Month: November 2006

reaping the fruits of hatred

Star-Telegram | 11/16/2006 | Sitting ducks on the bench:

When federal appellate Judge Danny Boggs said at a Friday legal conference at Las Colinas that physical assaults aimed at judges have come mainly from “the deranged,” [retired Justice Sandra Day] O’Connor underscored the safety concerns.
“Every member of the Supreme Court received a wonderful package of home-baked cookies, and I don’t know why, the staff decided to analyze them,” she recounted. “Each one contained enough poison to kill the entire membership of the court.”

I don’t recall hearing about this, but it should have received more attention. She doesn’t mention if anyone was apprehended in this incident.

What if the staff had been less diligent/experienced? If a Justice had been sickened or worse, what would that say about our republic?

links for 2006-11-16

when dynamic swap is a multiple of real memory, is it time to reboot?

paul$ ls -l /var/vm
total 3670016
drwx–x–x 16 root wheel 544 Nov 14 12:00 app_profile
-rw——T 1 root wheel 67108864 Nov 11 18:35 swapfile0
-rw——T 1 root wheel 67108864 Nov 12 02:12 swapfile1
-rw——T 1 root wheel 134217728 Nov 12 09:04 swapfile2
-rw——T 1 root wheel 268435456 Nov 12 12:25 swapfile3
-rw——T 1 root wheel 268435456 Nov 12 19:04 swapfile4
-rw——T 1 root wheel 268435456 Nov 14 12:02 swapfile5
-rw——T 1 root wheel 268435456 Nov 14 14:23 swapfile6
-rw——T 1 root wheel 268435456 Nov 15 11:32 swapfile7
-rw——T 1 root wheel 268435456 Nov 15 16:42 swapfile8
paul$ du -sh /var/vm
1.5G /var/vm

With only 640Mb onboard, it gets painful. Changing applications can bring up the beachball of death.

<update> But just as with OS 9 and earlier, quitting a bunch of applications and/or logging out without rebooting will force a reclamation of a lot of the swap (about 1 Gb worth, in my case). So that helps.

shoulda wound the film on further




short shell.jpg

Originally uploaded by paulbeard.

Arrcgh. this should be longer and show more of the shell . . .
Taken at the prelims for the Head of the Lake Regatta this past weekend and blustery Green Lake.

Holga 120S, 35mm film shimmed, trimmed and wedged in there, frame-counting as best I could tell. First time I have tried this, but encouraging results. Small light leak as well, but I’m lucky it was so minimal.

some minor changes

If you come to this fine emporium in web browser, you may notice that the pages are shorter, perhaps only one post on display. I decided to do this for a couple of reasons. One, I wanted page views per visit to go up, partly for ego-gratification reasons and two, to see if Google AdSense could do a better job matching stuff to a more refined target page. The nightly dumps of del.icio.us won’t help, of course, but the actual posts might be easier to work with one at a time. So I display a day’s worth at a time, and as you look through earlier posts, they also come up one day at a time.

The RSS feeds remain in full bloom, and I can’t see making them into extract only feeds. Since I don’t offer any commercial messages in the feeds, I suppose my goal of breaking out of the $5/month model may never be met. But I’m reluctant to tamper with them: I don’t mind ads in other feeds, but I haven’t looked into how to do it and frankly can’t be bothered.

The feeds are located way down at the bottom of the page (perhaps I’ll move them up?) but the content feed is here and the comments feed here. So subscribe, why don’t you?

Now playing: No Better Place by Fountains Of Wayne from the album “Welcome Interstate Managers”

links for 2006-11-14