Hamas and terrorism

So this latest attack by Hamas was entirely predictable. So is the next one. Hamas's legitimacy and public approval had dimished quite a bit in recent months, so they allowed the cease-fire to expire, and starting shooting rockets again. The Israelis did the predictable thing and fired back, quite a bit stronger, and now Hamas gets the benefit of sympathy for dead civilians. The locals is Gaza will have to stand behind their "elected government". Hamas is only legitimized by opposing/attacking Israel, so it had to do it. And it will do it again.

Make no mistake about this: Hamas has no intention of EVER concluding any peace deal with Israel. Not going to happen, any more than Arafat was going to. It's not what they want. Arafat's existence and continuation as PLO leader was permanently predicated on the ongoing suffering and victimization of the Palestinians.

Granted, Israel is being very heavy-handed about some things, like the blockade Hamas wants halted. That could be done differently--of course Israel is worried about the importation of weapons, which would inevitably happen, but then again it's already happening, isn't it?

By the endless self-victimization practiced by Hamas and the PLO, the Palestinians manage to be permanently the target of sympathy by the rest of the Arab world, and Israel continues to be hated. This is their goal.

But of course the rest of the Arab world is equally vested in this arrangement; witness the land blockade of Gaza by Egypt--that border is closed--if the Egyptians wanted to actually *help* the people of Gaza, it'd be trivial to do so. In some larger political sense, that's not in Egypt's interest, it'd look too much like peace with Israel, assimilation of Gaza, and the permanent existence of Gaza as separate from a Palestinian return--i.e., a separate nation-state--and the end of a good reason to continually harangue Israel about Gaza.

So the person quoted in the Wash Post yesterday: "why were my children killed? did they have AK-47s?" No, they were killed because the adults failed to report the presence of terrorists among them, and when those terrorists attacked Israel, Israel hit back. So I say to the people of Gaza: you want peace, stop shooting rockets at Israel. Report to appropriate authorities (by which I mean not Hamas) others in the population who would undermine or prevent that peace.

And be glad that it's not me in charge of the Israeli army--I would have been on tv saying "for every rocket launched at Israel, we will immediately flatten 3 buildings in Gaza. And the bulldozing of the rest will start after one week." I would raze Gaza to the ground, leaving nothing larger than a basketball standing. Push everyone out, into Egypt. Once Gaza is cleared, shoot at anything that moves. Turn Gaza into a live-fire bombing target practice zone, permanently.

another computer fix story...

A longish one again.

A few days ago the machine starting making the clicking noise that disks make when they are about to go bad. This noise indicates that the moving head spindle stepper motor is having problems engaging for some reason. O/S blocks while waiting for the disk to engage, position, and read. It had been happening every couple of weeks, in particular when the disks had been idle for some hours, for months.

Then all of a sudden it was ever minute, or every few seconds...pending disaster. Worst thing--it was the boot disk doing it, although I didn't know that right away.

So I went looking for a NAS unit that I could configure as RAID 1 (the mirroring approach, for fault tolerance). Figured I'd just start moving all the files that aren't part of booting onto the NAS. Cost of a RAID 1 NAS unit looked like it would be$300-$350, incl a pair of 500GB drives.

Best to get one with hardware RAID, if possible, and that has passworded control over access. Otherwise it's going to be open on my wireless net (well, not completely open, of course, I do have acess control set, and MAC-address limiting, but that stuff is spoofable/crackable).

So I evolved a plan whereby I would start with a 1 TB drive, use that as part of the copying shuffle, and order a RAID NAS. Then I discovered it was the boot drive that was failing.

This is a far harder problem--you can't just drag files around to make a copy of a boot disk. You also need the deep hidden things like the Master Boot Record, and some other low-level stuff that Windows Explorer can't get at. In addition, Windows Explorer can't copy files that are somehow in use (there are several things in your home-dir that are un-copyable that way).

