I Get Email

Apparently, having my name in CPAN is a sign that I know everything about Perl, SOAP, XML, and security.

Unless someone can come up with a legitimate reason to send 5000 authentication requests to a web server (including an explanation of why that’s not a brain-damaged way to solve the problem at hand), I’m going to assume that this guy is a wannabe script kiddie.

This isn’t the first time someone’s asked me to , but this time around, I don’t feel like toying with him. Script kiddies are people too.

Then again, so’s Soylent Green (as put it).

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Déjà entendu

From today’s news:

In an interview broadcast Friday, Bush said there could well be a long-term U.S. presence in Iraq, but it would be on the invitation of the Iraqi government.

Now, where have I heard that before? Oh, right. I think it was August 20, 1968:

Although on the night of the invasion, the Czechoslovak Presidium declared that Warsaw Pact troops had crossed the border without knowledge of the ÄŒSSR Government, the Soviet Press printed an unsigned request, allegedly by Czechoslovak party and state leaders, for “immediate assistance, including assistance with armed forces.”

Looks like the USSR won the Cold War after all.

Old Media

Things I Miss About LPs

  • Big cover art. You could spend hours looking at the details in the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, or feel overwhelmed by the lips on The Cure’s Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me. They really have to be seen at 12″×12″ for full effect.
  • Double albums. If 12″×12″ cover art was good, then opening up a record for a 24″×12″ inner image was even better.
  • Innovative packaging. I know, the important part is the music, but still, I liked things like the zipper on the Stones’ Sticky Fingers, or Styx’s Cornerstone, which opened up like a book, or textured covers, and the like.
  • Occasionally seeing a note or the recording engineer’s initials scratched in the master disk, by the label.

Things I Don’t Miss About LPs

  • Skipping.
  • Scratches, pops.
  • Quality loss after repeated playing.
  • Having to stop in the middle of the album to turn the record over.
  • Damn cheap paper sleeves that tear if you’re not oh-so-careful when putting the record back.
  • Plastic sleeves that stick closed with static cling, making it impossible to get the record back in.
  • Having to clean the record surface and/or needle before playing.
  • Having to be careful not to dance too hard next to the record player, or bump the furniture, especially while recording.
  • Size: can’t just bring a dozen LPs to listen to while on vacation.
  • Wondering why the music sounds like Alvin and the Chipmunks, then realizing that I forgot to switch the record player from 45 to 33 RPM (or alternately, wondering when Chrissie Hynde started singing baritone.)

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Airport Security: Annoying or Pointless?

First, here’s an opinion piece by Patrick Smith at the NYT’s “Jet Lagged” weblog, pointing out a lot of the problems with airport security procedures.

At every concourse checkpoint you’ll see a bin or barrel brimming with contraband containers taken from passengers for having exceeded the volume limit. Now, the assumption has to be that the materials in those containers are potentially hazardous. If not, why were they seized in the first place? But if so, why are they dumped unceremoniously into the trash? They are not quarantined or handed over to the bomb squad; they are simply thrown away.

We are not fighting materials, we are fighting the imagination and cleverness of the would-be saboteur.

If you’ve read that and gotten your blood pressure up, you won’t be doing your cardiovascular system any favors by reading this article by the always-excellent Bruce Schneier about a study (well, a meta-study, really) by the Harvard School of Public Health that went looking for evidence of the effectiveness of TSA screening procedures.

I’m going to disagree with Schneier on one point: he summarizes the study as

Surprising nobody, a new study concludes that airport security isn’t helping

From the articles he links to, I’d say it’d be more fair to say “Airport security procedures are costing us a lot, and we don’t even know whether they’re doing any good.”

But he’s right when he says:

The goal isn’t to confiscate prohibited items. The goal is to prevent terrorism on airplanes. When the TSA confiscates millions of lighters from innocent people, that’s a security failure. The TSA is reacting to non-threats. The TSA is reacting to false alarms. Now you can argue that this level of failures is necessary to make people safer, but it’s certainly not evidence that people are safer.

