electrongun - careful, we'll shoot your eye out!

http://www.savetheplanetprotest.com/

2010-09-02T01:33:00.003-04:00

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

2010-08-23T00:26:00.012-04:00

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!

2010-05-14T16:13:00.005-04:00

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

2008-03-21T13:36:00.002-04:00

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

2008-03-20T16:54:00.005-04:00

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!

2007-10-22T16:48:00.000-04:00

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

2007-10-19T12:55:00.000-04:00

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

2007-10-17T17:47:00.000-04:00

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

2007-05-19T20:22:00.000-04:00

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.

2007-02-12T21:25:00.000-05:00

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?

2007-02-01T14:38:00.000-05:00

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.

2006-10-25T23:21:00.000-04:00

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.

2006-09-21T15:24:00.000-04:00

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!!!

2006-09-12T00:09:00.000-04:00

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.

2006-08-30T13:05:00.000-04:00

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

2006-08-16T13:46:00.000-04:00

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

2006-07-31T15:15:00.000-04:00

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!

2006-07-12T18:00:00.000-04:00

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!!!

2006-06-09T17:21:00.000-04:00

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.

2006-06-04T14:19:00.000-04:00

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.

Yet another example of why I rule.

2006-05-24T17:36:00.000-04:00

I just wanted to toot my own horn today. I just finished this super-cool flash video player for the company where I work as VP of Technology. The interface includes default content for older flash versions, flash 6 auto-upgrade, specific video optimized for Flash 7 & 8 with the option to use completely different XML playlists for Flash 7 & 8 versions. The pop-up video browser interface is dynamically rendered from the playlist information using custom jpg thumbnails specified in the playlist xml. The thumbnail menu has schweet dynamic sliding behavior which is logarithmically self-padded depending on the distance it needs to scroll from end to end, making it easy to use in the way an apple OSX menu is easy to use. In other words, aesthetically pleasing, if less than efficient. The playlist XML files also allow you to specify a separate text .swf file corresponding to each video which is played as a teaser underneath the video window. When no video is playing, the teasers loop in a repeating cycle as they highlight the corresponding video thumbnails in the menu above. The cycle pauses if the user watches a video and then resumes when the video is over. I'm quite proud of this little puppy. Please check it out.

You people are all a bunch of fucking monkeys.

2006-05-20T15:15:00.000-04:00

Yeah, I said it, YOU people. According to a recent Washington Post article, it seems that proto-humans were fucking monkeys until fairly recently in our evolution and modern people actually descended from some kind of hybrid between monkeys and proto-humans. Stupid, stupid, monkey fuckers. We could have been a great species, but you just had to fuck the monkeys!

A Plea to the Cocksucking Browser Makers

2006-05-02T00:35:00.000-04:00

This is a plea to the programmers of the two major web browsers. I'm talking about Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox. I have been designing web applications for over 10 years now, and just when I thought the hellscape of browser layout inconsistency was finally disappearing from an otherwise fun occupation, CSS layout strikes and we are all fucking fucked again. I fucking despise you people who come up with this buggy shit! But I digress. This is, after all, a plea, which I can hardly expect a friendly target audience to smile upon if I simply insult the cockuckers right off the bat. My apologies. My plea is a simple one. A humble one, I think, given the thousands and thousands and thousands of hours of life-sucking browser debugging I've done this decade, simply to get some kind of box to fit its contents, or to get a box to extend arbitrarily to any side of the browser window, especially the bottom. I simply can not fucking believe that 15 years into browser development, we still have no good way to scale a box for these simple and universally understood purposes. We KNOW what front-end designers need in a layout engine. Either the standards committees at the WC3, or the standards interpreters who program the browsers themselves, need to deal with this problem tout de suite. If they don't, CSS is fucked for another 5-10 years and I'm leading the fucking revolt against it. It will be relegated to setting font sizes and a handful of other things it doesn't end up making 10 times more complicated and buggy than they should be. If CSS standards don't allow for someone to create a box that knows what size it needs to be to hold its contents, then browser programmers need to start breaking the living shit out of those standards because they are crap. Bullshit is the only word I can find for it. Fucking bullshit is what the current state of CSS is, and after this project is done, I'm sending it away to play by itself and reflect on what an evil, evil, evil little motherfucker it is because it's parents didn't raise it right and now it's rotting in browser prison while tables are out on probation. Fuck csszengarden.com (they seem like nice folks, but fuck 'em anyway) and all the other standards-hugging, beta-tester wannabes out there who thrill when they finally get a 3-column layout to work in CSS after 3 months of research. Fucking pathetic. I'm trying to get shit done and I want a browser standard that can lay out a page without the combined efforts of 10,000 pseudo-programmers exchanging messages on one of the 50,000 CSS help forums. Is that so fucking selfish of me? I welcome your comments.

Stupid, stupid macs!

2006-02-28T12:57:00.000-05:00

In an article at TheStreet.com, senior columnist Marc Lichtenfeld writes that

Like fans of the old-time Brooklyn Dodgers, Adobe customers will likely have to wait until next year for its new Creative Suite. One of the key issues is that Photoshop and other applications run 50% slower on the new Intel-based Macs. An optimized version of Photoshop is not expected until early 2007 and Adobe will hold off releasing its new Creative Suite until those problems are solved.

It's funny. I switched from Macs to PCs back in 2000 after about a decade of devotion to the Mac platform, specifically because I was tired of my inability to get new version of my Mac programs at the same time PC users were getting their new versions. Mac software releases always seemed to be lagging 6-months to a year behind in their PC counterparts. There was also the whole "stability" thing with OS7 through OS9. Now it seems that Mac programming issues have once again delayed an Adobe release, but this time Adobe has opted to delay the PC version until the Mac version can be ready. Leave it to Apple and Adobe to find a way to retard everyones upgrade schedule because of a Mac-specific problem. As Stephen Colbert might say, "Adobe, you're on notice for delaying the PC release of your creative suite just to help cover the ass of a whiny elitist computer company in the midst of yet another identity crisis. And Apple...you're dead to me."

