Übermenschen

I can't believe we actually one a war against people who can build crap like this.

Is getttext really worth an hour-long compile?

The hobby, the age-old balance between what you do for bread and what you do for fun. Everybody needs a hobby, whether that means astronomy, collecting bottle caps, or watching the boob-tube. Watching TV gets short shrift, if you ask me. It's nothing worse than reading comic books or blogs, really. But it's somehow gotten the attention of do-gooders everywhere, sort of like smoking and drinking. Smoking has been linked to everything from insomnia to low sperm count. Second-hand smoke is supposedly deadlier than the first-hand variety, despite the hard work smokers do filtering out the bad stuff with their own lungs and tracheas. Likewise, it's a widely know factoid nowadays anyway, that you burn more calories sleeping than you do while watching television. Once studies come out about you claiming absurd notions that no one dares to question, you know you've done something right.

But I'm not here to champion smoking or watching television per se; I doubt the two most popular pastimes of the 20th century need or expect my help. I'm here to tell you about my new hobby: Watching old episodes of the X-Files. Now, I always thought I knew a thing or two about special agents Mulder and Scully, and really felt no need to do any catching up. That is, until I actually sat down and watched an episode last year, only to realize that Mulder had been replaced by a T-1000 and nobody had noticed the switch! Granted, replacing Mulder with a single-minded, humorless robot that displays no emotion as it goes about its work isn't exactly what you'd call a catastrophic disruption, but you'd think the people around him would at least notice that it's a totally different dude! I decided to investigate.

As it turned out, not only was I missing the plot arc that involved a Terminator taking over Mulder's office, I'd also missed the part about the series being cancelled in 2003. So, I decided to turn to our old friend Mr. Torrent and do some catching up after all. Since I made that fateful decision about 6 months ago, the little lady and I have been watching an episode or two every evening, give or take. We've steeped ourselves in this fascinating bit of Clinton-era thêatre paranoie to the point where I realize that, despite having seen an episode or two back in the day, I know exactly fuck-all about the X-Files.

In retrospect, this isn't surprising, considering I never watch television. I mean, I try to slip into the comfortable rhythms, the somnambulant dynamic of the Tube, the Almighty, the One I so worshipped as a child. But I can't get my head around the fact that you can watch television for days, literally, and never once see a bukakke tentacle rape take place. I guess the Internet has spoiled me in that way. Nevertheless, there is good television to be found, as long as you have a good tracker. With years and tens of gigabytes of content before us, and a cheap DivX player as our trusty guide, we embarked on our journey to figure out just what the Hell Chris Carter and his minions were trying to tell us with their 10+ years of air time.

From the first scene, I knew that I had missed out on a whole bunch of things the first time 'round. In the pilot, for example, you see Scully in her underwear, as she examines a curious bug-bite in the bathroom mirror. Very erotic, albeit in a ham-handed, back-of-the-Sears-catalog kind of way. Up to that point, I had been under the impression that Gillian Anderson had been a bit pudgy for the first few years of the X-Files, and that it had actually damaged her character in later seasons when she had become the mercilessly hot red-headed seductress we all know and love today. But I was mistaken: She was built like a brick shitter from the very beginning.

The pilot also painted a rather remarkable version of Fox Mulder, one that I wasn't familiar with. He wore tacky sweaters, cracked terrible jokes constantly, and tried to be an all-around goof. These things went away, of course, as Mulder's demeanour became famously glazed and torpid. I guess the meds kicked in after the first couple of episodes. But one thing from the pilot stayed in the series, and I never noticed it. Namely, Special Agent Fox Mulder is a porn freak. A quick exchange in Mulder's office has Agent Scully referring ironically to his 'special video tapes', which he apparently has locked away in a drawer under the iconic "I Want to Believe" poster behind his desk. Apparently, he "Wants to Believe" that a woman could actually do that with a Heineken bottle.

In subsequent episodes, many references are made to Mulder's obsession with porn and masturbation. For example, in an episode about a grunge teenager who can channel lightning (which co-stars Jack Black and the medic from Saving Private Ryan), Mulder and Scully find a sleazy magazine called Big 'Uns, or something similar, and Scully makes a reference to Mulder having a subscription. Mulder timidly cops to it. In another episode, where Peter Boyle plays a psychic who can foresee how people die, a most disturbing exchange takes place while Scully is driving and Boyle is riding shotgun. Boyle says, "there are a lot of dignified ways to die, but autoerotic asphyxiation isn't one of the them." Mulder pokes his head in from the back seat and asks, suspiciously, "why are you telling me this?" At one point in the series you actually see Fox masturbating. At the end of Jose Chung's From Outer Space, he's laying in bed watching a well-known videotape of a supposed Bigfoot sighting, operating the VCR remote with his left hand while his right hand remains hidden under the covers. Any male over 30 would recognize the de facto official position of self-gratification of the those times. It was the early-90's version of using the mouse with your left hand.

But the X-Files wasn't only about waxing the dolphin. There are some great insights into the American mindset of the mid-90s. Every strenuous meeting that takes place in the office of Assistant Director Skinner (also a jerk-off addict, by the way) was smiled upon by the soothing, beatific visage of Attorney General Janet Reno on the one side and Bill Clinton on the other. Ah, the glory days of right-wing paranoia. Man, those were good times: The Unabomber Manifesto, the cattle mutilations, the crop circles, the black helicopters that hovered over Waco and Ruby Ridge. They just don't make psychotic delusions like that any more.

