The Blinne Blog

Fundamentalism and Repentance

In his commentary Thomas Sowell shows that fundamentalism is not the exclusive province of the conservative.

This is liberal fundamentalism at its purest: Protect parasites and law-breakers — and attack those who are producing. The exodus of hundreds of thousands of Californians to other states does not make a dent in this kind of thinking.

Killing the goose that lays the golden egg is a viable political strategy, provided the goose doesn't die before the next election. It could take decades to ruin California completely — and meanwhile liberals can keep on getting elected again and again.

What makes this liberal fundamentalism is the lack of changing of the mind even in the midst of other evidence. You see this all the time on the "debate" shows on television. Both sides scream their point of view — often on top of each other. No quarter is ever given to the other side.

This goes against the Biblical concept of repentance which literally means to change one's mind. Behind repentance is the concept of regeneration or being born again. Why? How many people do you know would when confronted with charges of murder and adultery would immediately admit to it like David? Self-defense is too engrafted into our nature. Repentance requires the three hardest to pronounce words in the English language: "I was wrong." This makes fundamentalism or any other strict ideological system antithetical to Biblical Christianity.

Crisis in the Episcopal Church

The Diocese of Central Florida had a Special Diocesan Convention to discuss the ordination of a non-celibate homosexual bishop and the adoption of resolution C-51 by the General Convention. This resulted in a dissociation from the General Convention on the issue, a call for an emergency meeting of Anglican primates in October, and a call to remain at unity with the Episcopal Church.

See extended entry for quotes of the resolutions along with the supporting materials.

Using .htaccess to Domain Map Typepad

Typepad just added domain mapping. They say they need to have your ISP DNS map for you. This is not completely true. If you are allowed to have an .htaccess file where you are hosted and can use mod_rewrite, then you can do this without remapping your DNS. Apache provides for proxying in the .htaccess file. This is what it looks like:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^blog/(.*)$ http://blinne.blogs.com/blog/$1 [P]
RewriteRule ^blog$ http://blinne.blogs.com/blog/ [P]
RewriteRule ^/$ http://blinne.blogs.com/ [P]
RewriteRule ^$ http://blinne.blogs.com/ [P]
RewriteRule ^about.html$ http://blinne.blogs.com/about.html [P]
RewriteRule ^foaf.rdf$ http://blinne.blogs.com/foaf.rdf [p]

I went to the control panel and then to the domain map, lied about DNS working, mapped www.blinne.org to blinne.blogs.com, and finally activated it. The result looked like this:

And I am now running www.blinne.org!

Passing Messages Between Disciplines

In today's Science Marc Mézard discusses the interaction between Computer Science and Computational Physics.

Problems in computer science, such as error correction in information transfer and "satisfiability" in optimization, show phase transitions familiar from solid-state physics. In his Perspective, Mézard explains how recent advances in these three fields originate in similar "message passing" procedures. The exchange of elaborate messages between different variables and constraints, used in the study of phase transitions in physical systems, helps to make error correction and satisfiability codes more efficient.

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The author is in the Laboratoire de Physique Théorique et Modèles Statistiques, CNRS, and Université de Paris Sud, 91405 Orsay, France. E-mail: mezard@lptms.u-psud.fr

The following diagram from the article shows how message passing help solves the error correction problem.

The circles represent the bits transmitted through the channel. The squares are the parity check constraints; for instance, constraint C1 requires that the sum of bits B1, B2, B3, and B5 should be even. Along each edge of this graph two messages are exchanged, one in each direction. These messages give the "belief" of the sending node on the state of the bit. This retrieves the actual value quickly for low density error correcting codes that are not too close to the Shannon limit. This also can be used to solve N-Satisfiability problems again when they are not too close to the Shannon limit.

By studying spin glasses, it has been discovered that these algorithms do not do well when the solutions are not clustered. The belief messages are limited to local areas. So, the algorithm has been modified to pass not just a beliefs but a whole survey of beliefs to get around the local problem. This has allowed this algorithm to be used for noisier channels and more difficult optimization problems.

What's My Pirate Name?

Today is talk like a pirate day. Arr, me pirate name be:

Mad Jack Flint

Every pirate is a little bit crazy. You, though, are more than just a little bit. Like the rock flint, you're hard and sharp. But, also like flint, you're easily chipped, and sparky. Arr!

Microsoft Throwing Its Weight Behind Web Search

Microsoft wants to get into the search business. Let me translate Micro-speak into English.

"The decision to build or buy came down to our ability to innovate," said Kirk Koenigsbauer, strategy manager at Microsoft's MSN Internet portal.

"Our ability to innovate is predicated on our ability to own the platform," he added, a clear sign that Microsoft thinks it can only beat Google if it owns the technology.

The ability to have monopoly power depends on owning the technology.

"Search engines are doing a good job but not a perfect job," said Koenigsbauer, adding most search results today "don't deliver the results people are looking for."

