Merry Christmas!
Here is hoping that the happy man in the red suit brought you all you wish.
More importantly, I wish you health and happiness in the coming years.
-Chris
What Time Is It?
I own a pocket watch. It is beautiful, but I don’t use it very often.
I know that I own a couple of watches. One of them is a battery powered solar recharging thing.
My standard “watch” today is my cell phone.
When I was in high school, I was very interested in accurate time keeping. As was my father.
This meant that we would call the “time” phone number to set our watches, at least once a week.
My grandfather had a “railroad watch”. This was a wristwatch that was approved by the railroad for time keeping. It was approved by the SooLine for use as a time keeping device. Amazing, until that model of watch was approved, the railroad required the use of pocket watches.
This was because a level of accuracy was required that only pocket watches or well regulated wristwatches could maintain.
The big thing in my youth were “quartz” watches. Instead of using a tuning fork or a mechanical balance/regulator, they used the vibrations of a quartz crystal to keep track of the time.
What this meant was that you had devices that were now able to maintain the same wrong time over an extended period of time.
The user had to set them correctly.
As an example, for years, maybe even to today, my wife would set her car clock (and many other clocks) 10 minutes fast. “So she would be on time for appointments.”
I set my car to my phone’s reported time.
One of the fun things that I did as a kid was to call up the Naval Observatory to get the current time. This was reported from their atomic clock. One of the most accurate time keeping devices in the world.
Accurate Time
Many protocols require accurate time. It is wonderful that you have a time piece that is accurate to within 1 second per year, but if it is reporting the wrong time, it is not particularly useful to the protocol.
What we want, is to know what time it is right now, and then to set our time to that.
We get the current time from a known, accurate time source. Today, that is often GPS satellites.
If you have ever wondered how GPS works, it works because your device knows where each satellite is at any instant of time. Each satellite transmits its ID and the current time. Over and over again.
That is all they do.
And here is the magic, if your device knows what time it is, and it knows where the satellite should be at his time, it can calculate the distance by comparing the difference in time.
If you are directly under a GPS satellite, it takes about 67ms for the signal to reach your device. From this, we can use the speed of light to figure out the distance traveled. Then some simple math and we know the location of your device.
We can also get accurate time by listening for the atomic clocks via radio. If you know where you are, and you know where the clock is, you can calculate the delay between the atomic clock and your device, then match your device to the atomic clock.
Today, when people want to use that type of process, they use a GPS device and get the time ticks from the device.
How long did it take?
This is where it starts to get complicated.
The standard for communications with a GPS device is 4800 or 9600 baud across a 3 wire serial connection. The protocol, the text being transmitted, specifies the time when the last character is transmitted.
That data is being received. Your device is processing it. Your device takes a certain amount of time to process the record it just received. It takes time to process that record. All of that is latency.
If you do not know the latency in your device, you do not know what time it is. For grins, just think of that serial link being 300,000,000 meters long. That would put a 1-second latency by itself.
There are ways of calculating the latency, but I do not remember what they are.
Latency is the important piece of information.
Calculating Latency
Many network people have run ping. It is a tool for testing reachability and latency between your device and some other device on the Internet.
ping -c 5 8.8.8.8
PING 8.8.8.8 (8.8.8.8) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=1 ttl=116 time=11.1 ms
64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=2 ttl=116 time=11.1 ms
64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=3 ttl=116 time=11.6 ms
64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=4 ttl=116 time=11.1 ms
64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=5 ttl=116 time=11.0 ms
--- 8.8.8.8 ping statistics ---
5 packets transmitted, 5 received, 0% packet loss, time 4004ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 11.022/11.179/11.616/0.220 ms
This is a test from one of my faster machines to a Google DNS server. This tells me that it takes 11.179 ms to reach that DNS server. Testing to one of my network timeservers, the average is 78.094 ms.
This means that the time reported by the timeserver will be off by some amount. In a simple world, we would guess that it is 1/2 of 78.094.
But, I use NTP. NTP does many transmissions to multiple timeservers to discover the actual time. It is reporting that the latency is 78.163512 ms. A little more accurate. It tells me that the dispersion is 0.000092 ms.
How does it know this? Because of many samples and because of four different time stamps.
When my device sends an NTP request packet, it puts the current time in it. When the server receives the packet, it puts the current time in it. When the server transmits the response, it adds the current time again. Finally, when the reply is received, the current time is added to the packet. This gives us four different time stamps from two different sources.
