Steve Gets A Life

reminiscing on firenze

i found my vaction journal from this summer. i stopped writing at the point just before andria, trissy, and i got lost trying to find la accademia in florence. i started writing again. it feels really good to remember all these places.
fortunately for this journal, i wrote up an outline on my old itinerary (and kept it around, thank goodness) so i can remember what happened on what day. keep the order straight. im sure i will leave stuff out, but thats what the journal is for, to spark those lost memories. ill remember getting lost near the Accademia forever, but just after reminiscing for a while, i remembered the room off to the side of David, where students of the Accademia have their sculpture on display. little pins sticking out where measurements were made to judge how accurate they were (or was it for something else?), or the africans selling posters just outside the door, packing up their wares everytime the police came strolling by.
that was the best vacation ever.
rick writes about meeting david

old times

eating breakfast with andria this morning. i've been drinking tea every morning for a while, but today andria made it. she served it to me in my old IC SC mug. its been a long time since ive used that cup. its funny how you can keep something around for a long time, but never use it.
its kinda nice. brings back good memories. fun office times, comraderie, etc. anyone else still use theirs?

weasly is our king

doing a bit of non-work this afternoon, i ran across a few interesting potter sites regarding a theory out there named "Knight2King"

essentially, this guy claims that Ron is actually Dumbledore, sent back in time, grown older. it sounds quite outrageous, but the evidence gathered is interesting.

what is more interesting, however, is the analogy of the chessboard in the first book (more). the two chess games symbolizing the two wars against Voldemort.

there are, of course, some arguments and rebuttals (and more) and it's a bit far-fetched, but so is the idea of a whomping willow.

what a loser

i haven't been blogging too much since i got back from vacation it seems. i wonder why. i think i've just been so busy getting the new place together and moving into a new office and all that, that i just don't have any pearls of wisdom (or pointless entries) that i think are worth sharing with everyone.

i also have been lagging in terms of researching all this stuff. i've seen a few more things about the new technologies out there, there's just so many acronyms i can handle at a time. OPML, FOAF, whatever. i think it would be pretty neat to work with that stuff, but i don't think there are a lot of people hiring new grads to think about social computing at the moment. who knows. all i know is that google sure isn't hiring me. jerks.

statistics can be counter-intuitive

i paste this here simply because i think its a great example (albeit probably overly-used) on how statistics are useful and sometimes enlightening and counter-intuitive. this was taken from the wikipedia
False positives in a medical test
False positives are a problem in any kind of test: no test is perfect, and sometimes the test will incorrectly report a positive result. For example, if a test for a particular disease is performed on a patient, then there is a chance (usually small) that the test will return a postive result even if the patient does not have the disease. The problem lies, however, not just in the chance of a false positive prior to testing, but determining the chance that a positive result is in fact a false positive. As we will demonstrate, using Bayes' theorem, if a condition is rare, then the majority of positive results may be false positives, even if the test for that condition is (otherwise) reasonably accurate.
Suppose that a test for a particular disease has a very high success rate:

• if a tested patient has the disease, the test accurately reports this, a 'positive', 99% of the time (or, with probability 0.99), and
  
• if a tested patient does not have the disease, the test accurately reports that, a 'negative', 95% of the time (i.e. with probability 0.95).

Suppose also, however, that only 0.1% of the population have that disease (i.e. with probability 0.001). We now have all the information required to use Bayes' theorem to calculate the probability that, given the test was positive, that it is a false positive.
Let A be the event that the patient has the disease, and B be the event that the test returns a positive result. Then, using the second form of Bayes' theorem (above), the probability of a true positive is

and hence the probability of a false positive is about  (1 - 0.019) = 0.981.
Despite the apparent high accuracy of the test, the incidence of the disease is so low (one in a thousand) that the vast majority of patients who test positive (98 in a hundred) do not have the disease. (Nonetheless, this is 20 times the proportion before we knew the outcome of the test! The test is not useless, and re-testing may improve the reliability of the result.) In this case, Bayes' theorem helps show that the accuracy of tests for rare conditions must be very high in order to produce reliable results from a single test, due to the possibility of false positives.

