Fixed a problem with register_globals = off. Basically, the various HTTP POST/GET variables weren’t being passed through correctly, as described here. Yes, the b2mailpost.php wasn’t written as safely as could be, but it’s a bit better now. Anyone who wants it can pick it up at http://www.cjc.org/blog/files/b2mailpost.zip.
I should have properly version controlled the thing. Oh, well.
My brother was in town yesterday, and he and my father changed the oil in the car. For the record, the mileage is just below 59,000 miles. According the Honda Owner’s Link website, we’ll have to do this every 3,500 miles, more or less. The timing belt, according to the scheduled maintenance table, will have to be changed shortly, at around 60,000 miles. We’ll wait until the weather is warming.
For the routine oil change stuff, watching my brother struggle for an hour with the unfamiliar car and the awkwardly placed oil filter has made me realize that, hey, $20 for the garage oil change is a good deal. They have the equipment on hand to get underneath the car comfortably and take off the filter, and have probably done this to thousands of Civics. Plus, at some places, you get a free car wash for the price.
While the car was jacked up, my brother also fixed the hood on the driver’s side CV joint — the joint wasn’t as contaminated with dirt as we had feared — and tightened up the loose plastic cowlings on the front wheel wells, which were occassionally scraping the tires.
Here’s an interesting point about some of the more and less obvious losers from the war:
Reading that blog post made me realize why I’m so irritated by many of the anti-war arguments that get passed around, and why I really, really want the left to come up with arguments that aren’t slogans:
There’s an anecdote about a Canadian professor discussing American power with his students. One student asks, what, with America being so powerful, can constrain it? The professor replied, 250 million Americans.
Yes, American power is constrained by the American people. Cynics may argue that this is a poor constraint, that Americans are ill-informed and easily mislead by their leaders. I don’t believe this is true, certainly not over the long term: Americans may take a while to do the right thing, but the right thing does get done, even if it takes decades. I think Churchill has a quote along those lines.
The problem right now is that constraint on the left has been discredited; it has self-destructed through its own self-righteousness and shallow arguments and genuine glee at American failure. I was appalled by DeGenova; I cringed at Michael Moore at the Oscars. How are these slogan-arguments going to sway America? How are these going to rally mainstream America to your side? Quite possibly, these antics will remove some of the constraints on American military action, leading to what you oppose. And that really would be a danger.
So, you may ask, what anti-war arguments would I agree with? They’d probably be along the lines where interests and costs (human, financial, moral) would be weighed. War with North Korea? Right now, the costs far, far outweigh any possible benefit that can be achieved with war; and diplomacy hasn’t been to be a failure, like it had been for Iraq. Syria? Assad is quite possibly a moron, but it hasn’t been shown that military action is required to make him realize where his self-interests should lie. Elsewhere? We’ll have to judge these case by case. War is bad, but not categorily the worst thing. At times, the soft powers of diplomacy and moral suasion reach their limits, and hard power, if the cause is right, must be used.
Update: I came across this piece about a frivilous case being submitted to the International Criminal Court, accusing the US/UK of commiting war crimes. Again, we see self-righteousness and an inability to think clearly about matters of war and peace. The result, the author fears, is that idiotic stunts like this will only give ammunition to the Republicans who want the ICC to just go away.
Michael Tomasky in The American Prospect has a similar point, invoking De Genova specifically, among others. The right will use De Genova and his ilk to caricature their critics on the left, leaving the policy debate far poorer (if there is a debate at all). And, really, it’s in our common interest to see a liberal, free state arise in Iraq, even if the necessary precondition was a war formulated by the neo-cons. The left’s cause should be to help make sure that the United States keeps its promises to the Iraqi people; the left’s cause must not be to hope for American failure.
