Older blog entries for schoen (starting at number 124)

I seem to have survived that party. I even enjoyed it. (This is not to say that I won't still have problems in the future.)

"I've never been to a party with Seth without a demonstration of the Pulfrich Effect..."

My friend gave me a CueCat (and I promptly took it apart on the bus back to San Francisco -- proprietary ASIC grumble grumble grumble grumble grumble). The argument is very solid that I own the CueCat outright and can do whatever I want with it: he got the CueCat in the mail as a gift from Wired, and then he gave it to me, and neither of us accepted any kind of license or contract.

I'll try to use the CueCat to catalog more of my book collection without hurting my wrists. If Digital Convergence is good for nothing else, they can help save my wrists. (Maybe I should send them a donation of $20 -- to thank them for the CueCat -- if they stop threatening to sue people.)

I'm going back to Berkeley on Sunday to see The Caucasian Chalk Circle; some of us know one of the crew for that play.

Jick, the best source of information on Bay Area Linux and free software groups and events is Rick Moen's Bay Area Linux Events page. Each user group is different, although there is a good deal of overlap in membership.

I started taking a practice LSAT to see how I'd do. I've completed two sections, and I'm doing pretty well so far.

zork.net came back up. Thanks, folks.

I seem to be living in a Dar Williams song now, or two, or three...

Waldo, we should remember that Peacefire didn't produce CPHack and acknowledge the authors, including mskala for their work and the liability they exposed themselves to.

Of course, Peacefire folks are carrying on the fight in an interesting way. So Peacefire has become associated with the CPHack case after the fact.

Daniel Burton, past president of Cal Libertarians, and State Assembly candidate in California, put out his press release encouraging people not to vote (for him or anybody else). I've been following this issue for some months already, so it seems like old news to me. I suspect it's going to get news coverage as "human interest" and not as "politics".

His press release isn't on-line, but he has (somewhat ironically) a web site at SmartVoter.org with a philosophy statement.

Tomorrow is going to be an exciting day. Good, I hope.

I'm working on a funny project I can't talk about. It's possible that this work will be published later.

I went to my first ever live professional contemporary music concert, Dar Williams at the Warfield. It was great! She played (in this order) "Calling the Moon" (GW), "If I Wrote You" (ES), "Spring Street" (GW), "Are You Out There" (ES), "It Happens Every Day" (GW), "Better Things" (ES), "The Christians and the Pagans" (MC), "End of the Summer" (ES), "I Had No Right" (GW), "After All" (GW), "Playing to the Firmament" (GW), "We Learned the Sea" (GW), "What Do You Love More Than Love" (GW), "Another Mystery" (GW), "Iowa" (MC), "As Cool As I Am" (MC), "When I Was a Boy" (HR). (Her four albums on CD are The End of the Summer, Mortal City, The Honesty Room, and The Green World.) The odd thing there was that she only did one song from HR, and it was the last song. I was very grateful for several of these, most especially "Are You Out There", which is even quoted on my web page.

Dar Williams is certainly one of my favorite contemporary musicians.

Skip to the end of my diary entry, if you'd like (source document was 960 words, 6028 bytes).

Since zork.net is still down, I'm missing the beginning: the story of an emergency response (maybe an attempted homicide) in the driveway outside my window on Saturday night. When zork comes back up, I can post that (although my record of actually going back and posting the contents of deferred diary entries here is not very good).

So, I did go to my cousin's open studio over the weekend. She is a very talented graphic artist.

I bought a print of a photograph of her collage called Saltwater, which was based on the fish and plant life in her old salt water aquarium. It's very beautiful, and it looks three-dimensional even in the photograph because of Moire effects.

For the random cool careers file: Perceptual psychologist. (That includes the discipline of psychoacoustics, which is very much in demand today on account of the importance of audio codecs.)

I had a very long conversation with my cousin about the, um, Structure and Interpretation of Romantic Relationships. I've had a lot of long conversations about parts of that with all sorts of people, but my cousin was particularly insightful.

She lives out in Noe Valley (a quiet and pretty old neighborhood in southern San Francisco, not to be confused with South San Francisco). San Francisco is (to paraphrase J. B. S. Haldane) not only larger than I imagine, it is larger than I can imagine.

On account of the air currents and reduced automotive traffic, the air in Noe Valley is much cleaner than the air downtown. Even I, who don't usually notice those things, can tell that right away.

I'm going to learn pic again something. I love the appearance of things typeset with pic. And LaTeX... mmmm. Once I know pic and LaTeX, I can write some technical papers, maybe about relay logic or something.

