Surprising absolutely no one, the lady who was allegedly attacked by a black man who carved a backwards “B” on her face after mugging her, apparently because he saw her bumper sticker that said McCain, has confessed that she made the story up. Police have now said that they suspected her story from the beginning; they say it’s because the “B” was backwards, but I also suspected it because people robbing people tend to want to get the money and run, not start carving into people’s faces, and because I think even the meekest of people would offer resistance when someone starts to carve stuff into their face, making it hard to complete the “B,” or because it seems odd that the mugger would have known which car was hers, or taken the time to notice her bumper sticker while he was engaged in mugging her, or just because the whole thing made no sense at all?

Amateur radio manufacturer Yaesu seems to have followed up their popular VX-7R transceiver with the Yaesu VX-8R. I admit I don’t follow the ham radio market that closely these days, so just like the 5D Mark II, I noticed this after seeing someone else make a passing reference to it. It’s actually not even mentioned on the Yaesu site yet, hence the link to Universal Radio, a two-way dealer.

It covers the 6 Meter (50-54 MHz), 2 Meter (144-148 MHz), and 70 centimeter (430-450 Mhz) ham bands at a full 5 Watts, and implements something that I’d speculated should be done a few years ago: it includes low power capacity on the 220 Meter (1.25 centimeter) ham band. 220 MHz is really underutilized, and, in my mind, endangered. (The FCC already took part of it away.) As long as radios are being made to operate on multiple bands, it never made sense to me to skip over one. A few other radios have been released that happen to include 220, which I hope will spark a little more interest in it.

Besides looking really weird and having a really stubby volume knob for no apparent reason, the VX-8R also seems to include options for Bluetooth and GPS. It’s not clear to me how the APRS works, whether simply plugging a GPS in will work. Another thing I’ve always thought would be neat, a spectrum scope, even if gimmicky, gets included, too: with a nice big LCD, you can set it up to scan a chunk of spectrum and plot it on the screen. The optional barometric sensor on its predecessor seems to have become standard on the VX-8R, though I always thought it was an odd thing to put in a radio. (How about a clock? And, ooh, get this: while you’re putting a clock in a radio with a wideband receiver, make it sync to WWVB. You can even use the pun “radio clock,” which is the correct term for what most people call an “atomic clock.” How about getting it certified for FRS, too? Or how about building in a better front-end, so that the 15 kW FM transmitter ten miles away doesn’t take up 10 MHz bandwidth? And what about D-Star?) Despite my criticisms, it looks to be a pretty slick radio, though the $410 price tag impairs my, “Wow, time for an upgrade” sensor in a much more serious way than a $310 price tag would.

Icom, the only one putting D-Star (a digital voice protocol) in ham radios right now, has also recently released the IC-92AD, an almost $600 handheld radio. They claim it’s mil-spec in durability, but with much smoother lines than the Yaesu radios. It covers only 2 meters and 440, not 6 meters or 220 MHz like some of its competition. It does include a digital voice recorder, though when $20 can buy 4GB of flash storage, I have to admit that its 30-second capacity seems a bit pathetic. I think its biggest problem, though, is that I don’t see any reason to buy it over its cheaper brother, the 91A(D).

Those frustrated with the fact that all the new radios seem unreasonably expensive (especially given the current economy) may enjoy Alinco’s new DJ-175T handheld, a no-frills 2 Meter handheld for under $100. (Though I should note that Icom seems to have beat them to the punch.)

Kenwood hasn’t announced anything new in a while, other than the discontinuation of the TH-D7AG, though I admit to never having paid much attention to their TH-F6A handheld. It appears notable for two things: the only radio with an option to use 0.05 Watts output (5 and 0.5W are the norm; I confess to being awfully curious about the range of 0.05 Watts), and the only multi-band radio to offer a full 5 Watts on the 220 MHz band. Oh, and possibly the only ham HT to offer SSB and CW receive (only) modes.

Okay, it turns out that Kenwood has introduced something new: the TM-D710A mobile radio, a $600 successor to its seemingly-popular D700 radio.

