On a mailing list, someone suggested that no matter which candidate we elect in November, he or she will not be able to halt the decline of the dollar.

Paul Ciszek replied:

Imagine a foreign country called Dumfukistan. This country is inhabited by religious fanatics who believe that the world will end any day now. This is reflected in many of their policies, as their government has no problem with borrowing a billion dollars a day with no intention of ever paying it back (indeed, insists that “deficits don’t matter), sees no point in maintaining any infrastructure, and behaves abroad as if they don’t expect to ever have to deal with the consequences of their actions. The people are so backward that they use their own medieval unit system, not shared by anyone else, that doesn’t even have units for things like voltage or current. Their science education is so piss-poor that most of their adult population is unaware that the Earth orbits around the sun, thinks the universe is only a few thousand years old, and even the majority of their college educated individuals cannot tell you (correctly) why summer is warmer than winter.

Now, if you found yourself holding a few million Dumfukistan quatloos, would you consider them a sound financial instrument and hold on to them, or would you try to convert them to something else while you still could?

Three other people sharing the elevator were discussing a documentation error.  One of them explained that a consultant had been brought in to write that documentation, but had been “thrown out the window”.

I asked, “are we actually allowed to defenestrate contractors?”

Maybe we can only do that when no one is looking.

I think this may be the first time I’ve been able to work the word “defenestrate” into a real conversation.

I’ve finally received in the mail a letter from Mission College confirming that I’ve met the requirements for my Associate of Arts in Mathematics degree, that the degree will appear on my transcript after the end of the semester, and that I’ll receive my diploma by mail four to six months after the end of the semester.

I’ve very excited about getting the diploma, because I think the four-to-six month delay can only be explained by one thing:  the college must have contracted with Tibetan monks to inscribe and illuminate the diplomas.  The result will surely be a thing of beauty, well worth the wait.

On the CCTALK mailing list, I found myself in the unusual position of defending some of the design decisions that went into the original IBM Personal Computer (PC), which was introduced in August 1981 and with which all modern PCs are still largely compatible. At the end of the posting, I wrote:

[Geez, I can’t believe I’m defending the engineers that developed the PC. Now I feel like I need to take a shower.]

Grumpy ol’ Fred replied:

Not gonna be enough.
It’s gonna take a lot of Jif and naval jelly

I’m not sure where and how the Jif and naval jelly need to be applied, but maybe it’s one of those things I don’t want to know.

And no, I don’t really think the designers were scoundrels. It’s from an H.L. Mencken quote, used for hyperbole.

Les brought to my attention that Google seems to think my blog hosts or links to malware, as shown here. I certainly don’t deliberately host any malware nor have any links to such, and a brief investigation doesn’t turn up any evidence that my site has been compromised, so I’m baffled as to what malware Google thinks is present.

Google says that I have to check with StopBadware.org, and StopBadware.org says that my site was reported to them by Google. That kind of finger-pointing is not very helpful for finding out what they think is wrong. If Google is going to report a site to StopBadware, then the Google Webmaster Tools should give the reason, rather than passing the buck.

The finger-pointing can be seen in two screenshots from Google and StopBadware.

Surplus in inches is absolutely necessary

If they’re necessary, by definition they aren’t surplus.

When the first first Gulf War broke out, I was watching the television coverage with coworkers in the company auditorium.  There was a commercial for a pickup truck, bragging about the size of its engine.  The voiceover said “there’s no substitute for cubic inches”, and one of my coworkers said “that’s just what my girlfriend says!”

On the way to a friend’s house, I went to a drive-through and ordered a burger and a shake. I still had the several-day-old remainder of a beverage in the cupholder that I needed to dispose of, but there was a waste can just beyond the pickup window, so after I got my order I pulled forward and used it.

After I ate my burger, I reached for milkshake, and discovered that I still had the old beverage, and had thrown the shake away.

That did save me 660 calories. Maybe I should have bought three shakes and thrown all three away, and I could have saved nearly 2000 calories!

I used LVM to increase the size of a logical volume containing an ext3 fileystem from 300GB to 500GB. After expanding the logical volume, it is necessary to expand the filesystem to use the added space. In theory, this can be done online (while the filesystem is mounted) by using the resize2fs command. In practice… Continue reading ‘The suboptimal way to expand a filesystem online’

I just got a refurbished Apple Mac mini, with the 1.83 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor. It is mainly intended for use compiling my open source programs such as Nonpareil for Mac OS X. I am extremely surprised at the user experience of booting Mac OS X Leopard for the first time, and very disappointed in Apple.

I’m used to new operating system installations wanting a very small amount of personal information from the user. Windows asks for the user’s name and company, though it allows the user to leave the company blank, as would be typical for home users. Fedora Core Linux asks for the users full name (not required) and a username. Neither of these seem very onerous, and the reasons for requesting the user’s name are reasonably clear. It’s less obvious why Microsoft wants a company name, but since you can omit it, I don’t much care.

Mac OS X, on the other hand, requires the user’s full name, postal address, phone number, expected place of use (home, small business, medium business, large business, etc), and industry. It will not allow the user to proceed until this information is entered. I don’t mind entering my name, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to tell my computer any of that other stuff without a very good reason. If I don’t put personally identifying information into a computer, that makes it less likely that the information will be misused or compromised. I’m pretty sure that the C compiler isn’t going to need any of that in order to compile my programs successfully.

The pages requesting the information have a button to view Apple’s privacy policy, which explains that Apple collects the information in order to provide an exceptional user experience. Exceptionally bad, in my opinion. I was put in the position of lying to the computer. I put “n/a” for all the fields that would accept that, and all nines for the ZIP code and phone number. I selected “home” for the place the computer will be used, though I wasn’t very happy about it. I selected “other” for the industry.

Apple shouldn’t force the user to choose between revealing personal information for no good reason, and providing false information. They should allow the user to skip providing the unnecessary information, or better yet, not even attempt to collect it.

The California Lottery is running advertisements claiming that over a million Californians win the Super Lotto Plus each month. Obviously their definition of “win” is different than mine. I don’t think it can be counted a “win” for the month unless the player is cash-positive for the total of all his or her lottery plays for the month. Of those one million Californians that “win” in a given month, how many actually wind up cash positive? I don’t have an actual number, but it is far less than a million.

For Super Lotto Plus, the odds of getting any payout are approximately 1 in 23. However, almost half of those payouts are only one dollar, the cost of the play, so they only break even, which can hardly be considered a win.

Based on figures from the California Lottery web site, in March 2008 there were a total of 1,991,983 Super Lotto Plus payouts, which means that approximately 45.8 million plays were purchased. Of those, 1,194,156 paid out only the one dollar purchase price, 400,024 paid $2, 381,692 paid $8-12, and 16,111 paid $43 or more. That means only a total of 797,827 plays were cash positive, so fewer than a million Californians could be said to have won the Supper Lotto Plus in March. Perhaps the Lottery could be forgiven for exaggerating the number of winners by 25%, but in fact the real number of winners is probably much lower, because many people buy more than one play, and of course 22/23 of those plays lose one dollar.

It is likely that almost all of the persons receiving the payouts of $43 or more actually won, i.e, were cash-positive for their lottery “investments” for the month. Perhaps even the majority of people receiving $8-12 payouts are cash-positive. But it’s likely that very few of the $2 payouts went to people that were cash positive. If we assume (very conservatively) that half of the recipients of $2 payouts were cash-positive, then at most only 597,815 players were cash-positive for the month. That means that the Lottery is overstating the number of winners by at least 67%.