::::: : the wood : davidrobins.com

My name is David Robins: Christian, lead developer (resume), writer, photographer, runner, libertarian (voluntaryist), and student.

This is also my son David Geoffrey Robins' site.

Thus begins the snow isolation

News ·Wednesday December 24, 2008 @ 01:09 EST (link)

20081217: Worked from home due to snow forecast and ice on roads; working from home for rest of week then off next week, probably week after too. (Started snowing heavily in the afternoon.)

20081218: Still snowing (10"-12" accumulation at 10pm) in "The Island Nation of Duvall" (as someone on the work Duvall mailing list put it), possible high winds this weekend.

Watched Saw (second viewing, or perhaps third): they try to present Jigsaw as a rational actor, "punishing" people, and giving them a way out of his trap. But I don't find him consistent, nor does he have standing to punish (he's not God, he has no injury if people aren't sufficiently appreciating life, despite the fact that he himself is dying). Lawrence saying that "Jigsaw Killer" is a misnomer because he never directly kills anyone is sheer sophistry.

20081220: Grades are in (supposed to be available on MyUW on the 17th, but they weren't available until today; until now the grade was "X" meaning not yet submitted); I got a 4.0 in Accessibility (I have no idea of the distribution; perhaps everyone did), and my 1.0 colloquium credit (colloquia are pass/fail). It's good news, but tough to maintain especially with more mathematical and programming-intensive courses, like I expect next term's Programming Languages to be. At least now I can put in for my tuition benefit at work.

Power went out for a half minute or so at 2345. minas-tirith decided to help out by turning off ip_forward (what the blazes?). Fixed it up in /etc/sysctl.conf; might have been due to the baselayout-2 change?

Having read the Wikipedia definition of paleoconservatism, I cheerfully identify as one, despising the managerial state; I suppose "paleoconservative libertarian" most accurately describes me (which is why I favor the Constitution Party, although I think the Libertarian Party has more of a chance of getting a candidate elected, so I support them too).

20081221: The promised windstorm never materialized (Honey wasted a lot of worrying). Sent Christmas gifts (money, since we didn't get out to pick gifts and postage is expensive for packages anyway) to (parents and younger siblings in) our families. Honey's relatives in Pullman finally got back to us on coming here for Christmas, begging off because of the weather.

11 o'clock news says Duvall got 19" of snow (up to 23" including overnight), more than anywhere else in the Seattle area (Seattle itself only got 9½).

20081223: Happy Festivus: shoveled the driveway out, took about three hours (1300-1450), went faster when a neighbor loaned me a snow shovel; but even after getting the car out, no dice; the local kids had been sledding on the road all day and it was too slick to get up and the library, one of our destinations, was closing at 1500 anyway. Argh.

Started watching Babylon 5; it's rather comical; bad acting ("Why, why… is the acting so bad?"), bad technology and special effects (you'd never guess it was made in 1993, contemporary with the end of Star Trek: The Next Generation (which ended in 1994).

Books finished: Technical Analysis of the Financial Markets, Into the Labyrinth, Day Trading the Currency Market, The Seventh Gate.

DVDs finished: Friends: The Complete Second Season, Paycheck.

Ammunition stamping: dumbasses and doubletalk

Political, Guns ·Saturday December 20, 2008 @ 22:41 EST (link)

I'd heard about this before but my father-in-law brought it to our attention. Here's the story. Once upon a time, an anti-gun businessman spent about $200k to create an ammunition-stamping system that would stamp serial numbers on batches of ammunition. He went around to ammunition manufacturers and tried to peddle it to them. They put their heads in their hands and thought: hmmm, should we pay money for this system that will increase our costs and decrease our profits? Since they're going concerns and not charities run by idiots (i.e. they're not US automakers), they laughed the guy out of their offices. But he vowed to get even, and bought up a lobbying firm or two who took some politicians out to expensive lunches and persuaded them that they should make this system law—for the good of the children, to bring dead victims back from the grave, and because criminals that will use a gun to commit crimes will certainly adhere to this law. After all, buying politicians was cheaper than employing a sales team or reading books, becoming informed, and building something the market actually wanted.

