James P. Howard, II's Blog

Working with Mediawiki

2010-02-01T08:13:00-08:00

Above are the slides/handout from a short course I prepared in 2008 called “Working with Mediawiki.” The slides give a very brief overview of Mediawiki then gives an overview of the Mediawiki syntax.

PWCrypt is Now at Bitbucket

2010-01-28T06:52:00-08:00

As part of my plan to rescue data from old CVS repositories, PWCrypt is now available at Bitbucket. PWCrypt provides command line access to the Unix crypt library function.

This program and an accompanying article were written in response to a problem I had in 1999 with Netscape Enterprise Server. After taking over administration of a Windows NT-based Netscape server, I discovered I did not know the administrator password for NES. I hunted down the password file and saw it hashed passwords using the same format at the password file for Unix-like systems.

So I needed a hashed value for a known password to drop into NES’s password database and used this program to create that value. It’s seen no substantive changes since the original publication eleven years ago.

Nota bene: This is a Mercurial repository stored on Bitbucket, not Git/GitHub like I’ve made available the past few weeks. I chose Mercurial for this project so I could get a better feeling for it vis-à-vis Git.

Policy Entrepreneurship at the Dorr Foundation

2010-01-27T01:26:00-08:00

In 2008, I gave this presentation to the University of Baltimore course on nonprofit management about how the Dorr Foundation’s research led to the outside lines on highways in the United States.

Why Tumblr is kicking Posterous’s ass « PEG on Tech

2010-01-26T15:38:00-08:00

Why Tumblr is kicking Posterous’s ass « PEG on Tech:

chrisbusse:

mirza:

The Short answer: Design.

I also think Tumblr is a more fluid experience — not sure I can describe it beyond that, but it just feels so easy. That might relate back to “Design” though.

It’s more fluid, but it’s more than that. Compare Tumblr to Wordpress or Blogger to really understand it.

Dennis Lane's 1,000th Blog Post

2010-01-21T08:27:00-08:00

Dennis Lane's 1,000th Blog Post:

I want to say congratulations to Mr. Lane on his 1000th post. He may be ambivalent, but he is Howard County’s most consistent blogger and you have to admire that.

Privatizing BWI

2010-01-15T13:28:00-08:00

Privatizing BWI:

Dennis Lane blogs about the possible privatization of BWI airport and suggests this doesn’t make sense since the airport generates positive revenue for the State of Maryland. This isn’t quite true.

The Maryland Aviation Commission reports revenue and expenses for FY2008 and FY2007 on their website. Generally, airport revenue and expenses are attributed to the Transportation Trust Fund (certain fees go in and out of a general fund). In 2007, BWI and Martin airports lost $25M in FY2007 and earned $3M in FY2008. And this does not include capital expenditures, which I am not going to sort through since they are collected in the Maryland budget. Income is broken down by airport, though expenses are not, so it is difficult to determine exactly what BWI’s financial position would be independently. However, it is clear BWI’s profits are not going to be a barn-burner unless costs can be cut across the entire enterprise and/or a better management agreement is negotiated with BAA Maryland, which manages the airport on behalf of the Maryland Aviation Administration. This is unlikely given BAA’s ongoing tenuous financial position.

Regardless, BWI is an interesting candidate for privatization. Selling off assets in a downturn is difficult to recommend as the State of Maryland will likely use the proceeds to offset costs in the operating budget. Sell it and spend it budgeting does not bode well for the future. The state would be better off selling the airport to a private interest or on public markets and using the proceeds to recapitalize the woefully underfunded pension system.

BAA Maryland is a subsidiary of BAA Airports, the British firm that also manages Heathrow, Gatwick, and Stansted in London.

Why I am howardjp

2009-12-23T21:14:00-08:00

A few weeks ago, someone asked on Facebook why my username is howardjp. Off to the left on this blog, you will see links to my accounts on Facebook, LinkedIn, GitHub, and Twitter. All of them use the username “howardjp.” Also, my Google account is “howardjp.” And this is on my Mac:

howardjp@thermopylae:~$ whoami
howardjp
howardjp@thermopylae:~$

And here is my personal server:

howardjp@byzantine:~$ whoami
howardjp
howardjp@byzantine:~$

When I can select my username, I will pick howardjp. The reason is that when I was 16, I received an account on the Miami University network and in 1996, they were an OpenVMS-intensive campus (both Alpha and VAX, Linux was making some inroads, however). So usernames were limited to eight characters and the standard was the first six letters of your last name, your first initial, and your second initial. I was howardjp. And ever since, if I can pick my username, it will be howardjp.

Source Code for LX, a Link Shortener

2009-12-16T14:54:43-08:00

Last August, I began work on a link shortening service as a me-too kind of project. In my case, I wanted to provide custom domains, so that, for instance, The Washington Post could be wp.ly. However, I had been displeased in the user interface I had created and had not taken it live.

