9:00 Well, I'm alive. Not by a whole lot, maybe, but I'm alive. The flu did not win, but it was pretty close to a Phyrric victory. A well. And it's Monday, with two new employees to settle in. Joy.

Well, at the request - or demands - of some others in the Gang, I have replaced my cute little rocket ship with a picture of me. And the hits drop dramatically... <g> However, this picture is proof that I hate cameras and camera people with a passion; that's a wedding picture, from May 10, 1997. I look much the same, except I've gained some forehead, lost the ponytail, and gained a mustache and goatee. And I seldom wear anything more formal than "the clean" jeans and a nicer shirt than normal.

But enough of that; I promised some interesting content for the day. To start us off, here's John Vogt, of NY, with an email:

-----Original Message-----
From: Jaydonalds@aol.com [mailto:Jaydonalds@aol.com]
Sent: Saturday, December 04, 1999 5:16 AM
To: belandm@itool.com
Subject: Education

Matt;

Here's what's happening in New York State.

Link to New York Times online; free registration required.

Ain't that a fine state of affairs? I remember when I went to school, (40 years ago to start), we had to pass State exams too! Most of my classmates did that with little or no sweat. That was from Grade 3 (?) to Grade 12. I will soon embark on my third career; this time as an Engineer, using the skills and information I learned in Grammar and High School.

This is nothing new; my wife quit trying to become an elementary school teacher primarily because of things like this. The emphasis is on pass/fail rates and funding, not on actually teaching the kids a damned thing. I first noticed this a few years ago, as I left high school; the books that I read in the second grade had become Junior High and High School level fiction. No wonder kids don't read; I had no problem understanding the stories back then, do we really believe High School students will accept that crap for a story line?

The sad part is, they do. My younger brother, Daniel, is in the 7th grade; his teachers are proud of his ability to read my old collection of Hardy Boys mysteries. At the rate of about 1 per week. When I was his age, I was reading them in a day or less, and they're proud that he's 7 times as slow. That's in 10 years, folks. Care to extrapolate the trend and see what that means?

As for the engineer bit, I can't say I'm surprised. I didn't learn a damn thing in college other than a few specialized equations that were in the books I could have read for free. Engineering isn't knowledge; it's a way of thinking. And that way of thinking is something I already had, and I watched my classmates who didn't have that suffer and struggle horribly.

Tuesday

8:00 AM My lovely wife scored a point this morning; that brings our score, after three years of marriage/engagement, to about 17,599,342 to 4. Well, OK, 5. Anyway, like every other member of the Gang, apparently, I take a few pills in the morning. Unlike the other members, proudly photographing their achievements, I hate mine. So when there was an extra one this morning, I prodded at it suspiciously with my finger. "What's this?" I demanded, loath to swallow an extra. "Euthanasia," she answered, "for your cold." Well, what the hell. I wasn't really awake yet, and popped the pill down - and realized what she'd said. And the fact that she was laughing.

Now I just have to find out if she was joking, or just ecstatic... <g>

More email from John Vogt:

-----Original Message-----
From: Jaydonalds@aol.com [mailto:Jaydonalds@aol.com]
Sent: Monday, December 06, 1999 8:14 PM
To: matt@rearviewmirror.org
Subject: Education

I also have to look at the grading system. It used to be that 75% = C. Period, end of discussion. To be average, you had to know and express your knowledge of the subject at least three quarters of the time on a test. Most important tests were almost all of a type. Part "A", which was multiple chose, fill in the blanks, matching, et al. Part "B" was essay type questions. These were designed to not only test your knowledge, but you ability to develop thesis and argument.

About the Engineering comment. I think you are right, either people have it or not. I was teaching my father inorganic chemistry when I was in fifth grade. My later problem was that I was lazy -- a pity, but I am catching up. I have one other confession - I have been a teacher, both in industry and schools. In industry, I teach my trade (ask Tom how that works!). In the High School; as a music teacher (percussion). I know what your wife is talking about.

John
jaydonalds@aol.com
jvogt47@hotmail.com

For most of my elementary school career, we didn't have letter grades. You got a plus, check-plus, check, check-minus, or a minus, and although the breakdown was similar to the letter grades, they weren't defined by percentages. They were based on how the teacher felt about your mastery of the subject.

In high school, we had letter grading. But it wasn't 75% = C, it was either "curved," where 75 percentile was a C, or it was "weighted." The weighted grades were in the International Baccalaureate classes, which were essentially a more complex, college-style version of the more common Advanced Placement classes. Weighted grades were measured on the A, B, C, scale, with 90% to 100% being A, 80% to 89% being B, and so on. Then, to calculate the GPA, IB classes were measured on the 4.0 scale - then multiplied by 1.2 before being counted with the rest.

