Woke up to the sound of howling kid. Finn was having some sort of morning nightmare around 7:15. I lay down with him and cuddled him back to sleep, then got up, made coffee and had breakfast and wrote out today’s agenda. (I resist calling it a to-do list because I don’t feel committed to […]
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Morning Routine
15-Sep-10The Server Crashing
14-Sep-10Turning and turning on its aging platter, The disk cannot answer the controller; Things fall apart; the server cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the blog… Sambal.org used to be served out of my house; that server suffered a disk crash about a month ago, on its root disk, which was not RAIDed (not […]
On Social Security Privatization
13-Sep-10David Henderson recapitulates a good point (talking about a hypothetical Social Security privatization plan): So what just happened here? The government imposed a new forced saving scheme. It, in effect, said to workers, “We were already taking X from you. Now we’re going to let you use X the way you want, within limits-…. Oh, […]
The Rape of Nanking
07-Aug-10I’ve been reading Iris Chang’s book The Rape of Nanking — which, for all its flaws, appears to be the best English-language general history available. Â I’m only about halfway through, reading about the International Committee’s Safety Zone and the descriptions of the atrocities; critics usually target the last third of the book, where Chang apparently […]
There’s Something Rotten
06-Aug-10We all know that Hamlet said, “There’s something rotten in the state of Denmark”. Â But did you know that was a reference to an earlier quote?
Still recovering from the server crash, but here’s a useful thing. When I brought up dhcpd on my new server, I set its name server option to my ISP’s name server. Â I hadn’t had time to set up a local DNS cache, and that was good enough to get web browsing working. Last night I […]
O Brave New Blog
05-Aug-10… to have no posts in it. The server that I was hosting my blog on just died, and I will (possibly) eventually pull some of the old posts out here. Â But I have been wanting to move to hosting for a while anyway, so here we are. Bonus technical tip: if your dhcp server […]
Unemployment And Make-Work Jobs
05-Aug-10Here’s something I’m unclear about: Suppose you’re unemployed and the government gives you a make-work job — e.g., digging ditches and filling them in again, or breaking windows and replacing them. Â This is supposed to stimulate aggregate demand. Then when the government ditch-filling program ends, do you get unemployment benefits? Â It looks like you can […]
Deleting From A Collection in STL
28-Jul-10Deleting from a collection is hard in STL. Or rather, it’s subtle. Which is roughly equivalent to hard. Jim Beveridge talks about STL erase in his latest blog post and that inspired me to spend some time messing around with STL containers last night. You can remove all even numbers from a set with Jim’s […]
I ran into this error – “setup.exe is not a valid win32 application” the other day while I was trying to upgrade cygwin (1.5 -> 1.7) on an old laptop. Underlying problem was that I was upgrading under a different account than had been used to originally install cygwin. Switching to that account and running […]