Welcome to the CaveBear website, a compendium of things from Karl Auerbach.
For those of you burdened with a serious outlook, take a look at the
CaveBear Blog
or dredge through the accumulated documents.
If you have a silly streak - find your way over to the
CaveBear Catalog
where our motto is "If we have it, you don't need it!"
There are also chunks of this and chunks of this laying about here somewhere.
A lot of folks come to view the
Ethernet vendor codes.
Others come by because this is one of the few websites that actually has
contemporaneous content
from when the
Privacy Act of 1974 was enacted.
(I should probably post the letter I have from Senator Ervin who was one
of the drivers behind the Act.)
There's other stuff hidden away in the nooks and crannies of this site - a goodly
chunk of it is in the archives underneath the old website.
Consider it your task to dig and seek, like an archaeologist
digging through layers of an ancient city.
Who knows what nuggets might have accumulated in the years
since this site began in 1994.
It used to be that people who drive with the windows open or the top down could
identify two kinds of vehicles from their smell, even at long distances:
Ford diesel pickups, both old and new, and old diesel Peugeots.
The ranks of the stinkers have been supplemented by biodiesel conversions
of cars and trucks that should have been scrapped long ago.
And here in Santa Cruz, there are a lot of these things.
Way back in the late '60's and early '70's I was involved with SCCA racing.
Folks back then used castor bean oil in their engines.
One could tell from the scent which cars used bean-oil and which used
normal lubrication.
Biodiesel has the same smell, but stronger.
You can't tell me that a cloud of sickeningly sweet stench coming from
the tailpipe of a 30+ year old car burning biodiesel is some sort
of environmental gain.
If it smells then it is polluting the air.
Perhaps a modern engine might not stink so badly when run on biodiesel fuel.
But who can tell when most conversions are done on old clunkers with motors
that were worn out decades ago and that, even when new, were high polluting by today's standards.
Unanswered Questions
Monday, 21 April 2008
So far none of the candidates for president has answered some of
the questions I would like to hear answered:
Will, and when, will the candidate initiate a review with the
purpose of repudiating Bush's excessive signing statements?
Will the candidate promise not to use signing statements except
to identify ambiguities and difficulties so that Congress may provide
clarifications?
Will, and when, will the candidate repudiate the concept of the
"unitary executive"?
Will, and when, will the candidate recognize that the Constitution
of the United States not only limits the powers of the United States
Federal government, including the executive, within the geographic
borders of the United States, but everywhere.
Citizens or Subjects?
Saturday, 09 February 2008
It's pretty obvious that the Republican party is going to try
to paint Democratic candidates for US Federal offices (President,
Senate, and House) as wimps who are going to hand the country over to
"terrorists".
That, of course, is utter and vacuous nonsense.
The real issue for fall 2008 is this:
Are we Citizens or Subjects?
The Democrats allow us, you and me, to have opinions, to
differ from one another, and to disagree with the government.
In other words, we would be citizens.
The Republican position, on the other hand, tries to make you
and me subordinate to the government position.
The Republicans want us to be subjects.
If we differ on any subject from their position -
whether it be on a war, on use of taxes to support "faith",
or on whether the government hand is put down our wife's throat or down
our pants - then we will be labelled as unpatriotic and un-American.
I chose to be a Citizen. I hope you join me.
Contempt
Thursday, 04 October 2007
I'm getting pretty disgusted with the way that Congress
does the dance of the neutered wimps around the president's
increasingly egregious claims of executive power.
GWB is playing a game of chicken with Congress and Congress
ought to call his bluff.
The House and Senate ought to begin by sanctioning those government
contractors who refuse to turn over documents because the
president told them not to.
Perhaps the Senate ought to begin by holding some
executives from Blackwater and AT&T in contempt
and tossing 'em into the clink until they recognize that
Congress has at least as much authority in this country as does the
president.
And Congress, even if it does not have the votes to pass veto
proof legislation or to get past the Senate's filibuster rules, most
certainly has the power to refuse to pass legislation that the president needs.
Teddy Roosevelt once sent a fleet across the seas and said that it was
Congress' problem to pay to get it back home.
Perhaps Congress ought turn the tables and refuse to pass the forthcoming budget,
let the Federal government go into stasis, and tell the president that it's
his problem to pay for his war.
Going Solar
Monday, 24 September 2007
I just got a new toy - We just added solar panels to our house.
Every hour or every time the sun changes I dash up to the garage to
check the output and then race out to the power meter to watch it
spin backwards.
It is somewhat ironic that as a result we are going to have to trim
the crowns of several trees that impinge on our solar horizon.
We anticipate that this will reduce our electrical bill to zero.
However, due to a Reagan era clunker in the the Byzantine US tax code,
we are going to be scrod and unable to obtain the Federal Tax credit.
