This probably isn't the right place to ask this, but I can't find anything on this problem, and hey, someone reading this might be able to point me in the right direction. When we run a build as a Scheduled Task (under NT or Windows 2000), we've been having problems with the NTVDM - when the build tries to run certain 16-bit applications (namely the Windows Help Compiler under Win2K), NTVDM gets an error and hangs with a dialog box until we clear it. This, obviously, is a problem for automated builds. It runs fine when we run the exact same scripts from the command line, so I'm baffled. I'm currently theorizing that it might have something to do with the process tree depth - maybe the NTVDM has problems if it's got 20 ancestor processes? I have no idea whatsoever. If you've got any ideas, or can point me towards a website/newsgroup/etc that might be able to help, I'd be very, very appreciative.

From the AP, via Atrios:

WASHINGTON - Zell Miller, Georgia's maverick Democratic senator, says the nation ought to return to having senators appointed by legislatures rather than elected by voters.

Miller, who is retiring in January, was first appointed to his post in 2000 after the death of Paul Coverdell. He said Wednesday that rescinding the 17th Amendment, which declared that senators should be elected, would increase the power of state governments and reduce the influence of Washington special interests.

"The individuals are not so much at fault as the rotten and decaying foundation of what is no longer a republic," Miller said on the Senate floor. "It is the system that stinks. And it's only going to get worse because that perfect balance our brilliant Founding Fathers put in place in 1787 no longer exists."

Hey, most states didn't have popular elections for the Presidential electors untli 1828 or so - South Carolina's electors were still chosen by the state legislature until after the Civil War, in fact. So why stop at getting rid of popularly elected senators? Let's just just have EVERY office be appointed by someone else. It'll be great! Democracy in action, I tell ya!

I was just flipping through channels, and saw a MoveOn commercial contrasting Kerry and Bush's military records...on Fox News. Swank.

From the AP:

BOSTON (AP) Thirteen state legislators asked the state's highest court on Tuesday to reverse its November decision legalizing gay marriage a ruling that the same court reaffirmed in February.

The lawmakers, represented by the American Center for Law & Justice, argue that the Supreme Judicial Court lacked jurisdiction in the case under the state Constitution. Instead, they said, it is the Legislature and governor who are entitled to determine marriage laws.

''We all believe the courts went beyond their authority,'' said Rep. Robert Correia, D-Fall River. ''I want a court that's going to operate under the laws of the commonwealth.''

Attorney Mary Bonauto, who represented seven gay couples in their landmark quest for marriage rights, said the question of jurisdiction had been raised when the case was decided by a Superior Court judge in 2001, when the high court heard arguments in 2003, and when the same court reaffirmed its decision in February.

''And there's a reason it's gone nowhere: It has no merit,'' Bonauto said. ''The court always has the power to review and decide whether the Legislature or executive has overstepped its boundaries.''

Yeah, they're soooo grasping at straws. Worth noting - the law firm representing these goofballs? It was founded by Pat Robertson. Yay!

Pretty much says it all. And now that I'm still awake at 1:20 in the morning, I discover that a very important build broke for no explainable reason, and, since I'm on call and I'm awake, I might as well fix it. Problem is it'll be another couple hours 'til I can tell if I actually fixed it or not, so I have to decide whether I'm going to sleep tonight at all or not. And my teeth hurt for no particular reason. So do my shoulders. It's one of those nights.

In the wake of the still-blowing-my-mind Pepys' Blog (Comments for annotations! TrackBack for cross-referencing! Gaaaah!), I've come across another hypertext of a classic of the English language - the Waste Land. Mmm...

Buried in this article on Romney and the 1913 law that prohibits Massachusetts from performing marriages that would be illegal where the participants come from (obviously designed to block interracial marriages from states with anti-miscegenation laws) is some good news:

In Boxborough yesterday, Romney's chief legal counsel, Daniel B. Winslow, told a meeting of the Massachusetts Justices of the Peace Association that the administration would not tolerate justices who flout the law. The warning came after some justices said they would sooner resign than officiate at same-sex weddings.