"terra rap" hits the UK

from the plastic article describing:
The lyrics brag about the attack on the World Trade Center, claim that Bush and Blair will be "thrown inna fire," condemn a range of Arab and Western leaders as "dirty infidels" and generally exhort Muslims to battle.
apart from the obvious concerns raised by music that exhorts anyone to battle, my inner, paranoid, privacy/security-advocate cringes at the sentance:
My apologies for being unable to find the actual website where you can order the video, but if I had, would you really want to take a chance on clicking the link?
take a chance? like, are we scared to be labeled terrorists for watching that video? well, im scared that im expected to be scared of watching a video, thats for sure. think about it.

rumble rumble

i just heard a good 5 seconds of continuous thunder. i dont think ive heard thunder like that in years. not in santa barbara, thats for sure. its raining pretty hard now, i can see the grey concrete of the library is streaked with near-black wet lines. one gutter is broken and a river is gushing from the bottom rail of a 5th story window in a waterfall to the ground. the trees are all drooping, looking sad. i know they're happy though.
just below the window is my bike. that i have to ride home on. whoops. i can't believe that i wanted to ride this morning instead of taking the bus. didn't bother to look at the weather report, serves me right. on the irony front, andria and i had a bit of a tiff this morning on the very topic of riding bikes or taking the bus. if i had only thought to watch the weather this morning, all of that could have been avoided. ok, not really, but it makes ya think.
the rain does strange things to one's mood. lots of people get depressed, many get excited. i seem to just introvert (is that a verb?) a bit more. maybe its the "downtempo musique" ive got on iTunes radio right now, or maybe its the self-conscious entry i just read at WWdN, but it got me writing. and thats always a good thing.

24

as cool as the tv show 24 is (season 1), Dennis Hopper's accent really sucks. I mean, come on. He sounds like dexter.

dr steve ?

if i really want to get into security, do i need a PhD?
should i go back to school? i had an offer to enter the program when i left with my MS. it seems like it might be the best way to really enter the security world, but what about everything else?
can i handle the entrance exams? i mean, i just squeaked by my undergrad on purpose, avoiding things like compiler design and programming languages (well, i took the courses, just conveniently forgot everything in them)
and how long would it take? can i really put myself through 6 more years of school? of course, i'd be in santa barbara, so it couldn't be that bad i guess. but damn it would be expensive. and i can tell you, grad students do not make the big bucks. maybe andria would be my schoolteacher sugar mama ;)
reading about recent events at my old stomping grounds makes me feel like im missing out on cool stuff. a distributed CTF game? awesome. and UCSB kicked ass. right on.
anyways. just feeling directionless as usual.

so true

Family IT support solution

wil puts it in perspective

from wil wheaton dot net

"Yeah, it was . . . but it was the 80s so we didn't notice. We were distracted by the awful hair and leather ties."

"Yeah, what were you thinking?" he asked.

"Uhm. I don't know, but I can promise you that all your friends who wear their ironic trucker hats cocked to the side on their heads will have this conversation with their own kids in fifteen years."

tell it will, tell it.

Lame & Often

Is it just me, or is Law & Order on way too often?
maybe its just cause we only get NBC.

isreal article

as much as i hate talking about politics, i recommend reading this article. Written by phil greenspun, an MIT professor of Computer Science, its a pretty good look at some of the problems in the middle-east. apparently philg either does his homework or knows his history, as he cites several events and facts ive never heard of before.

most of all, he makes interesting connections between mid-east violence and othere seemingly non-related issues like Nazi Germany, Sprint telecom's executives, and Roman emperors. his work is always a good read and this is no exception. of course, it is laden with nice photographs (all taken by him, of course. he also happens to be a great photographer. what a jerk).

also, be sure to see his other political writings and those on many other topics. and be sure to visit (repeatedly) photo.net

Blaming Zodo's

Watched Bowling for Columbine tonight.

