I just realized something. I'm moving to England in 12 days. I need to get cracking!

Technorati Tags: England, Moving House

Dax is a Linux guy now? Good luck, man, I'll be right there with you in a couple of weeks, at least at the office. But at home? I'd rather take a poke in the eye with a sharp stick than run Linux as my day-in, day-out desktop. But the price is right, and the licensing terms are more than agreeable, so if you have the time, and hate playing MP3s and games, Linux might just be for you. Naturally, my first instinct as a smug Apple Fanboi is to rip out my hair and say, "DAX, MAN, WHY YOU HATE YOU'RE FAMILY GET A MAC! OMG!". But he knows about Macs, and still decided on Linux. His reasoning, however, piques my interest:

Not that I’m going to become one of those freaky Apple people, mind you. After all, I like to actually run more than a handful of programs. However, I have downloaded Red Hat Linux. Let the learning begin!

"Handful of programs," I thought to myself, and hit the F9 key on my keyboard, bringing up Exposé:

Doing! That's gotta be like, 500 windows there. Has that crap really been running in the background all this time? I need to close a program every now and then, methinks. I know that document window in the bottom left, with the red header, has been open at least a week. That's when we printed the flyers for our apartment. It gets away from you sometimes, that desktop management thingy.

Then, of course, there's all that Dashboard crapola that's running in the background:

Is that really a modern impression of the Macintosh, that you can't run a lot of stuff at once? I guess that was the case back in the Multifinder days, but take a look at what ps ax spits out on my laptop:

[75 lines of meaningless code deleted]

I would say that's more than a handful. Or maybe Dax is talking about program availability. Like the ability to walk into a store and pick out shrink-wrapped software to take home with him. That would make sense, seeing as the acceptance of the Macintosh doesn't compare at all with that of Windows, especially in the retail space. But then, he's switching to Linux. If he thinks he's going to find software for Linux at Best Buy, well.... BWWWAAAAHAHHHAAAHAAAAHAAA!!! Talk about a rude surprise in the waiting.

Oddly, I just spent an hour trying to figure out why the sidebar of this blog disappears when viewed in Internet Explorer 6. There's apparently a missing tag, or a bad HTML element somewhere, or whatever it is today that causes IE6 to get the vapors.

I say 'oddly' because I really don't give a fuck how any of my pages look in IE. If you're still using Microsoft's abortion of a browser after all suffering and human misery that it's caused, you are a traitor and a Communist. Which is unfortunate, because look what you assholes are using?

Browsers Unique Visitors
MSIE 6	88229	62.16%
Netscape 7	46143	32.51%
Netscape 4	3038	2.14%
MSIE 5	2873	2.02%
Other	1096	0.77%
Netscape 3	249	0.17%
MSIE 4	247	0.17%
WebTV 1	12	0.00%
Opera 6	5	0.00%
AOL 4	4	0.00%
MSIE 3	4	0.00%
Opera 5	1	0.00%
Netscape 34.82% - MSIE 64.36% - Other 0.78%

I mean, what's up with you dickheads, anyway? This table tells me that at least 64.36% of my visitors are slobbering, knuckle-dragging waterheads. Did you ever wonder why 90% of email nowadays is spam? It's because dickheads like you surf porn sites using Internet Explorer, get viruses, and your computer uses your cable modem to send spam to people who should hate you, 24/7.

Is it really just beyond you people to go out and download Firefox? Do you really not understand that using IE is like going to prison with a naked Angelina Jolie tattooed on your back?

Technorati : Microsoft, Suck it Bill, ÌE

I was playing around with the Mac OS X dictionary applet today. It's that cool bit where, if you hit Control-Alt-D, you'll be given the Oxford English Dictionary definition for whatever word you happen to have the mouse cursor over at the moment. I ran it over a blog entry I wrote a few days ago, and got the following:

An "unsophisticated country person", you say? Sounds like a fairly P.C. definition of a hillbilly. I'm sure that hillbillies everywhere are pleased with the objectivity of that entry, at least the ones that own the Oxford English Dictionary. Or a Mac, for that matter, which I'm sure is the preferred computing platform for hillbillies everywhere.

