How to draw a car in MS Paint.

Technorati Tags: Art, Tip of the Day

Seeing as how, in a matter of weeks, I'll be working in an exclusively Linux-based environment, I figured I'd fire up my Fedora installation again and see how's tricks. Linux has been playing the Ike to my Tina for over a decade, always disappointing and abusing me every chance it gets, and I just keep coming back for more. This time, though, it's for real; I can feel it. Anyway, I don't have a choice, so let's just tell the neighbors I fell off the swing, and concentrate on the good times.

One of the biggest gripes I've had about Linux was its sound card support*. Every Linux distribution you can think of still defaults to 1993's concept of sound hardware. Namely, only one application can play a sound at any given time, and it locks the sound hardware from being used by other applications, for what reason not even God knows. This is behavior that belongs in a single-user, single-tasking operating system like DOS, not in a modern multiuser environment like Linux.

This problem was addressed back in the day by using "sound servers", like ESD or artsd, to provide a layer between the applications and the OSS-supported hardware. This introduced a huge amount of latency, however, and was generally considered a stopgap measure even at its inception back in 1998 (or maybe even earlier, I can't find that info). Even worse, software had to be written to explicitly support it or it was useless.

The limitations of the OSS+Sound Server architecture were overcome by a project known as ALSA, which introduced software mixing at the kernel level. This created an OSS-compatible, multi-streamed abstraction for sound hardware, and obviated the need for sound daemons altogether. That was back in, oh, 2000 or so, and to this day, every single Linux distribution still ships with sound servers and software mixing disabled.

Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, et. al still configure sound hardware to be accessible by one application at a time, despite ALSA's hard work. This means, for instance, that your Flash Player will freeze your browser if you happen to be listening to music in the background. Or if you get a system beep, it will lock you out of using your sound card for as long as the artsd/ESD timeout is set up. Games will not work. This sucks, of course, and is no way to compute in 2007.

The way to fix this is fairly simple. Simply put the following into your /etc/asound.conf, or in your ~/.asoundrc:

pcm.swmixer { type dmix ipckey 1234 slave { pcm "hw:0,0" periodtime 0 periodsize 1024 buffersize 4096 rate 44100 } }

Now, I profess neither to having written that snippet, nor to having any understanding whatsoever as to what it does. But since I put that magical incantation into use, I've had no problems whatsoever with sound-card locking, or Flash plugins, or anything else. It just works.

Now why haven't the distributions adopted this behavior as the default, instead of their asinine insistence on single-channel sound support? The reason is simple: Linux distributions hate their users, and want to destroy them by any means possible.

This would also explain their sticking with X Window System.

• See also: Kubuntu: Sucks Linux Sound: Still suckin’ after all these years

  Technorati Tags: ALSA, Linux, Fedora

In order to keep a vase full of flowers fresh, drop a penny (or other copper coin) into the water. Since 1982, pennies are copper-plated. Pre-1982 pennies were 95% copper or more, so would theoretically work better.

Technorati Tags: Flowers, Tip of the Day

The Wednesday Tip:

How to open a 4th Generation iPod:

This week's (and the inaugural) Tuesday Tip:

How to play a G Chord.

Computers have been around for a while, now. The first digital computers that did useful work were used by the British during World War II to crack the Germans' Enigma cryptographic scheme, with the help of literary greats Alan Turing and Kate Winslett. Computer networks came about not long after. In fact, the network technology that most people use today, Ethernet, was developed back during the Nixon administration by Xerox. But that's really more of a hardware spec, invisible to most of us that use it, and used only in the most vaguely analogous sense by the Internet and wireless connections that we find ourselves using more and more.

What runs over those networks, well, that's the stuff that really concerns us. We wouldn't care if our SMB, HTTP, or NFS protocols were running over a length of twine connecting a couple of dead beavers, just as long as they kept the links up and the bits moving. But for some reason, these protocols, like unto the network itself conceived in the dark, smoke-filled chambers of engineering history, are still less than adequate in real world situations. I'll give you an example: There's not a computer or operating system built today that gracefully handles an unexpectedly disconnected network volume.

I'll grant, for the sake of argument, that I'm on the only moron in the world who would forget to dismount a network drive before clapping his laptop shut and carrying it out of the office. But you would think, in the 30 or more years we've been using networks to share our data, that exactly this scenario might have come up at some point in a worst-case-scenario brainstorming session by one of the major vendors. But I guess the very idea such a thing could happen was judged preposterous, and relegated to the realm of science fiction, freeing the engineering team to work on more critical issues like the Desktop Cleanup Wizard.

So maybe the story I'm about to tell could land me in the rubber room, but I'll chance it, as the Truth Wants to Be Free. As you may have already inferred, in my hurry today, I forgot to dismount a shared network volume before packing my laptop and heading out of the office . Upon opening my laptop once more, I was greeted by the Symbol of Waiting, which refused to go away. All the while, in the corner of my friendly graphical user interface, said network volume's icon was displayed, indicating a continuing, vigorous mounting. Obviously, the Symbol of Waiting was my computer's way of telling me that, while it seemed unlikely that this drive could be mounted without access to its network or, indeed, any network whatsoever, it was still experiencing a moment of indecision. It was telling me that it was considering the two conflicting possibilities of a) the network connection being gone, and therefore all processes using it should be informed of this fact, or b) the server having followed me to the café I'm sitting in, installed a network cabling plant, snuggled itself under my table, and then connected itself to my laptop, and was just in the processing of booting itself back up in order to serve that dreadfully missing network share; a possibility which, I might add, the computer was willing to indulge ad infinitum. Apparently, Occam's Razor is a difficult principle to express in Objective-C.

All of this culminated in a computer caught in a permanent moment of indecision. I like to believe that every time you boot your computer, the cycle of its life is started anew, with the hopes and dreams of a better life this time around; the corollary of course being that you've had to viciously snuff out the life of its previous incarnation. Thus as I was administering the Mac equivalent of a three-finger salute (Ctrl-Cmd-Power) to this shivering, broken husk of a computer a moment ago, I felt no regret. It was better to end it there, to ease its suffering. I felt pity however, in that it probably didn't understand what it was going through, what the source of its confusion and suffering was.

But I also couldn't help think it could have been prevented. Perhaps the status check of a network mount could be moved into a thread, instead of being embedded in the main event loop of the user interface, blocking all input? Perhaps an operating system could check to see if there are any open files on a mounted network drive before betting its entire existence upon the fact that it may, one day, return? Is the termination of a single process blocking on a stat call really worth the life of the entire ecosystem? These are questions for the politicians, apparently, and not for the medics in the field.

In a technical interview recently, a man asked me if I knew the point of "hard-mounting" network shares, particularly those of the NFS variety. I gave the textbook answer he expected, that it was preferable for applications to block and fail in the case of a missing disk than to go on believing that it still existed, without the knowledge that their write operations had failed, and their data were most likely corrupted. It's easy to be so cold and calculating when you haven't seen the suffering involved in such a catastrophic break. It's easy to extoll the virtues of data integrity über alles. But from the perspective of the victim, ignorance is, unfortunately, bliss.

UPDATE: This was, oddly, the Whine of the Week on Macbreak Weekly.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Bill Gates, User Interface

Over 2 years ago, I made a modest little proposal about cameras embedded in cell phones:

So, I was wondering if there’s a way to send that directly to the police. For example, if you’re pretty sure you’re about to get mugged, you could just take a picture of the guy and send it quick-like to the cops. Then, you could say, “whoa, G, you might as well keep on moving: five-o’s got your mug.? Of course, this may come across as somewhat antagonistic, which muggers generally don’t like. Anyway, if you send an MMS to 911, does it work? It should. Then, we could all be bitch-ass little snitches at the touch of a button.

And today, what do I see?

Catching criminals in the act these days is s ometimes as easy as pressing a button on your camera phone. Now the city is moving to simplify your ability to share telltale evidence of subway flashers, house burglars or even a suspect pothole, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said yesterday. "If you see a crime in progress or a dangerous building condition, you'll be able to transmit images to 911 or online to nyc.gov," Bloomberg said in his State of the City address.

You ever have one of those days when you say to yourself, "If the world would just shut up and do as I say, it would be a better place for everybody"? Well, I don't. I speak, and the world listens. Sometimes it just takes a little longer than it should. Stupid world.

Hurricane Kyrill is blasting across Germany at the moment, leveling trees and flinging stucco about. Man, you'd think Gabriel was tooting his horn outside, the way the locals are reacting. Mind you, Kyrill's not really a hurricane, but rather a winter gale. That would be the way LEO translates the german word Orkan; well, that and hurricane. But a hurricane is necessarily in the Caribbean, moving west. Technically, anyway.

But I'm not here to split hairs, I'm here to talk about battering winds, upwards of 200 kilometers per hour. Not sure how fast that is in real measurement, but I can confirm it's a-howling through the alleyways outside. You can actually hear it whistling through the cathedral belltower, a good half-mile away. It's sort of a low hoot. The roof tiles they have over here are bound to start flying around at some point, injuring passers-by unlucky enough to be out in it, à la Ben Hur. I've still got to get home from this bar I'm sitting in right now, but I'm close enough that it would be a lucky shot, indeed.

They've stopped all trains in the entire country, even the streetcars, and the kids are staying home from school tomorrow. As are many businessmen, their firms more concerned about their safety than the four-hour workday most people put in on Friday over here. All in all, it's a pleasant diversion for everyone, an act of God that brings a bit of excitement to the daily routine. I'm just glad the bars are open, otherwise this entry would have been about four lines long.

It's sort of like it used to be in Atlanta before the Yankees came, when we got a few flakes of snow on the ground. Once the slightest flake fought its way through the climatical defenses enough to land and shout, triumphantly, Allahu Akhbar! Quake with fear before me! before becoming a small puff of vapor, well, that's when the fabric of Atlanta society would start coming apart at the seams. The groceries stores were run upon, with milk and bread being carried by the truckload to the homes of weather-maddened Southerners. The schools were locked down tight; lest the inexperienced, though well-meaning bus drivers tumble off a cliff, out of control on ice-slick roads with a full load of schoolchildren. We didn't like snow, not even the rumor of it.

Growing up in Cherokee County, we had a rather enviable relationship with snow. It's a large county, with a hilly bit up north, in the Canton area. But the rest of the county sits around Lake Allatoona, and is predominately mild in its winters. School closings, however, are granular only to the county level, which meant that whenever some meth-addled bus driver in Ball Ground happened to notice a patch of frost on the grass on her way out of the trailer park, the school board would immediately be notified, and all educational activities throughout the county brought to a halt. Sometimes, some farmer's pond was frozen over in a forgotten corner somewhere; the very presence of ice somewhere induced enough unease among the elected county officials that they just played it safe and let the kids have the rest of the week off.

During the Winter of '87, we actually had 16 days off in a row for snow. Down in our end of the county, we did indeed see snow the first day. I remember it well: We were sitting in home room, the first class of the day, when the first flakes began to fall, the shimmering little harbingers of freedom. In panicked tones, the principal came on the PA and announced that we should all get on the buses, or hop in our cars, and get the Hell home, not forgetting of course to stop on the way for whatever bread or milk might still be available in the local grocery store, every man for himself! I could just see him in his office: laying down the intercom microphone and strapping himself to his chair, cradling his service .45, a captain going down with the ship.

Predictably, once we were all home the snow stopped. In fact, it was 65 degrees by midday, and we were playing football in the yard with 8 men per team. It was a pleasant diversion for a Tuesday afternoon, but we were resigned to getting back to the grind bright and early the next morning. But there was no school the next day. Nor the day after that. In fact, for the next two weeks, despite spring-like temperatures and sunny skies, we were out of school on account of snow. Every day the disruption continued, the fun factor was reduced by half, until finally we were all wondering whether they had forgotten to tell everybody to go back. But no, there was Guy Sharpe every morning, announcing the one and only school closing in the state of Georgia: Cherokee County. For two solid weeks. I always wondered what people in other counties thought of that. At one point, the guy shows them a map of Georgia with little suns all over it and 60+ degree temperatures, then announces that our hillbilly asses still won't come out from under our rocks.

They cancelled our Spring Break that year because of that. Bastards. I didn't think much about it then, being a latchkey kid, but I can imagine that a lot of parents had actually planned their precious two-week vacations to coincide with Spring Break. But then, Cherokee County was a different crowd back then. I mean, to have vacations implies that you, you know, have a job.

But it became clearer to me in my last two years of High School how something like that could happen. It was easy to start rumors about snow sightings in Canton. Even mentioning an ice storm in Birmingham would have the teachers looking nervous. Do that in home room, and by lunch it would be all over school. Somebody would come up to you and tell you that the county seat was under a six-foot sheet of glacial ice, and that school would be cancelled forever, what with the coming ice age and all. It's a miracle that the public school system functions at all.

Weather is always what the Germans call a gaudi, a good time.

Technorati Tags: orkan, puppy, snow day

Apropos this post over at Wordpress, I'll be upgrading to the latest version. Please pardon if things look screwy for a bit.

Update:  Well, that wasn't so hard.  As you were.

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

Despite my near-absolute conviction that it would never happen, Chairman Jobs dropped the i-Bomb today on a suspecting crowd. By all accounts, the patented jobsian Reality Distortion Field went all the way to eleven at MacWorld Expo this morning as the Steve introduced the new Apple iPhone. The iPhone is, without a doubt, the sexiest-sounding piece of hardware ever, period. As its proponents were hoping, it brings to a mobile phone typical Apple touches, like motion-sensing gestures and easy media management, and does so in a way that will have Apple fans and detractors alike buzzin about it for weeks to come. It looks like a big, big win for Apple, and a disruptive entry into the smart-phone market.

"But hey, little Rube, why the long face?" you might ask, should you see the frown I'm wearing at this moment. And it may seem strange, me being a Mac Fanboi and it being Apple's day in the sun, that I would be in any kind of mood other than near-ecstasy. So, I'll explain. Although I'm a big fan of the Mac, there's nothing here that bodes well for that platform. The iPhone will almost certainly be a cross-platform device, which means a lot more Windows users are going to be using it than Mac users. And since I'm not really in the market for a portable phone, it's nothing more to me than yet another cool iPod that I can't afford. The iPhone comes at the expense of the Mac platform, not for its greater glory. In fact, it stole from the Macintosh platform its annual holy day, the MacWorld keynote.

Probably the biggest news for Mac users, which will remain almost completely overlooked, is that a commercially-available version of Mac OS X now exists for portable devices. Windows CE has been, up to now, the only really normal OS for handheld computers (not including the current iPod OS, which is most certainly the best-selling). But today, Apple showed they have a portable, flash-based version of OS X running on a hardware platform that includes wireless networking, bluetooth, and a brilliant touch-screen display to show it on. This makes the iPhone the best handheld PC on the market.

This bodes well for the iPod, of course. I don't see Apple abandoning. the sub-$500 market completely, and now that they have the hardware and software platform for it, could 802.11-enabled, bluetooth-capable iPods finally become a reality?

What I would like to see happen now is a hard-disk based iPod successor, somewhere in the 30-60GB range, with the form-factor and OS X version of the iPhone, but without the mobile phone part of it. It would be the second coming of the Newton, at a time when nobody gives a second thought to plopping down 350 bucks for an Apple product that fits in their pocket.

Jobs' demo today showed why Apple have made a lot of the decisions we've seen over the past year or so. First, they dropped the PortalPlayer iPod platform at the height of its popularity. Then, they made headlines all over the Web by securing enormous amounts of flash-memory around Asia, and everyone postulated flash-based MacBooks by year's end. Then, it leaked out that Apple had patented resolution-independent user interface technology, presumably for large screens running OS X 10.5 Leopard. Who would've thought that they were actually thinking about high-density mobile displays running a tiny, tiny version of OS X?

While everyone was salivating over a phone today (a phone for gossake!), I was thinking just one thing: Cool! There's a version of OS X that runs on StrongARM (or whatever's in there), includes Safari and Cover Flow, and runs entirely from flash memory! I wonder what the boot-times are on one of those phones?

Winners: Yahoo Apple Google Cingular OS X

Losers: Zune Windows CE The Macintosh Me

Technorati Tags: Apple, iPhone, OS X, Po' ol' Rube

Just a little something to keep Zonker from getting bored.

Technorati Tags: abject humiliation

I hope everyone had a happy and raucous holiday season. My December was surreal enough. I'm moving to England, it seems.

"You'd have to set up little 'blog policemen' on these entries to shoo away onlookers - 'Move along, nothing to see here!' But no, people stand there looking at the dead animal at the side of the road, at two people full of pride making complete fools of themselves in public, and then go and write whole blog entries about it." Stefan Niggemeier, media journalist and photoblog author, on a dispute in the blogosphere. The two "complete fools" Niggemeier means here are 'DonAlphonso', author of the A-list blog "Rebellmarkt", and Peter Turi, also a journalist, and author of the "Turi2" blog. The start of the argument goes a long way back, but the current escalation began when 'DonAlphonso' repeatedly referred to Peter Turi in his blog as a "blogging failure" - Turi struck back by calling Meyer a "moaning minnie". What started as a minor skirmish developed into a heated conflict, with both sides receiving support. Over the course of the dispute, old scores were settled, fervent slanging matches went on in several blogs, and threats of lawyers were made. Finally, Peter Turi shut down his blog - though it's unclear whether this was directly or only indirectly related to the argument.

This article is a translation of a german text that was first released on my weblog "buchstaben in bewegung". It attracted some attention in the german blogosphere, so an aquaintance of mine, Niall McCourt, translated it. I´ve asked Rube if he could publish it here, so he gave me permission ;-). I´d like to bring this article to a greater audience, so if you feel you´d like to pick it up and republish it somewhere, go for it.

Niall is a freelance translator. If you think he could do a job for you, email him.

Howdy, friends and neighbors! Man, I've hard a tough couple of weeks. Ever since thanksgiving I've been busier than a butt-legged man in a nun-kicking contest. Deadlines to meet, servers to build and ship, the entire back catalog of X-Files to watch. We're all the way up to the one where that guy from Monk kills people with his dark-matter shadow.

Not that it's all been work-related, mind you. I've recently re-discovered video games. With the little woman away this past weekend, I eschewed eating, bathing, and sleeping to sail a cartoon boat around an imaginary world in Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. Despite the obvious gayness inherent in all Zelda games, I'm secure enough in my masculinity to declare this THE BEST GAME EVER. I haven't been sucked into such a bottomless miasma of escapism and bad personal hygiene since the first Zelda, back in '88. That's right: miasma!

Anyhoo, that's about it. Almost. I also got a call from a rather large open-source company that you've probably heard of to come work for them in England. Maybe I'll move there with my sweetie, who knows. It'll be a big investment at first, since I'll have to buy a bowler hat and have my teeth darkened, but it'll probably be worth it, just for the weather.

I hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving. It's my favorite holiday, I think. It's truly a thing that everyone can do together, without worrying about offending anyone, unless it's because it's a typically American holiday. And let's face it: If that offends, then I'm happy to offend.

I cooked a turkey this year, for the first time ever. Being until recently a vegetarian, I was baffled by the various organs that I pulled out of the carcass, all neatly delivered in a little plastic bag. I realized that it was all probably edible, but I balked at eating the bagged innards, in the fear that one of them was the gizzard, which supposedly leaves a bad taste.

Treating Europeans to Thanksgiving is an enormous responsibility, but I think I pulled it off without disgracing my ancestors. By all accounts, my Southern Cornbread Dressing was not only edible, but delicious. I never realized that the defining taste of Thanksgiving Dressing is sage, of all things, and I was struggling Thursday afternoon with a tasteless mash of cornbread and gravy. But a few panicked phone calls to Mom can solve almost any crisis, and she finally, after all these years, spilled the recipe.

The in-laws were over, and I was able to feed and water them. There was French wine, German beer, and Southern American food. In short, there was much to be thankful for. And that's what I like about Thanksgiving: That reminder to sort out the things that make you happy, and be thankful for them. It's a good tradition; there's plenty of time to sweat the small stuff.

Hugs, Rube.

Technorati Tags: thanksgiving

Being a pompous douchebag, as the distinguished gentleman from North Carolina unmistakably is, does have its drawbacks. Can you imagine what kind of dishonest life you would have to lead if, like Edwards, you had to apologize nationally, in humiliating fashion, for trying to find your kids a Playstation 3 at Wal-Mart?

John Edwards _ a vocal critic of the retailer _ asked his local Wal- Mart store for help in getting the potential 2008 presidential candidate a Sony PlayStation 3. Edwards said a volunteer did so by mistake.

Edwards told The Associated Press that the volunteer "feels terrible" about seeking the game unit at Wal-Mart a day after his boss criticized the company, saying it doesn't treat its employees fairly.

Being an antisocial libertarian helps me immeasurably when it comes to lemming-like materialism. Were I not such a late adopter of technology, I would go into Wal-Mart myself and root around for Playstations 3; I would do this without a bad conscience, and would not have to apologize to anybody. Trust me, if Hitler's Electronics had them in ample supply, and at an acceptable price, I would walk in smiling with Visa in hand.

And now, as John Edwards contorts himself into various contrite postures, blaming his actions on subordinates, Playstations are most likely already in the homes of Wal-Mart executives across the country. Every Wal-Mart employee in North Carolina now has the opportunity to buy one before the good Senator. It's too bad they only make about $2 an hour, else they could bedeck the trailer with Christmas cheer, whilst a gloom hangs about the Edwards Manse.

Technorati Tags: consoles, politics, ps3

'Kubuntu' is the Swahili word for, 'Suck it, luser!'

For a lark, I downloaded the 4.5GB DVD for Kubuntu Linux. Ubuntu, upon which it's based, is the current darling of the Linux scene, so I figured I'd see how long it's come along since I last installed it.

Let's see...

• No MP3 support, even for network streams like you'll find at Shoutcast
• Major headache getting my ATI Radeon X1600 to work with 3D screen savers
• Refresh rate capped at 75Hz
• Printer sharing doesn't work
• Zero progress on sound card configuration
• Default resolution of 1600x1200 is a bit...ambitious. I can't find any way to change it permanently
• Applications like Firefox, Thunderbird, KOffice, Scribus, et. al. not included
• Did this thing really just ask me to insert my install DVD?! What is this, 1998?
• System always locks up after KDE session logout

Ah well, at least in Windows I can change my default sound card without being a Dungeon Master.

Technorati Tags: ubuntu, linux

For no particular reason, here's a list of national sales tax rates of European countries.

via Europe for Visitors.

Technorati Tags: germans, travel

Do you ever get the feeling that, just beneath the surface of the visible world, the world which you and I would consider reality, strange forces lurk, forming a sort of world-within-a-world? I didn't either, honestly. I mean, I've seen The Matrix, and I have to admit that their explanation, that a war between man and machine created a 300-year long meta-reality in which mankind is held thrall to a sentient, evil race of machines, would go a long way toward explaining things, like Everybody Loves Raymond.

But I'm not here to take cheapshots at non-threatening TV shows. I'm here to tell you that everything you've sensed, everything you've feared about meta-reality complex is true. I know this, because I've discovered a blind spot, a bubble in the Matrix. I've discovered a gathering place in the Internet where the world's top engineers, obviously unbeknownst to our bionical slavemasters, continue a discussion which already spans 9000 words, almost 40 pages of calculations and hypotheses.

It's a discussion about bacon.

Conclusions Microwaved - The bacon came out extremely crisp throughout both the fat and meat of the bacon. It felt a bit thicker than I expected from a thin cut piece of bacon. Examining the fat collected in the paper towels leads me to believe that very little fat was rendered out in comparison to the pan fry method. The technique is simple and hands free, but a problem that I have is that the paper towel stuck to several of the pieces of bacon. This may have been because I allowed the bacon to rest and drain on the same paper towel it was cooked on. Another issue is the limited number of bacon strips you can cook in a microwave oven at one time (but the time savings probably more than makes up for this).

Pan fried - The bacon felt the thinnest and lightest of the three. The bacon fat was crispy while the meat was slightly chewy. I actually prefer my bacon this way (not totally crunchy and crispy, but with some texture to it), but others may not. All in all, a good method to cook bacon but time consuming.

Broiled - The bacon was burnt in some spots and the meat felt undercooked. The areas need the burns were bitter in taste and the texture was soft and soggy throughout (except for the blackened parts). Not much fat was rendered off either. I would not recommend this technique.

So, microwaving is king if you're looking for bacon that feels thicker than what you purchased and crunchy throughout. Pan frying is great for a thin, light bacon with a little chew in the meat.

Technorati Tags: bacon, engineering

In a startling development, the smug leftist hipsters at überblog Boing Boing have gone two (2) straight days without mentioning Diebold. The last mention of the maligned "voting" machine manufacturer was right before the "election" results came in. Which, coincidentally, showed huge Democrat "wins".

Could it be that Diebold's agents have gotten to Xeni and Cory?! It couldn't possibly be that the whole body of anti-e-voting writings was just screeching partisan hysterics, could it?

Technorati Tags: electioneering, boingboing

Being a late adopter has its advantages. For example, I just picked up a Scott i960CS, which is a commodity DVD/standalone DivX player. It cost about fifty bucks, and is so generic that it's nigh ungoogleable. I bought it to replace my fifty-dollar DVD player, which was getting a bit long in the tooth. About three years ago, I really, really wanted one of these, but they were going for a cool $400 at the local shops, so I decided to buy shoes and electricity instead. Now, I can pick one up at about 12% the cost that I would have gladly forked out back then, had I had the cash.

What a cool thing these doodads are. It will play just about anything you throw at it, format-wise. You can easily shut off the irritating region restrictions that would otherwise keep you from playing DVDs from other countries, which in my case would be the US-bought movies that comprise about half my collection. It's got a USB port, into which you can plug a thumb drive, iPod, or external hard drive, and browse them to play media.

My big idea was to copy all my music and movies to an external 160GB hard drive, hook it up to the USB port, and never have to switch discs again. Unfortunately, two things keep me from doing that. First, the Scott doesn't read long filenames from external devices (data DVDs seem to work fine), so you'll have to wade through FAT32-style mangled names, trying to figure out what “BLOWJO~1.AVI? could possibly be. And second, whenever you access the external drive, it thrashes around alarmingly, as the player apparently scans the entire thing at a go. It's scary enough that I'll stick to copying things over to the USB flash stick for the time being.

I realize this was all new and hot about three years ago, but that's what's great about being a late adopter: 50 bucks and you get that consumerist rush. Now, I can't wait until Christmas 2009 when I can pick up that sweet-ass Xbox 360 I'll be having my eye on.

Technorati Tags: consoles, entertainment

Twelve years ago, the Republicans took power under the leadership of Newt Gingrich. Newt was a man that even 17-year old liberal drama fags at my high school hated in the '80s, so I was predispositioned to like him, even before I was old enough to vote. Anything that annoys pretentious, faux-political teenage liberals is fine by my book.

When they first came into power, the nation was damn near on internal Red Alert. Conspiracy theories, ranging from Con-Trails to cattle mutilations(!) by black-helicopter-flying secret government cryptofascist organizations, Unabombers, X-Files, Branch Davidians, Randy Weaver, Timothy McVeigh; you guys remember all that stuff, right? Well, it looks like it's that time again, kids! (Only this time, the Democrats have got the Patriot Act in their bag of tricks. And that seemed like such a good idea when the GOP was running the show...)

Gingrich, along with rich genius bastard Dick Armey, devised a scheme to defuse the situation. They called it the Contract with America, and it amounted to a Republican business plan for the newly-acquired Congress, Inc. I'm including it here on the vain hope that I'll actually read it all the way through at some point, and be able to assess what sort of progress the Republicans made over the last 12 years, in comparison to what they were actually all fired-up to do.

