botwerks

here’s an interesting little nugget as I catch up on a backlog of reading from the past month’s worth of travel and work.

from Melvyn Leffler’s recent essay in foreign affairs, 9/11 in retrospect:

Rather than thwarting proliferation, U.S. interventions on behalf of regime change provided additional incentives for rogue nations to pursue WMD. Iranian and North Korean leaders seem to have calculated that, more than ever before, their countries’ survival depended on possessing a WMD deterrent (a message that has probably been reinforced by the Obama administration’s decision to intervene in Libya in 2011 following Libya’s renunciation of its nuclear capability several years earlier).

this little bit about the interventionist (albeit limited in scope) activity wrt to Libya poses an interesting dilemma for U.S. foreign policy. there’s a populist moral perspective that assisting uprisings which lead to the establishment of democratic governments is a good thing and on the whole this is likely the direction that we’d like to see our government take. but the secondary signals that emerge from this are more than a little thorny and certainly have the potential to encourage less than peaceful behaviors of governments which are at risk of populist rebellion and with nuclear ambitions.

what a total PITA.

if you have to deal with big ass arrays of IP addresses in perl and you’ve been sorting.  i recommend reading the following paper.

A Fresh Look at Efficient Perl Sorting - if you’re looking for a  portable means to do an efficient multi-subkey record sorts this is a great run down on the machinery within perl to make it faster.  acquaint yourself with the Schwartzian Transform. it’s a good thing.

yes, i know, you could just use Sort:Key:IPv4.  but that’s not very portable and self-contained, now, is it?

because everywhere i go DHCP shoves its crap at me.

% sudo scutil --set HostName ZenHound

for that matter, scutil is an incredibly useful tool which allows you to probe the configd state in a lot more detail than i realized. very useful.

october 2011 is turning out to be the month we lose some giants.

dennis ritchie died – he gave us UNIX, we all learned C from him and we stood on his shoulders to build the internet and tools we have today.