January 2004 Archives

Ok, I'll be quite honest about it. I'm more excited about the new Survivor series staring tomorrow than I am about the Superbowl. This coming May will mark the seventh year that I've lived in the US and I still can't get into American sports.

I find myself really missing sports that *I* know and love. Things that just aren't shown over here. Cricket, Snooker, Rugby, Football (proper football, not that pads and helmets rubbish).

Tomorrow I'll be in the same boat as an American in England on FA Cup final day. He won't give a shit about either team [0]. He has no idea who Manchester United are or the history of Liverpool or why Spurs are 1000% better than Arsenal [1]. I think it's something you learn growing up as you are exposed to it week after week. It's not something that you just pick up if you're suddenly transplanted to another country in your early 20's.

I'm not sure if that made any sense, today has been a *really* long day and I'm knackered. Perhaps a few beers will help :-)

/me is going on a beer run. Anyone want one?

[0] - My apologies to any Americans who actually *do* give a shit about the FA cup final :-)
[1] - Yes Toby, Spurs are better than Arsenal. Deep down, you know it mate :-)

It's common to think you're a hard working programmer. You know, you crank out your Perl code and create schweet apps or modules and you feel rather proud of yourself. Then you realize how insignificant it all is. Afterall, real programmers work in the video game industry :-) From the production programming section of the Jak II site:

Jak II has over 1.2 million lines of code in the project from a range of programming languages: C, C++, MEL, LISP, and our own custom Game Object Assembly Lisp (GOAL). All million plus lines, with some carry-over from Jak and Daxter, took a team of 12 programmers one year and nine months to complete. Near the end of the game, it was necessary to put in 12-hour days, including weekends, to get the game shipped on time.

Of the 1.2 million lines of code, roughly 900,000 lines are written in GOAL. GOAL is a programming language based on LISP or rather Scheme (which is a dialect of LISP). Very few studios in the video game industry will write their own compiler to produce a game, which is a feat in its own right. However, when we began developing for the Playstation 2, the choice was made to create new technology that would squeeze every ounce of performance out of the hardware. GOAL produces some of the most optimized code for the Playstation 2 platform to date.

Jak II is an *awesome* game. I bought it today and all I can say is 'wow'.

Phew, for a minute there, I though that Georgia wanted to ban my beloved email client.

Nah, instead they want to ban the word 'evolution' from schools in favour of 'biological changes over time". Yes folks you did not read that incorrectly.

ATLANTA, Georgia (AP) -- The state's school superintendent has proposed striking the word evolution from Georgia's science curriculum and replacing it with the phrase "biological changes over time."

Superintendent Kathy Cox said the concept of evolution would still be taught under the proposal, but the word would not be used.

Cox repeatedly referred to evolution as a "buzzword" Thursday and said the ban was proposed, in part, to alleviate pressure on teachers in socially conservative areas where parents object to its teaching.

From the 'people with too much time on their hands' department. Ultimate Computer Case Modding. Check out the Matrix Rebirth one. Interesting to see how it was made.

After coding in Perl for such a long time, declaring variables with my gets imprinted in your brain. Jeremy found this out when writing some PHP code. I found this out last night when I could figure out why my C++ code wouldn't compile.

for (my x = 0; x < _result_list.size(); x++) {
}

Doh!

for (int x = 0; x < _result_list.size(); x++) {
}

Blimey, I might have to start drinking more than my usual 3 or 4 cups a day then :-)

Want a drug that could lower your risk of diabetes, Parkinson's disease, and colon cancer? That could lift your mood and treat headaches? That could lower your risk of cavities?

If it sounds too good to be true, think again.

Coffee, the much maligned but undoubtedly beloved beverage, just made headlines for possibly cutting the risk of the latest disease epidemic, type 2 diabetes. And the real news seems to be that the more you drink, the better.

Coffee: The New Health Food?

Literally :-)

The government's dogged insistence that Saddam Hussein was able to deploy weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes of the order being given suffered two serious blows yesterday as ministers braced themselves for the findings of the Hutton inquiry.

As the foreign secretary, Jack Straw, was once again forced to defend the justification for going to war, the Iraqi exile group in London which claims to have supplied MI6 with the intelligence about Saddam's 45-minute capability admitted that the information might have been completely untrue.

