Porchside Musings.

 It's been a busy couple of weeks recently. There was an attempt to assassinate former president Trump. Amid mounting pressure, President Biden quit his reelection effort. Vice President Harris is now the Democrat candidate for that office. Ukraine forces have crossed into Russia near Kursk, making substantial gains. It was a minor miracle that Mr. Trump survived the attempt on his life. The shooter was nearly at point-blank range for the AR-15 he was wielding. My observations on the matter... After the attempt and subsequent killing of Thomas Crooks, his parents seem unemotional. Your son tries to kill a nationally known figure, then is shot dead by a counter sniper, and you just go "oh well"? The detachment shown is striking. The shooter was alone on that rooftop. However I'm not convinced Crooks planned this attack by himself. Somebody managed to radicalize this man enough to want to assassinate a major political figure. Where did he get the idea of using drones, r

My last post was so full of darkness, I hate to follow on with another sad article. Life does not always allow for happy moments interspersing the less happy. For countless years ( honestly, I can't count this time in the morning ) I have been engaged in a hobby project writing a fairly massive software library of routines for use in adventure and combat simulations I call Zulu. When I started the project way back whenever I did weeks of research trying to determine the " best " game engine to use. Factors like ease of use, rendering quality, support, and cost all were gathered, then ground in the number-cruncher to determine a winner. In the end, Unity3d was the clear winner. In the last two weeks Unity announced a series of changes to its Terms and Conditions including how it charges for applications built using Unity that put a huge burden on developers, especially the smaller groups.   Th

One of those telling moments in history was August 25, 410 AD . That morning the citizens of Rome looked out at the Visigoth forces of Alaric as defenses failed and thousands of Visigoths poured though the breach. Thus began the sack of Rome.  For three days the Visigoths plundered the former capital of the Roman Empire. Rome would never be the same again. It was the  End of Western Civilization . Old symbols come crashing down.                                                                                                                        The Visigoths had already taken 2-1/2 tons of gold, 15 tons of silver, thousands of fabric, and 2-1/2 tons of pepper during a siege two years earlier. Barbarian slaves had been freed, many joining Alaric's army. On August 25, Rome's defenses failed completely. A visiting monk named Pelagius commented, T his dismal calamity is but just over, and you yourself are a witness to how Rome that commanded the world was astonished at the alarm o

 I thought I'd share some useful info for home computers. Sometimes your internet access may seem sluggish, it just takes forever  to get to websites. But once there things are snappy. It's not the network per se, it's DNS - the magic that takes your requested connection name and turns it into the an IP address that can be then used to connect to. Your service provider may have a DNS server that is overloaded, in turn giving you poor lookup speeds. Normally the location of the DNS server is set for you automatically at boot time and almost universally it's a machine owned by the IP provider. There may be dozens of them, each serving a small chunk of their network. Which is great for them, not so hot if that server taking your requests is not doing too well. If you are up for doing a little magic you can bypass the automatic setting for DNS and put in your own entries. There are a number of big DNS servers out there that available for open use. I use the pair offered by

It's been a while since my last post. For a number of reasons I had gone to ground. Taking shelter for a moment. First among those reasons is the increasingly intolerant attitude held by those who lean toward the Left, both those in government and individuals I happen to know. Say or do something that they don't like and they'll bury you with accusations of being a White Supremacist, a Fascist, or more specifically a Nazi. Name-calling is hurtful enough even when it's not true, but now a number of these folks are using insidious ways along with those labels to create far worse things. Like doxing, throwing a red-flag - claiming you're going to shoot up some place ( never!! ), triggering a law enforcement investigation, or tainting your online reputation records. Some will defend those activities with the religious zeal of witch hunters while others will bizarrely claim they were "just having fun". You have to worry not just about yourself, but your family

Today I went through the first stage of two surgeries to have cataracts removed and the lenses replaced. It's a common procedure, with most if not all patients experiencing a dramatic improvement in their vision, along with a very low complication rate. Despite that I had a lot of anxiety coming into this. Not about the procedure itself, but how well I would see afterwards. Would I be able to read a computer's monitor screen well enough to still write code? Could I find and hold on a target well enough to make those tiny groups of holes I pride myself on? Being a believer in not internalizing stress, I wrote to a number of friends, mentioning the surgery, the fact I was somewhat worried about it, and throwing a joke or two around as levity - I tend to use humor to counter stressful situations. One reply I received shocked me with the words "shut up" and "stop whining". I certainly had not been whining about eye surgery. Given the number of times this person

It's been over a year now since COVID-19 made it's first appearance on the world stage. And like a bad guest it's overstaying it's welcome. Through mutations, pools of the populace resisting preventative treatment, as well as an annoying ability to re-infect some folks this bug keeps defying the expert's expectations. Or are they experts? In order to be qualified as an expert you have to possess advanced knowledge on the matter. While the people who have been making frequent appearances before the press are highly trained scientists and physicians, they have little to no prior background with this virus. For all their degrees and years running this program or that they really are in the dark about how this bug operates. The guy at the podium is making a lot of guesses, perhaps well-grounded, perhaps not about what is going on and what to do about it. Meanwhile public officials had to do something. In the name of public safety a vast array of policies, regulations, a