Hayes-Compatible

The Center for Cognitive Architecture at the University of Michigan and Soar Technology, Inc. are pleased to announce the 28th Soar Workshop will be held Monday, May 5 through Wednesday, May 7, 2008, in Ann Arbor, MI beginning with a dinner on May 4. Greg Trafton (NRL) and Paul Benjamin (Pace University) are the invited speakers this year and will be talking on cognitive robotics.

Yeah right.

Web site and forum operators would be forced to collect and publicly disclose identifying information about all of the visitors who post content on their sites. Failing to do so would lead to a fine of $500 for the first offense and $1,000 for each subsequent offense.

Bob pointed me at this interesting article offering general advice to programmers. It seems like testing is near the top of every one of these lists I look at. We have tests in the Soar project but there is much room for improvement.

Finally. Link is to the right.

Dr. Bernard Vonnegut (1914-1997), Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s brother, was a professor of atmospheric sciences at the State University of New York at Albany, retired in 1985. A colleague of Dr. Vonnegut, Vincent J. Schaefer, discovered in an experiment during the 1940s that dry ice rapidly produced ice crystals when introduced into a cloud of supercooled water droplets.

Many clouds in our atmosphere are giant collections of supercooled water droplets that refuse to precipitate. One form that clouds precipitate is by a process called aggregation where the water droplets freeze and begin to fall through the cloud, gaining mass as they contact and acquire other water droplets on their way down. Unfortunately, water in this form will not freeze without the help of a condensation nuclei or until the temperature reaches levels around or below -40°C (-40°F), hence the designation “supercooled”.

The dry ice (solid carbon dioxide) Schaefer introduced into the cloud acted as a cooling agent, instantly bringing the droplets well past the necessary -40°C (-40°F) they need to freeze causing the cloud to precipitate. This was the birth of cloud seeding, or the artificial coaxing of precipitation by introducing particles into clouds to act as condensation nuclei and/or a cooling agent.

Dr. Vonnegut soon discovered that silver iodide has a crystalline structure similar to an ice crystal and that, because of this, it acts as an effective ice nucleus at temperatures of only -4°C (25°F). Additionally, silver iodide is far easier to handle than dry ice when attempting to fly it over a cloud to seed the cloud, which is precisely a process that Dr. Vonnegut refined and that is still in use by rainmaking corporations today.

It was this process and research of cloud seeding that inspired his brother Kurt Jr. to create and write a wonderful novel about Ice-Nine.

Note: I wrote this for everything2 back when I was in college.

…it will take longer to figure out what’s happening if dissent is stifled and skeptics are demonized. The skeptics in the minority start off with a disadvantage in getting their message heard simply because of the media’s bias for bad news and horror stories. When there’s a well-financed majority dominating the public debate, I find it odd to hear complaints that anyone else should receive money or attention.

An interesting opinion over at Tierney Lab.

I have memories of reading the Dungeon Master’s Guide cover to cover up north one summer around fourth or fifth grade, no small feat for me at the time. Small print on a mass of pages, a few big words and many foreign concepts. I remember thinking it was fascinating, and it fueled many hours of imagination playing with Lego sets.

It seems cheesy to say but I really think AD&D (coupled with my BBS hobby at the time) really motivated me to learn all kinds of skills and technology at a really young age. I learned the ins and outs of WordStar writing campaigns to send my friends on. I created character sheets, cheat sheets, reference pages, and all kinds of other forms using early versions of Excel and WordPerfect. I had a database of characters stored in Ability. I created simple scripts in Telix to help make it possible to run a game in a multi-node BBS chat room.

I really don’t have much more to say that has not been more eloquently said already.

How do I get S/MIME working with Firefox/GMail and Thunderbird? The details are varied, but here’s the big picture (I’m recalling this procedure off the top of my head, apologies for any errors in initial versions of this post).

First, grab Firefox and Thunderbird, and install this Firefox plug-in.

Next, head over to thawte and get a free, personal e-mail certificate from them. Try not to stare at the girl on the front page, I’m pretty sure there’s something strange going on there, some kind of spell, maybe it’s what killed Gary, I don’t know (rest in peace).

This whole getting-a-certificate-from-thawte requires trusting thawte since they serve up your private key for you, but I think the convenience of this system is worth this risk unless you are doing something very naughty. If you’re really paranoid, you could go through a different service where you control your private key, but that’s probably not going to be free.

The path to the free certificate on the thawte website is something like Products/Free personal e-mail certificates/Join. Fill out a bunch of forms and you’ll be logging in to retrieve your key in a jiffy. Somewhere in there you tell them you’re going to be using Mozilla/Firefox/Thunderbird. Eventually, you end up installing the key in the Firefox browser.

Once it is installed in the browser, you can start sending signed and/or encrypted email from your GMail account. Head over to GMail and hit compose and you’ll find two new, stealthy buttons off to the right, one for signing, one for encrypting. Note that the S/MIME plugin disables GMail’s auto-saving feature because that requires sending the message unencrypted to GMail’s servers, a message you potentially would like to have encrypted. Also note that the S/MIME plug-in does not verify signatures sent to your GMail account, not yet. You’ll notice the big fat yellow section next to any smime.p7s attachments you see.

Thunderbird does, however, verify signatures and interacts well with GMail in the process. Configuring Thunderbird requires one last step from Firefox, however, and that is exporting your certificate. The path to do this is something like Tools/Options/Advanced tab/Encryption tab/View certificates/Your certificates/Select the thawte certificate/Backup. There is probably a shorter path. When you save it, it will ask you to encrypt it with a password. File your certificate in a safe place with a strong password.

Fire up Thunderbird and set up your GMail account to use IMAP. Google has fine instructions for this if you go to your GMail account Settings/Forwarding and…/IMAP access/Enable then click Configuration Instructions.

After that is all set up, revisit your GMail account properties in Thunderbird and open its Security tab. There, View certificates/Your Certificates/Import/that file you saved from Firefox. Finally, select this certificate in the other two fields on that same Security page.

You may want to check the box to digitally sign messages by default, that’s up to you. If you don’t you’ll have to specify when you want to sign messages in the security menu when you compose a message.

Send yourself a signed email and check it out, it should work now.

Parts of this are documented all over the Internet.

1. Back up database, files
2. Download patch to mediawiki root
3. Inside mediawiki root: patch -p0 < patch-file
4. Inside maintenance subdir: php update.php
5. Check Special:Version

Upgrade guide, downloads.