3/18    Videos of Terri Schiavio, who some want to starve to death.
        http://johnsipos.com/terrivideos

3/18    How chaotic can Florida's (or America's) court system be? One
        \- Florida is a little different. See e.g.:
           http://home.lbl.gov:8080/~psb/Humor/Noble-v-BradfordMarine
        court rules to keep the feeding tube in, and 10 minutes later
        another rules to remove it. Isn't there a hierarchy? It's already
        gone to the State Supreme Court; how can little florida courts
        keep overturning their decision?
        \_ The Senate Health Committee has subpoenaed her and her husband.  She
           can't do that if she's starving to death.
           \_ That is what I mean. This entire situation is quite chaotic.
              Which ridiculous congressman is subpoena'ing a woman in
              a persistent vegetative state? Is he trying to be symbolic?
              \_ Short answer, yes.  I'm sick of hearing about this case.  If
                 she told her husband that she wouldn't want extreme measures
                 to keep her alive, she probably also told her parents.  If
                 they're not respecting her wishes, it's out of selfishness.
                 I think left to their own devices they could have worked
                 it out.  But since we've apparently got nothing else for
                 Congress to do than steroids and this, it's ended up center
                 stage.
                 \_ Congress is going to do steroids and remove a feeding tube?
                    Awesome!
                 \_ Congress loves shit like this.  Keeps them from having to
                    deal with real problems.  I bet they'd have Michael Jackson
                    hearings too, if they thought that they could get away with
                    it.

3/19    Caltech research have figured out how the brain plans movements:
        http://pr.caltech.edu/media/Press_Releases/PR12660.html

3/18    What's the best way to see if a certain kind of memory will work on
        a Mac? I'm looking at
                http://slickdeals.net/#p5870
        and want to know if it'll work on my sister's iBook or my PowerBook.
        TIA.
        \_ http://www.kingston.com
           \_ http://www.crucial.com  Kingston memory that was supposed to
              work in my G5 Tower most spectacularly did not. Crucial matched
              with the right memory at reasonable prices, and now I'm
              cooking with fire.

3/19    Primitive man-bot deputs in Japan, can walk 1 mile per hour. What is
        it with the Japanese people and their obsession with robots (Honda's
        Asimo, Robotech, and now this)?
        http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000957036737
        \_ Debuted a month ago. Beats the hell out of a Segway.
           Cf. http://www.hitachi.co.jp/New/cnews/month/2005/03/0315.html
           (Hitachi's EMIEW.)
        \_ Cost-cutting.  It's cheaper than Japanese people.  -John
        \_ It's necessary R&D before they can develop the tentacle-bot.
        \_ First step towards miniaturization of people in a city of minature
           manufacturing centers where tall people are excluded and cut up
           for parts.
        \_ Half the Japanese population will be too old to work soon. They
           need robots since importing slaves is not permitted anymore.

3/19    I have 2 HD's. When I transfer 25G files from one that is UDMA/5 to
        another one that is UDMA/6, it takes 15 minutes, or roughly, 27MB/sec.
        This is still well below the specifications. I'm sure that the
        100MB/sec specification is probably based on certain conditions, like
        data already in cache, sparse-data-compression, or some other ideal
        conditions that rarely exist in real life. So now I'm wondering, what
        is a typical SUSTAINED read/write rate for UDMA/5 and UDMA/6? -ok thx
        \_ The 'Ultra100' spec means the drive's connection with the system
           can do 100MB/sec.  That is not the speed of the drive itself and
           you will only see it when reading from the drive's cache.  27MB/sec
           sounds about right to me for copying.  Good drives can sustain 40-50
           MB when reading, or 30-40 when writing.  Obviously there's more over
           head when doing both at once and your drives are not say 10K RPM.
        \_ 100 MB/s is the interface speed.
           ~ 27 MB/s is the maximum sustained transfer rate of your drive(s).
           Interface speed is primarily limited by electrical signaling.
           Maximum sustained transfer rate is determined primarily by the
           data density of a platter (how many MB per square inch) in the
           drive, how fast the platters are spinning, and finally, by a
           combination of how fast the heads can seek to different tracks
           and how fragmented your files are.
           \_ FYI I my 2 HD's are on different IDE cables and they're both
              5400RPM. I wish they have a more standardized benchmarks.

3/19    http://emigrant-direct.com now at 3.25%. competition is good.
        \_ WOW this IS pretty good. Has anyone actually tried it? I do have
           a problem with its name though. It has the connotation of moving
           your money overseas or something. And there is the phrase that
           if it's too good to be true, it probably is...
           \_ I signed up for one. I doubt it's a scam. The bank itself looks
              legit. And 3.25% is not really "too good to be true". Interest
              rates at the online money markets have risen 0.5% in the last
              6 months or so, but there were only two major ones (ING and
              virtualbank). They were pretty much going tit for tat. A new
              challenger needs to up the ante a little more than normal to
              get attention.
        \_ I researched ED vs. ING and decided that ED looked a little rinky
           (have to do snail-mail confirmation, weird clauses on how and when
           you can get money out, crappy web interface for pulling up historical
           data on your account, and they don't own their own SSL server,
           AFAICT)  For only 0.65% less, I'm going with ING for now.  In a
           year either the competition from ED will have driven up ING's rates
           or the increased volume to ED will have caused them to fix their
           issues.  Either way's a win.

