Author Archives: joestump

Real ID Act

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The federal government is going to be voting on emergency funding for the troops, which is a good thing. I’m sure they could use the money. The real concern I have is the Real ID Act that has been added as a rider to this bill. This bill would require the following information to be present on your drivers license and available via a “common machine-readable technology” (most likely RFID tags that allow scanners to read such information wirelessly from up to 30 feet away):

  1. The person’s full legal name.
  2. The person’s date of birth.
  3. The person’s gender.
  4. The person’s driver’s license or identification card number.
  5. A digital photograph of the person.
  6. The person’s address of principle residence.
  7. The person’s signature.
  8. Physical security features designed to prevent tampering, counterfeiting, or duplication of the document for fraudulent purposes.
  9. A common machine-readable technology, with defined minimum data elements.

This is a complete victory for identification thieves who will now be able to glean such information with a quick scan of your drivers license. Everything they need to assume your identity is stored, digitally, on a little piece of plastic that thousands of people lose daily and everyone hands over to a total stranger at least once a day. It’s not too late to fight this bill. You can fax your Senators at UnRealID.com and you can also mail Congressment Sensenbrenner at sensenbrenner@mail.house.gov. Below is my email to him (feel free to copy and paste and send this to your senators).

Dear Congressmen Sensenbrenner,

I’m emailing from the state of Washington with my concerns over your Real ID Act. The bill states that a drivers license must contain my full legal name, date of birth, gender, license number, digital photo of myself, my principle address (not a PO BOX or work address) and my signature. This means anyone with a camera phone will have more than enough information with a quick click of the shutter. It makes me quite uneasy to know that many judges, cops and women could have such information readily available to stalkers, rapists and other criminals.

To make matters worse you have required a common machine-readable technology, which would be decided upon by the Dept. of Homeland Security. From what I have read they are leaning towards the use of RFID technology, which would make such identification cards easily readable with the proper equipment (which is quite affordable) from anyone within 30 feet of my person.

The centralized database also concerns me. This would, essentially, give the darker element of the internet a single point of access to enough personal information to wreak total havoc in the area of identification theft.

Please, reconsider this disastrous piece of legislation.

Sincerely,

Joseph C. Stump

The worst part is they plan on linking all of the state databases together into a centralized location. I give it a year, maybe two, before some hacker/cracker hacks his/her way into the database and hase enough information to, literally, hold the public hostage.

UPDATE: I just got an email back from a good friend who works on The Hill with regards to the Real ID Act.

It will be law sometime in the near future. The Senate is considering the supplemental appropriations conference report that contains Real ID. It’s a conference report, so it cannot be amended in any way. It will likely be on the president’s desk sometime in a the next week or
two.

Sounds rather bleak, but it shouldn’t stop you from faxing/emailing/calling your Senators.

Vegas or Bust (Mostly Bust)

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Let me first say that Vegas pretty much rules. Where else can you go and eat all the shrimp and New York steak you can handle for $10.99? Where else can you play 25 cent hands of video poker and get fed free drinks all night? I had a great time playing craps with Julia and Garren and video poker with Keith. However, travel to and from on this trip has stunk.

On the flight out here I was delayed two hours. Not a big deal since it was a direct fligh. However, on the way back it has been a totally different story. I sit here writing this post in the D terminal while waiting for a flight back to Seattle. If this story had happened to anyone else I’d be laughing, so feel free.

1:30PM – Having a 5:00 fligh and having heard that security and lines at Las Vegas can be a horrific experience, I decide to leave the Monte Carlo early for the airport.

1:45PM – I arrive at the airport to find out that my cab does not, for some reason, accept credit cards. After a frantic search for an ATM I get some cash and find my cabby, thankfully, waiting for his fare.

1:55PM – After a few failed attempts at the automated check-in station I am forced to wait in a long line for a real person to check me into my flight.

2:20PM – Arrive in security line and manage to get through security without any difficulties. I’ve learned to: a.) not wear a belt to the airport, b.) wear flip-flops and c.) stow my cell phone, wallet, watch, etc. in my carry one BEFORE getting in the security line.

2:40PM – Sit down to read my magazines, check email and call my Mom to wish her a Happy Mother’s Day.

4:40PM – On the way back from the bathroom I notice my plane is delayed an hour, which means I’ll be missing my connection flight from Phoenix to Seattle.

4:50PM – Stand in line at the courtesy desk and find out that I’ve been booked on an Alaskan Airlines direct flight (yay!) that leaves from Las Vegas at 11:10PM (boo!). It gets better, I’m only “booked” and have yet to get a “seat assignment”, which means I must leave the secured area to go to Alaskan Airlines’ ticket counter to get a seat assignment. This, of course, means I have to go BACK through security.

