The news media, racing blogosphere and some drivers and crew chiefs have just about gone mad wringing their hands over Sunday’s race at Talladega, at the end of which Carl Edwards’ car was nearly flung into the stands. Carl and the other driver involved in the wreck, Ryan Newman, are OK, but some fans were injured.

So, all sorts of ideas are being tossed out: smaller restrictor plate, bulldoze the embankments, stop guys from blocking, etc.

The problem is: some of these solutions take away the attraction of Talladega…which is one of the most popular tracks among race fans.

I think there are a couple of things that ought to be done. One is easy, but it requires NASCAR admitting they were wrong when they ruled that Regan Smith did not win the race last fall because he went below the yellow line on the last lap: just modify the yellow line rule to allow a pass on the last lap below the line if and only if a driver is forced down there by another driver trying to block him.

This keeps the yellow line rule in place, but with an important exception. One objection to removing the yellow line rule entirely is valid: guys would just try to block all the way down to the grass. But with this proposed rule change, the blocking driver would only be able to block down to the yellow line, or he’d be penalized one lap. So, the guy trying to make the pass would have enough room to pass him without wrecking anyone.

That takes care of the short term problem, I think. For the long term, a lot of good ideas have been thrown out there. I think you have to go with what Junior said about the track not changing. He’s right; for economic and entertainment reasons, the track is not going to change.

So, how about this? Run a test race sometime in the next year or two with a few different categories of cars. One class could have the 302 engine that was tested at Daytona some years ago. Another could have a V-6 of about 3-3.5 liters. And here’s an idea that no one else is going to suggest: also test cars with diesel engines of whatever configuration (3-5 liters displacement) with up to two turbos in series.

See what kind of racing you get and how throttle response is with the various engines. The diesel idea is so that you could get back to the idea of racing providing some tangible R&D benefit to manufacturers. And Audi has proved that modern diesels can compete in auto racing with their success with the V12 TDI in LeMans.

Red Scare

Fr. Gerhard Wagner, who had been appointed to auxiliary bishop of Linz, has asked Pope Benedict XVI to withdraw his appointment in the face of hysterical opposition by liberals in the diocese. Sadly, the Holy Father has accepted his resignation.

For those unfamiliar with this diocese, it is quite possibly the least orthodox diocese in Europe, which is saying quite a bit. Gillibrand at Catholic Church Conservation has documented much of the nonsense that occurs there over the past several years.

This episode has followed a pattern similar to the Regensburg address. The Holy Father does something that offends, those offended completely overreact, and he withdraws or modifies the offending action. The chief difference is that the liberals in Linz haven’t beheaded anyone, as far as I know.

The danger is that this will embolden the liberals, and the Pope will have an increasingly difficult time taking any action with which there is any significant disagreement.

This could also endanger regularization of the Society of St. Pius X, since these same liberals definitely oppose it.

Mark Steyn, in discussing the laughable expectations the West has for the Islamic world, hits on a point which is really something about which we need to have a conversation about as a civilization.

We are gradually losing our Western identity, and losing the support of those who really ought to support it, largely because we have abandoned any pretense of believing in our principles. Western civilization has become flaccid and indecisive. We can’t even decide whether marriage consists of a man and a woman.

If we are to survive, we must again develop a muscular, vigorous Western intellectual movement. We must not be afraid to say that, yes, Western Christian civilization is better than the civilization of say, Somalia. And we ought to aim to keep it that way. That this is the case is obvious on its face, but we have shied away from saying so, for fear of offending someone. We can no longer afford to indulge in this sort of prissiness.

In order to do this, we must first act at home. Let us unashamedly defend Western tradition, and defeat the intellectual terrorists who inhabit academia. We must recognize them as domestic enemies, as they certainly recognize us. Do not cower before their Fabian tactics; throw political correctness and hypersensitivity in the trash can where it belongs.

We conservatives and traditionalists must stand together, or, as Benjamin Franklin remarked, we shall surely hang separately.