On Monday, the jig was up when both Google and Facebook pushed their own link shorteners into the arena. Additionally, bit.ly announced bit.ly Pro which will provide the custom domain I had been interested in. Rather than being steamrolled by these behemoths, I will instead open source my code under a BSD License. It is now available at GitHub.

From the readme:

lx is a URL-shortening application created in CakePHP. The Git repository is a top-skimming of the /app directory from CakePHP v1.2.4. Also included in /sql is a database template for PostgreSQL. It is important to note, this code does not work and will need significant revision before being functional. However, here is a partial list of partially implemented features:

URL addition
URL deletion
URL redirection
URL favoriting (through the “stars” concept)
User accounts
User verification
URL renaming (title, not target)
Some jQuery-based AJAX

Please use this as the basis for your own work. If you wish to contribute changes back, please do.

More Old Code at GitHub

2009-12-09T17:09:53-08:00

I have recovered from an old Iomega Zip disk a few more programs I wrote in the 1997-1998 time frame which may be of some interest:

daemon
Daemon was originally written for FreeBSD to use the 4.4BSD library function, daemon(3) to launch a command after disassociating itself from the controlling TTY. I originally saw such an application on M-Net which ran BSD/OS 3.1 at the time. The source was unavailable, but it was easy to reimplement. Modern Linux implementations now include daemon(3), so it should be usable on Linux today.
rpt
Rpt was based upon the source from daemon, above but instead of disassociating from the controlling terminal, rpt reruns the command at a specified interval. This allows the user to monitor the output of a program over time.
uwatch
Uwatch was also born of M-Net. M-Net is an interactive BBS system dating back to 1983, which has always allowed users to communicate directly in real time. As a result, someone once developed a program to notify users when their friends logged in or out. However, it was always spotty at best, especially during a long session. I worked extensively on it back in 1997 to solve some memory management issues. This is what remains of that effort.
write
When I was a student at Miami University, we had several Linux systems spread across three (of four) campuses and we occasionally used write(1) to talk to each other. This implementation of write honors MIT’s Project Athena’s network-aware write protocol and allows users to send message to users on other systems.

My Geek Code

2009-11-30T19:27:52-08:00

-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.1
GCM/M/SS d++ s:+ a C++++$ UBLS*++++$ P--- L+$ E$ W+++@ N++ o+++ K w++$ O
M++ V PS+++ PE+++ Y+$ PGP+++$ t+++ !5 !X !R tv b++++ DI++ D++ G+
e+++$>++++ h---- r+++ y++++
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------

FreeGrep is now at GitHub

2009-11-24T19:42:44-08:00

I have been learning to use Git, the distributed version control system. I am more than a bit familiar with both CVS and Subversion, and finding Git to be interesting and capable of some incredible feats of source management. But when working with new tools, it is often easier to find non-trivial examples upon which to experiment. This brings us to FreeGrep.

Back in July of 1999, I was between freshman and sophomore years as a computer science major at the University of Maryland (when returning a month later, I switched to the Department of Mathematics). When you are a compsci major, you tend to get excited over things like the Towers of Hanoi problem, self-balancing binary search trees, or NP-completeness. Back then, what got me going were finite state automata. One in particular, called the Boyer-Moore search algorithm caught my attention. (Also, see item 179 in HAKMEM.)

I had used FreeBSD, the 4.4BSD-derived operating system for several years, finding it to be a sane and sensible alternative to the madness that surrounded the Linux development process, especially ten years ago. A number of the tools used in 4.4BSD-derived operating systems, especially toolchain components, are the GNU versions, leading to more licensing holy wars than necessary (and I can keep up with). So with toys-a-plenty, and some fancy-pants education, I took to writing my own version of grep(1), a regular expression pattern matcher and cornerstone of any respectable Unix-like operating system. I posted an initial announcement to the FreeBSD Hackers mailing list (with a disturbingly misspelled subject line) where I expressed my hope it would someday be the version shipped with FreeBSD. I had barely scratched the surface of the problem, but a few others were inspired and patches started flying across the world with incredible alacrity. Source control was nowhere to be seen, but it was just for fun, anyway. As the summer wound down, I worked less and less on the program. It was almost completely correct but was terribly slow in some pathological cases.

For reasons I can no longer recall, on September 14, 2002, created a new CVS repository and checked in FreeGrep v0.16. And in early 2003, a man named Sean Farley contacted me with some patches. I committed them to my repository, but never cut a new release. But later that year, both the NetBSD and OpenBSD projects dropped GNU grep from their source trees and added FreeGrep v0.16 and started doing a lot of heavy work, dramatically increasing the speed and solving many lingering bugs in the code. I watched, but did not say much.

