Trump And The Russians

Even if the US Intelligence services are right, and that Russia did influence the US election, I think it is a stretch to say that it was that influence that got Trump elected -- you can have it both ways.

I think it would be pretty clear that nobody, the Russians included, expected Trump to actually win -- the goal was merely to make Clinton (and, by extension, the US) look ridiculous and perhaps redirect some of the incoming administration's attentions in directions other than towards Russian interests. In that, the strategy paid off in spades, except that I'm sure that the Russians are just as worried about an unpredictable Trump administration as many of the American progressive voters are.

Religious Doctors

So if* Ontario doctors win the right to A) refuse to provide a particular treatment on the grounds of religious freedom AND B) refuse to refer their patients to doctors who will provide said treatment, will patients get the right to interrogate their doctors on their religious beliefs before or during any consultation or treatment planning?

Seems to me they'd have to.  You can't have it both ways -- if you have a religious right that may directly influence a course of treatment you may or may not propose and/or carry out, I as the patient should have the right to be fully informed as to where your influences are coming from.

Alternatively, if some doctors want freedom of religion, and that religion precludes them performing some of the duties of being a doctor, maybe the correct resolution of this conflict is for those people to recognize they can't be doctors in Ontario.

It is one thing to say "I don't believe it is right for me to do this" and quite another to say "I don't believe it is right for anyone to do this".  Your right to swing your fist ends at my nose; in this case the practice of these religions is affecting other, probably non-practitioners, and I think that the right to practice your religion ends at my health care.

* = I don't think it will come to that.

24x7x365

This is confusing to me.  It is usually read as "24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year."

But it occured to me today that it should be 24x7x52, as in "24 hours a day, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year"?  That preserves the flow: hours to days, days to weeks, weeks to years.

ssh Switches

Dear putty/kitty developers:

If you are trying to make a ssh work-alike, it would be very helpful if your tool took the same command line options as what you are copying does.

To wit:

• it is ssh -p 2022 user@system
  
• and it is kitty -P 2022 user@system

Should you make the mistake of saying kitty -p 2022 user@system, you get a polite dialog box telling you that it doesn't understand what -p means. And if you live with kitty long enough, you start trying to use the -P switch when you go back to unix world. Eventually you start feeling like no matter what you pick it is always wrong the first time, and you have a mental breakdown.

RAGE.

(Aside: the fact that it is scp -P 2002 file user@system:location is a separate problem and doesn't help one's sanity either -- but if Kitty is going to take cues from someone, it should be the direct target of emulation.)

Rancid 3, Reprise

Oh just a note for posterity's sake that I messed with Rancid 3 for all of 90 minutes after figuring out the last land mine because the Dell switch functionality just wouldn't work. So eventually I just gave up and transplanted a working 2.3.8 instance and reconfigured it.

So much for trying to stay current. I'll check in again once 3.1.x is in progress; maybe by then there will be enough web documentation telling us what the actual differences are and the Dell piece will actually work.

Rancid 3

WHAT. THE. FUCK. GUYS.

What I'm not seeing in the FAQ is a note that if you've been using 
rancid 2.x the router.db separator character changed from : to ; 

2.3.8 router.db: 
  cisco-router.domain.com:cisco:up

3.0 router.db: 
  cisco-router.domain.com;cisco;up 

Guys. Guys. Guys.

You don't just arbitrarily change the config division symbol. Who the hell needs continuity? Your user community, that's who.

If you really, really, really want to change something so fundamental, maybe you should cover the change with some code which says "looks like you are using an out-of-date config file format" or even merely a "hey, this config line is bogus, maybe you wanna look into that?"

But no -- lets silently do nothing. The absolutely worst result you can possibly have. It took me a month of fucking around with this to notice that it was diligently recording all my routers as down, which finally gave me the magic string rancid marking all routers down to google to find out what had been changed.

FUCK.

Stir-The-Pot-Tuesdays: ISIS

So Canada is over in the middle east because ISIS wants to kill us or something. Thing is, there's no declaration of war, so this is what, a police action?

Thing is, if ISIS came over here and actually killed a Canadian, we would catch them and put them on trial and lock them up forever -- but we wouldn't be putting them to death.

