Freedom Rider
There is nothing that irks me on the road quite like speed bumps. They exist solely because some group of people have decided that I don’t know how to drive safely. Long Island doesn’t have many areas with them; usually just private roads in apartment complexes where they’re trying to discourage thru-traffic. I understand this, but I think it’s backwards to punish the 95% of drivers who will use those roads, e.g. the tenants who are paying for it, to prevent the 5% who may or may not actually speed in a residential area.
Recently, I came across a private community that had a single access point for entry and five speed bumps. These bumps were on slopes and may have, at one point, been painted white, and were very difficult to see. One was marked by a tiny road sign that indicated it was there, in one direction—to people leaving the community. The first speed bump was located just feet from the entrance, making it difficult to react to when you turned in, and it was completely redundant on the way out, since the exit was bounded by a stop sign. So drivers had to slow down for the speed bump before they slowed down for the stop sign immediately after. Why was it there?
Florida would have speed bumps on nominally public roads. Where I drove, the Fort Lauderdale area, most public roads were huge 6 to 8 lane monstrosities. There were no speed bumps there, or there would have been blood, but turn off any main thoroughfare and you wouldn’t know what you were going to encounter. Often it was cul-de-sacs, and often those cul-de-sacs were littered with speed bumps designed to keep traffic bobbing up and down at 10 miles per hour, between bumps of course.
I know the idea is safety. They design roads with speed bumps in areas that have pedestrians, especially children. But again, speed bumps punish good drivers. Dangerous drivers may be discouraged by them, but they’re not learning to drive better because of them.
There is an article in The Atlantic describing why driving in America is so screwed up by people trying to make things safer. Because of the ubiquity of signage and prohibitions, we’re creating drivers who react slower and don’t use foresight to consider driving conditions.
Consider the stop sign. It seems innocuous enough; we do need to stop from time to time. But think about how the signs are actually set up and used. For one thing, there’s the placement of the signs—off to the side of the road, often amid trees, parked cars, and other road signs; rarely right in front of the driver, where he or she should be looking.
Then there’s the sheer number of them. They sit at almost every intersection in most American neighborhoods. In some, every intersection seems to have a four-way stop. Stop signs are costly to drivers and bad for the environment: stop/start driving uses more gas, and vehicles pollute most when starting up from rest. More to the point, however, the overabundance of stop signs teaches drivers to be less observant of cross traffic and to exercise less judgment when driving—instead, they look for signs and drive according to what the signs tell them to do.
The author, John Staddon, is from the UK, where they use traffic circles instead of stop signs at many intersections. I’m not a fan of traffic circles, or roundabouts, but this may change my opinion:
Roundabouts in the U.S. are typically large. But as drivers get used to them—as they have in the U.K. over the past three or four decades—they can be made smaller and smaller. A “mini-roundabout” in the U.K. is essentially just a large white dot in the middle of the intersection. In this form, it amounts to no more than an instruction to give way to traffic coming from the right (that would be the left over here, of course, since the Brits drive on the left).
This makes perfect sense. Roads don’t have to be widened, and it trains drivers to be cautious at intersections. Late at night, when I’m crossing service roads with traffic lights, I still slow down going through them, because, even though I have the right-of-way, drivers on the service road act as if they’re on the actual highway. Too many times, I’ve seen drivers blow through those red lights as if they weren’t there.
The article concludes with this, “…U.S. traffic policies are inducing a form of inattentional blindness in American drivers,” and I couldn’t agree more. Yes, I am advocating for fewer signs and “safety” features on the road. Driving is something that takes skill and constant vigilance, and it’s time for both drivers and traffic laws to grow up.
Posted on 05 July 2008.
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Song XXVIII
The temple has fallen
into disrepair
It’s sagging
and short of breath
The clergy are muttering
kind words to themselves
Holy invocations fall leaden
in front of their feet
The pews are all empty
The audience left
and coughs echo
flat on the marble
The temple is greying
into morbid disuse
It’s puffy
and soft in the middle
It never ran swiftly
nor sprung from the bed
And now it just moans
about this ache and that
The incense is burned
and the body is sacrificed
but no one is saved
and no one is blessed
Posted on 26 June 2008.
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Acid Trip to the Past
I’m not one to think that things were better in my childhood days. The 70s, for all those who choose not to—or are too young to—remember, sucked. Really. The 80s sucked, too. Sure, we’re all nostalgic for big hair and men in shorty-shorts, but except for an underground music scene that would pay off dividends in the 90s and beyond, my generation was the first to find their world more difficult to prosper than the previous generations in America. But, wait, I come here not to whine.
Instead, I find myself chuckling at this article from Newsday about a group of kids arrested after one of them was found with an “apparent ‘caustic liquid’” on his clothing. Because one of the group may have said something about “blowing it up,” this vague threat lead to four arrests and bails in the $60k range.
