Costume Idea Zone

Can't figure out what to be for Halloween? Check out the Costume Idea Zone. I like "Darth Brooks" personally.

The Best Science Photographs of 2005

Visions of Science has their 2005 winners up (with larger versions of the pictures over at BBC and National Geographic). I particularily like the mosquito hatching.

The Fragile Internet

I would guess not too many people in North America noticed (presumably being asleep), but late last night two separate Tier 1 (or "backbone") ISPs had major connectivity problems. Level 3 and Verio are both Tier 1 ISPs, which means they are two of the relatively few companies that provide portions of the "core" of the Internet. The Internet is designed in such a way as to be able to route around outages such as what happened last night, but any time a Tier 1 ISP has connectivity problems is a problem for everyone. Plus, anyone who's Tier 2 ISP buys transit from that particular Tier 1 ISP will find the Internet much smaller than usual.

The two providers were only down for about an hour, but the fallout of such a significant event is probably still happening. The system will recover from the event though, so that's not the real problem. The real problem is that Level 3 is having serious problems. Just a few weeks ago Level 3 turned off their peering point with Cogent Communications, another Tier 1 ISP, because of some undisclosed contract dispute, effectively disconnecting their customers from anything on Cogent's network. It has since been turned back on, but the incident put focus on a good question: What happens when the Internet, widely regarded as the world's future communication tool and essential to business, disintegrates because of a dispute or problem between two core companies?

I Can(n't) Stop at Any Time!

Yup, bad habits aren't my fault again. Well, maybe starting them is, but getting rid of bad habits is apparently harder that previously thought. It's my brain's fault, after all.

At least, that's what researchers at MIT found in rats.

Touchdown for Team No-Personal-Responsibility!

Damn the Poor, Help the Rich!

Got your attention? Good.

Sounds like our government is at it again, this time we're going to cut spending on programs that help the poor, particularily the people most affected by the gulf hurricanes, and we're going to simultaneously push through some more tax breaks for the wealthy. Because, you know, that'll help the poor suffering people in the gulf. Somehow.

Sometimes I think more effort is spent helping those playing golf, not those in the gulf.

Sojourners has more information, including a way to call your senators and representative and tell them to show moral responsibility in the budget. And don't let anyone convince you that this is somehow going to benefit anyone except the wealthy.

OpenDocument and Microsoft

I've been following the developments of Massachusetts choosing to support Adobe Acrobat (PDF) and OpenDocument formats and NOT Microsoft's XML format for public documents (NOTE: OpenDocument and Microsoft's new format are *BOTH* XML schemas, but have different licensing stipulations). It's a rather interesting case, and seems to highlight the fact that people are fed up with proprietary file formats that limit what you can do with your own creation. In particular, Massachusetts is arguing that the closed and/or limited formats provided by Microsoft are threatening Massachusetts' sovereignty, which is a bit strange at first. However, if you think about it, what would happen if Microsoft went out of business? What would happen to all those documents produced by the government? How would the people access them? What if, rather than going out of business, Microsoft simply decides one day to stop supporting their formats? Or perhaps they change the licensing requirements even further, preventing products from accessing documents in the future? With an open format even if a specific product goes out of business or stops support, another product can be used or created to support it.

Microsoft Word .doc files have frustrated third-party developers for a long time, given that the format is closed and thus has to be reverse-engineered in order to create an interface. Lack of compatibility with MS Word is probably the most often-cited reason for not using OpenOffice.org, and yet this is really Microsoft's fault, not OpenOffice.org's. Microsoft claims to have solved this issue with their XML schema, which is probably what they intend to replace the .doc format with. However, there are several licensing problems with the XML schema Microsoft has created that exclude sub-licensing, which is important to open-source products. Many people seem to think Microsoft did this on purpose to create good PR about an open format, while excluding their current primary competition, open-source products like OpenOffice.org.

It will be interesting to see if other government bodies choose to follow Massachusetts toward open standards.

Here's a link to the FAQ from Massachusetts' Information Technology Division, a Groklaw story about Microsoft's complaining, and a couple of articles [1 and 2] that describes the decision fairly well.

Fall Spider 2

Fall Spider

Caught this picture this morning off our deck.