We compute the total latency via mine(R)-mine(S). We know the processing time by server(S)-server(R). The difference between server(R)-mine(S) and mine(R)-server(S) as the symmetry between the two paths the request and response traveled.
From these values, we can calculate the network distance, in seconds, between us and them.
Assume we transmit at time 0(M), it is received at 100(S), the response is transmitted at 105(S) and we receive it at 78(M).
How can we receive our reply before the server sent it? Easy, we have to different views of what time it is.
The latency is 78. This means that the halfway point was at 38. It took 5 to process the reply and get it on the wire again. If we do simple stuff, this means that our time is off from their time by 67.
But we can do better. By looking at the reported latency between the two legs, we can actually calculate how long it took for us to receive the reply.
NTP uses multiple timeservers to get a consensus as to the time. It monitors each timeserver to determine which one jitters the least.
All of this means that we can have very accurate times.
And having accurate measurements of the time, NTP will calculate how much the computer’s clock drifts over time. It will then modify the clock rate in parts per million to get the drift as close to zero as possible.
This means, that the longer your device runs NTP, the more accurate it becomes.
Grey v. Jennings
In two days, we will get our next cup of tea leaves.
On the 16th, Gray waived the 14-day waiting period for distribution of Petition. They requested that the case be distributed for the January 10th conference on December 24th.
They did, indeed, get their reply in on time. Amazing how the good guys get their paperwork in on time while the state, with nearly infinite resources, is forever requesting extensions.
What does this mean?
As of the morning of the 21st, all three Second Amendment cases seeking cert are now fully briefed. Two are at final judgement and the third is about preliminary injunctions, so being in an interlocutory state is not an issue.
We have three cases teed up and ready to go.
All three cases are simple cases if the Court follows their own president.
Are “assault weapons” arms under the Second Amendment? Yes.
Is this a gun ban case? Yes.
Is this class of arms in common use for lawful purposes? Yes.
Done.
Are “large capacity magazines” arms under the Second Amendment? Yes, but with a bit more language. Magazines are to arms as ink is to free speech.
I this a ban on a class of firearms? Yes.
Is this class of arms in common use for lawful purposes? Yes.
Done.
Is a violation of the Second Amendment to the US Constitution a violation of a Constitutionally protected right? Yes.
Done. Irreparable harm has been committed if a Second Amendment protected right is violated.
Gray’s response points out that there is a circuit split. It points out that a violation of any constitutionally protected right that cannot be fixed with money is irreparable harm.
Prove it!
The state is arguing that the plaintiffs (good guys) “…failed to prove they will more likely than not suffer irreparable in jury while proceedings are pending.”
The petitioners (plaintiffs and good guys) did make a showing that they were suffering irreparable harm. They argued that violation of intangible Second Amendment rights is irreparable harm.
The state argues that they didn’t even try to prove irreparable harm. They counter with the proof is that it is irreparable harm because it is a violation of a Constitutionally protected right.
Force of Law
Yesterday was a good day. But you don’t want to hear about nerd rants.
I took my wife to the hospital for minor surgery. It was successful, and the patent lived.
There are hardly any places in this state that are “gun free zones”. Post offices, courts, and jails are the limit, as far as I know.
While schools are “gun free zones”, the law says that if you have a permit to carry, you can carry in school zones.
Certain parts of court buildings are gun free zones. When I went to support a friend, I was in the court building, carrying. There was a metal detector between me and the courtroom, which was a true gun free zone.
Post offices were made “gun free zones” when a postal worker went bonkers and killed some of his coworkers. Under leftist logic, that means that The People need to be disarmed when entering postal property.
Postal property including the parking lot.
This is being challenged in court.
If you look at the image, you will notice that there are no references to any legal documents.
For example, the signage in Massachusetts has “G.L.C. 266 § 120” on it. New York’s signage says it is a felony and “Penal Law § 265.01-D, Penal Law § 265.01-E”. Texas signage says, “Pursuant to section 30.05, penal code (criminal trespass), a person may not enter this property with a firearm”.
The sign on the hospital? No such verbiage. That is because it does not have the force of law behind it.
In my state, a NO GUNS sign doesn’t mean anything.
If the owner of the property discovers I’m carrying, they can have me trespassed. That’s it. It isn’t the sign, it is just their right as a private property owner.
They can trespass anybody they want for any reason.
It is nice to live in a free state.
How to you get there from here?
The Internet is a fantastic creature. I’m not speaking of the information you can find on the internet. Nor am I speaking of the entertainment that is available on the Internet.
