The Ubuntu Global Jam is an incredible opportunity for the Ubuntu community to unite together around the weekend of 2nd - 4th Oct 2009 to work together to improve Ubuntu. Everyone is able to contribute to the Jam, and everyone is welcome and encouraged to get involved. Curious about how to make a real difference to Ubuntu? This is a great chance to make that difference.

The Ubuntu Global Jam incorporates events that have been organized over the world to get Ubuntu contributors and fans together to have a great time and improve Ubuntu. Each event has one or more of our four themes:

* Bugs - finding, triaging and fixing bugs.
* Testing - testing the new release and reporting your feedback.
* Documentation - writing documentation about how to use Ubuntu and how to join the community.
* Translations - translating Ubuntu and helping to make it available in everyone's local language.
* Packaging - work on Ubuntu packages and improve them
* Other - other types of contribution such as marketing, packaging, advocacy etc.

The Schaumburg Library is located on the southwest corner of Schaumburg and Roselle Roads.

The solution to my predicament? Sun's brilliant VirtualBox open source virtualization package running the latest Ubuntu release -- currently 9.04 (or "Jaunty Jackelope," as they call it). The installation of VirtualBox took a bit on my lappy, but it went fairly seamlessly. The only hitch was that the installation of the VirtualBox Host-Only Network adapter in Windows XP SP3 broke my wireless networking. (It may well have broken all networking, but I didn't try plugging a cable in to check.) The solution to this was fairly simple -- disable the newly installed adapter! It seems that VirtualBox doesn't need this adapter enabled in order to provide the virtual OS networking. (I've no idea what this adapter is used for at the moment. Perhaps I'll figure this out as I work with VBox a bit more.)

The only Ubuntu image I had lying around was a Hardy (8.04) disc I burned some time ago. I added a new machine to VBox, installed Ubuntu from the disc, updated to Jaunty using apt, and installed Skype from the Medibuntu repository. So, I've got a virtual Jaunty up and running and, I must say, it is bloody fantastic! Good show, Sun!

Previously, I have endured spectacular failure when trying to flash version 8 devices. composite triple beatлаптоп (My devices are all version 2. The Wikipedia article I linked to above explains the differences in the hardware versions.) It turns out, the critical misunderstanding I had related to flashing the stock firmware with vxWorksKiller (prior to transferring the DD-WRT image to the router via TFTP). I did not realize that the upload of vxWorksKiller needed to be done from a special management screen that is only accessible after unplugging the router, holding down the reset button while plugging the router back in, and continuing to hold the reset button for 20 seconds. This implies that the upload should not be done from the default firmware's upgrade page. This understanding was gained this week when building a PC, and flashing two routers, for a friend of mine.

Given that the preponderance of WRT54Gs on shelves now are version 8.x, this realization bodes well for me in future purchases.

bash$ ulimit -c 100

In this case I have enabled core dumps and given them a limit of 100 blocks. Problem solved! Hopefully this makes it into the search engines and helps someone else frustrated by this same issue.

I spent a couple of hours on Saturday morning studying Latin inflection -- particularly the six declensions. I believe I have correctly declined the nouns in the title. I remain, however, open to suggestions!

What "the fog of war" means is: war is so complex it's beyond the ability of the human mind to comprehend all the variables. Our judgment, our understanding, are not adequate. And we kill people unnecessarily. Wilson said: "We won the war to end all wars." I'm not so naive or simplistic to believe we can eliminate war. We're not going to change human nature anytime soon. It isn't that we aren't rational. We are rational. But reason has limits.

McNamara, choking on emotion, shares the following in the last scene of the film:

There's a quote from T.S. Eliot that I just love:

We shall not cease from exploring
And at the end of our exploration
We will return to where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Now that's in a sense where I'm beginning to be.

"How much evil must we do in order to do good? We have certain ideals, certain responsibilities. Recognize that at times you will have to engage in evil, but minimize it."

McNamara recounts having read that General Sherman, during the Civil War, rebuffed the Mayor of Atlanta's plea to spare the city from burning by saying " War is cruel. War is cruelty."

" That was the way LeMay felt. He was trying to save the country. He was trying to save our nation. And in the process, he was prepared to do whatever killing was necessary. It's a very, very difficult position for sensitive human beings to be in."