In the meantime, I'm looking for presents for that party on Friday the 13th. One of the people being honored at the party may well never forgive me for getting her these presents, but I'm having a good time with it.

My dad sent me a book with a table of classical Latin acronyms! A lot of them are particularly useful for monuments and inscriptions.

• ADMHM Absit dolus malus hoc monumento (May this monument be safe from evil treachery)
• AOVFDSAEMQMDCS Amico optimo viro fideli de suo aere moerensque monumentum dedit, curavit, statuit (Mourning for his best friend, a faithful man, he gave, oversaw, and established this monument for his friend out of his own funds)
• NLicSVN Nemini liceat sepulcrum violare nostrum (Nobody should be allowed to descrate our grave site)
• OHF Ossarium hoc fecit (He established this catacomb)
• OTBQ Ossa tibi bene quiescant (May your bones rest well)
• PDF Publico decreto fecerunt (They made it according to a public decree)
• PSPD Pecunia sua posuit dedicavit (He erected and dedicated it with his own money)
• QISS Quae infra scripta sunt (Which are written below)
• QSSS Quae supra scripta sunt (Which are written above)
• SHSR Sub hoc saxo requiescit (Under this stone is resting)
• SQHAPESSAVDF Si quis hanc arcam post excessum suprascriptorum aperire voluerit dabit fisco (If anybody wants to open this arch after the death of the people written above, he shall pay the public treasury [why?])

There are also a lot of religious slogans (Roman polytheist and Christian) with convenient acronyms, and an amazing variety of titles (religious and secular) of people who were recorded in records or on monuments. And there's a whole series of disclaimers: "But this monument does not apply to his descendants..." :-)

I got a haircut.

Waldo, can you sue SurfControl (successor-in-interest of Mattel, as far as I know) to try to get a declaratory judgment that posting CPHack is legal? (I guess there are two problems there: attorney's fees, and attorney's fees. In particular, yours, in protracted and complex litigation -- which you were expecting originally with your non-party appeal -- and perhaps theirs, if a judge found for them and awarded them costs.)

Can you settle out of court with SurfControl by agreeing not to sue them (for declaratory judgment) if they agree not to sue you (for permanent injunction and money damages or for contempt of the earlier District Court ruling)? :-) :-)

Fear, uncertainty, and doubt about the legal status of a program like DeCSS or CPHack benefits companies which are trying to suppress it, because (1) fewer people will mirror it, (2) it is less likely to be published on a "mainstream" archive or in a "mainstream" publication -- although that didn't stop a certain art-collecting professor, (3) it's certain that the technology and information expressed in the program will not be incorporated in commercial products. (For example, that consumer electronics companies will not use the description of the CSS algorithm in DeCSS to build a region-free DVD player, or a DVD player with "unlicensed" digital output.)

"to promote the Progress of Science and the useful Arts", carefully managed and circumscribed by industry license agreements. :-(

What is Barbara Simons (recent ACM President) doing these days again? I remember being surprised by it, but I forgot what it was.

Uzi, take care and good luck in your new job. You should come over to Berkeley and speak at CalLUG sometime! (I'm trying to line up some speakers for the rest of this school year for CalLUG, because I don't think the official Board is going to rush to do that.)

I'm very impressed with some of the contents of Wietse Venema and Dan Farmer's "The Coroner's Toolkit", which is advertised for recovering information from a compromised system but which also has a variety of other uses. cat or ls by inode number, find crypto keys in memory (!)...

I'm waiting for zork.net to come back up so that I can post a diary entry I composed there (watching emergency response, visiting my cousin, Latin acronyms). I might move www.loyalty.org over to another box, but I'm likely to keep my e-mail on zork (with backup MX elsewhere).

This is a pretty long entry again, so some people might prefer to skip to the end of my diary entry. Thanks.

What a world! The NSA is publishing VHDL source for hardware implementations of state-of-the-art cryptographic algorithms on the Internet. It's not copyrighted, but if it were, I think their disclaimer would even qualify as open source! Remember, this is the same Federal government which investigated Phil Zimmermann for export control violations in connection with the export of PGP. Now Red Hat is shipping OpenSSH and the NSA is posting hardware crypto implementation details on the Internet.

I've been teaching at work again. That's lots of fun; we did a lot of stuff on networking, and I learned a lot from it. I think I need to be a teacher, and ideally I should teach more than just Linux system administration.