Now, granted, those classes were TOUGH. My freshman year at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, in one of the toughest Aerospace Engineering curriculums in the country, was actually my sophomore year; I received 63 credits from IB courses. And it was still easier than my senior year of high school. Our teachers were the best the school had - two former Teachers of the Year, and the rest had at least been in the running - and they weren't there to get us through it. They were there to drive us into the corner, keep hammering us with more questions, more information, and more problems. If you couldn't hack it - goodbye, thanks for playing. We started with two full classes, over 60 students, enrolled in the full "Diploma" program. I was the only one to actually receive the diploma, and none of my senior year classes had more than 15 students. Some had fewer than that. The most common form of classroom instruction was experimentation, in the technical classes (chemistry, biology, physics) and discussion in the classical classes (Literature, Philosophy, History, etc.) Our teachers were retrained for the purpose, and they were taught that they were only doing their jobs properly if they could stroll down to the teacher's lounge for a cup of coffee, come back, and none of the students would ever notice they were gone. We had some good ones, too, who did just that. Our final exams were given during one very, very long week well before the end of the year - they were shipped to Switzerland for grading. I later found out that a Brazilian graded our literature papers, a Canadian graded the biology, and so on. In addition, I wrote a 30,000 word research paper, on the potential for combining the US and Russian Federation space programs. I got a 0, which was average, out of -1, 0, 1, or 2. That same paper earned an A as my final project for a senior engineering class. (I cheated. Sue me. It was still my own original work.) It was honestly the toughest schooling of my life. I loved it.

Nobody ever taught me anything about thesis and argument until the International Baccalaureate class in literature. The rest of my graduating class didn't hear about the concept until college. Such is life in the United States of America, the land of the fee and the home of the slave. Or is that supposed to read something else? Sorry, my english isn't so good, I attended public schools.

I got another question regarding the redirect-page issue. I won't be doing that; I find that the redirects annoy me. <g> I am working on another solution to the linking problem; I should have it in place this week. Basically, it'll be up to you; you can leave the link as it is, pointing to current.html, and it'll work without redirects. On the other hand, there will be a menu page, like Dr. Keyboard's, that will let you pick the current week using a page name that won't change. It mostly means editing my update and weekly scripts, which is time-consuming, but not difficult.

Wednesday

9:30 AM More Windows 2000 Server foolishness today, among other things. I'm currently attempting to install Cold Fusion Server, Enterprise Edition, and SQL Server 7. I'd heard a lot of rumors that Cold Fusion wouldn't work on IIS5, but that turned out to be incorrect; the install was smooth and clean. The possible problem is that it required Active Directory - odd, since Active Directory didn't exist when ColdFusion was written - but it installed the interface itself, and came up on the first try without a problem. No reboot. SQL Server is proving harder, mainly because I'm a clumsy oaf and have forgotten the password. No matter, that's easy to fix. If both SQL Server and ColdFusion work, then we're going to start the REALLY INTERESTING bits. Like Streaming Media server. Like loading iTOOL on a Win2K server box and see what breaks, and other really interesting things like that.

On the lighter (?) side, I got talked into playing around with Quake 3 yesterday. I don't play games much; when I do, it's usually a strategy game, something with hundreds of units and grand battles, rather than first-person shooters - like Quake. I do have the old Quake 1 loaded on my work computer, as do several of my coworkers, simply because there's nothing more relaxing than wandering down dark corridors killing your coworkers. Not literally, of course - 99% of the fun is laughing with them afterwards. So, I agreed to give Quake 3 a try. I'd been impressed with the ability of the game engine in Quake 1 to shoot up and down, look around corners, and so on, so I was prepared to be impressed with Quake 3, as well.

Wow.

I don't care about the monsters and the weapons - what impressed me was the game engine. The graphics are incredible - helped by my Viper770 video card, no doubt, but still. I was playing at 1280 x 1024 resolution, max colors, and max detail, and the game was flawless. Shooting the monsters was OK, but what was really impressive was that I could damage the walls. This could be fun. Forget running down darkened corridors killing coworkers, how about running through impressively realistic scenery killing coworkers and doing a lot of damage while you do it.

Ah - SQL Server's done. Gotta go.

Thursday

9:00 AM Well, ColdFusion and SQL Server both installed perfectly. Today, we start the fun part - Security Auditing! Yes, that's right, I get to set up the box, then hack it. Should be interesting. I'm working through the obvious things first - all the old NT exploits and hacking tools. None of them work, so far, which is a good thing. There's still more hacking to be done, though.

So far, I've been working my way through the basic DoS attacks, port sniffers, and brute force hacks. I've not had any success with them, but that doesn't mean those basic TACTICS won't work. I'm going to start working through buffer overflows, permissions exploits, and various other goodies today. The life of a sysadmin...