Nick Theros, the Washington representative of Iyad Allawi, who headed the Iraqi National Accord in exile, said it was raw intelligence from a single source, part of a large amount of information passed on by the INA to MI6.

The claim that Saddam could deploy chemical or biological weapons within 45 minutes was highlighted by Tony Blair's preface to the dossier issued by the government in September 2002 in the run-up to the war.

It was also at the heart of the row between Downing Street and the BBC after doubt was cast on its accuracy by the government weapons scientist David Kelly.

But Mr Theros said the information now seemed to be a "crock of shit". "Clearly we have not found WMD," he said.

Iraqi who gave MI6 45-minute claim says it was untrue

...or lack thereof.

Spent the morning profiling a large application trying to figure out why it got slower as the day progressed.

One of our older legacy modules used Text::CSV to parse (yep you guessed it) a CSV file. The fact that we're using a CSV file instead of a database is a little pet peeve of mine but it's a legacy app that's been in production for years and I really haven't got the time to refactor it unfortunately.

So, with that in mind, I set to work trying to figure out what the hell was going on. The trouble ticket was *extremely* vague - "Sometimes, when we're doing something, transactions that sometimes take 3 or 4 seconds, take over 20 seconds to process. It doesn't happen all the time though and I don't know how to replicate the error" (actual cut-n-paste from the ticket).

Could you be any more vague? Sigh. Ok, so this is going to be a fun one.

After examining the logs, it became clear that the problem happened towards the end of the day. I also had a good idea of where the problem was. I've had little success getting Devel::DProf to work in the past (today was no exception) so it was with some excitement that I stumbled across Sam Tregar's Devel::Profiler. Schweet module.

It was just as I suspected, as the day progresses the CSV file grows *extremely* large and Text::CSV is not exactly the fastest parser on the block. The app in question was originally designed to run as a cron job in the middle of the night so performance was not one of the requirements - but users-being-users, they decided to run it every 30 minutes. Sigh. A quick hack of the code proved that Text::CSV was indeed the culprit:

my $fh = IO::File->new($csv_file);
#my $parser = Text::CSV->new;
while (<$fh>) {
   #$parser->parse($_);
   #my @fields = $parser->fields;
   my @fields = split /,/, $_;
 ...
}

Seeing as splitting-on-commas will get me lumped in with the parsing-XML-with-a-regex crowd (grin), I ended up settling for Text::CSV_XS. Not as fast as the native split, but still damn fast and it's a little safer in the long run :-)

Spent some time today cleaning out some of the drawers in our bedroom. I had no idea how many old crappy clothes I still had. Seems that I haven't thrown anything away in over 10 years :-)

Found an old Sisters Of Mercy concert t-shirt circa 1993. It was the Crystal Palce gig where they opened for Depeche Mode. One of the best concerts ever :-) Anyhoo, the drawer clean out quickly took a back seat as I dug out all my Sisters CDs & some old live bootlegs. Good times :-)

You know, I'm thinking that any day now would be a good time to stop turning on your outside Christmas lights. Just a thought :-)

I dunno, maybe they're going for some sort of record...

So orkut is the latest 'social networking' site to spring up. Sure enough, all the geeks ran and tried it out. As I read the announcements on just about everyone's blogs I couldn't help but wonder what all the fuss was about. I mean what is the actual point of these sites? What do you do with them? Why is it a good thing for me to be involved? I was hoping someone would explain it to me with a handy blog entry or two. Seems that I'm not alone in my confusion.

Ask Bjoern Hansen reflects on the number of 'friends' he has

(update ~8 hours later: closer to three dozen now; wow -- now if I only knew how that could ever be useful :-) )

...and the growing realisation that everyone has turned up hoping everyone else knows what you’re meant to do with it

The man leading the US hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has quit.

Iraq Survey Group team leader David Kay was named by the CIA in June last year to head the search for chemical, nuclear and biological weapons.

But eight months after the US-led war ended, no evidence has been found of Saddam Hussein's alleged arsenal.

After stepping down, Mr Kay told Reuters news agency that he did not believe there were any large stockpiles of such weapons in existence in Iraq.

Mr Kay is being succeeded by former UN weapons inspector Charles Duelfer.

Earlier this month, Mr Duelfer said he believed the chances of finding chemical or biological weapons in Iraq now were close to nil, the BBC's Jon Leyne in Washington reports.

