Opinions, facts, and a grain of salt. Take two... they're small.
One of the sites I visit a lot, fark.com, recently changed their design. I think it's an attempt to look "grown up" or something, as the guy who runs it is pimping a book, being interviewed on CNN, etc. So they wanted to myspace it up a little, and the new design is hard on the eyes and looks generally bad. It's slower, too.
There's a very nice Firefox plugin called Stylish which can fix that. You basically get to selectively override style sheets with the extension. So you can make cnn.com look like it's being rendered in Netscape 0.9b. Or you can fix fark.com's borked design and make it more readable again. Just use this:
@namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);
@-moz-document domain("fark.com") {
body {
font-family: Arial, Helvetica !important;
background-color: #666699 !important;
}
#commentsArea {
width: 100% !important;
text-align: left !important;
}
#commentsArea BR {
margin: -1px !important;
}
#commentsArea .ctableTF{
margin: 0px !important;
padding: 4px !important;
padding-left: 175px !important;
width: 100% !important;
border: 0px !important;
background-color: #e0e0e0 !important;
color: #000000 !important;
}
#commentsArea .ctableTF a{
color: #880000 !important;
}
#commentsArea .ctable{
margin: 0px !important;
padding: 4px !important;
padding-left: 175px !important;
width: 100% !important;
border: 0px !important;
background-color: #eeeeee !important;
color: #000000 !important;
}
#commentsArea .ctable a{
color: #880000 !important;
}
#commentsArea .cdate{
position: absolute !important;
left: -5px !important;
width: 150px !important;
font-size: 10pt !important;
text-align: left !important;
}
#commentsArea .ctext {
margin: 0px !important;
padding: 2px !important;
padding-left: 5px !important;
padding-right: 5px !important;
width: 100% !important;
text-align: left !important;
}
}
Now everything is (almost) back to normal, and your eyes won't hurt.
(Special thanks to TheEndless.)
UPDATE: You can also use Cthulhon's Fark Reskin to make further enhancements.
Someone decided to take the time to plot the president's approval rating over the course of the presidency. It's sad, in a "why did we bother with Iraq (again)" or "Isn't Iraq kinda looking like Vietnam 2 Electric Bugaloo, Mr. Cheney" kind of way.
But what I'm really curious about when looking at that graph is who the 30% are who approve of what he's done. Are they straight right-edge jingoists? War mongers? Those bumpkins with "Nuke Iraq" stickers on their trucks? I know plenty of gun-toting, died-in-the-wool republicans who are digusted at this nonsense Bush has dragged us into. And this chart is telling me that if I rounded up 1024 Americans, I'd find at least 300 who say they think he's doing a great job? What has he done that one would approve of? I can't think of anything, honestly.
Maybe it's the 8.7 trillion dollar deficit they think is fine. Or there's a large group of folks who think sending another 25,000 soldiers "surging" into a pointless war (something even Nixon couldn't bring himself to do) is a good thing? They like his policy of relegating the US to the backwaters of stem cell research? His efforts to tie our government to one kind of religion? They think he's a great public speaker? They like C students leading them? What is it?
What do the 300 people I talk to approve of exactly? Seriously, how, exactly, has he made our country a better place then before he was elected? What has he done that was good? What is he now doing that will leave us in better hands?
I just don't get it, and have yet to find anyone that can give me any examples of why he is in any way a good leader. Beyond the idiotic "I vote the party" horseshit, I mean. And he was elected (well, uh, you know, kinda-sorta) twice! It's just sad that we'd do that to ourselves.
Dear Mr. BizDev Guy in Cube Across the Hall:
I'm really curious if you are a double amputee or not. Because I just can't figure out why you always have to use your speakerphone on ultra-loud volume all day. I mean, you must not be able to lift the receiver to your ear, right? And have you heard of a headset? I'd think even a guy with a pair of hooks for hands could manage to wrangle one of those on in the morning (I mean, if you know you're going to be on the phone all day, why not get set up early?). They give headsets out for free at the tech stop. You might even be able to flag down some flunkie to make the 150 yard walk for you. Why don't you avail yourself of one instead of using your speakerphone. See, because nobody uses their speakerphone. Because it's rude!
Do you want to the rest of the office to know you're a mover and shaker? Probably. Is it your over-inflated sense of self-importance? Almost certainly that's part of it. But when you can can be heard waaaaaay over in the bathroom (easily 100 feet away) then you have a problem. It's called a lack of concern for the well-being of others, jackass. You work in a shared office for fuck's sake! Have a sense of responsibility for the comfort of the 200 other people who have to work near you!
Nobody cares who it is you're talking to. I've talked to people at big-shot companies too. Nobody cares that you're "going to have to put this under NDA before we move forward". I've signed more NDAs than I can remember. Nobody cares about synnergy, taking it to the next level, bringing [insert group name here] in the loop, or any other horseshit marketer-dronespeak that comes out of your filthy hole at the top of your voice. Everyone just wants you to shut the fuck up and use your phone like everyone else.
You want to swagger aroud the cube while being Important with a capital I? Fine, nothing wrong with that, Mr. Always Be Closing. Just get a headset and long cord. Don't continue to foist your conversation on everyone else. You already foist your goddam cologne on us (what do you do every morning, bathe in that shit?). What other senses can you assualt us with? No, I mean it: you touch me and you're in trouble.
Signed:
A guy who has to put up with your shit while actually trying to get the work done which you converse about with so much bravado.
P.S. If I once more have to hear you check voice mail more than 6 times an hour, I'm going to leap over the cube wall and stab you in the neck with my scissors. There's a fucking light on the phone which tells you if you have voicemail, you nitwit! Are you really too stupid to look for the flashing red light on the phone, or are you hot for the sound of the voicemail lady's voice? You just like pressing your PIN and the pound key a lot? You like to be reassured that you can press zero for more options?!? What is it? Why, damn you, WHY?
Well, about 75% full anyway. Want proof? Try this.
I don't know about anyone else, but I still get pretty darn good results using Google -- and they come up really fast without annoying ads all over the place. The rest of that nonsense I don't know anything about. P/E this, Chinese that... whatever. Use whatever search engine you like and quit your bitching, says I.
Oh, and the motto isn't "Do no evil". It's . There's a difference (besides semantics). I strongly believe in that motto, too.
And that's pretty much all I have to say about that.
So I changed offices today at work. They put me back in with the guys I used to be with -- except for one fellow. And as luck would have it, my beloved Model M keyboard was too loud for the new space. And I was using the quiet version even -- specially bought for this shared office situation!
So I had to march myself down to the parts guys and get a new, quieter, shitty keyboard. It's fucking hell typing on that thing. My wrists hurt after only a couple hours. I'm bringing in a quiet-ish, less shitty (but still not completely good) keyboard tomorrow. If that one isn't quiet enough, then I'll bring in my vintage 1987 loud-ass Model M and type out a novel on it.
In retaliation, I availed myself of the lamb curry from the cafe and was inclined to take it to-go, so that I could eat lunch in my new office.
If you find yourself the recipient of a spammy blog comment, and the spammer happens to be using a Gmail account as their "return address" for the comment, then Google provides a .
The cool part was that I didn't even have to go log into a work machine to find out who I needed to talk to (at work) about these low-lifes! I've met a few guys on the Gmail team, but looking up their email addresses and writing them an email from my work account would involve dragging out the laptop and such. Too much effort for a Saturday morning. I (sort of recursively, I guess) did a Google search for Gmail spam abuse and there was the form. How meta-handy is that?
It's much better to use the official abuse form than try to "back channel" it anyway. Added bonus is that anyone can report Gmail abuse using that form, and it wasn't hard to find.
I've never bothered looking for a Yahoo abuse form, since I long ago blocked any yahoo.com address from being able to leave comments here. So I can't say what those guys are doing. Seems like a lot of junk comes from the yahoo.com domain, though. (Maybe because it's been around longer than gmail.com?) I did some numbers a while back and close to half of the spammy comments left here had a yahoo.com at the end of the email address. So rather than report each one, I just blocked the entire domain.
But the really sad part was the spammy comment left today was for a kid's website. Kids! The website they wanted to clog search results with was this one: http://www.funbrain.com/. As you can see from for the phrases used in my spam comment, this particular slimeball has been quite busy lately. Just pathetic...
Anyway, I'll try pretty darn hard to see that they don't get to leave any more spam with that account.
I rarely wish harm on anybody. But sometimes I do. Not often, but every so often. Usually when I run across assholes wonderful human beings like these guys: http://www.mytrafficbutler.com/ (paste that URL into a browser; I'm not helping their ranking by legitimately linking to them). To wit:
BLOGS: Other 3rd party sites are in development right now and they plan to charge you a high price for services like this, plus by then, the blog blasting advertising method will be saturated. Start blasting your web site and your ad to thousands of blogs while the advertising method is still new. You'll get noticed by 1000's and get results. Plus, search engines list these and list YOUR AD AND URL.
That's a description of one of the "services" they offer.
This site got posted to fark.com, with a "cool" tag and a headline like "Send thousands of targetted visitors to your site". Another guy on Fark chatted with a customer servcie rep from their site. Here's his actual transcript, which he posted in the thread:
That's abhorrent. And what's really super annoying is that nearly every blog out there runs on software which removes the blog spam temptation from a technical perspective. Spamming a blog doesn't help your ranking. And it can even hurt it!
The sad part is that people actually pay them to do this. The web's been around over ten years now and some folks still don't get it.
UPDATE: The guy who posted the link to Fark actually responded to the posts and said that he had "removed the blog spam service from the site" (probably due to the guy who posted the chat session above, but also maybe from a post I wrote explaining why blog spam is useless). I was composing a reply to his comments, but by the time I hit "send" the article had been deleted. A shame. I had some valid questions for winston7, and was hoping he'd answer them for me. I've never been able to talk directly to one of Satan's minions before, and was looking forward to a rare opportunity...
The government confirms it: Yahoo, AOL, and MSN were also asked to supply search records information, and all complied. Google (rightly so) told the Feds to get bent.
This administration needs to go. Really now: Make up your own porn search terms. Don't ask a private organization to get involved in your judicial spats over silly and unproductive (and overturned!) laws.
I'll not be trusting Yahoo, AOL or MSN much. (Not that I did before, but still...) They gave everyone up without hesitation. The correct thing to do was refuse. They failed to do this correct thing, and it shows where they place their users and privacy in the grand scheme of things.
(Note: This is all my personal opinion, not authorized by anyone at work, blah blah blah.)
So this dullard submits a story to Slashdot about Google Analytics inviting more people to the service. And he calls it a "snazzy web site hit counter". That's like calling a 747 a "little airplane". It's just a bit more complex than a hit counter. Just a little.
It is sort of sad if people would sign up only to use it as a hit counter, though. There are a lot of people that would get much more use out of it than them. The "it would really help their online business" sort of use.
"Hit counter". Bullocks!
Grumble...
So Tess and I have these left over IKEA bookshelves (the Billy model; yes I know that sounds vaguely sensual) from our old house. They survived the trip and so I thought I'd use them to cover up the dance studio-like floor-to-ceiling mirrors in our front room by truning them into quasi-builtins. We went down to IKEA, got a corner unit and two other Billy shelves in the same color only to find that, once assembled and standing next to our legacy shelving, they don't match what we have in the slightest. It's not even close to the same color. It looks like two different kinds of wood even!
Up yours, you Swedish-like people!
So that means I have to go to IKEA again (about a 3 hour process) to grab two more shelves and hope they are the "new birch veneer" color as well. And it also means that I'm left with another two Billy shelves which will have no home.
We don't have what you would call a lot of space for shelving (I know that sounds odd, but so is the house), and I already have another two Billy shelves (in dark brown) that were destined for the spare bedroom. Actually, there's one more set (non-Billy; a model with deeper shelves) floating around as well. And a half-height Billy, too, that was left over from my old office. So that's, what? 5 ½ extra shelves which need a place to live?
I guess I can take the lighter color ones, the deep shelf can go in the spare room, one Billy can stay in the garage, and 1 ½ shelves get a "Free to a good home" sign on them and are placed on the curb for the Oompa-Loompaz in Da Hood to take away.
I like IKEA and all, but enough is enough. I should have just custom built shelves in front of the mirrors. Probably would have been faster.
