zen.org Communal Weblog

http://www.news.com/8301-13578_3-9834495-38.html

A federal judge in Vermont has ruled that prosecutors can’t force a
criminal defendant accused of having illegal images on his hard drive
to divulge his PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) passphrase.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Jerome Niedermeier ruled that a man charged with
transporting child pornography on his laptop across the Canadian
border has a Fifth Amendment right not to turn over the
passphrase to prosecutors. The Fifth Amendment protects the right
to avoid self-incrimination.

Niedermeier tossed out a grand jury’s subpoena that directed Sebastien
Boucher to provide “any passwords” used with the Alienware
laptop. “Compelling Boucher to enter the password forces him to
produce evidence that could be used to incriminate him,” the judge
wrote in an order dated November 29 that went unnoticed until this
week. “Producing the password, as if it were a key to a locked
container, forces Boucher to produce the contents of his laptop.”

Your 37th birthday is something of a unique event. You’re that much closer to 40, which just realigns your target to worry about 50. You’re way past your 20s, so day-to-day craziness is imitating a logarithmic curve approaching but, you insist, never reaching zero.

Two things so far have made today unique amongst birthdays. Well, three, but the first was cool: our eldest made me a great birthday card and had chosen what he wanted to give me for my birthday. He’s definitely growing up.

Another part of the feeling of truly living your age: I finally went into our local insurance broker and set up life insurance. I’ve been meaning to do it for a while now (since the birth of our first son, in fact), but seemed to never actually make the effort. At long last, I’m accepting some reality and making sure my wife and kids are suitably taken care of should I be suddenly attacked by rabid squirrels while walking down the street.

Then there’s the discovery this morning in one gift. My mother doesn’t live in Ireland, so she ordered my gift from someone in Cork and had it sent to me through the post. In it was a nice card:

Creative! If I didn’t know he made it up himself, I’d be convinced some online form completion was taken literally. 🙂

The American Antiquarian Society has put up a piece about the upcoming book The Gentleman in the Purple Waistcoat, an investigation into the murder in 1849 of Dr. George Parkman. Before the development of CSI-emulated forensics, it took only six months to decide Harvard Professor John W. Webster did it, should be arrested, and would die by hanging.

The “vignette” written by the AAS is really interesting reading. The book is apparently going to introduce plenty of reasonable doubt about the guilt of Professor Webster.

After a little difficulty, I’ve got it working! The music on the Mac Mini upstairs is coming out of the speakers of our 15 year-old Aiwa stereo in the diningroom downstairs.

My laptop’s got a Belkin TuneCastII FM Transmitter plugged into its headphone jack. The laptop (booted into WindowsXP) is running iTunes, playing a song—right now, “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” by The Charlie Daniels Band. And the laptop’s connected over our wireless network.

The Linksys WRT54G in the livingroom is running DD-WRT, a replacement firmware giving it a lot more oompf than what comes on the box by default. I specifically put it on to solve the continuous problem of Mac laptops losing their association with it after a few hours or a day.

Anyway, it turns out the only thing preventing the iTunes on my laptop from seeing the shared music off the mini upstairs was that I’d left the “SPI Firewall” enabled. Since I’ve got the wireless already as tight as I can get it (no broadcast, mac filter, wep encrypted and soon wpa), it’s probably not particularly useful since anything connected via an Ethernet cable wouldn’t be protected by it either.

With that firewall disabled, the packets (to whatever port(s)) made it through and can finally play music on my laptop!

Our 9 month-old boy doesn’t seem to like “Let It Roll”, the next song in that album. Let’s see if he likes The Eagles…

My brother sent me a funny joke recently, and I thought about throwing it up on the blog. But I figured I should first make sure it’s not one that’s done too much traveling around the Net. The basic idea is:

A husband and wife are traveling by car from Atlanta to New York. After almost twenty-four hours on the road, they decide to stop at a nice hotel and take a room. They only plan to sleep for four hours and then get back on the road. When they check out four hours later, the desk clerk hands them a bill for $350. The man explodes and demands to know why the charge is so high. He tells the clerk although it’s a nice hotel, the rooms certainly aren’t worth $350. When the clerk explains that $350 is the standard rate, the man insists on speaking to the manager.

The manager enters the conversation and explains that the hotel has an Olympic-sized pool and a huge conference center which were available for the husband and wife to use.

He also explains that they could have taken in one of the shows which the hotel is famous for. “The best entertainers from New York, Hollywood and Las Vegas perform here,” explains the manager.

No matter what facility the manager mentions, the man replies, “But we didn’t use it!”

The manager is unmoved. Eventually the man gives up and agrees to pay. He writes a check and hands it to the manager. “But sir,” the managers says, “this check is only made out for $100.”

“That’s right,” replies the man. “I charged you $250 for sleeping with my wife.”

“What! I didn’t sleep with your wife!” exclaims the manager.

“Well,” the man replies, “she was here, and you could have.”

