Safety Fork, the

I got to hook up Ye Olde Serial Cable tonight. The disk seeking-noises from my server were too regularly-timed to be normal. Sure enough, I find someone is attempting to login over ssh every two seconds. I don’t know aaron, or adom, or adlai, or adrian, or agatha, or any of the hundreds of other names. These people certainly don’t have shell accounts on my server.

Of course, it’s some moron in Rio with a dictionary attack script. I’m just an IP address listening on port 22 to him, but I wish he were reading this site. I could say to him, “You, sir, are many vile, despicable, unflattering things I won’t write here because this is the Internet and children might find this page if they’re not scared off by the picture of the bearded man at the top. But think of an insult that would make your mother cry, and imagine me never calling you that, because it’s too good for you.”

I’ve been neglecting Same OSX quite a bit lately, but I had enough motivation last night and this morning to finish a couple of features that I had been working on:

• Score tips appear when hovering over a possible selection. This was the trickier to implement, as OpenGL doesn’t have any built-in support for rendering text. OSX has nice text and drop-shadow support, so it was worth the effort to get it in.
• For fun, I made the light source in the scene follow the mouse cursor. I think it adds some nice detail, especially since the tokens themselves are rather plain.

Grab it from the Sourceforge.net page.

No real content, just playing with my favorite photographic subject:

My brother came North to visit me this weekend. He spent most of yesterday watching Firefly on DVD, but he also brought his copy of Empire Builder, so we snuck a game into the evening.

For those hapless readers not familiar with Empire Builder, it is a railroad-building board game. Players draw cards representing loads which need to be transported, build railroad networks on a map of the United States (and Southern Canada), and move their trains (one per player) about to deliver the loads. John beat me by three turns (I maintain that he was smuggling—I mean, who pays $36 million for rice). I kept trying to think about the game as a graph theory problem, but my best idea was that it would be interesting to play the game with the load cards sorted generally in order of increasing value. It would be fun to see if it makes a difference in how the railroads develop. Also, I’d really like to play with a full complement of (six) players sometime.

After lunch today, I took John over to the Mall of America to meet his ride back to Decorah. I figured that since I was there, I’d take a walk around. I didn’t buy anything (again—the Dual 2.3 GHz G5 I saw last week was still at the shiny things store, but I guess I must be marginally fiscally responsible). I did see something completely unexpected. At one side of the mall is a space where they sometimes set up a stage for guest performers. As I was approaching it, I noticed that there seemed to be a lot of small children cheering. Then, from around the back of the stage, right in front of me, came—I kid you not—the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

I was dumbfounded. I sort of assumed they were cancelled in the mid-nineties along with every other cartoon I ever liked, to be replaced with another show about elementary-school children animated by the same computer as every other cartoon show. I was struck by how short they were; I’d always envisioned them as somewhat larger. Well, I guess as teenage mutant ninja turtles it’s reasonable for them to be teenage-sized. I wonder how they do that, anyway. I mean, they were teenaged when I was about five years old, so shouldn’t they be like thirty by now? Found straight jobs and settled down? I guess Thirty-Something Mutant Married Turtles doesn’t have quite the same ring.

Stuck in my head right now, for unfathomable reason, is this poem by Jack Prelutsky:

Nine mice on tiny tricycles were riding on the ice.
They rode in spite of warning signs, they rode despite advice.
The signs were right, the ice was thin.
In half a trice the mice fell in,
And from their heads down to their toes,
Those mice entirely froze.

Nine mindless mice, who paid the price,
Are thawing slowly by the ice.
Still sitting on their tricycles;
Nine white and shiny micicles!

I like it, but is it a little scary that I remember a whole poem I never consciously memorized?

And you thought I was going to post about Spaceballs. Well, I’m not. But my server is running again, now with more Gentoo Linux and less Solaris 10. Backing up and restoring WordPress was disarmingly easy.

Maybe now I’ll have the ambition to get a mail server running on here, too. There’s no better way to get all that tasty email than with a safety fork.

I’m going to migrate Iago (the server to which you’re connected) to Linux tonight. If everything goes smoothly, the site will be back tonight; if not, then I’ll finish the job tomorrow.

On NPR this morning I heard that rioting in France has intensified for the eleventh straight night. It bothers me that three or four times they spoke of the rioters as ‘disaffected youths’ or ‘angry youths,’ as though their age somehow maintains their innocence despite their violence. I am not old. If I burn cars and fire guns at police, I become a hooligan and a criminal. Similarly, if French people burn cars and fire guns at police, their age has nothing to do with it. They also become hooligans and criminals, and the world media ought to have the spine to so label them.

Furthermore, there is no defense in claiming oppression. If social change is needed, suitable, successful methods can be found in Indian satyagraha in the 1940s and the American civil rights movement in the 1960s. They may require more intelligence and organization, and they may not feel so immediately cathartic, but they result in a livable future. Sustained violence and anger will only create another Ireland or Palestine.

It used to be, I was never phased by an Arby’s curly fry. Four score discarded Google maps were beneath my notice. Uselessly-shredded lettuce raining from Subway sandwiches—meh. About the soda cans bursting in air I couldn’t be bothered to care. But in the last three weeks, I have become someone I never expected: one man desperately searching his life for any sign of a car wash.

I think I probably washed my Saturn three times in two years. It’s Buick predecessor—if lucky—so many times in four years. Now I see the dirt on the fenders and taillights. Unseemly. I’m aghast at the handful of dry leaves on the passenger floormat. Scandalous!

Why is it, then, that for the first time in my recollection I can’t find a single decent car wash? All there seem to be around here are the lousy automatic kind. I’ve never been satisfied with the result. Afterward, whatever part of the car was dirtiest somehow seems to have been cleaned the least. Far better are the sort without all the machinery: the good car wash is the large garage with the spray nozzle and the soaping brush. You know, the sort that have always been two in any ten-mile direction from home.

So where are they now? This city is sometimes disturbingly upscale, but these people all have cars. Dirtied, shall they go unwashed? Or lies there just beyond the horizon some Mecca of automotive cleanliness I am not devout enough to perceive?