(Update: Punkwalrus imagines the future of air travel, in grainy black and white, with cheesy upbeat music.)

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Different Ways of Looking at Sound

I’m in the middle of ripping my cassette collection to MP3, and using Audacity to clean up the recordings, split them into individual tracks, and so forth.

One thing I’ve learned is that displaying a track as “Spectrum” rather than the default “Waveform” can be very useful in figuring out where one track ends and the next one starts, especially when the first track fades out and the next one fades in.

Here’s a perfect example I just ran across: Read More

The Pun Is the Most French Form of Humor

I’ve often been struck by how much French humor relies on puns and wordplay. I suspect that this has to do with how easy it is to make puns in French vs. English. For instance, every time I pass the canned foods aisle at the grocery store, I think of how “ravioli” in French is a near-homonym for “delighted in bed”. And I just ran across the song “Aux sombres héros de l’amer”, meaning “To the dark heroes of bitterness”; but as TehPedia points out, this can also be heard as “O Sombrero of the Sea”.

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Waiting for God(ot)

Courtesy of FSTDT and the Internet Archive Wayback Machine comes 2007rapture.com, by Shelby Corbitt.

Back on Aug. 29, 2004, his site said:

The rapture of the church (God’s children) willl happen JULY 2007.

By Nov. 30, 2004, he had added the only copyright notice he’d need:

©
2004-2007 2007Rapture.com. All Rights Reserved.

By Dec. 6, 2005, however, the Word of God™ had become fuzzier:

The rapture of the church (God’s children) will happen during the SUMMER OF 2007. This could be anytime from June 21-September 21.

(emphasis in the original)

As of Jun. 29, 2007, he had a huge header reading:

THE RAPTURE OF THE CHURCH IS GOING TO HAPPEN DURING THE SUMMER, THIS YEAR
(JUNE 21-SEPTEMBER 21) 2007!!

To his credit, the site now says:

I SAID :
THE RAPTURE OF THE CHURCH IS GOING TO HAPPEN, THIS YEAR
2007!!
I WAS WRONG!!!
I THOUGHT THIS WAS A WARNING FROM GOD TO THE WORLD

Meanwhile, Yisrayl Hawkins (formerly Buffalo Bill Hawkins) doesn’t seem to have noticed that the world didn’t end on or about Oct. 13, 2007. Oh, well.

Name Change

What with the new year, I’ve changed the name of this weblog from “Ooblog” to “Epsilon Clue”, which I like better.

All of the URLs, RSS feeds, and so on should stay the same, so no need to update your bookmarks.

Update, Mar. 25, 2008: In case anyone’s wondering, the name comes from this comment at The Daily WTF:

The designer must have had some clue about Web authoring, as he clearly understood complex Javascript, PHP etc. I can’t comprehend how anyone with even epsilon clue could engineer a pile of crap like this.

Yes, Virginia, You Can Rationalize Santa Claus

I thought I was being satirical when I wrote this post, justifying belief in Santa Claus in the same way that, as I see it, sophisticated believers justify belief in God. But then I realized that my post was already written 110 years ago, in the famous “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus” editorial.

Here are the first two paragraphs of the editorial’s reply to Virginia. Try substituting “God” for “Santa Claus”, and count how many arguments still make sense, and how many are routinely used

Virginia, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men’s or children’s, are little. In this great universe of ours, man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus! It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The external light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.

I admit that I’ve been Poed. I don’t see any significant difference between my parody and this apparently sincere bit of Santapologetics.

A Mystery Solved

Felix Leiter has appeared in 9 of the 20-some Bond movies. But he always looks different (except for Live and Let Die and License to Kill). He’s usually white, but was once black. Not only that, but in License to Kill, one of his legs was bitten off by a shark, but it was whole again in Casino Royale.

There is only one possible explanation: clearly the man is a Time Lord.