Daniel Von Fange

The Hawash Charges Affidavit.

I read through the 41 page affidavit with the charges listed against Hawash. Very interesting reading. Other people have probably covered the charges in more detail and I don't know if he is guilty, or not guilty, so here is a typical Daniel post that avoids the main issues, and just points out little side details.

Wow some of those guys are amateurs!

[Slightly Paraphrased Version of a conversation]
Terrorist: "I don't wanna do a suicide attack. I want to see the people I kill. Oh and my computer locks up when it turns on."
Informer: "That's bad"
Terrorist: "What should I do?"
Informer: "Let me take that computer, with all your data and emails still on it, and I'll get you a new for $300"
Terrorist: "$300! That's a deal!"

Lets say you want to go to Afghanistan, and fight the US. Obviously you need to keep as undercover as possible. Do you:
A: Continue with your daily routine to keep the neighbors unsuspicious.
B: Grow a big beard, begin wearing arab clothing, stop talking to the neighbors, and invite lots of mid-eastern males over to your house.

Hawash apparently choose "B".

Hawash is noted as traveling as part of the "third group", however there is no mention of the other members of that group in the Affidavit. The other members of that group are probably really scared right now.

If Hawash is innocent, it's will be interesting to see how he managed to follow the same itinerary as bunch of terrorists, even down to staying in the same hotels. But if he is guilty, he did a much better job of covering his tracks than the other guys did. Other than a receipt for a backpack and parka, putting the house in his wife's name, and moving small amount of money to her account, none of the evidence against him has come from him. The other guys left their tracks everywhere.

Fast cgi.

Just found Fast-CGI. Maybe now I can actually use Ruby for some website projects. (Yay.)

Opinionated linking.

Opinionated Linking.

Richard Grimm.

Today, Somehow, somewhere, someone has printed something, asking people to call a "Richard Grimm" - and the phone listed is my cell phone! I've gotten as many wrong number calls on the cell phone just today, as I have had in the rest of the time I have had this number. Next guy that calls, I'll try to get more details about this mysterious Mr. Grimm, so I can google for his real phone number.

A better web framework.

Joakim Ziegler explains the current state of web programing frameworks. He is right they are a mess. (Link via Shup up and Code).

Lorem Ipsum.

I needed some filler text for a site design. After a quick bit of googling I found lipsum.com, and I was back to desgin again.

Brick Films.

Over a hundred Lego stop-action films hang out over at brickfilms.com. Andrew, my youngest brother, showed me an new computer animated one today that was incredible in detail. Episode 2 of Rocketmen vs Robots has some hilarious lines that our family will probably quip back and forth for the rest of our lives. If you have an afternoon to spare, go ahead and start poking around among the films.

Server Zombie.

The morning came with the Carolina sunshine streaming in through the windows. After a long night, battling a friend's wayward server, I was fast asleep. My cell phone began ringing. I groped over to reach for the phone in the pockets of my next day's pants. I could feel the phone, but I could not find the opening of the pocket! Oh no! The opening to the pocket had sealed shut! This was yet another bug! Argg!

Then another part of my brain loudly pointed out the foolishness of that idea, and I recovered my sanity. I had been living inside the twisted world of a server with a partial hard drive failure, and had become used to the universe changing whenever it was out of my direct observation. Heh, on that server a simple SQL statement that worked hundreds of times before could crash the entire thing.

It's interesting how a human can focus down onto just a terminal window, and live, think, and communicate through just a little bit of ascii text. It was also a funny experience for me while coming back to the "real world" and subconsciously expecting it to play by the same illogical set of rules.

OS for 2005.

My dream list for my future computing environment.

Application Free Data

My data is my data. It does not belong to a particular application. It belongs to me! I should be able to pick and painlessly, instantly swich among a varity of tools to access my information.

Location Free Data

My data is my data. Just because I pull my laptop out of it case, should not mean that suddenly I cannot access my stuff.

