So I've mentioned many times before that more RAM is arguably¹ the most important upgrade you could add to your computer.

I'm the type that likes to have lots of things up, like iTunes, Photoshop (which consumes a lot of RAM when you foolishly open 20 images at the same time, each 10 megapixels), and Firefox (web browsers are more RAM-hungry than you'd expect)... All at once.

Today, a new recommendation: Eclipse is RAM-hungry. (Perhaps because it's a Java app. I'm unabashedly convinced that Java is the biggest drain on system resources ever.) But with 2GB of RAM, Eclipse's thirst for 150MB isn't a big deal.

What is a big deal, though, is HP's Web JetAdmin. I installed it to see what information it was able to receive from our network printer, kind of hoping for help in my search for MIBs. It's taking 145 MB of RAM.

But also, it uses an SQL Server backend, and SQL Server is using 120MB of RAM.

So the net effect is that, with only Eclipse running, I'm using over a gig of RAM. (And that's "using," not "having the OS cache components in unused portions of"). I think it's time for an uninstall party. (The good news is that Vista's actually handling it really well. The system's snappy as ever, even with massive background processes running on a desktop machine.)

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[1] I say "arguably" since it depends on your usage and what you already have: in some cases, your CPU may be the bottleneck, and sometimes the hard drive is the bottleneck. But in my experience, RAM is the bottleneck 95% of the time.

So I have watched some of the Democratic convention tonight. I heard a speech on energy that made a lot of sense though I think it was less than completely honest about McCain’s position. McCain would like to include nuclear power as well as more drilling. It was poorly delivered as well.

I heard some of Biden’s speech as well. The parts I heard were very well done. But I also watched a lot of commentary by Democrats on Twitter. That really ticked me off. Oh not because they loved it all or even because they disagree with me. No what bothers me is these seemingly intelligent people (most are in education) do not appear to have the least understanding of the people who disagree with them. They are too caught up in the emotion of the event to understand any of the politics either. Scary.

Now to be fair a lot of Republicans don’t understand Democrats either. But I expect more from educators. When I hear people say that pro-life people are anti-women I want to scream. That is one of the stupidest things in the world to say. It is a gross admission that one doesn’t even try to understand the objection to abortion. Anyone who says that is either too stupid closed-minded or too dishonest to be elected to public office. Oh it gets me so upset. Pro-choice is pro-women in the same way that pro-slavery is pro-African-American. At least it is to pro-life people. Actually if you look at how abortion is used in China and India you’d have to be blind not to see pro-choice as seriously anti-women. I admit that I do not understand why the Democratic party is not violently pro-life. I mean I understand why some people are pro-choice but if any party on earth should be pro-life it is the Democrats.

But I digress. One person on Twitter didn’t understand why Biden wasn’t hitting on the issue of the Supreme Court in his speech. The obvious answer is because Biden is not a complete idiot. For a lot of people the Supreme Court is a defining issue. It is the main reason I voted in the last two presidential elections and probably the only reason I will vote (if I vote) this time around. During the convention a lot of people who are undecided are listening. Why would Biden use that platform to say “we’ll make sure baby killing stays legal and take away all your guns?” The Supreme Court is an issue to take up with your supporters to get out the vote not a platform to win votes.

A week ago I was pretty sure Obama would win. Now I’m not so sure. I think Biden was really a bad choice. If people were starting to believe that Obama wasn’t too far to the left the choice of Biden will likely convince them otherwise. You have to run to the middle to win. Of course McCain could similarly blow his choice of a running mate so it is still too early by far to place bets. This one is going to the wire I think.

Mr. T's recent "Would you like to..." post displayed terribly on the main page, but was properly-formatted on his page.

I've (*crosses fingers*) fixed it... For some reason, both Firefox and IE throw up an error 'symbol' when they encounter a character with an ASCII value over 128... They normally look better, except for when browsers don't display them...

So I whipped this together:

        for($i=0; $i<strlen($text); $i++) {

                $val = ord($text[$i]);

                if ($val < 128) $return .= $text[$i];

                else $return .= ("&#" . $val . ";");

        }

Essentially, if a character has an ASCII value over 128 (which means it's one of the 'weird ones' that causes problems on some systems), it gets converted to the { syntax, which means it displays properly. And so far, so good!

Inspired by Kyle, I set up a Mozilla Weave server. (Link goes to directions, not my Weave server, since there's absolutely nothing to link to or show about it...)

A quick bit of advice: Weave has a "password" (which is used to authenticate with the server) and a "passphrase" (which goes to the public/private key that's generated). Not only is it important to understand which is which, but you also have to know that they can't be the same.

A second bit of advice, to save you from pulling your hair out: "invalid password" seems to be its catch-all error message. Apache wasn't able to create the directories Weave wanted due to a permissions error on my end at first, but I kept assuming Weave's message about a bad password meant that... my password was wrong. But in actuality, it meant that I had to have Apache's web user own the directory. (Which, in hindsight, makes sense...)

