Fairfax County denied my CHP Application
37 days ago I applied for a concealed handgun permit to the Fairfax County courthouse. I provided a complete application, save for proof of Fairfax county residency, which the county requires (I believe) extra-legally. I was called some days later by a Fairfax County police investigator who again prompted me to provide proof of residency, and again I refused. Today, I reaped what I had sown.
I can request an Ore Tenus hearing before a judge to dispute the denial, or I can capitulate and provide the proof. I’m not sure which I’ll do yet.
The details are on my OCDO post here
Mouseless Software
My laptop finally arrived, and now I’m reminded how much it sucks to have a laptop. In particular, the horrifying pointing device and (relatively) unergonomic keyboard. This has brought back all the ideas I had years ago about ways to go without a mouse and ease typing on the keyboard without re-engineering the UI.
A few of them are:
- Using the Active Accessibility API, allow the user for focus/click UI elements by typing a substring of their name, typing a chord, or using the keyboard to perform a binary search of the screen until you land on the element you want, ala Jordan Sissel’s keynav
- keynav’s logic could be improved by using the Active Accessibility API to partition the screen segments not by pixel area, but by control density, further reducing the keystrokes required to activate a particular control
- Using a Quicksilver-like metaphor to expose files/apps/folders/emails/etc in a unified collection accessible by ad-hoc abbreviations
- Using activation sequences for the above functionalities that are based on chords of home row keys and not hard-to-reach modifiers like Control and Alt. For example, it should be possible to intercept the simultaneous pressing of A, S, D, and F, as distinguished from normal typing.
- Scrolling by drumming fingers along the home row keys rather than using a scrolling device. Repeatedly drumming ASDF might scroll down, while :LKJ would scroll up. Shift could control slow or fast scroll speed.
I would also note that I’ve been playing with the information the AA API exposes using AccExplorer from the SDK. I was pissed off to discover that both GMail and Outlook Web Access basically break accessibility. In both cases, what seems like a hyperlink to a mouse user (as indicated by the ‘finger’ icon when mousing over an email subject) is in fact just text with some Javascript attached to it, so the accessibility API has no way of knowing that you can ‘click’ these ‘links’. Lame.
Sure, you can use the vanilla HTML version of both, but then they suck even more.
God, I’m glad I’m not blind!
Took Piedmont NRA Instructors' Personal Protection Inside the Home course
Yesterday I took the all-day Personal Protection Inside the Home course from Piedmont NRA Instructors. It’s the next course up from the Basic Pistol course I took for my CHP, and I was hoping I’d actually learn something from this one.
The course consisted of six hours of class time at a Marriot in Chantilly (the site says 11AM to 6PM, but it was out at 5PM), then two hours of range time at BRA.
I arrived 5 minutes late due to shit NoVA traffic. When I got in, Richard Gardiner was teaching the portion of the course that covers legal issues. He gave a great lecture, which was very informative, and even covered some legal topics I wasn’t familiar with (for example, did you know there is no duty to retreat prior to use of deadly force in VA? Neither did I). If you’re like me, you don’t recognize the name, but Richard Gardiner is the defense counsel for Sen. Webb’s aid who was arrested for carrying a loaded gun into the Capital, ostensibly at Webb’s request. A good number to have.
This was followed by a talk about Combat Mindset by an adjunct LFI instructor named Ed. I got nothing out of this portion of the course, partly because it was covered better by my DSAC-Iraq training prior to deploying to Baghdad last year, and partly because the instructor was attempting to emulate the Shatner Pause Acting&tm; style, albeit with considerably longer pauses.
After that another instructor went over setting up a ‘safe room’ in one’s house, and how to utilize that safe room in the event of a home invasion. It was all pretty basic stuff that I’d read online already.
Next a very thin woman with a very big 1911 in an SOB holster gave a talk about selecting a handgun for personal defense. As I’d already selected two (Glock 19 and Kahr PM9) I didn’t expect to get much from this course, and I got even less than that. It turns out the talk doesn’t actually address specific guns, their pros and cons, etc. Rather, it just tells you what you probably already know: find a gun that’s comfortable for you. At the very least, they could’ve run through maybe a dozen or so common self-defense handguns used by men or women, to give students (all of whom already had guns) a place to start.