So here’s a case where I can say, “Boy, times sure have changed,” and think wistfully back to childhood, where one of my friends, in junior high school, could bring a glass beaker, filled with a clear liquid, covered with tinfoil, and sporting a taped label saying “Dangerous: ACID.” He was not stopped the entire day, even though he displayed it at various times, including leaving it on the lunch table, during which a couple of other friends and I would mercilessly tease him about carrying “acid” in his bookbag covered with a flimsy piece of foil.
This is a true story, so I will not name my friend on this blog. Suffice to say, he knows who he his, and so do most of my friends, and so does the Mock Trial club from that year; because, the beaker was not filled with “Dangerous: ACID”—it was filled with a pint of Vodka. Oh, it sill cracks me up that the “acid” got no attention from anyone, but when a dozen kids were later caught in the girls’ room with their dixie cups, it became the crime of the century.
Times have changed, though. These kids, today, in the mean-streets of Levittown, may have actually had an acid, since the ‘caustic liquid’ kid’s shirt was burned, but I do believe that the authorities are over-reacting, as these four were going to be as successful in their “blowing it up” as the Mock Trial kids were in getting their booze on, all those years ago.
Posted on 20 June 2008.
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It bears repeating
Turn off Safari’s Open “safe” files after downloading under Safari->Preferences.
There’s a program out there in the wild that can download and install itself if that checkbox is checked. It’s possible that the payload is helped along by the Flash vulnerability; I’m not sure, but keep in mind that many websites are using Flash ads that are served from 3rd party servers. Even if you trust the site, the ads may be from nefarious sources.
There isn’t really an easy way to turn Flash off on Safari, unless you remove the plug-in from the /Library/Internet Plug-ins/ directory. Firefox has an extension, called NoScript, which is very customizable (you can block Flash, but not JavaScript, for example), and I highly recommend it.
Anyway, the payload from before installs a plug-in into the /Library/Internet Plug-ins/ directory that changes the DNS server that the Mac uses to resolve domain names. Basically, it means that typing in http://macphoenix.com may send you to a totally different site, or worse, if going to a banking or bill paying site, it may send you to a site that looks exactly the same, but is controlled by thieves. One of the bad DNS IP entries was 85.255.113.138. There was another IP number, but I didn’t record it. If you have a DNS entry pointing to the above, though, it’s a server in the Ukraine that will send you to whatever it wants to, not where you want to go.
The plug-in disguises itself, so it’s impossible to know what it’s named. The solution was to remove every plug-in from /Library/Internet Plug-ins/, restarting, and (after checking that the DNS changed back to the original number) installing trusted plug-ins like QuickTime and Flip4Mac. But remember, the first line of defense is turning off that preference that should not be turned on in the first place.
Update: In response to a comment by Antonio, allow me to clarify. There are exploits to javascript (and now apparently Flash) that can make Safari download something without the user being aware. With the Open “safe” files after downloading checked, the download can potentially contain an installer that can load a trojan onto your machine. It’s simply keeping the porch door open allowing raccoons to eat the pet food in the kitchen. As for usability, the only benefit to Open “safe” files after downloading is saving the user a double click on legitimately downloaded files.
Posted on 02 June 2008.
1 comment:
Antonio said:
Can’t really tell what the downside is…of course I would not want something to download and install itself on my Mac without my authorization, but, what does it do? In any event, I’ll uncheck that thing, and rely on Flip4Mac, Quicktime, Perian and Flash for video on the web.
cURL’d
This is one of those inside baseball posts. On my main page, I have two things that everyone ignores on the sidebar: Word of the Day and Your Random Weather Report. They both use a script to grab data from external sites—Wordsmith.org in the former and the National Weather Service in the latter.
Lately, they’ve been slowing the load time of my site down significantly. It’s taken 13 to 14 seconds for my home page to competely load, which is ridiculous over a cable modem. Sometimes, the sites that I grab the data from have slow downs, but those are temporary and never last more than a day or so, but my home page has been loading slowly for at least two weeks.
I could have just disabled the two scripts, which I eventually did, but I thought that I could figure out the problem, and, stubbornly, let my page load slowly for days.
Since both scripts were slow, I knew that the sites themselves weren’t to blame. Also, since I have the Google Ads, which loaded fine, I knew that it wasn’t my hosting company throttling external connections. It was something with cURL, which is a method for calling external data into a script. If anyone is having a problem with cURL, this is what helped in my case:
If you have a url in the form of a domain name, e.g. wordsmith.org, cURL has to look up the IP address via a lookup table. Sometimes, as in my shared hosting situation, those tables get corrupted or really large or whatever, and it takes cURL some 10 seconds to look up the address. The solution is to give cURL the IP address in the script, e.g. 216.12.219.209. Then there is no delay from resolving the IP address. It’s exceedingly logical, but I didn’t think of it, since I tend to ignore IP addresses. I found it on a discussion site.
This is a really boring post, but I’m hopeful that someone on the great big internets will find it helpful.
Posted on 17 May 2008.
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