It’s been submitted. I nearly ran out of paper printing out documents, then spent the morning making the requisite seven (7!) copies to ship with the original. A tree was probably killed for the paper that was used — when will co-op boards accept, say, a PDF by email? The total package didn’t fit in the FedEx “large” box, so I split the shipment across two of them. It should get there tomorrow, though, in retrospect, I should have just hopped a cab during lunch and dropped it off. The management company is near Penn Station, and it would have gotten there faster, for less money. (On the other hand, I actually forgot an entire copy; I found it after I came back from the FedEx office because I had forgotten the ship-to address. Lucky, that.)
The total shipping weight, with the boxes and padding, was 14 pounds.
Update: Upon reflection, this was much more work than I remember, even though I remember there being a lot of work the first time around. The first time, I was working with the real estate broker representing the apartment, and I now realize that he took care of a lot of things, such as shaping the application and the massive chore of photocopying and collating the application. This time around, I’m doing all of this work by myself (while having other things going on), and I have more paper to file, if only from the accretion of new financial accounts. Most of my documents are filed away digitally, so the extra documents only required time and paper to print, so this wasn’t too terrible.
In terms of a co-op purchase versus a house/condo purchase (I’m guessing on what’s needed for the latter), the co-op probably requires somewhat more than twice as much time and effort to get through. The house/condo presumably only requires the contract and mortgage application, plus some miscellaneous. The co-op application itself is at least as time consuming as the contract and mortage application, and there are extra miscellaneous items to work through, such as the co-op board interview (which should be relatively trivial and stress-free this time around, if only because of the special circumstances). This is without the chore of, say, making and collating eight copies for the individual board members.
In terms of work, the co-op application may be deterrent enough, without the bother of the board interview. You really have to want the place to go through at least twice the work, compared to a house/condo, so there’s going to be a self-selection issue there. The board interview is somewhat prefunctory, with that thinking.
I got new shoes over the weekend. The old pair were resoled recently — I’ve had them for over two years, and while they’re showing their age, they were serviceable — and I was wearing them, but for some reason my right foot started hurting.
I wore my sneakers for most of last week, and got to Tip Top Shoes on Saturday. The salesman helpfully remeasured my feet. My right foot is apparently a little larger than my left one — 9 vs. 8-1/2, more or less. The old pair must of have been just on the edge in terms of size on my right foot, and the recent resoling and insole replacement must have put it out of the comfort zone. Throw in a little swelling from the tight shoe, and the problem gets compounded. Note that different sized feet are sufficiently common for there to be a note about this in the catalogs of at least one web-based shoe stores.
I got a pair of Eccos, which the salesman recommended as good walking shoes. The best in the store are Mephistos, but I wasn’t willing to pay $350 for a pair. The right fits comfortably right now, but the left (of course) is now a little loose, and chaffs a bit. I need thicker socks on the left.
Ideally, I’d buy two pairs of shoes, sizes 8-1/2 and 9. This would be expensive. In a perfect world, I’d find someone with a similar taste in shoes, and with the same differently sized feet, but in a mirror image. This sounds like something the Internet would be good at doing, some niche of Ebay or something. However, after a quick inspection of the auction sites, I haven’t found anyone selling differently sized shoes.
Neat Perl snippet to generate a string of random characters, for, say, randomized usernames, passwords, etc.:
sub random_string {
my $p = '';
foreach (1..$stringlength) {
$p .= chr($chars[rand($#chars)]);
}
return $p;
}
# List of valid ascii characters, by decimal number
# numbers, capital letters, lowercase letters
@chars = (48..57,65..90,97..122);
An ascii chart can be found here.
Just a quick note: I’ve just started Kenneth Pollack’s The Threatening Storm. So far, I’ve gotten through what may be called the prelude to the book — the history of US/Iraqi relations through the end of the first Gulf War. Reading it now, with this second Gulf War all but over except the mopping up and the (much more complicated and important) reconstruction, is an interesting experience.
