CJC.org

Michael Totten has a pointer to this good take on the differences over the war on the part of liberals. The author notes that the primary division is over whether one sees neo-imperialism (embodied by America) as the greatest danger in the world, or whether one believes the greatest danger is 21st Century fascism (embodied by radical Islam and its foremost proponent, Al Qaeda). I believe our struggle is with the new fascists, that we are, indeed at war, and that there is no more important fact that we have to deal with. In some ways, this makes me a single-issue voter for the upcoming election: who will most forcefully prosecute this war?

My problem with the Democrats right now is that many of them seem to fall on the other side of this division and believe that America, or at least an America led by the Bush Administration, is a greater danger to the world than Al Qaeda, or, at best, that Al Qaeda is a problem that can be managed away or ignored by clever policy rather than a neo-Wilsonian foreign policy backed by occassional military force. Consider Kerry’s victory speech from last night, about halfway down the page, we see this quote:

And we will meet one of the historic challenges of our generation with a bold new plan for energy independence that will invest in technologies of the future and create 500,000 new jobs, so young Americans in uniform will never be held hostage to Mideast oil.

Granted, this is better than conspiracy theories about Halliburton or a neo-conservative cabal, and is, in the long term, one of the things that we have to do, but it fails to directly address the problem of this war on bad philosophy. The rest of the speech is about domestic issues, and the war isn’t mentioned in passing again. Domestic issues do matter, and nothing is going to change my opinion that the agenda of the religious right of this country is stupid, but, really, America and its Constitution has vast reservoirs of “American-ness” behind them, and no one domestic group can damage this country irreparably in the next four years. Fundamentally, we have debates over whether gay people can get married whereas Al Qaeda and its sympathisizers would simply kill gays with rocks. And that isn’t going to change, no matter how many spurious comparisons are made between the religious conservatives backing the Bush Administration and Islamic fundamentalists. Ultimately, we are Americans, and we believe in liberalism in its various shadings and interpretations.

From time to time, we seem to forget that, in the metrics of intentions and capabilities, Al Qaeda would have killed thirty thousand, three hundred thousand, three million people if they had the means to do so. Thankfully, they do not (yet) have these means. I believe that we’re in a race against time: this “War on Terror” is a golden hour, our last chance to avert catastrophe. Bluntly, what we’re trying to prevent is the use of nuclear weapons on American and Western cities by terrorists in the next decade or two. And the race may be shorter than we had thought even a year ago — possibly, Abdul Qadeer Khan’s actions will have as great an impact on destabilizing the 21st Century as Hitler and Stalin’s impact on destabilizing the 20th. For if such weapons are used against Americans by terrorists, and America faces an unrelenting string of such attacks, then America’s ultimate weapons may be unsheathed, and our best strategy of a slow approach, with limited war and long term political transformation, will be abandoned because we can no longer afford it. This will be an unmitigated disaster for both the rest of the world from the damage we would cause in defending ourselves from loose nukes, and for us at home: our liberalism may not survive such a hot, fast war.

Do I believe the Democrats will come up with an reasonable response to these threats? So far, they’ve failed: they’ve tended to advocate a judicial strategy, where law enforcement will roll up terrorists as they spring up. Yes, part of our response to Al Qaeda and the social pathologies that give rise to it should be more judicial than military. That’s what we’re doing in the countries that have strong states, that are willing to cooperate, in particular the European countries: terrorist cells are broken up by the police, they’re arrested and tried in courts of law. One may argue that the Patriot Act is an attempt to give domestic law enforcement more teeth. But the judicial strategy tends to fail when confronted by recalcitrant states: how does one apply law enforcement strategies to the international system? From the point of realism, you really can’t, since there’s no solid concept of laws between states; at best, you can hope for an alignment of interests between the various state law enforcement agencies. Other theories of international relations may buy you more. However, from an empirical matter, the judicial strategy was tried in the 1990s, had some successes, but was inadequate for the task at hand, as 9/11 ultimately showed.

We further don’t have the luxury of time to retry failed strategies. As noted, the nuclear genie is out of the bottle because the proliferation regime that relied on cooperation with inspectors and UN sanction has been shown to be next to useless. We will need to fall back to deterence, not because Al Qaeda is deterable, but the governments and people who finance them are. While we cannot prevent individual suicide bombers and small groups from causing harm, we can dry up the funding and resources necessary for large scale attacks, or operations that require sophistication. This may be good enough for the short and medium term, while the generations-long strategy of establishing liberalism abroad takes effect.

