The Design and Implementation of laffer1

I'm quite happy with the presidential election results last night.  Beyond the obvious step forward for equality in this country, we also voted for an intellectual who will think about the ramifications of his actions.

Last night, most TV networks began to discuss the possible outcomes for the country.  They focused on the positive.  Obama won.  Some even foolishly tried to declare racism dead.  There are still people who hate in this country.  Many have diverted that energy toward people with middle eastern backgrounds.  Many of these same people voting for change, voting for a biracial man, also voted against the rights of americans to marry and adopt children.  Arkansas banned anyone who wants to adopt without being married from participating.  That means children in their state will suffer with no homes because of the hatred of a few.  A single mother with a child has a tough go, but what about a child with no family at all?  In many other states including California they voted against same sex marriage.  I believe that issue is the new equal rights issue.  People supporting those measures cannot give a clear answer without including a religious belief or some ignorant hate.  I don't see how that is different than judging someone for the color of their skin.  Many of us still hold the "I'm x so you have to be too" mentality.  That has to change.

I've been busy lately.  These online classes keep me surprisingly busy.  Then there's MidnightBSD.  I've done a lot this month, and yet not reached my goal.  I decided to take a few days off over the weekend to recoup.  I've been playing World of Warcraft with my undead mage on Medivah.  It's been fun.  I played in the battlegrounds yesterday for hours.  Due to system freezes and some other things I switched back to playing in Windows for awhile.  My frame rate is double, but it means I can't work on MidnightBSD while flying, etc.

My mother called me this morning to tell me gossip about a church I belonged to 8 years ago.  I don't care that much anymore.  The people whom I would have wished to talk to haven't said a word to me in years.  I've been encouraging her to go to church because I think she needs it.  However, I don't like to hear about it much.

 find src -name CVS -prune -type d -print | xargs rm -r 

where src is the directory name.  

I've watched the first three episodes of the new series (plus the pilot movie) now. I think the casting is good. At first, I didn't think it was that great, but they're starting to give the characters personalities. In Mike's case, he doesn't seem like rambo so much. One thing I don't like about this series is that they've completely gotten rid of the one man can make a difference angle. Now it's just a bunch of people. That worked well at the end of Knight Rider (original show), but sometimes they need to cut him off and let him and the car do things. Caryn hates the show, but she didn't like the original either. That means it must be doing something right.

CNN is reporting that NATO is meeting to send ships to Somalia to combat pirates. This is crazy, but I'm glad they're doing something.

It seems like most ftp servers have a similar problem.  They have a command buffer.  That buffer is a fixed size like 512 bytes.  When the buffer is overflowed, it separates the contents of the first and second buffer.  This separation can be used to send commands to an FTP server as a trusted user (by providing the idiot a link to click).

MidnightBSD has been patched since yesterday, Netbsd and OpenBSD have addressed it, but FreeBSD has ignored the problem to date.  proftpd also has a problem so we updated to the last rc which may still have a problem.  tnftpd has also had a reported issue today.  This sucks. 

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/09/22/ea_spore_drm_changes/

It's amazing, the community finally bitched about DRM. EA had to release a patch to back out some of it. It might even be safe for me to buy the game now.

Testing Drivel 2.0.3 with JJ. It works well with LJ. I am surprised by the stability of this version over the last version.

My dad stopped by for a visit yesterday around noon. It was a big suprise. Caryn and I went out to dinner last night, but we were back in time for the debate. It was a very odd evening.

This presidential debate is hilarious. CNN has an "audience reaction meter" lLOL

I'm trying to figure out this weird java problem. It's annoying.

I am working on enhancing JJ client to (the unix client) to support titles. There are hacks in the blogger and metaweblog api by several people including the wordpress project to take title tags (like HTML). The first step is getting the client to send the correct data and then I need to make an adjustment to our API to run a regular expression test to grab the title tag in the post.

Today is the first day of Fall.  It's begun.   

For the first time in quite awhile, I spent much of the evening reading; not technology books or homework, but real recreational reading.

I won an auction on a Sony E-book reader from sonyrewards.com recently. The reader came with several sample books, a free book of my choice and 100 free classics. The classic selection isn't that great, but I think we'll end up with 20 OK books. I may even find something I wouldn't normally read. I decided to let Caryn pick 50 of the books. The display works well on the device. I started with a Monk book, Mr. Monk in Outer Space. I haven't read one of the Monk books before, and it seems to stick with the perspective of Natilie, his assistant. I find the extra internal thoughts of Natalie boring in the book, but it did pick up at crime scenes and with Amberose.

I've read the first ten chapters of the book, or about 275 pages. After I stopped reading that book, I read a sample from Alan Greenspan's book. It was 120 pages. He had an interesting life. His parents divorced when he was young and he was raised by his mother. His father was a stock broker and he also divorced after a year of marriage (first marriage). He knew Ayn Rand for many years and she influenced his life greatly.

 I just finished watching a special preview of the new Knight Rider television show on NBC.  The show premiers next week, but it was available on their site. 

It was significantly more interesting than the "movie".  However, it was a bit too romantic at times and there is a lot of random eye candy thrown in to a point it was creepy.  It reminds me of ST Enterprise with the various vulcan outfits.  

<?xml version="1.0" standalone='no'?><!--*-nxml-*--> <!DOCTYPE service-group SYSTEM "avahi-service.dtd">  <service-group>     <name replace-wildcards="yes">%h filer</name>     <service>         <type>_smb._tcp</type>         <port>139</port>     </service> 

I was reviewing the browser stats for MidnightBSD.org.  Most websites throw out crazy numbers for IE like 90%.  Well IE is a little over 11% on that site.  That is all versions.  Firefox has 54% with 45% as Firefox 3.  Opera has 6.94% and Safari has 7.15%. 

Isn't open source great.

 My first day of class went OK.  I don't have much opinion on most of my professors yet.  However, one of them needs to learn how to make online content.  This professor designed pages with many colors, all caps, and font sizes.  It makes it stand out less when it's hard to parse.

My books were $300.  :(  

This sucks.  My dad is in the hospital again.  (since thursday)  

The server is practically dying right now. Apache is going nuts. I can't do anything about it and I have no upstream to do much. I can't even get to my websites sometimes. Talk about load problems.