WombatNation

Although there is a lot going on with the San Jose Earthquakes, there was also some moving and shaking nearby my house early this morning. After a little flurry of quakes in December, 2006, all has been quiet on the Western Front. Last night at 4:42 a.m., though, we got a pretty good jolt. I felt the rumbling for close to ten seconds, and I could hear wine glasses in a hanging rack pinging against each other for another five to ten seconds.

I happened to be awake at the time of the quake, because just about ten minutes earlier my cat Nicholas had thrown up some grass he had eaten earlier and then demanded an early breakfast. This temblor was significantly longer and stronger than the previous ones. It turned out to be a 4.2, whereas the previous ones had been in the 3.5 - 3.7 range. Also, the epicenter was much closer to our house. In the Google map I just linked to, my house is just off the left of the map.

The epicenter was along Butters Drive, which is part of my most common bike route up and over the hills. The Oakland Naturfreunde clubhouse is right at the epicenter. Hopefully, they didn’t suffer any damage.

Tonight I was lucky enough to see Sonic Youth perform their 1988 double LP masterpiece Daydream Nation at Berkeley Community Theater. I’ve been a huge fan of Sonic Youth ever since Bad Moon Rising was released in 1985. My favorite Sonic Youth album is Sister, but Daydream Nation is a very close second.

I’m often disappointed by live shows by rock bands, as performances are often rote copies of the studio versions, filled with distracting visuals totally unrelated to the music, or confirmations that a band has minimal talent and is totally dependent on studio engineers. With Sonic Youth, though, the live performances are a fantastic complement to the released recordings. Fortunately, the sound quality in the theater tonight was also very good, instead of the stupid over-amped distortion foisted on the crowd by half deaf audio engineers at many shows. Sonic Youth are absolute masters at controlling feedback and twisting it into amazing sounds.

Afer performing Daydream Nation beginning to end, the band left the stage and then came back for a five song encore, which they then followed with a double encore with an additional song. When they came out for the first encore, Thurston made a couple of funny education-related comments, since the theater is part of a high school (though this theater was a thousand times better than the one at the high school I went to). After a humorous dig at our dim-witted President, Thurston announced that they were now going to play all of Sticky Fingers. He then said something like, “Be sure to watch Lee [Ranaldo]. He’s going to do the Mick Jagger chicken dance.”

Thurston, Lee and Kim all seemed to be having a great time on stage. Since they brought up a friend to also play bass during the encores, Kim was freed up to just sing on a couple of the songs while dancing around on stage in her super cool shiny black and silver dress. She even jumped down into the crowd in the orchestra pit and danced around during the last bit of the final song.

I wrote this review nearly three years ago, but never pulled the trigger to publish it to my blog. Maybe because it seems half written. I don’t think I’m going to ever go back to it, so what the heck.

Having skimmed part of the eponymous essay and having enjoyed other essays by Paul Graham, I bought a copy of Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age without bothering to read any reviews. While I’m very glad I purchased it and read it, there were a few elements of the book that bothered me.

Most of my issues with the book revolve around Graham’s take on programming languages. Even then, I think he is mostly dead on. There are significant differences in the power of different programming languages. As he suggests, even if they are all Turing machine equivalent, who wants to waste their time reimplementing the abstractions provided by a more powerful language?

If your knowledge of programming languages stops at around Visual Basic, Graham’s book should be extremely enlightening. There are a lot of powerful languages out there, and Graham does a very good job of explaining why Lisp is one of the best of the best. But, sometimes he goes a bit too far. It’s hard to avoid getting the impression that Graham views anyone who doesn’t program in Lisp or a Lisp-like language to be a fool. While he seems to accept that there are a few acceptable reasons for using other languages, I don’t think he’s being very realistic about software development at most companies, as well as about the typical skill level of the people available to do development at many companies.

One of Graham’s explanations as to why Lisp isn’t used more frequently is that you have to have mastered Lisp to understand its power. If all you know is VB, JavaScript, Perl, or perhaps even C++, Java, C#, Python or Ruby, I think you might have a difficult time understanding the powerful abstractions provided by Lisp.

I was fortunate enough to have spent a few years doing commercial software development in Lisp. Working with the Lisp interpreter was a great pleasure, and even though I was by no means an elite Lisp hacker, I was frequently amazed by how much functionality I could implement in Lisp in a relatively short period of time.