So who is taking this war most seriously? The Bush Administration has failed in many respects. It has failed to provide adequate troops to pacify Iraq immediately after the war. Its efforts at Homeland Security are not serious. And most importantly, it has failed to convey to the American people the importance of this war, its stakes and its long term goals. It has miserably failed to harness American national will when it was easiest to harness, right after 9/11: I remember a quip from one of our clients (albeit a Wall Streeter whose office would have been less than a mile from WTC) a week or two after the attacks: we should all get back to work, so we can make lots of money, so we can pay lots of taxes, so we can buy lots of bombs. Instead of buying lots of bombs, recruiting lots of troops, and training lots of civil affairs officers, the Administration stuck to its tax cuts and other fiscal stupidities, which may constrain our ability to finance this war in coming years. In terms of national morale, we were told to return to normalcy and shop rather than realize that we are under threat.

But the Democrats have been far worse. Hatred of Bush appears to drive the Democratic base rather than serious considerations about foreign policy. When there is consideration of the Administration’s foreign policy, it has tended to be conspiracy minded, or has contained strains of moral equivalence between Bush and Saddam, or America and Al Qaeda. Consider Dean’s ambivalence about not being glad that Saddam was gone. Consider Gore’s speech about how 9/11 was merely a pretext to engage in warmongering. At least I get the feeling that Bush himself, despite the electoral machinations of Rove, believes that we are at war, and that the end to this war will be decades from now, and only after there has been a political transformation of the Islamic lands. Even if Al Qaeda is crushed by the end of the year, we still have to address the ideological swamp from which it sprang, and the conquest and rebuilding of Iraq are the first steps.

In some sense, the strategy of bringing liberalism to the world is our thinking outside the box, a rewriting of the rules, a winning gambit for the Kobayashi Maru. I think it’s our only way out. The alternative is that we endure an unending series of attacks every few years, when a new group arises to take the place of the one we just crushed, until, at the end, we are struck with ultimate weapons, and we respond in kind.

We caught the end of the Oscars last night, starting at around the point they did the Katherine Hepburn memorial section. Billy Crystal remarked that all of New Zealand has now been thanked, so apparently Lord of the Rings had been winning in the technical categories. I was actually mildy surprised it won Best Picture, but that was because I became more of a Tolkien purist about fifteen minutes into the movie, and therefore disliked large parts of it. Still good, could have been better, certainly not the best movie I’ve seen.

I remembered this comment on Plastic about what is considered canon, in terms of the secondary creations of writers and filmmakers. The main thread was about the release of the original Star Wars movies on DVD, except that what we’ll get isn’t really the original films but the modified versions released in 1997. As everyone notes, Han Solo shoots first.

But what’s the canonical film? Is it what Lucas says is canonical, or what the fans consider to be canonical? The Star Wars special editions are a messy case. Other issues of canonical-ness are clearer: the movies and TV shows are canonical for Star Trek, no matter how many books are written, and no matter how internally inconsistent the movies and TV shows are. A commentator on the thread brought up the two different versions of the Lord of the Rings movies, theatrical and extended cuts, and asked which should be considered canonical. Someone noted that Tolkien’s books are canon. In this case, the movies are the add-ons.

But, as was pointed out by MrWarmth in the above linked comment thread, the only reason the books have been canonical may be because there hasn’t been a credible film version of the story until now. Historically, we have the Oz books versus the Oz movie, with the movie winning out as what people think of when they think of Dorothy. Similarly for the Maltese Falcon, Gone with the Wind, and The Silence of the Lambs. In these cases, the movies made from these famous books are dominant in the popular imagination, and if we read these books, we picture the actors from the movies as the characters in our minds. And, generally, people will see the movie before reading the book, if the movie exists. In many of these cases, people aren’t even aware that the books exist.

So what’s the fate of the Tolkien books decades from now? When we refer to the charge of the Rohirrm to our children (yes, Grace, we’re going to raise them with a geeky reading list), will they picture the Lord of the Nazgul at the broken gates of Minas Tirith? Will the books remain canon?

