http://www.savetheplanetprotest.com/

This guy sounds like me after two beers. I've been ranting about this shit for years and he has to go and steal my thunder! Sigh. Cross one thing off my bucket list.

A Woman Worth Her Weight in Gold

I was recently discussing or rather, maligning, the institution of marriage with a friend of mine. We both firmly believe that marriage is for schmucks, or for that lucky guy who finds a woman who has both money and the desire to support him with it. Anyway, we were casually joking about how we'd never marry an overweight woman (or American woman...we use the terms "fat" and "American" interchangeably a lot when we talk). But then my friend started making foolish exceptions saying, "I'd be willing to deal with a few extra pounds if she could cook." Similar admonitions were made for other skills such as cleaning, laundry, dishes, or if she was RICH. Rich seems to be the kicker. Apparently we're both so shallow (honest as I like to call it) that we'd be willing to act like just about any woman on the planet and overlook a certain amount of fat and slovenliness in exchange for a fat bank account and the prospect of being a stay-at-home couch dad. It seems that even I have my price. My weight limit for prospective mates is around 120 pounds. In reality that number has tended to be slightly flexible, but not by much, so 120 is a good average figure (literally). So anyway, as we continued joking I told my friend that if I were going to marry a woman that's a pound over 120, she'd "have to be worth her weight in gold." Of course, it was scarcely a moment later when I realized that I MUST KNOW WHAT THAT NUMBER IS. I quickly set myself to the task of figuring out this simple equation, and within about 30 seconds, with the help of Google, I determined that the absolute minimum an overweight woman would have to be worth to even get me to entertain the idea of marrying her is $2,165,664. And that's if she's just 1 microgram over 120 pounds. My friend and I laughed over this fact as I then determined that each additional pound would cost my sugar mama exactly $19,647.20 at current gold prices.

I suggest other men use this as their standard. It's simple, it's fair, and it's damned funny. It's guaranteed to get any college-age woman to use the word "Misogynist" (or "dickhead" depending on how well she did in school). Anyone else that wants to figure out what an overweight woman would have to be worth for you to marry her using my "worth her weight in gold" standard, just take the maximum number of pounds that you'd consider NOT overweight (which in my example was 120), multiply that by 16 to convert it to ounces, then multiply by the current market price of gold per ounce. That's your lower price limit. From there, the number goes up quickly for each extra pound so dream big. This is the United States after all -- the sky is really the limit on how fat a woman can be here in the good ol'US of A. Go America!

I strongly encourage you to share this info with your lady friends. If you can pull it off without getting slapped or violently sighed at you are:

• A. Rich
• B. Attractive
• C. Both A & B
• D. With a woman whose bills you pay

NOTE: The author's girlfriend laughed when he read this to her. Then she had sex with him. The author rests his case.

Making Amazon EC2 into your Bittorrent bitch!

I've seen a bunch of different sites with how-to's on using Bittorrent on Amazon's EC2 system. I've been doing this for over a year, but my method is much quicker than the method I've seen others using. I can launch a brand new EC2 instance and be up and running from a blank server in about 2 minutes (after the EC2 instance comes online of course). There are just 3 free programs involved and only about 3 actual commands to get it all up and running. It takes almost no time at all once you do it a few times. These brief instructions assume you already know how to spawn an EC2 instance and log into it via SSH, so if you don't know how to do that, then you should go find a tutorial on that first. Then....

• Step 1 - launch the smallest EC2 instance you can...I just use the basic minimal Fedora Core 8 AMI with the default security group...don't worry about firewall rules, you'll be turning off the firewall first thing.
• Step 2 - log into your EC2 instance via Putty and don't bother changing directories, just do everything directly in your root dir since we don't care about this machine.
  
• Step 3 - type "yum install rtorrent" and answer "Y" to the prompt. rTorrent is a commandline gui bittorrent client for linux that seems to rock.
• Step 3.5 - optionally, type "yum install screen" to install the linux screen program...if you don't know what that is, then don't worry about it, but if you use commandline progs often you'll want to learn about the "screen" command at some point.
  
