Some photos from a recent trip to Gyeryongsan near Daejeon:
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| 2008-11-22-Gyeryongsan |
I’ve not been taking enough photos of late and I found some photos of a quick trip to Mouuido in July on the camera as well:
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| From Mouuido |
I am reading Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations at the moment. He had a rather Spartan outlook on life (to say the least), but his thinking is attractive nonetheless. I cannot say that it will change the way that I live my life, or that I feel compelled to live like a true stoic, but it does remind me to ignore the less important ephemera.
I should admit that I have come to this book from a brief reference in “The Silence of the Lambs” and the character in the movie “Gladiator”, rather than as a result of some learned classical education. I find the character in the second movie particularly amusing.
The final line of “Gladiator” is something along the lines of “What we do in life echoes in eternity.” I guess that the slave rebellion story and the early democracy were to flatter a modern western audience: the way we live now is similar to the way it was then. Transporting modern values to a previous age in fiction is at worst dishonest propaganda and at best boring; if I wanted to know about today, I could look out of my window.
I have not found much like that in Marcus Aurelius’ writing. The opposite is to be found in fact. He repeats over and over how the events and trials of our lives are insignificant compared to the eternities before and after our lives and how everything gets washed away in the flood.
A Hollywood movie that made that the central point of the plot might be interesting, but I doubt that the hardness of the Stoic philosophy would sell as well as schmaltz and being told that our current system of government is in some way universal and eternal.
Everyone that I meet who cares to share their opinion seems to be very excited about Barrack Obama. This is understandable, he appears to have the potential to be a great president. However, effervescently singing the praises of anyone in power is never a sane thing to do.
The most dangerous part of the Obama cult seems to be the way that people project whatever they want on to him. He said that he would be prepared to send troops and planes over the border from Afghanistan into Pakistan in order to chase suspected terrorists. This has made him unpopular in Pakistan. However, some of his supporters insist that this threat was just empty rhetoric to convince conservatives that he is not a pussy. If you question his fondness for protectionism, people will insist that it just rhetoric to attract blue collar voters.
A politician who has been singing his praise even when they think that he is lying seems like a very great danger.
He promises to create 5 million green jobs by spending 15 billion dollars per year for 10 years on his Green New Deal. How anyone can create that many jobs for 3000 dollars each is beyond me, but we shall see if it has some of the desired effects.
A country that is galvanised by hope for a peaceful, prosperous, and green future is a beautiful sight, and I don’t want to be a party pooper. Big government projects have achieved great things in the past. They’ve also been wasteful. The worst consequence of an environmental Keynesian package (e.g. government money being spent on solar panels in cloudy and lefty Portland, Oregon) are probably not as bad as doing nothing. However, a package that spends billions of tax dollars and makes people feel good about themselves without having any measurable impact on carbon dioxide emissions would be ghastly.
I registered a project on Google Code months ago called Coelacanth. I’ve had a few different ideas about what my intentions were for the project but I’ve decided to use the name for a secure password management system.
To get the ball rolling, I’ve put up a very simple random password generator. This can be downloaded from:
http://code.google.com/p/coelacanth/downloads/list
This is my first C# program, so be kind.
I’ve written this using Microsoft Visual C# Express Edition 2008, so if you have that program installed, checking out the trunk and double clicking the Coelacanth.sln file should give you access to the source. If you want to study, compile, test, develop or extend the code in a different environment, please tell me about your experiences.
This is a very open ended project for me with no pressing time-frame. The program exists to help me with a specific problem.
I’ve only tested the program on Windows XP Pro with the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 installed. If you want the program to run on a different platform (e.g. on Mono on Linux), but this release does not work, please submit an issue on the Google Code site.
One area where I would like to extend this project would be to do with saving the passwords in some sort of secure data store. For example, in a file in an encrypted file system. I’m not terribly interesting in this store having any sophisticated access control. I only intend Coelacanth to be a single user system. It’s hard to see what value any other sort of system could be in this domain. So saving the file in an encrypted file system and assuming that anyone who can access that file system can access any password in the file is fine by me.
Another area that the project could be extended would be to give the user some sort of warning about how long a password has been in use. If a password is given an expiry date, then after that date the user should be alerted to update the password.
I was quickly reminded as I was putting this simple application together that once an idea is transferred to source code, it takes on a life of its own. Limitations become apparent and extensions become attractive. A Google Code project for a program as limited as this might seem like overkill, but hacking a little app, posting it on my blog, and then forgetting about it, did not seem to do it justice either.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article4988110.ece
I guess that it’s time that I started to consider giving my students fags and soju…
I read today’s Xkcd comic and didn’t understand it.
