wiredfool

There was snow on the ground and roofs this morning. A neighborhood cat apparently went exploring. I’m pretty sure that it wasn’t one of ours, since they have bigger feet than that. The paw prints look about twice the size of a squirrel.

The strawberry bed is resting for the year.

So is the cat.

To paraphrase Jason, Habenero is very danger.

I’m still not sure what possessed us to plant a habanero pepper plant this spring. But I’ve now come across the second time when I wished that I have a laminar flow hood in the kitchen. Both times due to peppers from the garden.

We used about half of the harvest (30 or so) to make some hot sauce. Roasted, then blended in lime juice and salt. We were smart enough to use gloves for the stemming and seeding process, but opening the blender releases enough capcaisin to cause coughing fits. Hence the desire for biotech grade lab equipment to contain the fumes. A bit on the tongue delivered by toothpick is enough to cause burning. We even cut the intensity with a couple of anchos, but still too hot for me.

Oh, and we still haven’t really made a dent in the cayenne or thai dragons, but they’re drying nicely and should store through the winter. So if there are any locals who are interested in some organic fire, let me know.

Today was one of those quiet minor voting days where only local questions are asked. so I had a good chance to look around and see where our particular system is more secure than the Diebold ‘Swiss Cheese’ electronic voting system.

My polling place has scantron style ballots that are fed into a central machine. So it is electronic voting, but there is a voter and election official verifiable paper trail.

The government knows:

• That I voted, or rather someone showing my voter registration card and signing my name voted.
• That I recieved a specific serial numbered ballot. The ballots are in two parts, a serial numbered tear off stub and the main portion with the choices. I did not see a serial number on the main portion. Both portions are printed iwth the precinct number. The ballot number was entered next to my signature by the poll worker.
• Presumably that the ballot was fed into the voting machine, as far as a count of ballots distributed vs. those collected.

I know:

• That I voted for a certain collection of candidates, and that if there should be a recount, an election official could determine who I intended to vote for.
• That I was about the 60th person to vote in my polling place today.
• I strongly suspect that the ballots are handed out in numerical order in any given precinct.

This system is supposed to provide an anonymous secure ballot. Strictly speaking, someone with access to the ordered stack of ballots and the precinct ballot numbers could come very close to determining whose ballot was whose. It could also be done with a surveillance camera noting the order of people exiting the building. not perfectly, but I’d bet you could get 95% confidence if the polling place wasn’t all that busy. (and they aren’t, at least in off years.)

Security seems better. I am confident that if the ballots were taken out and inspected by officals, they could arrive at an accurate total of votes in the event of a recount. This is the area where the Diebold systems fall down. There is no paper trail, so you can never objectively recount the ballots.

This system isn’t perfect, but any system that is proposed to replace it should be at least this secure against tampering. the only way to do that is to retain a voter and election official verifiable paper trail.

The indoor weather exhibit at the Tate Modern Art Museum.

A 22 mile long dry stone wall that runs over the tops of 15 mountains, in what passes for wilderness in Southern Northern Ireland.

London has such interesting architecture. 1000 years, all on top of itself.

London also seems to attract eccentrics who want to live in glass houses.

I’m now aquired and installed Panther (the family version) on an external firewire drive.

Verdict 1: It doesn’t play nice with my Geforce 4MX card in the Sawtooth machine. After the first disk wants to reboot, I’m left with a black screen. Attaching to the tibook works, so finishing the installation works.

Verdict 2: It does work on the tibook, and seems snappier than Jaguar. I’m not sure if this is due to Panther or the fact that it’s installed on a 7200rpm external drive, rather than the internal 4200rpm one.

Verdict 2.5: Powerbooks are no fun with a 5 lb firewire drive attached to them.

Verdict 3: If you change your admin user name using NetInfo Manager, make sure that you alter the sudoers file and the admin group to include the new username. You will need sudo and niutil to fix things. Or alternately, make sure that you have an alternate boot disk that you can resurrect things from. Scratch that. If you do anything using NetInfo Manager/niutil, make sure that you have an alternate boot disk.

As for verdict 1, there is at least one solutions that I know of for getting up and running, and I strongly suspect a second.

• Replace your geforce driver with the one from 10.2, which can be downloaded from Other World Computing, or found on your 10.2 drive. It’s named /System/Library/Geforce.kext . See here
• I strongly suspect that simply removing that kernel extension will also work, since I had mine installed with the wrong permissions the first time Panther refused to load it.

Both of those solutions leave you without quartz extreme, so it’s a bit of a hit, especially since we’re talking about a 400mhz machine here. But it does work, which means that I can get on with the business of mucking about in the new os.

And as an aside, this video card doesn’t work in 10.1.x either, which is also a pita since I’m still (sort of) supporting some apps on 10.1. Swapping video cards to change osxen is not a good long term policy. (but those solutions look terribly promising to the 10.1.x problem too. Promising, but not effective.)

***Update!

It works in 10.3.2! Quartz extreme, and oh it’s nice.

Tuesday Night: Sleep, Aurora.
Wednesday Night: Stayed up, Minor Aurora.
Tonight?

The indicators are pegged from the X10 (no not the painful ad company) flare late yesterday and the weather’s supposed to clear in a couple of hours.

It will probably only happen if I go to bed. So to fake out the aurora, I think I’m going to go to bed early and time one of my lingering cold coughing fits for the middle of the night. Heh.

There was an extremely large solar flare this morning, apparently the third largest in the last 20 years or so, pointed directly at the earth. There are forcasts for severe geomagnetic storms, which from my reading would tend to indicate that auroras might be visible in the Seattle area and points southward starting around midnight PST. It’s a little unclear if it’s really going to happen, as recent notable but much less sever flares have resulted in no activity. (even for locals in dark skies).

Some links:

• Lots of data
• Space Forecast
• Slashdotted forcast
• Coronograph Movie
• Three movies

From what I can gather, Seattle should see aurora activity if the Kp value gets above 7 or so, and it’s hovering around a 5 with 8 hours to go before the main mass is supposed to hit round midnight. And I’m not sure that observer satellites are staying up through the storm because of potential damage.

So. Is it worth staying up till midnightish and trying to find a dark spot?
This article says 30 hours from flare to aurora, which puts it tomorrow.

***Update
I decided to go to bed, with ~20% cloud cover from my Seattle neighborhood location. Looking at the data this morning, Kp went to 9 right around midnight local time, which means that we probably had visible aurora while I was asleep. Oh well.

Back in from the UK, where I’ve seen their equivalent of sucker weather. So far in two autumn trips to the infamously rainy and wet islands, I’ve seen all of two days of rain. Some mist, some clouds, but a lot of sun.

And we return on a day that Seattle has its wettest day ever – 3.77 inches of rain yesterday. And it’s not really letting up today, if the state of the incoming cat fur means anything.

Other than that, it’s about as you’d expect. 2000 spams, a handful of useful emails, and two cats saying “Feed me, dammit”.

While my body is in Northern Ireland, My consciousness is still somewhere over Iceland. A few hours out of phase, made worse by not being used to the custom of drinking (caffeinated) tea with every event.

It’s green here. Shades and shades of green, from dull to neon. And that’s just the back garden.