I’m posting this because I know someone out there will find it useful (or at the very least, a time saver).

What is FoxyProxy?

FoxyProxy is a great add-on to Firefox that lets you define multiple rule-based proxy servers.  It lets you do things like define a rule that loads all URLs through a certain proxy server except those that match a given pattern.  Rules can be wildcards (*whatever.com*) or regular expressions (https?://.*.whatever.com.*).

The problem (need an IP address regex)

I had a problem with FoxyProxy where IP addresses (e.g. 127.0.0.1, 10.0.0.1, etc) were being loaded through my work’s proxy server when they shouldn’t be using a proxy at all.  This is because I had a proxy setup with a “Match all URLs” rule along with a blacklist rule for local URLs (*.myworkintranet.com*).  What I needed was a blacklist rule that would tell FoxyProxy to load all IP addresses directly.  Specifically, I needed a regular expression that would match any IP address.

The solution (regular expression matching any IP address)

https?://[1-9][0-9]?[0-9]?.[0-9][0-9]?[0-9]?.[0-9][0-9]?[0-9]?.[0-9][0-9]?[0-9]?.*

There you have it.  I know this will also match invalid IP addresses (e.g. 999.999.999.999) but it shouldn’t matter since there’s no number-only top-level domains (i.e. .999 as opposed to say, .com).

Also, in case you were wondering FoxyProxy uses the Javascript regular expression format.

Other regular expressions you might find useful

Same thing but for FTP URLs:

ftp://[1-9][0-9]?[0-9]?.[0-9][0-9]?[0-9]?.[0-9][0-9]?[0-9]?.[0-9][0-9]?[0-9]?.*

Match reserved (non-Internet) IP addresses (i.e. 127.X.X.X, 10.X.X.X, 192.168.X.X, and 172.16-31.X.X):

https?://(127|10|172|192)\.(1[6-9]|2[0-9]|3[01])\.[0-9][0-9]?[0-9]?\.[0-9][0-9]?[0-9]?.*

Nanci Pelosi recently asked on Yahoo! Answers, Congress is working on legislation to address global warming – what would you like to see included?. I wrote my own response and afterwards I read some of the other answers… Wow! Either there’s a lot of people out there who don’t have the first clue about global warming or there’s some astroturfing going on (which I think is highly likely).

Some of the answers were just downright ridiculous. The amount of bullshit was staggering. If you were playing global warming bingo you’d “win” on every page.

This morning I read that the House is considering a bill to make price gouging on gasoline a federal crime. It made me wonder if Congress knows that is not going to fix the problem or if they’re intentionally showboating. Then there’s the conspiracy theorist in me thinking, “I wonder if the oil and gas lobbying groups suggested it to them as a misdirection campaign?”

Just about everyone knows (now) that gas is expensive “because oil inventories are down.” It has been repeated in the news over & over. But what does that really mean? Is it really a simple problem of supply and demand?

The problem is the rate of consumption. Imagine a bucket being filled with water at the same time as water is being pumped out. As long as you pump out at the same rate as you’re filling the bucket everything is fine. If the rate of water going into the bucket is reduced while the amount you’re pumping out stays flat you’ll run out of water. How long it takes to run out of water in the bucket depends on the size of the bucket and the rate you pump it out.

U.S. gasoline inventories are that bucket and it isn’t a very big one. In a good week we have 10 days worth of gas waiting to be sold. Starting about March, gas inventories dropped every week to a low of about 8.8 days worth of gas (see this). Last week inventories started going up again so the price of gas might go down but then again, it might not because Memorial Day weekend is coming up and that means a lot of gas is about to be burned.

When oil inventories start dropping again and there isn’t an excuse like, “we had a fire at a major refinery” or, “it was a long weekend” you can be rest assured that the U.S. is entering what I’m calling, “the permanent oil crisis.” We may already be in a permanent crisis if you consider that the smallest little disruption causes oil speculators to jump and gas prices to skyrocket.