I have a solution for the cruise ship piracy problem: arm the vacationers. You know how they used to offer trap/skeet off the stern of cruise ships a while back? It'd be like that. Except way more fun. Here's how it works...
At several points around the upper deck, there are unobtrusive white weatherproof lockers. In those lockers are surplus bolt action rifles -- like old Enfields or something. They're about $80 each, and so almost disposable. Stock each locker with, say, two dozen rifles and 2,400 rounds of ammo on stripper clips (for faster loading), and 6 shotguns with perhaps 50 rounds of 00 buck each. You need about one locker for every 60 linear feet of deck railing.
Every locker has two crew members assigned to it, each with a key. All the lockers also have a centrally-controlled internal lock, and each is alarmed. The crew members wield the shotguns, and act as spotters. The passengers get to use the rifles. They sign up for deck rifle duty early on in the cruise -- before the ships weighs anchor.
Right after the life jacket drill, the volunteers get training on how the anti-piracy program works, and basic marksmenship. This only needs to be about an hour at most. Each person signs a heavy-duty waiver, is inducted into the shipboard militia, given an oath swearing to upload maritime law and the ethical dictates of the captain and crew, and finally assigned a locker station to report to in case of defensible action in warranted.
When word of impending piracy is broadcast, the locker crews immediately attend to their assigned locations. Those passengers cleared for rifle duty are asked to report to their deck station. Everyone else is asked belowdecks.
The gun crews check in each passenger using the barcode on their picture IDs, and assign each militia member a weapon (also barcoded) and 100 rounds of ammunition. Each newly-armed passenger is assigned a portion of railing, a field of fire, and given the order to call out any targets.
Once pirates are spotted, locker crews report the contact to the bridge, and ask permission to fire. (If the ship is fired upon first, return fire is immediately warranted, and able to be authorized by the locker crews directly.) The bridge makes the call to open fire or hold fast.
What this basically boils down to is a big cruise ship bristling with rifles that have an effective range of about 600 yards. Since all militia passengers can't be relied on to accurately shoot that far, the concept relies on volume of fire, purely as an ersatz area-of-effect weapon.
Piracy would end abrubtly, which would be a shame. The world would be much better off without those who would prey on the unsuspecting in it. The passengers would get a bit of extra excitement, and the sense that they are improving the lives of everyone who comes after them. Without something, they're basically trapped there like cattle, at the mercy of a glorified rape whistle. If you take an African cruise, pray that you get a ship with high-tech defenses. But really, a more permanent solution is warranted.
Morally, there's no grey area with any of this. These are guys who pile into little fast boats with rocket launchers, bent on maiming, killing and stealing. They'd leave an entire ship's complement for dead in a heartbeat. The minute they come after a cruise ship, the jig is up. They know what they are there to do, and so does the crew of their would-be target. A lower form of life than these I cannot imagine.
Besides, it'd be hellaciously fun to teach these bastards a terminal lesson in the differences between right and wrong. I'd pay double for a room on that cruise ship.
The answer is: Not very damn much. Check out this Rolling Stone article which does a breakdown of where the money goes when you spend $15.99 for a CD:
$0.17 Musicians' unions
$0.80 Packaging/manufacturing
$0.82 Publishing royalties
$0.80 Retail profit
$0.90 Distribution
$1.60 Artists' royalties
$1.70 Label profit
$2.40 Marketing/promotion
$2.91 Label overhead
$3.89 Retail overhead
Of the $1.60 the artist is making from the sale of their CD, they have to pay out for recording studio fees, and other miscellaneous costs, so they basically wind up with little to nothing.
The next time anyone gives you crap about legally importing music from Russia, and taking advantage of good exchange rates rather than line the pockets of the RIAA, show them the numbers above. Then tell them that if they really want to "support the artists" they should go see a live show and buy a t-shirt on the way out, because the artists aren't making shit off that CD you bought.
I'm really curious to see what the breakdown is for iTunes Music Store. It costs about the same amount of money to download every song on a CD from them as it does to buy the actual disc, so I assume that the breakdown is the same.
If you ever find yourself the recipient of the Evil Eye when out in public, get yourself some magical string and be protected! Or, just take a shower and stop wearing patchouli and then maybe people will stop scowling in your presence, you smelly hippie.
Seriously, are there really people who believe this shit? Though I have to admit, there's something really appealing about fleecing new age morons by selling them $20-a-yard yarn. These are the same people who drink animal water and believe that life force energy somehow exists. They probably also take metaphysical advice from their cats and believe in (and buy!) pyramids. Honestly, sixty bucks for a nine inch wide wire pyramid? That's $10 a foot! For wire! Man, I really wish I could get me some of that hippie cash. I know where to get wire. And wire's cheap, too.
Some people might wonder how these new age hucksters sleep at night, but I think it's a really righteous burn, picking on the mentally disadvantaged like that.
Now this news story is just plain weird.
Steve Ballmer is just not right. No ape required.
It's my birthday. I'm in a temporary apartment in Mountain View. I was supposed to go home to San Diego and play poker with my wife and my friends, but I had to work today (and tomorrow).
I'm listening to Booker T & The M.G.s doing a cover of Day Tripper. I'm mostly through the last half of a bottle of 2001 Clos Du Bois Cabernet. I was writing a Python script for work, but now I'm cleaning a Star Model BM. I have a brace of fish sticks in the oven. Woo-woo.
Tracy and the poker crew just called in for B-day wishes, and that was awfully nice. I wish I was there with my wife and friends. I hope I didn't sound totally nonsensical on the phone, but my head has sort of been drawn inwards all night on this script I've been trying to write -- which has languished in the face of uneeded gun-cleaning.
No new work for me tonight I think.
I've written about that thing called 10x10 before. There's this guy named Jonathan, and he's got this site which takes images that are timely and presents them in a certain cool way that lets you "see" what's going on in the world. You look and get a "feel" for what's happening, rather than just read about it. It's actually a pretty cool idea. Novel, certainly. And worth a look.
Where it concerns me is the guy running it, Jonathan, tries in vain to spam-proof his email address by spelling it out as jjh at number27 dot org. And so I get a lot of his mis-addressed mail at my domain 27.org. It's kind of annoying, but can also be somewhat amusing.
Normally, I don't even bother to read the mail that should have gone to him; I just delete it like the spam that it is. (I've asked that he spam-proof his email in a way that is technically viable as well as 27.org-friendly, but those requests fell on deaf ears.) I do have a bounceback in place that explains the situation in small words. So the Illiterati will eventually reach Jonathan. My concession to Net Karma. Yeah, I'm a softy.
Anyway, I was in the process of deleting one particular email, because I thought it had come though my normal spam filters. But for some reason, I opened it (probably to make sure that it wasn't addressed to me). I just about died laughing.
Here's the mail I got (personally-identifying information has been changed to protect the dimwitted). My translation is in the small blue font in between the lines of the original email.
Hi Jonathan,
I'm the editor of Art Remora Magazine, a how-to publication featuring the best in web and print design software techniques. We were really enthralled with the Wordcount website and we are interested in featuring it in an upcoming issue.
Jane Doe,
editor, Art Remora Magazine
Lame Graphics Inc.
123 N. Elm Dr.
Nowhere, IL 11111
So it was time for my weekly "get rid of 300 spam comments" routine, when I notice about 200 spam comments from this company called the Dis aster Re covery Gro up (those spaces are intentional; the whole point of their spams was to increase their PageRank with Google, and I can't really talk about them without doing just that). You can get to their domain by running the words in their name together and adding a .com to the end.
I went to their website to see what they were all about and lo and behold they're based in Moreno, CA. And their contact page has a phone number: 951-488-0304. So I called it. You should too. That they're hiding behind an answering machine message is funny in and of itself, but their message is downright hilarious.
I'd love to know how a company can accidentally spam enough websites that they have to let an answering machine be their balls for them. And I'd also like to know what they are doing when they are "looking into the problem". And why they can't do anything about it. And who told them they can't do anything about it.
I ought to drive up there and ask them in person...
So there's this guy Jonathan, and he made this pretty cool online image thingy called 10x10. Well, he also has a web site called number27.org, and he uses this domain for his email. And that domain slightly resembles my other domain 27.org. So much, in fact, that lots of people who try to decipher Jonathan's simple spam-proofing of his email address as 'jjh at number27 dot org' actually send their email to 'jjh@27.org'. You'd be surprised how many people can't figure out how to email him and wind up emailing me instead. And some of them are people that you'd think would know how to read, like reporters from USA Today and CNN. Boggles the mind when you think about it.
I used to just reply to the illiterate person who mistakenly emailed me and CC: Jonathan on that reply so that he'd get the email, but I got tired of doing that about a month ago. I shouldn't be in the business of hooking up Jonathan with the more unlettered members of his fan base. I mean, I like the guy, and his web project is cool and all, but I have better things to do with my time than be his email forwarding service. And honestly, if he can't be bothered to ditch that hoky spam-proofing job, then I can't be bothered to forward mail frompeople who can't figure out how to email him, right? Frankly, I'm a little tired of getting spammed by people wanting to email him.
This morning I decided to automate the process of letting people know they can't read. Now they can send all the email they want to and my bounceback message will help sort them out.
This article wasn't at all surprising. Almost expected, really.
Someone wake me up when the government starts burning scientists at the stake.
So I check mail this morning, and at some point last some some goddam bottom feeding spamming asshole has posted 112 spam comments to this website. And you know the best part? The two URLs they used have underscores in the host names. And you can't have underscores in hostnames, can you? No, you can't, because hostnames can only have alphanumerics and hyphens. So they aren't even smart assholes. They're dumb assholes. They've been at me constantly for like 9 months now, the spamming bastards. Thankfully, MT-Blacklist keeps most of them away (now if only there was a way to automatically update the blacklist).
I don't really wish harm on anyone, but after spending 20 minutes deleting comments and email there's at least one person out there who I wouldn't mind putting the hurt to. Seriously, would it really be a crime if you killed a spammer? I mean, they're a spammer, you know? It's not like they're human or anything. It's like killing a chicken or something. No big deal, right? You'd probably only have to kill like a dozen or so before the rest would shun the temptation to spam. And the world would be ten times the better place for those dozen sub-humans being gone. It sounds like a deal to me. If you spam, you should be put to death. Easy, quick, simple. No more intrusion on your digital life.
So I'm going through comment after comment and every time I click the delete button I just keep imagining the sound of a 2x4 pulping that fucker's throat. Ah... all better...
It took me 24 minutes to get home from work tonight. I consider that a relatively speedy journey. Way better than 100+ minutes, in any case.
Argh... SoCal...
It took me 103 minutes to drive home from work today. My odometer says that I work 11.2 miles from home. 11.2 miles in 103 minutes. It boggles the mind why I continue to live here.
The cause for my lengthy and blood-pressure raising trip? Some light rain and the average Californian's complete fucking inability to understand the phrase "Do not block intersection". Yuppie assholes.
Me and one of the roadway 'tards had a lengthy "discussion" on the way home tonight after he ran a red light (it'd been red for over a minute) and tried to get in front of me by squeezing in between two lanes full of cars. I swear if I had had a baseball bat there'd be one less white Honda CRV on the road tonight.
Oy, me achin' head.
I'm going to go find my calming place, and be in that space.
Here's why I need my own machine:
wee@storm:~$ uptime
10:44:58 up 10 min, 9 users, load average: 13.37, 11.54, 6.70
Tried to log this morning, couldn't. Finally got on, and ran the above command. Which took over 30 seconds to complete. Pine took two minutes to start.
The three numbers at the end are the load average. The higher those numbers are, the worse performance is. The numbers above, while not amazingly high, aren't good. There are a lot of people on that box:
wee@storm:~$ ls -l /home | wc -l
456
And one of them obviously started doing something that required a reboot, ruining the server for everyone. Keep in mind we're talking about a quad Xeon machine with 2GB of memory. And this has been happening all the time lately. How you could get it wedged like that so regularly is beyond me.
Luckily, a new machine is ready to go, waiting in the wings.
Well this is just great news. The FBI knows that I went through Las Vegas over Christmas. Can't be too careful. Them pesky holiday travelers might do any number of things. Best to keep tabs on us -- just in case. I'm sure any sane judge would agree. Oh, wait. No judge need be consulted anymore. How con-veeeen-yent...
