Category: books

How long before corporations and small businesses alike demand a simplified, universal, single-payer healthcare system to level the playing field and allow small businesses to attract the same talented workers as bigger ones can?

One of the reason for staying at an organization is for the benefits — perhaps someone in the family has some long-term or chronic healthcare issues: to change employees might mean losing continuity of care or even basic coverage, not a risk a responsible person wants to take.

How long? 20 – 25 years?

Cascade Bicycle Club: Chilly Hilly:

Chilly Hilly reminds you that winter is no excuse to stop riding because spring is just around the corner.
Who Rode in 2004:

• 3739 riders (239 more than 2003 – a 6.5% increase)
• Riders came from 17 states (including New York, Alaska, Arizona, and North Carolina), plus British Columbia
• 27% female riders, 63% male riders
• Registered riders ranged from age 3 to 85 (we cannot tell the youngest rider that actually rode on their own)

It’s that time again. <yawn> time to pump the tires up, dust off the saddle, and get rolling.

Some friends want to do it for the first time (after realizing that I can do it, anyone can — she’s a tri-athlete, he’s a serious cyclist — so I don’t why they haven’t done it before now), so perhaps that will induce me to sign up for a second run.

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Now playing: Peace and Love by Fountains of Wayne from the album “Welcome Interstate Managers”

I’m not a regular reader of Parade magazine — the local Pacific Northwest magazine is lots better — but I picked it up and was drawn to this article by Norman Mailer on the power of reading as the basis of all learning.

I think Mailer’s point is a good one. He makes a stronger, more-focused argument about how television watching undermines education than I have seen so far: his point is that the constant interruptions — as shows end and begin every half hour as well as commercials of ever shorter durations — make it difficult for kids to develop the “mental muscles”? required to concentrate and truly master difficult material. A century ago, people could and regularly did read for hours, while fewer and fewer do today, though not from a lack of books or even a lack of interest: in many cases, they’ve never mastered the skills of concentrating for long periods.

The article is embargoed until next week: I’ll try to update the link and pull out a few choice quotes, but if you get a Sunday paper, you already have a copy. I urge you to check it out.

Continue reading “Norman Mailer’s One Big Idea”

This post on Crooked Timber made me look into how to do these: I guess that a &circ; was the right combination — that time spent learning diacritical marks in French occasionally proves its worth — but how to do it in text, not HTML? On the Mac, it’s ‘option-i’ to get the circumflex and then whatever you want under it.

WWW-Talk Jan-Mar 1993: &AElig;, &Aacute;, &Acirc;, etc.:

Are the mnemonic representations of ISO Latin 1 characters (e.g. in the subject or in
http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/MarkUp/Connolly/930106/ISOlat1.html) really necessary for HTML?

As far as I can see, the question translates to ‘Is there anyone who’s going to be typing in these things by hand that can’t type the numeric references instead?’ and ‘Aren’t HTML editors going to be used to produce documents with these characters anyway, and can’t editors use the numeric representation just as easy as the mnemonic representation?’

This message — between Marc Andreessen, pre-Netscape, and Tim Berners-Lee, pre-knighthood — is almost exactly 12 years old: what do you think of the progress we’ve made?

When I see things like this and recall the battle for mindshare — I’d love to see a list of all the now-discontinued tags from the late 90s browsers — and think what an enormous waste of resources that all was. Are things better now? Is CSS better than tag soup? Undoubtedly. Could it have happened sooner and without a lot of wasted effort, by programmers devising these features and web designers using them, only to see them go away? I think so. I look at a tool like ecto, which I use to create these scintillating observations, and consider how quickly it came into existence, matured, and is now in its second release after a redesign — and with one programmer (albeit a very good one). Perhaps it’s not possible to do something like this in a group: would Linux have happened with more than one person at the earliest stages?

It would make a big difference to how people use software if features and chrome were more carefully weighed against usability from the user’s point of view. Again, to use ecto as an example: I think I have access to every menu, every option, and I still have a lot of room on my 12 inch iBook screen. Would that be the case in Word?

I found jmates’ Using automount on Mac OS X notes to be useful in making regular backups happen. I use Apple’s Backup utility but I don’t want to get in the habit of backing up to a CD or anything like that. Backing up to another drive is just fine, but if it relies on user input — authentication, for example — it’s not good. Enter automount(8). Using Jeremy’s notes and a fair bit of trial and guess about the bits I was fuzzy on, I now have automounting working so backups get written to a remote volume. Now I have to work out some way of backing that up without burning CDs or otherwise wasting money (there is a tape drive in there, after all). So now to set up automount elsewhere and make sure we’re protected.

