Heroin in Afghanistan

A cool story on how some enterprising individuals are working to battle the heroin trade originating in Afghanistan:

A former homeless drug abuser from Swindon is the unlikely champion of an initiative that aims to fight Afghanistan’s vast narcotics economy – with fruit juice.

James Brett, 39, who once spent a year living rough before becoming a fruit juice magnate, is behind a scheme that aims to replace opium fields with pomegranate orchards.

Mr Brett’s scheme will begin in March with 100,000 pomegranate saplings in the eastern province of Nangahar. He hopes eventually to plant 175,000 hectares (432,250 acres) of orchards across the country.

This is all sorts of awesome (well, because I love pomegranates :-P)!

Chinese New Year!

Happy Chinese New Year! (Year of the Ox)

Work

I've been working through Eric Brechner's I.M Wright's Hard Code.  I'll have more on this in the coming weeks as I continue to digest the awesomeness of this book.  Excellent pieces on software engineering and dealing with the mess of it all.  Highly recommended reading.  I finished this up on my trip to Taiwan...

Family

It's been a long 2009 for me already.

My grandmother passed away near midnight on January 8th.  It's kind of strange, I wasn't all that close to her, but in the aftermath of my weeklong trip to Taiwan to attend services, I feel a sudden sense of emptiness.  It's a sort of spiritual/cultural/familial emptiness...an uncertainty about the future of my ties to Taiwan and to my family there. 

I was quite surprised that my family wasn't as emotional as I would have expected; but then again, to reach the ripe age 88 is not a terrible fate.  It was quite sudden for my grandmother, who was about as energetic and lively as a 8 year hold hopped up on a few bottles of pop.  My goodness, you would not believe the copious amounts of food that she could consume for a frame no bigger than 5' (maybe).

She was from a different generation, a generation that saved every yuan, ate every last grain of rice, and lived simple, disciplined lives.  She was stubborn to the end, from what I heard from my aunts, but it was her way of expressing her love for her family.  I think the following phrase best summed up her view of her matriarchical role:

The true meaning of life is to plant trees under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

-- Nelson Henderson

So I've been pretty depressed through all of this.  The Chinese place great emphasis on the family name and as the only son of her only son, it seems that the tradition of the Chen family will end with me as my children will surely grow up as Americans who may never really connect with their Chinese heritage.  I have an itch now to sell my house, store most of my stuff with my mom, and move back to Taiwan for a few years to better learn Chinese (I'm conversational on a 3rd or 4th grade level), get to know my aunts and cousins, and enjoy the awesomeness that is Taiwan.

For now, it's just a pipe dream.

Well, so far anyways:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/science/sciencenews/3981697/Scientists-plan-to-ignite-tiny-man-made-star.html

While it has seemed an impossible goal for nearly 100 years, scientists now believe that they are on brink of cracking one of the biggest problems in physics by harnessing the power of nuclear fusion, the reaction that burns at the heart of the sun.

In the spring, a team will begin attempts to ignite a tiny man-made star inside a laboratory and trigger a thermonuclear reaction.

As a side note:

Until now, such fusion has only been possible inside nuclear weapons and highly unstable plasmas created in incredibly strong magnetic fields. The work at Livermore could change all this.

The sense of excitement at the facility is clear. In the city itself, people on the street are speaking about the experiment and what it could bring them. Until now Livermore has had only the dubious honour of being home of the US government’s nuclear weapons research laboratories which are on the same site as the NIF. 

I recently came across a weird error with a parter that we're working with.  He was getting SSPI errors at the the client side.  I had seen these previously, but only when configuring SharePoint and our product (FirstPoint) for Kerberos.

After turning on Kerberos logging, it was clear that was clear that the client and service were trying to use Kerberos and failing with the error KRB_ERR_RESPONSE_TOO_BIG.  Now it's normal for the client and service to negotiate the authentication scheme and fall back onto NTLM, but it seemed that in this case, WCF was not falling back to NTLM due to the error type.

It was pretty baffling since we did have any issues using the same configuration in our test environments.

Fortunately, I came across a listing about this issue.  The solution is to simply add an invalid SPN to the service and client, which forces the usage of NTLM.

