Monthly Archives: February 2005

Safety is Overrated

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Now, give me a minute to defend myself. For some reason I can’t keep myself from using overly bold and inciteful titles. The point I’m trying to make is that we (and when I say we I mean the whole American populace) are all too willing to trade liberty for safety. I’m sure I’ve written about this in past posts, but I’m going to write about it now regardless, and I reserve the right to write about it again.
I was reminded of how little trust I have in the public by a television advertisement for News 12. That’s right. News 12 aired an advertisement for their doppler radar system and it reignited a feeling of worry in me so strong that it is now moving to me write this entry. Now, don’t get me wrong, this wasn’t just an advertisement for their weather report. To the untrained eye, or should I say to a less paranoid eye, that is all it was. But to me it speaks volumes about how frightened we are as a society. News 12 has recently added a second doppler radar to their fleet of weather predicting tools. As evidenced by the commercial this gives them the ability to, I don’t know, read the mind of the sun god and thereby predict the weather six months in advance. Regardless of what it actually does, they claimed that this doppler-duo is a (and I quote) “Umbrella of Safety”. Alright. Now, let that seep in a little bit. The commercial claimed that these meteorological-mates somehow combine to form an “Umbrella of Safety”. Now, the commercial wasn’t just born out of some advertising womb. There was, at some point, a group of people sitting around a table and one of them said something along the lines of, “You know what? The American public is so freaking scared that if we just tell them that we have something that makes them a little bit safer they’ll wet themselves in excitement.” Everyone else at the conference table agreed, either because they really liked the idea or their skull is so empty that it flaps in the wind. The sad part of the story isn’t that this pioneering ad executive probably got a sack full of cash and a BJ behind the copy machine for his brilliant realization. The sad part is that he is right.
Ever since September 11th (and probably for a while before then) we have been comatose with fear. It really isn’t that hard to notice, you just have to pay attention. It’s amazing how it permeates most of culture. You can overhear it in conversations. You can sense it in people’s voices when they talk about the war. Part of me thinks that fear might be what separates doves from hawks. If you fell scared enough, backed far enough into a corner, you can’t help but want to shoot everything that moves. You can sense this fear in our media also. It’s in movies, it’s in books, but most of all it’s on television news shows. We’re so pumped full of fear, it’s amazing that we carry on. It’s amazing that we get out of bed or leave the house.
FDR said it best when he said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Now I’m sure he was talking about how we shouldn’t be afraid to kill a few dark skinned people in some far off land or something like that. But, it fits well in my argument anyway. The real problem isn’t that we’re afraid, but that we’ll do most anything to get rid of the fear. There are few things that we wouldn’t give up for the chance to feel a little bit safer. Now, there really isn’t anything to be afraid of. If you live in the United States or Europe or some other civilized part of the world and you’re afraid of getting attacked by terrorists, you’ve missed the boat. You should be much more scared of cancer. No really, there is basically no chance that you’ll ever die in a terrorist attack.
But even I’m scared that we’ll see another terrorist attack on our shores in the not so distant future. However, I’m not afraid of losing my life, and my biggest worry isn’t the possible loss of thousands of lives. Now, don’t get me wrong. Any life lost is a horrible thing. However, I don’t think that the loss of life compares to the loss of our freedom. I’m slightly surprised that we retained the amount of freedoms that we did after September 11th. However, I feel that after another terrorist attack, we would be in a much different place. Noam Chomsky came to Stony Brook and gave a talk a few years after September 11th. I heard him say that in his eyes, if another terrorist attack were to occur in the US, that we would likely slip into a police state. He may have been exaggerating a little bit, but not very much. And if that were to come true, we would have no one to blame but ourselves. We wouldn’t even be able to blame the government, ’cause remember, we’re the ones that gives the government its power. That’s what a democracy is after all.
Now, if we really value our freedom so much. I mean, we must, that’s what we’re bringing to Iraq. Pretty soon freedom will be our biggest export. Anyway, if we value it so much, why do we want to throw it away so badly? Maybe I’m just a paranoid bastard, but I think someone has to worry about these things.