"If a justice of the peace cannot comply with his or her oath of office, then we would expect that person to tender their resignation from that office," Winslow said. Later, outside of the meeting, Winslow said clerks are required to carry out the administration's policy. He declined to specify what penalty a renegade clerk might face, but said the administration's policy is "absolutely workable."

This shouldn't really have been up for debate in the first place - it's the job of the state employees to do their job, regardless of their personal positions. As someone said at the Constitutional Convention, following an attempt by radical anti-marriage forces to add language allowing state employees to opt out of performing same-sex marriages for religious reasons, a state social worker can't refuse to work with an unmarried mother just because the social worker is religiously opposed to children out of wedlock. But it's still something - there's now not a single avenue of resistance left to Romney and his ilk. Marriages WILL start on May 17th, and all he's got left is the 1913 law, which will probably crumble under a court challenge anyway.

I'm taking a break from it - it deeply messed up my sleep with very vivid dreams. I haven't had a solid night's sleep in weeks. I've been off it since yesterday - hopefully tonight will be more resting...

I just came across this - www.pepysdiary.com. Phil Gyford 's going through Samuel Pepys' diary - in many ways, the creative predecessor of the blog - and transcribing and annotating the whole thing into a Movable Type blog. This is beyond great. Seriously, I'm absolutely blown away by this.

Wow - the Red Sox just swept the Yankees in a three game series at Yankee Stadium. This comes on the heels of taking 3 out of 4 in Boston over last weekend. As of now, the Sox are 6-1 versus the Yankees this year. They're 4 1/2 games above the Yanks in the AL East, too - in fact, the Yankees are (as of right this moment) below even the Devil Rays - only the Blue Jays have a worse record in the AL East than the Yankees do. This is beautiful...

Jay Leno had this to say about the Celtics getting cheerleaders for the first time ever (which bothers me, but is an issue for another time):

The Boston Celtics announced they're going to hire cheerleaders. They've been the only team in the NBA without cheerleaders, now they're going to get them. Actually, technically the Clippers don't have cheerleaders, they have a team of what they call grief counselors.

Arwen's actually got a cousin who's a male cheerleader for the Clippers. Seriously. If I'm ever in LA, I plan to do my best to use that connection to wheedle myself free tickets. Hey, it's pro basketball - I like it even if it IS the Clippers.

I'm finally getting around to finishing off my degree - yeah, Mom, I really mean it this time. Anyway, I'm trying to find online courses, ideally in history and not a survey course, and I'm having a terrible time. Go ahead and try to search for online courses in Google - you find absolutely nothing useful. Does anyone out there know of any good online history programs, or of somewhere to look for 'em?

So I've been working on this big project for the last couple months. It's for the group that I'll be working with in San Jose - new build scripts. I decided to go with a new technology that I hadn't seen used before, but that seemed to do everything I needed. Well, today I realized that I'd spent two months going down a dead end. Yeah. A complete waste of time. I have to come up with a new solution in the next week and a half or so. I feel very, very stupid. *sigh*

This is going to sound ridiculous, which is why I'm asking here rather than actually saying it out loud to someone - I need new glasses (eye-strain headaches are getting more and more frequent, and I know my vision is getting worse) and I don't know exactly what I need to do to get them. My insurance covers them, I know that much, but do I need to go to an opthamologist, or can I just go to a LensCrafter? I need a new prescription, I'd think - that means opthamologist, right?

Y'see, I just don't know these things. =)

Jesse over at Pandagon is too snarky for words:

"I said that if you harbor a terrorist, you're just as guilty as a terrorist...and I meant that."
- George W. Bush, 4/19/04
"Except the Saudis, jackass."
- Me, 4/19/04

Feel the LUV!

I forget this sometimes, being years out from it and all, but holy shit, is Oberlin insane:

The campus sexual assault hotline has been shut down after Sexual Assault Support Team members claimed the hotline was racist. Unfortunately, this closure is not due to a lack of need or the absence of sexual assault at Oberlin, but rather because of troubles occurring inside SAST.

