Brian's Blog

I know this has been all over the news but supposedly Microsoft wants to make peace with the Open Source community. I'm neither an analyst nor a lawyer, but my gut reaction is, "Yeah right." I mean, Microsoft is known for its embrace, extend and extinguish tactics. They've been this way from their beginning, which is something on the order of 20 years and I don't think they will ever really change at heart. Just like any other giant company they change only when they absolutely have to change as mandated by market or law. The only willing change they seem to make is when it benefits them in some way. That's called greed. They never change because it's the right thing to do, or because it would be better for the world, community, environment, etc.

My two cents is that this could be the beginning of the embrace phase and should be viewed with much caution. But that's just me.

Update: It look like there the author of this article at yahoo news feels the same way.

<rant>

I can sure feel for this fellow. This is exactly what I go through I'd say at least twice a month at work.

At the least the guy he worked with seems to have known what files to backup. The majority of the people who bring us computers have no clue where the hell they just saved their files. Usually I ask them about My Documents and they ask me what that is. It's an icon on the freakin' desktop! How can they miss it! The best fun with this is the files could be anywhere. I've seen systems where some files were saved in C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office, some On the desktop, and any of other places, usually not in My Documents where they are supposed to go. And, incidental, M$ Office is supposed to default to for it's save location.

Another favorite:

Brian: So, before I wipe your system, can you tell me what files you'd like backed up?

1user: What do you mean what files?

Yes, I've actually been asked that. Then they say I can't lose any files or their lives will be over.

If they were so darn important you'd think they'd know what they are, and where they are located. Oh, and maybe do something original and actually back the things up. *sigh*

</rant>

Sorry, just had to rant that out of my system. I feel much better now.

I just finished reading an excellent essay entitled What is an Agnostic in which it explains, almost exactly, my views on such matters. I must say it's nice to see what I've felt for so many years put on paper by someone who is actually good at expressing such views.

As I've said, it is almost exactly how I feel. I disagree on two points. First off, to the question of if an agnostic believes in an afterlife he say:

The question whether people survive death is one as to which evidence is possible. Psychical research and spiritualism are thought by many to supply such evidence. An agnostic, as such, does not take a view about survival unless he thinks that there is evidence one way or the other. For my part, I do not think that there is any good reason to believe that we survive death, but I am open to conviction if adequate evidence should appear.

While I realize this essay is what the author feels applies to most agnostics and I realize that I'm not necessarily like most I just can't believe that there is nothing after death. Without going into long winded and very personal explanations I'll just say I've seen to many strange and weird things to totally deny the existence of an afterlife or a spiritual realm of some sort. The second point I can't agree upon totally is the question of "How do agnostics explain the beauty and harmony of nature?", His answer is:

I do not understand where this "beauty" and "harmony" are supposed to be found. Throughout the animal kingdom, animals ruthlessly prey upon each other. More of them are either cruelly killed by other animals or slowly die of hunger. For my part, I am unable to see any very great beauty or harmony in the tapeworm. Let it not be said that this creature is sent as a punishment for our sins, for it is more prevalent among animals than among humans. I suppose the questioner is thinking of such things as the beauty of starry heavens. But one should remember that stars every now and then explode and reduce everything in their neighborhood to a vague mist. Beauty, in any case, is subjective and exists only in the eye of the beholder.

While beauty is in the eye of the beholder, I just can't deny that the way nature works is beautiful in certain ways. I think he centers on the negative aspects of life vs the postive. I can't help but marvel at the intricate way in which nature works. How the systems exist together and the complexity of it all. To me, the fact that all this works the way it does it a beautiful thing. Sure, I don't find any good points about the tape worm, but over all nature is a wonderful thing.

Basically, you can say I believe there is "something" out there but that is just belief based on emotion. I can't say with any certainty if there is a higher power nor can I say that there isn't.

I think that if I had to pick one Firefox extension that was the most useful to me it would be Adblock. I use to both at work and at home. One thing that does annoy me about it though is that it doesn't come with any good filters that I know of. Actually, it doesn't come with any filters at all. Which got me Googling on various phrases to find a list. I could have generated a list on my own, but that would have taken time, and skillful use of regular expressions among other skills that I don't have. Besides, I wanted to block the ads NOW!

I found a few that were simply OK and I ended up tweaking them but still didn't have the results I wanted. I was either blocking stuff that I didn't want blocked, or ads were getting through and annoying me. That is until I stumbled on these Adblock Filters. The site isn't pretty, just a list of files, but the file -instructions.txt is very clear and the filters are updated oven, about once a week. One thing I almost missed though was the settings.txt file at the bottom of the list with suggested settings for Adblock itself.

I've been using these filters for close to a month now and I'm very pleased with the results.

Between this filter list, Adblock, and the popupsdie extension I can't say when I last noticed an ad of any sort while browsing.

Ev3R w4n+ 2 +4lk l1k3 4n 3l1+3 h4ck3R? W3ll n0w yA c4n 4nd yA d0n'+ 3v3n n33d 2 R3dUc3 yA IQ.