Identities

I am one person, but I wear different "hats". Right now I have two main identities. The Daniel That Codes-For-Hire and The Daniel That Lives in South Carolina. Data should belong to an identity, and be able to be shared with other identities. I should be able to share the data that belongs to The-Daniel-That-Codes-For-Hire-For-Customer-X with The-Customer-X-That-Runs-X-Web-Design-Company. Any time I should be able to focus in on the documents, message, and stuff that belong to one identity, or push it completly to the background. At five o'clock I just tell the webdeisgn side of me to go away.

Arrrg! My Email! My Email!.

A few miss-clicks while switching over to an IMAP email account (by creating a new account, and deleting the old), and I unintentionally deleted all my email from the last six months. Heh, It was a bad afternoon. But I don't feel like finding my backup CD's, and trying to restore just the email part of it. I guess I'm lazy.

GlobeAlive - not yet primetime..

GlobeAlive is definitely still beta quality. Although there are great posts on the web about what it can become, at the moment it is not well implemented. Parts of it built to connect people to people, and parts are built to connect users to experts, with the result that it's very confusing.

Here is a chat from this morning, and actualy, it's so funny, it's the real reason for this post.:

-- user searched for "furnishing"
-- [guest] joined the chat
-- [Brains] joined the chat
[guest] hai
[Brains] Hi
[guest] what do you do
[Brains] Web design and programming
[Brains] I love it. :)
[guest] where is your country and
[guest] what is your name
[guest] age and sex
[guest] what happened you are not replying
[guest] are you confused
[Brains] I'm trying to think of a witty answer.
[guest] please do not time waste, reply soon
[guest] are you mad
[Brains] Okay. I'm not sure I'm an expert on "furnishing"
[guest] can you please furnish some address of buyers in your country to that we could do business with those parties.
[Brains] Hmmm.
[Brains] Probably.
[guest] you are not coming out properly
[Brains] What country are you from?
[guest] do you like me
[guest] i am from Inida
[guest] I am from India
[Brains] What kind of buyers are you looking for?
[guest] I am looking for home furnishing buyers of kitchen towels, table cloths, napkins, bed spread, mat etc.
[Brains] ah
[guest] do you provide these address
[Brains] No, I really do webdesign
[Brains] http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=imported+furnishings&spell=1
[guest] what is your main features
-- [guest] left the chat

How does an expert keep from getting bothered by the wrong questions?

You only come up in searches when you want to be found. Your keywords and nothing else. (It's a bit more complicated than that, I think; but that's what I wrote down.)

Actually anyone who is online shows up on any search. I've never gotten a single on topic question.

Unfortunately, the instant messager client for Mac OS dies after one chat, and you have to quit it to close the window.

A search engine for people is a awesome idea, but I'm not sure this is the right way. It seems against the Unix/Mac small-sharp-tools philosophy. Rather it is one big ball. I think people-communication problem should be broken down into four separate parts.

*Identity / Interests
*Search
*Communication
*Value / Ratings

A new use for a trainable Spam Filter.

I have some pretty smart, usually unconventional siblings. I just found out the latest example of it at supper.

My little sister realized that the spam filter built into Mac Mail, is really just a trainable "pet". Since she does not get spam mail, she did not want it to go to waste. Elizabeth actually trained it to sort out her mailing list subscriptions from her personal email. By pressing "Junk" on all her notifications, newsletters, and daily comics, she has her "pet" putting the email where she wants it. (Her rambling post about it)

I wonder if you could just use a bunch of bayesian filters instead of more traditional rules in mail applications. Would probably be easier to learn, and possibly more effective.

"Here is line of dog houses. A dog lives inside each one. When you drag a email into a dog house, the dog knows he is supposed to look for email like the one you gave him. When a new email comes in, the dogs go and look at it, and the one that the email belongs to takes it back with him. Sometimes a dog may grab the wrong email, but all you have to do is take it to the right dog and the right dog will learn and be more likely to pick it up next time."

