This is partly a throwaway post to keep the main page non-blank, but I figure I’ll actually convey some useful information…

The main page is now serving static assets (stylesheets, JavaScript, and images that are part of the template) from Akamai, via Rackspace’s Cloud Files service. This should hopefully speed things up a bit, though the bottleneck remains an underpowered VPS. Akamai has an obscene number of “edge nodes” to cache and serve content, and reportedly pushes something like a Terabit a second. This Akamai + Cloud Files partnership is quite handy for small sites that couldn’t really sign up with a good CDN on their own due to lack of obscene amounts of cash. (Cloud Files can be made to work with paperclip, too, for all you Ruby fans.)

I’ve been going out of my way to avoid politics lately, but I just watched Donald Trump on national television complaining that if you dare question Obama’s citizenship, people jump all over you.

Here’s why people jump all over you: Occam’s Razor. (Also, common sense.)

Scenario A: Obama was born in Hawaii as he claims, and as the valid birth certificate he released before he was elected confirms.

Scenario B: Obama was born in another country and an elaborate conspiracy is afoot:

• His campaign released a forged birth certificate to the press.
• FactCheck.org lied when they said they have seen it and verified that it is embossed with a seal and signed on the back, and that it does, in fact, meet all State Department requirements for obtaining a passport. (They also have photographs showing the certificate number that was blacked-out in the scan released by the campaign, explaining that, during the campaign, they rushed to release it but weren’t sure if it was confidential information, so they erred on the site of caution.)
• Hawaii’s Director of Health and Human Services lied when she said she had seen it.
• Hawaii’s Republican governor, Linda Lingle, lied when she said the President was “in fact, born at Kapi’olani Hospital in Honolulu, Hawaii” after viewing the original birth certificate.
• His parents were in on the conspiracy decades ago, planting birth announcements in two Hawaiian newspapers claiming he was born in Hawaii — even listing an address. (These birth announcements were uncovered, by the way, by an anti-Obama, pro-Hillary “PUMA” activist, who really had every incentive to try to make it look like Obama was not, in fact, born in the US.)
• Barbara Nelson, who was one of Obama’s teachers in Hawaii, is lying when she said that she spoke with the doctor who delivered Obama at the time. The incident was remarkable because Obama’s mother’s name was Stanley, hence the doctor’s quip about Stanley delivering a baby. She wrote home to her father about it, also named Stanley. She also remembers Barack as a grade-school student.

Which situation seems more plausible?

Also, some in the “birther” movement have committed fraud themselves:

• That audio clip in which his grandmother alleges he was born in Kenya? Yeah, listen to the whole thing. It was delivered through an interpreter, over a speakerphone in a crowded room. She does imply he was born in Kenya, but then the interpreter clarifies the misunderstanding and the grandmother explains that he was born in Hawaii. Those that link to a version of the recording that stops right before this clarification are trying to mislead you.
• Obama’s Kenyan Birth Certificate has been widely debunked as being fake.

So next time someone asks why Obama hasn’t released his birth certificate, point out that he did, back in 2008, and that a whole slew of people have authenticated it.

One of the more intriguing things about HF radio is the concept of numbers stations, which just pop up at certain times on certain frequencies and read a long string of numbers. The general belief is that they’re reading off data encrypted with a one-time pad, but the intended recipients are more unclear. People have located many of the transmitters and they’re often — but not always — military complexes. Rumors exist of some  being associated with drug traffickers or others, not just government spies.

I keep getting a call from 240-787-1342. A couple of months ago it was sometimes several times a day. The first few times I picked up, and no one was ever there. The next 50 times or so, I’ve just ignored the call. In Googling it, a lot of people get this. A few report telemarketers, but most report that it’s juts silence. I just blocked the number.

But now I’m really intrigued. Who are they, and what do they want? With dirt-cheap VoIP providers, it’s entirely feasible to start an overseas telemarketing firm and brazenly ignore the Do Not Call list. It’s been done before. But this isn’t a telemarketer, unless it’s the world’s least-competent telemarketing firm. These are calls to lots of people, lots of times, but with no one ever picking up. It makes no financial sense for anyone to be doing this. So what’s going on? Is it grand ineptitude? Some nefarious plot I can’t figure out?

I know a lot of people that dodge taxes. Sometimes it’s legally exploiting loopholes, sometimes it’s doing things that can’t possibly be legal. The business owner who “forgets” to ring in all-cash sales to skip out on taxes. The Massachusetts resident who drives to New Hampshire to buy expensive things so they don’t have to pay taxes. The business owner who buys a new luxury car in the business’s name with the profits so the business doesn’t have to pay taxes.

For some reason, we almost glorify these people. They’re clever. They’re beating the system; sticking it to the man. But this makes no sense to me. We all, collectively, have a (massive) bill to pay to keep the country running. The people that find shady ways to avoid their taxes are like a friend who skips out on the bill at dinner. We end up having to pay the slack. (Albeit more indirectly.)

And yet a lot of the people who skip out on the bill are the same ones who complain about people mooching off the system. I’m sure they exist, though I’ve never met a single one of them. I have, however, met a ton of people who don’t pay their taxes for one reason or another.

