LOCUS DEMENTIA

Before you read this, you need to download the accounting spreadsheet from IRS: IRS Accounting Spreadsheet You want to click on the "2010" link as that is the most current data. After you download the XLS file, open it and see the Table 29 "Collections, Costs, Personnel, and U.S. Population, Fiscal Years 1980 - 2010". For each 5 year span marked in the table: 1980 - 1984: 24% increase in tax 30% increase in IRS cost ($998M) 4% increase in population 1985 - 1989: 27% increase in tax 31% increase in IRS cost ($1.597B) 4% increase in population 1990 - 1994: 17% increase in tax 25% increase in IRS cost ($1.804B) 5% increase in population 1995 - 1999: 28% increase in tax 11% increase in IRS cost ($879M) 5% increase in population 2000 - 2004: 4% decrease in tax 15% increase in IRS cost ($1.497B) 4% increase in population 2005 - 2010: 3% increase in tax 16% increase in IRS cost ($1.955B) 4% increase in populatio...

I have a daughter who is a freshman at George Washington University. She has been in school for about 59 days now. For the last two weeks, we have gotten several appeals for more money on her "GWorld" spending card so that she can "eat." When she started school, her GWorld was funded with $1,000 and her Dining Dollars account was given $700. That's $1,700 to spend on food and sundries. After 59 days of school, and an infusion of $200, she is down to about $300 overall. We are able to get the transaction breakdown of her spending, which allowed me to come up with some metrics. Being female, she needs makeup and other girl things from a pharmacy store like CVS. To that, she spent $438, or roughly $7.42 per day. Being a hungry college kid, she spends most of her food money on carbohydrates and fast food from 7-11. To that, she has spent $745 or roughly $12.63 per day. Recently she discovered the magical elixer of caffeine, which comes in nifty packaging from Starbu...

The US GAO (Government Accounting Office) has published its audit of the federal reserve: Audit in PDF | Synopsis of Audit The audit shows the Federal Reserve Bank issuing $16 TRILLION in debt to banks and corporations around the world. Who authorized this release of US capital? The Federal Reserve Bank chairmen, such as Ben Bernanke. For the 340 Million happy citizens of the US, that $16 Trillion is about $46,376 for every citizen of the US. Remember back in the Bush Presidency where we all got a little check for $800, or $1200, or something like that as our "incentive" to go invigorate the economy? That little amount seems more like a slap in the face now. With $16T of cash, the US could have paid all of its debts and gotten China off of our back. Instead we continue to print paper with little regard to the consequences because the people in charge of said currency are not governed. We, the people of the United States, should be in charge of where our money is lent. ...

This is the configuration description for a Gateway 823 autoloader (LTO-3 8-tape loader): define tapetype GW823 { comment "Gateway 823 LTO3 Tape Autoloader" length 447129 mbytes filemark 6342 kbytes speed 38069 kps } This was generated using the amanda configuration utility against the loader and having the loader attached to an HP DL180 G6 with an LSI LVD SCSI card.

Today I noticed an odd little quirk about TSQL (Microsoft SQL) and SQL Server. If you have a smalldatetime, you only record date + hours + minutes. To get seconds, millis, and such, you need the full datetime. Well, if you are using "getdate()" to compare against the smalldatetime, then know that smalldatetime rounds the seconds UP to the next minute. The smalldatetime on 12:36:24.00 is actually 12:37:00.00. This caught me today in a query where I was doing a select looking for a record that occured after the last insertion time (smalldatetime) using "getdate()". That was always returning empty because the getdate() to smalldatetime conversion was giving me a date that was in the future thanks to the round-up behavior. To work around it, I had to convert(smalldatetime,getdate()) and then compare against my smalldatetime values. If you are inserting records with smalldatetime and using getdate() as the smalldatetime value, then those records will be recorded up to 1 ...