Embedding Google Video in your own Flash Player

2006-01-26T18:10:00.000-05:00

After messing with Google's new video upload service for a few hours, I noticed the "Put on Site" link which gives you some embed code that you can put on your web site to include a particular video on your web site. I wondered if I might be able to grab the video file URL from that code and load it into my own customized player instead of using Google's standard player. If you URLdecode the path to the file in the embed code Google gives you, you can decipher the secure URL and use it as the source for your own NetStream video object in Flash. This mean you could essentially use Google as your streaming media host and your users would never be the wiser. Obviously hosting your video files directly with Google is going to give you better bandwidth performance than just about any other streaming server in the world, so I thought it was a great idea. Just one minor problem. It appears that Google is somehow stripping out the bytesTotal property from the metadata so that you can't build a progress bar that works with the videos hosted at Google. The bytesLoaded property works just fine, but bytesTotal always seems to return -1. If anyone out there has a clue about how to get the bytesTotal from a Google hosted video, please let me in on your secret!

Reliance Group

2005-09-14T03:09:00.000-04:00

I was just doing some research on my Janus IRA and noticed that the top holding of one of my funds was Reliance Group. This is the top holding in the Janus Contrarian Fund which has been one of Janus' top performing funds lately, and is comprised mostly of energy stocks. So I wondered what Reliance does that makes them such a big performer lately. Here's what their web site has to say:

The Reliance Group, founded by Dhirubhai H. Ambani (1932-2002), is India's largest business house with total revenues of over Rs 99,000 crore (US$ 22.6 billion), cash profit of Rs 12,500 crore (US$ 2.8 billion), net profit of Rs 6,200 crore (US$ 1.4 billion) and exports of Rs 15,900 crore (US$ 3.6 billion).

The Group's activities span exploration and production (E&P) of oil and gas, refining and marketing, petrochemicals (polyester, polymers, and intermediates), textiles, financial services and insurance, power, telecom and infocom initiatives. The Group exports its products to more than 100 countries the world over. Reliance emerged as India's Most Admired Business House, for the fourth successive year in a TNS Mode survey for 2004.

Reliance Group revenue is equivalent to about 3.5% of India's GDP. The Group contributes nearly 10% of the country's indirect tax revenues and over 6% of India's exports. Reliance is trusted by an investor family of over 3.1 million - India's largest.

The Reliance Group Companies include: Reliance Industries Limited, Reliance Capital Limited, Reliance Industrial Infrastructure Limited, Reliance Telecom Limited, Reliance Infocomm Limited, Reliance General Insurance Company Limited, Indian Petrochemicals Corporation Ltd. and Reliance Energy Limited.

You may recognize Reliance Energy as the company that was recently in the spotlight as the provider of electricity to the region ravaged by Hurricane Katrina. But the thing on their site that really caught my eye was the flow chart which shows how all their myriad of products, from kerosene to PVC to polyester textiles, comes from oil and gets fed from one industrial plant to another, each making products derived from the previous plant's products. Check out this chart...

Kinda makes you wonder what's going to happen when the oil runs out.

Ajax info from Wikipedia

2005-09-07T17:40:00.000-04:00

Wikipedia is really turning into a great resource for all kinds of things. It seems like only yesterday that I first heard the term AJAX used to describe Javascript combined asynchronously with server side scripting and data transfer (generally via XML). Today I stumbled upon this Wikipedia page which lists many awesome AJAX programming resources. Here's the PHP resources which I found especially nice...

NAjax PHP library that aims to connect JavaScript and PHP. It acts as a proxy that maps PHP objects to JavaScript and vice versa.
xajax PHP Ajax toolkit
HTML_Ajax PHP and JavaScript Ajax

I also found this lovely little blog from Eric Pascarello, one of the authors of the newly released book Ajax in Action. I think you can guess what that's all about.

That is all for this post.

Why I got a Nokia Shorty from Virgin Wireless instead of a Treo 650 Smart Phone from Verizon Wireless

2005-08-23T23:10:00.000-04:00

PART I

If you are a citizen of the United States and you have a cellular phone, there's a pretty good chance you will empathize with the following story. You see, I recently had one of the most infuriating experiences I can ever remember having and it will come as no surprise to most, that it involved my cell-phone service.

A little over 2 years ago, after forgetting to pay a phone bill and being disconnected by Sprint, I decided the time had come to ditch my land line and get a cell-phone as a full time replacement. After all, cell phones had been around for decades already and surely the quality issues were minimal by this point, right?

Wrong. I signed a 2 year contract with Cingular Wireless and got one of those Motorola flip phones...the v60 or something like that. The phone was actually pretty cool aside from rampant antenna breakage problems, but the service quality was so bad at my house that it was almost unusable. It was so bad that I ended up getting VOIP service from Lingo.com, which came with its own set of headaches, but was usually enough to let me get by in conjunction with the spotty cellular service. For the next 2 years, I generally avoided using my cell phone at home due to the annoyances caused by the poor reception. I assumed that all cellular services would have the same trouble in my area, so I just lived with it.

Recently, when my 2 year contract expired, I started asking around about other people's service and discovered that several other people I knew were quite happy with their service. This was a surprise to me after my experience with Cingular, so after a bit of research I decided that it must be because I was using an old CDMA phone and Cingular was switching everything to GSM and my phone was basically obsolete. This seemed like a plausable explanation since it seemed like my service had steadily degenerated over time, to the point that it was finally all but unusable anywhere in town. So I decided to give Cingular another try with a phone upgrade, this time a new Motorola 3-band GSM camera phone that would be free with another 2 year contract and which the know-nothing at the Cingular store said would work much better than my old phone.

After a few day of testing the phone, it became apparent that this phone had all the same problems and that Cingular's GSM network was just as bad in my area as it's CDMA network. So, before my 1-month return period had elapsed, I decided to take the phone back and switch providers. This is where my recent troubles really begin.

The "Changing Wireless Companies" incident
I have heard from my Canadian and European friends, that when they want to change cell phone providers or get a different phone, it's almost as easy as simply going to the store and picking out a new phone. They don't have ridiculous rate plans with 2 year contracts and limited minutes. They pay for the service and then they get to use it and when they don't want to use it anymore, the get to stop paying for it and they don't get charged hundred of dollars just because they changed their mind. I know for most American's that's probably pretty hard to imagine. For some reason, we in the "land of the free" seem to rejoice at the opportunity to be fucked up the ass by one corporation after another, and then swallow the regurgitated ass-jizz of lies and warped half-truths they use to justify said ass-fucking. Nowhere is this more evident than in the current landscape of cellular phone service providers. But I digress.

