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Warning: This has been migrated from an earlier blog server. Links, images, and styles from postings before 2018 may be funky.

22 Mar 2006 — Three words no sysadmin wants to hear

I’m in the middle of moving ropine.com services from the old G4 in our basement to a virtual server at OpenHosting. (Virtual hosting is cheap enough these days that a cheap virtual server plus a cheap DSL line costs less than the static-IP DSL line that we have now.)

The first thing I moved over was the email. In the past, I’ve turned up my nose at sendmail, because although it’s the traditional Unix MTA, it’s been a poster child for insecure code. But OpenHosting comes with sendmail already set up, and I was tired of all the effort it took to get my MTA and my spam filter and my IMAP server to make nice to one another, and I decided to take advantage of whatever my ISP and its Linux distribution had done to make my life easier. (I am coming to the realization, in my old age, that every hour spent administering my computer is an hour I don’t spend using it.) And besides, sendmail hadn’t had any embarrassing security holes in a while.

So imagine my delight to see an article on LWN.net that begins: “It’s been a while since we had a good sendmail vulnerability…but we need wait no longer. Sendmail 8.13.6 has just been released in response to a security issue which could lead to a remote root exploit.”

(“Remote root exploit” is security-geek shorthand for “a way for someone who doesn’t even have an account on your machine to connect to it and take it over”.)

Hopefully, if anyone has actually figured out a way to take advantage of this security hole, nobody has yet bothered to use it against me (and if they try now, it’s too late). But maybe I should go to the trouble of setting up qmail or postfix after all.

21 Mar 2006 — In the interest of balance...

Mallard Fillmore, which the Boston Globe runs as part of its sinister plan to make conservatives look silly, devoted today’s and yesterday’s strips to praising “maverick conservative” Tom Coburn, M.D., Republican Senator from Oklahoma. After reading the Senator’s entry on dKosopedia, I have to wonder what this man, out of all the Republicans in the Senate, has done to earn the cartoonist’s praise. Is it his remark that “if you have [silicone breast implants], you’re healthier than if you don’t”? Is it his claim that thanks to his medical training, he can tell whether or not a witness is lying at a Congressional hearing? Is it the resolution he sponsored congratulating Carrie Underwood for winning American Idol?

14 Mar 2006 — A tale out of school

In a previous life, I aspired to be a teacher of deaf children. I had to abandon that plan for financial reasons, but not before serving two terms as a student teacher and collecting a master’s degree in the subject. A recent posting by siderea on Avidity, Giftedness, and the Classroom reminded me of the most depressing experience from my graduate-school years.

For my first round of student teaching, I worked in a middle-school science class at a school for deaf children. One of the students who passed through that classroom was a girl I’ll call “Ellen”. Ellen had been born outside the United States; in her country of birth, she had spent a number of years in an oral school (one that only allowed communication through speech and lipreading), and when her family moved to the US, she was placed in a school that used sign language. Even compared with other deaf immigrants, her progress at picking up ASL was very slow.

But by God, she was avid. She would tell me stories in a rapid-fire sequence of signs that neither I nor her ASL-fluent classmates could understand. I would set up a game for us to play and she would be eager to play it, although her guesses as to the rules of the game did not always match my intentions. Meanwhile, the other three students in her class would pretty much sit there and wait to be told what to do. I recalled a comment by Maria Montessori in one of her books: mentally retarded children would only use her educational materials when prodded by a teacher, but children of normal intelligence would pick them up on their own initiative.

I was convinced that Ellen was a bright kid whose intelligence was being masked by a combination of deafness, a deprived educational background (of the sort that is very common among prelingually deaf children), and some kind of language processing disorder. At some point, I must have said something too positive about her to my supervising teacher, because he just went off about how I had to understand that she was retarded: maybe from some kind of organic defect, maybe just as a consequence of her upbringing, but it didn’t matter now because. She. Is. Retarded.

As proof of Ellen’s poor language skills, the teacher described an incident where another student was standing too close to her, and Ellen said “B/w” (I’m transcribing this in ASCII-Stokoe notation).

“That’s a sign,” I said. I had seen a Deaf adult use exactly that sign in exactly the same context.

