Older blog entries for mattbradshaw (starting at number 17)

i guess i'm not as behind in my classes as i thought. yeah! i have a little break until test time strikes again. time to do some fun stuff. like code and finish some software artistry. ahhh. this makes makes me very happy. that and the fact that my family is wonderful. thank you God!

i find that God/Satan thingie on advogato to be pretty darned funny. not that i think the real God minds at all. :) i wish they'd update their diaries though. i also wish to solve the mystery to who it *really* is... it had to be an early adopter of advogato. my bets fall to... ok everybody start sniffing your network and find out where God and Satan are logging in from. i'll give you .25$ when i'm finished with my micropayments implementation. :) whatever.

so, well, um. yeah.

i just want to emphasize that i really think i am going to be done with some of my projects real soon now. i've been kind of a complete moron about not telling anybody what i'm really working on though. looking back, i probably shouldn't have done that just because it isn't 'nice' or 'smart' or the 'open source way'. but i can make mistakes. it's all about the fun anyways.

ok, here's this question that i know i should be posting somewhere else but what the heck.

why is strength of the difficulty of the prime factoring problem unprovable - or make that 'why is it hard to prove'.

please pardon my gross ignorance. and don't yell at me to rtfm cuz i already asked jeeves (tm) lots. i've always wanted to know this. thanks in advance, smart diary.

anonmity ramblings

i was looking through some earlier entries (horror!) and found myself often not really to be saying what i was truly thinking. and sounding pretty dumb, which is ok i guess as i shouldn't be trying to *impress* anybody. i think this diary thing is for me not really the public anyway... nonetheless, i think i might need to start taking a little bit more time in writing these things as to not be carelessly flinging out gross miscommunications for those interested in accurate information to digest. for instance, i stated that anonymity was the most important right that we have !?! wth? s/anonymity/freespeech. just wanted to clarify that in case anybody thought i was that wacked out and needed professional help. however, privacy is still an important right that i believe to be implicity granted to us in our constitution... end rambling on that subject, onto another

i'm actually quite surprised at the huge amount of interest that people have shown in projects (like freent) that are primarly devoted to the purpose of anonymity. do we really have all that much to hide??? i think that i'm that all for anonymity from the information consumers side of things. companies do *not* have the intrinsic right to know everything about me and the end of this road has mostly bad endings like advertising maniuplation, blackmail, etc... but 'm not so sold on the idea of the information producers right to anonymity. turn off the lights and its amazing what happens when people like us all (== unfortunetly evil quite a bit imo) are involved. i'm very familiar with the arguments of ian clarke et al. stating simply that "sticks and stones can break my bones but information will never hurt me/us". hmmm. i have to really think about this. because information isn't traditional information anymore. we're not in kansas anymore. we're no longer speaking of a supposed heretic idea that everyone should have the right to use their god given brain to evaluate. we're not talking about knowledge. we're talking about fregin anything that can be represented symbolically. images/video of rape, child pornography, and other things that thrive in the dark and that sickenly often appeal to our (as a bent society) darkest corners. anonymity for producers of information would foster (not expose as the the idealists arguments go) in-the-dark behavior that hurts everyone. its just that mechanisms already exist to provide anonymity on a small scale which is all that is really needed maybe. but freenet provides a vast opportunity for vast 'badness' as its one to many not one to one. i'm not so worried about abuses to intellectual property as business models sans ip do exist to finance the creation of digital works. its just a change. but i can't overemphasize my fear that freenet will provide opportunity for lots of damage to our society. hope that i am now fully 'in' the stereotype of "fundamental christian, religious right censorship bigot". whatever. i don't want to 'judge' what is wrong and right. i'm not the absolute authority. but i don't want to tolerate crap that will hurt my 5 year old daughter. i don't want our society to drenched in sexual deviance increasing the risk of my daughter and your daughters stumbling across dangerous individual that needs another sexual thrill. let me know if my concern is misplaced. i don't think it is. :)

the issue of anonymity provides us tough issues that have no easy answer imo. i'm not going to follow the herd here and make the snap judgement of western world "compartmentilization". its way too hazy for that.

however, i don't think that freenet et al can be stopped. it should be pretty easy to provide freenet services in stealth even. but as i stated early on, i'm not yet sure if this is a good or bad thing. :)

i probably should have posted to the article a few weeks back discussing the pros/cons of freent. oh well. i remember some of the points made though... graydon (whose words of wisdom in computing i deeply respect btw) stated that information in freenet is equivalent to bathroom stall writings == of little/no importance. i disagree of his assessment of the 'non importance' of freenet information:

• there is the issue of pseudo anonymity, in which someone guarantees their identity mathmatically w/ a digital signature or something along those lines and the validity of their (notice its not anonymous, just disassoicated from the real world author) information can be based on track record or something like that.
• this doesn't address the dangers of drastically increasing production/consumption of objects such as child pornography, etc that damage our society greatly - all the dismissals of freenet information doesn't really address untraditional "information" which i see as dominating the freenet network

maybe someone will read this (only if they have lots of time i'm sure) and email me or something. because i want some closure to this issue. i want to know what i think and i need more information to come to anything resembling a conclusion. :)

well that rant was fun. :)

c = m^e mod n

first week of classes at the university - done. :) wasn't as crazy as i had expected and thats good. i'm hoping to have a little bit more time to spend on family things and personal projects this semester. last semester was a nightmare for me. my fault, yes, but still a nightmare so "feel sorry for me". hopefully, i'll care a little more about grades and doing things well this time around. ;)

let me tell you something... i've got a great wife and i'm so glad! its pretty amazing really how someone like me (peasant) could hook up with someone like her (godess). miracle more like it.

my diaries suck! ouch. i was just looking back through them and its a sad state of affairs. time to take a look at my life and get things together. i apologize *very* much to anyone who read any of the prev. diaries. i'll try to fill new ones with stuff that actually matters. == tech stuff for those who are looking for it and == good social stuff who are interested in people.

i've just recently given ogg vorbis a whirl and i have to say that i'm a bit disappointed in the decoding - i was expecting the decoding to be a little less cpu expensive after reading that it was comparable to mp3. more like 2x mp3 in my experience. i know its still beta but on slow, overburdened machines vorbis just isn't lean enough. but it *is* the right tool for the job in many cases. infrastructure formats and protocols have many benefits to all if they are royalty free. i'm seriously expecting to see *lots* of artists offering their art in this format in the very near future. i even want to help them escape musicianhellalwayspayingtheman. small time bands that i've been a part of cannot afford this kind of damage. can you imagine a web designer shelling out that kind of $$$ ($15K minimum with royalties after that) for using the jpeg format. its the same deal here folks - data compression. if bandwidth increases anything like it has been lately, though, a simple generic gzip or bzip on uncompressed raw audio will suffice. because you know they've (btw, who are "they"???) been saying that network bandwidth capacity is increasing much faster than cpu speeds.

must end the novel now...

holy sweet wads of something... this life is insane. why is it that i always bite off more than i can chew. i'm near ulcer stage now looking at my todo lists. sorry to complain, but man this sucks.

i got don chafer's (of waterdeep) cd "you were at the time for love". talk about a good music. i didn't know it could be done that well. :) true artistry of the soul.

speaking of music, would one have to be absolutely crazy to enter the music distribution market? i mean, these big, evil, etc recording companies surely will do something bad to anyone who threatens them (legitimally or not). not that it matters what i want to do in my free time because i have NO free time anymore. i have come to the realization that iowa state is not only a money sucking machine but a time sucking machine as well. classes start in a week and i'm so unprepared i'm about to crack and smoke it. and working for iowa state is no better either. i'm finally begining to tire of getting paid magnitudes less than what i'm worth to the college of engineering. the flexibility and fun that once attracted to me to the "perfect campus job" are begining to dull. cheap expletives (not the people i directly work for but the unversity in gerneal). back to not-complaining...

for the first time in a long time, politics are becoming remotely interesting to me. i am finding myself constantly watching the coverage. i think that the widespread support of nader among the computing crowds is a bit scary. a nice guy, yeah, but some of his ideas are more off than my golf game.

more complaining... (stop reading now if you can't bear this terrible diary entry <grin>) just noticed that someone started a freenet-client-in-mozilla project (wfw). i had that idea about 3 months ago and was just moments away from starting in on it. just kinda pissed that someone beat me to the punch. but they've just got the idea, and NO CODE! that kinda irritates me a bit.

oh well, i'm not sure i am completely *in* to freenet anyway, at least as far as the very intense focus on complete anonymity goes. i agree that anonymity is needed, and even supercedes all other rights. but i just don't think that i care all that much about that aspect of freent, as needed as it may be. however, i am fascinated by the dynamic nature of data storage incorporated in freenet. you get tremendous gains in performance and reliability. it would be nice to have a generic comodity protocol for doing this. and probably without freenet's anon features just to avoid controversy and gain widespread acceptance. i am just now begining to scour the net in search of "better" solutions than freenet provides in this area. i think that sgi just recently released a file system that sorta-kinda does this. and i also think that a network file system like coda or intermezzo would do this too. but i'm talking out of my ignorance now. anyone willing to provide clues? thanks.

lots to talk about tonight... none of it important of couse.

