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Movement to canonize Rasputin and Ivan the Terrible

<p> If I had not heard it on the BBC World Service first, I would have assumed that discussions of <a href="http://washingtontimes.com/world/20030209-5611752.htm">canonizing Rasputin and Ivan the Terrible</a> were some kind of silly joke.</p> <p> Not so. In fact this apparently represents a significant schizm in the Russian Orthodox Church.</p> <p> This weekend I went to an <a href="http://ncartmuseum.org/exhibitions/exhibitions/gaudens/gaudens.shtml">exhibition of Augustus Saint-Gaudens at the North Carolina Museum of Art</a> with my wife and some friends. One of the larger installations is a bas-relief commissioned on the death of <a href="http://www.allsoulsnyc.org/whoweare/history/historymiddle.htm">Henry Whitney Bellows</a>, a Unitarian minister.</p>
One minute to read
Michael Alan Dorman

I thought I'd do better…

<p> The intent here was certainly to post every day, or every other day, but now I find I&#39;ve gone a week.</p> <p> However, I have nothing of substance to say, just pointers to the amusing <a href="http://www.beerchurch.com/mullet_haiku.htm">Mullet Haiku</a>, as well as an amusing <a href="http://www.wezl.org/supermarket.mpg">contraceptive commercial</a>.</p> <p> I&#39;m sure that last must offend someone somewhere, but I find it hilariously funny–although I have, in many ways, softened on the idea of kids (not that I want any of my own, but I&#39;m more willing to deal with other people&#39;s children), I still think it&#39;s a thing not to be entered into lightly. I think it deserves some real thought and consideration, and a realization that you are going to be giving up a significant portion of your existence to this child, so go aheadn and be prepared; it&#39;s like living in a budget–try doing it while you have a safety net so you&#39;ll know whether you can do it when you have to.</p>
One minute to read
Michael Alan Dorman

I was raised a nominal Christian

<p> That is to say, I was raised in a military family that spent the majority of my youth in the Southeastern United States, where Evangelical Christianity has a significant influence, and although my parents were not themselves particularly devoted to organized religion, members of my mother&#39;s family were, so I was exposed to it now and again–so I end not knowing if, say, I was ever baptised, though I would be suprised if I wasn&#39;t.</p>
2 minutes to read
Michael Alan Dorman

My Favorite Subversive…

<p> So, my wife is a librarian. If you ever doubted–or even just hadn&#39;t thought about it–you need only consider their reactions to the Patriot Act to realize that librarians are on the side of all that is good and true in this world: there are librarians out there who are considering breaking the law so that you, good person, can know when your government is spying on you.</p> <p> Anne, as a librarian with a law degree, has been part of a panel discussion in Fayetteville, NC (where Fort Bragg is located) regarding the Patriot Act, and is starting to accumulate a bit of a speaking schedule in the local academic community regarding the Patriot Act. Finally, she was one of several librians interviewed for &#34;this article in the News &amp; Observer:<a href="http://www.newsobserver.com/front/digest/story/2471743p-2298944c.html,">http://www.newsobserver.com/front/digest/story/2471743p-2298944c.html,</a> about NC librarian&#39;s reactions.</p>
One minute to read
Michael Alan Dorman

Ah, the joys of community wireless.

<p> So, I&#39;m able to sit here in <a href="http://beantraders.net/">the local independent coffee shop</a> and do work in the morning because, unlike, say, Starbucks, they&#39;re willing to spend the $50/month to have a simple wireless setup free for the using.</p>
One minute to read
Michael Alan Dorman

Seen in TurboTax' context-sensitive help.

<p> bq.. Do not use this form to report:</p> <ul> <li>…</li> <li>Illegal Kickbacks</li> <li>…</li> </ul> <p>So, is it a subtle joke from a writer, or is it one of those warnings that springs from a lawsuit? &#34;Your honor, they only caught me because TurboTax did not specify that I was not to report my Illegal Kickbacks on Schedule C!&#34;</p>
One minute to read
Michael Alan Dorman

How consistent is your belief system?