Sometimes the media makes me MAD

This is rediculous. Tonight I open up my web browser (Firefox!) to my home page, which is a My Yahoo! page with AP Top Stories on it, and I see the headline "FBI Examines Computers in Cheney's Office". Now I don't particularily like Vice President Cheney, but that does not give the media the right to create rediculous sensationalism about a story that HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH DICK CHENEY!! The only reason this story is tied at all to Mr. Cheney is because the FBI agent under investigation (for sending classified information to Filipino officials) USED to work in Cheney's office several years ago and the FBI searches for possible past violations as well as current ones.

Grr.

God's Politics

Picked up an interesting book tonight at Powell's called God's Politics, by Jim Wallis. The basic premise of the book is that American politicians, whether they be Republicans or Democrats, conservatives or liberals, are missing the point of religious issues by either perverting religious beliefs and focusing on key issues to pursue their agenda (such as focusing on abortion without tackling AIDS or people dying from the war in Iraq, as the "religious Right" are), or ignoring religious beliefs altogether and not allowing the various faiths of most Americans to play a role in politics at all (as the "secular left" are).

Very interesting read so far, the author is an editor for Sojourners magazine and apparently quite active both in evangelical Christianity and politics. He also comments every once in a while on the polarization of religion/secularism that mainstream media performs, something which I personally hate to see. Just tonight the local news, KGW, had a story about a group of "Christians" from a church in Kansas came all the way to Beaverton to protest Southridge High School's debate over the play The Laramie Project. Unfortunately, I can't find a link to the article, but here's a related article from when the whole issue began [Edit: here's the article]. Now why did they have to go to all the trouble to label them Christians? Why not a more appropriate label, like "self-righteous judgmental compassionless bigots", who rather than showing anger at the fact that a human being who was created in the image of God was murdered, instead chose to focus on the fact that he was gay.

The introduction to God's Politics talks about Sojourners' campaign before the 2004 elections calling for people to realize that "God Is Not a Republican. Or a Democrat." Their campaign led to an ad that was published in more than 50 newspapers across the country. Here's a link to the ad itself [PDF].

This book has stirred up strange emotions in me so far. More than anything, it makes me wish that I was more active, more civic, more vocal about what I truly believe, what Jesus actually teaches us in the Bible, rather than what I have learned to associate with Christianity through the media and through popular beliefs. Christianity is NOT the same as being an American! While both are perhaps good in concept, we as a country are not following either ideology.

Kernel Hacker

Today I became an elite Linux Kernel hacker.

Okay, maybe not. But I did get my first patch accepted into the mainline Linux kernel, trivial though it may be. Today I spent a bunch more time learning about various parts of the Linux kernel, including learning more about the kernel and userspace implementations of raw sockets, since I'm interested in extending bonding to have an ICMP (ping) monitoring mechanism. But enough of that jargon.

No luck so far on the job hunt, I try to spend at least an hour every day searching, though it tends to get boring very quickly since the jobs all start sounding the same.

Hurricane Katrina Blog

Jess and I have been following a blog from a friend of hers living in New Orleans: Hurricane Katrina Evacuation. It is strange hearing the accounts from a friend, since we're so far away and disconnected from the events.

Saddle Mountain

Here's a nice panorama from the top of Saddle Mountain in the coastal range of Oregon. I took this using our FujiFilm FinePix 3800 (PDF) and a tripod and then stitching it together with AutoStitch and some massaging from the Gimp.

Freedom... kinda

Well, it's my first day as an unemployed netizen :-) I suppose it's a bit of a mixed blessing, since I have the freedom to do whatever I want, and yet I know I need to find a job soon. Weird. And what better to do on your first day of unemployment than BLOG!

Yesterday was strange, it was my last day at Intel, and right then on my last day I got an invitation to meet with the manager of the development group I've been testing for all along. Apparently they're looking to fill a couple positions and I got rave reviews from the developers I've been working with, but he wasn't sure I was a good fit for now. I guess it can't be all that bad since it never hurts to have a face-to-face with another manager! I just wish it was a little more clear what I should be doing.