As Republican Members of the House of Representatives and as citizens seeking to join that body we propose not just to change its policies, but even more important, to restore the bonds of trust between the people and their elected representatives.

That is why, in this era of official evasion and posturing, we offer instead a detailed agenda for national renewal, a written commitment with no fine print. This year's election offers the chance, after four decades of one-party control, to bring to the House a new majority that will transform the way Congress works. That historic change would be the end of government that is too big, too intrusive, and too easy with the public's money. It can be the beginning of a Congress that respects the values and shares the faith of the American family. Like Lincoln, our first Republican president, we intend to act "with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right." To restore accountability to Congress. To end its cycle of scandal and disgrace. To make us all proud again of the way free people govern themselves. On the first day of the 104th Congress, the new Republican majority will immediately pass the following major reforms, aimed at restoring the faith and trust of the American people in their government: • FIRST, require all laws that apply to the rest of the country also apply equally to the Congress; • SECOND, select a major, independent auditing firm to conduct a comprehensive audit of Congress for waste, fraud or abuse; • THIRD, cut the number of House committees, and cut committee staff by one-third; • FOURTH, limit the terms of all committee chairs; • FIFTH, ban the casting of proxy votes in committee; • SIXTH, require committee meetings to be open to the public; • SEVENTH, require a three-fifths majority vote to pass a tax increase; • EIGHTH, guarantee an honest accounting of our Federal Budget by implementing zero base-line budgeting. Thereafter, within the first 100 days of the 104th Congress, we shall bring to the House Floor the following bills, each to be given full and open debate, each to be given a clear and fair vote and each to be immediately available this day for public inspection and scrutiny. 1. THE FISCAL RESPONSIBILITY ACT: A balanced budget/tax limitation amendment and a legislative line-item veto to restore fiscal responsibility to an out- of-control Congress, requiring them to live under the same budget constraints as families and businesses. (Bill Text) (Description)

2. THE TAKING BACK OUR STREETS ACT: An anti-crime package including stronger truth-in- sentencing, "good faith" exclusionary rule exemptions, effective death penalty provisions, and cuts in social spending from this summer's "crime" bill to fund prison construction and additional law enforcement to keep people secure in their neighborhoods and kids safe in their schools. (Bill Text) (Description)
3. THE PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY ACT: Discourage illegitimacy and teen pregnancy by prohibiting welfare to minor mothers and denying increased AFDC for additional children while on welfare, cut spending for welfare programs, and enact a tough two-years-and-out provision with work requirements to promote individual responsibility. (Bill Text) (Description)
4. THE FAMILY REINFORCEMENT ACT: Child support enforcement, tax incentives for adoption, strengthening rights of parents in their children's education, stronger child pornography laws, and an elderly dependent care tax credit to reinforce the central role of families in American society. (Bill Text) (Description)
5. THE AMERICAN DREAM RESTORATION ACT: A S500 per child tax credit, begin repeal of the marriage tax penalty, and creation of American Dream Savings Accounts to provide middle class tax relief. (Bill Text) (Description)
6. THE NATIONAL SECURITY RESTORATION ACT: No U.S. troops under U.N. command and restoration of the essential parts of our national security funding to strengthen our national defense and maintain our credibility around the world. (Bill Text) (Description)
7. THE SENIOR CITIZENS FAIRNESS ACT: Raise the Social Security earnings limit which currently forces seniors out of the work force, repeal the 1993 tax hikes on Social Security benefits and provide tax incentives for private long-term care insurance to let Older Americans keep more of what they have earned over the years. (Bill Text) (Description)
8. THE JOB CREATION AND WAGE ENHANCEMENT ACT: Small business incentives, capital gains cut and indexation, neutral cost recovery, risk assessment/cost-benefit analysis, strengthening the Regulatory Flexibility Act and unfunded mandate reform to create jobs and raise worker wages. (Bill Text) (Description)
9. THE COMMON SENSE LEGAL REFORM ACT: "Loser pays" laws, reasonable limits on punitive damages and reform of product liability laws to stem the endless tide of litigation. (Bill Text) (Description)
10. THE CITIZEN LEGISLATURE ACT: A first-ever vote on term limits to replace career politicians with citizen legislators. (Description) Further, we will instruct the House Budget Committee to report to the floor and we will work to enact additional budget savings, beyond the budget cuts specifically included in the legislation described above, to ensure that the Federal budget deficit will be less than it would have been without the enactment of these bills. Respecting the judgment of our fellow citizens as we seek their mandate for reform, we hereby pledge our names to this Contract with America.

Technorati Tags: 2006 election, abject humiliation, newt, politics

Rube drinks only 'prosumer'-level beer.

When watching baseball, live in the stadium, things are not always what they appear. Oftentimes, a pop-fly to deep short will look just like a home run to someone sitting in the upper deck, causing half the crowd (in Atlanta, anyway) to jump out of their seats and spill their beer, only to sit down again in humiliation when the shortstop catches it.

People who know how to watch baseball never judge a ball by the crack of the bat, or the appearance of its arc: They watch the outfielders. If the outfields turn around and start high-tailing for the fences, you just might have a homerun on your hands, stand up and scream. Otherwise, if they just start scratching themselves and looking into the crowd while the ball's still sailing, just play it cool, because it's a pop-up.

That's why I refer to the various cranks, commies, and dictators of the world collectively as The Outfielders. If I'm unsure how I should feel about a certain event, I judge their reaction to it, and relativize. If they lose their shit and start foaming at the mouth about something Bush or the USA in general does, it's a pretty fair bet that it's just what the doctor ordered. On the other hand, there's this:

Chavez applauds Rumsfeld's resignation

CARACAS (VENEZUELA): Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez applauded the resignation of US Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and suggested President George W. Bush should quit as well. Chavez pointed to the strong gains by Democrats in US congressional elections and called it a "reprisal vote" against Bush's policies and the Iraq war. The leftist leader beamed as he read aloud a news report of Rumsfeld's resignation.

Not only liberal Americans but peace-loving people all over the world must feel relieved by Democrats’ landslide victory Tuesday. But few would feel more pleased with the election results than North Korea’s Kim Jong-il

Plebiscite on an Outlaw Empire The wave - and make no mistake, it's a global one - has just crashed on America's shores, soaking our imperial masters. It's a sight for sore eyes.

"The US government of Republicans and neo-conservatives, which is a reckless government of idiots, will be reined in with the Democrats taking over the House," Oraib Rintawi, President of the Al Quds Centre for Political Studies in Amman...

LANDSLIDE! ...a big thanks from Michael Moore

You did it! We did it! The impossible has happened: A majority of Americans have soundly and forcefully removed Bush's party from control of the House of Representatives and the Republicans have also, miraculously, been tossed out of running our United States Senate.

TUESDAY WAS GOOD NEWS FOR .... WHO?[sic]

Those who want a weaker America

(Accepting the award will be Dominique Marie François René Galouzeau de Villepin, sometimes known as Dominique de Villepin, the Prime Minister of France. Dominique was the leader of the Axis of Weasels before he became Prime Minister.)

A poll earlier this year said that something like 58% of Europeans wanted a weaker America. They got their wish on Tuesday. Who is going to be there to pull their candied asses out of the oven when they finally wake up and realize the great strides that have been made in the Islamification of Europe? Hello Eurabia.

The first blow to be struck in the weakening of America will be for the Democrats to get rid of John Bolton as the Ambassador to the United Nations. They'll replace him with someone who will not stand up to UN corruption and the forces who want to weaken us.

The leftist media.

(Accepting the award for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, The Boston Globe, Time Magazine, Newsweek Magazine and too many more to mention will be Dan Rather)

Ninety percent or more of these people vote Democrat. They engaged in a six-year campaign of demonization of George Bush. It worked.

"Thank you, Ms. Speaker, may I have another!"

Technorati Tags: 2006 election, pelosi, politics, cleveland steamer

How to draw a car in MS Paint.

Technorati Tags: Art, Tip of the Day

Seeing as how, in a matter of weeks, I'll be working in an exclusively Linux-based environment, I figured I'd fire up my Fedora installation again and see how's tricks. Linux has been playing the Ike to my Tina for over a decade, always disappointing and abusing me every chance it gets, and I just keep coming back for more. This time, though, it's for real; I can feel it. Anyway, I don't have a choice, so let's just tell the neighbors I fell off the swing, and concentrate on the good times.

One of the biggest gripes I've had about Linux was its sound card support*. Every Linux distribution you can think of still defaults to 1993's concept of sound hardware. Namely, only one application can play a sound at any given time, and it locks the sound hardware from being used by other applications, for what reason not even God knows. This is behavior that belongs in a single-user, single-tasking operating system like DOS, not in a modern multiuser environment like Linux.

This problem was addressed back in the day by using "sound servers", like ESD or artsd, to provide a layer between the applications and the OSS-supported hardware. This introduced a huge amount of latency, however, and was generally considered a stopgap measure even at its inception back in 1998 (or maybe even earlier, I can't find that info). Even worse, software had to be written to explicitly support it or it was useless.

The limitations of the OSS+Sound Server architecture were overcome by a project known as ALSA, which introduced software mixing at the kernel level. This created an OSS-compatible, multi-streamed abstraction for sound hardware, and obviated the need for sound daemons altogether. That was back in, oh, 2000 or so, and to this day, every single Linux distribution still ships with sound servers and software mixing disabled.

Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, et. al still configure sound hardware to be accessible by one application at a time, despite ALSA's hard work. This means, for instance, that your Flash Player will freeze your browser if you happen to be listening to music in the background. Or if you get a system beep, it will lock you out of using your sound card for as long as the artsd/ESD timeout is set up. Games will not work. This sucks, of course, and is no way to compute in 2007.

The way to fix this is fairly simple. Simply put the following into your /etc/asound.conf, or in your ~/.asoundrc:

pcm.swmixer { type dmix ipckey 1234 slave { pcm "hw:0,0" periodtime 0 periodsize 1024 buffersize 4096 rate 44100 } }

Now, I profess neither to having written that snippet, nor to having any understanding whatsoever as to what it does. But since I put that magical incantation into use, I've had no problems whatsoever with sound-card locking, or Flash plugins, or anything else. It just works.

Now why haven't the distributions adopted this behavior as the default, instead of their asinine insistence on single-channel sound support? The reason is simple: Linux distributions hate their users, and want to destroy them by any means possible.

This would also explain their sticking with X Window System.

• See also: Kubuntu: Sucks Linux Sound: Still suckin’ after all these years

  Technorati Tags: ALSA, Linux, Fedora

In order to keep a vase full of flowers fresh, drop a penny (or other copper coin) into the water. Since 1982, pennies are copper-plated. Pre-1982 pennies were 95% copper or more, so would theoretically work better.

Technorati Tags: Flowers, Tip of the Day

The Wednesday Tip:

How to open a 4th Generation iPod:

This week's (and the inaugural) Tuesday Tip:

How to play a G Chord.

Computers have been around for a while, now. The first digital computers that did useful work were used by the British during World War II to crack the Germans' Enigma cryptographic scheme, with the help of literary greats Alan Turing and Kate Winslett. Computer networks came about not long after. In fact, the network technology that most people use today, Ethernet, was developed back during the Nixon administration by Xerox. But that's really more of a hardware spec, invisible to most of us that use it, and used only in the most vaguely analogous sense by the Internet and wireless connections that we find ourselves using more and more.

What runs over those networks, well, that's the stuff that really concerns us. We wouldn't care if our SMB, HTTP, or NFS protocols were running over a length of twine connecting a couple of dead beavers, just as long as they kept the links up and the bits moving. But for some reason, these protocols, like unto the network itself conceived in the dark, smoke-filled chambers of engineering history, are still less than adequate in real world situations. I'll give you an example: There's not a computer or operating system built today that gracefully handles an unexpectedly disconnected network volume.

I'll grant, for the sake of argument, that I'm on the only moron in the world who would forget to dismount a network drive before clapping his laptop shut and carrying it out of the office. But you would think, in the 30 or more years we've been using networks to share our data, that exactly this scenario might have come up at some point in a worst-case-scenario brainstorming session by one of the major vendors. But I guess the very idea such a thing could happen was judged preposterous, and relegated to the realm of science fiction, freeing the engineering team to work on more critical issues like the Desktop Cleanup Wizard.

So maybe the story I'm about to tell could land me in the rubber room, but I'll chance it, as the Truth Wants to Be Free. As you may have already inferred, in my hurry today, I forgot to dismount a shared network volume before packing my laptop and heading out of the office . Upon opening my laptop once more, I was greeted by the Symbol of Waiting, which refused to go away. All the while, in the corner of my friendly graphical user interface, said network volume's icon was displayed, indicating a continuing, vigorous mounting. Obviously, the Symbol of Waiting was my computer's way of telling me that, while it seemed unlikely that this drive could be mounted without access to its network or, indeed, any network whatsoever, it was still experiencing a moment of indecision. It was telling me that it was considering the two conflicting possibilities of a) the network connection being gone, and therefore all processes using it should be informed of this fact, or b) the server having followed me to the café I'm sitting in, installed a network cabling plant, snuggled itself under my table, and then connected itself to my laptop, and was just in the processing of booting itself back up in order to serve that dreadfully missing network share; a possibility which, I might add, the computer was willing to indulge ad infinitum. Apparently, Occam's Razor is a difficult principle to express in Objective-C.

All of this culminated in a computer caught in a permanent moment of indecision. I like to believe that every time you boot your computer, the cycle of its life is started anew, with the hopes and dreams of a better life this time around; the corollary of course being that you've had to viciously snuff out the life of its previous incarnation. Thus as I was administering the Mac equivalent of a three-finger salute (Ctrl-Cmd-Power) to this shivering, broken husk of a computer a moment ago, I felt no regret. It was better to end it there, to ease its suffering. I felt pity however, in that it probably didn't understand what it was going through, what the source of its confusion and suffering was.

But I also couldn't help think it could have been prevented. Perhaps the status check of a network mount could be moved into a thread, instead of being embedded in the main event loop of the user interface, blocking all input? Perhaps an operating system could check to see if there are any open files on a mounted network drive before betting its entire existence upon the fact that it may, one day, return? Is the termination of a single process blocking on a stat call really worth the life of the entire ecosystem? These are questions for the politicians, apparently, and not for the medics in the field.

In a technical interview recently, a man asked me if I knew the point of "hard-mounting" network shares, particularly those of the NFS variety. I gave the textbook answer he expected, that it was preferable for applications to block and fail in the case of a missing disk than to go on believing that it still existed, without the knowledge that their write operations had failed, and their data were most likely corrupted. It's easy to be so cold and calculating when you haven't seen the suffering involved in such a catastrophic break. It's easy to extoll the virtues of data integrity über alles. But from the perspective of the victim, ignorance is, unfortunately, bliss.

UPDATE: This was, oddly, the Whine of the Week on Macbreak Weekly.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Bill Gates, User Interface

Over 2 years ago, I made a modest little proposal about cameras embedded in cell phones:

So, I was wondering if there’s a way to send that directly to the police. For example, if you’re pretty sure you’re about to get mugged, you could just take a picture of the guy and send it quick-like to the cops. Then, you could say, “whoa, G, you might as well keep on moving: five-o’s got your mug.? Of course, this may come across as somewhat antagonistic, which muggers generally don’t like. Anyway, if you send an MMS to 911, does it work? It should. Then, we could all be bitch-ass little snitches at the touch of a button.

And today, what do I see?

Catching criminals in the act these days is s ometimes as easy as pressing a button on your camera phone. Now the city is moving to simplify your ability to share telltale evidence of subway flashers, house burglars or even a suspect pothole, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said yesterday. "If you see a crime in progress or a dangerous building condition, you'll be able to transmit images to 911 or online to nyc.gov," Bloomberg said in his State of the City address.

You ever have one of those days when you say to yourself, "If the world would just shut up and do as I say, it would be a better place for everybody"? Well, I don't. I speak, and the world listens. Sometimes it just takes a little longer than it should. Stupid world.

Hurricane Kyrill is blasting across Germany at the moment, leveling trees and flinging stucco about. Man, you'd think Gabriel was tooting his horn outside, the way the locals are reacting. Mind you, Kyrill's not really a hurricane, but rather a winter gale. That would be the way LEO translates the german word Orkan; well, that and hurricane. But a hurricane is necessarily in the Caribbean, moving west. Technically, anyway.

But I'm not here to split hairs, I'm here to talk about battering winds, upwards of 200 kilometers per hour. Not sure how fast that is in real measurement, but I can confirm it's a-howling through the alleyways outside. You can actually hear it whistling through the cathedral belltower, a good half-mile away. It's sort of a low hoot. The roof tiles they have over here are bound to start flying around at some point, injuring passers-by unlucky enough to be out in it, à la Ben Hur. I've still got to get home from this bar I'm sitting in right now, but I'm close enough that it would be a lucky shot, indeed.

They've stopped all trains in the entire country, even the streetcars, and the kids are staying home from school tomorrow. As are many businessmen, their firms more concerned about their safety than the four-hour workday most people put in on Friday over here. All in all, it's a pleasant diversion for everyone, an act of God that brings a bit of excitement to the daily routine. I'm just glad the bars are open, otherwise this entry would have been about four lines long.

It's sort of like it used to be in Atlanta before the Yankees came, when we got a few flakes of snow on the ground. Once the slightest flake fought its way through the climatical defenses enough to land and shout, triumphantly, Allahu Akhbar! Quake with fear before me! before becoming a small puff of vapor, well, that's when the fabric of Atlanta society would start coming apart at the seams. The groceries stores were run upon, with milk and bread being carried by the truckload to the homes of weather-maddened Southerners. The schools were locked down tight; lest the inexperienced, though well-meaning bus drivers tumble off a cliff, out of control on ice-slick roads with a full load of schoolchildren. We didn't like snow, not even the rumor of it.

Growing up in Cherokee County, we had a rather enviable relationship with snow. It's a large county, with a hilly bit up north, in the Canton area. But the rest of the county sits around Lake Allatoona, and is predominately mild in its winters. School closings, however, are granular only to the county level, which meant that whenever some meth-addled bus driver in Ball Ground happened to notice a patch of frost on the grass on her way out of the trailer park, the school board would immediately be notified, and all educational activities throughout the county brought to a halt. Sometimes, some farmer's pond was frozen over in a forgotten corner somewhere; the very presence of ice somewhere induced enough unease among the elected county officials that they just played it safe and let the kids have the rest of the week off.

During the Winter of '87, we actually had 16 days off in a row for snow. Down in our end of the county, we did indeed see snow the first day. I remember it well: We were sitting in home room, the first class of the day, when the first flakes began to fall, the shimmering little harbingers of freedom. In panicked tones, the principal came on the PA and announced that we should all get on the buses, or hop in our cars, and get the Hell home, not forgetting of course to stop on the way for whatever bread or milk might still be available in the local grocery store, every man for himself! I could just see him in his office: laying down the intercom microphone and strapping himself to his chair, cradling his service .45, a captain going down with the ship.

Predictably, once we were all home the snow stopped. In fact, it was 65 degrees by midday, and we were playing football in the yard with 8 men per team. It was a pleasant diversion for a Tuesday afternoon, but we were resigned to getting back to the grind bright and early the next morning. But there was no school the next day. Nor the day after that. In fact, for the next two weeks, despite spring-like temperatures and sunny skies, we were out of school on account of snow. Every day the disruption continued, the fun factor was reduced by half, until finally we were all wondering whether they had forgotten to tell everybody to go back. But no, there was Guy Sharpe every morning, announcing the one and only school closing in the state of Georgia: Cherokee County. For two solid weeks. I always wondered what people in other counties thought of that. At one point, the guy shows them a map of Georgia with little suns all over it and 60+ degree temperatures, then announces that our hillbilly asses still won't come out from under our rocks.

They cancelled our Spring Break that year because of that. Bastards. I didn't think much about it then, being a latchkey kid, but I can imagine that a lot of parents had actually planned their precious two-week vacations to coincide with Spring Break. But then, Cherokee County was a different crowd back then. I mean, to have vacations implies that you, you know, have a job.

But it became clearer to me in my last two years of High School how something like that could happen. It was easy to start rumors about snow sightings in Canton. Even mentioning an ice storm in Birmingham would have the teachers looking nervous. Do that in home room, and by lunch it would be all over school. Somebody would come up to you and tell you that the county seat was under a six-foot sheet of glacial ice, and that school would be cancelled forever, what with the coming ice age and all. It's a miracle that the public school system functions at all.

Weather is always what the Germans call a gaudi, a good time.

Technorati Tags: orkan, puppy, snow day

Apropos this post over at Wordpress, I'll be upgrading to the latest version. Please pardon if things look screwy for a bit.

Update:  Well, that wasn't so hard.  As you were.

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

Despite my near-absolute conviction that it would never happen, Chairman Jobs dropped the i-Bomb today on a suspecting crowd. By all accounts, the patented jobsian Reality Distortion Field went all the way to eleven at MacWorld Expo this morning as the Steve introduced the new Apple iPhone. The iPhone is, without a doubt, the sexiest-sounding piece of hardware ever, period. As its proponents were hoping, it brings to a mobile phone typical Apple touches, like motion-sensing gestures and easy media management, and does so in a way that will have Apple fans and detractors alike buzzin about it for weeks to come. It looks like a big, big win for Apple, and a disruptive entry into the smart-phone market.

"But hey, little Rube, why the long face?" you might ask, should you see the frown I'm wearing at this moment. And it may seem strange, me being a Mac Fanboi and it being Apple's day in the sun, that I would be in any kind of mood other than near-ecstasy. So, I'll explain. Although I'm a big fan of the Mac, there's nothing here that bodes well for that platform. The iPhone will almost certainly be a cross-platform device, which means a lot more Windows users are going to be using it than Mac users. And since I'm not really in the market for a portable phone, it's nothing more to me than yet another cool iPod that I can't afford. The iPhone comes at the expense of the Mac platform, not for its greater glory. In fact, it stole from the Macintosh platform its annual holy day, the MacWorld keynote.

Probably the biggest news for Mac users, which will remain almost completely overlooked, is that a commercially-available version of Mac OS X now exists for portable devices. Windows CE has been, up to now, the only really normal OS for handheld computers (not including the current iPod OS, which is most certainly the best-selling). But today, Apple showed they have a portable, flash-based version of OS X running on a hardware platform that includes wireless networking, bluetooth, and a brilliant touch-screen display to show it on. This makes the iPhone the best handheld PC on the market.

This bodes well for the iPod, of course. I don't see Apple abandoning. the sub-$500 market completely, and now that they have the hardware and software platform for it, could 802.11-enabled, bluetooth-capable iPods finally become a reality?

What I would like to see happen now is a hard-disk based iPod successor, somewhere in the 30-60GB range, with the form-factor and OS X version of the iPhone, but without the mobile phone part of it. It would be the second coming of the Newton, at a time when nobody gives a second thought to plopping down 350 bucks for an Apple product that fits in their pocket.

Jobs' demo today showed why Apple have made a lot of the decisions we've seen over the past year or so. First, they dropped the PortalPlayer iPod platform at the height of its popularity. Then, they made headlines all over the Web by securing enormous amounts of flash-memory around Asia, and everyone postulated flash-based MacBooks by year's end. Then, it leaked out that Apple had patented resolution-independent user interface technology, presumably for large screens running OS X 10.5 Leopard. Who would've thought that they were actually thinking about high-density mobile displays running a tiny, tiny version of OS X?

While everyone was salivating over a phone today (a phone for gossake!), I was thinking just one thing: Cool! There's a version of OS X that runs on StrongARM (or whatever's in there), includes Safari and Cover Flow, and runs entirely from flash memory! I wonder what the boot-times are on one of those phones?

Winners: Yahoo Apple Google Cingular OS X

Losers: Zune Windows CE The Macintosh Me

Technorati Tags: Apple, iPhone, OS X, Po' ol' Rube

Just a little something to keep Zonker from getting bored.

Technorati Tags: abject humiliation

I hope everyone had a happy and raucous holiday season. My December was surreal enough. I'm moving to England, it seems.

"You'd have to set up little 'blog policemen' on these entries to shoo away onlookers - 'Move along, nothing to see here!' But no, people stand there looking at the dead animal at the side of the road, at two people full of pride making complete fools of themselves in public, and then go and write whole blog entries about it." Stefan Niggemeier, media journalist and photoblog author, on a dispute in the blogosphere. The two "complete fools" Niggemeier means here are 'DonAlphonso', author of the A-list blog "Rebellmarkt", and Peter Turi, also a journalist, and author of the "Turi2" blog. The start of the argument goes a long way back, but the current escalation began when 'DonAlphonso' repeatedly referred to Peter Turi in his blog as a "blogging failure" - Turi struck back by calling Meyer a "moaning minnie". What started as a minor skirmish developed into a heated conflict, with both sides receiving support. Over the course of the dispute, old scores were settled, fervent slanging matches went on in several blogs, and threats of lawyers were made. Finally, Peter Turi shut down his blog - though it's unclear whether this was directly or only indirectly related to the argument.

This article is a translation of a german text that was first released on my weblog "buchstaben in bewegung". It attracted some attention in the german blogosphere, so an aquaintance of mine, Niall McCourt, translated it. I´ve asked Rube if he could publish it here, so he gave me permission ;-). I´d like to bring this article to a greater audience, so if you feel you´d like to pick it up and republish it somewhere, go for it.

Niall is a freelance translator. If you think he could do a job for you, email him.

Howdy, friends and neighbors! Man, I've hard a tough couple of weeks. Ever since thanksgiving I've been busier than a butt-legged man in a nun-kicking contest. Deadlines to meet, servers to build and ship, the entire back catalog of X-Files to watch. We're all the way up to the one where that guy from Monk kills people with his dark-matter shadow.

Not that it's all been work-related, mind you. I've recently re-discovered video games. With the little woman away this past weekend, I eschewed eating, bathing, and sleeping to sail a cartoon boat around an imaginary world in Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. Despite the obvious gayness inherent in all Zelda games, I'm secure enough in my masculinity to declare this THE BEST GAME EVER. I haven't been sucked into such a bottomless miasma of escapism and bad personal hygiene since the first Zelda, back in '88. That's right: miasma!

Anyhoo, that's about it. Almost. I also got a call from a rather large open-source company that you've probably heard of to come work for them in England. Maybe I'll move there with my sweetie, who knows. It'll be a big investment at first, since I'll have to buy a bowler hat and have my teeth darkened, but it'll probably be worth it, just for the weather.

I hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving. It's my favorite holiday, I think. It's truly a thing that everyone can do together, without worrying about offending anyone, unless it's because it's a typically American holiday. And let's face it: If that offends, then I'm happy to offend.

I cooked a turkey this year, for the first time ever. Being until recently a vegetarian, I was baffled by the various organs that I pulled out of the carcass, all neatly delivered in a little plastic bag. I realized that it was all probably edible, but I balked at eating the bagged innards, in the fear that one of them was the gizzard, which supposedly leaves a bad taste.

Treating Europeans to Thanksgiving is an enormous responsibility, but I think I pulled it off without disgracing my ancestors. By all accounts, my Southern Cornbread Dressing was not only edible, but delicious. I never realized that the defining taste of Thanksgiving Dressing is sage, of all things, and I was struggling Thursday afternoon with a tasteless mash of cornbread and gravy. But a few panicked phone calls to Mom can solve almost any crisis, and she finally, after all these years, spilled the recipe.