US chief Iraq arms expert quits

You ever have one of those mornings where you finally get something working and you're so pleased that you want to go and tell someone but quickly realize that there's really no-one to tell because the other developers aren't at work today and no-one else will give a shit? Yep, that's me today so I'm just sitting here grinning. Oh, I did say a few wooohooo's out loud to make up for it :-)

Signs that they didn't read the email you sent #1247875412. Quick summary:

ME: I tried X and we can't do it because of blah blah blah reason. So, I tried Y instead and it works like a charm. Can you think of any reason why we wouldn't want to go with Y and/or suggest another alternative?

THEM: Why didn't you just try X?

Grrrr. Today has been a very long and very frustrating day.

They're calling it "Total Complete Stupidity Syndrome". I did get a chuckle out of this :-)

The fact that a British woman may face a prison sentence in the US for joking at customs that she had bombs in her bag is bad news for us all. Civil liberties aside, if saying something stupid is a crime, an awful lot of people are in trouble.

Total Complete Stupidity Syndrome afflicts all of us now and again. The symptoms include verbal incontinence, a breakdown of the brain's defence systems and a ferocious appetite for eating words. The best we can hope for is that it strikes when we are among a supportive network of friends and family, rather than in front of a microphone, journalists or US customs officials.

A strain of foot-in-mouth disease that particularly afflicts politicians is the That Mic Wasn't On Was It? variety. When George W Bush pointed the journalist Adam Clymer out to Dick Cheney as a "major league asshole from the New York Times," his impromptu character reference was broadcast every 10 minutes throughout the evening on TV.

Last week a Spanish politician did the same thing to Tony Blair. On live TV, not realising his mic was on, Jose Bono said "Hey, and our colleague Blair? He's a complete dickhead." It makes you wonder whether Caesar and Anthony called each other "bum face" behind closed doors. We will never know.

But it's hard to beat the style and consistency of the Duke of Edinburgh.

To a Scottish driving instructor: "How do you keep the natives off the booze long enough to pass the test?"

In the 1980s recession: "Everybody was saying we must have more leisure. Now they are complaining they are unemployed."

To British students in China: "If you stay here much longer you'll all be slitty-eyed."

To a Kenyan woman: "You are a woman, aren't you?"

Puts things into perspective, doesn't it? Samantha Marson, now on bail but due to appear in court in Miami, has a long way to go.

Bigmouth strikes again

After revealing that Northwest Airlines secretly shared passenger data with the government, you knew *someone* was gonna sue :-)

MINNEAPOLIS, Minnesota (AP) -- Northwest Airlines is being sued on behalf of passengers angered that the company shared passenger data with the government after the 2001 terror attacks.

The lawsuit, filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court in St. Paul, contends that the airline violated its own privacy policy as well as federal and state laws with the disclosure.

Class-action lawsuit filed over data shared by Northwest Airlines

How sad am I? Let me count the ways :-)

Survivor - All Stars. I can't wait :-)

We have an in-house logging module that has been in production for the last 4 or 5 years and has served us quite well. Nothing fancy:

my $log = PHX::LogHandler->new;
$log->error("An error");
$log->warn("A warning");
# etc...

I have become quite frustrated that I have to pass the $log object between classes. It was with some excitement that I learned of Log::Log4perl's Singleton mechanism. I was bubbling with enthusiasm. From the POD:

Note that there's no need to carry any logger references around with your functions and methods. You can get a logger anytime via a singleton mechanism:

package My::MegaPackage;
use Log::Log4perl;

my $log = Log::Log4perl->get_logger("My::MegaPackage");
$log->error("An error");

Why Log::Log4perl->get_logger and not Log::Log4perl->new? We don't want to create a new object every time. Usually in OO-Programming, you create an object once and use the reference to it to call its methods. However, this requires that you pass around the object to all functions and the last thing we want is pollute each and every function/method we're using with a handle to the Logger.

Instead, if a function/method wants a reference to the logger, it just calls the Logger's static get_logger() method to obtain a reference to the one and only possible logger object of a certain category. That's called a singleton if you're a Gamma fan.

As I played with Log::Log4perl a little more, it became obvious that this was *not* the module for me. Log::Log4perl is without doubt one of the most powerful and flexible logging mechanisms I've seen to date. Unfortunately, It operates in a different mindset than our shop is used to. Log::Log4perl wants to log everything to the same file regardless of whether it's an ERROR, a WARN, an INFO, a DEBUG, or a FATAL message [0]. Our developers and support staff (and some log parsing programs) expect different types of errors in their own seperate files so this was going to be a major pain for me.

