Halffull.org

In case you haven’t heard of raggle, it’s a console/web RSS reader written in ruby and ncurses by Paul Duncan. If you’re in the market for a console RSS reader (perhaps to read halffull) it’s a great choice.

0.4, after agonizing delay, was released today. I contributed a lot of the new features and bugfixes, mostly scratching personal itches, but making it a lot more convenient to use if I don’t say so myself. It’s also a hell of a lot faster than 0.3.x because of some pretty major internal changes. Anyway, it’s neat, give it a try.

If pi day wasn’t geeky enough for you, it’s now time to party for 1111111111! That’s right, it has officially been 1111111111 seconds since the Unix epoch. As of right……

now!   (8:58:31 pm EST)

Congratulations Unix! You’ve brought so much joy into the lives of sysadmins everywhere. (we seriously need more posters here to keep the geek quotient down.)

I’m watching Bill Maher’s latest incarnation, whatever it’s called, and they have this wonderful democratic congressman from Massachusetts saying that Bush’s plan to reform social security would take away benefits for disabled people. I wanted to start a holy war. I’ll try to be rational here.

The administrator of social security testified on C-SPAN about SSI (Supplemental Security Income). This is different from the SSA (Social Security Administration). The SSI is a separate system with a separate account. So as of now, it’s leaving this debate. Bye bye, disabled people. Don’t let the door hit you in the wheelchair on your way out.

Now for the SSA. The administrator also said that the funds from social security are procured seperately from the general tax fund. However, these funds enter the general accounting pool. They are earmarked to satisfy social security’s needs for that year, then are taken by the treasury which issues an IOU to the SSA. Currently social security taxes bring in more money than the SSA needs, so these taxes generate a surplus which goes into the general federal budget. At some indetermined point in the future, the SSA will bring in less than it needs. The guesses for this deficiency range from billions to trillions. They’re just guesses though. Let’s define the problem more thoroughly.

When the SSA was formed by FDR he said it was to ensure that no one suffers through poverty-ridden old age. Back then, 19 workers paid for 1 retired worker. Now, it’s about 3. Back then, the retirement age was 65. Most people didn’t make it to 65. Now people live well into their 70’s, and Clinton lowered the retirement age in the late 90s. Add in the damn baby-boomers, and we’ve got WAY too many people retired. Of course another problem is that people are working until they are older and some of those who have “retired” have simply taken new jobs, reducing the number of jobs available to younger people. Why? Too much damn stuff to buy.

I’m sure some of you have heard of the new bankruptcy laws which will make it so that if you can pay back some of your debts, you have to. I hear a lot of tears being shed about this one and I don’t have a lot of sympathy. We all control our spending. With credit cards, it gets easier to get into debt. It’s still us getting ourselves into that debt, though. In the 1930’s they didn’t have too much to buy. You buy a coke, a broom, one of those new big-city fancy-pants refrigeration machines, and you’re living the high life. We’ve been getting addicted to that high life by consuming more and more. We’re spending our money on shit we don’t need because it’s there. And then we cry that we don’t have enough to pay our credit cards or retire. The real answer is we don’t have enough to retire in the fashion we want to.

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Today is a great day, for it marks the release of Span 0.2.1. The only visible changes are that terminal resizing is now handled gracefully and automatically, but behind the scenes there was a lot of code cleanup, and a ton of documentation updates. (namely, I documented it.) Not a vital upgrade, but nice to have - especially if you want to look at the code.

Kubrick sucks. No, not the filmmaker, the Wordpress template.

Blasphemy, I know.

You see it everywhere on the damn web nowadays, partly because of the popularity of Wordpress 1.5 and partly because people are too lazy to change the default template. I’m not saying the old default was anything to look at, but Kubrick just grates on my nerves. (This isn’t to berate Michael, I like most of the work on binary bonsai.)

I honestly don’t see why enough people liked this to make it the default. The title block is befungously huge, putting a little title on a huge ugly gradient. The entire text area is about as wide as my thumb, leaving very little room for actual content. More gradients at the bottom, and images for layout. I’m not saying I’m an arthouse pro or anything, but it’s the default…

[edit] I forgot to mention, it’s also been ported to almost every other blog/CMS software out there, making it even more common. Hooray.

Mmm, pi. Happy pi day (and Einstein’s birthday) to geeks everywhere!

3/14 1:59:26

Take that second of your life to think about how much you owe to pi and Einstein! You wouldn’t have modern technology or circles without them!

If you need some geeky inspiration, check out today’s Astronomy Picture of the Day - an awesome glowing gas nebula.

I hereby give to the good people of halffull Span 0.2.0! Along with some general fixes, I added full network play. Someone runs as a server with the -s switch (and optionally -C(x) for the number of clients to accept). Then, your friends can join in with any number of players they want - the server manages the remote players seamlessly while you play along. Hell, you could even have an internet AI-battle by just shutting off the human players.

Actually… that’d be great, having people write their own Span AI and having internet tournaments to see who’s the master programmer. I’m getting ahead of myself though - enjoy the game!

Tonight’s American Idol was fairly unremarkable. Bo Bice was only moderate, Constantine picked another horrible song, and Mario was probably the best of a mediocre group. Scott sucked and should be gone. Even the person the judges said was best, Anwar, was terribly pitchy.

The truly interesting thing was in the voting. I have a Verizon phone, and we all know Idol is a Cingular (formerly AT&T Wireless) gig. For a full 45 minutes, I was unable to vote - not because the lines were busy, as usual, but because the phone number was actually declared out of service. I get the friendly Verizon Darth Vader operator telling me that the number I dialed, which was correct, did not exist. This happened for any contestant I tried voting for, and didn’t stop for at least 45 minutes. At this point I could get in two votes, but the line was quickly out of service again for the full voting period. Not a circuit busy, please try again, nor a busy signal, but a bad number.

Is it possible that Verizon was, in fact, blocking these calls? On one hand, they could fight Cingular by shutting off intercommunication. On the other hand, they’re degrading their own network and making people wish they had the service that worked.

I still wouldn’t be surprised at all if it was intentional. AT&T + Cingular is a pretty imposing beast, and “In” is just not succeeding like they hoped (how about you hire good marketers for a change? and dump the “good” guy, FFS).