You Can't Make Mistakes

God Damned Right It’s Time

Well, if you haven’t voted already, since there seemed to be a great trend toward voting early or absentee—likely because Americans are leaving the United States like rats from a burning ship: it’s time.

The Economist finally published their endorsement for a U.S. Presidential candidate this week. I will let you guess who they chose. Or, you can read it for yourself.

I have to say that, in all honesty, I was thrilled to read it. I think that they made the right decision, so now maybe you all can make the right decision. Jeff and I voted via absentee write-in ballots, which don’t even get counted unless there is some electoral problem—which wouldn’t shock me in the least. So, if you haven’t planned on voting, or if you feel like you are too busy, or some other thing: please go and cast your vote for Barack Obama on our behalf. If you can’t vote for Obama, then Bob Barr is a good second choice.

Anyway, those are my two cents on the matter. I don’t have a whole lot of words for you right now as most of my words are being given to my papers and coursework. But I will say that I would greatly appreciate if you went and did your part and set the ball in motion for the United States to right itself a little bit. I’ll thank God one way or another when this is over, but I hope that it is thanks that I will be able to come back to the United States someday because it is the place that I remember, rather than having to stay away from it because increasingly resembles places that I would never want to go.

Thank you.

Happy Birthday

Today is, as some reckon, the 17th birthday of Linux, the open-source UNIX-like operating system which has become increasingly popular in recent years. I adopted Linux about 2 years ago, first dual-booting (having 2 operating systems installed on the same machine and choosing at startup) Fedora, and then Ubuntu. Then I got brave and removed Windows from my last laptop. Then I got a new laptop and nuked the drive the moment I got it with a fresh Linux install. Then I installed 64 bit. Then I started compiling my own kernel. After that, it was all downhill, or uphill, depending on which way you were looking.

I became a Linux enthusiast, then an evangelical. “There is this operating system that is freely available, you can download it, and then you can install software by searching for it and selecting it (if you are in a package-managed distro, that is),” I would say. “Why does one become evangelical for an operating system,” you ask? Here is why:

Now, I am running my own Debian server: a tiny little ARM-processor-based wonder-device, 4 watts/10 under load. That is less than most energy efficient lightbulbs. Right now it just houses my digital media, my backups (which is makes without my ever having to know), and acts as a print server on our network so that I don’t have to plug the computer in, print, etc. It just works. I just added audio to it via a hardware-hack, USB in-line, jack-spliced audio card cannibalized from an old USB headset. I now have a command-line stereo with music library. Streaming internet radio too. And I can serve my own radio stream, in case the end comes and we have to rebuild the internet with string and tin cans.

I have grand plans for this little guy, the Linksys/Cisco NSLU2, or SLUG as we call the firmware-modded versions. I want about 15 more of them to just do little tasks and coordinate with each other. There is a Mic-in jack that I spliced onto the aforementioned audio card, so I am working now on adding voice-command support. Just simple stuff: “Radio on” or “Backup laptop now.” I have these sci-fi-esque visions of a fully automated house where these little guys talk to me as I walk through, turn lights on and off, report the weather, stock prices, news headlines if asked. I have also been working on a project (currently on hold, too much hardware to move to the Middle-East) to create a group of thin-client picture frames and touch screen interfaces that will be placed around the house. These would display photos, art, whatever. When asked, they could show you websites, play music on the stereo, etc. I dream of an alarm clock which is set by saying, “Jeeves, wake me up at 6:45, NPR on the radio.” “Very well then, good-night Sir.”

I dream of these things, and I will have them. I already am far closer to having these things than I ever was using computers the way that we are taught to do so in out modern age. Even the best average user today really uses their computer no differently than they might use a typewriter and an 8-track. Why is this the case?

It is the case because we are not encouraged to be curious about what is inside of our computers anymore. That, and we have been conditioned to believe that you must pay for software for your computer, which is simply not the case.

I’m not talking about software piracy either, a practice that I am rather ambivalent about these days. I don’t think it should be illegal, because I don’t think that it should be an issue. The best software out there is being developed by the curious, hobbyist, academic interests of developers with a machine and a little know-how. It’s mass peer-review. When the software is not human readable and the source is closed, bugs and weaknesses aren’t found until they are exploited. Enter FOSS: Free/Open Source Software.

Back to my point, these things interest me because they have enabled me, as a hobbyist, to make some really cool things happen. Soon my server will be talking to me, and I to it. Then it will be a server farm, then an integrated system that commands a house, or at least some of the functions in it. It’s cool. I can do it. And it is freely available to me. Sold.

