100 books

The list of books from artofmanliness seems worthwhile. I've marked up in bold what I have read.

Please suggest which ones I should read next.

100 Must Read Books
1. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
2. The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
3. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
4. 1984 by George Orwell
5. The Republic by Plato
6. Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
7. The Catcher and the Rye by J.D. Salinger
8. The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith
9. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
10. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
11. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
12. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
13. How To Win Friends And Influence People by Dale Carnegie
14. Call of the Wild by Jack London
15. The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris
16. Swiss Family Robinson by Johann David Wyss
17. Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac
18. The Iliad and Odyssey of Homer
19. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
20. Walden by Henry David Thoreau
21. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
22. The Master and Margarita by by Mikhail Bulgakov
23. Bluebeard by Kurt Vonnegut
24. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
25. The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
26. American Boys’ Handy Book
27. Into Thin Air by John Krakauer
28. King Solomon’s Mines by H. Rider Haggard
29. The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky
30. A River Runs Through It by Norman F. Maclean
31. The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G. Wells
32. Malcolm X: The Autobiography
33. Theodore Rex by Edmund Morris
34. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
35. All Quiet on The Western Front by Erich Maria Remarq
36. The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
37. Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans by Plutarch
38. The Strenuous Life by Theodore Roosevelt
39. The Bible
40. Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
41. The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
42. The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler
43. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
44. The Dangerous Book for Boys by Conn and Hal Iggulden
45. The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara
46. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
47. The Histories by Herodotus
48. From Here to Eternity by James Jones
49. The Frontier in American History by Frederick Jackson Turner
50. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig
51. Self Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson
52. Another Roadside Attraction by Tom Robbins
53. White Noise by Don Delillo
54. Ulysses by James Joyce
55. The Young Man’s Guide by William Alcott
56. Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy
57. Seek: Reports from the Edges of America & Beyond by Denis Johnson
58. Crime And Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
59. Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse
60. The Book of Deeds of Arms and of Chivalry by Christine De Pizan
61. The Art of Warfare by Sun Tzu
62. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
63. Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer
64. The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
65. The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien
66. The Rough Riders by Theodore Roosevelt
67. East of Eden by John Steinbeck
68. Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
69. The Thin Red Line by James Jones
70. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
71. The Politics by Aristotle
72. First Edition of the The Boy Scout Handbook
73. Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand
74. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
75. The Crisis by Winston Churchill
76. The Naked and The Dead by Norman Mailer
77. Hatchet by Gary Paulsen
78. Animal Farm by George Orwell
79. Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs
80. Beyond Good and Evil by Freidrich Nietzsche
81. The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
82. Moby Dick by Herman Melville
83. Essential Manners for Men by Peter Post
84. Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelly
85. Hamlet by Shakespeare
86. The Boys of Summer by Roger Kahn
87. A Separate Peace by John Knowles
88. A Farewell To Arms by Ernest Hemingway
89. The Stranger by Albert Camus
90. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Dafoe
91. The Pearl by John Steinbeck
92. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
93. Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
94. Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
95. Foucault’s Pendulum - Umberto Eco
96. The Great Railway Bazaar by Paul Theroux
97. Fear and Trembling by Soren Kierkegaard
98. Undaunted Courage by Stephen Ambrose
99. Paradise Lost by John Milton
100. Cannery Row by John Steinbeck

New found lolz...

Ah, yes...

An Equal And Opposite Reality

Progress:

(1) - Identify target group that is afflicted.
(2) - Raise awareness.
(3) - Implement new "fair" rules to mitigate target's affliction.
(4) - Target forced into another scenario with similar afflictions.
(5) - Repeat.

Blasted Checked Exceptions

Argh You Checked Exceptions!!!!

Finally someone makes the case against the bastards in a clear way: http://java.dzone.com/articles/checked-exceptions-i-love-you

The Citigroup SSO was the only project I worked on that did this. Basically every exception was a RuntimeException - and would redirect you to a standard error page - and log the problem. That's it - this isn't a pickup game of softball - why do I have to catch and rethrow?

My Favorite Computer Warning Message

I don't see this one often, but this is my favorite warning message spit out by computers. Well, that is since "(A)bort, (R)etry, (F)ail?" has faded into obscurity. (Note the domain name and IP address have been changed to protect the innocent.

I generated this one intentionally by reassigning a DNS record for one of my domains to a different public IP address. And I'm not sure but I think in older versions of the ssh implementation it used to say "monkey-in-the-middle attack".

BTW - this is one of the messages you should take very seriously if you didn't deliberately trigger it.

@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
@ WARNING: POSSIBLE DNS SPOOFING DETECTED! @
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
The RSA host key for xyz.com has changed,
and the key for the according IP address 196.168.0.1
is unknown. This could either mean that
DNS SPOOFING is happening or the IP address for the host
and its host key have changed at the same time.
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
@ WARNING: REMOTE HOST IDENTIFICATION HAS CHANGED! @
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
IT IS POSSIBLE THAT SOMEONE IS DOING SOMETHING NASTY!
Someone could be eavesdropping on you right now (man-in-the-middle attack)!
It is also possible that the RSA host key has just been changed.
The fingerprint for the RSA key sent by the remote host is
da:ca:4b:b2:23:b2:ce:9d:95:09:77:7b:df:8d:c8:bf.
Please contact your system administrator.

amazon ec2 rocks

OK - I've drunk the kool-aide. I messed around with EC2 this week. And I have to say that it blows away any other hosting service that I have ever seen.

