Woo — approaching 7500 SETI work units!

Posted by rae in science
at 12:38 am on Friday, 30 May 2003

The computers in our house have been busy over the years. Check out the stats for Team Posl. Actually, including the results under ‘rae [G4/450]’ (7427) with the old results under ‘Reid Ellis’ (280) and ‘lp’ (227), we’re actually at 7934 — almost 8000. At 7439 units, we’re in 16,411th place, which puts us in the 99.636% category, according to SETI’s stats (stats change over time so numbers you see may be more up-to-date).

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The 14 Characteristics of Facism

Posted by rae in the Net
at 6:15 pm on Thursday, 29 May 2003

I ran across the below at Aladdin.com while searching for something else completely different. Very interesting if you ask me..

THE IDENTIFYING CHARACTERISTICS OF FASCISM

By Dr. Lawrence Britt
Free Inquiry Magazine  / Spring 2003

Dr. Lawrence Britt, a political scientist, studied the fascist regimes of Hitler (Germany), Mussolini (Italy), Franco (Spain), Suharto (Indonesia), and Pinochet (Chile). He found the regimes all had 14 things in common, and he calls these the identifying characteristics of fascism. The article is titled ‘Fascism Anyone?’, and appears in Free Inquiry’s Spring 2003 issue on page 20.

The 14 characteristics are:

  1. Powerful and Continuing Nationalism — Fascist regimes tend to make constant use of patriotic mottos, slogans, symbols, songs, and other paraphernalia. Flags are seen everywhere, as are flag symbols on clothing and in public displays.

  2. Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights — Because of fear of enemies and the need for security, the people in fascist regimes are persuaded that human rights can be ignored in certain cases because of “need”. The people tend to ‘look the other way’ or even approve of torture, summary executions, assassinations, long incarcerations of prisoners, etc.

  3. Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause — The people are rallied into a unifying patriotic frenzy over the need to eliminate a perceived common threat or foe: racial, ethnic or religious minorities; liberals; communists; socialists, terrorists, etc.

  4. Supremacy of the Military — Even when there are widespread domestic problems, the military is given a disproportionate amount of government funding, and the domestic agenda is neglected. Soldiers and military service are glamorized.

  5. Rampant Sexism — The governments of fascist nations tend to be almost exclusively male-dominated. Under fascist regimes, traditional gender roles are made more rigid. Opposition to abortion is high, as is homophobia and anti-gay legislation and national policy.

  6. Controlled Mass Media — Sometimes the media is directly controlled by the government, but in other cases, the media is indirectly controlled by government regulation, or through sympathetic media spokespeople and executives. Censorship, especially in wartime, is very common.

  7. Obsession with National Security — Fear is used as a motivational tool by the government over the masses.

  8. Religion and Government are Intertwined — Governments in fascist nations tend to use the most common religion in the nation as a tool to manipulate public opinion. Religious rhetoric and terminology is common from government leaders, even when the major tenets of the religion are diametrically opposed to the government’s policies or actions.

  9. Corporate Power is Protected — The industrial and business aristocracy of a fascist nation often are the ones who put the government leaders into power, creating a mutually beneficial business/government relationship and power elite.

  10. Labor Power is Suppressed — Because the organizing power of labor is the only real threat to a fascist government, labor unions are either eliminated entirely or are severely suppressed.

  11. Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts — Fascist nations tend to promote and tolerate open hostility to higher education, and academia. It is not uncommon for professors and other academics to be censored or even arrested. Free expression in the arts is openly attacked, and governments often refuse to fund the arts.

  12. Obsession with Crime and Punishment — Under fascist regimes, the police are given almost limitless power to enforce laws. The people are often willing to overlook police abuses, and even forego civil liberties, in the name of patriotism. There is often a national police force with virtually unlimited power in fascist nations.

  13. Rampant Cronyism and Corruption — Fascist regimes almost always are governed by groups of friends and associates who appoint each other to government positions, and who use governmental power and authority to protect their friends from accountability. It is not uncommon in fascist regimes for national resources and even treasures to be appropriated or even outright stolen by government leaders.

  14. Fraudulent Elections — Sometimes elections in fascist nations are a complete sham. Other times elections are manipulated by smear campaigns against (or even the assassination of) opposition candidates, the use of legislation to control voting numbers or political district boundaries, and the manipulation of the media. Fascist nations also typically use their judiciaries to manipulate or control elections.

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Revision Control

Posted by rae in development
at 2:41 pm on Thursday, 29 May 2003

My ideal environment for development includes CVS for revision control and Bugzilla for bug reporting/tracking. Invariably, most “cross-platform” shops are running SourceSafe. SourceSafe is compelling for a number of reasons:

  1. It’s integrated into Micosoft’s Visual Studio
  2. It comes with Visual Studio (no extra cost)
  3. It’s easy to use and very fast
Now, unfortunately, a Mac developer’s point of view is somewhat different:
  1. It used to be integrated into CodeWarrior, but not any more
  2. The standalone tool for MacOS 9 costs quite a bit
  3. It’s dead slow
So what I would like to know is — is there something that integrates CVS into a Windows IDE really nicely? Are there web sites that might help evangelize CVS in a Windows shop?

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New game from Id.. and it’s free??