My collage is done, really done, and signed, and sealed, and delivered. Can it be? My room looks so empty without all the collage scraps and scissors and source materials.

I've been in Berkeley a lot this week, once for CalLUG and then again just for a visit. And I bought into a machine in commercial colocation (my share being about what I've been paying for a whole machine in noncommercial colocation at the LinuxCabal).

In a restaurant and again in a store, I thought about the fact that I could actually now buy wine or beer or liquor legally. That's an odd feeling, because I'm used to thinking of them as illegal drugs. It's like they were suddenly decriminalized (but nobody noticed).

My short-term goals are to enjoy, if possible, a party on Friday the 13th (absit omen), and get to Davis and Santa Cruz to visit friends of mine who've recently moved to each place. Also, my cousin who is an artist is having an open studio this weekend, and I'd like to go. And maybe I'll also make it to the Exploratorium again soon.

I managed to hurt my right arm again, so I'm not going to volunteer to do ioctl documentation just yet. More to the point, I need to be more careful not to carry heavy bags or type with that arm.

I actually had conversations with a few strangers this week; that's really very unusual for me. And I certainly had a good time talking to some new and old friends.

I hope everybody has a good time at ALS.

Why are professional certification exams like the LPI paid for by prospective employees rather than prospective employers? Yes, requiring people to pay for standardized tests (like the LSAT, which a friend of mine took this morning) makes them prove to some extent that they are serious and that they do believe in their own qualifications, but the people who want the information and who believe it is meaningful and useful are the employers (or other institutions accepting applicants on the basis of their documented qualifications).

Cliff Stoll is really behind Acme Klein Bottles. I love it! So now I need to give those and Clever Clocks as gifts.

joey showed me Perl in Latin. "O let me be awake, my God! / Or let me sleep alway."

shaleh, do you still plan to create a Latin locale for GNU stuff?

Litigation

The Eldred v. Reno appeal was argued in the DC Circuit. Sounds like fun. At least Eric Eldred had a good time... wouldn't you, if Larry Lessig were your lawyer?

My condolences to Waldo, Lindsay, and Bennett on the disposition of their appeal. It might have been a major case in trade secrets, clickwrap licensing, and gratuitous licensing, but instead...

That case has some relevance for the people who are getting copies of the Universal v. Reimerdes injunction along with demand letters from the MPAA. Jacquith et al.'s appeal suggests that nonparties are only very rarely "bound by an injunction" and contempt proceedings will not be likely to succeed except against parties or people who are actually (for example) working for the parties.

In particular, the court said

The coin, however, has a flip side. A nonparty who has acted independently of the enjoined defendant will not be bound by the injunction, and, if she has had no opportunity to contest its validity, cannot be found in contempt without a separate adjudication. See id.; see also Alemite, 42 F.2d at 832 (declaring that a decree which purports to enjoin nonparties who are neither abettors nor legally identified with the defendant "is pro tanto brutum fulmen," and may safely be ignored). This tried and true dichotomy safeguards the rights of those who truly are strangers to an injunctive decree. It does not offend due process.

On the other hand, the damaging thing about the precedent in the 2600 case (as far as the general public is concerned) is that Judge Kaplan found that DeCSS violates the DMCA (declaratory judgment) and can be banned without impairing first amendment rights. This is an extremely damaging precedent which could be used by the MPAA as a basis for a new lawsuit, at least in the Southern District of New York, against people who don't comply with the demand letters.

Given the clearly parallel case, a judge might look at the precedent Kaplan set and grant summary judgment for the MPAA. So Kaplan's decision, in the light of this appeal (which claims that this is already long-settled in caselaw at the Supreme Court level!), doesn't directly forbid the public from publishing DeCSS; instead, it makes it especially easy for the MPAA to win in any subsequent related trial against some other defendant.

This means that lots of people who might be affected by having something (like writing free multimedia software, or doing security research, or publishing exploits for security flaws) that they like to do ruled illegal have an incentive to intervene in a precedent-setting case, at least so that they will have an opportunity to make arguments and have standing to appeal. But this is dangerous, because it risks making one's self into a target. Ah, "litigation strategy"...

I wrote to a couple of people asking whether there is Linux kernel ioctl documentation, and whether it would be silly for me to try to write some. I think ioctls are the most random, scary, undocumented thing, but they're the most common way to do anything "interesting". So really it would be good to have a decent reference to them.

Things in this world (and not just the Linux kernel) are so undocumented...