5:00PM – Make my way to the Alaskan Airlines ticket counter and get a seating assignment. As I’m grabbing the ticket from the counter person’s hand, her manager comes over and announces “Do NOT sell any more to America West.” Thankfully, I had already gotten my ticket, but if I had shown up 2 minutes later I’d have been out of luck.

5:10PM – Get back into the security line and find out that I’ve been marked for “special screening” and directed to another line. Am I fuming at this point? You bet. I get in the “special screening” line and check out my fellow terrorists: two small girls and their mom, a middle aged couple and me. Damn, and I left my turbin at home.

5:40PM – After going through not one, but two different scanners and having my bags completely searched, I finally start making my way to my gate. Oh joy, I get to take a tram over to the other side of the airport.

6:00PM – Hunker down for what will be about a five hour delay. The only bright spot being that there is free WiFi at my gate.

9:00PM – Find out my 11:10PM flight has been delayed until 1:15AM.

5:21AM – Finally arrive home and promptly pass out.

I wouldn’t be so pissed if America West had made some token gesture. Maybe a food coupon for a free dinner? Anything to at least attempt to make up for having me go through the security line twice, barely get a ticket on the next flight and then wait six hours in all to get back home. The best part? You guessed it, I have to pay a cab to get home as my wife will be sound asleep by the time I get home, which I’m hoping will be around 3:00AM Monday morning.

YATR

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Let me be the first to say that Tiger isn’t as great as everyone is saying it is. In fact, the only reason to upgrade that I can see is Spotlight and the new Mail.app. Supposedly it’s supposed to be faster, but I haven’t noticed any increase in speed on my 1GHz/768MB PowerBook. This could be due to me merely upgrading instead of doing a clean install. So what have I noticed that doesn’t have me roaring over Tiger? (C’mon, an entire review without using a tiger cliche?)

  1. If you have lots of email in Mail.app currently, watch out. The import into the new version of Mail.app barfed on one of my folders, which I had to delete in order for it to finish importing my email (about 25,000 emails). After that was over the fun had just begun. Every time I clicked on a message Mail crashed. After a reboot and some tinkering I finally got it working, but this left a really bad taste in my mouth.
  2. If you’ve been mucking around the UNIX settings then you need to watch out. The upgrade process appears to have modified, updated or simply deleted many of my changes from files such as /etc/profile and some of my VIM syntax files. Quite annoying.
  3. Spotlight is slow. I’m not sure if this has anything to do with me not doing a clean install or not, but it’s not the “lightning fast” that Apple purports it to be. Also, unless I’m a retard (which is likely) it matches “any” of the search terms and doesn’t allow you to specify that documents must match “all” of the search terms. Quite annoying. Also, while at the BASH prompt I can’t cd into a Smart Folder. This, simply, sucks. If I created a Smart Folder for “Word Documents” it should act like a regular folder, which would allow me to create intelligent backups and use rsync to back them up. This definitely sucks for people like me who use scp to move files from computer to computer.

So are there any things that I do like? Yeah, there are a few. I don’t think Apple touted the new Mail application enough. It’s, quite simply, a great upgrade. How did I live without Smart Folders before? I’ve added Smart Folders for “Today”, “Yesterday”, “Flagged” and “Pictures”,
which let me quickly find emails matching those criteria.

Also, Dashboard is a welcome addition for me. A lot of people, including me, ranted about it being a rip-off of Konfabulator. The thing I like about Dashboard is that a quick keystroke lets me see time, AirPort status, a dictionary, Wikipedia, etc. I’m totally addicted to browsing Wikipedia articles in this fashion. Could someone please offer a PHP/MySQL lookup module?

I think Apple would have gotten a LOT more fanfare if they had waited a few months and released the new version of iLife with Tiger. As it stands, the two major upgrades (Spotlight and Dashboard) are great additions, but probably shouldn’t have stood on their own as the main reason to upgrade.

Call from mom in Iraq nets a 10 day suspension

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In celebration of my new category, “Stupid Schools”, I have a story about a student who was suspended for 10 days for refusing to hang up a call from his mom in Iraq. Granted it was during school hours, but give me a break. They say they suspended him because he used profanities and became beligerant when asked to end the phone call.

“When a kid becomes out of control like that they can either be arrested or suspended for 10 days. Now being that his mother is in Iraq, we’re not trying to cause her any undue hardship; he was suspended for 10 days.”