I wonder if they've correlated my past travel data with my book-buying habits or grocery purchases at Von's. Makes me want to fly to Mexico, buy a copy of the Anarchist Cookbook online, and then order all the normal household chemicals needed to make a stupidly ineffectual bomb. But then (secretly!), I'd throw that dumbass book away, plant chiles, fertilize my garden and clean my windows with the stuff instead -- just to stick it to The Man. Maybe then I might even -- gasp -- buy an almanac afterwards. Yeah, that would show 'em!
It's like Ashcroft's taking pages out of the Geheime Staatspolizei playbook or something...
You'd think Microsoft would at least try to make just this one page render properly in browsers other than IE. If just one page on their site had to look good on a non-Microsoft platform it should be that one, right?
You'd think so. But that would probably make far too much sense.
I'm sure everyone has seen this article by now. It's an interview with Red Hat's CEO which says in part:
Matthew Szulik, chief executive of Linux vendor Red Hat, said on Monday that although Linux is capable of exceeding expectations for corporate users, home users should stick with Windows: "I would say that for the consumer market place, Windows probably continues to be the right product line," he said. "I would argue that from the device-driver standpoint and perhaps some of the other traditional functionality, for that classic consumer purchaser, it is my view that (Linux) technology needs to mature a little bit more."
I used my Red Hat Network (their service you use when you pay for support) account to email their sales/customer service folks. I asked for my money back.
Check out this blurb from Red Hat's press release announcing Red Hat 9:
Red Hat's community-based distribution became an option for home computing with the introduction of the BluecurveTM graphical interface in 2002. In Red Hat Linux 9, we've refined the installation and interface, adding new tools and applications for end users," said Brian Stevens, vice president of Operating Systems Development at Red Hat. "The result is an open source desktop operating system that is flexible and simple to use for mainstream technology enthusiasts.
So Red Hat's CEO admits that he has, over the course of many years, knowingly and intentionally sold me and others an inferior product unsutiable for its stated purposes. That's bullshit. He's been plenty happy taking my money for the past 6 years. Last January, Red Hat 9 was perfect for the desktop. This month, it isn't? I'm sure this has nothing to do with Red Hat discontinuing their commercial version of Linux.
I smell class action.
Don't ask why, but I was recently reading the Wikipedia entry about Hermann Göring. Frankly, I found that it was far more flattering than I would have written it (how one could be objective about a vile creature like Göring I do not know). The thing that caught my eye was a quote from a statement he made during his trial in Nuremberg:
Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don't want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.
Now, I'm not saying anything in particular, or making any accusations, or calling anyone a Nazi (there are few greater insults). I'm just pointing out the possible parallels to our current situation which are, IMO, surreally spooky. Was he just repeating what is obvious to any leader taking his country to war? Restating common political knowledge? Giving out free advice? Who knows. As for any parallels to our current leadership, let's just say that Herr Göring knew how to work a crowd and leave it at that.
Forbes.com has an article called Linux's Hit Men which describes the attempts by the Free Software Foundation to get Linksys to adhere to the terms of the GPL (Linksys used Linux as the operating system in their line of wireless router/firewalls). The author clearly doesn't understand the GPL, or what the FSF is all about, and the article is pure nonsense. I wound up using the "Reply to this" link at the bottom of the article. Here's what I wrote (with minor formatting changes):
Regarding your article (at http://www.forbes.com/2003/10/14/cz_dl_1014linksys.html) about Cisco/Linksys being asked to honor the (free) license they agreed to when they used GPL'ed Linux code in their SOHO routers:1. One reason Linksys sold so many units was that they used pre-written code, at zero monetary cost, to produce their product. This gave them a leg-up on the competition -- with no outright expense save allowing others to use their code in a similar way. How can you construe this as being bad? I would think that a pro-business publication like Forbes would have applauded Linksys for their decision. Using a free license cannot possibly do anything but help their bottom line.
2. You state that Linksys having to give back their changes to the GPL'ed code they used would mean that "anyone can make a knockoff of (their) product". At the risk of repeating what I said above, isn't this exactly what Linksys did in the first place when they built their product on top of Linux? And wouldn't it also be somewhat difficult for "anyone" to recreate a router such as what Linksys produces? You'd need to acquire the proper hardware and such, which is well beyond the capabilities of anyone but the most dedicated organizations. Regardless, a Linksys competitor somehow building a nearly-identical product merely because Linksys gave back their changes to Linux would find themselves in court in very short order.
3. You say that using GPL'ed software can be "more dangerous" than using commercially licensed code because it could mean either paying money or sharing your work (as you yourself have shared). Can you imagine how you have to would re-word your article if Linksys had bought just one licensed copy of WindowsCE or QNX for use in all 400,000 units they've sold? Would you attack Microsoft or QNX Software Systems in a similar fashion -- in essence comparing them to murderous mobsters? Do you suppose those companies would take kindly to such libelous speech? Would Linksys paying licensing/royalty fees on 400K units sold be better or worse than simply releasing their changes to a freely available GPL software base? Linksys didn't have to pay a dime. They could have simply given back what they had changed, and all would be well. It's only when they violated the teams of the license they agreed to that they are being asked to comply -- not necessarily pay.
4. The discussions between Linksys and the FSF have hardly been secret. I've not been following such news at all, and yet I've heard about it for months. A simple Google search (such as for 'linksys free sofware foundation' which yields some 9,000 hits dating back as far as June of this year) as the simplest of all possible research would have have disabused you of this notion that the FSF is somehow scheming and plotting in the dark to attack Linksys. The facts, apparently, don't make for juicy copy.
5. In the article you state "These disputes might scare companies away from using open source software." It's very clear the author does not understand the GPL. The GPL puts no obligation on the user of GPL'ed software. It *does* put an obligation on the a distributor of GPL'ed software: you are required to share as you have borrowed, nothing more. This is an important point. One can put a GPL'ed application on every corporate desktop computer and not incur any obligation under the GPL.
6. The article also states "the Free Software Foundation doesn't want royalties--it wants you to burn down your house". This is incorrect, and clearly meant to incite negative feelings in the reader rather than convey meaning through metaphor. A closer "house" comparison would be that the FSF wants you to make available the blueprints to the house you built using someone else's blueprints.
7. Finally, Linksys knew what the terms of the GPL stated well before they decided to use GPL'ed code. The license wasn't sprung on them, or introduced surreptitiously. They knew that the cost of using others' non-commercial work as basis for their own commercial product was that they would have to share their changes, and they apparently thought this was a fair deal (it certainly is simple enough to understand, despite the author's best efforts to the contrary). If Cisco acquired Linksys without knowing that their flagship product was built using GPL'ed code, and that they would have to give their changes back, then Cisco made a *huge* blunder. Cisco cannot hope to claim ignorance of the GPL without admitting that they performed almost no due diligence in their acquisition of Linksys. This would not instill a lot of confidence in those who own (or hope to buy) CSCO.
Please do a little more research before producing articles such as these. And if at all possible, try to avoid ad hominem arguments (viz. 'Linux Hit Men', 'comrade', etc.). It does your publication (and your apparent agenda) an injustice.
Yeah, it's pissing in the wind, I know. But I got up earlier than normal so I had a couple minutes to kill. Plus I couldn't just let that nonsense stand without comment.
So this guy named Gabe from this company called Valve got his machine (or machines) compromised recently. No big deal, right? Well, all he had to do was use insecure email (as in, when you check email remotely, a username and password fly in the clear), and use Outlook (you preview stuff, and "somehow" these bad guys' programs start running on your machine without you knowing it). Yet he was rooted. Weird, huh? Yeah. Very strange. 'Cause, like, all Microsoft's software is, like, really safe and stuff. You just have to patch and you're fine. Really. Honestly. You can trust these guys.
Well, tell that to Gabe. He got pantsed something fierce, primarily due to his company's use of Microsoft software. When I say "pantsed", I mean it in a "All our competitors can now see everything we've been working on for the past five years: our flagship product -- one we had hoped to release before the upcoming holidays in order to make a lot of money and pay for all this development time we've been taking..." sort of way. Not the "Oh shit, now all the bottom-feeding script kiddie assholes can figure out to how to cheat in our online game and possibly ruin our market share" sort of way.
But I think both ways might come to pass. I intended to buy and play Half-Life 2. There is not one single, small chance in hell will I run it or any of its variants now. Not after five years of development which relied on security through obscurity. I have no confidence that they can both finish the game and fix all the security holes before the holidays. If they would have been able to finish the game with that added effort, it'd be done and we'd have a patch by now. The game is hugely anticipated. They'd have released it if they could. Now with the added pressure to release anyway as close to Christmas as possible, I'm not sure what all holes can be fixed. But are people thinking like me? Are they just waiting for the game? I remember Eudora's release cycles. A word you never wanted to hear was 'showstopper' (you usually heard it Friday night at about 8:30pm the weekend you had show tickets). And while this would be a showstopper ("showkiller"?) for certain, there is going to be a lot of pressure to release the game regardless of what was leaked. But I hope not.
This is bad beyond belief and it will have repercussions. At worst, Valve, as a company, might go away. People will lose their jobs, decades of man-hours of work will be lost. Because Gabe used Microsoft Outlook. At best, Valve goes back to its parent company and asks for a couple million carry over payroll and R&D costs while they figure out how to tighten up their software and clean up the mess. I feel really sorry for Gabe. He was only trying to do his job, using tools his employer gave him. Security shoudln't have had to have been his job.
Was he patched? No idea. Does it matter? Probably not. If a very sophisticated group wanted the HL2 source code, they would get it, no matter what Valve did. Vavle could have used the most secure operating systems and the most secure software, and it wouldn't have matter had the interloper(s) been seriously determined. Having said that... Do you think Gabe will ever feel safe using completely patched and up-to-date Microsoft software ever again? You think he'll use non-SSL webmail or Outlook or IE ever again? I don't think so. Was it Gabe's fault? Not in the slightest. Not even by a longshot. He was using industry-standard tools. Tools his empoyeer gave him, and tools every employee probably used. Tools most of our government uses.
You scared yet?
Who did this? Koreans? Chinese? Nvidia? Saddam Hussein?
What got Gabe can get your congressman. It can get your doctor and your lawyer and your mom. And there's nothing you can do about it. Put the word 'porous' in your mind where user-level security is concerned. And no, firewalls don't help. That Linksys router you bought your folks/sister/whomever (updated that firmware lately?) is in some cases utterly useless. Exponentially so if the software behind it is unpatched. Or written by Microsoft.
I think we're entering a new and very scary world of networked applications and hardware, and Mr. Gates' obvious history of trading of security for convenience (read: sales) has done us nothing but a great disservice. It's a wonder didn't start sooner. Software from MS can harm you. It's as plain as that, and anyone with a clue knows it, too. They've known it for a long time. And now software from Valve can harm you. It might be able to harm you for a very long time to come.
Bah... The more I think about all this, the more apathetic I get. Maybe this is a sign to play fewer games and spend my online/offline time more constructively. Couldn't hurt. Unlike using Outlook or IE.
I spent a few hours last night trying to find out why the web server log files on the new he.net servers don't like to be parsed properly by Webalizer or AWStats, and I came across this entry:
12.148.209.198 - - [30/Sep/2003:22:12:05 -0700] "GET /wee/news/archives/2003_09.html HTTP/1.1" 200 49685 "-" "NPBot (http://www.nameprotect.com/botinfo.html)"
Apparently, it's a little web spider, and it comes by every other day and grabs all our pages. They very nicely provide a link to the FAQ about their spider in the bot's user-agent string. So I went looking to see what it was all about.
According to the link above, this NameProtect company's mission is "Digital Brand Asset Management", and they "engage in crawling activity in search of a wide range of brand and other intellectual property violations that may be of interest to our clients." Is it just me, or is it starting to smell a lot like bullshit in here? No, I'm definfitely picking up faint whiffs of it. Most certainly. It's the smell of sales, of marketing. It's the smell of people who talk of " comprehensive digital brand protection" and "Intellectual Property challenges of the digital era" with a straight face. It's the smell of people who over-use words like 'paradigm' and 'solution' and 'brand' even in non-business conversation. It's big, bangly Omega watch-wearing, Callaway club-using golf playing types who wear enough Calvin Klein cologne to choke even those annoying perfume ladies at the entrances of stores like Macy's.