You see, when I finally decided to switch cellular providers, I was on a schedule. I was 2 weeks away from leaving on vacation and I decided I wanted a phone that could access the internet while I was away, specifically to check my work e-mail for late-breaking emergencies.

I started my phone search and quickly narrowed my search to two choices. There were the so-called "Blackberry" phones and then there was the Treo 650 Smartphone from Handspring. Both had the QWERTY keyboard layout I required, but in the end, the fact that the Treo 650 ran the PalmOS won me over as I was already a very happy owner of ancient and battered Handspring Visor Deluxe, which I got for x-mas in 2000 and has seldom been idle for more than a week or two since. The idea of being able to use all my Palm apps and finally integrate my Outlook and cell-phone address books was really just one of the killer apps for this device. The real, honest reason I wanted the Treo 650 was to satisfy my geek aesthetics.

A brief detour into my feeble consumer mind
In addition to my cell phone adventures, I've recently become quite the fan of HBO's new series Entourage. I'm not going to explain anything about the show here, but in it, there's two characters vying for the same girl and each pretending to be interested and knowledgable about whatever she seems interested in. In once scene one of the guys bests the other by noting some obscure facts about an African country the girl will be visiting. She had just mentioned it for the first time, so there was no obvious way he could have prepared his knowledge ahead of time. When the girl is out of earshot, the defeated guy looks at the other and says something like, "how'd you know that?." Smirking, the other guy holds up what appears to be a Blackberry-type phone diplaying the Google homepage and says, "I Googled it bitch!"

It was after seeing this scene that immediately decided that the time had come to get a Blackberry or similar phone that could access the web, and more specifically, Google. Google is the real killer app that I wanted when I decided to get this phone. I'm always getting into arguements with my friends over one thing or another (a major problem when you and all your friends are know-it-alls) and we always end up agreeing to Google it to decide the arguement. Often we are nowhere near a computer, so it would be nice to be able to whip out my phone and query Google on the spot. Basically it's a real-life Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It's funny that out of all the sci-fi stuff I've read about and imagined seeing happen in my lifetime, the Hitchiker's guide is something I never really believed would be possible in my lifetime. And yet, that's what Google on a phone amounts to. This is going to be huge. Please don't blow it Google. But I digress.

Back to my cell phone problems...
So it was with these visions of technological grandeur that embarked upon my little adventure to get my cell new cell phone and have my service switched to a new provider, preferably without losing my number.

Please check back in a day or two for Part II of this story.

PART II
After doing a quick survey of the top Google results for cellular rate plans, I decided to go with www.myrateplan.com. They had some of the best rate plans and they had the Treo 650 in stock. On the monday, a full 5 days before I was scheduled to leave for North Carolina, I ordered the phone. The web site said to allow up to a week but that it was usually faster and they offered 2 day shipping. So I placed my order and paid extra for 2 day FedEx shipping. There was a place to include order notes on the order form, so I specified that they should notify me if the phone could not be delivered to my door by Friday because I would need to purchase a different phone from someone local instead.

Several hours after placing my order, the order status page on the web site said that my order had passed the "review" stage and was now in the "processing" stage where it would be packed and shipped. Then a few hours later I checked again, hoping there would already be a tracking number. Instead, the order status showed that it had been reset back to the "review" phase. So to clear up any problems as quickly as possible, I decided to give them a call.

After a somewhat difficult search, I found their contact number on the web and called what was almost certainly a call center in India. After 30 to 40 minutes on hold, I finally spoke to a polite woman with an Indian accent. She asked me the usual variety of personal questions to look up my order and verify my identity, then asured me that the order would be at my house by Wednesday and that there were no problems with the order. Reluctatly, I chose to believe her.

Wednesday came, but no phone. I was miffed. I called them again. I waited 40 minutes on hold again. This time I spoke to someone who told me the order was sent to Verizon for processing and that they were waiting on Verizon to approve the phone contract so the phone could be "released" to me. I reiterated the fact that I ordered the phone on the condition that it would be delivered by Friday and that if this was not possible that they should cancel the order. I was again assured that the phone would arrive by Friday. This time, I knew it was bullshit, but there was nothing I could do. There was no time to order another phone online and I wasn't ready get ass-fucked on a rate plan from someone local, where it would cost me $100 more for the same phone with the same rate plan. So I just had to wait.

In the meantime, I was also writing similar and increasingly angry inquries to the customer support department via their e-mail form at www.whereismyorder.com. I wrote one on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. Not once during the entire course of this story did I ever get a reply to any of these e-mail messages.

Thursday came and still no phone, so I called them again. Waited on hold again. Heard the same bunch of bullhit again. This time they gave me Verizon's number and a "backoffice order number" which I was supposed to able to give to Verizon to expedite the order.

So I called verizon. Verizon, it seems, has their customer service shit together. I spent very little time on hold and spoke to a customer service person who was both helpful, and knew what they hell they were doing. They told me they had only just received the order from myrateplan.com the day before and it was scheduled to be processed automatically sometime later that day. However, he was able to expedite my order immediately and complete Verizon's portion of the process while I was still on the phone. I now had my approval and they told me I could call my rate plan company and tell them everything was ready and they could send me the phone. So again, I called the myrateplan.com and waited on hold and answered the security questions and this time was told that there was nothing they could do to expedite the order and that it would have to wait until the end of the day when the batch processes would grab my approval code and my order would then move to the "processing" phase and my phone would be packed and shipped.

I was furious by this point. I had been assured multiple times that my phone would be at my house by Friday, but there seemed little chance of that now. There was still a chance of getting it before I left for the airport on Saturday, but only if I could get the shipping changed to special "Saturday Delivery" from FedEx. I asked the rate plan people if they could do this since they had clearly screwed up in not getting my order to Verizon the day I placed it. They could not do this and they could not guarantee that my phone would ship out that day for overnight delivery either.

I hung up on them.

I wrote another nasty email to them.

Friday came. The phone did not arrrive.

Frustrated, dejected, I went to Best Buy and bought a Nokia Shorty with "pay-as-you-go" service through Virgin Wireless. I brought it home, activated it and added $20 to my balance all within 15 minutes.

I smiled for the first time in a week.