“No,” the teacher said, “it’s not a sign, it’s a gesture.” And he went on about how he had studied ASL at a certain well-regarded deaf-ed program and knew the difference between a sign and a gesture, and he knew that if Ellen had been using proper ASL, she would have signed “pb/B"/fx”.

(Of course, I checked with Deaf ASL-fluent classmates later that day, and I was right. “pb/B"/fx” is the sort of sign you’d use to describe mailing a letter. Ellen had all sorts of trouble with ASL, but in this respect, she knew more than her teacher.)

I told the head of my deaf-ed program that I’d like to have a formal test of ASL fluency administered to Ellen, or at least videotape her telling one of her stories, so that someone who knew ASL backwards and forwards could analyze what was going on with her. No dice, said the professor. You can’t test a student without the principal’s permission.

So I went on to my next student-teaching assignment, and Ellen…she’s in her twenties now, so I assume she’s now out of high school and in a group home…for the mentally retarded.

I wonder how many kids like Ellen someone would encounter in a career of teaching deaf children. Maybe it’s just as well that I don’t know.

07 Mar 2006 — We're men and friends until the end / and none of us are sissies...

There’s a certain genre of conservative essay, lamenting how today’s society prevents little boys from growing into real men. I think I’ve finally realized why these essays always set my teeth on edge.

06 Mar 2006 — Homeland meta-security

Last night we saw Red Eye, an entertaining thriller about a hotel manager who becomes entangled in a plot to assassinate a deputy secretary of Homeland Security.

Meanwhile, at the real Department of Homeland Security, former security guards report that the DHS headquarters are, well, insecure. The DHS contracts out (of course) its security to Wackenhut Services, which apparently is subcontracting the DHS account to Maxwell Smart.

For instance, when an envelope with suspicious powder was opened last fall at Homeland Security Department headquarters, guards said they watched in amazement as superiors carried it by the office of Secretary Michael Chertoff, took it outside and then shook it outside Chertoff’s window without evacuating people nearby.

Fortunately for Mr. Chertoff, Osama knows as well as I do that even if he knocked out all the top DHS managers in one bold and vicious attack, nobody would notice their absence.

via TAPPED

06 Mar 2006 — Fight fiercely, Harvard

Shorter John Silber: Larry Summers was not wrong to pick fights with the Harvard faculty, who only had the power to whine about what he was doing, but he should have done more to ingratiate himself with the Harvard trustees, who actually had the power to fire him.

03 Mar 2006 — You won't see this in your Artscroll Chumash

As every good Orthodox Jew knows, the Documentary Hypothesis, the idea that “R” wrote the Torah by editing and amending previous writings by “J”, “E”, “P”, and “D”, is contrary to Jewish doctrine.

(You can find commentaries by famous rabbis that argue against the Documentary Hypothesis at great length. I never quite understood the point; since God is capable of writing in whatever combination of styles He wants, a proof that the Torah resembles an anthology does not disprove God’s authorship. But I digress.)

Most good Orthodox Jews probably don’t know, however, that another hypothesis, stating that God wrote the Torah by editing and amending previous writings by Adam, Noah, Abraham, and some of Abraham’s descendants, has been proposed by an impeccably kosher source.

P.S.: Best comment to that blog posting:

The patriarchs wrote scrolls?! In what language, might I ask?

Yiddish, of course. Duh.

01 Mar 2006 — Let us raise our voices in his honor....

The Globe informs me that today is Harry Belafonte’s birthday.

Or perhaps I should say, Harry Belafonte’s birthday-o / Day-o / Daylight come and me wanna go home.

Sorry. Couldn’t resist.

25 Feb 2006 — Family-values news of the day

• Gainesville, Georgia — A 37-year-old woman who married her son’s 15-year-old friend, and who gave birth to a boy earlier this month, pleaded not guilty to charges of statutory rape, child molestation and enticing a minor. (The minimum age for marriage in Georgia is 16, unless the bride is pregnant.) The marriage occurred a few days before the woman’s arrest; the young husband’s grandmother claims he is seeking a divorce.
• Laurens, South Carolina — An elementary-school teacher was arrested on two counts of criminal sexual misconduct with a minor after a parent accused her of having sex with an 11-year-old boy at the school.

24 Feb 2006 — Blasphemy in the UK

I keep seeing articles, both in newspapers and blogs, that have something to do with the right to publish images that are offensive to some religion or another. Most of these have such a dog-bites-man quality that they’re not worth passing along¹, but Wingrove v. The United Kingdom got my attention.

