What you leave behind

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Well, it’s done. Last night I finished the last episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. The Dominion War is done.

As I’d mentioned before, I’d never seen DS9 before — I’d caught a few episodes here and there over the years, but hadn’t seen enough to really gain any appreciation for the series or the characters. Now that I’m done…well, while I hate to rank the three versions of Star Trek that I’ve seen (TOS, TNG, and DS9) as they each have their strengths and special places, I do feel comfortable in saying that DS9 is by far the strongest Trek incarnation as a whole.

I’ll always have a soft spot in my heart for TOS. It’s the series that got this whole thing started, where we were first introduced to the Federation, the Klingons, the Vulcans, and many others, and the series that captured the hearts and minds of fans all over the world. I grew up watching Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and the rest of the crew, and that in itself is very important to me.

TNG was the rebirth of Trek, and it took a big chance in daring to boldly go where Paramount had gone before. New characters, new ships, new aliens — and a new show that ended up being far better than many expected it would be when word first broke that it was going to be made. Much of my high school weekends were spent in the company of my friends, gathering at one person’s house or another each week to watch the adventures of Picard and crew (often followed up by watching re-runs of TOS that were broadcast immediately afterward). Here we had a modern Trek, and it turned our initial skepticism into belief and a reborn love for the Trek universe.

With DS9, I believe that all the best parts of Trek were brought to the forefront, and then given just enough of a “darker” twist that could have doomed the show from the outset, but instead served to create some of the best Trek I’ve seen. For all their strengths, the almost antiseptic perfection of much of TOS and TNG sometimes seemed almost too good to be true. The characters were almost too perfect, there was too often a definite “right” and a definite “wrong”, without the shades of grey that so often color the real world. DS9 saw this, and painted the entire show in those shades of grey (almost literally, in the design of the Cardassian station). Without breaking away from the ideals set forth by Roddenberry in creating Star Trek, DS9 showed that as good as Paradise is, it takes work to maintain, and the real decisions and ramifications of that work are rarely as clear-cut as we’d like them to be.

So while I hate ranking one series above the other, I will say that DS9 is most definitely my favorite of the three Trek incarnations I’ve seen. Wonderful stuff.

And now that I’ve finally finished it all…

…what now?

You've got to be kidding me

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From the New York Times: Bush Seeks Help of Allies Barred From Iraq Deals

President Bush found himself in the awkward position on Wednesday of calling the leaders of France, Germany and Russia to ask them to forgive Iraq’s debts, just a day after the Pentagon excluded those countries and others from \$18 billion in American-financed Iraqi reconstruction projects.

White House officials were fuming about the timing and the tone of the Pentagon’s directive, even while conceding that they had approved the Pentagon policy of limiting contracts to 63 countries that have given the United States political or military aid in Iraq.

Many countries excluded from the list, including close allies like Canada, reacted angrily on Wednesday to the Pentagon action. They were incensed, in part, by the Pentagon’s explanation in a memorandum that the restrictions were required “for the protection of the essential security interests of the United States.”

How does any of this help anyone?

Panther bug: Dragging /System to the trash

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It looks like Damien Barrett may have discovered a potentially disastrous bug in Panther (Mac OS X 10.3) — apparently one can drag the /System folder to the trash, which then freezes the computer. Upon reboot, since the System is now in the trash, the computer can’t boot up.

Panther apparently allows admin users to drag the folder /System to the trash, which then will immediately cause the Finder to go into a spinning pizza of death (SPOD). Your only option is to shut down the computer. And then because the System is in the trash, the computer is rendered unbootable!!!

I don’t remember being able to do this in Jaguar. Shouldn’t the OS give a warning like “You don’t have sufficient priveleges to do this.” Shouldn’t the only user capable of moving the folder System be the root user?

Now, many people are going to immediately react by wondering just what in the world would prompt anyone to even try dragging the System directory to the Trash. As stupid as that seems, one never knows what people will try, or do by accident, and the OS really should be far more intelligent about how it handles this (such as not even allowing it in the first place).

From 299,792,458 m/s to 0

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Fun with science — physicists have just managed to (very briefly) stop light in its tracks!