Not only was my new Nokia Shorty cheap and quick and painless to set up, but the quality of the cellular service itself was leaps and bounds above what I had come to expect from Cingular Wireless. I have since learned that Virgin Wireless uses the Sprint PCS network and that this network has coverage that is second only to Verizon. I has since served me very well and my recommendations have already resulted in two of my friends getting new cell phones, one of whom is a first time cellular buyer. Since I have gotten referral credit for both of them, I have only had to add money to my phone once so far and I've been using it quite a bit. Pay-as-you-go service is still not as economical in the long run or for people who use their phone for over 300 minutes per month, but for light users such as myself or for those who want to try some different carriers first, or for those who simply hate the idea of cellular contracts too much to sign one, they are truly a godsend.

Unfortunately, the Spint PCS network has zero coverage where I was vacationing in Banner Elk, so despite getting a phone in time, I was unable to use it on vacation. Still, I've been quite happy with my Virgin Wireless service and phone, though I still REALLY want a Treo 650. I'm simply going to put it off until Verizon's and everyone else's rate plans get a bit better and I have time to try the Verizon network where I live. SO, Verizon should be pissed off at myrateplan.com because they definitely lost a sale. The Treo 650 finally arrived at my house the Monday after I left for vacation. I was actually still looking forward to having it when I got home, but despite the effort of my friend who had called FedEx and asked them to hold it, it had already been returned by FedEx by the time I got back. So it was not meant to be. Everyone at every level dropped the ball in this one so they will have to wait for my money. Too bad.

Followup: As of May 20, 2006, I'm still using my Nokia Shorty. The battery is still good and the lexan body of the phone has proven to be nearly indestructible, a fact that I sometimes demonstrate to friends by tossing it on hard floors and stomping on it (I use a vinyl screen protector to keep scratches off the display). My only real complaint with Virgin Wireless service is that it is a bit more expensive that it reasonably should be, and they jut started charging for text messaging. That really sucks for people like me, who manage a server and get status messages sent to their phone via SMS. Oh well, I'm staying strong and waiting until the carriers start charging reasonable prices for cellular data access and then I'll get a smartphone.

What the hell is this thing?

2005-07-30T02:33:00.000-04:00

I have these caterpillars all over a bush in my front yard. They are evil and aggressive. If you brush up against them they lunge at you and regurgitate a greenish liquid that they try to deposit on whatever touches them (as shown in the pictures). I'm afraid of them. I think they might bite or sting, so I have avoided touching them. They have destroyed the bush they inhabit. Their appearance on my bush did coincide nicely with the arrival of my new Nikon Coolpix 4500 which I just purchased for $350 refurbished. One of the main reasons I chose this camera was for its excellent macro ability and the cool swivel design. So click the images to check out my evil caterpillar and let me know if you know anything about it. I'm very curious to know if it can sting or if it's just bluffing.

UPDATE: After further careful study of the photos I took, it would appear that this thing can sting the hell out of you. You may notice from the photos that the caterpillar has 3 sets of front legs and 3 sets of back legs. The three sets of front legs are different from the back ones though. They have pointy segmented portions that extend from the base of the leg and if you look closesly, you can just see what appear to be the little white tips of stingers protruding from inside these segmented legs. So it would appear that this biotch can sting you with six stingers at once, while simultaneously spitting some sort of green vomit at you. This is like some kind of Hollywood/Sci-fi caterpillar from another planet. Truly disturbing.

FINAL WORD: It would seem, after further investigation, that this caterpillar is harmless to humans despite the fierce show. Thanks to luvweasel (who also has a great blog at blogbybent.blogspot.com) for pointing out this page which identifies the creature as a species of Datana, also known as an Azalea Caterpillar. In my investigations, I also came across the following fantastic pages in case anyone out there needs to identify their own critters:
http://bugguide.net
http://www.whatsthatbug.com

My Kickass Javascript ternary operator trick.

2005-07-27T23:20:00.000-04:00

I'm sure someone else has done this before, but I just discovered it myself, and it's mine now. Mine all mine.

I was just in need of a somewhat lengthy if-else statement to assign a string a particular value based on a series of variables. It's for a browser sniffing script I'm using to tell if someone's browser needs to be updated before they use an online course.

Basically, i'm assigning the variable platform a value based on the value of a bunch of other variables:

if (is_win98==true)
   platform="win98";
else if( is_winme==true)
   platform="winME";
else if( is_winxp==true)
   platform="winXP";
else if( is_win2k==true)
   platform="win2k";
else
   platform = "";

So anyway I needed this longish if-else statement and I wondered if it could be done in 1 line using ternary operators strung together. To my utter surprise, this works just like the above...

platform = is_win?"win":is_winme?"winME":is_winxp?"winXP":is_win2k?"win2k":"";

So how cool is that? Pretty cool I think.

Attention Clueless NASA Engineers

2005-07-27T19:45:00.000-04:00

I have no engineering degree, no higher math education of any kind really. But I've got a shitload of common sense and I'm great at doing mental simulations as I've discussed previously in my blurb on daydreams. I am now going to use my superior intellect for the benefit of all mankind and solve a little problem that the fine folks at NASA are apparently too smart to figure out.

When the space shuttle Columbia crashed (the second shuttle disaster) there was a flurry of speculation on what caused it, despite the fact that there was video from the very start that showed a large piece of insulating foam breaking off the external fuel tanks and impacting the leading edge of the shuttle's wing. As soon as I saw that I said, "well, obviously the foam was the cause". I have at least two witnesses to this proclamation. Meanwhile, many "experts" initially dismissed the foam as a potential cause because it "lacked the density" required to cause much damage to the wing. Actually, most of them just said something like "it's not hard enough to do that kind of damage", but they meant it wasn't dense enough. To me it was obvious that a piece of foam traveling at several hundred miles per hour would have no trouble smashing the hell out of the tiles and I called it that way immediately on seeing the footage the day of the disaster. And I was right. It was in fact a piece of insulating foam that ultimately caused the demise of the shuttle Columbia.

Today, about two years after the Columbia disaster, the space shuttle Discovery blasted off and wouldn't you know it, a giant fucking piece of foam broke off and fortunately, missed hitting the shuttle by a good bit. NASA is now saying they don't know why the foam is breaking off, they thought they'd fixed it. The last time this happened, they actually said the foam was designed to break off on purpose. Whatever.