Passing a dumbass law like this would:

criminalize handloaders
criminalize private ammunition sales
criminalize importing ammunition (unless foreign companies also employ this useless coding, which is unlikely
criminalize storing non-coded ammunition after 2011
further increase size and cost of government
do nothing to reduce crime
inordinately increase the cost of ammunition for legal users (probably as designed)
criminalize hitting a bullet with a hammer and removing the mark
further reduce privacy and increase government surveillance of what are becoming not free citizens, but subjects.

You can get more propaganda from ammunitionaccountability.org (intentionally not linked). They don't tell you about states where it's already failed, of course, such as Arizona. In Washington it seems to have died in committee (we can hope). Let your legislators know that you oppose this attempt at deprivation of liberties in the strongest terms, and that their support for it means the loss of your vote.

Books finished: Investing For Dummies, Fifth Edition, Short Term Trading In the New Stock Market, Stock Market Strategies That Work, How To Make Money In Stocks, The Hand of Chaos.

DVDs finished: M*A*S*H : Season #2, Back to the Future: The Complete Trilogy, Saw, Fracture, Saw II, Saw III, Saw IV.

Refactoring with the Template Toolkit

News, Technical, Guns, Trading ·Tuesday December 16, 2008 @ 15:37 EST (link)

… Government policies supporting homeownership (Fannie, Freddie, Community [Reinvestment] Act, pro-mortgage tax policies, …) caused a massive over-investment in housing. So massive that it could end up being the largest capital misallocation of our lifetimes.

—MK on the Investment Club list (MS)

20081210: All About Investing (Faerber): not very deep, nothing about analysis, but I learned a little more about futures and a lot more about bonds, since I'd hardly read anything on them yet. I'll still focus on equities, but it's good to have broad knowledge.

I'd put a few books on (artificial) neural networks on hold at the library, and Honey picked some up for me today. Baby Teacher: Nurturing Neural Networks From Birth to Age Five (Rebecca Shore, ISBN 0-8108-4284-X) sounded like a colorfully-titled book on training neural networks, but it was actually about real babies and real neurons; go figure.

20081210: McDowell's The ART of Trading is just an advertisement for his software, filled with useless bromides, lies, and cheap tricks to convince you that his program doesn't suck. Title sounds good (no wonder it has a lot of holds on it) but "ART" is actually an acronym for his system. So much for that.

20081211: Bad driver: WA 438 PBB, Blue Honda Civic (?) (late model, with silver-backed Honda logo), at around 1850: queue-jumping on Novelty Hill, and again at the WA-203 roundabout. Almost collided with the guy in front of me on the Novelty Hill attempt, so I had to let the twit in.

20081212: Gave Honey her Wii—a few days before her birthday, so she could learn it before her friends are here Saturday (turns out none of them could make it). She played until about 0300, but I hacked on my book tracking system until about 0400. Started with a plan to add topics (in a similar way as I did to my log), but ended up playing around with Template Toolkit, and using it for the book list view (existing, alphabetical by author last name) and a books read view (new, ordered chronologically by date read, internal only). All checked into Subversion and running smoothly.

20081213: Went to the gun show (Puyallup), picked up some Glock magazines (so-called "high capacity", which has as much meaning as "assault weapon"): two extended 33rd (made for the automatic G18, but fit semi-automatic standard 9mms, although they stick out, hence "extended") two standard 17rd, and 1000 rds. MagTech 115 gr. FMJ ammunition. Worked on this log (I'm still back on Alaska, August 26, which puts me almost four months behind). Imported photos on my camera (Luke Williams' goodbye party, Thanksgiving, and Honey opening her Wii from Thursday); realized I hadn't installed ImageMagick on the new machine, so went and did that, then had to fix the Gentoo USE flags (/etc/portage/package.use) so it could read JPEGs, since i'd set fairly minimal global flags. Installed ExifTool to look at image creation dates (exiftool -CreateDate <file>).

20081216: Had roast beef and champagne for Honey's birthday. Changed flat (left rear) tire on Solara. Don't know how it happened; either some reprobate slashed it in the Microsoft garage or I picked something up either in the garage or later.

