dkg's blog

David Hilfiker has a web presence

dkg — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 02:16:21 -0400

My friend David Hilfiker just let me know that he's publishing his writings on the web. He writes a lot of interesting, insightful material about the state of our country and our planet, and approaches his subjects of justice, religion, health, and poverty from a humble but perceptive place.

He's a Christian (which i am not), and one of a too-rare species of Christian who seems to take the best parts of those teachings and really dedicate himself to them in a way that tries to make the world better. One of the articles on his site is his Letter to Lefties, which addresses the relationship between the secular and religious sections of the progressive movement.

Redefining Avogadro's number

dkg — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 14:04:38 -0500

American Scientist presents an interesting proposal in its Macroscope column this month. The authors want to explicitly redefine Avogadro's number (~6.022 × 10²³, as you may remember from physics) to be a specific integer.

I remember learning that this number represented a mole, the number of molecules of water in a gram. It turns out, of course, that this depends on the definition of a gram. At the moment, the gram is defined by a specific chunk of metal held in a vault somewhere in France. This chunk of metal (Le Gran K, according to the article) is changing over time (due to handling, cleaning, etc), so the actual definition of a gram is changing, as is (consequently) Avogadro's number. Redefining Avogadro's number to be a constant would remove the Système International's dependence on this physical artifact.

princeton security analysis of diebold voting machines

dkg — Fri, 15 Sep 2006 15:28:59 -0400

Some folks at Princeton's CS department have done a good analysis of a Diebold voting system, the kind used in many elections across the country. They've done a good job of presenting their findings in several different forms, for various audiences ("executive summary", a video, an in-depth technical whitepaper). There's ways for anyone with web access to really grasp the content of their research, which i find pretty admirable.

Folks who know me know my personal preference is for the technical whitepaper, which was actually a great read. It's very clearly explained, sober and direct, and points out the wide range of potential vulnerabilities that the machines share with most commercial PCs, in addition to a series of vulnerabilities specific to the Diebold-proprietary software. If you have any interest in computer security, do yourself a favor and read it. They're thinking about these things the right way.

BBDB linguistic idiosyncracies

dkg — Wed, 12 Apr 2006 15:59:32 -0400

i use the insidious big brother database (bbdb, a set of elisp scripts that runs under emacs) to track my contacts.

it integrates with vm (my MUA, which is also implemented in elisp and runs under emacs), so that i can type part of a user's name in the To: line of an e-mail composition buffer, hit tab, and it fills in the rest, including the e-mail address (which bbdb stores in a field named "net:" in its records).

emacs keybindings and their place in my central nervous system

dkg — Mon, 10 Apr 2006 12:20:47 -0400

i just stumbled across an article titled emacs keybindings make you stupid. I am officially way way stupid. when i accidentally put too much of some ingredient in a sauce i'm cooking, i feel my fingers twitch for C-_ (or C-a C-k if i want to start over). I just pressed M-b to go back a word to edit this entry and brought down the bookmark menu of my web browser instead. i must do that a dozen times a day.

and sadly, my impulse is to want to "fix" the parts of the world that don't use emacs keybindings instead of retraining myself. i'm excited by the possibilities presented by MozEx, a mozilla extension that lets you edit a textarea in an arbitrary external text editor, for example.

noesis notifications are now working

dkg — Mon, 03 Apr 2006 22:07:01 -0400

jamie and i just sorted out how to get notifications working on this noesis installation. The problem appears to be that the cronjob wasn't running properly, mainly because it was being kicked off by php4-cli, and php4-cli's configuration (/etc/php4/cli/php.ini in a sarge system) didn't have the mysql.so extension loaded.

Since the notifications are normally kicked off by drupal's cronjob, and the cronjob couldn't access the database, nothing was happening. frankly, i think this should have generated an error condition that alerted the sysadmin that the cronjob was not being run somehow. perhaps that's a bug in the debian packaging of the cronjob?

moreutils

dkg — Sat, 18 Mar 2006 15:20:26 -0500

Also from Joey Hess comes moreutils, which looks to be an awesome package of glue utilities. As the README puts it:

This is a collection of the unix tools that nobody thought to write thirty years ago.

I look forward to this propagating into etch.

Thinking about security models and group empowerment in debian

dkg — Sat, 18 Mar 2006 13:33:27 -0500

Joey Hess has an interesting blog post about the relationship between security models, group empowerment, and bitter strife within the debian project. His basic idea is that if strict permissions models can be relaxed (and security is not degraded somehow), people will be more excited about working on a project, they'll contribute more freely, and the work will flow smoother and simpler.

The idea isn't terribly shocking, of course, but he ties it into ideas about Wikis, and proposes some interesting things learned from wikis (and proto-wikis like the Debian Bug Tracking System). The basic idea is: anyone should be able to contribute easily and simply, but important changes and modifications should be trackable, have full review, be straightforward to revert, and authorship should be apparent (at least pseudonymously).

squeak troubles

dkg — Sat, 11 Mar 2006 21:42:36 -0500

I just had a nasty experience that was compounded by a number of factors. Here's what i figured out had happened:

i put squeak (my computer) to sleep so i could go out for the evening last night at around 18:30. what i didn't notice was that /var was full, and mysqld was choking, waiting for disk space to get freed up. Somehow, this interrupted my sleep request, and squeak stayed awake (though unplugged). for some reason, squeak also decided to try to use the wireless card at about 22:30, and couldn't get the connection he wanted. Since squeak was awake and unplugged, he ended up draining both batteries, and ran out of juice at 3:30 the next morning (on a positive note, that's 9 hours of battery life!).

typographer's discussion of the euro symbol

dkg — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 17:55:44 -0500

I just stumbled across this interesting discussion among several typographers about the euro symbol. The discussion is from 10 years ago, when the symbol was just being introduced.

There are interesting points in there covering everything from the name of the symbol itself (some people think it should be the "ecu" instead of the "euro", others vehemently disagree), its placement into unicode and other character sets, complaints about the glyph's general form, political trouble with the guidelines set forth for its use by th