Now onto other things:

Lawrence Lessig, a board member over at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, made reference to an interesting book in his blog. The book is called Freedom of Expression®: Overzealous Copyright Bozos and Other Enemies of Creativity. It seems to be a refreshing look at patents, trademarks, the DMCA and a bunch of other well-intentioned ideas gone awry. I read the introduction and its both informative, hilarious, and sad. The book is available under a creative commons license as a PDF.

I really like the shows that NOVA puts on PBS every now and then. They recently aired a series called “The Elegant Universe”. It’s all about string theory and how the universe works. I missed it when it was aired on real TV, but I found out that NOVA has most of their shows available for streaming. I watched all three hours of the series this morning. It was very informative and I like to think that I understood most of it. I strongly recommend it.

Today was the first day that I sent a patch in to Coaster. I fixed bug #166788. It basically adds drag and drop support to Coaster. So now it’s possible to create a CD by dragging the files from your desktop or a nautilus window into the Coaster window. I spoke with the maintainer of Coaster, Bryan Forbes, on IRC about the patch and he said it’ll likely get into the next release of Coaster. Awesome! Now I won’t feel as much like a loser at Guadec. I want to try and do as much work as possible on Coaster over the coming months. I would really like to get it into Gnome 2.12. We need a good CD burning program. We’ll see.

This post was much longer than it probably should have been. My apologies. I just had so much to say. If you’ve gotten this far, you’re a real friend. Here we go, for fun, if you’ve gotten down this far, leave a comment that includes the word “fuzzy”. That’ll be our password. If you put it in a comment I’ll know that you really read the whole post and that you’re not just a poser. If anyone leaves a comment without the word “fuzzy” we’ll know that they didn’t read the whole post and that they’re a poser and we can laugh at them together. It’ll be fun I promise.

Updated to WordPress 1.5

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I updated the version of WordPress that I use to manage this site. The update process went fairly smoothly. There were a few bumps in the road because I had customized the look of my site a whole bunch, but it was fairly trivial to fix and only took around 10 minutes. This new version has a bunch of neat new features that I’m sure I’ll enjoy playing with. Hopefully these features will make it a little easier for me to avoid comment spam. Every 3 or 4 days I get hit with a piece of comment spam for every post I’ve done so far. Most of them get marked for moderation, but then I have to log in and delete each one. This verison of WordPress should make that a little bit easier.

Novell’s Hula Project looks pretty promising. I’m tempted to install it just to poke it for a bit. Honestly, if it had been released a week ago, I would probably already be using it as my mail server because I redid my mail server just last week. Apparently Jamie Zawinski, of Netscape and Mozilla fame, warned Nat Friedman about slapping Hula with the ‘Groupware’ label. Instead he offered the following advice, “Your ‘use case’ should be, there’s a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid?” That whole post is really pretty entertaining.

I’m actually going to try and install The Hurd in the next few days. I really don’t expect much from it, but that’s the point. It’ll be interesting to see an operating system in such an early stage of development. I mean, The Hurd has been 20 years in the making and it still doesn’t do much of anything. In fact, they very recently ripped out large chunks of it and started over. That’ll probably add another 20 years to the development time. I hope I’m alive to see version 1.0. Ha!

Browser Statistics

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So, I checked out my browser statistics for the whole month of January. It turns out that Firefox is used most often when going to www.markdrago.com. Admittedly, a bunch of those are me going to my own site to keep it updated and make sure everything is looking okay, but it’s not all me. Also, there are a bunch of robots and comment spamming things that represent themselves as being IE, so it’s a little hazy as to which number is over-weighted. Ahh well, it’s just nice to see a pie graph that looks this healthy. It should probably be noted that these numbers are based off of 819 identifiable hits that month. There was something like 1800 other hits that couldn’t be identified. I wonder what those hits were.

Browser Stats Pie Chart

Dave and Caesar

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My brother bought himself this giant Julius Caesar head. As if that wasn’t ridiculous enough, he had it on lay-a-way for a few days. I can’t handle him sometimes. I told him that he makes my life more and more like the Napolean Dynamite movie all of the time.