Update: After night of "Sleeping on it", I still think this is an awesome thing.

Up and running a new server.

Braino.org has just been moved to the new Von Fagne server. This post is a test too see what breaks. :)

Update: All went well. MT is a well behaved piece of software.

Sherman Joke.

A new statue of Sherman was unveiled. After the celebrations, a reporter of asked a visting Southern gentleman what he thought. "Well," he replied, "when you stand on the northern side of this square, and look at the statue, you see a wise, courageous general astride a noble charger. But," he paused, "when you stand on the south side and look, you see what we Southerners have always seen -- the back side of of a horse."

Compares with Sherman.

In the middle of the war of the war, I picked up a book on Sherman and was shocked at some of the similarities between what I was reading, and what was happening out in Iraq.

I live in South Carolina. I was born in South Carolina. That means I'm CONFEDERATE by nature. And Sherman, who ended the war after leading burn'n, thiev'n yankee troops through the heart of South Carolina is about as popular as the devil around here. Until I read the book, I had a hazy knowledge of Sherman as a man who lead a horde on an unopposed pillage through the defenseless heartland of the CSA while burning everything his men could get thier hands on.

Reality turns out to be different. Faceing Sherman's 75,000 troops were 60,000 Confederate soldiers. Since one Confederate soldier can whip two Yankees (see, I am from the South), Sherman was going in quite outnumbered. But his increadable strategic manuvering left his opponets having to fall back, or fight battles that were such onesided slaughters that they are not worth mentioning.

The great paralel I found was his belief that by going for the heartland of the enemy county, he could force the enemy to give up. Confederate soldiers with their homes safe belived that they could whip anything. Confederate soldiers with an enemy army marching seemingly unopposed through their states' capitals, belived that the war was over, and in accodance with that belief, quit fighting.

Which cities did more fighting take place in? The big homeland Iraq citys? Or the ones on the south edge of the county? In the eyes of an Iraqi soldier, Americans in Um Qatar means the war is starting, but Americans in the center of Bagdad means the war is over.

Sherman belived that only by guerrillas could he be defeated, and made his plans so as to avoid starting guerrilla warfare. Again in Iraq, I think the only thing that could push us out of the country agaist our will is guerrilla/suicide warfare. At the moment Iraqis are glad to see us. Lets keep out the Palestinians, not make stupid laws, and keept it that way.

Sherman did not believe in rigid plans, and set piece attacks, but rather in flexibility. His army was split into three main columns that moved as one animal. Apart and yet supporting each other, they twisted and coiled through the CSA, constanly baffling the enemy and to their intentions. This war has been one of the wars stunningly won through flexibility.

Tax day.

It's Tax-Day in the USA. The government just took their fat cut of my money. Ouch. This is my first year to really feel the pain.

After writing that check, I'm beginning to think of starting my own company. Individuals are taxed for everything that passes through their hands. Companies are only taxed for the stuff they keep in their pockets. Thing like your new G4 PowerMac are taxed when you by it, but not when your company buys it for you.

The whole tax thing must be approached as mearly a game, if you want to keep your sanity. Since the game is designed to take more money from stupid people and less from smart ones, so it pays very well to learn how to play it with skill. It's time for me to learn.

Another French Prison Break.

Yet another escape from a French prison, yesterday by helicopter. These are starting to get almost monotonous.

No shots were fired and no one was hurt during the escape, an official at the UFAP prison guards' union told Reuters.

Odd, especially when you read that "The whole operation lasted less than two minutes, the ministry added." Plenty of time. And the guy who "abseiled from the helicopter to cut through a security net" was surely a quite target.

I really like their solution too.

The breakout at Luynes prison near Aix-en-Provence was the latest in a series of escapes from French prisons, which have prompted Justice Minister Dominique Perben to order swifter rotation between jails of the country's most dangerous convicts.

That means that each prisoner gets a chance to get into the weakest prison for his getaway.