The in-laws were over, and I was able to feed and water them. There was French wine, German beer, and Southern American food. In short, there was much to be thankful for. And that's what I like about Thanksgiving: That reminder to sort out the things that make you happy, and be thankful for them. It's a good tradition; there's plenty of time to sweat the small stuff.

Hugs, Rube.

Technorati Tags: thanksgiving

Being a pompous douchebag, as the distinguished gentleman from North Carolina unmistakably is, does have its drawbacks. Can you imagine what kind of dishonest life you would have to lead if, like Edwards, you had to apologize nationally, in humiliating fashion, for trying to find your kids a Playstation 3 at Wal-Mart?

John Edwards _ a vocal critic of the retailer _ asked his local Wal- Mart store for help in getting the potential 2008 presidential candidate a Sony PlayStation 3. Edwards said a volunteer did so by mistake.

Edwards told The Associated Press that the volunteer "feels terrible" about seeking the game unit at Wal-Mart a day after his boss criticized the company, saying it doesn't treat its employees fairly.

Being an antisocial libertarian helps me immeasurably when it comes to lemming-like materialism. Were I not such a late adopter of technology, I would go into Wal-Mart myself and root around for Playstations 3; I would do this without a bad conscience, and would not have to apologize to anybody. Trust me, if Hitler's Electronics had them in ample supply, and at an acceptable price, I would walk in smiling with Visa in hand.

And now, as John Edwards contorts himself into various contrite postures, blaming his actions on subordinates, Playstations are most likely already in the homes of Wal-Mart executives across the country. Every Wal-Mart employee in North Carolina now has the opportunity to buy one before the good Senator. It's too bad they only make about $2 an hour, else they could bedeck the trailer with Christmas cheer, whilst a gloom hangs about the Edwards Manse.

Technorati Tags: consoles, politics, ps3

'Kubuntu' is the Swahili word for, 'Suck it, luser!'

For a lark, I downloaded the 4.5GB DVD for Kubuntu Linux. Ubuntu, upon which it's based, is the current darling of the Linux scene, so I figured I'd see how long it's come along since I last installed it.

Let's see...

• No MP3 support, even for network streams like you'll find at Shoutcast
• Major headache getting my ATI Radeon X1600 to work with 3D screen savers
• Refresh rate capped at 75Hz
• Printer sharing doesn't work
• Zero progress on sound card configuration
• Default resolution of 1600x1200 is a bit...ambitious. I can't find any way to change it permanently
• Applications like Firefox, Thunderbird, KOffice, Scribus, et. al. not included
• Did this thing really just ask me to insert my install DVD?! What is this, 1998?
• System always locks up after KDE session logout

Ah well, at least in Windows I can change my default sound card without being a Dungeon Master.

Technorati Tags: ubuntu, linux

For no particular reason, here's a list of national sales tax rates of European countries.

via Europe for Visitors.

Technorati Tags: germans, travel

Do you ever get the feeling that, just beneath the surface of the visible world, the world which you and I would consider reality, strange forces lurk, forming a sort of world-within-a-world? I didn't either, honestly. I mean, I've seen The Matrix, and I have to admit that their explanation, that a war between man and machine created a 300-year long meta-reality in which mankind is held thrall to a sentient, evil race of machines, would go a long way toward explaining things, like Everybody Loves Raymond.

But I'm not here to take cheapshots at non-threatening TV shows. I'm here to tell you that everything you've sensed, everything you've feared about meta-reality complex is true. I know this, because I've discovered a blind spot, a bubble in the Matrix. I've discovered a gathering place in the Internet where the world's top engineers, obviously unbeknownst to our bionical slavemasters, continue a discussion which already spans 9000 words, almost 40 pages of calculations and hypotheses.

It's a discussion about bacon.

Conclusions Microwaved - The bacon came out extremely crisp throughout both the fat and meat of the bacon. It felt a bit thicker than I expected from a thin cut piece of bacon. Examining the fat collected in the paper towels leads me to believe that very little fat was rendered out in comparison to the pan fry method. The technique is simple and hands free, but a problem that I have is that the paper towel stuck to several of the pieces of bacon. This may have been because I allowed the bacon to rest and drain on the same paper towel it was cooked on. Another issue is the limited number of bacon strips you can cook in a microwave oven at one time (but the time savings probably more than makes up for this).

Pan fried - The bacon felt the thinnest and lightest of the three. The bacon fat was crispy while the meat was slightly chewy. I actually prefer my bacon this way (not totally crunchy and crispy, but with some texture to it), but others may not. All in all, a good method to cook bacon but time consuming.

Broiled - The bacon was burnt in some spots and the meat felt undercooked. The areas need the burns were bitter in taste and the texture was soft and soggy throughout (except for the blackened parts). Not much fat was rendered off either. I would not recommend this technique.

So, microwaving is king if you're looking for bacon that feels thicker than what you purchased and crunchy throughout. Pan frying is great for a thin, light bacon with a little chew in the meat.

Technorati Tags: bacon, engineering

In a startling development, the smug leftist hipsters at überblog Boing Boing have gone two (2) straight days without mentioning Diebold. The last mention of the maligned "voting" machine manufacturer was right before the "election" results came in. Which, coincidentally, showed huge Democrat "wins".

Could it be that Diebold's agents have gotten to Xeni and Cory?! It couldn't possibly be that the whole body of anti-e-voting writings was just screeching partisan hysterics, could it?

Technorati Tags: electioneering, boingboing

Being a late adopter has its advantages. For example, I just picked up a Scott i960CS, which is a commodity DVD/standalone DivX player. It cost about fifty bucks, and is so generic that it's nigh ungoogleable. I bought it to replace my fifty-dollar DVD player, which was getting a bit long in the tooth. About three years ago, I really, really wanted one of these, but they were going for a cool $400 at the local shops, so I decided to buy shoes and electricity instead. Now, I can pick one up at about 12% the cost that I would have gladly forked out back then, had I had the cash.

What a cool thing these doodads are. It will play just about anything you throw at it, format-wise. You can easily shut off the irritating region restrictions that would otherwise keep you from playing DVDs from other countries, which in my case would be the US-bought movies that comprise about half my collection. It's got a USB port, into which you can plug a thumb drive, iPod, or external hard drive, and browse them to play media.

My big idea was to copy all my music and movies to an external 160GB hard drive, hook it up to the USB port, and never have to switch discs again. Unfortunately, two things keep me from doing that. First, the Scott doesn't read long filenames from external devices (data DVDs seem to work fine), so you'll have to wade through FAT32-style mangled names, trying to figure out what “BLOWJO~1.AVI? could possibly be. And second, whenever you access the external drive, it thrashes around alarmingly, as the player apparently scans the entire thing at a go. It's scary enough that I'll stick to copying things over to the USB flash stick for the time being.

I realize this was all new and hot about three years ago, but that's what's great about being a late adopter: 50 bucks and you get that consumerist rush. Now, I can't wait until Christmas 2009 when I can pick up that sweet-ass Xbox 360 I'll be having my eye on.

Technorati Tags: consoles, entertainment

Twelve years ago, the Republicans took power under the leadership of Newt Gingrich. Newt was a man that even 17-year old liberal drama fags at my high school hated in the '80s, so I was predispositioned to like him, even before I was old enough to vote. Anything that annoys pretentious, faux-political teenage liberals is fine by my book.

When they first came into power, the nation was damn near on internal Red Alert. Conspiracy theories, ranging from Con-Trails to cattle mutilations(!) by black-helicopter-flying secret government cryptofascist organizations, Unabombers, X-Files, Branch Davidians, Randy Weaver, Timothy McVeigh; you guys remember all that stuff, right? Well, it looks like it's that time again, kids! (Only this time, the Democrats have got the Patriot Act in their bag of tricks. And that seemed like such a good idea when the GOP was running the show...)

Gingrich, along with rich genius bastard Dick Armey, devised a scheme to defuse the situation. They called it the Contract with America, and it amounted to a Republican business plan for the newly-acquired Congress, Inc. I'm including it here on the vain hope that I'll actually read it all the way through at some point, and be able to assess what sort of progress the Republicans made over the last 12 years, in comparison to what they were actually all fired-up to do.

As Republican Members of the House of Representatives and as citizens seeking to join that body we propose not just to change its policies, but even more important, to restore the bonds of trust between the people and their elected representatives.

That is why, in this era of official evasion and posturing, we offer instead a detailed agenda for national renewal, a written commitment with no fine print. This year's election offers the chance, after four decades of one-party control, to bring to the House a new majority that will transform the way Congress works. That historic change would be the end of government that is too big, too intrusive, and too easy with the public's money. It can be the beginning of a Congress that respects the values and shares the faith of the American family. Like Lincoln, our first Republican president, we intend to act "with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right." To restore accountability to Congress. To end its cycle of scandal and disgrace. To make us all proud again of the way free people govern themselves. On the first day of the 104th Congress, the new Republican majority will immediately pass the following major reforms, aimed at restoring the faith and trust of the American people in their government: • FIRST, require all laws that apply to the rest of the country also apply equally to the Congress; • SECOND, select a major, independent auditing firm to conduct a comprehensive audit of Congress for waste, fraud or abuse; • THIRD, cut the number of House committees, and cut committee staff by one-third; • FOURTH, limit the terms of all committee chairs; • FIFTH, ban the casting of proxy votes in committee; • SIXTH, require committee meetings to be open to the public; • SEVENTH, require a three-fifths majority vote to pass a tax increase; • EIGHTH, guarantee an honest accounting of our Federal Budget by implementing zero base-line budgeting. Thereafter, within the first 100 days of the 104th Congress, we shall bring to the House Floor the following bills, each to be given full and open debate, each to be given a clear and fair vote and each to be immediately available this day for public inspection and scrutiny. 1. THE FISCAL RESPONSIBILITY ACT: A balanced budget/tax limitation amendment and a legislative line-item veto to restore fiscal responsibility to an out- of-control Congress, requiring them to live under the same budget constraints as families and businesses. (Bill Text) (Description)

2. THE TAKING BACK OUR STREETS ACT: An anti-crime package including stronger truth-in- sentencing, "good faith" exclusionary rule exemptions, effective death penalty provisions, and cuts in social spending from this summer's "crime" bill to fund prison construction and additional law enforcement to keep people secure in their neighborhoods and kids safe in their schools. (Bill Text) (Description)
3. THE PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY ACT: Discourage illegitimacy and teen pregnancy by prohibiting welfare to minor mothers and denying increased AFDC for additional children while on welfare, cut spending for welfare programs, and enact a tough two-years-and-out provision with work requirements to promote individual responsibility. (Bill Text) (Description)
4. THE FAMILY REINFORCEMENT ACT: Child support enforcement, tax incentives for adoption, strengthening rights of parents in their children's education, stronger child pornography laws, and an elderly dependent care tax credit to reinforce the central role of families in American society. (Bill Text) (Description)
5. THE AMERICAN DREAM RESTORATION ACT: A S500 per child tax credit, begin repeal of the marriage tax penalty, and creation of American Dream Savings Accounts to provide middle class tax relief. (Bill Text) (Description)
6. THE NATIONAL SECURITY RESTORATION ACT: No U.S. troops under U.N. command and restoration of the essential parts of our national security funding to strengthen our national defense and maintain our credibility around the world. (Bill Text) (Description)
7. THE SENIOR CITIZENS FAIRNESS ACT: Raise the Social Security earnings limit which currently forces seniors out of the work force, repeal the 1993 tax hikes on Social Security benefits and provide tax incentives for private long-term care insurance to let Older Americans keep more of what they have earned over the years. (Bill Text) (Description)
8. THE JOB CREATION AND WAGE ENHANCEMENT ACT: Small business incentives, capital gains cut and indexation, neutral cost recovery, risk assessment/cost-benefit analysis, strengthening the Regulatory Flexibility Act and unfunded mandate reform to create jobs and raise worker wages. (Bill Text) (Description)
9. THE COMMON SENSE LEGAL REFORM ACT: "Loser pays" laws, reasonable limits on punitive damages and reform of product liability laws to stem the endless tide of litigation. (Bill Text) (Description)
10. THE CITIZEN LEGISLATURE ACT: A first-ever vote on term limits to replace career politicians with citizen legislators. (Description) Further, we will instruct the House Budget Committee to report to the floor and we will work to enact additional budget savings, beyond the budget cuts specifically included in the legislation described above, to ensure that the Federal budget deficit will be less than it would have been without the enactment of these bills. Respecting the judgment of our fellow citizens as we seek their mandate for reform, we hereby pledge our names to this Contract with America.

Technorati Tags: 2006 election, abject humiliation, newt, politics

Rube drinks only 'prosumer'-level beer.

When watching baseball, live in the stadium, things are not always what they appear. Oftentimes, a pop-fly to deep short will look just like a home run to someone sitting in the upper deck, causing half the crowd (in Atlanta, anyway) to jump out of their seats and spill their beer, only to sit down again in humiliation when the shortstop catches it.

People who know how to watch baseball never judge a ball by the crack of the bat, or the appearance of its arc: They watch the outfielders. If the outfields turn around and start high-tailing for the fences, you just might have a homerun on your hands, stand up and scream. Otherwise, if they just start scratching themselves and looking into the crowd while the ball's still sailing, just play it cool, because it's a pop-up.

That's why I refer to the various cranks, commies, and dictators of the world collectively as The Outfielders. If I'm unsure how I should feel about a certain event, I judge their reaction to it, and relativize. If they lose their shit and start foaming at the mouth about something Bush or the USA in general does, it's a pretty fair bet that it's just what the doctor ordered. On the other hand, there's this:

Chavez applauds Rumsfeld's resignation

CARACAS (VENEZUELA): Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez applauded the resignation of US Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and suggested President George W. Bush should quit as well. Chavez pointed to the strong gains by Democrats in US congressional elections and called it a "reprisal vote" against Bush's policies and the Iraq war. The leftist leader beamed as he read aloud a news report of Rumsfeld's resignation.

Not only liberal Americans but peace-loving people all over the world must feel relieved by Democrats’ landslide victory Tuesday. But few would feel more pleased with the election results than North Korea’s Kim Jong-il

Plebiscite on an Outlaw Empire The wave - and make no mistake, it's a global one - has just crashed on America's shores, soaking our imperial masters. It's a sight for sore eyes.

"The US government of Republicans and neo-conservatives, which is a reckless government of idiots, will be reined in with the Democrats taking over the House," Oraib Rintawi, President of the Al Quds Centre for Political Studies in Amman...

LANDSLIDE! ...a big thanks from Michael Moore

You did it! We did it! The impossible has happened: A majority of Americans have soundly and forcefully removed Bush's party from control of the House of Representatives and the Republicans have also, miraculously, been tossed out of running our United States Senate.

TUESDAY WAS GOOD NEWS FOR .... WHO?[sic]

Those who want a weaker America

(Accepting the award will be Dominique Marie François René Galouzeau de Villepin, sometimes known as Dominique de Villepin, the Prime Minister of France. Dominique was the leader of the Axis of Weasels before he became Prime Minister.)

A poll earlier this year said that something like 58% of Europeans wanted a weaker America. They got their wish on Tuesday. Who is going to be there to pull their candied asses out of the oven when they finally wake up and realize the great strides that have been made in the Islamification of Europe? Hello Eurabia.

The first blow to be struck in the weakening of America will be for the Democrats to get rid of John Bolton as the Ambassador to the United Nations. They'll replace him with someone who will not stand up to UN corruption and the forces who want to weaken us.

The leftist media.

(Accepting the award for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, The Boston Globe, Time Magazine, Newsweek Magazine and too many more to mention will be Dan Rather)

Ninety percent or more of these people vote Democrat. They engaged in a six-year campaign of demonization of George Bush. It worked.

"Thank you, Ms. Speaker, may I have another!"

Technorati Tags: 2006 election, pelosi, politics, cleveland steamer

How to draw a car in MS Paint.

Technorati Tags: Art, Tip of the Day

Seeing as how, in a matter of weeks, I'll be working in an exclusively Linux-based environment, I figured I'd fire up my Fedora installation again and see how's tricks. Linux has been playing the Ike to my Tina for over a decade, always disappointing and abusing me every chance it gets, and I just keep coming back for more. This time, though, it's for real; I can feel it. Anyway, I don't have a choice, so let's just tell the neighbors I fell off the swing, and concentrate on the good times.

One of the biggest gripes I've had about Linux was its sound card support*. Every Linux distribution you can think of still defaults to 1993's concept of sound hardware. Namely, only one application can play a sound at any given time, and it locks the sound hardware from being used by other applications, for what reason not even God knows. This is behavior that belongs in a single-user, single-tasking operating system like DOS, not in a modern multiuser environment like Linux.

This problem was addressed back in the day by using "sound servers", like ESD or artsd, to provide a layer between the applications and the OSS-supported hardware. This introduced a huge amount of latency, however, and was generally considered a stopgap measure even at its inception back in 1998 (or maybe even earlier, I can't find that info). Even worse, software had to be written to explicitly support it or it was useless.

The limitations of the OSS+Sound Server architecture were overcome by a project known as ALSA, which introduced software mixing at the kernel level. This created an OSS-compatible, multi-streamed abstraction for sound hardware, and obviated the need for sound daemons altogether. That was back in, oh, 2000 or so, and to this day, every single Linux distribution still ships with sound servers and software mixing disabled.

Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, et. al still configure sound hardware to be accessible by one application at a time, despite ALSA's hard work. This means, for instance, that your Flash Player will freeze your browser if you happen to be listening to music in the background. Or if you get a system beep, it will lock you out of using your sound card for as long as the artsd/ESD timeout is set up. Games will not work. This sucks, of course, and is no way to compute in 2007.

The way to fix this is fairly simple. Simply put the following into your /etc/asound.conf, or in your ~/.asoundrc:

pcm.swmixer { type dmix ipckey 1234 slave { pcm "hw:0,0" periodtime 0 periodsize 1024 buffersize 4096 rate 44100 } }

Now, I profess neither to having written that snippet, nor to having any understanding whatsoever as to what it does. But since I put that magical incantation into use, I've had no problems whatsoever with sound-card locking, or Flash plugins, or anything else. It just works.

Now why haven't the distributions adopted this behavior as the default, instead of their asinine insistence on single-channel sound support? The reason is simple: Linux distributions hate their users, and want to destroy them by any means possible.

This would also explain their sticking with X Window System.

• See also: Kubuntu: Sucks Linux Sound: Still suckin’ after all these years

  Technorati Tags: ALSA, Linux, Fedora

In order to keep a vase full of flowers fresh, drop a penny (or other copper coin) into the water. Since 1982, pennies are copper-plated. Pre-1982 pennies were 95% copper or more, so would theoretically work better.

Technorati Tags: Flowers, Tip of the Day

The Wednesday Tip:

How to open a 4th Generation iPod:

This week's (and the inaugural) Tuesday Tip:

How to play a G Chord.

Computers have been around for a while, now. The first digital computers that did useful work were used by the British during World War II to crack the Germans' Enigma cryptographic scheme, with the help of literary greats Alan Turing and Kate Winslett. Computer networks came about not long after. In fact, the network technology that most people use today, Ethernet, was developed back during the Nixon administration by Xerox. But that's really more of a hardware spec, invisible to most of us that use it, and used only in the most vaguely analogous sense by the Internet and wireless connections that we find ourselves using more and more.

What runs over those networks, well, that's the stuff that really concerns us. We wouldn't care if our SMB, HTTP, or NFS protocols were running over a length of twine connecting a couple of dead beavers, just as long as they kept the links up and the bits moving. But for some reason, these protocols, like unto the network itself conceived in the dark, smoke-filled chambers of engineering history, are still less than adequate in real world situations. I'll give you an example: There's not a computer or operating system built today that gracefully handles an unexpectedly disconnected network volume.

I'll grant, for the sake of argument, that I'm on the only moron in the world who would forget to dismount a network drive before clapping his laptop shut and carrying it out of the office. But you would think, in the 30 or more years we've been using networks to share our data, that exactly this scenario might have come up at some point in a worst-case-scenario brainstorming session by one of the major vendors. But I guess the very idea such a thing could happen was judged preposterous, and relegated to the realm of science fiction, freeing the engineering team to work on more critical issues like the Desktop Cleanup Wizard.

So maybe the story I'm about to tell could land me in the rubber room, but I'll chance it, as the Truth Wants to Be Free. As you may have already inferred, in my hurry today, I forgot to dismount a shared network volume before packing my laptop and heading out of the office . Upon opening my laptop once more, I was greeted by the Symbol of Waiting, which refused to go away. All the while, in the corner of my friendly graphical user interface, said network volume's icon was displayed, indicating a continuing, vigorous mounting. Obviously, the Symbol of Waiting was my computer's way of telling me that, while it seemed unlikely that this drive could be mounted without access to its network or, indeed, any network whatsoever, it was still experiencing a moment of indecision. It was telling me that it was considering the two conflicting possibilities of a) the network connection being gone, and therefore all processes using it should be informed of this fact, or b) the server having followed me to the café I'm sitting in, installed a network cabling plant, snuggled itself under my table, and then connected itself to my laptop, and was just in the processing of booting itself back up in order to serve that dreadfully missing network share; a possibility which, I might add, the computer was willing to indulge ad infinitum. Apparently, Occam's Razor is a difficult principle to express in Objective-C.

All of this culminated in a computer caught in a permanent moment of indecision. I like to believe that every time you boot your computer, the cycle of its life is started anew, with the hopes and dreams of a better life this time around; the corollary of course being that you've had to viciously snuff out the life of its previous incarnation. Thus as I was administering the Mac equivalent of a three-finger salute (Ctrl-Cmd-Power) to this shivering, broken husk of a computer a moment ago, I felt no regret. It was better to end it there, to ease its suffering. I felt pity however, in that it probably didn't understand what it was going through, what the source of its confusion and suffering was.

But I also couldn't help think it could have been prevented. Perhaps the status check of a network mount could be moved into a thread, instead of being embedded in the main event loop of the user interface, blocking all input? Perhaps an operating system could check to see if there are any open files on a mounted network drive before betting its entire existence upon the fact that it may, one day, return? Is the termination of a single process blocking on a stat call really worth the life of the entire ecosystem? These are questions for the politicians, apparently, and not for the medics in the field.

In a technical interview recently, a man asked me if I knew the point of "hard-mounting" network shares, particularly those of the NFS variety. I gave the textbook answer he expected, that it was preferable for applications to block and fail in the case of a missing disk than to go on believing that it still existed, without the knowledge that their write operations had failed, and their data were most likely corrupted. It's easy to be so cold and calculating when you haven't seen the suffering involved in such a catastrophic break. It's easy to extoll the virtues of data integrity über alles. But from the perspective of the victim, ignorance is, unfortunately, bliss.

UPDATE: This was, oddly, the Whine of the Week on Macbreak Weekly.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Bill Gates, User Interface

Over 2 years ago, I made a modest little proposal about cameras embedded in cell phones:

So, I was wondering if there’s a way to send that directly to the police. For example, if you’re pretty sure you’re about to get mugged, you could just take a picture of the guy and send it quick-like to the cops. Then, you could say, “whoa, G, you might as well keep on moving: five-o’s got your mug.? Of course, this may come across as somewhat antagonistic, which muggers generally don’t like. Anyway, if you send an MMS to 911, does it work? It should. Then, we could all be bitch-ass little snitches at the touch of a button.

And today, what do I see?

Catching criminals in the act these days is s ometimes as easy as pressing a button on your camera phone. Now the city is moving to simplify your ability to share telltale evidence of subway flashers, house burglars or even a suspect pothole, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said yesterday. "If you see a crime in progress or a dangerous building condition, you'll be able to transmit images to 911 or online to nyc.gov," Bloomberg said in his State of the City address.

You ever have one of those days when you say to yourself, "If the world would just shut up and do as I say, it would be a better place for everybody"? Well, I don't. I speak, and the world listens. Sometimes it just takes a little longer than it should. Stupid world.

Hurricane Kyrill is blasting across Germany at the moment, leveling trees and flinging stucco about. Man, you'd think Gabriel was tooting his horn outside, the way the locals are reacting. Mind you, Kyrill's not really a hurricane, but rather a winter gale. That would be the way LEO translates the german word Orkan; well, that and hurricane. But a hurricane is necessarily in the Caribbean, moving west. Technically, anyway.

But I'm not here to split hairs, I'm here to talk about battering winds, upwards of 200 kilometers per hour. Not sure how fast that is in real measurement, but I can confirm it's a-howling through the alleyways outside. You can actually hear it whistling through the cathedral belltower, a good half-mile away. It's sort of a low hoot. The roof tiles they have over here are bound to start flying around at some point, injuring passers-by unlucky enough to be out in it, à la Ben Hur. I've still got to get home from this bar I'm sitting in right now, but I'm close enough that it would be a lucky shot, indeed.

They've stopped all trains in the entire country, even the streetcars, and the kids are staying home from school tomorrow. As are many businessmen, their firms more concerned about their safety than the four-hour workday most people put in on Friday over here. All in all, it's a pleasant diversion for everyone, an act of God that brings a bit of excitement to the daily routine. I'm just glad the bars are open, otherwise this entry would have been about four lines long.

It's sort of like it used to be in Atlanta before the Yankees came, when we got a few flakes of snow on the ground. Once the slightest flake fought its way through the climatical defenses enough to land and shout, triumphantly, Allahu Akhbar! Quake with fear before me! before becoming a small puff of vapor, well, that's when the fabric of Atlanta society would start coming apart at the seams. The groceries stores were run upon, with milk and bread being carried by the truckload to the homes of weather-maddened Southerners. The schools were locked down tight; lest the inexperienced, though well-meaning bus drivers tumble off a cliff, out of control on ice-slick roads with a full load of schoolchildren. We didn't like snow, not even the rumor of it.

Growing up in Cherokee County, we had a rather enviable relationship with snow. It's a large county, with a hilly bit up north, in the Canton area. But the rest of the county sits around Lake Allatoona, and is predominately mild in its winters. School closings, however, are granular only to the county level, which meant that whenever some meth-addled bus driver in Ball Ground happened to notice a patch of frost on the grass on her way out of the trailer park, the school board would immediately be notified, and all educational activities throughout the county brought to a halt. Sometimes, some farmer's pond was frozen over in a forgotten corner somewhere; the very presence of ice somewhere induced enough unease among the elected county officials that they just played it safe and let the kids have the rest of the week off.

During the Winter of '87, we actually had 16 days off in a row for snow. Down in our end of the county, we did indeed see snow the first day. I remember it well: We were sitting in home room, the first class of the day, when the first flakes began to fall, the shimmering little harbingers of freedom. In panicked tones, the principal came on the PA and announced that we should all get on the buses, or hop in our cars, and get the Hell home, not forgetting of course to stop on the way for whatever bread or milk might still be available in the local grocery store, every man for himself! I could just see him in his office: laying down the intercom microphone and strapping himself to his chair, cradling his service .45, a captain going down with the ship.

Predictably, once we were all home the snow stopped. In fact, it was 65 degrees by midday, and we were playing football in the yard with 8 men per team. It was a pleasant diversion for a Tuesday afternoon, but we were resigned to getting back to the grind bright and early the next morning. But there was no school the next day. Nor the day after that. In fact, for the next two weeks, despite spring-like temperatures and sunny skies, we were out of school on account of snow. Every day the disruption continued, the fun factor was reduced by half, until finally we were all wondering whether they had forgotten to tell everybody to go back. But no, there was Guy Sharpe every morning, announcing the one and only school closing in the state of Georgia: Cherokee County. For two solid weeks. I always wondered what people in other counties thought of that. At one point, the guy shows them a map of Georgia with little suns all over it and 60+ degree temperatures, then announces that our hillbilly asses still won't come out from under our rocks.