The United Kingdom has a law against blasphemy, forbidding “any contemptuous, reviling, scurrilous or ludicrous matter relating to God, Jesus Christ or the Bible”. When The Satanic Verses was published, British Muslims asked that the blasphemy laws be extended to outlaw similar offenses against their religion². The Home Secretary advised those benighted heathen that:

...an alteration in the law could lead to a rush of litigation which would damage relations between faiths. I hope you can appreciate how divisive and how damaging such litigation might be, and how inappropriate our legal mechanisms are for dealing with matters of faith and individual belief. Indeed, the Christian faith no longer relies on it, preferring to recognise that the strength of their own belief is the best armour against mockers and blasphemers.

Less than three months after the Secretary delivered this paean to free expression, the British Board of Film Classification banned³ Visions of Ecstasy, a short erotic film based on the life of St. Teresa of Ávila, on the grounds that the film was likely to infringe the blasphemy law. After three appeals, the filmmaker’s dispute with Her Majesty’s government reached the European Court of Human Rights, which weighed the film board’s decision against the “freedom of expression” article of the European Convention on Human Rights. Quoth their honors:

The Court recalls that freedom of expression constitutes one of the essential foundations of a democratic society. As paragraph 2 of Article 10 (art. 10-2) expressly recognises, however, the exercise of that freedom carries with it duties and responsibilities. Amongst them, in the context of religious beliefs, may legitimately be included a duty to avoid as far as possible an expression that is, in regard to objects of veneration, gratuitously offensive to others and profanatory…

It’s great when politicians have the courage to tell a hostile audience, “The right of free speech extends to these statements that deeply offend me”. When they say “The right of free speech extends to these statements that deeply offend you”, I’m not so impressed.

¹ Fundamentalist leaders use accusations of blasphemy to incite violence! Whoda thunk it?

² The British blasphemy law is not just restricted to Christianity; it’s restricted to Anglican Christianity. If you want to publish something contemptuous, reviling, scurrilous or ludicrous about the Pope, you’re in luck.

³ To be pedantic: they refused to grant the movie a classification, even a “you must be at least 18 to get within ten feet of this video” classification, and films without classifications from the Board may not be distributed in the UK.

via Crooked Timber

21 Feb 2006 — Your Senator is underpaid

A while ago, James Carville and Paul Begala proposed a campaign-finance reform that combined a Congressional pay raise with draconian limits on fund-raising. bellatrys strenuously objected to the first part of this plan, arguing that if you aren’t willing to serve in Congress for the current rate of $160K plus benefits, you don’t belong in Washington. I disagree.

If you’re looking to fill a job opening in the private sector, you decide on a pay scale and job requirements; if you can’t find someone who meets your requirements to work for the scale you offer, then you have to decide whether to raise the pay, lower the standards, or let the position remain open for a while longer. For Congress, we don’t have that option; any citizen who meets the age and residency requirements, and who gets one vote more than the other guy, gets to sit in the legislature. So how do we know that the country would benefit if members of Congress got a raise? Here are some clues based on what people get paid for similar work when they don’t face the embarassment of voting for their own paychecks:

• Ex-Congresscritters, or even former high-ranking Congressional staffers, can pull in beaucoup bucks as consultants, lobbyists, or law partners. Granted, a big proportion of their salaries depend on the assumption that their contacts can help grease the wheels of legislation. But if someone can be so valuable to General Dynamics or the Carlyle Group after being a member of Congress, shouldn’t they be as valuable to the country while a member of Congress? (This is especially true for those folks whose political outlooks are, shall we say, unfriendly to General Dynamics.)
• According to the National Association for Law Placement, an associate with six years’ experience at a law firm makes about $165,000 a year, i.e., roughly the same as one of the 535 people responsible for writing the law. Of course, a partner at one of these firms can make far more. An attorney defending a corporation accused of securities fraud can make far more than the SEC lawyers responsible for prosecuting the fraud case (whose salaries are generally capped by the Congressional salary). This seems kind of whacked.
• Look at major-league baseball: there are only 30 teams with 25 players each, competition for a spot on a major league is intense, and thanks to baseball’s antitrust exemption, the number of baseball teams competing for players remains relatively stable. MLB player salaries start at $300,000.