What warrants local news excitement

News ·Tuesday December 16, 2008 @ 12:48 EST (link)

So, after 15 years of living up here my take on what warrants local news excitement is as follows:

Lightning. Seriously, they will lead a newscast for lightning and severe thunderstorms. Back in North Carolina we used to call this "a summer afternoon."
Snow.
Bright sunlight.

—JT, Canucks at Microsoft list

Books finished: Mexifornia, The Little Book of Common Sense Investing, A Mathematician Plays the Stock Market.

DVDs finished: Shanghai Noon, Dreamcatcher.

Welcoming atheists to the mountain state

Theology ·Friday December 12, 2008 @ 22:19 EST (link)

Someone has posted a sign to welcome atheists to West Virginia. It makes a nice reply to recent events (Christmas display follies) in Washington state.

The sign says:

Attention: Lunatic Atheists & their Lawyers
Anti-God is Anti-American
Anti-American is Treason
Traitors lead to Civil War
Rev. E. F. Briggs, PO Box 9066, Monongah, WV 26554

Books finished: All About Investing, The Art of Trading, The 7 Deadly Sins of Investing, Serpent Mage.

A modern parable

Political ·Tuesday December 9, 2008 @ 13:16 EST (link)

A Japanese company (Toyota) and an American company (General Motors Corporation) decided to have a canoe race on the Missouri River. Both teams practiced long and hard to reach their peak performance before the race.

On the big day, the Japanese won by a mile.

The Americans, very discouraged and depressed, decided to investigate the reason for the crushing defeat. A management team made up of senior management was formed to investigate and recommend appropriate action.

Their conclusion was the Japanese had 8 people rowing and 1 person steering, while the American team had 7 people steering and 2 people rowing. Feeling a deeper study was in order; American management hired a consulting company and paid them a large amount of money for a second opinion.

They advised, of course, that too many people were steering the boat, while not enough people were rowing.

Not sure of how to utilize that information, but wanting to prevent another loss to the Japanese, the rowing team's management structure was totally reorganized to 4 steering supervisors, 2 area steering superintendents and 1 assistant superintendent steering manager.

They also implemented a new performance system that would give the 2 people rowing the boat greater incentive to work harder. It was called the 'Rowing Team Quality First Program,' with meetings, dinners and free pens for the rowers. There was discussion of getting new paddles, canoes and other equipment, extra vacation days for practices and bonuses. The pension program was trimmed to 'equal the competition' and some of the resultant savings were channeled into morale boosting programs and teamwork posters.

The next year the Japanese won by two miles.

Humiliated, the American management laid-off one rower, halted development of a new canoe, sold all the paddles, and canceled all capital investments for new equipment. The money saved was distributed to the Senior Executives as bonuses.

The next year, try as he might, the lone designated rower was unable to even finish the race (having no paddles), so he was laid off for unacceptable performance, all canoe equipment was sold and the next year's racing team was outsourced to India.

Sadly, the End.

* * *

Here's something else to think about: GM has spent the last thirty years moving all its factories out of the US, claiming they can't make money paying American wages.

Toyota has spent the last thirty years building more than a dozen plants inside the US.

The last quarter's results: Toyota makes $4 billion in profits while GM racked up $39 billion in losses.

GM folks are still scratching their heads, and collecting bonuses… and now wants the Government to bail them out.

Books finished: Trade Your Way To Financial Freedom, Trade Your Way To Financial Freedom (2nd Edition).

DVDs finished: Legends Of The Fall, Thomas Crown Affair.

Tumultuous MythTV upgrades

News, Technical, Work ·Saturday December 6, 2008 @ 23:38 EST (link)

20081128: Fixed DVD scanning system to use Michael's Movie Mayhem instead of the defunct DVDSpot.com. Works fine; I wish MMM had the runtime on the page, since the lack means an extra request to IMDb to fetch it. But I'm happy I can get all the fields I was using previously, and the cover images. I did some refactoring of the code; it's all very tidy.

20081129: Upgraded PostgreSQL to 8.3 and ported database over. Went to Woodinville library with Honey. Finished my last two peer research paper comments for Accessibility. Fixed IMAP server: /etc/ssl/certs had some dangling links to which courier-authlib objected (and I removed the authpipe library since it couldn't find its program; it wasn't necessary anyway).

