One of the eating establishments at Duke that everyone knows is Cosmic Cantina. Cosmic is best described as a Chipotle or Qdoba, but without the fine dining experience. Sure, its food might not be the best, and sure, at first glance you wonder whether the health inspector died on his last visit, but it has two unspeakably powerful draws: it’s cheap and it’s open until about 3 AM.

Tonight, as many of my friends graduated from Duke University, I started getting nostalgic. As it happens, there are three Cosmic Cantinas in the world: one in Durham, one in Chapel Hill, and…one in New York City. So I dragged my girlfriend halfway across town so that I could have a nostalgic burrito.

It turns out that Cosmic New York and Cosmic Durham have about as much in common as a freshman and a human. Our experience started when I walked in to order something from the counter. I was quickly informed by a genteel pothead that Cosmic Cantina was a sit-down establishment, and I was welcome to take a seat, following which I would be served. As I tried to suppress a laugh, Irena and I headed outside and sat ourselves down at one of the funky plus-sign-shaped tables. The waiter dude soon came over to hover over us like a hippie vulture while we tried to figure out what to order. We eventually decided on two glasses of water, primarily to make him go away. As I then perused the rest of the menu, I was happy to discover that “generic water” was $2 per glass. When stonerwaiter returned, I settled on a $7 veggie burrito for myself and a $5 glass of sangria for my belle.

Total bill: $18 with tip

Expected bill when I set out: $4

Laughing maniacally at what a rip-off Cosmic is in New York: priceless.

Some things money can’t buy. As long as you have a really fat wallet, Cosmic burritos aren’t one of them.

Ars Technica reports that used CDs are going to be subject to waiting periods and resale restrictions in Florida, Rhode Island, Wisconsin, and Utah. Ken Fisher writes:

In Florida, Utah, and soon in Rhode Island and Wisconsin, selling your used CDs to the local record joint will be more scrutinized than then getting a driver’s license in those states. For retailers in Florida, for instance, there’s a “waiting period” statue that prohibits them from selling used CDs that they’ve acquired until 30 days have passed. Furthermore, the Florida law disallows stores from providing anything but store credit for used CDs.

Billboard also has the story. For any of my old Duke Moot Court buddies who can’t quite believe this is happening, you can read Utah’s version of the bill. The bill begins by redefining pawn brokers to include any shops that sell secondhand merchandise (13-32a-102), and then enumerates what must be recorded at the time of transaction. To whit:

(1) Every pawnbroker or secondhand merchandise dealer shall keep a register of each article of property a person pawns or sells to the pawnbroker or secondhand merchandise dealer, except as provided in Subsection 13-32a-102 (17)(b) regarding secondhand merchandise dealers. Every pawn and secondhand business owner or operator, or his employee, shall enter the following information regarding every article pawned or sold to the owner or employee:

• (a) the date and time of the transaction;
• (b) the pawn transaction ticket number, if the article is pawned;
• (c) the date by which the article must be redeemed;
• (d) the following information regarding the person who pawns or sells the article:
  • (i) the person’s name, residence address, and date of birth;
  • (ii) the number of the driver license or other form of positive identification presented by the person, and notations of discrepancies if the person’s physical description, including gender, height, weight, race, age, hair color, and eye color, does not correspond with identification provided by the person;
  • (iii) the person’s signature; and
  • (iv) a legible fingerprint of the person’s right thumb, or if the right thumb cannot be fingerprinted, a legible fingerprint of the person with a written notation identifying the fingerprint and the reason why the thumb print was unavailable;
• (e) the amount loaned on or paid for the article, or the article for which it was traded;
• (f) the identification of the pawn or secondhand business owner or the employee, whoever is making the register entry; and
• (g) an accurate description of the article of property, including available identifying s such as:
  • (i) names, brand names, numbers, serial numbers, model numbers, color, facturers’ names, and size;
  • (ii) metallic composition, and any jewels, stones, or glass;

This law is completely asinine, inexcusable, and downright disgusting. It impedes the free market, effectively criminalizes what ought to be completely legal behavior, and has absolutely no positive benefit whatsoever to anyone except the recording industry umbrella organizations. Get this information onto the mainstream media so that people can start understanding what the RIAA actually stands for.

When I first started bitquabit, I wanted it to be strictly a technology blog. When people wanted to read something about Squeak or db4objects or Copilot, they could come here. When they wanted to read someone writing a meandering essay on farm subsidies and ethanol, they could go somewhere else.

That position is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain. On the one hand, technology is inextricably tied to certain political agendas that, I feel, must constantly be discussed—patents and copyright chief among them, but also such topics as freedom of speech or the ethics of invention. Yet these topics are, well, boring, because basically every single prominent tech blogger has exactly the same position on these issues: patents are too broad, last too long, insufficiently investigated for prior art by the USPTO, and, at least in computing, do far more harm than good; copyright is great, but in its current forms last too long, fails in its original purpose, and violates the Constitution; and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and its siblings abroad are blatantly unconstitutional due to their de facto destruction of fair use, stifle free speech, and should be at best struck down and at worst kept from spreading to more countries. Because these positions are so widespread, they’re neither controversial nor insightful. Others expound these arguments far better than I and are more up-to-date on the latest goings-on in the beltway. In short, though these topics may be relevant, they are also well-covered and therefore not issues I feel compelled to discuss here.