Finally there was a ‘quiz’, which would be better characterized as a form to be filled out by copying information from the class textbook, NRA Guide to Personal Protection Inside the Home. I got a 96, coz I was too lazy to look up one of the answers.
I then went home to kill 2 hours until the range time. Upon arriving at BRA (which is in a shitty industrial park in Chantilly), we mustered in the lounge area for our briefing. It turns out they didn’t have enough instructors to do one-on-one shooting instruction with each of us (the maybe nine of us there were), so a few of us had to wait. The actual time on the range was more like 30 minutes.
BRA’s pistol range is ghetto compared to the NRA range. We did a few drills like point shooting, rapidly sighting down the barrel and shooting without proper sight picture, shooting around imaginary walls both strong-side and weak-side, the same while kneeling, then a lame drill in which the instructor runs the target towards you from 25 yds, you yell at it to stop, and if the instructor stops it and runs it back away from you, you can’t shoot it, but if it keeps coming, you light it up. yawn
In all, the only portion of this course that was valuable to me was Gardiner’s legal talk. The rest was a disappointment.
Apparently, the next course up, Personal Protection Outside the Home, is where the real rigor starts. Shooting on the move, shooting from (real) cover, and extended (multi-hour) range time. Piedmont NRA guys estimated they’d have a course going in August; if I can find it from somewhere else before then, I’ll do that. That’s the last NRA course I’d want to take anyway; after that it’s tactical mall-ninja stuff like Blackwater, FrontSite, Valhalla, etc.
Project Idea: Dynamic External Storage
Now that I’m getting a laptop again, I’ll face a situation I dealt with a few years ago: one or more external hard drives at fixed locations, with a laptop on the move. I want to take advantage of this extra storage when I’m at home or at work, but on the road when it’s not there I still want access to my important files.
Three years ago I had a firewire hard drive that I just carried around, and manually copied files onto my laptop hard drive if I needed them. Now, time has marched on and there’s a better option: high-end eSATA drives running off a fast ExpressCard34 bus.
What this means, essentially, is that I can position high-performance logical storage at my home and work desks, which will provide superior I/O performance to the built-in notebook HDDs, potentially turning an hour-long build into a 20 minute build. The problem then is that on those rare occasions when I’m not at either of these places, I still want all the files I put on those fast disks, and would rather have them on my slow notebook drives than not at all.
I think there’s an easy solution here, at least on Windows systems. Using NTFS reparse points, one can redirect a folder (say c:\work) to another disk. When the laptop is mobile, c:\work is mapped to d:`, another partition on the notebook's internal drive. When the laptop is at home or work,c:\workis mapped to the drive letter associated with the high-performance external storage, saye:`. That much is easily automated with the Windows APIs in any scripting environment.
Of course, the complication is keeping the external and internal versions in sync. The internal drive would be the authoritative copy, while the external drives would be fast secondary copies. rsync could push changes on the internal drive to the external one when it’s connected, but maintaining the internal drive as the external drive was changing would be a bit trickier.
One could run a constant rsync job in the background, but that would hit both disks hard and negate any performance benefit. Alternatively, one could make the sync process totally manual, and require a rsync to sync back up the internal disk before removing the external disk. That has the unfortunate effect of risking a loss of sync, and could also lead to Office Space-esque situations in which one is desperately waiting for a disk to sync before bailing early on Friday.
I recall from a Channel 9 video that Windows Vista has I/O prioritization, which could make the constant rsync solution viable if the rsync I/O priority was set to the minimum, keeping it from degrading other I/O performance on the drive. Alternatively, maybe an intelligent monitor could detect lulls in disk activity and trigger incremental syncing.
Pulled the trigger on the AlienWare Area 51 m5790
I finally pulled the trigger on the m5790. I opted for 1GB of RAM, since the 2GB upgrade from Alienware is $270 and I can buy 2GB of RAM from newegg for $130.