What makes us omniscient? Have we a record of omniscience? We are the strongest nation in the world today. I do not believe that we should ever apply that economic, political, and military power unilaterally. If we had followed that rule in Vietnam, we wouldn't have been there. None of our allies supported us. Not Japan, not Germany, not Britain or France. If we can't persuade nations with comparable values of the merit of our cause, we'd better reexamine our reasoning.

After the Maddox incident, the President refused to respond to the act of aggression.  The Tonkin Gulf Resolution, and retaliatory bombing attacks, proceeded from the reports of the Turner Joy's encounter with North Vietnamese aggressors.  The decision to retaliate and seek congressional approval of military action in Vietnam was made based on the observed pattern of escalating aggression in the Tonkin Gulf and Johnson':

"belief that it was a conscious decision on the part of the North Vietnamese political and military leaders to escalate the conflict and an indication they would not stop short of winning.  We were wrong, but we had in our minds a mindset that led to that action. And it carried such heavy costs. We see incorrectly or we see only half of the story at times … Belief and seeing, they're both often wrong."

"Let me go back one moment. In the Cuban Missile Crisis, at the end, I think we did put ourselves in the skin of the Soviets. In the case of Vietnam, we didn't know them well enough to empathize. And there was total misunderstanding as a result. They believed that we had simply replaced the French as a colonial power, and we were seeking to subject South and North Vietnam to our colonial interests, which was absolutely absurd. And we, we saw Vietnam as an element of the Cold War. Not what they saw it as: a civil war."

McNamara travelled to Vietnam in 1995 to discuss "what might have been" with a former Foreign Minister.

"The former Foreign Minister of Vietnam, a wonderful man named Thach said, "You're totally wrong. We were fighting for our independence. You were fighting to enslave us." We almost came to blows. That was noon on the first day.

"Do you mean to say it was not a tragedy for you, when you lost 3 million 4 hundred thousand Vietnamese killed, which on our population base is the equivalent of 27 million Americans? What did you accomplish? You didn't get any more than we were willing to give you at the beginning of the war. You could have had the whole damn thing: independence, unification."

"Mr. McNamara, You must never have read a history book. If you'd had, you'd know we weren't pawns of the Chinese or the Russians. McNamara, didn't you know that? Don't you understand that we have been fighting the Chinese for 1000 years? We were fighting for our independence. And we would fight to the last man. And we were determined to do so. And no amount of bombing, no amount of U.S. pressure would ever have stopped us.""

Next, McNamara tasked the market research group to obtain data and conduct analysis on accidents.  It was determined that the primary causes for accidents were human error and mechanical failure.  Cornell Aeronautical Labs advised Ford that the primary problem was packaging.  Anecdotally, they suggested that eggs are protected from breakage when placed on the kitchen counter due to intelligent packaging.  Ford determined that if they could package people in cars as intelligently as eggs were packaged they could save lives.  In the 1956 model, Ford introduced seatbelts which, ultimately, revolutionized automobile safety.

LeMay firebombed many other Japanese cities. The table below lists the city, the percentage of the city destroyed by fire, and the size equivalent US city.  (Source:  http://www.ditext.com/japan/napalm.html.  Accessed 2 Jan. 2009.)

McNamara noted that these fire-bombings occurred before the nuclear bombs were dropped, and that the bombs were dropped under LeMay's command.

"Proportionality should be a guideline in war. Killing 50% to 90% of the people of 67 Japanese cities and then bombing them with two nuclear bombs is not proportional, in the minds of some people, to the objectives we were trying to achieve."

"I don't fault Truman for dropping the nuclear bomb. The U.S.—Japanese War was one of the most brutal wars in all of human history -- kamikaze pilots, suicide, unbelievable. What one can criticize is that the human race prior to that time -- and today -- has not really grappled with what are, I'll call it, "the rules of war." Was there a rule then that said you shouldn't bomb, shouldn't kill, shouldn't burn to death 100,000 civilians in one night?

LeMay said, "If we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals." And I think he's right. He, and I'd say I, were behaving as war criminals. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?"

LeMay was, according to McNamara, focused solely on target destruction.

"He was the only person that I knew in the senior command of the Air Force who focused solely on the loss of his crews per unit of target destruction."