On the receiver front, a couple new radios seem to have been released. AOR has the AR-Mini, a small and seemingly budget wideband receiver. I admit to being a bit skeptical, because AOR has a reputation for making top-notch, very pricey receivers, so the introduction of a cheap receiver, and especially one that looks cheap (at least in the photo), risks undercutting that reputation. On the other hand, it could be a top-notch radio inside, and the high-end market might not be too lucrative right now.

Icom released the IC-RX7 receiver, which has got to be the slickest-looking receiver ever. In particular, I’m hoping that the screen and arrow buttons indicate that it has something I’ve long thought radios should have: a menu-driven system, instead of an obscure-key-combination-driven system.

It also looks like the Icom 7800 “Dream Rig”, with a five-figure price tag, has seen much of its niftiness trickle down to the 7700, which weighs in at a much more affordable $6,000 or so. (I should note that, in the process of researching this, I accidentally ended up with $16,000 worth of radios in my shopping basket at a competitor. I, for one, am glad that one-click shopping isn’t that commonly used.) For the rest of us, the IC-7200 is also new, taking the bizarre ruggedized look you might expect from a Yaesu, costing about $1100. (I confess to being confused, as the legendary IC-706 is actually less expensive; I can’t imagine a water-resistant front on a stationary is worth that much more money (and a big step up in bulk) to too many people.

All around, Icom seems to be most aggressive, by far, in introducing new features, while Yaesu’s VX-8R is the only radio I can see myself buying in the next couple years.

Last night I saw Jacked on A&E, which follows the Auto Theft Task Force in Newark, NJ. In the opening, they talked about how “every car stolen seems to end up in Newark,” hence the task force’s creation. They also mention that cars really aren’t stolen for value all that often, but more as short-term things to commit other crimes with.

The task force is nicknamed The Wolfpack because of how they operate. A team of a couple dozen officers will cruise the city at night in myriad unmarked trucks and SUVs, modified a bit for what they do, yet designed to blend in pretty well. They put two officers in each truck, one to drive and one to run license plates and act as a second set of eyes. When one of the trucks spots a stolen car, they’ll follow them (hoping for what they call an “undetected follow”), and the others will close in, often on parallel or intersecting streets, until they’ve got a bunch in the area, at which time they all close in and “do it now!,” boxing the stolen car in with half a dozen trucks, ensuring that the only way out is to try to ram through a reinforced SUV, and that the only way to run is to run past more than a dozen officers who’ve got you at gunpoint.

They point out that they’re very different from the mainstream police department. Despite what they admit are very intimidating tactics (getting boxed in by a half-dozen SUVs, and having a dozen officers brandishing guns), they’re primarily concerned with safety. On the show I saw, a couple people ran, and they let them go. Not only does it put civilians (and the officers) in unnecessary danger to try to follow at a high rate of speed, but they always make the same comment when dropping a chase: “We’ll find ’em soon enough.” (Sometimes an hour later.) They’re very selective about where they stop cars, making a point to swarm in only when there are no bystanders. And boxing cars in, plus the massive show of force, is something they say isn’t so much about intimidation for the sake of show, as it is to ensure that a fight won’t take place at all.

The show’s on again Thursday night, although I make no warranties about the A&E site, which seems to throw errors more often than not.

It almost seems like the amount of spam I get has been decreasing:

The labels on that graph are deceptive; the “spam” and “virus” labels refer to things measured with a tool I don’t use, and mail shouldn’t be bounced; that refers to an initial configuration error. But the number of rejected e-mails is the volume of spam. (Technically, it’d include mail sent to non-existent addresses… But the only people who’ve done that are spammers.)

Oh, and check out my spam map, which I threw together a while ago. It uses MaxMind’s databases of IP-to-country mappings to determine the country each message originates from, counts the number of entries for each country, and then plots it using the Google Chart API. It has a rather distinctive shape, but for those of you wondering about that dark blue one in the Middle East, it’s Turkey, and it’s topped the list of spammers for a while now, for some reason. Russia is also a pretty notable spammer, as is, of course, China. But you can see that spam is hardly a problem that comes from just a few countries: the US is a fairly dark shade of blue, as are quite a few South American nations.