They cancelled our Spring Break that year because of that. Bastards. I didn't think much about it then, being a latchkey kid, but I can imagine that a lot of parents had actually planned their precious two-week vacations to coincide with Spring Break. But then, Cherokee County was a different crowd back then. I mean, to have vacations implies that you, you know, have a job.

But it became clearer to me in my last two years of High School how something like that could happen. It was easy to start rumors about snow sightings in Canton. Even mentioning an ice storm in Birmingham would have the teachers looking nervous. Do that in home room, and by lunch it would be all over school. Somebody would come up to you and tell you that the county seat was under a six-foot sheet of glacial ice, and that school would be cancelled forever, what with the coming ice age and all. It's a miracle that the public school system functions at all.

Weather is always what the Germans call a gaudi, a good time.

Technorati Tags: orkan, puppy, snow day

Apropos this post over at Wordpress, I'll be upgrading to the latest version. Please pardon if things look screwy for a bit.

Update:  Well, that wasn't so hard.  As you were.

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

Despite my near-absolute conviction that it would never happen, Chairman Jobs dropped the i-Bomb today on a suspecting crowd. By all accounts, the patented jobsian Reality Distortion Field went all the way to eleven at MacWorld Expo this morning as the Steve introduced the new Apple iPhone. The iPhone is, without a doubt, the sexiest-sounding piece of hardware ever, period. As its proponents were hoping, it brings to a mobile phone typical Apple touches, like motion-sensing gestures and easy media management, and does so in a way that will have Apple fans and detractors alike buzzin about it for weeks to come. It looks like a big, big win for Apple, and a disruptive entry into the smart-phone market.

"But hey, little Rube, why the long face?" you might ask, should you see the frown I'm wearing at this moment. And it may seem strange, me being a Mac Fanboi and it being Apple's day in the sun, that I would be in any kind of mood other than near-ecstasy. So, I'll explain. Although I'm a big fan of the Mac, there's nothing here that bodes well for that platform. The iPhone will almost certainly be a cross-platform device, which means a lot more Windows users are going to be using it than Mac users. And since I'm not really in the market for a portable phone, it's nothing more to me than yet another cool iPod that I can't afford. The iPhone comes at the expense of the Mac platform, not for its greater glory. In fact, it stole from the Macintosh platform its annual holy day, the MacWorld keynote.

Probably the biggest news for Mac users, which will remain almost completely overlooked, is that a commercially-available version of Mac OS X now exists for portable devices. Windows CE has been, up to now, the only really normal OS for handheld computers (not including the current iPod OS, which is most certainly the best-selling). But today, Apple showed they have a portable, flash-based version of OS X running on a hardware platform that includes wireless networking, bluetooth, and a brilliant touch-screen display to show it on. This makes the iPhone the best handheld PC on the market.

This bodes well for the iPod, of course. I don't see Apple abandoning. the sub-$500 market completely, and now that they have the hardware and software platform for it, could 802.11-enabled, bluetooth-capable iPods finally become a reality?

What I would like to see happen now is a hard-disk based iPod successor, somewhere in the 30-60GB range, with the form-factor and OS X version of the iPhone, but without the mobile phone part of it. It would be the second coming of the Newton, at a time when nobody gives a second thought to plopping down 350 bucks for an Apple product that fits in their pocket.

Jobs' demo today showed why Apple have made a lot of the decisions we've seen over the past year or so. First, they dropped the PortalPlayer iPod platform at the height of its popularity. Then, they made headlines all over the Web by securing enormous amounts of flash-memory around Asia, and everyone postulated flash-based MacBooks by year's end. Then, it leaked out that Apple had patented resolution-independent user interface technology, presumably for large screens running OS X 10.5 Leopard. Who would've thought that they were actually thinking about high-density mobile displays running a tiny, tiny version of OS X?

While everyone was salivating over a phone today (a phone for gossake!), I was thinking just one thing: Cool! There's a version of OS X that runs on StrongARM (or whatever's in there), includes Safari and Cover Flow, and runs entirely from flash memory! I wonder what the boot-times are on one of those phones?

Winners: Yahoo Apple Google Cingular OS X

Losers: Zune Windows CE The Macintosh Me

Technorati Tags: Apple, iPhone, OS X, Po' ol' Rube

Just a little something to keep Zonker from getting bored.

Technorati Tags: abject humiliation

I hope everyone had a happy and raucous holiday season. My December was surreal enough. I'm moving to England, it seems.

"You'd have to set up little 'blog policemen' on these entries to shoo away onlookers - 'Move along, nothing to see here!' But no, people stand there looking at the dead animal at the side of the road, at two people full of pride making complete fools of themselves in public, and then go and write whole blog entries about it." Stefan Niggemeier, media journalist and photoblog author, on a dispute in the blogosphere. The two "complete fools" Niggemeier means here are 'DonAlphonso', author of the A-list blog "Rebellmarkt", and Peter Turi, also a journalist, and author of the "Turi2" blog. The start of the argument goes a long way back, but the current escalation began when 'DonAlphonso' repeatedly referred to Peter Turi in his blog as a "blogging failure" - Turi struck back by calling Meyer a "moaning minnie". What started as a minor skirmish developed into a heated conflict, with both sides receiving support. Over the course of the dispute, old scores were settled, fervent slanging matches went on in several blogs, and threats of lawyers were made. Finally, Peter Turi shut down his blog - though it's unclear whether this was directly or only indirectly related to the argument.

This article is a translation of a german text that was first released on my weblog "buchstaben in bewegung". It attracted some attention in the german blogosphere, so an aquaintance of mine, Niall McCourt, translated it. I´ve asked Rube if he could publish it here, so he gave me permission ;-). I´d like to bring this article to a greater audience, so if you feel you´d like to pick it up and republish it somewhere, go for it.

Niall is a freelance translator. If you think he could do a job for you, email him.

Howdy, friends and neighbors! Man, I've hard a tough couple of weeks. Ever since thanksgiving I've been busier than a butt-legged man in a nun-kicking contest. Deadlines to meet, servers to build and ship, the entire back catalog of X-Files to watch. We're all the way up to the one where that guy from Monk kills people with his dark-matter shadow.

Not that it's all been work-related, mind you. I've recently re-discovered video games. With the little woman away this past weekend, I eschewed eating, bathing, and sleeping to sail a cartoon boat around an imaginary world in Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. Despite the obvious gayness inherent in all Zelda games, I'm secure enough in my masculinity to declare this THE BEST GAME EVER. I haven't been sucked into such a bottomless miasma of escapism and bad personal hygiene since the first Zelda, back in '88. That's right: miasma!

Anyhoo, that's about it. Almost. I also got a call from a rather large open-source company that you've probably heard of to come work for them in England. Maybe I'll move there with my sweetie, who knows. It'll be a big investment at first, since I'll have to buy a bowler hat and have my teeth darkened, but it'll probably be worth it, just for the weather.

I hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving. It's my favorite holiday, I think. It's truly a thing that everyone can do together, without worrying about offending anyone, unless it's because it's a typically American holiday. And let's face it: If that offends, then I'm happy to offend.

I cooked a turkey this year, for the first time ever. Being until recently a vegetarian, I was baffled by the various organs that I pulled out of the carcass, all neatly delivered in a little plastic bag. I realized that it was all probably edible, but I balked at eating the bagged innards, in the fear that one of them was the gizzard, which supposedly leaves a bad taste.

Treating Europeans to Thanksgiving is an enormous responsibility, but I think I pulled it off without disgracing my ancestors. By all accounts, my Southern Cornbread Dressing was not only edible, but delicious. I never realized that the defining taste of Thanksgiving Dressing is sage, of all things, and I was struggling Thursday afternoon with a tasteless mash of cornbread and gravy. But a few panicked phone calls to Mom can solve almost any crisis, and she finally, after all these years, spilled the recipe.

The in-laws were over, and I was able to feed and water them. There was French wine, German beer, and Southern American food. In short, there was much to be thankful for. And that's what I like about Thanksgiving: That reminder to sort out the things that make you happy, and be thankful for them. It's a good tradition; there's plenty of time to sweat the small stuff.

Hugs, Rube.

Technorati Tags: thanksgiving

Being a pompous douchebag, as the distinguished gentleman from North Carolina unmistakably is, does have its drawbacks. Can you imagine what kind of dishonest life you would have to lead if, like Edwards, you had to apologize nationally, in humiliating fashion, for trying to find your kids a Playstation 3 at Wal-Mart?

John Edwards _ a vocal critic of the retailer _ asked his local Wal- Mart store for help in getting the potential 2008 presidential candidate a Sony PlayStation 3. Edwards said a volunteer did so by mistake.

Edwards told The Associated Press that the volunteer "feels terrible" about seeking the game unit at Wal-Mart a day after his boss criticized the company, saying it doesn't treat its employees fairly.

Being an antisocial libertarian helps me immeasurably when it comes to lemming-like materialism. Were I not such a late adopter of technology, I would go into Wal-Mart myself and root around for Playstations 3; I would do this without a bad conscience, and would not have to apologize to anybody. Trust me, if Hitler's Electronics had them in ample supply, and at an acceptable price, I would walk in smiling with Visa in hand.

And now, as John Edwards contorts himself into various contrite postures, blaming his actions on subordinates, Playstations are most likely already in the homes of Wal-Mart executives across the country. Every Wal-Mart employee in North Carolina now has the opportunity to buy one before the good Senator. It's too bad they only make about $2 an hour, else they could bedeck the trailer with Christmas cheer, whilst a gloom hangs about the Edwards Manse.

Technorati Tags: consoles, politics, ps3

'Kubuntu' is the Swahili word for, 'Suck it, luser!'

For a lark, I downloaded the 4.5GB DVD for Kubuntu Linux. Ubuntu, upon which it's based, is the current darling of the Linux scene, so I figured I'd see how long it's come along since I last installed it.

Let's see...

• No MP3 support, even for network streams like you'll find at Shoutcast
• Major headache getting my ATI Radeon X1600 to work with 3D screen savers
• Refresh rate capped at 75Hz
• Printer sharing doesn't work
• Zero progress on sound card configuration
• Default resolution of 1600x1200 is a bit...ambitious. I can't find any way to change it permanently
• Applications like Firefox, Thunderbird, KOffice, Scribus, et. al. not included
• Did this thing really just ask me to insert my install DVD?! What is this, 1998?
• System always locks up after KDE session logout

Ah well, at least in Windows I can change my default sound card without being a Dungeon Master.

Technorati Tags: ubuntu, linux

For no particular reason, here's a list of national sales tax rates of European countries.

via Europe for Visitors.

Technorati Tags: germans, travel

Do you ever get the feeling that, just beneath the surface of the visible world, the world which you and I would consider reality, strange forces lurk, forming a sort of world-within-a-world? I didn't either, honestly. I mean, I've seen The Matrix, and I have to admit that their explanation, that a war between man and machine created a 300-year long meta-reality in which mankind is held thrall to a sentient, evil race of machines, would go a long way toward explaining things, like Everybody Loves Raymond.

But I'm not here to take cheapshots at non-threatening TV shows. I'm here to tell you that everything you've sensed, everything you've feared about meta-reality complex is true. I know this, because I've discovered a blind spot, a bubble in the Matrix. I've discovered a gathering place in the Internet where the world's top engineers, obviously unbeknownst to our bionical slavemasters, continue a discussion which already spans 9000 words, almost 40 pages of calculations and hypotheses.

It's a discussion about bacon.

Conclusions Microwaved - The bacon came out extremely crisp throughout both the fat and meat of the bacon. It felt a bit thicker than I expected from a thin cut piece of bacon. Examining the fat collected in the paper towels leads me to believe that very little fat was rendered out in comparison to the pan fry method. The technique is simple and hands free, but a problem that I have is that the paper towel stuck to several of the pieces of bacon. This may have been because I allowed the bacon to rest and drain on the same paper towel it was cooked on. Another issue is the limited number of bacon strips you can cook in a microwave oven at one time (but the time savings probably more than makes up for this).

Pan fried - The bacon felt the thinnest and lightest of the three. The bacon fat was crispy while the meat was slightly chewy. I actually prefer my bacon this way (not totally crunchy and crispy, but with some texture to it), but others may not. All in all, a good method to cook bacon but time consuming.

Broiled - The bacon was burnt in some spots and the meat felt undercooked. The areas need the burns were bitter in taste and the texture was soft and soggy throughout (except for the blackened parts). Not much fat was rendered off either. I would not recommend this technique.

So, microwaving is king if you're looking for bacon that feels thicker than what you purchased and crunchy throughout. Pan frying is great for a thin, light bacon with a little chew in the meat.

Technorati Tags: bacon, engineering

In a startling development, the smug leftist hipsters at überblog Boing Boing have gone two (2) straight days without mentioning Diebold. The last mention of the maligned "voting" machine manufacturer was right before the "election" results came in. Which, coincidentally, showed huge Democrat "wins".

Could it be that Diebold's agents have gotten to Xeni and Cory?! It couldn't possibly be that the whole body of anti-e-voting writings was just screeching partisan hysterics, could it?

Technorati Tags: electioneering, boingboing

Being a late adopter has its advantages. For example, I just picked up a Scott i960CS, which is a commodity DVD/standalone DivX player. It cost about fifty bucks, and is so generic that it's nigh ungoogleable. I bought it to replace my fifty-dollar DVD player, which was getting a bit long in the tooth. About three years ago, I really, really wanted one of these, but they were going for a cool $400 at the local shops, so I decided to buy shoes and electricity instead. Now, I can pick one up at about 12% the cost that I would have gladly forked out back then, had I had the cash.

What a cool thing these doodads are. It will play just about anything you throw at it, format-wise. You can easily shut off the irritating region restrictions that would otherwise keep you from playing DVDs from other countries, which in my case would be the US-bought movies that comprise about half my collection. It's got a USB port, into which you can plug a thumb drive, iPod, or external hard drive, and browse them to play media.

My big idea was to copy all my music and movies to an external 160GB hard drive, hook it up to the USB port, and never have to switch discs again. Unfortunately, two things keep me from doing that. First, the Scott doesn't read long filenames from external devices (data DVDs seem to work fine), so you'll have to wade through FAT32-style mangled names, trying to figure out what “BLOWJO~1.AVI? could possibly be. And second, whenever you access the external drive, it thrashes around alarmingly, as the player apparently scans the entire thing at a go. It's scary enough that I'll stick to copying things over to the USB flash stick for the time being.

I realize this was all new and hot about three years ago, but that's what's great about being a late adopter: 50 bucks and you get that consumerist rush. Now, I can't wait until Christmas 2009 when I can pick up that sweet-ass Xbox 360 I'll be having my eye on.

Technorati Tags: consoles, entertainment

Twelve years ago, the Republicans took power under the leadership of Newt Gingrich. Newt was a man that even 17-year old liberal drama fags at my high school hated in the '80s, so I was predispositioned to like him, even before I was old enough to vote. Anything that annoys pretentious, faux-political teenage liberals is fine by my book.

When they first came into power, the nation was damn near on internal Red Alert. Conspiracy theories, ranging from Con-Trails to cattle mutilations(!) by black-helicopter-flying secret government cryptofascist organizations, Unabombers, X-Files, Branch Davidians, Randy Weaver, Timothy McVeigh; you guys remember all that stuff, right? Well, it looks like it's that time again, kids! (Only this time, the Democrats have got the Patriot Act in their bag of tricks. And that seemed like such a good idea when the GOP was running the show...)

Gingrich, along with rich genius bastard Dick Armey, devised a scheme to defuse the situation. They called it the Contract with America, and it amounted to a Republican business plan for the newly-acquired Congress, Inc. I'm including it here on the vain hope that I'll actually read it all the way through at some point, and be able to assess what sort of progress the Republicans made over the last 12 years, in comparison to what they were actually all fired-up to do.

As Republican Members of the House of Representatives and as citizens seeking to join that body we propose not just to change its policies, but even more important, to restore the bonds of trust between the people and their elected representatives.

That is why, in this era of official evasion and posturing, we offer instead a detailed agenda for national renewal, a written commitment with no fine print. This year's election offers the chance, after four decades of one-party control, to bring to the House a new majority that will transform the way Congress works. That historic change would be the end of government that is too big, too intrusive, and too easy with the public's money. It can be the beginning of a Congress that respects the values and shares the faith of the American family. Like Lincoln, our first Republican president, we intend to act "with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right." To restore accountability to Congress. To end its cycle of scandal and disgrace. To make us all proud again of the way free people govern themselves. On the first day of the 104th Congress, the new Republican majority will immediately pass the following major reforms, aimed at restoring the faith and trust of the American people in their government: • FIRST, require all laws that apply to the rest of the country also apply equally to the Congress; • SECOND, select a major, independent auditing firm to conduct a comprehensive audit of Congress for waste, fraud or abuse; • THIRD, cut the number of House committees, and cut committee staff by one-third; • FOURTH, limit the terms of all committee chairs; • FIFTH, ban the casting of proxy votes in committee; • SIXTH, require committee meetings to be open to the public; • SEVENTH, require a three-fifths majority vote to pass a tax increase; • EIGHTH, guarantee an honest accounting of our Federal Budget by implementing zero base-line budgeting. Thereafter, within the first 100 days of the 104th Congress, we shall bring to the House Floor the following bills, each to be given full and open debate, each to be given a clear and fair vote and each to be immediately available this day for public inspection and scrutiny. 1. THE FISCAL RESPONSIBILITY ACT: A balanced budget/tax limitation amendment and a legislative line-item veto to restore fiscal responsibility to an out- of-control Congress, requiring them to live under the same budget constraints as families and businesses. (Bill Text) (Description)

2. THE TAKING BACK OUR STREETS ACT: An anti-crime package including stronger truth-in- sentencing, "good faith" exclusionary rule exemptions, effective death penalty provisions, and cuts in social spending from this summer's "crime" bill to fund prison construction and additional law enforcement to keep people secure in their neighborhoods and kids safe in their schools. (Bill Text) (Description)
3. THE PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY ACT: Discourage illegitimacy and teen pregnancy by prohibiting welfare to minor mothers and denying increased AFDC for additional children while on welfare, cut spending for welfare programs, and enact a tough two-years-and-out provision with work requirements to promote individual responsibility. (Bill Text) (Description)
4. THE FAMILY REINFORCEMENT ACT: Child support enforcement, tax incentives for adoption, strengthening rights of parents in their children's education, stronger child pornography laws, and an elderly dependent care tax credit to reinforce the central role of families in American society. (Bill Text) (Description)
5. THE AMERICAN DREAM RESTORATION ACT: A S500 per child tax credit, begin repeal of the marriage tax penalty, and creation of American Dream Savings Accounts to provide middle class tax relief. (Bill Text) (Description)
6. THE NATIONAL SECURITY RESTORATION ACT: No U.S. troops under U.N. command and restoration of the essential parts of our national security funding to strengthen our national defense and maintain our credibility around the world. (Bill Text) (Description)
7. THE SENIOR CITIZENS FAIRNESS ACT: Raise the Social Security earnings limit which currently forces seniors out of the work force, repeal the 1993 tax hikes on Social Security benefits and provide tax incentives for private long-term care insurance to let Older Americans keep more of what they have earned over the years. (Bill Text) (Description)
8. THE JOB CREATION AND WAGE ENHANCEMENT ACT: Small business incentives, capital gains cut and indexation, neutral cost recovery, risk assessment/cost-benefit analysis, strengthening the Regulatory Flexibility Act and unfunded mandate reform to create jobs and raise worker wages. (Bill Text) (Description)
9. THE COMMON SENSE LEGAL REFORM ACT: "Loser pays" laws, reasonable limits on punitive damages and reform of product liability laws to stem the endless tide of litigation. (Bill Text) (Description)
10. THE CITIZEN LEGISLATURE ACT: A first-ever vote on term limits to replace career politicians with citizen legislators. (Description) Further, we will instruct the House Budget Committee to report to the floor and we will work to enact additional budget savings, beyond the budget cuts specifically included in the legislation described above, to ensure that the Federal budget deficit will be less than it would have been without the enactment of these bills. Respecting the judgment of our fellow citizens as we seek their mandate for reform, we hereby pledge our names to this Contract with America.

Technorati Tags: 2006 election, abject humiliation, newt, politics

Rube drinks only 'prosumer'-level beer.

When watching baseball, live in the stadium, things are not always what they appear. Oftentimes, a pop-fly to deep short will look just like a home run to someone sitting in the upper deck, causing half the crowd (in Atlanta, anyway) to jump out of their seats and spill their beer, only to sit down again in humiliation when the shortstop catches it.

People who know how to watch baseball never judge a ball by the crack of the bat, or the appearance of its arc: They watch the outfielders. If the outfields turn around and start high-tailing for the fences, you just might have a homerun on your hands, stand up and scream. Otherwise, if they just start scratching themselves and looking into the crowd while the ball's still sailing, just play it cool, because it's a pop-up.

That's why I refer to the various cranks, commies, and dictators of the world collectively as The Outfielders. If I'm unsure how I should feel about a certain event, I judge their reaction to it, and relativize. If they lose their shit and start foaming at the mouth about something Bush or the USA in general does, it's a pretty fair bet that it's just what the doctor ordered. On the other hand, there's this:

Chavez applauds Rumsfeld's resignation

CARACAS (VENEZUELA): Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez applauded the resignation of US Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and suggested President George W. Bush should quit as well. Chavez pointed to the strong gains by Democrats in US congressional elections and called it a "reprisal vote" against Bush's policies and the Iraq war. The leftist leader beamed as he read aloud a news report of Rumsfeld's resignation.

Not only liberal Americans but peace-loving people all over the world must feel relieved by Democrats’ landslide victory Tuesday. But few would feel more pleased with the election results than North Korea’s Kim Jong-il

Plebiscite on an Outlaw Empire The wave - and make no mistake, it's a global one - has just crashed on America's shores, soaking our imperial masters. It's a sight for sore eyes.

"The US government of Republicans and neo-conservatives, which is a reckless government of idiots, will be reined in with the Democrats taking over the House," Oraib Rintawi, President of the Al Quds Centre for Political Studies in Amman...

LANDSLIDE! ...a big thanks from Michael Moore

You did it! We did it! The impossible has happened: A majority of Americans have soundly and forcefully removed Bush's party from control of the House of Representatives and the Republicans have also, miraculously, been tossed out of running our United States Senate.

TUESDAY WAS GOOD NEWS FOR .... WHO?[sic]

Those who want a weaker America

(Accepting the award will be Dominique Marie François René Galouzeau de Villepin, sometimes known as Dominique de Villepin, the Prime Minister of France. Dominique was the leader of the Axis of Weasels before he became Prime Minister.)

A poll earlier this year said that something like 58% of Europeans wanted a weaker America. They got their wish on Tuesday. Who is going to be there to pull their candied asses out of the oven when they finally wake up and realize the great strides that have been made in the Islamification of Europe? Hello Eurabia.

The first blow to be struck in the weakening of America will be for the Democrats to get rid of John Bolton as the Ambassador to the United Nations. They'll replace him with someone who will not stand up to UN corruption and the forces who want to weaken us.

The leftist media.

(Accepting the award for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, The Boston Globe, Time Magazine, Newsweek Magazine and too many more to mention will be Dan Rather)

Ninety percent or more of these people vote Democrat. They engaged in a six-year campaign of demonization of George Bush. It worked.

"Thank you, Ms. Speaker, may I have another!"

Technorati Tags: 2006 election, pelosi, politics, cleveland steamer

How to draw a car in MS Paint.

Technorati Tags: Art, Tip of the Day

Seeing as how, in a matter of weeks, I'll be working in an exclusively Linux-based environment, I figured I'd fire up my Fedora installation again and see how's tricks. Linux has been playing the Ike to my Tina for over a decade, always disappointing and abusing me every chance it gets, and I just keep coming back for more. This time, though, it's for real; I can feel it. Anyway, I don't have a choice, so let's just tell the neighbors I fell off the swing, and concentrate on the good times.

One of the biggest gripes I've had about Linux was its sound card support*. Every Linux distribution you can think of still defaults to 1993's concept of sound hardware. Namely, only one application can play a sound at any given time, and it locks the sound hardware from being used by other applications, for what reason not even God knows. This is behavior that belongs in a single-user, single-tasking operating system like DOS, not in a modern multiuser environment like Linux.

This problem was addressed back in the day by using "sound servers", like ESD or artsd, to provide a layer between the applications and the OSS-supported hardware. This introduced a huge amount of latency, however, and was generally considered a stopgap measure even at its inception back in 1998 (or maybe even earlier, I can't find that info). Even worse, software had to be written to explicitly support it or it was useless.

The limitations of the OSS+Sound Server architecture were overcome by a project known as ALSA, which introduced software mixing at the kernel level. This created an OSS-compatible, multi-streamed abstraction for sound hardware, and obviated the need for sound daemons altogether. That was back in, oh, 2000 or so, and to this day, every single Linux distribution still ships with sound servers and software mixing disabled.

Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, et. al still configure sound hardware to be accessible by one application at a time, despite ALSA's hard work. This means, for instance, that your Flash Player will freeze your browser if you happen to be listening to music in the background. Or if you get a system beep, it will lock you out of using your sound card for as long as the artsd/ESD timeout is set up. Games will not work. This sucks, of course, and is no way to compute in 2007.

The way to fix this is fairly simple. Simply put the following into your /etc/asound.conf, or in your ~/.asoundrc:

pcm.swmixer { type dmix ipckey 1234 slave { pcm "hw:0,0" periodtime 0 periodsize 1024 buffersize 4096 rate 44100 } }

Now, I profess neither to having written that snippet, nor to having any understanding whatsoever as to what it does. But since I put that magical incantation into use, I've had no problems whatsoever with sound-card locking, or Flash plugins, or anything else. It just works.

Now why haven't the distributions adopted this behavior as the default, instead of their asinine insistence on single-channel sound support? The reason is simple: Linux distributions hate their users, and want to destroy them by any means possible.

This would also explain their sticking with X Window System.

• See also: Kubuntu: Sucks Linux Sound: Still suckin’ after all these years

  Technorati Tags: ALSA, Linux, Fedora

In order to keep a vase full of flowers fresh, drop a penny (or other copper coin) into the water. Since 1982, pennies are copper-plated. Pre-1982 pennies were 95% copper or more, so would theoretically work better.

Technorati Tags: Flowers, Tip of the Day

The Wednesday Tip:

How to open a 4th Generation iPod:

This week's (and the inaugural) Tuesday Tip:

How to play a G Chord.

Computers have been around for a while, now. The first digital computers that did useful work were used by the British during World War II to crack the Germans' Enigma cryptographic scheme, with the help of literary greats Alan Turing and Kate Winslett. Computer networks came about not long after. In fact, the network technology that most people use today, Ethernet, was developed back during the Nixon administration by Xerox. But that's really more of a hardware spec, invisible to most of us that use it, and used only in the most vaguely analogous sense by the Internet and wireless connections that we find ourselves using more and more.

What runs over those networks, well, that's the stuff that really concerns us. We wouldn't care if our SMB, HTTP, or NFS protocols were running over a length of twine connecting a couple of dead beavers, just as long as they kept the links up and the bits moving. But for some reason, these protocols, like unto the network itself conceived in the dark, smoke-filled chambers of engineering history, are still less than adequate in real world situations. I'll give you an example: There's not a computer or operating system built today that gracefully handles an unexpectedly disconnected network volume.

