Jordan River is a Great Big Toilet

Jordan River threatened by dams and sewage - Yahoo! News: "'The Jordan River will disappear if nothing is done soon. More than half of it is raw sewage and runoff water from agriculture. What keeps the river flowing today is sewage,' Munqeth Mehyar, chairman of Friends of the Earth Middle East (FOEME), an Israeli-Jordanian-Palestinian group, told Reuters."

The atheist and cult hater in me really wants to say something snippy about all this, as if the only thing to come out of that river is more crap. But, unfortunately, it'll do nothing but encourage people to write impassioned but poorly-constructed and misspelled rants in my comments section. Considering I'll barely glance at them before deleting them and calling the writer a dumbass cultist kook, I can't see that it would help anyone.

So I'll leave it at that.

No I won't. In addition to some pathetically illogical belief that their god wants them to multiply like fucking rabbits until they destroy the entire fucking planet with the waste of their unchecked breeding, apparently the idea of wanton destruction without a moment's thought of the consequences has shown that even their most valuable icons - a natural resource as well - isn't safe from their vandalism.

So what's the message they take from their god through various prophets, other than that to listen to the wrong prophet is heresy? The message seems to be that one should have as many fucking children as possible, eat everything in sight, plough over rainforest to make room for houses and fields of only slightly modified wheat, and turn ALL the rivers of the world to cesspools.

Yeah, because your god wants you to fuck up what you think he created. What kind of god needs a fan club and wants them shitting on his lawn?

Second US case of Mad Cow Cannot be Blamed on Imported Beef

Tests Confirm Second Mad Cow Case in U.S. - Yahoo! News: "Tests have confirmed mad cow disease in what appears to be the first case in a U.S. born animal, the Agriculture Department said Friday. Officials would not specify where the case turned up, but Agriculture Secretary
Mike Johanns said there is no evidence the cow was imported."

Assholes. Since the only case of Mad Cow in North America which wasn't reported IN the US was found in a cow imported FROM the US, and since you folks seemed so fond of repeating that the cow you guys found was imported itself, you all were living in a typically American lack of common sense and concern over the whole thing. Now, since you folks didn't do a damned thing about the problem - except stop importing beef, like foreign beef is somehow less pure and the farmers less honest - you now have a case of Mad Cow disease in your own country in an animal, a case you cannot ignore or pass off because the animal was one of those lower-quality imported animals from one of those lesser countries with which you're unfortunately required to share the continent.

So you fucking made your own bed, in your arrogance and ignorance. Like in so many other cases, you may now sleep in it. Be my guest. Let me know if you want to try some imported beef. I hear the only case of Mad Cow found in imported beef was in an animal born in the US, so as long as you avoid beef born or raised in the US you should be fine.

Although it can only come back to haunt me, I deperately wish this were the last laugh, for all our sakes.

Google to Roll-out PayPal Competitor

Google to Roll-out PayPal Competitor - Softpedia News: "Friday, The Wall Street Journal reported that Google is making preparations towards releasing a new electronic payment system which will a direct competitor to eBay?s PayPal."

Okay. That's bizarre.

Google's the King in a few areas, and seems to be actively resisting the actual act of gluing those bits together; instead, it wants to do something completely different.

Google has gmail, and compared to Yahoo or Hotmail, it's awesome: huge storage, zippy feel, the whole thing. Google's got Orkut, a network toy for friends to meet their friends' friends. It's SixDegrees done way better. Blogger, which it more acquired than built, also rocks about 99% of the time. Google's the master at search, but its control of your browser - for isn't it the first place you go for news and decent searches? C'mon, you know it - and its handling of your email more than screams Messaging as a new technology.

In fact, many folks have said, many times, that google should step forward with a killer IM app. Take GAIM, employ 2-3 GAIM developers to make it Killer, set up a Jabber server on all nodes of their farm, figure the cross-server synch problems, and they'd crush AOL virtually overnight.