So the question remains: Will Congress ever work to solve the problem or will they just wait until the U.S. economy is destroyed by it? Don’t say “the market will solve the problem” because the “problem” is an externality outside of the control of the market. Does a shipping line wait until oil prices drop before they ship things? Do you decide to not drive to work because gas prices are high? Does the power company decide not to meet demand because oil prices went up? No. When the rate at which we can obtain and refine oil falls below demand it will already be too late for the market to adjust.

We need to forcibly diversify the U.S. energy portfolio now. Which would you rather have: An economy that suffers for a few years while we invest in alternative energy (particularly infrastructure) or an economy that is suddenly destroyed as a result of inaction? By doing nothing our government will ruin us. The market cannot correct itself without a catastrophe. No one in our present government at any level can say, “no one saw this coming.”

Tonight ABC News (TV) had a piece regarding, “Sex offenders on MySpace.” Here’s how I would sum it up:

Sex offenders on MySpace: What the popular-with-those-kids-these-days site is doing about sex offenders (you must say it slow, with emphasis). MySpace has already identified and removed 7,000 accounts of known sex offenders.

So the lesson here is clear: If you’re a sex offender, we want you to remain anonymous on MySpace. However, I must ask: Why can’t sex offenders have MySpace pages? It isn’t like it’s a “site for kids”—it is just a “site”. A bad one at that. What’s the point of banning people who were caught, say, soliciting a prostitute or peeing in public (aka indecent exposure)? Hell, some MySpace profiles are indecent exposure!

There’s registered sex offenders and then there’s registered offenders. You find the former on government websites and the latter on MySpace. Why all the fuss?

I am so sick of right-wingers calling anyone they don’t like “a liberal”. Either they never cracked open a dictionary or they’re intentionally trying to change what the word means (wouldn’t be the first time).

For reference this is what a liberal is (non-related definitions removed):

1. favorable to progress or reform, as in political or religious affairs.
2. of, pertaining to, based on, or advocating liberalism.
3. favorable to or in accord with concepts of maximum individual freedom possible, esp. as guaranteed by law and secured by governmental protection of civil liberties.
4. favoring or permitting freedom of action, esp. with respect to matters of personal belief or expression: a liberal policy toward dissident artists and writers.
5. free from prejudice or bigotry; tolerant: a liberal attitude toward foreigners.

1. open-minded or tolerant, esp. free of or not bound by traditional or conventional ideas, values, etc.

   This is what a conservative is:

2. disposed to preserve existing conditions, institutions, etc., or to restore traditional ones, and to limit change.
3. cautiously moderate or purposefully low: a conservative estimate.
4. a person who is conservative in principles, actions, habits, etc.

1. a supporter of conservative political policies.

   (The highlighted text is my doing)

   Now for some pertinent notes:

   • “liberal” and “conservative” are not direct opposites unless you’re talking about favoring reform VS preserving existing conditions. It is only in this context where labeling a politician makes sense. In other contexts there are much better labels such as radical, open-minded, or “civil rights advocate”.
   • Anyone who advocates banning abortion cannot be labeled as a conservative since they advocate change. This does not necessarily make them a liberal either since the stance is opposed to individual freedom. If I were to label this position, it would be “pro reproductive regulation” or “favoring moral-based prohibition”. Yes, this means that pro-choice people are conservatives!

• If you think the government should reduce its size and lower taxes you are a liberal! That would be a very big change indeed.

  What I’m getting at is that people usually aren’t “liberal” or “conservative”. Issues are.

Let’s say you’re a big U.S. corporation that employs skilled IT people. Lately, the human resources department has been giving you a headache because…

1. When you post a new job for a position that requires many technical skills you’re getting a lot less candidates than you used to and the ones you do get don’t have the all the specific skills that you need.

1. Because of this glut, you’re having to pay more & more for this kind of worker because of their increasing scarcity. Even worse, you might even have to pay to relocate some people.