That translated is:

Ever want to talk like an elite hacker? Well now you can and you don't even need to reduce your IQ.

This ever so useful but mildly amusing tool is at http://www.julian-bez.de/tools/. Kind of reminds me of the Ebonics Translator. Remember Ebonics? Now that was a joke.

Check this out from Blogthings.

Your Brain is 53.33% Female, 46.67% Male

Your brain is a healthy mix of male and female You are both sensitive and savvy Rational and reasonable, you tend to keep level headed But you also tend to wear your heart on your sleeve

Mentally I'm more a woman than a man! Well, at least that doesn't carry over into the physical world.

Now, excuse me while I finish doing my nails...

In nanoblogger there is a really nice option to run HTML Tidy every time you add an entry. It's purpose is to go through your code, check for obvious errors and hopefully correct them. One of the things that nanoblogger does is put the XHTML Validated icon in if you want to show others that you are standards compliant. Well, while messing around I decided to actually click my own XHTML Validated icon and see what happened. Much to my surprise I wasn't even close to being valid. The validator found something on the order of 50 errors just on the front page! My first though was, "WTF? I'm running tidy! It should be OK."

My first reaction was to let the guys on the nanoblogger mailing list know that I was having a problem. That was my first mistake. I committed the sin of not investigating farther into the situation before I opened my big mouth. After a couple of posts I realized that the problem was indeed mine and no one elses. So, off I went to edit my page and see what I did wrong.

Now, there were plenty of errors on my part. Things like uppercase tags, ampersands that weren't encoded properly, missing end tags for things like images, and no alt attribute for the images either. However, as anyone can see, I've added things that are not part of the standard nanoblogger. In particular, I've added stuff from Amazon, Bloglines, and the Creative Commons License among a couple of other things. What I noticed is maybe about 75% of the errors I found were in code that either I didn't write or was never a part of nanoblogger in the first place. Amazon by far was the worst. When you get the code from them for their search box, or to put the images of books and things that I blog about from time to time, you just copy and paste it. I'm not talking just copying and pasting the address from the address bar on your browser. They actually have a page that generates the URL for you and put it in a text box for you to copy. You'd think that they would take the time to make it correct. But, apparently they do not. So, lesson learned, don't assume it's write. Take a few minutes and look it over.

As an interesting aside, I noticed that some of the tags were IE specific, thus not to the standard. I'm not sure why these tags are even there in the first place because when I took them out everything looked the same in both Firefox and IE.

So, I went on through all of the archives and ran the validator on them just to see what was what and, of course, found a slew of errors. Now, I know I could have just left all this go, but I mainly did it as a learning exercise. Also, I figure if I'm going to display those nice little graphics saying how wonderfully standards compliant I am then I probably should be.

So, anyway, lesson learned are:

• Don't blindly trust code you didn't write. At least look it over before you use it
• Don't point the finger at the tool, when it's the user (being me this time) who doesn't know how to use the tool correctly
• Investigate the problem before barking for help. It help you not look like an ass and you may just learn something in the process.

You'd think I'd know this all by now?

Well, we've been in the new office building for a few weeks now and I thought I'd share a picture. This one is out the back of the office, which is on the second floor. Makes me want to bust out the fishing pole and say the hell with computers for a while! I only took 3 others since I was supposed to be working and they are, of course, in the photo gallery.

Well, now that I've learned something about CSS I've finally gone about making the photo gallery not suck. As usual, since I apparently have no personal creativity to speak of, I've taken heavy influence for it's appearance from my friend Ricardo's gallery. Incidentally, he also wrote jGal which I use to generate the albums themselves.

Hopefully I met my goal of making it not suck.

I've taken a moment to mess with the default style sheet for nanoblogger a little. I just finished the the CSS chapter in HTML & XHTML: The Definitive Guide and decided to put my new skill to some simple use.

I hope it doesn't look terrible. I admit, I did kind of borrowed the look of B10[m|g]'s Blog. I hope he doesn't mind.

Anyway, how does it look? Any suggestions?

I finally got my copy of WMD: Weapons of Mass Deception and sat and watched it. I must say, while it doesn't shock me, that it does offer food for thought and confirms to some degree what I've suspected for some time regarding main stream media.

WMD is by Danny Schechter who supposedly had worked for the very networks he's critical of. This may be just my perception but it seems that he got out of the main stream news because he wasn't pleased with what he saw.

Anyway, in a nutshell, this documentary is about how the media in the United States failed the American people by reporting inaccurate, non-critical, one sided information about the war in Iraq. It points out how different the news was presented and what was shown depending on where you lived. One interesting statistic was that, in a study he sited, 71% of American news was pro-war while only 3% were found to be against it. The explanation offered is simply that the major networks are now owned by a small number of large corporations who have been lobbying the government for law changes. To be critical of the actions of the current administration while simultaneously asking it a favor doesn't seem like a good way to get what you want. This is just one of many things he brings up.