But here they are, dinking around with pay stuff. Paypal? Isn't that such a dead idea that no one else wanted to even try it? eGold, Flooz, it's all been done before, and it's all flopped. Paypal is the shit.

The only saving grace is the awesome superiority of Google Maps, that shining beacon of all that's right in the miasmatic swamp of Internet Mapping and Direction services. It certainly kills yahoo, mapquest and mapblast; they really don't have a fucking chance, as anyone can see after a brief comparison between the interfaces -- or is click-and-wait any competition to maps that scroll and resize intuitively and automatically? Really, as soon as maps.google.com is polished, mapquest and its ilk are extinct.

Can Google take a tired idea like paypal and rebuilt it into something special, something wonderful and instantly superior to the entrenched competition? Maybe. If anyone can, then google will. But can they continue to win? David - which is a faked story anyway - can't beat Goliath on a daily basis.

Just, guys, please spend some of your brain power on making a killer Jabber server first, guys. Sell it with your gmail and enterprise search application, as the missing messaging link. It'd be a hit; I know it. Just do it before you guys finally fail to astound and start hemorrhaging disappointed geniuses.

Because that's never good.

Is Linux For Losers? - Forbes.com

Is Linux For Losers? - Forbes.com

A lot of people are going to be making a great big deal about Mr de Raadt's comments. Apparently, according to Mr de Raadt, Linux is terrible and no one realizes it.

The part where this all becomes a non-story is where we realize that Mr de Raadt works on OpenBSD, and his entire flame about Linux is really another instance of Bernsteinism. It's too bad, because OpenBSD is supposed to be pretty good, and I always felt sorry that it ended up the little brother to Linux's huge and sudden fame. This all just smacks of a little brother problem, really.

And now I will avoid OpenBSD because of this, too.

Silent Bish: I fixed vsftp and the author didn't even say thank you

Silent Bish: I fixed vsftp: "Unfortunately, it's been a month, and there's been no response. He hasn't even looked at it."

This is the story of a guy spending way too much time on a pointless and fruitless cause: he fixed someone else's software - vsftp - for him, and sent in the fix to the owner, and didn't get a damned thing in response. No, really: the guy can't be fucking bothered to fucking mail him back a "yup, thanks" or anything.

So I looked at the link in the blog post, and I looked at the vsftp site. And I looked at some code, too. Holy crap is that program code ever fucking hard to read. The guy has routines that are nothing more than

routinea () {
 if (routined()) {
   routineb ();
 }
 else
 {
   routinec ();
 }

Okay. While it's all indented and pretty, it's also a plate of spaghetti. Everything is just a series of functions linked by various minor logic. It'd be pure hell to try and even remember what half of it is doing in any one coding session.

Insane.

After looking at this vsftp project, I'm really amazed that it's being used in place of anything else. The thing's going to be interesting when it's fully-developed, but the entire site and code is soft and squishy like the centre of a brownie that needs a bit more time in the oven.

I'll stay the hell away from this one for a year or two. Woe to the company who rolls this thing out as part of a paid product. With its hairy code and insanely crufty configuration file method, the code should be of dubious value until it's all cleaned out. A complete redesign may help.

Bah. Who'm I kidding? SuSE is probably shipping this thing already.

This is not a Computer and Technology Blog

Dear Reader,

Mr Enouf left me a comment which suggested that my blog was chiefly a tech blog. It's not! I have many blogs, actually. This is the one I don't censor because my mom reads it and knows it's me.

Then I thought about it, and realized that this blog may easily appear to be about tech, because

• Mr Enouf's awesome blog is about the political fiasco that is America.
  
• I have a blog where I get honest about myself and my life and other touch-feely crap
  
• I have a blog about my aquarium hobby
• I have a blog about my job
• I have another blog that's fantastical in nature
• I work on my sister's aquarium blogs
• I work on my sister's blog about her Perfect son.

Finally,

• I have a blog I write about the things that happen to me that everyone should know about, a version of myself that's mild-mannered, polite and supportive. Fuck that!
  

