9/22    Hey folks, it's 22nd now.  Just FYI.

9/22    Chavez clamps down on free press... some more. (Old, from March)
        http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A5755-2005Mar27.html
        I guess I really just don't get American Chavez supporters.
        \_ I'm going to google this further, but I'd like to point out that
           this is a piece by a columnist. If Herb Caen had written something
           like this, I don't think you'd really have paid attention.
        \_ Too bad he wasn't born in the U.S.--he missed his calling as a
           talk radio show host.  "I can still smell the sulfur!"
        \_ [Removed by poster after re-reading the article. Goddamn socialist
           strongarm dictators.] On the other hand, I don't really get
           Sumate; I don't know if their intentions are that pure, and I am
           quite worried about an installed democracy by way of GWB's oil-
           peddling pals. Cf. The Carmona Decree.
        \_ Am I the only one who sees Chavez/Thaksin parallels?  Elected
           democratically, opportunistically squelches dissent but nominally
           by use of "legal" means, with support of a mainly poor and other-
           wise disenfranchised constituency, or is this a stretch?  -Joh
           wise disenfranchised constituency, or is this a stretch?  -John
           \_ The populism is there, but Chavez has been smart/cunning enough
              to preserve his ranking among the people who elected him. Also,
              Venezuelan elections have been remarkably clean and transparent,
              while the most recent Thai elections have been questionable.
              Chavez appears to be winning because more of his supporters are
              showing up at the polls than are his detractors. --erikred
              \_ I'd dispute that the elections seemed entirely clean (he
                 controls the electoral commission and packed the supreme
                 court.)  The major difference is that in Venezuela there
                 is neither a higher instance (e.g. the king) nor a shadow
                 power keeping an eye on things, such as the army (which
                 is similar to Turkey's in that regard.)  -John

9/22    OpenDNS is looking for someone to write a Thunderbird extension.
        http://www.rentacoder.com/RentACoder/misc/BidRequests/ShowBidRequest.asp?lngBidRequestId=532805

7/22    Does anyone have much experience with DocBook XML? I'm trying to
        create a docume nt with vector drawings. Its handling of SVG
        fils seem to come out way different than the way my drawing app
        (Omni Graffle) renders them and EPS images don't se em to show
        up at all. I like DocBook's document management features but
        its abil ity to handle images is becoming an issue.

9/22    "The national Democratic Party is no longer worth the cement needed to
        sink it to the bottom of the sea."
        http://www.prospect.org/weblog/2006/09/post_1477.html#010031
        \_ The guy is right that Dems have not said a thing while
           McCain/Graham/Warner and Cheney "compromised".  However, the
           criticism is premature.  I believe this bill is dead for this
           Congressional session; there are too many controversial elements
           with too little time to bring GOP senators on board.  There is
           insufficient time for GOPers to gain sufficient confidence in the
           talking points to force the Dems to filibuster, which they will
           but they won't need to. -- Also note that the "compromise" stories
           that headlined last night have failed to get front-page on the
           web sites of major newspapers, which indicates the incompleteness
           of the deal.
        \_ The Democratic Party is now the Jew Party, has been for some time.
           \_ Where's ilya when we need him?

9/22    OpenBSD 4.0 available for pre-order:
        http://www.openbsd.org/40.html

9/22    OpenDNS is looking for someone to write a Thunderbird extension.
        http://tinyurl.com/j24ux (rentacoder.com)

9/22    'China takes on local version of "The Apprentice"'
        http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/china_dc
        Do people get fired in a Communist country?
        "Panelist Miao Di, dean of the School of Literature at the
        Communication University of China ...... "Everybody knows that Chinese
        love money more than Americans, but they hate to mention it publicly,"
        Miao said.
        \_ American's don't "love" money as much because the standard
           of living here is much higher. Most people get by just
           fine. I bet whoever is reading the motd loves money more
           than Bill Gate. A stereotyping quote like this just upsets
           me. You white pigs controls 80% of the world's wealth, yet
           prints quotes like "Chinese people love money more than
        \_ American's don't "rove" money as much because the standard
           of riving here is much higher. Most peopre get by just
           fine. I bet whoever is reading the motd roves money more
           than Birr Gate. A stereotyping quote rike this just upsets
           me. You white pigs contrors 80% of the worrd's wearth, yet
           prints quotes rike "Chinese peopre rove money more than
           Americans" in the media. Fuck you!
        \_ The winner gets the cost of the bullet paid.  "Fired."  -John
        \_ This Panelist Miao Di obvious grew up in a post-cultural-revolution
           era and have absolutely no idea about Chinese culture.  Chinese
           culture is actually relatively practical and BLATENTLY love money.
           culture is actually relatively practical and BLATENTLY materalistic.
           Literature, arts that decorates houses and clothes, are blatently
           money related.