One counterargument might be something like Moby Dick. There have been film adaptations of this book, but these haven’t cast such a shadow on the popular imagination. Perhaps because the density of the literary work is too great for any film to capture, or because we know there’s a book out there because we were forced to read it in high school. This likely won’t be the case with Tolkien, except with the density of languages found in his Middle Earth.

The case of the Oz books may be the most instructive, as these may have been as well loved as Tolkien is now, and yet we barely recall them in comparison to the movie. And I think this would be a sad fate for the books, an unintended side effect of Peter Jackson’s epic film series, though this outcome would perhaps fit with Tolkien’s theme of loss and fading away for the Eldar. Into the Undying West these books may go.

This is for installing and running Sybase ASE 12.5 on a Fedora Core 1 box. The basic notes are derived from this Usenet posting. Basically, the tar ball and subsequent RPM from Sybase installs without too much of an issue. The main trick at this point is to set the shared memory max parameter for the kernel by adding “kernel.shmmax=some_reasonable_number” to /etc/sysctl.conf and then doing a “/sbin/sysctl -p”, where some_reasonable_number is, say, half of available RAM.

Java is required to get the setup program running. Use the latest JDK instead of what ships with the Sybase tarball; the shipped version doesn’t work. The setup choices are straightforward. Just ignore the “Incorrectly built binary which accesses errno or h_errno directly. Needs to be fixed.” messages that will appear on console as the dataserver and backup server start up. The license manager may not start because it’s pointing at the tarball’s JRE. Edit the lmgr script and point it at the right place.

To run isql (found in $SYBASE/OCS-12_5/bin), make sure the LANG environmental variable matches something in the $SYBASE/locales/locale.dat file. Setting LANG to ENGLISH works fine. Note that there’s a /usr/bin/isql, a part of the unixODBC package.

Note that Sybase doesn’t support dump loads across platforms, e.g., Solaris dumps loading into Linux, because of big endian vs. little endian issues. Note also that Sybase doesn’t have a trial version of 12.5 ASE for Solaris.

A few weeks ago, the “replace filter” light lit up on the old Bionaire UA1560 air cleaner I’ve had for a few years. We’ve gone through a couple filter changes before and noted that the thing is fundamentally a HEPA filter attached to a 50-cent fan; most of the cost is filter replacement. This time, I wanted to use the opportunity to get a better air cleaner, especially since we’re expanding the apartment, and the UA1560 is meant more for a 1-BR or studio than a larger space.

There was some thought about the Ionic Breeze from Sharper Image. One of its selling points is the lack of filters: dust and dirt collect on electrostatically charged fins, and all you have to do is wash off the fins every once in a while. This is fine in principle, as HVAC forced air systems use similar techniques to clean the air. Unfortunately, testing labs not sponsored by Sharper Image have found that the Ionic Breeze works about as well as your TV in clearing dust from the room. That the Sharper Image chose to use lawsuits to address the matter didn’t sit well with me.

Another filterless cleaner is the heavily advertised Venta AirWasher, which seems to have adspace in every copy of the New York Times I look at. Zabar’s carries it in the housewares section, so I’ve seen the actual model a few times. The AirWasher claims to be a 2-in-1 device, both a humidifier and air cleaner, where water is used as the filtering agent for the air. Something about circulating air through hamster-wheel-like contraptions and the wet particles dropping into some collection basin. The problem is that, unlike HEPA air cleaners, there’s no number associated with the AirWasher about how effectively it cleans the air: nothing about cubic feet of air processed, nothing about minimum particle size, and so on. Presumably, it makes a decent cold water humidifier, but may not be a particularly good air cleaner. People who claim to be helped by the Venta probably would have done just as well with a good humidifier in the room, and maybe a small HEPA cleaner.

