Speaker for the Diodes

"I think most of [Glenn] Beck's act is just that, an act; but I also think that for him to do what he does -- to spout crazy nonsense on TV and cash the check, knowing that perhaps thousands take him very seriously -- to be able to do all that requires a certain personality, one that's not entirely wholesome or healthy. Most normal people, I think, would not choose to be professional hucksters, even if they had a talent for it." -- Vermic, 2010-03-12

"Written laws are like spider's webs; they will catch, it is true, the weak and the poor, but would be torn in pieces by the rich and powerful." -- Anacharsis

"I posed myself the following scenario: Why is it that a transsexual woman can't represent a religious icon given life by so many other actors and actresses throughout history? To not do it would be akin to internalizing the same discriminatory principles that people want to throw against us" -- Spanish trans rights activist Carla Antonelli, quoted in an article about a controversial calendar using trans models to portray the Virgin Mary, 2009-10-17 (which I found by way of a post at Questioning Transphobia)

"Our Republic and its press will rise or fall together. An able, disinterested, public-spirited press, with trained intelligence to know the right and courage to do it, can preserve that public virtue without which popular government is a sham and a mockery. A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will produce in time a people as base as itself. The power to mould the future of the Republic will be in the hands of the journalists of future generations." -- Joseph Pulitzer, The North American Review (May 1904)

"The problem is that the vast majority of the issues brought up by the tea party types and Palin are idiotic. These aren't people with the traditional lower-middle class concerns of Americans (which is my family background) but instead these are people who largely believe the conspiracy du jour, whether that involves secret armies, the president's 'true' nationality, or Nancy Pelosi's 'death panels' that are set up to pull the plug on Grandma.

"While the concerns of many white, middle-class people are worthy causes and should be addressed by liberals (and are), it is not elitism to treat this roving band of conspiracy nuts for the cretins they are or associate with. This would be akin to President Johnson in 1964 undertaking a federal committee to study the mind control powers of fluoridated water. That would be asinine."

-- Oliver Willis, 2009-11-13, Salon

Still behind on ... well, life. Behind on lots of projects, behind on LJ/DW/IJ/etc. readiing, obviously behind on posting, behind on email ... Not sure when I'll start to catch up. But in the meantime:

I put the old hard drive from my Mac into a USB enclosure just to see whether it was Completely Dead or Mostly Dead. Well ... Disk Utility can see and identify it, but cannot repair it, nor copy it. Using dd(1) from the command line, I can copy a little bit at a time, then dd stops with an I/O error; starting it again with a "skip=" parameter gets me another chunk, and so on. (I also tried fsck(8), which said the superblock magic number was wrong and couldn't find an alternate superblock on its own.)

So I can apparently read parts of the disk, but what I'm copying will have holes in it.

To try to recover info from the drive more efficiently (or at least more conveniently) -- and/or to try to reconstruct MP3, JPEG, TIFF, and HTML files from the partial-disk-image-chunks, what tools should I STFW for? (Okay, I know I can use strings(1) to search for HTML...) Or is this going to be a yak-shaving exercise where I start by refreshing my fuzzy memory of the structure of an inode and start cobbling together my own tools in C?

A bunch of directories were in my Dropbox folder, so I got those back right away (about 600 MB). Another few gig, I was eventually able to read from the DVD I'd been in the process of burning when the old drive stopped being helpful (I couldn't read it on the Mac's internal optical drive, nor with an external USB DVD drive on the Mac -- I had to attach the USB DVD to a WinXP box and mount it as a Samba volume (once I found out that the Mac's Ethernet port automatically senses when a crossover cable ought to have been used and reconfigures itself accordingly, which is awfully convenient)). But there were a bunch of directories I wasn't able to copy in time, and a couple of those contained files it would be really good to be able to recover.