• Step 4 - Type "service iptables stop" to stop any firewall that might be running. You could also type "yum remove iptables" to completely remove the firewall. Since this machine will be completely deleted once we're done with it, who cares if it has a firewall right?
• Step 5 - Type "rtorrent" to launch rtorrent
  
• Step 6 - Upload whatever .torrent files you want to your EC2 root dir.
• Step 7 - Load the .torrent files into rtorrent as per the rtorrent instructions and download whatever you want a high speed (in rtorrent hit 'enter' then 'tab' to see the avail .torrent files you uploaded previously...you can load them all by typing '*.torrent')
  
• Step 8 - lower your upstream bandwidth by hitting the 'a' key a few times to change your upstream bandwidth limit to something reasonable so you don't end up getting killed on upstream data transfer charges.
• Step 9 - When your torrents are done downloading to the EC2 machine, smiply transfer the files to your local computer via SSH or SFTP.
• Step 10 - Once you're done downloading, simply shut down and delete the EC2 instance, removing all traces of the machine from the EC2 system. This should make it very hard to ever track your bittorrent usage.

Be sure to limit your upstream bandwidth or you may get a nasty surprise in the form of massive upstream data transfer charges....remember, you've got all of Amazon's bandwidth at your disposal, so your upstream data transfer can quickly add up if you don't limit it. I had $40 of extra transfer charges the first month I did it, but with careful use you can avoid any extra transfer charges. Of course, you'll still have to pay for the bandwidth to get the files to your local computer, so depending on how large your files are, this too could add up.

Stingrays Strike Again

The stingrays strike again, this time in Florida, killing a woman in a fishing boat. Kick-ass! Nice job stingray! Only 6 billion more to go!

The scariest thing I have ever seen

From the department of holyfuckingshit comes this robot called BigDog. It walks on 4 legs, can carry 350lbs over any terrain and looks eerily like two humans stooped over carrying something on their back....a fitting metaphor I suppose.

http://stupidevilbastard.com/index/seb/comments/big_dog_shows_that_robots_are_getting_more_capable_all_the_time/

The defense department wants fully autonomous robotic soldiers to do their dirty work in the future. No more risk to US soldiers...if you can still call them that. I'm not so sure that some highschool dropout sitting in a bunker somewhere controlling a bunch of robots like it was a game of "World of Warcraft" really qualifies as a "soldier". Anyway, it's a scary fucking world we live in when our government might not even have to have the cooperation of actual US citizens to wage war. Personally I think we need to enact a law right now that prohibits robotic soldiers from attacking humans. The only thing a robotic soldier should be allowed to attack are other robotic soldiers. Period. Within 10 years they will be able to build a fully autonomous soldier. It's only a matter of time after that, that we see robotic police that can smell the weed in your pocket from a quarter of a mile away and have even worse moral judgement than human cops.

Fucking cell phones!

So, I've forsaken the big cell phone providers for a couple of years now in favor of a Virgin Wireless pay-as-you go plan. I'm just against all these shit contracts on principle, and rarely use a cell phone because quite frankly they ALL suck beyond my ability to come up with nasty superlatives. There is no such thing as a good cell phone, regardless of how many features they cram into one because the underlying functionality of cell phones is still total shit no matter where you live. Nobody likes talking on a cell phone. Nobody. Not even the dipshits that were dumb enough to buy a 1st generation iPhone. But I digress.