So I used the new 1TB drive as a holder for data needing to be copied. At first I thought I'd just move drive E: content onto the 1 TB disk (ultimately this was right), and then clone C: onto E:.

I had plenty of space to shuffle things around...the real issue, and the centerpiece of this blog, is how do you clone a disk? What I want is to essentially make a new/different disk look exactly like the boot disk, then remove the boot disk and be back to where I was.

Earlier in the year I did it several times on my Mac G5. There's a nice convenient, easy to use tool for OSX that does this one thing: Carbon Copy Cloner. That's what it does. I did several disks this way, because I wanted to migrate from the original 160 GB disks (which were nearly full, because of MP3s and DVR) to 500 GBs, AND I wanted to install Leopard as well. So I figured I'd clone the boot disk, then install Leopard on the boot disk, and if I had to go backwards, that'd be easy. This whole process went just fine. Have had zero trouble with it, the clone was bootable, etc.

Windows is not so simple about this.

Well, ultimately, it kinda is, although not trivial. There appear to be two competing products for this, and some also-rans. And some freebies.

The big two are Acronis True Image Echo Workstation, and Norton Ghost. I also came across Paragon Disk Copy, which appears to be third.

What'd be ideal is if I could take the 1 TB disk, partition in two, with a smaller partition matching the boot disk, and have that regularly re-image the boot disk, and my old drive E: stuff on the bigger partition. That way I'd always have a safe partition I could use as emergency boot.

That doesn't seem to be one of the possibilities.

I downloaded the Paragon demo, but it doesn't actually work. Well, it does, sort of. You can walk through the mouse-clicks, see the dialogs, etc, but then it doesn't complete the task. You have to buy the thing to find out if it's going to work for you. So I uninstalled that immediately.

This is an odd issue here...online reading suggests that not all tools work for all people.

This URL provides a decent list of the available tools, but it's not complete (altho it did list things I didn't find earlier).

I did the acronis download, and knowing that Ghost was in use at the corporate office, I blasted an email there to see who used what, and how well it had worked. Responses mentioned Ghost and Acronis.

Acronis is a 15-day trial period...more than adequate for me to test-drive and see if it does what I need.

Answer is: yes, it did what I wanted, it went pretty fast...with one weird glitch that I didn't understand at first. My machine has motherboard onboard video, which it turns out is display 0, i.e., first in line for video, like the power-on self-test startup stuff you see. Acronis images your drive by a special reboot that then does the copying...which you can only see on display 0. Which meant that I was seeing nothing, because I didn't have the 2nd monitor plugged in. I could hear the disk activity (and the undesirable clicking), but I didn't know about progress. Or when it was done. This was getting alarming after a while.

Then during a phone call to a coworker who'd recommended Acronis, after he did his own separate test run and saw the right stuff, I realized that I would have too if I'd had the other monitor plugged in...too late at that point, I was already rebooting.

Anyway, it all went well, although it did take me nearly five days to get it resolved.

So: recommended tool: Acronis True Image Echo Workstation. Did the job for me.


I maybe still ought to do the RAID NAS thing...

great quote

it's political...from Talking Points Memo, referring to the Blagojevich issue this week.

"What could be more patriotic than to distract a presidency from its first attempts at fixing a damaged nation?"

What do you bet there will be no Republicans who come out saying it is not ok to criticize the [new] President on a wartime footing. They certainly said it about Bush--will they say it about Obama?

It's ok to criticize the President anytime. Has to be.

That said...it needs to be a valid criticism. Distractions are dangerous time-wasters. This attempt to smear Obama with some of the Blagojevich crap is just that. I'd be willing to bet that the guy doing it, apparently Mike Duncan, head of the RNC, would be unable to be so obnoxious and strident if he actually had to say the words to Obama's face.

Economics

I had a shitty economics class in college. Engineering econ, it was called. Textbook written by the prof; class was Sept 27 to Dec 17 or some such, book did not actually get printed and to the Univ until Thanksgiving.

and on top of that, what it covered was essentially useless. Only thing I got out of that class was the trivial knowledge of how to calculate compound interest. We're talking 1978 (or was it 79?), so this was before advanced math calculators could to that, and before Excel or 1-2-3.