<p> <a href="http://www.philosophers.co.uk/games/god.htm">Battleground God</a> is likely to make you think about your answers, maybe a lot, even if it doesn&#39;t change your mind about them.</p> <p> I had 1 direct hit (although I would almost swear that I actually answered differently than they said I did) and 1 bitten bullet (which means I&#39;m consistent, but perhaps outside of the normal moral footpaths).</p> <p> I had a Political Science professor in college, Dr. Daniel Pound, who started his Political Theory classes saying that he never taught anyone anything but a better vocabulary with which to articulate their pre-conceived notions. &#34;Tests&#34; like this make me think of him because that was, perhaps, the class that made me realize that I needed to consider what I believed and try and articulate it and see if it made sense.</p>
One minute to read
Michael Alan Dorman

It was pretty…

<p> …but ultimately, The Two Towers disappointed me.</p> <p> I do not think I am being obsessive about the movies exactly replicating the books–frankly, I have a great deal of affection for Ralph Bakshi&#39;s animated version which plays <em>much</em> more fast and loose with things than Peter Jackson has.</p> <p> What I do look for is staying true to the characters.</p> <p> So, changes in the flight from Hobbiton, the lack of Tom Bombadil and the Barrow Wights in both versions, the changes in the way the whole Rohan thing unfolds–even, after a second viewing of the first film, the modifications to Arwen&#39;s part–do not particularly bother me, because they do not seem to distort the characters, even if they do some violence to the story itself.</p>
2 minutes to read
Michael Alan Dorman

If you like '90s Bowie…

<p> …and you&#39;re a guitarist, you might want to check out <a href="http://www.guitar.com/features/viewfeature.asp?featureID=178">this interview</a> with Reeves Gabrels, his guitarist from &#39;89 to &#39;01.</p> <p> For my part, and, I&#39;m sure, much to the dismay of people I know–including Anne, who has to endure the guitar turned up too loud–I find that the things he does on guitar just make sense to me.</p>
One minute to read
Michael Alan Dorman

Maybe that's why it was so damn incoherent.

<p> So, it appears that, at least initially, David Lynch&#39;s Mulholland Drive was meant to be a <em>TV</em> series. If that weren&#39;t absurd enough, apparently a big feature was going to be lots of cameos by Marilyn Manson.</p> <p> No, I&#39;m not kidding. I couldn&#39;t make up stuff this silly. Look at the (unfortunately not directly linkable) March 12th entry at <a href="http://www.nineinchnails.net/news/mar99.html">Nothing Records&#39; March &#39;99 Newspage</a></p> <p> I recently watched Mulholland Drive and not even a naked Naomi Watts could really make me enjoy it. Put that together with catching about 15 minutes of Wild At Heart recently (how the hell did <em>that</em> get to basic cable!), and you really have to start wondering if David Lynch has done anything worth watching since Elephant Man.</p>
One minute to read
Michael Alan Dorman

Funniest domain name so far…

<p> <strong>incestuals.com</strong></p> <p> No, I didn&#39;t mean to make it a link–I didn&#39;t say that the content was funny (in fact, I haven&#39;t looked, they&#39;re just some damn spammers), just the domain name.</p>
One minute to read
Michael Alan Dorman

More SF trip

<p> The next morning in Sonoma, took a couple of random pictures.</p> <p> Stopped at a few wineries, and picked up a case-worth of wine to bring back. The most important was probably <a href="http://www.wellingtonvineyards.com/">Wellington Vineyards</a>, where we picked up quite a lot of their most excellent port.</p>
One minute to read
Michael Alan Dorman

SF trip

<p> Flew in the afternoon of the 27th. Saw the Dorado crew for lunch, then drove up the coast. Stopped at Rockaway Beach (I think) to take some pictures.</p> <p> After this we continued on to Sonoma.</p>
One minute to read
Michael Alan Dorman

libwww-perl updated today

<p> Marking the end of my pathetically long hiatus from doing any actual Debian work, I uploaded a new version of libwww-perl, based on the new upstream 5.69 release. It doesn&#39;t close every bug (there&#39;s a couple that need more looking at, and a couple that are probably going to get ste to wishlist), but it closes several, it compatible with both testing and unstable, and should even be installable on stable, though it&#39;s unlikely to ever actually show up there.</p>
One minute to read
Michael Alan Dorman

Fun in the sunshine state.