I finally bought a pro account over at Flickr. I’m really impressed by Flickr. They’ve taken a fresh look at photo management and web applications in general and it shows. Maybe we’ll get to do stuff like that at work in the next iteration of the interface, which should come out like 2 years from now. I wish things could move from the idea phase into the completed phase quicker than they do.

I’ve finally squared away my email situation. Let it be known that mbox is too slow for really anything. I’m now using maildir to store my mail on my new server and everything is much nicer. Oh yeah – fuck sendmail too. What good is a program if you can’t tell it what you want it to do. Someone needs to rethink how that thing interfaces with the user. Yeah – I’m saying that user interface matters even when the only interface is a configuration file. I always felt like one configuration file was going to be just about as easy or hard to use as any other. That was before I tried configuring sendmail. I’m now using postfix to deliver my mail into a maildir directory and dovecot to make it available through IMAP. Oh, and all of my mail traffic now runs over SSL. I know, it’s a little too geeky. It’s even geekier that getting it to work made my whole day.

I also applied a patch to office bocce that Jeff sent me. It abstracts all of the database calls so that we can use other database engines besides just sqlite. It seems to work really well. I plan on connecting it to PEAR::DB and thus be able to use a zillion databases. Alright, it’s 2am and I’m beat. I think I geeked out enough for one day.

Spit with Some Authority

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My Mom got back from here business trip today. She was in Orlando for the last few days. I drove my father and brother to pick her up from the airport. On the way my day laid into my brother pretty bad. He got on his case about helping around the house and a few other things. He got on him about how he spits his toothpaste into the sink. Apparently there was some toothpaste on the faucet or something. All through this rant I had Simon & Garfunkel playing in the background. It was a pretty surreal experience to be driving on Sunrise Highway in the rain, listening to Simon & Garfunkel and hearing my Dad yell at my brother for a good 10 minutes.

I found this linux commercial over at Novell’s website to be pretty funny. It’s pretty weird to see all of these big companies pushing linux so much. This was unheard of just a few years back.

American Morals

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“If you’re still free start running away.” –Bright Eyes – Landlocked Blues

Our idea of morals in this country is entirely fucked up. We need to get our heads out of our asses and get our shit straight. There are a few things that I hold very dear to me and a few things that I think are important for our country and these are the things that define my moral values. Here’s a short list of things that I think should fall under that “moral umbrella” that tend to get left out by politicians, the media, and religious authorities.

First and foremost we must preserve our freedoms. The most sacred of which is the freedom of speech. I really hope that we can spread free speech through the areas of American life that have been lacking it for so long. This includes saying “Fuck” on television and on the radio. I know, I’m a radical. Ha!

Everyone should be entitled to their opinion regarding their own moral values. We can’t go forcing our opinions on other people. Those folks who live in the “red states” aren’t the only people who can have moral values. This post is largely about proving that I have moral values that differ greatly from what the media is describing as morals and that I’m not “immoral”.

I believe that a woman is capable of making her own decision about her womb. This side of the argument can be fought from a moral stand point as well. Pro-choice is all about not forcing your view on others.

I try to treat every person like a fully fledged human being. This involves giving gay men and women the same right to marry that is afforded to straight men and women. It also involves fighting racism and sexism at every opportunity. It’s 2005. We can’t be complacent about something as obviously damaging as racism.

I question my government at every turn. This is for the good of the nation and the health of our government. Dissent is necessary and should be seen as a virtue. Hug a protester today.

My morals include not supporting a war that is unjustified. If you own an SUV and you have slapped one of those “support the troops” magnets on the back, you clearly have your priorities out of whack. First, you can’t both support a war and support the troops that are fighting it since the troops are over their being killed. The only way to support the troops is to call for an end to the war. Also, I don’t understand how you can drive a car that unnecessarily increases our demand on foreign oil and say that you support our troops. Buy a Prius and slap a peace bumper sticker on the back the next time you want to support our troops.

I just wanted to share my thoughts on this. I don’t want this to look like I want everyone to have the same ideas that I have. I just feel left out sometimes when I watch the TV because no one is speaking with my interests at heart. I can’t just wait for my thoughts to scroll across the bottom of the screen on CNN, so I’ve got to post them up here. Feel free to comment with all the reasons why I’m a dick. We support free speech here at markdrago.com.