NOT WORK SAFE!!!

EroTech Industries announces a new adult product: the LoveLump(tm). I'm not entirely sure this is a joke, which makes it even funnier

fidius.org: What's My Pirate Name? "Dirty William Kidd", it says, which I'm pretty sure isn't quite right.



I got "Dirty Sam Flint"
(You're the pirate everyone else wants to throw in the ocean -- not to get rid of you, you understand; just to get rid of the smell. Like the rock flint, you're hard and sharp. But, also like flint, you're easily chipped, and sparky. Arr! )

Man, that's a lot of rebooting. How much money are we talking about again lost to the "reboot activity tax"?

Everybody's already seen the French Military Victories page, right? I just stumbled on it today which shows you how far behind I really am.

SOE Shoots Itself In The Jimmies

Two days ago, an SOE employee announced on the Star Wars Galaxies page that the next hotfix would change the loot drop tables to include the mythical Holocrons. Finding a holocron would give you a hint as to what you needed to do next to unlock your secret Jedi character slot.

Then they pushed the fix back a day.

Today, the hotfix went in. I checked the server on which I play at 8:00 and people were already logged in killing NPCs for all they were worth. By noon, a person whom I know electronically had killed nearly 2,000 Meatlump thugs and had found exactly zero holocrons. People were calling in sick, taking vacation days, skipping class, what have you just so they could finally (FINALLY!) get a hint about becoming a Jedi.

At 13:00 Eastern time, they revised the patch notes to remove any mention of adding holocrons to the drop tables. That's right ... they silently decided not to put them in.

What could have been the single biggest day in terms of SWG excitement by the players has instead turned into yet another high hard one from SOE. I don't know whether it's due to error, malfeasance, or just plain f*ck-up-edness but they managed to turn a silk purse into a sow's ear.

Don't get me wrong ... I'm not cancelling my account, nor will I quit playing. I'm just saying that this is symptomatic of SOE's general state. They might have fixed quite a large number of things, but they somehow manage to screw the pooch every single time. Good job, fellows!

It's good to see that the Catholic Church has its priorities straight.

David Kay's testimony before Congress is online. This is about the state of Iraq's WMD programs as determined by the inspection teams sent in after the Three Weeks War. I won't taint you by commenting. Yet.

BWA-hahahahahaha! Take that, you evil Lords of Redmond! I will lick the salty tears of anguish from your cheeks!

CNN says that the FBI is going to be arresting somebody for writing the "Blaster" worm. Here's their story. The bit that I find most curious is this paragraph:

A witness reportedly saw the teen testing the infection and called authorities, the official said.

I'll just let you sit and think about what that must mean for the two people involved. Doesn't the informant necessarily have to be part of the accused's circle? I mean it's not as if you can watch somebody typing away in another cubicle and figure out what they're doing with any real accuracy. They'd pretty much have to be giving you a demonstration, wouldn't they?

Mark Steyn has a few things to say about the California recall election, most of them quite funny and right on the mark:

I had a brief conversation with Bustamante at the 2000 Democratic Convention and he didn’t seem entirely there. A few months later, he was giving a speech in honour of Black History Month to the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists and carelessly referred to the Negro Labor Council as the ‘Nigger Labor Council’. He carried on speaking, apparently oblivious, until it occurred to him rather a lot of people seemed to be walking out. I’d love to see a Republican use the N-word at a Black History Month dinner and live to tell the tale. But what’s relevant here is the delay between the unfortunate error and realising he’d made it.

Lee, you need one of these for your house.

Gawd love Ralph Peters. He's quite obviously a man who isn't afraid to come right out and tell you what he thinks in small words.

Yet more pictures of me in my Star Wars Galaxies alter-ego.

Progress is being made. I know Lee won't be satisfied until we find an actual missile with a nuke warhead and Saddam giving it a big hug while saying "It's mine, and keep your filthy mitts off", but reasonable people (i.e. not Lee) will eventually be satisfied, I think.

In one fell swoop, Robert X. Cringely describes a potential business that can (1) provide music downloads cheaply, (2) isn't illegal, and (3) pisses off RIAA. I love it. If I had $2,000,000 hanging around, I'd be all over this like white on rice.

This email archive has a quick statement by an anonymous IBM source about how SWT (the Eclipse widget set) came to be and why they think AWT/Eclipse is teh suXor.

Rachel Lucas opens up on a particularly deserving specimen of homo stupiditous. It's so moving, I'm all teary-eyed. <sniff/>

Some time ago, Kathy's brother Michael called and told Kathy about this new massively-multiplayer online role playing game, set in the Star Wars universe. After the two of them talked about it a while, she told me I should pre-order the collector's edition so we could try the game and see how it went. Being the easy sell that I am, I dashed right off to EBworld.com to order our copy and then I promptly forgot about it.

On launch day, the box arrived. We were doing other stuff that weekend (I forget exactly what now), and so didn't get around to opening the box and installing the game until Sunday. That meant that we went to bed at a decent hour both Friday and Saturday nights. That was good, because I'm pretty sure that was the last time I went to bed at anything like my usual bedtime since (about three weeks now). This game is really good. There are bugs, of course, and I spend a bit of time complaining about them, but I also note that I'm spending all my leisure time playing the stupid game instead of doing other stuff so it's obviously more entertainment than the bugs are annoying.

Here's how addictive the game is: after playing less than a week, Kathy said I needed to upgrade another desktop machine so that she could have her own character and we could play together. After pricing upgrade bits, we wound up buying a pre-made HP Pavilion system for her, and she's been playing since. That's right ... we bought a computer system just to play this game. We're insane, obviously.

While in the game one day, we ran into a friend of Kathy's brother who told us his in-game hobby was taking snapshots of the other characters to post on his website. "Well, duh," I thought to myself. "I should be doing that as well." So, here is my first batch of snapshots.

BWA-hahahahaha. Oh, my aching sides ... this is high-larious: Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About.

"You want some of this? All you gotta do is stand up." That's pretty much what I heard President Bush tell the bad guys, and it appears I'm not the only one who heard it that way. "Woot!" for the President.

Bill Whittle finally posts Trinity in two parts. I continue to be amazed at the quality of the writing that falls off this guy, and further amazed at how perfectly he captures the essence of Americanism. Hooray for Bill!

Trinity Part I

Trinity Part II

Go and read. Now.

David Brin's "The Transparent Society" had quite an impact on me, not least because it crystallized a suspicion I already had towards people who claimed that if we all used PGP then the government would just wither away and utopia would arrive. Now, interestingly enough, MIT appears ready to test his theory of transparency.

I don't mind overdubbing so much; everyone makes mistakes and overdubbing just helps ensure that the finished CD is listenable over many sessions. I do, however, think that pitch correction like this is pretty dishonest. I'll grant that it's merely a question of degree; you could claim that it was just overdubbing if you cut-n-pasted individual notes that a musician happened to get just right, but we'd all recognize that as a travesty of the idea of performance. Pitch correction: okay as long as it's labelled.

Java Performance Tuning author Jack Shirazi went to JavaOne and watched a bunch of presentations on large-scale deployments. From this, he's generated all new tuning heuristics for your edification and pleasure.

I wish these guys would get over their anti-commercial attitude and get on teevee already. "Adult Swim" would be much improved if they had a few shorts like this in the rotation.

I'm gonna start a petition to MAKE them take some money from the teevee people!!!!

I'm laughing so hard my face hurts. I'm also running through my list of friends classifying each as "TweedleDee & TweedleDum" and "Ren & Stimpy" now, thanks.

Frank J. talks about hurricanes. I laughed out-loud enough to make people stand up out of their cubicles to see what was happening.

Cue the music! Dinesh D'Souza writes a stirring article on why he became an American. Most of these are obvious after-the-fact, but this is still well worth reading.

I wonder if this workflow engine will produce a stable release ... it sounds like a promising project. I wish them luck, which I suspect they're going to need since they've stopped COMPLETELY EFFING DEAD IN THE WATER to change build systems. I hope the "change the build system" need came across them because something in the old build system was fundamentally b0rken, not because they felt compelled to lemming off behind Maven (rant forthcoming).