The Consumer Reports review that slammed the Ionic Breeze did recommend an air cleaner, the Friedrich C90A. This actually isn’t a HEPA cleaner, either, but works similarly to the Ionic Breeze by trapping particles on electrostatically charged fins. The main difference is that the Friedrich has a big fan to actually move air through the fins, as opposed to relying on, I suppose, magic (granted, electrostatic effects can move air in a meaningful way, but not in anything built for home use; anyway, moving air produces noise, and the Ionic Breeze is silent). The Friedrich also has a CADR rating (a really high one in fact: my old Bionaire has barely one third of the rating), so someone other than Friedrich has looked to see if the thing does what it claims to do. We picked up a Friedrich at Len Harris, Inc. in Queens yesterday. (An added bonus with going to Len Harris: we looked at stackable washer-dryers there, since we have to decide in the next few weeks on what to get. The Frigidaire looks good, and is much less expensive at Len Harris than I’ve seen elsewhere. The salesman noted that other stackables, especially the European models, are both smaller and more expensive than the Frigidaire, since, like electronics, it can be costly to make things tiny. Since we have room, we’re going for the larger capacity washer/dryers, and saving money in the process.)

The Friedrich is big and ugly — it looks like the designers spent less than five minutes trying to make it look nice. The Ionic Breeze looks sleek and sexy, and it’s advertised in a something-for-nothing manner, claiming to be simulatenously silent and maintenance-free, yet effective. We have the engineering/marketing dichotomy at work here, with the engineers winning out at Friedrich, and marketing winning at the Sharper Image. Possibly, the company name says it all.

Update: the Consumer Reports review of all these air cleaners I mentioned was for October, 2003. No link, since I don’t have a subscription to CR.

Update 04/2005: This press release from CR coincides with the new beat-down of the Ionic Breeze administered by Consumer Reports in the May 2005 issue. There are pointers to CADR numbers and mentions the Friedrich C-90A as top-rated.

Way back at the beginning of the year, I had my annual physical, and the blood work showed my cholesterol was high, along with the usual suspects: triglycerides, LDL:HDL ratio, and so on. I was also 10-15 pounds heavier than I usually am. This is what happens when you schedule routine medical exams just after the holidays and a month of eating very well: we only ate at a few French restaurants, but it felt like we were having foie gras every day for a week. That and bacon. There was also very little exercise in December beyond watching TV.

Anyway, after seeing a Good Eats episode on oatmeal, I’ve started eating a lot of the stuff for breakfast. The main benefits are: the basic physical limitation where the more oatmeal one eats, the less bacon and eggs one has in the same meal (I typically don’t have bacon and/or eggs, so this isn’t that big a deal); lots of fiber, contributing both bulkiness in the insoluable form and bile-absorption in the soluble form. And the more bile taken away, the more cholesterol goes away. My liver is happier, in any case.

Oatmeal comes in a variety of forms in the grocery store, according to Alton Brown. There’re groats, which are pretty close to being the raw oat. It’s a pain to cook. Groats that have been put through an industrial food processor and sliced up into 2 to 4 smaller pieces are called steel-cut oatmeal. You can find tins of the stuff on the supermarket shelf, possibly labelled as “traditional” or “Irish” oatmeal. Typically, it takes about 30 minutes of simmering on the stove to cook these, but they have a nice, chewy texture. Steel-cut oats that have been steamed and then mashed flat by giant rollers are rolled oats, and are what you find in the big Quaker Oats cylinders; it’s what you think of oatmeal if you’re an American. This cooks in about 10 minutes, but can be a bit gummy; they’re better for making granola and cookies than eating outright, compared to the steel-cut variety. At the bottom of the ladder, and the most processed, is instant oatmeal. This is somehow made from rolled oats (presumably with smaller pieces) and precooked so that it’s a matter of just adding hot water.

Note that steel-cut oatmeal can be bought pretty cheaply by going to the local health food store and taking a bagful from the bulk food bins. The 74th Street Fairway has it upstairs for about $0.85/lb, which is probably high compared to the rest of the country, but damn cheap compared to the tins of McCann’s Traditional Irish Oatmeal, which is apparently close to $3/lb. The 137th Street Fairway doesn’t have the bulk bins. I have no idea about the Long Island one.

I’ve found that the standard rice cooker pretty much every East Asian household has is pretty good at making steel-cut oatmeal. The only change is the water:oats ratio, which should be a bit more than 2:1. If you toss in dried cranberries, use a 2.5:1 ratio. If you have to add water to the hotplate portion of the rice cooker (which I do with my model), the water should be aimed at running the rice cooker for about 30 minutes, i.e., at the “4-cups of rice” line on the measuring cup. Less fuss than cooking oatmeal on the stovetop: whenever I’ve done that, I think I’ve had a 25% oatmeal attrition rate to the crust at the bottom of the pot, since I’m disinclined to stand and stir for 30 minutes in the morning. Cleanup is fairly easy, since there’s nothing burnt at the bottom.