The SAST hotline was created to offer abused students anonymous counseling. The hotline closed because some SAST members felt it was a racist service.

"For years the hotline has only been available to a small section of Oberlin, white straight women," Junior Myrl Beam, who began working with the organization in 2000, said. "We know this not only because of who feels this is a resource for them but also because SAST itself operates as a white space."

"At this point SAST needs to make a meaningful commitment to restructuring the entire organization to work under an anti-racist framework," said sophomore Farah Joyner, who joined SAST in spring of 2002 and ended her involvement with the organization this February. "Until that happens it can not continue to offer racist services, including the hotline."

...

"I think this is one symptom of a very large problem on campus where instead of educating people we hurl words at them like 'racist' and 'homophobic,'" Tinkelman said. "It scares people from saying what they feel. This way of inhibiting freedom of speech is problematic."

"This is endemic of bigger race relations on campus that has always been really troubling but is now actually affecting something that I want to do and is helpful to the school," Klein said.

No, I'm not making this up, and sadly, I'm not even all that surprised by it. Oberlin's a great liberal bastion - but it's also got ridiculously high racial tensions. The absurdity of some of the conflicts in my years there...oy. But nothing tops this. SAST had problems when I was there, no doubt - there were real questions about their attitudes towards sex in general, among other things - but this takes the cake. How the hell is a sexual assault hotline racist? Seriously - anyone who really thinks this is something worth spending their time fighting to stop because it's "racist" really needs to get out in the real world for a while. Kids...oy.

Just flipped through Crypto and was immediately hit by something - I know who Rudolf von Hacklheber, Turing's lover, fellow mathematician, and later member of Crypto's first grand conspiracy, is descended from. Hot damn. I have a weird feeling that a re-read is going to lead to a LOT of these kinds of discoveries - but not an explanation of Enoch Root, at least not yet.

EDIT - aha! I was right about the connection between Mr. Foot and Kinakuta! And I just realized ANOTHER back-and-forth connection - think Goto and miners. Oy - I'm worrying that Stephenson may have gotten a little too caught up in the fun of connecting his books...

Just finished the new Stephenson book - The Confusion. This one had even more back-references (or is it forward-references, given the timeframe of each book?) to Cryptonomicon, on top of the amazing historical discourse we saw in Quicksilver Not everyone's going to like it, but I loved it. Now I need to go back and re-read Crypto to see who (and what) in The Confusion actually do lead to later things in Crypto, besides the obvious Waterhouse and Shaftoe family connections. Over time, I'd imagine a lot of the connections will end up documented over at the Metaweb, but there isn't much there yet...

In this entry, discussing, among other things, the possible options the US has in Iraq:

1. Declare victory and pull out. This would likely lead to civil war and an unpredicable — but bad — outcome, but at least no more Americans would die.

2. Stay the course. This will probably also lead to some version of civil war and a bad outcome, and many more Americans will die in the process.

3. Increase both the resources and the time frame devoted to Iraq. Americans will continue to die, but at least there's the possibility of a (moderately) good outcome.

Doves prefer option #1 and hawks prefer option #3, but surely everyone agrees that option #2 is the worst of the lot?

I'm a definite dove, but I'm a firm supporter of option #3. While I care more about an individual American life than I do an individual Iraqi life (I'll admit it), I do believe that we have a responsibility to get SOMETHING acceptable and stable in place. Can we possibly justify the deaths of thousands upon thousands - which is what WILL happen if we pull out and the civil war breaks out? That's not hawkishness at all, I don't think.

I'm getting freaked out now - how many goverments will Bob Woodward take down with his new book?

In the book, Plan of Attack, Mr Woodward writes that Mr Bush offered Mr Blair the option of keeping British troops out of the war because he was so concerned that the government might fall. Mr Blair rejected the offer.

The book, to be serialised in the Washington Post today, also says that Mr Bush asked the Pentagon to draw up plans for the invasion of Iraq as early as November 2001, keeping it a secret from the CIA and his national security staff.