So, to save NASA the additional time and aggravation of actually THINKING about things before coming up with random excuses and solutions, I will now provide some possible reasons for the foam problems. Since I'm such a nice guy, I'll also go ahead and provide the solutions.

Reasons for the Foam Problem:

The foam is breaking off the external tanks for two reasons. Obviously, the adhesive used to attach the foam to the surface of the tanks is failing. This is most likely due to condensation on the tanks which I am speculating are very cold prior to launch since they are filled with liquid hydrogen and oxygen. Condensation under the foam would mean that your foam and adhesive is either porous enough to let humid Florida air pass through it to the underlying surface, or the expansion and contraction of the underlying tanks is greater than the adhesive and foam can handle. Perhaps the foam is not expanding or contracting enough and is tearing. This is causing failures in the adhesion, most likely at seams between sections of foam. Air is getting forced into the seams and undermining the already weakened or failed adhesion. If the adhesive is brittle from being cooled by the fuel tanks, this can probably happen very easily. There is also the chance that the adhesive has nothing to do with it, and the foam itself is not structurally sound enough to take the air pressure during high speed flight. Regardless of whether it is the adhesive or foam or both things failing at once, the solutions are the same.

Solutions to the Foam Problem:

To solve this problem you have two alternatives. You can either reengineer your adhesive and and/or foam to correct these failures OR you could simply pre-cut the foam insulation into 1-3cm squares and glue them on individually. This way when foam rips off, it will not come off in giant pieces that will bash the shit out of your lovely spacecraft. You might even be able to get away with just scoring the foam without completely cutting it. This will make it easier to attach. Capiche?

Plea for Money:

Now, if you use this idea, I'm going to need about $100,000. After all, the freelance spacecraft repair business is very unpredictable and I don't have a PhD or anything to fall back on like all you NASA folks.

That is all.

Alex Jones is an ignorant fucktard, but I like him.

2005-07-25T21:00:00.000-04:00

I love the alternative press that has sprouted up online over the past decade. You get whackos from all over the world that gain their own little following and become pseudo-famous among their own harmless little group of crazies. It's so cute.

Take Alex Jones for instance. Alex Jones, in case you haven't heard (and you probably haven't), is a right-wing conspiracy theorist and talk show host who does a talk radio show out of Austin Texas, and more recently a series of videos tackling issues ranging from the modern atrocities collectively known as "The War on Drugs" (TWOD) to the modern atrocities collectively know as "The War on Terror" (TWOT). Anyone who has bothered to educate themselves on these issues know that both TWOD and TWOT are a load of shit, orchestrated by the government to maintain and exert various levels of control over the lives of non-billionaires in all nations.

Alex Jones has managed to somehow blindly stuble backwards and fall into some of these truths, which he now hurls at his listeners and viewers in a distracted montage of paranoid rantings. To be sure, his videos are quite interesting and often times even offer valueable documentation on the troubling and likely criminal behavior of our leaders, our increasingly militarized police forces, our criminal use of our military abroad, and the rich elite who have joined forces across international borders to control all this through corporations and international financial markets. Unfortunately, he somehow manages to combine all his arguements with some kind of reference to the Second Ammendment and how the government is trying to take our guns away like they supposedly did to all the Canadians. (Unfortunately for Alex, Canadians have tons of guns, they just don't kill each other with them so you don't notice them quite so much and their governement doesn't have to raise the issue every year like they do here in the US. The next time I hear some idiot talking about how Canadian's have no guns and no rights, I may have to shoot the motherfucker and move to Canada.)

Seriously though, I really like Alex Jones because he's sort of like a Republican that makes more sense than your average republican. Still childlike in his level of education and understanding of things, but he's got at least one set of wheels on the track most of the time. Recently however, I heard a show of his that really pissed me off.

I'm not sure when it aired, but I saw this Alex Jones audio file on the file sharing networks the other day and I downloaded it because it was an interview with an intellectual I've come to admire, named Noam Chomsky. If you've heard of Noam Chomsky, you most likely either love him or hate him and if you're an ignorant piece of shit that knows nothing and has no facts to explain your opinions, then you probably hate him.

At any rate, Alex Jones apparently had Chomsky on his show sometime in the recent past, under the guise of holding a civilized interview, but without really having a topic in mind, other than Jones' usual rambling list of conspiracy topics. Unfortunately, Alex Jones' knowledge on most topics is informed only by his own interpretations of his own research. Much of his research is gathered first hand, but I'll give him credit for doing tons of homework too. He's got reams of documents from every source imaginable to back up much of what he says. It's hard to say what percentage of these documents are taken out of context, unverifiable, or have already been proven as factually inaccurate. Usually though, it is not so much a question of whether his documentation is bad, so much as it is his interpretations and conclusions just being wacked out by his overbearing Christianity and Second Amendment issues. So usually he ends up combining some legitimate first-hand observation or documented fact, with a bunch of random Christian gun lover bullshit. I've usually got no problem with the gun nuts, I myself am the proud owner of four guns. But the Christian bullshit I just can't ignore. It practically invalidates everything that comes out of his mouth. It's amusing, bemusing, tiresome and frustrating all at once. Best in small doses during moments of anti-government angst, provided you can ignore the random conservative Christianity.

But there was a point to this post, I'm sure I remember....oh yeah. In his recent interview with Chomsky, Jones asked a bunch of questions clearly designed to get Chomsky to give him the kind of answers he could later berate. That was expected and Chomsky wouldn't walk into any of the rhetorical traps Jones was feebly trying to set for him, so Jones pretended to be civlized for a few minutes. Then as it became apparent to Jones that he would not make Chomsky look like an idiot as long as Chomsky was actually there to defend himself, the interview was cut short by Jones suddenly instulting Chomsky and then cutting him off (I can't remember if they cut him off in mid sentence or if they actually went to a commercial first). This was followed up by several minutes of Jones calling Chomsky various names, and continuing to argue his point against Chomsky who could not answer or defend himself now that the interview was over. Rather than actually debate Chomsky (who has more facts on the criminal behavior of our government than Google does) Alex Jones, like an adolescent child, threw a little temper tantrum and continued spouting a stream of near obscenities about Chomsky for several minutes.

