repak shawahb
armed and hammered

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rsw@jfet.org


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Sun, 30 Mar 2008

weekend update

New pictures of the little one:


Loving that pig's ear.

Tired after herding the soccer ball.

What? I ain't sayin' nothin'.


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Mon, 24 Mar 2008

puppy update

I got the puppy Saturday as planned; he's adorable and very smart. In the end the names came down to Shockley or Tycho, and I decided to go with Shockley despite Katherine's preference for Tycho.

I'm not 100% sure yet, but I'm leaning towards feeding him a raw diet because it's better for him, I have backyard space in which to feed him, and he doesn't seem altogether impressed with dry food at the moment.

Meanwhile, the cats are divided in their reaction. Anya is just pissed that we brought another thing into her territory (especially at me, because I'm the one who carried him into the house). If I go near her she'll grumble audibly, and if I pick her up she'll yowl and even hiss. She's not actually all that scared of him: she walked right up to him and sniffed him before deciding he was the enemy. Dinah, on the other hand, is a bit more affectionate since we brought the dog home, presumably in a bid to keep our attention. Meanwhile, she seems like she's trying to work up the courage to play with him. My guess is they'll eventually be best buds.


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Thu, 20 Mar 2008

my new best friend

This Saturday I'm finally going to exercise one of the privileges of having a fenced back yard and my own house: I'm getting a puppy! That's him on the right. He's a Pembroke Welsh Corgi and is 8 weeks old today.

Though I'm not 100% on the name yet, I believe the leading candidate is Shockley (especially since this has been my planned dog name for approximately forever). Other possibilities include Ampere, Faraday, Heaviside, and Rayleigh. Also, since he's Welsh, I'm considering Aneirin. Katherine has suggested Thorin (since "Corgi" is believed by some to be derived from the Welsh phrase for "dwarf dog"), Panama (imagine yelling after your dog in your best David Lee Roth impression), and Goro, but I'm not particularly partial to any of them.

Obviously I'll post more pictures as soon as they're available (hopefully ones where he looks less like Tommy Chong after a bender). In the meantime, please cloud the name issue with more suggestions!


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Sun, 16 Mar 2008

can you back it up? no, no, that box... back it up

After a hard drive crash scare on proton (my colo machine) earlier this week (no data lost, fortunately!), I decided it was time to get serious about regular backups.

I did a bit of research and initially settled on Bacula, but because of licensing issues the Debian packages do not link to OpenSSL. This means that I can't encrypt even the handshaking, let alone the data transfer, between client (proton) and backup server (positron).

After a little more searching, I found BoxBackup, a solution geared towards backing up across a WAN. It uses SSL/TLS authentication: the server has a signing key and clients must generate keys and then have them signed with the server key before they can connect. On top of that, each client has another key it uses to encrypt the data it stores on the backup server so that it's transmitted and stored securely, and clients can be sure that their data is secure even from the backup server's admins.

Setup was a breeze (somewhat simpler than Bacula, though neither is particularly difficult), and while the initial 1.6Gb of data was somewhat unpleasant to transfer over my DSL connection, I expect that the incremental change data should not unduly load my network connection.

Now go set up your backup server already.


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Wed, 05 Mar 2008

adventures in democracy

or, Precinct Captain Sam(ir)

Yesterday was primary day here in Texas. Most of the time the primary results here are meaningless, but this year the Obama-Hillary race is hot and every delegate counts. Thus, I was determined to do my civic duty and vote. Early in the morning, after dropping Katherine off at her lab, I headed to the middle school near my house that served as the voting place for my precinct. Unfortunately, when I got to the head of the line, it turned out that I was still registered in a different precinct—the one I'd been in last election, a 20+ minute drive away. I determined that I'd go vote around 6:00p and wait around to take part in the caucus at 7:15p (yes, Texas has both).

I arrived at the polling place around 6:30p, well in time to get in the doors (which closed at 7:00p) and vote. Since there were only three voting machines, the people who were in the voting place at 7:00p took until almost 8:00p to finish their voting. After that, we waited for over an hour before they were finished "closing the books," as they told us. Apparently some time during that hour they got scared that the 150 people waiting around to caucus would get rowdy, because 6 police officers showed up—you know, to keep the peace.

Now it got interesting. The dude came out with the caucus folder and asked who the Precinct Chair was. Turns out, there was no precinct chair, at which point it became rule of the unlame—in this case, me.

After appointing a Secretary pro tempore, deputizing a bunch of people to run the sign-in sheets (despite starting almost 2 hours late, we still had over 100 people caucusing!), and getting everyone organized and signed in, I explained the process of the caucus meeting to everyone and (as prescribed by procedure) called for the election of a new Chair and Secretary. Now, whereas I was pro-Obama and our temporary Secretary was pro-Clinton, the roles switched: the Chair was a Clinton campaign volunteer (who turned out to be a nice guy once he calmed down a bit) and the Secretary was pro-Obama. Such was the tone for the rest of the meeting: I worked through the sign-in sheets checking voter ID numbers, counted the votes, and computed the delegates, all with oversight from the Clinton camp. Then a Clinton person independently verified my results with oversight from an Obama supporter.

Things got a little hairy because we couldn't verify the identities of two of the people who had signed in, but I moved successfully that we compute everything with and without those two votes to determine if it made a difference in how the delegates were assigned. If it did not, we resolved, we would simply count them (to avoid having to go through the process of striking votes) and proceed. Luckily, the delegates were the same by both counts.

Finally, we got to the fun part: picking the 8 Obama and 5 Clinton delegates to the county caucus (plus alternates). By then we were down to fewer than 30 people, so it was really just a matter of determining who wanted to be a delegate and then convincing the rest of the people that being an alternate probably wouldn't actually entail any work. At midnight—three hours after starting the whole process—we'd finished.

Who knew that dispensing democracy would remind me so much of running a Random Hall general election? For that matter, who knew Robert's Rules of Order would come in handy when arguing with anyone other than Roger Ford or JHawk?


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