Oops. I used brand names just then. And with no little ® tags, either. My bad. The sales weasels will be after me for sure now.
Disney. Mickey Mouse. Whoops. Microsoft. Windows. Uh, I mean, "Nothing." Coke, Pentium, Dickies, Zerox, Lego, T-Mobile. Big Mac. Strike all that, wasn't me. Kleenex.
Damn this Tourette's Brand Illness! Damn it, I say!
So I just noticed that PHP's < a href="http://php.he.net/manual/en/function.date.php">date() fucntion will let you convert dates and times into something called Swatch Internet Time. Can someone tell me what the hell is up with this? Did I miss that memo which said the current UTC/GMT/Zulu time system that everyone and their bank uses isn't working? Did we need a new time system?
And what's up with dividing the day into 1,000 "beats"? One thousand is a really stupid number to use. Computers don't think in units of ten. People do, but divide the day into three equal work shifts if you don't believe me when I say 1,000 beats per day is just a moronically arbitrary number. Someone wasn't thinking when they came up with that one. You'd think a watch company would understand how time works.
Seriously, can anyone look at a normal analog clock and figure out what time it is in Swatch Time? No? You mean you can't figure the number of minutes from midnight in Switzerland and then divide by 86.4 to get the current time in beats? You can't do that? Idiot. You're not part of the digerati. You should just buy a if you want to tell time like all the cool people do.
The word "hoodwink" just popped into my head. Oh wait... so did "swindle". Nope, now I've moved one to "hornswaggle" and "bamboozle". OK, I've settled on plain old "scam".
Swatch Internet Time. A more completely pure load bullshit you will not find.
Today I got to find out what's worse than having an office mate that listens to hip hop/dance music: having an office mate that listens to Michael Jackson. But even worse than that? Can it be possible? I didn't think so until he started singing along. Out of key.
And here I had gone so very long without hearing Michael Jackson's "music", too...
As a public service, I offer a link to a list of Unpatched IE security holes. I think I may change this to the default home page on the Windows 98 laptop downstairs (which probably needs to be re-imaged by now; it's been 4 years and is pretty crufty).
My cell phone just rang, and when I answered it (a rarity for me since the phone is either off or in my car or both) I got an earful from a very pissed off fellow. He was not phoning nicely. Luckily, it was a wrong number. Kinda.
Near as I can figure out, at some point in the recent past moved offices, and by doing so changed their number. Their new number is one digit off from that of my cell phone. I used to get the occassional call, and I didn't sweat it. My home phone is one digit off from the local Domino's Pizza, and that's way more annoying (although it can be fun if I happen to be in a spiteful mood).
The problem is that in the last two months, the call volume I've been getting to that "wrong" number has increased substantially. I get very irate calls filling up my voicemail box. I've been getting a lot of calls for that lawyer guy. Some of them are pretty angry, too. A lot of people want to know why "I" haven't called them back or why "I" wasn't at some place or the other. They start bitching pretty much as soon as I say hello. Every once in a while I can get a question in edgewise through their hate speech. I did so just a few minutes ago and I think I know what's going on.
Come to find out, a few months ago one of the lawyers there started giving people my number instead of his. Yeah: the lawyer got his own number wrong, and I'm getting calls. Whether the lawyer got his number wrong on purpose is a matter I'll leave to the angry dude that I just hung up with. Although judging from the increase in not-so-nice phone calls for this lawyer, I just might suspend impartiality and side with him on the issue. The guy who just called swears he was given my number. Other callers have said the same thing. It does seem awfully coincidental.
So I guess my only recourse is to call the law offices and tell them that they might want to double check their number before they give it out to people. I just hope they haven't printed up business cards with my number or something. Although... Is it a crime to impersonate a lawyer over the phone?
Gee, I don't know... Should I SCO? Or FedEx them a bag of human feces? Which, do you think?
Either way, I'm putting corn on the dinner menu, just in case.
Let's just get this out of the way right now: SCO (in general) and Darl McBride (in particular) can suck my ass.
And Darl, leave Linus the hell alone.
It looks like the French are angry that the French language is . Everyone doesn't want to speak French? Oh no! France had better form a government committee to study the reasons why French entertainment and language isn't popular! They should enact legislation to subsidize the spread French culture around the world! They should create a government agency that makes sure the French language isn't sullied by foreign words and concepts! They should restrict the importation and broadcast of non-French movies and music!
Oh wait... they've already done all that. Thanks to Vichy France and Uncle Adolph, it would seem. You have to be at least a little suspicious of a country whose citizens rely on a government solution for everything -- even if that government doesn't have Nazi roots.
But why would an isolationist country with 71% of it's workforce employed in services industries expect to be able to export anything culturally? Why would they think their language would be internationally prevalent if their major contribution to the world economy is tourism and government employees? I'll be the first to admit that putting the adjective "American" in front of words like "cuisine" and "culture" can make for some wonderful oxymorons, but face facts: if your country researches and invents and produces things which the world needs and wants, then your country is bound to have some global influence. Now with the Internet genie out of the bottle, the English language will only get more popular, regardless of what the French government does. And that's how it should be. You can't legislate everything into being the way you want it to be. The world is getting smaller. Expect shrinkage.
If you want to support out President and our country, don't bother with this nonsense. That has got to be one of the silliest things I've seen in a long time. I thought it was a joke, but I guess they're serious. If you want to help the US, just pay your taxes, vote during elections and try to be a good person. Citizenship makes no mystical requirements of its participants.
If someone really wanted to help the country, they'd figure out a way to keep jobs from leaving country. The US is going to have service industries and entertainment as its only domestic products before too long. In honor of this "momentum" I decided to play a little Ravi Shankar.
Anyone in the state of California who has ever used a social security number as a primary key in a database now has a new and compelling reason to revisit their status as an ignoramus.
Any entity that retains "unencrypted" (SB1386 doesn't say anything about what counts as encryption) "personal" (another toss-up for the courts) information which gets compromised must report the incident to the people whose information was involved. Put simply: if you are using SSNs as a key (or anywhere) in your database and that database get lifted, the box gets hacked, a bug leaks information, whatever, then you have to let everyone in your DB know what went down. That's a shit sandwich of which I'd rather not bite.
Did people really need a reason to not use SSNs as DB keys? , even though it's a bone-headed thing to do. Folks can and do change their SSN. Then there's the fact that SSNs aren't really guaranteed to be unique. Intended, yes. Guaranteed? No. Besides, it's just not a good idea to use SSNs in databases. Nearly every RDBMS has a built-in feature to generate and use unique numbers and such for keys. People should use those features and stop colleting SSNs.
I'm not even going to get into the privacy implications of a person's SSN being bandied about willy-nilly. We have a law which will hopefully discourage such behavior now and as much as it pains me to admit it, I'm kind of in favor of SB1386 for that reason alone. Then again, I'm a freak. You should have seen my reaction at the DMV when I first got a California license to replace my Arizona one. The minion behind the cage bars flat out told me that unless I coughed up an SSN I wouldn't be issued a license. I damn near had kittens. She told me to tell it to the judge, and then called the next number. She was used to the complaining and would have none of it. I eventually knuckled under and went back to give it up, but not before I did some online research and found some "blank" SSNs that I might use. The little blurb about perjuring myself with false info caused me to begrudgingly use my real number.
Get ready to hear about SB1386 for some time to come. The SSN is persvasive, the cracker pernicious.
Bill Gates came to speak at my workplace today. I had zero urge to see him or hear him talk, the trollish multi-billionaire. The man is a vampire. He is to the computer literate as ripple is to a hobo. He's the Jim Jones of the computer age. You can tell who drank his kool-aid by the "innovation" gibberish they spew. Name one product MicroSoft has actually developed all by themselves. I dare you.
He offers "to devote a lot of money to research and develop new products and technologies", but that's a Faustian bargain . "Innovation can be co-opted; anyone will sell out -- or else." That should be their message. MicroSoft exists only to take over the world. If you don't believe that you either hold or you're a prostitute who wants a job. Nobody with even a single scruple would work for MicroSoft.
The dude with the pie had the right idea.
I just did a web-based authentication system at work. We have a new web site structure, and we wanted to protect an area for faculty and staff only (I work at a university, in the CS department). I wrote up some scripts and a small database that lets people choose (and reset) their own passwords. In so doing, I had to come up with a scheme to "force" good passwords for use with the web site (since there will be stuff in that private area that students should never be able to see). It's harder to do than you might think. There's a very fine line between pissing people off with strong passwords and letting them slide by using things like "qwerty".
In the end, I came up with this:
That's it. Pretty easy going, right? Not really. I've had a couple people complain already (it's been two days since we went live). I even removed the "Cannot be based on a dictionary word" requirement. We also removed the "Cannot be the same as your Unix system password" requirement (over my loud protestations). I did get to add a blurb on the initial form "strongly encouraging" people to use different passwords.
I actually had a professor (a computer science professor, mind you) ask that I make it more lenient. He lamented to me that because he had to choose a "strange" password (since his "normal" password didn't pass my tests), he had already forgotten what he had chosen. He then asked me to email him and let him know what his password is. After I got done laughing, I prepared a carefully-worded LARTish email explaining to him what a one-way hash is and why I wasn't able to tell him what his word was, even if I wanted to send it to him in email. I also threw in a little bit of "weak passwords are the #1 security hole" boilerplate (although it's actually number 8 in the top ten list) and explained that I was glad that his normal system password wasn't able to be used on the web site. That I (me!) have to explain any of this to a full-on computer science professor is astounding.
I haven't sent the email yet; I thought it might be too harsh so I decided to sit on it overnight. I think on one hand that anyone clueless enough to use a password that can't pass even my lame scheme deserves to be cut down a notch or two. Then I think that he's a tenured prefessor, and I should be more respectful. Then I think that he's a tenured professor, and yet is a complete idiot, and I go back to the first thought.
Besides, I've always wanted to give a prof what-for.
Microsoft is going to let the Chinese government take a look at the source code to Windows. Take a guess on how much respect the Chinese have for anti-piracy/intellectual property laws. Yeah. So this basically means that the Windows source code will be freely available before too long. I give it 9 months (revised from my earlier estimate).
It's pretty sad when your software has a reputation for being so completely shoddy and insecure that you have to give foreign governments the source in order to get them to trust you. You'd think giving away source would also be bad for U.S. national security and help us lose wars, but I guess that's not the case (anymore).
I tried to register the username 'galileo', without any hesitation or forethought at all. I'm nearly positive that the mere attempt was offsides in some way. I could have picked bruno, but I figured that "letters from exile" worked better as a metaphorical device than "letters from a guy who got burned at the stake for trying to learn shit". I don't know... astronomy has never been my strong suit and seems, historically at least, to be something of a touchy subject.
I happened to see on fark that the homeless are using mouthwash as a beverage in great numbers lately. I don't know why, but this sort of astounded me. You have a mouthwash that's basically 58 proof liquor, but it's really cheap, can be bought at any hour of any day even in dry areas, and is hardly ever locked up. It's like schnapps without the sugar. No wonder the hobos are downing Listerine! I was really curious (enough to forgo sleep, at any rate) as to why it is this loophole exists.
Apparently, the alcohol in mouthwash is a certain type of denatured alcohol. The BATF calls this specially denatured alcohol (or "SDA"). There are apparently 50 varieties of and formulas for denaturing alcohol into SDA, according to this page (whose authors seem to know what they are talking about). SDA for mouthwash has no component considered all that harmful for drinking (ie, no methanol, unlike paint stripper or the like), but the whole product meets the requirement that "no potable alcohol cannot be derived from it" -- and so gets no liquor tax applied to its sale.
Now I had a thought: why not produce a mouthwash that is basically the same as all the others (inasmuch as it can still be called "mouthwash" as far as the ATF and FDA are concerned), but make it such that you can sell it at half the cost? You don't need all the "special" ingredients of the "real" mouthwashes since you aren't out to remove plaque or prevent gingivitis. You don't need Methyl Salicylate, Thymol, or any of those others; adding things that will actually wash one's mouth will only drive up the cost. What you want is water, SD alcohol, Minty Freshness ExtractTM, and coloring. That's as close to mouthwash as you'd need to get, and it'd be really cheap to make. A feasibility study would need to be done in order to make sure that you can beat the competitor's price. I think it could be done.