However, there were several times when I found concepts in Lisp to be difficult to grok. One issue is that I don’t have a formal computer science degree, but rather degrees in physics and in philosophy and a lot of graduate work in electrical and computer engineering. A lot of the programmers in the IT departments of companies are going to have even less experience in computer science. I think you will see a lot of eyes glazing over if you drop into a typical IT shop and start trying to explain lexical closures. Of course, there will many IT developers who get it, but I’m talking about the average mainstream developer.

Graham echoes a common sentiment that the majority of great software is written by a very small percentage of the best developers (though I don’t remember him making an estimate as to what percentage of that code is written in one of the most powerful languages).

Tomorrow MLS Commissioner Don Garber will officially announce that the San Jose Earthquakes will return to Major League Soccer in 2008. The Bay Area lost the Quakes two years ago when hapless, disinterested owners AEG moved the team to Houston, where they became the Houston Dynamo. Fortunately, a dedicated group of fans lobbied to preserve the team name and records. The Earthquakes were MLS champions in 2001 and 2003, and the name was used even earlier by a NASL team on which Guus Hiddink and England star George Best once played.

Lew Wolff and John Fisher, business partners who also own the Oakland A’s, bought the rights to start a new San Jose Earthquakes team. After a lot of negotiations, they are now finally able to exercise their option to have the team start playing next year. Wolff has become a big supporter of soccer, and I think he and Fischer will be great owners.

The team will likely play their 2008 matches in two or three different stadiums, while the ownership team continues to work on plans for a new stadium. The descriptions that I have heard of the stadium design sound awesome. Of course, just about anything would be awesome compared to their former home, San Jose State’s Spartan Stadium. At least the beer selection at Spartan was awesome, but that’s about the only thing about the facility that was great.

Here’s some of the early news coverage:

• San Francisco Chronicle
• San Jose Mercury News
• Sports Illustrated

More info is available at the Soccer Silicon Valley website. SSV is throwing a celebration party Thursday night at the Britannia Arms Dow ntown in San Jose. I’d love to go, but I’ll be watching Sonic Youth perform Daydream Nation that night in Berkeley.

Update 7/18/07: We put down our deposit on season tickets today. Go Quakes!

Al Gore, Gore-Tex, movie full-o-gore? Nope.

I’m talking about what regularly happens during the running of the bulls in Pamplona, Spain. Do not, I repeat, do not, click on the link below if you are even remotely squeamish. Of course, how can you not click on it, now? Just don’t blame me. Or tell my mother.

Gnarly goring in Pamplona

Earlier tonight the US beat Uruguay 2-1 in extra time in an exciting second round match at the Under 20 Men’s World Cup. It would have been a lot more exciting if the Uruguayan team had focused on quality of play instead of alternating between diving throughout the match to draw fouls (and sadly receiving them) and trying to seriously injure US players.

After the game, one of the Uruguayan players comically complained to an interviewer that, roughly translated, “As always, it was stolen from us,” implying that the referees treated them unfairly. What was truly unfair is that Uruguay didn’t finish the match with only eight players on the field. While the referee did make a few bad calls that favored the US, he made far more bad calls that favored Uruguay. Vicious fouls by Uruguayans were regularly left unpunished. An Uruguayan blatantly kicked Adu’s legs out from under him in the penalty box while Adu had the ball, which should have led to a penalty kick, but the ref called nothing. Altidore had to leave the match with a calf injury after Caceres slid violently into the back of his legs. Caceres was furious that a foul was called, when he should have just been happy not to have been ejected with a straight red.

Worst of all was the classless display by the Uruguayan team after the match. While Michael Bradley, who had scored a beautiful game winning goal, was celebrating with his teammates, Cardaccio ran up to Bradley, spit in his face, tried to slap him, then turned and ran away like the gutless coward he proved himself to be. Then more Uruguayan players came over and tried to start fights. Finally, in the tunnel leading away from the field, an Uruguayan allegedly punched one of the volunteers.