That leaves The Ugly Topics—the topics nominally only distantly related to technology. Topics like the war, Sarkozy’s election, the heightening tensions in the last month in Israel, the rapidly intensifying atheist-believer debate, and global climate change. These topics, charged though they may be, have profound impacts on technology. Wars divert funding from general science and research, yet fuel technological innovation—provided that the technologies in question are usable for waging war. Sarkozy happens to be sympathetic to digital rights management software and does not seem to support the EU’s drive to force Microsoft to open its networking protocols and file formats. Israel is a miniature Silicon Valley and a major exporter of cryptography and encryption software. The atheist-believer debate has profound impact for artificial intelligence and, indeed, the purpose and future use of technology in general. Global climate change drives ever-more-powerful computing clusters in an attempt to simulate weather patterns, spurs green buildings and high-efficiency solar cells, and may usher in the return of nuclear power. Even if we ignore all of their greater significance, the topics are still relevant.

The problem, of course, is that I cannot discuss just the technology side. Some readers are already fuming that I can touch on the war and step right past all the people dying, others are annoyed that I’m ignoring the “interesting” parts of Sarkozy’s politics, and my good friends, who are well aware of my fascination with religion, are curious why I’ve never touched a single religious topic on this blog. These issues are all so big that I have to discuss parts of them that have nothing to do with technology if I want to cover their technological aspects at all. Yet by attempting to address any of these topics, I will divide my audience.

If I want to speak on these topics, yet doing so costs me readers who are interested in what I have to say on technology, does that make addressing these topics “bad”? Does my hesitancy, however brief, to speak my mind and lose those readers make me a coward? If I honestly care more for this particular blog to reach a technical audience than a political one, does that change the answer? If it did, would the answer change again if I were to split bitquabit into a personal blog and technical blog?

Where is the dividing line?

I don’t exactly consider myself a bad-ass system administrator. In fact, to be honest, I’m a pretty poor one. I like programming computers, not maintaining them, and the hoops that system administrators have to jump through to get everything configured and running smoothly give me headaches. Granted, machines under my dominion usually end up stable after a week or two of heavy dogfooding, and, so far as I know, no machine I’ve administered has ever been hacked (knock on wood), but administration is most definitely not my forte.

So when I decided to move to Linode, I did so with a little bit of trepidation. Yes, I wanted more flexibility than Dreamhost offered, and yes, I wanted full control over a server so I could run whatever I felt like, but at the same time, I was extremely nervous about whether I’d actually be able to get everything working properly.

Mostly, I ended up having an easier go of it than I anticipated. Debian 4 has been a great distro and was wonderfully easy to set up. sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-php5 php5-mysql helped me get WordPress back up and running very quickly. Getting mail operational using dovecot and exim4 with TLS proved more of a challenge, but I eventually got that working too, and even figured out how to get my self-signed certs permanently accepted by Thunderbird and my awesome Nokia N800 (more on that some other day). But I had two major problems: I was getting identified as spam by all the major hosting providers, and I could not for the life of me get Apache virtual hosting doing what I wanted.

The first drove me completely bonkers: even though I verified repeatedly that I had set up valid SPF records in DNS, Gmail kept nailing everything I sent as spam with no explanation whatsoever. Nothing I could come up with helped. At the same time I was trying to get inside Gmail’s head, I was also trying to make bitquabit.com point to, well, bitquabit.com, but make code.bitquabit.com point to an encrypted site that hosted my Mercurial repositories. Try as I might, I simply could not make a configuration that did what I wanted. I ended up with all virtual hosts authenticated, or the code subdomain burning out, or Apache rejecting my configuration entirely. I finally caved in and asked Michael Gorsuch, our sysadmin, if he could lend me a helping hand.

Michael’s awesome. Rather than tell me he was too busy, which I would have completely understood, and rather than just pointing me to clear documentation, which is what I had hoped for, he actually wrote tutorials of his own for his website that explained how to do what I was trying to accomplish. After reading the tutorials and getting a quick lecture on PTR records, I finally managed to get everything up. Everything’s working perfectly. No more spam blocks, my repositories are live, and I even managed to cram a few extras features in there as well (specifically, authenticated WebDAV). I don’t know of any other sysadmins who would’ve taken the time to help me like that, so thank you, Michael.

All you readers, go check out his blog. It’s a pretty good read. (And after this weekend’s redesign, it’s pretty pretty, too.)

What’s left? I’m not completely sure. The immediate impetus for moving to Linode was to enable me to rewrite this blog in Squeak using Seaside and Pier or HttpView2. Long-term, I wanted to be able to clean up and begin publishing some small web apps I’ve written in Seaside. Regardless of what I end up doing, I’ll be sure to let you know as soon as there’s something to click on.

Since I moved from Dreamhost to Linode, Gmail thinks that all email coming from this domain is spam. As near as I can tell, my SPF records are correct, and exim is definitely not set to be an open relay. Does anyone know what might be up?

Edit: At a friend’s recommendation, I checked Spamhaus and friends to see whether the previous owner of bitquabit.com’s IP might have been a spammer, but it’s not on any of the lists.

Nothing quite says summer in the city like the sweet, succulent scent of melting urine gently raping your olfactory senses.