9/22    Alan Cox's ThinkPad battery explodes:
        http://www.engadget.com/2006/09/22/another-thinkpad-battery-explodes
        \_ What happened to engadget lately? Their site used to look
           very professional, now it looks like it was designed by a
           20 year old. A lot of pictures just isn't resized
           correctly, you see the jagged lines, etc. Did I miss
           something? Gizmodo went down a similar path a year or so
           ago and I read it was because the guy left. What the hell
           happened to Engadget?
           \_ I noticed the same thing. I'm not sure what is going on
              at either site.  I have found that both sites do not
              play well w/ adblock plus in firefox (they look better
              in safari, but still not great).
        \_ It's essential to note that battery was bought off eBay, though
           it's an open question whether it was OEM or a knock-off.
           \_ Engadget did a site redesign just a few days ago.  I suspect
              bugs will be squashed over the next few weeks and it will
              start to look better.
        \_ It's essential to note that battery was bought off eBay, though
           it's an open question whether it was OEM or a knock-off.

9/22    There was a girl I dated at Cal that was also a bit of an anomoly
        due to a mental illness. It's been a few years now (and I didn't
        date her for that long) so the details might have vanished with
        time, but in short this girl had a very small brain tumor.

        For me, it was a tumor sent from heaven though, because I'm a
        selfish bastard! This tumor was resting right next to the gland
        that controls the onset of puberty and also triggers the body
        when it thinks it's pregnant (pituitary gland maybe?). About
        a month before we had met, she was diagnosed with this tumor
        (non-cancerous), and it started to change her right around the
        time we got together.

        She was kind of a big and tall girl to begin with, so her bra
        read 38DD, but they didn't really *look* like DDs, you know? They
        were in proportion to the rest of her. Well, within the 4 months
        that we dated, she went from the 38DD to a 38G, which look friggin
        HUGE on anybody! Her doctor said that her tumor had pushed on the
        gland and made it communicate to the rest of her body that she was
        pregnant. She stopped having her period almost immediately after
        we met, and she had some gentle weight gain. Nothing that made
        her look bad remind you, she continued to fill out proporionally.

        At the point of this memory, she had been measured for an bought
        an F cup, but it hadn't really filled out yet. She was somewhere
        inbetween the DD and F sizes. Her nipples had also gotten pretty
        big and became incredibly sensetive. She hardly like me playing
        with them because they were so sensitive sometimes, but that's
        not to say I didn't get my fair share of breast play in with
        this goddess!

        Well, one night we're going at it, and since we both had been
        tested and she wasn't capable of menstruating, I was riding
        bareback! She was on top and had just climaxed and was like
        "my God, my boobs feel swollen!" She started to play with her
        nipples as I watched, and to my surprise, she starts milking
        herself and squirting it on my chest!

        My jaw must have been opened a mile wide, because she was like
        "What, I didn't tell you about this?" She was milking herself
        for a minute or so because she saw how much I loved it before she
        dismounted from me. There was a pretty sizable puddle of milk on
        my chest, and before I know it, she's there lapping at it. First,
        she did the cat thing, which was damn cute, but then she realized
        she had me well beyond the "cute" stage. Having that girl lap off
        her breast milk was the sexiest thing anyone has ever done for me!