Alex Jones lost major points with me for that. I apparently gave him more credit than he deserved as a purveyor of fact, but now I know better. I'll probably still watch his psychotic rantings for entertainment purposes, but not as a source of reliable information.

Daydreams = Thought Experiments

2005-07-25T19:34:00.000-04:00

The daydreamers of the world are a special sort. Perhaps I'm jaded since I am one, but I was just daydreaming about daydreaming, and it occurred to me that to many people, the word "daydream" has negative connotations. Even to me, it brings up images of listless know-nothings who bumble through life in spite of themselves. It seems worth mentioning because, I remember how much grief I used to get as a kid for being a daydreamer.

As a 15-year old "child" daydreaming was a source of consternation for parents and teachers alike. There was no appreciation of daydreaming as the important reasoning skill it truly is. As a 34.9 year-old "adult" I know the true power of a strong imagination, and that's the power that daydreams give you.

Albert Einstein knew that, he was famous for his daydreams. When Einstein had daydreams, people called them "thought experiments", but they were daydreams nonetheless. They may have been very well informed daydreams, but in the end, it was still just a really well educated and creative man using his imagination to perform a set of tasks or to simulate a hypothetical event.

The mind is a fantastic parallel computer by any standard, and those who know how to use it to perform mental simulations benefit in much the same way an a scientist benefits when he uses a supercomputer to perform a simulation. Certainly, these mental simulations are not as testable, verifiable, or repeatable as their computer-driven counterparts, but given the ease with which some people can perform mental simulations, there's certainly a lot of bang for the buck. This economy of time and resources makes them very useful for certain types of experiments that, for whatever reason, could not be done another way (eg: light rays being bent by the curvature of space, a theory that could not be tested until many years after it was imagined in one of Einstein's thought experiments).

Of course, all the imagination in the world won't help you at all if your head is filled with nonsense, lies and other forms of non-facts, which is why a thorough and broad education based on actual fact is still essential (I could digress here about conservative Christians and other forms of Bush voters, but I'm trying to turn over a new leaf with regards to meandering posts...yes I'm talking about you, you bible-stroking fucktards).

What I'm suggesting is simple. If you have a child (or adult) who likes to daydream, rather than discouraging it, maybe you should let them perfect their skills while encouraging them to apply that skill to the task at hand, such as their classwork, rather than treating them like they are doing something wrong. Daydreaming is thought experimentation, and experimentation is after all, what education is all about.

Severance Pay(off) - The Golden Parachute

2005-07-12T23:17:00.000-04:00

Keeping with my tradition of posting commentaries that still need editing...

ABC News just ran a story this evening on Stephen Crawford, ex-co-president of Morgan Stanley. He quit just 3 months after being named co-president and was rewarded with a $32 million severance package. This amounts to slightly more than $300,000 per day. Many people are aghast at these mega-severance packages from Fortune 500 companies that seem to try to out-do each other year after year. News agencies report them over and over and it's as if the shareholders of these companies have their heads up their collective asses. There is zero accountability. They are being fucked again and again and again by these corporate thieves and they just scratch their heads and never bother asking any questions, like WHY are these people getting these sums of money. Often these corporate executives are being fired or quitting due to poor performance, so why should they be getting this much money? How on earth can it be that all these companies, whose sole responsibility is supposedly to make as much money as possible for shareholders, be allowing people to walk away with millions for doing nothing -- literally taking money out of the pockets of shareholders?

The answer is so simple, and yet you will find very few people on TV or in the financial news willing to say it. But first you must accept the simple fact that everyone involved in these transactions is a CROOK. These companies are run by super-ultra-mega-rich people who conspire on a regular basis to manipulate markets and profit off severe swings on stock prices. This is the way Wall Street works now. This is sort of how things have always worked, but it's now been turned into a totally blatant science. No matter how poorly their companies perform, the executives at these companies all get filthy rich. Often they tell lies about how their companies will perform, jack up the stock price, then sell out before it crashes (Enron). Or they overestimate earnings and then miss the estimate to kill a stock price so they can buy it up cheap. They use their positions in investment banks to extort huge numbers of shares from companies during IPOs and then pass them off to their friends who dump them for enormous profits (free money anyone?). They steal investors money and they steal taxpayers money. Hell, half of them run the government, stealing directly from taxpayers (eg: Halliburton), the other half run all the major corporations. These days they can even do both at the same time, just ask Dick Cheney.

So what does this have to do with severance pay? The reason people get huge sums of money they don't deserve when they leave a company is simple. Think of it. If you were leaving a company that had been involved in illegal activities and you knew everyone there who had been involved because you were hired by and worked with them -- if you worked in a situation like that, would you leave quietly, or would want some extra money to keep your mouth shut? Exactly. When you see these CEOs getting $32 million for 3 months of shitty work, it's like an announcement that someone was a witness to some seriously illegal shit. So imagine you're on the board of Enron. You're sitting there around your giant boardroom table discussing how you just jacked California for another half-billion and Ken Lay suddenly stands up and announces that he's tired of living a lie and raping his shareholders and he just can't take it anymore. He reaches into his briefcase and before he can even pull out his signed resignation, checkbooks are literally flying through the air like salmon swimming upstream. People in $15,000 suits are literally falling over each other to make sure Kenny-boy knows just how much his criminal fellowship means to them. They're gonna give him enough money to sedate any conscience Kenny-boy might ever develop. They might even give him $32 million for doing nothing at all.

The Best Online Color Schemer

2005-06-20T16:59:00.000-04:00

There's tons of sites out there that offer color scheming tools, but most of them are commercial tools that cost $35 or more and are often more than the average designer really needs in a color scheme generator, especially for web graphics. Here's a link to the best free online color schemer I've found to date...

http://wellstyled.com/tools/colorscheme2/index-en.html

It also comes in Spanish and Czech versions.

Not only is this little tool useful as hell, but it's also an excellent example of Javascript programming. In fact, I thought it was a Flash movie at first because I just couldn't imagine programming something like this in Javascript. Javascript just keeps getting better and better in terms of delivering rich interactivity to web browsers. I guess that's why Google is standardizing a platform based on Javascript and XML called AJAX (thanks to weasel for pointing me to the article). Looks like it's time to get out Ye Olde Javascript Reference and bone up on some client-side scripting.

