These are my GPG / PGP keys for 2010, valid for one year; keys for previous years have expired. Replace the “:FOO:” with “@” for proper addresses.
Personal correspondence. ID 90F42C39: Larry Olin Horn (lohnet mail 2010) <hornlo:FOO:lohnet.org> Business correspondence. ID C2B1AE2A: Larry Olin Horn (ptk mail 2010) <hornlo:FOO:ptk.org> Business, when I have to use Outlook / Exchange. ID F2039886: Larry Olin Horn (outlook mail 2010) <hornlo:FOO:ptk.org> (or <Larry.Horn:FOO:ptk.org>)
I didn’t make any New Year resolutions; I have enough trouble keeping up with the day-by-day ad hoc stuff. Over break I got done a number of minor things I wanted to do, and dealt with some fix-me-now problems, but I let most of my bigger plans slide.
At least for me, getting to the bigger or more time-consuming stuff takes some buildup, like preparing to take off in a large plane — gotta get on the runway, build up some speed, then rotate. Except that all these minor things keep dashing onto the runway in front of me, so that I have to abort the takeoff.
Gotta get myself more organized (cynical laughter in background).
“[S]odium-free salt (potassium chloride) is sufficiently radioactive (from the isotope potassium-40) that after several months, a saltshaker-ful will form an image on film.” –Theodore Gray, Gray Matter: DIY X-Ray Photos, Popular Science
Unrelated to the content, a brief rant….
Apparently PopSci (yeah, I know) is de-optimized for my flavor of Firefox. I ran across the article as I was catching up on my lifrea RSS feeds. I clicked it to open in Firefox … and waited … and waited … many minutes later, still a blank tab. Only after I left and came back from dinner was the page loaded … except NO article (content) images. Yes, I did try reloading. Arrrgh.
Usually I abort pages that behave this badly, but after seeing how (non)-loading it was behaving — not even set up to at least display something in the tab while-u-wait — I decided leave it alone to see how long it would take to load.
Curious about what made the page so awful, I handed the URL over to the Web Page Analyzer, which gave a total of 2,324,785 bytes requiring about 205 http accesses for the page, broken down like this:
HTML: 15072
HTML Images: 506066
CSS Images: 1511636
Total Images: 2017702
Javascript: 165275
CSS: 126736
So only 22% of this is content (well I’m being generous, calling all of the “HTML” and “HTML Images” content).
I drink coffee. A lot. Neither the cup on my desk at work nor the one on my desk at home stays empty for very long. I’m pretty sure that my cups per day stat is in the double digits. I probably should measure my consumption in pots rather than cups.
Fortunately for my wallet, my sensibilities are unrefined. Just about any old coffee will do as long as it is black, strong, unadulterated. I don’t have any interest in all the fancy coffee-based beverages that are more Other than Coffee, served by artistically frustrated barristers drawing whimsical doodles in foam, and that require a second mortgage to maintain as a habit.
Yet I do keep a bottle of original Baileys around for an occasional treat.
Some may cringe at the thought of drinking so much coffee, remembering all the dire warnings of shattered chromosomes, heart attacks, and organ failure. And that God kills a kitten every time you drink a cup. Well, there’s some good news:
Last year, researchers at Harvard University and the University of Madrid assessed data on more than 100,000 people over 20 years and concluded that the more coffee they drank, the less likely they were to die during that period from any cause. –Melinda Beck, Seeking Coffee’s Benefits to Health, Wall Street Journal
The article didn’t say how the kittens fared, but it did mention that coffee had positive effects in diabetes, cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, and mood.
Some of the holidays coming up in January: Festival of Sleep Day, Play God Day, Peculiar People Day, Blame Someone Else Day, and Escape Day. I’m torn.
A lot seem to be concerned with food. Specific days are for Bean, Hot and Spicy Food, Popcorn, Buttercrunch, Eskimo Pie, and Cornchip. The whole month is devoted to Fiber Focus, Soup, Hot Tea, Oatmeal, and Prune Breakfast — wonder what demographic was in mind?
More at “Bizarre January Holidays“.
Lately my dreams, or at least the rapidly evaporating-on-waking memories of them, seem more realistic. Most are brief snippets, but some are lengthy detailed stories.
