Monday - 11 December 2000
Final Four. The University of Hawai'i women's volleyball team won the NCAA Western Region finals this weekend thus heading for the final four tournament in Virginia. Na Wahine are two wins away from the national title.
Lo'i Feet. The last class of the semester was at the Ka'ala Cultural Learning Center (see it here, note that the server is not always up). The Center is located in Waianae on the Island of O'ahu. The area once was the poi basket to the entire western end of the island. However, as the water for growing taro was diverted in the 1800s for plantation use, the taro lo'i dried up and died.
The Center has restored many of the ancient lo'i and is a living research and training center of the original Hawai'ian culture. Part of that culture is preparing the lo'i for planting. In our case, that meant walking in knee deep mud looking/feeling for rocks in the bottom of the lo'i. Hard, back breaking work, but necessary to prepare the way for the planting. A good time was had by all.
Fortunately, the weather all weekend was perfect for being outside. Including all 25,000 or so hardy souls who completed the Honolulu Marathon yesterday (I was too busy getting a tan so I was, unfortunately, unable to participate this year).
VMWare vs. Win4Lin. InfoWorld's Nicholas Petreley steps into the fray with a comparison between VMWare and Win4Lin (see it here). In his opinion, Win4Lin is the clear winner and wonders why anyone would want to get VMWare. Read the column and then you decide. By the way, I bought two copies of VMWare under their limited time offer of $99/copy (see it here) based on fellow Daynoters Brian Bilbrey's recommendation in his column. I have not installed either yet, but will get around to it as soon as I can.
Media Player Virus Vulnerability. Yikes! Just when you think you've gotten rid of all of the rats, smarter rats appear. According to InfoWorld's Brian Livingston (see his column here), MS MediaPlayer 6.4 and 7.0 are vulnerable to a new type of virus that uses ASX files to execute, as they say, arbitrary code (that's compuspeak for all programs or commands on any drive you have access to). MS has a patch which supposedly closes this hole, and one regarding skins (which apparently can also act as a payload carrier). Sheesh. Don't these people have better things to do?
I have some research to do on court organization so I need to head over to the law library so I gotta go - Aloha!
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Tuesday - 12 December 2000
Eye See. The New York Times has an article on laser eye surgery for the far-sighted (see it here). Most people are aware of the more common procedures for the near-sighted. But up until recently, there was very little for the former.
Laser Thermal Keratoplasty, unlike Lasik, does not require the cutting of the cornea. Rather, all of the correction is done with short bursts of laser light (usually lasting less than three seconds per eye). The costs range from $2,000 to $3,000 per eye. YMMV.
LeakTest. The latest news letter from security guru Steve Gibson points out one of the problems with most firewalls. Namely, they can keep intruders out, but if a Trojan Horse/virus/spyware program somehow gets past it (by email or diskette for example), the program can call home through the wall since many firewalls do not scan outbound packets.
One firewall that can prohibit any unauthorized outbound packets is ZoneAlarm (ZA). But ZA requires the user to decide what is okay and what is not. Of course, should a program figure out a way to piggy-back on an authorized service (for example, your browser or email client), you are dead meat. While ZA can detect if a program has renamed itself to an authorized service, I'm not sure it could detect anything if the program was able to hijack, rather than completely replace, the service.
So Gibson has a simple downloadable program that checks if it can get out, as a Trojan Horse would. Now don't get too excited if it can. As I said, most firewalls (including most Linux based ones) are designed to keep people out, not to stop a Trojan Horse from within. Also, if you are using ZA, and you give Gibson's program permission to access the Internet, the Gibson program (see it here) will announce a problem. If you lock it out, it will say it failed. So even with ZA, eternal vigilance is required.
I leave it up to you to decide what you want to do with this information.
Lots to do at work so I gotta go - Aloha!
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Hump Day Wednesday - 13 December 2000
Blowing Smoke. In Montgomery County, Maryland it is now illegal to smoke on all public property, including sidewalks and streets. If you are caught doing so, you get one warning, then after that a $100 fine.
Some would say this is taking things too far. You decide. Cough. Cough. (See the story here).
The Fat Lady Sings. Well, at least she's warming up. A quick read of the US Supreme Court ruling (see it here in PDF format, 56kb in size) finds an opinion full of (unintended?) irony, political, and contradictory statements.
In the past, the Court talked about how the public's trust and confidence in the Court is of utmost importance. Decisions like this do not further that worthy goal. In fact, it was my opinion that the Court should not have heard the case in the first place. If there ever was a political, rather than judicial question, choosing the President qualifies, bar none.
In the final analysis, one lesson to learn from this ordeal is the election process must be centralized at the state level. That is, the policies and procedures for counting votes needs to be fair and uniform across the entire state. Right now, I would not go so far as to say it needs to be uniform across the nation, but that could be a logical inference.
As for me, I still think Gore should have conceded on the Wednesday after the election (see my posting for that day here). Very little, if anything that has transpired since then has strengthened the electoral process, the courts, or the Presidency. Let's hope the next election is not as confusing.
I gotta go - Aloha!
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Thursday - 14 December 2000
SSM. SWMBO is in the hospital this morning for an procedure. It's one of those "female" kind of things so I will say no more. Any good thoughts you may want to send our way would be appreciated.
It's funny how it's the little things that we notice sometimes. Part of the preparation for her operation is that she can not eat or drink anything for at least eight hours prior to the procedure. This meant that I had breakfast by myself this morning. You know, I missed her not being at the table something awful...Sigh.
I gotta go - Aloha!
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Aloha Friday - 15 December 2000
It's Friday!
Thank You!. Mahalo to all who took the time to send my wife and I good thoughts and prayers. She came through it like the champ she is. It took a little longer than I had thought it would, but all is well (other than some pain, which she is bearing up under very well).
There's Always Next Year. Sigh. From the glazed look on the faces of the University of Hawai'i Wahine volleyball team, as they came on to the court yesterday for the NCAA quarter-final match, you could tell it would not be a good game. They had the same look as the late George Dubyah Deer had (no relation to the President-elect) as the bright lights of the semi barreling towards it shone into its eyes. But then, a 32-2 season ain't bad. Maybe next year.
XHTML. My experiments with XHTML continue. While it is very similar to straight HTML 4.x, it incorporates XML rules. These rules make for a "well-formed" page, but will drive you crazy until you learn the differences. What will also drive you crazy is even the most up-to-date browsers may not parse your XHTML correctly. And by correctly, I mean if it doesn't parse, nothing, save for a cryptic error message will be displayed. This forced discipline will not sit well with some people. Below is a list of differences between XHTML and HTML:
Tags and attributes must be in lower case
All XHTML elements must be closed
Attribute values must be enclosed in quotes
The id attribute replaces the
name attribute
The script element needs a type definition
A pretty good place to start looking at XHTML is www.w3schools.com/xhtml/xhtml_html.asp
In fact, this weeks post, except for the header information/document type and id vs. name, is written to comply with XHTML rules. Starting in January, if not before, all posts will be in XHTML. Have fun.
Sorry this is being posted so late, but from the time I came in this morning, I've been working on a position paper regarding trial court consolidation. It's due at the end of the day, and the clock is running. So I gotta go - Have a Great Weekend Everyone! - aloha!
© 2000 Daniel K. Seto. All rights reserved.