The research differs from work published in 2001 that was hailed at the time as having brought light to standstill. In that work, light pulses were technically “stored” briefly when individual particles of light, or photons, were taken up by atoms in a gas.

>

Harvard University researchers have now topped that feat by truly holding light and its energy in its tracks – if only for a few hundred-thousandths of a second. “We have succeeded in holding a light pulse still without taking all the energy away from it,” said Mikhail D. Lukin, a Harvard physicist.

(via Prairie)

A bus driver I can relate to

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Extreme traffic on James St from Broadway to I-5. At one point an ambulance was trying to get through. The driver was on his PA instructing blocking motorists:

“Please pull forward and to the right.”

[PAUSE]

“…and get off the phone.”

(found on co149)

Safari bug: Amazon Associates Build-A-Link

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Safari/Amazon bug screenshot

I’ve been noticing a bug in Safari over the past few days, and finally figured it was worth writing up and seeing if this is a “just me” thing or not.

I just recently started using the Amazon Associates Build-A-Link tool to create the product boxes for certain items that I talk about (like the one for Season 7 of Deep Space Nine in this morning’s post). Unfortunately, once I find the item I want to create the product box for, when Amazon sends me the page that is supposed to give me the appropriate HTML code to copy and paste into my entry, the textarea field is blank. In order to get the code, I’ve either been using Internet Explorer (shudder) or just viewing the source code for the Amazon page and digging through until I find the code snippet in question.

The code in question is found about 80% of the way down the source code. Here’s the relevant section of what Amazon sends, with what I should be seeing in that blank box on line six:

<tr>
  <td>
    <form name="snippet_form">
      <center>
        <textarea name="snippet" rows="7" cols="35">
          <iframe marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" width="120" height="240" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?o=1&l=as1&f=ifr&t=djwudicom-20&p=8&asins=B00008KA57&IS2=1&lt1=_blank"><MAP NAME="boxmap-p8"><AREA SHAPE="RECT" COORDS="14, 200, 103, 207" HREF="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm/privacy-policy.html?o=1" ><AREA COORDS="0,0,10000,10000" HREF="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect-home/djwudicom-20" ></MAP><img src="http://rcm-images.amazon.com/images/G/01/rcm/120x240.gif" width="120" height="240" border="0" usemap="#boxmap-p8" alt="Shop at Amazon.com"></iframe>
       </textarea>
        <br />
        <input type="image" style="margin: 3px;" src=http://g-images.amazon.com/images/G/01/associates/build-links/highlight_html.gif name="highlight" onClick="javascript:this.form.snippet.focus();this.form.snippet.select(); return false;"/>
        <p style="margin: 5px;"><font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="-2">Paste all the HTML into your Web site's HTML.<br /> Note: your tracking ID, <strong>djwudicom-20</strong>, is already embedded in the HTML.</font></p>
      </center>
    </form>
  </td>
</tr>

My immediate guess is that because the code ends up looking as if it’s requesting an iframe inside a textarea, Safari is just discarding what it sees as “bad code”. Unfortunately, as placing code inside a textarea is a fairly common way to avoid issues with long text strings that muck up a page’s layout (such as, well, this very post), that behavior effectively breaks the Amazon tool.

I’ve submitted a bug through Safari’s bug reporting feature, but I figured sending a TrackBack ping to Dave of Surfin’ Safari couldn’t hurt, either. ;)

3-Way Capitalism?

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Stop Capitalism

Mom and Dad just got back to Anchorage after a trip to Florida and Indiana to visit Mom’s parents and Dad’s family, respectively, and Dad just posted his pictures with commentary. The picture of the stop sign made me laugh, and for the same reason that it amused Dad — yet another indication of just how alike we can be at times.

A picture of Dad’s brother Doug, who I haven’t seen in about three years, also caught my eye when I noticed just how much he and Dad resembled each other — something that I’ve also been noticing about my brother and I more and more as we age. Apparently the Hanscom genes run strong in our family!