If Listerine sells for $3.99 per 50-ounce bottle, then you'd need to undercut them by at least a buck. Selling those 50 ounces at $1.99 would be best. You'd need to figure out how much it would cost to make in bulk and how much it costs to set up the whole operation before final pricing can be determined, but since you wouldn't advertise or do any marketing of any kind (word of mouth would surely sell your product) then you could certainly undercut a national name brand like Listerine.
Once you have the formula down, you get all the ATF permits in place, set up a producer/packager (Mexico would work), line up a distributor to open the retail channels and then sit back and facilitate the winos' need for non-seizures. You'd be doing them a favor by preventing them from ingesting all that other crap that goes into real mouthwash. They'd get better a SDA, so that would help their livers. Since the product would cost dramatically less, the merchants would experience less thievery and other related offenses -- which in turn frees up police to tackle other, certainly more serious crimes. Bums would need to beg less change and therefore panhandling and general loitering would go down (it goes without saying that you would have to find that magical price point where a hobo would rather panhandle the money for your product than risk stealing it; I'd bet that price is very close to that of a 40 ouncer of malt liquor). Since they'd only need to spend half as much to get their freshness groove on, the homeless might also get a taco or whatever in addition to the hooch. And if they wound up doubling up on their supply of your product instead of buying food, then so much the better for you. Anyway you look at it, it's a win-win for everyone.
I think it's clear that there is a definite need for such a product. If I had a more entrepreneurial bent, I'd write it up and head out in search of funding.
Pardon my french, but the USPTO is staffed by a bunch of braindead morons. This ought to be against the law. Awarding patents like this ought to mean that the patent examiner who approved it is personally liable for making things right when the patents are found to be nonsensically awarded. It ought to mean that (s)he get's horsewhipped when someone can tell them "Do you know what 'IRC' stands for? Ever used CompuServe or a BBS? Have you ever used 'talk'? Asshole?"
It just boggles the mind how much arbitrary wealth the low-bid, non-technical rubber-stampers at the USPTO wield. It's very scary.
I was having a chat with someone about the Roman/pagan origins of Christmas. I happened across a good page on the History Channel's web site that explains it pretty well.
Happy shopping!
Harry Potter is on TV downstairs. I've been avoiding Harry Potter like it was ebola. I've not seen the movies, not read the books, and not bought the toys (primarily because I was "supposed to" since everyone else had, was, and did). And before anyone trots out that tired, anti-curmudgeonly old saw, I don't need to eat dogshit to know I don't like it. I know I don't like Harry Potter -- if for no other reason than because it's been so incredibly hard to avoid the damn thing. (When it all first came out, I actually thought that Harry Potter was a Disney product/brand for this very reason. Disney has made an art form out of telling people what it is they need to be seeing and reading.)
I got to watch a couple minutes of the movie while I ate. It's the Taco Bell of entertainment: light, predictable, non-spicy, pre-packaged; a bland imitation of other, more real food made for people who wouldn't care to know any better. I could feel myself getting simpler by the minute.
Someone needs to tell that Rowling person what deus ex machina means. She must not have even been trying to come up with a viable story. There's some magic thing that does this other thing, or some character nearby who's in the know, no explanation or thought needed throughout the entire process. Escapism is fine, obviousness not so much. The whole thing is just so tired. It's played out. We've seen this all before, and now we have it shoved down our throats every ten goddam minutes by some marketing conglomerate. On the other hand, Rowling's made a mint separating numbskulls from their money with that magical non-plot tripe, so I suppose I should salute her. I'm conflicted on that matter.
It's not that I don't like fantasy or anything (although it's not my favorite genre; I'm not the biggest Tolkien fan in the world, but I can recognize what he did for the world). It just kills me that this kind of mindless fluff gets media and big-screen attention and something actually good and thought-provoking like Neverwhere doesn't. Harry friggin' Potter gets "people" reading again while Douglas Adams never did. Most people don't even know how to pronounce Michael Crichton's name or that George Orwell is a pen name. Everyone knows who Britney is and what new shape Michael Jackson has himself kinked into.
America is made up of corn-fed morons. Before too long, there won't be anyone left who can think for themselves. We'll all read books published by Bertelsman and see Disney movies and watch CNN news on a Time-Warner TV system and access AOL-approved web sites and listen to music Sony released and which Clear Channel decided was fit for airplay. In short, bags and bags of money are being spent as fast as possible to ensure that we're going to get more and more Harry Potters as time wears on. That's really sad.
So I had a nice long nap today/tonight, and woke up feeling every bit as bad as I did when I went to sleep. I decided to play video games until I got tired again. I noticed Return to Castle Wolfenstein on the shelf and it occurred to me that I hadn't played it in some time. I installed it. Figuring there was an update out, I checked online and sure enough there was.
During the install of the patch, I noticed that it had two EULAs, one for RtCW and one for something I'd not heard of before called Punkbuster. I alt+tabbed to opera and looked it up. It's apparently some sort of anti-cheating thing.
I'm all for playing without cheaters, so I decided to read the license agreement they wanted me to agree to. After reading it, I'm going to take my chances with the cheaters. It's a scary license. Here's the part that caught my eye:
Licensee acknowledges that PunkBuster software is optional and is not a requirement in any respect for using or enjoying games that integrate PunkBuster software technology. Licensee also acknowledges and agrees that PunkBuster software is self-updating, which means that future updates will, from time to time and without any notice, automatically be downloaded and installed as a normal and expected function of PunkBuster software. Licensee consents to this automatic update function. Licensee further acknowledges and accepts that PunkBuster software may be considered invasive. Licensee understands that PunkBuster software inspects and reports information about the computer on which it is installed to other connected computers and Licensee agrees to allow PunkBuster software to inspect and report such information about the computer on which Licensee installs PunkBuster software. Licensee understands and agrees that the information that may be inspected and reported by PunkBuster software includes, but is not limited to, devices and any files residing on the hard-drive and in the memory of the computer on which PunkBuster software is installed. Further, Licensee consents to allow PunkBuster software to transfer actual screenshots taken of Licensee's computer during the operation of PunkBuster software for possible publication. Licensee understands that the purpose and goal of PunkBuster is to ensure a cheat-free environment for all participants in online games. Licensee agrees that the invasive nature of PunkBuster software is necessary to meet this purpose and goal. Licensee agrees that any harm or lack of privacy resulting from the installation and use of PunkBuster software is not as valuable to Licensee as the potential ability to play interactive online games with the benefits afforded by using PunkBuster software.
The hell I agree. Not a chance.
I don't consent to any "function" which automatically performs updates without telling me. While I certainly do agree that it's invasive software, I don't agree that it needs to inspect my computer and report on any files/settings/etc I have. I certainly have nothing to hide, but I don't have to prove that to anyone either. I also don't consent to them taking screenshots for publication. Notice they say they can take screengrabs when their software is running, which is not necessarily the same as when I'm running game software. How do I know when their software is running? It could start up every hour on the hour and take a screenshot for all I know -- and that would be acceptable since I agreed to it.
Finally, I most certainly do not agree that any harm or lack of privacy resulting from the use of Punkbuster is better than encountering cheaters in online games. You'll always find them online, with or without stuff like Punkbuster. The only way to stop cheaters is to play alone. Installing Big Brother onto your machine will not solve the problem.
There's a really scary trend lately towards unreasonable software license agreements. Software is so complex that there's no real way to know everything that is happening at any given time (even if you do have the source; having source isn't the answer, but it does help). Most people simply click "Yes" to everything and place their trust in the software vendor. The answer isn't blind trust; that can get you into trouble. The answer is openness and honesty and ethics, not invasiveness and seedy behavior. Sometimes the cure really is more harmful than the disease.
The real cure? Read the EULAs that come with software. Know what is being installed. If possible, use software with available source code. We have enough of our privacy leaking out every day without making it worse by actually inviting to happen and giving it away. If enough people complained about this sort of thing, it wouldn't happen nearly as much. Sadly, I think most people don't care.
I'm glad I read this EULA, and I'm glad I said no to it. If I happen across cheaters, I'll just do what everyone else has done for years now: find a new server or play a different game.
Honestly, I can't stand it. Maybe it's because I don't like it when the doorbell rings. The doorbell is like fingernails on a chalkboard for me; I can't stand hearing it. The phone can be the same way sometimes. Like now, when I'm working and trying to concentrate and just want nothing but to be left alone in silence.
Maybe it's the repetitiveness of it. The doorbell rings, the dog barks/growls for like 5 minutes. It's all quiet until the bell rings and then there's this loud barking and running and howling -- for NO REASON AT ALL. She doesn't need to bark. But there no way to tell her that. Then it rings again, as if one annoyance won't make you interrupt what you're doing, but two or more will. Worse even still is when they let the kids ring the doorbell. They ring it, and they ring it, and they ring it, and they ring it, and they ring it, and they ring it. It's bothering you and it just... won't... stop. It brings out a primal "hit it until it goes away" feeling in me. I hardly ever shout and I'm extremely nice to my dog, except when the the doorbell rings.
Having said all that, I can say I'm nowhere near as bad as this guy. That's just not right. It's one thing to dislike the doorbell, but another thing to perforate your front door and injure people.
Maybe it's my general dislike for strangers. I can't imagine a type of person worse than those who actually walk up to people's doors and try to sell them things. The ones that try to foist pamphelets and shit on you in the mall are pretty bad, but at least you can escape them at home. People coming to your door on Halloween is like people selling you stuff, except trick-or-treaters bother you because they want stuff from you. Bottom line: if you don't know me, then leave me alone -- don't call, don't come over, don't bother me. Even on Halloween. Especially on Halloween.
I'd like Halloween much better if I could just leave a bucket of candy outside with a note saying "Take a couple, just leave me the hell alone."
Anyway, I turned out all the lights downstairs, and locked the door. I think they can hear me yelling at the dog to shut up, though...
A while back, I wrote two entries which went against the intended purpose of this web site. The posts were honest opinions of certain events surrounding my tenure at a previous employer, and were also perhaps a not-so-flattering (but nonetheless truthful) take on some of the people who worked there. I have removed these posts and will not restore them (indeed, the actual content has been deleted, and I have no copies or archives). I did not censor myself, nor did I remove them at the request of anyone involved. On the contrary, I've been asked by several people (some of whom were tangentially involved with the now unmentioned events) to put them back. I won't do this. As I've said, the posts did not fit the purpose of this site and writing them in the first place was a mistake. That I'm writing this entry at all is evidence of that. Let me explain why I feel this is so.
This site was originally intended to be a place where I could write things down, get thoughts out, save geek stuff, annotate what would otherwise be bookmarks, sort ideas, try new things, and rant and rave in whatever direction my fairly off-kilter mind took me. It was also originally intended for "internal" use, and was in fact originally "installed" on an internal, non-public server. After a while, I had some people say that they wouldn't mind having access to the stuff that I had written. My wife and I decided, almost on a lark, to register this domain and start putting things on it.
The "site" was repurposed into something more public; anyone who happened upon it was free to look at whatever they wanted. It grew over time and people came to know about it but we never advertised or promoted this site. In fact I've never even linked to it from anywhere (there are no links back to here from my "primary" domain 27.org, for instance). I don't even think my family knows about it (one of my brothers might; I'm not sure). Most of the people I know have no idea it exists, actually. It's not that I don't want anyone to know about it, it's just that there really isn't any good reason for telling them; I don't think they'd care all that much. I suppose I'm just apathetic in the matter, or maybe I'm not conceited enough to think they'd want to read anything I've written. What I'm saying is that anything here is for me and me alone. I have no other intended audience.
At the risk of repeating myself once again, the common thread running through the idea and motive behind this site is that it is ultimately for me and nobody else. This is a key concept.
As you can guess from looking at the search terms list to the right, I have a habit of looking through the web server logs with various automatic processes. Forewarned is forearmed, even from a non-security standpoint, and looking through logs is good practice to get into. So when I happened to find out that there were more than a couple visitors from my former employer, I decided to take a closer look at what was going on. Turns out that just before those visits, unknown person(s) from a certain distinct area of the U.S. had found my posts while searching for the names of my former co-workers. Instantly, those posts I made were for someone else, and being used by someone else. This was bad -- and more than a little upsetting. I felt like a powerless and unwitting accomplice to whatever their actions happened to be, and had no idea what damage others were doing using what I wrote. My thoughts were being used without my will against other people, in a battle in which I not only could not stay out of but couldn't even choose which side to be on (assuming I even wanted to be involved at all). This was a startling experience and something of a wakeup call for me to re-examine what I am doing here. I don't have an editorial "mission", not in the slightest, but clearly something was amiss.