I was a subscriber to the AT&T Uverse service for a little over 2 years. In that time, we had experienced good service for the first year, and then it sucked. After 12 months, or there in, the service degraded quickly, and would stop working all together at times. At first it would die for a short period of time, usually when we were not home. Then it would get progressively worst, until there was an entire week of no service. We had technicians at the house trying to fix the service, but it would repeat the behavior quite consistently. On January 15th we finally gave up and switched to a lesser service, COX TV and Internet. In the past we had cable service and it was always reliable, but not as good as the AT&T digital service. COX doesn't have nearly as many HD channels, but that's not enough. We needed internet to be reliable, and AT&T couldn't deliver that. Cancelling the AT&T service was a nightmare. Try to find anything about such things on their web s...

Recently I had a RAID5 array crash on me. The array was composed of 3 Western Digital 250GB disks controlled by a 3Ware 9550SX card. This array had been in continuous operation for nearly 4 years. Yet, about 12 days ago one of the drives appeared to have crashed. As luck would have it, though, the PSU was also failing in this box, so the +5V line stopped working and took another drive offline. That was the end of the array. 3Ware/LSI was a great help. They created a custom application that was able to recover the original RAID header information. After attaching a new PSU to the box, 2 of 3 drives were online and the LSI tool made the array online too (but degraded). That was zero day and I was still hopeful. I downloaded R-Tools linux recovery application and created a rescue CD. Stuck the CDROM into the failed system and started the recovery process. After about 4 days, R-Tools consumed the entirety of a 500GB disk that I had attached to the system and it was not done. So I gave up o...

I was reading the New Scientist today and found an article about the Global Warming/Climate Change debate that is raging today. Page 2 of this article (Deniergate: Turning the tables on climate sceptics) makes a statement that is, well, sophomoric: "The UK Met Office this week published data showing that the first decade of the 2000s has been the warmest on record." A very long time ago, this planet was covered in ice and snow. Slowly, this global "ice age" receded and has gradually given rise to the modern world of today (2009). Yet, there are still large ice sheets on the planet (the Arctic and Antarctic Poles) that are continuing to melt. For these large sheets of ice to melt, the average atmospheric temperature of the planet must increase. Without that increase, we would still have more ice and snow, and likely no humans and fancy fast cars. Therefore, it goes without saying that the Plant's average temperature is increasing, and it HAS been increasing fo...

So I bought a new XFX X58i motherboard and a nifty Intel Core i7 CPU to go with it. It was time to upgrade my Core 2 Quad system to a faster Core i7 system and get more RAM. I had Windows XP Pro 64bit and it was finally starting to run slow after a good 2 years of processing and programming. Friday came and I pulled apart my system and installed the new motherboard. Turned it on and ... nothing. No beeps, no POST, nothing. Worst yet, my 3ware card did not show the bios. So I pulled out the new stuff and returned the old stuff. Turned it on. Got past the POST and the Marvel embedded RAID controller BIOS and then again, no 3ware bios. Well, that really stinks because the 3ware card controls my RAID-1 array that contains my system data. I called 3ware who insisted that I just RMA the 8006-2LP and get a replacement. When I talked to the tech support person, she stated that it was not possible to hook the drives up to a new 3ware card because the "old" 8006-2LP (pre-9000 series) l...

In the USA, it would seem that lots of writers, commentators, screen writers, and pundits are obsessed with fat or obese people. One commentator on CNN [1] writes about using a tax to control obesity. In California, we already have a Fat Tax , it's in the form of a tax on fast foods and sugary junk foods. Yet, there are fat people in California, and most of the people who are eating at McDonalds, Wendy's, Jack, and In-N-Out are all thin or acceptably sized. Forbes ran an article in September of 2009 discussing how a fat tax could be some kind of reformist ideology. The Forbes article mostly is concerned with raising billions of dollars to help pay for some kind of unforseen increase in socialized healthcare. It also claims that by 2015, 40% of Americans will be obese. Seriously, how can anyone publish this stuff? There are some level headed people out there who have some good things to say [2] in the Center for Consumer Freedom's Who Wants A Fat Tax article. There, a re...

