Scientists Being Killed? What the Hell?

Whitley Strieber's Unknown Country: "Since January of 2004, more than twenty scientists are known to have died in accidents, under suspicious circumstances, or been murdered."

Where's that tin hat of mine? Holy crap, but this is a nasty-ass coincidence.

CBC News: U.S. living beyond means

CBC News: U.S. living beyond means, Dodge warns: "'I am referring, of course, to the persistent and growing current account deficit in the United States that is mirrored by large current account surpluses elsewhere, especially in Asia.'"

Argh. If only there was a way to prevent your collapse from harming my country. We should invade, considering that the Iraq invasion was based on a shakier premise.

Mozilla Bug 163993 - The Mozilla Hall of Shame

Bug 163993

Mozilla's bugzilla has a wealth of information. Almost anyone who's reported a bug can tell you that even very regularly reported problems, very broken bugs and very popular features are met in mozilla with silence. Jerry Baker has recently opened an RFE #117 on bugzilla.mozilla to highlight the continued disregard in a format with which one can easily see the important bugs currently being ignored:

Anyone who uses Bugzilla quickly becomes aware that bugs are not fixed according to their importance with users. At least we agree on that. I know it is, and has been, the position of mozilla.org to keep any advocacy that conflicts with their goals out of public view as much as possible. It looks bad to have a huge list of bugs, that many users are interested in seeing fixed, being ignored for years. It looks even worse when you can click on any bug in that list and read the blatant, egotistical attitude frequently taken by drivers and others when refusing to fix bugs because of petty personal vendettas and for other lame excuses.

As far as spam, there are email preferences if you do not want to receive bug spam.

However, I am sympathetic to the spam complaint. It would be just as effective to list all of these bugs in a comment to this bug. That way you can still see the list and see which are fixed, and which are not.

While I disagree with his method, I really can't find fault with his opinions, and I can easily see how he'd become so disillusioned.

Of course, he will be ignored.

RPM sucks

I don't know who the hell busted RPM, but the version packed with Red Hat Enterprise Linux absolutely bites.

The stupid thing can't install software from a bare http reference! What kinda lame-ass coding broke that part to the point where no one wants to fix it?

This kinda FAILING means we can't -V vs remote RPMs, for instance, because it silently fails without mention (a very deceptive response), so checking key binaries vs remote (and reliable) package versions is now impossible.

The ability to verify and account for all contents of a running system is why, after 18October 1998, I chose to go with RedHat vs Slackware. Now I'm no longer sure that RedHat knows what it's doing any longer.

Planet-wide, short memory

So I told PLanetwide games to remove my account, mainly since I was entirely unimpressed with the way in which they managed their software support. They reported that I was gone.

Today, though, I get this;

Hello from your friends at Planetwide Games! As you know, your 14-day trial period is going to expire on 05/26/2005. You don’t want this to happen - you’ll lose your experience points, your characters, and even worse all the events that are coming up in the next few months.

That's interesting, especially because I

• am not registered there
• specifically selected NO SPAM when I registered.

I guess they must have mixed me up in all the fuss, and I'm entirely not surprised. Then again, my reasons for suspecting they made a mistake has nothing to do with the timing. I am concerned that their company is getting a bad reputation if other people are getting the same service I'm getting.

WhiteBox Enterprise Linux 4

I installed White Box Enterprise Linux 4 the other day. It sure is pretty.

Today I installed over it.

The reasons?

• impossible to upgrade, ergo to maintain
  
  • yum isn't configured, and I logged two bugs into the nonexistent bugzilla
  • up2date isn't functional
  • apt isn't provided
    
• no bug database
  • the hallmark of unprofessionalism is a bug database run by email, and I'm disappointed that a professional product like WBEL is trying so hard to make more work for itself and resemble unprofessionalism
  • no way to coordinate and avoid reporting the same bug multiple times
  • no method to check on the status of reported bugs -- better for morale
• no updates
  • nothing's come out in the 4 weeks wince WBEL4 was released
  • yes, it started with a lot of updates rolled in (so it's really RHEL4.0.5) but there's the fear that nothing's going to be coming out for a while.
    
• no support structure
• single point of failure
  • if Mr Morris should happen to get hit by a bus, WBEL4 is dead.
    

It's obvious Mr Morris has a lot of work to do, and the fact that he's taken it on himself without accepting any of the help that's all but thrown at him, that's really unfortunate for his project; I thought it was only lame IT departments who became too busy to accept free fucking labour. I want WhiteBox to be the dominant RHEL4 clone, although I don't know why, and this is a real disappointment today.