I considered making a prediction at Long Bets and may still when I can scrounge up the $50.

My prediction is that it will be possible to buy a car or other human transporter without a powerplant, leaving the choice to the buyer (electric/hybrid/internal combustion [gasoline, diesel, biodiesel, methane, hydrogen]). The underlying premise is that the drivetrain fittings will become standardized like radios and CD players. The form factor of the different types of cars now — everyday I see hybrids, biodiesels etc. — so it makes sense for manufacturers to disintermediate themselves, offering styling and comfort level with your choice of powerplant.

I figure 25 years before this is an option, and it need not be a mass-market option: it could be some clever small manufacturer who wants to leverage value(s) instead of pure market efficiency, ie, cost. I think this could lead to some innovations in the body and passenger compartments as well as people specialize in those.

I have been trying to add some exercise to my daily regime and one easy way to do that is to walk the path around green Lake once the kids are safely ensconced in their classrooms. So today was the fourth time in two weeks I have managed it — go, me! — and we — the other mom-to-a-school-age-kid I went with and I — had a wide-ranging discussion, mostly on family and child-raising issues. Takes about 45 minutes to do the 3+ miles so you can cover some conversational ground as well.

One of the topics was faith/religion and how to handle that with kids. We, the adults in my house, are not particularly religious, and the kids have not shown a lot of curiosity about it, but that seems to be coming up as they are exposed to different kids and their traditions. My take on it was that if I decided to go to church this Sunday, where would I go? MapQuest lists 20 places of worship within 1 mile of my house, 150 within a larger radius.

My argument was and is that few churchgoers pick their faith or house of worship for doctrinal reasons: there’s nothing in the liturgy or sacraments that draws them. It may be the faith they were raised in, the nearest church, the most compelling preacher, the fact that it’s next to a donut shop. So given that, can you let a kid choose a faith and should they be made to feel any loyalty to the faith they were raised in?

I feel some kinship to the Anabaptists, the sect who felt infant baptism was wrong, that only adults who could willingly profess their faith were fit for baptizing. My walking companion was raised as a Catholic but has lapsed, though not without the trademark guilt. If your memories of churchgoing are not ones you’d like to repeat or visit on your own kids, how to choose a faith that fits?

Now playing: Prove It by Television from the album “Marquee Moon” | Get it

I have the RSS feed for new titles at Project Gutenberg in my aggregator and noticed that Flatland was in the collection.

I read that when I was a boy and thought it would make for a good read. So starting Feb 1, I’ll be putting up one section a day here: they’re already posted into WordPress and will be made available at 4 AM on each day.

This is the best-known of these projects, I suppose: I think it would be interesting to see more of these. I see that Ulysses is in the Gutenberg repository, possibly incorrectly, considering all the fuss that Joyce’s remaining heir made at the prospect of public readings for the centenary this past summer.

What book would you read if it were serialized?

Now playing: I Shot The Sheriff by Bob Marley & The Wailers from the album “Legend” | Get it

Microsoft RC4 Flaw:

One of the most important rules of stream ciphers is to never use the same keystream to encrypt two different documents. If someone does, you can break the encryption by XORing the two ciphertext streams together. The keystream drops out, and you end up with plaintext XORed with plaintext — and you can easily recover the two plaintexts using letter frequency analysis and other basic techniques.

It’s an amateur crypto mistake. The easy way to prevent this attack is to use a unique initialization vector (IV) in addition to the key whenever you encrypt a document.

Microsoft uses the RC4 stream cipher in both Word and Excel. And they make this mistake. Hongjun Wu has details (link is a PDF).

In this report, we point out a serious security flaw in Microsoft Word and Excel. The stream cipher RC4 [9] with key length up to 128 bits is used in Microsoft Word and Excel to protect the documents. But when an encrypted document gets modified and saved, the initialization vector remains the same and thus the same keystream generated from RC4 is applied to encrypt the different versions of that document. The consequence is disastrous since a lot of information of the document could be recovered easily.

This isn’t new. Microsoft made the same mistake in 1999 with RC4 in WinNT Syskey. Five years later, Microsoft has the same flaw in other products.

Hmm, does this — repeating the same mistake — happen in open source implementations?