It was LeMay who oversaw the horrific firebombing of Tokyo which killed more than 100,000 civilians. LeMay took the B-29s down to 5,000 feet and decided to bomb with firebombs -- greatly increasing the effectiveness of these planes and their incendiaries. McNamara shared an anecdote of a pilot who returned from the firebombing of Tokyo in March of 1945 and complained that, by flying the mission so low to the ground his wingman had been lost to enemy fire. LeMay rebutted the pilot's complaints by explaining that, while he lost one wingman, the mission had destroyed Tokyo.

"Tokyo was a wooden city, and when we dropped these firebombs, it just burned it."

(Emphasis added.) Incidentally, the choice to use firebombs was also specifically LeMay's decision -- a further indication of his focus on maximized efficiency.

"I never heard of Plato and Aristotle before I became a freshman at Berkeley … I couldn't wait to go to another class!"

A focus on philosophy, logic and ethics stressed values and a responsibility to society -- "something beyond one's self" -- and rooted McNamara. He delighted in his marriage and family, and declared the early years of his new family as "some of the happiest days of our lives."

"I want to say, and this is very important: at the end we lucked out. It was luck that prevented nuclear war. We came that close to nuclear war at the end. Rational individuals: Kennedy was rational; Khrushchev was rational; Castro was rational. Rational individuals came that close to total destruction of their societies. And that danger exists today."

Poignantly, McNamara notes:

"The major lesson of the Cuban missile crisis is this: the indefinite combination of human fallibility and nuclear weapons will destroy nations."

• The first message said that if the US was to guarantee that it would not invade Cuba, the USSR would withdraw the missiles
• The second message said that if the US attacked Cuba, the USSR would respond with devastating military power

Thomas "Tommy" Thompson, a former ambassador to Moscow, was in the room. He urged Kennedy to respond to the first message. He saw that Kruschev would capitulate if he was presented a deal in which he could say to the Russian people that he saved Cuba from a US invasion.

"We must try to put ourselves inside their skin and look at us through their eyes, just to understand the thoughts that lie behind their decisions and their actions."

Lesson #1: Empathize with your enemy.
Lesson #2: Rationality will not save us.
Lesson #3: There's something beyond one's self.
Lesson #4: Maximize efficiency.
Lesson #5: Proportionality should be a guideline in war.
Lesson #6: Get the data.
Lesson #7: Belief and seeing are both often wrong.
Lesson #8: Be prepared to reexamine your reasoning.
Lesson #9: In order to do good, you may have to engage in evil.
Lesson #10: Never say never.
Lesson #11: You can't change human nature.

For each of the lessons listed above, over the coming eleven days, I will share a synopsis of Robert McNamara's thoughts as portrayed in the documentary. (It is certainly worth purchasing a copy of the film for yourself!)

I should note that all quotes related in the forthcoming posts have been taken directly from the transcript of the documentary provided by the director, Errol Morris, on his website. I will indicate any grammatical modifications made to this text, or any emphasis added.

The proof of concept spreadsheet can be found hererent a car bulgaria. Credit is due to the guys at Juice Analyticsкомпютри for pioneering the concept of representing values graphically within a cell.

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I read the knowledgebase article at HostGator Support on setting up addon domains which warns at the top of the article:

"Before you can add an addon domain you must change the name servers for the domain name to the ones provided for your hosting account. You cannot create an addon domain if your DNS for the site you are trying to add hasn't propagated yet."

I was exact in following these instructions and waited 3 days for the DNS changes I had made at GoDaddy (where I purchased and manage the domains) to propagate. Ultimately, they did not.

The solution to the problem was to setup the addon domain at HostGator, via the cPanel, immediately after making the DNS changes to the domain. I'm not sure if this is an issue unique to GoDaddy domains -- I imagine it is not. It seems that the documentation provided by HostGator is inaccurate in this regard.

I typically wash scratched or otherwise unreadable DVDs or CDs in warm, soapy water and then dry them with a soft, non-abrasive cloth. Discs which are not readable after this washing can be repaired in another manner. Scratched -- even significantly scratched -- DVDs and CDs can be "repaired" by rubbing conditioner into the surface of the data-side of the disc. I met success in this endeavor by pouring conditioner liberally onto the surface of the DVD -- I used a blob roughly the size of a quarter -- and then rubbing it all over the surface until most of it disappeared. There was some residual conditioner left on the disc so I wiped it off with a tissue, being careful to not leave tissue particles behind.