One thing I did like about it though was that it is not delivered in a sensational manner. It was pretty much a down to earth documentary. In my mind, putting sensationalism into something like this makes me doubt it's accuracy. For instance, I like what Michael Moore has to say, but find it hard to take him seriously at times.

Overall I think this was worth the money I spent on it. I'll keep it on my shelf along with The Corporation as one my favorite documentaries.

I was just poking around on Slyck.com getting updated on the latest news about P2P networks when I found an article claiming to end 99% of illegal file trading.

Just on the little bit of info given in this article this seems like it has the potential, if done right, to be a short term hit on P2P networks. I say short term because it seems to take advantage of weak file hash algorithms in various P2P networks by creating a bogus file that happens to have the same hash as the file with the real, usable, content. I'm no expert by any stretch of the imagination when it comes to encryption and hash methods. But it seems to me that this could be rendered useless or at the very least much harder by simply using a different, well tested and trusted hash method.

I don't know what methods are available, but I see many uses of MD5 or SHA. Maybe one of these would do the job? Does anyone more knowledgeable than I on these matters read my blog? If so, feel free to comment, I'd like to know more on the subject.

Even so, this approach seems like it could do what it is intended to do if done right. That is, to harm the spread of illegal content while allowing legal content to flow. But, as with all things technology and P2P in particular, I'll just sit back and see what happens.

Today's project was to setup a PC at Lafayette College in Easton PA to access a remote database via Terminal Services. I was figuring I'd be setting it up on a PC but ended up in a room full of Mac systems running OS X which caused me to learn one useful thing. Microsoft actually has a version of the Remote Desktop Connection for Macintosh which was super easy to install and worked perfectly (which is odd for a Microsoft product on any platform). Not surprisingly I was doing the exact same configuration on a PC later and it took 2 hours to get working what took 30 minutes on the Mac.

Anyway, while I was there I was instructed by the person I was meeting about this on where to go and where to park my car. It is a college campus after all and I always find them confusing to get around in. The parking lot I entered didn't have any signs warning against parking that I noticed. And besides, I'd think the administrative person I was meeting would know where I can and can't park.

So, I get out to my car and find a parking ticket from "The Office of Public Safety" telling me that I owe the college $245 for parking where I was told to park. $245 for a freakin' parking ticket?! I would have been better off finding a metered parking area and letting the time run out. But I guess this poor, under-payed, college has to make up the money somehow from the ultra low tuition they charge.

While I was standing there messing myself over the ticket cost I decided to read the back which is entitled "Visitors", which says:

Lafayette's faculty, staff and students must register their vehicles, display registration stickers and park in assigned areas. The Public Safety staff cannon distinguish between a visitor's vehicle and an unregistered vehicle without a sticker.

If you are a visitor to Lafayette, please return your ticket in person or by mail to the Office of Public Safety, Marguis Hall, Lafayette College, Easton, PA 18042-1768 within seven (7) day in order that the ticket stub be cleared. An explanation of the nature of your visit should be noted below. (If there is no response in seven (7) day, a check on the vehicle registration may be made.)

So, rather than warning you and directing you to something like a visitor's parking lot they just ticket everything the see and figure they'll work it out later. Why not have a time limit? As in, you can park here for two hours like they did at the University of Scranton where my wife went to school? They had signs all over the place letting you know where you can and can't park and for how long.

I wonder how many signs Lafayette could have bought with the salary of the fellow that patrols the parking lots all day tagging vehicles that are there on legitimate business?

It looks like there's been an update to the Pop-ups Must Die Extension. This one seems to be fine tuned to allow windows that are opened via the target="_blank" part of a URL where the 1.0 version blocked them.

While I haven't personally seen them yet I hear of a rash of pop-ups the somehow get by the Firefox pop-up blocker. Quite a few people at the The Linux Link have mentioned these new pop-ups and Dann pointed out the Pop-ups Must Die Extension which, from what I've read, essentially blocks every new window no matter what it is unless the site is specifically whitelisted.

You just gotta love how fast open source deals with these things.

In a fit of gaming obsession I've finally finished Knights of the Old Republic. This one was the first game in a long while to really get me sucked in. Well, other than the Thief series of which I still need to finish the last one. No game is perfect but this one didn't have anything that jumped out at me except for when you tried to disarm a mine sometimes your character would run up to it and blow it up instead of stopping and disarming it. But that was only a minor annoyance.

Now that I'm done with this I can return to the land of the living for a short while before starting my next game, or maybe actually finishing a book on my list. I'm thinking of finishing the venerable Planescape Torment. Planescape is one of those games I've started many times and never finished. And every time I start it I think how excellent it is.

Since Knights of the Old Republic played perfect under cedega I thought I'd give Torment a shot there, but sadly cedega just doesn't cut it for some reason. I did find an interesting project called GemRB which aims to be an Infinity Engine emulator that lets you play classics just as Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, and Planescape on Linux. Sadly though, it seems very much in beta so it didn't do to well for me for Planescape so I guess I'm stuck booting into Windows to play. But I'm going to keep an eye on GemRB and maybe give it a whirl when I eventually get around to playing Icewind Dale.