Holy cow, it’s apparently pretty popular. So frequently used, in fact, that there exist a wide variety of adjusted versions involving:

• an unnamed husband and wife; Yonkel and Sara; Steve and Sarah; a Sardarji and his wife; a Uclutian and his wife; Sordarji and his wife; a biker and his wife;
• driving from Key West to Boston; Miami to Boston; Atlanta to New York; Florida to Canada; somewhere to Tofino; London to Southampton; Edinburgh to London; Delhi to Mumbai; Yorkshire to Scotland; Johannesburg to Cape Town; Sydney to Cairns;
• $350 US dollars; £350 British pounds; Rs. 5000/- Indian rupee; R750 South African rand;
• husband charges for: sleeping with his wife; kissing his wife.

I could actually take the time to turn it into an Ireland joke, but it sure seems almost as pointless as the last hour I spent looking at all of those sites. 🙂

Installing Kubuntu Linux on a Sony TX1XP laptop is absolutely amazing.

After struggling with xorg.conf myself but never succeeding, I’ve now got a multihead display going with Thunderbird to my left on the laptop screen, and Firefox in front of me on the big monitor. AND, when I change to another one of my four virtual desktops—both screens change. I’ve now got twice the space.

So now one desktop’s got Thunderbird & Firefox, but if I move to another, voila, there’s the PDF of the ISO standard for the C programming language up on my laptop screen, and on the monitor are the editor and terminal window where I’m doing my work based on what’s in the standard.

How COOL. (insert horrible geeky laughter from TV here)

The road I live on leads to a cul-de-sac, so we don’t get much through-traffic. However, enough homes are on the road that strangers who don’t live here often visit those who do. No problem. We have family and friends do just that. But there’s a behavior problem involved.

The “Children Playing” sign at the entry to the road needs to be twice its current size, and have lasers attached which will blow out the tires of the fuckers who go tearing up and down the road so maybe their car would flip and crush their useless skulls in a mesh of metal and glass.

Ahem.

There are more than six children on the road under the age of 10. They love to play together, and go running up and down the sidewalks or ride on their scooters or even their bikes. All of the parents are trying to get them into the habit of looking before the go running into the road, but reality being as it is, sometimes they don’t follow our instructions.

A couple of days ago a lady was coming down the road from the cul-de-sac at an incredible speed. I’d just walked my son down to play with his friends, and wasn’t in a glowing mood, so I stood in the middle of the road waving my arms. When they slowed down, I saw a woman with at least four children (not a seatbelt fastened around one of them) looking at me curious as to why I’d signaled her. I yelled (I won’t be silly and try to suggest I was speaking calmly), “SLOW DOWN, there are CHILDREN on this road!” I was looking at her own kids more than her while I said it. She looked sheepish and drove away…a little more slowly.

Just now, I was walking home with my son’s broken scooter as he went running with his friends up the sidewalk in some game I wasn’t privy to. Down comes a red Volkswagen burning enough fuel to reach its 0-60mph rating pretty quickly. I repeated my Hit me, you fucker pose, and when he slowed to pass me I saw the 20 year-old (at best) looking at me like I was nuts when I yelled basically the same sentence again, word-for-word. To help him deal with the repercussions of his actions, he went tearing out around the corner—again, not losing control of his car, much to my dismay.

I don’t want speed bumps on our road, but at the same time I want something better than the sign no one looks at. I know kids are going to come running out from behind parked cars, and I’ve yet to see more than a few people honor the 10mph rule for this sort of road.

Given that, I also don’t want some useless sack of shit given the power to take away my son’s life.

Jesus, time for some wine.

I’m working away, letting iTunes play what it will. Up comes “If This Is It” by Huey Lewis, and I’m pulled back in time. I was twelve years old, listening to the Sports album, my mind buried in the depths of Stephen King’s Pet Sematary.

Since I’ve been reading King’s books from age ten (gasp), I don’t think I was very sensitive to horror novels or movies by then. But it must be a little odd that I remember quite so much detail: the dead cat comes back to visit after being buried in a spooky cemetery, and he needs the bits of green garbage bag picked out of his whiskers—the very same garbage bag used to hold his stiffening corpse only the day before.

Perfectly normal to remember, right?

One neat feature found while using Ubuntu Linux: if you invoke a command you’re accustomed to using (being a command-line user), but it’s not actually installed, you get the helpful message

The program 'pm' is currently not installed. You can install it by typing:
sudo apt-get install speech-tools
Make sure you have the 'universe' component enabled
bash: pm: command not found

How very cool.

Mr Suit Guy walked onto the elevator, chatting away into his phone with his loud obnoxious voice. “Of course we can try to make that happen, it’s just a question of putting the right spin on it. Listen, I think when the door closes I’m going to lose my signal, so I’ll ring you back later once I’m upstairs, okay?” The lady standing next to me tried to look like she was comfortable with this large First Class-traveling gentleman making his ownership of the elevator known.

As the doors closed, he announced, “Yup, ok, it’s going now, I’ll give you a call.” He had a smug look of satisfaction as his Star Trek communicator of a mobile phone snapped shut. He got away with it.

Almost. “You know, sometimes this elevator is a real inconvenience,” I said looking at him, “but other times it sure comes in handy.” His head shot up and looked like I’d just approached him after the candy bar had slipped into his shoplifting pocket.

Then the smug exterior came back and he gave me a knowing shit-eating grin. “Yeah, sure does.”

Sometimes there are people you know you’d never get along with.