Fundamentally, the power of the United States of America rests with we, the people. (Forgive the grammatical inaccuracy. I was making a point.) But in practice, if you stopped someone on the street and asked who runs America, I’m pretty sure no one would say “you and me, buddy!” You’d get answers like, “Obama,” “Congress,” “Special interests,” or the political parties.

As a matter of practicality and convenience, since we couldn’t have all 300 million of us gather in one place to talk, and since we have busy lives to lead, we have appointed some delegates. We pay them a generous salary to do our bidding, and call these employees of ours “Congress.” But how many people believe Congress is actually representing their interests? The question is not rhetorical. The answer is 9%.

We hire people to represent us in Congress because we don’t have the inclination to do it ourselves, and because it’s not practical for so many people to meet. But I content that both of these premises are wrong.

People talk about politics all the time. We read about politics in the newspaper, and we forward each other political emails. We monitor elections in other states to see if the people who share our political beliefs are elected. When a terrible piece of legislation is put forth, millions of people reach out to try to stop it, but feel mildly powerless to effect change. People are involved in their government, and feel like they don’t have enough involvement.

As for 300 million people meeting, the Internet has changed this. True, it’s not remotely feasible for 300 million people to gather in a meeting hall. But having 300 million people collaborate on something online? Sites like Facebook and Google handle massively more users than we have citizens. And sites like Wikipedia and Github prove that people can come together and build amazing things.

But when I bring this concept up, there are two problems that everyone I’ve mentioned it to have raised. I instinctively agree with them, but, thinking more about, I’m not sure either is worse than status quo.

The first issue is that hackers will have a field day with it. And there’s some truth here. Electronic voting machines are ridiculously insecure and error-prone, to the point that a huge number of geeks actively oppose the use of electronic voting machines. It’s one thing to be able to break into my Facebook account and post spam, but it’s something entirely different to hijack my vote. Security would have to be a key consideration central to the design of such a system, but that’s a design requirement, not a reason to write the whole thing off as infeasible. But second, opposition on the basis of  security assumes that our system is presently secure. When you do vote for candidates, voting fraud is a known issue, although it’s not nearly as rampant as in other countries. But how often do you even get to vote on the issues that affect you? You write to your Congressman, who reads your email, but who also hears a lot from lobbyists who can wine-and-dine him in a way you cannot. So I have to wonder if, even if the system were wildly insecure, it would actually give users less of a voice than they have now. I’m inclined to think that it would still be an improvement.

The second issue is more surprising: do we actually trust people with a vote? Read the comments on any major news site some time, or worse, the comments on Youtube, and you will be horrified at the prospect of those people voting. And then consider all the falsehoods and fake emails that get sent around to try to scare people into voting for their preferred candidate. And it turns out that this question of whether everyone should be able to vote on everything goes all the way back to the American Revolution, and the general answer was “No,” which is why we have a representative democracy. It’s not just that the Founders saw practical issues: it’s that they didn’t trust everyone!

But I contend that this, too, is wrong. (Sorry, Alexander Hamilton.) There are, admittedly, a ton of people whose ability to vote terrifies me, and I completely agree with many of the observations about the pitfalls of allowing everyone to vote on issues. But I reject the notion that allowing us to pick representatives to make decisions for us somehow solves the problems of tyranny of the majority that the Founders thought were inherent to a direct democracy. And the whole model is based on the offensive notion that our elected officials know better than we do.

To be sure, this isn’t a simple problem. Given the pace of anything involving the government — and the fact that incumbents (and special interest groups) have every reason in the world to oppose being replaced by a website — I can’t imagine that this could be put in place in less than a decade. But that’s all the more reason to start thinking about it now.

401(k) plan over the past year: A good investment. (Sort of.)

Actively-traded brokerage account I opened with a small amount of savings as an experiment after realizing my bank was paying me 0.25% interest on that money, and after borrowing some concepts from Joel Greenblatt but only investing in companies with excellent analyst recommendations when they dipped below their normal range without substantial cause. (Axis is chopped to not show off my pitiful balance, but the rate of return is approximately 30%.) Overall: Great investment.

Key Lime Pie, frozen, bought at supermarket and stored in freezer for whenever I want a slice, even if it’s not a tenth as good as something you’d find in a gourmet restaurant or in Key West: Excellent investment.

The problem is that when people come over, it’s really tiring to hand them a sheet with the network name and password/key on it, and still have to explain:

• My network isn’t any of the ones that pop up on your wireless device, because I turned SSID Broadcast off. You have to manually add it.
• It’s WPA2, not WEP. It’s also Personal, not Enterprise, so there’s no username prompt.
• The name is weird, because it was auto-generated. Stop asking what it means; it means nothing.
• It’s only on 5 GHz.

So I decided I wanted something more than a sheet of notebook paper, but also something that people could “get” pretty quickly. I grabbed a photo of the iOS network setup, guessed that Helvetica Neue was a close-enough match for the font, and did a little Photoshop manipulation, ending up with this:

(These values are randomized and not my actual credentials.)

My plan (once I get my printer set up and working) is to print a couple copies of this on thick cardstock like an index card and keep them handy for when guests want to use my network.

Photoshop template here [720KB, .psd], if you’d like.

[Thu Dec 08 21:53:28 2011] [error] [client 192.168.1.2] (13)Permission denied: file permissions deny server access: /var/www/html/aml/i
ndex.html

The error implies it’s a filesystem permissions issue, and the Apache site explains that it’s almost always related to filesystem permissions, not Apache configuration. But this was exasperating, because the file ownership was apache.apache, and index.html was chmod 755. Apache could absolutely access it. But then the Apache docs made a passing mention that sometimes it was related to SELinux errors.

