Dali Clock is in countdown mode and I’m anxiously awaiting my leap second. Actually I accidentally read the spoiler and found out that OSX didn’t ever display 23:59:60.
Here’s another OSX oddity. When I installed Tiger I noticed that I had to choose other than the default to get a filesystem that advertised itself as case-sensitive. Talking to [Cadet] the other day I mentioned this to him and he tested on a factory install my hypothesis that OSX comes with a non-case-sensitive filesystem, but no one ever notices because the default shell is case sensitive. Maybe everyone already knew this, but it seems an odd feature under all that gui goodness. Try it out.

It’s official now. As much as I really thought he would change his mind at the last minute; my friend, coworker and bandmate Mark retired from the service. We’ll all miss him, but I suspect he’ll be around somewhere. In the last few weeks I’ve been shadowing him and I’ve heard a lot of offers passed around. Good luck, Mark.

Caution: pistol pedantry follows.

Is there something I can do to cause people to stop using the odius term “double-action only”? I doubt it, but someone has to speak out. And today, that someone is me.

Back in the good old days when ships were wood and men were steel the revolver to have went by the name “Single Action Army”. The name describes the action of the piece, which is that it works in only one way: the hammer must be “thumb-cocked” and the trigger trips the sear, releasing the hammer. The Single Action Army took the counter to the double-action revolvers of the day that could be fired one of two ways: By thumb-cocking the hammer and using the trigger to release it, or by using the trigger to draw the hammer to the rear and release it. It may have been in the 1890s or the 1970s when it happened, but some people started thinking that the term “double-action” meant that the trigger did two things: cock the hammer and drop the hammer. I cannot be any more emphatic about the wrongness of that thought. The problem is that for the most of recorded history when the terms were used correctly by the learned and incorrectly by the ignorant they were still talking about the same thing. This provided no opportunity for the illuminated to gently rebuke the wrongheaded fools of the day and the problem grew unnoticed until the 1980s or so.

In the ’70s or ’80s American police realized that they were carrying antique fighting tools (double-action revolvers) around and started the migration to autoloading pistols. As a quick aside, a revolver is a firearm with multiple chambers in a rotating wheel, a pistol is a handgun that has it’s chamber built into the barrel. Now, Americans had a (the) world-class fighting handgun in the Model of 1911. The 1911 is a single-action pistol that is designed to be carried with the hammer cocked -that’s the single way the action works. the cocked hammer and the larger calibre seemed alright for warfare, but police administrators thought them too agressive for civil duties. A more European style pistol, double-action and 9mm designed to be carried with the hammer down would be a nice compromise. Manufacturers rushed in to fill the need and soon one couldn’t swing a dead cat within a mile of a magazine stand and not hit a glossy photo of the latest double-action wunderneun. Finally even the military took a giant sip of the kool-aid and adopted the M9 double-action 9mm.

An alternate, and just as feasible history is that the military decided that they wanted that and the police departments followed suit. I’m going from memory here. This is a rant, not a research paper.

Around this time the Austrian military had adopted a pretty fair single-action battle weapon in the Glock 17, and it was imported and marketed in the USA. Now the Glock marketing folks, faced with the task of selling a single-action pistol with the only safety on the trigger to a culture bombarded by “single-action is scary” marketing, opted to obfuscate the operation of the piece by insisting it’s operation was something new called “safe-action”

All was going along fine and people could debate the relative merits of double-action toys and single-action pistols until trainers or competitive shooters or Glock marketers or someone figured out that having two distinct trigger pulls on the same weapon was stupid and the manufacturers of double-action pistols started making thier wares available in a configuration without the sear catch that made the automatic cocking of the hammer possible. This rendered them (you guessed it) single-action pistols. the manufacturers loved having a new product for negligible research and developement costs, but had already spent millions on shills to write Guns and Ammo articles about the dangers of anything “single-action” and so embraced the now ubiquitous “double-action only”. This turned their old double-action pistols into the just-as-dumb “double-action/single-action” guns.

Now you know the history as I recall it. It’s probably about half right, but you know in your heart that “double-action only” can’t be right. So follow me and fight the good fight for our language. Here are some ensamples to help you through discussions with the unwashed:

• Single-Action: May be self-cocking only like a 1911, trigger-cocking only like a shrouded hammer Ladysmith revolver or half-cocked only like a Glock
• Double-Action: Smith and Wesson revolvers that allow trigger cocking and thumb-cocking, Sig 226
• Crunchenticker: A 1980s-era double-action abomination that has a decocking lever and trigger-cocks on first shot, self-cocking thereafter –like the Beretta M9

As long as I’m on the subject; a clip is something used to load a magazine. But you
knew that.

I saw one of my pictures in the paper this week. I don’t know exactly how they got it, but they spelled my name “Courtesy”. Everyone knows that’s only my middle name.
As long as they’re not using hoyhoy.org bandwidth, I have no problem with it. Maybe I’m even a little flattered: front page and in color, baby. Maybe next time they can use a more handsome picture.~

Bumper’s Corollary to Zawinski’s Law: All remodeling projects will expand to the point that load-bearing walls are demolished.

Liberty Hill High School class of 19mumblemumble will be holding our *cough*^th year reunion at (drum roll please) my mummy and daddy’s house. I suspect invitees know where that is, but you can email me if you don’t. 1730hrs on 08OCT05. Band geeks: don’t forget to wear your old uniforms!

