“How To Fight Fair”

Posted by on

One family I know (whose identity will not be mentioned to protect the guilty as well as myself) is well-known for their knock-down, drag-out, no-holds-barred battles. When they get into arguments, their opponents are called every name in the book and accused of the most heinous crimes against humanity, whether the names or accusations make any logical sense or not, and all at top volume. I’ve heard of the same behavior in a few other families as well, so I know it’s not an isolated phenomenon.

It’s an easy, and very damaging, habit to fall into, and for a long time I thought that silently accepting bad behavior from others until you explode in anger (the strategy my family used while I was growing up, and one that can be equally damaging) was the only alternative. Until I read this. If you ever have to deal with people (and who doesn’t?), the stuff there is very useful.

Mac OS Upgrade

Posted by on

Those of you who care about such things might have heard that Apple recently released a new version of it’s desktop OS, 10.7, code-named Lion.

It was inevitable that I would upgrade my current system (a mid-2009 model MacBook Pro) eventually, but I wanted to put it off for a while. I’ve talked before about my love/hate relationship with upgrades; they’re often a big improvement, but at the cost of a lot of unnecessary grief, and I have work to do. But Lion included some features that sounded very nice, and one that I found irresistable: new versions of FileVault (the disk-encryption software) and Time Machine (the automatic backup program) that work properly together, rather than the Snow Leopard versions where Time Machine was crippled if you used FileVault as well.

As mentioned before, I do very little on the Mac OS side of things; the only programs I generally run on it are VMware Fusion, Skype (because it doesn’t work well in virtual machines), and a to-do list program called Things. Most of my work is done in Linux or Windows virtual machines. That turned out to be a major benefit for this upgrade, because there was far less to go wrong; so long as those three programs continued to operate, my work wouldn’t be disrupted, and reports indicated that the latest versions shouldn’t have any problems that would affect me.

Despite that, I waited until Friday (yesterday), so I’d have three days to recover if anything went seriously wrong, and began.

(Of course, Friday morning a friend of mine — who I won’t name, but who comments on this blog regularly — helpfully sent me a link to a bunch of complaints that Lion caused major instability in many systems. And I’d recently seen the same complaint on The Register’s review of it, though that one was fixed by a clean reinstall. The clean reinstall route was my plan B if the system couldn’t manage an upgrade; plan C was to go back to Snow Leopard via my Time Machine backups, but I hoped I wouldn’t have to use it.)

I’d read somewhere that in order to get the FileVault benefits of Lion, you had to turn off the old FileVault and then turn on the new one, so I decided to turn off the old one before I upgraded. That required a great deal of free disk space, so I had to move about 150GB worth of virtual machines to my NAS drive (which took several hours), then decrypt it (which took several more, and I couldn’t use the machine while it worked).

That done, I followed the steps here, including uninstalling VMware Fusion (because VMware recommended reinstalling it after the upgrade anyway, for stability), fired up the Mac App Store (for the first and possibly only time), bought it, and downloaded it. The download took quite a while; it’s nearly 4GB of data, which is twice what we normally use in a full month, but we have a fairly fast connection and plenty of bandwidth allowance that we never use, so I wasn’t worried. I didn’t install it immediately; instead I made a backup of the installer and created a clean-install boot disk on an SD card, as described here. Then disconnected my Time Machine drive (just in case) and let the installer rip.

It took about 40 minutes. I sat through the last three minutes of it, then crossed my fingers while it rebooted and I logged in…

It came up without any problem. 😀

Turning the new FileVault encryption on was a lot easier than turning the old one off — it worked in the background, and apparently encrypted everything in place, so it didn’t need all the room that the old one required. I’ve temporarily lost my third monitor, because the USB video adapter I use for it doesn’t have a stable Lion driver yet, but I knew about that ahead of time. And every hour now, if I’m in the office, Time Machine automatically backs up all the changes that I’ve made since the last backup.

Unless something goes wrong in the next week or so, I’m calling it a success. 🙂

“Amazon heralds unstoppable rise of the e-book”

Posted by on

I’ve been reading e-books since about 2001, first on my several Palm machines, and more recently on my iPod Touch. I appreciate their compactness (GoddessJ and I already have to devote an entire spare bedroom to our library), the fact they don’t wear out, that I can read them in the dark, and that (depending on the software) I can customize the font, colors, and backlighting as I wish. At the time, my only complaints were that only a fraction of titles were available as e-books (that has changed dramatically), and that pricing an e-book the same as a physical one was ridiculous since there are no printing costs involved (that hasn’t changed much).