This is why I am a Linux evangelical. I will walk down the street wearing a Linux t-shirt if it gets people to ask me what it is. I also just realized that I am wearing a Linux t-shirt.

Help celebrate this Linux birthday by taking Linux for a spin. There are a number of distributions that allow you to run the operating system from a CD (called a “Live-disk”). Live-disks are slower, because they have to run off of a CD. But try it. If you have an old computer laying around, dig it out, and install Linux on it. In my opinion, Ubuntu is probably going to be the best for first-time users. Here is a list of live-disk distributions which will allow you to install if you would like to:

Ubuntu
Gentoo
Debian
Knoppix
Damn Small Linux

Try it out. Linux has come a long way from its roots in the command-line. Sometimes when I am sitting in public using my laptop people come up wondering what kind of laptop it is and what my “Windows” is. I invite them to sit down for a cup of coffee, and I say “Have you ever heard of something called Linux?”

May your spirit find its way, whichever way that might be

My advisor and friend David Ede, Chair of the Department of Comparative Religion at Western Michigan University, passed away a week ago today. He was 73 years old and died as the result of an allergic reaction to nuts, something that he had known about and was always prepared for with an epi-pen on hand. I am not sure as to the specifics, really.

I was shocked to learn this when a good friend called me last Sunday to let me know. I was thankful because I might not have known as soon otherwise, being that I just returned to Cairo a few weeks ago. Dr. Ede’s death is an untimely one: for me it seems especially untimely because we were still working on my thesis project. He will unfortunately not be able to see the results.

There was a very nice write-up in the Kalamazoo Gazette yesterday which can be found here. However, as with all such articles and obituaries, I felt that it left something to be desired. So, I will use this forum to express a few of my more fond memories of David.

I hadn’t really realized, having studied under him for almost 4 years, how much I had come to consider Dr. Ede a friend as well as mentor. I, of course, had my gripes with him, but that is par for the course in any grad-student/advisor relationship. Grad school wouldn’t be very interesting if our advisors didn’t occasionally piss us off. However, those gripes were typically assuaged by even the shortest conversation with him. He had a way of setting my mind at ease whenever I was freaking out about my project or anything else. This would typically involve his telling of anecdotes from grad school or living and traveling abroad. One thing that I regret that I will never be able to do now is to help him compile these stories into a memoir of sorts, something that we spoke about briefly this spring after I suggested that he do this. In that same meeting, having not met in months as I was living in Egypt last year, we spent about 15 minutes talking about my thesis and a good three hours talking about our recent travels. He had just returned from a trip to Japan with his wife, Yumi, and his eyes lit up like a kid in a candy store while talking about food, trains, and other little phenomena of which he had taken note.

That is how he was: his attention to detail was remarkable. One of the most valuable things that he taught me as his student was how to compile an exhaustive bibliography. If you were writing a paper for him, he wasn’t happy until you had found every source in existence with even a mere mention of your topic. It is for this reason that I have been able to find as much primary source data as I have to work with for my thesis. He told me once that you could start out compiling sources by excluding some of them from the beginning. You have to wait until the end to decide what is redundant and what is irrelevant to your work.

I think that it was in that same spirit of being thorough that he conducted his own education. Having been initially trained at a Lutheran seminary, he used to say that he didn’t go into the clergy not because he didn’t believe, but because there were so many other things out there to believe in. He didn’t feel like he could choose just one path. This led him to study religion in a comparative/pluralist academic environment, a field of study which he remarked only recently is “still very new, and still theoretically wide-open.”

This was the same thing that he said to me the day that I, having just come back from Egypt for the first time, went to his office to inquire about the MA in Comparative Religion. He was dressed in a such a way that he looked like he might be off to the beach as soon as he left the university with his flip-flops and Acapulco shirt. I left his office that day having been accepted into the department and with a teaching assistantship for his course on Islamic Traditions. He wore sandals, shorts and Acapulco shirts to class too. I remember him once saying, “when you get to a certain age, if you want to wear flip-flops to teach, you just can.”

A number of the students in that class would come to my office hours with endless questions. They thought that the material was a little obtuse, that Ede was a little boring. I, sitting in the same class so that I could help with the undergrads and grade exams, thought that he was giving the most in-depth survey he could given the time-constraints, and that he was as thorough and as knowledgeable as you could get. His answers to students’ questions were not patronizing, pedantic, or overly simplified, they were complete. When they weren’t complete, he would give students the information they needed to find a more complete answer on their own. He was a big fan of teaching students the joys of utilizing the library for research. On one occasion, we took the entire class to the library to show them where the Islamic Studies references were and how to use the Encyclopedia of Islam (2nd Ed, Brill) and the Index Islamicus (Brill), among others.

