Author: Michael Alan Dorman

Yogi, brigand, programmer, thief, musician, Republican, cook. I leave it to you figure out which ones are accurate.

Ah, the glories of Photoshop

In fact, I’m always somewhat amused at the verbing of Photoshop. Regardless, though, “the faux Google News feeds of Rumsfeld”:http://www.musicforamerica.org/node/view/21365 are pretty amusing.

“Rumsfeld denies eating Iraqi prison” indeed.

Updating your Treo 600 under Linux

Provided without warranty, don’t blame me if it turns your Treo 600 into a pile of worthless silicon. That it didn’t do it to mine is probably only happenstance.

Go to the “palmOne page for the updater”:http://www.palmone.com/us/support/downloads/treo/treo_600_updater_sprint_v1_20.html.

Contemplate the fact that they do not provide the .prc file you need in any format that is easily accessible to linux users.

Find a friend with a Mac to unstuff the Mac version and give you a copy of the resulting .prc file.

_*MAKE A BACKUP OF YOUR DATA*_: @pilot-xfer -b ~/pilot.backup@

Make sure you know what your user name (and perhaps id) is: @install-user@

Install the Updater: @pilot-xfer -i "Sprint 1.20 Updater.prc"@

Run the update utility from the application menu on your treo.

Watch all the scary warnings flash by. Quake in fear that you’ve just destroyed this very expensive bit of hardware. Do this for roughly ten minutes.

Once it’s done, set your user name (and perhaps id): @install-user -u "Your User Name"@

Now, restore your backup: @pilot-xfer -r ~/pilot.backup@

I had the following .prc files fail to restore. Eyeballing the list, none look problematic–in fact, I like the idea that this might have lightened the load of non-native code. Only time will tell:

Net Prefs.prc
HsSysResource68K.prc
City Time_CiAa_appl_a68k.prc
Address Book_addr_appl_a68k.prc
Activation_HsAc_appl_a68k.prc
Buttons_HsBt_panl_a68k.prc
Texter_HsCh_appl_a68k.prc
DefaultApps_HsDH_panl_a68k.prc
Display_HsDs_panl_a68k.prc
HandangoLauncher_HsHL_appl_a68k.prc
Keyguard_HsKg_panl_a68k.prc
Phone_HsPh_appl_a68k.prc
Calculator_HsPr_appl_a68k.prc
Sound_HsRN_panl_a68k.prc
HSTraceDatabaseHead.pdb
Card Info_cinf_appl_a68k.prc
Batcam_Bcam_appl_a68k.prc
IOTA_Iota_appl_a68k.prc
Date Book_date_appl_a68k.prc
Digitizer_digi_panl_a68k.prc
Date & Time_dttm_panl_a68k.prc
Formats_frmt_panl_a68k.prc
General_gnrl_panl_a68k.prc
Launcher_lnch_appl_a68k.prc
Memo Pad_memo_appl_a68k.prc
Connection_modm_panl_a68k.prc
Network_netw_panl_a68k.prc
Owner_ownr_panl_a68k.prc
Preferences_pref_appl_a68k.prc
Security_secr_appl_a68k.prc
Welcome_setp_appl_a68k.prc
ShortCuts_shct_panl_a68k.prc
Get BC_S7DL_appl_a68k.prc
To Do List_todo_appl_a68k.prc

I have little sympathy for SpamCop

I’ve worked on a service that sends out lots of email. We were very careful to 1) only add people to our system who have requested it (which involves sending out confirmation emails), and 2) not send mail to someone who never wants to hear from us again.

Now anyone who does this sort of work will have immediately spotted that if we send an email in step 1 in order to verify the address, it is possible for someone to have us send emails to arbitrary addresses.

This is where #2 comes it; every email we send out includes a link that will put you on our “Do Not Call” list–get on that list and you’ll never be able to sign up for the service, because we won’t ever send you an email again even if you (or someone else trying to annoy you) asks.

Nonetheless, I’ve had to deal with several SpamCop complaints. Each time it’s the same thing–a forwarded message with wild invective, etc., and, inevitably, SpamCop *never tells us the address the message was sent to!*

Yep, that’s right, it’s a great game of Hide The Ball–“If you’re not a spammer, remove this person’s address. No, we’re not going to give it to you, just do it.”

Usually there’s something in the headers that gives it away–which arguably just proves how stupid a game it is for SpamCop to play–but it’s a waste of time.

That said, it’s unfortunate that it’s Scott Richter “who is suing them”:http://www.clickz.com/news/article.php/3348241, since he’s a fucking spamboy wanker.

Josh Marshall has captured it perfectly for me

bq. Another way to put this might be to say that being the good guys is about what you do, not who you are.