The disclosures are provocative. Mr Blair will be asked to justify a decision to go to war when he had a chance to keep British troops out of harm's way with no political sanction.

For Mr Bush, who has suffered a steady erosion in his approval ratings, it becomes even more urgent to turn the page on Iraq before it begins to hurt him in the elections in November. An opinion poll released yesterday by the National Annenberg Election Survey found that 56% of Americans now believe the president has no clear plan for resolving the situation in Iraq.

That's just weird - Bush was helping to prop up a Labour government in the UK? Maggie Thatcher must be rolling over in her grave. I know, she's not actually dead, but she's really evil, so she probably sleeps in an open grave. If the Brits manage to toss Blair out before we get rid of Bush, I'm going to be very disappointed in my fellow Americans.

Over the last two weeks or so, I've been about as productive as I've ever been. I've written an online build scheduler with an automated build-launching backend, I've written a database-driven on-call system, I've cleaned up my group's web pages and added a bunch of new ones, I've added a FAQ that allows users to submit questions, and more. I'm overworked.

What's more, I'm afraid that I'm TOO productive - that is, that my boss is going to expect this level of output from me on a regular basis. That doesn't happen - a bunch of building blocks happened to be ready all at the same time, and so I got a LOT of stuff done. But normally, big projects take a lot longer than the build scheduler (which took maybe a week and a half). I think my boss will understand and be realistic, but still - it's a funny thing to worry about. =)

Richard Nixon had a plan to get us out of Vietnam, too.

I'm shocked - I'm watching the Mr. Burns Casino Simpsons episode (real title is "$pringfield (Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Legalized Gambling") and I'm surprised that they didn't cut one scene from the syndication version: a tiger mauling Siegfreid and Roy knockoffs.

Not that this should come as a surprise to anyone else who's ever seen these buffoons in action. LGF stands for Little Green Footballs, a racist blog with even more racist comments - these jerkoffs regularly gloat over the death of Rachel Corrie, for chrissakes. I'd link to it, but I'd feel dirty. Anyway - Matt Yglesias linked to a quiz - the challenge is to see if you can figure out which quotes are from LGF commenters, and which quotes are from the Nazis. It's distrubingly difficult. Anyway, the trolls showed up at Matt's blog, and went into their various rants. My favorite are the ones who say "We support Israel and Jews! So we can't be Nazis! Stupid librul!" Because, after all, we're saying that LGF are just a bunch of 1930s-40s anti-Semitic German assholes. They seem to believe that all Moslems should either die or convert (shades of Ann Coulter?), with an extremity of hate towards (especially) Palestinians that bears an eerie resemblance to Nazi attitudes towards Jews - if that doesn't merit comparisons to Nazis, I don't know what does. Morons.

I think I may have found a potential winner in the apartment hunt. Obviously, this is a little early - at this point, I'm really just looking for places to visit in May. This one is a different location than I've been looking - it's at the southern end of the light rail, right next to the station, just off a lake...it's about a 50-60 minute ride to work, though. I dunno. Gotta think about this. Apartments look great, the location looks wonderful - but it's a pretty long trip...ah well. Like I said, it's a little early. I won't be moving until July anyway. It's just fun to fantasize, I guess.

Well, actually, I'm the witness. While putting my groceries in my car this evening, I saw a car speed through the parking lot, going through the row of spaces I was parked in, and plow straight into an SUV coming up between the rows. The car's view had been blocked by a parked SUV next to my car. I knew it was going to happen, and sure enough, the car smashed into the front right corner of the SUV. I'm actually writing this up here to make sure I remember it - I gave the driver of the SUV my contact info, since the guy in the car was definitely responsible. Made me pretty nervous the rest of the drive home, though.

I need to stop taking a look at work stuff at 7:00 or 8:00 in the morning, before getting on my way to work. Every time I do that, I end up sitting at home for another couple hours hacking code. I'm definitely in fullblown workaholic mode right now.