Hmm. Sigh. Bugger. What to do??????

Well, I was really looking for the Singleton mechanism so...

Class::Singleton to the rescue. After a little hacking on our logging module, I had the exact feature I was looking for and didn't have to change the world for everyone around me. NICE.

So now, it doesn't matter if it's foo.pl which uses Foo::Bar which in turn uses Foo::Bar::Baz, I just call the instance method and everyone uses the same object:

my $log = PHX::LogHandler->instance;

I love productive days :-)

[0] While you *can* seperate messages by threshold (i.e all ERROR and above go in one file, all others go in another file), you still cannot have each message type in a seperate file (without some hackery).

So I was all set to upgrade MT to 2.661 when I read that the 2.66* series and MT-Blacklist don't play well together. I think I'll wait until Jay has the new version of MT-Blacklist out. MT-Blacklist has become a must-have for me so I'm not going to go without it just to obtain comment throttling :-)

Get the flags out. Yes, get them out. I now know what those Dodge commercials are talking about. Yes, I KNOW WHAT A HEMI IS. Thanks Car Talk

While doing some channel surfing in my car on Saturday I stumbled across Car Talk which usually interests me about as much as watching paint dry but when I heard this question, I was hooked. A caller actually uttered the magic words "What the hell is a Hemi and why would I want one?"

Classic. Oh, it's, er just the shape of the top of the combustion chamber above the piston in case you were wondering. As to the "...and why would I want one" question. You don't. Apparently the Hemi engine has been around forever and they periodically drag it out of the closet when cars aren't selling too well.

Now I can sleep easy at night :-)

After stating in public that it had not given out this type of info to anyone, seems Northwest Airlines told a bit of a fib.

Northwest Airlines provided information on millions of passengers for a secret U.S. government air security project soon after the Sept. 11th terrorist attacks, raising fresh concerns among some privacy advocates about the airlines' use of confidential consumer data.

The nation's fourth-largest carrier publicly asserted in September that it "did not provide that type of information to anyone." But Northwest acknowledged Friday it had already turned over three months of reservation data to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Ames Research Center by that point.

The disclosure of Northwest's participation with NASA comes just four months after JetBlue's admission of involvement in a secret security project conducted by the Pentagon. The airline conceded that it violated its own privacy policy when it turned over records of 1.1 million passengers and the carrier is now being sued by passengers in class action lawsuits.

Confidential Passenger Data Used for Air Security Project

Are they trying to make me look like a complete twat? Eh, eh? People who use the bloody 'earpiec e and microphone thingy' instead of actually using their cell phone the normal way. Back in the good old days, you could always tell if someone was using their cell phone. Now you have no idea if the person is a complete nutjob and just talking to themselves. Or worse - think they are talking to you.

Yes boys and girls, Uncle Kev was made to look like a total arse yesterday. There I was minding my own business picking out tomatoes in Safeway and a bloke stands next to me and starts asking me what the difference is between the green ones and the red ones.

"Well the green ones aren't ripe yet, you'll have to leave them out before you eat them." I replied, thinking that this bloke must have been living in a cave or something. Then he says "I thought we decided on green, just take the rocker launcher". Rocket launcher? WTF?

"Er, what was that?" I replied. Bloke turns round and I see that he has the bloody earpiece thingy in his other ear. Bastard. A women who was also picking tomatoes just snickered at me and walked off.

Ziggy has a new article on perl.com about the future of Perl. Good read actually. I got a kick out of his ending paragraphs.

Then there's the original question that started this investigation rolling: "Can Perl compete with Java and .NET?" Clearly, when it comes to solving problems, Perl is at least as capable a tool as Java and .NET today. When it comes to evangelizing one platform to the exclusion of all others, then perhaps Perl can't compete with .NET or Java. Then again, when did evangelism ever solve a problem that involved sitting down and writing code?

Of course, if Java or .NET is more your speed, by all means use those environments. Perl's success is not predicated on some other language's failure. Perl's success hinges upon helping you get your job done.

The State of Perl

search.cpan.org has a new diff tool. How cool is that? I even found a real need for it when trying to figure out what changed between versions 1.55 and 1.56 of XML::LibXML. Schweet.