Wow. Tobin wrote about the "culture of fear" mentioned in that movie before, but i didnt realize how well it was really presented. The whole comparison of the US and other countries, trying to determine what exactly caused the rediculous nature of gun violence in the US was really thought-provoking. I never knew the numbers before, which really do help. The ratio of guns to people in Canada and USA (similar) compared to the amount of gun violence is stunning.

The bit with Marilyn Manson was really good. as much as i dont really dig his image (or his music i guess, not horrible, but not my thing), every time i hear him speak about something serious, i respect him more and more. he's a smart guy and knows what he's doing. The cycle of fear and consumption is so well presented, from home security systems (vs unlocked canadian front doors), y2k preparedness, and especially guns.
The finale with Heston made the movie. Watching "Moses himself" stumble over his words when confronted directly was fantastic. The bit with the Columbine victims and KMart stopping bullet sales was awesome as well. Awesome as in "instilling awe." I was amazed that they actually made that change. I know the media presence was the only reason, but who cares, it still worked. I just hope it remained in effect. There's a KMart commercial on right now: "right here, right now."

There was so much in that movie, i hate that i can't remember all of it. Im gonna have to watch it again, maybe buy it. ya, probably.
shit, maybe ill even get a book or two of moore's.

The Patriot Act

Every time I hear about the patriot act, I can't believe it was ever passed. This time is no different. Taken from Schneier's cryptogram it raises a good point about how this law is being used for reasons it was not meant to be used for. A good case of poorly worded law, if you ask me. Here it is:

The Patriot Act and Mission Creep

One of the problems with laws is that the crimes that justify their passage are not always the crimes they are used against. In the United States, the RICO (Racketeering Influenced Corrupt Organizations) law was passed to help fight organized crime, but was used against anti-abortion protesters and relatively minor drug offenders. And the Patriot Act, passed to help fight terrorism, is being used against a variety of other crimes.

According to a TRAC report, definitions of "terrorism" have broadened considerably. The AP reports that the Justice Department admits that the Patriot Act has been used "to crack down on currency smugglers and seize money hidden overseas by alleged bookies, con artists, and drug dealers." So someone with a pipe bomb in California is suddenly charged with "terrorism using a weapon of mass destruction," and a North Carolina man who had a methamphetamine lab is suddenly charged with breaking a new state law barring the manufacture of chemical weapons. The Justice Department has even been conducting seminars on how to use the new wiretapping provisions in the Patriot Act in non-terrorism cases.

It's a big deal. The guy with the meth lab could get 12 years to life in prison for a crime that, under the old laws, was only worth about six months. The Patriot Act was hurriedly passed less than two months after 9/11 with almost no debate. That was a mistake, but it echoed the national mood about terrorism. Having the law applied broadly against common criminals is something that we shouldn't do lightly. Security is a trade-off, and the trade-offs in the Patriot Act were extreme. Maybe treating drug dealers like terrorists is something Americans want. But we should debate it in public, and not let the Justice Department sneak it by us.

Report: "Criminal Enforcement Against Terrorists and Spies in the Year After the 9/11 Attacks":

so is it no big deal that they're giving meth dealers 12 to life instead of 6 months? from a certain standpoint, maybe not. what about someone who is wrongfully sentanced for such a crime? maybe under past laws they would have served a few years fighting the decision, what if their accused crime was covered by this act? they could be considered a potential terrorist and possibly executed. who knows.
The point is, laws that have been on the books for years are being overruled by this singular, hastily worded, frankly outdated, law of fear. If someone is caught making a bomb, they should be tried for making bombs, not for being a "potential terrorist."

I'm not even getting into the wiretaps on suspected terrorists without courts approval mess.