   Not only that, but you’re hearing in the news that fewer and fewer students are graduating with technical degrees and even less are entering the fields you need them to. Things are not looking good for your payroll numbers so for the past several years you’ve been doing everything you possibly could to keep salaries as low as possible while you wait for this “glut” to disappear. Here’s some strategies you’ve tried:

2. Layoffs and re-hires: Get rid of as many people as possible. Then, if necessary, re-hire the few you do need at a lesser rate or as contractors to save on things like health insurance. This strategy used to work great back when there wasn’t a glut of IT workers.
3. Make your existing staff do more, and more varied work. Application specialists (say, Weblogic) are expensive so you tasked your systems administrator(s) to cover it along with their other duties. You made your Oracle database administrators cover the Microsoft SQL boxes and perform basic administrative functions on their respective servers (since the other admins were not getting things done fast enough). You tasked your developers with being systems administrators for some systems. You even expected your existing IT workforce to handle and implement all your security needs.

1. Hire H1B visa holders: There’s hundreds of thousands of foreign workers with the skills you want who will work for less than the natives. Not only that, but you can probably get away with not paying for their benefits and since they’re not citizens you don’t have to pay for things like unemployment insurance.

   All of these techniques at your disposal have finally dried up. Because there really is a glut in the number of skilled IT people you can’t do the layoff thing anymore. Also, your existing staff has reached levels of productivity beyond your wildest dreams—but now all the skills you forced them to develop makes them more expensive to retain (oops, didn’t see that one coming). Then there’s that H1B thing: The cap on the number of H1Bs has been reached. If only there were a way to get more H1Bs…

   As part of a successfully lobbying campaign on the part of TechNet (lobbying group of Microsoft, Oracle, HP, Intel, etc big corp IT), Senator Chuck Hagel (R-Nebraska) has introduced Senate Bill 1092 to triple the number of H1B visas granted each year. If the bill passes, that means that instead of 65,000 U.S. jobs being filled by foreign workers it will be 195,000.

   That’s right: 195,000 jobs will be given to foreign workers instead of U.S. citizens. But wait: How can billion-dollar U.S. corporations stay competitive if they can’t find workers? Easy:

2. Spend some of those billions on training. You may not be able to find a developer with experience in C++, Java, .NET, and perl but you can most assuredly find one with at least two or three of those. As long as training is being neglected there will always be workers that are a few skills short. The current situation is unsustainable.
3. The market will correct itself. Sure, it will cost these big companies some money in the short term but how long do you think there will be a shortage of IT workers if the pay and benefits just keep going up? How many people left the IT industry altogether because of the piss-poor work hours, pay, and benefits during the dotcom bust? They can come back you know…
4. Be flexible on skills and be patient. You probably don’t need to train an employee on half of the “required skills” in your job listing. Administering a Solaris server isn’t all that different from administering a Linux box. There will be a few weeks or months of low efficiency but you’ll make up for it with a much more flexible employee.

1. Hire more helpers. If you’ve got your systems administrators taking care of not only your servers, but your network, your firewalls, and your databases all at the same time you would do well to hire a helper. Helpers can be fresh college graduates that are A) Cheaper than an experienced employee and B) by hiring these “beginners” you’re helping solve the worker shortage problem. Even better: If you treat them well and pay them according to their experience they just might stick around and turn out to be great employees. Who would have thought?

   In closing, I’d like to point out that there really isn’t a shortage of U.S. IT workers. There’s plenty of IT workers, they’re just working non-IT jobs right now because companies aren’t paying enough, aren’t providing good enough benefits, are being too picky about skills and certifications, and there’s almost no job security (off-shoring, potential of H1B cap increases, etc).

The idea of providence
Is belief without evidence

It is fine to preach kindness
But not to be mindless

With complete devotion
Comes powerful emotion

That addiction to religious zeal
Can lead you to ignore what is real

When you come to find that you’ve lost your mind
You’ll realize it’s the ignorant who’ll be left behind

Dogma and doctrine can be difficult to flee
But if you just seek it, the truth can set you free

I just received a letter from Senator Mel Martinez that states that global warming is the result of changes in land use! …and that it is perfectly natural! How out of touch with reality is this guy? I mean, next he’ll be telling me that the earth was created in six days and that humans walked with dinosaurs!

Here’s the full text of the letter:

Thank you for contacting me regarding our nation’s initiatives to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. I appreciate hearing from you and would like to respond to your concerns.