<endpoint address="net.tcp://myserver/myservice"
	binding="netTcpBinding" bindingConfiguration="DefaultTcpBinding"
	contract="IMyService"
	name="NetTcpBinding_IMyService">
	<identity>
		<!--/// The value is left intentionally blank ///--->
		<servicePrincipalName value=""/>
	</identity>
</endpoint>

Lesson learned!

In short: don't do it to yourself!

Okay, so that's not a realistic solution.  But you know what?  It is a pain in the butt.  Terrible.  Teeeeeeerrible.  I've spent the last two days battling Kerberos, Active Directory, and NLB trying to figure out what the heck is going on with a test environment I'm building.

So this is what I came away with:

• Setting up Network Load Balancing.  This is a great article on how to set up NLB before you set up your SharePoint environment.
• Setting up SharePoint with Kerberos.  This is your starting point for configuring SharePoint for Kerberos.  It's confusing as heck and creates an inordinate number of domain accounts which I think are totally extraneous, but it's the most extensive document that I found on the subject.
• Enabling Kerberos Logging.  You're going to need it.
• Troubleshooting Kerberos/IIS Errors.  Good tips on working with Kerberos.
• HTTP 401.1 with Kerberos.  This document probably had the most important tip:

  Important An SPN for a service can only be associated with one account. Therefore, if you use this suggested resolution, any other application pool that is running under a different domain user account cannot be used with Integrated Windows authentication only.

• Ask The Directory Services Team.  A blog with many good posts on Kerberos issues.  The Kerberos introduction is useful to start with.
• Wireshark.  This will let you watch the Kerberos and DNS traffic which can help surface errors and provide more diagnostic information than the Windows Kerberos event logging alone.  You can just trap all traffic on the physical interface and filter using "kerberos".

The tip in KB871179 was particularly useful since this, I think, was what was causing me all this trouble.  Be sure that you're not registering an SPN multiple times!

There's a pretty fascinating article over at Portfolio.com by Michael Lewis fittingly titled The End which gives insight into the grimey details of how the collapse of our seemingly infallible financial markets came to be.  Contrary to the right-wing nuttery that lays blame on the likes of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and some bullshit idea that minority lending somehow caused all of this, Lewis points the fingers squarely on the greed of Wall Street and the financial corporations that enabled the buildup to the fall.

Eisman knew subprime lenders could be scumbags. What he underestimated was the total unabashed complicity of the upper class of American capitalism. For instance, he knew that the big Wall Street investment banks took huge piles of loans that in and of themselves might be rated BBB, threw them into a trust, carved the trust into tranches, and wound up with 60 percent of the new total being rated AAA.
...
He called Standard & Poor’s and asked what would happen to default rates if real estate prices fell. The man at S&P couldn’t say; its model for home prices had no ability to accept a negative number. “They were just assuming home prices would keep going up,” Eisman says.

...Wall Street had used these BBB tranches—the worst of the worst—to build yet another tower of bonds: a “particularly egregious” C.D.O. The reason they did this was that the rating agencies, presented with the pile of bonds backed by dubious loans, would pronounce most of them AAA. These bonds could then be sold to investors—pension funds, insurance companies—who were allowed to invest only in highly rated securities. “I cannot fucking believe this is allowed—I must have said that a thousand times in the past two years,” Eisman says.
...
That’s when Eisman finally got it. Here he’d been making these side bets with Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank on the fate of the BBB tranche without fully understanding why those firms were so eager to make the bets. Now he saw. There weren’t enough Americans with shitty credit taking out loans to satisfy investors’ appetite for the end product. The firms used Eisman’s bet to synthesize more of them.

...when Eisman bought a credit-default swap, he enabled Deutsche Bank to create another bond identical in every respect but one to the original. The only difference was that there was no actual homebuyer or borrower. The only assets backing the bonds were the side bets Eisman and others made with firms like Goldman Sachs. Eisman, in effect, was paying to Goldman the interest on a subprime mortgage. In fact, there was no mortgage at all. “They weren’t satisfied getting lots of unqualified borrowers to borrow money to buy a house they couldn’t afford,” Eisman says. “They were creating them out of whole cloth. One hundred times over! That’s why the losses are so much greater than the loans. But that’s when I realized they needed us to keep the machine running. I was like, This is allowed?”
...
He explained that the rating agencies were morally bankrupt and living in fear of becoming actually bankrupt.