The fact that I was unable to use any method of installing new apps without grabbing the RPMs by hand from the website or the CDs and dropping them in individually so as to satisfy dependencies and install the desired stuff, that's the biggest let-down of it all. I've not had to do that since 1999, really, and I certainly wasn't rpepared for labour-intensive maintenance by an OS released 6 years later. It's a temporary problem, to be sure, but another brick in the wall.

Now, although it's been Bernsteined all to hell and I'm really not sure who's running the show or what I get out of it, I've picked up and installed CentOS Enterprise Linux 4. We'll see how it goes. I hope XOS4 is released soon.

Planetwide Games, small-town charm

I registered to play RYL the other day.

The day after that I removed the game.

I've just lost all patience for small-time operations, really. I'll not submit my bugs via email, thank you; point me at the bug database and I'll log them as I see them. I'll thank you to have something for which I'd like to pay, before gearing up the pledge drive as well, because a free trial is either your best PR tool or your worst.

I'm paid enough that I have a few dollars at the end of the month, and either you get them or they go to Starbucks for coffee. If you can't muster up enough of a reason for me to give you the money instead of Starbucks, then I'm sorry, pally, but they bunny barista at the Bucks will have to get it .. .. four dollars at a time.

Especially in this day and age when Vivendi Universal is buying so many development houses and thereby knocking them off the list of companies from which I will purchase software, the unfortunate fact that I spend so much money at starbucks is a depressing gauge of the state of computer gaming software.

Instiki

Instiki

It's fun! Wooo!

It's easy to use! Wooo!

It's easy to install! Wooo!

It needs Ruby. What the fuck?!? Why do we have to have everyone's pet language implementations of everything? Next I'll read about a lisp wiki and a scheme wiki. How utterly pointless and useless.

GeekCoffee | Sun, MS, RDP and Single Sign-on

GeekCoffee | Technology News and Reviews

Let's see if I have this right:

1. MS ends up paying a whack of money to Sun on a lawsuit
2. Sun and MS agree to an inter-operable single sign-on protocol.
3. Sun agrees to license MS's RDP.

Anyone else see this? The result is actually:

1. MS and Sun are tired of this pointless lawsuit and agree to stop.
   
2. Sun's SSo tech will become standard, since MS just paid 1.5bil for a perpetual license
3. Sun pays MS $500mil for RDP, in order to even it out and maybe give Sun something out of it.

How close am I? I guess we need to find out if there's more money coming in on the other agreements.

Dirty Tricks: Ways to Piss Off Your Neighbors

Dirty Tricks: Ways to Piss Off Your Neighbors

I hope Mr Enouf is only speaking figuratively. But hey, even if he is, the whole US/MX wall could be darkly humorous. Consider it in fast-forward:

• Drivers experience long waits at the Wall.
• street vendors start appearing, followed by buskers, then fruit and convenience stands, washrooms, gas stations, truck stops; then hotels and houses and restaurants and GAP stores and Starbucks.
• Then we'll have a whole new town to name, one which straddles this wall.

I vote 'New Berlin.'

I simply have to see what they do for a US-Canada wall, especially considering the Sea-sized lakes in the middle of all that.

Ben Goodger calls the Kettle Black

Inside Firefox - The Inside Track on Firefox Development
Ben Goodger scolds the KDE crew for wanting to use a slower, more complete KHTML engine.

Apparently, actually finishing something is difficult for Mr Goodger and his crew, who gave up on the mozilla suite in favour of a small portion of it. Less than a year after it was usable, mozilla was dead.

What should we now do with the comments from the leader of such an unreliable project?

Certainly not put much faith in them.

Overheard in New York

http://www.overheardinnewyork.com/archives/001534.html:

Bike girl on cell: Hey, this is Tammy. Yet again you were in my dream. It involved fucking. Call me back.

I'm only crying because it's not me.

Britain faces big chill as ocean current slows

Britain faces big chill as ocean current slows - Sunday Times - Times Online:

"CLIMATE change researchers have detected the first signs of a slowdown in the Gulf Stream — the mighty ocean current that keeps Britain and Europe from freezing.

They have found that one of the “engines” driving the Gulf Stream — the sinking of supercooled water in the Greenland Sea — has weakened to less than a quarter of its former strength."

Thanks, Yanks.

Tarot 101

never read your own tarot.

You get readings like this (celtic Cross):

1. Fool, reversed
2. 4Cups, reversed
3. Lovers (far future)
4. Queen of Swords (foundation)
5. 6Pent (recent past)
6. Tower (near future)
7. King of Wands, reversed
8. High Priestess
9. King of Swords, reversed
10. Page of Cups (outcome)

Muy severe reading. Don't ask what I was asking about. She'll know.

I'm getting the sneaking suspicion ...