I manage high traffic web servers that are constantly under attack. To manage the security of these web servers, I need to routinely update my iptables rules, and by routinely, I mean every morning when I roll into the office. When I searched for a solution that allowed me to dynamically define my rules with a merge option, nothing come to the forefront. There are some miscellaneous posts about using PERL and cat, but nothing really useful. Then I remember M4. If you don't know about M4, then you should man it. Here's what you do. iptables.m4: ---- start ---- # Firewall configuration written by # system-config-securitylevel # Manual customization of this file is not # recommended. *filter :INPUT ACCEPT [0:0] :FORWARD ACCEPT [0:0] :OUTPUT ACCEPT [0:0] :RH-Firewall-1-INPUT - [0:0] -A INPUT -j RH-Firewall-1-INPUT -A FORWARD -j RH-Firewall-1-INPUT include(/root/iptables/iptables_special) include(/root/iptables/iptables_reject) include(/root/iptables/iptables_accept) # # The final r...

I've been fighting with an ASP.NET 1 conversion to ASP.NET 2 where for some unknown reason, the Global.asax code is no longer being run. No matter what I do, including making a Global class or even embedding the code into the asax file, the Application_Start is not being invoked when the app starts. No matter though. What I am embarassed about though is a simple mistake: public class Foo { private static Foo _Instance = new Foo(); private static KEY = null; private Foo() { KEY = ConfigurationSettings.AppSettings["MyKeyValue"]; } public static Foo Instance() { return(_Instance); } } Guess what value "Foo.KEY" has after you call Foo.Instance? Eight hours later, I finally realized why KEY is always null and the real fix is just to do the following: public class Foo { private static KEY = null; private static Foo _Instance = new Foo(); private Foo() { KEY = ConfigurationSettings.AppSetting...

A recent experience with intermittent network failure started me thinking about how I could read data from a server without the NOC knowing about it. I could do this with a virus that replaces "netstat" and "syslog" and "ps" so that it never shows itself running. That's just too simple and blunt, a child could do that. No, what I wanted to do is create a method that goes undetected because it looks like a common attack that is easily thwarted and often ignored. First, there is the ICMP ping relay attack. One way to communicate with a 3rd party covertly is to send ping packets to a server and spoof the source IP so that they are bounced to the 3rd party by the server. This way you never directly communicate with the 3rd party. Secondly, you need to take advantage of subliminal channels [1] in network protocols. This is the super-secret spy stuff that makes this idea a reality. By utilizing a subliminal channel, I am able to send secret messages to the ...

Stem cells are abound in medical research. Today I read an article on CNN [1] that claims blood stem cell transplantation gets Type-I diabetics off of insulin. I suppose that is good news for the countless young kids who are dealt this death sentence. Yet, there is something more to this disease. This year, 2009, has found several research papers on the study of viral activity and Type-I diabetes [2] , [3] , [4] , [5] . This makes me question whether or not any transfusion, transplantation, or any other replacement therapy has any merit for Type-I diabetes. No matter what you replace in the patient's body, the virus will continue to infect the new material, and the disease will continue to manifest. What we really need to see isn't more snake-oil stem cell therapy that is costly and inconsequential, but rather real medical trials using virus-targeting therapies that are localized to the infected pancreas. These kids are doomed to an early death with this disease, and if it ca...

I seem to be the poster child for failed hardware. Today, my Pioneer DVD-RW DVR-112D decided to stop writing discs. From what I can tell, though, this has been going on since the day I installed this disc drive. Pioneer admitted in 2007, just prior to my purchase of the drive, that there are some manufacturing problems with the drive. They shipped the drive because they "did not feel that a use-case existed in which the error would manifest." Well, apparently that was wrong because many a person has experienced problems with these drives. For the last year, I've noticed that my Windows XP 64-bit has been experiencing random halts that would last for about 5 seconds. During that time, I would grumble and refine my repertoire of colorful expletives. Today, after installing a SONY DRU-842A as a replacement, I noticed the random halting was gone. The startup time for Windows was back to its super-fast normal self. With the Pioneer in there, sometimes the Windows boot would ju...