“But,” you say, “it wouldn’t be fair to pay members of Congress so much money. Heck, it isn’t fair that a lawyer with six years’ experience makes $165,000 while a teacher with the same experience would be lucky to make a third of that.”

No, it’s not fair. But that’s because capitalism is systematically unfair. Pointing fingers at a few particular beneficiaries of that system and shaming them into accepting a lower wage is not going to reform the system; if anything, it distracts people from reforming the system. (Look at how readily conservatives sneer at wealthy liberals. Or recall the grumbling, during the recent New York City transit workers’ strike, about how much NYC bus drivers were already being paid.)

So by all means, let’s work to reform our economy so it is not so systematically unfair (e.g., by making the income tax more progressive). At the same time, though, when we hire someone to do a job for us, we need to recognize the price that the market has set for that work, and budget accordingly.

“But,” you say, “a person should be running for Congress out of a sincere desire to serve the public, not because the money is good. If we raise the salary, then there will be more unscrupulous people running for office—as if we needed any more.”

When people have the luxury of choosing which job to apply for, they usually have a mixture of financial and non-financial motives. A brilliant teacher may pass up more lucrative work for the sake of continuing to work with children, but that doesn’t mean you can reduce teachers’ salaries to zero and expect the brilliant ones to stay on. It’s reasonable to assume that the same is true, in reverse, for public officials: some people out there might run for office if the pay were higher, out of a mixture of wanting the money (or at least, wanting enough money to make up for the suffering they expect on the campaign trail) and a desire for public service.

Sure, some unscrupulous people will run for office. But if honest people run against the unscrupulous ones, the voters at least have a fighting chance of comparing the records of the candidates and deciding which one is less likely to be scamming them.

How do we get more honest people to run? First, we need more meaningful campaign finance reform (and I’m not terribly impressed by the Carville/Begala proposal), so that candidates don’t have to choose between following their principles and affording to run for re-election. Second, we need…well…more people to run. If potential Congresscritters are not entirely immune from the law of supply and demand, then hiking Congressional pay can help with that.

17 Feb 2006 — I found this on The Web™

Since when did “XHTML” grow a trademark symbol? Especially since the W3C’s own trademark list describes this term as “generic”?

via Elliotte Rusty Harold, who has a completely different reason for complaining about that document

15 Feb 2006 — Welcome to the machine

If you can read this, your browser or feed aggregator was successfully redirected to the TextPattern-based version of this blog. Permalinks to the old blog will continue to work until I either set up a massive number of redirects or screw up my Apache configuration again.

All the old entries should have been imported, although there are some formatting glitches, especially in the entries with source code. All the non-spammy comments should also be here.

I have resisted the urge to spend six months tweaking the design before going live, but I will just point out that in this new layout, if you’re using a text-based browser, the content conveniently precedes the stuff in the sidebars; and if you’re not, the colored background of each entry has four rounded corners. Ph33r my 31337 CSS $kill$.

10 Feb 2006 — We value your opinions…

...but comments have been temporarily disabled.

After a new reader noticed some particularly amusing comment spam, I searched some more through my archives, and installed a plugin to email me every time a new comment was posted, and…wow.

Unfortunately, blosxom (or, more precisely, blosxom’s standard “writeback” plugin) stores all the comments for one post in a single flat file, and has neither a spam-filter plugin nor a Web-based administrative interface. Therefore, managing comment spam—an essential part of managing any blog that’s open to comments and is indexed by Google—is a major pain. In the long run (hopefully within a week or so), I’m going to migrate this blog to a different platform. In the short run, I’ve turned off the writeback plugin.

You can still comment on recent postings in yesh omrim’s LiveJournal feed (if, that is, you have been assimilated into the Collectivehave an LJ account). Or you can send me email. And you should. Because we care.

10 Feb 2006 — I lost a Geek Purity Point today

Today I realized that a bug in a certain shell script, which involved the output of a sort command being in almost but not quite the right order, could be fixed with the judicious use of ed.

The scary thing is, this is the second time I’ve resorted to ed in my profession. The first time was a few years ago, when I was trying to analyze some file that was too large to fit in Emacs.

Remember, ladies and gentlemen, ed is the standard text editor. Accept no substitutes.

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