The only thing I'm here to complain about today is the fact that I can't disable the fucking voicemail on my Virgin Wireless account. I've got a great VOIP line from Vonage that I'm quite happy with, and they have this great "Simultaneous Ring" feature, but it won't work with my Virgin Wireless service. Why? Because when I turn off my cell phone, all calls are picked up by Virgin Wireless and sent directly to voicemail. You cannot disable this. You can call Virgin and have them turn off your voicemail, but then all calls are still picked up by a recording that tells callers there is no mailbox for that number. Is it really too much to ask that when I turn my cell phone off it just do NOTHING!? Can I just have a fucking device that you can actually turn off with the expectation that it is really the fuck OFF! Jesus fucking ass-christ. I just emailed Virgin about this since I refuse to listen to their insulting fucking "urban" automated call center operator. I don't really feel like calling an automated call center to have some bullshit hip-hop-esque slang thrown at me on top of having to listen to 15 options I don't give a fuck about. So I emailed them and hopefully I will one day be able to turn off my cell phone and expect that all callers won't automatically be transferred to my voicemail. Strike one against Virgin. Not bad for 2 years of service. I still love my Nokia Shorty too, but had to switch to a "Super Slice" because it was the only model of Virgin phone that could use a bluetooth headset, and since I just paid waaaaaay too much for my "Jawbone" headset for use with Skype, I figure I better be able to use it with my cell phone too. Of course the "Super Slice" is a piece of shit compared to the Shorty...the battery life is pathetic and it's just a cheap piece of easily breakable crap, but at least it had bluetooth. I'm sure I'll be switching back to my Shorty when it breaks.

My new favorite person

Okay, I fucking despise Christians and religious people in general, but I'm going to have to make an exception for this brave old lady. Apparently, an irrational belief in a higher power can sometimes give you the courage to go out and do something so wonderfully stupid and heroic that it inspires and shames the rest of us spineless aetheists who normally would be laughing at your mental inferiority. Congrats Hammer Lady, you're my new favorite person. In your honor, I will have to say a little prayer for comcast today.

Something to smile about

I was just talking to my girlfriend the other day about something that apparently reminded me of Bill Cosby. For years, I've occsionally thrown the phrase "I hobope that you are satifibed" into my conversations, as a reference to a Bill Cosby routine I heard many years ago as a 10-13 year old...sometime around 1980-83. I used to love any kind of comedy I could get my hands on and I had a couple of LP records by Bill Cosby and there was a routine about a visit to the dentist that had the line "I hobope that you are satisfibed" in it, and it stuck with me ever since. Years went by, I lost the albums and mostly forgot about the rest of that Bill Cosby comedy routine, but the other day I threw it into conversation and my girlfriend questioned me and and I couldn't really explain why I used the phrase or why it should be funny. I couldn't even remember what the routine was about or the context of the line, all I remebered at this ripe old age of 37, was that it was Bill Cosby's line. Well a few minutes ago, on a lark, I decided to try and find it online, and would you fucking believe that if you google

bill cosby "I hope that you are satisfied"

it pulls up a single search result which is a link to the complete routine. If you've never heard it before, it's a classic that you shouldn't miss. Many other comedians have stolen this routine. I can't think of any of them off the top of my head, but I know I've heard other versions of this by other comedians over the years. Everyone's got a dentist joke I guess. Anyway, you can check out : http://worldwordweb.com/listening/billcosbythedentist.mp3

Electricity directly from trees

I have been speculating for years about alternative methods for generating electricity. Recently I was thinking about how plants are able to efficiently store solar energy as sugar and wondered if it might be possible to coax them into generating free electrons that could be siphoned off directly as an electrical current. I wondered if there might be some way to splice some genes from an electric eel or some other bioelectric organism and get a tree to produce a similar electrical field. Of course, this seems somewhat impossible since they biological systems in a tree are nothing like those in an eel. But after a bit of searching I came across this article which describes a method of extracting current directly from a tree using a method that most elementary school science fair participants will probably be familiar with from their "potato battery" experiments. Apparently Gordon Wadle, an inventor from Thompson, IL. was thinking about how lightning eminates from the ground, often near large trees. He basically did a variation of the "potato battery" experiment with a tree instead of a potato and it worked.

"Simply drive an aluminum roofing nail through the bark and into the wood of a tree -- any tree -- approximately one half inch; drive a copper water pipe six or seven inches into the ground, then get a standard off-the-shelf digital volt meter and attach one probe to the pipe, the other to the nail and you'll get a reading of anywhere from 0.8 to 1.2 volts of DC power," he said.

And apparently, no matter how many spikes you put into a tree, they all produce the same amount of energy, so a single tree is probably capable of putting out much more energy than the simple experiment suggests. Talk about a sure-fire way to get people to plant more trees! Anyway, the inventor and a company called MagCap Engineering, LLC. have applied for a patent, so hopefully we will hear some more about this in the near future. In the meantime, I think I'll see how much electricity the oak tree in my back yard is producing.