So why is it OK to go over there and kill them (plus civilians and support people) without a trial? Isn't that basically what we're accusing them of wanting to do to us?

A little bit stir-the-pot, yes, but also a little serious.

Boring Sunday: Ten Car Garage

As a wise man once said, everyone must have a perfect ten car garage. That wise man was Jeremy Clarkson, but moving on.

(From Jalopnik).

Well this Sunday is boring, so why not indulge in a little day dreaming? This is just off the top of my head, and in no particular order:

• Toyota Sienna V6 AWD minivan customized to be a limousine inside, including drinks, TV, and internet. Sometimes you don't want to drive or you want someone else to drive so you can work, read, or sleep. And since I won't be driving it, I don't care that it has the handling characteristics of a shopping cart. But still AWD so it can go places I might reasonably want to go even in poor weather.
• Subaru Impreza with CVT and the paddle shifters as a daily driver. I'm old and lazy now and can't be bothered to row my own gears any more. So no STi. The CVT paddle shifter is a nice compromise between play and work, and can be ignored completely when I am lazy. I'm not 100% sure about this car, really. The last Legacy and Imprezas I drove had really vague steering. Cars like the Mazda 3 have much more responsive steering and just feel more fun to drive, even if they are ultimately less capable in the bad weather.
• BMW 325 xiT -- for things that don't fit in the Subaru.
• Mazda Miata or Honda S2000 -- because convertible. I am told I probably wouldn't fit in the Miata so I would try them both. If I don't fit in either I might look at a Ferrari California or something even though that's more of a cruiser than a "sportscar".
• 1992 Audi ur-Quattro -- both the first, and last, of the first generation of 4WD rally cars on the street. The Group-B monsters don't really count for me because they were not really offered for sale beyond the ridiculous homologation requirements.
• 1985 Toyota Supra -- I have lusted after these cars since they were new.
• Acura NSX -- if there is a mandatory super car requirement, we might as well have one at is easy to drive.
• Ferrari 328 GTS -- one that is rough enough to be driven and won't have to be a garage queen. You have to have a Ferrari or Porsche on lists like this, but I would like one that I wouldn't have to treat like it was made out of porcelain or something.

Frankly after this point I'm padding. I might be padding with the BMW, even. Things like the Nissan GT-R might appeal to me in a visceral way, but I can't see any reason to have such a ridiculously overpowered car. I can probably have more fun, more safely, in something like a Miata than in a monster like the GT-R.

The one thing that strikes me about this list: only two garage queens, the Audi and the Supra. Everything else I would expect to drive regularly, normally, on every-day streets.

Probably the only other addition would be kind of bending the rules -- a specific 1960 Austin-Healy Bug-eye Sprite. My dad has this car in his garage and although it probably needs more "restore" than "repair" at this point I would love to get it fitted out and then put it back in his garage. If money was no object I would certainly offer to do that for him.

Okay, that's another Sunday killed.

Guardians

Todd Alcott: "That a movie as rushed as Guardians stops for a moment to consider the feelings of an alien thug for his favorite knife is an indicator of Guardians’s essential humanity; everyone has a story, everyone feels loss, even for, especially for, the dumbest of things. It’s the dumb things, Guardians suggests, that we love the most."

Public Transit

Watching the Reddit slapfight on r/ottawa about Uber, I find reinforced my perception that

A) everyone thinks the local public transit they have to use is crap, and

B) everyone thinks everyone else's is nicer.

Personally I think that no matter how nice or efficient or modern or affordable a mass transit system is, the perception of how good or not it is is overwhelmingly driven by your interactions with other users -- and thus you will always have a generally negative opinion of it, if not a specifically overwhelmingly negative opinion of it.

On City Parking

Speaking as a spoiled suburbanite, if you want me to go downtown and spend my money there, there had better be parking around where you want me to be because there's very little I will sit on a bus for 45min each way for.

Prostitution

I'm not terribly convinced by the legal argument that prostitution shouldn't be illegal because having it so makes it dangerous for these involved in said illegal activity, but that's probably why I'm not a Supreme Court judge.