From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2008-01-15:

"If the best in the business is that bad, there's hope for us all." -- Hoagy Carmichael, composer, on colleague Irving Berlin's rudimentary piano playing. Quoted in the book The House that George Built, by Wilfrid Sheed.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/22/books/review/Keillor-t.html]

(submitted to the mailing list by Terry Labach)

"Humanity I love you because when you're hard up you pawn your intelligence to buy a drink." -- Edward Estlin Cummings (aka E.E. Cummings or e.e. cummings; b. 1894-10-14, d. 1962-09-03)

"If it goes away when I remember to take my medication, it probably isn't a character flaw." -- suecochran, 2010-02-27

-- from the comic strip The Whiteboard by "Doc" Nickel, 2006-12-04

"Equal civil rights should be a floor we're all standing on, not a ceiling only a few people can reach." -- Keori, 2009-07-06 (regarding whether flamboyant, kinky members members of the LTBG community should be "pushed off" of "the GLBT civil rights bandwagon" in order to improve the odds of more mainstream-lifestyle members getting accepted social conservative anti-gay folks)

"Unix programmers inherit a strong bias toward making interfaces expressive and configurable. Like programmers from other traditions, they think about how to match their interfaces to the target audience -- but they differ in how they deal with uncertainty about that target audience. Software developers whose experience is primarily with client operating systems default toward making interfaces simple; they are willing to sacrifice expressiveness to gain ease. Unix programmers default toward making interfaces expressive and transparent, and are more willing to sacrifice ease to get these qualities.

"The results of this attitude have often been described as interfaces written 'by programmers, for programmers'. But this oversimplifies the matter in an important way. When a Unix programmer opts for configurability and expressiveness over ease, he is not necessarily thinking of his audience as consisting solely of other programmers; rather, he is often acting on a gut-level instinct that in the absence of knowledge about end-users' intentions it is best not to patronize or second-guess them."

-- Eric S. Raymond, The Art of Unix Programming, 2003 (partway through chapter 11, if you want to jump straight to the immediate context)

"Funny how on both sides of the border policies supported by the majority of the public get dismissed as 'left wing fringe'" -- DailyKos user MadRuth, 2009-09-20

From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2008-07-22:

"Every rehearsal of the Maggiore Quartet begins with a very plain, very slow three-octave scale on all four instruments in unison: sometimes major, as in our name, sometimes minor, depending on the key of the first piece we are to play. No matter how fraught our lives have been over the last couple of days, no matter how abrasive our disputes about people or politics, or how visceral our differences about what we are to play and how we are to play it, it reminds us that we are, when it comes to it, one. We try not to look at each other when we play this scale; no one appears to lead. Even the first upbeat is merely breathed by Piers, not indicated by any movement of his head. When I play this I release myself into the spirit of the quartet. I become the music of the scale. I mute my will. I free my self." -- Vikram Seth, from his novel An Equal Music.

(submitted to the mailing list by Kathleen Magone)

"If absolute power corrupts absolutely, does absolute powerlessness make you pure?" -- Harry Shearer [thanks to blueeowyn]

man: "I think the realities of the political processs probably mainstream most of the radicalism out of anybody, just in the name of being able to get anything accomplished at all."

woman: "So if we feed the system visionaries, and it spits them out as mediocrities... then what we need is some sort of extreme double mega-visionary who'll get worn down to the level of 'visionary'.

man: "In other words, we should elect the most crazy nutball whackjobs out there."

-- from Wondermark, by David Malki, 2008-02-05

[Er ... are we sure that hasn't already been the strategy of the neocons for a while?]

"I guess there's a mathematical puzzle here because Jon Stewart's coolness is almost infinite but if you divide it by Viacom's stupidity you still manage to get a zero." -- Laurent, 2010-03-04 [ thanks to osewalrus for linking to the article this was said in response to]

"I'm the captain of a space ship! I deserve to be higher on the food chain!" -- Sam Starfall (a squid-like alien from the comic strip Freefall by Mark Stanley), after being found tasty by an emu 2006-11-27

"[I]f the last 20 years has proven anything, it is that the Mainstream Media will absolutely never under any circumstances report on any serious and systemic political problem if they cannot somehow figure out a way to allocate at least 51% of the blame to the Dirty Fucking Hippies." -- Driftglass, 2010-02-21 [ thanks to realinterrobang for quoting it earlier]

"If your soundbites sound oppressive, you need better soundbites." -- aquaeri, 2007-07-30