I heard back from Michael Chastain, who wrote ioctl-number.txt, that there is no current list and that making one could be "2 to 3 months of full time work starting from scratch". Yikes! So let me see if my wrists hold out for another week (dictating ioctl names is not fun), and then I guess I could send a proposal to linux-kernel.

One good reason why there should be a detailed ioctl list, according to Michael Chastain, is for strace, so that when you strace a random program that does a bunch of ioctls, you can find out what they are (and then, even better, look them up in the documentation). Indeed, that's one of two main reasons that ioctl numbers are supposed to be unique. This is easy for syscalls -- almost every syscall has a man page -- but there are so many more ioctls than syscalls!

At about the time of the release of 2.2, there were "no undocumented system calls" in 2.0, according to undocumented(2); on the other hand, there are a few undocumented calls in 2.2 again:

No manual entry for umount2 in section 2
No manual entry for rt_sigreturn in section 2
No manual entry for rt_sigaction in section 2
No manual entry for rt_sigprocmask in section 2
No manual entry for rt_sigpending in section 2
No manual entry for rt_sigtimedwait in section 2
No manual entry for rt_sigqueueinfo in section 2
No manual entry for rt_sigsuspend in section 2
No manual entry for getcwd in section 2
No manual entry for sigaltstack in section 2
No manual entry for getpmsg in section 2
No manual entry for putpmsg in section 2

But overall, the documentation for syscalls is pretty good and pretty thorough. (I try the same exercise with 2.4; this would probably not be a bad idea. The above pages are missing from the current Linux man pages release at ftp://ftp.win.tue.nl/pub/linux-local/manpages/.)

In Sony's 5x7 LED or VFD displays (not to be confused with seven-segment displays), there is only one dot which is never used at all for displaying numbers. Not that that has anything to do with anything. I've just been paying a lot of attention to numeric displays lately.

I finally gave my slightly unfinished collage to Wolfgang. It has a total of 237 sources cited in the bibliography. I didn't get a final page count; I'm guessing around 150 or so. I've promised a supplement of 15 or 20 pages which should finish it off; I can't add any new sources, because she already has the bibliography.

It's a strange feeling not to have a collage here any more. A whole corner of my room feels very empty now.

Goals for Sunday: lunch, buy lamp sockets and tube-shaped light bulbs, arrange them to display the digit "3" in seven-segment style, finish collage supplement, thank birthday party guests, collect all my lists of Martin Gardner books into one.

I've been talking on a mailing list about a variant of chess where each player takes two moves in a row. There is a controversial but simple proof that the first player has a non-losing strategy. I think I've actually found a winning strategy for the first player, if one can win by capturing the opponent's king.

I had an excellent 21st birthday party, with a bunch of friends (Advogato users: crackmonkey, stephane, lilo) coming over to the apartment and a few people calling or sending e-mail. I got some nice presents, and one of the nicest was a clean room (no, not like in semiconductor fabrication; like when you have a room and you clean it up). My room is clean; it's hard to believe. My room hasn't been clean in months.

What I found buried in the corners of my room is a long story. Some of the things I found made me very sad, simply by reminding me of things.

I demonstrated the Pulfrich effect at the party. Sunglasses, Krazy glue, twine, pennies, a couple of bright red Nerf darts, a chair, and you're all set for an impromptu perceptual psychology experiment!

I didn't recite the Nicene Creed or the MIT X license, despite earlier threats to do so. Nor did I recite pi, nor did anybody try to sing "The Elements".

I'm working on initrd stuff, and it looks like I may go back to doing some teaching. That would be nice.

lilo, I think you want to say "et alii" when you refer to people (unless they are all female: then "et aliae") and "et alia" when referring to things (works of authorship, ideas, topics, tasks, et alia). People who know Latin, as I've said now and then, may be offended if you refer to them with neuter grammatical gender. :-) The standard "et al." avoids the problem, because it could stand for any of these phrases, whichever is appropriate.

[zork(~)] echo \($(date +%s -d now)-$(date +%s -d '8:16 EDT Thursday, September 27, 1979')\)/"(86400*365.2422)" | bc -l
21.00163036538696990857
[zork(~)]

Oops, it looks like I wiped out an earlier diary entry by editing it instead of posting a new one (more lynx troubles). I'm actually afraid I may have lost two diary entries that way! I apologize for the inconvenience, if anybody's reading this. My current diary entry, in place of one that may have existed a few days ago, is down here.

I don't think I've lost too much -- probably some discussion of being sick, trying to feel better, and then really enjoying the RSA party.