I’m increasingly wanting to write my own plugin for Postfix. Currently, my mailbox doesn’t get any spam, but one mailbox on another domain gets a small volume, maybe one message week. SpamAssassin catches it (usually giving it a score of something like 25, with a score of 5 being needed to classify it as spam), but SpamAssassin takes a couple seconds for each message. (Much of this, actually, is that it goes off and queries several DNSBLs, so it’s waiting on remote servers to respond.)

There are two things that are actually very effective against spam that I don’t use: rejecting mail based on DNS blacklists, and requiring HELOs to be fully-qualified domain names. The trouble with the former is that historically, many blacklists have gotten full of themselves and started listing whole networks, aiming for “collateral damage” to make companies get rid of spammers, but causing mailservers to reject innocent mail. Requiring HELOs to be FQDNs caught way more spam than I’d have expected, but I grew concerned that, strictly speaking, it didn’t set spammers apart: a not-so-hotly configured legitimate mailserver could identify itself with a short name (“exchange1” instead of “exchange1.example.com” for example).

What SpamAssassin (the software that scans the body of a message for ‘spamminess’ after it’s accepted) does is scoring. It does lots and lots of checks, and each check has a predefined score. Some things only increment the score a tiny bit, others increment it a lot. Some actually decrease the score, when it identifies things that usually occur only in non-spam. I want to write a plugin for Postfix that does that. Being in Spamhaus‘ blacklists might increase your score by 3, whereas the DNSWL would be -10. A site known for being a little more aggressive, like UCE-Protect, might be +1.5 or so. A non-FQDN HELO might be +2.5. And then I can route mail accordingly. Anyone with a negative score would be accepted and automatically whitelisted; anyone over 5 would be rejected and blacklisted, and anything in between would just be accepted. I’m actually surprised this sort of thing doesn’t exist. You can get very accurate results anyway, but I find it hard to believe that the idea of “scoring” mail during the SMTP session itself is something I invented.

The main page was blank. So here’s a filler post until I think of something good.

One thing I have to give credit to McCain for is that he’s done a really good job linking Obama to higher taxes. If you hear McCain speaking, in between “maverick” and “my friends,” you’ll hear a lot about Obama raising taxes.

McCain said, “Sen. Obama is measuring the drapes and planning with Speaker Pelosi and Sen. Reid to raise taxes, increase spending… What America needs in this hour is… [s]omeone who puts all his cards on the table and trusts in the judgment of the American people.”

Speaking of putting all one’s cards on the table and trusting the judgment of American people, Obama is the one who’s vowed to cut taxes on the middle class, and the one who’s assured families making under $250,000 a year (and individuals making under $200,000 a year) won’t see their taxes increase a penny. McCain talks a lot about continuing the Bush tax cuts for the rich and about cutting taxes on corporations.

McCain likes to bring up how Obama voted to raise taxes on people making as little as $32,000/$42,500. Except this is misleading on multiple levels… For one, the bill was a procedural vote on appropriations, and had no impact on actual tax rates. And as I understand it (I can’t find the bill in THOMAS), McCain voted the same way.

Of course I’m simplifying both candidate’s stances on the issues. But just like you shouldn’t trust Sarah Palin when she says she’s “pleased to be cleared of any legal wrongdoing …. any hint of any kind of unethical activity there” (she was actually found, by the Republican-led Alaskan legislature, to have abused her power and violated state ethics law), you should roll your eyes every time McCain mentions Obama planning to raise taxes. Because Obama is the one who’s promised not to do that; in fact, he’s the one who’s promised tax cuts for the middle class.

Remember Troopergate? The news hasn’t covered it much, but the state ethics panel ruled that she did abuse her power, but that she did have pretty much unchecked to hire and fire, thus the only law broken was an ethics law.

Sarah Palin’s take on the ruling? She says it cleared her of all wrongdoing.