Sure enough, that’s exactly my problem:

[matt@bos aml]$ ls -alZ
drwxr-xr-x. apache apache unconfined_u:object_r:httpd_sys_content_t:s0 .
drwxr-xr-x. root   root   system_u:object_r:httpd_sys_content_t:s0 ..
-rw-r--r--. apache apache unconfined_u:object_r:httpd_sys_content_t:s0 .htaccess
drwxr-xr-x. apache apache unconfined_u:object_r:user_home_t:s0 images
-rw-r--r--. apache apache unconfined_u:object_r:user_home_t:s0 index.html
drwxr-xr-x. apache apache unconfined_u:object_r:user_home_t:s0 stylesheets

Note that the directory, and the .htaccess file I touched, have the httpd_sys_content label, which is appropriate here. But the other files show user_home_t. This apparently precludes Apache from being able to see them.

Where this went wrong is that, to get them onto the server, I scp’ed them from my desktop to my home directory on the webserver, and then cp’ed them to /var/www/html. In doing so, they picked up the user_home_t label since they were in my home directory.

A quick sudo restorecon -r . got everything sorted out. There may be a more elegant way, but this worked for me.

This is defined in RFC 4255, Using DNS to Securely Publish Secure Shell (SSH) Key Fingerprints if you’re looking for some light reading.

In Ruby 1.8, you can generate Base-64-encoded strings, hex, random numbers (integers), and random bytes. Ruby 1.9 adds the ability to generate UUIDs and URL-safe Base64 strings. Really simple, and not particularly interesting — unless, like me, you found yourself thinking you had to write this functionality yourself.

So first things first, Kmart is still in business. I was surprised to learn this. I asked my roommate and he was too. We both just kind of assumed that, like Juno and NetZero, they had gone out of business when their names faded from our memory years ago. It turns out that Kmart has about 1,300 stores in the United States.

I glossed over the company’s history, but it’s interesting to note that the company was started by Sebastian Kresge — then working as a traveling salesman selling to Woolworth’s — in 1897. In 1912 he incorporated S.S. Kresge Corporation. In 1918, the corporation was listed on the NYSE. In 1924, Kresge’s personal net worth was estimated at $325 million. (In 1924 dollars.) It wasn’t until 1977 that S.S. Kresge Corporation was renamed to Kmart.

But back to random facts about Kmart. It turns out that, between 2004 and 2005, Kmart bought Sears. I apparently failed to notice this at any point in the past 6 years. The purchase was a mere $11 billion. The name was changed to Sears Holdings Corporation. (So it’s interesting to note that Kmart bought Sears, but Kmart is now a brand of “Sears Holdings Corporation,” which gives a confusing sense of who bought who.)

It also turns out that Sears Holding Corporation owns a lot more than I was aware of.

For example, Kmart bought Waldenbooks in 1984, and in 1994, Borders and Waldenbooks merged.

The Kmart-OfficeMax lineage hurts my head, but Kmart more or less bought OfficeMax in 1990 before taking it public in 1995 and then selling off its remaining shares.

Also in 1990, Kmart bought Sports Authority. Like with OfficeMax, Sports Authority was spun off from Kmart proper in 1995.

And as for Kmart’s ISP? It, too, has a confusing history. They started it as a dialup ISP in 1999, as a free service supported by in-browser ads. The company was later spun off from Kmart. In 2001, after becoming a paid service, Kmart bought BlueLight back. In 2002, Kmart filed for bankruptcy, and that’s when United Online stepped in to purchase BlueLight. (It seems that Kmart filed for bankruptcy protection in 2002. It emerged from bankruptcy in 2003, and in 2004 it purchased Sears.)

Okay, so maybe I’m a little weird… But I found this moderately fascinating.

For various ridiculous reasons, searching a mailbox is hard. Most of my mail clients will do it, but sometimes I really want to do it myself because I want to be more exacting. Lately I’ve been tinkering more and more with using IMAP from the command line. Partially it’s that IMAP is really just a little bit unusual and kind of intriguing. But mostly, it’s just that, from time to time, it’s easier for me to just send some manual IMAP commands if I know what I’m doing. (For example, I have absolutely no idea how to subscribe to a particular folder in any of the mail clients I have available. I could wade through the menus and maybe find it, but it’s easier for me to just use Net::IMAP to subscribe to the folder.)

Like most implementations, Ruby’s Net::IMAP library provides a search method. And, like most implementations, it does a very poor job of documenting what is supported. At the risk of sounding like I’ve lost my mind, I actually found the IMAP RFC (3501) to be the easiest bit of documentation to understand. Below are some examples:

You can chain keys, so the following is a valid search command:

FROM "matt" SUBJECT "bacon"

But what isn’t abundantly clear is that search terms are combined with a logical AND, so the above will only match mail from Matt with “bacon” in the subject line.

This appears to be the way to get a logical OR instead:

(FROM "matt") OR (SUBJECT "bacon")

After spending a while trying to get all possible keys for a text search — e.g., (FROM "foo") OR (SUBJECT "foo") OR (CC "foo")... — I realized that there’s an easier way: the TEXT key, which searches headers and the body. So for my generic search method, the search simply became TEXT "foo".

You may also find some of the other keys interesting, like the ability to search for RECENT or FLAGGED. I don’t intend to provide an exhaustive list here, however.