20081202: Still have turkey left; had it every day except yesterday, so far. (It ended up lasting us about six days.)

20081203: Finished colloquia reviews for school (4, plus 4 watched and rated but not reviewed). Bit of a rush at the end, oh well, no harm.

20081205: Holiday party. Parked at 6th and Oliver. Left work 1830, arrived about 2000, about 30 minutes to walk to the Space Needle (turns out we could probably have parked closer, but I didn't know how busy it would be); left around 2200 (much faster going home). Honey wasn't wearing very comfortable shoes, so she actually took them off on the way back, although I offered to pick her up at the Needle.

20081206: (Early hours.) Upgraded kernel on cirith-ungol (MythTV box) to 2.6.26-gentoo-r3. A lot of things broke, cascadingly: LVM now wanted baselayout-2, which put a lot of things in the wrong runlevels: networking wasn't included in default, so it didn't get started; checkfs was put in default (instead of boot), so it kept failing to check the root filesystem since it was already mounted and couldn't be remounted read-only. I tried to set the hostname in /etc/conf.d/hostname to localhost to appease Apache, but apparently MythTV stores its configuration by hostname, so to appease both I set the hostname back to cirith-ungol and ensured cirith-ungol was in /etc/hosts (as an alias 127.0.0.1, localhost). I still plan to do an emerge -Duav world… optimistic or foolhardy, I don't know. Time to kick back and watch survivor, I've been at this for five hours.

20081207: More updates to cirith-ungol: some conflicts (had to apply a patch from the Gentoo bug database to xine-lib so it would work with current ImageMagick, due to an API change; other programs depended on the new version, so there was a slot conflict); the LIRC update clobbered the numeric keys for my remote (since it used "One", "Two" etc. rather than "1", "2") but I'd backed it up and just restored my aliases. E2fsprogs and E2fsprogs-lib replaced ss and com_err, so I removed those, and broke wget (so I couldn't install packages any more; it also broke ssh and links). Fortunately Samba was still running and I could download the E2fsprogs packages on another machine and copy them over (to /usr/portage/distfiles).

I also had to apply a linux-headers patch to ivtv-utils (download patch, cd to /usr/portage/media-tv/ivtv-utils/files, apply patch to create a .patch file and patch the .ebuild to use it, and run ebuild <path to .ebuild> manifest to update the manifest file).

Oi… now MythTV comes up with a blank screen. The theme background is there, but no text or selector. Probably freezing rather than a font issue, since the background graphic is there. Eventually turns out that it could have been a number of things, one of which is that WindowMaker was reparenting itself to mythfrontend (!) and then mythfrontend was waiting for it (strace showed it in a wait4 syscall). Stopped that by removing WindowMaker from .xinitrc, but it'll need to come back if I want to use various emulators that need window widgets.

(By the way: this is certainly all a pain in the rear. But it's all diagnosable and fixable. If I was running Windows or another closed system, I'd be completely and utterly screwed.)

… Now mythfrontend can't talk to mythbackend (readStringList/writeStringList errors in the log). That seemed to magically go away. Had some log directory access permission issues; fixed. Also some database permission issues: apparently MythTV can't use an empty password, and if you set one, it acts as if you asked it to kindly make up a completely random password and pass it in.

On books: I'm reading Weis and Hickman's Death Gate Cycle, a heptad of books about a universe sundered into four elemental realms; great series; we got all the books at Duvall Books (used bookstore) or Half Price Books.

Technical Analysis by Kirkpatrick and Dahlquist is an excellent book; very rigorous treatment of the various technical indicators, although it doesn't go much into candlesticks (but there are plenty of other good books for that).

Books finished: Technical Analysis, Fundamentals of the Stock Market, A Bold Fresh Piece of Humanity, Elven Star, Fire Sea.

DVDs finished: The Untouchables, Girl, Interrupted, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Friends: The Complete First Season, M*A*S*H Season One Collectors Edition.

Catching wild pigs

Political ·Friday November 28, 2008 @ 05:05 EST (link)

A chemistry professor in a large college had some exchange students in the class. One day while the class was in the lab the Professor noticed one young man (exchange student) who kept rubbing his back, and stretching as if his back hurt.