Technorati Tags: Hobbies, X-Files

Being a native English-speaker in a foreign land can be a real pain in the ass. Especially if you're using a computer. First of all, you'll probably be buying keyboards and the like from local purveyors, instead of having them flown in specially like the rich boys do. Getting used to a new keyboard is a task unto itself: the German keyboard, for example, reverses the positions of the Y and Z keys in relation to U.S. English keyboards, in addition to relocating the most of the special punctuation symbols ({,},|,) to finger-breaking combos involving the magical, mystical "Alt-Gr" key. Most commonly used symbols in command-line environments, like the / (Shift-7 in German layout), were not really envisioned as Barre chords, and using them a lot can be exasperating.

Figure 1: The German PC Keyboard (Stolen from Here)

Even worse are the efforts by all the world's programmers to be the cleverest little boys in town when it comes to solving the localization problem. Take Google, for example. Even though they have more money and resources than about 80% of sovereign nations, they've chosen the least reliable method possible to determine a user's preffered language: His geographical location. If your IP address is in Germany, you'll get forwarded to the German start page. It's a solution, I guess, but it paints users with a very broad brush. If you're a businessman travelling in Germany, for example, and you type in "google.com", that's not what you'll get; you'll get google.de. Oh, you can set a cookie with Google to always be in English, but you'll have to navigate to the "Settings" page, if you happen to know that Einstellungen means 'settings', then pick your language from a drop-down list you probably can't read, then save your new settings. As long as you know what Einstellungen Speichern means.

But a lot of people in Germany don't speak German; and even more don't have it as their first language. There are a lot of English, Turkish, and Italian speakers, not to mention Russian, Vietnamese, and Chinese left over from the Communist East German days; among them are people who can't even read Latin characters. Using geography to determine language doesn't even wash in the United States even more, since the Burrito Invasion went into overdrive. So why not just let the user tell you what language he wants if you're so interested. In reality, he already is telling you, you're just not listening! Here's another example. If you install a program under Windows, more often than not that program will use the Locale setting to determine which language to display. If you live in Germany, it will display – you guessed it – German, no matter what language your Windows OS is running in. When I install SVN, for example, and type "svn help" at the command prompt, this is what it returns:

C:\Documents and Settings\eric>svn help Aufruf: svn UNTERBEFEHL [Optionen] [Parameter] Subversion Befehlszeilenclient, Version 1.3.1. Geben Sie 'svn help UNTERBEFEHL' ein, um Hilfe zu einem Unterbefehl zu erhalten.

Now, considering my Windows installation is in English, why in the world would this POS be spitting German at me?Because it uses the Locale setting instead of the Language setting, and this is wrong. Although I'm speaking English, I'm still bound by other Locale settings, like the Euro Symbol and date format, when I'm living in Germany. I'm not sure why everybody in the world gets this wrong, but they do.

Here's how it should be: Your web page – I'm looking at you, Googlezonhoo! – shouldn't show me a language I don't understand just because your GeoIP database says that's what language I should speak. My browser tells you what language I want with the "Accept-Language" header. This is a much more reliable indicator than my IP address as to whether or not I can speak English or not. Most Germans use German versions of their web browser, which will in turn send you that information. That's what it's there for! Thanks, Dr. Schmidt, you can make the billion-dollar check payable to "Rube".

As to your application, Mr. SVN, why the hell don't you read the Language setting instead of the Locale setting? If you ask at install time which language you should use, why would you do it in German? What if I was in Japan and couldn't make heads nor tails of the posed question? I guess it doesn't help that Microsoft itself confuses the role of a Locale with that of a language. Even better is their insistence that an "Input Language" is the same thing as a keyboard layout! Bravo, Bill! How does having a German keyboard magically change the language that I'm typing on it to German? Bob knows. Observe what happens with the following Python code:

C:\Documents and Settings\eric>python ActivePython 2.4.2 Build 10 (ActiveState Corp.) based on Python 2.4.2 (#67, Jan 17 2006, 15:36:03) [MSC v.1310 32 bit (Intel)] on win32 Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. >>> import win32api >>> print hex(win32api.GetUserDefaultLangID()) 0x407 >>> print hex(win32api.GetSystemDefaultLangID()) 0x409

Huh? Looking at Microsoft's handy localization page, I see that 0x407 is German, and 0x409 is U.S. English. I'm getting a different language for my user than I am for my system, even though we're both in Germany, and we're both speaking English. In other words, even though I'm using the English version of Windows, my user language is set to German because I've got a German keyboard? What a crock o' crap. Windows' Multilanguage Support is viciously, unfixably broken.

A lot of programmers give very little thought to internationalizing their products. Some people, like the ones mentioned here, would've been better off ignoring it and sticking to English-only versions.

Technorati Tags: Bill Gates, Ex-patratism

Hey, man, you ain't bad. Think about what kind of splash you'd've made back in, say, 2003! You would have been fucking king back then. And that screen, man, that's even better than a 5th generation iPod! Don't go breaking your head about that 6th generation iPod, iPhone, whatever, because you came out first, my man. You beat that poser to market by a good six weeks, so you've got that going for you.

And who needs a phone anyway, dude? Phones are so, you know, 20th century web 1.0 and shit. You've got the Social, my friend. At least, you will, as soon as all that Wi-Fi stuff gets worked out, what with Universal demanding their cut and all. I dig. But still, you think that iPhone-come-lately even thought about clearing all that 802.11b/g/n and Bluetooth stuff with the RIAA before flouting it all over town? Now really, man, would a true friend do that? That ain't what people want. What's to stop somebody from just sendin' all that copyrighted stuff over email to their buddies without the record labels getting a cent?! Who does that Apple think they is, anyway? They don't even put those "Intel Inside", "Made for Windows 2006", "Graphics by XYZ", or "Centrino" stickers on their junk! What's up with that?! How's a brother to know what chipset he's using, know what I'm saying?

Don't you worry, Zune, my man. We know who our friends are.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Bill Gates, iPhone, OS X, riaa, zune