Search results tailored to individual users based on a history of their interests and searches is one area that Microsoft is looking at, Koenigsbauer said.

We are going to build spy-ware into Windows. You really aren't very happy with Google, are you? You should feel guilty for being satisfied.

Does Eolas Lawsuit Mean the Death of Flash Ads?

This was buried in a NY Times article entitled:Setback for Microsoft Ripples Through the World Wide Web

The consortium organized a four-hour meeting on Aug. 19 at the San Francisco offices of Macromedia, a producer of software for showing animations on the Web. Those invited were the leading producers of multimedia Internet and Java applications, including Real Networkscoei, Sun Microsystemscoei, Apple Computercoei and Adobecoei, as well as Macromediacoei.

Microsoft proposed three possible design tweaks to its browsing software to ensure compliance with the court ruling. These include having personal computer users approve a "click to proceed'' box to run multimedia programs from the browser and modifications that other software companies and Web page designers can make. All would require some adjustments from companies, executives say, but should not affect ordinary PC users significantly.

If the customer had to click on a Flash ad, it would mean the death of them. The reason why there are Flash ads is to animate (and make noises) without the customer's consent. If we want to run a Flash application, one click is not much of a hassle. Combine this with the pop-up block on the Google toolbar (yeah!), and we might gain control of our desktop again.

Senator Takes a Swing at RIAA

Finally, a senator who is making sense. Three cheers for Senator Brownback. Senator Brownback introduced legislation that returns some sanity that was lost with the passage of the DCMA. In the following story, note the lame RIAA quotes. Wired News is reporting:

A Kansas senator introduced legislation Tuesday that could deal a blow to the music industry in its ongoing battle with file-sharing fans.

Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) introduced the Consumers, Schools, and Libraries Digital Rights Management Awareness Act of 2003, a bill that addresses two hot topics in the digital realm: privacy and digital rights management.

The legislation would require owners of digital media to file a John Doe lawsuit to obtain the identifying information of an Internet user, rather than simply requesting a subpoena.

Currently, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act permits copyright holders to subpoena an Internet service provider for the name and address of a person they believe is violating a copyright. The one-page subpoena request can be issued by a court clerk and doesn't require a judge's signature.

Brownback said the DMCA subpoena process raises serious privacy and due-process concerns.

"There are no checks, no balances, and the alleged pirate has no opportunity to defend themselves," Brownback said when introducing the bill. "My colleagues, this issue is about privacy, not piracy.

"This will provide immediate privacy protections to Internet subscribers by forcing their accusers to appear publicly in a court of law, where those with illicit intentions will not tread, and provides the accused with due process required to properly defend themselves."

Manual Trackbacks in Typepad

This post has been updated. See update at the bottom.

ORIGINAL POST:
I found out last night that Typepad doesn't yet do autodiscovery of trackbacks like Moveable Type does. You can, however, do the trackback pings manually. This post shows you how to do it. First of all you need to discover what the URL is for trackback. For typepad this can be found in the individual archive of a post. Here's a screenshot of what this looks like:

For you own post you will need to turn on advanced editting. In the screen shot below, click on Customize the Display of this page and then select Advanced or Custom:TrackBack URLs to Ping. Take the URL that you found in the post you were referring to and place in the box, and save your post.

UPDATE:

Liza mentioned that this could be done with quick post. Here's how it is done. First set up your quick post bookmarklet like this:

When you have a post that has a trackback, then you see the following pulldown menu in your quick post:

Select the trackback ping that you want.

Buzz words, or how we all start using the same weird words...

Dappled Things is interested in the buzz words you are hearing in the blogosphere.

Have you ever noticed how a word you've never heard before or at least never used in general conversation suddenly takes on a life of its own? You start seeing/hearing/reading it everywhere. Sometimes it's a neat new word that really fills a niche; it conveys something that you never really had the exact right word for before. Or maybe it's just fun to say. You like to repeat it over and over and over, just to hear the sound of it. Then again there are some words that enter the mainstream or maybe just your personal sphere that almost immediately begin to grate on your sensibilities. Business jargon is great for this. I remember a number of years ago when everyone was talking about paradigms and paradigm shifts. Lately I've seen a couple of words take off in the blogosphere, although perhaps I'm late coming to them. Everyone and his brother is being described as snarky. And everyone else has a new meme to share and propagate. If you've never heard either of these words, where've you been???? :) Here are the entries in Merriam-Webster online ( a great dictionary source if you aren't aware of it. My officemate and I used it the other day just to make sure we were pronouncing template correctly. )

Main Entry: snärky
Pronunciation: 'snarkE
Function: adjective
Etymology: dialect snark to annoy, perhaps alteration of nark to irritate
Date: 1906
: CROTCHETY, SNAPPISH

Main Entry: meme
Pronunciation: 'mEm
Function: noun
Etymology: alteration of mimeme, from mim- (as in mimesis) + -eme
Date: 1976
: an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture

What are the buzz words you're hearing? which do you love? which do you hate? :)