To keep up with the analogy of someone skipping out on the bill at a restaurant, now imagine two criminals. One walks one wearing a ski mask and makes off with $100 from the cash register.  But then there’s the guy over at the table who enjoys a delicious $75 steak and a $25 fine wine, and then pretends to choke on the steak and demands a free meal. Or the restaurant supplier who, when totaling the receipt for what he’s delivering, “mistakenly” raises the total by $100 to see if the restaurant notices his error, and walks out with $100 extra as a result.

We all despite the first guy, the robber. His crime was brazen and unforgivable. I think this is like the people who “mooch off government handouts.” I hear about them in the news, and totally agree that it’s bad, but think blaming them for all our problems is a straw-man argument. But then there are the two people defrauding the restaurant of the same amount of money as the ski-masked robber. And for some reason, there’s a novelty. Instead of being aghast at what we’ve just witnessed, we laugh. “They really fell for that? Man, you’re sneaky!” These are like the people who find “loopholes” to get out of paying the taxes they really owe. They’re ultimately sticking us with the bill just as much, but we for some reason are less eager to point the finger at them.

And then we, as supporters of the white-collar criminals, make nonsensical statements to justify them. “Yeah, the prices at that restaurant were too high! That’ll show them!” “It was just going to be stolen by a robber anyway!” Or, even less-sensibly, “That restaurant carries a ton of debt! It’s only fair that I skipped out on the bill.”

All of this said, I hate how high my taxes are. But I pay them, because we have roads (in terrible shape) to repair, kids to teach, and a country to defend. I have to pay for the fireman that put out the burning building across the street to keep it from spreading to my apartment, the police that catch hypothetical masked restaurant-robbers, the guys that repaired the gaping hole in the bridge I used to drive over every day, the military that keeps deranged despots from attacking us, the cost of repairing the 4′-deep pothole in the highway that I used to hit every single time, and even the cost of running the constellation of satellites that permit my GPS to function. I wish it were all cheaper, true, but I pay what I owe and am proud in the knowledge that I’m doing my part in supporting my country, state, and city.

I’m looking to replace a laptop at home, and I know a few other people in the market as well, so I’ve been keeping my eyes peeled.

Some of the specs are really pretty amazing. For under $750 you can get a laptop with a powerful dual-core processor, 6-8 GB of RAM, and a huge hard drive. But the hard drives are always 5400rpm.

And it occurs to me that disk is almost always the bottleneck. If you had 512MB of RAM today or something, that could be your bottleneck, but almost any new computer seems to come with plenty of RAM. (Although more RAM is always better, and I confess to thinking 4GB is inadequate for real work.) CPU is almost never my bottleneck, aside from really rare use cases like resizing thousands of photos or compiling a long series of applications for multiple architectures.

But whenever my computer is “being slow,” it’s waiting on disk, and I bet it’s the same for you. Takes forever to boot? Slow disk! Programs take a long time to launch? Slow disk! (Cucumber tests take forever to run? It’s all disk I/O!)

So what surprises me is that you have to work really hard to find a laptop that has SSDs. It’s fairly easy on new Macs, but I initially dismissed them from inclusion because you’ll easily spend $1500 on a base model. But then I realized that it’s the same with “PC” laptops: try to find a new SSD-equipped laptop for under $1500. This makes some sense on the surface — SSDs are still a premium, high-performance device, so you’ll pay a premium.

But here’s what irks me: you can get a perfectly capable laptop — I’d even dare say “fast” — for about $600 today. 6GB RAM and a good dual-core chip. But it’s got a 5400rpm, 500GB hard drive. You could buy it, crack it open, and drop a 128GB SSD in for under $250. But no one makes a computer like that: a sub-$1000, moderately compact (and by that I mean “less than 8 pounds,” not netbook-style) laptop that happens to include an SSD. This is insane to me, because I think it’s exactly what most people actually need.

This caught my eye while going through the Costco circular. I’m going to buy gum, croissants, and orange juice, but they have this deal for $999.99: an HP desktop with quad-core Phenom (2.93 GHz), 8GB of RAM, a 1.5 TB hard drive, DVD-RW drive, 802.11b/g/n wireless, and a pair of 23″ 1920×1080 LCDs. Gamers, the graphics card is a Radeon HD 6450 (512MB). Windows 7 Home Premium, though I’m sure it would run Fedora swimmingly as well 😉 Sadly, they chose a 5400rpm hard drive, ensuring that disk I/O will forever be your bottleneck.

After far too long of a wait, I finally made some tweaks to the main page:

• There are no longer links to non-existent pages across the top. They link to the bloggers. (In alphabetic order.)
• Posts from sites that don’t implement a comment_count parameter no longer generate illegal HTML causing random URLs to be spewed across the page
• Post sanitization is relaxed, allowing images and other objects to be included. Some sanitization still happens when importing from the RSS feed, but posts aren’t as mangled anymore.
• The page no longer has boilerplate demo text at the bottom
• The page no longer has “Pandora” (the HTML theme) as the title

Hopefully, later today I can fix the problem with the server swapping out Apache periodically, so that pages don’t sometimes take 20+ seconds to load.