3/19    Is there a way to get Mozilla under Windows to use mystore to manage
        certificates rather than its own internal cert manager?  I have a
        DER-encoded client cert that's usable by IE, but I'd like to see
        it used by Mozilla (which requires PKCS#12 certs for its own store,
        rather than DER or p7b.)  -John
        \_ It is possible to conver between DER and PKCS#12 (I believe that
        \_ It is possible to convert between DER and PKCS#12 (I believe that
           OpenSSL will do it if you know the correct incantation).  email me
           if you go this route and have trouble, it's been a while since I
           did it last, but I should be able to figure it out again. -dans
           \_I may do this when I get a chance--the problem is that PKCS#7
             just contains certs, and #12 can contain certs along with
             private keys.  You can tag a private key in a PKCS#12 container
             to be non-exportable, in which case, good luck under Windows.
             There's no way to get Mozilla to use the (otherwise very nice)
             MS CAPI directly?  -John
             \_ Right, the PKCS#12 format containing private keys sounds like
                the rub I remember.  If memory serves part of the problem was
                that the keys *could* be encrypted using a password as a
                symmetric key, but were not necessarily the case.  I have no
                experience with the MS CAPI so I can't speak to its
                capabilities.  I think when I did the conversion, I only
                needed the public certificates and managed to get OpenSSL to
                slam a (public) cert into PKCS#12 format with an empty or
                garbage private key that was never used.  I'm a little slammed
                workwise at present, but if I find a spare moment later this
                week I'll poke at OpenSSL and get back to you. -dans
                \_ That's a very cool trick, I hadn't thought of that.  I
                   will also have a go at it when I have a moment--don't
                   stress.  Apparently something called 'safesign CSP' lets
                   Mozilla use CAPI but I haven't tried it yet.  -John
                   \_ Cool, let me know how it works out. -dans

3/19    I'm writing a simple GUI interface for an existing text-only Java
        product. The GUI would expose a small portion of the functionality
        to entice new clients. Should I write the GUI in Java AWT/Swing which
        I'm more familiar with (advantage:all in Java solution, disadvantage:IE
        users needs to install VM) or should I write it in Flash
        (advantage:more lightweight than VM, more readily available on
        browsers, disadvantage:I'll need to learn Flash, which shouldn't be
        harder than AWT/Swing I hope). What do you guys think?
        \_ Can you just do a mockup?  The problem with Swing is that you can't
           (please correct me if I'm wrong) make it look entirely like
           Windows which has an annoying tendency to turn off idiot managers
           to what you're trying to do.  -John
        \_ If you decide to go with flash, go out and get a copy of
           flash mx 2004 for server geeks.  If you end up doing it in
           java you'll probably need to stick to using non-swing awt,
           as some of the older vm's that come with browsers don't have
           swing set up.  I recommend doing it with html/cgi. --darin
        \_ I was distinctly unimpressed the last time I used Swing which was
           supposed to be an improvement over AWT.  Of course, that was years
           ago so it might suck less now, but I doubt it.  Perhaps a third
           avenue you could pursue which would be useable pretty much anywhere
           just like darin's suggested html/cgi, but have interactivity closer
           to Flash would be something writting in client-side javascript that
           utilizes the XMLHttpRequest object. -dans
           utilizes the XMLHttpRequest object. -dan

3/19    Given the choice between a firewire and USB2.0 connection
        (between an external hard drive and my computer), which one is
        better and why? Thanks.
        \_ Firewire is faster and more robust for that application.  USB
           is more widely available if you'd ever want to move the disk to
           another machine.  -tom
        \_ Interface-wise, FireWire is better technically speaking, but to
           most users they see no difference.
           As tom said, you see USB 2.0 on more notebooks and desktops than
           FireWire, because Intel p0wnZ dat f00l st3vee j0b5, I mean,
           Intel produces mobo chipsets with USB 2.0 on-board as a std feature.
                \_ Cool, thanks for the responses.
        \_ Firewire.  It's peer-to-peer instead of host/client, so you don't
           load your CPU while transferring data.  You can burn one CD while
           ripping another one, etc.
           \_ nothing personal, but this is a fine example of the utterly
              bizarre, meaningless techno-babble advice often disgorged
              on the motd.  what happened to the CS in CSUA?
           \_ Uhm, the firewire peer to peer connectivity between computers
              has nothing to do with how efficiently peripherals functions.
              The spec has provisions for peer to peer networking which
              would allow for fast grid computing. This doesn't mean you
              get higher efficiencies when transferring information to a
              CD burner.
        \_ http://csua.com/?entry=35792  (specs)
           http://csua.com/?entry=12107  (speed)
           Also just search for "usb firefire" on Kais Motd

3/19    I put in an application to Paul Graham's summer founders program,
        but am likely to incorperate regardless of weather I get funding
        or not.  Anyone who needs something to do over the summer should
        email me.  Experience/interest in foreign language(s), linguistics,
        perl, sql, javascript or statistics would be useful. --darin