I wrote what I wrote because I had strong feelings about the subject. At the time I wrote those posts, I had just been reminded of extremely distasteful events which I'd tried, mostly successfully up to that point, to forget about. So as a cathartic of sorts, I wrote about those events. I wrote the truth, as far as I knew it, along with my opinions and how I felt. Those who are familiar with the events generally agree with my interpretations. I still hold those opinions. If asked, I'll volunteer them and give the same recollection of what happened and why. I won't do it online, however.
I have rarely written about work. I rarely write about friends or family. I don't write about me all that much. I don't even swear in my posts (those of you that know me will recognize the contrast between the online and the conversational). Now you know why. I don't want to have to second-guess myself, or worry about what someone else might think if I happen to mention them. It's hard enough for me to not be uncouth and stubborn and asocial and indiscreet and sarcastic in person without immortalizing people in what someone might see as harsh online words. I really have no urge to harm or offend anyone, and if you ask anyone who knows me, they'll likely say I'm the most helpful person they know -- helpful to a fault, probably. When I wrote those posts, I was in a bad spot, mentally. I forgot what it is I do here. My posts didn't reflect who I am or what I'm about as much as they didn't reflect what this site is about; they did both a disservice. So they had to go.
Call it caving to internal pressure, but after thinking about it for a while, I feel that there's enough ill will in this world without actively creating more.
And that is all I'm going to say about the subject.
Someone needs to tell America's "religious leaders" (Falwell, Graham, et al.) to shut the hell up. They're embarassing those of us in this country who can actually think rationally, and they are giving this country a bad name.
Just can it already. You're making things worse.
I happened upon a Slashdot submission recently that smacked of advertising. The gent who submitted the story said:
K-Man asks: "A while ago, I spent a few months at a dying web startup, and, as I looked at the costs of running such an operation, I realized that a tremendous synergy could be achieved by consolidating multiple dying web startups into one umbrella organization. Many functions - bankruptcy filing, creditor evasion, even hiring contractors for fictitious compensation - could be combined under one roof. While the "web incubator" was invented in the 90's, why has no one adopted a similar model for the 00's?"
He seemed like a guy who was trying to pitch an idea, and get something started in a not-so-subtle way. Slashdot has been essentially taking ads recently, so the post was not surprising. I could tell from his idea that he had never done anything technical or successful. I could tell that he mostly "created" things, or was "an enabler". He used the word "synergy" seriously. I'm postive that he's used the word "paradigm" in conversation and felt he was being earnest. Maybe he's a solutioneer? I have no idea. But his ideas are wooly thinking electronically personified. I felt as though I had to say something. And I thought my response was pretty good, and I thought other people might like to see it too. Here it is...
A while ago, I spent a few months at a dying web startup, and, as I looked at the costs of running such an operation, I realized that a tremendous synergy could be achieved by consolidating multiple dying web startups into one umbrella organization.
I've worked for two failed start-ups since 1994, both of which did things relating to the Internet and hosting. In that time, I've also worked for a Fortune 500 company and a state government. I've known many people who have worked for various organizations, failed or otherwise. I've seen quite a range of workplaces. Your idea will not work.
First off, you assume safety in numbers. This is not the case. If you were CEO of a struggling dotcom, barely keeping afloat, would you like a pets.com to merge with you? A company that tries to make a profit shipping products which have margins so slim that double bagging erases profit? Would that help you or hurt you? There is no economy of scale in failed ideas.
Secondly, I've seen and had to deal with what happens when you try to bring different companies' technologies together under one roof. You want to set something up where everyone can use the same database servers, right? One company uses Windows 2000, one uses NT, one uses HP-UX, one uses Linux. You want them to use to the same web server? One uses IIS, one uses Websphere, one Apache, and so on and so on. You would need to have technical staff able to setup and administer these one-offs. In fact, you'd have a whole company with one-offs. Everything would be an emergency (I've seen this in action; it's not pretty), everything would be custom fit, nothing can be re-used. There's a reason Henry Ford became rich by employing standardized parts on an assembly line and his competitors who built each unit from scratch, by hand, have been completely forgotten. You might be able to get away with using the same physical Net connection(s) and rack hardware/floorspace, but that is about it.
The third reason why your idea won't work involves personalities. When a company starts dying, people leave (and get laid off) in pretty well defined stages. I can't quantify those stages, but I can say they exist as fact since I've seen and experienced them first- and second-hand many times.
The first to leave are the flighty ones that are always looking for greener pastures even in good times. These people never drank your koolaid and felt little loyalty. You were a paycheck and they'd have likely left even if your comapny hadn't tanked. The second group to leave are ones that would like to stick it out, but since they have families and such, they feel the need to protect their personal future. "No hard feelings, but I can't take IOUs two pay periods in a row..." Good, solid workers who make up the bulk of the company (and will might even remember it fondly). The third group to leave are those who thought they'd get rich off the company, or move up in the company once it got real big. These are the ones that take loans against their homes and advances on their credit cards for the company's sake. They bought into the company's dream, and had impressive titles to match their impressive hopes. The 25 year-old CTOs and VPs you heard a lot about a couple years back were in this group (but were not the sole members by any means).
Who does that leave? Founders, initial investors, and those that came in very early (and probably worked very hard early on). This is upper management, usually, and might even include one or two technical people. By and large, however, these are the folks who have made business plans and sold investors on ideas by using fanciful, meaningless graphs printed on glossy paper, not technical merits. They knew enough buzzwords to get them in the door, or fake technical acumen. They have insane amounts of stock options, and were all hoping to cash in. Depending on their proclivities they will either do anything to save "The Company" (moral, ethical or otherwise) or they will try to make things right by cutting a few corners or trying new things (moral, ethical or otherwise). These are the ones that wanted to get rich off the backs of others. It was their turn to make it big, and their "Vision" which was to succeed and make them rich and powerful. Their baby was going to grow up into Something Big.
Their baby has genetic defects, however, and is dying slowly of a wasting disease. This makes them angry, bitter, spiteful parents. They wanted their baby to be in the World Series, or win a Nobel Prize, but instead they get to watch it take the little bus to school all its short life. They gave birth to the runt of the litter. Their simple-minded and feeble offspring cannot survive on its own. It's not fair. They turn evil. It was not their idea that failed. It was not their mis-management that failed. It was 9/11, or market conditions, or a competitor's dirty tricks, or that one supplier who wouldn't extend them just a little more credit which they needed in order to "take it to the next level". It was something or someone else which failed, not them. Not their ideas or their personalities or the mishandling of the company, no.
These are the last people around when a company dies. They are not nice or happy people. They don't have good personality traits in the best of times and at the worst or times can turn on those around them like a rabid Rottweiler. These are people who will backstab and then fire their own family members if it means even getting one more chance at a small round of funding (I've personally seen this happen -- twice).
So your idea is that these people all get together, with the goals of making their ideas work by becoming a unit. By combining their strengths, they can overcome the redundancies that killed their businesses. They can all get together and learn from each other's mistakes. They can not repeat history together, and avoid the pitfalls others have encountered. Is that about right? It will never work.
There will be several people who feel they should run the show, decide direction, forge new alliances, etc. There will be several people who steal the ideas of other members of the co-op and use them to try to get rich. There will be people who see the successes of another unit and decide to move into their territory. There will be people who try to headhunt from within other units. There will be people who use the whole co-op to claim their unit is larger than it really is, or that it does more than it really does. Once one unit gets a taste of success, it'll do everything it can to shrug off the other members. There will be those who will lie, cheat and steal to get ahead. Business is, after all, business.
You may say that I have a cyincal view of the world, and I might indeed, but what I say is true. Ask someone who has been in a commune what they think of altruistic ideals. You'll find that nearly all of them discovered that the only person who really thought the commune was a good idea what the leader/founder of the commune. I know what you propose is completely different from a commune, but the point remains that there will always be people who seek to gain at the expense of others no matter what it takes. Getting these types together will not help any of them (or you), collectively or separately.
I happened to notice on linuxtoday.com an ad for a book called "MySQL Weekend Crash Course". I clicked the link, wondering what constituted a "crash course". The detail page for the book has a description, which includes statements like the following:
The problem is, you\'re not really up to speed. Maybe it\'s been a while since you worked with relational databases. Maybe you\'re new to MySQL.Those slashes in front of the single quotes are there because that text is stored in a database -- which is more than likely MySQL -- and the quotes need to be escaped so that the DB doesn't think they are part of the SQL statement. Anyway, I read the description and the first thought that popped into my head was "So why didn't these guys read this book when they built this site?" and the second thought was "Or maybe they did read it..."
I decided to observe Patriot Day (not Patriot's Day; the apostrophe is important) in a substantive way by doing two things every September 11th:
I posted a comment on Slashdot which got a lot of responses, in email I mean. I said the RIAA needs to be collectively wished into the cornfield. More than a couple people mailed me asking where the cornfield thing came from. More a couple people mailed me saying where it came from. More than a couple mailed me saying they thought the same thing. I got more mail form that one comment than I did from one of my web pages being posted on the front page of Slashdot. It's weird.
Anyway, the cornfield thing is from a short story called "It's A GoodLife" by Jerome Bixby. It was in the Twilight Zone TV show, a short story, a paperback, and the Twilight Zone movie.
I wish people into the cornfield all day. It never really happens, but if you squinch up your eyes and make tiny grunting noises while you think it in front of them, then they do go away temporarily. I recommend it.
I saw this on fark.com:
Q: What's the difference between Courtney Love and a hockey game?
A: Hockey players shower after 3 periods.
I laughed at that way more than I should have, I think. I just don't like Courtney Love all that much. Not that she's done anything to me personally, mind you. At least when you hate someone who has a song on the radio, you can always change the station. It ain't like they are your neighbor or anything...
Zac sent this to me via email and I got a big kick out of it. I decided to HTML-ify it and post it here.
We, the sensible people of the United States, in an attempt to help everyone get along, restore some semblance of justice, avoid any more riots, keep our nation safe, promote positive behavior, and secure the blessings of debt free liberty to ourselves and our great-great-great-grandchildren, hereby try one more time to ordain and establish some common sense guidelines for the terminally whiny, guilt ridden, delusional, and (more than occasionally) liberal people of the country.
We hold these truths to be self-evident: that a whole lot of people are confused by the Bill of Rights and are so dim that they require a Bill of No Rights:
- ARTICLE I:
- You do not have the right to a new car, big screen TV or any other form of wealth. More power to you if you can legally acquire them, but no one is guaranteeing anything.
- ARTICLE II:
- You do not have the right to never be offended. This country is based on freedom, and that means freedom for everyone-not just you! You may leave the room, turn the channel, express a different opinion, etc., but the world is full of idiots, and probably always will be.
- ARTICLE III:
- You do not have the right to be free from harm. If you stick a screwdriver in your eye, learn to be more careful, do not expect the tool manufacturer to make you and all your relatives independently wealthy.
- ARTICLE IV:
- You do not have the right to free food and housing. Americans are the most charitable people to be found, and will gladly help anyone in need, but we are quickly growing weary of subsidizing generation after generation of professional couch potatoes who achieve nothing more than the creation of another generation of professional couch potatoes.
- ARTICLE V:
- You do not have the right to free health care. That would be nice, but from the looks of public housing, we're just not interested in public health care.
- ARTICLE VI:
- You do not have the right to physically harm other people. If you kidnap, rape, intentionally maim, or kill someone, don't be surprised if the rest of us want to see you fry in the electric chair.
- ARTICLE VII:
- You do not have the right to the possessions of others. If you rob, cheat or coerce away the goods or services of other citizens, don't be surprised if the rest of us get together and lock you away in a place where you still won't have the right to a big screen color TV or a life of leisure.
- ARTICLE VIII:
- You don't have the right to demand that our children risk their lives in foreign wars to soothe your aching conscience. We hate oppressive governments and won't lift a finger to stop you from going to fight if you'd like. However, we do not enjoy parenting the entire world and do not want to spend so much of our time battling each and every little tyrant with a military uniform and a funny hat.