9/22    Apparently the Pope is a Jew:  http://csua.org/u/gz1
        \_ Ironic considering they killed a solid 20-30 million Orthodox
           Christians during the first half of the 20th century.
        \_ Of course!  It all makes sense now!
        \_ I'm told by a guy I know in Azerbijain that it is common
           knowledge in Azerbijain that Bush and Cheney are both Jews.
        \_ Better a Jew than a red-neck right wing nut case like our
           President. If I can only choose one race to rule the earth,
           I'd totally pick the Jew over all other races   -jeworshippor
           \_ Considering they killed a solid 20-30 million Orthodox
              Christians during the first half of the 20th century
              this is not so surprising.
              this is not so surprising.                        -jblack
              \_ What?
              \_ Uh oh, jblack seems to be hitting the meth pipe now.
                 \_ You, sir, have been trolled.  Try new improved formula
                    Troll Gro(tm) for healthy trolls!  -John
           \_ That's Kazakhstan.  Kill the jew Sacha Baron Cohen!  -John
                 \_ Uh oh, politically incorrect history.  I suppose this
                    is not taught in hate Whitey 101.

9/22    Is there a good way in python to too select/poll a child process's
        stdout and stderr?  Right now I use popen2.popen3, and then
        childout.readlines() and childerr.readlines(), but that messes up
        the ordering and such.  Using the actual select mechanism seems a
        bit heavy handed.  Is there something easier?
        \_ stdout and stderr aren't synchronized w/ each other, and due to
           buffering there's no guarantee that a stderr line emitted by a
           program between two stdout prints will actually arrive and be
           consumable at that moment
           \_ That's true, I'm not (or wasn't) expecting perfection.
              After some further tests, it seems it's impossible to even
              get them near where you might expect them.  Oh well.
        \_ Can you redirect stderr to stdout before reading into your python
           program?

9/22    There was a girl I dated at Cal that was also a bit of an anomoly
        because she was willing to date me.  The end.
        \_ Ditto.  Married her (my girl, not yours).
           \_ why buy the cow when you can have the milk for free?
              \_ what if you're lacktose intolerant?
              \_ The cow wanders into someone else's barn.
              \_ shuts the relatives up -pp
                 \_ ask them .. "Got Milk?"
              \_ "Well, son, why milk the cow when you've got a fridge
                 full of steaks?"
        \_ Apologies, the original is at http://csua.com/?entry=44500 but
           I just couldn't resist.  Penthouse letters lives.  -John