I'll grant, for the sake of argument, that I'm on the only moron in the world who would forget to dismount a network drive before clapping his laptop shut and carrying it out of the office. But you would think, in the 30 or more years we've been using networks to share our data, that exactly this scenario might have come up at some point in a worst-case-scenario brainstorming session by one of the major vendors. But I guess the very idea such a thing could happen was judged preposterous, and relegated to the realm of science fiction, freeing the engineering team to work on more critical issues like the Desktop Cleanup Wizard.

So maybe the story I'm about to tell could land me in the rubber room, but I'll chance it, as the Truth Wants to Be Free. As you may have already inferred, in my hurry today, I forgot to dismount a shared network volume before packing my laptop and heading out of the office . Upon opening my laptop once more, I was greeted by the Symbol of Waiting, which refused to go away. All the while, in the corner of my friendly graphical user interface, said network volume's icon was displayed, indicating a continuing, vigorous mounting. Obviously, the Symbol of Waiting was my computer's way of telling me that, while it seemed unlikely that this drive could be mounted without access to its network or, indeed, any network whatsoever, it was still experiencing a moment of indecision. It was telling me that it was considering the two conflicting possibilities of a) the network connection being gone, and therefore all processes using it should be informed of this fact, or b) the server having followed me to the café I'm sitting in, installed a network cabling plant, snuggled itself under my table, and then connected itself to my laptop, and was just in the processing of booting itself back up in order to serve that dreadfully missing network share; a possibility which, I might add, the computer was willing to indulge ad infinitum. Apparently, Occam's Razor is a difficult principle to express in Objective-C.

All of this culminated in a computer caught in a permanent moment of indecision. I like to believe that every time you boot your computer, the cycle of its life is started anew, with the hopes and dreams of a better life this time around; the corollary of course being that you've had to viciously snuff out the life of its previous incarnation. Thus as I was administering the Mac equivalent of a three-finger salute (Ctrl-Cmd-Power) to this shivering, broken husk of a computer a moment ago, I felt no regret. It was better to end it there, to ease its suffering. I felt pity however, in that it probably didn't understand what it was going through, what the source of its confusion and suffering was.

But I also couldn't help think it could have been prevented. Perhaps the status check of a network mount could be moved into a thread, instead of being embedded in the main event loop of the user interface, blocking all input? Perhaps an operating system could check to see if there are any open files on a mounted network drive before betting its entire existence upon the fact that it may, one day, return? Is the termination of a single process blocking on a stat call really worth the life of the entire ecosystem? These are questions for the politicians, apparently, and not for the medics in the field.

In a technical interview recently, a man asked me if I knew the point of "hard-mounting" network shares, particularly those of the NFS variety. I gave the textbook answer he expected, that it was preferable for applications to block and fail in the case of a missing disk than to go on believing that it still existed, without the knowledge that their write operations had failed, and their data were most likely corrupted. It's easy to be so cold and calculating when you haven't seen the suffering involved in such a catastrophic break. It's easy to extoll the virtues of data integrity über alles. But from the perspective of the victim, ignorance is, unfortunately, bliss.

UPDATE: This was, oddly, the Whine of the Week on Macbreak Weekly.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Bill Gates, User Interface

Over 2 years ago, I made a modest little proposal about cameras embedded in cell phones:

So, I was wondering if there’s a way to send that directly to the police. For example, if you’re pretty sure you’re about to get mugged, you could just take a picture of the guy and send it quick-like to the cops. Then, you could say, “whoa, G, you might as well keep on moving: five-o’s got your mug.? Of course, this may come across as somewhat antagonistic, which muggers generally don’t like. Anyway, if you send an MMS to 911, does it work? It should. Then, we could all be bitch-ass little snitches at the touch of a button.

And today, what do I see?

Catching criminals in the act these days is s ometimes as easy as pressing a button on your camera phone. Now the city is moving to simplify your ability to share telltale evidence of subway flashers, house burglars or even a suspect pothole, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said yesterday. "If you see a crime in progress or a dangerous building condition, you'll be able to transmit images to 911 or online to nyc.gov," Bloomberg said in his State of the City address.

You ever have one of those days when you say to yourself, "If the world would just shut up and do as I say, it would be a better place for everybody"? Well, I don't. I speak, and the world listens. Sometimes it just takes a little longer than it should. Stupid world.

Hurricane Kyrill is blasting across Germany at the moment, leveling trees and flinging stucco about. Man, you'd think Gabriel was tooting his horn outside, the way the locals are reacting. Mind you, Kyrill's not really a hurricane, but rather a winter gale. That would be the way LEO translates the german word Orkan; well, that and hurricane. But a hurricane is necessarily in the Caribbean, moving west. Technically, anyway.

But I'm not here to split hairs, I'm here to talk about battering winds, upwards of 200 kilometers per hour. Not sure how fast that is in real measurement, but I can confirm it's a-howling through the alleyways outside. You can actually hear it whistling through the cathedral belltower, a good half-mile away. It's sort of a low hoot. The roof tiles they have over here are bound to start flying around at some point, injuring passers-by unlucky enough to be out in it, à la Ben Hur. I've still got to get home from this bar I'm sitting in right now, but I'm close enough that it would be a lucky shot, indeed.

They've stopped all trains in the entire country, even the streetcars, and the kids are staying home from school tomorrow. As are many businessmen, their firms more concerned about their safety than the four-hour workday most people put in on Friday over here. All in all, it's a pleasant diversion for everyone, an act of God that brings a bit of excitement to the daily routine. I'm just glad the bars are open, otherwise this entry would have been about four lines long.

It's sort of like it used to be in Atlanta before the Yankees came, when we got a few flakes of snow on the ground. Once the slightest flake fought its way through the climatical defenses enough to land and shout, triumphantly, Allahu Akhbar! Quake with fear before me! before becoming a small puff of vapor, well, that's when the fabric of Atlanta society would start coming apart at the seams. The groceries stores were run upon, with milk and bread being carried by the truckload to the homes of weather-maddened Southerners. The schools were locked down tight; lest the inexperienced, though well-meaning bus drivers tumble off a cliff, out of control on ice-slick roads with a full load of schoolchildren. We didn't like snow, not even the rumor of it.

Growing up in Cherokee County, we had a rather enviable relationship with snow. It's a large county, with a hilly bit up north, in the Canton area. But the rest of the county sits around Lake Allatoona, and is predominately mild in its winters. School closings, however, are granular only to the county level, which meant that whenever some meth-addled bus driver in Ball Ground happened to notice a patch of frost on the grass on her way out of the trailer park, the school board would immediately be notified, and all educational activities throughout the county brought to a halt. Sometimes, some farmer's pond was frozen over in a forgotten corner somewhere; the very presence of ice somewhere induced enough unease among the elected county officials that they just played it safe and let the kids have the rest of the week off.

During the Winter of '87, we actually had 16 days off in a row for snow. Down in our end of the county, we did indeed see snow the first day. I remember it well: We were sitting in home room, the first class of the day, when the first flakes began to fall, the shimmering little harbingers of freedom. In panicked tones, the principal came on the PA and announced that we should all get on the buses, or hop in our cars, and get the Hell home, not forgetting of course to stop on the way for whatever bread or milk might still be available in the local grocery store, every man for himself! I could just see him in his office: laying down the intercom microphone and strapping himself to his chair, cradling his service .45, a captain going down with the ship.

Predictably, once we were all home the snow stopped. In fact, it was 65 degrees by midday, and we were playing football in the yard with 8 men per team. It was a pleasant diversion for a Tuesday afternoon, but we were resigned to getting back to the grind bright and early the next morning. But there was no school the next day. Nor the day after that. In fact, for the next two weeks, despite spring-like temperatures and sunny skies, we were out of school on account of snow. Every day the disruption continued, the fun factor was reduced by half, until finally we were all wondering whether they had forgotten to tell everybody to go back. But no, there was Guy Sharpe every morning, announcing the one and only school closing in the state of Georgia: Cherokee County. For two solid weeks. I always wondered what people in other counties thought of that. At one point, the guy shows them a map of Georgia with little suns all over it and 60+ degree temperatures, then announces that our hillbilly asses still won't come out from under our rocks.

They cancelled our Spring Break that year because of that. Bastards. I didn't think much about it then, being a latchkey kid, but I can imagine that a lot of parents had actually planned their precious two-week vacations to coincide with Spring Break. But then, Cherokee County was a different crowd back then. I mean, to have vacations implies that you, you know, have a job.

But it became clearer to me in my last two years of High School how something like that could happen. It was easy to start rumors about snow sightings in Canton. Even mentioning an ice storm in Birmingham would have the teachers looking nervous. Do that in home room, and by lunch it would be all over school. Somebody would come up to you and tell you that the county seat was under a six-foot sheet of glacial ice, and that school would be cancelled forever, what with the coming ice age and all. It's a miracle that the public school system functions at all.

Weather is always what the Germans call a gaudi, a good time.

Technorati Tags: orkan, puppy, snow day

Apropos this post over at Wordpress, I'll be upgrading to the latest version. Please pardon if things look screwy for a bit.

Update:  Well, that wasn't so hard.  As you were.

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

Despite my near-absolute conviction that it would never happen, Chairman Jobs dropped the i-Bomb today on a suspecting crowd. By all accounts, the patented jobsian Reality Distortion Field went all the way to eleven at MacWorld Expo this morning as the Steve introduced the new Apple iPhone. The iPhone is, without a doubt, the sexiest-sounding piece of hardware ever, period. As its proponents were hoping, it brings to a mobile phone typical Apple touches, like motion-sensing gestures and easy media management, and does so in a way that will have Apple fans and detractors alike buzzin about it for weeks to come. It looks like a big, big win for Apple, and a disruptive entry into the smart-phone market.

"But hey, little Rube, why the long face?" you might ask, should you see the frown I'm wearing at this moment. And it may seem strange, me being a Mac Fanboi and it being Apple's day in the sun, that I would be in any kind of mood other than near-ecstasy. So, I'll explain. Although I'm a big fan of the Mac, there's nothing here that bodes well for that platform. The iPhone will almost certainly be a cross-platform device, which means a lot more Windows users are going to be using it than Mac users. And since I'm not really in the market for a portable phone, it's nothing more to me than yet another cool iPod that I can't afford. The iPhone comes at the expense of the Mac platform, not for its greater glory. In fact, it stole from the Macintosh platform its annual holy day, the MacWorld keynote.

Probably the biggest news for Mac users, which will remain almost completely overlooked, is that a commercially-available version of Mac OS X now exists for portable devices. Windows CE has been, up to now, the only really normal OS for handheld computers (not including the current iPod OS, which is most certainly the best-selling). But today, Apple showed they have a portable, flash-based version of OS X running on a hardware platform that includes wireless networking, bluetooth, and a brilliant touch-screen display to show it on. This makes the iPhone the best handheld PC on the market.

This bodes well for the iPod, of course. I don't see Apple abandoning. the sub-$500 market completely, and now that they have the hardware and software platform for it, could 802.11-enabled, bluetooth-capable iPods finally become a reality?

What I would like to see happen now is a hard-disk based iPod successor, somewhere in the 30-60GB range, with the form-factor and OS X version of the iPhone, but without the mobile phone part of it. It would be the second coming of the Newton, at a time when nobody gives a second thought to plopping down 350 bucks for an Apple product that fits in their pocket.

Jobs' demo today showed why Apple have made a lot of the decisions we've seen over the past year or so. First, they dropped the PortalPlayer iPod platform at the height of its popularity. Then, they made headlines all over the Web by securing enormous amounts of flash-memory around Asia, and everyone postulated flash-based MacBooks by year's end. Then, it leaked out that Apple had patented resolution-independent user interface technology, presumably for large screens running OS X 10.5 Leopard. Who would've thought that they were actually thinking about high-density mobile displays running a tiny, tiny version of OS X?

While everyone was salivating over a phone today (a phone for gossake!), I was thinking just one thing: Cool! There's a version of OS X that runs on StrongARM (or whatever's in there), includes Safari and Cover Flow, and runs entirely from flash memory! I wonder what the boot-times are on one of those phones?

Winners: Yahoo Apple Google Cingular OS X

Losers: Zune Windows CE The Macintosh Me

Technorati Tags: Apple, iPhone, OS X, Po' ol' Rube

Just a little something to keep Zonker from getting bored.

Technorati Tags: abject humiliation

I hope everyone had a happy and raucous holiday season. My December was surreal enough. I'm moving to England, it seems.

"You'd have to set up little 'blog policemen' on these entries to shoo away onlookers - 'Move along, nothing to see here!' But no, people stand there looking at the dead animal at the side of the road, at two people full of pride making complete fools of themselves in public, and then go and write whole blog entries about it." Stefan Niggemeier, media journalist and photoblog author, on a dispute in the blogosphere. The two "complete fools" Niggemeier means here are 'DonAlphonso', author of the A-list blog "Rebellmarkt", and Peter Turi, also a journalist, and author of the "Turi2" blog. The start of the argument goes a long way back, but the current escalation began when 'DonAlphonso' repeatedly referred to Peter Turi in his blog as a "blogging failure" - Turi struck back by calling Meyer a "moaning minnie". What started as a minor skirmish developed into a heated conflict, with both sides receiving support. Over the course of the dispute, old scores were settled, fervent slanging matches went on in several blogs, and threats of lawyers were made. Finally, Peter Turi shut down his blog - though it's unclear whether this was directly or only indirectly related to the argument.

This article is a translation of a german text that was first released on my weblog "buchstaben in bewegung". It attracted some attention in the german blogosphere, so an aquaintance of mine, Niall McCourt, translated it. I´ve asked Rube if he could publish it here, so he gave me permission ;-). I´d like to bring this article to a greater audience, so if you feel you´d like to pick it up and republish it somewhere, go for it.

Niall is a freelance translator. If you think he could do a job for you, email him.

Howdy, friends and neighbors! Man, I've hard a tough couple of weeks. Ever since thanksgiving I've been busier than a butt-legged man in a nun-kicking contest. Deadlines to meet, servers to build and ship, the entire back catalog of X-Files to watch. We're all the way up to the one where that guy from Monk kills people with his dark-matter shadow.

Not that it's all been work-related, mind you. I've recently re-discovered video games. With the little woman away this past weekend, I eschewed eating, bathing, and sleeping to sail a cartoon boat around an imaginary world in Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. Despite the obvious gayness inherent in all Zelda games, I'm secure enough in my masculinity to declare this THE BEST GAME EVER. I haven't been sucked into such a bottomless miasma of escapism and bad personal hygiene since the first Zelda, back in '88. That's right: miasma!

Anyhoo, that's about it. Almost. I also got a call from a rather large open-source company that you've probably heard of to come work for them in England. Maybe I'll move there with my sweetie, who knows. It'll be a big investment at first, since I'll have to buy a bowler hat and have my teeth darkened, but it'll probably be worth it, just for the weather.

I hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving. It's my favorite holiday, I think. It's truly a thing that everyone can do together, without worrying about offending anyone, unless it's because it's a typically American holiday. And let's face it: If that offends, then I'm happy to offend.

I cooked a turkey this year, for the first time ever. Being until recently a vegetarian, I was baffled by the various organs that I pulled out of the carcass, all neatly delivered in a little plastic bag. I realized that it was all probably edible, but I balked at eating the bagged innards, in the fear that one of them was the gizzard, which supposedly leaves a bad taste.

Treating Europeans to Thanksgiving is an enormous responsibility, but I think I pulled it off without disgracing my ancestors. By all accounts, my Southern Cornbread Dressing was not only edible, but delicious. I never realized that the defining taste of Thanksgiving Dressing is sage, of all things, and I was struggling Thursday afternoon with a tasteless mash of cornbread and gravy. But a few panicked phone calls to Mom can solve almost any crisis, and she finally, after all these years, spilled the recipe.

The in-laws were over, and I was able to feed and water them. There was French wine, German beer, and Southern American food. In short, there was much to be thankful for. And that's what I like about Thanksgiving: That reminder to sort out the things that make you happy, and be thankful for them. It's a good tradition; there's plenty of time to sweat the small stuff.

Hugs, Rube.

Technorati Tags: thanksgiving

Being a pompous douchebag, as the distinguished gentleman from North Carolina unmistakably is, does have its drawbacks. Can you imagine what kind of dishonest life you would have to lead if, like Edwards, you had to apologize nationally, in humiliating fashion, for trying to find your kids a Playstation 3 at Wal-Mart?

John Edwards _ a vocal critic of the retailer _ asked his local Wal- Mart store for help in getting the potential 2008 presidential candidate a Sony PlayStation 3. Edwards said a volunteer did so by mistake.

Edwards told The Associated Press that the volunteer "feels terrible" about seeking the game unit at Wal-Mart a day after his boss criticized the company, saying it doesn't treat its employees fairly.

Being an antisocial libertarian helps me immeasurably when it comes to lemming-like materialism. Were I not such a late adopter of technology, I would go into Wal-Mart myself and root around for Playstations 3; I would do this without a bad conscience, and would not have to apologize to anybody. Trust me, if Hitler's Electronics had them in ample supply, and at an acceptable price, I would walk in smiling with Visa in hand.

And now, as John Edwards contorts himself into various contrite postures, blaming his actions on subordinates, Playstations are most likely already in the homes of Wal-Mart executives across the country. Every Wal-Mart employee in North Carolina now has the opportunity to buy one before the good Senator. It's too bad they only make about $2 an hour, else they could bedeck the trailer with Christmas cheer, whilst a gloom hangs about the Edwards Manse.

Technorati Tags: consoles, politics, ps3

'Kubuntu' is the Swahili word for, 'Suck it, luser!'

For a lark, I downloaded the 4.5GB DVD for Kubuntu Linux. Ubuntu, upon which it's based, is the current darling of the Linux scene, so I figured I'd see how long it's come along since I last installed it.

Let's see...

• No MP3 support, even for network streams like you'll find at Shoutcast
• Major headache getting my ATI Radeon X1600 to work with 3D screen savers
• Refresh rate capped at 75Hz
• Printer sharing doesn't work
• Zero progress on sound card configuration
• Default resolution of 1600x1200 is a bit...ambitious. I can't find any way to change it permanently
• Applications like Firefox, Thunderbird, KOffice, Scribus, et. al. not included
• Did this thing really just ask me to insert my install DVD?! What is this, 1998?
• System always locks up after KDE session logout

Ah well, at least in Windows I can change my default sound card without being a Dungeon Master.

Technorati Tags: ubuntu, linux

For no particular reason, here's a list of national sales tax rates of European countries.

via Europe for Visitors.

Technorati Tags: germans, travel

Do you ever get the feeling that, just beneath the surface of the visible world, the world which you and I would consider reality, strange forces lurk, forming a sort of world-within-a-world? I didn't either, honestly. I mean, I've seen The Matrix, and I have to admit that their explanation, that a war between man and machine created a 300-year long meta-reality in which mankind is held thrall to a sentient, evil race of machines, would go a long way toward explaining things, like Everybody Loves Raymond.

But I'm not here to take cheapshots at non-threatening TV shows. I'm here to tell you that everything you've sensed, everything you've feared about meta-reality complex is true. I know this, because I've discovered a blind spot, a bubble in the Matrix. I've discovered a gathering place in the Internet where the world's top engineers, obviously unbeknownst to our bionical slavemasters, continue a discussion which already spans 9000 words, almost 40 pages of calculations and hypotheses.

It's a discussion about bacon.

Conclusions Microwaved - The bacon came out extremely crisp throughout both the fat and meat of the bacon. It felt a bit thicker than I expected from a thin cut piece of bacon. Examining the fat collected in the paper towels leads me to believe that very little fat was rendered out in comparison to the pan fry method. The technique is simple and hands free, but a problem that I have is that the paper towel stuck to several of the pieces of bacon. This may have been because I allowed the bacon to rest and drain on the same paper towel it was cooked on. Another issue is the limited number of bacon strips you can cook in a microwave oven at one time (but the time savings probably more than makes up for this).

Pan fried - The bacon felt the thinnest and lightest of the three. The bacon fat was crispy while the meat was slightly chewy. I actually prefer my bacon this way (not totally crunchy and crispy, but with some texture to it), but others may not. All in all, a good method to cook bacon but time consuming.

Broiled - The bacon was burnt in some spots and the meat felt undercooked. The areas need the burns were bitter in taste and the texture was soft and soggy throughout (except for the blackened parts). Not much fat was rendered off either. I would not recommend this technique.

So, microwaving is king if you're looking for bacon that feels thicker than what you purchased and crunchy throughout. Pan frying is great for a thin, light bacon with a little chew in the meat.

Technorati Tags: bacon, engineering

In a startling development, the smug leftist hipsters at überblog Boing Boing have gone two (2) straight days without mentioning Diebold. The last mention of the maligned "voting" machine manufacturer was right before the "election" results came in. Which, coincidentally, showed huge Democrat "wins".

Could it be that Diebold's agents have gotten to Xeni and Cory?! It couldn't possibly be that the whole body of anti-e-voting writings was just screeching partisan hysterics, could it?

Technorati Tags: electioneering, boingboing

Being a late adopter has its advantages. For example, I just picked up a Scott i960CS, which is a commodity DVD/standalone DivX player. It cost about fifty bucks, and is so generic that it's nigh ungoogleable. I bought it to replace my fifty-dollar DVD player, which was getting a bit long in the tooth. About three years ago, I really, really wanted one of these, but they were going for a cool $400 at the local shops, so I decided to buy shoes and electricity instead. Now, I can pick one up at about 12% the cost that I would have gladly forked out back then, had I had the cash.

What a cool thing these doodads are. It will play just about anything you throw at it, format-wise. You can easily shut off the irritating region restrictions that would otherwise keep you from playing DVDs from other countries, which in my case would be the US-bought movies that comprise about half my collection. It's got a USB port, into which you can plug a thumb drive, iPod, or external hard drive, and browse them to play media.

My big idea was to copy all my music and movies to an external 160GB hard drive, hook it up to the USB port, and never have to switch discs again. Unfortunately, two things keep me from doing that. First, the Scott doesn't read long filenames from external devices (data DVDs seem to work fine), so you'll have to wade through FAT32-style mangled names, trying to figure out what “BLOWJO~1.AVI? could possibly be. And second, whenever you access the external drive, it thrashes around alarmingly, as the player apparently scans the entire thing at a go. It's scary enough that I'll stick to copying things over to the USB flash stick for the time being.

I realize this was all new and hot about three years ago, but that's what's great about being a late adopter: 50 bucks and you get that consumerist rush. Now, I can't wait until Christmas 2009 when I can pick up that sweet-ass Xbox 360 I'll be having my eye on.

Technorati Tags: consoles, entertainment

Twelve years ago, the Republicans took power under the leadership of Newt Gingrich. Newt was a man that even 17-year old liberal drama fags at my high school hated in the '80s, so I was predispositioned to like him, even before I was old enough to vote. Anything that annoys pretentious, faux-political teenage liberals is fine by my book.

When they first came into power, the nation was damn near on internal Red Alert. Conspiracy theories, ranging from Con-Trails to cattle mutilations(!) by black-helicopter-flying secret government cryptofascist organizations, Unabombers, X-Files, Branch Davidians, Randy Weaver, Timothy McVeigh; you guys remember all that stuff, right? Well, it looks like it's that time again, kids! (Only this time, the Democrats have got the Patriot Act in their bag of tricks. And that seemed like such a good idea when the GOP was running the show...)

Gingrich, along with rich genius bastard Dick Armey, devised a scheme to defuse the situation. They called it the Contract with America, and it amounted to a Republican business plan for the newly-acquired Congress, Inc. I'm including it here on the vain hope that I'll actually read it all the way through at some point, and be able to assess what sort of progress the Republicans made over the last 12 years, in comparison to what they were actually all fired-up to do.

As Republican Members of the House of Representatives and as citizens seeking to join that body we propose not just to change its policies, but even more important, to restore the bonds of trust between the people and their elected representatives.

That is why, in this era of official evasion and posturing, we offer instead a detailed agenda for national renewal, a written commitment with no fine print. This year's election offers the chance, after four decades of one-party control, to bring to the House a new majority that will transform the way Congress works. That historic change would be the end of government that is too big, too intrusive, and too easy with the public's money. It can be the beginning of a Congress that respects the values and shares the faith of the American family. Like Lincoln, our first Republican president, we intend to act "with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right." To restore accountability to Congress. To end its cycle of scandal and disgrace. To make us all proud again of the way free people govern themselves. On the first day of the 104th Congress, the new Republican majority will immediately pass the following major reforms, aimed at restoring the faith and trust of the American people in their government: • FIRST, require all laws that apply to the rest of the country also apply equally to the Congress; • SECOND, select a major, independent auditing firm to conduct a comprehensive audit of Congress for waste, fraud or abuse; • THIRD, cut the number of House committees, and cut committee staff by one-third; • FOURTH, limit the terms of all committee chairs; • FIFTH, ban the casting of proxy votes in committee; • SIXTH, require committee meetings to be open to the public; • SEVENTH, require a three-fifths majority vote to pass a tax increase; • EIGHTH, guarantee an honest accounting of our Federal Budget by implementing zero base-line budgeting. Thereafter, within the first 100 days of the 104th Congress, we shall bring to the House Floor the following bills, each to be given full and open debate, each to be given a clear and fair vote and each to be immediately available this day for public inspection and scrutiny. 1. THE FISCAL RESPONSIBILITY ACT: A balanced budget/tax limitation amendment and a legislative line-item veto to restore fiscal responsibility to an out- of-control Congress, requiring them to live under the same budget constraints as families and businesses. (Bill Text) (Description)

2. THE TAKING BACK OUR STREETS ACT: An anti-crime package including stronger truth-in- sentencing, "good faith" exclusionary rule exemptions, effective death penalty provisions, and cuts in social spending from this summer's "crime" bill to fund prison construction and additional law enforcement to keep people secure in their neighborhoods and kids safe in their schools. (Bill Text) (Description)
3. THE PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY ACT: Discourage illegitimacy and teen pregnancy by prohibiting welfare to minor mothers and denying increased AFDC for additional children while on welfare, cut spending for welfare programs, and enact a tough two-years-and-out provision with work requirements to promote individual responsibility. (Bill Text) (Description)
4. THE FAMILY REINFORCEMENT ACT: Child support enforcement, tax incentives for adoption, strengthening rights of parents in their children's education, stronger child pornography laws, and an elderly dependent care tax credit to reinforce the central role of families in American society. (Bill Text) (Description)
5. THE AMERICAN DREAM RESTORATION ACT: A S500 per child tax credit, begin repeal of the marriage tax penalty, and creation of American Dream Savings Accounts to provide middle class tax relief. (Bill Text) (Description)
6. THE NATIONAL SECURITY RESTORATION ACT: No U.S. troops under U.N. command and restoration of the essential parts of our national security funding to strengthen our national defense and maintain our credibility around the world. (Bill Text) (Description)
7. THE SENIOR CITIZENS FAIRNESS ACT: Raise the Social Security earnings limit which currently forces seniors out of the work force, repeal the 1993 tax hikes on Social Security benefits and provide tax incentives for private long-term care insurance to let Older Americans keep more of what they have earned over the years. (Bill Text) (Description)
8. THE JOB CREATION AND WAGE ENHANCEMENT ACT: Small business incentives, capital gains cut and indexation, neutral cost recovery, risk assessment/cost-benefit analysis, strengthening the Regulatory Flexibility Act and unfunded mandate reform to create jobs and raise worker wages. (Bill Text) (Description)
9. THE COMMON SENSE LEGAL REFORM ACT: "Loser pays" laws, reasonable limits on punitive damages and reform of product liability laws to stem the endless tide of litigation. (Bill Text) (Description)
10. THE CITIZEN LEGISLATURE ACT: A first-ever vote on term limits to replace career politicians with citizen legislators. (Description) Further, we will instruct the House Budget Committee to report to the floor and we will work to enact additional budget savings, beyond the budget cuts specifically included in the legislation described above, to ensure that the Federal budget deficit will be less than it would have been without the enactment of these bills. Respecting the judgment of our fellow citizens as we seek their mandate for reform, we hereby pledge our names to this Contract with America.

