Crisis of one sort or another

July 1, 2003

On January 28, 2003 President George W. Bush said in the State of the Union address to Congress: "Our intelligence officials estimate that Saddam Hussein had the materials to produce as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent. In such quantities, these chemical agents could also kill untold thousands. He's not accounted for these materials. He has given no evidence that he has destroyed them."

It seems that we have a crisis. Possibly the claims were not as substantiated as they were stated to be, in which case we have a crisis of leadership. Perhaps we have a military and intelligence service that is incapable of finding hundreds of tons of hideous materials in which case we have a crisis of security. Finally the possiblity exists that our intelligence agencies are not up to the task and we have a crisis of intelligence gathering.

Three bad options.

Loading Microsoft Excel data into MySQL

June 24, 2003

This is mainly a cheat sheet for me in recalling the best way to load MS Excel data into MySQL.

  1. Set dates to format YYYY-MM-DD
  2. Put columns in the same order as the database
  3. Save data as tab delimited
  4. Use BBedit (or another program) to convert line breaks to UNIX (^n)
  5. Put file in directory with no spaces in the path
  6. Launch MySQL
  7. Load data with command "load data infile '/PATH/FILE' into table `TABLE_NAME` LINES TERMINATED BY '\n';"

This is not comprehensive nor does it deal with all situations. Just a place holder for the information.

Suburban Decay

June 15, 2003

Today brought a trip to the Westminster Mall in Westminster, Colo. The mall, once the shopping hub of the Northwest portion of the Denver suburbs and the only thing between Denver and the Crossroads mall in Boulder, is in a state of decay. It is very much like the Crossroads mall in Boulder which has shrunken to a few shops and no major department stores. J.C. Penny, Sears etc., one by one they pull out with pressure from the newer and fancier likes of the Flatirons shopping center in the Broomfield/Superior area. Occupancy in the Westminster mall appears to be declining with many open spaces and no hint of anything to fill the space left empty by the Wards bankruptcy half a decade ago.

Remains found near clothes of missing boy

June 14, 2003

Twenty-five searchers from Larimer County Search and Rescue and Allyn Atadero were in the Poudre Canyon area today to search for remains of 3-year-old Jaryd Atadero who became separated from a group hiking in the area in October of 1999. Earlier this week the Larimer County Sheriff's office announced that hikers had found clothes, which were identified as being the clothes Jaryd wore the day he disappeared, in an area off the Big South Trail where Jaryd was last seen. 9news has a story on the search.

The Denver Post reports that investigators with with NecroSearch International of Denver will join the search as well.

News sources say this afternoon that remains were found in the area of the clothing found last week. The skull fragment and tooth have not yet been positively identified . Allyn Atadero, after viewing the remains said "They found him."

UNIX based controversy

June 14, 2003

The Open Group is suing Apple over their use of the term UNIX Based to describe its OS X operating system. The Open group claims the use infringes on their trademark. Apple is countersuing claiming that the trademark has become a generic term.

The claim seems to be made easily as a read of a recent Sys Admin magazine will show. The logo for Sys Admin shown here and it's tagline were modified this month to include UNIX and Linux but since 1992 it said just UNIX.

Sys Admin apparently violates The Open Group's claim of trademark in several ways:

  • Attribution - The Open Group's legal page says "Blanket or generic attributions are not acceptable." While Sys Admin says "All trademarks are respectfully acknowledged."
  • Sys Admin recognizes (with the TM or (R) marks) trademarks which have not become generic such as Solaris(TM)
  • Sys Admin uses the term UNIX generically in its tagline as well as in its text. For example the June 2003 issue has an article titled Freeware Forensics Tools with the subtitle that starts "Westphal examines three popular UNIX freeware tools." After introducing the tools the article states "All three tools mentioned in this article were utilized in a Linux 7.3 environment."

The use of UNIX to describe Linux will raise many hackles amongst purists but it goes to show how much the term UNIX has become generic to describe an entire class of operating systems. This is only one example of how diluted The Open Group's once trademark has become. So it seems likely that UNIX will join escalator, thermos, linoleum, yo-yo and zipper as one-time trademarks that have become generic.

Sys Admin is but one of the fronts on which The Open Group has failed to maintain it's trademark. FreeBSD has long used the term UNIX on their home page to describe their product (which is also the foundation of Apple's OS X).

These are two of many prominent examples proving that The Open Group has abandoned their once trademark on the term UNIX. Apple Computer's case should have many examples to draw upon.

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