If you don't pwn this, then you ain't leet.

Recently I stumbled across an amazing documentary on Bittorrent called "BBS: The Documentary". It's a series of hour long episodes covering the pre-internet world of the early BBSes and it really brought back some memories. I can't really say enough nice things about this series. It is a very in-depth look at the BBS system of the 80's and 90's, yet despite the breadth of the series, the fantastic editing makes it very watchable. The soundracks are mostly excellent (especially the fantastic Atari-inspired tracks on the episode "Art Scene"). Anyway, it was released (in part) under the Creative Commons license, so you can feel good about downloading pirated copies of it. The director, Jason Scott, even sells blank packaging for $10.00 to people who want to burn their own copies. If you are a geek, nerd, hacker, phreaker, craker, tweeker, or anything in between, rush the hell out and get a copy of this awesome documentary. It will be the best $40 you ever spent. Seriously, I haven't bought a DVD in 3 years (I think I own like 5 DVDs in my 1500+ movie collection). But when I saw this thing, I just couldn't resist. This is the kind of independent production that you always talk about how great it is to support. So go out and support it, cuz if you don't own a copy of this documentary, then you ain't leet baby.

Also, if you spend an extra $10 you get an extra DVD-ROM that includes all the original ANSI artwork mentioned in the "Art Scene" episode. You'll probably never get another chance to obtain as comprehensive a collection of ANSI artwork from the old BBSes again, so it's definitely worth having too. It comes with viewer programs so you can view the old ANSI files on your "modern" Windows system, so no worries about not being able to view them for many years to come.

Anyway, if you've seen BBS: The Documentary and liked it, you'll probably be happy to hear that Jason Scott is working on another documentary, this time covering the old text-based adventure games such as the old Infocom games. This is just too cool, because if you're like me, and watched the BBS series with a friend, you had to stop it several times to talk about your glory days of Zork and early PC gaming. So I was super-happy when I heard there would be another documentary on the text adventure games. It won't be as long as the BBS series, but I'm sure it will be great. You can read all about it at www.getlamp.com.

Just so you know, I am not affiliated with, nor have I ever met Jason Scott or anyone involved with the aforementioned documentaries.

Are people in Boston complete idiots?

Ah, yes, the age old question. Are those people up there in Boston just a bunch of complete fucktards or have they really never seen a an LED before?

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=2841646&page=1

The recent "terror hoax" as it is being called was nothing more than a harmless publicity stunt. Had there been anyone with an IQ over 20 working in the relevant city departments, the electronic signs would have been immediately recognized for what they were. Even from a distance they are obviously some kind of electric sign. Now Boston officials are "furious" over the resulting panic that their own incompetence created. So to avoid taking responsability for being ass-stupid, they are now trying to blame the artists. Just another day in the so-called "War on Terror". I think we can safely call this a terrorist victory. The Boston officials who are now shrieking about "irresponsible marketing in post 911 world" should just do the world a favor and kill themselves. They are incompetent fools who completely lack leadership. Seriously, if you're a Boston official who had anything to do with not realizing what the hell these things were from the very start, please, kill yourself.

Sun's Little Black Box is not cool.

Seriously, what the hell are the engineers at Sun thinking putting a datacenter in a black box? The systems are really sweet and they apparently spent all kinds of money optimising the power consumption and cooling systems to provide "20% less energy consumption". So what the hell were they thinking painting it black? They have all these nice pictures of the thing sitting out in remote and sunny locations, yet they paint the thing the most thermally stupid color possible. Why didn't they make it a "White Box" and save their customers another 20% on cooling? Hopefully this is just a marketing gimmick and you'll be able to order them in white or silver to minimize solar heating effects. Otherwise, I have a feeling this Sun is going to be really hot.

Global warming, oxygen deprivation, and autism.

