Slashing Weapon

The notables of the party were graciously received by Lady Calanth’s staff. Tad, on the other hand, was sent to the stables where he spent the rest of the afternoon grooming horses
Thaddius Poole: 6: Deeds and Dinner

A few days later Tad found himself at the back of a line of horses, looking over a very fine estate. It wasn’t the largest he had ever seen, and in fact compared to some of the royal estates near Newholy it was quite small. You could almost see one end from the other.
Thaddius Poole: 5: Walter's Bailey

"He wouldn't stop dancing! We had to pin him down to put out the fire!" Laughter rang off the brickwork walls of the Dog and Peonie, out the second-story windows and into the streets of upper Corak.
Thaddius Poole: 4: Old Friends

Thaddius hadn’t known a broken nose could bleed so much, but being chased through most of Corak was probably making the bleeding worse.
Thaddius Poole: City Life

“You’ve never been in a big city have you boy?” All Tad could do was shake his head while his eyes struggled to take in the enormity of Corak. “It just looks like a hill from here, but it’s really more like a finger sticking up out of the ground. They call it the Sauvine, because on the other side is a sheer drop-off. Good for defense.” Mr. Brightstar pointed to the massive dome at the top of the city, overlooking everything like a full moon rising. “That grand edifice there is the Duke’s palace. Don’t let the pretty outside fool you, it’s a fortress as much as a palace. Never been taken by arms. And those mountains you see beyond are the Silver Hills. Most of the king’s coinage is dug out of there.”

Thaddius Poole: 2: Views

Thaddius Poole, called “Tad” by those who knew the boy, watched apprehensively as the sun sank into the Angsul forest. Of all the days and nights of all the spheres, the night without Lunos was always the worst. The larger of the two moons watched over the dead, and without it some of the recently departed would forsake their dreamless sleep and take to walking around. And the walking dead were invariably hungry.

Thaddius Poole: 1: Nightfall

I have a function that has grown out of control and desperately needs refactoring.  Kind of like the contents of my garage.

It started out simply enough.  I wrote a hundred lines or so of code to change a header in an email message.  Then we had to play to Outlook's peculiarities.  Then add language detection, character set support, and RFC 2047 encoding.  Then the ability to add and delete headers.  Also some smart content-type detection.  And so on...  None of these things by themselves means much, but for some reason a lot of the code ended up inside this one function.  Now I have to modify it again, and I can't wrap my head around it any more.

I'm about to do something I haven't done in years: print out source code and tape together the sheets of paper so I can see the whole function at once.

I feel like I'm back in the soggy Okinawa summer of 1989, working on my first sizable piece of software that other people were going to use.  It was just several thousand lines of dBase III script, but the Marine Corps would use that program for damn near a decade.  There were a few times when I printed out large swaths of code on continuous-feed paper and taped it on the wall, then used a ruler (because Lines should be Straight) to outline chunks that could be generalized and put into their own subroutines.  I couldn't have said what I was doing exactly, I just knew it could be better.  It was my first major refactoring. 

People are going to look at me funny when I do this.  I just know it.  But ... its got to be done.  I need paper.  I also need to remember what printer I'm supposed to use around here.

I'm sure everyone who reads my blog knows that the President is having trouble getting Congressional approval to be extra-mean to terrorists and allow secret evidence in tribunals. The Washington Post titled its editorial on the matter, "A defining moment for America: the president goes to Capitol Hill to lobby for torture." I think that pretty much spells it out. Here's a link to the SF Chronicle if you haven't heard about this before now.

Senator John McCain, once my favorite Republican, finally got tired of kissing King George's ass and has reverted to generally doing the right thing. In an interview on Face the Nation he said "But it's not about [terrorists]; it's about us. This battle we're in is about the things we stand for and believe in and practice. And that is an observance of human rights, no matter how terrible our adversaries may be." Nice to have you back, John.

Colin Powell came out of his self-imposed exile to say what he really thinks in a letter to the Senate committee debating the bill. He wrote in part, "The world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism." There is still a lot of respect for Powell free-floating around the hearts and minds of Americans who remember him from Gulf War I, respect that could be his to own again if he would just be the same stand-up guy in public that we all believe him to be in private.

Meanwhile King George is maintaining his stance that the fight against terror justifies anything and everything claiming, "The most important job of government is to protect the homeland." No George, the most important job of the government is to protect our values. And I don't mean the homophobic religious supply-side rat-knackery that passes for a Republican agenda these days. I'm talking about our values as a nation, the values that made us a light on a hill for oppressed people everywhere. I'm talking about what make us America the Beautiful, the Land of the Free, and the Home of the Brave.

The most important job of government is to protect and defend the Constitution, a document that has been made sacred by the blood of millions of Americans wounded or killed in service to this nation. It is a document consecrated far above any terrorist's poor power to add or detract. But King George is doing his best to undermine it every day of his rule.

The oath of the president is:

I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.

The office of President is defined by the Constitution, and the only specific duty mentioned in the oath of office is to protect said principles. It is the first and last job of our President, who has long abandoned us to become King.

I have been neglecting my LJ, and people are begining to complain. What the heck have I been doing all this time?