Looks like that money tree Dubya planted is going to come in handy. Not content with running up the biggest deficit in history and hot on the heels of last week's news on the proposed moon & mars missions comes this little gem.

WASHINGTON, Jan. 13 — Administration officials say they are planning an extensive election-year initiative to promote marriage, especially among low-income couples, and they are weighing whether President Bush should promote the plan next week in his State of the Union address.

Bush Plans $1.5 Billion Drive for Promotion of Marriage

Sometimes I'm not sure whether the whole world has gone mad or whether it's just me ;-(

Via Chris.

The Penny Arcade cartoon for today is quite amusing. I'm easily amused :-)

Watched Formula 51 last night. Up until now I'd been avoiding it like the plague as it always sounded a bit crap. There wasn't anything else on and I had a sudden rush of insomnia so I sat and watched it. It was actually quite good. Odd, but good. Rhys Ifans was excellent as was Robert Carlyle.

After a nice break over Christmas, school started again last night. So for the next 8 weeks it's 'all C++, all the time'. We're forced to use MS Visual C++ in class which is a serious bummer. I'm so used to vi that I'm lost when having to use any other editor. We're in a CS lab with no net access so I can't download gvim. I think I'll burn a copy and take it to class tomorrow so that I can keep my sanity :-)

You know it's time for an early afternoon 'pick-me-up' when you cannot figure out why this seemingly simple SQL statement doesn't work:

DROP TABLE IF EXITS DEVELCFG;

[vek on alyssa, Linux - 2.4.21-0.13mdk, bash]-{4}
[~/dev/nycc]
->mysql < DEVELCFG.sql
ERROR 1064 at line 12: You have an error in your SQL syntax. Check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near 'EXITS DEVELCFG' at line 1
[vek on alyssa, Linux - 2.4.21-0.13mdk, bash]-{5}
[~/dev/nycc]
->

Er, hello Kev, exists has a fucking 's' in it.

DROP TABLE IF EXISTS DEVELCFG;

There, all better. Shame I've spent the last 10 minutes figuring that out :-(

Oh yes, the ol' trip down memory lane. Zzap64, the Commodore 64 magazine that I was addicted to in my youth has an archive of covers, features, reviews, and editorials.

And what Monday morning would be complete without a scary 'Big Brother' story eh?

Precautions in the name of air security are about to taken to a level unimaginable in the United States only a few years ago.

The Washington Post reports the Bush administration is expected to order as soon as next month the first step in setting up databases on all air passengers, to be used to color-code each air traveler according to his or her potential threat level.

Airlines and airline reservation companies would reportedly be forced to turn over all passenger records to U.S. government officials, who struck out in a trial program was based on voluntary surrender of airline industry data.

Not a single airline agreed to turn over data voluntarily.

Air Passenger Code Plan In Motion

Unless you've been living in a cave, you've no doubt read that President Bush is set to propose sending astronauts back to the moon and eventually Mars. I'm in two minds over this. I love *everything* to do with Space exploration. Love it. Can't get enough of it. It fascinates me. Always has, always will. I would like nothing more than to see us return to the moon and eventually build a permanent base. Going to Mars would be awesome.

The cynic in me is saying that this is just an election year tactic by Bush to get the public to forget the clusterfuck in Iraq. To be honest, who can blame him? I'd be trying everything I could to make the public forget that my lies cost hundreds of American lives. So, even if I can force myself to look beyond that I start wondering where the money is going to come from to pay for the new space endeavor. I've heard numbers ranging from $240 billion to the trillions. I wonder what programs are going to be cut to make room for this? Spending half a trillion dollars to go back to the moon seems, I dunno, somehow wrong when you've got millions without health care and homeless on the streets. I heard someone in my office the other day say something to the effect of "perhaps he should spend the money fixing the problems on earth first".

I think the me of a few years ago wouldn't have even questioned this. I'd be all for going back to the moon regardless of the cost. It's funny how your views change as you get a little older/wiser/cynical :-)

Won't be long now until the new season. March 7th in fact. The Sopranos is the *sole* reason I re-subscribed to HBO in the first place - how sad is that? Since re-subscribing, I think you could count on one hand the number of times I've actually found anything on HBO worth watching :-)

Ok, looks like we still haven't hit the absurdity threshold yet.