I didn’t realize that e-books had become so mainstream until GoddessJ got her iPad for Christmas and discovered the e-book apps for it, and convinced me that we should get her mother an e-book reader as well. Our library even has a good number of e-books available for loan, and now I discover that e-books are outselling physical books in the US.

Science fiction has long predicted that we’d be moving to electronic books. Star Trek is probably the most popular example, but I’ve seen references to that sort of thing in several hard-SF books, though I don’t recall any specific titles.

I guess I was just ahead of the curve again.

“Why Multi-word Phrases Make for More Secure Passwords Than Incomprehensible Gibberish”

Posted by on

I was rather surprised at this assertion, at first. Then I thought about it… there are only about 95 printable characters in the basic seven-bit ASCII character set. A very conservative estimate puts the number of distinct English words at well over 65,000, most of which are many letters long.

If you knew that someone’s password was several properly-spelled English words separated by single spaces, you’d still have 65,000-to-the-power-of-X combinations to go through for X words. That’s over four billion combinations to try for a two-word phrase, and about 275 trillion combinations for a three-word phrase — four billion is easy enough for a computer to handle, but 275 trillion is more secure than a seven-random-character password. And if you didn’t know that the password followed that pattern, or there was even one deliberately misspelled word or different bit of punctuation, the numbers skyrocket.

That said, I’m not about to abandon my current password scheme, but for some passwords, this might be useful.

“Microsoft ribs Google’s ad tech with ‘Gmail Man'”

Posted by on

You’d think that a company like Microsoft would come up with something better written, better acted, and altogether better thought-out than this. Disappointing.

(I’m not a big fan of Google, but I’m far less a fan of Microsoft, given that they’ve done their damnedest to sabotage any progress for at least the last ten years — usually successfully.)

“Tanning Can Cause Cancer, but Not Tanning Could Cause a Lot Worse”

Posted by on

Vitamin D, produced in human skin when it’s bombarded by the ultraviolet rays of the sun, may be the most powerful anticancer agent ever known, and lack of it during a mother’s pregnancy and breastfeeding (and keeping babies shielded from ultraviolet sunlight) could be the cause of most autism:

Many researchers now fear that the explosive increase in autism is a result of pregnant mothers having close to no vitamin D in their bodies and then young babies and infants being similarly shielded from the Sun. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) says that virtually no infants are getting enough vitamin D. The inadequacy figures, even using the CDC’s pre-2011 lower recommendations of what they thought the body should have, was that 90 percent of infants are deficient.

According to Cannell, the highest autism rates occur in areas that have the most clouds and rain, and hence the lowest blood levels of vitamin D. A Swedish study has strongly linked sunlight deprivation with autism. Moreover, blacks, whose vitamin D levels are half those found in whites living at the same latitudes, have twice the autism rates. Conversely, autism is virtually unknown in places such as sunny Somalia, where most people still spend most of their time outdoors. Yet another piece of anecdotal evidence is that autism is one of the very few afflictions that occur at higher rates among the wealthier and more educated – exactly the people most likely to be diligent about sunscreen and more inclined to keep their children indoors.

As we saw in assessing links between earthly events and sunspot fluctuations, it’s perilous to assign connections too quickly, and autism in particular is a can of worms. Nonetheless, these early threads should set off alarms: it might be wise for pregnant women and mothers of small children to immediately start exposing themselves and their kids to more sunlight.

I know at least one of my regular readers has reason to take note.

“Truck nuts swing onto US freedom of speech agenda”

Posted by on

Um… this is a matter of excessive authoritarian zeal, personal opinion, or dollar signs (imagine all the people driving through their town that they could ticket for having these). Whichever it is, these people should be publicly slapped down for abusing the law.

Leaving aside the obvious First Amendment issue, consider this: if testicles are obscene, then the owners of any male animal — including unsterilized dogs and horses — should be forced to cover them, or must be fined for displaying them as well. If they’re not, then having fake ones displayed on your vehicle must be permitted. Only finding them obscene in certain instances is selective enforcement, which historically “is recognized as a sign of tyranny, and an abuse of power,” according to Wikipedia.

(For the record, I find truck nuts to be uncouth — though amusing — and I wouldn’t allow them on a vehicle I own. Nevertheless, my argument stands.)

“Boffins develop method of driving computers insane”

Posted by on

Well, turnabout is fair play. Computers have been driving us crazy for decades already. 😉 And does this mean that we’re ready to create the HAL-9000? 😉

(Really interesting ideas about brain research using neural nets, though I have my doubts that it will be very useful for most things until we understand the brain a lot more than we do now.)