...I'd hammer my head in, rather than listen to some of the bullshit coming from the right. I've been throwing down in a few threads at that message board I frequent - namely bitch-slapping a couple people for taking Kerry statements completely out of context (or completely rewording them) so as to make him look bad, and bitch-slapping one of those guys again, as many times as possible, for some truly outrageous statements about anti-Semitism and the European left. Specifically, he's saying that the European left is anti-Semitic. Which is bullshit. I asked him to supply some evidence to support this assertion. He didn't. Someone else tried to back up his claim that "No group has done more harm to Europe's character and makeup over the last 70 years than the euro left." How could someone possibly back THAT up, what with the Nazis and all? By claiming that the Nazis were leftists. Jesus CHRIST. Why are people so stupid?

I only took the first pill about an hour ago, but I can tell you - the Stratera is definitely making a difference. It feels a little weird, but I think that's as much just not having eaten enough today as anything else. That and I've spent almost the entire day reclined on my couch with the laptop, hacking code - I've written a build scheduler system that allows for automated and manual build requests, and then queueing and launching those requests for multiple releases on one or more machines...oh, it's a beauty, and it's only a week's worth of work. Anyway... Some of the weird feeling may come from the fact that my brain is something closer to behaving like a normal brain, but, unlike every other time that my brain has veered towards normalish, I'm not on a stimulant. I dunno. This all requires more thought, and I've had a long day. Enough thinking!

...but it was 10 years ago yesterday, on April 5, 1994, that Kurt Cobain killed himself. I can still remember where I was when I found out, and then sitting in front of the TV at my dad's, watching MTV News for the rest of the day. It was traumatizing, and I thought it'd have a huge impact on American culture. As it turned out, it didn't, not really. But honestly, I don't know if there's been a band as vital and urgent as Nirvana since then. David Neiwert over at Orcinus has more to say on Nirvana, Kurt, and Seattle - go give him a read.

Just got back from seeing a new psychiatrist, and I have in my hot little hands a prescription for Stratera. I'll be trying it out, easing up on the dosage to avoid side effects, while remaining on the Ritalin for days, at least for now. Here's hoping it works well - it'd be nice to be off the stimulants.

Just saw this at CNN.com. No story to link to yet:

U.S.-led coalition announces an arrest warrant has been issued for anti-American Iraqi cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. Details soon.

It's about to get very, very ugly in Iraq.

EDIT: Ah, got a link via the AP:

AGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - An Iraqi judge has issued a murder arrest warrant for a radical Shiite Muslim cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr, for the slaying of another Shiite leader, coalition officials said Monday.

Coalition spokesman Dan Senor announced the warrant but would not say when al-Sadr would be detained. "There'll be no advance warning," he said.

Senor said the arrest warrant had been issued several months ago. He refused to say why al-Sadr had not been arrested earlier.

Al-Sadr and his supporters were responsible Sunday for some of the worst violence since the ouster of Saddam Hussein.

So we've been holding the warrant in our back pocket, waiting for when al-Sadr pissed us off enough or something?

California, here I come. Maybe. Not a sure thing yet, but I've been offered/asked to take a transfer to our San Jose group. The move would be sometime in July, probably. I haven't definitively made up my mind, but I am leaning towards going - it's a great professional opportunity, and I won't always be able to move across the country as easily as I can at this age. Honestly, the only reason there's any question is Arwen - a long distance relationship would be hard, but I think we can make it work.

Anyway - I'm beginning house-hunting. Well, apartment-hunting, technically. Assuming I do go, I'll be working in Milpitas, very near where Tasman Dr. meets I-880. I'm infatuated with the idea of public transportation to work - Cisco gives its employees free access to the light rail and busses in the San Jose area - and conveniently, there's a light rail stop just a couple hundred yards from the building I'd be working in. So, apartment-location-wise, the major influences are convenience to public transportation - ideally the light rail, relatively easy access to San Francisco and the East Bay (hey, if I'm going to move to the Bay Area, I want to be able to actually get at it!), and reasonableish prices. From what I can tell so far, that seems to point to Mountain View or Sunnyvale. Apartment prices are higher than I'm paying now, but not a lot higher, the light rail runs right through both cities, and it's a relatively straight shot up 101 to San Francisco (or the nearest BART station).