<p> Of course, it was amazing to realize that it&#39;s been three years and ten months since we left Miami to move to Durham–that means we&#39;ve been in Durham almost as long as we were in Miami, and that Durham is very soon going to be come the second longest time I&#39;ve lived in one place, and not very long after that, the longest time I&#39;ve lived in one place (the current holder of the title being a small villiage about 20km outside of Ramstein AFB, Germany).</p>
2 minutes to read
Michael Alan Dorman

We're working on a radically new look and feel

<p> There&#39;s some actual usability reasons that we need a new look and feel–there are many things on the site that are too clunky for words, the presentation is often unattractive, etc. No one doubts</p>
One minute to read
Michael Alan Dorman

Five days without an update…

<p> Five fairly busy days, too.</p> <p> Finished building a diagram for the the data model for one of my clients. Did some more tweaking on my dia-to-sql XSL stylesheet to get things working. I think I&#39;m starting to really <em>like</em> XSL. What&#39;s next, scheme? Intercal? Brainfuck?</p> <p> I <em>should</em> package up my stylesheet for public consumption, though–I understand that the next version of Dia is going to have an XSLT plugin, which would mean you could go directly from the diagram to SQL without an intervening processing step.</p>
One minute to read
Michael Alan Dorman

The Big Book of Amber, Zelazny

<p> OK, so it&#39;s the Great Book of Amber rather than The Big Book of Amber, but it certainly big, and there&#39;s some reference to my childhood that I can&#39;t quite apprehend but nevertheless makes it stick (Note: the options you get <a href="http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/results.asp?WRD=big+book+of">on Barnes &amp; Noble</a> are wierd and fascinating).</p> <p> I&#39;ve never read any Zelazny before, and it&#39;s distinctly wierd for me; as I&#39;m sure Unix old-timers would cringe to hear me admit that I know Perl infinitely better than sh and awk (I barely know awk at all), I&#39;m sure many SF fans will look askance when I admit that I recognize the writing well–it reminds me of Steven Brust.</p>
2 minutes to read
Michael Alan Dorman

Agile Software Development with SCRUM, Schwaber, Beedle

<p> I started reading Agile Software Development with SCRUM. I think I read a fair number of software-development-oriented books, at least compared to many of my peers, and although some of the writing in this book is <em>horrid</em> (section 1.3.1 is the most buzzword-heavy thing I&#39;ve read in ages, and it doesn&#39;t need to be) and the images are badly done, the actual content is certainly intriguing.</p> <p> In short (and I&#39;m not suggesting that this is earth-shatteringly brilliant or new insight, it&#39;s just someone actually discussing stuff of which most of us probably have an inarticulate sense) the message so far (I&#39;m only on chapter 2) seems to be: requrements will never be complete, consistent or static, so keep your targets short-term so you can achieve them and then reorient yourself to the new priority.</p>
One minute to read
Michael Alan Dorman

In real news…

<p> I found that the refactored code was very amenable to modifying the block/pass list processing to do two consecutive passes, first with any domain settings, then with any user settings.</p>
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Michael Alan Dorman

So sue me…

<p> One of the little pleasures I find in doing this blog is the fact that I&#39;ve decided on using exclusively textual names for the files. This means that each time I go to do a new entry, I have to come up with a unique filename for it. I&#39;m sure some day it&#39;ll get boring, but not yet.</p>
One minute to read
Michael Alan Dorman

In what will no doubt be the first of many messages with this name…

<p> So I look at the stats this morning, like I do most every morning, and I see that hiwaayoffice.net has been seeing incredibly high volume–more than two messages per minute, which is enormously more than they normally do. <em>Enormously</em>. And the message size was pretty frigging huge, too.</p> <p> As usualy when things involve HiWAAY, I called dad. I asked to know if he knew of someone trying to beat up on our machines, etc. He asked who it was, so I did a couple of quick queries on the log file, and found out it was his address that was getting all the mail.</p>
One minute to read
Michael Alan Dorman

Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers, Ed Sikov

<p> There&#39;s nothing upbeat to say about this book.</p> <p> Don&#39;t get me wrong–it&#39;s a fine book, very readable, presumably accurate, but from page one, this is a portrait of a talented but very disturbed human being. He gets fame, fortune, artistic recognition, he even gets the girl(s), but he doesn&#39;t ever seem happy, and he dies at age 54.</p> <p> <a href="http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?isbn=0786866640">Boycott Amazon.com!</a></p>
One minute to read
Michael Alan Dorman