We threw birthday and gowing-away parties (four in the last six weeks).

I built a small catapult out of PVC pipe, which I suppose people want me to show on my blog. If I can find my camera I will take pictures.

I've been working on my D&D Campaign Setting, although only the country of Aspera is really fleshed out.

I wrote another one of my popular consumer letters, this time to the tax collector of California.

I ate too much birthday cake.

I've been watching the Ze Frank Show.

That's really about it.

ENERGY CRUNCH: State has added only 6,774 megawatts since '01

That would be 6.774 gigawatts, and it sounds like an awful lot to me. I mean, you only need 1.21 gigawatts to go Back to the Future.

So, in case people are thinking "what the heck is Hezbolla in Lebanon thinking?" or "I wonder what CJ thinks about this" (because of course people are always asking for my opinion on such things. Always!), here's what I think.

On the face of it, the actions by Hezbolla in Lebanon seems stupid to us outsiders: why would they start a new war with Israel? Surely they can't hope to destroy the nation of Israel, any more than Israel could hope to occupy both Palestine and Israel. They have their reasons, most of them not very good ones, but the real beneficiaries of the war aren't in Lebanon at all.

Iraq and Syria have taken to heart Bush's latest mantra of "we're fighting our enemies abroad so we don't have to fight them at home". This is a truer and older maxim than most people realize, a sentiment dating as far back as when men first learned to gather and make use of armies against each other. If you find you must fight a war, then it is best to fight it away from your own lands and your own people.

In my own time this was exemplified by the USSR and USA wars-by-proxy in southeast Asia, Afganistan, and dozens of "client" states worldwide. Now Iran (and probably Syria as well), feeds the Iraq insurgency with fighters and ideology to keep America focused on Iraq. And as Iran perceive an immenent threat from the US over its nuclear programs, it pushes its allies in Palestine and Lebanon to attack Israel. The US will have to come to Israel's aid diplomatically or militarily. Either way, it is a major distraction from Iran's nuclear program and what to do about it. Nobody wants to think about bombing alleged enrichment facilities because of a possibility of Iran gaining nuclear arms in the future, when Hezbolla and Israel are doing their best to kill each other today.

Obviously, the big losers of such wars are those people who live on the battlegrounds. Lebanon was making decent progress, sixteen years after their civil war ended. Pretty soon they'll be back in the stone age again.

I know what to do about high gasoline prices ...

Nothing! Don't do a darn thing about them. People are buying smaller cars, the state is getting a little extra tax revenue, more people are taking mass transit or carpooling, and Bush's approval ratings are down. Honestly, I don't see any serious problems with that.

In some kind of mythical perfect world we could have cheap gas AND people who are motivated to reduce consumption. Market forces however have no such utopian ideals. There's just supply and demand.

My boss at work thinks gasoline will get to $4 a gallon. I say bring it on!

There is an excellent summary of the latest NSA surveilance excess, and its implications, on Brice Schneier's security blog. Qwest was the only telephone company to refuse the NSA's requests, even though they were threatened. Kudos to them, and shame on everyone else. (If Quest had cellphone service in California I would be switching providers right now instead of typing this.)

Frankly, it is a smart idea in its own right, since it allows the NSA to do wholesale traffic analysis of almost the entire US without actually listening in on phone calls. It is probably the most truly useful intelligence gathering plan put forth by this administration. But when you put it together with all of the other unconstitutional powers that this Emperor President abrogates to himself, it is wholly alarming. To quote Matthew Yglasias, who puts it nicely:

One thing the Bush administration says it can do with this meta-data is to start tapping your calls and listening in, without getting a warrant from anyone. Having listened in on your calls, the administration asserts that if it doesn't like what it hears, it has the authority to detain you indefinitely without trial or charges, torture you until you confess or implicate others, extradite you to a Third World country to be tortured, ship you to a secret prison facility in Eastern Europe, or all of the above. If, having kidnapped and tortured you, the administration determines you were innocent after all, you'll be dumped without papers somewhere in Albania left to fend for yourself.

The story of Khaled al-Masri is worth reviewing if you haven't heard of him before. He's the German citizen who was kidnaped by the US in an "extaordinary rendition", beaten, carted off to one of our secret prisons, then summarily released and dumped in Albania without papers. German authorities are quietly investigating the case, but seem reluctant to piss off the US, with whom they have just started to make up after a few years of bad relations. Stories like this are appaling, and far too easy to believe. We should all feel ashamed.

In the name of "fighting terror" the President has been able to assert his ability to do whatever it takes to protect us. All we need now is a gradual expansion of "terror" to include just about any criminal activity, and the President's power will be complete. Oh wait, that last bit is already happening.

If you've been listening to NPR or following the progress of Presidential power, this will be old news to you. To everyone else, it might come as a bit of a shock.

There's a very nice article in the Boston Globe about Presidential Signing Statements. Basically, whenever he signs a bill into law the president can also file a signing statement. Historically, signing statements have been used for rhetorical purposes or to give additional instructions to government agencies on how the new laws should be implemented. Occasionally presidents have used signing statements to express grave misgivings about a law's constitutionality and their intent not to enforce it.