This is why, despite the wretched, vile, but sadly-not-quite-inhuman acts of the al-Queda operative “Bush chose not to pursue, so as not to distract from his desire to go to war with Iraq”:http://dailykos.com/story/2004/3/4/2045/08540, we should continue to pursue the issue of the wretched, vile acts we have perpetrated.

Jane Austin as Baseball historian (and other errata)

I don’t know what to say. As much as I enjoy watching the Durham Bulls, I was spectactularly ignorant of baseball’s history, other than having some notion that it was a 19th-century thing.

“Rivka fixes this”:http://respectfulofotters.blogspot.com/2004_05_01_respectfulofotters_archive.html#10843352196650749, with a discussion of it’s late-18th-century appearance in Jane Austen novels, and further references–ones that also mention “Morris-dancing”:http://www.geocities.com/tokyo/subway/4346/pages/morris.html, natch–from the earliest parts of that century.

And the Steven Jay Gould quote on the page uses the word _tendentious_. So there.

I hate these sorts of articles…

Robert Reich “has an interesting editorial on whether interest rates are artificially low”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/11/opinion/11REIC.html, which is echoed by “Josh Quiggin”:http://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001836.html and “Brad DeLong”:http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2004_archives/000808.html.

Billmon used to be the one to scare me with economics articles, but now I’m reading more stuff from economists.

A Debian Developer died in a car accident

Manuel Estrada Sainz died in a car accident last night, going home from the Free Software Conference in Valencia, Spain.

Although my actual participation within Debian has been, well, pathetic of late, and I didn’t have any particular interaction with Manuel–I didn’t use any of the packages he maintained–it’s still always somehow affecting to find that someone with whom you had this connection has died.

Heh

“Crooked Timber”:http://crookedtimber.org/ has “an amusing post wondering exactly why “Trojan” gets used as a name by various organizations”:religion/.

And yet again, our “real” media seems out to lunch.

While my antipathy for religious fundamentalists both foreign and domestic is, I suspect, pretty obvious, what gets less airtime is then fact that I don’t actually have a problem with religion–examples of people who are given strength and purpose and compassion and belonging by their faith are all around me.

But, let’s face it, it’s the wingnuts who get most of the airtime in the mainstream media. Fortunately, we have PBS.

“NOW with Bill Moyers”:http://www.pbs.org/now/ April 30 show included a segment discussing the large number of Christian pro-choice organizations who showed up at the March for Women’s Lives.

bq.. MOYERS: You no doubt read or heard something about that huge March for Women’s Lives in Washington last weekend.

A single photograph captured it for me. Hundreds of thousands of people, spread across the mall in the heart of the nation’s capitol marching for choice. We took a closer look, and found something that the press all but ignored. Many of these people were there on faith. Our report is produced by Naomi Spinrad.

MOYERS: They came from all over the country to join the largest demonstration for a woman’s right to choose ever held in the nation’s capital.

Despite the sheer size of the crowd, this day was more than a matter of numbers. For thousands of these people, coming here was a pilgrimage. They came as an act of faith, a witness to deeply held beliefs about religion and conscience.

On the fringes of the march were their old adversaries from the religious right, who say the Bible teaches that abortion is murder. The mainstream media often seem to think theirs are the only religious opinions that count.

p. Yeah, it’s the first I’d heard of ’em, too. But it makes me happy to know that they’re out there–and sad that you don’t hear more about them; I guess reporting on moderation and conscience doesn’t sell enough clothes detergent, or whatever.

“I can’t even have a head-on collision in peace”

After “Sling Blade”:http://imdb.com/title/tt0117666/, Billy Bob Thornton wrote, directed, and starred in a second movie, “Daddy and Them”:http://imdb.com/title/tt0166158/.

The cast is improbable–Billy Bob, Laura Dern, Brenda Blethyn, Ben Affleck, Jamie Lee Curtis, Jim Varney, Andy _Fucking_ Griffith–and the family they portray is both grotesque and hilarious.

I’m amazed that I can’t find any information about why this movie, filmed in ’98 or ’99, was released direct to cable in 2001 and then didn’t make it to DVD until late last year.

Oh, the bizarre patterns of nature

You know, there’s not a lot of arguments for believing in some sort of overarching creator figure that I give much credence to. But I have to say, the strange and wonderful things that nature produces, well, they almost convince me, because how could cicadas be anything but “a particularly elaborate joke”:http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=2647052?

I think Adam Felber sums it up quite well

“Read it here”:http://www.felbers.net/mt/archives/001777.html

bq. That’s when I start coming around full circle, and the fruitlessness of the quest becomes clear. In the end, the Bush presidency is defined by the Bush presidency. It has been amazingly consistent and self-defining in a way that will some day stun mathematicians: Every little tiny action of the administration is actually _a complete representation of the administration itself_. It is, in fact, a fractal presidency.