I looked up Burma Shave on Wikipedia and the Xkcd cartoon has already been added to the Popular_culture section of the Burma Shave article.
Sometimes the speed of the internet kinda makes my head spin!
I went to a Salsa bar in Itaewon on Saturday night.
Once again, I was struck by just how bad a dancer I actually am.
I also realised that the government could probably go a long way in with reducing the problems of binge drinking if they introduced compulsory dance lessons in school. I was once in Costa Rica and there, everyone seemed to be an amazing dancer (at least those that I saw in bars). They didn’t seem to need a drink to loosen themselves up and shake their funky stuff on the dance floor. I wonder how many needless drinks are downed every weekend in England just because people are self-conscious and can’t dance until they’ve had a few.
Dr. Hosty, my high school English literature teacher, once said that he had seen Othello on the stage many times but had no intention to see the play performed again. It is too depressing. One can see the cogs turning in Othello’s mind that lead inevitably to the deadly conclusion of the play. Such is the nature of tragedy.
In the aftermath of the 1929 crash, there was the Smooth-Hawley Tariff Act. This raised import duty on thousands of products — bare-faced protectionism. The international response, predictably enough, was retaliatory trade tariffs against the USA. This increased the length and misery of the Great Depression.
Iceland’s banks are collapsing and British savers’ money is at risk. The list of councils with money at risk is long. Gordon Brown is threatening to use anti-terrorism legislation to freeze Icelandic assets in Britain in order to recover the money.
In the current credit crisis, I believe that we are seeing protectionism of a different, less explicit kind. Protectionism drives away foreign investment because it’s less attractive to run a company in a country where one is forced to buy goods and services locally rather than buying the globally optimal ones (which may be the local ones).
There can be few deterrents more certain against foreign investment than the threat of government expropriation of foreign assets. Iceland has invested heavily in the UK. Will Gordon Brown’s actions drive further investment away? We shall see.
The reason that I refer to this as a tragedy is that it appears that Gordon Brown does not have much choice in the matter. He has to try to protect the deposits of British savers and councils; one cannot simply roll over for that amount of cash. However, the money lost may be dwarfed by the repercussions.
I sometimes wonder if anyone can read the Guardian without cringing:
The headline presents the Tories as anti-multicultural but the comments of Dominic Grieve could not be interpreted in that way by anyone who read the article.
The sad part is that Guardianistas lap this sort of filth up and believe it sincerely. A few minutes perusing the comments left by readers on any article that mentions the current Conservative lead in the polls, and you’re sure to find some reference to St. Margaret’s statement about there being ‘no such thing as society’. Anyone who took the trouble to read Mrs T’s statement might be surprised to find that she was not advocating donning an Armani suit and racking up some charlie whilst the forgotten bootless millions wept on the street. She was in fact telling people something similar to Kennedy’s exhortation in his inaugural address about how one ought to ‘ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country’. No one ever calls JFK a cunt for saying that. An individual’s sense of responsibility has to outweigh that of entitlement for society to work.
Another week, another catastrophic personal data leak story (this time, one that’s not from the UK):
http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/biz/2008/09/123_30635.html
What I always find surprising about these stories is that people are using spreadsheets to handle datasets with millions of records in them.
I use Excel everyday at work and have done so, on and off, for years. If I’ve not been using Excel then it’s been OOo. Spreadsheets are ubiquitous, flexible and people seem to be able to work with them without a great deal of training.
But as a way of handling the data for 11 million people, how well do they perform compared to database systems?
Let’s assume that these big companies have professionally administered and expensive database systems that collect their millions of customers’ data. This data is probably fairly secure. Accessing it would involve sophisticated hacking (in the mainstream press sense of the word).
Non-technical employers of the company extract data for some or all of the customers as a spreadsheet and use the spreadsheet to do market research or what-have-you. Such a system’s security would be compromised if that employee were to accidentally or deliberately leave a CD or pendrive somewhere public. In terms of security, such a system is evidently not fit for purpose.
But how useful is it? As someone who’s spent a fair amount of my professional life working with script languages like PHP, Perl, Bash and what-not, I tend to see spreadsheets as a rough draft of a more automated system. Shouldn’t office employees be trained to write scripts in VBA or similar and not cobble stuff together with spreadsheets?
I am reminded of an epigram that the writer and engineer Nevil Shute used:
An engineer is a man who can make something for five bob that any bloody fool can make for a quid!
If you have a lot of employees, a Heath Robinson arrangement of spreadsheets is workable. A well trained programmer might be able to automate a lot of what they are doing.
It’s not that I want to be disrespectful to or underestimate the intelligence and learning of people who work with spreadsheets. My feeling is that companies would probably achieve significant gains in terms of productivity and improvements in security if scripting were seen as a core office skill.