“They fucked people. They built a castle to rip people off. Not once in all these years have I come across a person inside a big Wall Street firm who was having a crisis of conscience.”

...the main effect of turning a partnership into a corporation was to transfer the financial risk to the shareholders. “When things go wrong, it’s their problem,” he said—and obviously not theirs alone. When a Wall Street investment bank screwed up badly enough, its risks became the problem of the U.S. government. “It’s laissez-faire until you get in deep shit,” he said, with a half chuckle. He was out of the game.

The whole article is worth a read.

One of my favorite quotes from the news coverage:

"[Barack Obama] is the first 21st century president."

- Chuck Todd, MSNBC

What our peers across the pond think:

They did it. They really did it. So often crudely caricatured by others, the American people yesterday stood in the eye of history and made an emphatic choice for change for themselves and the world. Though bombarded by a blizzard of last-minute negative advertising that should shame the Republican party, American voters held their nerve and elected Barack Obama as their new president to succeed George Bush. Elected him, what is more, by a clearer majority than one of those bitter narrow margins that marked the last two elections.

Check out the comments, too. 

jigan:

Truly a beautiful moment. I feel like I have witnessed a historic moment that, unlike 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq, is actually very positive.

I think in many ways it transcends the politics of Democratic/Republican and race. It's a repudiation of the "spend a little time on the dark side" years of Cheney.

As a Brit ex-pat living in the US, I'm finally tempted into exploring citizenship. Hey, maybe there's even a God...?

sidewaysantelope:

Congratulations, America, I'm truly in envy of your country right now. Oh to be so politically energised, so motivated, so...ready to do something about the world, and not in a Daily Mail, let's sack all comedians kind of way. Positive energy. I'd almost forgotten humans were capable of it, and I don't say that with any exaggeration.

Worth staying up for.

EssemD:

bloody hell... what a country.. after all these years living here as an ex-pat, 28, I actually want to be an American. It's 10 pm.. the kids stayed up to watch Obama's speech... my teen and i just sat there and let out tears flow.. even my 6 yr was moved to tears....

boywithaproblem:

From Adelaide, South Australia I congratulate all of those who voted for Obama. I'm inspired by this and it's made me reassess my perception of the US. I had tears in my eyes today. A historic day for the US and the rest of the world. Wonderful.

Mervo:

Obama's election gives rise to a depressing thought: his brilliance as a candidate is nowhere to be found in British politics. Our election in whenever is going to be a gloomy event.

Nevertheless, today is a good day. Congratulations America.

Holiver:

Sometimes I wish I was an American, in those moments where they seem to stand apart from us. Their endless optimism and their endless desire for change and movement and history. They make history, where as an English woman I feel I am just you know in it. I don't know that much about life, or what it takes to be a successful adult because well I am just a student, full of that optimism and promise and you know I like to watch Jeremy Kyle. I sat up and watched Obama become the 44th American President, I watched Americans cry and I cried and I believed in him and his words and the fact that really, this is going to have an impact on us all and to say that we are not involved is really fruitless.

Derk:

For all the bad things people say about American there are moments in there history where the prove they are the greatest country in the world. When you see that the UK may vote for posh Eton toff as our next leader and their are less ethnic MP's in Parliment than the percentage of enthic people in the country, then the UK can no longer claim to be more developed than the USA.

The USA is changing from a fist to brain. Good choice America.

I think the world just let out a huge sigh of relief; we can finally move forward and really move into the 21st century as a leader not by our might, but by the power of our example.

That the election was only about 6 percentage points apart in the popular vote speaks volumes about the general stupidity of a large portion of the population and the movement towards anti-intellectualism over the last 8 years.

