Daniel J. Luke's Weblog

I thought that Gwen Ifill did a good job as moderator. While I was disappointed with the debate format (especially the shortness of the answers), her questions overall seemed very good. One exception being the stupid 'achilles heel' question (which seemed more like a typical HR interview question).

Of course, during the debate I envisioned a new debate format where the moderator would interrupt and berate the candidate for not answering the question that was asked. (In this debate, both candidates would have been interrupted, although Gov. Palin would have been more often).

And finally, I think that the seemingly random specter of Holocaust 2.0 by Gov. Palin at 9:52PM managed to cross over into "Godwin's Law" territory, thus giving us a definitive loser to the debate.

That is all.

So, I had apache2 configured globally with mod_deflate as such:

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml text/javascript

... which was working fine.

However, when doing a test deployment of an application I'm working on for work, FF3 didn't like what Catalyst was sending back for my login page (which works fine in Safari).

A quick fix was to temporarily disable it. Of course, one noticeable thing is that the web application I'm writing feels much faster without it on. I suspect this is mostly due to the relatively slow CPUs on the geeklair.net machine. This plus the fact that the server isn't bandwidth constrained at all probably makes mod_deflate a bad idea (or at least a bad idea to be globally active).

I may re-enable it for some portions of the stuff that is being served (perhaps most of the vhosts and the geeklair.net main site + blogs). For now, though, it's disabled.

Purdue scientists to use wasps against ash borer

We're importing a non-native species (or three) to try to control the emerald ash borer.

I don't like wasps.

PyObjC, you are so helpful:

"Expecting instance of reply_fixer as self, got one of reply_fixer"

That doesn't seem like a reason to throw an exception to me.

I'm pretty close to just giving up on python for this and using Objective-C instead (even though part of the reason why I'm doing this is to play with python some more).

I've been suffering from progressively worsening achilles tendonitis since sometime around 2002. In 2004, I was fitted for orthotics (since I over-pronate) and it made things better, but I didn't heal fully. In late 2006/early 2007 I started getting worse and decided to stop fencing competitively, not practice as much, and let things heal. Achilles tendonitis is an over-use injury, so rest seemed to be the best idea.

However, I while the day-to-day pain went away, any activity would cause the problem to flare up again. After an appointment with my new doctor (since my previous one retired), I'm now going to a physical therapist to try to help my achilles tendonitis (which wasn't healing by just resting).

So far, the results are really good. On the first day, I had cortisone delivered via therapeutic ultrasound and electrical stimulation on both tendons.

The second visit started with some warm-up and then some exercises. Since the previous visit had made me fairly sore, we skipped the electrical stimulation and just did the ultrasound treatment.

On the third visit, we did some exercises, noted that the swelling in my tendons had been dramatically reduced, and tried iontophoresis. Which was what my new doctor had originally recommended (he also advised me to get some night splints, since they are fairly cheap and help a good portion of the time. I ordered a pair of Strassburg Socks after being unable to find something similar locally).

Today was visit 4. The night previously, I had a fencing lesson which went fairly well (and I was able to do a moderate level of activity which didn't result in lots of pain the next morning). Again, we noted the the swelling had gone down (even more) in my tendons and the physical therapist noted that they felt looser. Since the iontophoresis had resulted in a little pain/discomfort, we decided to just do the ultrasound treatment after the exercises. We added a couple of new exercises to the routine this time.

That brings things up to date. My tendons currently feel much better than they have in the past two years, which is pretty exciting.

You must click this:

holy f'in WOOD

The Michigan supreme court makes another bad decision.

I at least some of the uninformed people who voted for that craptacular state constitutional amendment realize what a stupid mistake that that was.

Things completed:

- Filled the bird feeder for the first time since last fall
- Prepare snowblower for off season (siphon fuel back to can, run snowblower dry)
- Change lawnmower oil
- Sharpen lawnmower blade
- Mow the lawn
- Clean up piles of leaves near driveway, air conditioner, and back porch steps (and put them in our new compost bin)
- Take hoses out of garage and hook them back up
- Change tires on the IS300 (store snow tires, put on summer tires)

Things yet to be completed:

- Pick up my roto-tiller from my sister
- Prepare garden area behind garage (till, mix in new soil, fertilize)
- Purchase garden fence and install it
- Plant seeds
- Water
- Purchase new mulch and spread
- Use the tiller in 'edger' mode to clean up the edges of the lawn near the driveway/sidewalk
- Trim bushes
- Trim trees (and call a tree trimmer to allow more sunlight by the garden and trim the maple away from the house)

So, CNN is reporting that a study shows single parents cost taxpayers $112 billion.

Of course, the observant reader will notice that the "... work was sponsored by four groups ... the New York-based Institute for American Values, the Institute for Marriage and Public Policy, Families Northwest of Redmond, Washington, and the Georgia Family Council, an ally of the conservative ministry Focus on the Family."

As you might expect, when advocacy groups (of any political persuasion) support any kind of study, the outcome is strangely correlated with their agenda.

There is a good discussion of the particular trick used to achieve the result with this study in this post (at the Freakonomics blog).

Summary:

"But the first law of advocacy science coincides with a well-known economic principle: any cost-benefit analysis that only looks at one side of the ledger will always come to a reliable conclusion."

Mail.app has been acting a little strangely for me on 10.5 (incorrect unread message counts for mailboxes, occasionally stalling for a minute or so before displaying a message - especially while synchronizing).

Some searching online led me to suspect that the Envelope Index sqlite database was in in need of a vacuum.

Procedure:

1. Quit Mail.app
2. Run $ sqlite3 ~/Library/Mail/Envelope\ Index vacuum
3. Wait.
4. Launch Mail.app

So far, it seems to have helped immensely. (In a year or so, I'll probably need to search for this post to do it again - it might make sense to turn on auto_vacuum, but it looks like it needs to be turned on before the tables are set up).