Category: Uncategorized

Masters in Computer Science at Evergreen

There’s a very obscure recommendation for a Masters in Computer Science program at Evergreen which I may have mentioned before. It’s an interesting proposal, since it integrates both the undergrad and potential graduate curriculums. I have to say, though, that Data to Information was one hell of a trial, and that was only the introductory course. I’m not sure I’d want to try a Masters program knowing how hard the introductory one was. That said, it would be a very interesting program to see implemented.

Hodgepodge II

Thursday brought about a judge’s ruling that Washington State’s ban on selling certain violent video games to minors violates First Amendment free speech rights. The ruling also stated that the ban was too narrowly defined. Interesting, considering that these sales are more of a perpetuation of violence than anything else. There are those who would say that such games are harmless, but I err more on the side of caution: I prefer to say that there is a fairly high likelihood that these games cause children to think that violence is somehow routine. I would agree that the ban is too narrow, but it seems to me that construing this as a First Amendment issue is a little questionable.

Lawyers are free to contradict me on that conclusion.

In other news, I’m now officially working for Evergreen’s Web Team and Access Services departments, as well as being on retainer for the Writing Center. The Web Team position is probably only for the summer, and I will be focusing on accessibility issues within the entire Evergreen site. The other two are both part of my Site Manager position, which I’ve been doing for the last year on behalf of the Writing Center. It’s nice to add another Evergreen department to the list.

Not much else going on. I’m looking forward to a camping trip with Amanda to celebrate our one-year anniversary. We leave for Larrabee State Park on Wednesday and come back on Saturday. Until then, we’re lounging around in Bellingham doing generally nothing.

Looking Back

It’s weird looking back.

I had to get information from my old high school for some documentation purposes, and decided to request a copy of my official transcript while I was at it. I closed out high school with a 3.04 grade point average. I was somewhat surprised on this fact, since I was convinced I had done much worse.

Okay, so that’s no longer really all that significant and I don’t care all that much (which is precisely why I’m devoting a blog entry to it). Still, I was pleasantly surprised.

Go me.

Fall Quarter Book List

Larry Mosqueda, the faculty for my class next quarter, was nice enough to e-mail us the book list quite early — I wasn’t expecting to request it for another week, at least. Thanks, Larry!

Here it is:

Howard Zinn, A People�s History of the United States, HarperCollins, 1995,
ISBN 0-06-092643-0 paper

Noam Chomsky, The Chomsky Reader, James Peck, ed., Pantheon Books, 1987, ISBN 0-394-75173-6 (selected readings throughout the quarter) paper

John Locke, Second Treatise on Government, C.B. Macpherson, ed. and Introduction, Hackett Publishing, 1980, ISBN 0-915144-86-7 paper

George Orwell, 1984, with Afterword by Erich Fromm, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (Signet Classic from New American Library), 1961, ISBN 0-451-52493-4 paper

Angela Davis, The Angela Y. Davis Reader, Joy James, ed., Blackwell Publishers, 1998, ISBN 0-631-20361-3 paper

Thomas J. McCormick, America�s Half Century: United States Foreign Policy in the Cold War and After (second edition), John Hopkins University Press, 1995, ISBN 0-8018-5011-8 paper

Kevin Phillips, American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush, Viking (Penguin), ISBN 0-670-03264-6 (Hardcover only as of July, 2004, get paperback if available by 9/04. Discounted copies available)

Larry Everest, Oil, Power, and Empire: Iraq and the U.S. Global Agenda, Common Courage Press, ISBN 1-56751-246-1 paper

Douglass V. Popora, How Holocausts Happen: The United States in Central America, Temple University Press, 1990, ISBN 0-87722-750-0 paper

Mike Prokosch and Laura Raymond, The Global Activist�s Handbook: Local Ways to Change the World, Nation Books, ISBN 1-56025-401-7 paper

Student subscription to the New York Times

Recommended Books (not seminared upon)

Joan Powell, ed., Education for Action: Undergraduate and Graduate Programs that Focus on Social Change, Food First, ISBN: 0-935028-86-2, 2001, fourth edition

Jennifer Willsea, ed., Alternatives to the Peace Corps, tenth edition,
Food First, ISBN 0-935028-91-9

I probably won’t pick up the recommended books; any book titles in bold above are ones I still need to pick up. The latest of Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States actually seems to be ISBN 0-06-052837-0. This is the copy I picked up, so hopefully it’ll suffice (I suspect, since this is only the book list that was requested from Evergreen’s bookstore, they may carry the same edition).

I’m a glutton for punishment. This book list should make that obvious.

Exporting Evolution Contacts for SpamAssassin Whitelists

Warning: Programming/Technical Content

I’m currently using Novell Evolution 1.5.9 as an Outlook replacement, using it for my Calendar, Contacts, and e-mail. I’m also using SpamAssassin 2.63 (specifically, spamc/spamd) for e-mail filtering. What I used to do under Windows was have Outlook check all e-mail against my Contacts and throw away any messages that weren’t explicitly from those people. However, Evolution lacks any method of doing this. As such, I decided to write my own scripts that would allow me to do the exact same thing with SpamAssassin’s user preferences file. The result is quite nice. It goes through all of Evolution’s addressboook.db files (stored for me under ~/.evolution/addressbook/local/) and outputs any line containing the word “EMAIL”, then does some text stripping with sed, sorts the addresses, removes any duplicates, and then regenerates my SpamAssassin user_prefs file with the addresses specified for whitelisting.To avoid making everyone incredibly bored, I’ve added more details in the extended entry.