An extremely niche post, but for scanner listeners who wonder what the numeric codes given after the fire department responds somewhere, e.g., “We’ll be returning. Code this a 136,” the answers are varied:

• Many places seem to have their own codes. Boston uses these codes, while someone kindly scanned the codes used by Waltham here.
• There’s a national standard, NFIRS (National Fire Incident Reporting System), that people seem to want to standardize on, but change is slow. You can get the complete guide here (FEMA.gov); you probably want page 3-21, which is page 41 of the 491 page PDF.

It’s really exciting to see protests going on across the world. Not because of the unrest or the violence — that’s scary — but there’s this awe-inspiring wave of people who are starting to take a stand for freedom, security, and their rights. But — and I know this is a ridiculous leap — it reminds me of a revelation I had one day listening to Pandora: I’m sick of putting up with things that merely OK. There are lots of songs that are OK. If I’m busy, I’ll let them play because they’re not horrible, but if I had the time, I’d skip them. So one day I vowed to aggressively thumbs-down any song that was mediocre, and, very quickly, I started hearing only good songs. I decided to expand this concept from Pandora to the rest of my life.

And now I’d like to expand it a bit further. I feel like the society I’m living in is kind of like my Pandora music stream before my micro-revolution: full of potential, but a blend of good and bad things that averages out to something that’s merely OK. I would like to thumbs-down the following:

• The continuation of DOMA, or any other laws which discriminate against same-sex couples.
• Donald Trump running for President.
• Mike Huckabee running for President. Actually, just Mike Huckabee in general.
• The entire situation in Wisconsin, including the entirety of everything both sides have done.
• People who drive slow in the left lane and won’t get over.
• Twenty-first century McCarthyism
• Stricter prohibitions on marijuana than on alcohol, despite the latter being much more dangerous. (Sidenote: I feel oddly compelled to disclaim that I’m not a pot user. It just makes absolutely no sense to me to arrest people who are.)
• The piles of junk mail I get every day and am obliged to dispose of.
• How messed up the main page of the blogs is.
• Having to care and feed for the server hosting the blogs and such.
• No one caring about the deficit until Obama was elected, when suddenly it was a crisis.
• Politicians who won’t work with each other to compromise. (Which is to say, all of them.)
• People who have decided that global warming is a myth.
• Cold weather.
• The stupid stiff-plastic bubblewrap that everything you buy is encased in, rendering it an enormous headache to open.
• ISPs that don’t provide IPv6 by now. (Which is to say, pretty much all of them.)
• That my car is entirely dependent on gasoline to function.
• People who think God’s message was one of hate or favoritism towards a select group. (This goes a lot of ways.)
• Hearing about Charlie Sheen on the news.
• Hearing about Lindsay Lohan on the news.
• The condition of the economy and my investments.
• The amount of work I have to exert to do my taxes when the government has already taken my money.
• Blog posts that are long lists of things people dislike.

Okay, so I admit to being biased here. I’m an open-source advocate, work for an open-source company developing an open-source application, and my Wikipedia edit history goes back to 2005, ranging from fixing picayune details to reverting massive vandalism to creating new articles. (I actually recall making edits long before that, but I don’t recall what the account was, much less its credentials.)

But let me ask this: Why shouldn’t you trust Wikipedia? The answer anyone would give you is that anyone can edit it.

I don’t understand this logic. Isn’t that exactly why you should trust Wikipedia? On another site, or in a print dictionary, only a select few can make edits. The presumption is that the fewer editors, the better the quality. This seems insanely backwards to me, though. When something isn’t quite perfect on Wikipedia, anyone in the world can fix it. When something is wrong on a traditional site, or in a print encyclopedia, hardly anybody is empowered to fix it.

Digging a little deeper, I think the “Don’t trust Wikipedia” notion has got to stem from a belief that there are more people seeking to do harm than good. But in my experience, the opposite is true. Back when I had a lot more free time than I do now, I’d watch the list of recent changes, investigate suspicious ones, and roll back vandalism. Maybe 5% of changes were malicious, and one of the reasons I lost interest in reverting vandalism was that I was very frequently beaten to the punch. The changes to Wikipedia are overwhelmingly for the better, and the tiny minority vandalizing articles rarely have their changes stick for more than 30 seconds. (And I’ve seen persistent vandals get banned in a matter of minutes. In keeping with the spirit of openness, bans, with rare exception, only last a week.)

I was going to try to think of some ludicrous analogy, like “Not trusting Wikipedia is like being afraid to (something very safe) because you’re afraid of (something extremely rare),” but then I realized that there are tons of things that fit that category — being afraid to swim in the ocean because you’re afraid of being eaten by a shark, not trusting airplanes because sometimes they crash, not visiting Mexico because of the crime, distrusting Muslims because a minuscule minority of people hold perverted violent views…

But if you’re the type that thinks Muslims are swell and realizes that you’re far more likely to be killed in a car accident than in a plane crash, I don’t understand why you’d think Wikipedia was anything other than the most trustworthy site out there.