When this common helicopter stunt was tried in the US back in 1988, the helicopter was forced down, and the bad guys were captured.

Document Root Problems With Dynamic Vhosting.

I discovered "Dynamically configured mass virtual hosting" today. It will save me quite a bit of grief - since I won't have to edit a mysql database, and have my own shell scripts building configuation files and restarting apache. I just point the DNS at my server, and then create a directory with the name of the domain. It's a good way to do things.

But it has a bug. The DOCUMENT_ROOT environment variable is not being set to the document root being used. This throw errors into PHP scripts and cgi programs that use DOCUMENT_ROOT. (Someone with the same problem)

The docs tantalizingly say, "The other thing to `fake' is the document root", but then spin around at the end of the paragraph to declare, "there isn't any way to change DOCUMENT_ROOT dynamically".

Maybe I'll have to try to get a fix put into Apache. Anyone have any experience with doing that? :)

Discontented with software.

When I was young, everthing was beatiful with the programs I used. I took everything unquestioningly, and learned to conform to the software and hardware. If for some reason I could not do something, that was fine. If I had to take eight obscure steps to do something simple, it did not bother me. After all, was not it a priviledge to use a computer.

And then I grew up, and got a Mac. Now when software or hardware is missing a feature, or makes me go out of my way, it upsets me. And what makes it worse, I can't fix it. Take PDA's for example. Everyone on the market has big problems. I know what I want, but I can't wave my hand and have it.

Now looking at myself, I'm obviously crazy for wanting everything my way. I guess it's too much programing on my own sites that have worked me up to expecting to be able to make everything I "touch" just the way I want it.

My Links Script.

I built a php "bookmark / history" script this morning, for no good reason really.

I needed to reboot my computer to install the latest version of Mac OS X, and I realized the ten open Camino window's tabs contained the accumulation of useful webpages from a week's web browsing. If I just closed the windows, I'd loose all of them, some of those pages I found while working on getting the new server setup were really hard to find.

So the upshot was that I decided to throw together a quick bookmark script. I punch the [^.^] bookmark in my menubar and up pops a window allowing me to set the emotion the page gives me (Makes it easy to spot political news items from technical) . I hit save, and there we go.

If anyone wants the source for this kludge, send me an email.

So why did I not use just plain browser bookmarks? That's the question I'm asking myself right now, actually. :)

New Server Woes.

I've spent the last two days bashing the new servers into shape. Things should not have to be this hard! Maybe Macs have spoiled me, but it should take only a few minutes to setup a virtual hosting computer, not a few days. If I had dollar for every time I put my hostname, or ip address into yet another config file.

Currently I'm off scouring the web for a better way.

Here is what I really want:

• Runs on any linux/BSD
• I only have to configure the software, and it builds and configures, the individual server software.
• Web based control panel
• Free

Nooo!!! Braino.org expiring..

Dear Domain Name Owner,

As of today, the domain name registrations listed below
will expire. These domains will no longer resolve in name
servers. After today's
expiration date, we will still maintain the
registrations in the Registry database for 15
days. During that time, you may still contact us to
re-register the domain names. After the 15-day grace
period, however, the domain name registrations will be
released and you will no longer be the registered owner
of the domain names.

This is the list of domain names that expired today:
BRAINO.ORG

Noooo!!! I don't have a Credit Card, so I'll have to wait a few days to use a relative's one... Braino may be down for a few days. :( Thank you Dotster for keeping them an additional 15 days, though.

Fun new software.

PhotoPal - PHP powered web photo album. I wish I had had this when I went to Europe.
Hydra - realtime multi person document editing, with Mac slickness.

(Sorry for neglecting the blog lately, I've been too sleepy to do much.)

New Server.

"Wallace", the new 1U server, has arrived. After swearing him in, I started to install Gentoo Linux on him. So far I'm getting a kernel panic, and thus must give up after five hours of going at it. Things should not be this painful!