mcgees.org

Test post.

Pearl Jam on Letterman Thursday, May 4th.

There are 264 TLDs (top-level domains) that the analog log analysis software knows about. TLDs are things like ".com", ".org", ".us", and ".uk" that you find at the end of domain names. And for several years I have been keeping track of the TLDs of visitors to mcgees.org. My goal is to have a visitor from each TLD, the internet equivalent of a ham's "Worked All Countries". This may not be feasible — some TLDs may be obsolete, and some will just be damned difficult, like ".kp", North Korea — but I'm keeping track of it. You can follow the progress of my domain visitors here. As of yesterday, I knew of visits from 141 TLDs.

Today, though, I ran jdresolve on my log entries, which does lookups on unknown IP addresses, and nabbed seven more: Air Transport Industry, Bahrain, Kenya, Monaco, Maldives, Togo, and Tanzania! I'm now at 148. Stay tuned.

Find a wallet containing 1,000 euros.
Track down the owner and extort a 100 euro finder's fee for the return of the wallet and money.
Profit! I mean, jail!

Study Explains Evolution's Molecular Advance: "Thus, it turned out that the receptor for aldosterone existed before aldosterone. Aldosterone is found just in land animals, which appeared tens of millions of years later.

'It had a different function and was exploited to take part in a new complex system when the hormone came on the scene,' Dr. Thornton said."

"It sounds like a job for Wallace and Gromit. A 'monster' rabbit has apparently been rampaging through vegetable patches in a small village in northern England, ripping up leeks, munching turnips and infuriating local gardeners.

In an uncanny resemblance to the plot of the hit animated film 'Wallace & Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit,' angry horticulturists in Felton, near Newcastle, have now mounted an armed guard to protect their prized cabbages and parsnips…

'This is no ordinary rabbit. We are dealing with a monster,' [local resident Jeff Smith] was quoted by newspapers as saying… 'We have two lads here with guns who are trying to shoot it, but it is very clever.'"

Internet Explorer hit by new phishing flaw. I hear a death knell. Anyone not switched to Firefox yet? You are missing out.

Pop-up Potpourri: Funny, funny error messages.

Truthdig - Reports - Robert Scheer: 'Anti-Christian Conspirators' Slay DeLay. Ah, if only we could take credit for DeLay's downfall. That would have been a major coup. Instead of, say, something akin to the laws of physics.

Journalism Payola. And a really good discussion.

Grow a grass armchair: "The Grass Armchair is a kit to grow a seat in your yard… You will need about 240 litres of soil, to fill in the frame. First find the right spot, because once the armchair has grown you won't be able to move it!!"

Pearl Jam on SNL April 15th.

More Legal Protection for FOSS Developers: "The Software Freedom Law Center has launched the Software Freedom Conservancy, which is designed to permit certain projects accepted as members, such as Wine, uClibc and BusyBox currently, to apply for and then benefit from nonprofit tax-exempt status… [W]hat the Conservancy is offering is, for those accepted as members, to take that administrative load off of you developers, because they know how to do this, and you probably don't."

Second [Pearl Jam] Forum Show Added: "That’s right. A second show has been added in LA. Stay tuned for further updates!

If you reserved rollover tickets for this show, your credit card will be charged. A confirmation email will be sent closer to the show date, but in the meantime, you can check your profile in the pearljam.com Goods section to view your orders."

Japanese firms divest themselves of whaling interests.

I thought Pearl Jam would send an email update when West Coast shows were announced, as they have with the East Coast shows. I was wrong, and missed the window to buy tix for the LA Forum show. There is a possible second show being added, on contingent presale from 10am to 10pm PST on 31 March (tomorrow).

Pearl Jam's new news feed is http://www.pearljam.com/flat/pj-rss2.xml. Use it in your favorite reader, such as the Google Reader I discussed recently.

Got Time?: "Please program in more days." Or, if you like, "Please teach your programmer arithmetic division." It hurts the brain.

Google Reader, for syndicated site feeds. In Beta. Good, needs a lot of work and a blogroll export feature.

Many popular male first names commonly thought of as being Irish, such as Patrick, Mick and Sean, actually originated with the English and the French-Danish-Norwegian Normans, who invaded Ireland in the 12th century…. Freya Verstraten, a doctoral postgraduate student of history at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland

"A name like Se�n is usually thought of as typically Irish; however, it is an Irish adaptation of the Biblical name John, and this version of the name was used in Ireland only after the invasion," [said Verstraten]. "There are many other names people consider to be Irish, although they are in fact Irish versions of Anglo-Norman names. S�amus, for example, is the Irish form of James."

At around the time of the invasion, popular Irish male first names included Diarmaid, Donnchadh, Cormac, Cathal, Niall, Brian, and Aodh…. — Discovery Channel News

Myths about the sanctity of life, or of consciousness, cut both ways. They may be useful in erecting barriers (against euthanasia, against capital punishment, against abortion, against eating meat) to impress the unimaginative, but at the price of offensive hypocrisy or ridiculous self-deception among the more enlightened.