But thank goodness that disaster was narrowly averted:

Your eyes do not deceive you: Fox News, of all outlets, piling on Palin and exposing a disaster in the making.  Come on, not knowing that Africa is a continent?  Not knowing which countries are in NAFTA after claiming bordering Canada and being able to see Russia as foreign policy credentials?  Good fucking lord; I'm not religious, but even I am on the verge of thanking the Heavens that she didn't get elected into office and I hope that America never looks back to this brand of politics of idiocy.

Speaking of religion...

In contrast, check out Obama's stance on the topic of religion and policy:

Nuanced, well thought out, and beautifully centrist (as far as religion is concerned).

This time, from Alaska's own Anchorage Daily News:

Sen. Barack Obama, the Democratic nominee, brings far more promise to the office. In a time of grave economic crisis, he displays thoughtful analysis, enlists wise counsel and operates with a cool, steady hand. The same cannot be said of Sen. McCain.

Sen. Obama warned regulators and the nation 19 months ago that the subprime lending crisis was a disaster in the making. Sen. McCain backed tighter rules for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, but didn't do much to advance that legislation. Of the two candidates, Sen. Obama better understands the mortgage meltdown's root causes and has the judgment and intelligence to shape a solution, as well as the leadership to rally the country behind it. It is easy to look at Sen. Obama and see a return to the smart, bipartisan economic policies of the last Democratic administration in Washington, which left the country with the momentum of growth and a budget surplus that President George Bush has squandered.

What's next, Obama winning Arizona?

In a separate endorsement, the Financial Times writes:

Obama is the better choice

...a campaign is a test of leadership. Mr Obama ran his superbly; Mr McCain’s has often looked a shambles. After eight years of George W. Bush, the steady competence of the Obama operation commands respect.

In responding to the economic emergency, Mr Obama has again impressed – not by advancing solutions of his own, but in displaying a calm and methodical disposition, and in seeking the best advice. Mr McCain’s hasty half-baked interventions were unnerving when they were not beside the point.

On foreign policy, where the candidates have often conspired to exaggerate their differences, this contrast in temperaments seems crucial. For all his experience, Mr McCain has seemed too much guided by an instinct for peremptory action, an exaggerated sense of certainty, and a reluctance to see shades of grey.

John Hodgman -- you may know him as "PC" from the Apple commercials -- raises some excellent points in an interview over at The A.V. Club:

JH: The thing that I find so compelling is that right now Obama's whole campaign strategy is simply [to] speak to people as though they were adults and trust that the truth of the world situation will be evident to them. For him to be attacked as a friend of a terrorist, for "palling" around with terrorists and to simply go back and say, "No, I'm not"? That was such a refreshing political moment. It's like he's saying, "Oh, you know that's not true. You know what's happening here." So much of the past eight years in politics, whether you're a Democrat or a Republican, you have to acknowledge is based on what the Bush people to themselves have described outside the reality-based community. That the words they were speaking had no basis in reality and they felt no compulsion to exist in a real world. They were creating a world of their own imagining.

<snip/>

Do I think that his candidacy is historic? Sure, that's exciting too, but what I think it's really amazing that he exists in the same world that I also inhabit and no other political candidate lives in that world right now. They live in a made-up world that is not reality. I think that that's why you see Obama surging right now. It's that the people like the fact that Obama lives in the world that they live in.

I think the keyword is "reality".  Hodgman hits it on the head with regards to why Bush has failed and why McCain has also failed to deliver (so far) in this campaign.  Neither man seems to be comfortable embracing reality.

An excellent interview that's worth a read.

Also, two of my favorite images from this election:

Check out the official flickr photostream for more good stuff.

I played the game for about 6-7 hours yesterday. I wasn't immediately smitten with it, but once I got into it, I couldn't put it down.

I was thinking about it this morning as I was taking a shower and I've personally come to some conclusions about why this game is so awesome:

1) The enemies actually have resistance/weakness attributes and it actually matters. In the CVs that I've played (AoS, PoR), you could hack your way through the game with one of the more powerful weapons against nearly every single enemy. For example: Claimh Solais. Once you obtained this weapon, you basically didn't need to use anything else and all strategy -- for most of the game -- was thrown out the window. The same is also true for the soul system as well: it didn't really matter which soul you used once you found a powerful one.