The mere fact that you can ask for information at your desk or on your phone and somehow that request gets there, and the response gets back, is mind bogglingly complex.
Here is the dirty little secret about computers. It is all zeros and ones. There are no pictures, there are no videos, there are no songs nor even text, it is all zeros and ones.
We group these zeros and ones into units of different sizes. The three primary sizes are 8, 32, and 64, with a spattering of 16. At the lowest level, we think about these in groups of 8, called octets.
You might know them as “Bytes”.
Now, zeros and ones are a bit difficult to read and write. So we use base 16 to read and write bytes.
Base 16 has 16 digits, just like base 10 has 10 digits. 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9. are the digits of base 10.
For base 16, we add A, B, C, D, E, and F as the six extra digits.
So we have a 32-bit number that looks like this: 4C4F5645 in hex (base 16) and 1280267845 in base 10, and “LOVE” as ASCII.
It is all zeros and ones. It takes meaning when we decide how those bits will be interpreted.
When you ask Google to search for “The Vine of Liberty”, your browser starts with a name, which it needs to convert to an address. The name is “www.google.com”. Depending on where you are, one of the addresses will be 142.250.69.68.
This is a different representation of a 32-bit word. In this “dotted quad”, each number represents the decimal value of an 8-bit byte.
For you, the simple household, your device asks, “How can I get this message to 142.250.69.68?”
Your device looks up the address in the “routing table”. Your device likely only has a single entry in the routing table. The route of last resort, or default route.
When no other table entries match, then send the request to a default router
A router has a single job, to move packets (requests and responses) from one network to another. When your default router receives your device’s request, it looks up the IP address (142.250.69.68) in its routing table. Again, it is likely that there is only a single entry in that table, the default route.
This is the simple way that things work in simple networks. It continues to work until the moment when a router has to make a choice. Does it send the packet from network H (your home network) to network A or to network B.
That router will have a routing table. It will find a match for 142.250.69.68 in that table, which will tell that router which network to forward your request to.
If nothing about the Internet ever changed, that would be all that was needed. Every router would know how to get to every address and that would be it.
But it isn’t that easy. The Internet changes, constantly. This means that we need to be able to change those routing tables quickly and easily.
The answer to that issue is a routing protocol. The oldest was RIP. It doesn’t work well today as it sends too much data too often. Back in slower networking times, RIP was taking up nearly 70% of my bandwidth. We stopped that.
There are two major types of routing protocols, external and internal. The primary external protocol, today, is the Border Gateway Protocol, or BGP. I don’t have to worry about that.
What I do need to worry about is internal routing. For internal routing, I use a combination of static routes and OSPF.
And this is where it gets complex. The data center has two physical networks. A management network and a production network.
The management network runs on a single subnet, with each host having a unique address on that subnet.
The production network runs on multiple subnets, each subnet serving to isolate problems. In addition, traffic on the production network needs to be able to reach the Internet.
The management network requires zero routing. One network space. No connection to the outside world.
On top of the physical network are layered multiple other networks. There is the OVN NAS network. This is how each of the hypervisors gets access to block storage (and shared file systems). There is the OVN NAS data network. There is the OVN VM network, the container network.
In addition, there are other networks used inside the container environment.
Some of these networks exist in isolation. Others are used as transport networks. No traffic originates nor terminates in these transport networks.
But other networks need to be able to speak to each other.
That means that every device needs to know how to reach every address. This means that OSPF is doing magic all the time to make things work.
Why? Redundancy. Every device has at least two paths to the next hop. If the primary link fails, the secondary link takes over.
This is done by rebuilding the routing table.
OVN links don’t fail (unless the idiot driving the keyboard does something stupid). The physical network can fail. When this happens, OVN just routes the tunnels in different directions.
So why this rant?
Because I can’t get parts of this to work!
My need is to move the containers into the OVN.
And I can’t get routing to work consistently. ARGH!
Oh well. Filler done.
Gray v. Jennings, No. 24-309
The trifecta of pro-Second Amendment cases
In the 60s, I can remember wrapping Christmas presents and then going to the Greyhound bus terminal with my mother. There, she would pay to have a box shipped to the Midwest. This had to be done weeks in advance.
My relatives would go down to the bus station when the packages arrived to pick them up. There were no tracking numbers, there were no promises to deliver on any particular date.
As regular people, it was how you shipped large boxes safely and “rapidly.” The US Post Office would tell you that by the early part of November you should have mailed all your Christmas presents.
When Federal-Express came into existence, the concept of getting something from here to there in less than 24 hours sprang into existence as well. For a few dollars, you could send your packages in early December and still get them there in time.
