Dinomite.net

I don’t recall how I came across the free Proggy font family but I wanted to try them out on my Ubuntu workstation for use in Eclipse. After some searching, I figured out how to install TrueType (.ttf) fonts and the process is pretty straightforward. I downloaded and unpacked the fonts into ~/.fonts, created a fonts.dir metadata file, added them to the font cache and when I restarted Eclipse, they were available.

This is the synopsis of Off The Hook that aired on 23 April 2008. The show runs live on WBAI at 7pm on Wednesdays. Call in at 212.209.2900 or send letters to oth@2600.com. The show is also available as a high-quality podcast.

In the studio: Emmanuel, Mike, Redbird, Redhackt, Not Kevin, Lexicon, Mojo from California, Al & Zach from North Carolina
On the phone: Bernie S in Philadelphia

There wasn’t a show last week because the show was pre-empted and there isn’t one next week; WBAI is having a Report to the Listener show during OTH’s time slot so listen in to hear about running a radio station.

Bernie S relates a Supreme Court decision concerning a man who was stopped for a traffic violation, arrested and, as part of the arrest, searched. The crux of the issue is that the reason for which the man was stopped was not an arrest able offense, thereby making such detainment illegal. As such, the state appeals court ruled that the pursuant search was also illegal a stance which was overturned by the United States Supreme Court, making the evidence collected during such a search admissible in court. In the case of Virginia v. Moore, the inventory search performed after the illegal arrest found illegal drugs and the evidence was used to charge Moore with crimes pursuant to those findings.

Another case concerning searches performed by border patrol for people entering the United States. The ruling made by the Ninth Circuit court states that border patrol agents need no suspicion to search persons entering the country at a border control station. Though the authority to search sans-probable cause has always been in place for border agents, the question of whether search laptops was also legal had been in question. Though it is still legal to encrypt data and refuse to divulge the encryption key, the concern of law enforcement officers simply seizing the device as evidence and delaying its return for months or years is brought up.

Bernie S brought up a very interesting combination of the above mentioned decisions wherein a law enforcement officer can illegally arrest you, such as in Virginia v. Moore, they may then search you and subsequently charge crimes based upon what the search finds.

The Australian government is exploring the introduction of laws allowing employers to read all of their employee’s company email in order to prevent cyber terrorism. In the United States, this is already the case since the owner of the network and computers, the employer, is the de-facto owner of all data upon them.

A council in England has employed laws meant to fight terrorism to put families under surveillance in order to ferret out fraudulent school placement applications.

As reported by Jane’s Police Review, London’s metropolitan police department is planning to equip all of their officers with microchips that will track their presence.

Israel says that Facebook is a threat to national security because soldiers and government employees post pictures of potentially classified material and equipment. Redhackt commiserates the desire to post pictures of oneself with interesting military hardware.

This weeks data loss comes from a New York Presbyterrian hospital that lost 40,000 records of patient names and social security numbers. Unsurprisingly, a spokeswoman fr the hospital says that there is nothing to show that the information has been misused.

Lexicon talks of the Not Our Concern Network Operations Center that will be in place at The Last Hope which he summarizes as a coat check for servers. Just reserve a spot and you can hook your box up to a big tube for the duration of the con. The con will also host a radio station for its entire duration. Named Radio Statler after the previous name of the hotel, the radio station is seeking people to help run it during the con weekend. If you want to help out with the con, or know about it, check out HOPE.net.

Having a purgatory for files that are on their way to deletion, such as the trash can in Mac OS or the recycle bin in Windows, is a great idea, for even the most careful users occasionally delete something only to find that they later need it. Unfortunately, the two aforementioned implementations, as well as those in Gnome and KDE, only allow you to empty the trash all at once. Much more useful is to have a timeout where files that are sent to the trash are automatically removed after a period of time. I finally got around to implementing this myself in Mac OS by putting the following in my crontab:

0 5 * * * /usr/bin/find /Users//.Trash -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -mtime +14 -exec rm -rf {} \;

Every day at 5 minutes after midnight any item more than 14 days old is delete from the trash can. To install it, read the linked article above or, if you know the command line, open a terminal, type crontab -e, paste the above (substituting your username) and save the file.

I learned something new in the world of Perl regular expressions today when I came across this line:

The operative side of the line, $string =~ /(.oo)(.*?r)(.*?z)/ is a normal Perl regex binding statement - apply the regular expression /(.oo)(.*?r)(.*?z)/ to $string. What’s interesting is that the binding operator returns the things matched within the capturing parenthesis as an array, allowing you to assign them all at once, as demonstrated by the left hand side of that = expression. The above statement does the same as the more verbose:

Used in a scalar context along with the /g modifier, this is an easy way to count count occurences:

There’s a small chain of taquerías in the Bay Area called Taquería Pancho Villa. At the San Mateo location this evening I noticed a plaque commemorating the revolutionary general. I took picture of it and translated it when I got home:

In tribute to Pancho Villa (Doroteo Arango [Arámbula, his full name]) To 119 years of his birth (San Juan River, Durango) And 74 years of his death (Parral, Chihuaua) San Mate, California 1997

I wanted to change the mirrors that CPAN was set to use because it seemed that the first one on the list wasn’t responding. I figured there must be a way to do this from the CPAN command line and indeed, a quick Google search turned up a result. To do what I wanted, I first printed the current URL list, shifted off the offending host and then wrote the altered configuration to disk for next time

cpan> o conf urllist
    urllist           
        ftp://archive.progeny.com/CPAN/
        ftp://carroll.cac.psu.edu/pub/CPAN/
        ftp://cpan.calvin.edu/pub/CPAN
        ftp://cpan.cse.msu.edu/
        ftp://cpan.mirrors.redwire.net/pub/CPAN/
Type 'o conf' to view configuration edit options

cpan> o conf urllist shift

cpan> o conf urllist
    urllist           
        ftp://carroll.cac.psu.edu/pub/CPAN/
        ftp://cpan.calvin.edu/pub/CPAN
        ftp://cpan.cse.msu.edu/
        ftp://cpan.mirrors.redwire.net/pub/CPAN/
Type 'o conf' to view configuration edit options

cpan> o conf urllist commit

To completely reconfigure CPAN, you can use the command o conf init.

