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Silnith’s Lair
Apr. 19th, 2012
04:10 pm - Right to Drive
I am sick of hearing people deny any right to drive with the ridiculous, “Driving is a privilege, not a right.” The Second Amendment explicitly protects our right to own and operate firearms, whose sole purpose is to kill. Really they have no other purpose, they only exist to kill. If the Founding Fathers explicitly stated our right to own and operate objects with one purpose, namely to kill, who in their right mind could possibly believe that we do not have a right to own and operate objects whose primary purpose is travel and secondary purpose is transporting cargo? I cannot comprehend what sort of cognitive dissonance is necessary to make that logical leap. Do these people also believe we do not have a fundamental right to walk? Take public transit? Charter private transit? Carry boxes down the street?
aggravatedMar. 8th, 2012
02:12 am - To hate or not to hate?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art
I saw this linked from fark.com. I read it, I understand intellectually why people are reacting the way they are. But, somehow, I just am not angered by it. I don’t care. Is it a weird edge case in orthogonal government systems? Yes. Is it non-optimal? Sure. Do I think they need a new law to fix it? No. Particularly the law being proposed, which cuts off government benefits for anybody who wins $1000 or more, that is a gross overreaction. $1000 is not enough to justify cutting somebody off, that amount of money will barely go a couple months if you are living below the poverty line.
People need to stop looking for things to be angry about. There are legitimate emergencies out there, this is not one of them. The lottery is a self-sufficient system, it was not any drain on the government, it did not drain any taxes. Statistically, the odds of this being a long-term financial solution for somebody in her position are minimal. She probably really will need assistance again in the future. The entire process of changing the rules just to deny her the meager assistance will cost an order of magnitude more than the assistance itself will, counting the cost of the legislature’s time, the media time, and so on. It is not a battle worth fighting, shake your tiny fists and then move on.
Feb. 11th, 2012
Jan. 18th, 2012
04:40 pm - Bad housekeeper! No cookie!
So far the house cleaning has not gone well. I always come home to find the cat scratchers pushed up against the wall or this week stacked up on top of the cat perches, denying the cats the use of all of the above. This weekend I went shopping and got a bunch of frozen dinners, some Lucky Charms, and two bags of cookies. The frozen stuff I put in the freezer, and the rest I left in the grocery bag in the living room. Today I decided I wanted to have Lucky Charms for breakfast. I go to the living room, look around, nothing. I check the kitchen, nothing. I look through all the cabinets, even where I keep the dishes, nothing. Finally I call the cleaning service. Apparently the cleaning ladies saw they were within ten feet of the garbage, and threw them away. Brand-new, unopened packages. Lucky Charms, Oreos, and Chips Ahoy.
I am irritated and annoyed. The cleaning service owner apologized and offered to pay for the food. But I don't want money. I want my food. For me, money means little, and going out to go shopping is a huge burden. I don't want the money back, I want the food back.
frustratedNov. 13th, 2011
02:42 am - Lady Gaga
Was flipping channels late at night and came across Lady Gaga's Monster Ball special. She certainly has talent and personality. It was a very good show.
entertainedOct. 30th, 2011
03:34 am - Sundance movies can be dangerous
I just watched a movie called "Student Services". It looked like it might be enjoyable, but instead I spent the whole movie tensed, worried for the protagonist, desperately hoping things would not happen. I just wanted to intervene, protect her from what was happening. The whole thing stressed me out completely.
It was not as traumatic for me at "Sucker Punch" was. But it was still a very unpleasant experience.
Aug. 4th, 2011
02:41 am - good day at work
Once I got to work this morning, the day was great. I got complimented by both my boss and my tech lead on the quick and insightful debugging I had done the previous night, two hours after midnight, of the recurring production crash that I was not even involved in analyzing. But it just so happened that I was up and my work laptop was on when the Ops guy sent the e-mail with the stack trace in it, and I immediately recognized the class because I have extensive knowledge of the system due to completely rewriting it the past month, and I knew at a glance what the problem with that class must be. So I pulled down the code, checked my assumption, and then sent out a reply with a description of the root cause as well as an immediate configuration fix that Ops could apply in production. Then I went to bed, and let the rest of the people involved do their thing. My tech lead pushed through the management resistance and got it out. Meanwhile, I chatted with my favorite QA guy who was trying to reproduce the issue in a test environment, and with my knowledge of the root cause he was able to modify his stress test to focus on the problem and reproduce it an order of magnitude more quickly.
Between all these things I also got tasked with helping another teammate get a project building correctly, and then creating a client package for the project in question for yet another teammate to use. That teammate also tagged me to help him fix a bunch of test cases, since I understood how to write Mockito tests. And in between these other things, I spent some time looking out the window into the bay as the Navy aircraft carrier group swung through, showing off for the annual Seattle Seafair. I thought I heard the Blue Angels too, but didn't go to a window to see them.