The Death of Macromedia...The Birth of a Monster

2005-04-18T20:30:00.000-04:00

On April 18, 2005, Adobe announced that it was buying Macromedia, thus marking the beginning of a merger between the two dominant players in web graphics technologies. For decades now, Adobe has been a goliath in professional graphics for print and to some extent for the web. However, since Macromedia's reorganization around web technologies in the late 90's, many, I daresay most, professional web developers have come to rely on Macromedia's innovations in web content creation. Macromedia's Dreamweaver was the first professional-grade WYSIWYG HTML editor to create clean code. Fireworks still leads the industry in the creation of animated GIF's, better GIF and JPEG optimization algorithms, and a slew of productivity innovations such as "image slicing"...features which Adobe has been trying to duplicate without much success until recently, by shoehorning all the additional features into the Photoshop add-on program know as ImageReady. And Macromedia's Flash Player, had already become the most widely distributed piece of software in history before Adobe even started thinking about vector graphics for the web. So by the time they released Adobe LiveMotion to compete with Flash, there was a loyal and vast following for Flash. SVG, the XML-based file format proposed as the output format for LiveMotion, seemed like a pathetic and poorly disguised attempt to sneak their own SVG format into international web standards when I watched Adobe's presentation at FlashForward 2000. John Warnock was lucky not to have been booed off the stage during his presentation. I interviewed some of the people Adobe had hired to build demo projects for the Adobe presentation, and they admitted to having used Flash to build the LiveMotion presentations. I lost alot of respect for Adobe that day. Adobe still continues to develop LiveMotion, but they have consistently failed to get content creators to use the SVG format. Why? Because everyone is quite happy with Flash. So, Adobe is now buying Macromedia and effectively destroying their only competition. For all of us content creators, this is a very bad sign. Combined with the coming browser war between Firefox and Explorer, this could literally plunge us right back into the dark ages of web design. Of course, Peak Oil is going to do that anyway, so I guess it doesn't really matter anyway. None of us are going to have jobs in 10 years when nobody can afford the electricity to power their computers. Too bad.

The last person of decency in the Republican party?

2005-04-11T19:13:00.000-04:00

Could John McCain actually qualify as a decent person despite being a member of the treacherous, treasonous, villanous, evil-doing Republican party? I doubt it, but check this shit out:

[excerpt from MoveOn.org mailing list]
Last Friday MoveOn members placed more than 40,000 calls to Congress opposing the "nuclear option," and two days later Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) announced his opposition to this radical plan to break the rules and ram through extreme judges. McCain is now the third Republican senator on record against the "nuclear option."

Now I don't know if MoveOn.org had anything to do with McCain's decision, in fact, I kinda doubt it. Either way, I'd now like to give a big shout out to Senator John McCain for consistently breaking with the Republican party's ass-fucking-of-modern-civilization whenever it seems both rational and possible to do without destroying his own career. He has often towed the party line and swallowed his tongue at times when any man of decency should have been screaming bloody fucking hellfire and damnation to his constituents, but sometimes he has the courage to stand up to those ignorant mouth-breathing fucktards, and that's worthy of some kudos. That's why today, as I whack off (again), I won't be thinking about that blonde chick that pours a pitcher of milk into her cunt and then gets fisted. No, today, I'll be daydreaming of John McCain going on a shooting spree during his next visit to the white house. Johnny, get your gun. Oh wait, he's not invited to the White House anymore, I forgot. They nixed McCain from the list of potential White House visitors back when he wouldn't go along with the Swiff Boat Veterans bullshit about John Kerry's Vietnam war record. I still have a hard time believing that during the last election, the Democrats were hurt by a group of (white) cocksuckers, who set about criticizing John Kerry, someone who actually did his duty and went to Vietnam, while working on behalf of George Bush, a candidate who clearly dodged the war. That one still makes my head spin. That's why I've given up on groups like MoveOn.org. They are Democrats. They can't win when they are dealt aces. They should have fucking buried the Bush campaign during the last election, but they didn't count on a voting population that was completely uninterested in reality...but I digress.

Now where the hell did I put that Vaseline?

The bitch died!

2005-03-31T13:56:00.000-05:00

Yay! Terri Schaivo is fucking dead! Yay! Sing it from the highest fucking peak!

I don't have much to say about the vegetable bitch dying, other than describing how amazingly happy and uplifted I felt when I heard the news today at work. Not only did the bitch die, but I had the opportunity to laugh in one of my religious co-worker's faces about it when they told me in their little "sad christian" tone of voice that Terri Schaivo was in fact no more. I was beginning to think that an individual death no longer had the power to make my day, but I was wrong. Sometimes, just a single death is all it takes to make the world a better place, and today the world has improved by at least an entire vegetable garden. One down, 5.5 billion to go.

Let the bitch die!

2005-03-24T15:17:00.000-05:00

Terri Schiavo. Sigh. Why is it that every time those mouth-breathing fucktards from the Republican religious right come up with some new idiotic non-issue to waste our collective lives with, the Democrats and other thinking people always end up looking like they are the ones in a persistent vegitative state? I'd just like to say, for the record, that there is at least one person on this planet who not only doesn't care if Terri Schiavo suffers, but who actually hopes she does suffer. I hope she is totally fucking aware of every bit of bullshit going on around her. I hope that, secretly, in her gelatinous mind, she has renounced her faith and put some kind of evil hex upon every person who has tried to interfere with her pathetic existence. I think the dude who does the "Get Your War On" comics at http://www.mnftiu.cc/mnftiu.cc/war45.html said it best in one of his most recent strips...

Glassy-eyed, no cognitive ability, persistent vegatative state. Poor Terri Schiavo -- the unwitting personification of the Christian right. Except she's not a disgusting hypocrite.

Sheer genius. So why are you staring at this shit page when you could be off reading the whole masterpiece.

Further proof that the universe is out to get us.

2005-02-22T02:48:00.000-05:00

The weather is trying harder than ever to kill us, our heros immolate themselves on the altar of pseudo-democracy, and now it appears that the universe itself wants us dead.

A huge explosion halfway across the galaxy packed so much power it briefly altered Earth's upper atmosphere in December, astronomers said Friday.....

...The commotion was caused by a special variety of neutron star known as a magnetar....

