Idiotprogrammer Blog

  • Grits on Prison

    Grits for Breakfast by Scott Henson has always been one of my fave political blogs. I really should read it more often. He focuses on the overincarceration problem we are experiencing in Texas, the self-licking ice cream cone phenomena occuring in my own state.

    Here’s his guide about how to reform the penal system. Among his suggestions: better pretrial screening to increase bond use, progressive sanctions instead of locking people up for technical violations and better use of lab services. This is a great summary of practical suggestions to improve things, including lots of links.

    Here he quantifies the benefits of increasing the number of probation officers in exchange for counties agreeing to reduce their revocation rates by 10% (which would shave off 2000 people)

    The average revoked probationer in Texas spends 4.3 years in prison. Thus, estimating incarceration costs at $16K per person per year, keeping 2,084 people on probation each year who would otherwise be revoked would avert upwards of $143 million in incarceration costs, or more than $286 million total.

    Here’s some mythbusting about the alleged link between immigrants and crime rates. Apparently they commit fewer crimes, even for the uneducated.

  • KDE, Wow!

    Purely for the heck of it, I changed my linux session editor from Gnome to KDE. I had been warming up to the simplicity of Gnome (and might continue to use it), but frankly, I’m stunned at the extent of the features that KDE has.  Definitely a welcome surprise.

  • Solutions for group management?

    It’s one of those days that nothing goes right.

    First, after I thought I completely solved the linux wireless mystery, it appears that a new and startling problem has  now preventing me from connecting to wifi. I’ve learned my lesson. It looks like I’m going to buy a #$#$#$# external wifi card. Or uninstall FC 5 and go with Ubuntu.

    Second, I wanted to post an email on a developer’s list on SourceForge. Guess what? The new member registration page doesn’t work. (And this is a site catering specifically to SW developers!)

    Third, I noticed that one of my meetup groups is becoming defunct. No biggie, but apparently as a come on, meetup.com is sending me “Please start a group” email whenever another tech writer registers.  Meetup.com is one of the craziest sites I have encountered. A brilliant idea, but the steep price for organizing a group ($12/month) just made it unrealistic except for well-established organizations. I would be willing to pay something for using Meetup (maybe $20 a year or so), but meetup’s price is just absurd. What were they thinking?

    Fourth, I was hoping upcoming.org would turn into the next meetup because it allowed you to create groups and associate events with groups. Apparently, though, they erased all my groups (perhaps through inactivity) and past events I organized. In this respect upcoming has fundamentally misunderstood the demand here. People want a way to find out about new groups and events; they also want a way to make postings about their own groups. Really, this isn’t that hard.

    Yes, people want shared calendars, but the problem is not only event management but group management. I attend about 5-10% of the meetings of groups I am involved in. Obviously I would love to go to more, but time makes you choosy.  So there are hundreds of events I am missing each year, but maybe 10-12 groups I am involved in (most in a casual once-or-twice-a-year kind of thing). From the standpoint of data, it’s easier to deal with groups than expiring events.
    Upcoming is owned by yahoo. They could deliver a great solution if they wanted. Instead they are focused on a smaller subset of the problem.  They may be limited by resources. But by scaling back their scope, they may in fact may make the problem more difficult to solve.

  • Power of 10

    Where are tax dollars are going (video) Yes, that is some hole all right.

     Advocacy commercial on marriage laws.

    Power of 10 short science film.

    Designing for 800×600 monitors.

    2006 version of Nokia is out 

  • Bogons are to Blame–A Network Admin Tells All

    A network admin plans a huge transition in Internet service and finds out the new provider idiotically provided him with a bloc of nonroutable addresses (i.e., bogons).

  • Wifi Problems Solved: The culprit: Wacky Default Values

    I am happy to report having solved my linux wireless problems (for now). I might write up a short tutorial about troubleshooting linux wifi (by now I’m practically the expert). The solution was dumb and ridiculously hard to figure out. I needed to hardcode the device configuration so that the channel corresponded to the channel of my LAN.  The default values in Fedora Core 5’s are absolutely ludicrous. I don’t know if the firmware is supposed to provide some default values or if the network configuration tool just is ludicrous.

    I’m sorry to say that this problem had really gotten me stuck. I gave myself one more session to figure it out, or else I would buy a separate wireless card.  Luckily blind luck helped me.

    Things I have learned from this experience:

    1. When you start talking specific hardware, the number of people who can help you becomes very small.
    2. Actually, I think the Network Manager tool is nifty. It seemed to have a lot of insight into the wifi networks around me, and it provided many visual cues for what was going on.
    3. I had a stupid error message that apparently nobody else had gotten. That should have led me to believe that the problem was a lot dumber than I initially thought.
    4. Although here yum/fedora wasn’t really to blame, I see the problems inherent in maintaining a package management system like Yum. When you update lots of things at once, it’s not always clear what is actually causing the problem.

  • Catching up on my post backlog

    I have about 60 half-written posts that I never got around to publishing. Most are practically finished, some have been hibernating for over 2 years. I  haven’t had time to giving them one final look over. Probably not all 60 are post-worthy (maybe 30-50% of them are), but I’ve vowing to release one “captive” post a day for the next week.

  • Most Important Story of the Week

    For those of you distracted by holidays and North Korea, here was the real bombshell of the week: according to Murray Waas, Bush was the one who authorized the Plame leak:,

    Bush also told federal prosecutors during his June 24, 2004, interview in the Oval Office that he had directed Cheney, as part of that broader effort, to disclose highly classified intelligence information that would not only defend his administration but also discredit Wilson, the sources said.

    But Bush told investigators that he was unaware that Cheney had directed I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the vice president’s chief of staff, to covertly leak the classified information to the media instead of releasing it to the public after undergoing the formal governmental declassification processes.

    Bush also said during his interview with prosecutors that he had never directed anyone to disclose the identity of then-covert CIA officer Valerie Plame, Wilson’s wife. Bush said he had no information that Cheney had disclosed Plame’s identity or directed anyone else to do so.

    What surprises me is that Bush was even involved in this kind of backbiting. It wouldn’t bother me so much if I knew that he had actually read Joe Wilson’ damning editorial. (That would have been good for the American people). More likely, some staffers and maybe Cheney related it to him secondhand, and got his verbal authorization to disclose evidence against it. You can’t let your proxies do work for you all the time.