It’s a shame Paul Bremer can’t see in his crystal ball this time…

Because he sure as fuck “got it right about Septermber 11”:http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=%2Fap%2F20040502%2Fap_on_re_mi_ea%2Fbremer_bush_3. From a statement in February of 2001:

bq. The new administration seems to be paying no attention to the problem of terrorism. What they will do is stagger along until there’s a major incident and then suddenly say, ‘Oh, my God, shouldn’t we be organized to deal with this?’

Robert Fripp on movies

(from “his diary”:http://disciplineglobalmobile.com/diary/diary-RobertFripp.shtml, April 22, 2004)

bq. 23.17 The Punisher. My sister is still trying to rationalize B movies, now after watching them with her brother for at least 50 years. I suggest to my Sister that the plot details of B movies are irrational: accept that people do things that are contradictory, against their own best interests, have short term aims & limited attention span, and do incredibly stupid things while things blow up. Apart from things blowing up, this is just like the music industry.

But experiencing my Sister experiencing the irrational adventures of a B movie is itself a movie entertainment.

Neal Stephenson, The Confusion

bq.The dream was interrupted by the raucous vehement on-rush of the carriage of the Marquis d’Ozoir, which was about as fitting and about as welcome in this scene as musketry at a seduction.

Ah, San Francisco

Every time I hear about the marriages in San Francisco, it makes me smile.

Most know this, but should anyone not, my wife and I got married for the very unromantic purpose of getting me health insurance when we moved to Miami. Then we didn’t tell anyone for a couple of years.

We’re both committed to the relationship–well, I am, and it keeps my stress level lower to believe that she is, too–but that commitment doesn’t reside in a piece of paper issued to us by the City of Cambridge, hinge on a big public ceremony or somehow reside in piles of wedding gifts. Which is good, since we only have one of the three.

(Though we _have_ been contemplating the having a 10-year anniversary party this June. Don’t know if that’ll happen, though–that’s a lot of logistics, and we’d want to try and spend most of the money where it counts: on the bar. “Feel free to register interest.”:mailto:%6D%64%6F%72%6D%61%6E%40%6D%61%6C%6C%65%74%2D%61%73%73%65%6D%62%6C%79%2E%6F%72%67)

Add to that the fact that we’ve none of the 50s-style traditional notions of marriage that seem to permeate the Republican party’s rhetoric–we both kept our last names (though Anne does occasionally use mine because it’s shorter and easier to communicate to, say, the dry cleaners or for restaurant reservations; _BTW, a belated thanks to Joy and Carl for what may be only the third wedding invitation that got it right by naming both of us as we prefer to be addressed_), neither of us wants to sit around the house eating bon-bons and watching soaps, and although I have been known to cook, I wouldn’t go barefoot in our kitchen (all the catfood bits make it an unpleasant experience), and I figure another six months of regular yoga will put any pregnancy jokes to rest once and for all–and we’d almost certainly be considered part of the problem, not the solution.

All that said, it should come as no suprise to anyone that every time I hear about the little revolution going on in San Francisco I can’t help but smile. I’m sure the Great Braying Ass that is the current Republican Party will find some way to spoil the fun, but I, for one, cannot be convinced that something that has made so many people _happy_ can be in any way a bad thing.

So Fucking There.

(Seriously, June 21st is on a Monday, so we’d probably do it the weekend before. It might just be a big house party, or if enough people wanted to come, we would do something more elaborate. I’m probably fooling myself as to whether this is a good venue to mention all this, though)

Wow

I just don’t know what else to say. “This”:http://perlmonks.org/index.pl?node_id=329174 wins any “Write a hello, world” program competition hands down.

If you want SSH for your Treo 600

I recommend, so far, “TuSSH”:http://staff.deltatee.com/~angusa/TuSSH.html. It is not perfect, but it does do SSH2, which the old standby “TGSSH”:http://online.offshore.com.ai/~iang/TGssh/ does not. I have not used TuSSH a bunch, but it appears adequate, at least for the very low-use I intend.

There are at least two other commercial alternatives, “Mocha Telnet”:http://www.mochasoft.dk/palm.html (which you can try before you buy–I have not done so yet, so I can’t tell you how good or bad it is) and Expand Beyond’s “PocketAdmin Console”:http://www.xb.com/products/pocketadmin/console/, for which a 30 day eval is available. I’ll probably get around to trying both at some point–the fact is, I’m willing to pay for a good enough app, but it will have to display significant benefits over TuSSH.