President Bush has taken this last use of the signing statement into uncharted territory, indicating he does not believe he has to follow 740 different laws passed during his tenure. These laws include Congressional oversight of the war and the administration of Iraq, whistleblower statues, attempt to legislate the military, and just about anything else he feels impinges on executive power.

The (un)funny bit is how administration supporters say that "just because he claims he can ignore laws doesn't mean he actually will". But we can see from his history that he has, in fact, chosen to do exactly that. Illegal wiretapping, torturing prisoners, and silencing GAO inspectors are actions that are contrary to legislation that Bush objected to in his signing statements.

To sum it all up, the President has decided that he is the final arbiter of constitutional limits on executive power, and he claims those powers are practically unlimited. Congress apparently has no interest in stopping him, and the court is now loaded with conservative appointees.

I didn't know I was asleep at the time. I was just having a nice chat with a Greek chap named Herodotus, whose book I just happened to be reading.

H: This boat is very fast. Everything here is very fast.

CJ: Yeah. I travel a hundred miles to work every day, so fast is good.

H: Why don't you just work closer to where you live?

CJ: That's not where the jobs are.

H: Then why don't you live closer to where you work?

CJ: That's too expensive.

H: [Looking curious.] And this is normal in your country?

CJ: It isn't uncommon. I'm surprised you haven't asked me about our women.

H: [shrugging] They are of no account.

CJ: Don't let THEM hear you say that or you're likely to regret it. Women here vote equally with men, have property, and choose their own husbands. I'm surprised you haven't noticed.

H: I really didn't notice. I guess I wasn't looking.

CJ: That's a pretty big thing to overlook, Pal. Those places you visited where wives are bought at auction, our women would never agree to that. There would be a revolt.

H: How fascinating! And yet you still managed to build a civilization.

CJ: These days, the wealth of a civilization is closely related to womens' rights.

H: [Looking incredulous.] Now that's rediculous. I don't believe a word of it.

About that New New Testament that the Mormons are always going on about: I'm not sure I believe in the old New Testament.

The New Yorker ran an article Sunday about how the White House is doing advanced battlefield planning for Iran, even to the point of considering nucular weapons. Then, we get denials with reassurances that all diplomatic avenues are being pursued. All of this is on the heels of intense UN and US pressure, Iranian intransigence, sabre-rattling, and insistance by all sides on some particular outcome. Substitute Iraq for Iran, and WMD for Nuclear Technology, and it sounds just like the runup to the Iraq war. All we need now is the head of the State Department to appear before the UN and justify our intentions. Only this time, there's nuclear goodness in our arsenal.

Am I the only one who thinks this is insane? Surely not.

There is something sad and desparate about Bush's dogged attempts to bring democracy to the Middle East. He's like the man who keeps cruising the same bars looking for women. It is the same story every time: he pursues her until she gives in to him, and they have a few days or a few weeks of bliss. Then the disappointment sets in. Women never appreciate all the nice democracy he gives them, and complain whenever the lights go out or the plumbing backs up. Their old boyfriends keep calling, and he keeps finding IEDs all over the house. Ultimately, the romances are unsatisfying, strangled by violent shouting matches and unkept promises. Dishes are thrown, furniture is broken, small animals are kicked. He leaves his stuff in her apartment long after their visits become grudging affairs barely tolerated for pride's sake. In the afternoons he begins to leave work early to cruise the same bars, looking again for someone he can save. Surely, the next one will welcome him with open arms and love him properly, dutifully, the way he deserves.

It's been a long time since my last LJ post. Honestly, not much has happened. We bought a new van, a pretty blue Honda Odessy with a bigger DVD player and other nice goodies. It will cost us quite a bit less per month than our old minivan because we took the excess cash from the insurance settlement and used it as a down payment. It's kind of nice to get a brand-new car and make more room in the family budget at the same time. That won't be happening with the Odessy, however: we had a lojack installed in it.

In other non-noteworthy news, ./ has a pointer to fibonacci poetry. It is like haiku, but the number of sylables on each line follows a fibonacci sequence (1/1/2/3/5/8) My favorite so far is:

a
is
zero
b is one
loop forever: do
add b to a and swap the two

There is more, much more, and not all of it on geek topics. But it might be best to take it in small doses all the same.

There are lots of stories in the news lately about how Google has compromised their values by agreeing to censor their search results for China. Most of the articles are, I think, either knee-jerk populist crap or just written to sound controversial. Google is suddenly the Giant Corporation so all of a sudden their promise to "do no evil" isn't just a quaint counter-cultural oddity.

Not many people seem to be asking the important question: will Google serve the cause of free information by not doing business with China? Honestly, I doubt it. China is totally willing to ban AOL, Yahoo, Google, and all the rest of their ilk from the country and make their own search engine even if it is crappy. Stepping out of the country serves no purpose.

I am reminded how, on every Presidential election cycle, the "outsider" candidate promises to "play hardball" with China. Yet it never happens. That is because given the choice between engaging the Chinese under less than idea circumstances versus not engaging them at all, engagement is the best way to influence them.