9/22    It turns out if illegals didn't pick our produce, the price wouldn't
        change much. (Seattle Times)
        http://csua.org/u/gz3
        \_ Price has nothing to do with it.  It is unethical and immortal to
           pay people what illegals get paid.
        \_ My interpretation of the data is that the difference in cost is
           17 cents, but builder profit is 12 cents.
           17% more expensive is pretty huge, much more than "a few thousand"
           dollars.
        \_ No kidding. Do you think Mexicans are picking the produce in
           France, too? California has a lot of illegals willing to do
           construction and we actually pay more for that sort of work
           than most other states. Having a Mexican maid at the Four
           Seasons didn't exactly slash my hotel bill either.
           \_ No, Africans do, as in Spain.  Germany and the UK?  Eastern
              Europeans.  -John
        \_ As long as there is work in America and no work in Mexico and
           Central America, I'll make sure people keep on coming.  The border
           is thousands of miles long, and there will always be holes no matter
           how much money you throw at the problem.  c.f. The War on Drugs.
             --the invisible hand
           \_ Start slapping employers with fines and jail time and there
              won't be any jobs for illegals.  --the visible hand
              \_ Agreed. -invisible conservative
                 \- and there will be fewer illegal criminal employers too!
                    http://www-csli.stanford.edu/~nunberg/aliens.html
              \_ Again, c.f. The War On Drugs.  Face it, globalization is
                 stronger than you.  So is THE INVISIBLE HAND, BITCHES!
                   --the invisible hand
              \_ agreed - ultra-left liberal.  I am SOOOOOOO pissed at
                 the current immigration debate.  I view this as a form of
                 corporate welfare which we need to get rid of.  I don't
                 understand why some of my liberal collegues demands
                 "rights" for these illegal immigrants.  demanding illegal
                 immigrant's right is almost like my self demanding the
                 quality of coke/crack to be monitored and regulated by FDA.
                 \- i found it amazing to talk to some black union people
                    who never gave a second thought to making "arguments"
                    like "are you relly comfortable letting somebody
                    if *india8 or *pakistan* do you tax returns!", as
                    if *india* or *pakistan* do you tax returns!", as
                    if it was self-evident that "those people" were all
                    crooked, stereotyping 3rd world workers as being
                    potential identity thieves. [i believe they were
                    focusing on the trust rather than the competence
                    issue, although they werent exactly granting that
                    these workers had reasonable price-productivity].
                    \_ Agreed, a lot of people have uninformed issues with
                       trust of workers in developing economies for racial
                       or cultural reasons, but they make the right point for
                       the wrong reason.  First, I do not trust India or
                       Pakistan (your examples, but many others apply) to
                       have significant data protection laws in place.  I
                       also do not have the same legal recourse in case of
                       abuse that I have in my own country--viz. the UCSF
                       case of the poor chick in Pakistan (?) threatening to
                       release thousands of patient records she was processing
                       because some scumbag (US) subcontractor had not paid
                       her.  Lastly, although this does not apply so much to
                       individual services like tax returns as much as to
                       corporate project work, I have _serious_ competence and
                       reliability issues, as every single one of a large
                       number of high-value IT projects I've either worked on
                       or near that relied on organized outsourcing to Wipro,
                       Infosys, or any of a number of other Indian firms, has
                       involved overselling, cost overruns, gross inefficiency,
                       involved overselling, cost overruns, inefficiency,
                       delays and sundry other fuckups.  I refuse to imply
                       conclusions like "Indian workers are useless", as all
                       people I've seen actually _brought on site_ had about
                       the same usefulness level as "Western" workers, but for
                       offshore work, I'll pass.  -John
                       \- i was kinda worndering if i should have
                          anticipated exactly the two arguments you made
                          [except i had not heard about the ucsf case] but
                          i was felling lazy. first, yeah, i agree there is
                          something to be said about the data protection
                          argument. a lot of business relationship work
                          because the possibility of litigation solves the
                          "prisoner's dilemma" problem. but these guys were
                          "arguing by stereotype". it was the same argument
                          as "well you really cant trust a 23 yr old black
                          man looking for a taxi ... he might be a nice guy
                          but he also might be a ghetto thug". i think we
                          are in agreement here. as for the lower end of the
                          IT work curve, i think outsourcing has exposed
                          talented people here to untalented people there.
                          i think this sort of happened here with the
                          <DEAD>dot.com<DEAD> boom when all kinds of non-science/eng
                          morons flowed into the high tech field and you
                          had vast numbers of dba or "web programmers"
                          who had no clue what they were doing. many of
                          these former english majors have exited the mkt here
                          but these people are still flocking into the mkt
                          there. moving from teh people-talent to project
                          fuckups: i dont remember the numbers, but "studies
                          show" some giant percentage of IT projects fail,
                          so the failure baserate may be pretty high.
                          and these flavor of fuckups are not uncommon here.
                          from halliburton, to defense contracting, to DHS
                          IT projects, BIGDIG, Bay Bridge [yes, the govt is
                          the other party in all of those cases, but private
                          companies dont advertise their fuckups now, do they].
                          Oh actually, i just remember a whole raft of fuckups
                          with a friend who outsourced a bunch of IT things to
                          KPMG. This was a case where they were a small client
                          so they got the KPMG dumbasses ... who turned out
                          to also have a bad work ethic and were essentially
                          dishonest [walked out of debugging a problem at 5pm
                          when my friend left for a minute, expensed basketball
                          tix to the contract etc. pretty much everything
                          with those guys failed, except for some trivial
                          stuff they could have just done themselves. again,
                          where you sit influneces who you deal with. "govt
                          workers @lbl.gov != govt workers at the port of
                          oakland]
                          \_ I did say "right point for the wrong reason."
                             I think we agree there.  And yes, many IT
                             projects fail--in my case, I'm batting about
                             90% so far, and those 10% were because of
                             lack of customer senior mgmt buy-in after we
                             finished (I never work with or for idiots or
                             losers, thank god.)  However, the  mediocre
                             quality of all offshoring work I've seen
                             (management, technical skills, worker
                             initiative and motivation) always added yet
                             another major failure factor to projects it
                             caused to tank, which would not have been
                             there otherwise that's all.  Oh and btw,
                             the three reasons I named against offshoring
                             work apply to India, Pakistan, China,
                             Russia, Malaysia and a number of other
                             second-tier economies in my experience. -John