Technorati Tags: 2006 election, abject humiliation, newt, politics

Rube drinks only 'prosumer'-level beer.

When watching baseball, live in the stadium, things are not always what they appear. Oftentimes, a pop-fly to deep short will look just like a home run to someone sitting in the upper deck, causing half the crowd (in Atlanta, anyway) to jump out of their seats and spill their beer, only to sit down again in humiliation when the shortstop catches it.

People who know how to watch baseball never judge a ball by the crack of the bat, or the appearance of its arc: They watch the outfielders. If the outfields turn around and start high-tailing for the fences, you just might have a homerun on your hands, stand up and scream. Otherwise, if they just start scratching themselves and looking into the crowd while the ball's still sailing, just play it cool, because it's a pop-up.

That's why I refer to the various cranks, commies, and dictators of the world collectively as The Outfielders. If I'm unsure how I should feel about a certain event, I judge their reaction to it, and relativize. If they lose their shit and start foaming at the mouth about something Bush or the USA in general does, it's a pretty fair bet that it's just what the doctor ordered. On the other hand, there's this:

Chavez applauds Rumsfeld's resignation

CARACAS (VENEZUELA): Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez applauded the resignation of US Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and suggested President George W. Bush should quit as well. Chavez pointed to the strong gains by Democrats in US congressional elections and called it a "reprisal vote" against Bush's policies and the Iraq war. The leftist leader beamed as he read aloud a news report of Rumsfeld's resignation.

Not only liberal Americans but peace-loving people all over the world must feel relieved by Democrats’ landslide victory Tuesday. But few would feel more pleased with the election results than North Korea’s Kim Jong-il

Plebiscite on an Outlaw Empire The wave - and make no mistake, it's a global one - has just crashed on America's shores, soaking our imperial masters. It's a sight for sore eyes.

"The US government of Republicans and neo-conservatives, which is a reckless government of idiots, will be reined in with the Democrats taking over the House," Oraib Rintawi, President of the Al Quds Centre for Political Studies in Amman...

LANDSLIDE! ...a big thanks from Michael Moore

You did it! We did it! The impossible has happened: A majority of Americans have soundly and forcefully removed Bush's party from control of the House of Representatives and the Republicans have also, miraculously, been tossed out of running our United States Senate.

TUESDAY WAS GOOD NEWS FOR .... WHO?[sic]

Those who want a weaker America

(Accepting the award will be Dominique Marie François René Galouzeau de Villepin, sometimes known as Dominique de Villepin, the Prime Minister of France. Dominique was the leader of the Axis of Weasels before he became Prime Minister.)

A poll earlier this year said that something like 58% of Europeans wanted a weaker America. They got their wish on Tuesday. Who is going to be there to pull their candied asses out of the oven when they finally wake up and realize the great strides that have been made in the Islamification of Europe? Hello Eurabia.

The first blow to be struck in the weakening of America will be for the Democrats to get rid of John Bolton as the Ambassador to the United Nations. They'll replace him with someone who will not stand up to UN corruption and the forces who want to weaken us.

The leftist media.

(Accepting the award for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, The Boston Globe, Time Magazine, Newsweek Magazine and too many more to mention will be Dan Rather)

Ninety percent or more of these people vote Democrat. They engaged in a six-year campaign of demonization of George Bush. It worked.

"Thank you, Ms. Speaker, may I have another!"

Technorati Tags: 2006 election, pelosi, politics, cleveland steamer

How to draw a car in MS Paint.

Technorati Tags: Art, Tip of the Day

Seeing as how, in a matter of weeks, I'll be working in an exclusively Linux-based environment, I figured I'd fire up my Fedora installation again and see how's tricks. Linux has been playing the Ike to my Tina for over a decade, always disappointing and abusing me every chance it gets, and I just keep coming back for more. This time, though, it's for real; I can feel it. Anyway, I don't have a choice, so let's just tell the neighbors I fell off the swing, and concentrate on the good times.

One of the biggest gripes I've had about Linux was its sound card support*. Every Linux distribution you can think of still defaults to 1993's concept of sound hardware. Namely, only one application can play a sound at any given time, and it locks the sound hardware from being used by other applications, for what reason not even God knows. This is behavior that belongs in a single-user, single-tasking operating system like DOS, not in a modern multiuser environment like Linux.

This problem was addressed back in the day by using "sound servers", like ESD or artsd, to provide a layer between the applications and the OSS-supported hardware. This introduced a huge amount of latency, however, and was generally considered a stopgap measure even at its inception back in 1998 (or maybe even earlier, I can't find that info). Even worse, software had to be written to explicitly support it or it was useless.

The limitations of the OSS+Sound Server architecture were overcome by a project known as ALSA, which introduced software mixing at the kernel level. This created an OSS-compatible, multi-streamed abstraction for sound hardware, and obviated the need for sound daemons altogether. That was back in, oh, 2000 or so, and to this day, every single Linux distribution still ships with sound servers and software mixing disabled.

Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, et. al still configure sound hardware to be accessible by one application at a time, despite ALSA's hard work. This means, for instance, that your Flash Player will freeze your browser if you happen to be listening to music in the background. Or if you get a system beep, it will lock you out of using your sound card for as long as the artsd/ESD timeout is set up. Games will not work. This sucks, of course, and is no way to compute in 2007.

The way to fix this is fairly simple. Simply put the following into your /etc/asound.conf, or in your ~/.asoundrc:

pcm.swmixer { type dmix ipckey 1234 slave { pcm "hw:0,0" periodtime 0 periodsize 1024 buffersize 4096 rate 44100 } }

Now, I profess neither to having written that snippet, nor to having any understanding whatsoever as to what it does. But since I put that magical incantation into use, I've had no problems whatsoever with sound-card locking, or Flash plugins, or anything else. It just works.

Now why haven't the distributions adopted this behavior as the default, instead of their asinine insistence on single-channel sound support? The reason is simple: Linux distributions hate their users, and want to destroy them by any means possible.

This would also explain their sticking with X Window System.

• See also: Kubuntu: Sucks Linux Sound: Still suckin’ after all these years

  Technorati Tags: ALSA, Linux, Fedora

In order to keep a vase full of flowers fresh, drop a penny (or other copper coin) into the water. Since 1982, pennies are copper-plated. Pre-1982 pennies were 95% copper or more, so would theoretically work better.

Technorati Tags: Flowers, Tip of the Day

The Wednesday Tip:

How to open a 4th Generation iPod:

This week's (and the inaugural) Tuesday Tip:

How to play a G Chord.

Computers have been around for a while, now. The first digital computers that did useful work were used by the British during World War II to crack the Germans' Enigma cryptographic scheme, with the help of literary greats Alan Turing and Kate Winslett. Computer networks came about not long after. In fact, the network technology that most people use today, Ethernet, was developed back during the Nixon administration by Xerox. But that's really more of a hardware spec, invisible to most of us that use it, and used only in the most vaguely analogous sense by the Internet and wireless connections that we find ourselves using more and more.

What runs over those networks, well, that's the stuff that really concerns us. We wouldn't care if our SMB, HTTP, or NFS protocols were running over a length of twine connecting a couple of dead beavers, just as long as they kept the links up and the bits moving. But for some reason, these protocols, like unto the network itself conceived in the dark, smoke-filled chambers of engineering history, are still less than adequate in real world situations. I'll give you an example: There's not a computer or operating system built today that gracefully handles an unexpectedly disconnected network volume.

I'll grant, for the sake of argument, that I'm on the only moron in the world who would forget to dismount a network drive before clapping his laptop shut and carrying it out of the office. But you would think, in the 30 or more years we've been using networks to share our data, that exactly this scenario might have come up at some point in a worst-case-scenario brainstorming session by one of the major vendors. But I guess the very idea such a thing could happen was judged preposterous, and relegated to the realm of science fiction, freeing the engineering team to work on more critical issues like the Desktop Cleanup Wizard.

So maybe the story I'm about to tell could land me in the rubber room, but I'll chance it, as the Truth Wants to Be Free. As you may have already inferred, in my hurry today, I forgot to dismount a shared network volume before packing my laptop and heading out of the office . Upon opening my laptop once more, I was greeted by the Symbol of Waiting, which refused to go away. All the while, in the corner of my friendly graphical user interface, said network volume's icon was displayed, indicating a continuing, vigorous mounting. Obviously, the Symbol of Waiting was my computer's way of telling me that, while it seemed unlikely that this drive could be mounted without access to its network or, indeed, any network whatsoever, it was still experiencing a moment of indecision. It was telling me that it was considering the two conflicting possibilities of a) the network connection being gone, and therefore all processes using it should be informed of this fact, or b) the server having followed me to the café I'm sitting in, installed a network cabling plant, snuggled itself under my table, and then connected itself to my laptop, and was just in the processing of booting itself back up in order to serve that dreadfully missing network share; a possibility which, I might add, the computer was willing to indulge ad infinitum. Apparently, Occam's Razor is a difficult principle to express in Objective-C.

All of this culminated in a computer caught in a permanent moment of indecision. I like to believe that every time you boot your computer, the cycle of its life is started anew, with the hopes and dreams of a better life this time around; the corollary of course being that you've had to viciously snuff out the life of its previous incarnation. Thus as I was administering the Mac equivalent of a three-finger salute (Ctrl-Cmd-Power) to this shivering, broken husk of a computer a moment ago, I felt no regret. It was better to end it there, to ease its suffering. I felt pity however, in that it probably didn't understand what it was going through, what the source of its confusion and suffering was.

But I also couldn't help think it could have been prevented. Perhaps the status check of a network mount could be moved into a thread, instead of being embedded in the main event loop of the user interface, blocking all input? Perhaps an operating system could check to see if there are any open files on a mounted network drive before betting its entire existence upon the fact that it may, one day, return? Is the termination of a single process blocking on a stat call really worth the life of the entire ecosystem? These are questions for the politicians, apparently, and not for the medics in the field.

In a technical interview recently, a man asked me if I knew the point of "hard-mounting" network shares, particularly those of the NFS variety. I gave the textbook answer he expected, that it was preferable for applications to block and fail in the case of a missing disk than to go on believing that it still existed, without the knowledge that their write operations had failed, and their data were most likely corrupted. It's easy to be so cold and calculating when you haven't seen the suffering involved in such a catastrophic break. It's easy to extoll the virtues of data integrity über alles. But from the perspective of the victim, ignorance is, unfortunately, bliss.

UPDATE: This was, oddly, the Whine of the Week on Macbreak Weekly.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Bill Gates, User Interface

Over 2 years ago, I made a modest little proposal about cameras embedded in cell phones:

So, I was wondering if there’s a way to send that directly to the police. For example, if you’re pretty sure you’re about to get mugged, you could just take a picture of the guy and send it quick-like to the cops. Then, you could say, “whoa, G, you might as well keep on moving: five-o’s got your mug.? Of course, this may come across as somewhat antagonistic, which muggers generally don’t like. Anyway, if you send an MMS to 911, does it work? It should. Then, we could all be bitch-ass little snitches at the touch of a button.

And today, what do I see?

Catching criminals in the act these days is s ometimes as easy as pressing a button on your camera phone. Now the city is moving to simplify your ability to share telltale evidence of subway flashers, house burglars or even a suspect pothole, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said yesterday. "If you see a crime in progress or a dangerous building condition, you'll be able to transmit images to 911 or online to nyc.gov," Bloomberg said in his State of the City address.

You ever have one of those days when you say to yourself, "If the world would just shut up and do as I say, it would be a better place for everybody"? Well, I don't. I speak, and the world listens. Sometimes it just takes a little longer than it should. Stupid world.

Hurricane Kyrill is blasting across Germany at the moment, leveling trees and flinging stucco about. Man, you'd think Gabriel was tooting his horn outside, the way the locals are reacting. Mind you, Kyrill's not really a hurricane, but rather a winter gale. That would be the way LEO translates the german word Orkan; well, that and hurricane. But a hurricane is necessarily in the Caribbean, moving west. Technically, anyway.

But I'm not here to split hairs, I'm here to talk about battering winds, upwards of 200 kilometers per hour. Not sure how fast that is in real measurement, but I can confirm it's a-howling through the alleyways outside. You can actually hear it whistling through the cathedral belltower, a good half-mile away. It's sort of a low hoot. The roof tiles they have over here are bound to start flying around at some point, injuring passers-by unlucky enough to be out in it, à la Ben Hur. I've still got to get home from this bar I'm sitting in right now, but I'm close enough that it would be a lucky shot, indeed.

They've stopped all trains in the entire country, even the streetcars, and the kids are staying home from school tomorrow. As are many businessmen, their firms more concerned about their safety than the four-hour workday most people put in on Friday over here. All in all, it's a pleasant diversion for everyone, an act of God that brings a bit of excitement to the daily routine. I'm just glad the bars are open, otherwise this entry would have been about four lines long.

It's sort of like it used to be in Atlanta before the Yankees came, when we got a few flakes of snow on the ground. Once the slightest flake fought its way through the climatical defenses enough to land and shout, triumphantly, Allahu Akhbar! Quake with fear before me! before becoming a small puff of vapor, well, that's when the fabric of Atlanta society would start coming apart at the seams. The groceries stores were run upon, with milk and bread being carried by the truckload to the homes of weather-maddened Southerners. The schools were locked down tight; lest the inexperienced, though well-meaning bus drivers tumble off a cliff, out of control on ice-slick roads with a full load of schoolchildren. We didn't like snow, not even the rumor of it.

Growing up in Cherokee County, we had a rather enviable relationship with snow. It's a large county, with a hilly bit up north, in the Canton area. But the rest of the county sits around Lake Allatoona, and is predominately mild in its winters. School closings, however, are granular only to the county level, which meant that whenever some meth-addled bus driver in Ball Ground happened to notice a patch of frost on the grass on her way out of the trailer park, the school board would immediately be notified, and all educational activities throughout the county brought to a halt. Sometimes, some farmer's pond was frozen over in a forgotten corner somewhere; the very presence of ice somewhere induced enough unease among the elected county officials that they just played it safe and let the kids have the rest of the week off.

During the Winter of '87, we actually had 16 days off in a row for snow. Down in our end of the county, we did indeed see snow the first day. I remember it well: We were sitting in home room, the first class of the day, when the first flakes began to fall, the shimmering little harbingers of freedom. In panicked tones, the principal came on the PA and announced that we should all get on the buses, or hop in our cars, and get the Hell home, not forgetting of course to stop on the way for whatever bread or milk might still be available in the local grocery store, every man for himself! I could just see him in his office: laying down the intercom microphone and strapping himself to his chair, cradling his service .45, a captain going down with the ship.

Predictably, once we were all home the snow stopped. In fact, it was 65 degrees by midday, and we were playing football in the yard with 8 men per team. It was a pleasant diversion for a Tuesday afternoon, but we were resigned to getting back to the grind bright and early the next morning. But there was no school the next day. Nor the day after that. In fact, for the next two weeks, despite spring-like temperatures and sunny skies, we were out of school on account of snow. Every day the disruption continued, the fun factor was reduced by half, until finally we were all wondering whether they had forgotten to tell everybody to go back. But no, there was Guy Sharpe every morning, announcing the one and only school closing in the state of Georgia: Cherokee County. For two solid weeks. I always wondered what people in other counties thought of that. At one point, the guy shows them a map of Georgia with little suns all over it and 60+ degree temperatures, then announces that our hillbilly asses still won't come out from under our rocks.

They cancelled our Spring Break that year because of that. Bastards. I didn't think much about it then, being a latchkey kid, but I can imagine that a lot of parents had actually planned their precious two-week vacations to coincide with Spring Break. But then, Cherokee County was a different crowd back then. I mean, to have vacations implies that you, you know, have a job.

But it became clearer to me in my last two years of High School how something like that could happen. It was easy to start rumors about snow sightings in Canton. Even mentioning an ice storm in Birmingham would have the teachers looking nervous. Do that in home room, and by lunch it would be all over school. Somebody would come up to you and tell you that the county seat was under a six-foot sheet of glacial ice, and that school would be cancelled forever, what with the coming ice age and all. It's a miracle that the public school system functions at all.

Weather is always what the Germans call a gaudi, a good time.

Technorati Tags: orkan, puppy, snow day

Apropos this post over at Wordpress, I'll be upgrading to the latest version. Please pardon if things look screwy for a bit.

Update:  Well, that wasn't so hard.  As you were.

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

Despite my near-absolute conviction that it would never happen, Chairman Jobs dropped the i-Bomb today on a suspecting crowd. By all accounts, the patented jobsian Reality Distortion Field went all the way to eleven at MacWorld Expo this morning as the Steve introduced the new Apple iPhone. The iPhone is, without a doubt, the sexiest-sounding piece of hardware ever, period. As its proponents were hoping, it brings to a mobile phone typical Apple touches, like motion-sensing gestures and easy media management, and does so in a way that will have Apple fans and detractors alike buzzin about it for weeks to come. It looks like a big, big win for Apple, and a disruptive entry into the smart-phone market.

"But hey, little Rube, why the long face?" you might ask, should you see the frown I'm wearing at this moment. And it may seem strange, me being a Mac Fanboi and it being Apple's day in the sun, that I would be in any kind of mood other than near-ecstasy. So, I'll explain. Although I'm a big fan of the Mac, there's nothing here that bodes well for that platform. The iPhone will almost certainly be a cross-platform device, which means a lot more Windows users are going to be using it than Mac users. And since I'm not really in the market for a portable phone, it's nothing more to me than yet another cool iPod that I can't afford. The iPhone comes at the expense of the Mac platform, not for its greater glory. In fact, it stole from the Macintosh platform its annual holy day, the MacWorld keynote.

Probably the biggest news for Mac users, which will remain almost completely overlooked, is that a commercially-available version of Mac OS X now exists for portable devices. Windows CE has been, up to now, the only really normal OS for handheld computers (not including the current iPod OS, which is most certainly the best-selling). But today, Apple showed they have a portable, flash-based version of OS X running on a hardware platform that includes wireless networking, bluetooth, and a brilliant touch-screen display to show it on. This makes the iPhone the best handheld PC on the market.

This bodes well for the iPod, of course. I don't see Apple abandoning. the sub-$500 market completely, and now that they have the hardware and software platform for it, could 802.11-enabled, bluetooth-capable iPods finally become a reality?

What I would like to see happen now is a hard-disk based iPod successor, somewhere in the 30-60GB range, with the form-factor and OS X version of the iPhone, but without the mobile phone part of it. It would be the second coming of the Newton, at a time when nobody gives a second thought to plopping down 350 bucks for an Apple product that fits in their pocket.

Jobs' demo today showed why Apple have made a lot of the decisions we've seen over the past year or so. First, they dropped the PortalPlayer iPod platform at the height of its popularity. Then, they made headlines all over the Web by securing enormous amounts of flash-memory around Asia, and everyone postulated flash-based MacBooks by year's end. Then, it leaked out that Apple had patented resolution-independent user interface technology, presumably for large screens running OS X 10.5 Leopard. Who would've thought that they were actually thinking about high-density mobile displays running a tiny, tiny version of OS X?

While everyone was salivating over a phone today (a phone for gossake!), I was thinking just one thing: Cool! There's a version of OS X that runs on StrongARM (or whatever's in there), includes Safari and Cover Flow, and runs entirely from flash memory! I wonder what the boot-times are on one of those phones?

Winners: Yahoo Apple Google Cingular OS X

Losers: Zune Windows CE The Macintosh Me

Technorati Tags: Apple, iPhone, OS X, Po' ol' Rube

Just a little something to keep Zonker from getting bored.

Technorati Tags: abject humiliation

I hope everyone had a happy and raucous holiday season. My December was surreal enough. I'm moving to England, it seems.

"You'd have to set up little 'blog policemen' on these entries to shoo away onlookers - 'Move along, nothing to see here!' But no, people stand there looking at the dead animal at the side of the road, at two people full of pride making complete fools of themselves in public, and then go and write whole blog entries about it." Stefan Niggemeier, media journalist and photoblog author, on a dispute in the blogosphere. The two "complete fools" Niggemeier means here are 'DonAlphonso', author of the A-list blog "Rebellmarkt", and Peter Turi, also a journalist, and author of the "Turi2" blog. The start of the argument goes a long way back, but the current escalation began when 'DonAlphonso' repeatedly referred to Peter Turi in his blog as a "blogging failure" - Turi struck back by calling Meyer a "moaning minnie". What started as a minor skirmish developed into a heated conflict, with both sides receiving support. Over the course of the dispute, old scores were settled, fervent slanging matches went on in several blogs, and threats of lawyers were made. Finally, Peter Turi shut down his blog - though it's unclear whether this was directly or only indirectly related to the argument.

This article is a translation of a german text that was first released on my weblog "buchstaben in bewegung". It attracted some attention in the german blogosphere, so an aquaintance of mine, Niall McCourt, translated it. I´ve asked Rube if he could publish it here, so he gave me permission ;-). I´d like to bring this article to a greater audience, so if you feel you´d like to pick it up and republish it somewhere, go for it.

Niall is a freelance translator. If you think he could do a job for you, email him.

Howdy, friends and neighbors! Man, I've hard a tough couple of weeks. Ever since thanksgiving I've been busier than a butt-legged man in a nun-kicking contest. Deadlines to meet, servers to build and ship, the entire back catalog of X-Files to watch. We're all the way up to the one where that guy from Monk kills people with his dark-matter shadow.

Not that it's all been work-related, mind you. I've recently re-discovered video games. With the little woman away this past weekend, I eschewed eating, bathing, and sleeping to sail a cartoon boat around an imaginary world in Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. Despite the obvious gayness inherent in all Zelda games, I'm secure enough in my masculinity to declare this THE BEST GAME EVER. I haven't been sucked into such a bottomless miasma of escapism and bad personal hygiene since the first Zelda, back in '88. That's right: miasma!

Anyhoo, that's about it. Almost. I also got a call from a rather large open-source company that you've probably heard of to come work for them in England. Maybe I'll move there with my sweetie, who knows. It'll be a big investment at first, since I'll have to buy a bowler hat and have my teeth darkened, but it'll probably be worth it, just for the weather.

I hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving. It's my favorite holiday, I think. It's truly a thing that everyone can do together, without worrying about offending anyone, unless it's because it's a typically American holiday. And let's face it: If that offends, then I'm happy to offend.

I cooked a turkey this year, for the first time ever. Being until recently a vegetarian, I was baffled by the various organs that I pulled out of the carcass, all neatly delivered in a little plastic bag. I realized that it was all probably edible, but I balked at eating the bagged innards, in the fear that one of them was the gizzard, which supposedly leaves a bad taste.

Treating Europeans to Thanksgiving is an enormous responsibility, but I think I pulled it off without disgracing my ancestors. By all accounts, my Southern Cornbread Dressing was not only edible, but delicious. I never realized that the defining taste of Thanksgiving Dressing is sage, of all things, and I was struggling Thursday afternoon with a tasteless mash of cornbread and gravy. But a few panicked phone calls to Mom can solve almost any crisis, and she finally, after all these years, spilled the recipe.

The in-laws were over, and I was able to feed and water them. There was French wine, German beer, and Southern American food. In short, there was much to be thankful for. And that's what I like about Thanksgiving: That reminder to sort out the things that make you happy, and be thankful for them. It's a good tradition; there's plenty of time to sweat the small stuff.

Hugs, Rube.

Technorati Tags: thanksgiving

Being a pompous douchebag, as the distinguished gentleman from North Carolina unmistakably is, does have its drawbacks. Can you imagine what kind of dishonest life you would have to lead if, like Edwards, you had to apologize nationally, in humiliating fashion, for trying to find your kids a Playstation 3 at Wal-Mart?

John Edwards _ a vocal critic of the retailer _ asked his local Wal- Mart store for help in getting the potential 2008 presidential candidate a Sony PlayStation 3. Edwards said a volunteer did so by mistake.

Edwards told The Associated Press that the volunteer "feels terrible" about seeking the game unit at Wal-Mart a day after his boss criticized the company, saying it doesn't treat its employees fairly.

Being an antisocial libertarian helps me immeasurably when it comes to lemming-like materialism. Were I not such a late adopter of technology, I would go into Wal-Mart myself and root around for Playstations 3; I would do this without a bad conscience, and would not have to apologize to anybody. Trust me, if Hitler's Electronics had them in ample supply, and at an acceptable price, I would walk in smiling with Visa in hand.

And now, as John Edwards contorts himself into various contrite postures, blaming his actions on subordinates, Playstations are most likely already in the homes of Wal-Mart executives across the country. Every Wal-Mart employee in North Carolina now has the opportunity to buy one before the good Senator. It's too bad they only make about $2 an hour, else they could bedeck the trailer with Christmas cheer, whilst a gloom hangs about the Edwards Manse.

Technorati Tags: consoles, politics, ps3

'Kubuntu' is the Swahili word for, 'Suck it, luser!'

For a lark, I downloaded the 4.5GB DVD for Kubuntu Linux. Ubuntu, upon which it's based, is the current darling of the Linux scene, so I figured I'd see how long it's come along since I last installed it.

Let's see...

• No MP3 support, even for network streams like you'll find at Shoutcast
• Major headache getting my ATI Radeon X1600 to work with 3D screen savers
• Refresh rate capped at 75Hz
• Printer sharing doesn't work
• Zero progress on sound card configuration
• Default resolution of 1600x1200 is a bit...ambitious. I can't find any way to change it permanently
• Applications like Firefox, Thunderbird, KOffice, Scribus, et. al. not included
• Did this thing really just ask me to insert my install DVD?! What is this, 1998?
• System always locks up after KDE session logout

Ah well, at least in Windows I can change my default sound card without being a Dungeon Master.

Technorati Tags: ubuntu, linux

For no particular reason, here's a list of national sales tax rates of European countries.

via Europe for Visitors.

Technorati Tags: germans, travel

Do you ever get the feeling that, just beneath the surface of the visible world, the world which you and I would consider reality, strange forces lurk, forming a sort of world-within-a-world? I didn't either, honestly. I mean, I've seen The Matrix, and I have to admit that their explanation, that a war between man and machine created a 300-year long meta-reality in which mankind is held thrall to a sentient, evil race of machines, would go a long way toward explaining things, like Everybody Loves Raymond.

But I'm not here to take cheapshots at non-threatening TV shows. I'm here to tell you that everything you've sensed, everything you've feared about meta-reality complex is true. I know this, because I've discovered a blind spot, a bubble in the Matrix. I've discovered a gathering place in the Internet where the world's top engineers, obviously unbeknownst to our bionical slavemasters, continue a discussion which already spans 9000 words, almost 40 pages of calculations and hypotheses.

It's a discussion about bacon.

Conclusions Microwaved - The bacon came out extremely crisp throughout both the fat and meat of the bacon. It felt a bit thicker than I expected from a thin cut piece of bacon. Examining the fat collected in the paper towels leads me to believe that very little fat was rendered out in comparison to the pan fry method. The technique is simple and hands free, but a problem that I have is that the paper towel stuck to several of the pieces of bacon. This may have been because I allowed the bacon to rest and drain on the same paper towel it was cooked on. Another issue is the limited number of bacon strips you can cook in a microwave oven at one time (but the time savings probably more than makes up for this).