A Toast To G. W. B.
Sunday, 16 September 2007
Mr. President, I offer you a toast.
May you have a long life; may your mind remain lucid.
May you live to see the nation and history
repudiate everything you have done and everything you stand for.
My you live to understand how you perverted your oath to preserve,
protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.
May you live to perceive how you polluted the words "freedom" and
"democracy" and so dishonored the United States and its citizens
that we are ashamed to say "We are Americans".
May you live to comprehend that you cheapened religion, morality,
and ethics by turning them into political tools of expediency rather than
reflections of our highest aspirations.
May you live to feel shame for what you have done.
Being Distracted - An Outing
Wednesday, 05 September 2007
I've been rather busy of late; I've been writing a lot of code in pursuit of my long developing ideas about self-healing networks and network troubleshooting (these may seem disjoint, but they are two ends of a spectrum.)
I needed a break, so this last weekend I fired up Doda, dropped her top, and headed south for a trip over the Santa Lucia mountains, from King City to
Big Sur
via the Nacimiento-Ferguson Road.
The trip encompassed landscapes covered by two of California's greatest writers - Wallace Stegner and John Steinbeck. (All married people ought to read
Stegner's
Angle of Repose
and Crossing To Safety.)
It was a hot afternoon - it was 6pm and 101 F. when I went through the guard station at Hunter-Liggett. I was surprised to find that station manned by
a Federal police officer rather than a soldier. I wonder whether the guard
(who was quite nice and helpful yet clearly a no-nonesense type) is a Federal
employee or works for a contractor.
It took about an hour to cross the mountains - it is a drive that I highly recommend;
the east side is classic California chaparral - I was reminded of the Kate Wolf song
about the "golden rolling hills of California" - and yes, the hills do turn
brown in the summertime.
The road goes right through several of the army's training areas. Fortunately
I didn't have to interact too closely with any passing tanks.
The west side is not for flatlanders who are afraid of a narrow, steep,
and twisty road with no guardrails - like Tuna Canyon in
Santa Monica mountains but steeper and narrower. You can get an idea
from the photo.
Eventually I came down to California Highway 1. This road, from Morro Bay
to above Fort Bragg, is a national treasure. (My office is only a few yards
away from one of the more urban parts.)
Near Eselen I stopped to watch the sun go down and call my wife. It was
surprisingly warm - nearly 80 degrees F at some points where the sun had heated the
rocks. (Usually at this time of year the temperature is in the low 60's F and
the fog makes it feel much colder.) It was even warm enough that I could
pick up the smell of jasmine near Carmel Highlands.
Wow, night blooming jasmine, my favorite scent and one that evokes many
pleasant memories of things that can not be described here without triggering
an avalanche of web filters.
What a great way to take a break from writing code.
The central coast of California is right up there with New Hampshire and Vermont in
the late September/early October and Yosemite in the winter.
The New CaveBear Website
Saturday, 19 May 2007
The old CaveBear website was getting a bit old - it was started, I believe
in 1994 and thus is officially a teenager.
The new one is based on a Joomla, a content management system.
That is a source of both flexibility and constraints.
We'll see how it works out.
One of the hardest parts of this has been the preservation of old content
at the old URL's. I did not want any pointers held by search engines
to end up pointing into the void.
There are a couple of ways to do this.
I could have maintained mapping rules that would rewrite old URLs into
new ones. But I suspect that over time that would become unwieldy.
So I decided to use what are called "permanent redirects"
to a new, archival, location. It may take a while, but I hope
that the search engines, Wikipedia, and other repositories that contain links to
materials on this site will recognize the redirections and update their links.
For example, the popular collection of
Ethernet vendor codes has been moved to the archive and may be reached by either the old or new URL.
But no matter how hard I've worked, I'm sure that something will fall through the
cracks, that some old material will vanish. For that reason I chose
to preserve the old website in the web accessible archive.
It used to be that people who drive with the windows open or the top down could
identify two kinds of vehicles from their smell, even at long distances:
Ford diesel pickups, both old and new, and ol...
Read More ...
Unanswered Questions
So far none of the candidates for president has answered some of
the questions I would like to hear answered:
Will, and when, will the candidate initiate a review with the
purpose of repudiating...
Read More ...
Citizens or Subjects?
It's pretty obvious that the Republican party is going to try
to paint Democratic candidates for US Federal offices (President,
Senate, and House) as wimps who are going to hand the country over to
...
Read More ...
Contempt
I'm getting pretty disgusted with the way that Congress
does the dance of the neutered wimps around the president's
increasingly egregious claims of executive power.
GWB is playing a game of chi...
Read More ...
Going Solar
I just got a new toy - We just added solar panels to our house.
Every hour or every time the sun changes I dash up to the garage to
check the output and then race out to the power meter to watch ...
Read More ...