In the mean time I'm continuing to try to learn more about the Linux kernel and try to demonstrate some of my development abilities since that's what I want to do. Right now I'm looking at adding functionality to the Channel Bonding driver, since that's what I worked on the most while at Intel, so I'm picking my way through the Linux TCP/IP stack.

My old computer has been resurrected from the dead after removing a bad memory stick (down to 384MB of memory from 512MB) and a dead hard drive (the 250GB drive died, so I had to swap my 40GB drive back in). I'll have to see if the dead drive is still under warranty, since it's a shame to lose a fairly new 250GB drive.

Phantom Bridge

Jess and I went hiking this weekend in an area southeast of Portland in the Cascades. This picture is a panoramic stitched together from 6 separate pictures I took at the top of a place called Phantom Bridge. On the left side you can see Mount Jefferson, and peaking out behind some trees on the far right side you can see Three Sisters.

Dead computer

Well, my five-year-old custom-built computer finally bit the dust tonight, it seems to have some memory problems and/or motherboard problems. Since the computer is so old, it's probably not worth trying to fix, since the cost of compatible parts is probably as much as buying a new computer. Sigh.

It's interesting how disposable computers are now. I have to wonder how long until we have a computer recycling "crisis." Greenpeace just released a report on how China and India are getting tons of the world's computer junk, creating these toxic computer landfills. Traditional CRT monitors (not LCD flat-panels) have a lot of lead in them, for example. On the other side of things, groups like Portland's very own FreeGeek take old used computer equipment, pull the working pieces out, and give away the resulting working (though old) systems loaded with Linux to people for free in exchange for volunteer work. Hard to beat that deal!

Garden State

Saw a good movie tonight, called Garden State, with Zack Braff and Natalie Portman in it. It's really just a movie about life, about how screwed up most people are in some way or another, and how sometimes instead of trying to be "happy" it's better to be "okay." Highly recommended movie.

Blue Like... Rock?

I started reading a book called Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller today. The book was sent to us by a friend who read it and noticed it was all about Portland. It's kind of a strange book, more a collection of memoirs than anything, but memoirs relevant to life, God, love, purpose, etc. It's interesting, in his second chapter Don talks about how people are almost always motivated by selfish reasons, from the criminal to the pastor.

Do I think you should sell all your possessions and live as some sort of homeless nomad? No, I believe that command was for that individual because Jesus knew his heart and knew that was what kept him separated from God. But I do believe we need to think about why we have possessions and what purpose they serve. If your wealth isn't for God, then what purpose does it serve?

I listen a lot to alternative and rock bands, groups like Linkin Park, Staind, Puddle of Mudd, etc, because I feel like they have so much raw emotion in them about the world we live in. In the introduction to his book, Don talks about not liking Jazz until he stood outside watching a guy play the saxophone for 15 minutes straight without opening his eyes. The idea is you can't truely love something until you see someone else love it first. I wonder at that, since I listen to rock all the time, but not so much because the music is pleasing. It's more because the music is mad. Do I have to see someone raving mad playing rock before I like it?

First Post

It seems you can't avoid blogs these days, so if you can't beat 'em, join 'em! This is my opportunity to ramble on about life, strife, and wife, as well as link to pictures, web sites, etc, that I think are cool.

If all goes well, I should publish here a couple times a week, and might even get Jess to contribute :-)

I'll start by promoting FireFox, as I intend to do periodically. If you haven't tried it yet (instead of Internet Explorer), give it a spin.

This week has been hard on us. I've been pursuing a permanent position at Intel and had four (yes *four*) different interviews for one position this week. It's a bit stressful. In addition, Jess and I have been "exploring" different possibilities in transportation, since the single car thing is getting a little old. Portland has some of the best public transportation in the nation, and all of it seems to bypass our poor little apartment (unless you're trying to go downtown, in which case it's really easy).

On a more positive note, we've been exploring a church in SE Portland called Imago Dei, and for the first time since leaving Illinois we think we've found a church that excites us! We'll see what happens...

I've been experimenting with some more "advanced" features of The Gimp, an Open Source image editor similar to Photoshop, so I thought I'd share one of my experiments. The picture to the right is one Jess took at Washington Park in Portland, with some layer magic by The Gimp.