Well, let's see what they say about Rube:

What the...? Well, that seems a little dismissive to me. Do I need to point out the fact that hillbillies got a six-syllable Scrabble-buster to describe them? And really: Bumpkin? Is that even a word? Dang, dudes, at least try to temper your contempt for a second.

My optimism for a warm welcome from the British folk isn't really stoked by this. "Hello, Mr. Bumpkin, welcome to England. Please be aware that chewin' on wheat stalks is restricted to designated areas. Enjoy your stay."

Pommy bastards.

It looks like I'm moving to England. My papers have gone through, so now instead of sitting around griping about the Huns, I'll be bitching about the redcoats. In about two weeks, the beer will be warm, the sausages weak and flabby, and the teeth around me like rotted tree-stumps in a putrid bog. They happen quickly, these changes in context.

Over the last few weeks I've been swapping emails with the high-powered London lawyering firm that's taking care of my visa application. You got to know when to cover your redneck past when dealing with certain types of people. I try to keep the y'alls in the closet where they belong. And I really have to bite my tongue whenever I start to bring up all those tales about Pappy getting put on the peanut farm a short trick for moonshining. You've got to pick your audience when you're bringing out the really good stories, you know. I mean, I can't even put a picture of my family on my desk. My cover would be blown:

That's Pappy in the dark jacket, just right of center in the front row. He wore shoes because it was Picture Day. How do explain that to an scone-eatin' Englishman?

I just hope my future employers don't discover that they're getting billed $400 an hour to import some backwoods north Georgia hillbilly. At least not until the office Christmas party, when I break out the banjo and give 'em a little Foggy Mountain. Then it'll be:

RUBE: "Oh, your uncle's named Earl, too? Wow, that's interesting!" LIMEY GUY: "No, he is an Earl. " RUBE: "I'm outta scotch, be right back."

Playing it close to the vest; that's the new Rube.

Although I'm not much of a guitar player, every now and then I learn a tune enough to enjoy playing it. I remember commercials from my youth, hawking a crash course in learning the three or four chords on a guitar which would turn you into the envy of all your friends and the object of desire for cheerleaders and candystripers everywhere. Well, I've learned at least that many chords now, and a few songs to go with them; everything I need to be the hit of parties and campfires, as laid out by those Urban General hucksters. Unfortunately, I always seem to choose songs that a) no one wants to hear, or b) nobody can sing. A short list of songs I can play on guitar, none of which are suitable for campfires and/or parties:

- Rowboat, by Johnny Cash. It's written by Beck, and sung by Johnny, so you can rest assured that no man born of woman can hit that first note. - Back to the Old House, by The Smiths. Campfire + Smiths = Maudlin Loser. - Black Gold, by Soul Asylum. It loses a bit of umph when played on creaky old acoustic guitar with plastic strings; also, no rhythm section. - Superman, by R.E.M. Bursting into shameful tears at the line, "You don't really love that guy you make it with, now do you..." is no way to impress the ladies. - Jane Says, by Jane's Addiction. Imagine your mom with a pint of bourbon in her, belting out "I want 'em if they waaaant meeeeee!" in her best Perry Farrel screech. - House Above Tina's Grocery, by Kevn Kinney. "Kevn who? Play Free Bird, dumbass!" - Norwegian Wood and/or Hide Your Love Away, by the Beatles. The last four guys who had the guitar already played it, and they were better than you anyway, so put a sock in it. - Marie's the Name, by Elvis Presley. Although this sounds like it would work, it's important to keep one thing in mind: You are not Elvis.

So, what is a good song to learn for campfires, which requires but meagre skills? I, too, would like to be the hit of the party someday.

Technorati Tags: Guitar

Since Agent Bedhead seems obsessed with this knowledge, I've decided to tell the world the complete story. I present, rather un-proudly, ashamedly, actually, The Marmoset Movie.

May God have mercy on our souls. Y'know, if there was ever a reason to learn how to put little black bars over people's eyes in iMovie, this is probably it.

Technorati Tags: Jeckyll, Marmosets, Dax Montana

People who've never been to Germany fail to realize just how bad the radio is over here. Germans are notorious cheapskates, and their penny-pinching habits extend to paying for their music. Even in well-established bars over here, you'll see stacks of clumsily-labelled CDROMs sitting next to the stereo system, or a broken down old computer playing downloaded MP3s from a Winamp playlist. That's something you hardly ever see anywhere else in Europe. In Amsterdam, for example, the bars all have a standardized, computer-based music system, displayed prouldy, that gives confidence that these are indeed Legally Purchased Tunes we're listening to. Comforting, despite the fact that they only seem to have Phish and Cold Play.

But a tiger can't change his stripes. Germans simply refuse to pony up the Euros for quality music, and nowhere is this more evident than on the radio. In contrast to the loose-cannon BitTorrent-using bar owners, the radio stations in Germany don't have the stones to play pirated music. GEMA rules the airwaves with an iron fist over here, and would swiftly visit upon such transgressions great justice. In that light, it's a perfect control group, since you can be sure that the music is legal and paid for. And when given the choice of expensive music performed by known artists or discount hootenanny doggerel fit only for a drunken choir of railway hobos, you can be sure that a German will choose the latter.

An example is in order. As I was exiting the shower this morning, I noticed a familiar melody playing from the transistor radio hanging next to the door. I stopped my vigorous towelling for a moment, and bent my ear towards the wafting notes. Something was familiar in them, yet I was convinced that it was wrong somehow. I presently recognized the tune, it being the unforgettable paean to European optimism, The Final Countdown, from the rock and roll band which, in a most rascally fit of cheekiness, decided to name itself Europe, despite the curse of naming your band after a continent . Having reminded myself of this, it suddenly occurred to me that, despite having a deceptively similar tonal and lyrical structure to that much-despised song of my youth, what I was hearing was merely a facsimile thereof. It was, in jazz parlance, a cover. At the risk of being vulgar, I feel it necessary to lay stress upon the fact that not only did some fucking band fucking cover the Final fucking Countdown, somebody fucking bought it and fucking played it on the fucking radio! Imagine, if you will, my discomfort.

I can only imagine that this decision was made in order to save money on the licensing fees. I can't for the life me think of another reason to actually buy a cover of The Final Countdown. This is typical Big Picture stuff, as I see it: The song you want costs too much, but it sucks, so you buy a cover of that song, thinking that nobody will care, because it sucks anyway. This is the optimistic view of this transaction, I might add; the pessimistic view being that whoever decided to buy it figured that the listeners were too stupid to know the difference and probably like The Final Countdown on its merits, no matter who sings it. But accepting that is tantamount to accepting the end of civilization as we know it, so I'll take the high road. So what we're left with is that somebody decided that a woefully serious cover of The Final Countdown, which means one not in the vein of Dread Zeppelin or the Pressure Boys, was preferable to four minutes and thirty seconds of dead air. This is wrong.

I woke up this morning, grabbed myself a steamin' hot cup of joe, and took a look out my frontside fourth-floor window. Instead of dully staring at the insanity of my neighborhood, which is my usual morning routine, I noticed that there were police in riot gear milling about. This isn't something you see every day, despite being a good idea, especially around here.

Thinking maybe the Beatles were coming through, I feigned interest and stared out over my windowsill. Maybe the excruciating monotony of my existence was about to be broken, if only for a few short, sweet minutes. Then, at my most vulnerable moment, my girlfriend reminded me that today is Nazi day here in Augsburg. And the troglodytes of the Ancient Order of People Who Got Their Asses Kicked Last Century But Good would be slipping out of their caves for a short march, passing right past our windows. Super, I thought, more weirdos. I considered hanging my American flag out the window, along with a poster of the Red Army capturing the Reichstag, but only for a moment.

Marching for or against Nazis is about as pointless as marching for or against foot fungus. Little fungi just love being between your toes; people hate having them there; and you're not going to change either one's opinion about the matter. But some people are attention whores, and can't pass up the chance at making asses of themselves as long as it's in front of crowds. Just look at Jimmy Carter.

But I don't want to take sides, lest I be seen as unfair. So here's a little something for our Nazi brethren, on their special day:

In Berlin, history hangs around like a psycho ex-girlfriend.

"Eternal Glory to Heroes Who Fell in the Struggle Against the German Fascist Invaders for the Freedom and Independence of the Soviet Union"

No wonder Berliners are so fucking weird.

Technorati Tags: abject humiliation

"Um...honey, you know I don't like telling you how to run your computer, even though that's the profession I've been in since the late 80s. You now I respect your work habits, and trust you to do the right thing with your data. But do you think it might be time to clean out your Email inbox?"

Technorati Tags: Productivity, Tip of the Day, Workflow

How to tie a Windsor knot.

How to draw a car in MS Paint.

Technorati Tags: Art, Tip of the Day

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This would also explain their sticking with X Window System.

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

  Technorati Tags: ALSA, Linux, Fedora

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

Technorati Tags: Flowers, Tip of the Day

The Wednesday Tip:

How to open a 4th Generation iPod:

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

How to play a G Chord.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Technorati Tags: Apple, Bill Gates, User Interface

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

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

And today, what do I see?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Technorati Tags: orkan, puppy, snow day

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

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

Übermenschen

I can't believe we actually one a war against people who can build crap like this.

Is getttext really worth an hour-long compile?

The hobby, the age-old balance between what you do for bread and what you do for fun. Everybody needs a hobby, whether that means astronomy, collecting bottle caps, or watching the boob-tube. Watching TV gets short shrift, if you ask me. It's nothing worse than reading comic books or blogs, really. But it's somehow gotten the attention of do-gooders everywhere, sort of like smoking and drinking. Smoking has been linked to everything from insomnia to low sperm count. Second-hand smoke is supposedly deadlier than the first-hand variety, despite the hard work smokers do filtering out the bad stuff with their own lungs and tracheas. Likewise, it's a widely know factoid nowadays anyway, that you burn more calories sleeping than you do while watching television. Once studies come out about you claiming absurd notions that no one dares to question, you know you've done something right.

But I'm not here to champion smoking or watching television per se; I doubt the two most popular pastimes of the 20th century need or expect my help. I'm here to tell you about my new hobby: Watching old episodes of the X-Files. Now, I always thought I knew a thing or two about special agents Mulder and Scully, and really felt no need to do any catching up. That is, until I actually sat down and watched an episode last year, only to realize that Mulder had been replaced by a T-1000 and nobody had noticed the switch! Granted, replacing Mulder with a single-minded, humorless robot that displays no emotion as it goes about its work isn't exactly what you'd call a catastrophic disruption, but you'd think the people around him would at least notice that it's a totally different dude! I decided to investigate.

As it turned out, not only was I missing the plot arc that involved a Terminator taking over Mulder's office, I'd also missed the part about the series being cancelled in 2003. So, I decided to turn to our old friend Mr. Torrent and do some catching up after all. Since I made that fateful decision about 6 months ago, the little lady and I have been watching an episode or two every evening, give or take. We've steeped ourselves in this fascinating bit of Clinton-era thêatre paranoie to the point where I realize that, despite having seen an episode or two back in the day, I know exactly fuck-all about the X-Files.

In retrospect, this isn't surprising, considering I never watch television. I mean, I try to slip into the comfortable rhythms, the somnambulant dynamic of the Tube, the Almighty, the One I so worshipped as a child. But I can't get my head around the fact that you can watch television for days, literally, and never once see a bukakke tentacle rape take place. I guess the Internet has spoiled me in that way. Nevertheless, there is good television to be found, as long as you have a good tracker. With years and tens of gigabytes of content before us, and a cheap DivX player as our trusty guide, we embarked on our journey to figure out just what the Hell Chris Carter and his minions were trying to tell us with their 10+ years of air time.

From the first scene, I knew that I had missed out on a whole bunch of things the first time 'round. In the pilot, for example, you see Scully in her underwear, as she examines a curious bug-bite in the bathroom mirror. Very erotic, albeit in a ham-handed, back-of-the-Sears-catalog kind of way. Up to that point, I had been under the impression that Gillian Anderson had been a bit pudgy for the first few years of the X-Files, and that it had actually damaged her character in later seasons when she had become the mercilessly hot red-headed seductress we all know and love today. But I was mistaken: She was built like a brick shitter from the very beginning.