According to the National Academy of Sciences, the recent warming trend of the Earth’s surface temperature can be attributed to the effect of natural occurring and human-generated gases such as carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide. Yet, long term temperature data maintained by the National Aeronautical and Space Administration’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) suggests that changes in temperature might be more closely related to changes in land uses.

In addition, researchers have found that environmental awareness and initiatives are stronger when people enjoy a higher standard of living, which is in turn a result of steady economic growth.

When addressing the complex questions surrounding this issue, we need to make decisions grounded on sound science to ensure our nation’s continuous economic growth and the welfare of the most vulnerable in our communities is not put at risk. Developing a comprehensive climate change policy must include strategies to deal with the growing emissions and energy consumption of large industrial nations such as, India and China; where energy consumption is growing at more than four times the global rate.

25 years ago, China was largely energy self-sufficient. According to the International Energy Agency, demand for oil in China and India will double by 2030. We must continue to engage developing nations to ensure that scarce energy supplies are being used efficiently and that we support new technologies that promote cleaner-burning fuels.

On February 2002, President Bush unveiled a comprehensive strategy to reduce greenhouse gas intensity in our nation by 18 percent within a decade, thus preventing the release of 500 million metric tons of carbon-equivalent emissions to the atmosphere. The President’s budget for fiscal year 2006 includes nearly $3 billion for the development of environmentally sound technologies, and $200 million for climate-change-related international assistance programs.

On June 21, 2005, I joined a strong majority of my Senate colleagues in approving an amendment (S. Amdt. 817) to the Energy Policy Act of 2005 (H.R. 6) introduced by Senator Chuck Hagel (R-NE). This amendment promotes the adoption of new technologies that reduce greenhouse gas intensity and the transfer of these technologies to developing countries. The amendment also offers credit-based financial assistance and investment protection for projects employing advanced climate technologies in our nation.

Recently, I was pleased to learn about the President’s initiative to achieve pollution reductions, energy security, and responding to climate change concerns by joining the New Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development. Another five countries have joined this initiative including Australia, Japan, South Korea, as well as developing nations such as China and India, in an effort to enhance cooperation to accelerate the development and deployment of cleaner, more efficient energy technologies.

Rest assured that I will keep your thoughts in mind should the full Senate address our nation’s environmental laws. As always, I appreciate hearing from you. Please do not hesitate to contact me with any additional comments or questions. In addition, for more information about issues and activities important to Florida, please sign up for my weekly newsletter.

Sincerely,

Mel Martinez
United States Senator
Next time he’s up for election (in four years?) I’m going to campaign like hell to get him out of office. It isn’t just that he’s stupid, it’s that he is actually harmful. To spread bullshit like this is absurd. He also fully supports the war in Iraq (and sending more troops/having it go on forever), lied about his campaign contributions to the tune of $500,000 dollars (corruption), is responsible for the Schiavo Memo, is against gay marriage (and appears rather homophobic in general), is against comprehensive sexual education, supports the No Child Left Behind program, wants to turn federal parks into hunting sports attractions, is against a single-payer system for healthcare, and is a general all-around trickle-down economics conservative Republican.

I noticed on Boing Boing today a great flowchart comparing the scientific method to the “faith” method. I thought it was very well done, so I’ve decided to share my own version.

I created this flowchart many months ago to try out the auto-flowchart-generator built into TWiki. Feel free to share (copy) this chart with your friends and coworkers, post it on websites, or make your own version. Just make sure to give me credit as the guy who came up with the idea and provide a link back to this post (so I can see how far and wide my creation has spread =)

I was just looking at this article covering the various 2008 presidential candidates stances on IT-related issues. When I followed the links to their websites, however, most of them were talking about fixing our health care system with hardly passing mentions of things like Net Neutrality or improving high-speed Internet access and competition. Since they’re all so adamant about “fixing health care” I thought I’d share my opinion regarding one of these big “plans”…

One of the first sites I perused was John Edwards and it left me rather upset. John Edwards Health Care plan is so bad I just had to write about it. I had to let everyone know that it

• Will hurt the economy.
• Won’t reduce drug prices.
• Won’t reduce health care costs.
• Won’t reduce health insurance premiums.