Here’s my config:
- Processor: Intel® Core™ 2 Duo Processor T7200 2.0GHz 4MB Cache 667MHz FSB
- Operating System (Office software not included): Genuine Windows® Vista Home Basic
- Display: 17″ WideUXGA 1920 x 1200 LCD – Saucer Silver
- Motherboard: Alienware® Intel® 945PM + ICH7 Chipset
- Memory: 1GB Dual Channel DDR2 SO-DIMM at 667MHz – 2 x 512MB
- System Drive: Extreme Performance (RAID 0) – 200GB (100GB x 2) Serial ATA 1.5Gb/s 7,200 RPM w/ NCQ & 8MB Cache
- Primary CD ROM/DVD ROM: 8x Dual Layer CD-RW/DVD±RW w/ Nero Software
- Video/Graphics Card: 256MB ATI Mobility™ Radeon® X1800
- Sound Card: Intel® 7.1 High-Definition Audio
- Wireless Network Card: Internal Intel® PRO Wireless 3945 a/b/g Mini-Card
- Communications: Integrated 10/1000Mb Gigabit Ethernet & 56K V.92 Modem
- Warranty: 3-Year AlienCare Toll-Free 24/7 Phone Support w/ Onsite Service / Alienware® Respawn
- Alienware Extras: Alienware® Mousepad
- Alienware Extras: AlienInspection – Exclusive Integration and Inspection – $100 Value – FREE!
- Free Alienware® T-Shirt: Free Alienware® T-Shirt – Black
I don’t know what I’ll call her yet. Maybe something from Heinlein this time…
Highlander: The Source ruined the Highlander franchise for good
A while back, my pirate friend brought over a rip of Highlander: The Source, the latest movie in the Highlander franchise. I enjoyed the series as a teen, and the last movie, Highlander: End Game, was pretty good. Sure, this one got bad reviews on IMDB, including the dubious claim that it was the “worst movie ever”, but I figured the reviewer just didn’t get the Highlander Zen.
Sadly, my faith was misplaced. “The Source” really is_ the worst movie ever made. So bad, in fact, that it managed to erase all my past enjoyment of the Highlander franchise and replace it with bitterness and disgust. It’s _that bad.
The plot? There wasn’t one. The dialog? Excruciating. The acting? Horrifying. The SFX? Well, does fast-forwarding action in a sort of reverse-Matrix effect count?
I want those two hours of my life back, dammit!
Which Desktop Replacement Laptop to Buy?
My desktop, prospertine, is getting long in the tooth (2 yrs old!), and I need a replacement. I also have a trip to Colorado coming up, and I need to able to do my development and support work remotely. So, I’m considering a desktop-replacement laptop instead of another desktop.
I of course want a machine that will handle the software development tasks I’ll throw at it, which means high CPU load, heavy memory load, and brutal disk I/O. Since developers are a fairly small constituency, none of the major brands have laptop builds for dev purposes, but I find that builds for gamers tend to emphasize the same things, with the addition of overkill GPUs.
My requirements are:
- 17″ display with maximum possible resolution
- Ability to play HD content in the future
- SATA disks with hardware RAID 0
- 2GB RAM, with upgrade path to 4GB
- Core 2 Duo CPU
Nice to haves:
- Better battery life
- Built-in webcam & mic
- Attractive chassis
I narrowed the field to the following:
- Dell XPS M1710
- HP dv9000t
- Apple MacBook Pro 17″
- Alienware Area-51 m5790
The M1710 is the top gaming notebook according to C|Net, which doesn’t mean much in and of itself, but it’s clearly favored on the laptop forums too. However, I was really underwhelmed. For $3500 you get a Core 2 Duo T7200, 2GB of RAM (no upgrade path to 4GB), one hard drive, and an NVidia 7950 GPU. Apart from the 7950, this isn’t very remarkable, and costs way too much.
The dv9000t seems a much better value. For $2400 I spec’ed out a Core 2 Duo T7200 w/ 2GB of RAM (sadly, not upgradable to 4GB), NVidia 7600 GPU (rather dated now), dual (non-RAID) 7200 RPM SATA drives, and the upgraded 1440×1050 display. the dv9000t also has a built-in web cam and microphone, an HDMI output port for HDTV displays, and a (ridiculously expensive) HD-DVD option which I didn’t include. Unfortunately, the dv9000t doesn’t do RAID, has no 4GB upgrade path, and comes with a non-upgradable aging nvidia 7600 GPU.
The MacBook Pro is the laptop I really wanted. The Apple industrial design and MacOS X are appealing, plus the ability to run Windows natively or within a Parallels VM is really nice. Sadly, the Apple brand premium is just too much, especially considering the dated Radeon x1600 GPU. It didn’t come out as expensive as the M1710, but it was clearly not a good value.