Global warming is a fact that scientists and most other educated people have come to accept. We hear people all the time talking about increases in the levels of greenhouse gasses in our atmosphere, however there is an interesting side effect of increased levels of CO2 and other gasses in our atmosphere and that is a relative decrease in the amount of atmospheric Oxygen. I've always wondered why nobody talks about this. It seems so obvious to me that I'm surprised I couldn't find anything on this topic when I did a Google search. Any time you have a mixture of something, then add a bunch of something else, you end up diluting the overall concentration of whatever was in the mixture to begin with. This is true for liquids and gasses and anything else that is subject to brownian motion and/or fluid dynamics. So I've been wondering when I would start hearing people talking about the decreasing levels of Oxygen in our atmosphere, relative to CO2. I've also long suspected that this decrease in atmospheric Oxygen will begin to manifest itself as a variety of human health problems. Well, here's my first stab a finding a link between a human disease and lower Oxygen levels. I recently stumbled upon this article, which describes a potential link between Oxygen deprivation and Autism. I also found some articles on using Hyperbaric Oxygen therapy to treat autism, with much anecdotal evidence to support its efficacy. So, if there is a link between oxygen deficiency and Autism, could it have something to do with a decrease in the concentration of atmospheric oxygen? I don't know, but I suspect that we will begin to hear more about the link between oxygen levels and human behavior. Autism is just one of many potential symptoms of oxygen deprivation. Many previously unknown illnesses have been springing up over the last century, notable for their idiopathic qualities. It is becoming increasingly common for large numbers of people to report constant feelings of fatigue and other symptoms that could be attributed to Oxygen deficiency. Doctors have no clue what is causing most of these problems despite decades of searching for viruses, bacteria or other pollutants that could be causing them. Of course nobody has even bothered to see if the actual composition of the atmosphere could be causing these things. Changes in Oxygen availability have long been known to have direct effect on metabolism. So why isn't anyone talking about this? Probably because it's just too damned scary for most people to deal with. I've always been against child birth due to the massive overpopulation problem facing current and future generations. I think Bill Hicks said it best when he said, "Can you calm down on your rutting just for a couple of seconds until we can figure out this food, air deal?" Apparently not. Even my supposedly well educated friends insist on perpetuating this global catastrophe that is "the miracle" of childbirth. I guess it's only fitting that their children will be the ones to suffer the most as we run out of food, water and air. Okay, we probably won't run out of water...hell, practically all of Greenland is covered in potable water, but the whole food/air issue is definitely in everyone's future, that is, eveyone who plans to be alive in 20 years. I think it's about time we started talking about it and doing something about it. I'm all for doing what the Chinese did when they couldn't feed the ridiculous number of children they used to produce. As far as I'm concerned, anyone with more than one child is an outright environmental terrorist. When the sheer number of your babies starts affecting my ability to breath air, that's where I draw the fucking line. But first we need proof, so atmospheric scientists of the world, I call on you to figure out what the hell is going on with our Oxygen levels and to start sounding the alarm if my suspicions are correct. I would also love it if someone could disprove my theory, because this shit keeps me up a night and I'm starting to feel a bit short of breath.

The Macromedia Flash Docs are utterly reprehensible!!!

I've been a Flash developer for over 9 years now and throughout that time, I have longed for acceptable documentation from Macromedia. Each new version of Flash adds a myriad of poorly documented features while generally failing to improve the documentation on existing functions. I will now provide a perfect example of what I mean. The (relatively) new v2 component architecture specifies that you should not set the depth of new component instances the way you used to using getNextHighestDepth(), but instead should rely on the new DepthManager class to instantiate and manage components on the stage. Well, here are the docs that explain that. We will assume for the moment that you actually managed to find the Macromedia Component Language Reference after your failed expedition to the regular Actionscript Reference. After finding the docs for the DepthManager class and then stumbling upon the actual function you need to use, you would finally end up at this page:

http://livedocs.macromedia.com/flash/mx2004
/main_7_2/wwhelp/wwhimpl/common/html/wwhelp.htm?context=Flash_MX_2004&file=00002429.html


Which gives this information....

DepthManager.createClassChildAtDepth()
Availability
Flash Player 6 (6.0.79.0).

Edition
Flash MX 2004.