Because FreeGrep is a small program (2121 SLOC in the current release of OpenBSD, the largest implementation) with a complex development history, it was the perfect place to experiment with Git. So this week, I used Git’s CVS import feature to import my CVS tree, the OpenBSD CVS tree, and the NetBSD CVS tree into one repository. Now, the full history from these development strands are available and I did the obvious thing and merged work done by the OpenBSD project directly into the master branch and consider it the new base. Because I have been occasionally remiss in keeping this code available to all, I have uploaded everything I have, including fifteen pre-CVS source releases to GitHub where it can remain available to any interested party. Please enjoy.

And submit patches.

Two Parables of a Twenty Dollar Bill

2009-10-17T07:00:00-07:00

There are two important stories about a twenty dollar bill worth telling. The first is best told by Bardach:

Two friends are walking down the street when one stops to pick something up. “What about that—a twenty-dollar bill!” he says. “Couldn’t be,” says the economist. “If it were, somebody would have picked it up already.”

Source: Eugene Bardach, A Practical Guide for Policy Analysis: The Eightfold Path to More Effective Problem Solving, 2nd ed. (Washington: CQ Press, 2005), p. 53.

This is a common story in the economic world and it simply means that if there is an advantage to be had, someone already has it. But it is only half the story.

When I was an undergraduate, about ten of us were walking from the dinning hall to the dorm, I at the back of the group. I saw on the ground ahead of us a twenty-dollar bill. I watched as each of my friends stepped over it and picked it up when my turn came. Then I said, “Hey, everybody! Mr. Jackson does not like being stepped on!”

The lesson is sometimes there are twenty-dollar bills on the ground. It just happens nobody has noticed them yet.

Financial Advisory Committee Meeting Tonight

2009-10-13T05:12:10-07:00

The Financial Advisory Committee will meet tonight at the Columbia Association’s maintenance facility just off Snowden River Parkway.

An Inaugural Post

2009-10-12T17:47:27-07:00

An Inaugural Post:

openpgpblog:

This is a new blog dedicated to OpenPGP and related topics. OpenPGP, itself, is a standard for encrypting and signing digital data. Some of the related issues might include identity management, X.509, and even social media.

I started this because so much of the material surrounding OpenPGP is so poorly documented. While several books exist, they do not provide much insight into the nuances of signing data and none provide a lot of resources for those interested in more than encrypting a few emails.

This blog will cover a lot of topics from key generation and types to certificate authorities and probably some other interesting things coming over the horizon. Posts will probably run about once a week, usually on Tuesdays.

The Financial Advisory Committee has Recommenced

2009-09-30T01:49:00-07:00

Last night, the Columbia Association’s Financial Advisory Committee held its first meeting of the term and we introduced three new members. Those members have a diverse background and strenghen our expertise in financial analysis.

This year, the Financial Advisory Committee will be reviewing two key questions for the Columbia Association’s Board of Directors. The first is recommend measurement target for financial performance of the organization, particularly with regard to the outstanding debt position. As the Committee has experience in establishing measures for the organization, this is a natural outgrowth of that work.

The second question the Financial Advisory Committee will address is to consider and respond to a proposed business plan being developed by the Columbia Association’s senior staff. The proposed business plan is not yet available and will be addressed when ready.

Both topics this year are quite exciting and give the Financial Advisory Committee some red meat to chew on following a few lean years. I look forward to diving into these and am delighted to be working with new Committee members.

The Canterbury Twitter

2009-08-05T17:41:20-07:00

The Canterbury Twitter:

Well, I have now completely tweeted The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer. Actually, it wrapped itself up last week. Who has a suggestion on what may be tweeted next?

Chase’s birth certificate!

2009-08-05T16:13:26-07:00

Chase’s birth certificate!

How Chase Got His Name

2009-08-01T08:15:25-07:00

Nina and I discussed Chase’s name for months. I wanted to name him Alexander, for Alexander Hamilton, who was the first Secretary of the Treasury. Nina wanted to name him Marshall, for John Marshall, John Marshall Harlan, John Marshall Harlan II, and Thurgood Marshall. This led to a several week stalemate.

One day, Nina called me and suggested Chase in honor of Samuel Chase and Salmon P. Chase. Samuel Chase was elected to the Continental Congress, signed the Declaration of Independence for Maryland, and was appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States. Salmon P. Chase was from Ohio, like me, and went to Dartmouth, like Nina. He was Secretary of the Treasury and Chief Justice of the United States. He wrote the National Banking Act and is on the $10,000 bill. Chase ticked all the boxes.

Next week, Chase and I will start a business together we will call J.P. Howard, Chase, & Company.

Chase Kumar Basu Howard arrived twenty-four hours ago. He is...

2009-07-29T20:01:00-07:00

Chase Kumar Basu Howard arrived twenty-four hours ago. He is six pounds ten ounces and 19.5 inches tall. His hobbes include crying, getting his diaper changed, and staring at people.

Parlez-vous anglais?

2009-07-21T18:57:41-07:00

While playing Catchphrase with Nina and Caitie...

Nina: You go there to get money when visiting a different country.
Me: Bureau de change.
Nina: Right, but in English.
Me: I don't know what it is in English!