What's that leave us? This blog is about the things I want to rant about, write about, ramble on about, that kind of thing. I once alluded to a big bag of squid which I have to kick down a beach: some things in life don't smell nice, don't look nice, and are neither easy nor avoidable. Ergo, one great big bag of squid.

But I'm telling you now, I don't enjoy this bag of squid that's my life. I hate every minute of it, for reasons that's on another blog entirely (that my mom doesn't read knowing it's me) and I WILL rant on this channel; it's my fucking right. You, dear reader, can easily look the other way.

So if squid makes you squeamish, imagine kicking a big bag of it down the beach.

Y'all come back, now, y'hear?
- Lunchbox

Skype 1.3 for windows - Spamcredible!

Download Skype for Windows

Sucktastic.

The new version of Skype is hard-coded to be a minimum of about 300 pixels wide, and has stupid ads hogging up the space for voicemail and other pointless services I don't need. It still has the real-estate gobbling redundant icons (I think I will call them eye-cons) and actually ads more crap.

Look. Skype usually works. Design the UI like you've done the connections, and you'll find a simple, sleek setup with minimal crap really is what people want. I want a contact list, a presence indicator and a chat text window. My boss wants a voice chat. I'm stuck with it, but I hope like hell they pull 1.3 out of their ass and make it Better instead of worse.

I know they're gonna stuff ads onto it now.

NewsForge | Mandriva embraces Lycoris

NewsForge | Mandriva embraces Lycoris

Hmm. More like Extends, Embraces and then Extinguishes.

Am I the only guy who sees the writing? Lycoris is dead, of course. It's deader than heck, and MDK only wanted their customers anyway. Joe knows this, and he's taking his payout and going home like every decent startup operator who doesn't get filthy rich.

He's tired of the crap. Let him have a coupla bucks and go to a ranch in the Olympic National Park so he can dream up his next big thing. It's what he does.

MDK will absorb the customers of Lycoris, and this Fall release will bridge the technology gap. Done. MDK/CL people get Lyc's Click n' Run for paying customers, and MDK is ebriched that much more. It's all a big win, really.

Go, Joe. Have a break. You've done good.

I'm number Three!

Yahoo! Search Results for how to piss off your neighbors

What the hell? Somehow I became number three on the top Yahoo picks for How to Piss Off Your Neighbours. It's all for some stupid blog post I made that linked to a Dirty Tricks article about the US and its neighbours.

But get this: I'm ranked higher than the page to which I point. What the hell? Yahoo blows, apparently.

Long Live The King!

The twenty-second article of amendment to the Constitution of the United States is repealed

That's the one that sets the term limit to 2 per person. We could, conceivably, have a 3rd term with George Bush as President.

God Help us all, because the people in power certainly aren't going to prevent this kind of shenanigans.

Letters | Economist.com - The BSA Quacks like a Duck

Letters | Economist.com

The implication that an industry would purposely inflate the rate of piracy and its impact to suit its political aims is ridiculous.

Psst! That's just what you've done -- unless you can prove your figures, that is.

But thanks, ever so much for the learning: the proper term is 'ridiculous', and not 'criminally fraudulent.' Now I know how to refer to the organization when I write. I almost said 'racketeer'. Phew. Thanks for the help!

Make RPM

I want to slap all of the mentally-challenged people who dream up the idea of having an RPM package be a Make target.

You don't make an RPM from within the build process, you dickwad; you build your little package from within the RPM build process. Got it? One thing only fits within another the one way, no matter how appealing it is. Like the entire SuSE distribution, you people don't quite get the idea that the RPM contains all the bits required to buidl the RPM; most of the time, your little make-rpm build process fucks that over so that the package can't be rebuilt the way it needs to be.

The packages your frankenstein process creates are abominations and nothing like what's intended by the entire RPM methodology. Then again, maybe you're all SuSE people anyway, and would probably stomp over your root volume during a real build process anyway. You're the kind of people who want to start the car without getting into it.

Fuck, you people piss me off.