Oh, BTW - don't bother. The box we're doing the tests on is not visible to the outside world. Sorry. <g>

---

Tom has an excellent set of comments on his site, posted yesterday afternoon. I know how he feels; I've heard all the "perfect is the enemy of 'good enough'" speeches, thank you, and I can't really agree with them. It's not finished until I'M happy with it, damnit, and if that means it takes an extra day, well, then, it takes an extra day. Or week. Or month. That's how it is.

Now granted, I don't write. I used to be a design engineer, and you know what? I never had something that I designed and built fail. Not once. I took longer, I spent more money, but damnit, I delivered. And now, on my network, my users have everything they need, everything they want, and they're happy. They get 100% or they don't get it, and they know it. And they like it, too.

As for workspaces, I've got you all beat, now. My wife came in to the office one weekend - I had to make an emergency run - and made me clean up. I hated every minute of it, because I didn't know where anything was. I'm still looking for a power cable and some other things. But it only took a week before I was back in condition. <g> Life is funny that way.

Go take a look at the Daynotes site. I'm too lazy to update my personal links pages - well, I will anyway, but not right this second - but there are several new members, all an excellent fit for this little community of ours.

Well, I've got lots to do, and I'm burning daylight. Have a good one.

Friday

7:30 AM The good news is, that Windows 2000 Server is still running, and I wasn't able to get into the IIS5 server - or any other part of the box - without brute-forcing the Administrator password. The BAD news is, my boss's password selection skills suck. 10 seconds. Can you believe it?

Oh - and I left the scanner running on my workstation. Still hasn't cracked it as of this morning. Maybe I need to go around and change a few server passwords this morning...

Some very, very interesting news over on the BBC this morning - Scientists think they're ready to create life. Whoa. That's not the sort of headline you see every day.

Slashdot has an article about it up, with over 700 comments already. The biggest issues are, of course, the religion vs. science debates. The interesting difference is that EVERYONE on the religion side is convinced that this is a horrible idea, whilst 99% of the people on the science side are for the idea. The only people NOT for the idea of creating life are a few wondering about the physical consequences of a new life form, and the technology implied - the ability to create tailor-made organisms, possibly including new plagues and diseases. But I have yet to see, anywhere in the discussion, someone taking the religious side of the debate but saying that they think it's OK. Usually there are at least a few, but not this time.

Where do I stand? I say do it. Biggest opportunity for mankind since the invention of fire. Of course, there's a downside to it; the risk of a whole new class of weapon, for example. But you know what? There's always some new weapon, some new threat. There were probably Neanderthals telling Ug to put down that burning stick; didn't he know that fire could kill them all?

They were right; fire could have killed them all. So could the first stone knives and axes, as compared to clubs. Bows versus spears. Crossbows versus longbows. Rifles versus crossbows. ICBMs versus B-29s. There's always a new threat, it's always bigger than the last. And the opportunity for advancement is always greater than the threat. Always.

You say that someone might learn how to create a tailor-made plague? I say someone might learn how to create a universal disease-killer. I say that someone might learn how to create a bacterium that splits water into hydrogen and oxygen with a low energy cost. I say that someone might learn how to create a food source that grows anywhere and feeds on waste. I say that someone might learn how to create a DNA repair organism and triple our lifespans.

The argument that bothered me the most was from someone who wanted to know what right we had to play God. "Haven't we had enough?" they asked. We poison our air, our water. We cut down the trees for our industry and complain when we run out. Humanity, they said, sickens and disgusts them. That bothers me.

It bothers me because someone out there is no longer proud of the human race. We are a race of fierce predators, without claws, without teeth, without armor, with only our intelligence and each other. Look at Africa, study the wildlife there. We were born there, grew from infancy there, learned to fight and to survive and to conquer a planet - and we did it in an environment filled with the most fierce creatures on Earth. We spread to every continent, every environment, from the deserts to the jungles to the arctic. We've gone to Moon, and sent robotic messengers to nearly every planet in the solar system.

We've fought. Good Lord, have we fought! Whole generations slaughtered. Sometimes the killing was in the name of God. Sometimes in the name of Freedom. Even, God help us, in the name of Wealth and Power.

And we've always won. Not always the right fights, and never without cost, but we've made it to where we are today. Poised to send humans to other worlds, to send people to live their entire lives without setting foot on this planet. We communicate with people on other continents and are concerned when we don't hear a reply within seconds. We have the wealth and the leisure to recognize the damage we have done to our world, and to begin to repair it.

The human race disgusts them? How sad. How poor, how small, how pitiful they must feel. Pride, they sneer, is a vice, a disease, something that we will all come to regret. I say, sorrowfully, that they must not have any, to think so.

Hubris is indeed a disease. Hubris reminds us of when we have become too arrogant by making us pay for it. But there is a difference between pride and hubris. Hubris is arrogance, the belief that nothing can go wrong. Pride is the knowledge that things will go wrong, coupled with the belief that we will be able to solve it when it does.

Saturday

Sunday