Continue reading →

Hybrid SUVs

Ford has come up with an exellent oxymoron: a hybrid SUV, specifically a hybrid version of their Escape model. There’s a Ford SUV cartoon posted on suvsuck.org that’s interesting in the face of this announcement (mirrored locally):

It’s pretty much well-known that SUVs aren’t very good environmentally, so this might take a chunk out of it, but the likelyhood is that people who already own SUVs will simply buy the normal model (and the same is true of others who are looking for SUVs). This is more a “feather in the hat” of Ford, and it’s fairly unlikely given the current state of the SUV market that anyone will care about the hybrid version beyond the usual intrigue over what they percieve as an oddity on the roads.The better (and far more admirable) approach on Ford’s part would be to scrap the Escape entirely and only market the Escape Hybrid version. This might lose them some customers, but I’m wondering how many people would really notice such a switch and be compelled to buy one regardless of whether it was “good for the environment”. This assumes, of course, that people don’t care too much about the slight differences between the two versions.

Overall, my reaction is negative: there’s far too many downfalls to buying an SUV that this is only a minor tweak. It does nothing to improve the fact that, in a high-speed collision between a compact car and an SUV, the people in the SUV are far more likely to survive. It does nothing to improve Ford’s bad environmental image, and means nothing if they refuse to follow up with higher MPG ratings or hybrid versions of other vehicles across their expansive brand line. Really, what is this but an attempt to enter into an unestablished SUV market that probably doesn’t need establishing?

Computers and Cars

So I’ve had a shift in scenery to Bellingham since yesterday, which is, as usual, quite welcome. It’s interesting to go somewhere else for a little while and just sit around doing nothing but observing and relaxing. Well, not entirely true — we’re still doing some things, Amanda and I, though perhaps not as much as we could be doing. Not that I’m complaining or anything!

I’ve been thinking the last little while about the implications of being a licensed driver. I came into it later than most people, though that’s not all that uncommon judging from other people I’ve talked to. Obviously, it’s a great responsibility, both for the safety of others and for your own mobility. If there’s one thing that not getting my license officially for a few years showed me, it was that driving isn’t something to be toyed around with. That’s probably a lesson I had already learned by being in a head-on car accident back when I was about 15, but it’s driven home to me now that I’ve finally gotten a license rather than still sitting around with a permit for two or three years.

The fact is, I now have some measure of freedom with that license, even if I don’t have a car and I’m not a perfect driver. Everyone can improve, of course (some more than others, and some never improve). I somehow feel like I still have a long way to go before I can consider myself a “safe” driver. Perhaps that’s a misconception on my part about my driving skills and my comfort behind the wheel. Only time will tell.

Someone said the other day that I was crazy to switch all my computers to Linux, that I’d never be able to run anything. That’s one of the major misconceptions about Linux today. While it was once true that you had little or no accessibility to common Windows programs, the fact is, I’m running Macromedia Dreamweaver MX on this system (which itself is a SuSE Linux 9.1 Professional laptop). In addition, I will be loading Adobe Photoshop 7 for my graphics work in the near future. For the Linux people out there, I’m not relying on Gimp simply because I’m used to Photoshop and I’ve always been taught to use what you know. Granted, running Linux may lower the number of options I have in running Windows software, but that’s not that big of a deal — I’m not much of a gamer, so my Windows games don’t matter much. I may, however, research getting SimCity 4 and Civilization 3 on this system, just for fun.

It’s funny, there’s almost an overlap in my interest in computers and getting my license — switching to Linux has brought me a measure of freedom from having to pay higher prices for software, and has also allowed me a greater flexibility in tinkering with my systems. My license has given me physical freedom without tying me to other people to get me places. Granted, in the short term, I am still relying on others, but I hope for that to change quickly.

We’ll see what happens on both fronts.

Prius In Stock

Toyota of Kirkland apparently now has a Seaside Blue Prius 2004 in stock, with the perfect options. Shame it’s about $27,000 and I’m not around to test drive (or necessarily even ready to test drive).

Happy day-after-July 4th (which would make it July 5th)!

Raving about the Prius

Anyone who doesn’t care about advocacy for a cleaner environment can probably skip this entry (he says with tongue in cheek).

Okay, so I admit that the 2004 Toyota Prius is now my hybrid car of choice. It’s got the highest ratings through Car and Driver, some damned good safety ratings from Consumer Reports (last I checked, at least), and has some really interesting statistics. I particularly like the dashboard. Coool.

A really, really nice Prius site is john1701a.com. John was once an owner of a 2001 Prius but now owns a 2004 Prius. Of particular interest to me were the Prius Misconceptions, the Prius Selling Points document (PDF), and the Prius Info Sheet (also PDF). The Selling Points document still seems to reflect the 2001 Prius, but seems like it’s still applicable to the 2004.

In addition, there are IntelliChoice reviews, a US Department of Energy article on the Prius’ technology, and a review from The Car Connection.

Bottom line: test drive, anyone?

Update (11:46PM): I got bored and priced my ideal Prius through toyota.com, just for fun. Never let it be said I had nothing better to do.

MSRP
4-Dr Gas/Elec ECVT (1224) $20,295
Delivery, Processing and Handling Fee $515
Exterior / InteriorSeaside pearl (08S2)/ Ivory/brown (FA08)
OptionsPackage #7 (AM) includes: Intermittent Rear Window Wiper, Driver & front passenger
seat-mounted side airbags and front & rear side curtain airbags, Smart Keyless Entry
System, Vehicle Stability Control, front foglamps, HID headlamps, 50 state emissions		 $2,255
Total MSRP $23,065