The DVD was really in bad shape when I got it -- the movie hardly played at all -- but I managed to play through the entire movie with only a few skips after the conditioner-fix.

I'm certainly open to hearing other methods of fixing scratches on optical discs!

As such, I have also disallowed public access to the SHiFT8 File Archive. All personal files will be moved to a new file archive to be hosted here shortly. I will also be deploying a new script to host both archives. I have narrowed the candidates down to a small handful of scripts and will be testing them over the coming days.

More to come ...

The script is actually quite good. It is called PHP File Navigator. Its SourceForge project page can be found here. I will (when I have the time) modify it to suit my liking a little better.

I hope to have figured out some reasonable workaround for the problem by the end of the week. Until then, the site is fully functional -- the back-end is just not to my liking. I will live, though. I'll have a good whinge about it and then I'll get over it, I'm sure.

The file archive will be back online as soon as I deploy a trustworthy application to serve it. I have possibly settled on one, and may well put the archive back online before this week is through.

(Note: Before following the procedures outlined below, I had downloaded a tested driver -- as per the ndiswrapper wiki -- for the Dell Truemobile 1300 MPCI card. The recommended driver can be found here.)

(Additional note: This process was followed in Fedora Core 6 -- I can only vouch for it working in this environment, although I imagine it will work in most distributions.)

Solution 1: bcm43xx-fwcutter
Today I found a fantastic little program called bcm43xx-fwcutter. In essence, it extracts the driver from the Windows driver file, and incorporates it into Linux' native support for the bcm43xx controller. After finding this gem, the entire process -- including download and installation -- took about 5 minutes.

Here is what I did:

1.) Download bcm43xx-fwcutter from BerliOS.de. (Note: be sure to get the correct file for your version of the controller!)

2.) Unarchive and compile the tool:
tar -xvf bcm43xx-fwcutter-006.tar.bz2
cd ./bcm43xx-fwcutter-006
make

3.) Run the tool to extract the driver from the Windows driver file and install it in Linux:
bcm43xx-fwcutter -w /lib/firmware bcmwl5.sys

4.) Remove the bcm43xx module from the kernel then add it back with the new driver:
rmmod bcm43xx
modprobe bcm43xx

5.) Configure the wireless card (substituting your interface name where appropriate):
iwlist eth1 scan
iwconfig eth1 essid (SSID here)
iwconfig eth1 key restricted (WEP key here)
dhclient eth1

Voila! It was a truly effortless process after having extracted the driver using bcm43xx-fwcutter. My hat goes off to the developers -- you lot have truly made Linux life much easier for owners of BCM43xx controller-based wireless cards!

Drawback to solution 1: The bcm43xx driver -- the driver used in the process above -- will limit the wireless card to 11mbps. GRRR!!

Solution 2: ndiswrapper
Ndiswrapper -- available at SourceForge here -- is a linux-based wrapper for Windows wireless card drivers. To quote the project page, "Some vendors do not release specifications of the hardware or provide a Linux driver for their wireless network cards. This project implements Windows kernel API and NDIS (Network Driver Interface Specification) API within Linux kernel. A Windows driver for wireless network card is then linked to this implementation so that the driver runs natively, as though it is in Windows, without binary emulation."

Ndiswrapper can be a bit of a pain to implement, but I have managed to pare down the myriad instructions I found in various forums into several easy-to-follow steps.

1.) Download ndiswrapper from its SourceForge project page. (As of this posting, the current version is 1.37)

2.) Unarchive and compile ndiswrapper:
tar -zxvf ndiswrapper-1.37.tar.gz
cd ./ndiswrapper-1.37
make distclean
make
(As root) make install

3.) Ensure that the native bcm43xx driver is unloaded and add it to the module blacklist:
rmmod bcm43xx
vi /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist
Add a line: blacklist bcm43xx

4.) Install the Windows driver:
ndiswrapper -i bcmwl5.inf

5.) Run depmod and ensure that there are no errors:
depmod -a

6.) Add the ndiswrapper module to the kernel:
modprobe ndiswrapper

7.) Configure the wireless adapter (substituting your interface name where appropriate):
iwlist eth1 scan
iwconfig eth1 essid (SSID here)
iwconfig eth1 key restricted (WEP key here)
dhclient eth1