The report affirmed that, as governor, she had the constitutional right to hire and fire at will, and therefore her termination of Monegan was lawful. However, the report found that Palin, her husband Todd, and her subordinates used pressure and intimidation to try to force the firing of Michael Wooten, beginning before her swearing-in ceremony took place, and therefore broke the law. The investigation said she violated Alaska Statute 39.52.110(a) of the Alaska Executive Branch Ethics Act, which states, “… each public officer holds office as a public trust, and any effort to benefit a personal or financial interest through official action is a violation of that trust.”

I’d sorta like a VP who doesn’t have the legislature conclude that she violated ethics law, and then turn around and declare, “I’m very, very pleased to be cleared of any legal wrongdoing … any hint of any kind of unethical activity there. Very pleased to be cleared of any of that.” She also called the investigation, conducted by the majority-Republican legislature, “a partisan circus.”

Years ago, OSWD.org was perhaps one of my favorite sites. It was a site where many designers released free web templates. There were certainly some junky ones, but there were a lot of amazing ones. Over time, OSWD disappeared, and has undergone some confusing forks. The only good one has been OpenDesigns.org, but it’s been plagued with slow load times and has repeatedly been hacked to host viruses.

I’ve mentioned OneDollarTemplates.com before, which is where the design on ttwagner.com came from. (Guess how much I paid for it!) But I’ve just noticed Solucija’s free templates page, which is home to a few dozen amazing free templates.

On a lighter, non-political note, I’ve come across two great things on hilarious blogs, both of them related to rap music.

The first appears to be some sort of application form for a singing group, composed by someone lacking in sharpness. (Besides the highlighted question, note that the next one begins, “If yes or no…”)

Equally as inappropriate is this coloring book, purportedly from Japan.

I once had a history teacher remark that what set Nazism and Fascism apart from most other ideologies was that they weren’t necessarily for a cause, as much as against an existing cause. And I’ve never really liked that style of politics.

In 2004, I voted for Kerry. I thought he was a pretty good guy, but I admit, my vote wasn’t so much “I emphatically support John Kerry” as much as, “I vehemently oppose the notion of George W. Bush being elected again.” So I was excited in 2007 about 2008. In the summer of 2007, I couldn’t make up my mind whether I’d support Obama or Richardson, two superb candidates. But there were lots of other good candidates. Sure, I didn’t really care for all the candidates, but I was emphatically for Obama. (After being emphatically for Richardson for a while.) I wasn’t against anyone. And when I watched the Republicans, I liked John McCain. Compared to some of the others, he seemed like a level-headed guy. I was happy when he won the primaries, though admittedly a bit apprehensive, because he was the one Republican I could see moderates and undecideds getting behind.

Even with the race Obama vs. McCain, I was emphatically for Obama. It wasn’t the “cake or ice cream” dilemma with Obama vs. Richardson, but it was perhaps “ice cream or fresh French bread.” I like one more than the other, but the other’s still good. And until a month ago, I still felt that way. But then the French bread turned stale, and eventually, it started to grow some mold. And nowadays, it’s crawling with worms, while the delicious bowl of ice cream is as good as ever. It sometimes aggravates me that Obama doesn’t fight back as hard against McCain as he ought to, but lately, I’ve been viewing it as McCain slinging mud at Obama. Obama wipes the mud off, and keeps talking about how to solve the issues facing America. And McCain just keeps flinging mud.

Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner, remarks in a recent Washington Post piece,

“Twice last week alone, speakers at McCain-Palin rallies have referred to Sen. Barack Obama, with unveiled scorn, as Barack Hussein Obama. Never mind that this evokes — and brazenly tries to resurrect — the unsavory, cruel days of our past that we thought we had left behind. Never mind that such jeers are deeply offensive to millions of peaceful, law-abiding Muslim Americans who must bear the unveiled charge, made by some supporters of Sen. John McCain and Gov. Sarah Palin, that Obama’s middle name makes him someone to distrust — and, judging by some of the crowd reactions at these rallies, someone to persecute or even kill.”