They act like they did him a favor. The real travesty would be if his parents grounded him over getting suspended (or would that be irony?).

Restarting the Dock in OS X

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The problem is that when your Dock freezes in OS X it can be difficult to get to programs to restart it or anything pretty much. Luckily, when mine froze today I had a Term open and this is how I restarted it without having to power down my damn computer. 


jstump@Joseph-Stumps-Computer
jstump$ ps auxw | grep Dock
jstump  3231   0.0  0.5   169272   4204  ??  S     9:48AM
 0:04.75 /System/Library/CoreServices/Dock.app/Contents/MacOS/Dock -psn_0
jstump  6868   0.0  0.0    18644     92 std  R+   11:45AM
0:00.00 grep Dock
jstump@Joseph-Stumps-Computer
jstump$ kill -HUP 3231

The second field in ps‘s output is the pid for that process (Process ID). Using kill we can restart the Dock without crashing everything. You’ll see your Dock disappear for a second and reappear in working form a second later.

Maya has relations with Crash

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Whenever I tell people that Maya has a strange habit of humping my cat, Crash, they always think I’m lying. Well, I’m not. In fact, I have a video of Maya humping Crash (1.4MB).

I’m not really sure why my female dog has taken to humping my male cat, but I find it quite funny to say the least. It seems to happen mostly when Crash is bent over eating out of the food dish. The part I find most odd is that Crash doesn’t seem to mind.

Anatomically nothing is happening, but man it’s funny as hell to watch. I was at a party last night showing everyone the video and getting good laughs.

RDF, RSS by Category, etc.

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I’ve made a number of updates to the site. Probably the biggest addition is the fact that you can now subscribe via RDF 1.0, which includes the text for the entire posts. Below is a list of other changes to the site.

  1. The RSS 1.0 feed has been updated to include a dc:creator tag. I also changed references to josephstump.com.
  2. Category pages now include the name of the category at the top of the page as well as a link to that category’s RSS feed. This means you can subscribe to a specific category instead of the entire site.
  3. I have updated the links to the right to include links to the RDF feed as well as a validation link for the feed.
  4. The archive page now includes links to the RSS feeds for each category.
  5. You can subscribe to search results! Each search result page has a link to the RSS feed. Any time a new post matches your search term it will show up in your feed.
  6. I also added a few links in the “Publications” section to an unfinished book of mine and a few other articles.

Also, you can subscribe to search/category feeds in RDF, instead of RSS, if you change rss/2.0 with rdf/1.0. I plan on adding a link when I get the chance. You can also hack the feeds to crawl my entire site via RDF or RSS by passing ?start=$x where $x is an increment of 10 to the various feeds (ie. ?start=0, ?start=10, etc.).

Since there were major updates to the feeds please let me know if you have problems. All of the feeds validate without issues so they should work.

Bo Bice is a Druggie – I'm shocked!

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Apparently, Bo Brice has been arrested twice for drug possession. There’s a shocker. A rock n’ roller busted for doing drugs?! That’s like finding out the girls in Sports Illustrated’s Swimsuit Edition have had their breasts augmented.

To his credit he was up front about his “past indescretions” and won’t be booted from the show. Good thing too, since he’s been my pick to win it since the beginning.

SAT Prep Online

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I’ve been working on a new SAT Prep Course for enotes.com. We are the only place on the internet that offers the entire SAT Prep book online. I’m extremely proud of this pariticular application because of the fact that I think students will be better prepared after taking it. Below are some of the features that I like about the product.

  1. We offer our entire vocab word database in a format that you can load onto your iPod so you can study the SAT Vocabulary on your iPod.
  2. We offer 4 complete practice tests that you can take in an online environment. The tests are timed just like the new SAT, allow you to pause your test and come back to it and, after you have finished your test, view the answer key, which is complete with detailed explanations of each question. Additionally, once you have completed your test we score the test just like the real SAT.
  3. Unlike our competitors we offer all of the end-of-chapter practice drills in an online testing environment, which automatically scores your drills after you take them. You can take the drills as many times as you like. We also offer virtual flashcards so you can practice your vocabulary online.
  4. Our unique diagnostic test looks at the questions you got wrong and then refers you to sections in our online book as well as practice drills you can read over and work on to improve your performance on similar questions.

This was a major technical undertaking and is the result of about 3 months of full-time coding. It also represents the first use of many new technologies for me: InnoDB tables, foreign key constraints, heavy JavaScript usage and XMLHttpRequest to name a few. I’m working on finalizing some of the featurs, but for only $49.95 you won’t find a better SAT Prep Course online.