I haven’t gotten to the bulk of the book, where he talks about the various scenarios on how best to deal with Iraq. His conclusion, well known, is that Iraq should be invaded and Saddam overthrown, and the country reconstructed. I am aware that the war had gone better than his most optimistic forecast, of a six week war with some 500 American combat deaths. Some points he makes early in his narrative are startingly prescient, even though these were not presented as predictions.
Pollack, for example, noted that the Shia intifada in 1991, while a great threat to the Baathist regime, was actually fairly limited, with just some tens of thousands of people rising up against Saddam. Most people, fearing retribution, sat it out, and waited to see which way things would go. This was how it went when we invaded; the Iraqi populous couldn’t be convinced that Saddam was actually gone until American armor actually arrived in the center of Baghdad. If the most optimistic hawks had read Pollack, they may have predicted joyous crowds at liberation, but now on the first day or week.
The other point was on how badly Saddam misjudged American intentions and resolve in 1990/1991. Fundamentally, he believed that America would not accept heavy casualties — he was reading Vietnam and Beirut at the time — and that his military could inflict these casualties. He was wrong about both these counts.
One can’t help but think that he believed similar things this time around, with modifications. Presumably, his interpretation of Somalia was that, still, America was unwilling to sustain casualties. Handing out copies of
Black Hawk Down suggests that he somehow thought that disorganized militia driving around on pickup trucks with .50 caliber machineguns on the back could somehow inflict these casualties. Apparently, he didn’t notice that the American forces in Somalia didn’t have armor.
I’ll see how the rest of the book goes. It’s good so far, Pollack was the most interesting talking head I saw on TV in the first day of war.
We saw Thwak Friday night at the New Victory Theater in Times Square. It’s a show by the Umbilical Brothers, a mime/ventriloquist/human soundbox group from Australia.
Mime for the 21st Century! Their innovation was to do mime with, well, sound. The sounds generally came from the member of the pair wasn’t being the “action guy”, all sorts of sounds and imitations. The “human soundbox” guy on Police Academy has nothing compared to their range and precision — the Umbilical Brothers sound effects had to sync up with what they were doing on stage. The most stunning bit of syncronization was at the end, when they were tap dancing, with the tap sounds being generated from their voice boxes.
They’ll be at the New Victory until late this month, in case anyone wants to see them.
The dearth of updates has been due to three things simultaneously coming to a head this month. The major one is a project at work with an April 28th deadline. Work is going well: I will curse VBscript as a horror, but have discovered ActivePerl, which comes ready with the Win32::ODBC libraries that have made scripting against MS SQLServer a dream. My Plan B was to compile DBD/DBI in Cygwin, which would have been problematic, since I’m not sure how I would have told the client how to install this. But they run ActivePerl, so I’m scripting against that.
The second thing is the sankyu test for jujitsu. This, too, has a deadline of April 28th. I feel I should graffiti up the back wall with handy tips such as “Relax”, “Bend your knees”, “Posture”, etc. The hint is to use lots of projections at the beginning, such as katana-nage. On the morning of April 19th, we’re supposed to work with Shihan for a bit, so he can see us before the test. It’ll be up at the Soldier’s Memorial on Riverside and 88th Street, so it’s just a quick walk up there.
The last thing, with a deadline before April 28th (say, April 15th), is the co-op application. It’s basically done except for the printing and the reference letters. I’ll take care of the latter today, and get, say, Itai, Scott and Joel to sign off on the Monday. Then I can make lots of photocopies (eight total) and send them off in a big FedEx on Tuesday or Wednesday.
Based on this Cooks.com recipe:
APPLE – TUNA TOSS
1 med. head lettuce, torn bite-size
1/3 c. chopped walnuts
2 c. diced apples, unpeeled
2 tsp. soy sauce
1 (6 1/2 oz.) can tuna, drained
1 (11 oz.) can mandarin oranges, drained
1/2 c. mayonnaise
1 tsp. lemon juice
In a large bowl, combine salad ingredients. Toss together. Combine the mayonnaise, soy sauce and lemon juice. Mix well. Toss with salad. Serves 6.
Modifications:
