Rob Meyer's profile
 Member Since:May 19th 1999 Number of rants: 188 Email this ranter Visit webpage See gift list | Bio: I built this sumbitch and an responsible for most of the ugliness therin. I've now been "working" on an improved version for two and a half years. Don't hold your breath. Oh, and I'm married to Cyndie, I own a home in Folsom, have a dog named Miles, and have a baby on the way. There. Now my bio is up to date. |
I can think of no good reason every red blooded American shouldn't own one of these. - View/Add Comments (3 so far)
Happy birthday Beth, have a great day! - View/Add Comments (6 so far)
There's really nothing else to say about this kick-ass kitchen-aid. (This link will probably move off after a few days because the site doesn't have permalinks; look for the Jan 24th, 2005 entry). - View/Add Comments (3 so far)
Plenty of connections here... - View/Add Comments (0 so far)
Wherein many new pictures are posted. - View/Add Comments (1 so far)
Indeed is a pretty cool Google-like job searcher; highly recommended. - View/Add Comments (2 so far)
For those of you in Sacramento, or those who know of KCRA, I offer you, Bizzaro-KCRA.
I know, they're owned by the same company, but it was funny to follow a link and end up somewhere else where the news also comes first. -
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This has been discussed to death everywhere except here. I thought it was basically done, but this article raised my hackles. Basically, one of the guys who didn't get suspended because he didn't throw any punches is now saying that he feels like he didn't defend himself and that he might regret not fighting. Great role model for the kids..."Hey kids, don't turn the other cheek, you'll be a big wuss; kick their ass!" If I were the commissioner, I'd suspend that guy for a game or two for that interview.
Remember, this whole thing got kicked off essentially by a cup of ice. That's right, a thrown beer was enough to entice a near riot. NBA toughman Ron Artest, terrified and feeling he needed to "defend himself" because he got hit in the face with a cup of ice. If someone had thrown the chair first, then that's a different story; that's potentially real danger. But no one has ever died from ice being thrown at them from 10 feet away. It probably stings a bit, but I thought Artest was supposed to be one of the NBA's "toughest" guys.
Anyway, I'm mostly willing (unlike some people) to excuse most off-court bad behavior; just because you get paid big bucks doesn't necessarily mean you have to be a perfect role model all the time. But on court, in uniform, you're fuckin' Mickey Mouse. Doesn't matter what anyone does to you, you take it unless there is a serious safety issue (which there wasn't in this case until he took it upon himself to charge into the stands). -
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If you laugh at this website, you are a total geek.
Yes, I giggled. -
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More evidence that the proposition system in California is a fundamentally bad idea. Another $3 billion in debt on the way for a state already up to its eyeballs in debt and who's credit isn't really worth anything.
Anyone know how to draw up a proposition? I'd like to draw up a proposition and get it on the ballot for next election that removes the proposition system from the constitution entirely; then we won't have to worry about stupid things like endlessly borrowing money with no plans on how to repay it, or making it illegal to sell horsemeat for food, or whatever other crazy thing any old special interest can come up with. -
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Carson has arrived - View/Add Comments (13 so far)
Is this thing street legal? - View/Add Comments (1 so far)
Check out this relatively new Virginia law. Now does anyone want to tell me that there's not a huge amount of bigotry and hate against gays and lesbians in our government? "Oh, you're company allows two committed people who live together to share health benefits? I'm sorry, we're taking that right away from you. Power of attorney or hospital visitation rights? Sorry, you don't get those either."
So this bunch of legislators isn't even happy giving equal rights to gays; they don't have a problem with gays getting married, they have a problem with gays existing.
I'm pretty much appalled beyond words. -
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The comments on this picture are laugh-out-loud funny, at least to me. - View/Add Comments (3 so far)
Check out these funky-fresh soccer playing robots. That's some amazing goal. This is part of a yearly "roboscoccer" competition each year. They plan to eventually create a team that can beat the human world championship team. That would be cool. - View/Add Comments (3 so far)
Check out this new alleged demand from the Kobe-ster:
"The Los Angeles Times reported in Sunday's editions that the unrestricted free agent asked the team if it was willing to play 10 or 12 games a year at the Arrowhead Pond in Anaheim, Calif., which is closer to his Newport Beach home than Staples Center. Reportedly, the Clippers are considering the request."
Wow. Them's big demands from someone who might be spending the rest of their life in prison for sexual assult. -
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Now instead of "application speciality" or "system administrator/developer," or "hosting engineer", or "web operations" I can just say "computer programmer" and everyone will know what I mean because I'm finally a full time developer. - View/Add Comments (4 so far)
So we've all heard of or seen what's been going on at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad. Does it seem like our government's reaction is completely underwhelming? The president says "I didn't like it one bit," and the perpetrators are detained? That's doesn't seem like the appropriate reaction, especially given the our level of anger when the American POW's were mistreated.
Regardless of what we think about it, or what really happened, or who's telling the truth, it is likely that those American soldiers have with their actions cost us any remaining credibility with the Iraqi people. It was really inevitable, as it is in all wars or occupations that at some point, some American unit somewhere would lose their professionalism, if only for a while. No one is perfect, and wartime warps morality.
Again though, it did happen, it's now a turning point in the occupation. We are no longer liberators, we now represent repression and occupation. A slap on the wrist will do nothing to restore our reputation; real punishment has got be doled out there. Does anyone else think that those responsible should be turned over to an international court that the US holds no power over for a fair trial? We, being the ones in the position of power, obviously don't have to do this, but I think it's the only thing that start to put this relationship back on the right track. The fact that we knew this was going on for quite some time and didn't act until the pictures arose is even more troubling and probably even costs us more, but I don't know how to begin to rectify that... -
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What is it about email that makes people completely not read it, especially when a company or organization is involved. It seems like every time I send an email to a company, the response I get back is completely cryptic, like they didn't even pay attention to what I said. They just scan for keywords until they find something they have a canned form letter for and send that in reponse, even if it has nothing to do with what you are talking about. Drives me f'in nuts.
The target of my venom in this particular case, ACM, makes it even more entertaining this time. See, ACM is the professional organization for computer scientists, which makes it all the more amusing that their website is a complete waste of bytes. You'd think that when sent a clear description of a problem, they'd be able to respond accordingly. I sent two seperate emails to two different addresses and got completely bogus responses back to both, neither of which even bothered to answer my basic question.
Drives me batty. This is not the way to endear yourselves to customers. -
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So check out the the DCI homepage. Looks like this year, not only are finals going to be in Denver, which is about as far west as they ever get, if I'm reading this right the week after finals the top corps will be doing performances in California. One in the Rose Bowl, one in at Spartan Stadium (an awesome DC venue), and an indoor performance in Cupertino. That is totally freaking cool. Finals caliber dc, in California, in some of the best venues. Definitely worth checking out, and a nice boost to the California shows which have really fallen off in frequency and size over the past few years. I highly recommend checking it out. Tickets go on sale soon, and it's going to be a good idea to buy early. See you there! - View/Add Comments (1 so far)
See, I knew it. Of course they say maps are a sign of terrorism as well, and my dad, I think Andy, and I are all big map junkies, so we're probably terrorists too. - View/Add Comments (15 so far)
Discussions about the discussion forum are rarely interesting, but we need to solicit some user feedback. A big update to BIGdis is actually a fair way towards complete, with an all new back-end, to make it easier to add new features, and make things a lot faster. While we're add it, we'll be cleaning up some warts and introducing a few new nicities.
Anyway, the big question that I pose to you is, should we have the option of flagging posts as "private," so they are only viewable by logged in users?
This would allow people to speak more freely I think, since they would know they are among friends, and out of the omniscient eye of Google. More crap talking, more juicy stories, etc...:-)
My fear though is that too much will end up flagged as "private". If the whole site is private, then really what's the difference between this and just having a mailing list? I really want to still have interesting discussions that are of interest to the internet at large (not that there have been a lot of those recently).
What do you guys think? Good idea, awful idea? I think it would encourage authorship, which is good, but perhaps decrease readership (there are a lot of lurkers who have just never really bothered to ask to sign up, or in some cases don't really know any of us). This is your chance to sound off on this; we might be able to arrange a trial when we launch and see if it works for us as well.
If you want, feel free to discuss other feature requests under this topic as well; don't worry about little things because a lot of them are going to get included/fixed already. I'm more concerned about any major feature additions/changes you want to see.
This is different than all of the other times I've posted messages like this because there's quite a bit of running code now behind the new version, so it actually is going to happen at some point...:-) -
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Formatted email, particularly HTML mail is evil, for the following reasons: 1) it's a total waste of bandwidth, 2) it makes you way, way, way more suspectible to viruses, and 3) it makes spam hundreds of times more effective.
Most of the spam I get these days is just nonsense text; literally just random noise (or snippits from news articles, my personal favorite). How can someone possibly make money sending out millions of copies of emails filled with nothing but random "xxxyakjldj aj93jj djkasdfjjei"? You ask? It's because they can still embed links, which people will inevitably click on (particularly if they misreprsent what's on the other end), which will drive traffic, making them money from ads and the occasional sale.
No HTML email, much less spam, because no one is going to bother (or accidentally) cut and pasting something they don't know what it is...plus as they cut the URL, they are much more likely to notice that it actually goes to www.buymoredogsextoys.com, even though the text of the link says "puppies and flowers". Spam problem 50% solved right there.
Someone also thought it was a good idea to embed not just an HTML renderer, but a full blown scripting engine into the mail programs as well. This opens you up to all kinds of untrusted users being able to throw code against you en masse that can try to exploit problems with the security model; of which there are many since HTML was never intended to be delivered to your mailbox on your local computer. As an added insecurity, some of the mail program manufacturers made the preview window render HTML mail as well, meaning you didn't even have to open the mail to visit the ads or be infected by its payload. Great idea.
Finally, email should be small, lightweight, and to the point. Adding a 50K background image accomplishes none of that. Or crazy fonts, or whatever else you can dream up. Okay, bulleted lists are nice for email, but if you have a decent editor, those are easy with plain text as well.
So I'm making October National Send Plain Text Email month. Everyone go into your mail programs and disable sending and reading of formatted mail. You'll probably notice your mail client run a little faster, you'll be less annoyed by silly emails and spam, and somewhere, on the other end of one of your emails, there's a geek that will thank you. :-) -
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What are you doing for talk like a pirate day? - View/Add Comments (9 so far)
This whole issue is almost too funny to talk about.
Almost.
Is it me, or did we not as a state cast more than 50% of the vote for the current lieutenant governor, so that in the event of something happening to the governor (assasination, early onset Alzhiemers, felony drug possession, recall, etc.) there would be someone to take over. So, having elected this person to be the 2nd in the line of succession, why are we accepting other candidates for the recall election.
Speaking of the other candidates, 350 or whatever is signed up now sounds like a lot...maybe they should categorize them by industry; tv, radio, magazines, porn, movies, sports personalities, actual politicans. That way we Californians could find the candidate we wanted easier.
Because apparently, it takes the courts 7 hours to decide that the election should proceed as scheduled...and that Californians don't need to wait for more modern voting systems. After all, hopefully we know how to use the current ones since we've been using them for at least 20 some-odd years.
If anyone makes one more bad Arnold schwarzenegger pun I'm going to scream. Especially when they laugh about it like they are clever. Please no more "running man", "terminator", "I'll be back," "hasta-la-vista-baby" puns from anyone. If you're going to do one, at least have the decency to do something obscure. Like working in something about Hercules in New York or something...90 minutes of movie with every single line from the lead dubbed...there's something worth punning about.
And no sooner do I say that then I hear the current governor in the same speech make an "I'll be back" pun, followed by "terminate the terminator." And delivered as oddly and off-kilter as possible. You know things are bad when when Larry Flynt, Gary Coleman, Arnold, Pete Uberof, and a porn star are running for governor and the current governor is still the goofiest mother-fucker in the running. This whole thing is starting to sound like the plot to a police acadamey movie to me...does Steve Gutenburg live in California?
I'm out citizens; and remember, if come election day every single person votes for themselves, it'll be a 35-million-way tie. :-) -
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Many of you might be getting mail from "admin@bigdis.com" with the subject line "Your Account". These are not from us at all; these are a virus called w32.mimail. It's not a huge big deal, but don't open the attachment, it will infect your system.
Actually, all of you are probably getting mails from "admin@youemailaddressdomain.com"; same virus. Pretty sneaky; luckily it's pretty benign (at least this variant, but don't bet on it staying that way). -
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Here's what I think the basic difference on the desktop between the Windows world and the free software world. In the free software world, it can be an incredibly frustrating, infuriating experience to get anything working; even for experienced users, the level of effort required for seemingly simple tasks is just not appropriate. However, once you get things working, they work mostly like you would expect (not necessarily more usable, but more predictable).
Windows is butt-ass-easy to set things up, but once it's set up, it might as well still be broken; it just doesn't work like someone would expect it to.
For example, would you expect your email client to lock up in the middle of writing an email because it couldn't talk to the server? I mean, I'm writing a local email, on my own system, and haven't tried to send it at all yet. But since outlook suddenly realizes it can't talk to the exchange server, I wait 4 minutes (I timed it) to wait for the thing to come back. During that time it's totally locked; no screen repaints, no typing, etc...What kind of sense does that make I ask you? -
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So some of you might have noticed, I like taking pictures a lot (Check out the latest batch of Hudson pictures. I've got these these studio lights that I haven't used much, and I need practice with them. So any of you in the area who are interested in getting pictures of your babies, fiancee's, life partners, families, pets, whatever, I'd love to practice on you. Basically just drop me an email and we'll schedule a time. I'll provide the film, shoot the pictures, and just hand them off to you to get developed. The only thing I ask is that you develop them in a timely manner so I can learn from 'em before I forget what I did, and that I get a chance to scan a few of the better negatives for my collection.
Probably a good, cheap way to get some half decent pictures. I'm certainly not great, but with your help I can get better. Thanks! -
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Well, bigger family necessitates bigger car, so we bought a blue Mazda Protege5 on Friday. If you're looking for a cheap-ish car that's fun to drive, I highly recommend the Protege. I really have to agree with Car and Driver when they say it's a "four door miata". Obviously not a Miata, but definitely in the spirit of one. Got it at AutoWest Mazda in the automall, and paid the carsdirect.com price.
So now we've got a Miata for sale. Anyone interested? I'd love to send her to a good home. We're asking $15,000/best offer (Private party blue book is $15,170). It's a 2000, almost perfect condition, LS, the bose upgraded audio, limited slip differential, brand new tires (although I do think they suck), and only 27,700 miles. You really can fit a suprising amount of stuff in the trunk, and it's more fun than a barrel of monkies.
Anyway, so now I've got some years to start saving for the dream car. :-) -
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Today I decided to put "google" into google and hit "I feel lucky," and viola! I was right back at google. Very Zen.
Then I started thinking about the poor old Google as a number. If someone didn't know that a google was a 1 with one hundred zeros after it, they'd be hard pressed to find it. I sure was. Can you come up with a query that has a definition of google (not the search engine) somewhere close to the top? Bonus points for an I'm feeling lucky response. There is a chance that google is actually spelled gogol, which I believe is the mathemtician it is named for, but I can't confirm.
Google's cool, but the nature of it's algorithms can sure make it tough to find something with a name that's identical or very close to something else very popular. -
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This is an article from a middle-eastern news portal of some type about a poll conducted in Jordan. The combination of people and the ways to introduce error (or just plain lie) with statistics produces some truly great stuff. Twenty-seven percent of those polled "supported the assassination of the US top diplomat, Laurence Foley in Amman last year." Lovely. Even better though, "the poll indicated that 86% of the respondents consider the political and economic ties between Jordan and the US are good in general". That would mean there are (at least) 13% of the people polled think that relations are good in general, but supported the assasination of our diplomat. That's pretty funny stuff. - View/Add Comments (2 so far)
Wanna see some scary stuff? Go to ready.gov. It's a production of your ministry of homeland security. It seems to be saying that nuclear bombs aren't such a bad-thing after all; just "get out of the area." After your done reading about nuclear blast safety at the official site, cruise this brilliant parody. Why do I get the feeling that "terrorism" is going to be the next "communism." Maybe we can kick the whole thing off with a bang, and have us a McCarthy style witch hunt for terrorists. Just remember to do your patriotic duty and be afraid of all foreigners and report suspicious activity to your nearest homeland defense center. - View/Add Comments (12 so far)
Warrants? We don't need no stinking warrants. Or public oversight. We're the government? You can trust us. We would never do anything unconstitutional... - View/Add Comments (1 so far)
Here's a funny story from Oregon about a town who's officials support the police digging through trash to obtain evidence (a position the courts have supported, and one I'm on the fence about). If that site is still down, here's a slashdot mirror. So what do you think? Should police be able to dig through your garbage? - View/Add Comments (6 so far)
Finals are done for me. My computing theory final last night took me 3 hours. I'm glad to be done. For the record, I'd like to brag about my first semester back a little. Here are some stats:
Number of classes cut: 3 (but two of those were for vacation)
Number of homework assignments missed: 0 (yes, zero)
Number of homework assignments turned in late: .5 (phase II of the last assignment).
Pretty much every one of those was a record. It's a different perspective trying to ace a final so you can get an A, instead of desperately trying to ace a final so you can scrape by with a C (my usual situation in the past). Anyway, glad to be done, ready to blow off some steam this weekend! -
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This article is perfect. An internal Microsoft whitepaper about the Hotmail Unix to Windows transition was leaked. In it, the Microsoft guys responsible for doing the transition detail out just about every single one of the reasons that I think Windows sucks for production server usage. It's the kind of stuff that people don't believe when I say it, because I'm sort of a zealot. I am a zealot, but not a blind one; I don't care what the tool is, as long as it does things the right way. Complex, undocumented, inter-dependent services with inconsisent logging and debugging tools that can only be controlled while physically standing at the server with a GUI is certainly not an efficient way of doing things. - View/Add Comments (0 so far)
December 2nd is my last day (again) at Wells Fargo! I'm returning to another gig you may remember. It's in Emeryville, so I'll be commuting on the train, but only two days a week; the other three are from home. Truly an offer that was tough to refuse. - View/Add Comments (8 so far)
Check it out, congress finally got something right. They've been trying to censor the internet to make it "family safe" for years now, and they've finally hit upon something workable I think. This way, it will quickly become economically interesting for companies interested in kids to maintain a kid-safe site, but obviously it can't be their only site. And parents can come closer to ensuring their kids are seeing only-kid safe stuff (although granted, the definition of kid-safe wiil probably be a little overzealous, but it should be workable) without worrying too much about it. Not a bad idea at all really. - View/Add Comments (0 so far)
Here's a scientist talking about the chances of another earthquake at this all-California world series:
"It's probably the same probability as people would have given to the Angels winning the World Series at the beginning of the year," said Tom Heaton, professor of engineering and seismology at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.
And this is supposed to make people feel better? :-) -
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Well, contrary to what the first, half-assed ultrasound would have you believe, our baby is not a girl. It's a hyperactive, kicking and waving baby boy. Now we have absolutely no name ideas. :-) - View/Add Comments (32 so far)
This is going to be hard to believe, I have finally finished and published my Travelog from Europe. I considered waiting until the three anniversary of my return, but I thought it had been long enough (the three year anniversary is only about a week away...:-). If you're bored, and have finished reading all of Irony Central's story about the baby (something way more interesting and funny than my travelog), then you should check it out. The pictures are generally pretty good. - View/Add Comments (4 so far)
Apparently, Rugby is a rough sport. - View/Add Comments (1 so far)
Don't know if we mentioned this yet, but we've built a baby website. It's got an ultrasound picture, and soon it will (baby cooperating) have recordings of the heartbeat. Just in case you're curious. - View/Add Comments (1 so far)
Here's the first rant on the new server. There might be a few broken things (like question of the day and probably the hdml interface) for a while, I'm tired and need to sleep now. I think the basics are covered. Remember, if you use BIGdis for your email, then make sure you are not using "jay.bigdis.com" as your mail server (it's disabled now for good measure). Use mail.bigdis.com. Let us know if you have any problems. Pretty much unless you are sure you should be using jay for something, then make sure you're using the more generic names (mail.bigdis.com, www.bigdis.com, etc.).
There are some new things for primerib that will have some documentation soon, including one time passwords for telnet, SSL POP3/IMAP, and eventually webmail.
Oh, also of note is that we're no longer supporting FTP. Use SFTP or SCP. There's a free client for Windows called WinSCP that works pretty simply, and SecureFX is a good client, from the makers of secureCRT (Van Dyke Software). Anyway, that's it for me, I'm exhausted. You should notice a big speed increase; share your thoughts about that here. We'll also be able to start offering a few more services now that we have some real hardware. More to come on that front. -
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I know people often don't fully read the news so I thought I'd make mention of it down here as well. Our server is being upgraded (finally!) to a much faster system sometime this weekend. We're hoping for no disruption in any services and everything should be transparent to you guys, other than being a whole boatload faster...
For comparison, the current system (jay.bigdis.com) has 64MB of RAM, two Pentium Pro 180 Mhz processors (of which only one is getting used), and a 4G hard drive. Remember this system does mail server for three domains as well as their webpage, and is the primary Unix workstation for 5-6 people; pretty neat for such an older system. Oh, and it didn't come back up automatically if the power went off, and wouldn't boot without a keyboard attached. Despite the quirks, for a cobbled together home-brew PC, shuffled from home to home for years, I think it did a pretty darn good job, and it will be remembered with honor. :-) I believe it went into service way back in the 519 days, when we rolled out the first real version of this website (non-withstanding the flat-file driven prototype, which ran on JPS's corporate webserver), which would make it August of 1999...three years.
The new server has been named primerib.bigdis.com, and is running Linux. It's got one 550 Mhz Pentium III (for those keeping score, that's three generations newer than a Pentium Pro) that can be upgraded to 1Ghz if necessary, as well as support for another (that we can make work this time :-)). It's got two 18GB IBM SCSI drives that are configured as a mirror set, so we have some disaster redundancy (we'll still make offsite backups nightly of some things), and 768MB of RAM. It's quite fast, even with the BIGdis code in as crappy a shape as it is. It's an old rack-mount server from Organic that I bought for $20. Then add in another $100 for more RAM (courtesy of Erik I believe, or maybe Andy), $50 for a new power supply, and $110 for a new motherboard (this is what caused the delay; the old MB would only boot some of the time, then crapped out completely), so total cost was $280. This will open us up for doing a lot more with BIGdis going forward. Hope you enjoy. -
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No more security questions! Yay. It only took them 16 years to realize how stupid those were. So that's one benefit the TSA has had. However, later in the same blurb, the director, James Loy, has this to say about the random screenings before boarding:
We never understood that. You either do it right the first time or fix what you're doing at the security lane.
So on one hand we're doing away with one pointless, time consuming measure, while on the other hand, we're considering getting rid of one of the actually useful security measures we've deployed. The head of the TSA doesn't understand why it's a good idea to design systems that fail gracefully, so that if one part fails the security of the whole is not compromised? That's a pretty basic security engineering principle, and our guy in charge of transportation security doesn't understand it? Doesn't understand why having random in-depth checks as a second safeguard in case someone manages to slip by the overworked, busy, harried, underpaid security station is a good idea? This is a big, big problem. I feel safer already. -
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The judge has essentially thrown out [pdf] and laughed at British Telecom's patent lawsuit. For those of you not following this, BT claimed to have invented hyperlinking, well after the web existed. Additionally, their scheme could only fringely be called related to URL's. Patents are dumb. - View/Add Comments (0 so far)
I know there is at least one more memepool fans out there. I've often wondered what the origin of their name is, and today I stumbled across it (interestingly, from a link that I found on a site linked to by memepool, speaking about the circular condition of claiming you don't have a website on a website). Here's the definition of meme, and essentially what memepool means. Neat. - View/Add Comments (1 so far)
If Microsoft isn't a monopoly, how come the biggest PC manufacturer in the world isn't allowed to sell me a PC without Windows on it (or anyone else for that matter)? Yes, they could not go with the OEM license program, but then they're computers would be more expensive, and soon they'd no longer be the biggest, they'd be out of business. I can't even find a place that will sell me a decent notebook without Windows, and then everyone fights like hell to keep you from getting your money back for the copy of Windows that I'll neither want nor use. Oh that's right, the courts decided they are an unfair monopoly, abusing their power. They're just not going to do anything about it. This is just frustrating me, because I want a laptop for Unix, and apparently I can't get one without betting Windows too. - View/Add Comments (13 so far)
Why the hell can't computers live up to their potential? What do I mean?
Let's start with an example (albiet a trivial one). The other day, Cyndie
asks me if I can remember the names of the characters from the movie Sabrina. I try to make it a
policy to avoid memorizing things I can look up, and that peice of
information is definitely something I should be able to look up. So I
fire up the WAP Browser on my phone and surf to www.imdb.com. Whoops,
server error; they haven't provided a WAP interface. So I spend a few
minutes browsing around the horribly organized and poorly thought out
Sprint menus, looking for an equivalent wireless service. Apparently, there
is none, although there's no easy way to tell that...
That's okay, Google to the rescue. I'll use their wap
gateway/proxy/translator thingee. So soon, I'm on the IMDB page. However,
after another couple of minutes, I discover that IMDB's HTML is absolute crap,
so Google's translator can't really make any sense out of it to present an
interface that's even capable of searching at all.
So I managed to waste 5-10 minutes of my time (and airtime) for nothing,
all because IMDB blatantly flaunts not only web standards that have been
established for years, but also doesn't have the foresight to provide a
decent interface to thier content. For the most part, IMDB is pretty cool
and I especially admire their new business model that will hopefully help
them get paid (IMDBpro), but this is just flat out lame. I could write my
own gateway, but I would have to scrape through their nasty-ass HTML, and I
would be very subject to breakage. How hard is it for them to build an XML
interface of some sort and dish out content? Tons of advantages for them in
doing that (mostly that their site gets tons easier to maintain and edit).
But no, they decided to go with HTML 3.2; a horribly flawed, bad-idea
standard (although not quite as bad as the never finished 3.0), and they
don't even come close to actually adhering to it.
So where is the professionalism in computers as a field? Software defects
are considered normal, commonplace and inevitable. People with no
background in software are responsible for buying it, overseeing it's
construction, and in some cases even writing it. Even Amazon, basically the world's leading
online store, can't get
their HTML right. HTML is an incredibly simple markup language, and no
one can do it right, or won't for short sighted reasons. Even google can't
get thier HTML right. BIGdis is closer than all of them believe it or not (and if
it weren't for some html escaping issues, we would actually
validate).
Anyway, there are more examples of utter incompetence throughout the
industry. Where are the really sexy uses for a computer? Where are the
productivity gains that computers supposedly were going to bring about. I'd
venture to say that just about process that uses software for
Customer Relationship Management, Enterprise Resource Planning, Trouble
ticketing, incident tracking, change control, or any other workflow type
application would be better performed with good old pencil and
paper.
In IT and other computer technology, means to the end has become the focus
of the task. Computers are supposed to help business and people
solve problems, yet we inevitably allow them to become the focus,
distracting us from the main goal. Really think about how a pen/paper type
process would replace some of your core business software and tell me it
wouldn't run smoother without the computers, or at least as well (which
would then allow you stop spending hundreds to millions of dollars
maintaining those programs). Because the people generally in charge of
those systems have no background in building software that really fits a
need, the systems end up a mess requiring constant attention. Repetitive,
boring tasks that should be done by the computer are relegated to the human
and tasks that require analysis and thinking end up trying to get handled
in the software, and typically being mangled because of it.
Where has all the innovation gone? If you work with software, next time you
start a project, spend some time talking to the people who will use the
software, find out what they want. Consider the software (or system, or
whatever) in a broader context and create something that really fixes the
problem, rather than performs one small task within the overall scheme of
things, while the rest of the process is left to rot. We should stop
wasting billions of dollars a year on software that is crap and doesn't
work, and put it into projects that actually solve problems instead of
creating new ones. -
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It's official. I've been accepted to CSUS as a returning student. I'm back in school...I'll keep you updated with how it goes.... - View/Add Comments (6 so far)
This ruling doesn't cover individual state laws, only federal, and it will probably be overturned on appeal, but at least someone up there is trying to get rid of this practice. - View/Add Comments (26 so far)
Why doens't the state just hire skilled people, so things like this breakin
don't happen? This is just totally embarassing. The funny part is, the politicans in charge will blame the managers, who will blame their employees. Of course, it's the politicians who have created the state salary structure and you know what, it's pretty much impossible to find truly skilled network admins, system admins, security personnel, or programmers for $50k a year. That, and beuracracy breeds security problems; one of the key elements in preventing and detecting attacks is communication, which is non-existent at the state (and most large corporations).
Taxpayers and shareholders alike should just stop giving their money to organizations who treat that money, and their personal information so carelessly.
And remember, this particular attack they managed to detect (albeit totally ineptly). How many have succeeded that these monekeys don't even know about? -
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Check it out! Mozilla 1.0 has actually been released. Wonders never cease. I've actually been using at as my mostly primary browser on Windows/Linux for a while, and it's actually pretty stable, and pretty fast, and even does a few things better than IE. Although IE jumped ahead of it cookie handling with version 6.0, but it's still pretty cool. Go download it, use it, enjoy it. Lord knows enough programmer hours went into it. :-) - View/Add Comments (5 so far)
Okay, so there's the latest nasty, nasty hole in Exchange server. Normally not newsworthy in my eyes, I mean Microsoft products probably have thousands upon thousands of undiscovered bugs so it's not unusual for 1-2 to get found a day. But two things about this one crack me up. Number one, check out this quote:
The bulletin noted that creating such messages would require specialized knowledge and software, as common e-mail clients such as Outlook are incapable of creating RFC 821 or 822 content.
"You'd have to be fairly sophisticated," Budd said. "This is not something where somebody opens an e-mail client, puts a few bad characters in a message, and sends it. It would basically require someone to know the language of SMTP."
In one swoop, we have Microsoft saying that Outlook doesn't send internet standard mail; way to go! We also have them saying that something is "fairly sophisticated" because it relies on "knowing the language" of SMTP. For those of you who don't understand the humor, SMTP consists of words like HELO, MAIL FROM:, and RCPT TO:. Not exactly rocket science; people do it every day to forge mail. Where do you get this "sophisticated knowledge?". How about searching google for RFC 821? If that is really considered "sophisticated" to Microsoft, no woner their software is so bad...
Second of all, according to Microsoft, it's impossible to stop. You have to let it run it's course until the bad message is processed. It will even survive a reboot. So what do you do if you have 10,000 in your queue? Call everyone and tell them your email is down for the next two weeks? Maybe there's a way to delete pending ones from the queue.
Anyway, if you have an internet accessible exchange server out there, get rid of it for your own safety and sanity and replace it with sendmail (or qmail, or postfix). Or at least get this bug patched before some "sophisticaed hacker" brings down your mail. Of course, anyone who would have an Exchange server available to the internet needs a head check anyway (the only reasonably safe way to use any Microsoft product on the internet is to put something else in front of it and proxy requests through). -
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Did anyone see the Celtics/NJ game? For some bizzare reason I decided to watch the 2nd half after listening to a little bit of it in the car while running errands. Damn. I'm pretty sure I don't want the Celtics playing the Kings in the Finals now. I'd be suprised if New Jersey even bothered to show up for the rest of the series though. It's not just that the Celtics were losing by 21 at the start of the 4th, it's that until the quarter started, they were playing totally beaten. With the Kings/Lakers, at least the Kings had to keep pouring it on all game to maintain their lead. The Celtics had mentally packed it up and gone home, the Nets were planning their victory celebration during time outs, and then all of a sudden the 4th quarter begins and it's a whole new ballgame. Nutty. - View/Add Comments (1 so far)
Here's Microsoft's latest gambit. Now they are claiming that documenting their API's or disclosing internal information represents a security problem. Wow. I don't even know where to start. Let's hope the good-guy attorney took them to task for this comment, which at best can be called a horrible misrepresentation of remotely true things, but is more realistically called a complete fabrication. Let's all say it again folks, security by obscurity doesn't count for shit. That policy gets us code red, nimda, sircam, the morris worm, and pretty much every other major security incident that you can imagine...
Oh and while we're on the subject, if Microsoft has really set aside work on all new features until they audit and fix existing problems, where are the patches? They started months ago. You're telling me that 50,000 programmers pouring over millions of lines of shoddily developed code haven't found a single bug in 4 months since the 'trustworth computing' initiative was launched?
The other recent example of Microsoft's evil is in their new school licensing program. (Pardon the biased nature of the link, it's the only one I found off-hand). Basically you have to pay per-computer for all of your software, regardless of whether that computer has a copy of Microsoft software installed on it, or even if it's capable of running it. Macintosh computers? Too bad, you have to pay for a Windows license for them. And using terms in their previous licensing agreement, they are strongarming schools into adopting the new one. Basically they are dropping by school districts as of about a month ago, demanding a full blown compliance audit. This of course takes staff and time, something in short supply right before the end of the school year. The previously licensing agreement for schools requires the school to do this within 60 days of request. So the schools don't have the money to do this audit. Microsoft says 'no problem, we'll supply the staff and personell and do your audit for you.' The fine print is that if they find a single violation (like that's going to be hard in a school district to find an unlicensed copy of some peice of Microsoft software, intentionally or not), the school has to pay penalties and the cost of the audit. So that option is pretty much out of the question. Now here's the hook though: 'If you want to switch to our new, per-pc, per-year licensing agreement, we won't do the audit.' It's kind of like a protection racket really, 'Pay up and re-license software you don't need, or we're gonna hit you for even more money.' Very nice scam. -
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I know a lot of my zealotous rants seem a little paranoid about the future, but this time the day is upon us. Broadcasting music over the internet is about the be destroyed by a ridiculous proposal. It basically requires impossible tracking of everyone listening, as well as expensive, fatty licensing fees. All of the internet radio stations have gone silent today in protest. Visit SaveInternetRadio.org for more information. Do something, get involved. The process for legal webcasting is already obscene, and this will just put a bullet in the whole thing. No crazy paranoia this time, the recommendation in question is being considered for acceptance later this month. - View/Add Comments (3 so far)
I realize no one is even going to care, but I'm going to breath a public sigh of relief mixed with a little angst. I just spent the better part of the evening trying to figure out how to get my durn video card to run at 1152x864 under X. See, 1024 is not enough real estate, and 1280 only runs at 60Hz on my monitor, which is too flickery (not to mention too small on a 17"). Anyway, so the problem was that XFree86 4.x uses VESA's DDC (aka EDID) to query the monitor to find out it's capabilities. Apparently my monitor doesn't follow the spec so well, so it was reporting that it couldn't do 1152x864, so it was popping up to 1280x1024. So I disabled the auto detection support and generated a modeline for my desired refresh rate/resolution (1152x864 @ 70Hz). But this didn't work with the NVidia Linux driver, because it requires modelines adhere to some 'gtf' standard. They listed a URL to a mailing list posting that had a base64 encoded c program to generate gtf modelines. I decoded it with memencode -u, compiled the program, answered it's questions three, scp'ed that modeline to the new system, and bingo. KDE3 running on XFree86 4.2 at 1152x864 @ 70Hz with the commercial NVidia GL drivers and all of the bells and whistles.
Now if only I can get the sound working...:-) -
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Anyone want to road trip to utah for saturday? I'm serious. Sorry for typos, I'm at arco. - View/Add Comments (10 so far)
HeeHee. Go here, scroll down to the Apple Macintosh section, and behold the fear. My favorite part is the last addendum, mentioned the responses from the slashdot crowd, which linked to this and probably caused their traffic increase. I really don't think things get funnier than this. I love zealots! :-) - View/Add Comments (11 so far)
Okay, it's been a while since we've heard much about the oft-delayed-much-overhyped-incomplete started-but-not-finished dragging-on-forever vaporware BIGdis version 2 project. We've obtained ourselves a new server that will be faster and better, and a much more stable, hopefully permenant location for it. Sometime within the next few weeks it will be moving into "production". Since it's got more horsepower, we can be a little free-er with what we offer the BIGdis community. I'm curious to see what people are interested in these days, so I'm gonna put a list of features here, and you guys tell me by the numbers what you think about them. How useful they'd be, if you'd use them or not, etc. Some of them would be easy, some would be hard; some would be part of the website, some would be a seperate thing, with just a teeny bit of website integration.
Without futher ado:
1) Weblogs/journals for everyone
2) Picture database uploads for everyone
3) Unix shell accounts
4) yourname@bigdis.com email, with webmail access
5) Technical Question and answer forum, where people could ask questions and get them answered (categorized perhaps). Each person would list some skills of some sort, and other people (maybe anonymous, internet people) could post questions and self-decided gurus's could answer them.
6) Easy, cool shared link service, for sharing cool links.
7) Reviews as in music, food, or movie.
8) Customizable front page with the ability to add feeds from other services. Perhaps also an .RDF file for you slashdot users to have a bigdis slashbox.
9) Improved wireless access (did you even know we had wireless access?)
10) A simple calendar and member locator so we could know where people are approxamtely located and have more real get togethers.
11) Finally, any attempts to expand the discussion, perhaps allowing unknown, random internet users accounts with no access to our personal information to contribute to certain types of discussions.
12) Your own bigdis webpage.
13) Anything else you want? Sports team trash talking area? Daily debates (sides chosen randomly...) Excercise stats recording and comparison, voting preferences? Pet pages, interactive chat, collaborative fiction, collaborative stand up comedy, virtual dog walking...
Please sound off about any or all of these. We're pretty open to ideas I think as long as they fit within the general sense of what BIGdis is, whatever that is. :-) Anyway, it's your house too, and I don't want to waste any time implementing stuff people don't want. I am personally very interested in increasing the activity level, so that there's always something interesting going on and we avoid stagnant stretches where everyone must go to other websites to get their cure for boredom. :-) -
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Riddle me this...I've been reading quotes from Israeli reserves called up to fight, and the general consensus is that "This sucks. I'm supposed to be at home with my family, and I don't want to be here. But, that's really not safe anymore since bombs are exploding everywhere. I've got to do this to make things safe for my family." When has terrorism ever done anything but galvanize the target (and usually the rest of the world) against your cause and your group. Terrorists are not stupid, because they keep coming up with new attack vectors and methods that stay one step ahead of our planners. How come, after 70 years of terrorism, they haven't figured out that it doesn't work.
My guess is because the masterminds either a) don't care about the cause and have their own motives, or b) are totally insane. Get the message dorks: Terrorism is a waste of time and energy as a tool. -
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Oh man. If I go to one more site to read their content and stupid little lizards or cars or airplanes or whatever drive across the screen as I try to read, then plop right in front of the text, I'm going to explode. Before I could boycott the sites and advertisers that tried crap like this, but now everyone's doing it.
Congratulations all of you fuckheads with your MBA's and marketing degrees that came to Silicon Valley a few years ago with no business plan to milk the public for the explicit purpose of lining your own fat fucking pockets. You've managed to truly reduce the value of something that is immensely powerful and interesting, and turn into a warmed-over, censored, co-opted 8pm sitcom equivalent.
All the better reason to keep using alternative browsers (Opera, Mozilla, or Lynx that let you selectively disable crap like this. I never disabled advertising banners because I figured it was fair to have to look at some advertising in exchange for free content; no problem. But co-opting that content and running dancing adds that make the content useless is just plain stupid. I feel like I'm sending out 3-4 letters of complaint every day about these stupid, stupid campaigns.
In TV or Radio, there are established means for judging the efficiency of advertising, and it would rapidly be shown that this new style actually drives customers away, both from the product being advertised and the provider that runs it. However, all these so-called-brilliant MBA's and CEO's are too busy kissing their shareholders (and their own) asses to bother to listen to the people who could build systems to really track things. Instead they rely on bull-crap numbers, gathered through shoddy and incomplete means, from other ass-kissing CEO's who are relying on those numbers looking good to get to keep their own golden parachute and milllion/billion dollar option pacakges, all while the poor guy who was forced to implement this crap-ass adversiting toils away on restoring his original dream of bringing interesting content to people for free or at very low prices.
I'm boycotting these sites, and you should too, but damn the list is getting long. -
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Congratulations to Andy and Dawnna! (They tied the knot officially...and not a square knot, bowline, or taut-line hitch, I'm talking about the knot). Best wishes! - View/Add Comments (10 so far)
Short rant today. Just read this story and be amazed at what science can do today. - View/Add Comments (20 so far)
Who's everyone supporting? Who's everyone dissing? Is prop 42 here in CA a good idea? Which fat, lazy sack are you planning on voting for? - View/Add Comments (4 so far)
I've decided to start doing short restaurant reviews as we explore what our new area has to offer in the way of food. Last night we stopped at the Bidwell Street Bistro instead of Panda Express. It's in a strip mall location, which almost never bodes well, but it's definitely the most nicely decorated strip mall I've ever seen. Very "cute", but in a good way. :-)
They've got a little wine and beer bar, with a pretty good selection of both. Every 2nd Tuesday of each month is a wine tasting which sounds like fun. Menu is typical French style bistro, with an oddly wide variety of meats (duck, pork tenderloin, NY strip...). Ceasar salad was good, if not "anchovyee" enough for me. I had the steak frittes, Cyndie had the shrimp special (skewered). Can't speak for Cyndie, but mine was pretty good; slightly overcooked from the rare I ordered and certainly no Vic Stewarts, but pretty flavorful for a $18.95 New York (fries were excellent).
Overally, very cute place for a date. It's not too formal and not too informal. Food is good, prices are a smidge high but in the ballpark, and the place has a very intimate feel to it. We'll probably go there again, and not just because it's a block or two from our house.
By the way, I have essentially zero qualifications as a reviewer other than knowing what I like and having eaten at a lot of places, so readers beware! -
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Thank you to everyone who helped out with wedding, and for everyone who attended. It was great to see everybody, and I'm really glad everyone at least did us the honor of pretending to have a great time. :-) Thanks to all of my boy-eee-zz and homies; you know I love you all. Thanks to my Mom and Dad for all of there help, and a shout out to the Cyndie's girls. We're back in the grind now, but we had a fabulous mini-moon. I can heartily recommend Avalon as one of the best B and B's around. We'll have some pictures up soon, and if you all be real nice, maybe even some full motion video of the infamous centipede. Which, I'd like to officiall announce, that due to my frail and aging nature, I am officially retiring. There's always the slim chance I could come out of retirement for a big event, like maybe my sister's wedding, or one of the unmarried bozy, but enjoy the video because I think you've seen the last of it. :-) - View/Add Comments (16 so far)
For those of you that don't check memepool every day, here's what you are missing. Warning: a little offensive, but the funniest thing I've seen in a long time. Do not miss it. - View/Add Comments (2 so far)
What a bunch of crap. Does anyone really believe Bill's line of bull? My rough guess is that it would take about 1-2 years of effort to re-engineer Windows 2000 to make it reliabiliy secure to the standard that Bill sounds like he's talking about. Does anyone think that the next version of Windows is not going to have a single new feature? Microsoft's entire business process is designed to churn out new features and software that mostly work at an incredible rate. They would have to almost completely throw out their software development process, and maybe their business model. Don't be fooled, it's just more lip service. Do we think that they will "waste time" properly implementing MIME in the next release of Outlook? Suddenly remove HTML mail capabilities? Tear ActiveX out of IE? Tear macros out of the files for Word and Excel? Add a real logging and auditing system to the OS?
Fat chance.
They're building "web services" and all that .NET crap. I can't wait.
Tell Microsoft to piss off by using better software. Run linux or OpenBSD. There are lots of Word like clones with similar functionality. Use Mozilla or Opera. I know some of these tools aren't as good, but if more people start using them and giving feedback they'll get better. Write letters to websites that require IE and tell them they've lost a customer.
Microsoft only gets away with writing crap, because people still buy it and use it. Don't make the government come down and have to mandate that software be secure, because they'll screw it up completely. Just stop buying the crap. -
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Check out the Cellular Phone Taskforce. These guys oppose cellular phones not because they're annoying, or make people more prone to accidents while driving, but because they feel that all those radio waves hitting them are harmful. Holy crap! I particularly like the chart on the bottom showing mortality increases after installation of PCS service. Notice how across six cities, there are only 10 deaths in the period they've chosen (no mention of course about the cause of those deaths), and yet on the limited data set of less than 2 mortalities per city, they've decided that there was a meaningful increase in the death rate. They also only conviently show 6 cities...what about all the other cities in the world where PCS service was installed.
Just another reminder that the world is filled with crackpots, and that statistics can be made to show you anything at all that you want. Never believe them in isolation, and always take them with a grain of salt. Incidentally I would write these guys off as harmless crackpots, but according to wired magazine, they've actually gained some traction in Mendecino and are driving "radio waves" away. So I guess all the TV signals bombarding them every day are okay, as well as the cosmic rays, and electromagnetic radiation from the Sun. I bet there's a conveinent pseduo-scientific reason way too...I would be so pissed at that guy if I lived in Mendecino. -
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I was thinking about something yesterday and I decided wireless ethernet is decidedly disturbing. Of course, using wireless networking of any kind has a lot of perils, and adminsistrators must take care to ensure that their installation is secure. Most of the security issues with wireless ethernet have been unauthorized access or sniffing of company-sanctioned wireless access points. Drive around with a wireless network card, laptop, and sniffer program and you are bound to come across several 802.11b lans. Some of these are properly configured, some are not, and this is where all the focus I've seen has gone into when it comes to wireless networking.
I say, who cares about that. Securing your own access points is just another peice of the security puzzle and is no more difficult or interesting than auditing and securing your firewall rules. Keeping traffic from being sniffed is just matter of being disciplined and ensuring that your wireless lan fits with your security policy.
My problem is with unauthorized wireless access points. Physical access to most places is relatively easy to achieve once or twice, but there's a very noticble risk in trying to gain network access. You have to physically be there, and using your own laptop or an empty workstation, and the risk of being caught (or at least raising suspicions) is quite high. Maybe you could install a backdoor program that worked through the firewall, but the traffic leaves evidence that would be discovered, and you still have to commendeer someone's computer. Maybe if there was an analog fax line, you could tap a modem in unnoticed, but again, it's risky (and probably none-too-reliable).
Now enter wireless ethernet. Sneak in, find a hub under someone's desk, and add a wireless access point. Bam. Now you can leave, and access the network at leisure from the parking lot, maybe further with specialized equipment, and with very little chance of being discovered after installing your tap.
So basically, every security adminstrator now needs to check dilligently for wireless networks everywhere on their premisis, anywhere their network extends. This works in data centers, offices, worker's homes....just another reason that your firewall setup is only half the battle (at best) and that you need airtight security behind the firewall as well. Seek out those weak points (SMB, NIS, POP) and eliminate them before they bite you in the ass. What are you going to do even if you find an unauthorized wireless signal on your network? The equipment to track down such things precisely is pretty specialized and expensive. I guess wander around the building with your laptop checking out signal strength, playing some kind of hot and cold game...
Theoretically, someone always could have built something like this, so this is not a new vulnerability. However, the threat equation is changed now. Before, most places worried about hardcore wireless network engineers custom building equipment to tap the network were paranoid and thorough enough to install the expensive countermeasures probably necessary to stop it. Now everyone's network is vulnerable to a $300 network card and someone willing to take a little bit of risk.
I need to learn more about this. Anyone have any countermeasure ideas? Perhaps it's possible to install your own wireless hub but not put it on your network and boost the strength so it interferes with anyone else's? I don't know what frequencies 802.11b uses or how many segments are supported within a given range so maybe that doesn't work. Does anyone make jammers? All of this is complicated if you are actually using wireless networking....blech. -
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Here are the pictures of the house; we had our (rather cursory so it seemed to me but oh well...) inspection yesterday. We may have to go to Sacramento yet again to sign some missing papers or something this weekend...sigh. Anyway, here's a good shot of where the home theater will go. It's the room on the left. The room on the right has the fireplace and will be the cozy, hangout room or something. Check out the icky painted patterns in the bathroom. Can't wait to sand and primer it! - View/Add Comments (9 so far)
That's all the trash TV and bon-bon's for me for a while I start at Wells Fargo tomorrow. It's a good thing; the seat cushion in my computer chair is getting kind of worn down these days. :-) - View/Add Comments (9 so far)
Wow. Check out what Enron is up to. Just a nice little reminder that companies lie. All the time. In fact, they thrive on it. Because the people who are in charge of speaking to the public, and to the company itself almost always all have something to gain by lying. Why do we have to give two weeks notice when they can terminate our employement at will? Why does upper management make somewhere between 5-100 the average worker? Why does the government have to step in and mandate things as basic as "the product has to mostly work." Most important, why do we continue to do business with companies that lie, cheat, and steal whenever they get a chance?
Remember: Companies lie. Don't be fooled.
Corollary: Your government, and the people within it lie, cheat, and steal just as often. -
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Is it fair for me to be extremely annoyed with Lucas for continuing to produce half-baked prequels while the original holy trilogy languishes without a DVD release? What are we supposed to do? Go out and scrounge up a Dolby Digital compatible laserdisc player for $200 and buy the laserdiscs for another $100? Watch it on VHS? Ick. I don't care about getting gouged; go ahead and released a stripped, movie only DVD now (as long as the quality is there of course) and I'll buy it. Then in three or four more years he can release the giant, old and new version, tons of extras, 8 disc box set and I'll buy that too. - View/Add Comments (10 so far)
It's official! I'm laid off! Woohoo! - View/Add Comments (21 so far)
I was the one who censored today's QOTD. Anyone who knows me knows I take such things very seriously. The reason I did it, is because it's bullshit. Anyone who anonymous insults or threats are targeted against doesn't get the
benefit of knowing who their attacker is. They have to sit around and wonder, "Who said that? It could be anyone...even people I think are my friends." It's intimidation, plain and simple. Just like hooding yourself up and burning a cross on someone's lawn. That's not free-speech, that's being an asshole. Despite's Shawn's assumption, I would have taken it down just the same in anyone else's case too. Had whoever asked this question asked it themselves, I would never have dreamed about pulling it.
I challenge whoever submitted it to repost it as themselves, where it will remain for all eternity, untouched within the BIGdis archives. I'll protect that free speech until the end. That I assure you. But if you're speaking anonymously, you lose that protection if you decide to try and intimidate people.
I tried to spare someone's feelings today. Apparently I need to apoligize for that. Also apparently, some members of BIGdis are so insistent on using it as a forum to disparage, insult, and instill fear on people that when someone challenges their ability to do this freely, they can't handle it and leave. I did not build this forum so anonymous cowards could freely dash off hurtful words to people, and it hurts me to see it used as such. Today's QOTD could have no redeeming value associated with it. If the poster wants to own up to it and explain how their motivation was other then hurting someone, I'm all ears.
You want to flame me? Call me a heavy handed moderating asshole? Go for it. We've got over 13,000 untouched comments and 1,600 untouched rants. I was trying to spare some feelings, but apparently people were really, really determined to get thier message across. But no so determined as they would dare post it themselves.
So do I do shitty job with this place? Should I just pack it in? Weigh in here folks; agree or disagree with what I did today.
I can write up totally anonymous posting and we can become a usenet newsgroup in a week. Only we can do even more damage, because we know each other, and we're all supposed to be freinds. It's easy to ignore some half-raving lunatic off the internet in rec.arts.music.u2 when he calls you a stodgy, dung-eating coward for not thinking that Pop is the best album ever. It's a lot harder to ignore someone who is supposedly your friend, or at least a close aquaintence when they tell you you're a bitch or an asshole, but don't think enough of you to do it to your face.
Anyway, we've apparently lost some members over this, as well as a big chunk of content (one of those members had the database password and deleted all of thier presence). Everyone apparently hates each other, and now everybody is pissed at me and everyone else. I'm about two seconds from pulling the plug on the whole fucking thing. Let's remember, I did not censor any particular person's speech. Sorry Mel, since you don't exist, you don't get the same speech protection as the real humans on this forum. -
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We've got a mixed bag of news today...First the bad news. The justice department pussed out on Microsot today, giving them nothing more than a slap on the wrist after being found guilty of being the biggest and nastiest monopoly since the railroads or oil companies of the 1900's. It's all window dressing. Taking away all of those predatory practices from Microsoft before they had destroyed the entire field of competitors would have been really helpful. Now it doesn't matter. Who cares if OEM's are free to install any browser they want now? A large percentage of sites don't even render without IE anymore. Too little, too late.
The only real remedy contained in the settlement is requiring Microsoft to document and release their server protocols. Now, what the extent of this will be remains to be seen, but could be a huge deal. This would allow a project like Samba to gain 100% interopability with Microsoft stuff. That's a step in the right direction. If only they'd force them to do the same for Windows and the API or Office and the file format; then a group like WINE could write a real Windows substitute. Or OpenOffice could hvae perfect Word compatibility. That would start giving consumers real choice.
Of course, Microsoft would never go for that. My question is, what the hell is their leverage? Why were they in settlement talks at all? If I get found guilty, I don't get to deal with the prosecutors (unless I tell them something I know). Oh that's right...Microsoft pays hundreds of dollars a year on lobbying officials and helping them get elected. So they get the best government money can buy. What a sham.
Now for the good news...an appellate court found that code == speech. This is the right decision, and relates to the DeCSS case. They made a good call here, in that maybe what you post can get you sued, but no one is allowed to restrain you from publishing it. Awesome. First step in getting that abortion of a bill, the DMCA, declared as unconstitutional as it so obviously is. The war's not over yet, but at least we won one of the battles. -
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Cool. Now I'm a first class zealot! I've been quoted in a column on privacy at BusinessWeek online. The author e-mailed me because she found my rant about this service on BIGdis. :-) - View/Add Comments (7 so far)
How can technology have come so far, yet people still insist on doing things so backwards. I don't care what tool you're using, Work, StarOffice, Excel, Access, raw text...I still can't believe that people actual mail out copies of 2MB, 10 page documents to 5 team members, tell them to make their changes, and email the result back so that person can "merge" the changes. I'm sure the Wells Fargo spreadsheet brigade can back me up here. Why are people so freaking stupid when it coems to things like this no matter how many times you explain it to them.
Five emails at 2MB each makes 10MB. Plus 15 minutes per person making changes equals 75 minutes. Mailing all those changes back is another 10MB of bandwidth. Then the inital person has to manually go through and create the final document (30-40 minutes). Of course, it needs to get reviewed so it goes out via email again (another 10MB). Some people make minor changes and send back (another 35 minutes and 10MB). Then the person who started all this has to again incoprorate those changes and send it out again. And when you're finally done wasting time and bandwidth, you're left with a document that has no revision history, has multiple copies scattered all over the place, and isn't indexed or tracked anywhere so anyone else can find it (unless there's another manual process on top of this whole thing).
I think we'd be way more efficent if we totally dumped computers and went back to paper at most offices. Why do people insist on doing things so ineffeciently? -
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This article annoys me. Quick abstract: Saudi Arabia won't let us use bases and a command center we have there to stage air strikes. They didn't seem to have any problems letting us stage attacks from there when Saddam Hussein was knocking on their door. We'd better win the negotiations on this one.
In completely unrelated things to bitch about, I hate bad interfaces. As I was typing this, I was downloading a 65MB file (Wolfenstien MP Test). The download finished, and the stupid copying dialog box popped up and grabbed the keyboard focus. Of course, this box only has one button, "cancel", and of course I was typing so I was using the space bar, which pressed the canel button. Stupid assholes up at Microsoft. What is their problem figuring out how users use computers? When do you ever want anything to pop up when you're in the middle of doing something else. Maybe a virus scanner or some other sort of major administrative alert should pop up, but it certainly shouldn't cancel a half hour operation with a single keystroke...morons.
Oh, and if that weren't bad enough, they've broken IE6 somehow with the way it handles form fields and the back button. I went back to fix a typo in my rant after previewing it, and it was gone! I had to cut and paste from the preview page and re-htmlize the thing. Aren't you glad that Microsoft is soon going to have a broadband connected, digital video recording, dvd playing box in every TV in America? I'm sure they won't abuse their monopoly power as they have in the past; this lawsuit resultant slap on the wrist must have showed them. Notice how now you have to register every single install of Windows with them? That won't be an inconvience at all I'm sure. And notice how Office now costs 50% more? I'm positive they won't try any more things like that once they monopolize the home "information appliance" market. Their little box, along with .NET certainly is going "revolutionize" software. Won't it be nice to just get a bill at the end of the month for all of the features you use? All the while those stupid bastards encouraging a collaborative model of computing that allows things like Nimda to happen, which is running roughshod over millions of unsuspecting customers, half of which probably didn't even know they were running a webserver.
Can anyone explain to me why, when on Windows 2000 you go to "Windows Update", supposedly the clearinghouse for updating your system and downloading urgent security patches, that you can download everything they say and still be vulernable to about a million different things? "We're sorry, there hasn't been much publicity yet about this bug, so we haven't made it easy to get to. You must go to the security section, find the Knowledge Base article, and download the hotfix from there, then run the program and follow the directions to patch your system for that problem." WTF? I'm sorry, if I go to a "Windows Update" page that claims to be where to get OS fixes, and it says "no updates needed", then I damn well better be patched against everything they know about. But sadly no...you're still vulnerable to about 15 other bugs.
And finally, AGHAGHAGHAHGAHGHAG, the download thing just happened again. STUPID BASTARDS. I guess I'll just have to start the download and leave the computer alone; god forbid I should ever want to do MORE THAN ONE THING AT A TIME. How is it possible to design such a stupid interface? Oh that's right, they don't give a shit because THEY HAVE ELIMINATED ALL COMPETITION and HAVE A GIANT MONOPOLY. They don't need to worry about making their products "good" or "useful". How many of you consider Word to be critical to getting work done, either at home or at work? Now how many features do you actually use out of Word? Would WordPad (the word processor included with Windows) do just as well or you if had a better interface? Are those extra features worth the extra $300 you pay for the software up front, and then $100 a year for "upgrades". Not to mention the fact that documents can spread viruses, so it's not really safe to ever give anyone else a word file. Will it be worth it once they're charging you per action? Want to spell check that document? That'll be a buck. Plus you'll have to logon using their integrated, maybe secure passport system, and maybe they get a copy of your document. They'll be able to see how many times you use the spell check, file->save, and how you work. Maybe they'll turn that into a profile so they can better target advertising to you, or sell the info to other companies. Maybe you won't even own what you write with Word in a few years. Hell, it looks like if you make a web page with FrontPage right now (or least if you use certain features of the product) you're not allowed to say anything bad about Microsoft or any affiliate, or have anything pornographic or inspiring "hatred" on the site (no definitions of what that might be of course). It's not that farfetched. It'll be great; right now if you violate their bullcrap license they have to sue you. In about 5-10 years, they'll just turn off your computer. No appeal, no trial, just poof and your computer no longer boots. It tries, but all that comes up is a message saying "Please contact microsoft support at 1-888-whatever and reference case ID #3949993993". Nothing illegal about it; this isn't the state restricting your speech, this is a civil matter. They're just a business right? They have the right to decide who uses their software, how they use it, and what they use it for right?
I don't believe this scenario is that farfetched. Fight back; join the Free Software Foundation or the Electronic Frontier Foundation now. It's important. I promise. Well I have to leave now; my download is almost done and I wouldn't want to cancel it by mistake for a third time. -
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Check out this article. I found something oddly amusing in this sentence: "Endorsing suicide attempts which aim to kill others is illegal in France." - View/Add Comments (1 so far)
For those of you thinking that the CIA should just be opening up old Nostradamus books to predict terrorist attacks, have a look at this MSNBC link. Basically, what he actually said is so vauge as to be useless. The really accurate sounding quote running around isn't by old Nostie' at all. So anyway, as always, take e-mail forwards with a huge grain of salt and verify with a reputable source any information you recieve. Of course, I've only verified this with one source, so maybe it's incorrect also. - View/Add Comments (2 so far)
I asked Cyndie, the love of my life to marry me tonight and she said yes!!!! :-) - View/Add Comments (24 so far)
Okay, so it's not much of a contest because there's no real prize, but I need your help. I'll give a shout out to the first person who can figure out why BIGdis doesn't render right in standards mode for Internet Explorer 6. The rants end up clearing the side menu, regardless of the fact that "clear" in the style sheet is set to none. I've tried several things, none of which work (except for changing the DTD so it's back to compatibility mode). I'm stumped (well, I have one more thing to try). I validated both the SS and the HTML and they're fine (except for one or two little things that I wouldn't think would matter).
Other than that, ie6 is pretty sweet. They actually spent some time fixing their standards problems and I believe, finally, after all these years, have managed to make a CSS1 compliant browser. The privacy settings are sweet too; finally, no more bad cookies; just good ones. -
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Hey guys and gals. For BIGdis 2 (design and features), I've become very high on the idea of modeling things after late 80's-early 90's dial up bbses. I'm not sure yet what extra features would be available, but I think it would be a dope ass model to follow. We could even build a vt100, terminal style interface so the place would be a lot more interactive.
Additionally, as a visual design concept I think it could be fun. Maybe an ASCII-art stylized logo, similar BBS color schemes (not too literal, we still want things useful and readable), that sort of thing?
What does anyone think? Good idea? Bad idea? Check www.textfiles.com for something similar to what I'm talking about, as well as a lot of history of old BBS'es. Maybe Joe could whip up a simple treatment or two? -
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I tweaked the search engine a smidge, so it's a lot clearer how it works now. I've actually ended up using it quite a bit; it's a full text search of all rants, comments, film rolls, and images. It's probably a good place to go to see if a question of the day has been asked before....
Also included in today's changes is a slight change to the cooke. If you have a tendancy to browse the site under one of its alternative names (bigdis.net, bigdis.org, www.bigdis.net, etc) it should work much better now. Instead of hard-setting the site for the cookie, I'm letting the browser decide now. There may be some absolute links that cause some problems, but overall I think things should work smoother for everyone. -
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That's it. Lucas has lost it. Attack of the clones? Is that or is that not the worst title you've ever heard. I'm now expecting a B-C grade horror flic about college coeds in the woods. Lucas must be stopped before he further sullies the series. - View/Add Comments (11 so far)
Here are a few pictures that I scanned yesterday, including a few of the super-cute Dylan and Jeff and DM's wedding/reception. Enjoy. - View/Add Comments (14 so far)
So Bush is trying to get some $$$ from your wallets so he can continue pursuing a "magic missile shield." Don't let him. Write your representitives and tell them not to give him a single dime. Sure, some of that money (after being filtered through tons of defense contractors) will eventually make it into research that after many classified years will benefit us all, but why make it take such a long and arduous route? If you're really intent on throwing away billions of dollars into useless projects, why not put it straight into research that directly benefits the public (alternative energy, materials engineering, medical research), or at least isn't classified (NASA).
Why am I not even accepting the fact that the ABM system might work? Because it won't, plain and simple. I have no idea what our leaders are tihnking on this one (aside from fattening the wallets of defense contractors that have been anxious ever since star wars closed down). What is this thing supposed to defend against? No country is going to launch a sizeable missle attack against us because of the retaliation threat. So what are we protecting against? A missle or two launched by a rouge state? If they really wanted to nuke us, it would be a lot easier to drive a van with a bomb right into one of our cities and detonate it. Missile defense isn't going to stop that. It's just a weapon system without a purpose. The threat of retaliation is just too great to make anyone really give serious thought to trying. The United States has a good record of retaliatiing against anyone who even looks remotely related to an attack if it's in our best interests.
And then there's the fact that it just won't work. Even in the pretty much optmal case of the Gulf war (great terrain, outdated missiles), we only shot down a small percentage of the incoming missiles. Those were out of date, very stupid missles at fairly low velocities. Incoming ballistic warheads are way, way more difficult to shoot down. Sure, if the unthinkable and unlikely exchange came to pass, it would be nice to shoot down some. But if someone targeted 50 warheads at New York, and lets say we're bad-asses and shot down 98%. That still means one goes off, and New York is gone. Somehow we've reverted back to the cold-war era "we could win a nuclear war" scenario. The attackers will always be able to overwhelm our defenses. Defense doesn't work with nukes, because it only takes one. With convential munitions, you've done an awesome defense job and made a huge difference if you could somehow shoot down 99% of the bombs hitting a city. With 350 kiloton warheads (that's 35 times as powerful as Hiroshima), it only takes on. We are being fleeced in the name of politics. Bush appealed to ultra-conservatives during the election by supporting this thing, so now it's got to happen for him to keep their support. What kind of sense does it make to dump $100 billion dollars into a useles defense system when we have such other pressing needs? Anyway you decide, but remember; even systems that test 100% perfect during peacetime never work 100% during wartime; ever. The ABM systems have never really had a sucsessful test under optimal, controlled conditions. Does that make you feel safer? Is it worth billions of dollars for that small, false sense of security? Plus the risk of destabliziing the strategic balance that's been in place for years, as well as having to blatantly violate a key nuclear treaty that we signed and pledged to support? -
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Maybe in the new days of Usenet's declining participation and lack of quality forums, this index may seem a bit outdated. But it should ring true and hilarious with anyone who'se ever frequented a newsgroup, BBS, Fidonet forum, MUD, or the like. - View/Add Comments (1 so far)
In the seemingly neverending parade of silly, stupid things out
there in the world, I just got my 2nd phone call in week
from PacBell, hawking their new "privacy manager" service which
is supposed to help cut down on telemarkter calls. This annoys me
on many levels. A brief description is in order...
Basically, you sign up, and then everyone who calls and has a private
or unknown caller ID gets a recording, saying "yaddi yaddi yaddi, this
house does not accept calls from private numbers, please speak your
name at the tone." So the person says their name and the computerized
operator says hang on, and rings your phone. The caller id for that call
comes up as "privacy manager"; you answer, and it says "you have a call from:"
and plays back their name. Then you can choose to refuse the call, answer it,
or send it to voicemail.
This is stupid on so many levels. The real problem is that
telemarkters almost always have caller ID on. Who cares if the customer
gets your phone number. It totally avoids all problems with services
like these; you're call goes right through. As proof, notice that PacBell's
telemarkters themselves have both had a valid caller ID and would have
gone straight through this system to annoy me twice in one week.
Whata bunch of dumbasses. When they call again, I'm going to ask
them if it blocks their telemarketing calls and give them an earful.
How much freaking sense does it make to make an unsolicted commerical
call to sell a service that blocks unsolicited calls??? Talk about one hand
washing the other. PacBell just cranks up their unsolicited calls
until everyone's so sick of hearing them that they buy this stupid service.
I've got a better idea...STOP CALLING ME!!!. Next
time PacBell calls you, for anything at all, tell 'em to F'off for me okay? -
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You know what pisses me off? Every day on Fucked company, there are 15 stupid companies laying people off or going out of business. This is because they overhired and overspent, based on silly projections based on 2 short years of trends. Every time I complain about their lack of foresight (take our new, giant, $100M dollar building that my company is in right now), everyone tells me "there's no way they could have seen this coming; cut them some slack because who could have possibly foreseen this?"
That's starting to bug me. That excuse is thin; it works if you're talking about Joe Schmoe off the street, or some lowly engineer or janitor. However, these people who made these serious miscalculations are supposedly the best and brightest business people in the world. It's okay for me to not see the bubble bursting in 6 months; that's not my job to know. It was these people's job to know. In fact, they got paid millions and millions of dollars, supposedly because they were so brilliant and valuable, to make these predictions. Yet they totally and completely missed the boat. I believe this supports my assumption that almost all business people are fundamentally and irrerperably stupid.
Not just ignorant and technical things, and project management, and employee psychology as I originally suspected, but just plain dumb. So people counter me with "Well, the market is unpredictable; you just never know what's going to happen; it's not their fault." Well, then why are they so highly paid? If they lack the ability to remotely influence the health of their company, and are completely at the whims of market fluctations, why are we paying them millions of dollars? Wouldn't any English speaking high school graduate be good enough?
The ironic part is to me, if you asked all the engineers, creative staff, and other people who actually do work a year ago, we all pretty much predicted that most of these dumbass companies would go out of business. Maybe not exactly to the depth of where we've gone, and maybe not exactly when, but it was sure obvious to us that an online scotch tape store with 500 employees, $100 Million dumped into a single super-bowl ad, and $17.34 in yearly revenue was not going to be sucessful just because it was called "eScotch.com". But these supposed "wizards" of the business world, with huge salaries and option packages had no clue. You can't even take some happiness away from their now worthless stock options, because they had so many at such a low price that either they're still worth something, or they cashed out several dollars ahead of the break even point, taking away a couple of million dollars for their trouble.
So how come our economy rewards incredible stupidity over and over again? More importantly, can we do anything to fix it, or are we stuck until their is a giant revolution. Where are all the smart business people? -
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Check out this Rolling stone article on Yahoo. Notice how everything is linked up all nicely, except for Diamond Dave's website. They did bother to put it in italics though. So I guess they wouldn't want to drive any traffic there; then they'd have to make Dave pay for it or something. First off, it's pretty lame to make the user type or cut and paste a URL to visit a site they most obviously will want to go to in order to get the full press release (although after visiting, I kind of wish I hadn't). And second, hasn't poor Dave suffered enough? Throw him some freebies man...
And yes, I occasionally forget to link things up, but a) that's out of laziness, and b) I'm not a professional journalist. -
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I can't believe someone actually said this..."This could get resolved quickly, or it could get resolved in a matter of time," White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said. This is referring to the China situation. I can only hope that it was taken dreadfully out of context...I found it on Yahoo if you don't believe me... - View/Add Comments (1 so far)
Welp, Cyndie and I got the house! Wheee! It's a nice big one with a brand new kitchen and a big-ass yard. BBQ's galore! We just need some help moving in...March 30th (Friday) is the date. We get the truck at 2pm, and we have it until 2pm the next day (Saturday). We'll be all packed and ready to go, so it's just shuffling boxes and furniture; promise! It's a lot easier to get stuff down the stairs then up them, and there's plenty of big doors and no stairs in the new place. So if anyone could lend some help, it would be greatly appreciated. Anyway, that is all...we'll send out a mass e-mail or evite (citysearch?) with more details in a bit. Even if you can't help us move, we'll certainly be having some sort of shin-dig shortly after move in that you're all invited to. See you soon! - View/Add Comments (34 so far)
Happy Pi day. How many digits can you remember - without the help of any external sources... - View/Add Comments (6 so far)
So I have a question...I've been thinking about ssh alot recently. I'm torn between two schools of thought; there is the generate a host key and use RSA/DSA authentication way of thinking. There is also the password only way of thinking. Anyone care to share some experiences or debate the effectiveness of either of these methods?
With a key, you must of course protect your key and your passphrase. This means generating a good passphrase and being very careful about storing the key. If your passphrase is good enough, I suppose it does't matter if someone steals your key, since it will take them almost forever to break the encryption on your key. Which is good, because it's usually not too hard to nab someone's key in most enviornments. Then I suppose you use ssh-agent to store your passphrase in memory while you work...not too shabby, but of course you need to trust root.
Now with the password solution, someone could sniff your session startup off the wire. I'm assuming this session could then be brute forced to determine the password offline, since there can't be very much strong encryption going on here. I would have to check the protocol to be sure...Plus someone could try and brute force guess for bad passwords. Of course, your system would notice this and lock them out, but if they can brute force the ssh password sniffed session offline, then you'd never know. I think I might start using keys...it feels a bit more secure to me, plus provides some cool flexibility as to what keys you allow from where... -
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"My" database cluster is back up and running. I am so happy. - View/Add Comments (2 so far)
If you're interested, Sony's Playstation site has PS2's available for sale right now. They have quite a few, but they'll be going fast. They sold 600 in the first minute or two. - View/Add Comments (12 so far)
Sound off! Using a hacked smart card to get free Satellite TV. Okay or not? What about stealing cable? Are they different issues? The same? - View/Add Comments (20 so far)
It's been a while since we've a had an "evil of the big studios" rant from me right? Well, so as not to lose my zealot label...First, read this link. Basically it amounts to the studios being able to demand that DirecTV turn off high-definition output of whatever programs the studio desires. So you've spent thousands of dollars setting up your home theater so you can actually circumvent all of the crappy limitations that have been put on picture quality over time. You've paid for your content and you're ready to rock and roll. You fire up your system to watch your movie, and POW! Nothing but a message that says, "please activate your old-school, crappy, 50 year old standard viewing mode." Where will this copy protection crap end? Like a compressed, mediocre transfer from HBO out an analog input is going to be good enough to pirate in a major way. Perhaps I'd be more sympathetic if the studios could show any significant financial loss from piracy. In the past the courts and lawmakers have helped us out at least a bit, making decisions and passing laws that served to at least partially protect the consumer. Now that those are all being overturned and repealed, guess we're at their mercy. And free market doesn't work, because the studios openly collude to provide shitty, cheap-ass, inconvienent service to the customer, and bar innovation in every concievable way.
What will it take to turn this around and force the studios to compete? I'm putting my money on our new friend the internet. Soon video quality will get better, and the distribution properties will improve. Hopefully a couple of major directors will break away from the studio model and finance their own projects, releasing them directly somehow, in an open form, bypassing whatever control the studio had. As this catches on, newer, hipper studios will get keen to that model, more moviemakers will follow them, and soon the good-old-boy network will crumble. We can hope. More likely, the studios will come up with a big, non-copyable on-demand streaming system, stop producing DVD's, rescind your license agreement for existing DVDs that you've purchased and make it illegal to play them, and every time you want to watch anything, you'll be paying $5.99 for it, or whatever price they want to set. After all, they own it right? If you want to watch it more than once, why shouldn't you have to pay for it again? How did they ever manage to become some of the biggest corporations in the US by actually allowing people to buy content for unlimited viewing? It's a miracle isn't it. I shed a tear for their hardship.
All the while compiling a nice big database of your personal viewing habits (preferred times, movies, shows, music, etc) which they own exclusively and selling it to make even more dough. Probably to a private investigator firm that doesn't really check who queries their internet database as long as they get their 5 bucks per query. So Mr. Home Invasion buys your personal living habits for them and breaks into your house when you're not home, or worse steals your identity, ruining your financial life forever, since it's impossible to control your own credit report (owned by another set of huge companies, whose ownerships eventually trace back to the same corporations that have big stakes in the media companies), and the government refuses to implement any sort of secure authentication or identification, or even make standards for the protection of such information. So now you can't even prove that you are you and someone else isn't to anything, pretty much making the rest of your life a disaster since you can't pay a bill, open a bank account, or rent or buy a home without spending 6 months sorting out all the bad things on your credit.
To say nothing of the fact that the Evil Movie Studio doesn't know dick about computer security, and puts all of that information for 100 million Americans in a crappy, insecure database unencrypted. Then a 14 year old hacker from Russia breaks in, steals it, and posts it to a newsgroup, effectively making our entire credit system completely ineffective and having vast and unkown repercussions on our economy.
Movie studios: destroying America peice by peice.
-
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Sonofabitch! Let me just recommend to everyone that you never buy a Toshiba DVD player. Maybe they're okay now, but the one I bought oh so long ago sucks ass! Today I purchased 3 DVD's and rented two. Of those, only two actually play; the others just say "Please check disc." This is in addition to other problems I've had in the past with this unit (SD-3108). No Gladiator, no Road Trip, no Abyss disc 2, no American Beauty, no MI-2...this list goes on. I supposedly need a firmware upgrade, which Toshiba tries to charge $50 for since it's out of warranty. Bite me. If they don't fix it for free, I'm gonna have to show them buy running out and buying on of their HDTV's.
Okay, so I guess that doesn't really show them. But I won't buy another Toshiba DVD player again. It's just really frustrating these days. The Abyss disc 2 actually locks up the player, so I have to unplug it before it will do anything. This may accelerate my decision to pick up a Pioneer Elite DV-37; the DVD player I've picked out to replace this one (although the Sony 9000ES is a dark horse). Thoughts? -
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Now, _this_ is the wireless web! I'm in Seattle, and using a notebook with a wireless modem. Fun stuff. Real browser, ssh connection...not so fast, but it works. - View/Add Comments (6 so far)
Digital Subscriber Line. - View/Add Comments (12 so far)
So today the internet as we know it took two major blows...
Webvan turned to crap
A great service re-did their web page in such a strange, bizzare way so as to exclude a crap load of internet users, for reasons that I can't even fathom. That's right, Linux users and Solaris users at least can no longer access webvan. When will the horror stop? When will companies stop writing shit code and dilberately (or incompetently) excluding users. A web page is not a Hollywood movie premiere; people aren't dying to go to it. If you make it difficult for them, they won't come. It's that simple. Stop annoying your customers!
Netscape 6 was released
Why would you throw away your whole codebase, work 2.5 years on a new browser, and then bother releasing it before it was finished? It's not like 6 months is going to make a difference one or the other at this point. Netscape 6 is unpolished and slow at best. Why would they not wait til they had a decent product? Why? Or perhaps Netscape knows that Mozilla will never be a decent product so they just decided to run with it? Either way, Netscape deserves to go out of business. Netscape 1.0; now that was good software. It's been totally downhill ever since. Let's not even talk about their server side crap. Let's join together and enjoy watching Netscape fade completely away.
These things would both be funny if it weren't for the increasing frequency at which the bad news keeps rolling in. Soon we won't even need browsers; just a shockwave player and our .PDF readers, and that will be all that's available. Who gives a shit if that completely destroys the point and utility of the whole thing right? As long as it looks good on someone's computer, probably the idiot CEO/CTO whoever that approved the damn thing. Why are these people so clueless? Will they ever get a clue, or we doomed to a wasteland of buggy javascript and non-standard HTML that doesn't even render on some platforms? -
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So I realize that I'm a latecomer to this whole Multimedia Gultch thing,
but I still find it nostalgic to be leaving this building. All the stories
I've heard, from back in the Wired days, and the early Organic and Vivid days. For
those of you that don't know, Organic is leaving it's long time office
here on 3rd and Bryant.
Probably the first professional services company
targeted at the internet, Organic was building websites back in 1993. Apache
was partially developed here at this building...one of the first application
servers was built here. It's very interesting to be leaving, for a newer,
way more traditional corporate style office. It will be even more
interesting to see if our informal, somewhat underground work attitude
survives the move. Anyway, I'm about to lose my 37 day uptime (would have
been 100+ if I didn't have to apply OS patches to get Java 2 installed)
and power down my workstation. When it comes back up, it will be at
our new offices (which have a pretty cool layout and a very cool server
room). I'll be out of touch for the next 2 days as I schlep servers
and rebuild all of our stuff in the new location.
And of course, tonight is the last official drift (the Eagle's Drift-Inn on Bryant)
night. If you're in the SF area, I highly recommend checking it out, as
attendance is required for all Organic engineers tonight. I suppose
I'm being needlessly sappy, but I do think it's a fun full-circle type
thing. Organic as a bunch of rave-scene kids helped start something
that was kind of a revolution against traditional business, grew, and
now the company is moving into big offices and becoming a traditional business.
Where do you think the next major generational shift is going to come? Nowadays
it seems you have to have a fancy CEO and business plan to get
anywhere at all in the internet. Do we think that there's still a chance for
a "garage-band" company to start a ruckus, or is it all too corporate now?
-
View/Add Comments (1 so far)
Is there anyone else out there who feels like they really want to do something useful with their lives, but can't because they lack the willpower to do the actual work required? There's so much I want to learn; and it's all out there for the taking. I just tend to not be able to motivate myself into the actual doing of things. I can read whitepapers, articles, and books forever, but when it comes down to actually implementing things, I get bored and distracted. Crap. It's so frustrating. I think part of my problem is just the silly desire to learn everything. That's when I'll be satisfied; when I know every single bit of knowledge that exists everywhere. Obviously an impossible goal, so I probably shouldn't waste time being frustrated about it. I do of course, and then I find myself wasting time worrying about weather or not I can actually learn everything. Sigh. - View/Add Comments (6 so far)
Check out this
interview. Is the first interview I've seen with either candidate
that feels like it's devoid of the usual drone-developed copy
that they spout out to win some votes without losing any. It seems
like it's kind of the real guy. More importantly to me, it clears
up Gore's, "Invented the internet" comment and makes Gore's position
a lot clearer. He's a techy. Who knew? With the exception of the
v-chip, I agree with almost everything he says. I may actually be
able to vote for him now without feeling guilty. He at least took
a stand on some issues, and appeared to have some kind of sense-of-humor
about things. Interesting; even if I don't agree with everything that
he said, he at least seems to actually understand the things. I'd
rather have someone who understands the technology making descions
then someone who's just a public opinion slave.
Of course, sadly the comments about the white-house web cam indicate
a fundamental underestimation of the value of traffic analysis
attacks, but I think we might actually be able to teach this guy
something. Like, maybe we could get him to read
"Secrets and Lies"
and actually stand a chance of him understanding it... :-) -
View/Add Comments (10 so far)
I hate to be a Slashdot reflector, but check out this fun quote from
last night's debate:
"Columbine spoke to a larger issue, and it's really a matter of
culture. It's a culture that somewhere along the line we begun
to disrespect life, where a child can walk in and have their
heart turn dark as a result of being on the Internet, and walk
in and decide to take somebody else's life."
- George W. Bush, presidential debate, October 11, 2000
Heart turn dark as a result of being on the Internet? Wow. So we have
one candidate who "invented" the Internet, and one who wants to destroy
it because it turns children's hearts black. What a fucking idiot. I better
stop writing now, wouldn't want to have my heart turn black and
shoot up a classrom. Sigh.
-
View/Add Comments (36 so far)
We as a society, need to spend more time deciding what model we will allow
intellectual property to use in the future, rather than arguing over the
semantics of the what the law currently allows. It should be obvious to most
everyone that the current model is crumbling around us (Napster, MP3.com, DeCSS,
etc...). We concentrate much time on trying to battle these cases out and
fit them into current law. The fact is that these new technologies don't fit,
and how we address that will determine how we use and grow the Internet.
Napster, at is core, is very much like a search engine. People search for
something they are looking for (songs), and Napster shows them a list of
places where they can get those things. This indexing function is extermely
valuable, and critical to the way in which the Internet operates. Napster has
run afoul of the law, essentially because of their unwillingness to attempt to
filter out copyrighted content. Napster's service is being misused, and there
is the very strong potential that they may be shut down because of it. Napster
is a special case of the problem though; their primary legal troubles lie in
that no matter what they say, they are relying on that illegal distributed
material as their primary content. As they plan to (somehow) make money from
all of this eventually, they are essentially using other people's copyrighted
works to further their economic interests. This happens to be exactly what
current copyright law is designed to prevent, and Napster will (and probably
should) lose their day in court.
However, what if Napster was making an effort to police themselves, and keep
unauthorized material off of their service? This would shift their primary
purpose to the transfer of authorized material, at the cost of the majority
of their users (frankly, what percentage of Napster users are really doing
nothing unauthorized with the service). Would this be enough to satisfy the
record companies? Should Napster be forced to police itself? Let's equate
Napster to Internet Service Providers. Both provide network services, and both
have very little technical control over what happens over their network.
Let's extend the analogy even further; let us equate phone service while we're
at it. It's certainly possible to use Napster for both legal and illegal
purposes. It's also equally possible to use the phone network for legal and
illegal purposes (threatening phone calls, arranging criminal actions, even
the unauthorized transfer of copyrighted materials). Let's also include the
post office; they don't bother to police what's inside the messages they
deliver. They are simply a service provider also. Do we hold them responsible
for illegal actions that may occur over their service?
These analogies may seem redundant, but they draw our attention to the fundamental
matter: preventing illegal actions over service providers. Few would argue
that because the postal service, or phone network, or AOL can be used
for illegal actions, that they should be completely shut down. That is what
is proposed for Napster, most likely even if they made a genuine effot to stamp
out piracy. There are two ways to stop illegal use: one is by proactively
preventing it, and the other is to set up penalties that deter illegal usage.
The second method is far more suited to an open, democratic nation such as ourselves.
Using the post office as an example, illegal use of that service is punishible
by the federal government, and is extremely harsh. This deters most people from
ever attempting to abuse it, since the penalites are so great, and likelyhood of
them being imposed is high. The first model would find postal carriers opening all
letters to examine their legality, then proceeding to process them if appropriate.
That, or the total abolishment of the postal system, since it is possible to use
it illegally.
The same people who argue for the shutdown of Napster, and services like it, aren't
advocating the shutdown of the postal service or the phone system. This is because
of the new ideas that the Internet brings to the party. The Internet makes everyone
a publisher, with a potential audience of millions world wide. Without the internet,
the average "music pirate", using a CD burner and postal service as his or her means of
distributing copyrighted material, could hardly make a dent in the bottom line of those
companies. Add the Internet to the mix though, and that same person is suddenly capable
of leaking stolen tracks to millions of people without proper authorization. The record
companies fear losing control over distribution of music.
Once Napster has died because of it's obvious reliance on unauthorized material, new
decentralized services will spring up. The only way for the record companies to attack
these, is to ask the law to force network providers to block these services, altering
the very fabric of the Internet. Open flow of information is what the Internet is based
on, and exactly why it works and is so powerful. If service providers are forced to
police themselves and proactively block access to certain services, the very point of
Internet becomes moot. If the restrictions on a service become to onerous, then that
service will cease to be useful. The Internet has the potential to become one of the
most important human discoveries in all of history, and it should not be destroyed simply
because of a few services that potentially harm the economic intrests of a few powerful
companies. These powerful companies are going to try and pressure lawmakers into laws
that directly affect your individual freedoms.
The basic problem with digital media right now is that the content providers are
terrified. They make their money by monopolizing the distribution
channels, forcing artists to sign with them to get their music distributed.
Now all of a sudden, an artist doesn't need a record company (or a publisher,
or soon a movie studio). It becomes possible for an artist to set up
a small ecommerce site, and distribute that recieve payment for their work
all over the world, all by themselves. This will require the record company
to actually become competitive, since the artists have a choice about what
they do with their music. This will cut massively into the record company's
profits, since artists will no longer want to sign with outrageous terms.
The media conglomerates don't care about people being able to
download music off the internet; they just don't want the artists to realize
that suddenly they don't need the record companies. Digital music in any
form encourages the eventual shift from something you can buy at the store
and hold in your hand. The more people get used to that, the more willing
they are to accept downloading music straight from an artists web page.
That is what I think the real reason they are suing Napster and mp3.com...
they really don't want people getting used to the idea of listening/paying
for music online.
Soon you'll see artists starting to "break ranks." As their incredibly
unfair contracts expire, they'll start creating new music and selling it on
their website. Record companies will at that point start to pull even more
underhanded attacks and slight of hand to go after those bands, probably to
the point of suing them for using their old names and using their lobbyists to
pressure laws restricting content sales into existence.
So what model will replace our traditional ideas of intellectual property? What
properties does it need to have? Any proposed model needs to retain incentive
for the artists to product material in an economic free market. This means at
some point, the artists need to get paid, without other companies infringing on
their revenue. It would ease the transition if there was a place for traditional
content providers, but that is not required. Of course, intellectual property
refers to more than just music or movies: it includes software, algorithms, ideas,
trademarks.
The somewhat extreme groups argue that information should always be free. That no idea should
ever be permitted any protection under law, since it is by it's very nature an
abstract concept and not subject to society's laws. Any time law restricts the use
of an idea, innovation is being stifled. An excellent idea, but it doesn't
seem to leave room for incentive in a free market economy. Perhaps the answer lies
in replacing money as the sole incentive for producing work. Making other forms of
compensation available to those who innovate might serve the desired purpose. Maybe
there is enough value to be added by content providers in producing real media,
marketing, or advising that the public will still want to pay for their content,
even if it is available for free.
Wherever the solution lies, I believe it is critical that we as a society get
involved now, and choose the battles well. The best chance the public has of defining
what the next major paradigm will be is by preparing ourselves now. Write your
congress people and let them know what you think.
Get involved with the EFF or GNU
and really make a difference. The real issues regarding your personal freedom in the
future's digital world have very little to do with weather or not Napster survives.
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I'd like to congratulate Rashmi on his spectacular In France's. If you haven't seen them yet, I highly suggest checking them out. - View/Add Comments (4 so far)
So last night I saw "Slash's Snakepit" and AC/DC live in concert at the Oakland arena. The diversity of the crowd totally blew me away. There were teenage girls in leather who probably would have looked just as at home at a Brittney Spears show, whole nice looking families wearing AC/DC shirts, middle aged people in torn denim reliving the glory days, 18 year old pot smoking burnouts, preppy computer people, hardcore gangstas...you get the picture. Slash's Snakepit (Slash from GNR) sucked total ass. The only bright spot was the Mr. Brownstone cover, and that just made you want for GNR again. AC/DC rocked the house though. How fun that a metal band can still play an arena show and pack the place. Canons, Angus, screaming fans...it was like the early 90's all over again. I took Bart home, and it was worth a laugh when we met the connecting train from SF. There were a whole bunch of people who had just come from the SF Opera (The Tsar's Bride was the show that night) who got on. Talk about your worst case culture shock. I felt like confusing them, so I started up a conversation, asking what tonight's opera had been, and if they had caught the Ring cycle last year, and how was it. That otta confuse the crap out of their preconcived notions of youth for a while...:-) - View/Add Comments (2 so far)
So as you may have noticed, BIGdis has undergone a facelift. I realize it's not a dramatic improvement, but it should allow things to look a little more organized. Notice that site news now requires a click. Although, if it's been updated within the last week, you will see the little NEW! text next to it (same goes for ZTN and a couple of other things I think), so it will be more obivous when those things have been updated. You also can comment on news items now, so feel free. There's still some residual old looking stuff lying around; expect that to be cleaned and updated this weekend. Let us know what you think; there's probably going to be major display problems with Netscape, so we may have to build a special version of the frontpage just for you guys. :-) As a bonus now though, the site looks great with Lynx... - View/Add Comments (7 so far)
I think I just figured out what bothers me about the whole Napster thing. It's kind of a tough issue in some ways, so I haven't taken a real hard line stance one way or the other yet. But in thinking about it, I just came up with something new (to me at least).
We all known how Napster is not actually transferring any of the files, just providing a directory for the transfer of them from person to person. There is nothing technically illegal about this. The judge has now decided that the spirit of this action and primary purpose of this directory, or at least what has become it's primary use, is to violate copyright laws and "steal" music. That's all fine and dandy if that's what he thinks the primary purpose is, but it's not technically against the law. He's using common sense and his opinion of the matter to draw his decison.
So basically, we have judges creating new legislation instead of interperting it as they are supposed to. How many times have silly things happened in the courtroom on technicalities, yet the judges/juries had to abide by them because that's the law. Here we have a judge pretty much throwing the law straight out the window because the technicality isn't convienent. That's what bothers me. Same for the judge on the DVD decoding case, who ruled on illegal hyperlinking.
He stated that linking to something on the web is "the same as" supplying it yourself. Huh? Technically, you have nothing to do with the transfer. I thought that's what the law was all about; technicalities and facts. If I put up a sign in front of my house that says "Crack house next door," does that make me subject to be arrested for dealing drugs? It may a different crime to aid an illegal act, but I'm certainly not dealing drugs.
Do we think it's a coincidence that the law always lands on the side of deep pocket corporations? I sure don't. I think the whole thing is just rather offensive at this point. - View/Add Comments (15 so far)
So of course last week, I bought a car. Fun stuff. Until I get a call from the dealer on Wedesdnay. "We screwed up the paperwork, and BofA isn't going to lease the car with the residual as high as it is." The gist of it is, BofA kicked back the financing because the calculated the residual off an inflated MSRP that they tried to stick us with, so they need to cover some costs, would we mind paying an extra $10 a month? I laughed, and said no way, I have a signed contract with you. "Well how about we meet in the middle and do $5 a month more." Uhhh...yeah, right. This is not a negotiation, we did that a week ago and signed the deal.
So he says, well, we can do the same payment and everything, but you'll have to come up and sign the papers tonight. Sorry bub, I'm busy as hell right now. So they decide to send a driver to bring me the new contracts that night. Heehee. I'm totally on guard, but I figure that since it's the same lessor, the form will be the same and I can just compare them to make sure everything's on the level. The driver arrives, but the contract is wrong; it's for a 15,000mile/yr lease, and the payment is $20 a month higher. I send their driver home with an unsigned contract and they say they'll send another one tomorrow.
This one arrives the next day and is actually correct. Same payment (actually $.08 a month lower), but the residual is just $700 less. Heehee. So for those of you unfamilar with a lease, I'm paying the same throughout the term, and then at the end if I want to buy the car, it's $700 cheaper! So not only did we first work a decent deal on a car at the Roseville Auto Mall (where all cars start at $4k over MSRP!), but they had to call us a week later and make us a better deal by $700! We got to screw over a car dealership. How often can you say that in life? Our end price on the car was only about $380 over dealer invoice, not counting the $1000 factory cash back. Sometimes life is sweet. :-) - View/Add Comments (5 so far)
So I've gone out and purchased a brand new, 2000 Miata LS. It is just a fun-ass car to drive. Everyone should always own at least one convertible at all times. I'm addicted. We'll get some pictures up soon. All in all I'm so far very impressed. We'll probably buy it at the end of the lease, and then I can start modding it out Mcf-style! Something like this maybe? - View/Add Comments (11 so far)
Check it out! It's the first mobile rant from dennys. - View/Add Comments (11 so far)
So I was working this morning on a style-sheet-esq version of BIGdis, that was simplyfing life in soooo many ways. I just took a look at it with Netscape 4.7something...wow. What a bad, bad implementation. Impressively bad. It's not even close; I have no idea what crack they were smoking. So how many people out there use netscape signficantly? I do on my Solaris box at work, but I can live with the ugliness. I'm curious if I should bother finishing this cosmetic upgrade.... - View/Add Comments (9 so far)
This is just bizzare drama here. All these intense emotions, sparked off by a misunderstanding. That's not to say there are no issues here; obviously there are. So let's work 'em out. Maybe a public forum isn't the best place, but who cares? We aired out dirty laundry here, now let's do some healing. We're obviously stressed about the changes that are occuring to our group, as people move, and have babies, and get new jobs. Things are changing. I don't think any of us have really dealt with this type of change before. I say let's do it together. I love you guys. McF, book, Andy, Jeff, Erik, Cyndie...just about everybody here I know and love. And I don't want that to change. Who's with me? Share the love. :-) We've got things to work out for sure, but I trust that it will happen, and we will all stay friends forever. That's what's really important I think. - View/Add Comments (13 so far)
So out of all the stupid, inane little frustrations that Microsoft software brings to life, there is one that pisses me off more then anything. Sure, complete lack of real remote adminstration tools is bad; so is total lack of useful documentation. Their "security bug a week" policy is also pretty lame, as are the hoops that you have to jump through to secure their software. But the biggest, stupidest fucking thing they have ever foisted on the American public is "Windows Update."
What a crock of shit. In theory, it's a great idea; a unified place where you can go, it runs a little code on your system, checks the results against a database, and tells you every thing you need to upgrade your system to the latest versions. This way, you can check and see all if you have all the latest patches, and to boot, it can even check every once in a while and send you there if there's a critical update to be had. Great promise; everyone running up to date code without a big burden on the user.
Of course, in real life, IT TAKES LIKE TWO WEEKS FOR NEW EXPLOIT FIXES TO APPEAR THERE. By that time, every damn system in the US could be screwed up. Not to mention the fact that they don't put every fix in there, just ones that they deem "critical", which rarely includes all the security bugs, and certainly not minor updates. It's the biggest cluster-fuck I've ever seen in my life. And they make it pretty difficult to figure out what you do need to download, since their expecing you to use Windows Update (which of course doesn't work). So there's basically no way to check and see on a Windows box if you have the most recent patches for everything, aside from maybe digging through the entire FTP site, knowledge base, and security bullitens, and manually checking every file mentioned. A task that could take weeks.
And just in case you don't know what inspired this rant, EVEN IF YOU'VE TUNED OUT BY NOW READ THIS!!!! If you're running a Windows box, you are now potentially vulernable to two NASTY bugs that will start appearing in a few days. One of them affects you if you have Windows with Access installed. It makes it possible for a bad person to, from a web page or email, run VB Script code on your computer; basically just like Melissa or I love you stuff that could concievably do just about anything. The only difference is, no matter what your security settings are, it still works, and....YOU DON'T HAVE TO OPEN AN ATTACHMENT. That's right, this guy will just do it's magic upon reading the email or visiting the web page. Yuck.
NASTY BUG #2 for the day: If you're running Windows, and using Outlook/Outlook Express to read POP3 or IMAP4 mail, someone could send you a mail that AS SOON AS YOU DOWNLOAD IT crashes your system or runs code that could delete your hard drive, or copy senstive information back to somewhere else, or install software to "backdoor" your computer. Yuck yuck yuck. I know these both sound like "Good times" bullshit hoaxes, but they are not, please take them to heart. Click on the links above to get the patches; god knows their not available at "Windows Update" yet. Make sure you get both patches ASAP. - View/Add Comments (5 so far)
I'd just like to give a shout out to Scott, who's "mad c0din4 ski115" and seriously impressive dedication helped launch www.wamumortgage.com. The boy is just a crazy worker. Props to the whole team actually. Go visit the site and check out what he helped build; go get a home loan or something. :-) - View/Add Comments (18 so far)
Why can't people just support standards? When has it ever been bad business to fully support a standard? Netscape supported standards and was cool, so it gained a huge market share. Then they stopped caring, while Microsoft started, and all of a sudden Microsoft is the one with the 80% market share. Now that Netscape is languishing, Microsoft has stopped caring about standards. If it weren't for these two pathetic sad-asses trying to "out-proprietary" one another, it would be easy to develop web pages that look good and consistent across a wide variety of platforms and computers. But no, you're stuck implementing tons of code just to work around their crappy bugs, omissions, and "innovations". I can only hope Mozilla gives some kind of order to this mess, but it appears to be years away still. And to boot, my hunch says that AOL's Netscape branded version (which will probably be by far the most prevalent) will be broken or crippeled in several subtle but important ways. Supporting standards is good business. - View/Add Comments (7 so far)
I don't know whose idea it was, but I'd just like to give a heaping helping of thanks to whoever thought remastering Bad Boys on DVD was a good idea. We finally have a multi-channel soundtrack, anamorphic Bad Boys transfer...whew. Now when the hell is Bad Boys 2 coming out? - View/Add Comments (7 so far)
IT IS FUCKING HOT!!!!!!! - View/Add Comments (37 so far)
The first version of what I consider to be the goals for BIGdis(.org?) in the future are up on the new version2 link up top. Please review them and let me know what you think. I really don't want to design this thing in a vaccum. If think I'm totally off base but don't want to lambast me in a public forum (yeah right, candor is real high on this group's list of qualities...:-)) feel free to email me. Even if you think they're perfect as is, just drop a comment here to let me know that you're "signing off" on them. Thanks! Oh and by the way, I'm moving on Saturday. If anyone wants to help, it's gonna be a blast! - View/Add Comments (21 so far)
For those of you interested, please check out www.bigdis.com/version2/. This is going to be the clearing house for information about the next BIGdis version. The draft project plan is there now, check it out and see what you think. Keep checking it; keep us honest. I'll start putting dates there as things develop, and version2 should finally start to materialze. If you want to help in any way, let me know. I'll probably create a project alias so everyone who's working on it can communicate easier. Mostly what I want it whatever "outside of the box" ideas you guys have initially as to what direction you want our humble home online to go. - View/Add Comments (7 so far)
In order to better focus our planning and development efforts, I've been looking to create a "Thesis statement" for BIGdis. A simple sentence or two that encompasses what we want the site to be. I'm soliciting help from all of you here - I'd love to get a response from everyone here with a couple of ideas for sentances that can guide what the requirements are going to be. Sorta like a mission statement, but I hate those, so something more focused. Just like writing an English paper...give me as many ideas as you can think of. Let's use this forum to brainstorm! So bring them on! - View/Add Comments (10 so far)
Okay everyone, I've been thinking about the whole Napster debate and some other general copyright questions. For those of you who don't know what all the hub-ub is about, Napster is a little program that you tell it where your mp3 (digital music) files are, then you fire it up on the internet, and it sends a directory of your files to main server. Then other people can search on that server for particular songs (of course you can search too), and it presents a list of everyone online right now that you can currently get the song from, and you transfer it straight from your computer to the other one. Napster has been able to avoid some litigation because they never actually touch the files; it's just a directory.
Of course, as most of us know, Metallica has now brought suit against Napster for violating their copyright. The've now put an interesting twist on things by identifying individual users who have specifically violated the copyright. Now in my eyes, Napster gets away with what they do because there is a non-infringing use. If you own a copy of the CD, then by fair use you are allowed to grab/make as many MP3's of that music as you want. Of course, you can't distribute them to people without their own license. This is of course exactly what Napster is helping you do. Notice I said helping; the fact remains that they are not distriubting any files, just a convienient means of doing so. Will that be enough to protect them? Should it be?
Personally, I think it's a pretty borderline case; I doubt that very many people do use Napster in a legally compliant way. Now sure, Metallica is probably being hurt very little by the whole mess, but smaller bands trying to break out might be hurt by large scale infrigement. On the other hand, it is a lot like linking to disputed material on a web page, which I think should always be legal. The ulimate solution probably lies in the record companies realizing that digital music is here to stay, and moving to profitize a service like Napster.
But then you look at things like the new mp3.com lawsuit, and you just have to wonder what they are thinking (the record companies are trying to claim that mp3.com's beam-it service is infrining on copyrights. That service requires that you actually own the CD before you can download the mp3's online. Also in question is their instant music service, which allows you to order a CD and get it shipped to you, but immediately listen to mp3's from mp3.com's site. Again, both of those sure seem like fair use to me. I think what we're seeing is just the typical thrashing of the giant dinosaurs before they die, being swarmed and consumed by faster, smaller mammals. Perhaps they will learn that they're survival in the future depends on embracing free and open technologies for digital music. - View/Add Comments (5 so far)
Oops. Looks like I've created myself a whole heap of work. I'm taking a look at PostgreSQL to replace MySQL as our database here at BIGdis, for a variety of reasons. Mostly the fact that MySQL lacks: stored procedures, triggers, referential integrity (although that can be worked around), and transactions. Which makes it fail just about all of the ACID test. PostgreSQL has all those things, so I thought I'd take a look into switching. What I discovered, in looking at some of my data, is that I was smoking crack before.
Bad design descisions abound...inconsistient column names, strange data types, partially used tables...the usual stuff. Now part of that was the learning process for sure. Regardless of how it got that way, I'm gonna have to figure out some way to get the data out of the current format and into whatever exists next. That's the rub. The actual code for BIGdis is just as disorganized...however, all of that gets to get left behind when I rebuild it. The data must come though (I think - I'm assuming we don't want to start over. I suppose if that's amiable to everybody then we could entertain discussion on that). I'm gonna have to do some serious massaging to make any of it useful. I feel a whole slew of Perl scripts coming on...
So anyway, the moral is (this is somethiing I've always known) that your code can be crappy, but once you get users actually using things, you're tying yourself into at least some of your design. As soon as a database goes live, the instant the users start entering data, you're partially stuck. Remember that when you half-ass your data models. - View/Add Comments (19 so far)
Check out this example of what's wrong with people...I'm bored, so I'm browsin' around looking for what's going on with The State cast these days, and I find this old write up. People just don't get it man. I don't know which is funnier, the show, or this person's wild offense at it...:-) - View/Add Comments (3 so far)
Well, I lost the coin toss. I (get to|have to) go to Texas on Sunday afternoon through Tuesday evening. What am I doing you ask? Transitioning a certain client's code release environment to them. There's really not much for me to do, other then sit around and talk to some people. Sounds like it's mostly because the client wants some insurance in case something goes horribly wrong when they do the release. So everybody watch the site closely on Monday night, and if something seems hosed up, just know that I'll be at the data center in McKinney, Texas working frantically to fix it. I'm sorry Andrew - I was really looking forward to helping you move (I was - really - I really appreciate all the help you gave us and I was looking forward to some yummy food.) Sigh. - View/Add Comments (5 so far)
So I can't decide what's scarier... the fact that I went to an apartment complex and the leasing agent said the rent was $2791 a month for a two bedroom apartment, or the fact that the next words out of my mouth were: "That's not so bad!" Plus of course $280 for two parking spaces. But regardless, I now have a place to live. Hurrah! The bonuses: nice big rooms, outdoor balcony, year round heated pool, concierge desk, underground parking garage, spa, fitness center, right smack in soma, and last but not least: 2 blocks from work. Still doesn't make it any less painful to part with that amount of money but hell... it should be fun, and you only live once. I'll be saving through the company's 401k plan, so I'm not going to have nothing to show for this, even if I blow all my disposeable income on steak, burboun, and hookers. :-) - View/Add Comments (6 so far)
Hehe...I think this is first rant that any of us have entered wirelessly. I'm just testing out the Ricochet modem on the on-call laptop to see if it works while I'm on the ferry. Much to my happiness, it does; very cool. So I'm commuting on the ferry right now, and I'm still connected to the internet. Wireless, fast and reliable internet access is a very cool thing that needs to be accelerated. What do you guys think? If it was available on phones and watches and small PDA's, do you think it would stay within the geek/yuppie toy world, or is this somethng that people want. I think it is. - View/Add Comments (7 so far)
Woah! We all need to give some belated, and some on-time shout outs to some of the girls of BIGdis! Let's all wish DM a happy birthday first. Then of course Kindle is headed across the pond as of this week, so let's all wish her the best. And last but defineately not least, I'd like to give a big loving Happy Birthday to Cyndie, who despite what she might think is not even close to old! Comment away and let's rack up those tidings of good cheer and luck. - View/Add Comments (39 so far)
OK, this is crap. Plastics technology is incredibly advanced. We have plastics that can conduct electricity, plastics that are strong enough for airplane wings, plastics that resist heat, plastics that can become transparent, plastics that can resist large caliber bullets, and who knows what else these days. So can someone tell me why we don't have a damn plastic that they can make a CD case out of that actually survives shipping. Of the CD's I've bought recently, I'm shooting about 25% with broken jewel cases, either covers or the little spindle that holds the CD in. What the hell? How much force do these things take in shipping. The old style, non-clear plastic didn't break. I don't have a single, classic grey jewelcase with a broken spindle. Nor do I have a single "old school" plastic CD with a broken cover part (at least not one that broke without me stepping on it). So now I buy CD's and the little arms for the cover are broken, the spindle's are broken...basically everything that can be broken is. Let's complain here. The record companies are already making obscene profit off CD's (since they're cheaper to make then tapes but cost MORE), I think they can spring the extra freakin' $.10 a CD so the damn jewel case doesn't break. REVOLT! Write letters! Get Angry! Nothing pisses me off more then to open a brand new CD only to have a pile of those little spindle pieces fall out on my floor. What a bunch of crap! - View/Add Comments (3 so far)
Here it goes - the big official announcement! I'm moving! That's right folks, I'm taking a job at organic, where Bryce works. I'll be leaving for the big city. I'm excited. I'm gonna be sad to go in many ways, but I think this will be a fun place to work, and a great time. More importantly it's going to be good for me. Now I just need to find a place, and figure out how this whole thing is going to work. - View/Add Comments (6 so far)
Okay, so rant #2 for today. This is my funny for today also. Here's a little pull quote from an article on zdnet (which you can find here). It's referring to Solaris 8: "...support for IPSEC and IPv6, allowing an almost infinite number of Internet addresses." Almost infinite? Did I just hear a professional journalist use the equivalent of "infinity minus one?" Grrr...innumeracy at it's finest. I mean, it's not like they said practically infinite - which may or may not be true, but is at least open to interpertation. "Almost infinite" - I mean, 3.4x10^38 is a truly huge number - but instead of just making up crap - why not try to inform the user. It didn't really drive towards the point of the whole article - so why even bother. Sigh...I mean the number "1" is pretty much just as close to "almost infinite." - View/Add Comments (4 so far)
That's it. I don't care if the damn Pacific Ocean rises and floods into our pool or pond. I'm done trying to stop it. It can have what it wants. I've got the pool and pond both draining, and the backyard is still flooded. You win mother nature. - View/Add Comments (4 so far)
Sweet. Computers are finally starting to come along. Here I am stopping at home for a few minutes, and I find transmeta's live web-cast. I start watching it an it looks pretty damn good and smooth. I also realize that I have some pictures to process and scan, so I open photoshop and do some image processing, all while the transmeta live video runs in the background without a hitch, as well as when I upload the images to bigdis. That's just plain cool as far as I'm concerned. Watching what looks to be the future of mobile computing delivered by the desktop technology that finally works. Neat.
Anyway, in other news, I'm really happy about BIGdis' burgeoning popularity. Soon it might just be better named foothillhighschoolalumni.com or something. :-) Not that that's a bad thing. A hearty welcome to our two new users today. - View/Add Comments (2 so far)
WoooooHooooooo! That's it. BIGdis's (as well as most of the internet's) internal clocks have now rolled over! It's Jan 1st, 2000 GMT. Happy New Year all you European blokes! And look - it's a miracle. My web browser, my computer, my os, all still works enough to send this message through the still working internal network, over still working routers, to the still working proxy server, over the still working internet, right into my still working database on my still working *nix server. Imagine that!!! Yeeeeeeeeeeee haw. Now it's time to party. And for those WFB'ers that are curious, our Sun and NT servers are all serving web pages just dandy, I can still log in to routers, and all the dates appear to be right. - View/Add Comments (1 so far)
First check out this link (it involves yet another hiring of a stupid cracker fuckhead). This is really starting to piss me off. Since damn idiot corporations are too stupid to figure it out, I guess we need legislation. Why do they keep hiring unethical, short sighted people who develop computer viruses and other various forms of computer crime? See the way that provides an incentive to do bad things? The military doesn't hire murderers, even though they'd probably make decent soldiers. The business world (usually) doesn't hire convicted embezllers, even if they are a whiz with the numbers. This shit _has_ to stop. The more we give people an incentive to commit computer crime, the more they will do it. Anyone for organizing a boycott of companies that hire known crackers? I'm not talking about people who reverse engineer software and find security holes - that's different. I'm talking about people who with intent, develop a destructive virus or break into a system. These people have commited a crime! Hello! Do you want people with felonies on their record working for you? What are they thinking. I say we organize a boycott - either that or the government is going to have to step in and pass legislation that disallows people convicted of computer crime from ever working in the industry again (much like convicied sex offenders aren't allowed to be school teachers). Either that, or the courts need to stop dishing out slaps on the wrists. Jail them and fine them - seriously. Computer security is only going to become more important, not less - let's start paying attention to things like this. - View/Add Comments (1 so far)
Thing #1: So since I know no one ever reads the news, I just thought I'd rant so you could see that I've added a suggestion box. Fun fun fun. Go to it and make suggestions or ask questions about the site. And I get to rebuild all the code for this thing from scratch or nearly so, since in the process of adding features I've realized everything sucks and needs rewriting.
Thing #2: Y2k stuff. Everybody chill. Repeat after me: "Nothing's going to happen." Make it your mantra. The bug is fixed with everything that's important. The terrorists are always trying to blow everything up, so there's nothing new there. And even if some incidents do happen and there's some minor disruptions in normal services, who cares? Panic certainly won't help the situation at all, and what it will equal is a little bit of inconvienece. Is it worth panicing over slightly longer ATM or grocery store lines? I think not. And obviously, and tterrorist attacks that result in loss of life are tragedies, but that's the price we pay for our open society. Our security comes from the fact that we'll indescriminantly lash out at whoever claims responsibility for such terrorism. So don't get me wrong - there are crazies out there. Just be careful, use your brain, and there's nothing to panic about. Sounds like a plan to me. So everybody go out there, drink too much at a New Year's Eve party, and wake up late on Jan 1st with a hangover - just like any other year. The bowl games will still be there. - View/Add Comments (6 so far)
So just to finish off the toilet paper thoughts, (previously discussed here), there is a new dispenser that I quite like, because 1) it's stainless steel and that's just cool, 2) It's got a big flat spot on top where you can put a book or something you don't want to set on the floor, and 3) for some reason, they moved it to the other side of the stall, so it doesn't block the door anymore. Oh and by the way...IT SUCKS NOT HAVING INTERNET ACCESS AT HOME!!! - View/Add Comments (1 so far)
So here it goes. My last rant from 519. I have to shut down and move my computer, and it will be without real internet access for a whole month. What am I going to do? I guess I'll have to figure something out. Anyway, this is rob, signing off from the place where this computer has rested for a year and half. - View/Add Comments (1 so far)
This sucks ass. So in the continue saga of ASSHOLE PROPERTY MANAGERS, our war has been escalated to the next level. They are REFUSING to give us a reference unless we give them 30 day notice. FUCK YOU!!!! Is what I say to them. And yes, I realize that is a very carefully crafted argument sure to win them over. So they are interfering with our ability to get a new place, and they THREATENED us to "take their time" responding to reference requests, screwing us over even more. I don't care what it takes, we're fighting them tooth and nail over everything now. They can eat my ass, what an unprofessional bunch of jokers. They've probably shot our chance at this new place because the new property company just thinks we're a bunch of punks that cause problems now. Some just get so caught up on their little fucking power trips with the little control they can wrangle over life that they fuck people over without thinking about it. Assholes. I mean, we've been totally cooperative at every step of the way, never been late with the rent, and have a good relationship with the owners. And this is what we fucking get? A giant mouthfull of piss as we try to move? Screw them. Maybe just to spite them we'll say we never got the notice. Turns out they did not deliver it in a manner required by law, so technically, we've never gotten notice. We could just stay another month - then they'd look like idiots and we'd have more time to look for a house. It might just come to that. Fuckheads.
In additional news, the idiot salesperson at Good Guys who I bought my phone from oh so long ago has now caused me some pain. Apparently, they lied or were mistaken and my free nights and weekend promotion ended in a year, despite the fact that they SAID it ended in 2000. Moral: GET IT IN WRITING. So now I have to sort out the whole phone plan thing quickly and get a new plan, but thost Nokia bastards are trying to charge 800 DAMN DOLLARS for the 8860. Screw that, it's not $500 smaller or cooler then a 6190 or StarTac.
And finally, my contracting company neglected to send me a check for my timesheet again, so now I have to call and sort that crap out. But of course, there aren't going to be and FTE's around tomorrow to sign the bloody thing, because they're hanging out at a party in Tempe, leaving me to not get a check for yet ANOTHER week, unless I can find a blank timesheet tonight (which of course I don't have any because I haven't gotten my check and they won't send me any extras) and get Scott to sign it before he leaves tomorrow. SON OF A BITCH!!!!!!! I'm annoyed beyond the capacity for all rational thought. Really. I can barely form a congnitive sentance right now. So of course the best thing to do is hop in the car and drive down to the I-80 split at Madison WHERE SOME SELFISH BASTARD IS SURE TO CUT ME OFF AT THE LAST MINUTE. - View/Add Comments (5 so far)
So in the wake of the finding's of fact pretty much against Microsoft, we're posed with a question about what we want software anti-trust legislation to be. Most slashdot idiots are running around proclaiming the evil empire dead - "l0ng l1v3 l14ux", or the Microsoftees are calling the judge a fool. Obviously the issue is not so simple.
Microsoft I think without a doubt has engaged in anti-competitive behavior. They have forced hardware manufacturers time and time again to sign licensing agreements that prevent the use of non-MS OS's on shipped computers, or penalized them if they did. This is obviously using your market power to bar entry of others into the market and there should be some punitive action as a result. Here is where I agree with the judge. However why is anyone (specifically the generally anti-establishment linux/slashdot) accepting this judge's opinion that the court can mediated what features to include in softare?
So what if Microsoft wants to add HTML rendering functionality to the OS. Using HTML in your user interface makes sense in spades: compliancy with standards, reuse of code, and user familiarity. But the court says no? Why don't we go pull the spell checkers out of word processors while we're at it. The DOJ didn't come after Microsoft, Lotus, or Wordperfect when they included grammar checkers into their word processors, but I believe that the company that made Grammatik is dead and gone. If we start legislating features, where do we draw the line? Software is hard enough to build without the government telling you can and can't include.
I grant you, this is new. It does seem like MS's browser gets an advantage by being stuck into Windows, and perhaps not a fair one. A better solution must be found though. The user can benifit highly from tightly integrated software - who decides what is more benifical, the other company's software playing on a level field by legislating features or innovation by one manufacturer. I'd like to make my own desicions thank you very much. Capitalism works. It's gotten us this far, there's no reason yet to believe that it won't continue to work, so let's not interfere. Give Microsoft their lumps for their anti-competitive business practices, and watch them like a hawk in the future. This level's the field to a large degree. The computer industry moves way, way too fast to try and legislate. Since this suit has started, countless new developments (Palm's popularity, Sun's rising agressiveness towards the desktop market, Linux's continued inroads, Be's progress, Mac's resurgance) have cropped up that threaten Microsoft's dominance. If they fail to innovate, they'll be just as out of business and forgotten as the next guy. They've survived this far perhaps by their unfair business, but I think largely by their savvy in being so large, yet being able to change strategies at the drop of a hat. That's a powerful ability in a company that large. So please government, do what you're good at - enforce the laws. Stay out of the software development business. - View/Add Comments (4 so far)
You want a rant? Here's a damn rant. Let's talk about our property managers. What a bunch of fuckheads. So now they're THREATENING TO EVICT US for "not being cooperative" with the realator who wants to come by and see the house to get an idea of what's going to be required for the owners to sell it. This lying ass realator says she's left tons of messages with us and we've never returned them. We can count exactly three, only two of which went unreturned. This is the same bunch of jokers who CAN'T EVEN GET THE DATE RIGHT ON A LEASE or bother to return our phone calls EVER about little things like wanting a lease, or sprinklers that are broken, or FUCKED UP PLUMBING!. So now, after already saying we have to be out of there by January 8th, they want to EVICT US? FUCK THEM!
And, even though they are losing the contract because the owners are moving back in so they gave us notice, they want us to give them some bullshit 30 day "counter-notice". For what? So they can prepare the house? We'll be out of there in enough time for that. What do they need a notice for. Screw that. What a bunch of fuckheads. They are absolutely one of the most unprofessional "business" I've ever dealt with. They don't return calls, they don't fix things right, and now they have the nerve to cop a 'tude with us over the same shit they've been pulling for a year and half now. Somehow we ended up with the "JPS/Roseville Telephone" of the property management world. We have always been cooperative with them, and have always paid the rent on time. So in closing, I'd just like to give them a big ass virtual middle finger and a FUCK OFF. - View/Add Comments (4 so far)
Okay, so two targets tonight. #1: The WWF IPO. Why wasn't I told about this? Seventeen smackers a share to get in on the ground floor of the organization that successfully marketed Hulk Hogan's album? Damn! Missed out. #2: Martha Stewart's IPO. Apparently, you're allowed to bribe all the traders on the floor by cooking them all breakfast. I cry foul! Today's IPO for her company makes her worth a billion dollars. How the hell does that happen? - View/Add Comments (1 so far)
That's it. The stretch of land around I-5 is now officially the ugliest ass place in the world. What a wasteland. I wish the whole thing would get swallowed up by an earthquake (just the land of course - I've got no quarrel with the people). Of course, it almost did this weekend in our 7.0 quake that woke me up in my hotel room at 2:46 AM. That was a lot of fun. So is being basically up since 8 AM yesterday. I'm loooooooooooooooopy. looooopy. loooooooopy. Must go to sleep, but I don't seem to be able to...ick. - View/Add Comments (1 so far)
Sorry about this - it's just a test. I promise all this dust will be worth it. Well, maybe it will be. I'll do my best to make it worth putting up with it. - View/Add Comments (0 so far)
Recently I see more and more little rice rockets running around with fictional badges. People renaming their car models into something that doesn't exist and that they stole from another car name. Like Civics with "Type-R" badges on them. Today I saw what was originally a Civic EX, but rebadged (without removing the EX badge, so it wasn't even convincing) with an SI AND an R. So it was a Civic SIR EX. That makes me think of three other letters: WTF? I mean come on - what exactly do you think you've done to your car to make it into this fictional hybrid. That's like taking an SHO engine, sticking it in an Subaru Brat, and sticking SHO badges on the car (hey - that sounds like fun - but I digress). Parts in common does not make it the same car. And why are they making up cars? And I don't know exactly what it would take for me to call a Civic EX a Civic EX SIR, but it's certainly not bad ground effects, red Honda badges, clear taillight covers, and a loud ass exahust. - View/Add Comments (0 so far)
Let's talk about toilet paper. So the campus facilities people at CSUS say there is a very good reason they don't have real toilet paper (they have crappy little brown squares - elementary school style). People steal it when they have real toilet paper. Seems hard to believe, but it makes sense to me in some ways - college students are often on a serious budget. And they say that there are special anti-theft dispensers that exist, but they get vandalized and people steal the toilet paper. Fine. So here at work, the stall in the middle of the bathroom has been through three different toilet dispensers in a year and a couple of months. My question is...why? Do people here steal the toilet paper? That seems unlikely - everyone here is decently well paid. Why not just pick one and go with it? I only bring this up, because today, the most recent dispenser (which personally I kind of liked - a little 4 roll jobby that rotated the new one into position), is gone, leaving no toilet paper dispenser in my favorite stall. I wonder what the motivation for these changes are. Is there really someone anaylzing this stuff and trying to determine the best dispenser for the job? It seems to me it would be a lot cheaper to just stick with one, even if it wasn't the most efficient at stopping theft. Do people really steal toilet paper here anyway? - View/Add Comments (0 so far)
Just for all those that are curious, full HTML capabilities are coming. Scott is generously donating his HTML checking module, and as soon as I roll it in here, I'll be able to specifically allow or disallow any HTML tag, in addition to it automatically closing all your tags, so people won't be able to screw things up by putting in bad HTML. Should be a pretty good deal. In other news, I've got some antibiodics now, so hopefully I won't be dying as much. And thanks to everybody for the welcome home dinner - it was really nice. - View/Add Comments (0 so far)
First a rant. Being sick. Let me explain how it sucks to be this sick. Wait - there is no time. Let me sum up. Lame lame lame. Second - rave: WHEW! After a mostly disappointing 1st batch of pictures, I picked up the remainder today and there are some really nice images in there. Perhaps enough to actually make it worth the $750 I spent for film and processing. Oh and by the way, it sucks really, really, really bad to be sick. - View/Add Comments (0 so far)
Thanks Jeff. Now I've got a rant of my own here. ESPN is really pissing me off. Now, despite the fact that we've just come off two solid victories (the latest being a 41-10 ROMP of a confrence team), and we have the leading running back in the Big Sky by a long shot, and are third in the Big Sky, there is no page for our team showing our record and schedule. WTF? Screw them is what I say. We appear to be just as competitive as the rest of the Big Sky this year, and they don't even bother to have a page for us. To see if we won, you have to look at the standings, or on the page of the team that we played. What the hell is that? I'm gonna send them an angry email - it's a bunch of crap. Either follow everybody in the Big Sky, or nobody. What's this singling people out stuff? What a bunch of crap. - View/Add Comments (0 so far)
I'm back in black. I hit the sack. It's good to know I'm glad to be back. - View/Add Comments (0 so far)
Quick shout out to all the team. I'm in Amsterdam. yay! Staying right next to the red light district in a borderline seedy hotel. But we're good now. Ooops - gotta go. Later! - View/Add Comments (0 so far)
Okay this rant comes in parts: 1) Traffic. You should see Rome. Crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy drivers. Just insane. No lanes, no rules, and speeding Vespas. Crossing the street requires and act of will. Almost fun though. 2) Keyboard layouts - you wanna bitch Jeff? Let me tell you abuot France. I tried to code some damn perl to write myself a web interface for my mail real quick, and I could type any damn symbols because of terminal type mapping. That sucked! 3) Keyboard shortcuts. Different language versions of windows suck because the first letters of the menu choices that I use with ALT key are all different, so I get the wrong thing. LAME! 4) Sucky internet and telcom. I couldn't even call the UK. The stupid phone just ate my money and beeped at me. What is this, 1979? It's not even touch tone - just rotary - at a hotel payphone...a nice, otherwise modern hotel. LAME! Oh and of course, I finally get POP turned on so I can check my mail from the hotel at the silly little terminal that only supports POP and a web browser, and when I go to check, the thing is broken! So I have to truck my lonely ass all the way to other side of the town to find an open internet cafe. Sigh. Sometimes, life is hard. And my clothes are stuck in the washing room until tomorrow morning because they lock out our keycards at 10pm. Ack! Oh well - aside from that - everything is spectactualr. I actually really enjoyed my rail jaunt through the city and then my walk by the college district (the Sorbonne!). Finally - GO CSUS! Too bad, so sad for Davis. Maybe we'll actually start winning like we're supposed to now. - View/Add Comments (0 so far)
Thanks Drew! Much appreciated. Let's see...I update the itinerary on my web page with the rest of the travel schedule. One more night in Paris, then to Amsterdam by train, then to London by plane. 1-2 more days there, then home. Finally. Whew! It's been really exhausted. The good news is, I'm finally a touch more healthy. Yay! Talk to you all soon. - View/Add Comments (0 so far)
Hey guys...problem. I cant telnet at this internet station at the hotel. Could someone turn install a secure (2.5x) pop server and stick it in inetd? Thanks! - View/Add Comments (0 so far)
So how's this for fun? Erik and I found a mall here in Paris that has their computers set up so that you can use the internet (kinda expensive though). Sadly, French keyboard layout...which is terribly, terribly different then ours. However, it's win98 and they don't have it locked down at all, so I reconfigured the keyboard layout to a US one. I touch type just fine, so everything works nity! I love this stuff. Anyway, we're not going back to London with the tour. We're gonna stay here in Paris another night (hopefully) and then take a train to Amsterdam, then I'm flying back to London for a couple days of sightseeing, then back home. Finally! What a rush. I can't say I'm not having a great time, but I can say that I miss most of you terribly. Paris is unbelievably gorgeous and expansive. You could live here for years and still not see everything. It's just totally amazing. Anyway, Have fun everybody! - View/Add Comments (0 so far)
Wow. Rome was dirty. Fantastic but dirty. Overall, not nearly enough time to see any of it. You can't even imagine how huge the Vatican Museum is...it just goes on and on and on and on...hundreds of rooms filled with hundereds of statues...really amazing if you ask me. The tour's finally starting to wind down. Tons of interesting people...lots of Austratilians, lots of people from the US. We've made an effort in the psat few days to get know the people we missed on kind of the first part of the tour. Tonight is the big Tuscany dinner and nightclub night. I've had three mellow nights in a row and am still not better. As far as I'm concerned, it's a bunch of shit. Anyway, the time on the coach driving has been good for me. I read a thought provoking book and have been thinking about a lot of things - maybe even finally clarifying stuff. It's liberating to realize that you can just pretty much handle living anywhere. Anywhere in the world I wanted to pick, I'd feel okay about my ability to just move there and start things up. Not saying that I will, but it's nice to see it as a possibility, instead of feeling restricted by only what I saw and encountered before. Oh - and mad props to C3 for phoning - that was so cool - even if I was barely conscious. :-) - View/Add Comments (0 so far)
Kick Ass! Zou know whats fun? Foreign kezboard lazouts. Apparentlz, the Germanz lazout (if zou haven't guessed alreadz) has the y swapped with the z. Makes for fun tzpuing. Rather then adapt, I've chosen to go with it. The apostrophe is also an umlatted a, but rather then test bddb's abilitz to handle international character sets Ive chosen to leave them out or go back and fix. Im still sick and it sucks ass. Good thing though is that this cafe kicks ass. Its actuallz a resturaunt - and with the purchase of 10 DM worth of food, zou get an hour of free internet. How cool is that? I had the schnityel - verz zummz! Been in Germanz for 2 dazs now, and all Ive bought is schintyel. Cant go wrong with that! So now its to the Haufbrauhaus for some serious beer drinking. Amsterdam was fun. Ran short of time while visiting the Van Gogh museum and had to run through the streets while not reallz knowing where I was going. Made it back though - no wrong turns! Used the tram and still made it back all the waz across town in like 10 minutes. Germanz is so far the coolest place - Id reallz like to come back sometime and spend some more time here. Its got much more of its own culture then Ireland or England. Probablz the language. So anzwaz, this bus trip reallz moves. Were seeing a lot, bzt mostlz from the bus. Earlz mornings and late nights. Last night we built a schnapps tower in the hotel bar...long storz - Ill explain in the travel stories. Fun little game, and the plus was that I didnt paz for anz of mz drinks. Also did a wine tasting and bought some reallz good wine for a good price. Different then what Im used to. California is well repersented on the tour, with 4 people from Sacramento, and about 8-9 total from CA. Lots of aussies too, but what are zou going to do abou that? The tour manager is Scottish which makes for an interesting perspective on some things. Anzwaz everzbodz - having a great time. This is the first internet cafe that uses linux on all their boxes- thats cool. Thezre actuallz all locked down though luckilz thez still allow telnet. That reminds me - can someone reboot renee? Its not responding and I need an address off there since Im sans palm pilot. Mazbe it would be better to tar up mz home directorz and rcp it to gwen. Thanks. Guess tahts about it for now... Ill probablz check in from rome in a couple of dazs. Everzbodz keep having a good time, I certainlz will! - View/Add Comments (0 so far)
Damn! Somebody screwed me. I have a transaction showing up twice, for $54.81.... I have no idea what that was. That sucks....I guess it could be two trips to the ATM...actually, that's probably what it was I guess...my 40 Irish pounds that I got out. Makes sense I suppose. That's a pretty good exchange rate...nevermind - I'm happy now. I like London so far - seems nice. All nice people so far. Very cool. Really just have to go enjoy the beautiful day now though - sunny - 72. I thought it was supposed to be crappy weather her. It's pretty much been gorgeous. Anyway, talk to y'all later. - View/Add Comments (0 so far)
I hear you Ben - for sure. I'm constantly amazed at the lack of knowledge that they actually try to instill in you. It does way more harm then good. Most of my professors advocate extremely bad programming practice (especially with C - pointer magic and a bunch of shortcuts are all advocated). Testing is barely covered, and design basically not at all. They force feed you all the design work - wouldn't want to make anyone actually have to think or learn. Except for professor Meyers at CSUS. I had him for CSC20 and he was the best educator I've ever had. Advocated good programming practice, had a good balence of giving you designs and making you come up with your own so ever slower students didn't get frustrated. Just a really awesome class. Anyway, we're about to get on a taxi for the airport and leave Dublin. Interesting city - a lot more like the US then expected really. Now we get to see what the rest of Europe has in store. - View/Add Comments (0 so far)
Hey people, wassup? I'm all the way around the world, and I can find time to email and update rants, but you can't? Three rants in 4 days? Lame...anyway, for me today we're looking at a rave. Raves for a guy in England, who found my lost palm pilot in Heathrow and emailed me. I'm getting back later this week. How very, very cool is that. And why is it hot here? Today is the first cool day. Yesterday it rained, but before that it was 85, sunny, and muggy? What happened to crappy overcast skies? Oh well, tomorrow, off to London. - View/Add Comments (0 so far)
Let me just say, what the hell is the deal with sodas here. Twice I have ordered a soda, twice I have recieved no ice in the soda. Does water not freeze here? This is a bunch of crap. Especially considering how freaking hot and humid it is. What the hell happened to cloudy, overcast Ireland? It's like 80-85 degrees here with massive humidity. And they have weak ass air conditioners - some places not at all. Particularly in some rooms in the hostels, where there are at times 15-20 people in a little tiny space. Hot hot hot. Anyway, if you haven't guessed I'm here safely. Oh and Drew can handle adding head shots (just make sure the size is right, they've been sepia toned (an action in photoshop5), and there's a 1 pixel black border around the edge). For people with smiley faces there's just a symbolic link to default.gif. - View/Add Comments (0 so far)
Monique - totally understandable about the dark campus thing. I've been to several college campuses at night, and ours is _DARK_. The darkest I'd say. And it's like no one cares or something. Tons of hiding places, it's deserted at night, minimal security, and no happy blue rape light line. It's more then a little scary. Anyway, what I'm really here to say is that I'm outta here. I've still got tons of of stuff to do, but I'll hopefully have time to fix stuff up a little better. Remember, I'll be (hopefully) ranting and updating as I go - cyber cafes providing. - View/Add Comments (0 so far)
Woah! Please don't make me code perl/SQL while I'm on vacation to implement the ideas I have and fix this thing up. I'm trusting everybody not to get frustrated and stop playing while I'm gone. Jeff - don't you think your rant against Andy was perhaps just a touch too venomous? I mean, when you get right down to it, no one at all really cares what any of us write here. So let's all try to play nice and try to come up with interesting or thought-provoking things to say, and remember, if someone's talking smack here, it's almost surely in jest. For those of you turning in late, I suggest going to Rants and then checking out the last 50 in chronoligcal order. Certainly a heated discussion. - View/Add Comments (0 so far)
Okay, so as promised, back from King Smorgi and ready to throw my whole two cents in. So Andy's right in that the original point was for everybody to have column-like things, where'd they'd put stories, or anecdotes, or rants about something that interested them. Something that was interesting to read, for both us and the outside world. So in the redesign, I had a feeling that things were going to take a different direction, but I wasn't sure enough to bother thinking the whole thing through. This is an expiriment, and my plan is to let it evolve into what it needs to. I've got a couple ideas rolling around in my head for how to fix things up and make the site even cooler, all based on your feedback and what I've seen. Sadly though, it will have to wait until I return. But rest assured, I am thinking about where things are going, and have in mind some cool plans to streamline things a bit. So kiddies, until I get back, remember that you're welcome to rant as you see fit. Try to keep the "chat room" aspect to a minimum though - that's all I ask. That's what email's for until I get my ideas solidified and implemented. Thanks! - View/Add Comments (0 so far)
Hey bub, before you start eyein' my room for moving in case of a plane accident, it's a 767-300, which is a little newer. Plus, the Airbuses are both short flights - they can handle an hour flight I think. I am stoked about the 777 though. I'll write more about the ranting issue after lunch. - View/Add Comments (0 so far)
And let's not forget good 'ole AKK - as far as I'm concerned the champion ranter around here at the moment. Anyway, I'm going to rant a bit. As most of you know, I leave for Europe on Friday. I purchased a ticket from London to Dublin through Expedia on British Midland. Despite the fact that I emailed for confirmation, and I called them for confirmation, _AND_ that I've already recieved my tickets, the intinerary under my profile in Expedia _STILL_ shows the ticket as awaiting confirmation and to check back in the 2-24 hours. This is IT gone horribly wrong. Aside from that though, I pretty much gush over Expedia. It works really well and really quickly for the most part. - View/Add Comments (0 so far)
Okay, so I'm brilliant. The whole point of sending the email to me when someone new signs up for BIGdis is so that not just anyone can sign up and start ranting - espescially before I get a head shot for them. So I have this handy actve field that I can turn on or off with the intent of being able to disable accounts without deleteing the user record. IDIOT me forgets to write any code to check this field on most of the 2nd gen pages. Yippie. Oh well. I'm going to fix it now. - View/Add Comments (0 so far)
Thanks for the suggestion guys. Already if you click on someone's head you get some info about them (including personal webpage which will hopefully tell you more about them. However, I agree that there needs to be a little more, so if you all go check out your profile page now, there's a new field for bio that now gets displayed on the ranter page. Use that to give the world a quick run down on what you do and who you are. Does that work for you? - View/Add Comments (0 so far)
Okay, so let me just remind the person in charge of the weather that this IS CALIFORNIA!!! NOT the south. We are not supposed to have 95 degree temperatures when it raining and overcast. Yuck! Add in the smoke, and this is a bunch of bull patootie. This is to Shawn...HONKEY? is going to race? That sounds like fun! I'm sure we can swing by. It's gonna have to go down to LA for some mods though right? And yes, compaq does suck. So does PCMCIA. Like the 3com network card that _supposedly_ is the same as the old and works with NT but isn't and doesn't. Oh and check this out - fate took a hand in my descision makin. I ordered my stuff from the B&H today, and I finally thought I had decided between the two wide angle lenses, but they were out of the one I wanted. So I got the other. Fate? I think so. - View/Add Comments (0 so far)
Amen 'drew. I mean, I built this site so we could all be columnists. Bitch about anything, go off on anybody, or even give somebody or something props, for all the world to see. And it's been nearly silent for the last couple days. Twenty users, and we still don't get updated all that often. Perhaps I should bust out some guidlines or something. Don't get me wrong - I don't want people posting of they don't really have anything to say...this isn't exactly intended to be a chat room. But spend some time thinking of things to write about. Let's get some action! - View/Add Comments (0 so far)
Smoke. Smoke smoke smoke. It looks like fog outside, but it's actually smoke from some giant fire. Wonderful. So it's smoky, over 100 degrees, and thunderstorms are expected. Wonderful. "Our next weather report will be in 3 days." In other weather news, right now out there, there's a hurricane Bret, and a tropical storm Cindy. Those who know the story will appreciate the coincidence there. So in protest of all this weather nonsense, let's all take a moment, go outside, and give mother nature a great big middle finger. We can all do it at the same time - we'll send an internet chain letter to coordinate the whole thing. It'll be fun. - View/Add Comments (0 so far)
Ummmm...not to be nit-picky, but for the record Cyndie, your Allie is also Alli #3. This is mostly so the Cyndi (pronounced sin-die: you know, my "i" plural fetish at work), numbers match the Allie numbers, but also because I know another Allie that can count as Allie #1 to make the numbers work out. Confused yet? - View/Add Comments (0 so far)
So this is a whole lot of fun...I'm making this update from a little HP Windows NT machine with a wireless network card. How much fun is that? That's right -a little tiny computer with a totally wireless, go anywhere network connection. Sure, it's only 19.2kbs, but telnet connectons are workable, as is internet browsing (although probably best sans pictures to save your sanity). Anyway, here it is. And it's working from within our vault-like room, so that's impressive in itself. - View/Add Comments (0 so far)
See, I knew that was going to happen with the parsing newlines bit. Stupid netscape doesn't wrap it's text area box, so people are putting returns at the end of every line, which makes the stuff look totally goofy. So newline parsing is gone for the moment. I'll have to implement actual checking and validation of HTML tags as the "right" way to do things. No time estimate yet - as soon as I can get to it, how about that? Party pics will be up tomorrow... Cindy - not sure what I have in the way of other pictures of you, so you may need to send me one or something. - View/Add Comments (0 so far)
Well, the only problem is the whole point (for me at least) of designing a page where we could each write articles was so I could have my head is Sepia just like a real magazine columnist. I think i'm inflexible on that one. I do agree about the monochrome look though...I'll figure out some sort of fix for that...perhaps a new logo or something. And finally as to your picture, it's one of my favorite ones of you ever taken. However, it loses all the cool stuff as just a head shot, so I'll see what I can dig up in the photo library (which, incidentally, is going to be the next bddb feature - a completely searchable and index image database). - View/Add Comments (0 so far)
Ooops...wonder why that didn't work.
Let's try that bad boy. -
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Hummm....Andy - that would take actual work. Right now I'm parsing them out the simple, simple minded way. To actually make it allow some tags and not others requires writing a real parser of sorts. I agree with the need. Actually, perhaps I could get carridge returns in there though...that might not be so bad...hang on. Okay... That should work. Although this may change, because I'm not sure how good an idea it is... - View/Add Comments (0 so far)
Alright, enough asinine abstract arguments and altercations about actual literary devices. - View/Add Comments (0 so far)
So here it is, the very first rant and I have nothing to say. Typical. I can't even really bitch about the tools I used to make this thing work...apache's great, so is Perl and homesite...mysql. Ooooh! I can bitch about javascript - had a hell of a time making the silly rollover work. Of course, I was tired and it was my own damn fault, but I guess it's something. To add to the fun, I forgot that Text::Template interperts brackets, so it kept munging my javascript code...(which I took from ArsDigita - credit where credit is due). - View/Add Comments (3 so far)
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