I'm about to slap someone..

For the last goddamn week some fucking asshat has been parking across the street and down 2 or so houses. They pull up and about 10 people pour out of this vehicle and they proceed to test the nerves of the surrounding 2-3 blocks with wall-shaking bass. This, of course, annoys me endlessly. The passing vehicles with obnoxiously loud bass I've managed to deal with fairly well mentally.. as long as I know it will go away I can take a few deep breaths and forget it (When I first moved to Minneapolis in 1998 I thought I was going to die of panic attacks). But this lingering shit destroys my spirit.

SO -- Calling the cops is useless, they're too busy pulling people over for trivial nonsense (esp. if they're a minority)..

So what's a ginger to do?

I think I am going to buy a few Air Horns. I am going to rig something up so I can set it and leave with the goddamn thing blaring away. Leave it on the doorstep with a nice note that says "TURN YOUR FUCKING MUSIC DOWN YOU ASSHAT".

What will I really do? Nothing. I'll sit and stew in my basement while my nerves drive me to fantasize about some form of payback for my torture. ..Oh, and continue to browse for homes in first-third ring suburbs.. and wish I made more money.

~Nic

We have a problem

We have a fucking problem here:

A small town in Alabama is offering non-violent offenders the choice between doing prison time and paying a fine, or working their sentence off by going to church every week.

From TPM

~Nic

Rails 3 - Check if any possibilities exist before validation

In this work project I have a few models: contest model, submission model, and subject model. Subject is a table that belongs to contest, AND subject. Some contests don't have subjects, but if they do, I need to have the user select one. These few snips of code worked well for that situation:

class Submission < ActiveRecord::Base
  
  #Set up how the model works
  belongs_to                :contest
  belongs_to                :subject

  #Validate the field we're talking about in this post:
  validates_presence_of     :subject_id, 
                              :on => :create,
                              :if => :needs_subject?

.. And later I defined needs_subject? as follows:

  def needs_subject?
    if self.contest.subjects.any?
      return true
    else
      return false
    end
    
  end
end #End the model.

So this allowed me to only check if there's a subject if there SHOULD BE a subject.

Hope this helps someone.

~Nic

Probability of god making an earthquake and hurricane?

0.

Tell yourself whatever you want. For the record, the probability of a hurricane arising within 1 day, 1 week or 1 year after any arbitrary point (in this case, after an earthquake) is exactly the same, given seasonal adjustments. When events are close together, we notice. Had these two events been a year apart it would be a different story for the christnuts.

Back to homework.

~Nic

LifeNet Autonomous net

Apparently my idea does exist, though it is in a quite broken-down and seemingly abandoned way. I would think that the source for that project could be branched and modified to do what I had proposed earlier. Find it here: LifeNet

~Nic

I just had a 9/11 flashback..

It was really about the earthquake. I just saw it out of the corner of my eye, and had an "oh fuck, not again" moment for about 1/2 a second. Terrible shot.

~Nic

Ad-hoc autonomous wireless network for mobile devices

Dictatorships, and oddly BART have practiced shutting down of cellular networks to quell protests and dissent. It is clear that something needs to be done to remove this powerful anti free speech weapon. I've thought about this all last week, but have no time to write the software, but I will outline it in hopes that someone will do it (or let me know if someone already has)

The network should use both Wifi, and Bluetooth technologies.
It will work in a fashion similar to how Samba systems "elect" the controller (within the software).
Simple "multicast" type messages will be used to find neighbors, and use a common messaging protocol that requires nothing other than a private IP address (
Network splits should be dealt with by having another intermediary relay messages between newly autonomous segments.
IP addresses should be randomly assigned in such a way that there will not be collisions between segments.. Address should use a class-A private address (10. etc).
All traffic destined to the internet should be encrypted by the sender with a destination to be safe-server somewhere in the world with stable government and free speech laws.
The server host will remain neutral, and ensure the secrecy of all encryption keys, with a complete revocation infrastructure incase of compromise.
Should one of the participating mobile devices suddenly get internet access, it should be immediately shared, and use adaptive throttling.
If multiple devices have access, a delegation system should be used to distribute the load.
Internet sharing should be mandatory, but with a pre-set limit of usage (eg. "I'll share up to 50MB of my connection when I get access")
Any queued messages (that would be distributed on the network for later delivery) will be delivered by at least two devices, if not all to ensure integrity.

A network working like this will de-fang any cut off of internet/cellular access, as participants will still be able to communicate among themselves. The technology we currently have is capable of doing this with no physical modifications, and a moderately sized application. The application will probably require root/su access to the device, as the device will have to switch to access point mode. Devices that are not capable of ad-hoc will be used as Wifi to BT proxies.

Make it fucking happen, now.

~Nic

** Added:

... for information to start moving out to the internet should take nothing more than ONE node gaining internet access. Since all messages (outgoing, and a log of internal messages) will be distributed to ALL nodes, all messages should eventually see the light of day. In the case that the primary relay-to-internet server is taken down, there should be fall-back machines. Since the messages leaving the network will be encrypted there will need to be some kind of central repository.

It is important to note that local messages in the network (not with the final destination of the internet) will not be encrypted in the local network, only encrypted on their way out. This will disallow tampering. The key for encryption for distributed outbound messages will be encrypted with the senders key. It will also be important to have everyone informed that all messages will eventually see the light of day. Though they (the messages) should be anonymous, the eventuality of them being out in the open will allow, theoretically, for some self policing -- If a group is cut off from internet access, uses this software and is found out to have been coordinating some kind of violence, everyone will know.

I would suspect that the safe-server would use some kind of application that posts the messages to twitter and other similar places, but also replicates them to other machines (post-encryption) to ensure their "liberation".

Not only does this have the potential to deal with internet cut-offs, but also to deal with emergency situations where cell service is overwhelmed, or destroyed. The idea arose from my interest in the historic, and recent use of ham radio in catastrophic situations.