Posted by rae in software
at 2:39 pm on Thursday, 29 May 2003

Id today released “Castle Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory” which is a version of Return to Castle Wolfenstein of some kind. The specifics of the game are not as interesting ot me as the fact that the game was released for free. I have yet to read an explanation anywhere as to why it is free.

Even more interesting is that Id has set up their own BitTorrent server to distribute the game, which should make downloading more of a breeze than usual for Id games. (BitTorrent is a way to share the downloading amongst everyone else who is downloading the same file; the idea is that those who have been downloading a while, or who are finished will have bits of the file you want, so you can grab it off of them if they are closer or faster anyways).

Unfortunately there are only Windows and Linux versions available, so we can’t switch over for our Friday night games just yet!

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Craig’s 40th!

Posted by rae in friends
at 1:29 am on Sunday, 25 May 2003


Jeff and two very sleepy ladies

Tonight was Craig’s 40th birthday party! We all met at:

Gio Rana’s Really, Really Nice Restaurant
1220 Queen St. East
Toronto, ON M4M 1L6
Phone: (416) 469-5225
I would have to say that the food was excellent, but the service and the ambience was lacking. The service was probably because we were such a large crowd. There were 16 of us, and it’s a kind of bar/restaurant (lots of cigarette smoke!). They actually changed our waiter right at the beginning because we were having so much trouble with our first waiter (he left halfway through taking our orders!). The ambiance was poor because the music was deafeningly loud. We had to shout across the table to hear each other. I don’t know what they were thinking having it so loud.


Picture proof that I was at Craig’s party!

Despite the conditions we had a pretty good time. It was nice seeing everyone. i was sitting across from Kaarel / Debbie / Jeff, so there are quite a few pictures of them in my collection.

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Matrix Reloaded

Posted by rae in entertainment
at 12:28 am on Friday, 23 May 2003

In a quick phrase: could have used more editing.

I won’t put any spoilers up, but ya, it could have been better. Also, I want to see the rest of it in November. Unlike the first Matrix, this is not a complete, self-contained film. That sucks.

Meanwhile, according to The Matrix newsletter Matrix Reloaded will be out in IMAX in June. Now THAT will be cool to see.

Btw, there is a new Matrix comic out as well. I really like some of the comics they have. Quite imaginative stories set in the world of the Matrix.

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Another day..

Posted by rae in hardware
at 11:51 pm on Thursday, 22 May 2003

Got a new Mac today at work. A dual-CPU 1.25 GHz “mirror door” Power Mac. You know what? It feels about the same as my dual-CPU 450 MHz machine. I thought it would be more.. different. Iain assures me it’s the OS and that Panther (10.3) will make it faster. Well, I hope so. i was planning on buying a new Mac later in the year (after the 970’s are out) but I think I’ll try one first to see if it’s qualitatively faster than the 450 first.

:-/

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ssh exploits in Matrix Reloaded

Posted by rae in software
at 11:53 pm on Sunday, 18 May 2003

insecure.org has shots from Matrix Reloaded showing Trinity using an ssh exploit to hack into a computer. The funny thing is that exploits very much like this one were used twice against me over the last few years.

Trinity first runs nmap and then something called sshnuke to set the root password to (get this) Z10N0101. Cute, eh?

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PhotoSuite 5

Posted by rae in Reid
at 5:18 pm on Friday, 16 May 2003

I haven’t talked about it much in my blog, but I’ve been working on PhotoSuite 5 for over 3 years now. It’s a consumer-oriented photo editing app. When we started working on it, there was no such thing as iPhoto :-) but now, well there is, so it’s bound to be compared to it. Fortunately, the feature set of the two is not identical, and each has it’s strengths.

The interesting thing is, the team that was working on PhotoSuite 5 for Mac OS was let go in August of 2002. That was when Roxio announced that they were not going to concentrate on the OEM market any more, and let go a whole bunch of people who were involved with OEM. Well, the Mac team was seen as being a part of OEM, and so was let go. However, the five of us then formed a company, ZorroDev Software, and negotiated a deal with Roxio to finish PhotoSuite in our spare time. At first there was lots of spare time while everyone looked for work, but as they found jobs, it grew less.

Now we’re about done, which is good, since I’ve started working full-time. When the app is up on Roxio’s web site for sale, I’ll post a link here for all and sundry. For now, you can take a look at our still-not-quite-done website for ZorroDev: http://zorrodev.com. Feel free to leave comments here about what you think of the site, suggestions for streamlining/improving it, etc. I’m a little concerned about the images, because my upload speed is not too hot these days. I’ve been giving serious consideration to renting space somewhere, but I can’t do that unless there’s cash to pay for it. We’ll see how it goes.

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Working at enTrac

Posted by rae in Reid
at 4:49 pm on Friday, 16 May 2003

So I’m now working full-time on contract at enTrac, which is where Mark Thompson works. Guess how I got the job? :-)

They gave me a G3 with a 6GB disk and 128MB of RAM, so I brought in my G4 today instead. At first I was just using this little 15″ (maybe 14″?) Sony monitor, but it did 1152×870 at 75 Hz, so that wasn’t so bad. Mid-afternoon, a shipment arrived from Kinko’s for Mark, but Mark wasn’t there today. Lo and behold, it was a huge Apple monitor. So now I have a monster and a midget on my desk. (I have 2 video cards, y’see, and am used to having 2 monitors) I’ve never had a nice Apple monitor before, so I set it to a strange resolution, just to see what it was like: 1920×1080. (more…)

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