.. that XFire blows.

So far: Download was great, installation flawless. So far so good.

Registration, however, was a pain. Why the hell do they want to know how old I am? At least the spam-rider in the registration was opt-in and not opt-out, so hasty clicks wouldn't be detrimental, but after a few hours' wait, I'm still not registered. Yes, you bonehead, my password is right. I've done the 'recover my password' dance twice, and I've yet to see a recovery message hit my mailbox or my mail server, for that matter -- so don't talk to me about spam blockers and whitelists and crap: I'm tailing the fucking maillog on my server, and I can see what's happening.

I can only conclude that XFire sucks. Nice presentation, barely-adequate registration (with points off for birthdays and spam) and NO points at all for usability since I can't even log on!

update: An anonymous rep from xfire sent me e-mail and suggested I try to log on again. They had a bit of a Db problem that week, it appears, and new subscriptions were probably failing to get actually put into authentication. However, upon trying the client, I noticed that it's an extremely chrome-infested CPU- and screen-hogging IM. It's too bad it has such uses as joining the TeamSpeak server your friend is on, for instance, because I end up rebooting my machine twice as often now due tot he memory leaks (the Corel Effect).

Marginally good features, terrible resource pig.

Florida girl's abortion allowed

BBC NEWS | Americas | Florida girl's abortion allowed

Ugh. Of course! What part of this wasn't a slam-dunk?

• The fact that she was thirteen fucking years old and living in a shelter (that's a slavery reference, but you have to be above 100 IQ to get it, so I'm giving a hint to all the 'pro life' (pro slavery) people out there.
• The fact that she knew she couldn't provide for this baby?
• the idea that it may have been potentially dangerous for her to have this baby?

Thank god - and I use this as a pun - we have people like Mr Simon from the ACLU, people with two bran cells to rub together and who can thereby see that a child carrying a child to term is not only cruel but unusual (for now).

I love the quote:

Abortion is a deeply divisive issue in the US.

It's not abortion that's divisive: it's the fucking easter-bunny cults that think such a thing is against the teachings of santa or something. THAT's the divisive part.

Illicit downloading is now tantamount to domestic terrorism

Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Illicit downloading is now tantamount to domestic terrorism: "there were, attached to his family bill, some piddling 'intellectual property' provisions relating to 'rampant piracy' from the internet. In fact, tagged-on clauses now make illicit downloading and file-sharing tantamount to domestic terrorism."

You people are IDIOTS! I don't know why you people continue to vote in losers like these every year.

USATODAY.com - Surprising 'Galaxy' hitchhikes to No. 1

USATODAY.com - Surprising 'Galaxy' hitchhikes to No. 1: "'Batman Begins (June 15) might do it, but it's been tough predicting what audiences will respond to,' Gray says."

Here's a bit of a clue: audiences respond to quality. Q-u-a-l-i-t-y. You've heard of it, right? Acting that's more talent than name, writing above the bar set by monkey #76850 on the Shakespeare project, and camera work that's not limped along to the finish by pointless effects.

Yes, H2G2 had effects. But it was also mildly amusing without a preponderance of square jaws and 'splosions.

So. Hollywood: Lose the remakes and make something new. Okay? We can't all be expected to spend our $10 a set on batman and Sin City alone, okay?

Oh. And if the theatres would lower the concession stand prices, then we'd stop smuggling stuff in.

GAIM is OS-agnostic Goodness

While I still refuse to accept the fiasco, with GAIM not working under Win98se just because of code the GAIM folks put into GAIM which they refused to back out, I do enjoy that GAIM works equally well/poorly under all the OSes on which I try it.

Additionally, through the use of a mostly excellent tool called TortoiseCVS, I'm now storing my GAIM preferences and accounts on a server, to which I can synchronize when I move from one machine or OS to the other. It's officially got more roaming capability than Mozilla and ICQ.

The idea of a worker shutting down Windows and moving to Linux - either on a daily basis or forever - is that much closer to becoming reality. With OpenOffice, Mozilla and GAIM among the tools that cross the OS barrier without loss of functionality, the reasons for paying good money for second-rate OSes - when one can get them for free - are just not as strong as they used to be.

Open-Source and the Chain of Deniability

[in all cases, when I mean Open Source, I also mean Free Software and all the other terms. I just like Mr Raymond's more sane approach, rather than, oh, everything about Mr Stallman, which unfortunately is too naive to be realistic]

I've discovered something else about Open Source software: no one's responsible.

When the source is open, and the customer has the theoretical ability to download and fix his own copy, then there is no real and absolute need for the developer to fix his own work. Since there is no absolute need, there is also no pressing need, and the developer can continue to work on chrome bits (which I call the Mozilla Protocol) and it's now Somebody Else's Problem. Someone else can do it, because that guy's just too busy macdinking with the corners of the interface, really.

This kind of attitude persists even if the user gets anxious, and even if he asks after a fix. The user is encouraged - in language occasionally mistaken as arrogant and petulant - to fix his own bugs and to submit any changes back to the project. Now, how the hell is a lawyer or fry cook gonna fix an off-by-one error in a structure governing the format of data passed between two procedures? Hell, the poor guy doesn't even know what the fuck a procedure is! Yet, he's encouraged to learn and do it, sometime within the next week.

Recently I looked at the evolution of a piece of code I put into the apache server. It was valid code, serves a purpose and fulfills a need even today. However, after 3 year s of maintenance, I don't recognize it. I know it from what it's doing, but I can neither claim it as my own nor even understand what the hell it's doing -- enough to fix it if it's broken, anyway. So, there I am, a reasonably intelligent guy, the guy who originally wrote this piece of code, and I'm not confident I can fix it if it's busted. Mr Fry Cook is fucked.

Unfortunately, this isn't rare, and, due to our naturally egocentric nature, it's very easy for developers to get into this mind-set on a project where they're not pegged as the person responsible. But, as I've learned from managing an open source project or two, one can't easily dictate things to free labour; it just doesn't work. So, no one is responsible, and therefore nothing gets fixed.

Welcome to Open source. Please sweep up as you leave our fine store, and come again.

His or Her. HERstory. Fuck off.

Certain people piss me off. This politically correct bullshit mars our language and slows down communication. In the name of ensuring that every fucking fringe group is satisfied today, we must either alter our speech or can't even say it at all.

Free speech my ass.

Among examples, I find myself constantly in need of saying 'him or her'. I can't use the prior art of 'eir' to shorten it, moo-style, and I sure as hell am not going to use the vulgar replacement 'their' for 'him or her', since it's impossible if I meant to use it like that or if I'm just some dumbass hooligan fuckwad with pathetically bad (american) education and don't know any better. Yes, I need to make my subjects and verbs agree, and 'him or her' is the only acceptable subject that will agree. Thus, I need to write three times as much. Fuck you, you PC bastards.

Especially because 'him' used to mean 'him or her', in the same way that 'man' is really short for 'mankind'; it's only through ancient political correctness - which disguised the efforts of fringe groups to bend common will to their own special interest, then as now - that we adopted the special moniker for half the human race, that of Woman. It was a title, to indicate that a woman had voluntarily debased herself by becoming shacked to some Neanderthal for 'life'. 'Man' was the shortened synonym for 'humankind'. Note the root or 'man' in there, too.

But no. Apparently that's not good enough. We've capitulated to some self-important assholes in ancient time, little overly-entitled narcissist pricks who needed their own term, and now we have to constantly nod to them even when we're using the formerly generally recognized official term for a group.

Do we say 'chickens and hens'? Do we say 'dogs and bitches'? No. But apparently we have to say the container and its subset in 'men and women'.

My fucking christ, do you people ever suck. You've made the English language less efficient - which I didn't think was possible - just to get your own recognition. I don't get recognition, so sit your self-important coddled-child ass back in your seat, and understand that you're just not more important than anyone else.

Don't get me started on the whole 'african American' thing. Humankind is already so stupid as to be killing this planet just by our own wasteful egocentrism, but here we have people represented by one vocal group who can't even decide which title is acceptable to them. Yes, I'd like to get money from the United Negro College Fund, myself, and I think that in order to get it, we need to re-assert the scientific Negro label again. It's the fucking word for that style of human, you numbskull. It's not a 'dirty word', no more than a female dog is a bitch.

Ugh. You people and your overinflated sense of self worth. You're just like the rest of us: no better, no worse, so get over yourself.

Please call me racist or sexist so I can call you a hypocritical arrogant fuck or one of the people who coddle them.

OSes aren't free, and never will be

I've just got to weigh in on this issue. Either that, or I'll burst at the seams for keeping it in -- and we know that's not what I do, either the bursting or keeping things in.

Operating systems aren't free (hereafter, as-in-beer not as-in-speech): Since they require people to maintain them, and since those people need to eat and live, and since basic needs usually require money, there's no way that dedicated linux kernel engineers can survive while linux is free.

Most of these people are supported by other companies, and either get paid (today) to work on linux or they do so oin their off-work time. Considering that most people work full-time, any extra time spent on other projects really is above and beyond the time that a person can spend doing this kind of work without slow degradation in performance and health. Thus, a person is either compensated (QED) or will eventually be fired for declining performance.

There's money in the equation, and we need to realize it.