So far I've been running an AMI from alestic. Apparently there are some rouge AMIs out there which have rootkits or some such nonsense, but these look legit. It is a big step forward from the Fedora Core 7 instance I had on godaddy.

I've also setup my S3 storage with a few buckets. One is just a public bucket that I plan on using for storage related to the various blogs that I maintain or post to. I've even used a bucket to customize the alestic 9.04 ubuntu AMI with my own updates. Now I just need to setup some persistent storage that I can mount as a drive from within my instance, and I will be in business.

Well that and there is some annoying Tomcat 6 issue that I am hitting. For some reason some of my servlets are not being found. I'm pretty sure that my ajp configuration from apache isn't the problem, but I've tried several different web.xml values for the servlet's URL mappings. I can run the app, and my login and logout servlets hit fine. But the servlets that I have for hitting gwt based remote services aren't flying. Ergh.

Oh and I've got an "elastic" IP address. It is really a neat idea. Instead of having to muck with A Records, you can quickly repoint the public IP address to various instances on your account. All in all, it really does rock!

FYI - I'm looking for copies of any of these concerts (if taping policy of the artist or group permits).

Date Band
7/15/1997 wsp
11/14/1997 blues traveler
8/8/1998 phish
10/3/1998 gov't mule
11/21/1998 phish
4/27/1999 wsp
9/23/1999 elton john
10/14/1999 moe.
11/13/1999 wsp
11/14/1999 wsp
11/17/1999 George Clinton
12/30/1999 phish
12/31/1999 phish
2/9/2000 moe.
4/24/2000 wsp
4/25/2000 wsp
4/26/2000 wsp
5/5/2000 Rat Dog
5/7/2000 Allman Bros.
9/20/2000 moe.
4/8/2001 gov't mule
7/18/2002 wsp
7/19/2002 wsp
7/20/2002 wsp
9/7/2002 gov't mule
10/26/2008 wsp

Opposite Effect - Say It Isn't So

Well this popped up on Drudge this morning: Big government spending programs -- having opposite desired effect...

If you haven't already read the article, stop for a moment. What might the article be about? Which area of the vast federal outlay might be pouring your tax dollars into a plan that is working entirely contrary to its stated goal?

The article covers the mortgage market and explains how no amount of emergency spending will be able to forestall rising interest rates on loans. It was not green shoots springing up last quarter. It was just the government shooting up a lot of green.

I think a better caption would be "Big government spending programs -- having opposite of advertised effect...". Let the conspiracy buffs chew on that.

So is the sovereignty in our country out of its collective mind? Maybe Obama is actually a Manchurian jacobite using his cult of personality to hasten the demise of the modern liberal system by giving it everything it has wished for throughout the 20th century. Well if he is, it is totally by accident.

The truth will not set you free. It may piss you off enough to motivate you to do something, but that something may not be enough. Don't pray for an easy road. Pray for strength to handle the challenges that are ahead.

14541 => 6 ?

one one four five four one one, four five four one one.
That is the chord pro-gress-ion, chord progression.
one one four five four one one, four five four one one.
Every line is just like another, four five four one one.

one one four five four one one, four five four one one.
Wait there is one line that's different, and here it is:
one one two five five six six two-oo
Dont forget those are minor key-eys, four five four one one.

one one four five four one one, four five four one one.
I ripped this off from praise band, four five four one one.
one one four five four one one, four five four one one.
Now I'm paying with my sanity, four five four one one.

one one four five four one one, four five four one one.
Wait there is one line that's different, and here it is:
one one two five five six six two-oo
Dont forget those are minor key-eys, four five four one one.

one one four five four one one, four five four one one.
That is the chord pro-gress-ion, chord progression.
one one four five four one one, four five four one one.
That is the chord pro-gress-ion, chord progression.

fin

Around The House

I haven't written much lately, but I've been spouting off a lot over on John Galt's blog.

I didn't realize this bill was so far along. "H.R. 2454: American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009" has some really fun stuff in it.

I mean this has to be a good sign right?

This bill is very large, and loading it may cause your web browser to perform sluggishly, or even freeze. This is especially true for old and/or bad browsers. As an alternative you can download the PDF of the bill or read the text on THOMAS.

Bad browsers? Do Microsoft and Google use the display of currently pending legislation as a regression test on their code to determine if they have made a good or a bad browser?

There are some snags apparently. But it's just such a bad idea.

I've had my hopes up that H.R. 1207 would at least come to a vote in the house. It seems to keep getting more and more cosponsors, but it could as well die in the Financial Services committee. I mean the illustrious chair of that committee isn't behind this last time I checked.