..."Had this happened within 10 light-years of us, it would have severely damaged our atmosphere and possibly have triggered a mass extinction," said Bryan Gaensler of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA)...

[ read the full article at space.com ]

Like anyone would even notice another mass extinction these days. Pfffff.

Hunter S. Thompson Dead. George Bush, still kicking.

2005-02-21T12:28:00.000-05:00

I think the title pretty much sums up this little post. Hunter S. Thompson was the very first motivational factor that got me to pick up a pen and start writing. He was a man among cowards and hypocrites and today he lies dead by his own hand. At least, that's what it LOOKS like. I haven't gotten all the details yet, but if it's true and HST did kill himself on purpose I have just one question. Why the hell didn't today's headlines read "Hunter S. Thomson kills 87 in fiery deathstorm". How is it we live in a world where great men like HST cannot find the will to keep living, while somehow George Bush and Dick Cheney continue to sleep like babies by night and to visit their hateful wrath upon the world by day? It's always the wrong people who seem to kill themselves and leave the rest of us wondering why we even bother to care. I've personally known at least 4 people who have taken their own lives and each time I cannot help but wonder why the hell they didn't go on a shooting spree first. I mean, if you hate the world that much, and you plan on removing yourself from it anyway, why not take a few idiots with you? You could walk into virtually any public place and shoot in any direction and probably hit someone that deserved it. So, I'm adopting new policy. If you kill yourself without first making an attempt at visiting some kind of hateful vengeance upon the world that has so mistreated you, then you are a pussy and you deserve to die your meaningless, impotent little death. So fuck you Hunter, you psychotic little mouse. Good riddance. If you want to regain my respect now, there's only one option left for you...kill god.

Using .htaccess files to control directory access on Linux Apache setups

2005-02-16T18:14:00.000-05:00

I've been looking for a nice summary of .htaccess directives for use in controlling Apache on Linux and finally found a decent one at the address below:

http://thunder.prohosting.com/~sampieri/freefaq/g_htaccess.shtml#dirindex

Why today's non-violent activists are really mostly just pussies.

2005-02-16T02:56:00.000-05:00

I was having a discussion with my boss the other day, trying to explain to him why I felt that non-violent protest no longer had any relevance in America. I couldn't articulate it, until I stumbled upon an interview with a man named Ward Churchill, a professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado. Here's an excerpt from the interview entitled Dismantling the Politics of Comfort: The Satya Interview with Ward Churchill

Nonviolent action can be effectual when harnessed in a way that is absolutely unacceptable to the state: if you actually clog the freeways or occupy sites or whatever to disrupt state functioning with the idea of ultimately making it impossible for the state to function at all, and are willing to incur the consequences of that. That’s very different from people standing with little signs, making a statement. Statements don’t do it. If [they] did, we would have transformed society in this country more than a century ago.
[ read the full interview with Ward Churchill from Satya Magazine ]
[ Ward Churchill's Homepage at Zmag.org ]

PrimalScript - The Little Script Editor that Almost Could.

2005-02-11T20:06:00.000-05:00

If you work with Flash Actionscript or Javascript, chances are, you're pretty unimpressed with your "stock" options for writing code. I've recently been testing some alternatives to my usual hodgepodge of tools such as the built-in Flash actionscript editor, UltraEdit and a short list of other small text editors and debuggers. Recently I ran across two editors for Actionscript.

The first one, the SEPY Actionscript editor is geared only toward Flash development. It is a very promising editor that you might want to try that includes such nice things as code folding and brace matching. Unfortunately, the second time I used it, it literally destroyed one of my actionscript files and completely overwrote it with a blank file. I don't know how or why, I just know that this editor is not ready for prime time. Maybe in a few months, but not today.

This brings us to our second option, a great little program called PrimalScript, offered by the fine folks at Sapien. This program has just about everything an ActionScript coder would want. But's that's just the beginning. PrimalScript is quickly gaining a following as an editor for ASP, PHP, VBScript and most other scripting languages. For Actionscript 2.0, PrimalScript includes the entire Actionscript function list, making it exremely easy to find the proper syntax. It's got too many cool and very helpful features to bother listing here, so just do yourself a favor and download a trial version from their web site. Give it a whirl and see for yourself. Features such as matching braces, excellent syntax hilighting, function browsing, code completion. Unfortunately this program has one EXTREMELY large problem. It offers no word-wrapping whatsoever. I couldn't believe someone would spend so much time writing a script editor and then leave out the ability to wrap long lines, so I wrote the author to confirm this fact and sure enough, the program offers no word-wrapping functionality. From the author's response, there's no indication that it will be added. It's too bad, because I can't live without word wrapping and I also can't live without some of the cool features of PrimalScript, so I guess I'll just keep my copy of UltraEdit handy for when I need a better view of some of my more unruly code.

So, in summary, give PrimalScript a try, but stay away from SEPY Actionscript editor until they've got some more of the bugs worked out. And if you feel like it, please e-mail the primal script author and hassle him about adding word wrapping.

Cheney Staves off Heart Attack During State of the Union Address

2005-02-04T08:52:00.000-05:00

Am I the only one that noticed Dick Cheney's heart attempting a vote of no confidence during the State of the Union address Wednesday? I was watching ABC's coverage, and it was right at the part where Bush starts talking about how Condolizza Rice will be visiting Israel and the West Bank, and they cut to Condi, looking all smug and racially conflicted, and then they cut back to Bush just in time to see Cheney, behind him, suddenly cough and then turn about 5 shades of red. For a second, it looked like there was some kind of liberal agenda lodged in his ass and he was trying in vain to force it out. Then, in an attempt to look inconspicuous with the entire world watching him, he lurched in his seat, fumbled in his pants pocket, then pulled out what I can only assume was a nitroglycerin tablet, and popped one in his mouth. If anyone has this on their TiVO, please verify this for yourself because it looks to me like Dick Cheney had a minor heart attack and none of the media seem to have picked up on it. I thought for sure the bloggers would have caught this before Bush had even finished his 30th "freedom". So now I'm forced to break the story myself. Hopefully others will verify this independently.

Careful...we'll shoot your eye out.

2005-01-15T21:18:00.000-05:00

This is not a blog. The real Electron Gun blog will be available at www.electrongun.com at some point in the future. It will be hazardous to children and Republicans. And by children, I also mean Christians. Have a nice day.