I am getting tired of making execuses for our troops in Iraq.  I know it's just a few among hundreds of thousands there who were responsible for the ugly deeds.  I also know that it was the zealots in the military intelligence willing to do anything to get information and irresponsible army commanders more interested in avoiding political conflicts than doing the right thing.

But the road to understanding how those soldiers can do what they did, even if coerced, leaves rest of the hundreds of thousands American soldiers in Iraq naked.  Could other groups of them have behaved better under the same circumstances?  Sadly, my answer is no.  Only consolation is that armies of other countries would not have done any better if they were traumatized through the same tragic events as US have.  Some consolation.

I am not sure which is worse.  Death of thousands of American citizens and Destruction of a famous American landmark or stunning blows to our pride like this.  The former enraged me, the later left me hollow.  I know that most of the pride was more wishful thinking reinforced by the hero-worshiping media, but it's shocking still to be stripped of it.

Update:

I thought this Washington Post editorial titled Mr. Rumsfeld's Responsibility was a good read although it didn't say what I was hoping it would say.

The lawlessness began in January 2002 when Mr. Rumsfeld publicly declared that hundreds of people detained by U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan "do not have any rights" under the Geneva Conventions.

This was what I was hoping the editorial should have said:

Regardless of law and origin, people are not born with basic human rights nor are they deserved, earned, or gained by agreement, but they are given by those who value their sanity and the risk they face in absense of such gift to their enemy.

Yes, it goes back to my Selfish Pig philosophy.  We must give these rights out of our own selfish need to preserve of our sorry ass morals.

Semacode is an interesting implementation of an old idea reborn yet again (remember the Cat fiasco?) to take advantage of increasing number of camera phones to link real world to the cyberspace.  Check it out.

I finally saw the movie Master and Commander today.  While the movie was very well made, I didn't enjoy it as much as I enjoyed the books.  Also I felt Russell Crowe portrayed Captain Aubrey too differently.  Aubrey I know is more stoic, drier character who gains respect by doing.  Russell Crowe's Aubrey was wittier and flimsier.  Maturin was also too young and seemed too inexperienced.  Still, I enjoyed the action at sea although I wish there was more battle scenes and ships manuevering.

Today is my 42nd birthday and I have yet to wake up.  I like to run away alone to some quiet corner of the world on my birthdays, but haven't been able to since I got married.  I wish I could be standing somewhere in Tibet right now, completely lost and grinning for no reason at all.

I want to be somewhere where I don't have to think about things like Bush, Iraq, Google, or Atom.  And I want to be there without hours of jet engine noise.  Maybe I want to get there in a merchant ship, puking across the Pacific and telling passing whales 'sorry but you piss in there too, don't ya?'

Why do I like to get away on my birthdays?  Well, I do get into a really weird mood in the first place, and I want to remember all of my birthdays by eccentric events.  Living the everyday life is like living in a mine, you can't tell what time it is without a watch.  It's like being told the wind outside is 30mph instead of feeling the wind on your face.  Being alone and somewhere I never been before lets me feel the 'wind' of life as it passes by.

Oh, heck.  Maybe when I retire, I'll pickup my travelling stick again.  Until then, bitching is all I'll be doing.

When I replaced the silly Notepad last time, I switched to SciTE.  While SciTE was good, its UI was non-standard and the single binary packaging version had some irritating problems such as config file updating.  Still it was better and it's syntax hilighting was really helpful.

Now there is a better option: Florian Balmer's Notepad2 (via Omar Shahine).

Notepad2 seems to offer everything SciTE did and without having to live with it's weird UI.  And it also comes with source code if you need to make changes.

To install, you can follow Omar's directions or do the samething I did last time.  Here is a copy with appropriate changes.

How to replace Notepad.exe on Windows XP

Windows XP has file protection so Notepad.exe will get restored if you just replace the file with renamed Notepad2.exe.  Follow these steps:

1. Download Notepad2.zip, expand and rename Notepad2.exe to Notepad.exe
2. Save a copy of the original Notepad.exe somewhere.
3. Replace Notepad.exe in following three locations (order is significant):
    
   • %WINDIR%\System32\DllCache
   • %WINDIR%\System32
   • %WINDIR%

     *%WINDIR% is your Windows folder (i.e. C:\Windows)
      

4. Press Cancel when a warning dialog appears.

I don't know about others, but I noticed a sudden drop in the number of spams I receive daily starting last week.  I used to get 600 to 1000 spams per day every day but now I am getting 150 to 250 per day.  First I thought there might be some spammers' convention going on but now I think the news of this spammer crack down might have been leaked ahead and froze at least the US spammers.  Are others seeing the similar drop in spams or did I somehow drop out of must-spam-this-guy list?

Some of you probably have seen this my wife showed me this video that has been going around among Korean-American mothers: a Chinese video showing how to fold a T-shirt in 2 seconds.  The technique works for long sleeve shirts too but takes a couple of seconds longer.  Although I am pretty much a typical male chauvinist pig when it comes to house chores, this video was so amazing it actually made me want to fold some T-shirts!  Wow.

Recent posts about LOAF, which uses Bloom filter, created a small surge of discussion about bloom filters, most notable being the Using Bloom Filters article at Perl.com by Maciej Ceglowski whom I like to remember as the fish guy (visit his blog to see why).

I went fishing for some bloom filter code but couldn't find a general library in either Java or C++.  There was one for Perl but…  Anyhow, it's probably because there isn't much code needed.  Most of the Bloom filter works is finetuning the parameters and choosing the right hashing function so it doesn't really matter.

Beside Maciej's article, I found these pages useful:

• Bloom Filters – the math (obviously explains the math behind BF)
• Some Motley Bloom Tricks (does this and does that with BF)
• Compressed Bloom Filters (PDF – self-explanatory)
• Coding Bloom Filters (game developer's tuturial on BF)

BF is pretty simple stuff but useful in many areas.  I am thinking of using it to detect 'access devices' (user name, password, SSN, credit card numbers, etc.) being submitted translucently (translucent as in Translucent Database) so I can throw up a dialog warning to the user.

Is it summer or late spring?  It sure feels like summer here in the Bay Area.  Anyhow, Steve Kirks shot his azalea for me, so I thought I should send him some of my flowers.  I guess Tim Bray is too busy with his new job to take snapshots of his lawn.

I am rather embarrased to admit that I have no idea what this flower growing in my backyard is.  The tag got lost you see and my head being filled with essentials like Boo leaves little room for flower names other than simple ones like the rose and the sunflower.  It's the same with wine names so all I can manage is 'I'll have the, er, red.'