In the past I’ve dismissed AlienWare hardware as over-priced gimmicks for cash-rich gamers, but I took a second look at the Area 51 m5790. In classic AlienWare style, it’s way overpowered, with an Intel 945M chipset, SATA RAID, a 4GB upgrade path, and Radeon x1800 and x1900 options with the MXM slot so I can update later. It doesn’t have the same battery life at the dv9000t, nor the webcam or HDMI output, but those are nice-to-haves. The important factors are there, and it even has a (more expensive) option for an overclocked T7600G at 2.66Mhz. Price was roughly equivalent to the dv9000t ($2400 for the T7200; $2700 for the T7400).
I also like the AlienWare m9700, which has the option for SLI NVidia GPUs and has a built-in web cam, however it runs the AMD Turion64 chip, which doesn’t hold a candle to Core 2 Duo.
For now I’m leaning towards the m5790.
UPDATE: I just ran through the still-secret m9750 configurator, which is a C2D version of the m9700 w/ SLI Geforce 7950 512MB. It’s about $1k over priced imho, plus it’s not shipping yet. Pass.
Great article in Reason about totalitarian public health
I just received my April issue of Reason Magazine, which has a great cover article titled An Epidemic of Meddling: The Totalitarian Implications of Public Health . Unfortunately Reason doesn’t make the latest issue available on their site until a month or two after publication, so I can’t link to the article itself.
Reason is a unique magazine for me. In recent years I’ve subscribed to The Nation, The New Republic, National Review, and the Weekly Standard. I found I consistently (but not always) disagreed with The Nation and TNR (in the case of The Nation, my disagreement was often blended with a combination of horror and amusement), and I consistently (but not always) agreed with National Review and the Weekly Standard. Reason is a different kind of magazine altogether.
Each issue contains a roughly even split of agreeable and disagreeable pieces, almost without exception cogently written and rationally defensible (“because Cheney eats kittens and hates black people”, while convincing, sadly doesn’t pass the Rationality Test). Reason articles tend to be strongly anti-war and pro-choice, with which I don’t agree, but they are also firmly committed to individual liberties and the (rhetorical, political, and social) fight against tyranny wherever it lurks, be it on the left or the right.
This month’s cover article is among the better pieces I’ve read in recent years. It notes the creeping totalitarian implications as ‘public health’ departs from its historical focus on communicable disease and takes on the epidemics of the 21st century, which turn out to be individuals making lifestyle choices the public health moralizers don’t agree with, like smoking, overeating, not wearing a seat belt, consuming trans fats, playing Grand Theft Auto, owning guns, running with scissors, and generally not being safe. It’s for the children, you see.
I recall clearly my first encounter with totalitarian meddlers. When I was a child living in Colorado, a seatbelt law was enacted, requiring drivers and front seat passengers to wear seatbelts, on pain of a traffic violation. I hadn’t formed any coherent libertarian philosophy at the time, but I recall how ridiculous the law seemed to me then, just as it does now.
It’s only gotten worse since then, with big cities like New York City (which is, to paraphrase Mike Bloomberg, the least free big city in America) and Chicago vying for bragging rights to various food and smoking bans. Just recently here in VA our benevolent masters gave us HB2422, which bans smoking in restaurants and bars that don’t explicitly permit it with prominent signage.
It’s quite disheartening to see our country take this turn. The Supreme Court can scour the emanations and penumbras of the Constitution to discover heretofore-unknown rights to privacy, abortion, sexual freedom, and (in the near future) same-sex marriage, but can find nothing in the Bill of Rights that proscribes the McCain-Fiengold First Amendment Reduction Act, the forcible taking of private property by eminent domain for private development, or the interference with or outright prohibition of individual lifestyle choices like smoking and eating trans fats and driving without a seat belt.
Make no mistake; totalitarian meddling won’t stop of its own accord. The same strained logic that allows the state to ban trans fats and make you wear a seat belt can compel you to exercise, take away your video games, restrict your entertainment options, monitor and coerce your food choices, ban your beer and whiskey, outlaw your religion, crush dissent, sterilize ‘high risk’ groups, and subjugate citizens to the benevolent tyranny of the state. If it gets really bad, they might even fuck with American Idol.