Here’s a program that replaces the cgi script that one gets when attempting to access a site on the chastity-list when using a squid proxy plus squidGuard plus chastity-list. The main feature of this script is that it allows the user to bypass the blockage for a configurable length of time. Admittedly, this isn’t for everyone (maybe anyone), but it is an effort to facilitate safe-surfage and allow the user to make the final decision. By default it logs the unblocking by email, but that can be disabled. I added a simple passwording scheme to increase the utility for people who might want to use it in a slightly less trusting atmosphere.
The README file spells out the pain of installation in detail.

USENIX pictures are up!

We’ve been living in this house for so long, not because it’s beautiful, but because it’s so close to home. Our current little project started out as a new doorknob on the backdoor or something, but everything that gets re-done makes whatever’s next to it look a bit shoddy and now we’ve got the whole place cluttered with building materials, tools and a bunch of things that recently had someplace to be stored. A few pictures of the progress are available.

A while back I received a card in the post. The card seemed to be a Japanese advertisement for some sort of gelatinised sea water, which turns out to be the most normal part of the card. On the back of the card are 13 two cent stamps and a load of gibberish. Of course this could only be from a few people and they’re all hoyhoy.
This particular gibberish is in the form of a pile of made up characters, I did a frequency analysis to confirm my suspicion (and hope) that it was a substitution cipher. My first though was to further substitute each character with an ASCII character so that I could easily test it against the library of presumably similar plaintext insanity but in listing the characters for frequency analysis I realized that due to penmanship issues and postmarks I wasn’t really able to identify a few of the characters and there were a some that may or may not have been discrete characters. For example there is a hash mark and an slightly italic hashmark; these turned out to be different characters.
My first attempt was a “same word” attack. I simply went throught the ciphertext looking for strings that occur more than once. I found a string of 8 characters doubled with a doubled character within, but it yielded nothing very promising in /usr/share/dict/words. It turns out it was two words and contained an apostrophe, so analysing it on real plaintext with punctuation and spaces removed would have been helpful, but just running the pattern against the words file was not.
Next I tried an attack I remember using against the krauts in the big one. The Nazis couldn’t keep from beginning a transmission with some formal address and I hoped my writer would have started this note in some fairly normal way. My task was made a lot easier by the fact that the first seven characters contained two sets of doubles. It’s not unthinkable that hoyhoy may begin a letter with the word “smorgasbord” or “monkeychow”, but in this case it was “Hey dude”. After that it was surprisingly easy to fill in the rest. Why he chose to solve the traveling salesman problem in that format is beyond me, but I guess it does add a little flair.

All of my kids and 2/3 of my ne(ice|phew)s were in the paper on Thursday. At least we think that’s Robert: it might be (the other) Bigfoot.
The guy playing guitar is Joe McDermott. He got generally positive reviews from the kids. Abbie said his work was trite and formulaic, but she’s always a little hard on the singer/songwriter types.

Anna just caught me: I had posted this as 12JUL05 and ten minutes later she tells me that I’ve blown it. I didn’t even know she read this junk.
Yesterday she found a gmail bug (duly filed) in which the last line of a message got mixed up in the quoted text of the last. Let me know if you need anything beta tested.~

Scott and I spent part of our busy workday out at the old airport (nee AUS) running cones on the company’s tires. That’s some high-quality tarmac wasting away out there! I wish I could rent it out for a party.

It did give me just a little start everytime I’d look up to see a big jet flying low toward Bergstrom, but it was a good time. There are a few pictures of Scott running the course.~

For Old Payne’s memorial week Dad and I digitized old photos and put them into a slideshow. It seemed as though the family enjoyed watching the pictures go by as a nice group activity and it at least gave me something to do that felt productive and helpful.
Dad did the hard part (scanning) and I just cropped and resized them for televisor viewing. Given the low resolution available, my impulse was to crop everything tight. I soon realized, however, that the interesting bits of a lot of the pictures were in the backgrounds.
Here‘s a picture of me and some girlfriend or cousin or both (just kidding, I’m pretty sure that’s a cousin) at the lake that would have been a perfect candidate for cleaning up. It would have been simple enough to even clone out that crazy camper frame around $COUSIN’s head, but the Dr. Demento T-shirt and tube top are nature’s timestamps (well, tube tops are always in style in my family) and the girls doing handstands in the background are interesting points for identification conjecturing. The banana-seat bicycle ices the cake.
Here’s one in which people went to the trouble to pose next to a car, but inexplicably the shot is framed to include a water hose and a tar-papered shack. 40-ish years later, though it’s the shack project and half a car that make the picture worthy of discussion.
Cars seem to be the single best way to date a photo and identify the people. Our family is blessed to have a car or wagon in almost every photo. As much as I like cars and pictures of cars, I’m pretty vigilant about keeping them out of the backgrounds of family snaps. Or I have been until now.

It’s occurred to me before that one of the things we’ll be missing in future is shoe boxes full of photos that weren’t good enough to make it into a frame but weren’t bad enough to throw away. Here‘s my favorite-ever picture of Pappy: backfocused beyond repair, I’m afraid it would never make it to print today. A new find I like for all the wrong reasons is this compositional train wreck.

I plan to try to pay some attention to the criterion “potential future interestingness” in my picture selection process from now on. I wish you would too.~