joel's thoughts

For a little more insight on what’s going on in our lives right now, more than “hey, we’re on vacation,” go read Andi’s post from yesterday.

We’re on vacation this week at my in-laws, so we probably won’t be posting as much as normal (whatever that is), even though I still have to log on every day and clean up the glut of comment spam I keep getting from time to time. Plague hasn’t fully left yet, and the kids are having occasional trouble sleeping which makes everyone tired the next day. Ah well, such is life…

Plague. Fever of 100.6 yesterday morning, 100.9 this morning. I already got sick this year. What’s up with that?

I haven’t posted much about this issue yet, but touch-screen voting is something that concerns me deeply. Much has been said in various media and such about the issue, but I recently came across a very good post by Bruce Schneier, a well-regarded expert in the areas of cryptography and computer security, so I thought I might share it with you. He clearly lays out the major issues and concerns, and sticks with clear non-technical language. If you have any desire to know whether or not our current election process can be trusted as accurate and reliable, or just want to know what all the fuss is about, I highly recommend reading his post.

Firefox, the relatively new browser from the Mozilla project, has reached its 1.0 release. Congratulations and many thanks to those involved. This is really a great piece of software, and it’s evident by the amount of attention it’s gotten in the press as well as the fact that mozilla.org’s web and ftp servers and mirrors are getting the tar pounded out of them today.

Of course I have to do things the hard way, so I downloaded the source code and recompiled it this morning :). This is one of the great things about Open Source Software — you don’t like something about a program you use? Change it! Granted, you need various amounts of knowledge and the right tools, but the same applies to working on your car.

In this case, all I wanted to do was get rid of anti-aliased fonts. The default builds of firefox for linux are configured to use the Xft font subsystem, which by default uses anti-aliased fonts. When they first included this it was a big Feature that the browser Finally Had. Well, I don’t want it. Maybe it’s just me, maybe it’s just my laptop screen, but to me anti-aliased fonts just look fuzzy, and make my eyes go buggy after awhile. Plenty of graphic designers and such will no doubt tell me I’m wrong, and that anti-aliasing is the greatest thing since the typewriter. But hey, they can have it all they want. Just don’t force me to use it if I don’t have to.

So back on version 0.9.1, I compiled my own version of firefox with Xft disabled to see what it looked like, and it was wonderful! Text was clear and crisp. Just to see if I could avoid the trouble of re-compiling every time, I figured out how to disable anti-aliasing in Xft itself and went back to the default firefox build. Once. It looked horrible. So it’s re-compilation for me, but that’s okay. It only takes half an hour to build ;). And I’ve been running on 0.9.1 ever since, regardless of subsequent point releases and such, mostly out of laziness. But now that 1.0 is out I figured I might as well make the move. Now that I’ve done so I’ve gotten more familiar with the process than the first time around, so it’ll be easier for future releases.

Once we get moved to our new host I’ll post links to download my rebuilt version, along with build instructions if you want to do it yourself, in case anyone’s interested. I’m guessing most people using firefox on linux are happy with their fonts as-is, but there may be a few fellow renegades out there…

I think I’m about ready to move us to a new hosting outfit, which will mean a new blogging package, which will mean a little time to settle in and get comfortable. Should be interesting; hope it doesn’t hurt too much :P. Anyway, changes are a’comin, so stay tuned…

Waited an hour and ten minutes in line to vote this morning, and no sir, I would rather not use the optional touch-screen voting machine, thank you very much. Chatted with a few nice people in line while I waited, and had a great commute to work afterward. Listened to the radio on the way in and heard them interviewing some political talking head or other. They commented on how this year we seem to have a very strong political Left and a very strong political Right, but no strong Center. They asked him why he thought that was, and he replied that many of the current issues, particularly the social ones, are rather clean dividers for which there is no middle ground — abortion, gay marriage, etc. Thus, as he said, “You can’t half-abort a baby,” a comment I found somewhat amusing in its astuteness.

In any case, if you live in the US (which I know isn’t all of you) and haven’t voted yet, go vote. If you like the guy who’s in there already, he won’t be around for long unless you help him out. If you don’t like him and prefer another guy, he’s not going anywhere unless you speak up. And if you can’t decide or couldn’t care less, for cryin’ out loud get out here and help the rest of us make up our collective mind and get it over with!

[update 12:48 pm] I just read an interesting interview-ish article over at the Guardian [UK] about novelist Tom Wolfe, author of Bonfire of the Vanities (among other things), and his take on the election and the overall political climate here. Rather insightful, that man. Yes, I suppose if I were a good little blogger I’d give you a tantalizing snippet or two, but I’m afraid I haven’t the time after having read it myself ;).

After 86 years, the Red Sox finally managed to go all the way. Good for them, congratulations, high-fives all around, and all that.

Now quit yer’ whinin’ about that stinkin’ curse, or we’ll make you wait 86 more for your next one!

I am, after all, still a Yankees fan ;).

Wow.

What else can I say? Growing up in New Jersey, I’ve long been a Yankees fan. Not the rabid honorary-Bronx-resident sort, but I occasionally check on them through the season, making sure they’re first in the division where they should be ;). When the postseason rolls around I start to pay a little more attention, follow how they’re doing and root for them the whole way through. And true to the New York – Boston tradition, I’ve always had a little bit of guilty pleasure when the Red Sox get their hopes up and the Yanks put them in their place.

But this time it’s the Yankees who will be staying home Saturday night. Granted, they’re not the team they were four years ago, and I shudder to think what havoc George Steinbrenner will wreak this winter. And I confess I’m generally a “revenge-loser”. If another team beats my team in the playoffs, I’ll root for their next opponent to shut them down. But given the almost morbid fascination professional sports has with history and statistics, consider:

• First major league baseball team in history to come back from a 3-0 deficit in a best-of-seven series
• Haven’t won the World Series since 1918, and only had four chances since then (’46, ’67, ’75, ’86)
• Were in this exact same spot last year with their bitter rivals, the Yankees, and lost
• After the momentum turned this time in games 4 and 5, they soundly and clearly won games 6 and 7. No controversy or anything.

No, this time I have to hand it to them. I’m disappointed in my team, to be sure, and the Yankees will always be my team, but I have to say the Red Sox deserved this. They had guts, they put their hearts into it, and they pulled off an impossible comeback against no less than the New York Yankees. Good for them.

And as a Yankees fan, I’m not ashamed to say I’ll be rooting for Boston Saturday night.

Back in February I posted about some remarkable developments in the area of cybernetics, and mentioned the possibility of allowing people with paralysis to perform complex tasks. Well, here we are only eight months later (eight months!!) and that wall has been breached. In an FDA-approved trial, a company called Cyberkinetics has implanted 100 sensors in the brain of a 25-year old quadriplegic with wires running to a computer. Just by thinking, the patient is able to “control a computer well enough to operate a TV, open e-mail and play Pong with 70% accuracy.” That’s pretty incredible. The article clarifies that this is obviously still at a very early stage, likening the technology to “the first pacemaker in 1950, which was the size of a boombox and delivered jolts through wires implanted in the heart.” For one thing, they’re only capturing a small part of the signals the brain is sending. For another, there’s still the wires-poking-through-the-skull issue.

Not surprisingly the question of medical ethics comes up, and our friend Art Caplan gets a few quotes about how the brain isn’t “some sacrosanct organ you can’t touch” and that we shouldn’t hold up this kind of research for those who fear a slippery slope of body modifications and human enhancements. And this time, I couldn’t agree with him more. This needs to be monitored, to be sure, but the potential vastly outweighs the risk that some mad scientist is going to start churning out cyborgs or something.