So, does a public discussion about oatmeal and cholesterol mean that I’m now in my mid-30s? I’ve been complaining about achy legs and general soreness for the past couple of years, but I know why that’s happening.

I think everyone should take a course or two in microeconomics. Children should be taught the notion of opportunity cost early on. Models of supply and demand should be shown in high school at the latest, along Smith’s pin factory and some notion of how to read macroeconomic news. And, of course, there should be a discussion of Ricardo’s comparative advantage model. To paraphrase the link (and deviating from the whole Britain/Portugal Wheat/Wine thing to use the more contemporary Gilligan/Skipper metaphor, which is apparently all the rage in econ 101 quizes):

Suppose Gilligan can gather 10 coconuts an hour, or catch 10 fish an hour, while the Skipper can gather 20 coconuts/hour or catch 15 fish/hour. The Skipper is absolutely better at both gathering coconuts and catching fish that Gilligan; the Skipper also has a comparative advantage at coconut gathering, since he can gather 1-1/3 coconuts for every fish he catches, whereas Gilligan gathers 1 coconut for every fish he catches. Conversely, Gilligan has a comparative advantage in fish catching. As an aside, note that Gilligan, if coconuts and fish were converted to currency, would have absolutely lower wages than the Skipper (this is pretty much tautological in this simple model, as the Skipper is absolutely more productive at both tasks).

If Gilligan and the Skipper have a spat and move to opposite sides of the island, how do they spend their day? If they each spend 4 hours in each activity, Gilligan winds up with 40 coconuts and 40 fish, while Skipper has 80 coconuts and 60 fish. The total production for the island would then be 120 coconuts and 100 fish. We can vary the distribution of activities to get other numbers, but that’s the basic picture. Now, suppose Gilligan and Skipper make up and decide to trade. Gilligan specializes in fish catching, his comparative advantage, and spends 8 hours doing that, catching 80 fish. The Skipper can spend 6 hours gathering coconuts, and 2 hours fishing, yielding the same 120 coconuts, and 30 fish. Total island production is now 120 coconuts and 110 fish, and the ten surplus fish can be divided up in some way between Gilligan and the Skipper. So, specialization, even partial specialization in the case of the Skipper, has yielded extra production compared to autarky. Consumption choices can of course be changed, but you still get more stuff at the end of the day when there’s specialization: Skipper can spend all his time gathering coconuts, resulting in a total island output of 160 coconuts and 80 fish. The island inhabitants may want to sacrifice 20 fish for 40 coconuts. Or, the Skipper can devote some time to catching fish as in the above example, if there’s a greater demand for fish relative to coconuts; his fish catching productivity will be used to fill in for the supply shortfall from Gilligan.

That’s the basic Ricardian model. In this description, we’ve ignored real-world effects, such as costs of trade, externalities, market power, etc.; these elaborations of the basic idea are explored in detail in the trade theory literature for those interested. Note also that the Britain/Portugal metaphor Ricardo originally used focuses comparative advantage to trade amonst nations. The Gilligan/Skipper metaphor hints a bit more about the benefits of specializing in your comparative advantage to smaller scales, such as two people working on a desktop publishing project (one person is comparatively better at writing while the other is better at page layout), or a bank outsourcing its janitorial needs. It’s a little more concrete and everyday.

Krugman has an interesting take on why there’s resistance to, say, Ricardian trade theory by non-economists, be they journalists, politicians or other lay people, even though these people are generally smart and intellectual. He notes that the theory of comparative advantage gets rejected because:

Perhaps the more literary economic stories are told to confirm or describe a particular moral point of view? For the basic economic models are fundamentally objective and amoral, and cannot be ignored; they do not leave room for good intentions, which may not be to the taste of everyone. In any case, the lack of understanding about how comparative advantage works and how it will help developing nations in the long term tends to lead to, say, anti-WTO protests and the like. Currently, we have the whole outsourcing thing becoming a campaign issue this year, even if this is more or less a special case of Ricardian theory.