The pilot also painted a rather remarkable version of Fox Mulder, one that I wasn't familiar with. He wore tacky sweaters, cracked terrible jokes constantly, and tried to be an all-around goof. These things went away, of course, as Mulder's demeanour became famously glazed and torpid. I guess the meds kicked in after the first couple of episodes. But one thing from the pilot stayed in the series, and I never noticed it. Namely, Special Agent Fox Mulder is a porn freak. A quick exchange in Mulder's office has Agent Scully referring ironically to his 'special video tapes', which he apparently has locked away in a drawer under the iconic "I Want to Believe" poster behind his desk. Apparently, he "Wants to Believe" that a woman could actually do that with a Heineken bottle.

In subsequent episodes, many references are made to Mulder's obsession with porn and masturbation. For example, in an episode about a grunge teenager who can channel lightning (which co-stars Jack Black and the medic from Saving Private Ryan), Mulder and Scully find a sleazy magazine called Big 'Uns, or something similar, and Scully makes a reference to Mulder having a subscription. Mulder timidly cops to it. In another episode, where Peter Boyle plays a psychic who can foresee how people die, a most disturbing exchange takes place while Scully is driving and Boyle is riding shotgun. Boyle says, "there are a lot of dignified ways to die, but autoerotic asphyxiation isn't one of the them." Mulder pokes his head in from the back seat and asks, suspiciously, "why are you telling me this?" At one point in the series you actually see Fox masturbating. At the end of Jose Chung's From Outer Space, he's laying in bed watching a well-known videotape of a supposed Bigfoot sighting, operating the VCR remote with his left hand while his right hand remains hidden under the covers. Any male over 30 would recognize the de facto official position of self-gratification of the those times. It was the early-90's version of using the mouse with your left hand.

But the X-Files wasn't only about waxing the dolphin. There are some great insights into the American mindset of the mid-90s. Every strenuous meeting that takes place in the office of Assistant Director Skinner (also a jerk-off addict, by the way) was smiled upon by the soothing, beatific visage of Attorney General Janet Reno on the one side and Bill Clinton on the other. Ah, the glory days of right-wing paranoia. Man, those were good times: The Unabomber Manifesto, the cattle mutilations, the crop circles, the black helicopters that hovered over Waco and Ruby Ridge. They just don't make psychotic delusions like that any more.

Technorati Tags: Hobbies, X-Files

Being a native English-speaker in a foreign land can be a real pain in the ass. Especially if you're using a computer. First of all, you'll probably be buying keyboards and the like from local purveyors, instead of having them flown in specially like the rich boys do. Getting used to a new keyboard is a task unto itself: the German keyboard, for example, reverses the positions of the Y and Z keys in relation to U.S. English keyboards, in addition to relocating the most of the special punctuation symbols ({,},|,) to finger-breaking combos involving the magical, mystical "Alt-Gr" key. Most commonly used symbols in command-line environments, like the / (Shift-7 in German layout), were not really envisioned as Barre chords, and using them a lot can be exasperating.

Figure 1: The German PC Keyboard (Stolen from Here)

Even worse are the efforts by all the world's programmers to be the cleverest little boys in town when it comes to solving the localization problem. Take Google, for example. Even though they have more money and resources than about 80% of sovereign nations, they've chosen the least reliable method possible to determine a user's preffered language: His geographical location. If your IP address is in Germany, you'll get forwarded to the German start page. It's a solution, I guess, but it paints users with a very broad brush. If you're a businessman travelling in Germany, for example, and you type in "google.com", that's not what you'll get; you'll get google.de. Oh, you can set a cookie with Google to always be in English, but you'll have to navigate to the "Settings" page, if you happen to know that Einstellungen means 'settings', then pick your language from a drop-down list you probably can't read, then save your new settings. As long as you know what Einstellungen Speichern means.

But a lot of people in Germany don't speak German; and even more don't have it as their first language. There are a lot of English, Turkish, and Italian speakers, not to mention Russian, Vietnamese, and Chinese left over from the Communist East German days; among them are people who can't even read Latin characters. Using geography to determine language doesn't even wash in the United States even more, since the Burrito Invasion went into overdrive. So why not just let the user tell you what language he wants if you're so interested. In reality, he already is telling you, you're just not listening! Here's another example. If you install a program under Windows, more often than not that program will use the Locale setting to determine which language to display. If you live in Germany, it will display – you guessed it – German, no matter what language your Windows OS is running in. When I install SVN, for example, and type "svn help" at the command prompt, this is what it returns:

C:\Documents and Settings\eric>svn help Aufruf: svn UNTERBEFEHL [Optionen] [Parameter] Subversion Befehlszeilenclient, Version 1.3.1. Geben Sie 'svn help UNTERBEFEHL' ein, um Hilfe zu einem Unterbefehl zu erhalten.

Now, considering my Windows installation is in English, why in the world would this POS be spitting German at me?Because it uses the Locale setting instead of the Language setting, and this is wrong. Although I'm speaking English, I'm still bound by other Locale settings, like the Euro Symbol and date format, when I'm living in Germany. I'm not sure why everybody in the world gets this wrong, but they do.

Here's how it should be: Your web page – I'm looking at you, Googlezonhoo! – shouldn't show me a language I don't understand just because your GeoIP database says that's what language I should speak. My browser tells you what language I want with the "Accept-Language" header. This is a much more reliable indicator than my IP address as to whether or not I can speak English or not. Most Germans use German versions of their web browser, which will in turn send you that information. That's what it's there for! Thanks, Dr. Schmidt, you can make the billion-dollar check payable to "Rube".

As to your application, Mr. SVN, why the hell don't you read the Language setting instead of the Locale setting? If you ask at install time which language you should use, why would you do it in German? What if I was in Japan and couldn't make heads nor tails of the posed question? I guess it doesn't help that Microsoft itself confuses the role of a Locale with that of a language. Even better is their insistence that an "Input Language" is the same thing as a keyboard layout! Bravo, Bill! How does having a German keyboard magically change the language that I'm typing on it to German? Bob knows. Observe what happens with the following Python code:

C:\Documents and Settings\eric>python ActivePython 2.4.2 Build 10 (ActiveState Corp.) based on Python 2.4.2 (#67, Jan 17 2006, 15:36:03) [MSC v.1310 32 bit (Intel)] on win32 Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. >>> import win32api >>> print hex(win32api.GetUserDefaultLangID()) 0x407 >>> print hex(win32api.GetSystemDefaultLangID()) 0x409

Huh? Looking at Microsoft's handy localization page, I see that 0x407 is German, and 0x409 is U.S. English. I'm getting a different language for my user than I am for my system, even though we're both in Germany, and we're both speaking English. In other words, even though I'm using the English version of Windows, my user language is set to German because I've got a German keyboard? What a crock o' crap. Windows' Multilanguage Support is viciously, unfixably broken.

A lot of programmers give very little thought to internationalizing their products. Some people, like the ones mentioned here, would've been better off ignoring it and sticking to English-only versions.

Technorati Tags: Bill Gates, Ex-patratism

Hey, man, you ain't bad. Think about what kind of splash you'd've made back in, say, 2003! You would have been fucking king back then. And that screen, man, that's even better than a 5th generation iPod! Don't go breaking your head about that 6th generation iPod, iPhone, whatever, because you came out first, my man. You beat that poser to market by a good six weeks, so you've got that going for you.

And who needs a phone anyway, dude? Phones are so, you know, 20th century web 1.0 and shit. You've got the Social, my friend. At least, you will, as soon as all that Wi-Fi stuff gets worked out, what with Universal demanding their cut and all. I dig. But still, you think that iPhone-come-lately even thought about clearing all that 802.11b/g/n and Bluetooth stuff with the RIAA before flouting it all over town? Now really, man, would a true friend do that? That ain't what people want. What's to stop somebody from just sendin' all that copyrighted stuff over email to their buddies without the record labels getting a cent?! Who does that Apple think they is, anyway? They don't even put those "Intel Inside", "Made for Windows 2006", "Graphics by XYZ", or "Centrino" stickers on their junk! What's up with that?! How's a brother to know what chipset he's using, know what I'm saying?

Don't you worry, Zune, my man. We know who our friends are.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Bill Gates, iPhone, OS X, riaa, zune

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Winners: Yahoo Apple Google Cingular OS X

Losers: Zune Windows CE The Macintosh Me

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

Just a little something to keep Zonker from getting bored.

Technorati Tags: abject humiliation

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