Class *could* have covered real valuable content, like how to cost and budget a engineering proposal, estimate manpower needs for a project, how to manage costs over time. But no.

and now it's 2008. Dec 2008. The economy is in a slump. Big time. Well, the economy was in a slump when I graduated from college. So it will come back.

But what's the deal? There's a really simple explanation you won't ever hear.

Economics, the world economy, our capitalist model, is basically a pyramid scheme. It requires that there be new products and new customers ALL THE TIME.

ok, so as long as the population is growing, there are new customers. But businesses have to keep growing lest the competition take their customers away. Which leads to the need to borrow money--and if there's a hiccup in that, the pyramid turns out to be a house of cards, and starts to collapse.

In addition to the greed. This is the essential flaw in Greenspan's thinking: it doesn't account for criminal behavior by the participants. Like this: when someone thinks up the "derivative" idea of bundling mortgages into a package that can then be "securitized" and resold to investors, the thing you most want to do is resell quickly--i.e., fast turnaround, with a sliver of profit in the sale. You can claim that the risk is low, because the securities are backed by real estate, which always has solid value. But there isn't anyone in the chain, other than the homeowner, who actually *wants* to own the property. The problem there is that once you put enough distance between the homeowner and the ultimate holder of the securitized loan bundle, the investor doesn't know whether the homeowners can actually pay the loans. What's worst is that the mortgage maker who originated the loan doesn't care, ultimately. Said maker wants to make loans, and resell bundles of loans, the fast the better. So you make it as easy as possible to get a mortgage loan, which leads to more people bidding on houses, prices going up, and eventually people being unable to really afford their houses, but have them anyway. The mortgage maker makes a little money from originating the loan, and more when it is resold. The faster that can be done, the better--and they can make new loans as soon as previous ones have been sold. So much for needing due diligence on the buyer's being able to afford the thing, why do you care? You're going to pass the risk on to someone else, that someone isn't likely to investigate the buyer.

But there is going to be a sort of ceiling in prices on houses. They can only go so far upwards before people just can't buy.

As soon as there's a hiccup...those loans turn out to be non-performing. Then you have to wonder about the value of the thing. Housing prices being cyclic, at some point they will be going back down, and maybe then you have the value inversion.

Which is why the screwup in how Treasury and Congress are handling this is happening. They aren't dealing with the loans issue. Banks have asked for money, but are paying operating expenses with it.

And this happens this way because it's a pyramid scheme. As soon as there stop being new customers (or customers able to pay), things start back downward.

A way to solve this for the future: require that mortgage originators hold the loan for a minimum of three years before they can sell it. You know that if the originator knows it has to hold the loan, it is going to be very careful about knowing the buyer can pay. As opposed to recent years, where that absolutely did not matter.

Spellforce update

started a round of this again...was suddenly feeling curious about whether playing the game from the beginning without making bases and armies was a winning strategy...

Yes.

In fact, on several of the maps ("islands"), you can run the table without ever activating one of the elf/human/dwarf monuments. You probably always want to do your heroes, but they don't attract attention, unlike the other monuments.

In fact, there was one map where I had a really hard time because I started building an army immediately, last time, that turned out to be pretty simple if I ran it by myself. You have to destroy five commanders, which opens the gate into the big enemy base; there's already an army in there, which you cannot take on, and there's no need to try. That army goes hunting around for you, but the cool thing is that as soon as that army leaves the base, you can stroll in behind it, and destroy the entire place. Solo.

The other thing I decided to do this time is play it from first-person view the whole time. Well, almost the whole time. Turns out that's not effective for certain things, like placing your base buildings, or click-n-drag-select an army team; yeah, you do have to have them sometimes, but generally you can do all the hard work yourself, making it a lot simpler to build an army without being continuously attacked along the way.