Southern Bread Blog

If you are a Trek nerd like me then you already know the “prime directive” by heart. But for those who are normal citizens or have social lives, I’ll give it to you straight from wikipedia:

Now take off your pointy ears for a second and put down your tri-corder. If you look at the “prime directive” from the perspective of a philosopher, you will recognize it instantly as a souped up version of cultural relativism. Nothing new here, but the reason I bring it up is because of how it relates to the problem of evil. The biggest stumbling block for many a non-believer is how a God could possibly exist, and yet let so much evil happen in the world. But these same people will frequently nod there head in agreement with something like the “prime directive” where the more advanced society is obligated to stay out of the affairs of developing societies at all costs. Indeed, some of the Star Trek writers themselves would probably quote the problem of evil to you in support of their atheism.

See the problem? You can’t hold to cultural relativism, and at the same time put forth the problem of evil. It’s a hypocrisy. But there is also something else. You could say that the “prime directive” is a nod to a sort of anthropological natural selection. It’s a recognition of a perceieved force at work in social development, and that force is reckoned to ultimately be a good thing. In a more general sense, it’s the thought that what’s best for a society comes from a pattern of non-interferance by outside forces. For example, Soviet Russia collapsed mainly from the inside – the result of much pain and hardship on the part of it’s people. And this was almost universally accepted as a good thing.

So silently, the fact that suffering, pain, hardship, etc. produces a unique fruit in the character of men and nations has been accepted in the minds of those that would hinge non-belief on the existance of evil. The fruit is sometimes bad but often times it is a more good fruit than what comes from those societies that don’t suffer hardship. It is a fact for instance that the Christian church expands and grows rapidly in those regions where it is most persecuted. I’m not saying that this is the way I would argue against the problem of evil as a rule. I’m just saying that this is one way it could be done in a society that has detente as one of it’s most noble ethics.

While trying to get some info on the upcoming Rush album, I stumbled upon the following quote by their drummer Neil Peart. He is speaking about “faith” as the main theme of their upcoming album:

I could go on and on about the problems I see with Peart’s worldview, but this statement was a little surprising even for him. I have to wonder what he means by “this stuff is going on in both localities”. What exactly is “this stuff”? Nothing in my Christian faith gives me the slightest inclination to hate muslims. I’ll tell you what does give me the inclination to hate muslims though: when they chop American reporters and construction workers heads off. But that has nothing to do with my faith. If by “this stuff” he means “malevolent” faith then he is ignorant of the facts or just doesn’t want to see them. Equating a faith that prays for muslims to change with a faith that sends peoples heads home in baskets for changing is naive.

But here again, I just don’t understand why he is trying to equate strife between east and west with Christianity vs. Islam. When have we even heard Christianity mentioned in the whole middle eastern mess, except that time that the American state department stepped in to try and stop Afghanistan from executing a convert to Christianity. I don’t remember any such reciprocal action ever being needed.When he says “both would probably be insulted by the comparison” he is right. The difference is when the muslim mob in Europe and the middle-east get insulted they riot, kill cops, stab documentary film-makers to death in the street, blow up car bombs, etc. When Christians get insulted we just take it on the chin like we have been for the last 2000 years.

He goes on:

Here we go again with the same old refrain that some people “need” religion to make them feel better. Let’s see, what would make me feel better is polka-dotted fairies, so I think I’ll believe in them so I’ll indeed feel better. Like anyone believes in something they know is false just to make themselves feel better. That’s not just unadulterated arrogance. It’s impossible. You can’t believe in something you know is not true. That’s not how the human mind works Neil.

I generally stay away from people who set themselves up a notch higher than everyone else, based on some intellectualism. They are usually the biggest hypocrites you will meet. Neil speaks of “malevolent” faith, as if the ultimate good is just to be happy and nice to everyone without actually “believing” in anything. Yet, if you read his books, it becomes evident that he looks down his nose in judgement at half the population. My advice to that kind of person is just to go on and live your life how you want, and leave the moral judgements to those that don’t think of themselves too highly.