The fifth day began with visiting Petroglyph National Monument just outside of Albuquerque, a city whose name I can now spell without looking it up. While the petroglpyhs themselves are interesting, I found the best part of the park was the short hike to the top of one of the mesas to see an awesome view of Albuquerque and the surrounding landscape. The lava rock fields that constitute the national monument were formed by the cinder cones that are atop the mesa. The volcano’s discharge covers much of the tops of the mesas and spills over the edge into the folded canyons where the images are carved.

Next up was the Painted Desert and Petrified Forest in Arizona. Though the petrified wood is quite striking, I found the painted desert to be more breathtaking. The majority of the painted desert scenes are North of Interstate 40, displaying a vivid array of color stripes across the canyon walls and cones. I hadn’t thought about the fact that the landscape is formed by wind and water erosion, but it’s unsurprising that the wind in the entire area is constantly gusting.

After seeing the first park in Arizona, we headed toward Flagstaff and then North to the Grand Canyon. We booked a room at a hotel just outside of the park and tried to drive in to get dinner at the main lodge but failed because they were completely full, which is probably the case nearly year round at the canyon. In the few minutes we were walking around the lodge, however, we were within 10 feet of the rim, a fact we didn’t realize until the next day upon seeing it in the light the next day.

The fourth day started with a trip to see White Sands National Monument which is contained within the Army’s White Sands Missile Range. That point is important because when we arrived at the park around 8:30AM, we were told that the road in wouldn’t open until 9:45 due to a missile test at the surrounding range. Immediately upon entering the park, you are surrounded by brilliant white sand in the form of dunes covered with desert vegetation. In short order, the vegetation subsides leaving nearly naked alabaster mounds surrounding the park road. Even from atop the dunes, the only thing visible is the white sand and the mountains surrounding the Tularosa Basin.

After seeing White Sands, we drove back through Alamogordo North to Carrizozo, NM, West to Socorro, NM and further to the Very Large Array. The 25 meter radio telescopes at the VLA are individually huge and the array is something to behold even in the medium configuration that we saw, with only a few hundred meters between them. What’s more striking is to see the enormous size that the telescopes can be arranged as each of the railroad track arms is 25 kilometers long. Thankfully, the VLA was courteous enough to put this in terms very easy for a Washingtonian to understand.

After seeing all of that, we headed to Albuquerque and had dinner at a standard city brewpub, Kelly’s near the univeristy. Driving through the city was very nice, as the facades throughout town are all very entertaining to see.

After a couple days of seeing next to nothing while driving through southwestern Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas and Texas, a day of absolutely nothing was on tap in the form of West Texas. Our drive took us from Abilene through Sweetwater to Big Spring where we ditched the interstate in favor of state highways. Plentiful along this route are oil wells, pumps visible for as far as one can see. There were also a number of drilling crews working to create new wells in the the most productive oil fields on the continent. Additionally, Sweetwater is home to the largest wind generator concentration in the Western hemisphere. The hills in the town are home to innumerable multi-megawatt, 90+ meter diameter wind turbines. Other than said hills, the highest thing around is a highway overpass, from which I took a few pictures.

After passing through Hobbs, NM, we headed south-southeast toward Carlsbad, NM in order to see the Carlsbad Cavern near that town. Though I had been to Luray Caverns as a kid, I remembered little of that cave. No matter, as Carlsbad dwarfs its East-coast equivalent. The size of the cavern, from the incredible entrance and the significant depth to the amazing underground area is astounding. Most striking is the lighting, apparently designed by a Broadway theater technician. If you are going through Arizona, Carlsbad Cavern is certainly something to stop and see. Even outside of the cave, the drive through the canyon in the park and the resulting view from the mesa are worth the trip.

The second day started with a trip through Memphis, TN to stop by Graceland, not because either of us particularly care about Elvis but it’s a major stop for Americana, so you can’t just drive by. Surprisingly, even on Easter this landmark of tackiness was open and visitors could take a tour of the mansion, were they so inclined. This was of little interest so, after a couple of pictures, we drove on to Arkansas with a stop to see the Mississippi river up close. The river is incredibly wide as everyone has always heard and it was moving quite quickly due to recent rains.

In Arkansas, the terrain more or less continued getting a bit flatter as we moved on. Little Rock isn’t very big and the sparsely populated terrain continues all the way to Dallas except for the border town of Texarkana. Dallas-Fort Worth is as huge as one would expect, but we were on our way to Abilene, TX which held another pleasant gastronomic surprise. In Abilene we had dinner at the Lytle Land and Cattle Co. which served undoubtedly the finest steak I have ever had. I wouldn’t have believed prior to this that a steak could be so good and it’s surely due mostly to the quality of the local beef. Texas is, unsurprisingly, a great place to get a steak and I am now inclined to try Omaha Steaks that you can get by mail.