Running is therapy

There is an interesting snippet in The Blood of the Fold book I am reading. When asked if other kingdoms will join in a fight against an oppressive regime someone in the audience asks:

What if we choose neither? It is against our principles to fight. We want to be left alone to go about our lives. What if we choose not to fight, to simply go about our business?

The reply given:

Do you arrogantly believe that we want to fight – you are somehow better because you wish not to? Should you enjoy the freedom to live by the same principles you refuse to help us defend?

Now, I am not putting this here in an effort to say that I think pacifism is wrong, or that being a conscientious objector is wrong, or any of that. I am more interested in the ideas and just thinking about them, not in making moral pronouncements. What interests me is the idea that there could be some conviction in the rebuttal. Leaving the current war in Iraq alone, and thinking on WWII (because that is more the type of war that is being discussed in the book). Do countries have a right to the peace, when they did nothing to secure it? My guess is yes, but I am not wholly convinced of why. In WWII, let’s say a country choose to ignore a cry for help from the Allies (I am sure there could have been such a circumstance, but I am not a WW2 historian) and the above was the exchange that ensued. Does the rebuttal carry some truth to it? I find it an interesting conundrum. On one hand I want to respect the sovereignty of nations to choose to abstain from war, but on the other, can they demand a peace they refuse to defend?

I don’t want to give the impression that I would favor attacking a nation that opted out of a war on pacifistic reasons, merely calling attention to the ideas that seem to be at odds.

What say you?

Disclaimers:
I did not serve in the military, nor do I want, nor did I ever want to. I do think there are reasons to declare war. I do think people should have the right to object to war. According to some things I have read, Terry Goodkind the author of the Sword of Truth series is influenced by, Objectivist Philosophy, and Ayn Rand’s writing in particular.

Well friends and neighbors, that is it. I just completed the last day of the 9 week Couch To 5 K program.

As luck would have it, I can’t find my watch. However, my running buddy these last 9 weeks is running his 5K race today, so in solidarity, I ran 3 miles on a measured trail.

I hadn’t run 3 miles yet, my slow pace means that if I run for 30 minutes, I am somewhere between 2 and 3 miles when I finish. Today, since I had no watch, I ran for distance, and decided that since Eric (who posts on here as E-Dog) was running 3 miles, then so would I.

The first two miles melted away with no effort at all. By the time I hit 2.25, I could feel that I was getting a little tired…the last 3/4 of a mile, I was ready to be done :)

Overall though, I feel great. Now I need to devise what my running schedule will be from here on out. Right now these are the rules:

1. Run 3 days a week
2. Run for at least 30 minutes or 3 miles (unless doing a specific tempo run)

That is all for now.

Against my better judgment, I am entering a 5K race in Lancaster. I really don’t like races, I have participated in a couple, years ago, and I don’t find the experience particularly enjoyable. However, a bunch of coworkers are entering and it will be fun to hang out before and after. I am going to treat the run like any other of my runs, as a workout.

Speaking of workouts…today is the last day of my C25K runs…more later (after I actually do it :)

Just finished the second novel in the Sword of Truth series. Again, great book. This is the follow up to Wizard’s First Rule (which I blogged about a week or two ago). Recommended.

I am reading the third now, Blood of the Fold. After that I think I will take a break from the series, the books are rather large and there are some other things I want to read. I do plan to continue with the series though as long as it doesn’t start to suck. The final and 11th book is due out in November, and I’d like to be caught up when it comes out so I can tear right into it.

If you use Monit and DenyHosts together…make sure you put ‘ALL: 127.0.0.1′ in your /etc/hosts.allow…DenyHosts sees monits checks and thinks it’s a ssh attack.

At work we launched the new colo over last weekend. In the aftermath it was time to get pam_abl installed. However for some reason it wouldn’t work. I found one blog post that suggested that the OpenSSH server that is on Dapper doesn’t properly call pam and so you need a patched version to run pam_abl. Well the idea that 1. I only found it in one blog, and 2. He was offering a deb that was patched, didn’t really sit well with me.

I am all about community, but something as fundamental as ssh, I am sorry I am not willing to install that on the word of some yabo with a wordpress blog.

I decided that there was more than one way to skin a cat, and that I would give DenyHosts a try. It’s a simple idea. It’s a python script that adds IP’s to /etc/hosts.deny on failed attempts at whatever protocol you give it. I just wanted to stop the lame ssh brute force attacks (and really if I had my druthers I would have used pam_abl, I think it’s much more elegant). I installed DenyHosts and am pretty pleased so far. I set it up to send me a notification when a host is blocked (at least for a little while till I trust it). It’s not surprising that I get about 8 emails at a time. The brute force script just goes down the line of IP’s on the subnet and tries each one…so in turn each server blocks the ip and sends me an email.

This is the most recent jackass: 69.249.96.57 (c-69-249-96-57.hsd1.nj.comcast.net)

Fricken stupid people.

Lon found this snippet this morning. It’s cool in a number of ways.

class Fixnum
def prime?
('1' * self) !~ /^1?$|^(11+?)\1+$/
end
end


First, it’s cool because it uses a regex to determine weather or not a number is prime. Second, it shows how trivial it is to add methods to a builtin abstract class. For example you can’t create an instance of it:


irb(main):001:0> n = Fixnum.new
NoMethodError: undefined method `new' for Fixnum:Class
from (irb):1


So how do I use it then?? Easy.


class Fixnum
def prime?
('1' * self) !~ /^1?$|^(11+?)\1+$/
end
end

puts 10.prime?


Just kidding. I wanted to leave myself a note that I have been reorganizing some of the categories for the posts. It seems that the default ‘computers’ gets left on posts I didn’t mean it to, and I added running the other day for those posts, moving them out of the ‘blather’ section.

Somehow I made it to 253 posts with this one. I switched to wordpress in late 2005, from blosxom. Blosxom was pretty cool. It’s written in Perl and there is a decent community around it, but ultimately, wordpress had the things I was looking for and was easy to maintain. One thing I miss, and the reason I used blosxom for so long was that it read plain text files, so I could blog using vim rather than a web interface. Though for over a year now I have been using wordpress, and it’s not that bad using a textarea to blog. Bleh my mojo is gone.

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