Usage
movieClipInstance.createClassChildAtDepth(className, depthFlag[, initObj])


Parameters
className A class name. This parameter is a of type Function.

depthFlag One of the following values: DepthManager.kTop, DepthManager.kBottom, DepthManager.kTopmost, DepthManager.kNotopmost. All depth flags are static properties of the DepthManger class. You must either reference the DepthManager package (for example, mx.managers.DepthManager.kTopmost), or use the import statement to import the DepthManager package.

initObj An initialization object. This parameter is optional.

Returns
A reference to the created child. The return type is UIObject.

Description
Method; creates a child of the class specified by className at the depth specified by depthFlag.

Example
The following code draws a focus rectangle in front of all NoTopmost objects:

import mx.managers.DepthManager
this.ring = createClassChildAtDepth(mx.skins.RectBorder, DepthManager.kTop);


The following code creates an instance of the Button class and passes it a value for its label property as an initObj parameter:

import mx.managers.DepthManager
button1 = createClassChildAtDepth(mx.controls.Button, DepthManager.kTop, {label: "Top Button"});

The first example they give, isn't even testable without first creating a bunch of other code. And if you are dumb enough to try the second example, you'll quickly see that it DOESN'T FUCKING WORK! In fact, it's so far off base, that I spent an ENTIRE FUCKING WEEKEND trying to get it to work as documented. Rest assured it does not.

Now please visit my post on Flashkit.com to see how it is acutally done:
http://board.flashkit.com/board/showthread.php?t=702902



So you can hopefully see now, why it has taken me 3 days to display a progress bar and then destroy it when I'm done with it.

Adobe has a major problem on its hands with these docs. As Actionscript 2 is now evolving into Actionscript 3 with different flavors for Flash 9, Flex, Flashlite, etc... it is going to become increasingly impossible to code actionscript. Adobe should fucking drop whatever they are doing on the development side and put 100% of their efforts into fixing the doc system before writing another line of code. I honestly can't believe they've made something so simple into such a complicated mess. What the fuck is wrong with a single centralized HTML-based documentation system like PHP uses? Instead of spending hours combing through one of 4 different language references depending on whether you're looking for component docs, or core docs, or remoting docs, etc.....why can't I just go to a fucking web page with the name of the function I'm looking for and get ALL the docs related to it? Imagine a world where you could go to http://www.adobe.com/actionscript/createclasschildatdepth and actually find what you are looking for along with actual working examples contributed by users? When was the last time you found something useful in the Macromedia user comments on a specific doc page? More often than not there are NO comments whatsoever. This is why I can write a complete application in PHP in a day and the same application takes me a month to do in Flash. It's absolutely pathetic and unforgivable. Is anyone at MM/Adobe listening? Have they ever tried to use their own software? I can't say enough bad things about the Actionscript docs, so I won't continue this tirade. I just wish they'd hire someone that knew what they were doing and didn't treat the act of finding a function reference so much like a god damned treasure hunt!

A cheap and effective solution to lower back pain caused by sitting.

I have been working on computers full time for over 15 years now, and suffering from related back pain for about 9 years. In that time I have literally tried every ergonomic chair on the market. Okay, there are a few I haven't tried due to not being able to find them in a showroom, but here's a short list of what I've tried in recent memory...

This post has been moved to my new Ergonomic Reviews blog. Check out the full post here:

http://ergonomicreviews.blogspot.com/2006/10/cheap-and-effective-solution-to-lower_23.html

Why I still haven't bought a Treo smartphone

It seems like only yesterday I was going on my tirade about why I didn't get the Treo 650 Smartphone I'd been wanting to replace my dead Handspring Visor organizer. Well, it's actually been more like a year (exactly) and I'm still using my pay-as-you go Nokia Shorty from Virgin Wireless. Why keep such a limited little phone around for so long? Two reasons, price and features.

The Price: My Virgin wireless service actually costs me almost exactly what a basic wireless rate plan would cost from one of the major carriers due to my stingy usage of the phone. I have VOIP service at home and I use it as much as possible to avoid crappy cellular coverage and fees. My Nokia Shorty battery is finally starting to die, but I can get a brand new Shorty including a battery and a $20 pre-paid card from Virgin for like $39. It's a no-brainer. Same cost as Verizon or Sprint, or Cingular, but with absolutely no obligation of any rate plan. Plus, my Shorty has a built-in flashlight, a feature that alone has almost made up for the lack of other features over the past year.