Not quite the smoking gun we expected, but they are warm gun parts and we've got the guy who put them there too.

Yes, sir, Mr. Tim Blair sir ... we'll get right on that because we don't want that kind of result at all. No siree-bob.

Hooray! The only thing (and I do mean the only thing) I didn't like about IDEA was that you couldn't get the correct keybindings for it. As we all know, had there been a diety he would have wanted us to use "vi" for all time. And now, Rick Maddy has developed a "vi" plugin for IntelliJ IDEA. The world is saved!!!!

Mean Mr.Mustard has designed yet another t-shirt for me to buy. BWA-hahahaha. Ahem.

Hi. I'm Mitchell, and I'm a bright.

Holy effing crap. Dick Gephardt announces his complete preparedness to overthrow the Constitution to suit himself. Everyone please remember this when election time rolls around again.

No cannisters of VX yet, but we may be closer to a conclusion, as much as it may pain weak-minded in-duh-viduals such as Lee to find that it wasn't all made up.

I love a good rant. "No," you say, "not you! Why, you're a paragon of friendly friendshipdom and shizznit."

Behold The Bile Blog from a guy who obviously knows his way around the Java community and is able to inspire great reaction in his readers. I'm also putting him in the blogroll so I won't forget to check his page daily. Hooray for hatred and loathing!

Oh, my aching sides. You kids!!!

Oh dear sweet Jebus ... this sounds like great hooting fun.

News Flash! Globalization is Good!!! With a capital "G"!!!! (Found via Tim Blair)

Finally! A responsible explanation of why writing projects (like the Full of Hate Brothers) might someday have real meaning.

In yet another fine example of other people thinking of things in a completely new way, Erik Benson runs a service called All Consuming, which displays a running list of the most talked-about books in a (large-ish) subset of the blogosphere. He also wrote an article for O'Reilly explaining how he built the whole thing using SOAP, XML, and RSS. It's quite an interesting story, I opine.

BWA-hahahahahah! Rand Simberg lets Bill O'Reilly have it with both barrels. Woo hoo!

Finally, the online world catches up with the real world. New icons for MSN Messenger.

I keep finding these things just a few montsh too late to save me. In an effort to make my pain have meant something, I present the way I should havegenerated those damned Excel spreadsheet from a weba pplication instead of the way I wound up doing it.

Oooooh ... Samurai Jack action figures!!! Yet more crap to clutter my workspace! Yay!

I love to issue proclamations, but I don't really expect anybody to do what I tell them to. I would like to ask, however, that you please go sign this petition. The steady erosion of our public domain due to lobbyists for Disney et al is a real problem, even if it doesn't look like it yet. There are many many pragmatic solutions to the issue that don't involve depriving Mickey of any of his residual income.

If you're considering trying to find a VC, there's obviously a lot of stuff to think about. Thanks to Joel Spolsky, I found two interesting bits:

• Presenting Your Company: David Hornik and Andrew Anker, two VCs with August Capital, throw out a few bullet points of ways to completely screw yourself up in the presentation
• Joi Ito describes her company's investment process, which is kind of icky in its own special way.

Come and get it! Finally, a browser that is usable and that doesn't suck as bad as IE6. I had hoped against hope that eventually the time spent rewriting Mozilla from the ground up would accomplish something (besides giving the entire browser market to Microsoft), and it appears that it might finally bear fruit. Presenting: the Firebird Browser Project Page.

Hooray! Now you can configure Outlook (if you're using it) to quit hiding your attachments from you. Sure, some attachment suffixes are dangerous, but so is a pocketknife, fire, and bleach. Just because you may hurt yourself with a thing isn't necessarily enough reason to expunge it completely from your world. Sometimes, you really want somebody to email you an Access database, damn it.

Ooh! Owww! <thwack/> <thwack/> <thwack/> Arnold Kling unleashes a short torrent of economic attitude on Clinton, Bush, Greenspan, and other worthy recipients. More like this, please, sir.

Kathy and I took our daughters to see Finding Nemo yesterday, and I have to say that Pixar has done it again. The film was great fun and the voice characterization was spectacular. The story was sufficiently engrossing that, for most of the film, I wasn't even marvelling at the animation but was just pulled into the quest for Nemo. And for me that's really saying something.

As always, there's a scary bit. McKenna cried pretty seriously at that part, but she stuck it out and cheered for the big finish. All in all it was well worth the price of admission. Go see it.

If you google up "mr tones.com", we're #4. Curiously enough, a real website with a url anything like "mrtones.com" doesn't show up anywhere. I suppose that's why nearly half of our visitors here with referrer tags are from some variant of that search. Sorry 'bout that kids ... they have their own page at "http://www.mrtones.com/". (Duh)

I wonder if they know how much of their traffic we're siphoning off, and if it's worth any cash to them?

Damn, but that miniputt is some hard sh*t.

Since the Jayson Blair-a-thon hasn't yet run its course, I'd like to point to this 404 page, found via Joanne Jacobs.

Holy effing crap! That is a staggeringly impressive layout you've got there. I'll be cutting and pasting some CSS tonight, for sure.

BWA-hahahahaha! Finally, an academic quite to my liking. He's a funny funny man.

In case you ever want to use the stock JavaMail distribution to fetch via POP3 or IMAP over SSL, you'll be glad to have these tips on JavaMail and JSSE.

More SCO happiness:

Novell announces that they own all the patents to what used to be AT&T Unix System V, so SCO doesn't have any intellectual property to be trying to protect. Neener neener.

SCO replies that, um, they weren't alleging patent or copyright infringement (so what was all that back there then?), but breach of contract instead. Way to go! Move them goalposts!

BWA-hahahaha! A quick quiz: Art or Crap (as found on Gawker)

Whoa! Flashback alert! Jess, the Expert System Shell for the Java Platform, brings back all kinds of weird memories of my narrow escape from the crushing black hole that was AI research.

Blah blah blah until you get down to the sidebar at the bottom that describes how SAML solves the cross-domain SSO problem. Sure it's kludgey, but it'll be workable. You have a better idea?

LinuxTag, a non-profit organization in Germany chartered to support and evangelize the use of Linux, has filed suit in German court. Under German law, it appears, company "A" may demand that company "B" stop making anti-competitive speech unless they can demonstrate a factual basis for company "B"s claim. In short, SCO now has to either (1) divulge their evidence of intellectual property misdoings, or (2) shut up.

Choice #1 lets them continue making their "Linux is infringing on our patents" claims while giving IBM an early look at their evidence which may very well help IBM in the US trials coming eventually. Choice #2 suggests, rather strongly I'd say, that SCO in fact have the proverbial sack-o-nothingness.

Couldn't have happened to a more deserving pile of schlubs. Hooray for LinuxTag!

There's always a HOWTO, isn't there? Sand Castle Tips and Tricks by sandy feet.

BUSH ATTACKED BY CRAZED TRIBBLES!!!!!

BWA-hahahahaha! I gotta get me one of these t-shirts!!!

I missed two, for an embarassing 89% score.

Oh crap. Here's yet another thing for me to worry about, and my oldest daughter is only 5.

Bob Cringley weighs in on the SCO v. IBM suit. My opinion, and thanks for asking, is that SCO has a big ol' sack full of nothing, and they're hoping to make some money fall out of the sky. I suspect they'll be in Chapter 13 in no time at all.

Whoops! Sorry 'bout that, chief. It apparently isn't true that all emails containing the letter 'P' are evil; it's just that some people apparently imagine they are.

I just found this, and only about two years after it was written: Ted Husted wrote a quick few notes about performance penalties for reflection and creation v. caching in Java. I was under the impression that reflection was an order of magnitude slower than direct invocation, and here people are only seeing 5-10% slower. Damn, but that's a whole different kettle of fish.

Hooray for The Gipper! And hooray for Scott for writing this moving essay about the great change in the world that is the end of the Cold War.

Well, crap. More stuff I have to buy. I'm going to have to get a second (or third) mortgage to pay for all the stuff plus someplace to store it.