8.) Finally, to prevent having to reconfigure the card the next time I reboot, I edit /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth1 and add the following configuration strings:
ESSID=(your SSID here)
KEY=(your WEP key here)

Additionally, add the following line to /etc/modprobe.conf:
options ndiswrapper if_name=eth1
alias eth1 ndiswrapper

Ndiswrapper is a much better solution for operating BCM43xx controller-based wireless cards in Linux, in my opinion. This is largely due to the wrapper's ability to enable 802.11g (i.e. 54mbps) transfer rates for the card. The bcm43xx driver limits the card to 802.11b rates (i.e. <= 11mbps). (Note: Because ndiswrapper creates a kernel module, if you upgrade your kernel you will have to rebuild the module for the new kernel. Just recompile ndiswrapper and reinsert the kernel module.)

There it is! I hope that my documentation of this process will help others who find themselves in a similar bind.

It would certainly be worth the time spent searching YouTube and Google Video (why the two sites still exist exclusive of each other, in light of the recent purchase by Google, remains to be explained) for other videos of the hilarious, self-proclaimed inventors of rap music.

It's business time!

I will host a blog there, along with forums where I hope readers will join in and discuss the issues posted on the site. I will publish the findings of myself and my colleagues who are involved in financial research. Additionally, I will make available papers that are uncovered during our research -- respecting, of course, the rights of the author(s) and publisher(s) of the papers.

I would certainly welcome the contribution of qualified researchers. If you are interested in contributing to the site, or having your work published there, please email me at corey.gallon@TheEMHProject.com.

I will be launching the site with "The Cramer Project." This project will, as aforementioned, track the performance of Jim Cramer's recommendations over varying periods of time, and in porftolios of his picks which fit varying criteria. The object of the project will be, of course, to determine the implications of the "Mad Money" picks' performance on the EMH. Interested, qualified researchers are invited to participate by emailing me at the above listed email address.

I am rather excited to commence work on this project, and also for the launch of what I hope will grow to be a valuable resource for research in financial theory.

TournamentLadder (TL) is currently being redesigned from the ground-up. Brendon (my partner) and I are intent on re-releasing TournamentLadder as a new, innovative approach to online gaming. The planned features are, as of the present moment, being kept at a close-hold to maintain the integrity of our intellectual property. Needless to say, we are confident that the newly released TL will generate a great deal of buzz in the gaming community, as it did in the small community it was tested in during its initial release period.

The former TL TeamSpeak, and future TL IRC, server is still down. I physically removed it from the colocation site several months ago, but have not yet taken the time to complete the OS upgrades and IRC server installation. Chalk this one up to procrastination/laziness on my part! (D'Oh!) This is still temporary (I swear) and I hope to remedy this soon. It is, unfortunately, not high on my list of priorities at this time.

Tentative New Project
I am presently considering another project to add to this chaotic mix. I feel it would be rather interesting to analyze the price movements of Jim Cramer's "Mad Money" stock picks. There are other sites which currently perform similar, but not identical analysis to that which I have in mind.

I am interested in this largely due to my ongoing research on the Efficient Market Hypothesis -- a tenet of modern financial theory. I wrote my honors thesis on the subject during my senior year at Loyola University Chicago. (I will make this paper available at some point in the near future.) The efficiency of financial markets is a fascinating subject which has generated it's fair share of controversy within academic circles for decades. Analysis of the price movements of Jim Cramer's stock picks would provide valuable, contemporary insight on this topic.

I haven't the time -- or, quite honestly, the patience requisite to endure Jim's on-screen antics -- to watch the show daily. This means that the data will have to be compiled from third-party sources. I have not yet identified this source. Without some sort of data-sharing agreement with one of the sites that publish this information, automated data compilation would require a fair bit of coding on my part. This, then, clearly has implications on my already-limited time. This is the major factor keeping this project in the planning phase.

Epilogue
This projects are, as ever, works-in-progress. More information will be disseminated as it becomes available.

Word.

The brother of a friend of mine -- Mark Bellio (aka "Belly-HO") -- has filmed himself in a spoof of the closing credits to that old-school "Super Mario Brothers Super Show" program. It is absolutely hillarious!

The video can be found here. (NOTE: If this video gains momentum and robs me of too much of my bandwidth allotment, I will move it and publish the new location here.)

Enjoy!

Word to your uncle!