I’m really not sure if it’s any accident that, as conservatives push McCain to “take off the gloves,” the repeated use of Obama’s middle name—Hussein—comes back right as Palin repeatedly tries to link Obama to William Ayers. (Never mind that Obama was 8 at the time, that he has denounced Ayers’ actions, and that his “ties” to the former domestic terrorist are in the form of Obama and Ayers volunteering on the board of a charity to help failing schools. It’s not about the facts, it’s about the montage of “Obama” and “terrorist” enough to make it seem believable.)

I’m sure that, when these people get called out for repeating “Hussein” over and over again, they’ll claim that they meant nothing by it: they were merely calling Obama by his name, and it’s the Democrats that seem to have a problem with it. But that’d be a bald-faced lie. He is Barack Hussein Obama, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s the “unveiled scorn” that Hosseini mentions that is objectionable. He’s not “Barack Hussein Obama,” a proud American senator, he’s “Barack Hussein Osama, I mean Obama,” who cavorts with terrorists and went to school at a terrorist training camp. The “Hussein,” at least on several occasions in the past, is very clearly being injected to evoke imagery of Saddam, Iraq, and Islam, all the things that patriotic Americans should hate. “Hussein” is un-American and can’t be trusted.

Hosseini continues,

The real affront is the lack of firm response from either McCain or Palin. Neither has had the moral courage, when taking the stage, to grasp the microphone, turn to the presenter and, right then and there, denounce the use of Obama’s middle name as an insult. Instead, they have simply delivered their stump speeches, lacing into Obama as if nothing out-of-bounds had just happened. The McCain-Palin ticket has given toxic speeches accusing Obama of being a friend of terrorists, then released short, meek repudiations of some of the rough stuff, including McCain’s call Friday to “be respectful.” Back in February, the Arizona senator apologized for the “disparaging remarks” from a talk-radio host who sneered repeatedly about “Barack Hussein Obama” before a McCain rally. “We will have a respectful debate,” McCain insisted afterward. But pretending to douse flames that you are busy fanning does not qualify as straight talk. What I find most unconscionable is the refusal of the McCain-Palin tandem to publicly condemn the cries of “traitor,” “liar,” “terrorist” and (worst of all) “kill him!” that could be heard at recent rallies. McCain is perfectly capable of telling hecklers off. But not once did he or his running mate bother to admonish the people yelling these obscene — and potentially dangerous — words… Is inaction tantamount to consent? The McCain campaign certainly thinks so when it comes to Obama and incendiary remarks from the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

This Daily Show clip includes a segment near the beginning in which you can hear the jeers of the crowd when Obama’s name is mentioned, and someone, pretty clearly, screams “Kill Him!” I could see that being tolerated in a wartorn third-world nation where it’s an honest reformer running against a racist warlord dictator, but in America, between two US Senators? We seriously think it’s okay to chant “Kill him” to refer to an American presidential candidate? I’m not a big fan of the “calling for an apology” thing (to me, it makes no sense to ask for an apology, much less demand one), and really, I’m still not holding out for an apology from McCain/Palin. They have an election to win. But for the love of God, don’t let people at your crowds scream “Kill Him!” about Obama, or allow people speaking on your behalf to repeatedly interject “Hussein” in the middle of his name with a sort of sneer.

McCain and Palin keep trying to bring up his ties to Ayers to question Obama’s judgment. And now that the legislative ethics panel in Alaska has concluded that Sarah Palin abused her power as governor, I expect the Obama-Ayers thing to get repeated louder and louder.

At the risk of blockquoting too much of Hosseini’s excellent article, his conclusion is perfect:

I — and, I suspect, millions of Americans like me, Republicans and Democrats alike — couldn’t care less about Obama’s middle name or the ridiculous six-degrees-of-separation game that is the William Ayers non-issue. The Taliban are clawing their way back in Afghanistan, the country that I hope many of my fellow Americans have come to understand better through my novels. People are losing their homes and their jobs and are watching the future slip away from them. But instead of addressing these problems, the McCain-Palin ticket is doing its best to distract Americans by provoking fear, anxiety and hatred. Country first? Hardly.