It's currently highly beta, in that I just set it up and have no idea if it works... But if you're interested in an account, let me know!

I just upgraded to WordPress Multi-User (WPMU) 2.6, the latest tree.

I'm hoping this will fix the problems with blogging via external applications. As always, let me know if you come across bugs.

So I went bowling last week. Ten pin not candlestick. First time I did real bowling for decades. It was a group social event and there were no real bowlers there. I was the second high score with is really scary as I bowled a 99.
I have an excuse though. Besides not bowling for years my left leg would not hold me up on a proper approach. It is still weak from some problems I had some years ago and on the first try I fell at the end of the lane. Not pretty. I wound up standing at the end of the lane, bracing my leg with one hand and trying to bowl. That I got any strikes or spares at all is amazing and as much luck as anything.
Oh but most of the group was really bad. I can imagine real bowlers cringing as balls bounced down the lanes rather than rolled. To say nothing of a good number of fouls besides my own.
Still it was fun and I realized that I missed bowling. But I'll have to exercise my leg before I can try it for real again.

I'm probably one of very few (liberal) Democrats who is pro-gun. I'm not sure "pro-gun" is really the right term. Essentially, I think that the bad guys are always going to have access to guns, so I strongly oppose the notion that I shouldn't be allowed to have one. "Gun control" is a really loaded (hi hi) phrase, but I'm not at all opposed to people being required to have a fairly clean background, or to demonstrate that they understand safe gun handling and whatnot. Because those things wouldn't disqualify me, but would probably make society safer than issuing gun permits to felons, or allowing people to carry guns without them every demonstrating that they're not going to put their sunglasses in their purse and accidentally press them into the trigger, accidentally shooting a baby in the head. I think it should be kind of like auto licensing.

But there are a few things that still don't make sense to me. One is the type of people who carry guns with them everywhere. Honestly, this alone might make sense. If I lived in a bad neighborhood, I could see myself applying for a concealed carry permit, and keeping a small pistol tucked under my shirt. But to some people, a gun is just something else you put on in the morning, just like your shoes. And I always thought "open carry" was strange, too.

Today I was helping at my mom's school, and ran down to the quaint little market down the street from her school to pick up lunch. You need to understand that, while I live in a town with very little crime, my mom's school is in a place with astronomically less crime. I'm pretty sure that you could fill a wheelbarrow up with millions of dollars in cash, be a frail old lady, and push it around the town during the middle of night, and the only thing that might happen would be some people stopping to ask if you needed directions or wanted to borrow their flashlight.

When I was paying for my sub, the guy in line in front of me was well-dressed, but had an M1911 on his belt. He didn't appear to be a cop (it was really way too "flashy" of a gun for a police department to issue, and I was once told that any plainclothes detective who's openly carrying a gun will have their badge displayed right next to the gun), just a well-to-do business man who felt the need to bring his pistol with him as he went to grab lunch. It seemed a bit strange, and I'd be lying if I didn't say that I thought it was kind of silly that he felt the need to do so.

It made me realize that I'd actually prefer that people who carried guns did so in a concealed fashion. The law tends to view concealed carry as something more "severe" than open-carry: in NH, you need a permit to carry a concealed weapon, but my interpretation of the law is that, if it's in plain sight, no permit is needed to wear your pistol around in public. And honestly, if the purpose is safety, it's probably an accurate assumption that those who carry a firearm in plain view are less likely to use it in a crime. But it just looks like the lawless west when people walk around with guns hanging off their belts, and it seems to creep lots of people out.

(Plus, most of what I've heard is that the "I want everyone to know I'm packing heat" school of thought is actually flawed. While you're probably less likely to be attacked, the type of people who would still attack you are exactly the type of people that you carry a gun to protect against, and now they know what you're carrying and where. Keep it concealed, and you have a nice element of surprise.)

I've also found that NH has a sizable contingent of the "free state" people, who seem to border on lunacy when it comes to guns. There was a video on Youtube a while back of a guy in NH who had a pistol strapped to his leg while walking around downtown Manchester, and he was seemingly marching around like a madman with it on display. A police officer happened to be in the area, and stopped to ask him what was going on. He started screaming about how it was turning into a police state, and how the police were trampling his constitutional rights.

The video was accompanied by a bunch of text about how it's imperitive that people 'defend' their Second Amendment rights by doing things like that. And all I could think is that he's really making a great case for stricter gun control. Legal arguments aside, if you take a random sampling of people and ask them how they feel knowing that thousands of NH residents choose to go about their daily lives with a concealed pistol, I bet the majority would say that it doesn't bother them at all. But if you asked that same random sampling of people how they felt knowing that people were marching around the city with firearms strapped to their leg, screaming about how we live in a police state, I bet an overwhelming majority would agree that gun laws are too lax. The guy, at least to me, seemed to do a good job of showing exactly the opposite of what he was trying to prove.