In OoE, you are constantly switching glyph sets, even when you revisit parts of the game which should be a cakewalk. Of course, the beautiful part of this is that they put in a very simple - yet powerful - system to set up sets of glyphs. The sleeve system empowers the player and makes the experience fun, strategically. If they had forced players to go into the start screen (i.e. no sleeve system), this game would not be as enjoyable. As an example, I always thought that one of the shortcomings of MGS3 was that it could have played up the role of camo a bit more and made it more strategically fun if it wasn't such a pain in the ass to keep switching camo by going into the menu.

There's also some variety in how dual wielding stacks. As I said: this game empowers the player through the superb control system and introduces an element of strategic action, but in a way that doesn't punish the player by having to take the experience out of the action and into the menu system. It makes it a joy to play.

2) The glyph union system, while limited, is pretty awesome. I would have liked to see more distinct combination types. For example, if you combine a non-weapon type glyph with a weapon type glyph, you get the same animation and same attack characteristics, regardless of which weapon type you combine it with. It would have been cool if you ended up with a greater variety of combinations to experiment with. For example, combining the ice glyph with a sword type glyph would yield a different result than combining the ice glyph with an ax type glyph.

But still, while it's not very deep, it's deep enough that it adds variety to how you configure your glyphs.

3) While the game is not "OMG I'M GOING TO THROW THIS ACROSS THE ROOM IF I DIE ONE MORE TIME" hard, it's definitely not as easy as the other CVs I've played. The key is that it's not hard in a cheesy way. At all times, you feel that Shanoa is sufficiently powerful; I would summarize it as "it's hard in terms of strategic action". It's not mindless hack-n-slash.

Also, the item system is very limited (in a good way). There aren't absurdly powerful items in the game (yet) that nullify the need for player skill. This is a good thing. Healing items are VERY weak, in general.

4) As an extension of (3), I think they did a good job balancing the game. Shanoa's life meter isn't absurdly high to the point where she can just take damage and slash her way through bosses. Also, using MP for attacks adds to that sense of balance: you can't just slash your way through with your most powerful glyph. You need to consider strategy. The glyph union/heart system is also a nice touch since it means you can't just spam your most powerful attacks and expect to win. At least to this point, at every boss encounter, I've run out of hearts long before the battle has been over.

_____________________________

Conclusion: this game is solid, fun, and ultimately very satisfying. It's everything that's right about gaming.  If you have a DS, you owe it to yourself to get this game.

Yesterday at dinner, a coworker brought up the election and my support for Obama.  The conversation started something like: "So I can't believe you're voting for Obama."  It diverged into various topics from healthcare to gun control to experience to socialism.  It was a great conversation and it felt good to be able to have such a civil converstation with a friend from a staunchly Republican state.  America needs more dialogue like the one we had over dinner last night; America needs a sanity check against extremism towards either side of the spectrum and understand that divided we fail.

But today, as I was following the news, it struck me that I'm not the one that should be questioned about my support for Obama -- I'm a 20-something moderate liberal from New Jersey, after all .  The statement should really be made to the various high profile conservatives who have now come out in support of Obama, including Colin Powell.

The latest round of conservatives supporting Obama comes by way of Charles Fried:

Reagan Appointee and (Recent) McCain Adviser Charles Fried Supports Obama

Charles Fried, a professor at Harvard Law School, has long been one of the most important conservative thinkers in the United States. Under President Reagan, he served, with great distinction, as Solicitor General of the United States. Since then, he has been prominently associated with several Republican leaders and candidates, most recently John McCain, for whom he expressed his enthusiastic support in January.

This week, Fried announced that he has voted for Obama-Biden by absentee ballot. In his letter to Trevor Potter, the General Counsel to the McCain-Palin campaign, he asked that his name be removed from the several campaign-related committees on which he serves. In that letter, he said that chief among the reasons for his decision "is the choice of Sarah Palin at a time of deep national crisis."

Fried is exceptionally thoughtful and principled; his vote for Obama is especially noteworthy.

and Larry Wilkerson:

Foreign Policy: Colin Powell endorsed Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama this weekend on Meet the Press. How significant was that move for General Powell, and was it something you expected?