Absolutist barriers, like the Maginot Line, seldom do the work they were designed for…. Surely it would be better to try to foster an appreciation for the nonabsolutist, nonintrinsic, nondichotomized grounds for moral concern that can co-exist with our increasing knowledge of the inner workings of that most amazing machine, the brain. The moral arguments on both sides of the issues of capital punishment, abortion, eating meat, and experimenting on nonhuman animals, for instance, are raised to a higher, more appropriate standard when we explicitly jettison the myths…. — Daniel Dennett.

Discuss, if you are so inclined.

The Wine Info Site. Learn about your grape varietals. They don't have much info about Aghiorgitiko.

Forgetting what our local portal server at work was called, I typed in portal in Firefox's address bar. That was not the name of the server, so Firefox did its magic, running an "I'm Feeling Lucky" search at Google and giving me the first match: http://www.firstgov.gov/. It's a massive, wonderful U.S. Government web portal. Auctions, taxes, science for kids, census data, blue pages, product recalls, forms — massive amounts of stuff. Well recommended.

Wow, I'm glad I kept reading The Blank Slate. The last two chapters, "The Arts" and "The Voice of the Species" were really, really, really good. Maybe borrow the book and just read those?

I have been reading the intricate shell game that is Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate. Thought-provoking shell game, but shell game nonetheless, prone to rapid escalations from fish-in-barrel-shooting to global generalization in seven-league leaps of Randian proportion. I've kept reading it for one reason: its occasional aha-generating moments are really fun (and normally in the form of citations from other thinkers.) In that sense the book is a footnote to its bibliography.

Allow me to cite, however, the first citation that has made me put the book down to write a blog post. He cites a writer called J.C. Wakefield as follows:

A good definition of a disease or disorder is that it consists of suffering experienced by an individual because of a malfunction of a mechanism in the individual's body.

Now, hold on. That is an immeasurably lousy definition of disease and disorder, on the scale of David Gelernter's definition of vivid imagination. By this definition, brain death is not a disorder. Early-stage HIV infection is not a disease. They're not causing suffering, right? At least not unless you expand suffering to something like "eventual diminution of lifespan", or "elimination of the potential for experience of happiness". But maybe his argument doesn't rely on the suffering bit, or maybe it permits this sort of wide definition. He proceeds to explain why violence is not a disorder:

But as a writer for Science recently pointed out, "Unlike most diseases, it's usually not the perpetrator who defines aggression as a problem; it's the environment. Violent people may feel they are functioning normally, and some may even enjoy their occasional outbursts and resist treatment. (Emphasis added)

I'm not making a claim about the pathology of violence. That's not the point. The point is that if you are willing to start with assumptions this flawed, where do your arguments lead? Apparently, if this book is testament, the effect is arguments such as Neural models with distributed intelligence function better than top-down models. Leftism is top-down and utopian. Conservatism, with its free economic agents pursuing their own ends, is distributed. Therefore, the validity of Conservatism is supported by artificial intelligence research. The only difference is that he takes ten pages to state this thesis.

I have discovered the interesting fact that all the regular male cast members on Firefly are older than all the female cast members on the program, that this span is 1,357 days, and that my birthdate lies in this gap. So, a game. Points to players who:

Find other shows where all the men are older than all the women (or vice versa) and the gap is smaller than 1,357 days. IMDB and the date calculator will help.
Extra-super-crazy points if you find one of these gaps in which your birthdate lies.
Runner-up credit for finding a show where all the old cast members are older than all the young cast members.

Context: You've recently switched to apache2 with separate vhost configurations in sites-enabled and you are trying to get CGI scripts to execute in a directory called something other than "cgi-bin". You've turned on the ExecCGI option for the directory.

Symptom: You are getting "Access Forbidden" errors, and your server's error log shows "Options FollowSymLinks or SymLinksIfOwnerMatch is off which implies that RewriteRule directive is forbidden"

Further context: You're not running any RewriteRules.

Solution: Uncomment the line AddHandler cgi-script .cgi in your main apache2.conf file.

Reason this is the error you get: Hell if I know.

In closely related news, ScotchFinder is back.

I've started reviewing Magic repacks. See here, and feel free to request repacks to review.

If Blogger stopped publishing to your server four months ago, change (or ask your sysadmin to change) "PasswordAuthentication" to "yes" in your sshd config file (check /etc/ssh/sshd_config).

In related news, mcgees.org is back.

Legalese, Canada Style: [The teacher] replied to students' answers on occasion — "That is not what your mother said last night" which the students interpreted as the Member implying that he had spent time socially with that student's mother.

I actually had to reboot a Linux machine tonight to get it to display web pages properly. Restarting apache didn't do the trick.