On Friday night, near midnight, I ordered a gift. It arrived Sunday morning.
Instant gratification.
The courts still move like it was in the days before the Pony Express. Everything takes more time than you want it to. Everything is slower than it should be. Everything is designed to allow for extensions to file.
Nothing is ever “fast”.
For example, you file a petition for writ of certiorari, the respondent has 30 days to file a reply. If that reply is not “We aren’t going to reply”, the petitioner has 14 days(IANAL) to file their response.
This back and forth always has a built-in delay. In addition, the parties can always ask for an extension. It is unusual for the extension to be denied.
September 16th, Petition for writ of certiorari is filed. It is a month before the state says, “we are not going to respond”.
October 28th, the court “requests” the respondent file a response. It is a month before the respondent asks for another 30 days to respond. They want 60 days to write a response.
The Court says, “No, you can have 14 days.”
The petitioner files their response on the day it is due. Do you think they wrote on the day it was due, or do you think they wrote it back when the request for a response was filed?
By the rules of the Court, the petitioner has 14 days to respond. This would put their due date as the 26th of December, past the date to distribute for the January 10th conference.
The Supreme Court conferences every(?) Friday to discuss which cases they will grant cert. These conferences are just the 9 justices. Nobody else attends them.
If the normal schedule was kept, that would mean that the case would not be conferenced until late January. Which means we might miss the 2024 Supreme Court term.
The lawyers for the petitioner (good guys) filed a short note requesting that the petition be distributed on the 24th of December for the January 10th conference. They promise to file their response on the 20th.
This puts this case on schedule for the 2024 term.
Conclusion
We might not see a response from the Court regarding this letter. What we will see is the filing of the response on the 20th.
What we want to see is the case distributed for the conference on the 24th. We are also hoping to see Snope and Ocean State Tactical distributed as well.
If that happens, then the Justices will be discussing all three Second Amendment cases on the 10th of January.
Out of that Conference, we can expect to see each case either relisted or denied. I do not expect to see any of them denied.
If they are relisted, the most likely reason is that they are being granted cert, barring anything procedurally wrong with the cases. That week, the law clerks will be researching those cases to make sure there are no monkey wrenches to be thrown.
The next week, we should expect another relisting. If we don’t see a relisting, we will see acceptance.
What we do not want to see is more than two relistings. More than two is likely to indicate something is wrong with one or more of the cases, and one or more of the Justices is writing a statement regarding that denial of cert.
Small Wins
Defamation: A statement that injures a third party’s reputation. It is a type of tort.
Slander: A false statement, usually made orally, which defames another person. The damages from slander must be proved by the party suing.
Libel: A method of defamation expressed by print, writing, pictures, signs, effigies, or any communication embodied in physical form that is injurious to a person’s reputation.
In other words, it is all linked together. In general, we speak of libel as written defamation and slander as spoken defamation.
E. Jean Carroll accused Trump of raping her. Trump denied the allegation he raped her. Carroll then sued Trump for defamation.
Trump lost the defamation case. I believe that the case is on appeal.
This is the case that leftists have been using to say “Trump was found guilty of rape.”
No, he was not. Rape is a criminal offense, tried in a court of law, prosecuted by the state. E. Carroll was unable to find a single prosecutor willing to charge Trump with rape.
She brought a civil case. In a criminal case, the accused must be found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. In a civil case, it is a preponderance of the evidence. Very different.
Nobody on the left is willing to say that a court that finds in the way they want might be biased, while at the same time screaming that any court that finds against their wishes must be right-wing extremists/right leaning bias. In terms of this case, the suit was brought in a notoriously anti-Trump court.
The court allowed statements that did not directly relate to the charge.
In the end, the jury found that no rape occurred but felt that there was a sexual assault. See past articles regarding multiple charges to allow a jury to do the right thing and then give a lesser charge to make the plaintiff (in a civil suit) or the prosecutor a “smaller” win.
The jury awarded E. Carroll 5 million dollars.
Trump makes it all back, and then some
Yesterday, December 15th, Trump reached a settlement with ABC News agreed to pay $15 million to settle Trump’s defamation suit against ABC News for statements made by George Stephanopoulos.
George claimed that Trump had been found guilt of Rape. This is a false statement that damages Trump’s reputation, i.e., defamation.
Rather than a length and expensive civil trial, which they would have lost. ABC News agreed to pay $15 million for the building of the Trump presidential library. They will also pay $1 million dollars towards Trump’s legal fees.