David was also very thorough in his other interests. One of the most fascinating conversations that I had with him happened as we were listening to some recordings of Qur’anic recitation by Iranian women reciters that I had found for him. I brought them in on a USB stick and he put them on his Mac so we could listen. He commented that it was amazing how much audio you could fit in such a small space these days, and how it all sounded terrible.

It turned out that he was a HUGE audiophile, actually constructing his own multi-track audio systems from parts: ceramic drivers, hand-wrapped coils, hours of soldering and fitting boards into amplifiers. He had constructed a system which in which he had striven to make the playback sound as much like being live as possible. He said that the secret wasn’t this trend toward very low-frequency sub-woofers balanced with tweeters for dispersal, but those combined with lots and lots of mid-range stacks. “Mid-range is where all of the sound really is,” he remarked, “Without it, all you have is booming bass and screechy treble.” We sat and listened to the rest of the recordings and he made some suggestions for my living-room system, which I immediately went home and implemented. Dvorak had never sounded so good, neither had Zeppelin.

I know that Dr. Ede felt bad that in the past year he had been very distracted with having been tapped as the department chair and not as focused on his students’ research projects. He said as much to a colleague/friend of mine who recently graduated from the department when she spoke to him about my project. While it is true that he may have been distracted sometimes, the advice that he did have was always spot-on, and is still applicable. It will be with this in mind that I finish this project, my interest in which would have never come to the surface if not for him. He was always excited that I had found something so original and new to work with and his eyes would light up whenever we talked about it. He never doubted my ability to conduct scholarly work, sometimes—I felt—over-estimating me. Because of this, I worked ever harder to live up to his expectations, and he was never disappointed. At one point he even asked me to collaborate on a translation of Hasan al-Basri’s letter to ‘Abd al-Malik on the problem of free-will, and some other unpublished things that he had been kicking about for years. We just never really got around to doing anything about it. Had we but world enough, and time, I suppose…1

There is a visitation and memorial service being held today in Kalamazoo. Details are listed in the link above.

Dr. Ede, you’ll be sorely missed. I hope your spirit finds its way now the same way you did in life, whatever way that might be. Rest in peace, dear friend.

———

1 “Had we but world enough, and time, / This coyness, Lady, were no crime” – from “To His Coy Mistress” by Andrew Marvell, 17th-century English poet.

et al.

While self-critical, I typically don’t allow myself to indulge in speculative self-loathing, like wondering what I am doing or what I will do next.

Typically.

That said, there is nothing like a birthday—mine, today—to really push one into such a mood. So, I was already there, and then I read this:

It made me wonder a bit. Why am I doing what I am doing? Do I indulge myself enough in doing things that I love? Do I love my work/field?

Then I remembered that I don’t really need to know why: I only really care about the process most of the time. At least on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. On Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, I tend to be more of a pragmatist. Today is Friday.

Do I indulge myself? I suppose this would depend upon your viewpoint. Some might say that I do not. Others might argue otherwise. I would place it like this:

Indulged========[ME]==========================Not Indulged

I tend to indulge my curiosities whenever they arise. I tend not to indulge whims, however. I feel that this is a reasonable indulgence model. I know more than enough people who indulge whims and then refuse to indulge curiosity because they believe their curiosity to be a manifestation of whim. This is wrong. Curiosity is the stuff of life, as far as I am concerned, and the deadening of curiosity in children by overindulgence in whim that goes on these days will be the downfall of human society eventually.

In other words. Turn off the TV. Get off your widening ass. Put down your processed-cheese-processed-burger. Eat a tomato that you grew in your backyard while you take apart your favorite toys with a screwdriver.

As an aside, I just took apart and reassembled my mobile phone because I noticed that I had the right screwdriver and realized that I could. That is the kind of indulgence I am talking about, I suppose.

Do I love what I do? I think so. Sometimes I wonder if I have just trained myself to love it. Though, what I suspect is that I only love it because I am able to indulge my curiosity in a number of ways via this route.

Think about it:

Because I indulged my curiosity, I did a degree in Latin rather than in music. That led me to accidentally studying Arabic because I indulged my curiosity about it one semester. That led me to traveling to Egypt, which led me to become interested in Islam, which let me into an MA in religious studies. Subsequently, I indulged my curiosity further by deepening my study, which eventually led me to come here for a long-term stay. That led me to apply for an MA program outside of the United States, which led me to come and live in North Africa, where I can so fully indulge my curiosity on a continuous, real-time, full-immersion basis.

The short answer: obviously.