- ARTICLE IX:
- You don't have the right to a job. All of us sure want you to have a job, and will gladly help you along in hard times, but we expect you to take advantage of the opportunities of education and vocational training laid before you to make yourself useful.
- ARTICLE X:
- You do not have the right to happiness. Being an American means that you have the right to PURSUE happiness-which by the way, is a lot easier if you are unencumbered by an overabundance of idiotic laws created by those of you who were confused by the Bill of Rights.
The Japanese are from space -- or they might as well be. They have a way of thinking (viz sausage octopus) that is truly strange to Western people. This is spectacularly true when one looks at a traditional Western item which is in use in Japan. (No, not that kind of item!) For example, most Americans know what pizza is, what it tastes like, etc. You can go from Seattle to Tampa, find a pizza joint, order a pie, and expect pretty much a narrow variation on the same theme. Pizza is pizza all across the country. Pizza is even pizza in England, Australia, Israel, Mexico, etc. (and no, Macedonian egg and lard pizza doesn't count). But not in Japan. No, most certainly not in Japan.
They have Dominos Pizza in Japan, just like in England, Israel, etc. But their pizza is not quite what one expects. Ask 100 Americans, Brits, Aussies, Spaniards, whomever what a Dominos pepperoni pizza is and you'll get 100 accurate descriptions. Ask that same group what Sumibiyaki Chiki-Teri pizza is and you'll get 100 vague stares. Ask them what a Margherita pizza is and you'll get those same stares. Ask them "Have you ever had a Tuna Delight pizza?" and you'll get those same stares.
Keep in mind, this is Dominos we're talking about. It's not like we're screwing with Big Macs or anything. I haven't even mentioned the half-meter-long pizzas with corn and shrimp and mustard and seaweed yet. Or other places that serve pizzas with names like "Golden Triple Corn" and "New Funky" and "Nasu Meat" and, my personal favorite, "Pizza-La Ebi-Mayo". Ask 100 people what "Nasu" tastes like and see what answers you get. Nothing like the answers for sausage or beef or even squid, I bet. Ever had a pizza with mayonnaise on it? Yeah. You need no more evidence that the Japanese are from space than a mayonnaise, potato, bacon, onion, corn, tomato sauce and double cheese pizza.
I rest my case.
I came across something tonight which I didn't think much of at first, but after careful reflection, troubled me deeply. I don't know how else to say it than to just say it: Race Bannon filed suit against Dr. Benton Quest to win custody of Jonny and his pal Hadji. I think I'm going to get sick and spit up on my desk. Oy.
That's just not right. It. Is. Not. Right. Johnny Quest was like my favorite show growing up. And I dug Race Bannon. He was my hero during my formative years. When the outer space spiders came down, he whipped out the Garand. When there were crocodiles, he'd get the .50 cal on the jeep. He flew the plane and blew shit up and drove cars really fast and generally kicked complete ass against any and all manner of bad guy both far and wide. He was the Quest family's fearless protector and had an unknown bond with them: Never a "true" part of the family, yet the one that would give his life to save the family. He always made sure they were safe even if it meant his life was on the line. He was unconditionally devoted even though he knew he would never be a real family member. He was a selflessly caring character in that respect, and he was also a rambunctious little punk's idol. And now, 35 years later, they say he's gay? That's the unknown bond?! But... But... But... No!
I'm not saying there's anything intrinsically wrong with him being gay. I have and have had lots of friends who are gay. I've known and worked with and gone out with and had whole entire relationships with gay people. I've got no problem whatsoever with people being gay. It's their thing, just like my thing is my thing. I am down with gay. Really and truly. But none of the many wonderful gay people I've known were my friggin' childhood cartoon heros!
It shakes a small foundation is all I'm saying. A tiny one. Something you took for granted isn't the way you thought it was. Nothing major on the surface, but somehow profoundly disturbing the more you think about it. Like a picture that always looks crooked, and gets more croooked the more you mess with it. Or like a table that is never quite level. Like that, but in your head.
Anyway, I submitted the link to fark.com...
I happened to notice this story on news.com about Microsoft shipping the Nimda worm (it's not a friggin' virus, dammit!) with the Korean version of Visual Studio .Net. What a hoot. But buried in the story was something very scary.
Microsoft has exceedingly bad Quality Assurance. While trying to play down the sheer stupidity of actually bundling a worm -- by accident -- with their developer software (where's the virus scanning? where's the software manifest?), a MS spokesman said this:
It wasn't until a Microsoft employee was adding the help documentation to the software giant's developer Web site that the worm was found. "We have to go through a conversion process to an online HTML format," said Flores. "During that process we found an extra file hanging around.""Awww, shucks, silly us, it's not a big deal, see it was with the help files and that's where we found it..."
I swear I have a mental tick when it comes to the word 'virii'. I just can't stand it. Why must people use that word? Here's a good page on the etymology of the word 'virus'.
Although I can't stand the fact that I find myself agreeing with Tom Christiansen...
Filthy (my favorite movie critic of all time) reviews Attack of the Clones:
"If I hadn't seen the other four Star Wars movies, I would think Attack of the Clones was 90 minutes of shit and 45 minutes of decent movie. Having seen the others, though, I think this one is 90 minutes of shit and 45 minutes of really good movie."Which pretty nicely sums up what I was thought about it. The rest of the review explains why the movie mostly sucked: Action with jedis and droids good, love story with wooden acting and smarmy dialog bad. Stuff we all knew.
I saw a resume today from a guy who wants to be a VP of something (anything). There was something unobvious about the resume that really annoyed me, yet I couldn't put my finger on just what it was. (The rest of it was hilarious in its own right.) Driving home tomight, it occurred to me what was wrong with the resume. It had the following as part of its objective:
... strive to ... increase corporate profitability, create a unique and rewarding environment for my staff, and enable customer 'delight.' ...What bugged me about that? No, not the word "delight", and no, not that it's in quotes, and no, not that it's right after the word "enable". The sexual innuendo and/or jokes in that phrase are officially Low Flying Fruit, and I cannot go there.
I've been wondering why otherwise seemingly intelligent and capable people continue with affectations like 'virii'. Maybe they think the double 'i' makes them sound smarter? This has always confused and annoyed me. The real plural for virus is of course viruses. It has a dreaded 'ses', not two i's. When are people going to give up the chance to sound like bigshots? Every time another email worm comes around, you see self-proclamined experts talking about "virii this" and "virii that"... If I was King of All U.S. of A, I'd ban TechTV first thing.
And where the hell did that extra 'i' come from anyway? You can use the plurals cacti and octopi (although cactuses and octopuses are preferred), but what would you think if someone said "Yes, there appear to be quite a few octopii in that tank." or "Please watch your step as there are many cactii about..."? Did Webster have a sale on i's at some point? Is today brought to you by the letters i and i?
While I'm ranting, let me just say that the only thing worse than seeing 'virii' in print is hearing someone say "veye-rye". Damn that's annoying... you might as well pretend to have an English accent while you say it. I'd even prefer "veer-eye" over the long first i. Those waterheads sound like Fry's clerks hawking overpriced Norton products to Joe Simpleton the Hewlett-Packard PC owner. Strangle strangle strangle.
Oh yeah, one more thing to rave on about while I'm on the subject: trojan != worm != virus. Those are three distinct things! They have different infection vectors, life cycles, etc. The virii get royally pissed when you confuse them with trojii and worii.
I ought to make a virus/worm/trojan that infects windows machines. I'll call it 'callthemViruses!goDdammIt.A'. It'll add/change a line in the c:\msdos.sys file to "BootDelay=999999" and then it'll drop in a new logo.sys file to an image which simply has the definition of the word 'virus' on it. Have people get a nice, long look at that while they wait a million seconds to boot up.
Well, enough of my pet peeve du jour. I'm home sick with a real biological virus. Instead of try to work I'm going to do some more word puzzles. I've got a book of rebii around someplace...
I should be sleeping. It's 3:00am and I didn't get a lot of sleep last night. But instead of nap out, I have some Catholic jokes to share.
Q: How do you get a nun pregnant?
A: Dress her up like an alter boy.
Q: How are a Christmas tree and a Catholic priest alike?
A: They both have ornamental balls.
Seen in a .sig some place: Abstinence makes the Church grow fondlers.
And just for good measure:
Q: What's the difference between a Catholic wife and a Jewish wife?
A: A Catholic wife has real orgasms and fake jewelry.
And that's about as offensive as I wanna get right now.
The subject says it all: MS BOB. Huge boongoogle. Although it didn't really die.
Interesting story about BOB. You every wonder where you got that paperclip in Word? BOB. Ever wonder who the project lead for BOB was? Bill Gates' wife was responsible for the paper clip. Really, it's true.
Melinda French Gates was a project lead on MS Bob (you have to remember MicroSoft Bob -- it was that cartoony software that slowed your machine to a crawl and insulted you while balancing your checkbook or reading email). When Bob was revealed to be the complete and utter turkey that it was always destined to be, guess what got some of the "usability and human interface" stuff? Office. Guess who happened to also be, ah, "seeing" The Boss? Melinda. Why wasn't Bob just canned, like any other project that wastes millions and failed completely? You have to wonder if Bill G wasn't getting pillow-talked into something. In fact, MS Bob was the first consumer product Bill Gates released personally. People do the strangest things for love.
Anyway, a lot of what Bob had to offer didn't get canned (as it should have). It got repuposed and wound up in other MS products. Take a look at the screenshot on this page. See that dog in the lower corner? That was Bob's dog Rex. (I wish they had a picture of the dragon named "Java"; I wonder if McNealy every knew about that?) Looks like that paper clip, eh? Bob's ghost is in other stuff, too. MS Agent had a re-incarnation.
I don't know what got me on the topic, really. Just a random thought. Maybe it was that negative ad campaign they started recently. Do I want my server run by the guys who gave me BOB? Yeah... I think the Bob fiasco sheds some light on what goes on at MS. There's really no reason to wonder about the pape clip. I'm sure Melinda will insist on touchy-feely stuff being included in every MS product. I love it when someone thinks for me...
I was exploring some ideas I had floating around in my head and I came across the ||= operator in a perl man page example. I didn't recall having seen that before, so I looked it up. Turns out that it's a very cool operator and highly useful.
Here's an example. Say you have this script:
#!/bin/perl
$foo = "on";
if ($foo = undef) {
$foo = "off";
}
print "Variable is $foo\n";
#!/bin/perl
$foo = "on";
print "Variable is ", $foo ||= "off", "\n";
#!/bin/perl
$foo = "on";
$foo ||= "off";
print "Variable is $foo\n";
Pretend for a moment that you're a technology geek. You're a die-hard Linux user, and you've been using one Linux distribution for a long time. You like this distribution a lot, and you even buy a copy of every new release even though you can download it for free (say that you've also downloaded it as well). Using this version of Linux feels like home, and is something you make a career out of. Oh yeah, also imagine that you own stock in this Linux company, and have since it was first publicly traded. You literally have a vested interest in the survival of . Just suppose that all this is true for a minute or two.
Now say that you've been "online" in one form or another for like 10 years. You like being online, and you've made good money by doing things online. You've made filthy, dirty, obscene cash because you can do things online. In short: you're into being online, and something of an "online" expert. What would be the antithesis of everything online which is good and wholesome? Yeah, sure, AOL. Of course. Ever since they had their own private network opened to the world, with their buggy newsreader triple posting every "me too" three times to five newsgroups at once, AOLers have been the Fingerhut of the online world. (Although I admit it's great fun to wander among them occasionally, to see their painful existence.) AOL is the online equivalent of the guy who takes his girl to the Big Date at the fanciest of Sizzlers and lets her get the all-you-can-eat salad bar since it's such a special occasion. The Great Unwashed is what I'm trying to say. Plebeian and wired. The people who order stuffed bears and crocheted/needlepoint hearts and painted wood plaques with pithy sayings and wall hangings made of baby blue plaid. Hummels and Beanie Baby collectors. A Trans Am is a sports car. They are as un-technically inclined as the average Linux user is, all other things aside.
Now imagine that these people are going to own "your" Linux company. That's right... the Clampetts are not only your neighbors, they own the whole city.
I think I'm going to be sick.