Pascal was a French scientist, mathematician, Christian apologist and philosopher who lived from 1623 to 1662. He was a brilliant writer as well and is considered the father of French prose. He was an ardent defender of the scientific method and rightly saw intuitional truths(that is, things that we know are universally true even if we can’t prove them) as a foundation for a proper use of it. He was homeschooled by his father, who was a tax collector in France and developed what has become known as “Pascal’s Theorem” at the age of 16. At 18 he built a mechanical calculator to help his father with work. It only performed addition, but he later improved it and built a total of 50 throughout his life.

Here are some of his most notable scientific works/inventions:

He made many other contributions to the sciences such as rightly theorizing that a vaccum existed above the atmosphere. He made significant progress in mathematical probability theory with his colleague Pierre de Fermat. Philosophically, he’s also well known for what has come to be called Pascal’s Wager. In that vein, he was a deeply committed Christian. What was perhaps to become his most monumental written work, Pensees, was originally titled Defense of the Christian Religion. Here are some good quotes from Pascal:

And lest you think he was some sort of deist or something, the following was found written on a piece of cloth sewn inside his clothing after his death:

New version of PodWrangler today. The Vista-compatible version I posted the other day was not uninstalling correctly(not that you should ever need to uninstall when selecting uninstall from the menu. That is fixed in this update. The install/uninstall stuff is hard to get right, as it’s based somewhat on timing. I’m a firm believer in not using “Installers” like InstallShield for small 1-file utility programs. I like to make the software install and uninstall itself if possible. As usual just click “Check for upgrades…” on the menu to auto-update your version.

• Get the source and binary here

I have 4 pipes and they are all meaningful to me for different reasons. My wife bought me all of them but one. She bought me a churchwarden a couple of years ago that I like to show off. It’s fashioned as a replica pipe of the one used by Aragorn(Viggo Mortenson) in the Lord of the Rings trilogy of movies. It has an oak stem and a briar bowl and it’s 10.5″ long. The stem has a gentle curve to it and it fits the hand nicely. It’s not the “official” film re-creation version of Aragorn’s pipe that you might see online nowdays. That one has an acrylic mouthpiece where mine does not.

You can buy this pipe here.

I updated PodWrangler to work on Windows Vista. Vista puts a new system in place called User Access Control(UAC) that restricts a lot of what even administrators can do without providing approval to the app itself. One of the restrictions is that system directories like c:windows are off-limits for writing files to. That’s a problem because PodWrangler wrote to the windows directory. It also wrote to the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE registry branch which is also off-limits in Vista. In the end I just changed it to write to the CSIDL_APPDATA location and to use HKEY_CURRENT_USER instead. This change only affects Vista since it checks the Windows version before hand so current users should rock along just fine. Use the “Check for updates” as always to update automagically.

• Get the source and binary here

Me and a friend have been playing the Lord of the Rings TCG(Trading Card Game) for a few years now and it’s a great game. If you are or were a fan of TCG’s or CCG’s you should really check it out. It’s different from most TCG’s because it’s not purely a head-to-head battle type game where you both lay down a foe and then duke it out. It’s more like a board game with cards. Each player has a token that represents them as they go through the game. As the game progresses, your token moves down what is called the “site path” or “adventure path”. That’s just a sequence of “site” cards that are revealed with each progressive turn. The first player to make it through site #9 without having their Frodo card killed wins.

Here is the board layout:

You can see the adventure path on the left side. Each player has a fellowship that includes one copy of Frodo bearing a One Ring card and up to 9 other companion cards. The object is to get your fellowship down the adventure path all the way to site 9 without Frodo being killed. When the game starts, whoever goes first is the “free-peoples” player, and it’s up to them to get their fellowship down the path. When their turn is over, it becomes the other persons turn to move their fellowship. Whoever is not currently the free-peoples player, is playing as the enemy. It’s up to them to play enemy(or “shadow”) cards to slow down or kill the free-peoples player’s fellowship cards.