If you’re running SpamAssassin

I have two recommendations, stemming from the thrills and chills I experience daily running “a commercial anti-spam service”:http://antespam.com/:

* Use some supplementary rules

Go to the “SpamAssassin Custom Rule Emporium”:http://www.merchantsoverseas.com/wwwroot/gorilla/sa_rules.htm, and pick up, at the very least, copies of backhair.cf, chickenpox.cf, weedsonly.cf and bigevil.cf. These have shown an enormous benefit for us.

The great thing is that all you have to do is drop these rules in your SpamAssassin rules directory (our Debian boxes use /etc/spamassassin for local stuff) and it will immediately start using them.

* Don’t let spamassassin automatically train the bayes database

Now our situation differs somewhat from most people–we do filtering for a couple of hundred domains, so we see a very wide range of email, and our users often don’t have the facilities (since LookOut! sucks so much) or the time to get all incorrectly-classified messages fed back into the system. If you are diligent in doing this for every mis-classified message you see, your results will probably be good.

Still, for us, auto-learning was a _disaster_.

We have found it much more effective to pull and classify random mails going through the system, and build a bayes database exclusively from that corpus; the fact is, the accessibility of SpamAssassin’s rule set means that clever people can find holes, and although closing them will happen quickly, it might not be before a number of messages go through your system with scores low enough that they cause SpamAssassin to learn them as ham, and _Whammo!_ you’ve got a bayes database that is going to start working counter to your desires unless you make sure each and every one of those messages gets re-learned as spam.

So my recommendation is that you add a ‘bayes_auto_learn 0’ parameter to your config file.

Of course, the real solution is to sign up with “AnteSpam”:http://antespam.com/, and let us take care of the maintenance headaches.

I’ve been getting back into comic books of late

I noticed a sign near the coffee shop I go to for a new store opening up around the corner–it turns out that simply having a car was not enough; I needed proximity, too, and the shop in Chapel Hill could only lure me in for something I knew I wanted like ??1602??.

So–predictably, I suppose–I’ve found myself alternately catching-up and finding new stuff; it’s sure as Hell more fun than, say, tracking the declining State of our Union–I happily leave that to “kos”:http://dailykos.com/ and “Josh”:http://talkingpointsmemo.com/ and “Billmon”:http://www.billmon.org/.

As an example, I’ve picked up most of the ??Hellboy?? trades (I date myself by admitting that my first remembrance of Mike Mignola is “Rocket Raccoon”:http://members.aol.com/Swordrat/RakkRuin.htm), and, as something of a Lovecraft fan, ??Hellboy?? works just wonderfully for me.

I wonder how I’ll like the movie. I suppose it couldn’t be worse than ??Underworld??, but I doubt it could approach ??Lost In Translation??, either.

(More on that later, perhaps)

There’s ??Y, The Last Man??–as the proprietor of the store pointed out, “The best last-boy-on-earth story since “Kamandi”:http://members.fortunecity.com/gemex/!”

I’m also amused to see Bill Willingham doing a ton of writing, when I remember him first for his illustrations in various AD&D materials in the early ’80s.

I’m waiting, with intense anticipation, for the end of Cerebus–while reading with a great deal of distress the reports of just how, well…NUTS Dave Sim has become. Still, if you have the slightest inkling of interest in comic books, and you haven’t read ??High Society?? and ??Church & State??, you’re missing out.

I fear that means you, Chet. 😉

And, finally, I’m sad to see that “Julius Schwartz died”:http://www.newsfromme.com/archives/2004_02_08.html#003668. While I would be lying–or at least overstating things–to suggest I have some sort of eidetic memory, the fact is, this stuff sticks with me for a long time. And I remember a lot of comic books I read when I was a pre-teen with Juliuz Schwartz’ name on the masthead.

I don’t know why this seems so sad to me right now–good lord there’s plenty of other sadder things going on in fifty-zillion places than an old man who had a pretty damned good run dying just shy of 90. Perhaps it’s just the passing of someone that you realize had, however ephemeral, some influence on your childhood.

So some days I’m really, really, really slow…

I bought the new Living Colour album, ??Collideoscope??. In a welcome change from most new-albums-from-old-bands, I mostly like it, though it is an incredibly angry album–it _seeths_.

The first three tracks just flow into one another, and they are a relentless assault, but there’s a little oasis of calm on track #4, ??Flying??.

I’ve taken to putting it on and sort of vamping over it off and on for the last week–it’s a nice little chord progression, plenty of open space, I get to pretend I’m Vernon Reid, etc.

I just now figured out that it is about 9/11. More specifically, it’s about the people who jumped out of the buildings, to their certain death, to escape the fire.

I am in awe.

No, really, I don’t get out much

I had never heard of “GoogleBombing”:http://www.blah3.com/graymatter/archives/00000654.html before. But it seems like an amusing pasttime, and as Ted at Crooked Timber “said”:http://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001111.html, well, “Ninja”:http://www.joe2004.com/site/PageServer.