Pan fried - The bacon felt the thinnest and lightest of the three. The bacon fat was crispy while the meat was slightly chewy. I actually prefer my bacon this way (not totally crunchy and crispy, but with some texture to it), but others may not. All in all, a good method to cook bacon but time consuming.

Broiled - The bacon was burnt in some spots and the meat felt undercooked. The areas need the burns were bitter in taste and the texture was soft and soggy throughout (except for the blackened parts). Not much fat was rendered off either. I would not recommend this technique.

So, microwaving is king if you're looking for bacon that feels thicker than what you purchased and crunchy throughout. Pan frying is great for a thin, light bacon with a little chew in the meat.

Technorati Tags: bacon, engineering

In a startling development, the smug leftist hipsters at überblog Boing Boing have gone two (2) straight days without mentioning Diebold. The last mention of the maligned "voting" machine manufacturer was right before the "election" results came in. Which, coincidentally, showed huge Democrat "wins".

Could it be that Diebold's agents have gotten to Xeni and Cory?! It couldn't possibly be that the whole body of anti-e-voting writings was just screeching partisan hysterics, could it?

Technorati Tags: electioneering, boingboing

Being a late adopter has its advantages. For example, I just picked up a Scott i960CS, which is a commodity DVD/standalone DivX player. It cost about fifty bucks, and is so generic that it's nigh ungoogleable. I bought it to replace my fifty-dollar DVD player, which was getting a bit long in the tooth. About three years ago, I really, really wanted one of these, but they were going for a cool $400 at the local shops, so I decided to buy shoes and electricity instead. Now, I can pick one up at about 12% the cost that I would have gladly forked out back then, had I had the cash.

What a cool thing these doodads are. It will play just about anything you throw at it, format-wise. You can easily shut off the irritating region restrictions that would otherwise keep you from playing DVDs from other countries, which in my case would be the US-bought movies that comprise about half my collection. It's got a USB port, into which you can plug a thumb drive, iPod, or external hard drive, and browse them to play media.

My big idea was to copy all my music and movies to an external 160GB hard drive, hook it up to the USB port, and never have to switch discs again. Unfortunately, two things keep me from doing that. First, the Scott doesn't read long filenames from external devices (data DVDs seem to work fine), so you'll have to wade through FAT32-style mangled names, trying to figure out what “BLOWJO~1.AVI? could possibly be. And second, whenever you access the external drive, it thrashes around alarmingly, as the player apparently scans the entire thing at a go. It's scary enough that I'll stick to copying things over to the USB flash stick for the time being.

I realize this was all new and hot about three years ago, but that's what's great about being a late adopter: 50 bucks and you get that consumerist rush. Now, I can't wait until Christmas 2009 when I can pick up that sweet-ass Xbox 360 I'll be having my eye on.

Technorati Tags: consoles, entertainment

Twelve years ago, the Republicans took power under the leadership of Newt Gingrich. Newt was a man that even 17-year old liberal drama fags at my high school hated in the '80s, so I was predispositioned to like him, even before I was old enough to vote. Anything that annoys pretentious, faux-political teenage liberals is fine by my book.

When they first came into power, the nation was damn near on internal Red Alert. Conspiracy theories, ranging from Con-Trails to cattle mutilations(!) by black-helicopter-flying secret government cryptofascist organizations, Unabombers, X-Files, Branch Davidians, Randy Weaver, Timothy McVeigh; you guys remember all that stuff, right? Well, it looks like it's that time again, kids! (Only this time, the Democrats have got the Patriot Act in their bag of tricks. And that seemed like such a good idea when the GOP was running the show...)

Gingrich, along with rich genius bastard Dick Armey, devised a scheme to defuse the situation. They called it the Contract with America, and it amounted to a Republican business plan for the newly-acquired Congress, Inc. I'm including it here on the vain hope that I'll actually read it all the way through at some point, and be able to assess what sort of progress the Republicans made over the last 12 years, in comparison to what they were actually all fired-up to do.

As Republican Members of the House of Representatives and as citizens seeking to join that body we propose not just to change its policies, but even more important, to restore the bonds of trust between the people and their elected representatives.

That is why, in this era of official evasion and posturing, we offer instead a detailed agenda for national renewal, a written commitment with no fine print. This year's election offers the chance, after four decades of one-party control, to bring to the House a new majority that will transform the way Congress works. That historic change would be the end of government that is too big, too intrusive, and too easy with the public's money. It can be the beginning of a Congress that respects the values and shares the faith of the American family. Like Lincoln, our first Republican president, we intend to act "with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right." To restore accountability to Congress. To end its cycle of scandal and disgrace. To make us all proud again of the way free people govern themselves. On the first day of the 104th Congress, the new Republican majority will immediately pass the following major reforms, aimed at restoring the faith and trust of the American people in their government: • FIRST, require all laws that apply to the rest of the country also apply equally to the Congress; • SECOND, select a major, independent auditing firm to conduct a comprehensive audit of Congress for waste, fraud or abuse; • THIRD, cut the number of House committees, and cut committee staff by one-third; • FOURTH, limit the terms of all committee chairs; • FIFTH, ban the casting of proxy votes in committee; • SIXTH, require committee meetings to be open to the public; • SEVENTH, require a three-fifths majority vote to pass a tax increase; • EIGHTH, guarantee an honest accounting of our Federal Budget by implementing zero base-line budgeting. Thereafter, within the first 100 days of the 104th Congress, we shall bring to the House Floor the following bills, each to be given full and open debate, each to be given a clear and fair vote and each to be immediately available this day for public inspection and scrutiny. 1. THE FISCAL RESPONSIBILITY ACT: A balanced budget/tax limitation amendment and a legislative line-item veto to restore fiscal responsibility to an out- of-control Congress, requiring them to live under the same budget constraints as families and businesses. (Bill Text) (Description)

2. THE TAKING BACK OUR STREETS ACT: An anti-crime package including stronger truth-in- sentencing, "good faith" exclusionary rule exemptions, effective death penalty provisions, and cuts in social spending from this summer's "crime" bill to fund prison construction and additional law enforcement to keep people secure in their neighborhoods and kids safe in their schools. (Bill Text) (Description)
3. THE PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY ACT: Discourage illegitimacy and teen pregnancy by prohibiting welfare to minor mothers and denying increased AFDC for additional children while on welfare, cut spending for welfare programs, and enact a tough two-years-and-out provision with work requirements to promote individual responsibility. (Bill Text) (Description)
4. THE FAMILY REINFORCEMENT ACT: Child support enforcement, tax incentives for adoption, strengthening rights of parents in their children's education, stronger child pornography laws, and an elderly dependent care tax credit to reinforce the central role of families in American society. (Bill Text) (Description)
5. THE AMERICAN DREAM RESTORATION ACT: A S500 per child tax credit, begin repeal of the marriage tax penalty, and creation of American Dream Savings Accounts to provide middle class tax relief. (Bill Text) (Description)
6. THE NATIONAL SECURITY RESTORATION ACT: No U.S. troops under U.N. command and restoration of the essential parts of our national security funding to strengthen our national defense and maintain our credibility around the world. (Bill Text) (Description)
7. THE SENIOR CITIZENS FAIRNESS ACT: Raise the Social Security earnings limit which currently forces seniors out of the work force, repeal the 1993 tax hikes on Social Security benefits and provide tax incentives for private long-term care insurance to let Older Americans keep more of what they have earned over the years. (Bill Text) (Description)
8. THE JOB CREATION AND WAGE ENHANCEMENT ACT: Small business incentives, capital gains cut and indexation, neutral cost recovery, risk assessment/cost-benefit analysis, strengthening the Regulatory Flexibility Act and unfunded mandate reform to create jobs and raise worker wages. (Bill Text) (Description)
9. THE COMMON SENSE LEGAL REFORM ACT: "Loser pays" laws, reasonable limits on punitive damages and reform of product liability laws to stem the endless tide of litigation. (Bill Text) (Description)
10. THE CITIZEN LEGISLATURE ACT: A first-ever vote on term limits to replace career politicians with citizen legislators. (Description) Further, we will instruct the House Budget Committee to report to the floor and we will work to enact additional budget savings, beyond the budget cuts specifically included in the legislation described above, to ensure that the Federal budget deficit will be less than it would have been without the enactment of these bills. Respecting the judgment of our fellow citizens as we seek their mandate for reform, we hereby pledge our names to this Contract with America.

Technorati Tags: 2006 election, abject humiliation, newt, politics

Rube drinks only 'prosumer'-level beer.

When watching baseball, live in the stadium, things are not always what they appear. Oftentimes, a pop-fly to deep short will look just like a home run to someone sitting in the upper deck, causing half the crowd (in Atlanta, anyway) to jump out of their seats and spill their beer, only to sit down again in humiliation when the shortstop catches it.

People who know how to watch baseball never judge a ball by the crack of the bat, or the appearance of its arc: They watch the outfielders. If the outfields turn around and start high-tailing for the fences, you just might have a homerun on your hands, stand up and scream. Otherwise, if they just start scratching themselves and looking into the crowd while the ball's still sailing, just play it cool, because it's a pop-up.

That's why I refer to the various cranks, commies, and dictators of the world collectively as The Outfielders. If I'm unsure how I should feel about a certain event, I judge their reaction to it, and relativize. If they lose their shit and start foaming at the mouth about something Bush or the USA in general does, it's a pretty fair bet that it's just what the doctor ordered. On the other hand, there's this:

Chavez applauds Rumsfeld's resignation

CARACAS (VENEZUELA): Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez applauded the resignation of US Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and suggested President George W. Bush should quit as well. Chavez pointed to the strong gains by Democrats in US congressional elections and called it a "reprisal vote" against Bush's policies and the Iraq war. The leftist leader beamed as he read aloud a news report of Rumsfeld's resignation.

Not only liberal Americans but peace-loving people all over the world must feel relieved by Democrats’ landslide victory Tuesday. But few would feel more pleased with the election results than North Korea’s Kim Jong-il

Plebiscite on an Outlaw Empire The wave - and make no mistake, it's a global one - has just crashed on America's shores, soaking our imperial masters. It's a sight for sore eyes.

"The US government of Republicans and neo-conservatives, which is a reckless government of idiots, will be reined in with the Democrats taking over the House," Oraib Rintawi, President of the Al Quds Centre for Political Studies in Amman...

LANDSLIDE! ...a big thanks from Michael Moore

You did it! We did it! The impossible has happened: A majority of Americans have soundly and forcefully removed Bush's party from control of the House of Representatives and the Republicans have also, miraculously, been tossed out of running our United States Senate.

TUESDAY WAS GOOD NEWS FOR .... WHO?[sic]

Those who want a weaker America

(Accepting the award will be Dominique Marie François René Galouzeau de Villepin, sometimes known as Dominique de Villepin, the Prime Minister of France. Dominique was the leader of the Axis of Weasels before he became Prime Minister.)

A poll earlier this year said that something like 58% of Europeans wanted a weaker America. They got their wish on Tuesday. Who is going to be there to pull their candied asses out of the oven when they finally wake up and realize the great strides that have been made in the Islamification of Europe? Hello Eurabia.

The first blow to be struck in the weakening of America will be for the Democrats to get rid of John Bolton as the Ambassador to the United Nations. They'll replace him with someone who will not stand up to UN corruption and the forces who want to weaken us.

The leftist media.

(Accepting the award for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, The Boston Globe, Time Magazine, Newsweek Magazine and too many more to mention will be Dan Rather)

Ninety percent or more of these people vote Democrat. They engaged in a six-year campaign of demonization of George Bush. It worked.

"Thank you, Ms. Speaker, may I have another!"

Technorati Tags: 2006 election, pelosi, politics, cleveland steamer

How to draw a car in MS Paint.

Technorati Tags: Art, Tip of the Day

Seeing as how, in a matter of weeks, I'll be working in an exclusively Linux-based environment, I figured I'd fire up my Fedora installation again and see how's tricks. Linux has been playing the Ike to my Tina for over a decade, always disappointing and abusing me every chance it gets, and I just keep coming back for more. This time, though, it's for real; I can feel it. Anyway, I don't have a choice, so let's just tell the neighbors I fell off the swing, and concentrate on the good times.

One of the biggest gripes I've had about Linux was its sound card support*. Every Linux distribution you can think of still defaults to 1993's concept of sound hardware. Namely, only one application can play a sound at any given time, and it locks the sound hardware from being used by other applications, for what reason not even God knows. This is behavior that belongs in a single-user, single-tasking operating system like DOS, not in a modern multiuser environment like Linux.

This problem was addressed back in the day by using "sound servers", like ESD or artsd, to provide a layer between the applications and the OSS-supported hardware. This introduced a huge amount of latency, however, and was generally considered a stopgap measure even at its inception back in 1998 (or maybe even earlier, I can't find that info). Even worse, software had to be written to explicitly support it or it was useless.

The limitations of the OSS+Sound Server architecture were overcome by a project known as ALSA, which introduced software mixing at the kernel level. This created an OSS-compatible, multi-streamed abstraction for sound hardware, and obviated the need for sound daemons altogether. That was back in, oh, 2000 or so, and to this day, every single Linux distribution still ships with sound servers and software mixing disabled.

Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, et. al still configure sound hardware to be accessible by one application at a time, despite ALSA's hard work. This means, for instance, that your Flash Player will freeze your browser if you happen to be listening to music in the background. Or if you get a system beep, it will lock you out of using your sound card for as long as the artsd/ESD timeout is set up. Games will not work. This sucks, of course, and is no way to compute in 2007.

The way to fix this is fairly simple. Simply put the following into your /etc/asound.conf, or in your ~/.asoundrc:

pcm.swmixer { type dmix ipckey 1234 slave { pcm "hw:0,0" periodtime 0 periodsize 1024 buffersize 4096 rate 44100 } }

Now, I profess neither to having written that snippet, nor to having any understanding whatsoever as to what it does. But since I put that magical incantation into use, I've had no problems whatsoever with sound-card locking, or Flash plugins, or anything else. It just works.

Now why haven't the distributions adopted this behavior as the default, instead of their asinine insistence on single-channel sound support? The reason is simple: Linux distributions hate their users, and want to destroy them by any means possible.

This would also explain their sticking with X Window System.

• See also: Kubuntu: Sucks Linux Sound: Still suckin’ after all these years

  Technorati Tags: ALSA, Linux, Fedora

In order to keep a vase full of flowers fresh, drop a penny (or other copper coin) into the water. Since 1982, pennies are copper-plated. Pre-1982 pennies were 95% copper or more, so would theoretically work better.

Technorati Tags: Flowers, Tip of the Day

The Wednesday Tip:

How to open a 4th Generation iPod:

This week's (and the inaugural) Tuesday Tip:

How to play a G Chord.

Computers have been around for a while, now. The first digital computers that did useful work were used by the British during World War II to crack the Germans' Enigma cryptographic scheme, with the help of literary greats Alan Turing and Kate Winslett. Computer networks came about not long after. In fact, the network technology that most people use today, Ethernet, was developed back during the Nixon administration by Xerox. But that's really more of a hardware spec, invisible to most of us that use it, and used only in the most vaguely analogous sense by the Internet and wireless connections that we find ourselves using more and more.

What runs over those networks, well, that's the stuff that really concerns us. We wouldn't care if our SMB, HTTP, or NFS protocols were running over a length of twine connecting a couple of dead beavers, just as long as they kept the links up and the bits moving. But for some reason, these protocols, like unto the network itself conceived in the dark, smoke-filled chambers of engineering history, are still less than adequate in real world situations. I'll give you an example: There's not a computer or operating system built today that gracefully handles an unexpectedly disconnected network volume.

I'll grant, for the sake of argument, that I'm on the only moron in the world who would forget to dismount a network drive before clapping his laptop shut and carrying it out of the office. But you would think, in the 30 or more years we've been using networks to share our data, that exactly this scenario might have come up at some point in a worst-case-scenario brainstorming session by one of the major vendors. But I guess the very idea such a thing could happen was judged preposterous, and relegated to the realm of science fiction, freeing the engineering team to work on more critical issues like the Desktop Cleanup Wizard.

So maybe the story I'm about to tell could land me in the rubber room, but I'll chance it, as the Truth Wants to Be Free. As you may have already inferred, in my hurry today, I forgot to dismount a shared network volume before packing my laptop and heading out of the office . Upon opening my laptop once more, I was greeted by the Symbol of Waiting, which refused to go away. All the while, in the corner of my friendly graphical user interface, said network volume's icon was displayed, indicating a continuing, vigorous mounting. Obviously, the Symbol of Waiting was my computer's way of telling me that, while it seemed unlikely that this drive could be mounted without access to its network or, indeed, any network whatsoever, it was still experiencing a moment of indecision. It was telling me that it was considering the two conflicting possibilities of a) the network connection being gone, and therefore all processes using it should be informed of this fact, or b) the server having followed me to the café I'm sitting in, installed a network cabling plant, snuggled itself under my table, and then connected itself to my laptop, and was just in the processing of booting itself back up in order to serve that dreadfully missing network share; a possibility which, I might add, the computer was willing to indulge ad infinitum. Apparently, Occam's Razor is a difficult principle to express in Objective-C.

All of this culminated in a computer caught in a permanent moment of indecision. I like to believe that every time you boot your computer, the cycle of its life is started anew, with the hopes and dreams of a better life this time around; the corollary of course being that you've had to viciously snuff out the life of its previous incarnation. Thus as I was administering the Mac equivalent of a three-finger salute (Ctrl-Cmd-Power) to this shivering, broken husk of a computer a moment ago, I felt no regret. It was better to end it there, to ease its suffering. I felt pity however, in that it probably didn't understand what it was going through, what the source of its confusion and suffering was.

But I also couldn't help think it could have been prevented. Perhaps the status check of a network mount could be moved into a thread, instead of being embedded in the main event loop of the user interface, blocking all input? Perhaps an operating system could check to see if there are any open files on a mounted network drive before betting its entire existence upon the fact that it may, one day, return? Is the termination of a single process blocking on a stat call really worth the life of the entire ecosystem? These are questions for the politicians, apparently, and not for the medics in the field.

In a technical interview recently, a man asked me if I knew the point of "hard-mounting" network shares, particularly those of the NFS variety. I gave the textbook answer he expected, that it was preferable for applications to block and fail in the case of a missing disk than to go on believing that it still existed, without the knowledge that their write operations had failed, and their data were most likely corrupted. It's easy to be so cold and calculating when you haven't seen the suffering involved in such a catastrophic break. It's easy to extoll the virtues of data integrity über alles. But from the perspective of the victim, ignorance is, unfortunately, bliss.

UPDATE: This was, oddly, the Whine of the Week on Macbreak Weekly.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Bill Gates, User Interface

Over 2 years ago, I made a modest little proposal about cameras embedded in cell phones:

So, I was wondering if there’s a way to send that directly to the police. For example, if you’re pretty sure you’re about to get mugged, you could just take a picture of the guy and send it quick-like to the cops. Then, you could say, “whoa, G, you might as well keep on moving: five-o’s got your mug.? Of course, this may come across as somewhat antagonistic, which muggers generally don’t like. Anyway, if you send an MMS to 911, does it work? It should. Then, we could all be bitch-ass little snitches at the touch of a button.

And today, what do I see?

Catching criminals in the act these days is s ometimes as easy as pressing a button on your camera phone. Now the city is moving to simplify your ability to share telltale evidence of subway flashers, house burglars or even a suspect pothole, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said yesterday. "If you see a crime in progress or a dangerous building condition, you'll be able to transmit images to 911 or online to nyc.gov," Bloomberg said in his State of the City address.

You ever have one of those days when you say to yourself, "If the world would just shut up and do as I say, it would be a better place for everybody"? Well, I don't. I speak, and the world listens. Sometimes it just takes a little longer than it should. Stupid world.

Hurricane Kyrill is blasting across Germany at the moment, leveling trees and flinging stucco about. Man, you'd think Gabriel was tooting his horn outside, the way the locals are reacting. Mind you, Kyrill's not really a hurricane, but rather a winter gale. That would be the way LEO translates the german word Orkan; well, that and hurricane. But a hurricane is necessarily in the Caribbean, moving west. Technically, anyway.

But I'm not here to split hairs, I'm here to talk about battering winds, upwards of 200 kilometers per hour. Not sure how fast that is in real measurement, but I can confirm it's a-howling through the alleyways outside. You can actually hear it whistling through the cathedral belltower, a good half-mile away. It's sort of a low hoot. The roof tiles they have over here are bound to start flying around at some point, injuring passers-by unlucky enough to be out in it, à la Ben Hur. I've still got to get home from this bar I'm sitting in right now, but I'm close enough that it would be a lucky shot, indeed.

They've stopped all trains in the entire country, even the streetcars, and the kids are staying home from school tomorrow. As are many businessmen, their firms more concerned about their safety than the four-hour workday most people put in on Friday over here. All in all, it's a pleasant diversion for everyone, an act of God that brings a bit of excitement to the daily routine. I'm just glad the bars are open, otherwise this entry would have been about four lines long.

It's sort of like it used to be in Atlanta before the Yankees came, when we got a few flakes of snow on the ground. Once the slightest flake fought its way through the climatical defenses enough to land and shout, triumphantly, Allahu Akhbar! Quake with fear before me! before becoming a small puff of vapor, well, that's when the fabric of Atlanta society would start coming apart at the seams. The groceries stores were run upon, with milk and bread being carried by the truckload to the homes of weather-maddened Southerners. The schools were locked down tight; lest the inexperienced, though well-meaning bus drivers tumble off a cliff, out of control on ice-slick roads with a full load of schoolchildren. We didn't like snow, not even the rumor of it.

Growing up in Cherokee County, we had a rather enviable relationship with snow. It's a large county, with a hilly bit up north, in the Canton area. But the rest of the county sits around Lake Allatoona, and is predominately mild in its winters. School closings, however, are granular only to the county level, which meant that whenever some meth-addled bus driver in Ball Ground happened to notice a patch of frost on the grass on her way out of the trailer park, the school board would immediately be notified, and all educational activities throughout the county brought to a halt. Sometimes, some farmer's pond was frozen over in a forgotten corner somewhere; the very presence of ice somewhere induced enough unease among the elected county officials that they just played it safe and let the kids have the rest of the week off.

During the Winter of '87, we actually had 16 days off in a row for snow. Down in our end of the county, we did indeed see snow the first day. I remember it well: We were sitting in home room, the first class of the day, when the first flakes began to fall, the shimmering little harbingers of freedom. In panicked tones, the principal came on the PA and announced that we should all get on the buses, or hop in our cars, and get the Hell home, not forgetting of course to stop on the way for whatever bread or milk might still be available in the local grocery store, every man for himself! I could just see him in his office: laying down the intercom microphone and strapping himself to his chair, cradling his service .45, a captain going down with the ship.

Predictably, once we were all home the snow stopped. In fact, it was 65 degrees by midday, and we were playing football in the yard with 8 men per team. It was a pleasant diversion for a Tuesday afternoon, but we were resigned to getting back to the grind bright and early the next morning. But there was no school the next day. Nor the day after that. In fact, for the next two weeks, despite spring-like temperatures and sunny skies, we were out of school on account of snow. Every day the disruption continued, the fun factor was reduced by half, until finally we were all wondering whether they had forgotten to tell everybody to go back. But no, there was Guy Sharpe every morning, announcing the one and only school closing in the state of Georgia: Cherokee County. For two solid weeks. I always wondered what people in other counties thought of that. At one point, the guy shows them a map of Georgia with little suns all over it and 60+ degree temperatures, then announces that our hillbilly asses still won't come out from under our rocks.

They cancelled our Spring Break that year because of that. Bastards. I didn't think much about it then, being a latchkey kid, but I can imagine that a lot of parents had actually planned their precious two-week vacations to coincide with Spring Break. But then, Cherokee County was a different crowd back then. I mean, to have vacations implies that you, you know, have a job.

But it became clearer to me in my last two years of High School how something like that could happen. It was easy to start rumors about snow sightings in Canton. Even mentioning an ice storm in Birmingham would have the teachers looking nervous. Do that in home room, and by lunch it would be all over school. Somebody would come up to you and tell you that the county seat was under a six-foot sheet of glacial ice, and that school would be cancelled forever, what with the coming ice age and all. It's a miracle that the public school system functions at all.

Weather is always what the Germans call a gaudi, a good time.

Technorati Tags: orkan, puppy, snow day

Apropos this post over at Wordpress, I'll be upgrading to the latest version. Please pardon if things look screwy for a bit.

Update:  Well, that wasn't so hard.  As you were.

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

Despite my near-absolute conviction that it would never happen, Chairman Jobs dropped the i-Bomb today on a suspecting crowd. By all accounts, the patented jobsian Reality Distortion Field went all the way to eleven at MacWorld Expo this morning as the Steve introduced the new Apple iPhone. The iPhone is, without a doubt, the sexiest-sounding piece of hardware ever, period. As its proponents were hoping, it brings to a mobile phone typical Apple touches, like motion-sensing gestures and easy media management, and does so in a way that will have Apple fans and detractors alike buzzin about it for weeks to come. It looks like a big, big win for Apple, and a disruptive entry into the smart-phone market.

"But hey, little Rube, why the long face?" you might ask, should you see the frown I'm wearing at this moment. And it may seem strange, me being a Mac Fanboi and it being Apple's day in the sun, that I would be in any kind of mood other than near-ecstasy. So, I'll explain. Although I'm a big fan of the Mac, there's nothing here that bodes well for that platform. The iPhone will almost certainly be a cross-platform device, which means a lot more Windows users are going to be using it than Mac users. And since I'm not really in the market for a portable phone, it's nothing more to me than yet another cool iPod that I can't afford. The iPhone comes at the expense of the Mac platform, not for its greater glory. In fact, it stole from the Macintosh platform its annual holy day, the MacWorld keynote.

Probably the biggest news for Mac users, which will remain almost completely overlooked, is that a commercially-available version of Mac OS X now exists for portable devices. Windows CE has been, up to now, the only really normal OS for handheld computers (not including the current iPod OS, which is most certainly the best-selling). But today, Apple showed they have a portable, flash-based version of OS X running on a hardware platform that includes wireless networking, bluetooth, and a brilliant touch-screen display to show it on. This makes the iPhone the best handheld PC on the market.

This bodes well for the iPod, of course. I don't see Apple abandoning. the sub-$500 market completely, and now that they have the hardware and software platform for it, could 802.11-enabled, bluetooth-capable iPods finally become a reality?

What I would like to see happen now is a hard-disk based iPod successor, somewhere in the 30-60GB range, with the form-factor and OS X version of the iPhone, but without the mobile phone part of it. It would be the second coming of the Newton, at a time when nobody gives a second thought to plopping down 350 bucks for an Apple product that fits in their pocket.

Jobs' demo today showed why Apple have made a lot of the decisions we've seen over the past year or so. First, they dropped the PortalPlayer iPod platform at the height of its popularity. Then, they made headlines all over the Web by securing enormous amounts of flash-memory around Asia, and everyone postulated flash-based MacBooks by year's end. Then, it leaked out that Apple had patented resolution-independent user interface technology, presumably for large screens running OS X 10.5 Leopard. Who would've thought that they were actually thinking about high-density mobile displays running a tiny, tiny version of OS X?

While everyone was salivating over a phone today (a phone for gossake!), I was thinking just one thing: Cool! There's a version of OS X that runs on StrongARM (or whatever's in there), includes Safari and Cover Flow, and runs entirely from flash memory! I wonder what the boot-times are on one of those phones?