But chances are that someone else reading this might have better ideas on places to look for apartments than this - so any suggestions you've got would be quite welcome!

Take a look at this picture:

According to the guy who posted it, it's Gmail. He claims to have been invited in some time today (the post is from April 1, he says he got in 30 minutes before posting) and yet he's got emails from Wednesday evening. Oh, and it's all spam, as best as I can tell, which makes sense, since you can see that we're looking at a folder called Junk. So either spammers just mass-spammed everything at gmail.com right after the "announcement" or they somehow got this guy's address before he ever posted it anywhere. Rrrright. Not to mention that the interface is, um, well, it's SquirrelMail with Google logos and the like. Hoax.

Mind you, this is without question one of the most thorough and impressive hoaxes I've ever seen. It's almost plausible, it's coming from the one company on the planet that might actually do something like this, etc... But you've got to eventually realize that the odds are stacked heavily in favor of it being a hoax.

Well, I do. And this article (via the Politech mailing list) just makes me more sure. No, I haven't found the actual source of the article yet, but either someone's really quick in their April Fools reaction time, getting this all ready after hearing about Gmail, or it's all a hoax. Emphasis is mine.

Google plans to buy data mining firm
Published: April 1 2004 12:33 | Last Updated: April 1 2004 12:33

Google is in negotiations to purchase Acxiom Corporation, the massive data warehousing company that has been embroiled in numerous privacy scandals over the last few years.

Sources close to the talks said Thursday that the search engine company hoped to use Acxiom's databases, which feature information on nearly every American family, to optimize search results, share more information with law enforcement, and target advertisements with greater accuracy. Acxiom's expertise is intended to allow Google to make money from its new Gmail concept, which gives every user a gigabyte of free email space.

"This is a great way to leverage Acxiom's industry-leading collections of personal information on Americans and deliver more value to all of Google's customers and advertisers," a Google executive participating in the talks said. While no details are final, one source said the purchase could be around $1.8 billion, an affordable sticker price for a company valued at over $15 billion in an expected initial public offering.

Acxiom, based in Little Rock, Ark., sells police and corporate customers products including InfoBase, touted as the "largest collection of U.S. consumer" data, and Personicx, which tracks the "specific consumer behavior" of almost every American and can sort households into one of 70 distinctive segments. Acxiom and JetBlue were involved in a scandal last year after providing personal information on Americans to the Transportation Security Administration, and documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show that Acxiom would have been a primary source for the Defense Department's short-lived Total Information Awareness project.

To offset the cost of providing up to 1 GB of email storage, Google plans to employ real-time customer data integration (CDI) to target offers based on the link between email content and information about each family in Acxiom's vast databases. "This is a truly innovative, unique solution that provides consumers with real value," said a source close to Acxiom Company Leader Charles Morgan. "Because we know their drugstore shopping habits, CDI can show them ads for condom, birth control pills, or day-after pills, whichever is most appropriate."

Google spokesman Nate Tyler declined to comment on the proposed acquisition.

Lisa Dean, chief privacy officer for the Transportation Security Administration, applauded the proposed deal, noting that the CDI system would be designed to detect terrorist conversations in Gmail and forward the relevant email correspondence to law enforcement.

Because Google sets what's known as a "cookie" that records all searches ever done on a specific computer, it has accumulated a wealth of data about hundreds of millions of Internet users. By linking that CDI data with Acxiom's information about family income, shopping habits, and bank account balances, Google expects itself to be in the enviable, and profitable, position of being the largest personal information repository on the planet.

Acxiom's shares increased 2.8 percent Thursday to $22.58 on word of the pending deal. In anticipation of the purchase, Acxiom on Wednesday cut 230 jobs and upped its earnings estimate for the fourth quarter ending March 31.

So yeah, either this one is a hoax (and most likely Gmail is too) or Google's getting really, really evil on us.