• Promotes inequality in health care and especially will hurt the poor and the middle class.

  Here’s his plan (quoted from his website):

  1. Requiring businesses and other employers to either cover their employees or help finance their health insurance.
  2. Making insurance affordable by creating new tax credits, expanding Medicaid and SCHIP, reforming insurance laws, and taking innovative steps to contain health care costs.

1. Creating regional “Health Markets” to let every American share the bargaining power to purchase an affordable, high-quality health plan, increase choices among insurance plans, and cut costs for businesses offering insurance.

   Here’s why it is so awful:

2. Requiring employers to pay for employee health coverage will further increase health care pricing (and drug prices) by continuing to hide the real cost of health care in employees paychecks. It may also prevent them from opting out of bad plans and may restrict them to very limited drug coverage. Not only that, but it still leaves employers with the burden of paying more for their employees than their foreign competitors do; hurting the U.S. economy.
3. Tax credits are great, but why is health care spending taxable at all? If you pay for your health care through an HSA you’re already avoiding paying taxes on it. It is a stupid and unnecessary system that confuses taxpayers and puts them in the impossible position of trying to predict how much they’re going to spend on their health in any given year. Also, State Childrens Health Insurance Programs(SCHIP) are equally as dumb. Why is it OK to provide for the health of children but not for adults? “Sorry, you’re 18 now so you’ll have to pay the $30,000 yearly it costs to keep you alive on your own.” Are we really that cruel that at a certain age you’re left out in the cold? People seem to forget that there’s a HUGE gap between when you start working and when you can afford health care (if ever). Starting salaries are lower than ever.

1. It’s a fact: Every time you divide up health care costs, the more inefficient the system becomes. Is it OK that New York will get cheaper coverage than Kansas because it has richer residents and more people paying into the system (and thus, more negotiating power)? Regional coverage is a stupid idea. It should be national coverage. Think of all that bargaining power compared to say, Hawaii or South Dakota.

   There’s many ways to get every U.S. citizen covered, but some things must be implemented in order for it to work. Here’s the basics of how it needs to be done if we want it to work:

2. Employers can’t be paying for health insurance anymore. It makes it harder for them to compete with foreign businesses—none of which (in 1st-world countries) pay this cost. The U.S. is the only 1st-world country that doesn’t have universal healthcare.
3. You can’t allow people to supplement government health insurance with their own. What do I mean? Well, if the government negotiates to pay $3,000 for appendectomies but they actually cost $4,000, a person with supplemental insurance would pay a monthly premium so they wouldn’t have to pay that extra $1,000. It sounds great in theory, but the problem is that care providers will continually increase rates since they know that many people will have the supplemental coverage and their insurance company will pay the rest—the patient won’t get the bill and they won’t care. Sure, they might see the cost in a HIPAA form that’s mailed to them but if they don’t have to pay it, why should they care? The overall effect of allowing supplemental coverage is year-over-year ballooning of costs as providers increase costs to whatever the supplemental insurance will pay. Worse than that, people can still be denied supplemental coverage and some may not be able to afford it—you’d end up with a system that is more inefficient and at a higher cost than it is today!

1. There has to be a single payer for the whole country and everyone who can must pay into the pot. The more people that pay, the lower the premiums will be and the better the bargaining chip for the single payer. If people can opt out of paying into the system, it will not only hurt people on the “government plan”, it will hurt people on private plans as well. Why? Because the more payers there are the more inefficient (and expensive) the system becomes. It is the complete opposite of how you’d expect capitalism to work because there’s no competition on price—only quality of care¹.

   Everything else regarding universal healthcare is a matter of, “What should we cover?” and “How much are we willing to pay?” Any government system will need to be tweaked and refined over time and I have no doubt that at its onset there will be problems with whatever is implemented. However, this should be expected and should not be used as a reason to do away with it.

   ¹ In order capitalism to work you must have businesses competing on both cost and quality. In the few choices that patients have regarding care, they will always choose the best available since the insurance will pay regardless of the price. Not only that, but information regarding care providers is extremely scarce and requires expertise of the highest level to discern who’s good and who’s bad at what.