Winners: Yahoo Apple Google Cingular OS X

Losers: Zune Windows CE The Macintosh Me

Technorati Tags: Apple, iPhone, OS X, Po' ol' Rube

Just a little something to keep Zonker from getting bored.

Technorati Tags: abject humiliation

I hope everyone had a happy and raucous holiday season. My December was surreal enough. I'm moving to England, it seems.

"You'd have to set up little 'blog policemen' on these entries to shoo away onlookers - 'Move along, nothing to see here!' But no, people stand there looking at the dead animal at the side of the road, at two people full of pride making complete fools of themselves in public, and then go and write whole blog entries about it." Stefan Niggemeier, media journalist and photoblog author, on a dispute in the blogosphere. The two "complete fools" Niggemeier means here are 'DonAlphonso', author of the A-list blog "Rebellmarkt", and Peter Turi, also a journalist, and author of the "Turi2" blog. The start of the argument goes a long way back, but the current escalation began when 'DonAlphonso' repeatedly referred to Peter Turi in his blog as a "blogging failure" - Turi struck back by calling Meyer a "moaning minnie". What started as a minor skirmish developed into a heated conflict, with both sides receiving support. Over the course of the dispute, old scores were settled, fervent slanging matches went on in several blogs, and threats of lawyers were made. Finally, Peter Turi shut down his blog - though it's unclear whether this was directly or only indirectly related to the argument.

This article is a translation of a german text that was first released on my weblog "buchstaben in bewegung". It attracted some attention in the german blogosphere, so an aquaintance of mine, Niall McCourt, translated it. I´ve asked Rube if he could publish it here, so he gave me permission ;-). I´d like to bring this article to a greater audience, so if you feel you´d like to pick it up and republish it somewhere, go for it.

Niall is a freelance translator. If you think he could do a job for you, email him.

Howdy, friends and neighbors! Man, I've hard a tough couple of weeks. Ever since thanksgiving I've been busier than a butt-legged man in a nun-kicking contest. Deadlines to meet, servers to build and ship, the entire back catalog of X-Files to watch. We're all the way up to the one where that guy from Monk kills people with his dark-matter shadow.

Not that it's all been work-related, mind you. I've recently re-discovered video games. With the little woman away this past weekend, I eschewed eating, bathing, and sleeping to sail a cartoon boat around an imaginary world in Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. Despite the obvious gayness inherent in all Zelda games, I'm secure enough in my masculinity to declare this THE BEST GAME EVER. I haven't been sucked into such a bottomless miasma of escapism and bad personal hygiene since the first Zelda, back in '88. That's right: miasma!

Anyhoo, that's about it. Almost. I also got a call from a rather large open-source company that you've probably heard of to come work for them in England. Maybe I'll move there with my sweetie, who knows. It'll be a big investment at first, since I'll have to buy a bowler hat and have my teeth darkened, but it'll probably be worth it, just for the weather.

I hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving. It's my favorite holiday, I think. It's truly a thing that everyone can do together, without worrying about offending anyone, unless it's because it's a typically American holiday. And let's face it: If that offends, then I'm happy to offend.

I cooked a turkey this year, for the first time ever. Being until recently a vegetarian, I was baffled by the various organs that I pulled out of the carcass, all neatly delivered in a little plastic bag. I realized that it was all probably edible, but I balked at eating the bagged innards, in the fear that one of them was the gizzard, which supposedly leaves a bad taste.

Treating Europeans to Thanksgiving is an enormous responsibility, but I think I pulled it off without disgracing my ancestors. By all accounts, my Southern Cornbread Dressing was not only edible, but delicious. I never realized that the defining taste of Thanksgiving Dressing is sage, of all things, and I was struggling Thursday afternoon with a tasteless mash of cornbread and gravy. But a few panicked phone calls to Mom can solve almost any crisis, and she finally, after all these years, spilled the recipe.

The in-laws were over, and I was able to feed and water them. There was French wine, German beer, and Southern American food. In short, there was much to be thankful for. And that's what I like about Thanksgiving: That reminder to sort out the things that make you happy, and be thankful for them. It's a good tradition; there's plenty of time to sweat the small stuff.

Hugs, Rube.

Technorati Tags: thanksgiving

Being a pompous douchebag, as the distinguished gentleman from North Carolina unmistakably is, does have its drawbacks. Can you imagine what kind of dishonest life you would have to lead if, like Edwards, you had to apologize nationally, in humiliating fashion, for trying to find your kids a Playstation 3 at Wal-Mart?

John Edwards _ a vocal critic of the retailer _ asked his local Wal- Mart store for help in getting the potential 2008 presidential candidate a Sony PlayStation 3. Edwards said a volunteer did so by mistake.

Edwards told The Associated Press that the volunteer "feels terrible" about seeking the game unit at Wal-Mart a day after his boss criticized the company, saying it doesn't treat its employees fairly.

Being an antisocial libertarian helps me immeasurably when it comes to lemming-like materialism. Were I not such a late adopter of technology, I would go into Wal-Mart myself and root around for Playstations 3; I would do this without a bad conscience, and would not have to apologize to anybody. Trust me, if Hitler's Electronics had them in ample supply, and at an acceptable price, I would walk in smiling with Visa in hand.

And now, as John Edwards contorts himself into various contrite postures, blaming his actions on subordinates, Playstations are most likely already in the homes of Wal-Mart executives across the country. Every Wal-Mart employee in North Carolina now has the opportunity to buy one before the good Senator. It's too bad they only make about $2 an hour, else they could bedeck the trailer with Christmas cheer, whilst a gloom hangs about the Edwards Manse.

Technorati Tags: consoles, politics, ps3

'Kubuntu' is the Swahili word for, 'Suck it, luser!'

For a lark, I downloaded the 4.5GB DVD for Kubuntu Linux. Ubuntu, upon which it's based, is the current darling of the Linux scene, so I figured I'd see how long it's come along since I last installed it.

Let's see...

• No MP3 support, even for network streams like you'll find at Shoutcast
• Major headache getting my ATI Radeon X1600 to work with 3D screen savers
• Refresh rate capped at 75Hz
• Printer sharing doesn't work
• Zero progress on sound card configuration
• Default resolution of 1600x1200 is a bit...ambitious. I can't find any way to change it permanently
• Applications like Firefox, Thunderbird, KOffice, Scribus, et. al. not included
• Did this thing really just ask me to insert my install DVD?! What is this, 1998?
• System always locks up after KDE session logout

Ah well, at least in Windows I can change my default sound card without being a Dungeon Master.

Technorati Tags: ubuntu, linux

For no particular reason, here's a list of national sales tax rates of European countries.

via Europe for Visitors.

Technorati Tags: germans, travel

Do you ever get the feeling that, just beneath the surface of the visible world, the world which you and I would consider reality, strange forces lurk, forming a sort of world-within-a-world? I didn't either, honestly. I mean, I've seen The Matrix, and I have to admit that their explanation, that a war between man and machine created a 300-year long meta-reality in which mankind is held thrall to a sentient, evil race of machines, would go a long way toward explaining things, like Everybody Loves Raymond.

But I'm not here to take cheapshots at non-threatening TV shows. I'm here to tell you that everything you've sensed, everything you've feared about meta-reality complex is true. I know this, because I've discovered a blind spot, a bubble in the Matrix. I've discovered a gathering place in the Internet where the world's top engineers, obviously unbeknownst to our bionical slavemasters, continue a discussion which already spans 9000 words, almost 40 pages of calculations and hypotheses.

It's a discussion about bacon.

Conclusions Microwaved - The bacon came out extremely crisp throughout both the fat and meat of the bacon. It felt a bit thicker than I expected from a thin cut piece of bacon. Examining the fat collected in the paper towels leads me to believe that very little fat was rendered out in comparison to the pan fry method. The technique is simple and hands free, but a problem that I have is that the paper towel stuck to several of the pieces of bacon. This may have been because I allowed the bacon to rest and drain on the same paper towel it was cooked on. Another issue is the limited number of bacon strips you can cook in a microwave oven at one time (but the time savings probably more than makes up for this).

Pan fried - The bacon felt the thinnest and lightest of the three. The bacon fat was crispy while the meat was slightly chewy. I actually prefer my bacon this way (not totally crunchy and crispy, but with some texture to it), but others may not. All in all, a good method to cook bacon but time consuming.

Broiled - The bacon was burnt in some spots and the meat felt undercooked. The areas need the burns were bitter in taste and the texture was soft and soggy throughout (except for the blackened parts). Not much fat was rendered off either. I would not recommend this technique.

So, microwaving is king if you're looking for bacon that feels thicker than what you purchased and crunchy throughout. Pan frying is great for a thin, light bacon with a little chew in the meat.

Technorati Tags: bacon, engineering

In a startling development, the smug leftist hipsters at überblog Boing Boing have gone two (2) straight days without mentioning Diebold. The last mention of the maligned "voting" machine manufacturer was right before the "election" results came in. Which, coincidentally, showed huge Democrat "wins".

Could it be that Diebold's agents have gotten to Xeni and Cory?! It couldn't possibly be that the whole body of anti-e-voting writings was just screeching partisan hysterics, could it?

Technorati Tags: electioneering, boingboing

Being a late adopter has its advantages. For example, I just picked up a Scott i960CS, which is a commodity DVD/standalone DivX player. It cost about fifty bucks, and is so generic that it's nigh ungoogleable. I bought it to replace my fifty-dollar DVD player, which was getting a bit long in the tooth. About three years ago, I really, really wanted one of these, but they were going for a cool $400 at the local shops, so I decided to buy shoes and electricity instead. Now, I can pick one up at about 12% the cost that I would have gladly forked out back then, had I had the cash.

What a cool thing these doodads are. It will play just about anything you throw at it, format-wise. You can easily shut off the irritating region restrictions that would otherwise keep you from playing DVDs from other countries, which in my case would be the US-bought movies that comprise about half my collection. It's got a USB port, into which you can plug a thumb drive, iPod, or external hard drive, and browse them to play media.

My big idea was to copy all my music and movies to an external 160GB hard drive, hook it up to the USB port, and never have to switch discs again. Unfortunately, two things keep me from doing that. First, the Scott doesn't read long filenames from external devices (data DVDs seem to work fine), so you'll have to wade through FAT32-style mangled names, trying to figure out what “BLOWJO~1.AVI? could possibly be. And second, whenever you access the external drive, it thrashes around alarmingly, as the player apparently scans the entire thing at a go. It's scary enough that I'll stick to copying things over to the USB flash stick for the time being.

I realize this was all new and hot about three years ago, but that's what's great about being a late adopter: 50 bucks and you get that consumerist rush. Now, I can't wait until Christmas 2009 when I can pick up that sweet-ass Xbox 360 I'll be having my eye on.

Technorati Tags: consoles, entertainment

Twelve years ago, the Republicans took power under the leadership of Newt Gingrich. Newt was a man that even 17-year old liberal drama fags at my high school hated in the '80s, so I was predispositioned to like him, even before I was old enough to vote. Anything that annoys pretentious, faux-political teenage liberals is fine by my book.

When they first came into power, the nation was damn near on internal Red Alert. Conspiracy theories, ranging from Con-Trails to cattle mutilations(!) by black-helicopter-flying secret government cryptofascist organizations, Unabombers, X-Files, Branch Davidians, Randy Weaver, Timothy McVeigh; you guys remember all that stuff, right? Well, it looks like it's that time again, kids! (Only this time, the Democrats have got the Patriot Act in their bag of tricks. And that seemed like such a good idea when the GOP was running the show...)

Gingrich, along with rich genius bastard Dick Armey, devised a scheme to defuse the situation. They called it the Contract with America, and it amounted to a Republican business plan for the newly-acquired Congress, Inc. I'm including it here on the vain hope that I'll actually read it all the way through at some point, and be able to assess what sort of progress the Republicans made over the last 12 years, in comparison to what they were actually all fired-up to do.

As Republican Members of the House of Representatives and as citizens seeking to join that body we propose not just to change its policies, but even more important, to restore the bonds of trust between the people and their elected representatives.

That is why, in this era of official evasion and posturing, we offer instead a detailed agenda for national renewal, a written commitment with no fine print. This year's election offers the chance, after four decades of one-party control, to bring to the House a new majority that will transform the way Congress works. That historic change would be the end of government that is too big, too intrusive, and too easy with the public's money. It can be the beginning of a Congress that respects the values and shares the faith of the American family. Like Lincoln, our first Republican president, we intend to act "with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right." To restore accountability to Congress. To end its cycle of scandal and disgrace. To make us all proud again of the way free people govern themselves. On the first day of the 104th Congress, the new Republican majority will immediately pass the following major reforms, aimed at restoring the faith and trust of the American people in their government: • FIRST, require all laws that apply to the rest of the country also apply equally to the Congress; • SECOND, select a major, independent auditing firm to conduct a comprehensive audit of Congress for waste, fraud or abuse; • THIRD, cut the number of House committees, and cut committee staff by one-third; • FOURTH, limit the terms of all committee chairs; • FIFTH, ban the casting of proxy votes in committee; • SIXTH, require committee meetings to be open to the public; • SEVENTH, require a three-fifths majority vote to pass a tax increase; • EIGHTH, guarantee an honest accounting of our Federal Budget by implementing zero base-line budgeting. Thereafter, within the first 100 days of the 104th Congress, we shall bring to the House Floor the following bills, each to be given full and open debate, each to be given a clear and fair vote and each to be immediately available this day for public inspection and scrutiny. 1. THE FISCAL RESPONSIBILITY ACT: A balanced budget/tax limitation amendment and a legislative line-item veto to restore fiscal responsibility to an out- of-control Congress, requiring them to live under the same budget constraints as families and businesses. (Bill Text) (Description)

2. THE TAKING BACK OUR STREETS ACT: An anti-crime package including stronger truth-in- sentencing, "good faith" exclusionary rule exemptions, effective death penalty provisions, and cuts in social spending from this summer's "crime" bill to fund prison construction and additional law enforcement to keep people secure in their neighborhoods and kids safe in their schools. (Bill Text) (Description)
3. THE PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY ACT: Discourage illegitimacy and teen pregnancy by prohibiting welfare to minor mothers and denying increased AFDC for additional children while on welfare, cut spending for welfare programs, and enact a tough two-years-and-out provision with work requirements to promote individual responsibility. (Bill Text) (Description)
4. THE FAMILY REINFORCEMENT ACT: Child support enforcement, tax incentives for adoption, strengthening rights of parents in their children's education, stronger child pornography laws, and an elderly dependent care tax credit to reinforce the central role of families in American society. (Bill Text) (Description)
5. THE AMERICAN DREAM RESTORATION ACT: A S500 per child tax credit, begin repeal of the marriage tax penalty, and creation of American Dream Savings Accounts to provide middle class tax relief. (Bill Text) (Description)
6. THE NATIONAL SECURITY RESTORATION ACT: No U.S. troops under U.N. command and restoration of the essential parts of our national security funding to strengthen our national defense and maintain our credibility around the world. (Bill Text) (Description)
7. THE SENIOR CITIZENS FAIRNESS ACT: Raise the Social Security earnings limit which currently forces seniors out of the work force, repeal the 1993 tax hikes on Social Security benefits and provide tax incentives for private long-term care insurance to let Older Americans keep more of what they have earned over the years. (Bill Text) (Description)
8. THE JOB CREATION AND WAGE ENHANCEMENT ACT: Small business incentives, capital gains cut and indexation, neutral cost recovery, risk assessment/cost-benefit analysis, strengthening the Regulatory Flexibility Act and unfunded mandate reform to create jobs and raise worker wages. (Bill Text) (Description)
9. THE COMMON SENSE LEGAL REFORM ACT: "Loser pays" laws, reasonable limits on punitive damages and reform of product liability laws to stem the endless tide of litigation. (Bill Text) (Description)
10. THE CITIZEN LEGISLATURE ACT: A first-ever vote on term limits to replace career politicians with citizen legislators. (Description) Further, we will instruct the House Budget Committee to report to the floor and we will work to enact additional budget savings, beyond the budget cuts specifically included in the legislation described above, to ensure that the Federal budget deficit will be less than it would have been without the enactment of these bills. Respecting the judgment of our fellow citizens as we seek their mandate for reform, we hereby pledge our names to this Contract with America.

Technorati Tags: 2006 election, abject humiliation, newt, politics

Rube drinks only 'prosumer'-level beer.

When watching baseball, live in the stadium, things are not always what they appear. Oftentimes, a pop-fly to deep short will look just like a home run to someone sitting in the upper deck, causing half the crowd (in Atlanta, anyway) to jump out of their seats and spill their beer, only to sit down again in humiliation when the shortstop catches it.

People who know how to watch baseball never judge a ball by the crack of the bat, or the appearance of its arc: They watch the outfielders. If the outfields turn around and start high-tailing for the fences, you just might have a homerun on your hands, stand up and scream. Otherwise, if they just start scratching themselves and looking into the crowd while the ball's still sailing, just play it cool, because it's a pop-up.

That's why I refer to the various cranks, commies, and dictators of the world collectively as The Outfielders. If I'm unsure how I should feel about a certain event, I judge their reaction to it, and relativize. If they lose their shit and start foaming at the mouth about something Bush or the USA in general does, it's a pretty fair bet that it's just what the doctor ordered. On the other hand, there's this:

Chavez applauds Rumsfeld's resignation

CARACAS (VENEZUELA): Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez applauded the resignation of US Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and suggested President George W. Bush should quit as well. Chavez pointed to the strong gains by Democrats in US congressional elections and called it a "reprisal vote" against Bush's policies and the Iraq war. The leftist leader beamed as he read aloud a news report of Rumsfeld's resignation.

Not only liberal Americans but peace-loving people all over the world must feel relieved by Democrats’ landslide victory Tuesday. But few would feel more pleased with the election results than North Korea’s Kim Jong-il

Plebiscite on an Outlaw Empire The wave - and make no mistake, it's a global one - has just crashed on America's shores, soaking our imperial masters. It's a sight for sore eyes.

"The US government of Republicans and neo-conservatives, which is a reckless government of idiots, will be reined in with the Democrats taking over the House," Oraib Rintawi, President of the Al Quds Centre for Political Studies in Amman...

LANDSLIDE! ...a big thanks from Michael Moore

You did it! We did it! The impossible has happened: A majority of Americans have soundly and forcefully removed Bush's party from control of the House of Representatives and the Republicans have also, miraculously, been tossed out of running our United States Senate.

TUESDAY WAS GOOD NEWS FOR .... WHO?[sic]

Those who want a weaker America

(Accepting the award will be Dominique Marie François René Galouzeau de Villepin, sometimes known as Dominique de Villepin, the Prime Minister of France. Dominique was the leader of the Axis of Weasels before he became Prime Minister.)

A poll earlier this year said that something like 58% of Europeans wanted a weaker America. They got their wish on Tuesday. Who is going to be there to pull their candied asses out of the oven when they finally wake up and realize the great strides that have been made in the Islamification of Europe? Hello Eurabia.

The first blow to be struck in the weakening of America will be for the Democrats to get rid of John Bolton as the Ambassador to the United Nations. They'll replace him with someone who will not stand up to UN corruption and the forces who want to weaken us.

The leftist media.

(Accepting the award for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, The Boston Globe, Time Magazine, Newsweek Magazine and too many more to mention will be Dan Rather)

Ninety percent or more of these people vote Democrat. They engaged in a six-year campaign of demonization of George Bush. It worked.

"Thank you, Ms. Speaker, may I have another!"

Technorati Tags: 2006 election, pelosi, politics, cleveland steamer

How to draw a car in MS Paint.

Technorati Tags: Art, Tip of the Day

Seeing as how, in a matter of weeks, I'll be working in an exclusively Linux-based environment, I figured I'd fire up my Fedora installation again and see how's tricks. Linux has been playing the Ike to my Tina for over a decade, always disappointing and abusing me every chance it gets, and I just keep coming back for more. This time, though, it's for real; I can feel it. Anyway, I don't have a choice, so let's just tell the neighbors I fell off the swing, and concentrate on the good times.

One of the biggest gripes I've had about Linux was its sound card support*. Every Linux distribution you can think of still defaults to 1993's concept of sound hardware. Namely, only one application can play a sound at any given time, and it locks the sound hardware from being used by other applications, for what reason not even God knows. This is behavior that belongs in a single-user, single-tasking operating system like DOS, not in a modern multiuser environment like Linux.

This problem was addressed back in the day by using "sound servers", like ESD or artsd, to provide a layer between the applications and the OSS-supported hardware. This introduced a huge amount of latency, however, and was generally considered a stopgap measure even at its inception back in 1998 (or maybe even earlier, I can't find that info). Even worse, software had to be written to explicitly support it or it was useless.

The limitations of the OSS+Sound Server architecture were overcome by a project known as ALSA, which introduced software mixing at the kernel level. This created an OSS-compatible, multi-streamed abstraction for sound hardware, and obviated the need for sound daemons altogether. That was back in, oh, 2000 or so, and to this day, every single Linux distribution still ships with sound servers and software mixing disabled.

Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, et. al still configure sound hardware to be accessible by one application at a time, despite ALSA's hard work. This means, for instance, that your Flash Player will freeze your browser if you happen to be listening to music in the background. Or if you get a system beep, it will lock you out of using your sound card for as long as the artsd/ESD timeout is set up. Games will not work. This sucks, of course, and is no way to compute in 2007.

The way to fix this is fairly simple. Simply put the following into your /etc/asound.conf, or in your ~/.asoundrc:

pcm.swmixer { type dmix ipckey 1234 slave { pcm "hw:0,0" periodtime 0 periodsize 1024 buffersize 4096 rate 44100 } }

Now, I profess neither to having written that snippet, nor to having any understanding whatsoever as to what it does. But since I put that magical incantation into use, I've had no problems whatsoever with sound-card locking, or Flash plugins, or anything else. It just works.

Now why haven't the distributions adopted this behavior as the default, instead of their asinine insistence on single-channel sound support? The reason is simple: Linux distributions hate their users, and want to destroy them by any means possible.

This would also explain their sticking with X Window System.

• See also: Kubuntu: Sucks Linux Sound: Still suckin’ after all these years

  Technorati Tags: ALSA, Linux, Fedora

In order to keep a vase full of flowers fresh, drop a penny (or other copper coin) into the water. Since 1982, pennies are copper-plated. Pre-1982 pennies were 95% copper or more, so would theoretically work better.

Technorati Tags: Flowers, Tip of the Day

The Wednesday Tip:

How to open a 4th Generation iPod:

This week's (and the inaugural) Tuesday Tip:

How to play a G Chord.

Computers have been around for a while, now. The first digital computers that did useful work were used by the British during World War II to crack the Germans' Enigma cryptographic scheme, with the help of literary greats Alan Turing and Kate Winslett. Computer networks came about not long after. In fact, the network technology that most people use today, Ethernet, was developed back during the Nixon administration by Xerox. But that's really more of a hardware spec, invisible to most of us that use it, and used only in the most vaguely analogous sense by the Internet and wireless connections that we find ourselves using more and more.

What runs over those networks, well, that's the stuff that really concerns us. We wouldn't care if our SMB, HTTP, or NFS protocols were running over a length of twine connecting a couple of dead beavers, just as long as they kept the links up and the bits moving. But for some reason, these protocols, like unto the network itself conceived in the dark, smoke-filled chambers of engineering history, are still less than adequate in real world situations. I'll give you an example: There's not a computer or operating system built today that gracefully handles an unexpectedly disconnected network volume.

I'll grant, for the sake of argument, that I'm on the only moron in the world who would forget to dismount a network drive before clapping his laptop shut and carrying it out of the office. But you would think, in the 30 or more years we've been using networks to share our data, that exactly this scenario might have come up at some point in a worst-case-scenario brainstorming session by one of the major vendors. But I guess the very idea such a thing could happen was judged preposterous, and relegated to the realm of science fiction, freeing the engineering team to work on more critical issues like the Desktop Cleanup Wizard.

So maybe the story I'm about to tell could land me in the rubber room, but I'll chance it, as the Truth Wants to Be Free. As you may have already inferred, in my hurry today, I forgot to dismount a shared network volume before packing my laptop and heading out of the office . Upon opening my laptop once more, I was greeted by the Symbol of Waiting, which refused to go away. All the while, in the corner of my friendly graphical user interface, said network volume's icon was displayed, indicating a continuing, vigorous mounting. Obviously, the Symbol of Waiting was my computer's way of telling me that, while it seemed unlikely that this drive could be mounted without access to its network or, indeed, any network whatsoever, it was still experiencing a moment of indecision. It was telling me that it was considering the two conflicting possibilities of a) the network connection being gone, and therefore all processes using it should be informed of this fact, or b) the server having followed me to the café I'm sitting in, installed a network cabling plant, snuggled itself under my table, and then connected itself to my laptop, and was just in the processing of booting itself back up in order to serve that dreadfully missing network share; a possibility which, I might add, the computer was willing to indulge ad infinitum. Apparently, Occam's Razor is a difficult principle to express in Objective-C.

All of this culminated in a computer caught in a permanent moment of indecision. I like to believe that every time you boot your computer, the cycle of its life is started anew, with the hopes and dreams of a better life this time around; the corollary of course being that you've had to viciously snuff out the life of its previous incarnation. Thus as I was administering the Mac equivalent of a three-finger salute (Ctrl-Cmd-Power) to this shivering, broken husk of a computer a moment ago, I felt no regret. It was better to end it there, to ease its suffering. I felt pity however, in that it probably didn't understand what it was going through, what the source of its confusion and suffering was.

But I also couldn't help think it could have been prevented. Perhaps the status check of a network mount could be moved into a thread, instead of being embedded in the main event loop of the user interface, blocking all input? Perhaps an operating system could check to see if there are any open files on a mounted network drive before betting its entire existence upon the fact that it may, one day, return? Is the termination of a single process blocking on a stat call really worth the life of the entire ecosystem? These are questions for the politicians, apparently, and not for the medics in the field.

In a technical interview recently, a man asked me if I knew the point of "hard-mounting" network shares, particularly those of the NFS variety. I gave the textbook answer he expected, that it was preferable for applications to block and fail in the case of a missing disk than to go on believing that it still existed, without the knowledge that their write operations had failed, and their data were most likely corrupted. It's easy to be so cold and calculating when you haven't seen the suffering involved in such a catastrophic break. It's easy to extoll the virtues of data integrity über alles. But from the perspective of the victim, ignorance is, unfortunately, bliss.

UPDATE: This was, oddly, the Whine of the Week on Macbreak Weekly.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Bill Gates, User Interface

Over 2 years ago, I made a modest little proposal about cameras embedded in cell phones:

So, I was wondering if there’s a way to send that directly to the police. For example, if you’re pretty sure you’re about to get mugged, you could just take a picture of the guy and send it quick-like to the cops. Then, you could say, “whoa, G, you might as well keep on moving: five-o’s got your mug.? Of course, this may come across as somewhat antagonistic, which muggers generally don’t like. Anyway, if you send an MMS to 911, does it work? It should. Then, we could all be bitch-ass little snitches at the touch of a button.

And today, what do I see?

Catching criminals in the act these days is s ometimes as easy as pressing a button on your camera phone. Now the city is moving to simplify your ability to share telltale evidence of subway flashers, house burglars or even a suspect pothole, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said yesterday. "If you see a crime in progress or a dangerous building condition, you'll be able to transmit images to 911 or online to nyc.gov," Bloomberg said in his State of the City address.

You ever have one of those days when you say to yourself, "If the world would just shut up and do as I say, it would be a better place for everybody"? Well, I don't. I speak, and the world listens. Sometimes it just takes a little longer than it should. Stupid world.