Earlier times, if I remembered dreams at all, they were generally incoherent, often nightmarish. Occasionally there was no memory of content at all, just waking up with a pervasive sense of menacing evil. I didn’t look forward to them at all.
Or it may just be that They have upgraded our substrate, so that dreams within dreams are more performant.
Perhaps my next dream will be a pixelated Raven saying “Nevermore“.
Some random things I’ve run across the last few days:
The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity
A quote from the commentary on the third law:
Our daily life is mostly, made of cases in which we lose money and/or time and/or energy and/or appetite, cheerfulness and good health because of the improbable action of some preposterous creature who has nothing to gain and indeed gains nothing from causing us embarrassment, difficulties or harm. Nobody knows, understands or can possibly explain why that preposterous creature does what he does. In fact there is no explanation – or better there is only one explanation: the person in question is stupid.
If you like the Stupidity grid, you may also be interested in Jerry Pournelle’s “The Pournelle Political Axes“; then try out “The Political Compass“, a test whose result may well annoy you: see their FAQ.
You could of course program this, but it wouldn’t be nearly so dramatic. 
You are going to build a matchbox robot [loh: yes, real matchboxes or any small containers] and teach it to play Hexapawn so that it always wins. To start with your robot will make random moves and will lose many times. But each time it loses you will discipline it and teach it strategies so it will ultimately win every time.
If you’re into science fiction, you’ll find this site a great time sink. 
This site was mainly intended for science fiction authors who wanted a little scientific accuracy. But anybody who is interested can play with the toys contained within, designing their own Planet Rangers Rocketships. It is assumed that the reader has enough knowledge to know the difference between a star and a planet, high school mathematics, and enough skill to use a pocket calculator. Computer spreadsheet and computer programming skills are a plus, spreadsheets in particular will make your life much easier.
Lots of interesting links, fascinating facts, and nostalgic book and magazine covers, movie and TV stills, and quotes.
If you want to go so far as to give your aliens (or future Earthlings) a language, check out Mark Rosenfelder’s site: 
This set of webpages (what’s a set of webpages? a webchapter?) is intended for anyone who wants to create artificial languages— for a fantasy or an alien world, as a hobby, as an interlanguage. It presents linguistically sound methods for creating naturalistic languages— which can be reversed to create non-naturalistic languages. It suggests further reading for those who want to know more, and shortcuts for those who want to know less.
This picks up from where “So much for rest and relaxation” left off.
Good: The work crew didn’t finish, so we didn’t have to go in to move equipment.
Bad: They rescheduled it for the 29th. Good thing I didn’t have plans for then, eh?
Good: I went in anyway to finish updating my laptop, since I’d already planned my day around that.
Bad: I’m still in awe of how primitive Windows software updating is.
Good: I got everything installed and updated … except for one last product.
Let’s review …
On a new machine, before it actually gets used for anything, I install all the typical software I expect to use (or need to support), install all the updates, “touch” all the programs to get past the agreements, registrations, and initial setups. I do all this as Administrator.
Then I log in as my regular (administrative powers) user and touch everything again, to get past the agreements, registrations, and initial setups. Because some programs do have per-user setups, but others haven’t quite figured out how to deal with global (machine-specific, non-user specific) settings, and some are just insanely anal about accusing you of being a pirate and insisting on verifying and validating your right to use their precious software.
Finally, I defrag, recreate the page and hibernate files as contiguous chunks, empty all caches and history, delete all temporary files, defrag again, and create an image backup. I do all this to get a known good image, up to date, configured like I want, ready to be restored at a moment’s notice.
You know what’s coming next …
Ahem. So I’ve done the Administrator part above — everything has gone smoothly, if tediously, all the programs are working, there have been no errors, so now I’m ready to install a firewall. I install virus software and then firewall software last, because I don’t want to be slowed down and/or nagged while I’m doing the earlier installations and so their scans will pick up all the previous software in one pass. One of the reasons I do this at my office is so I’m behind the company firewall in the meantime.
The UGLY
The company uses ZoneAlarm Pro on their laptops. Lately the installation has often, but not consistently, been a little flaky, but otherwise installs ok. So I decided to install Free ZoneAlarm on mine.
Oops. Something about not finding ordinal 23 in vsdata.dll, over and over again — that’s one I’ve not seen before. Reboot. Restart the installation. Apparently goes ok.