Hey France! So, like, we're have a party? and lots of people are gonna be there? and you're totally not invited. Okay?

Frank J. explains how to deal with the plethora of Homeland Security Alert Levels. In detail.

Death to these bastards. I'll even supply the bullets and fire 'em myself.

BWA-hahahahaha! "Throw me a frickin' bone" indeed!! This sounds like great fun.

Sick of dealing with actors and their fragile egos and demands for better lighting/blocking/trailers? Dump 'em all in the very near future.

Holy crap. Lee, it appears that you got out just in time, because your erstwhile countrymen have gone completely around the bend.

(Blogger archive links are hosed. Again. What a crock).

More reason why Tim Blair is must-reading for all sentient beings:

According to Clean Up Australia, Australians use in excess of 6 billion plastic bags per year. If tied together these bags would form a chain that is long enough to go around the world 37 times.

Well, maybe that's exactly what we're trying to do, art haters.

I seem to be on a web services kick. As in most things, once you get immersed in something you get sensitized to it, and start finding it everywhere. (This happens especially when you buy a car). Anyway, if you do anything that remotely involves books, you can now access the entirety of the Amazon powerhouse via their published web services.

For the three people left in the world who write their own WSDL files, let me point out this free graphical WSDL editor. "Use vi and be careful" is no substitute for a good format-specific editor. ("Use emacs and be careful" is, of course, malfeasance)

Once again, the Japanese lead the world in coming up with bizarre crap to buy. Here we have hats. For cats. To wear on their little feline heads. Plus collars, in some cases. I'm completely boggled. (Thanks to Kimberly Swygert for finding this rare gem)

BWA-hahahahaha! How to look like a no-life-having online dork without trying.

Just like Urban Dictionary but with a higher S/N ratio: pseudodictionary - the dictionary for words that wouldn't make it into dictionaries :: v2.0

Well, well, well ... who knew the Beeb was in the training business?

Bwa hahahahaha! Kathy and I watched all the episodes of "Red vs Blue" released so far, and laughed at quite a bit of it. These guys are a riot.

For those who don't recognize the visuals, this is all done with Halo for the XBox. Quite an impressive accomplishment, given the nature of the tool (first-person shooter for a console).

Also, rememberize this IBM series on BPEL in order to ensure full bozzword compliance.

Note to self: make sure I've internalized this list of IBM's best practices for web services; it's sure to impress somebody eventually.

I kept waiting for Lee to notice this theory, and even told him about it, but he never blogged it. I suppose it doesn't really tie into his "it's all America's fault" mania.

The clouds broke just long enough for me, my wife, and our oldest daughter to see the vanishing moon. It was wonderful. I know it meant a great deal more to me and Kathy than it did to McKenna, but hopefully she'll remember it later. The clouds moved back in before the totality finished, but the coolness was fully established by then.

Hooray! A Sam & Max sequel is coming!!!!

And now ... a diet for Lee to endorse.

Hey Lee! You keep claiming that free speech is being suppressed here in America, right? Perhaps you've forgotten what suppression of dissent really looks like. Keep this counter-example in mind the next time you want to chat about the Dixie Chicks and their poor pitiful dissent-suppressed selves.

"Switch" to a better entertainment form!

I am completely dying here. I'm hoping with all my being that this is a joke. The crappy MIDI music gives it away, if it is.

If it isn't a joke, then I weep for the future.

Michelle has a fun contest!!!1! Enter now!

Moxie explains the difference between women and men, in a disturbingly clear graphic.

FInally, a real help to all those people looking for a complete timeline for the development of the Internet.

Well, well, well ... who knew?

This was from yesterday, but I only now got around to reading it: Orin Kerr quotes Terry Fisher as saying that record companies only make $0.19 per $20.00 CD sold, to which I thought "well, that's crap." My reply was this (sent via e-mail, since they don't have comments on their blog):

I apologize for the lateness of my response, but I only today read your posting on The Volokh Conspiracy about CD prices. I'm not in the music industry, so perhaps I'm missing some important facts from elsewhere. Allow me to question one aspect of your posting: the $1.50 per CD for manufacturing. I can go to Best Buy, Media Play, or Circuit City and buy 100 CD-Rs for $10 nearly anytime. With only a slight bit of preparation (buying the Sunday paper for a week or two), I can find a coupon/rebate combo that results in CD-Rs being free after all the paperwork is filed.

CD-Rs: between $0.00 and $0.10 per
CDs: $1.50

Hmmm ... my "Hollywood accounting" detector is ringing madly. I suspect that most of the cost (beyond what the retail store gets) is inflated tremendously. As I said before, I'm no industry maven, but I can certainly question the accounting practices that cause Toni Braxton to file bankruptcy simultaneous with having a multi-platinum selling CD, the Dixie Chicks telling Dan Rather that their 17-million-selling CD didn't make them millionaires in spite of that representing $200M in revenue, and Courtney Love does the math for us.

All in all, I think somebody's leg is (or legs are) being pulled quite mightily.

Professor Hatch already responded; he said to read the paper because he's just repeating the numbers. I read the paper, and it did absolutely nothing to dispell my unease. I also suspect that these numbers might very well be correct at exactly the same time that Courtney Love's numbers are correct. It's all about where you decide to put the numbers in which column, and where you are when you put them there. I still believe that the record companies are playing fast-n-loose here, although I can't prove it.

And another thing ... if these CDs are created as works-for-hire (which the music industry claims is the case), how come the artist has to bear the cost of the creation? Am I to understand that "40 Grit" gets to pay to create the music, gets to pay for the producer, gets to pay for the studio time, gets to pay for the marketing, gets to pay for damned near everything related to the generation of the content, but the record company owns the result? The record company gets the profits? How exactly do you explain that away without terms like "indentured servitude"?

Holy effing crap. I may have to buy a Honda, just to reward the people that make adverts like this. And amazingly enough, it all really happened exactly that way in real-time ... no Photoshoppery involved, although it did run to 606 takes to get it all right start to finish.

Peter Oborne asks "Is Blair just an empty, vainglorious, narcissistic creep?" Come on, Peter! Tell us how you really feel about it all!

A quick excerpt:

The government now faces two distinct challenges. The first, of course, is the reconstruction of Iraq, while the second remains the reconstruction of Britain. Labour swept to power six years ago with a series of promises to rebuild public services. They have all been broken. As far as Tony Blair is concerned, the central paradox of six years in office is stark: the levers of power respond with alacrity in defence and foreign affairs, and yet government is all but powerless in the domestic arena.

It is worth pondering this contradiction, made sharper by the military victory in Iraq. It raises two fascinating questions. Why do British armed forces, with their meagre £25 billion budget, always deliver? But why do the NHS and the education system, though in receipt of unlimited amounts of public money, continue to fail? To put the problem in another way: how come the simple British squaddie — though underpaid, overworked and forced to carry out his or her duties in conditions of appalling danger — always rises to any challenge? But how come so many British schoolteachers, rather better paid, with far shorter hours and long holidays, endlessly whinge and — as the teachers’ union conference demonstrated yet again — block even quite sensible reforms?

Once again, Bill Whittle has penned a truly wonderful essay, "Victory", which everyone should go read right away. As always, it's moving, forceful, and really just about the best use that those electrons could have been put to.

I keep putting "BIll Whittle" into Amazon's search page. Sooner or later a book's going to show up, and I'll be having one thank you very much.

A quick essay on why the Jakarta Commons Logging API instead of plain ol' Log4J is a bad idea. I'm not sure I buy this completely, but it is the way I've been trending over the past half-dozen web-apps I've delivered.

Ummm ... can you say "conflict of interest" boys and girls? I sure can.

In my long-running quest to completely exhaust my meager savings and earnings by acquiring scads of nearly-worthless electronic junk .... I present the home laser cutting/etching tools. They even come in colors! CNC machining tools in my own goddamned basement!

Yet more consumer crap that I must now buy. I'm going to have to get a better-paying job if I plan to continue affording all this electronic junk, aren't I?

An easy one-page guide to properly using apostrophes in your writing.

Holy crap!!! I may have to revise my mental picture of what arbitrary and capricious means. Not only is the law (apparently) written far too broadly here, but it also suggests that a digital camera has an unforseen advantage over film: it doesn't allow the local busybodies-masquerading-as-retailers a chance to poke their noses into your business. Christ on a stick, I've got pictures of both of my daughters naked (in the bath, getting a diaper, running down the hall, etc) ... does that mean that I'd be considered a child pornographer in Texas?

My wife also says "we never talk", when in fact our household is filled with talking from the instant the girls wake up until they go to bed. Rather a lot like this, in fact.

I must admit to having been vaguely irritated at seeing our various Presidents returning salutes since they weren't in uniform, although unlike the NYT I didn't demean the men holding the office by calling them "puerile"; I just didn't like it. Now, thanks to Bill Quick, I find out the history of the returned salute, and find that it doesn't offend me quite as much anymore. Yes, that's probably because I thought Reagan was a spectacular President.

It's all about the ooooooiiiiillll, innit? Don't bother denying it, you sorry sonsabitches.

Kanan Makiya is an Iraqi expatriate, a respected author of several books on Iraq, and is reporting for The New Republic. In general, not really a good candidate for inclusion in the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy(tm). So how come he's pointing out that Baathist officials had the most reason to loot the National Museum and none of The Big Media is picking up on it?

I won't call her a buffoon either. I will, however, call her a liar unless she upholds her end of the bet.

Oh my oh my oh my. That's quite an error you've got there. I'm not a lawyer (duh), but doesn't most software come with a license that says that the company doesn't warrant anything at all? This might be a most interesting test of how well a software company can claim they're not responsible for how their software product performs.

Having accidentally missed a Paul Graham essay (the topic of the previous post), I figured I'd be happier if I went and made sure I hadn't missed many. I hadn't, although I note he's written yet another essay about language design.

For those of you who don't know, which is damned near everybody, Paul Graham is a Lisp resource of the first magnitude. He wrote the textbook on ANSI Standard Lisp, and his book "On Lisp" covers in more depth how to think in Lisp/write idiomatically in Lisp/be a Lisp native than anything else I've ever written. He really is The Man.

Unfortunately, he hasn't yet learned the central lesson of RMS ... the set of people who want to learn/know/use Lisp is vanishingly small. No amount of proselytizing will convert the vast majority of software developers into Lisp guys. It just doesn't work that way. Eric Raymond (go read everything he's ever written, by the way) noted this same thing about RMS a while back, although I haven't been able to track it down via Google yet.

Mr.Graham also looks down his nose at Java, and C (and C++) to a lesser extent. In fact, in his essay Beating the Averages, he states that there is a continuum of language power/expressivity such that some languages occupy higher places on the lattice than do others. Lisp, of course, sits at the pinnacle. Java comes in for a real beating in nearly every essay he writes.

And yet ... Java is everywhere. How did that happen? I'll posit my opinion, and it's a remarkably simple one:

Java forces you to play well with others

That's it. There isn't any magic ... just the fact that all the bits and pieces are required to fit together without serious blood loss. Sure, you can get libraries written in C with well-documented headers, but they're woefully OS-and-version dependent. C++? The language standard specifies that symbol mangling is implementation-dependent because the committee knew that trying to force one single object model/memory layout on everybody at this late date was going to be organizational suicide ... so you not only have to have the right OS at the right version, but also the right compiler also at the right version. Perl, Python, Tcl, and Ruby are all doing pretty well in places, but none of them have serious corporate buy-in, for reasons which I completely do not know.

Lisp? There's a bit of lip-service paid in the standard to what they call "FFI", but the reality is that Lisp expects everything in the entire world to be loaded (in source form) into the current image. Sure, the libraries you can find/buy will work, but that's because the vendor has to give you the source. Not many vendors really want to do that.

And so we come to Java. Run-time linking works because it's specified in the standard exactly how it has to work, and Sun is quite serious about prosecuting people who call their product "Java" that doesn't hew quite closely to the standard. Hey, look! We can write servlets, and web apps, and SOAP services, and sell the damn things to people using any old J2EE container and we don't give a good goddamn whose container they're using because run-time linking works.

I can sell/give away a JAR file full of Java classes and interfaces with embedded documentation, and my clients can just drop it into their copy of JBuilder, IntelliJ, VAJ, or even EMACS. Compilation works, context-sensitive help works ... it's just shocking.

Don't misunderstand me here ... I don't particularly like the language. It gets in the way far too often for a language that does so little to help you out. The real truth, though, is you don't have enough time to write all the infrastructure and support you can have via download if you just put up with the warts.

I have no doubt whatsoever that Mr.Graham's Lisp-based e-commerce solution is clean, sparse, elegant, tasty, and more absorbant than anything I'll ever write. I, however, can get to the finish line faster than he can because I can download stuff written by IBM (representing untold man-years of effort) and nail it to stuff written by the Apache group (representing more untold man-years of effort) and then nail that to stuff written by Object-Refinery. My finished work product isn't nearly as pretty as Mr.Graham's but it only took me a week. What was your time to market again?

Hey! I missed a Paul Graham essay from earlier this year.

I've read it twice now, and I continue to be strongly conflicted over this paper. On the one hand, it creates a tremendous resonance in me; I hated my school years from sixth grade on, although it was much better from tenth grade because my high school placed a huuuuge premium on aggregate performance on national standardized tests, such as the SAT and the AP exams.

I hated school so badly that I was (and still am) determined not to let my daughters suffer through the same things. I am completely in favor of homeschooling them both right up until they turn 18 and decide they want to go to college and drink too much. My wife, however, feels that she can't teach them effectively, so wants to put them in good private schools. Given that I'm the primary earner in the family (and consequently not home to bear the obligation of mentoring full-time), my eldest (5 years old) is in a private pre-K, and will probably be in a private kindergarten this fall. Believe me when I say this does not make me happy, but she seems to really enjoy being around her classmates, so I can only hope she'll wind up sitting at the "A" table when the time comes.

On the other hand, this essay also carries with it a whiff of sour grapes, as well as the subtle flavor of a well-coddled self-esteem. Poor Paul Graham (and me) ... those horrible heathens didn't recognize how truly superior we were, refused to acknowledge that we were already travelling down the road they were only dimly aware they had to follow, why we were true leaders! We deserved their respect and admiration, and they were the doody-heads for not giving it to us! Wah! We demand our just due! Wah!

Ahem.

On the third hand (yes, I'm an alien), he's exactly on the money (I opine) with his analogy of school personnel to prison wardens. Public schooling is nothing if not relentless in its demand that students sit down, shut up, and do as they're told. It's horrible, but unlike Paul, I don't see a mechanism for improving that except taking the kids out of the situation. He seems to hold some hope that the system isn't irredeemable, but he didn't say how he thought it gets fixed. In the meanwhile, my daughter goes to school four days a week and I hope each day that she doesn't ever have to put up with the cruelty and spitefulness that I did.

And here's a review in English for the little tanks. Oooh .... I've got to get a couple or four of them right quick.

How's your Japanese reading these days? Good enough for this toy? I'm having trouble finding all the characters in my J->E dictionary, but what I've translated so far looks super-dee-duper.

How come it took this long for the M.S.S./Monty Python to be made so clearly?

Today I received a spam (as yet unopened) with the subject "Iraq: God's Plan?" Now I must admit I'm a big fan of General Franks and the CENTCOM general staff, but isn't that a bit over the top? I mean, they're still just professional military personnel, plain ol' homo sapiens sapiens just like the rest of us.

Holy crap! Cats and dogs are expected to begin cohabitating immediately, now that Microsoft is leaping on to the open source bandwagon.

It appears that I'm the last guy in the world to link to this make your own freeway sign applet. Requires Java 1.4 (as far as I can tell) to work.

I keep saying I need to take a look at Maven, since it appears there's quite a lot of movement towards it as a build tool. Here's IBM's take on it.

As an aside, I always thought project management was about managing the project goals, requirements, stakeholders, and schedule. How surprised I am to find out that project management really only means "smarter build tool". Who knew?

Holy f*cking crap, that's insanely hard.

Only about six months ago (see! I'm getting less irrelevant by the minute!), Chuck Cavaness wrote an article about Struts best practices. Excellent stuff, that.

I still occasionally go look at the Sitemeter stats to see who's coming to the page, and what they were looking for. Most of the stuff is more-or-less normally bizarre, but this just blew me away.

According to Google.co.kr, we're the sixth best hit for "f*cking my brother's wife".

Holy crap. Since I don't have a brother, they must be looking for you, Lee. Better watch your back.

I lurv Homestar Runner. I do I do I do.

Also, am I the only person who doesn't understand why Cartoon Network isn't offering them a production deal? WTF?

ScrappleFace: Looting Suddenly Stops in Baghdad. Oh, my aching sides.

Hooray for Brigadier General John Kelly, United States Army. Thanks to Tim Blair for finding this loverly article.

The Tech Report has a review of the NVIDIA GeForce FX 5800 Ultra. I really need to start saving up, don't I?

I'm only a year out of date, it appears. I just found an article about web application development comparing XMLC and JSP. I now officially have my curiousity bit latched high, and I must now go poke around a bit.

Our weapons technology is so amazing, we now actually need (and have) bombs that don't explode.

Hooray! Finally, someone has compiled a list of the 100 best hoaxes ever.

My name is Mitchell, and a ridiculously large percentage of my extended family suffers from HEV.

Look! hours and hours and hours of fun, as found by 2 Blowhards.

Ummmm .... you did what with your floppy drive? Drives? As in plural? Good God, man, are you insane?

The Department of Defense has published it's favorite photos of the war so far.

Goddammit ... now I'm getting all weepy again. You people stop writing these things, would ya? I'm going to run out of Kleenex.

<sniff/>

Behold the power of Trogdor!!!1! And all was in burnination!

In another stunning discovery, American entrepeneurs have discovered an entirely new way to make money without discarding their hipster cred.

Hey, Lee! This guy's got you pegged completely. Who knew you were so easily winkled out?

Damn me, but Bill Whittle can f*cking write. I have to go compose myself again.

BWA-hahahahaha! Finally, some signs I'd be willing to carry in the "protest"

My irony-o-meter just pegged. Oh, my aching sides. Stop it! You're killing me!

Unfortunately, the only people who will get this joke will have already understood how stupid the broadcast flag is. It's really a pity, because RFC3514 is hilariously funny and deserves a much broader audience.

HaloScan has crapped out. Again. Gah, but I'm sick of this. Who's a good hosting company for two guys running a blog for nothing but their own self-gratification? They need to allow something by way of decent blogging software, probably Moveable Type, although I don't have an opinion yet on whether that's the right bandwagon to hop on.

Crap, but this is irritating.

BBC news chief claims there's no systemic bias to their reporting. This would be more meaningful if he hadn't been speaking at meeting of Media Workers Against The War. It's okay to be biased; everybody is. It's not okay to be biased enough to go to a meeting for Media Workers Against The War and give a speech while claiming you're neither for nor against the war. That isn't being unbiased; that's flat-out lying.

What's the opposite of "nationalize"?

Curious about how many people are playing massively multiplayer online games? Well, wonder no more.

Massachusetts doesn't really surprise me, but Texas did: Use a Firewall, Go to Jail.

First the dolphins, and now the monkeys have joined the coalition of the willing.

Kewl!!! A map of the developing force deployment.

Lee, I'll be buying you a beer plus any other Britsh gentlemen I can find just because. Offer dependent on my financial state at the time of the purchase, of course.

Like most people, I didn't go to West Point. So this Flash animation describing U.S.Army doctrine for dealing with an emerging target was all shiny and new to me.

I've only started reading this essay on the roots of European anti-Americanism, so I can't really comment yet. I also have a habit of losing bookmarks, so I'll stuff it in here until I get back to it.

The scariest part about this story is this was a manager, for f*ck's sake, and he's able to drive a car and vote and everything.

Lee, this article is just for you.

More fun with iconography from Homeland Security.

Lee: send me an email or an IM when you wake up, would you?

It appears the clock has officially run out on the warm-up, and the serious business has begun. I'm one of the most atheistic people you'll ever have the sorry misfortune not to have been able to avoid meeting, but sometimes a little ceremonial deism is in order:

God save the United States, and protect the brave men and women serving in her armed forces.

My wife has been threatening me recently. It seems that an acquaintance of ours has a soda fountain in his house, and she wants one. Luckily for me, somebody wrote up a HOWTO.

Click now. Sign. Press the button.

Oh yes ... this makes it clear how the entire world is opposed to supporting our line on Iraq.

WARNING: Extreme time-suck ahead.

Chinese Characters and Culture will let you waste entire days just poking around inside a huge dictionary of Chinese words plus etymology and other huge great happy word-fun bits.

Don't say I didn't warn you.

Holy crap, um, carp. I mean it ... "holy", that is. Whole religions have been built around less.

Let me start with "I love Strong Bad". Notice the link over there (<===) on the left side. Now his fame is spreading far and wide: two new words in the dictionary.

Yet another nation signs on to enforce the U.N. mandate, whether or not France wants them to.

Woo-hoo! Hooray for the Aussies!!!1!

Okay, so it's only American cowboys who insist on attacking a peaceful sovereign nation in the Middle East? Guess again. Once more it appears that the more a person finds out about Iraq, the more determined they are to see the UK/US/Aussie/Spanish/Italian/[...]/Jordanian coalition take his punk ass down.

BWA-hahahahahaha

All who are in favor of helping the regime that retains and trains people like this stay in power, raise your fucking hands so I know who to shoot.

Umm ... not yet guys. You have to wait for the whistle. Found via Brian Tiemann

BWA-hahahahaha!!!! I'm absolutely dying! Thanks to Jane Galt for finding this treasure.

I'm watching the Preseidential press conference, of course, and getting more irked by the moment. President Bush did a good job of seeming presidential, but I'd like to go yell at his handlers for a while.

Why, when reporters asked about the opposition of France and Germany et al, didn't he respond that neither Chirac nor Schroeder is primarily concerned with the good of the U.S.? Even if he (and you) want to assume that's understood by all the people in the room, he should still state it. Out loud, and with force.

Also, when the same (or equivalent) reporters asked about the masses opposed to the U.S. policy, why didn't the President respond by naming the nations and masses who are with us? He said even France approved resolution 1441, but he completely dissed the Vilnius group by not mentioning that the majority of the citizens' governments in Europe have published an open letter stating their support? Why would he just let the barely unstated assumption that it's us against the world go unchallenged?

Crap crap crap. Another opportunity not completely capitalized upon. Still, it was much better than it could have been. He stayed on message and didn't provide any wiggle room whatsoever. Plus, as a bonus, he smacked every maroon who asked about "another last chance" with the clue-stick that they so richly deserve.

A history of graphing, as found by Colby Cosh. Only geeks with more analytic skill than life will find this compelling, but boy do we ever!

Today was a very special day in the life of Mitchell Morris. For the past four weeks, I've been busting my ass writing a web application for data visualization and dimensional alaysis of some performance metrics. Today I arrive at the client site to install the first code drop (version 0.1.0) only to find my <quote type="scare">partner</partner> had shown up and told the client that I was his employee, not his partner, and that he'd fired me and I should be escorted from the building. Hooray for internal power politics!!!

Unfortunately, my lawyer tells me I can't send a cease-and-desist to the client for reasons with long legalese names that I promptly forgot. All I've got is this pitiful little soapbox.

So ... fuck James Copher and his horse.

Actually, the last time we were delivering a product to the client that was primarily my work-product and not his, he also engineered a big row just before the deadline. Apparently, he always has to make damned double sure that he's always got somebody else he can visibly blame if things aren't just right. Here I thought we were partners and it turns out I was just his scapegoat.

Behold! The Power of The Oracle of Starbucks!!!!.

I'm not dead yet ... just very very very busy. I'm so far behind my required reading now I may never catch up. It's so bad, in fact, that I might have even missed a few days reading Megan's work.

BWA-hahahahaha! Get it? "line" sounds like "lion"! One of our cats, Miz Boo, gets this haircut during the summer and she loves it.

HA! Hahahahahahaha! Kevin Mitnick's security company's website gets hacked. Twice. Hee hee hee.

Let me see if I've got this straight: a U.S. Senator was the CEO of the company that made the voting machines that tallied his "landslide" victory, and he's also facing questions from the ethics comittee? I can spell "conflict of interest" ... can you?

Way back when, Microsoft added some special code to Windows 3.1 to detect DR-DOS (a competitor to MS-DOS) and throw up spurious error messages during install in an effort to make customers think there was something wrong with the not-from-MS product. They appear to be doing it again, the bastards.

And now Haloscan seems to have restored another backup tape. We now have back our comments between Feb 2nd and Feb 5th, but lost those left yesterday. Crap crap crappity crap. This is almost as bad as YACCS.

Haloscan seems to have lost all our comments left since February 2nd. Sorry about that.

Moe, I had left a comment following your comment about open source which was one of the lost bits. One person who's spent a good bit of time thinking and writing about the economic and sociological bases for open source v. closed source is Eric S. Raymond. He has a dead-tree book named "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" available now from Amazon.com as well as probably everybody else. He also has the original essays online at http://www.catb.org. I suggest, given the economic nature of your question, starting with The Magic Cauldron.

Why is JBuilder evil?

Among all the other things I do that suck up my time, I read the two main Struts mailing lists. On struts-user, there is periodically a message or two observing that JBuilder is the Worst.Tool.Ever!!!1! or similar unsupported statement.

Do either of you readers know what they're talking about? I use JBuilder all the time, and find it an excellent tool worthy of my attention (not least because I can get "vi" key bindings in it, and we all know that CUA and EMACS are the sperm of the devil).

What gives? What's so evil about JBuilder that I just don't see?

Apparently AT&T isn't the only group trying to make a completely human sounding conversation without any human involved. I'd heard "Most Requested" a time or two before, but never really thought about the time commitment that would be invovled in honestly doing such a thing.

Note to self: start working out. I would have added "more often" but that implies "workouts(current) > 0" which isn't quite true.

Ooooh! Shiny toys!

Hooray! Homestarrunner is back! 404 Doodoo Error

Step 1 of my all-time-consuming project is (apparently) done: today I submitted a tag library to allow Struts projects to target small-footprint wireless devices via WML. Because 1.1 is about to go release candidate 1, the submission is being set in abeyance, but it should be part of the "contrib" distribution post 1.1 release.

Maybe 1.2 ... we'll see.

Analysis of the Sapphire Worm, which managed to infect almost 80,000 hosts in just 30 minutes. I'll graciously allow you three guesses to figure out which manufacturer's products were affected.

God-botherer or no, I still laugh out loud reading about Tony and his brood. Hilariously funny, I think, but I no longer know what it's like not to have small children.

Hey Lee! The Mad Emperor Misha I lets fly with what I think is essentially your take on amnesty for illegal immigrants. Nicely put, and the argument sounds sane coming from somebody that isn't, um, you.

Hey! What happened to my post about the Columbia? I've been Blogger-ized!

Crap. It was pretty good too, as far as that goes. I'll rewrite it, but it won't be the same.

Not that anybody's noticed, but writing has been inordinately light here recently. Big things are afoot, and I hope to be issuing press releases in a few days to a couple of weeks. Details to follow.

Phillipe DeCroy, of the inestimable Volokh Conspiracy, finds an interesting common-law precendent that may shed some light on lawfully putting a cap in Saddam's asshat.

I fear the coming conflict for the lives of our soldiers and the lives of the Iraqis, but sometimes the dog has to be shot (cf. "Old Yeller", not that Saddam is our dog mind you)

Hmmmm again

Hmmmm

A law lecturer from across the pond writes about DeCSS, DVD encryption, and translating them as numbers.

Ever wondered if you've got what it takes to be a techno mixer? Well, wonder no more. In my case, the answer seems to be "no".

This suXor5. Hard. F*ck f*ck f*ckity f*ck.

Hey, Jim! F*ck him and the horse he rode in on. I, for one, will miss your online presence. Hurry back, would ya?

Be afraid; be very afraid. Mr.Lion points out that Microsoft makes the software that makes the BMW 745 run (or not run, as the case may be). Remember all those old jokes about having to stop the car, open and close the doors, and start up again? Here, again, we have life imitating comedy. Remind me to drive less often, huh?

Ummm ... holy crap! Lee, man, what the f*ck is happening to your erstwhile nation? The bobbies have been told not to investigate crimes such as burglary, vandalism, or assault. Do the gummint officials want more such crimes? That's the only possible result of such a policy. I am ... boggled.

Sometimes I do stuff that I know is just stupid. Today, I responded to a post by Tony Woodlief about his time working the Abortion Clinic detail for his local god-bothering collective. This was inordinately stupid for a couple of reasons:

1. Nobody is ever convinced of anything by a short argument presented once
2. There's no way to respond to his other commenters in an essay short enough that they'd be willing to read the whole thing
3. There isn't anybody who hasn't already had their opinion on abortion solidified by now
4. See item #1 repeatedly

Every now and then I forget my commitment not to try to educate anybody who isn't paying me for an education. People who don't want to learn new stuff generally don't. The only reliable way I've found to identify people who are open for instruction is that they'll offer cash money in trade.

I'll probably be able to resist responding to this kind of stuff for another six months at least, so I guess it wasn't a complete waste.

Hello, Mr.Panthorn: I'm looking forward to watching you choke down that crow sandwich. Yummy!

Crap crap crappity crap.

Today, I spent several hours troubleshooting my network here. Currently, I get cable modem service from Adelphia (28 kilofeet from the CO is no place for DSL CPE), with a Netgear RT311 firewall/router. The Netgear, unfortunately, doesn't tunnel PPTP connections because it doesn't understand PPTP well enough, so I'm replacing it with a Cisco SOHO71 (same as the 806 with a four-port 10Mb switch). Ought to be a breeze, right?

Wrong. When I plug the cable modem directly into a Windows box and retrieve an IP address via DHCP, I get a real routable address with DNS options attached. When I plug the cable modem into the Netgear and retrieve an IP address via DHCP, I get a real routable address with DNS options attached; the same address, in fact.

When I plug the cable modem into the Cisco and retrieve an IP address via DHCP, I get a non-routable address with invalid DNS options attached. Turning up debug a bit shows that the DHCP server's IP address is on the same subnet as the IP address I would have otherwise retrieved myself.

That means that some brain-dead n00b on my cable segment is stupidly trying to serve DHCP over the WAN. Of course, there's no way to configure the Cisco to ignore some DHCPOFFER packets, so my only recourse is to wait for Adelphia tech support to get around to investigating the problem and doing, um, something. I suspect they're pretty much limited to disabling the culprit's cable modem and waiting for him to call so they can tell him he's violating the TOS.

In the meanwhile, I still can't PPTP and the Cisco, on which I spent quite a bit more of my hard-earned cash than I wanted to, just sits idle. I swear to <diety/>, I'm this close to breaking out the ol' NMAP to see if he's willing to let me shut him down myself. F*cking dork. If you're going to set up a server, then for f*ck's sake set it up correctly.

Finally! A slogan I can support: Celebrate Diversity!

It's the modern-day equivalent of bear-baiting, I tell you. Steven Den Beste writes 5000 words (plus another 17000 words worth of pictures) tweaking the Mac faithful and they respond. My question is: why?

Or to rephrase the question slightly, who cares what's on the business desktops? Companies that have specific software needs purchase the software they really need, and whatever hardware is appropriate to run it, and the decision is made in that order. Sure, there are lots of Intel chips running Windows on various desktops, but they're the red-headed stepchildren of the business world. If you're in the image manipulation business, your art-school dropouts have Macs. Sure, the MBAs in the front office have Windows so as to make those shiny PowerPoint presentations and to read the Word docs from the client, but the real guts of the business is on (as far as I can tell) Macs and the serious Unix hardware in the glass house.

When you're serious about performance, you go buy a Sun E10000 and run Oracle on it. They're both complicated products from companies with truly horrific pricing schemes, require a professional priesthood to sacrifice the goats at the right time, and provide lifetime employment for their cadre, but when you by-Gawd have to have the data available, that's where you have to go.

In modern post-pro houses, I'd bet the artists are probably running Maya, and the render farm is almost assuredly running Linux. Those guys don't seriously give a crap about the material on the desktop, which is why they can afford to let Windows in the building at all. If it was really a corporate asset, it'd be housed on a Unix box. Where do you think all those source code repositories live? Where is the actual rendering of the 425 FX shots for "Matrix Reloaded" taking place?

I'll give you a hint: it doesn't involve Redmond.

I'm super-delighted to point to my miniscule contribution to the world's stock of accumulated knowledge: begging Capitalist Lion to write stuff about video production. Woo-hoo!

Mindles H. Dreck fires a broadside at a British "friend" with delightful accuracy. Now, them's some fightin' words, there, boyeee. Woo-hoo!

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is our brush with greatness. Mr. Simon walks in, graces us with his presence for a brief moment, and then he's gone, leaving only his timeless prose and a faint smell of cologne behind. Give it up for Laurence Simon, ladies and gentlemen! Hooray!

I would like to add that I don't hate Carrot Top, but I do (generally) hate people that hate Carrot Top. Does that mean we now have to duel with plastic grocery store paranoia bars? I'm game, I suppose.

(And now, a brief message from Laurence Simon of Amish Tech Support, who is appearing here as part of the Amish Tech Support 2003 Blog A Day Tour.)

I really don't have much of important to say today on the Tour. I don't even have anything overly hateful to say on this Full Of Hate site.

I do want to talk about a party, however.

We went to the birthday party of a friend's 4 year-old yesterday where Spider Man was the theme. My wife pronounces that Spider Man, and I pronounce that Spiderman, as in the Spidermans from Long Island who import hats.

Many parents were there, occasionally pointing at the roaming, rolling tide of small children. A costumed Spider Man (Spiderman) and Bat Man (Batman, of the Hamptons) were there entertaining the kids, too.

"Who are those guys really?" someone asked me.

"Don't tell the kids this," I said. "But they're Peter Parker and Bruce Wayne."

Most people know that it's futile to ask me question I can use as a straight line. Others still haven't learned yet. They suffer for my art.

Then there was this pair of Harry Potter glasses. Someone requested that I put those suckers on, see if they fit:

"Yeah, I know why the fifth book of the series is late. I've been away, you see. After my fourth year at Hogwarts, well, I kinda used my magic powers to blow up the Dursleys. The fat little bastard was getting on my nerves, I just couldn't take it anymore. Then I set Draco Malfoy on fire, his whole gang, and most of those kids in Slytherin, too. So I was shipped off to Magician Reform School, having a rough time of it. I wish Ron Weasley would return my calls, man, because I've got a great idea for a business when I get outta here. And Grainger... oh man, chicks dig scars.

Bah. Voldemort was right. Screw 'em all. Once I get a second-hand wand and a spellbook, my ass is outta here."

And then there was the Spider Man disk shooter. I was about to reach for it and make a comment about speeding up Catholic Mass by using one of those for firing out wafers and a Super Soaker full of sacramental wine when I realized...

This is what Carrot Top does.

I hate Carrot Top.

Everybody hates Carrot Top.

I went back to drinking my Bud Light and didn't play with another toy for the rest of the evening, reminiscing to the earlier part of the evening where I noticed that I enjoyed Snickers Ice Cream Bars better than actual Snickers Bars.

But I don't hate Snickers Bars like I hate Carrot Top.

(If you understood all of that, then you're a better man than I am, Gunga Din. However, it doesn't mean you can't also participate in the Amish Tech Support Blog A Day Tour... go to Laurence Simon's weblog and volunteer your site today!)

Recently, my wife's laptop started displaying some interesting errors. "Corrupted registry" has to be the worst possible error message a Windows box can give you, because now you know you're completely hosed. Various bits of error correction, volume scanning, etc kept it limping along for a while as we considered what to do about it. Coincidentally enough, while reading something or other from IBM developerWorks, I saw a banner ad for IBM laptop hard drives. I clicked through (yes, I'm embarassed for me too) to see what was up.

The vendor was Googlegear.com, and the deal was a 40GB drive in the right form factor to stuff into the laptop for $131 shipped. If you haven't priced hard drives from Sony (it's a VAIO), then you don't know how astoundingly good this price is. I ordered one immediately. That was late Friday afternoon. I was hoping that since I'm on the east coast and they're in California that it might get shipped out then, but no luck. They shipped it UPS 2nd day on Monday, and posted the tracking number. UPS admitted they had the package and estimated that they'd deliver it on Wednesday.

On Wednesday, I had to run to the grocery store for stuff and, of course, that was when the UPS guy dropped off the package. Or rather, that was when the UPS guy dropped off some other persons' package but not mine. That's right ... the hard drive was AWOL with UPS claiming it had been delivered. I called the 800 number for UPS the instant I got home and told the customer disservice clerk that there had been a misdelivery and my package was still missing. They told me that my package had in fact been delivered and I should go look on the porch. I repeated that no, it had not been delivered, but someone else's package had been delivered instead. The clerk typed in a note and said they'd have the local depot contact me within the hour.

Three hours later I still hadn't gotten the phone call. I called the 800 number again, and told the second rep that I was expecting a call from the local depot and could they give me the phone number or connect me directly. They asked what the story was, so I repeated it. This clerk then looked on their web page and said the package had been delivered and I should go look on the porch. I told them, slightly less politely than I told the first clerk, that no it hadn't been delivered but someone else's package had been misdelivered to me instead. Then I asked them why my previous contact wasn't showing, and what had the first clerk been typing if it wasn't a contact record. They told me that there was a contact record but they hadn't read it. Super. Clerk #2 said they'd call the local depot and I'd get a call within the hour.

Two hours later, the local depot finally called. I told him (clerk #3) the story. He looked on the web page and said the package had been delivered and I should go look on the porch. I used my last remaining smidgen of patience to tell him that I didn't care what his website said, I didn't have my package but instead had someone else's package that had been misdelivered and I wanted him to find my damned hard drive. He said he'd go find the truck and see if it was still on there and call me back within an hour. If it wasn't on the truck, he continued, then he'd have to wait until tomorrow because the driver had already left for the day. I was flabbergasted to find that they hadn't done a damned thing in the five hours since I placed the original call, but told him that would be okay since I had no other choice. He called back eventually, and of course it was more than an hour later. He repeated he'd have to wait until tomorrow to check with the driver, but he'd call first thing in the morning.

By lunchtime Thursday I still hadn't heard anything, so I call back to the UPS 800 number and begin politely demanding that clerk #4 solve my problem and find my hard drive. I wasn't interested in getting a call back, I wasn't interested in hearing anything about online presence, I just wanted her to find my package. She finally said she couldn't do anything and I needed to get the shipper to start a trace. I boggled. "What can they do that you can't?" I asked. "Start a trace" she replied, and continued that she couldn't start one and nothing I could say was going to change her position.

I called Googlegear and they were not only sympathetic but actually helpful. The customer service people there started the trace process, and continued to email me when they said they would with schedule updates. I don't mind that things don't always go perfectly, but if the vendor will just do what they said they would, I would be much happier about giving them my custom. On that metric, Googlegear is worthy of my repeat business.

The moral of this story is Googlegear good, UPS bad. If you're looking to buy computer-y bits online, then I will strongly recommend Googlegear, and will further recommend either (1) using FedEx instead or (2) requiring a signature from UPS since if they think you got your package then they're not going to do a damned thing to help out.

And yes, I'm still pissed off. Why do you think this public jeremiad is making its appearance?

Oh yeah ... the hard drive showed up in my mailbox Friday morning. It was probably misdelivered to a neighbor who stuffed it into the mailbox Friday morning as they went to work. The laptop survived its surgery, and things are back to normal. Now that Kathy can check her email on her own machine again, I'm golden.

Microsoft have finally admitted what the rest of us figured out quite a while back: as a brand, ".Net" can't possibly mean anything if it includes everything in sight. So, they're dropping dot-net from their unrelated products. Occasionally, they do seem to show quick flashes of cluefulness.

Usually, I'm able to resist this sort of thing, but alas, I'm too weak today. (Found via Jim Henley)

Mang! I must have been sleeping or something. The Apache foundation has released Apache Axis, an implementation of SOAP in a yummy stable 1.0 release. It's so tasty, in fact, that it's passed Sun's JAX-RPC and SAAJ compliance tests. I'll be having some now, thank you very much.

How did I miss this? The Supreme Court lifted their injunction on the distribution of the DeCSS program, which decrypts the information off a DVD. Hooray for fair use!

A real first on the Internet. Pictures from SomethingAwful.com that haven't been photoshopped. Will wonders never cease?

There used to be a time (long, long ago) when there were images on the Internet which weren't porn. I'm sure many of you nice folks out there can't remember this magical time of lore, but trust me, it once existed. During that time, a brave SA Forum Member did a Google Image Search for the phrase "The Greatest Picture Ever." Google, like always, did not disappoint and returned a marvelous image, but it also brought up the question, "what image do you feel is the greatest picture on the Internet?" Forum members immediately began tossing in their favorite non-Photoshopped images to the thread, turning it into .a surreal, comical series of non-sequiturs. Why are these pictures funny? I don't have any idea, I just know that these are some of the greatest pictures on the Internet.

Apparently, our engineering students do have a little too much spare time. People's Exhibit #1: Squirrel Fishing

Derek Lowe has this to say about the Raelian brouhaha:

My opinion of the human clone claims can be easily expressed: bullshit. Look, you fools: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Come up with multiple blood samples now for DNA microsatellite analysis, in full view of multiple witnesses, or shut up. This is an important issue, and watching all of you hit each other with pies and try to cram yourselves back into the midget car isn't very instructive.

[ed. emphasis in original]

Hooray! Norwegian court finds Jon Johansen innocent of all charges. This doesn't really establish precedent in the U.S. (unfortunately), but they did state:

Head judge Irene Sogn, in reading the verdict, said no one could be convicted of breaking into their own property, and that there was no proof that Johansen or others had used the program to access illegal pirate copies of films.

"The court finds that someone who buys a DVD film that has been legally produced has legal access the film. Something else would apply if the film had been an illegal ... pirate copy," the ruling said.

It found that consumers have rights to legally obtained DVD films "even if the films are played in a different way than the makers had foreseen."

Johansen said that was the key part of the ruling.

"As long as you have purchased a DVD legally then you are allowed to decode it with any equipment, and can't be forced to buy any specific equipment," he said.

The irony here is just too sweet: globalization is going to save the environment and reduce our needs for ooooooiiiiiiiilllll. That's got to really chap the asses off the hairshirt/Birkenstock crowd, doesn't it?

My only complaint here is there's no mention of where the energy to extract the hydrogen from whatever it's bound up in currently comes from. My (incredibly limited) understanding is that extracting the hydrogen will not reduce actual pollution, but merely transfer it from the cars to the distillation stations and/or the generation plants.

F*cking suicide bombers. I've long since passed the point where I think anything other than "kill 'em all and bury 'em in pig fat", but James Lileks sums up his feelings with rather more elegance than I've managed.

And now, the 8th Annual Halloween Document from Microsoft!

Mark Steyn has has piece to say about gun control, and why it isn't working in Britain. You wanted my opinion? There's no way to make criminals give up their guns, so forcibly disarming the citizenry just ensures that the criminals have a steady stream of helpless victims. Furthermore, gun control laws demonstrate that, rather than doing something about the predators in the jungle, the lawmakers and police have decided to give up completely and try to pin blame on the population. It's just nasty, and both South Africa and Great Britain are demonstrating rather conclusively that is doesn't work.

A brief comparison note: gun owners in Texas are more law-abiding than the general population. So we are we disarming the people that have demonstrated they can most be trusted with our civil defense? Can we at least try trusting "we, the people"?

Argh. I hear various people saying that Islamic belief isn't the source of misogyny, but damn me if they don't disprove themselves. I realize it isn't our job to make the rest of the world stop acting like fuckwits, but I certainly have a few suggestions along those lines.

I read this essay by Steven Den Beste about the concept of "a fair fight" between combatants. Then, I read this response by Robin Goodfellow. My reaction turns, as did Mr. Goodfellow's, on SDB's comment "Would I rule out torture, rape, mutilation, mass murder? I won't rule out anything."

SDB claims that if we capture an enemy combatant who's planted a nuke in an American city with the timer ticking, then he's shoving pointy things under the guy's fingernails. Mr.Goodfellow says that some things are beyond the pale, and he's willing to die rather than do those things to live.

Good for Mr.Goodfellow, and I hope that we never have to depend on his punk ass. His claim that it's better to die than to live means that he's decided that my daughters would be better off dead all by his lonesome. Fuck him. With a stick. If a combatant is holding our population hostage and there isn't any other alternative, then the guys on the spot have to commit themselves to hell so that the rest of the nation can live. That's just the deal, and I'll further claim that that's always been the deal: the soldier's existence requires him to endanger his soul in order to save his people. If you're not willing to make that trade, then cover yourself in white paint and quit pretending you're not a pacifist free rider.

And yes, I'm willing to make that trade. The lives of my family, neighbors, state, and nation are worth more than my "soul". Damn, but I'm pissed now.

UPDATE: I hadn't yet read Kim du Toit's response. If I had, I'd have just pointed at that and said "You damned skippy". After my wife read my response we had a short-ish discussion, wherein the phrase "Marquis of Queensbury" came out of my mouth. I'm thrilled to pieces to find that I'm on the same wavelength.

And now, the very special condensed parody version of "Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers". Found by Mindles H. Dreck.

Apparently, some H&R Block employees were stealing customers' identities for plain ol' fraud and theft. The ugly part is the company wouldn't assist without subpoenas. Wouldn't you think they'd like to ensure their credibility with their customers enough to assist the Feds in an investigation?

John Scalzi gets a publishing deal from his website. No joke, jackson.

I'm also pleased to say that the book deal comes as a direct result of having the book up here on the Web site; the editor who made the offer (Patrick Nielsen Hayden, who in addition to being the Senior Editor of Tor is the author of the Electrolite blog) did so after reading chapters on the site and then downloading the complete book (and by doing so, Mr. Nielsen Hayden's ranking on my list of People Who Can Ask For a Kidney and Not Be Dismissed Out of Hand has shot up rather dramatically over the last few days. And I can assure you, it's a very short list).

A different legal structure for distributing your non-software works under a commons-friendly system: Creative Commons. Found via Lawrence Lessig, who copyrights his blog writings and licenses them under the "by" variant.

Strangely enough, I find it more difficult to blog when working from home than I do when in the office. It's probably a function of the density of distraction; at the office, there isn't anything except the other humans who are all full-grown and many of them are humor-impaired. At home, I have a 10 month old daughter who is a continual source of amusment, and I find I'd rather pick her up and tickle/hug/kiss her when I have a spare moment much more than I want to read CNN. Go figure.

A short(ish) whitepaper from Intel on securing your home network. Unfortunately, as they point out, these measures are "well-known security measures are both inadequate and burdensome", but you still have to deal with it.

"Hey check out my new wireless keyboard" says Norwegian local. "Yeah, I see" says his neighbor (also his employee). "I also see your keystrokes on my computer" he added. Yet another vulnerability to think about, in this day of wireless everything.

David Kahn, the author of one of the most important books about cryptography, spoke at the NSA about the death of cryptology. It's a short speech, but one that I found interesting anyway.

Yet another reason why Bill Frist is better than Trent Lott: he's willing to get out of the car.