies on the presence of shared libraries that are by no means default.  When I downloaded their IPMI tool from their FTP site, besides that it contained 50Mb of bloaty Java Run Time Environment, presumably because Java on this platform is nothing like Java on any other — besides that, it didn’t work.  Running the .bin file through sh gave this error message:

This application requires a Java Run Time Environment (JRE)
to run. Searching for one on your computer was not successful.
Please use the command line switch -is:javahome to specify
a valid JRE. For more help use the option -is:help.

Reading the code was entirely unenlightening (it doesn’t have a clear reason for failing – it just happens to fail to extract the JRE component all over my hard disk).  The SuperMicro forums had nothing interesting, but I found the answer in an InstallShield forum.

To make it work it really wants to be run like this:

chmod 755 IPMIView20-Linux_v2.7.23_Build110531.bin
./IPMIView20-Linux_v2.7.23_Build110531.bin

Hang, you would think they would know about handing running a script with a script interpreter.

Once it’s installed, you can run it like so:

java -jar IPMIView.jar

Now all I really want from this thing is the KVM component, which happens to run as a separate application.
Running just java -jar iKVM.jar doesn’t work – it says “no iKVM32 in java.library.path”. When using the supplied JRE, it does manage to run the application, which shows up in the process list as this:

java -cp .:::::$PWD/iKVM.jar:$PWD/IPMIView20.jar:$PWD/TrapView.jar:::::: \
	-Djava.library.path=. \
	-D tw.com.aten.ikvm.KVMMain \
	$IP $USERNAME $PASSWORD null 5900 623 2 0

When using openjdk, this seems to work just as well (or better):

java -Djava.library.path=. -jar iKVM.jar \
  $IP $USERNAME $PASSWORD null 5900 623 2 0

And it looks wonderful:
I really should do the world a service and reverse engineer the hacky quasi VNC protocol being used, which also allows resizing and media sharing — but I suddenly have something that works, so I’m going to stop.  I’m not even going to try and fix the problem that it requires write access to ISO images that will be simulated as CD-ROMs to the target machine.

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