Here Come The Clouds; Send In The Clouds

OK - the title is a bit sensational but the article does a good job of explaining what underlies all this cloud-computing hype.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/is_the_relational_database_doomed.php

--

Swine Flu

You can't escape the swine flu stories today.

I just don't see how anyone is surprised about it; considering all the pork coming from the federal government lately...

taking up less space after a major upgrade

I love it when a huge upgrade actually decreases the size of your OS. Also fun when programming to get some nifty functionality added and actually remove more lines of code than are added. If only the govment could function that way.


pubuntu@pubuntu:~$ sudo apt-get upgrade
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following packages have been kept back:
bind9-host dnsutils libbind9-30 libdns35 libisccc30 libisccfg30
The following packages will be upgraded:
acpid alacarte app-install-data-commercial apt apt-utils avahi-autoipd avahi-daemon base-files bsdutils console-setup cpp-4.2
cupsys cupsys-bsd cupsys-client cupsys-common dash dbus dbus-x11 evince evolution-data-server evolution-data-server-common firefox
firefox-3.0 firefox-3.0-gnome-support firefox-gnome-support flashplugin-nonfree gcc-4.2 gcc-4.2-base gdb gedit gedit-common
ghostscript ghostscript-x gksu gnome-power-manager gstreamer0.10-plugins-good gstreamer0.10-tools gtk2-engines-pixbuf
guidance-backends gvfs gvfs-backends gvfs-fuse hal-info icedtea-gcjwebplugin icedtea-java7-plugin initramfs-tools initscripts
jockey-common jockey-gtk language-pack-en language-pack-en-base language-pack-gnome-en language-pack-gnome-en-base
libavahi-client3 libavahi-common-data libavahi-common3 libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libavahi-glib1 libavahi-ui0 libc6
libc6-i686 libcamel1.2-11 libcupsimage2 libcupsys2 libcurl3 libcurl3-gnutls libdbus-1-3 libebook1.2-9 libecal1.2-7
libedata-book1.2-2 libedata-cal1.2-6 libedataserver1.2-9 libedataserverui1.2-8 libegroupwise1.2-13 libexchange-storage1.2-3
libexif12 libffi4 libfreetype6 libgadu3 libgcc1 libgdata-google1.2-1 libgdata1.2-1 libglib2.0-0 libgnutls13 libgomp1 libgphoto2-2
libgphoto2-port0 libgs8 libgstreamer0.10-0 libgtk2.0-0 libgtk2.0-bin libgtk2.0-common libgvfscommon0 libicu38 libjasper1 liblcms1
libldap-2.4-2 liblwres30 libnautilus-extension1 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libnss3-1d libntfs-3g23 libperl5.8 libpng12-0 libpurple0
libsmbclient libsndfile1 libsnmp-base libsnmp15 libssl0.9.8 libstdc++6 libvorbis0a libvorbisenc2 libvorbisfile3 libxml2
libxml2-utils login logrotate module-init-tools mount nautilus nautilus-data ntfs-3g ntpdate openjdk-6-jre openjdk-6-jre-headless
openjdk-6-jre-lib openssl passwd pciutils perl perl-base perl-modules pidgin pidgin-data python-apt python-gobject python-gtkhtml2
python-libxml2 rdesktop readahead rhino samba-common smbclient sudo sysv-rc sysvutils totem totem-common totem-gstreamer
totem-mozilla totem-plugins ttf-opensymbol tzdata ubuntu-docs ufw update-manager update-manager-core update-notifier
update-notifier-common util-linux util-linux-locales vim-common vim-tiny vinagre xkb-data xulrunner-1.9
xulrunner-1.9-gnome-support
170 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 6 not upgraded.
Need to get 123MB of archives.
After this operation, 1286kB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]?

If you're reading this in English, you can thank nuclear weapons.

I've really got to put some effort into writing something new.

But for now I'll just pass along links to other short postings that are already just comments on links to other news articles.

For some reason the word simulacra comes to mind.

Any way - start clicking here.

And even though I know sod all about fashion this quote seems apropos today:

“My God, don’t they know? This stuff is simulacra of simulacra of simulacra. A diluted tincture of Ralph Lauren, who had himself diluted the glory days of Brooks Brothers, who themselves had stepped on the product of Jermyn Street and Savile Row, flavoring their ready-to-wear with liberal lashings of polo kit and regimental stripes. But Tommy surely is the null point, the black hole. There must be some Tommy Hilfiger event horizon, beyond which it is impossible to be more derivative, more removed from the source, more devoid of soul.”

—William Gibson, Pattern Recognition

PR is a great story btw.

--
Jeff

Now that is progress!

Just google-ing (sp?) a bit to see what the current state of reactionary political information is in the flotsam and jetsam of the interwebs.

At this point it looks like UR is really the gold-standard. However this little article from 2005 has a nice chart. I like their headings of Reactionary, NeoCon, Progressive, Fascist.

I can't read the word "Fascist" anymore without thinking about the exchange between Simon Pegg and the inn keeper in Hot Fuzz.

First!!!!1!

Well hopefully things will be uphill from here.