Which leads into my next point: I never thought of the Second Amendment as a reason to carry a gun. You might carry a gun because you enjoy target shooting, because you're concerned for your safety, or because you're a hunter. And you might become a big supporter of the Constitutional Amendment allowing you to do so. But I've never understood the people who cite the Second Amendment as a reason for gun ownership. To me, it would be like burning crosses* on my front lawn because of the First Amendment, or me joining the Church of Satan because of the Free Exercise clause.

I suppose this is really just meandering diatribe. But my point is that a lot of what goes on with gun ownership just seems weird to me. Even though I don't think we live in an area where it's really "necessary" to carry a gun, it's certainly something I can understand. (If I were to work again in a place that sometimes had be closing a big cash-centric business, and walking out of the building at 1am by myself, I might give it some thought.) But I'm struggling to think of a reason I'd want it on display, other than to show off: I think it would freak out "innocent" people, get drunkards to lunge for it as a joke... But more importantly, if I carried a gun, I wouldn't want anyone who might do me harm to know anything about it. And the Second Amendment doesn't make me 'want' to go buy a gun in any way.

* I don't know the citations off the top of my head, but I should point out that case law on cross-burning is stacked against what's probably the most common use of cross-burning. Burning crosses, in and of itself, is legally permissible (as long as you get a fire permit?). But when it's used as a threat (as the KKK seems fond of doing to black people), it's quite clearly illegal. It's really no different than arguing with your neighbor and saying, "I'm going to go back to my house, get my axe, and come murder you and your family." Freedom of speech doesn't protect against threats, and it makes no difference if the threat is implicit or explicit.

Has anyone else found "Breaking news" to be way out of hand? To me, "breaking news" is something major that's just happened. When you hear breaking news, your jaw drops and you run into the next room and tell everyone. 9/11 was breaking news. A major earthquake is breaking news nearby, but not overall. (I have friends and family in California, but I don't think many of the wildfires or earthquakes there are breaking news. Cause for concern to me, yes. But I wouldn't call it breaking news on the East Coast.)

In addition to being major, it has to be, well, breaking news. What was breaking news on the noon broadcast of your news show isn't breaking news when the news comes on at 5.

But the bar keeps getting lower and lower for "breaking news." A car chase in the next state over? Breaking news. The weird Rockefeller guy? That was breaking news for days, if not weeks. So wasn't the polygamist sect in Texas. None of it really seemed like "breaking news" to me, as much as fairly interesting stories.

So today, the bar got even lower with this:

Breaking News: CBSNews.com - Who Is Michelle Obama? - 1 hour ago

I suppose it could be breaking news if, for example, Michelle Obama had just been outed as the guy that Barack Obama had secretly fathered two children with, or if McCain had criticized Obama for suspiciously buying his (only) house with a mysterious "Michelle Obama" entity. But anyone who's ever watched the news will recognize that Michelle Obama is Barack Obama's wife. She's been on the campaign trail. She's been on the news. In fact, unless you get your news from far-right attack machines, she's not even a controversial figure. (And actually, none of those examples are really breaking news.)

The thing is, in addition to making me roll my eyes, and maybe discrediting the news a little further, I really think this type of thing, in the long run, is just going to make "Breaking News" lose its meaning. Breaking News isn't something that happens every day.

I've noticed that "PM Spam" seems to be the new thing. A spammer signs up and sends private messages to lots of people. They're usually not terribly obviously-spammy, either.

On one site, where I basically never used my account and never uploaded any info at all to my profile, I just got this private message:

Helo,

i waz browsin over for people like me, and I unearthed ur profile. You look like you're a rather noticeable person, but I'm somewhat inexperienced at how things work here, and dont know where to go. Shouldn't they have some sort of chat thing here? i hate writing messages to ppl, & maybe not receiving a responce! Well, if you are interested in talking with me, you can catch me over @ [link to another site], my name over there is [redacted].

So, ya, hope to see you there. I'm always lookin' to meet more ppl.
[redacted]

My profile is totally blank, so I'm definitely not a "rather noticeable person."

I think this is an easy problem to fix, though. For one, it should be easy to institute fairly sane limits on PMs. Don't allow them to send more than [their total number of posts] PMs per day, or more than one a minute. (And you should have backend monitoring, so that if PMs are being sent exactly every 60 seconds, you catch on pretty quickly...)

Plus, when I have a PM, why not display, "This user has sent n private messages in the past 24 hours." I can see, "This user has sent 1 private message in the past 24 hours" and think, "Wow, a real person! Contacting me!" But in this case, I'd see, "This user has sent 152,524 private messages in the past 24 hours," and think, "Wow, way for the admins to be oblivious!"