Here is an example of a free-peoples card and a shadow card:

The main mechanic in the game that makes it all work is this notion of “twilight points”. For almost every action the fellowship performs, the free-peoples player has to put in a number of twilight tokens into the twilight pool. The shadow player then takes out twilight tokens to fund his actions. In other words, the more actions the free-peoples player takes, the more ammo the enemy has to stop him. It’s a great game mechanic, and it matches the actual Lord of the Rings story so well. The smaller the fellowship got and the less noise they made, it became harder for Sauron to find and fight them.

There is also an online version of the game that makes it easier to hook up with other players for a quick match. All in all, if you are into card games or MMORPG’s, you should really check it out.

Here are three kickin albums that you might have forgotten about or haven’t heard since high-school/college. Go get them off iTunes and re-aquaint yourelf with what rock-n-roll is supposed to sound like. Back in the days before grunge killed the guitar solo.

I’m very picky about what keyboard I use. If I’m going to be typing on it all day then by gosh I’m going to put some thought into it. I like my keyboards big and hulking. Any keyboard that weighs in at less than 5 pounds is for girls. It also has to have lot’s of non-key area real-estate for laying stuff or sticking stuff to it. Last but not least it has to have clicky buttons. Once you get used the the clicking noise that old keyboards make, you will never go back to a modern day silent keyboard. Here is the one I’m using now. It’s old as crap and I just so happen to have a spare on if this one ever goes out on me:

Encryption on laptops is a hot topic these days, and I’m no more immune from it than any other sysadmin. Any time you have people carrying around laptops, it’s important that they are secured against possible theft or loss. The data carried on portable computers these days can get you into lots of trouble if you aren’t very careful to keep it secured against prying eyes. Encryption solves that problem by scrambling the files in a certain part of the laptop hard drive and requiring some type of authentication in order to decrypt it. This stops “casual” theft of data by just popping the hard drive out of the notebook and sticking it in another machine as a second drive.

Encryption is a two-edged sword though, and it must be very carefully planned before being rolled out. The same scrambling of data that keeps thieves from getting at the data can also keep a sysadmin from getting at the data in a disaster situation. If you use the built-in Windows encryption for example, you are screwed if you can’t log into Windows. That means your hard drive doesn’t even have to fully crash for the data to become inaccessible. You will have to make sure you have a very robust backup plan in place for your laptop users. If you use a third-party tool such as the excellent TrueCrypt, you still need to backup your files, but it’s possible to restore the volume as long as the header is intact and you have the correct passwords and keyfiles.

Backups are the life-blood of a sysadmin. If backing up your system is not the most important thing you do on a daily basis then you have no business being a sysadmin. So with all of that said, here is a good batch file to get you started with backing up the encrypted folders or drives on your Windows laptops:

@echo off
setlocal

@set src=X:
@set dst=U:encbackup
@set args=/XD "%src%Recycled" "%src%System Volume Information" /COPYALL /B /SEC /MIR 
@set opts=/R:5 /W:3 /LOG+:c:synclog.txt /NFL /NDL /TEE /ETA

IF NOT EXIST %src% GOTO QUITNOSRC
IF NOT EXIST %dst% GOTO QUITNODST

robocopy %src% %dst% %args% %opts%
GOTO PAUSEQUIT

:QUITNOSRC
echo Couldn’t find "%src%".
echo Your encrypted volume is not mounted.
GOTO PAUSEQUIT

:QUITNODST
echo Couldn’t find "%dst%".
echo If you are NOT connected to the network then this is normal.
GOTO PAUSEQUIT

:PAUSEQUIT
pause
@cls
exit

This is a modified version of a well layed out robocopy script I found on the internet somewhere. The src variable holds the drive letter or folder of the encrypted volume that needs backing up. The dst variable is where the backed up files should be placed. In this case they would go in a folder called “encbackup” in the user’s network home folder. The args and opts variables set up some common exclusions and loggings and such. You can see all of the options for robocopy here. Each laptop user would run this file whenever they come back in the office and hook up to the network.