Larry Wilkerson: I was stunned. I was ecstatic. I was thrilled, but I was stunned. I thought that he would come forward and make statements about the need to tamp down the hatred and the vitriol that seemed to be surrounding Senator McCain and Governor Palin’s rallies. And I thought he would use the opportunity to make his strong point about Muslims. I thought he would take the opportunity to reinforce that we need to restore America’s reputation and solve this financial crisis. But I didn’t think that he would endorse a particular candidate.

FP: What do you see as the strengths and weaknesses of each of the candidates in foreign policy?

LW: Both have strengths. I’m not quite sure what I would describe as Obama’s weaknesses, not because I’m trying to say that he’s perfect but because he’s so unflappable and so far his pronouncements have been so solid.

With McCain, I’m alarmed by the lack of sophistication on issues such as Iran; the bomb Iran [idea] seemed to come out of [McCain’s] passion more than his judgment. I’m alarmed by the people around him; [many] are radicals. They are just like the Wolfowitzes and the Perles of the world. Calling them conservatives offends the title. I have grave difficulty with McCain taking advice from these people. I am concerned with his inability to accept that we have to leave Iraq. Victory is not coming home with trumpets blaring; it is leaving a relatively stable government in place that won’t fall in first five minutes and not resort to civil war. He still thinks that victory was possible in my war, Vietnam, which I know was not correct. Those kinds of things concern me.

and Bill Weld, the former governer of Massachuesetts who supported Romney in the primaries, also voiced his support for Obama:

Weld told the Associated Press that while he has never endorsed a Democrat for president before, his choice in recent weeks became "close to a no-brainer."

"It's not often you get a guy with his combination of qualities, chief among which I would say is the deep sense of calm he displays, and I think that's a product of his equally deep intelligence," he said.

Weld said his decision was not based on McCain's weaknesses.

Weld said, "Senator Obama is a once-in-a-lifetime candidate who will transform our politics and restore America's standing in the world. We need a president who will lead based on our common values and Senator Obama demonstrates an ability to unite and inspire. Throughout this campaign I've watched his steady leadership through trying times and I'm confident he is the best candidate to move our country forward."

It's interesting, to me at least, because I would think that a self professed moderate liberal would be the last person that would suprise anyone by voting for Obama when there are plenty of high profile conservatives who have already voiced support for Obama.  And certainly, each of these folks have the right to support any individual they wish -- be it Paul, Barr, Romney, or anyone else for that matter -- but they have come out in overwhelming support for Obama. 

So the question shouldn't be why guys like me are supporting Obama; the question should be why guys like Weld, Powell, Wilkerson, Fried, Wick Allison, Christopher Buckley, Susan Eisenhower, and CC Goldwater are not just rebuking McCain, but actively showing support for Obama when they can choose neither candidate and/or stay silent on the topic; heck, they could even write in their candidate of choice.

I hope more moderate conservatives around the country start to examine why many high profile Republicans and conservatives have come out in support of Barack Obama.  It's hard to use the "hype", "brainwashing", or "no substance" argument when several conservatives (far more distinguised and more accomplished than myself -- not even the same plane) have chosen to support Obama when they are free to support any alternative they wish.

Is it really that the liberal masses are acting like sheep and overdosing on Hopium?  Is it really the case that Obama is just empty rhetoric and merely an eloquent speaker?  Or perhaps these seasonsed veterans of politics and veterans of a now perverted conservative movement have seen something in Barack Obama to lead them to believe that perhaps, just maybe, there is a slight chance this guy has the potential to be not just a good president, but a great president?

I don't know; I'll leave this as an exercise for the reader to consider these endorsements and votes from several high profile conservatives, Republicans, and traditionally conservative newspapers.

As a closing comment, I'd like to share a story by way of Ben Smith, a story of a guy named Mike who went to the polls with his Dale Earnhardt jacket fully prepared to cast a vote for McCain:

"Obama's going to win, and I didn't want to tell my grandchildren some day that I had an opportunity to vote for the first black president, but I missed my chance at history and voted for the other guy."

Food for thought.