This was originally sent to me from a friend who works on massively parallel medical imaging software: I thought I'd take a little time out of my day to rail, once again, against the incompetency of those [software developers at Microsoft]. Consider the following innocent looking bit of code:   #include <omp.h>   #include <vector>   int main(int argc, char* argv[])   {     #pragma omp parallel     {       std::vector<int> A(1024 * 1024);     }   } For the OpenMP-uneducated, the inner code block will be executed in parallel by one thread per CPU on your system. In my case that is 8 threads (dual quad-core). If you run this bit of code in VTune and look at which black hole your clock-cycles disappear down, you'll find an unusually large number of them being gobbled up by "ntoskrnl.exe". And, if you dive down into this file, you'll fi...

I bought a BFG Technologies video card (GeForce 9800 GX2) which had an $80 rebate attached to it. So I sent in all of the required items, including the proof of purchase which mutilated my retail box. Surprisingly, I received the rebate check numbered 16605458 drawn from Stearns Bank of Scottsdale, Arizona, USA, and deposited it. Much to my further surprise, the check was returned to me with a stop payment order! The void date on the check is 01/26/2009, and I deposited the check in November 2008. Not only did this video card NOT fit properly in my Intel motherboard, but the manufacturer refused to pay on their retail rebate. My list of acceptable manufacturers is growing shorter by the minute. BFG is yet another casualty in my quest to find a reliable hardware vendor. Dell : Off the list (blown capacitor) EVGA : Off the list (blown capacitor TWICE) BFG Technologies : Off the list (snubbed)

Remember back to 2006 when a young girl killed herself [1] , [4] after being tricked and harassed by a faux boy she found on the Web using MySpace. The trial against the faux boy, an adult woman (Lori Drew), did not result in prosecution for the death of Megan, much to the dismay of many.  Yet, today we read about another trial where someone is being accused of second degree murder because they may have mentioned something slanderous about another person who was later killed by a hit man [2] . In this case, though, the person on trial is a former FBI agent who was working deep cover to infiltrate organized crime. In both cases, someone released information to third parties that resulted in the death of another person.  Neither defendant in either of these cases actually committed the act of murder, though. In the case of the FBI agent, though, the murder charge is being taken seriously. Yet, in the MySpace slander case, the murder charge was not taken seriously. How are t...

Apparently Microsoft is being accused of abuse in China because it is cracking down on illegal copies of its software. [1] One excerpt from the article sums up the mentality in China: More than 80% of the 60,000 Internet users participating in an online survey conducted by Tencent, one of the largest Internet service portals in China, protested the campaign. They complained that it was the high price of a legitimate copy of XP that had forced them to turn to counterfeits. A genuine copy of XP Pro is priced at $376 (2,578 yuan) in the Chinese market. So if you don't like the price of candy at the local grocery store, you should just steal it. Why should you pay their fair market price when you could just take it and then claim that they forced you to steal it. China is the single largest offender of global information espionage and currency manipulation. On all of the computer systems that I monitor daily, the vast majority of elicit hacker activity originates from IP addresses in C...

CNN reports that a WWF study has found that global climate change is happening faster than predicted in 2007 and that there will not be any arctic ice by 2013, or 2040. [1] Then it goes on to say that global sea level will increase by 1.08 meters by the end of the century, which is 2100, 92 years from now. Quite honestly, nobody really cares what is going to happen to the planet in 98 years. Why? Because in 98 years we (as humans) will either: (1) Obliterate ourselves because God told us to do it. (2) Eat eachother because there will no longer be any land available to grow crops and sustain living quarters for our 50 billion people. (3) Suffocate because our planet will no longer smell nice thanks to 50 billion people producing lots of solid waste in our oceans. (4) Leave the planet because there will no longer be enough fresh water to sustain our lives. Wait a minute. Consider (4) for a moment. Where can we get an abundance of fresh water TODAY? Anyone? Yeah, the arctic! It's goin...