Well, that was a productive day

<p> Generally, Saturday is my day Away From The Machine. Some Saturdays I don&#39;t even log in–no email, no web surfing, nothing.</p> <p> Unusually, though, I did some work today, and mighty productive it was, too.</p> <p> One of the things we need to get a handle on for <a href="http://antespam.com/">AnteSpam</a> is building (and maintaining) a corpus of messages. Having a good corpus gives us what we need to build a good Bayes database, which will hopefully keep us nice and accurate, and it will also allow us to contribute some to the SpamAssassin development by running mass-checks and generally giving input on how well things are working.</p>
2 minutes to read
Michael Alan Dorman

A relatively unproductive day

<p> I hate to say it–especially where prospective employers might see it–but my version of productivity is kind of…nonstandard.</p> <p> That is, I have a tendency to sit around play guitar, read email, etc. for a long time, then sit down, crank out in a few minutes something that might take someone else hours to do, and then move on to other activites.</p> <p> The sad fact is that this frustrates me, perhaps more than anyone else–I mean, from the perspective of my employers, who aren&#39;t actually sitting and watching what I do, I am still terribly productive. I get more stuff done than a lot of other people, in a shorter billable time. That&#39;s great for customers, but tough on the bottom line sometimes.</p>
One minute to read
Michael Alan Dorman

How does one do it?

<p> So some super-gigantic catastrophe severed some huge wad of fiber somewhere in my general area, and I find myself without high-speed connectivity.</p> <p> Even ignoring the fact that I was all stoked yesterday to start on a project that was going to involve doing a lot of programming on another system, it&#39;s frustrating as hell to have to slow down to dialup speeds.</p> <p> More frustrating, though, is the fact that what I <strong>really</strong> would like to do is have multiple connections–DSL, cable, backup dial-up–that all converge into one box, and which intelligently fails over (or multipaths). You can do this with a Linux box–and it&#39;s not like I&#39;ve not run a Linux box as my gateway before–but finding a Linux box that is as quiet as my Linksys box would be virtually impossible. And now that I&#39;ve got things this quiet in here, I&#39;m loathe to go back to the perpetually screaming fans situation.</p>
One minute to read
Michael Alan Dorman

OK, I was wrong.

<p> So I ended up getting back into the swing of things, and ended up making some fairly significant revisions to the code for the main daemon at the heart of <a href="http://antespam.com/">AnteSpam</a>. No really groundbreaking changes to the core functionality, but some optimizations, and some cleanup of the code. It may be a little more accessible now.</p>
One minute to read
Michael Alan Dorman

No good database modellers in Linux

<p> I&#39;m not usually much of a &#34;visual&#34; guy. I&#39;d rather read a text description of most stuff than look at pictures.</p> <p> The one great exception to this is when it comes to modelling large databases–say, more than 10 tables. At that point, staring at line after line of SQL simply doesn&#39;t cut it–I can&#39;t discern the problems at a glance, there&#39;s lots of paging around, etc.</p> <p> For the moment I use the UML mode of <a href="http://www.lysator.liu.se/~alla/dia/">Dia</a>, which is an OK tool, plus a custom XSL stylesheet for coverting the Dia&#39;s output into SQL. It works OK–you do get a diagram out of it, and you can coerce it to produce decent SQL–but it&#39;s just not…fluid. There&#39;s a lot of fiddly stuff that requires very careful work, and supporting things like foreign key references always requires more work than it should. This makes creating the diagram that much more work and frustration.</p>
One minute to read
Michael Alan Dorman

We're growing

<p> When you talk actual numbers it sounds pitiful in a way, but <a href="http://antespam.com/">AnteSpam</a> is growing consistently, if not super-fast. We&#39;re up to 18 paying domains, and there are reportedly several &#34;ready to land&#34; any moment now.</p> <p> If I ever felt for a moment that this wouldn&#39;t sell because it didn&#39;t provide value to the customers, I need only look at the stats to see that we&#39;ve got domains that get three spam mails for every good mail. Amazing.</p>
One minute to read
Michael Alan Dorman

Well, it's up and running

<p> I guess I&#39;ve decided to really try and keep a blog.</p> <p> Of course, one of the things that has worked against me doing so up to this point has been that there always seemed to be <a href="http://advogato.org/">web forms</a> or <a href="http://userland.com">proprietary software</a>. Nothing that would work pretty-much transparently with <a href="http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs.html">good old Emacs</a>.</p> <p> Hopefully <a href="http://www.raelity.org/apps/blosxom/">Blosxom</a> will change that.</p>
One minute to read
Michael Alan Dorman