OK…this is another one of those things that I’m posting in case anyone else is trying to do this, and can’t find information on how to do so. After extensive Googling, it appears there was one German guy looking for an answer to this, but never received one.

What I was trying to do was install IPcop via PXE onto a SATA hard drive in a Soekris 5501, which is a PC in a very small form-factor. It is designed to act like a network device. Some of the things you expect in a PC are, however, not present. Like a video adapter.

The IPcop PXE install was a no-go, because there seemed to be no way to redirect the output of the install screens to the serial port (which is how you work with the system until you get networking going).

What I ended up doing was to plug in the hard drive in another machine. I installed IPcop, changed the network device type to via-rhine in /var/ipcop/ethernet/settings, changed the /dev/harddisk* links to point to /dev/hdb (which is where the hard drive shows up in one of these devices), and modified /boot/grub/grub.conf by commenting out the fancy stuff (colors, pixmap), adding terminal serial near the top, changing /dev/sda4 to /dev/hdb4 and adding console=ttyS0,57600 to each append line. Then, I just did grub-install –recheck /dev/hdb.

You should comment out the mingetty lines in /etc/inittab and add one like this:

S0:2345:respawn:/sbin/agetty 57600 ttyS0

if you want to have a login prompt on you serial console. This requires an agetty addon package. You can get it here: http://www.ipadd.de/binary.html.

That should be enough to get you up and running. After that, if you feel like it, you can clean up some of the scripts in /etc/rc.d to remove stuff that doesn’t work on the Soekris, like doing anything with /dev/tty1, /dev/tty2, etc., or outputting tones to the non-existent speaker.

OK…this is a bit different from what I usually post here, but I want to put this somewhere in case anyone else is ever trying to figure this out.

After fighting with Nagios distributed monitoring off and on for months, I have concluded that the submit_check_result_via_nsca script is just broken. It is sending the service state (”OK”, “CRITICAL”, etc.) to nsca, which is expecting a return code (-1,0,1,2).

The solution is to just change the script. Here is my version:

#!/bin/sh

# SUBMIT_CHECK_RESULT_VIA_NSCA
# Written by Ethan Galstad (nagios@nagios.org)
# Last Modified: 11-21-2008 by Brian Knotts
#
# This script will send passive check results to the
# nsca daemon that runs on the central Nagios server.
# If you simply want to submit passive checks from the
# same machine that Nagios is running on, look at the
# submit_check_result script.
#
# Arguments:
#  $1 = host_name (Short name of host that the service is
#       associated with)
#  $2 = svc_description (Description of the service)
#  $3 = return_code (An integer that determines the state
#       of the service check, 0=OK, 1=WARNING, 2=CRITICAL,
#       3=UNKNOWN).
#  $4 = plugin_output (A text string that should be used
#       as the plugin output for the service check)s
#
#
# Note:
# Modify the NagiosHost parameter to match the name or
# IP address of the central server that has the nsca
# daemon running.

printfcmd="/usr/bin/printf"

NscaBin="/usr/sbin/send_nsca"
NscaCfg="/etc/send_nsca.cfg"
NagiosHost="<your nagios central server>"

# Convert the state string to the corresponding return code
return_code=-1

case "$3" in
OK)
return_code=0
;;
WARNING)
return_code=1
;;
CRITICAL)
return_code=2
;;
UNKNOWN)
return_code=3
;;
esac

# Fire the data off to the NSCA daemon using the send_nsca script
$printfcmd "%s\t%s\t%s\t%s\n" "$1" "$2" $return_code "$4" | $NscaBin -H $NagiosHost -c $NscaCfg

# EOF

You’ve no doubt heard that Barack Obama has selected Clinton retread Eric Holder to be his nominee for Attorney General. This is the same Eric Holder who was “neutral to leaning favorable” on the Marc Rich pardon.

That was nothing.

While it now looks doubtful that she will be nominated, the best candidate Obama could find for commerce secretary was: Penny Pritzker.

Yes, that Penny Pritzker.