It is sad to hear that, as tends to happen over the years, age is starting to catch up with some of our family. Mom’s parents will soon be moving into an assisted living facility, as Grandma is essentially blind, and Grandpa has, quite unfortunately, started to find his mental faculties declining. On Dad’s side of the family, “Uncle” Bud (my Dad’s uncle, my great-uncle) is battling liver cancer, and there are fears that the treatment may be as difficult to get through as the disease itself. However, all three of them are still getting along, and as no-one on either side of the family could deny being described as “strong willed”, I expect all three of them will continue on as best they can for as long as they can.

My cousins appear to be doing quite well, too. Eric has just graduated high school, and both Hannah and Kayt (“Katie”) are as gorgeous as ever (and I do mean gorgeous — Kayt is becoming one heck of a knockout, and she’s only thirteen…the boys don’t stand a chance).

All in all, it looks like a good trip, and while I’m not always in touch with my extended family very often, it’s always good to be able to catch up vicariously through Mom and Dad.

The Dominion War keeps distracting me…

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Just a quick note on the relative lack of posts (especially any of any real substance) lately — having never seen Star Trek: Deep Space Nine before, I’ve finally made it into their final season on DVD.

The war is at its peak now that the Breen have joined forces with the Dominion, the Founders appear to be dying, Gul Dukat (disguised as a Bajoran) is manipulating Kai Wynn’s lust for power on Bajor to try to release the Pah Wraiths, and we just lost the Defiant in a major battle. Things are looking really grim, and I’m watching as many episodes as I can each night in order to find out how it all wraps up without staying up too late and not being able to concentrate on work the next day.

So for the moment, I’m afraid you’ll have to put up with my Trek-loving geek self, and settle for a few “this-is-nifty-go-here” posts each morning until I wrap things up with Sisko and crew.

Gore endorses Dean

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The news actually “broke” yesterday, with a bunch of “this is about to happen” articles, but now it’s official: Al Gore has endorsed Howard Dean’s presidential campaign.

Al Gore endorsed Howard Dean’s bid for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination on Tuesday, substantially deepening Dean’s fast-developing drive for dominance in the nine-candidate field of would-be challengers to President Bush.

“I’m very proud and honored to endorse Howard Dean to be the next president of the United States of America,” Gore said.

[…]

“In a field of great candidates, one candidate clearly now stands out and so I’m asking all of you to join in this grassroots movement to elect Howard Dean president of the United States,” Gore said.

[…]

“He was the only major candidate who made the correct judgment about the Iraq war,” Gore said. “And he had the insight and the courage to say and do the right thing. And that’s important because those judgments — that basic common sense — is what you want in a president.”

“Whether it is inspiring enthusiasm at the grassroots, and promising to remake the Democratic Party as a force for justice and progress and good in America, whether it is a domestic agenda that gets our nation back on track, or whether it is protecting us against terrorists and strengthening our nation in the world, I have come to the conclusion that one candidate clearly now stands out,” Gore said.

Excellent news, I’d say — nice to get an endorsement from the candidate who was actually elected President of the United States back in 2000! ;)

Stradivarius' secret

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While I’ve never had the opportunity to hear one in person, nearly anyone involved in the world of music is aware of the near-legendary quality of the instruments created by Italian violin maker Antonio Stradivari. It appears that scientists may have narrowed down one intriguing factor in what makes a Stradivarius sound the way it does — it’s all in the wood.

…a tree-ring dating expert at the University of Tennessee and a climatologist at Columbia University offer a new theory — the wood developed special acoustic properties as it was growing because of an extended period of long winters and cool summers.

[…]

Grissino-Mayer at Tennessee and Dr. Lloyd Burckle at Columbia suggest a “Little Ice Age” that gripped Europe from the mid-1400s until the mid-1800s slowed tree growth and yielded uncommonly dense Alpine spruce for Antonio Stradivari and other famous 17th century Italian violinmakers.

[…]

“I think it is very, very interesting, and it seems to me a valid observation,” said Helen Hayes, president of the New York-based Violin Society of America, which hired Grissino-Mayer to examine “The Messiah.”

“But on the other hand, nobody in this field … would ever say that if you put the best wood in the world in the hands of a mediocre maker that you would get a good instrument,” she said. “So it is never a complete explanation. Nor is the varnish nor any of the other things they have talked about. I would dare say there is no one piece of the puzzle.”

(via Marginal Revolution)