personal stuff : looks to be a very late night tonight and a very early morning tomorrow. i've finally revived my home pc and now my nervous habits have subsided (slightly at least). <grin> at *real* work (not *not-so-real* work which is my own consulting co that i can devote hardly any time to nowdays) we have to move over all our web stuff over to a new box. sometime between now and tomorrow at 6 i've got to figure out why ms frontpage2k server extensions are being crabby. when it rains it pours.

my co-worker passed away this weekend while i was out of town. it was expected to happen but not this soon i had thought. cancer is cruel and wickedly efficient. i want to do the right thing for my other co workers and her family but i just don't know what it is exactly that i'm supposed to do. i'm dreading work tomorrow, it's going to be very somber. and rightfully so.

in other, slightly happier news, i think i've convinced my wonderful s.o. to like linux. now that i've gotten some desktop-ish apps on my box all is well. btw, today (sunday the 23rd as i don't know if it's tomorrow yet...) was her birthday. i really enjoy getting older as it feels like we have more credibility being married. getting married at 20 was pretty weird for me, thinking that family and all were kinda like 'wait a few years'... our marriage is going wonderfully though! i've sure got a good spouse that i am very excited to spend the next 50-60 years of my life with.

tech stuff : at isu we're trying to come up with a (good) way of merging our modified rpm spec files with newer versions. would 'cvs join|merge|whatever' work for this??? please let me know. i need to escape rpm hell.

man, i'm writing a lot tonight. must be wound up. wonder if raph will ever put ssl on advogato so i don't need to login with my password over the wire. not a huge deal i guess. i wonder if i should obsfucate my email addr now that people *know* about avogato. darn that salon.com! probably wouldn't matter all too much as every fregin spammer in the world has my email. good thing it's going to soon (like this month) change.

the truth : god is good

seeing that i can't get in to the office (grrrr...) i'll write a diary from the lab. yeah.

this is just too funny (or very sad and i'm just trying to hide the sickness of it all...). yesterday i spent my day upgrading our web server, making it generally a pretty rocking box -- added *tons* of stuff. we wanted to finally be able to have ssl logins for all of our frontpage (l)users (<grin>) in the college. up until now we were stuck with Basic http auth (cleartext over the wire for everybody - bah!). in the process of upgrading i found a very interesting nugget.

ms frontpage98 sucks very badly! fp2000 is only *slighly* better...

yes, i'm aware that everyone knows this, and has known this, and will always know this - but it's worse than you thought... i promise. :) in trying to convince fp98 to connect to our apache webserver loaded w/ mod_ssl and mod_frontpage there was absolutely no way. it turns out that fp98 had it's list of CA's built in to the binary w/ no method of updating them and no update to the program (as far as i can find). seeing that all of the CA certs compiled in to fp have now expired (as all certs do - man this is stupid...) this makes fp98 completely *worthless* when connecting to a secure server. these guys at mickeysoft really know what they're doing, let me tell you. their new initiative with .NET is going to be simply amazing... :)

built-in obsolescence is either stupid or evil - my guess is stupid.

out of the blue, my (normal job) employer decided to have me start on getting some web server farm stuff ready for the college. on linux. wahoo. i have finally escaped irix/solaris/linux integration hell. at least i hope.

but i'm pretty much a virgin when it comes to clustering technology. it should be loads of fun learning though. what kind of stuff is out there??? i quickly found the "linux virtual server project" and piranha... anything else out there to occupy my reading time for this week?

wouldn't financial independence be nice?

confession time: being full of stupidity and pride (very normal - attempting to decrease this common state over time) i previously credited myself as journeyer. what a joke! that has now been remedied and i have ranked myself "honestly" as an apprentice. i have high hopes, of course, of finishing some really cool free software for the community but as of yet it's very unpolished and what i have done is small contribs to small projects. but that's ok. :) from now on i'm wanting the community cert me. no excuses for the wrong certs. my apologies to the world...

in other news wesley felter directed me to the answer i've been seeking regarding filesystem-backupsystem integration. that answer would be Network Appliance. he also stated that Plan 9 has a backup system built in to its file server. i'll keep an update here as soon as i check it out. thanks much wmf! i *really* appreciate your vast knowledge of what's going on (your ranking yourself as apprentice was the truth-stick for my mis-certification of myself).

off to 4th of july parades and what not. later.

viewcvs is very cool. kudos to gstein!

graydon mentioned ciphersabre a while back and i must say, very very very cool stuff. i already feel like a jedi. or something. must watch the star wars trilogy (and maybe the episode one thingy) yet again...

wesley felter joined avogato! man oh man he gets news fast on his site. pretty good stuff over there at hack the planet .

happy trails...