I realize that this was primarily written to myself, but isn’t that what a blog is sometimes? I like it when it can be a sounding-board for my own personal, interior thoughts. Also, in this case, it might help me in explaining an answer to the question: “Well, what are you going to do with that?”

I’m going to go see if there are any other things lying around that I can take apart with my new screwdriver.

Don’t forget to wear a condom.

The comic this morning on xkcd is a good example of arguments for and against electronic voting.

Read it. Careful though: it is funny, so the humorless fascists for whom you work may have blocked the site and also be in the business of firing anyone who tries to access it.

Regardless of that, it is a little ridiculous to have anti-virus software on a voting machine. A voting machine should probably not be network connected. If it is in fact network connected, then we shouldn’t have had the problems that we did with corrupted SD cards not having the voting data when needed. These things each indicate other problems as well.

First, if a voting machine is online, it is immediately insecure. All computers are prone to attack through either a network interface or by way of physical access to a machine. That said, some computers are more secure than others. Those computers used for high-profile applications—such as, I don’t know, off the top of my head, uh, VOTING—will of course be more delectable targets. So, possible operating principle number one: keep voting machines off-line.

Then, if a voting machine is off-line, why does it need virus protection software? The SD cards used for transporting data—the insecurity of which we will get to in a moment—should be checked for any virus or malware IMMEDIATELY BEFORE they are being placed into a machine. Ergo, there should never have been any need for virus protection software on these machines.

On to the point of XKCD this morning: What operating system is running on these voting machines and what is it doing? I am not sure, but I am just going to take a gander that is was Windows XP, or some-such. Now, Windows is known for: crashing, being-virus prone, being entirely insecure in the case of physical access to a machine, and a laundry-list of other fun things. Firstly, Windows should not be the operating system of choice for this application. There are more than enough compelling reasons to take that right off the table. Therefore, we should assume that there was a contract—read: set of payouts, kicks-backs, or other reward perks—involved between Premier Election Solutions (a.k.a. – Diebold) and Microsoft.

Let’s look at this again. Logically, so far, we have decided that: 1) voting machines should be using a secure, robust operating system, 2) voting machines should not be networked.

Or should they?

Is it secure to have votes stored in .xls (Microsoft Access) files and then transported on SD cards to a computer terminal by some flunkie (read: election official or Premier Election Solutions Employee) for transmitting over what one would hope are secure channels?

No, is the only answer to that question, by the way. PHYSICAL ACCESS to data is the point of least security. Swapping cards is just the easiest way to corrupt/alter the voting data.

The alternative: a networked voting machine which is connected to several sets of voting servers around the country—redundancy, in this case, is security, or at least accountability—via port/transport-encrypted connection protocols. The data is transmitted and tabulated at these central sites, plural. The data that is transmitted is stored on a separate physical disk from the operating system. That disk is encrypted and, if it is an SD card, there is no physical access to it—like a slot that it plugs into. Screwdrivers with weird noses are in order if you want it out.

When the data is transmitted, it can be in the form of an encrypted binary image of the disk. This is more secure than an .xls stored on an SD card. All of this will happen when the decentralized server farms call the data in at the end of the election. Also, at the end of the election, a printout could have a per-transaction list of the data received from the voters at each site. There are a number of ways to maintain the anonymity of the voters. Remove names, randomize times, etc. This printout would also be output electronically so that it can be stored for checking results, if there is a dispute.

Votes are tabulated/reported faster. The security is better—though only as good as its worst implementer. Everyone goes home happy-ish. Or at least as happy as they were before the election.

Back to the original topic: virus software. Here’s a fun thing: often, these days, viruses are written to attack and corrupt the virus protection software itself. Like real-world pathogens, they have adapted to attack the defenses first, and then go for the soft belly. So, if your computer is riddled with viruses, start over. This time, don’t use the virus software. Just use a malware detector like Spybot – Search & Destroy. In the distant past, when I still bothered with Windows, this was my virus-protection scheme, and it worked like a charm. My dad has been doing the same thing for years, and it works like a charm.

Again, back to the original topic: voting machines should not have Windows on them. Neither should servers. Linux is working all over the computing world on servers and in embedded devices for applications which require a great deal of security and require the OS to be robust—i.e. – not crashy. It comes in all sorts of flavors. It is scalable, customizable, and the source code is open. In other words, the kernel—most basic part of the operating system—can be fully customized to run exactly what is needed in the hardware, which also limits security gaps. It is also good at all the things that we talked about above: transport encryption, disk encryption, complicated networking schemes, redundancy, binary image backups. It also doesn’t have that nasty habit of crashing and dying forever. If it crashes, it can reboot, and it will be fine. This can even happen automatically since parts of the system can be restarted without your ever having to know about it in a user interface.