DeLong has a recent piece that reiterates the notion that trade and outsourcing don’t affect employment level in the US — the Fed has more influence than anything else, following by national macro policy — but instead affects the composition of jobs in the country. Industries shift to conform to comparative advantage (textile manufacturing in the US?), producers use to the cheapest providers of raw materials or necessary services (call centers), workers shift from the old factories to new ones, and as a whole the country is better off. Note also that technological change is far more influential in the Schumpeterian uprooting of old industries and the creation of new ones; Bhagwati points this out in a recent NYT editorial. Of course, this is painful to the workers that have been uprooted, regardless whether the industrial restructuring is because of trade (international or domestic) or technical change. As white-collar industries are now being affected, people may not understand that the time and money they’ve invested in their education may no longer matter (what did the buggy whip makers feel at the dawn of the automobile age?). Arguably, this is why we need better education on economics, and a big push to strengthen such things as Trade Adjustment Assistance, and expand it into a general program for worker retraining, to help ease the transition from old industries into new ones, regardless of what happened. America is the land of reinvention, after all.

Update: Daniel Drezner has an article on EU outsourcing to the US. For example, Nokia has a contract with IBM to handle IT help desk functions and desktop environment. The EU apparently understands the notion of liberal world economy (even though it doesn’t practice it particularly well with regard to agricultural subsidies). There’s also a note about the relative rise in “insourced” US jobs compared to outsourced ones. As noted, the main effect of trade is the composition of US jobs, not the quantity.

In the opening pages of Snow Crash, Stephenson notes that every man, until he is about twenty-five, occassionally believes that, if only he takes a few years off and studies in a Shaolin temple in China somewhere, he could be the biggest badass in the world. This is a generalized case of “green belt’s disease”, where newly minted green belts walk around and look at people, nodding and thinking, “yeah, I can take him.”

The brown belts in our school, I think, know better: the occassional class where you get repeatedly “cut” by the training knife when uke does something unexpected or even expected; the everyday where your technique gets blown and the switchup doesn’t quite work, but uke goes along with it in order to avoid injury for everyone; the times when you’re uke and tori can’t get the technique and you’re not quite sure how your own stuff is working. People who are willing to do harm to you tend to better armed, or are more committed to doing harm than you are, or are simply bigger than you. And random chance, accidents and slips happen in real fights, not always to your advantage. Brown belt tests are hard our school, I think in part to demonstrate how things go catastrophically wrong.

So, what use is all this? Sensei Coleman, in the post-class talk last night, started off with an Ursula K. Le Guin story about a bricklayer shipwrecked on an island who tried to build a bridge across the ocean to get off the island. Such a hopeless, ridiculous task was only marginally less hopeless and ridiculous than trying to build a brick boat to escape, but it was all he had. Eventually, his bridge goes some way off the island by the time he runs out of bricks, but at the end of the unfinished structure, he sees a sail off in the distance, jumps off and starts to swim towards it. While building the bridge, he learned how to swim.

The hope with these jujitsu classes is that all the techniques we learn and practice are the bricks from the story. They’re specific answers to specific questions in specific circumstances, and are as inadequate to the problem of personal violence as a bridge across an ocean. But, maybe, we’ll understand enough about the patterns of footwork, the ways of unbalancing and the techniques of escape to be able to swim when we need to; swimming for the distant sail is a better chance than not being able to swim at all. We, however, just have to realize that we should start swimming and stop laying bricks.

This basically sums up who I’ve tended to think about the basic techniques, and how a lot of our techniques and exercises might be derided as useless in a fight. Yes, certainly I can get sankyo if you hold your arm in a particular way, but you may not cooperate. But the repetitive exercises for doing sankyo are more for imprinting footwork and hinting at how you can gain some control over uke’s body by taking all the slack out of his arm, than for the technique itself. So, you swim: sankyo didn’t work, but you wind up in a good spot and can unbalance the attacker by going in a different way. Then you can switch up or, perhaps better, run.

Oh crap. The internal contradictions in my attitude towards the Treo 600 is now almost at crisis: they’re now available for T-Mobile.

I want this phone. I just don’t feel like buying it for $400 after the upgrade discount.

I’m basically without excuses now. I’ll probably put this off until the discount is almost about to expire on March 2nd.

I’m debating on whether to pick up the generic GSM or T-Mobile branded phone, which is probably locked. The generic one is unlocked, which will make it more flexible in the future if I switch to a different carrier. The T-Mobile can probably be unlocked relatively easily with firmware from T-Mobile or other sources, and probably has T-Mobile APNs and MMS already configured. I’ll probably go with the latter when I have to decide.

Here’s a pointer to a NYT Magazine article about the categories of desire embodied with gadgets like the new(ish) Treo.

I think I saw the reference on BoingBoing, but Luminous Landscape has a very nice series of photography tutorials online. The site belongs to a landscape photographer who works in both digital and film, and looks fairly instructive. For example, here’s a discussion of exposure, which I don’t really have a feel for. With my camera, there’s an exposure meter, but I generally won’t know what to do if the scene differs from the standard gray the meter is calibrated against. The site’s general tutorials has tips and techniques for more specific scenarios the basic concepts from the Understanding Series, such as night landscape photography, and the rule of 600 with regard to focal length.

Thinking about focal lengths today, I actually found a couple of Nikon lens compatibility charts when shopping for a 28mm/f2.8 AIS on EBay. Nikon will be releasing its D70 sometime this year, and I’ll probably buy that or its successor model in the future. Will the AIS lenses work with this body? No certainty: the charts suggest that the older digitals will mount these lenses, though, of course, only in manual mode, but exposure metering may not work. Of course, I may just be silly with all this, since I may be shopping for Nikon because I’m trying to preserve the use of relatively cheap manual lenses instead of thinking about what would be the best system. On the other hand, one can always get rid of old lenses on EBay.

Update: Ken Rockwell also has a nice set of tutorials on picture taking. Rockwell also points out that the Nikon School is good, though from the website it looks like the school is in recess during the summer.

My users are generally good at not clicking on the infected attachment when there’s a mass-mailing worm going around, but we still have to pick through dozens of these emails. To keep them from hitting the mail server to start with, we just installed Clam AntiVirus. Yes, reading Slashdot comments for articles is sometimes useful. When we looked at the MTA antivirus problem early last year, the open source solutions didn’t seem to fit well, or didn’t seem ready, but ClamAV works very well. Currently, not quite a week after the main Worm.SCO.A outbreak, we’re getting about 1 such email every minute or two.

Note that I had issues with the clamav-milter that ships with ClamAV. Things broke when the number of pre-spawned child processes were exhausted by a burst of email, or by processes that got stuck for some reason; there were progressively more clamfi_abort messages in the log. We switched over to smtp-vilter, which seems more stable, though a bit of a pain to install (the gotchas have to do with its chroot, and the creation of the necessary files/folders therein).

Products like ClamAV makes me wonder how commerical anti-virus software can stay in business, at least for MTA scanning. ClamAV is free (in terms of both beer and speech) and is updated as fast as the big companies. The main problem for ClamAV is that there’s no program to intercept Windows calls; but this is an issue for desktop use, not for the mass-mailing worms. Anyway, there’s a perceptive piece at attrition.org that talks about how those annoying and useless emails that anti-virus software send out are fundamentally spam, especially since the vendors know that the mass-mailing worms forge their From: lines.

Last observation: most of the Worm.SCO.A mail seem to be targeted at non-existent email accounts. Not just defunct accounts (that’s obvious), but also accounts that never existed. These non-existent accounts are of the form common-name@example.com, e.g., betty@example.com, john@example.com, and so on. Joel speculates that these non-existent accounts are the result of spam sitting in people’s mailboxes. When Worm.SCO.A scans the mailspool of an infected computer, it’s using the fake From: addresses generated by spammers as To: addresses for virus mailings. If this scenario is true, then spammers have made the mass-mailing worms less efficient.

Update: 864 instances where the MTA blocked a virus on 1/30/04, of which 826 were Worm.SCO.A, 35 where Worm.Gibe.F, and one each of Worm.Sober.C1, Worm.Dumaru.A and (nostalgia!) Klez.H.

Update 2: Version 0.65 had stability issues, which caused the MTA not to work very well. I can try the CVS version, or wait for 0.66. I’ll think I’ll do the latter.