The Penny Pritzker who was the chairman of a bank that ran into problems and had to be recapitalized in order to “once again restore Superior’s leadership position in Subprime lending,” and was later bailed out by the FDIC.

This is his first choice for Secretary of Commerce?

As I said before…this guy just might make Jimmy Carter look competent and visionary by comparison.

You know…I really don’t agree with the voters’ choice of Barack Obama as president. He is on the wrong side of too many issues, so he’s just not acceptable. So, let’s go to court and try to get the election overturned, and prevent him from being inaugurated.

That sounds pretty absurd, doesn’t it?

Not according to a former California judge.

Oh…one slight correction. This “judge” is talking about overturning Proposition 8, not the presidential election:

That said, I am entirely convinced that same-sex marriage will again be legalized in California, the 52 percent vote notwithstanding. Just as the courts overrode the will of the majority in ordering desegregation of public schools and public accommodations, and just as the courts ignored the demands of the electorate by opening voting to people of color and the right to marry to mixed-race couples, so, too, will the courts, in defiance of the majority, however slim, reopen the doors of marriage to the gay community. The Sturm und Drang with which society greeted these courageous and controversial court rulings was ultimately replaced by acceptance. I predict that same-sex marriage will follow the same path. After all, 18,000 couples already have wed and the world has not stopped turning. On May 15, 2008, the California Supreme Court boldly bestowed upon gay couples the right to marry. I have no doubt that these brave justices will do it again.

Overturning the clearly expressed will of the voters is “brave.”

Want to save General Motors? How about Ford and Chrysler, too?

It’s a tall order, as the Big 3 have a lot of problems: huge pension and medical costs, unrealistic union contracts,  poor image, etc. Most of the proposed solutions I’ve heard involve dumping billions of dollars into these companies without any fundamental changes, which would merely result in the  disappearance of that money.

One thing that could be done, that wouldn’t cost anything, is to immediately remove or suspend some of the regulation which makes it more difficult for these companies to recover. How about junking CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy)? It’s unecessary, as we saw when oil was $140/bbl. People started buying smaller vehicles. Eliminating CAFE would at least give the automakers a bit of breathing room in developing cars people actually want to buy. Government need not compel them to do so. Suspend the NOx (nitrogen oxide) rules, which are not accomplishing anything right now, due to the imbalance with VOCs (volatile organic compounds), and GM, Ford, Chrysler and others could import efficient diesel cars from Europe.

One of the troubling things about the current state of the Republican Party is that we don’t hear of such suggestions, even from so-called “conservatives” within the party. It seems that we’ve collectively decided that big government is now good, or at least that we’ve lost the argument, so let’s stop arguing, and try to be the ones in charge during the march toward European-style social democracy.

Call me old fashioned, but I actually believe that government gets in the way of business, and ought to be as small and inobtrusive as possible. We need to cut the size and scope of government, and business will be able to operate more efficiently, resulting in prosperity for all.

If we simply offer a lighter version of the Democrats’ big government agenda, people will, as they did this time, choose the “real deal.” We need to offer an alternative view: one of limited government, private enterprise, and individual charity.

You might this this is from the Onion, but it’s not:

Reporting from Sacramento — In the wake of crushing defeats for Republicans in last week’s national elections, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said today that his party should regroup by moving away from some of its core conservative principles and embrace spending on programs that Americans want.

“I think the important thing for the Republican Party is now to also look at other issues that are very important for this country and not to get stuck in ideology,” the governor said in an interview broadcast on CNN this morning. “Let’s go and talk about healthcare reform. Let’s go and . . . fund programs if they’re necessary programs and not get stuck just on the fiscal responsibility.”

So, after the GOP gets its clock cleaned for straying from its principles, Schwarzenegger prescribes doing more of the same. Brilliant.

If there were ever a case for excommunicating someone from a political party, this is the time to do it.

If that wasn’t enough, he also said that he hopes Proposition 8, a constitutional amendment, is overturned by the courts.

Maybe he should be recalled.