Mythsara successfully tanked Baleroc to death today, and was greatly reassured about her own performance when she went through the combat logs afterwards. I kept telling her that she was doing just fine, the wipes had nothing to do with her. Even Exemplar said it in Ventrilo, though mostly to quiet the whispers from the raid. Maybe we will actually get a bear tank back into our raids full-time! And it has been years since we had a woman in the tank channel. Hooray gender balance!
awesomeJun. 17th, 2011
05:57 pm - I can't hear you over the sound of how awesome I am.
I am amazingly good at my job. While I was putting the finishing touches on my rewrite of the final portion of the service I've reverse-engineered and re-implemented almost from scratch, the tech lead asked me to show our newest team member what I had been working on. While we were going through my refactoring, the tech lead's right-hand man came over and asked me to look at a problem he was seeing in production with a task executor failing to execute tasks. We went through the logs and found RejectedExecutionExceptions, which could only come from the executor being shutdown somehow, or else the work queue overflowing. Since there was no place he called shutdown, we looked into the tasks he was executing. Turned out one of the tasks itself fired off another asynchronous task into the same executor, and eventually under load it would reach deadlock. After finding that and returning to my desk, one of the QA guys came over and asked me to look at a persuasive essay he was writing on the value of dependency management systems. I suggested he insert a section pointing out the value of having dependency version conflicts clearly highlighted, and as I was speaking one of the devtools guys called me over to help them debug why one of our services was not starting up. I explained what the error message in the bottom of the stack trace meant (a config value was missing) and showed him where to find the correct value for the configuration parameter. Then the tech lead wanted to talk about the timeline for wrapping up my refactor efforts so he can refocus the team to building an end-to-end testing infrastructure, which he wants to put myself and the newest teammate on next week.
Then I went to lunch.
After lunch, I managed to get three exchanges working between an unit test client and a fully-formed instance of our service except with the database fully mocked out. Once I get all the operations tested thusly, we will be able to run full automated tests of our entire service as part of our continuous builds.
I feel good. (Queue the music!)
accomplishedJun. 5th, 2011
06:41 pm - unedited musings as my mind wanders while grinding Archaeology
Another term for "terrorism" is "asymmetric warfare". "Terrorists" almost always have political goals of some kind, goals they cannot achieve. They cannot achieve them due to power imbalances, they have no power and those performing the acts they fight have great power.
Whenever people talk about terrorism and security in terms of locking down society and trying to prevent anybody from ever performing any action they consider dangerous or bad, I always wonder if the people proposing this realize they are simply responding to a power imbalance by trying to make the power imbalance even worse. Rather than escalating the conflict, why not try to remove the source and stop doing the overpowering acts that are provoking the reaction in the first place?
A lot of hatred towards the United States coming from the Middle East is due to the United States' decades of military occupation and intervention. All political attempts to reign in this behavior have failed. In essence, the United States has limitless power to impose our military on the rest of the world, and we have been doing that for decades. The people who are victimized by this have no power to stop it, so they resort to "asymmetric warfare" or "terrorism". In response, the United States increased its military imposition, attempting to quell the anger by repeating the very actions that provoked the anger.
The same phenomenon goes on locally. You can see it in attempts to protest suppression that are themselves suppressed. "Free speech zones" are a blatant example. You can see similar behavior in the responses to sexual assault by the Transportation Security Administration, warrantless wiretapping and surveillance of Americans, torture in Guantanamo Bay, secret interpretations of the USA PATRIOT Act, a whole litany of examples. You can even see it in smaller examples of police officers confiscating cameras from people recording the police actions and charging people doing the recording with illegal wiretapping. The rational response to seeing law enforcement being recorded acting illegally is not to stop the occurrences of recording, it is to stop the behavior of the police. Yet across the country, the irrational approach is being adopted in legislatures and courts pretty consistently.
In the computer security industry, it used to be standard for any software producer to persecute and prosecute any security researcher who found a vulnerability in their software. The Open Source movement (among other factors) helped standardize the practice of embracing these vulnerability reports and fixing them, rather than denying they existed and attacking the reporter. Lately this trend has suffered several setbacks, possibly due to an overall culture shift in this country spawned largely from the irrational and all-consuming fear of terrorism. But addressing the root causes improved the lives of all people involved, from the software producer to the security researcher to the end-consumer of the software. It benefits all involved with virtually no downsides. The computer security industry (mostly) learned this lesson, why can't we learn the same lesson in other aspects of our lives such as politics?
contemplativeMay. 6th, 2011
08:05 pm - Gird your loins, we're going technical.
( Gird your loins, we’re going technical. )
Sometimes I think the true mark of intelligence (or, perhaps, wisdom) is knowing when to avoid complicated designs and requirements, and stick with elegant simplicity.
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