Features: Compared to the Treo smartphones of today, the Nokia Shorty is a veritable showcase of um....missing features. It has no color screen, no camera, no mp3 player and almost nothing else you'd want in a fancy new phone. The important thing about the Shorty is that it functions very well as a portable phone and nothing else. It is the perfect size, has no awkward external antennas protruding anywhere and is almost indestructible. I have, on several occasions, dropped the phone on the floor of local bar and stomped on it just to prove my point. Minor scratches are the only damage. This little phone has been worth every penny.

Compare that to the best offerings from any of the carriers and you'll start to understand why I don't own a smartphone and may never own one. There is no single smartphone on the market that does everything I want in my universal device. I had been holding my breath in anticipation of the iPhone that Apple is supposedly working on, but based on the rumors going around the industry, the phone has been delayed because the cellular carriers aren't too keen on all the free features that Apple is building into their phone. Features such as being able to upload music into the phone for free if you already own the song. Cellular carreirs want to control your access to your music and want you to pay a fee for every song you put on the phone. This is fucking retarded on so many levels that you'd have to be an executive in the cellular industry to come up with it. Apparently they just don't want people to use the new features of their high-end phones. I for one, will simply carry a REAL mp3 player around with me until the cellular carriers will let me put my music on my phone FOR FREE. Period. I would urge anyone who reads this to do the same. Do not buy music from cellular carriers. Ever. They fucking suck and you do not need to be encouraging them.

So, since I'm apparently never going to get a phone that can play one of my thousands of MP3 files for free, I'm going to have to carry around an MP3 player for my music. Since I'm already carrying one extra gadget, I might as well carry a PDA around too. I can get a used Handspring Visor for like $30 on eBay, so it looks like I will keep lugging around a little bag 'o gadgets for the forseeable future. As soon as someone comes out with a phone that can double as an MP3 player with a 60GB hard drive and a personal organizer, one that isn't ass-fucked by a ridiculous rate plan (I'm looking at you Verizon), then I'll be buying one. Until then, I will continue to be a happy pay-as-you-go customer who loves his Nokia Shorty. If Virgin comes out with their own version of a smartphone that can do any or all of this stuff, then I'll probably just stay with the pay-as-you-go option forever and the major carriers can bite me. And apparently many others are figuring this out for themselves as Virgin's prepaid cellular division continues to experience excellent growth of around 20% per quarter compared to about 6-10% growth for Verizon, and Sprint's per-subscriber revenues are actually declining after factoring out the growth of their data services. Perhaps their own greed will set them on the right path, but since the music industry and movie industries are getting involved too, the outlook for smartphones and other rich-content services remains bleak for the end user. Until all these providers realize that we are moving toward full-fledged computers built into our phones and we expect to be able to use them like a real computer, the cellular phone market will continue to confuse industry executives and consumers alike.

Testing Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 Beta 3

After working the bugs out of a new XHTML 1.0 Strict compliant version of my company's hompage using XHTML and CSS, I decided I should probably test it in the new version of Explorer 7, which will soon be the defacto standard for web browsers. Well, not only does it break layouts which previously worked with IE6, but the IE7 installer also takes the liberty of completely disabling and/or overwriting your existing IE6 installation. After a bit of hair-pulling and uninstalling IE7 to revert back to IE6, I did a search and found a great little package to let you run a standalone version of IE7 without removing IE6. Perhaps it will be of use to you too. It consists of a set of batch files that will extract the IE7 files from the latest installer and then makes some registry changes to let you run the browser in standalone mode. It also installs a "hotfix" that is required for tabbed browsing, but the hotfix does not affect IE6 functionality in any way. Someone else created another IE7 standalone installer that will do all this transparently, but I like the batch file method a bit better because it's fast, easily reversible and you can look at the files to see what it's doing.

Fuck Quickbooks and Fuck Intuit!