A mother's enquiry about buying Microsoft Flight Simulator for her ten-year-old son prompted a night-time visit to her home from a state trooper.

Flight Sim enquiry raises terror alert

Just finished Peter Straub's 'lost boy lost girl'. Wasn't overly impressed. I'd heard some good things about Straub but based on this effort, I won't be reading anything else of his.

So now I'm reading Dean Koontz's 'Odd Thomas'. Koontz rocks and I'm looking forward to reading this.

So I got to thinking. Just how much punishment can the ol' car steering wheel take anyway? Marilyn Manson's Tourniquet. Traffic jam. Let the air drumming commence!

That kid in the car next door must have thought I was a nutjob :-)

After 13 days, this is pretty amazing.

A man was today found alive in the rubble of Bam 13 days after the city was devastated by an earthquake, according to Iranian state radio.

Rescuers find man alive in Bam rubble

NASA building escape pods into its next generation spacecraft. This can only be a good thing right?

Not since the Apollo moon shots have astronauts had an escape pod in case of an emergency during launch, but that safety measure will be central to NASA's next generation of spacecraft.

Aerospace industry giant Lockheed Martin started work on the Pad Abort Demonstrator, or PAD, in November 2002 after winning a competitive contract from NASA. Lessons learned from that automated getaway capsule will be applied to the upcoming Orbital Space Plane, which will replace the Russian Soyuz capsules as a space station escape pod by 2010. By 2012, the space plane will carry crews up to the station as well, making it a successor to the space shuttles.

NASA Looks for an Emergency Exit

Unfortunately things are not looking any better in the search for Beagle 2. It's a shame really.

Scientists involved in a final attempt to locate Britain's Beagle 2 Mars probe said they had again failed to make contact with the missing craft.

The mission's chief scientist, Professor Colin Pillinger, was visibly downcast as he told a press briefing that Mars Express, Beagle 2's mothership, had failed to pick up any signal from the probe when it passed 195 miles directly above its landing site earlier today.

Not a whimper out of Beagle

Brent Simmons has an interesting write-up on the problems regarding multiple RSS-reader synchronization. I switched to bloglines a while back because of that very issue.

Been playing with gtk2-perl. So far I'm really impressed. I had a bit of an issue with some of the Gtk2 stuff that Mandrake installs in its own part of @INC. Kudos to Mandrake for using Perl for their GUI config tools in the first place but it makes it a little awkward for us Perl hackers to futz around with Gtk2 stuff.

Anyhoo, those gtk2-perlers came through with flying colours and I'm a happy programmer again. I've got a bunch of ideas about GUI apps I'd like to write for Gnome, it's just a question of finding the time :-)

As for other people's Gtk2-Perl apps:

- syndigator - cool looking RSS reader
- Perl Panel - how cool is that?
- Greenwich - nice whois app.

And I must have been living in a cave again as this was the first I'd heard about the GTA:VC lawsuit.

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. - A lawsuit that claims a top-selling video game is dangerous to society and asks that it be removed from store shelves will be decided in federal court.

Haitian civil rights groups filed the lawsuit because the game, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, instructs players to "kill the Haitians" and awards points for each kill.

The New York-based Rockstar Games Inc. has agreed to remove the offensive line from future versions of the award-winning video that has sold 11 million copies.

Lawsuit Against Popular Video Game Moves

The ACLU has a fact sheet of the recent stealthily signed Patriot Act II. Here are a couple of scary highlights.

Current court limits on local police spying on religious and political activity would be repealed (sec. 312).

The government would be allowed to obtain credit records and library records without a warrant (secs. 126, 128, 129).

The reach of an already overbroad definition of terrorism would be expanded – individuals engaged in civil disobedience could risk losing their citizenship (sec. 501); their organization could be subject to wiretapping (secs. 120, 121) and asset seizure (secs. 428, 428).

Americans could be extradited, searched and wiretapped at the behest of foreign nations, whether or not treaties allow it (sec. 321, 322).

ACLU Fact Sheet on PATRIOT Act II

After completing the first Ratchet & Clank game I went out and bought Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando. To say this game is addictive would be the understatement of the year. Spent most of yesterday playing it while nursing a slight, ahem, headache :-) In fact I was still playing it at 1:20am last night before uttering "shit, look at the bloody time, I've got to get up for work at 7:00am". Damn fine game.