Except on reboot Dell’s connection manager bombs. And the Network Connections folder won’t open. And shutdown hangs at the “Saving your settings” window.
Reinstall. Now things appear to work ok.
Log in as my regular user. Previous symptoms.
Reinstall as regular user. Now things appear to work ok.
Log in as Administrator. Broken.
Repeat.
Apparently, last installer wins, other users broken.
Give up in disgust and go home, to deal with it tomorrow (now today).
This morning I uninstall ZoneAlarm, clean it out of the registry, etc.
I still have a system that, while it does connect to the network (that has always worked throughout all this), the connection manager usually won’t start, and the Network Connections folder usually won’t open, and it won’t shut down cleanly, hanging at the “Saving your settings” window.
Great. I’m OCD enough that I want a clean, untainted (so to speak) image for backup. Now I have to decide whether to try to fix this, or start over from a bare-metal installation. Arrrgh. I’m gonna put this off until after Christmas at least.
Have I mentioned lately that I detest Windows?
… or at least that’s what the headlines say.
Gets your attention doesn’t it? Being such a fan of Microsoft, I couldn’t help but get a little buzz when I read that.
Actually, Microsoft is banned from selling versions of Word that contain a particular piece of “XML technology” which i4i has patented.
This is effective January 11, 2010. The injunction was originally granted last August, but was stayed until MS’s appeal, which they lost yesterday, was ruled upon.
I doubt that MS will actually stop selling Word; they’ll either drop the disputed technology or come up with some royalty agreement with i4i.
One concern I have, if they drop (or alter) the technology, is what effect that will have on the usability of older documents that were saved using the original code.
Just yesterday someone showed me a stack of diskettes they found while cleaning up their office, containing files generated with old software no one (that I know of) has any more. Fortunately, it was out of date material that could be discarded.
Archivists have legitimate concerns about digital artifacts. Not only is the software needed to process material soon out of date and no longer available, but the hardware needed to simply access the media is disappearing as well. For example, diskette drives are now usually special-order items rather than standard; how long before you can’t even get one at all?
But there are a few people who are thinking of The Long Now.
So far this week, “break” has been good-news / bad-news.
Monday
Bad: Went to work Monday at 9am, didn’t leave til 8pm. What with other things I needed to do after that, I didn’t get home til about 10:30pm.
Good: Got my office cleaned up a little bit, and I think I got all the year-end paperwork done I needed to do.
Bad: ADP’s ezLabor suddenly decided that the version of Firefox I’ve been using for months is either too new or a beta version (according to the error message) and refused to do anything other than tell me to change browsers. Fortunately, a different version of FF in my Windows VM worked fine.
Attention ADP developers (or whoever you contracted this out to): I’ve used your pedestrian, pain-in-the-ass application; you’re not doing anything special. So gratuitous, poor parsing of browser ID strings, rather than writing robust code, is either incompetence or laziness. Pick one.
Good: My new laptop came in Monday, instead of the predicted mid-January, so part of that late time at work was updating my laptop.
Bad: Updating my new laptop — over a gigabyte of updates. Windows and Office service packs, Adobe, Apple, … multiple reboots, multiple scans (and more reboots) to discover updates to the updates. Programs that won’t continue unless you agree to gen-you-whine validation, allow online activation, register (my email is “nowhere@example.com”), agree to this and that; decline superfluous add-ons, “Pro” upgrades, and unrelated third-party installations of virus scanners, toolbars, branded and modified browsers, music managers, social networking tools, …. Turn on things that should be defaults, turn off things that are obnoxious impediments to useful work, ….
Such a contrast to Linux: “yum update” and you’re done, all the magical interdependencies dealt with at once, and only reboot (when you feel like getting around to it) if there’s a kernel update.
Tuesday
Bad: I had to replace my water heater.
Good: I now have really hot water.
Wednesday (today)
Bad: Some of us are on call to go back to the office to re-install computer equipment once the painters, carpet, and furniture people give the OK after re-doing an office suite.
Good: (sorta) While at the office I’ll finish my laptop upgrades (still more huge updates to download). Then I can image the sucker, repartition it, put Linux on it, and be happy.
... my personal blog.
Unless otherwise indicated, anything I write here is simply my personal, probably ill-formed, opinion and does not represent the views, beliefs, positions, or opinions of any other person or entity.
Site last updated 2012-01-25 @ 15:14:10