I used to recommend Intuit Quickbooks to people running small businesses. It has most features anyone might ever need and can integrate (albeit very sloppily) with UPS shipping tools. Yesterday I was suddenly and rudely made aware of a limitation that was coded into Quickbooks Pro 2006 and apparently all other non-enterprise versions that is proof that Intuit is run by a bunch of fucking crooks. It turns out that Quickbooks Pro 2006 has a limit of 14,000 items that can be entered before it stops accepting new transactions and tells you to upgrade. The cost to upgrade? A mere $4500 for a 10 user license plus monthly fees for an upgrade to the "Enterprise" version which has yet another totally arbitrary limit of 29,000 items. I would like to say for the record that this is a totally underhanded and mean-spirited tactic. Businesses spend many thousands of dollars implementing an accounting system, integrating it with their shipping tools, and training users on a Quickbooks-based system. Then, after they've been using it and grown their businesses around Quickbooks, they are shafted with arbitrary limits for which there is no technological basis whatsoever. And just to shut you Intuit apologists up, the limitation is NOT clearly stated in any marketing materials, in fact, most people who by the product have no clue that this limit exists. Here's the Quickbooks Pro 2006 details page for anyone that doubts. Whatever marketing fucktard at Intuit that came up with the idea of adding this utterly unforgivable limitation to the software is a cocksucker who should be severely beaten and then fired. Even worse, they should have their name and address published on slashdot. So anyway, because of this issue, I will never again use ANY Intuit product if I have a choice. Nor will I waste any time writing applications that interface with this shit product via their shit SDK. I will no longer recommend any Intuit products to anyone for any reason. Fuck you Intuit! You have no idea how much you just cost yourselves, but I suspect that by the time my career has run its course I will personally have disuaded dozens of people from using your products and with any luck others will follow suit...and maybe even file a few too.

My New Framebusting Technique is Unstoppable!!!

Don't you just hate it when someone loads your site into their own frameset? I do, so I was looking at some poular frame-busting javascripts recently and discovered a few problems with virtually all of them. Most importantly, none of the scripts I found worked properly with the Wordpress story editor, causing an immediate redirect from the edit screen back to the main post screen whenever I tried to edit a story. This was apparently because the preview frame in the editor was loading the framebuster code which is simply included globally in my main site javascript file that holds all my Macromedia rollover and popup window code. Since my Wordpress template uses this javascript include file, it was causing problems. So anyway, I have come up with a super-cool method of framebusting a site that let's you first determine if your page is being loaded from an external domain. Of course, this wasn't an obvious solution at first since, due to Javascript security constraints, you cannot do a search of your parent frame's URL to see if it contains your domain name (or anything else for that matter). However, since we know that any time a search of your parent frame's URL property throws an error, then the parent frame must be loaded from a different domain. Therefore, we can simply write a little framebusting script that takes advantage of this fact like so:

var myDomain = 'somedomain.com';
try{
     if(window.top.location.href.search(myDomain)==-1){
          if(parent.frames.length!=0) {
               window.top.location.replace(document.location.href) 
          }else if (top.location != self.location){
               top.location=self.location;
          }
     }
}catch(err){
     window.top.location.replace(document.location.href) 
}

I'm not a javascript guru, so I'm not sure if there are any other issues with this script, but I'm sure the method could be adopted to work with all browsers if it doesn't already. It appears the javascript try/catch syntax is valid for IE5+, Mozilla 1.0, and Netscape 6, so there may be some problems with other browers that will need to be handled by the "onerror" event used in Netscape 3+. If I improve the script with that feature, then I will post it here.

All your oil are belong to US.

In case you weren't aware, Jinx.com is the place to get all the super-hip hacker apparel to make you look like a true wannabe. Unfortunately, most of their t-shirts only come in black, as if that's some kind of hacker uniform (it's not). I happen to look like ass in black, so I usually take my favorite shirts from Jinx and redo them on white shirts with my epson printer and some iron-on transfer paper. Anyway, one of my favorites is the "All your oil are belong to US" shirt. Some dude just posted this funny picture of George H.W. Bush (AKA: The Decider) wearing one.