The TRC scouting application for 2005 has arrived. Its got almost no security, so please be nice. Comments are welcome, but don’t expect me to do anything about them. I can give out the source code though, so if you are feeling creative have at.
You can now say that you read the blog of the secretary of the Libertarian Party of King County.
Yeah.
Now, the story…
About a week ago, I got an email from the Libertarian Party of King County (LPKC) inviting me to a “Liberty Forum” at the Azteca resturant in Bellevue. Well, I like Mexican food, and I like liberty, so I thought, sounds like a good deal to me!.
I made it to the resturant (after driving maddeningly around in circles due to the circuitous nature of Bellevue’s roads in the vicinity of Azteca), and on the way to the back room, I ran into the Jimmas, but that is another story. After chatting with them, I went back into the room, where the experience truly began. In attendance was Ruth Bennett, recent gubernatorial candidate who won something on the order of 50 times the votes that divided the other two candidates, J Mills, a senatorial candidate, who later spoke at length about the contested governor’s election, King 5’s mistreatment of the Libertarian Party, and several other topics. But back to the story.
The first order of business was election of new officers. Two students from the University of Washington became chair and vice-chair of the LPKC, but then when the call went out for nominations for the Secretary, the room was silent. Well, I had actually played with the idea of running for an office before arriving, but there was a small problem – I was not a member of the Libertarian Party, officially. I informed the group of my willingness to fill the position, and of the caveat.
“Well, we can fix that,” burst out Ruth. So, with a move to nominate me, a second, and no objections, a vote was taken, and I was unanimously elected to the post of Secretary of the Libertarian Party of King County.
My duties consist of taking minutes at about four executive meetings over the next year and a few other miscellaneous tasks that I’ll have to get rebriefed on, because frankly, I forgot what they were. So as you can tell, I’m already doing a great job…
More seriously, however, could this be the start of my political career?
With some help from my wonderful mother, the latest TRC video is basically complete. And it’s a doozie. Four songs perfectly blended with action, suspense, drama, plot, and excitment all curled in to about seven minutes of video. The first screening will be at the International School in Bellevue, but after that it will likely find its way on to the TRC website. Stay tuned!
Today I was searching for a good way to change permissions recursively, but only on directories or only on files, because of the vast difference in meaning for the executable flag between the two. Google is a great friend, and led me to a site, whose address I do not exactly remember, but whose advice was perfect:
find . -type d -name public_html -exec chmod 0755 {} \;
Just strip out the -name argument, and change between -type d and -type f to chmod only files or only directories, recursively from the current directory. A great way to correct past misconceptions about the setgid and setuid bits!
The more I learn about the Unix security system, the more amazed I am with how well it accomplishes so many taks while remaining very lightweight with just 12 bits of permissions per file. With my newfound better understanding of the setuid and setgid bits, specifically at how they behave differently when applied to directories and files, I am now starting to think I have a pretty good grasp of how the Unix security scheme works, and how to make it both high security and highly usable. User Private Groups is in my view the best way to set up a user-friendly filesystem that allows for higher-than-average security and higher-than-average usability for webmasters.
The website of the Titan Robotics Club uses the ColdFusion Meta Language (CFML) to generate and display its dynamic content. I posted earlier about how ColdFusion was an easy language to learn, and that it seemed semantically powerful, able to accomplish a lot in not too many lines of code. While that is still true, there seems to be a dark side to the ColdFusion story or at least that of our current host, readyhosting.com. It seems that of the server’s stability leaves something to be desired, especially on start-up. For example, if you are te first person to visit the site after some period of time and (at least this is what I speculate happens) the ColdFusion interpreter has shut down, you are greeted by a hideous page with SQL statements and unprocessed cfoutput statements, which is hopelessly ugly. Occasionally when just reloading the home page, you will witness the same phenomenon. Needless to say, we can only hope this doesn’t happen when a judge is around. So, to hopefully minimize the chance of this happening, I created a shell script that, every 30 seconds, reloads the home page, and logs whether it recieved a “big” (correct) or a “small” (incorrect) version of the page. This way, the command interpreter should remain active (hopefully) and I’ll get statistics on how often the page loads incorrectly, even after a “hot” start. Nothing like hard data with which to confront your host (or should it be Macromedia?) .
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I am sitting in my Philosophy of Science class listening to my teacher pontificate about how government programs really are more efficient and accountable than those in the private sector.
Oh
My
Goodness
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