Cardaccio had earlier distinguished himself by scoring an own goal (although, if he hadn’t lunged forward with his foot to barely reach Szetala’s shot/cross that was already headed on goal, Akpan would have slammed it home for the US). Cardaccio later head butted Szetela, yanked the front of his shirt, threw an elbow at his head, and then swung an open hand back into Szetela’s ear. The referee called nothing. Although the hits weren’t that hard, they still deserved a red card, as he intentionally swung at Szetela. Also, when the ref went to show a yellow card to another player, Cardaccio grabbed his hand and dragged it down. It’s hard to believe the ref didn’t give him a card, as well. Oh yeah, I forgot, the refs stole the game from Uruguay. Yeah, right. He finally received a long deserved yellow card in the 118th minute. I can only hope that FIFA reviews the tapes and gives Cardaccio an extremely long ban.

The thing is, there were significant stretches of the game where the Uruguayan team showed a lot of skill and outplayed an unusually out-of-sorts US team. While the US played much, much worse in this game than in their thrashing of Poland and convincing win over Brazil, the Uruguayans showed they really could play well. Too bad they don’t focus on that. I feel very sorry for the Uruguayan fans, who don’t deserve a team that behaves so poorly.

Since I’ve posted several times before about spoofing the caller ID for a phone call, you might think I would be interested in the Truth in Caller ID Act of 2007 that was recently introduced in the US Senate. And you would be correct.

Originally introduced in the House as H.R. Bill 251 and passed by voice vote, the bill has moved on to the Senate. A very similar bill, the Truth in Caller ID Act of 2006, was also introduced and passed in the House last year, but never made it out of the Senate. Both of these Acts were designed as amendments to Section 227 (RESTRICTIONS ON THE USE OF TELEPHONE EQUIPMENT) of the Communications Act of 1934.

Here are the major differences:

• Changed “telecommunications service or VOIP service” to “telecommunications service or IP-enabled voice service”
• Removed the qualification of “with the intent to defraud or cause harm”
• Added exemptions for “any authorized activity of a law enforcement agency” or “a court order that specifically authorizes the use of caller identification manipulation”
• Added a statement that implies (at least to me) that the FCC can include exemptions that the “Commission determines appropriate”
• Added a statement that the FCC shall report back 6 months after enactment as to whether additional legislation is required to cover new technologies that have emerged
• Added explicit civil forfeiture penalties and criminal fines for each violation (including up to $10,000 for each violation and treble damages per day for continuing violations)
• Specified a 2-year statute of limitations on events ocurring after a violation notice has been delivered (here’s an example of a real notice as defined by the Communications Act of 1934)
• Added explicit statements regarding enforcement of the Act by States (though States must wait in line if the FCC is already taking action for an alleged violation). This section of the Act is intended to replace section 227, sub-section f, of the Communications Act of 1934, at least in regards to violations that involving Caller ID spoofing.

One of the challenges faced by the authors of the Act is not to disallow legitimate uses of caller ID spoofing. When outbound calls are placed by an outbound calling service, the trunks that are used do not normally accept inbound calls. Although many outbound trunks may be used simultaneously, it typically makes sense that returned calls would go to a single recognizable number. Let’s say an emergency notification system were established to place outbound calls to a community in case of an accident at a nearby oil refinery or chemical plant. Obviously, many calls must be made very quickly, so lots of outbound lines would be used. In this scenario it makes sense to spoof the caller ID for each outbound line to a single inbound number that distributes the calls to people who are trained to answer questions about the notification.

The 2006 Act stated that it applied to cases where spoofing the caller ID was done “with the intent to defraud or cause harm”. While I can understand the desire to avoid having to prove the intent of an alleged violator, I’m worried that the new Act removes this statement and leaves it at - “transmit misleading or inaccurate caller identification information”. While my above example illustrates a case where the spoofed information is not misleading, one might technically argue that it is inaccurate. Maybe I’m splitting hairs, but I can think of several cases where “inaccurate” caller ID information is not necessarily harmful.

This Act covers more than just the calling party number (which is, strictly speaking, the caller ID). The Act also covers any other information that is also provided as part of a calling number identification service, such as a brief alphanumeric name that can optionally be requested along with the phone number, depending on the service provider.

Regardless of whether this Act passes, you should change your mobile phone voicemail account (if you haven’t done so already) so that it requires a password. The typical default setting is not to challenge you for a password if the caller ID for the call matches your mobile phone number. Convenient, but terribly insecure. You don’t want me listening to your voicemail, especially since I already read your email.