I recently went to the latest meeting of San Diego Regional Info Watch at UCSD. My old boss is the one that got me interested in it (he's been going for years). It's a bunch of local computer guys (university, government and private companies) that get together once a month and talk about security-related issues. It's good to hear from other IT folks, and it's good to network and meet new people that are in my field. It's a couple hours in a room full of geeks, bascially. (I can guarantee that every attendee saw Lord of the Rings, for example.)
The meeting was very informative. They occasionally (~10/year?) have speakers, and the reason I went Monday was because their speaker was Special Agent Bruce Barron of the FBI. SA Barron gave us an overview of the USA PATRIOT Act. (The reason that both "USA" and "PATRIOT" are capitalized is because both are acronyms. I didn't know this, but USA stands for "Uniting and Strengthening America" and PATRIOT is "Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism". One was from the House the other from the Senate, and they combine into a nationalist whole quite nicely. Maybe someone thought a jingoistic name might help them ram its Big Brother-esque notions past the civil libertarians. After all, how can anyone not be a patriot in these times of heightened security?) SA Barron approached the Act from a purely law-enforcement point of view. He was essentially trying to let us know how the Act helps them deter "cyber-crime". If I was an admin for a large company or government agency, I would have found it particulary interesting. I've known more than a couple people who've helped the FBI prosecute online ne'er do-wells, and I've even participated in one such investigation (albeit peripherally). So he explained how the Act gives law enforcement better tools to prosecute online crime, because the USAPA really does make easy to nab the bad guys and any sysadmin ought to welcome it. The Act removes jurisdictional barriers, lumps some crimes into one federal bin from which to prosecute, allows for more consistent sentencing, broadens the scope of wiretaps to include online surveilance, etc. Which is all fine, except that it also does little to actually combat terrorism while doing a lot to reduce the online freedoms of Americans.
I went to the meeting as a Libertarian. I read through quite a bit of the USAPA (it's looooooooong and there's lots that didn't pique my interest), and I read through the EFF's analysis of the Act. I was prepared to ask pointed questions, from a personal point of view. I figured it was a good time to ask The Man what he thinks of liberty and freedom and how many terrorists he thinks would have caught (or "lives they would have saved" if you're feeling particularly uhmurcan) had the USAPA been enacted last year. But I couldn't bring myself to be poop in the punchbowl. Why? Well, the forum wasn't approriate. It would be like a PETA member sneaking into the American Butchers Association's annual meeting and then trying to make a statement. Convince a roomfull of butchers that meat is murder and see how far you get. There's no choir to preach to there. You'd only end up pissing people off and you'd make no headway whatsoever. They'd only hate PETA more than they already do. I've never been big on protest for protest's sake. The guys there at the meeting Monday were anxious to hear how they can now call the FBI to get that Canadian script kiddie extradited, not why it's sad that an innocent Altavista search can be monitored by the government just by convincing one person that it might be relevant to any sort of investigation, terrorist or not. SA Barron was there to help those guys, not enter into social debate. I felt that it would be detrimental to everyone else if I derailed the meeting (even inadvertantly). And besides, these are guys I want to get to know better. Maybe a few of them had similar concerns (I did hear some grumbling afterwards that I agreed with), but they weren't willing to get in the way of everyone's education either.
I did ask a few questions, though nothing particulary inciteful (as opposed to "insightful"... get it?). The USAPA allows the FBI to prosecute attackers/misusers of computer systems at the request of, say, an ISP if the malicious user doesn't have a contractual obligation with that ISP. Meaning if someone you don't know or isn't your customer breaks into a server or DoS's other customers you can call the FBI and have them pinched lickety-split. Which sounds nice. But what if I attack another customer of my cable modem provider? If I cause them to have to call tech support and rack up enough "damages" (USAPA says $5000 is enough to bring down the heat) can I be prosecuted? After all, it's my cable company losing money, and I do have a contract with them, right? Another thing along those lines that alarmed me was the immediacy of the USAPA. SA Barron can call a judge and get a newfangled wiretap on my ISP in a New York minute. Like fast. And before you can can say Electronic Privacy Information Center the g-men have a box installed at my cable company which saves and analyzes everything I do online. So what if someone claims that I'm attacking them and I'm not? What if the claimant in the previous question says I'm harming them? Do I get sniffed? What happens to the information that gets saved through the course of a spurious investigation? I didn't see a lot of oversight. The USAPA basically says that if you're doing something online, someone can find out what that is without any real reason. Which, again, sounds nice. But how does it stop or combat terrorism?
Well, I could drone on and on about this forever and it still wouldn't change anything. I mostly wanted to write down my thoughts and impressions before I forgot them. Speaking which, I almost forgot the funniest thing that came out of the talk: it turns out that your TV viewing habits are not subject to the same rules as your online habits. I guess a while back someone Congressional types had their cable and movie rental records subpoenaed as part of an investigation. Apparently, that didn't sit very well since those viewing habits were fairly embarrasing. So it was decided -- in a very real and legally binding sense -- that TV viewing and movie renting are private, and therefore protected, behaviors. So the FBI can, with very little probably cause, at the slightest whim and on after asking only one judge, collect everything you do and say online. But to get your pay-per-view records, they have to do a full-on Title III search which involves multiple panels judges, paperwork, accountability, etc. Terrorists must not rent movies or watch cable TV. Well, I thought it was funny that viewing was specifically excluded from the USAPA. Maybe a Senator will go surf a porn site or something we'll get our privacy and liberties back. Could happen.
Like it says: no news. That's the latest from work these days. I'm still hanging in there, doing whatever it is that I do these days. So far, that's been everything but sweeping up at the end of the day. Oh... wait. I did that too once. At least I don't have to clean the toilets. Never say never, though. If I tell anyone at work that I had a job in high school cleaning toilets at a transmission shop, I'm sure I'll get picked to do that at the office too. They're always pleased when I tell them I have experience in something. They love the concept of "doing more with less". It's just so sexy these days.
I just wish I knew what it is I was supposed to be "offically" doing -- even if that official word was only good for a couple weeks or something. Lately, I do a little programming, a little fixing customer issues, a little internal IT stuff... and a lot of talking about doing in between any other odd job that pops up. An example is in order.
Yesterday I was the engineer on call up at our data center in Irvine. I didn't know I had to be the on-call that day when I left the house. I got the page midway during my 45 minute commute to work. It's not like I mind driving another 45 minutes to Irvine. (The hour and a half coming back at night isn't so fun though.) But some warning would be nice. I had plans to talk about stuff yesterday. No biggie.
So anyway, I get to Irvine and I'm trying to be productive and get my remote management stuff working in the midst of telling the Ops guys to reboot NT machines and/or restart IIS. (I kinda like playing BOFH sometimes, I admit it.) We're trying to push "one dot oh" of our software out the door. There's really no official version number. We just want to release something so we can show everyone how handy it would be to let the programmers write programs instead of work a broom or do backups. And just when I get some cool bit worked out, I get an email asking me to walk across the street and "look at the condos". (There is a rather large apartment complex -- excuse me, "Executive Suites" -- across from our data center.) That's as much detail as I got. Look at them. So that was enough trying to write code for that day. I could see how this was going to play out. I shut down my editor, closed my compiler and ssh windows, and left nothing but Pine running. This was going to be me squeezing info out of mgmt, via email, in order to put out some fire.
See, I know that our data center people are not liking the fact that we're using an office space for storage. So I think my company wanted me to find a condo in order to store the piles of shit we moved from the La and SD data centers and just threw into this room. Really: there's just this one room with piles of shit in it. Except for a couple cabinets with doors, the rest of it is just stuff we crammed in there since we were in such a hurry. Miles of cable, tons of 1U rails, buckets of screws, that sort of thing. I could just see us hauling that crap over to these fancy apartments. We'd be like the Beverly Hillbillies if they had servers. "Jethro, make sure you git all that there CAT5 and stuff it up agin the closet..."
I went across the street and played like I was a big shot company guy. My story was that we had traveling executive/salemen types that need to show our data center warez early in the morning sometimes and getting up from San Diego was hard in the early morning so we needed executive suites to park them in over night. They actually bought it. I got applications, took a tour, saw the workout room, looked at the pool, all that. I even turned on the kitchen faucet, flushed the toilet and "Ooohed" and "Ahhhed" at the Corian counters when I was touring the "Brushwood" model. Just because I felt like Abraham, my guide, deserved as much. I had to stay in character, after all. I got the docs, brought them back to the colo and wrote up a review of the condos. Word comes 30 minutes later to "rent one... today". Have you ever tried to rent a horribly expensive condo (about two bucks a square foot, in case you were wondering), under a corporate account, when you have no signing authority and don't know any other details, with no money, in two hours? It's that kind of thing that makes my day fun. What the hell, I get paid pretty well, right? I went back over, talked to another rental lady, sent some faxes, got more info, and set everything up. I could write a personal check for $132 and get keys to a fairly nice apartment in my company's name tomorrow by nine am. Spiffy.
But I don't think we'll rent one after all. They told the colo people that we're going to blow $1300 on an apartment to store our junk. I guess the colo guys thought we were crazy. After all, who needs to store things in a high-tech data center? I have to call back Abraham and tell them that the salesmen won't be coming.
In the meantime, I'm going to try and force the development thing. I'm toying with the idea of working from home for an entire week. I think I can bust out my stuff in a week if I really pack it in. Then I can show my ersatz boss that we have a thing everyone will like and that they would be wise to continue funding further development since it'll make everyone's life easier. It's a theory anyway. All I really want is to write software and invent cool stuff. Failing that, I'd just like to know what it is that I'm going to be doing. I'm getting too old to have a mystery job every day. It's wearing on my soul.
Then you have to remember that hot dog vendor who was giving the inept cops grief. After I read MS's latest security bulletin about the IIS security hole of the week, I couldn't help but think of him:
"What does 'buffer overrun' mean?"
"What does 'serious vulnerability' mean?"
"What does 'run with Local System privileges' mean?"
"What does 'reformatting the hard drive' mean?"
Hey, I'm allowed to laugh -- it's Microsoft. :-)
(I posted this on Slashdot tonight and thought it was worth sharing.)
I did two major things last week:
1. I quit smoking
2. I quit Windows
The two have nothing to do with one another, but I can tell you that replacing a machine which had been running Windows for over two years certainly tested my new non-need for nicotine.
Tribes2 came from tuxgames, and I no longer work at Eudora. I don't really need Windows anymore. So I wiped my big, fast SCSI drive and threw Linux on it. No more using the tinier and slower drive in dual boot when I want Linux. I'm going to have an actual uptime on my main, daily-use machine. And now the only Win32 machines in the house are my wife's.
I've been using Linux since 1994 (Slack, even) and I'm pretty familiar with it. I have a couple machines at home that run Linux (including a gateway built from the Linux Router Project's stuff that has no hard disk). I'm confident when working with Linux, and I use it at work. I don't really like Windows all that much and I've been wanting to dump it for years. Yet it was a hard decision to leave Windows completely.
What games will I be giving up? Will there be some new killer app I cannot run? Can I live with Samba for all my non-Linux connectivity? Will all my USB stuff work? Will the latest CVS snapshot Voodoo5 drivers be better than the six month old Win32 ones? Will they work at all? How will I update my BIOS now that they pack them in Win32 self-extracting EXEs? How's WINE doing these days? Can I get drivers for my old Canon laser printer?
I think things are fine. I've got stunnel doing cool things, and ssh port forwards for my mail. Opera runs like a champ, and I can get pix out of my digital camera. I'm thinking of installing GNUCash. I feel comfortable for the first time in years. It's like being home again. I wrote a shell script that did absolutely nothing, just because I could.
But if the decision to completely switch was hard for me, it must be really, really hard for the casual user. I can't imagine what a new Linux user would do. ("I have to link a GLU DRI to what .so thingy where? Huh?") I think it would be nearly impossible for the average/new Linux users to make the switch.
So we need WINE. We also need native ports. It's a very tough question. I can tell you that the people like me won't support Lokigames -- there aren't enough of us. But if we rely on WINE to run all our non-ported apps, MS (or someone) will work on breaking the implementation, just like what happened to AIM and Samba. I'll deal with either WINE or a native port (ports preferred), but if the goal is new Linux users then games aren't where the answer is. Ask anyone with Mac OSX to burn a disc and see what they think of Unix. The interface to the OS needs significant ease-of-use changes.