The professor asked the young man what was the matter. The student told him he had a bullet lodged in his back. He had been shot while fighting communists in his native country who were trying to overthrow his country's government and install a new communist government.

In the midst of his story he looked at the professor and asked a strange question. He asked, "Do you know how to catch wild pigs?"

The professor thought it was a joke and asked for the punchline. The young man said this was no joke. "You catch wild pigs by finding a suitable place in the woods and putting corn on the ground. The pigs find it and begin to come everyday to eat the free corn. When they are used to coming every day, you put a fence down one side of the place where they are used to coming. When they get used to the fence, they begin to eat the corn again and you put up another side of the fence. They get used to that and start to eat again. You continue until you have all four sides of the fence up with a gate in The last side. The pigs, who are used to the free corn, start to come through the gate to eat, you slam the gate on them and catch the whole herd.

"Suddenly the wild pigs have lost their freedom. They run around and around inside the fence, but they are caught. Soon they go back to eating the free corn. They are so used to it that they have forgotten how to forage in the woods for themselves, so they accept their captivity."

—Seen on CLAMS (also).

Thankful that the turkey turned out well

News ·Thursday November 27, 2008 @ 22:14 EST (link)

Cooked Thanksgiving dinner: turkey and the works. Not as hard as we thought. Ended up doing the stuffing on the stove, since most (online) sources advised it (bought some Mrs. Cubbison's, added fresh celery, and peanuts; turned out very well). The turkey we thawed out about a day and a half before; the removables were in a bag, which made them easy to take out; we used an aluminum throwaway roasting pan, and put it in for I believe five hours, occasionally basting it with an oil, water, and herb mixture, and covering it with a foil tent at the end. No problem cutting it with my electric knife, either. Everything (as well as the turkey and stuffing, we had Brussels sprouts, (boiled) potatoes, corn, and cranberry sauce for the turkey) was delicious!

Technical trading and charts

News, Guns, Trading ·Thursday November 27, 2008 @ 20:34 EST (link)

20081106: Went shooting at Wade's with Philip P. from work @ 1800; I paid the lane fee, he let me shoot his AR-15 modified to shoot .22LR. I'd never shot a .22 before; recoil was negligible; it was a lot of fun. Definitely plan to get an AR-15.

20081107: I've been steadily absorbing information about trading (skimmed the For Dummies book below; didn't learn anything new, but it is what it is). Good series on reading candlestick charts from StockCharts.com's ChartSchool.

Technical trading is trading based on market data (price and volume and derived indicators, such as moving averages); oppose fundamental trading (which uses company financial statements and news), although that's not to say that both can't be used together. Technicals appear to lend themselves well to automation.

20081110: Ordered a Rock River Arms AR-15 (Elite CAR A4, with lightweight chrome-lined barrel). The place I got it from (in NH) is so backed up that I won't get it until February 2009, sadly, but I got a decent deal (also, no tax). Still debating whether I should order a second one; their value will go up immensely when that socialist Obama and his bleeping Democrats violate the 2nd Amendment and pass an assault weapons ban. Molon labe!

20081110: Read more about candlestick charts during class; it was interesting, but each presenter managed to say in an hour and a half (their half of the three hour class) what could have been said in fifteen minutes.

20081118: Sears guys came to fix our dryer, which died last week. Turns out it's a stuck button (not our fault), which they couldn't even temporarily unstick, so they're ordering a part and a repairman will be coming back December 2 (sooner if the part arrives and we call and get an earlier appointment). Fortunately, and very surprisingly, we're covered under some warranty we bought.

20081124: Presentation day in Accessibility class. Presentations had to be short (we had 16+ people in three hours, meaning about 10 minutes per person, with maybe one or two questions; the TA managed time and showed time left). I felt my presentation went well (and someone told me they liked it in the CSE lounge before next class), although I was somewhat nervous. The class was somewhat interesting because of the range of topics. Afterward, for the rest of our grade, we have to comment (on the class discussion forum) on at least two final reports (final reports were also due today), e.g. ask a question or explore an avenue.

Books finished: Investing Online For Dummies, Dragon Wing, Financial Freedom Through Electronic Day Trading, Liberalism is a Mental Disorder, Frankenstein.

DVDs finished: Pleasantville.