I don’t want to sound like an evangelical Linux user, but I am. And I will also admit that Linux is not for everyone—a statement that I do not fully believe, but which I will allow at present. It is however, perfect for an application like running voting systems. Even if you ran a Linux system comparable to what is running now on these silly machines, the problems would scale back immediately.

So, take that for what it’s worth. I felt that the comic was funny, but might need a little further explanation. There you go.

Oh yah, disclosure: This post was written from a laptop running an unnecessarily secure Ubuntu install, backed up on a server in my house running Debian and transmitted to the internet via a router running the Linux-based DD-WRT to a—you guessed it—Linux web-server share running WordPress. This blog post is delivered to you using only open-source operating systems and applications on our end. I can’t vouch for what you used to view it, but if you used Firefox, it’s a step in the right direction.

Testing… Testing. Is this thing on.

We are always, it seems, interested in measuring or coding personality. I read this article [PDF] this morning over my coffee and found it fascinating. The results aren’t necessarily fascinating, but the idea is.

The gist is: can we something about the personality of an individual based on their e-mail address? This is an age-old question, of course. The primary use of astrology, in this author’s estimation, has been to parse personality traits. For example, Virgos are particularly mercurial. Their interests wander and range vastly. Is this true? Well, it probably is, for some.

The difference between the former and latter types of personality profiling is that the former uses a trait generated by the individual in question, whereas the latter has very little to do with them, at least on the surface. Then again, perhaps there are more factors that we are not considering, such as weather, personalities of parents and mood/temper changes based on time of year. Who knows?

Then there is the personality inventory. I took my first one a few years ago as part of a study conducted by a counseling psychology student for her thesis project. She was testing the Minnesota Multi-phasic Personality Inventory. I’m not sure about the particulars. Regardless, the questions are tricky and vague, but their compiled results are supposed to tell you something about your personality. My test indicated that I either had a personality disorder, or was a genius. Now, I don’t think that I am a genius, not even a little, but it was the more comforting alternative. There was more to it than that, something about frequencies, blah blah. Boring stuff. Sort of.

It made me interested in these types of tests though. Do they really tell us anything about ourselves, and, if so, what?

A few years later, I took the Myers-Briggs test. This one I liked. The results are a bit more human-readable—not that psychologists are not human, but well, you get what I mean. Since taking this, I have always tested the same way, which is also interesting. The questions on different exams will vary greatly, but they are designed to indicate personality traits when answered in a specific way.

I am an ENTJ [Extraversion - iNtuition - Thinking - Judging], apparently.

You have the following traits as options: Attitudes—Extraverted or Introverted, Functions—Intuitive or Sensing, Thinking or Feeling, and Lifestyle—Judging and Perceiving.

Here are a couple of tests for your enjoyment. These are obviously just intended for online amusement, not for real use. These type of assessments are best administered by a professional. But, then, when have we ever cared about that. Each one takes about 4-5 minutes. If you have a few minutes to kill take one—or more—and post the results as a comment here. It would be interesting to see what sort of personalities we all have, wouldn’t it?

A general Myers-Briggs assessment

An assessment for programmers

An interesting assessment with sliders

Well, that should help you to waste about 15 minutes today. Try it out and post the results.

for humor.

Yesterday I got an e-mail from my mother. This is not an uncommon event, but the e-mail was uncommon. She indicated that when she attempted to click the link my my blog-update email, that the computer told her that the web page was not accessible because it contained humor.

Humor?

I was blocked by a server for being funny. I don’t really think that I am funny, but I am on someone’s radar, I guess. I wonder if there is a list published every month with the URL’s of websites that may or may not contain humor. Either that or a great deal of people are reading this blog at that particular place—no names, protect the innocent—and the sysadmin caught it.

I get it, really. No one wants employees surfing the internet during work. Sure. I just cringe at the idea that we block we content because it contains something funny. I think that I might lose my mind if I couldn’t read humor online in between other tasks. We might see an increase in postal-employee-psychosis-style freakouts.

My advice: read this blog at home. Don’t get fired on my account.

Mom, et al: wear Kevlar to work, and have humorless attack drills regularly so that everyone knows what to do if someone loses it because they couldn’t read Dilbert that morning.

And me, well, I probably get flagged for stuff all the time. We live in a world of paranoia and flagging of “sensitive” data, risks, shady people, people who aren’t shady but might be in a place that is known to have other shady people in it: these are all very common. I know my passport has been flagged before, but never for being funny.