briancarper.net (λ) (Category: Rants)

Dell: the aftermath

Thu, 08 Jul 2010 11:11:28 -0700

In a previous post I outlined the ways in which Dell's customer service sucks. I finally got my computer yesterday, a Studio XPS 9000. Here are my first impressions.

The bad

This computer weighs so much I almost hurt my back lifting it. I thought computers were supposed to be getting smaller and lighter?
The HD indicator light is tiny and on the top of the case. I can't see it with my computer under my desk.

The optical drive is behind one of those stupid plastic flap door things. So there isn't even an indicator light for the DVD drive. I'm seriously considering taking a screwdriver the case to fix this.
It didn't come with a Windows install disk or a driver disk. It only has a recovery partition on the HD.

I found an order form which I think will get me my disks. In the mail. Seriously, Dell? Seriously? Why not come to my house and kick me in the balls while you're at it?

The recovery partition doesn't help you worth a crap if you want to do things like repartition your drive to put Linux on it. Windows7's sucky partition shrinking app wouldn't shrink it lower than 500GB.
The Dell recovery program is called DataSafe or something, and when you use it, it tries to upsell you like crazy to get a "pro" version that has a bunch of useless backup features. Uggggghhhhh.
The side of the case is white. In 10 years it's either going to be yellow with age, or scuffed up beyond hope. Kind of ugly, but I don't care much. The front of the case looks OK though. Black with red highlights. About as good as I could expect.
It came pre-installed with some crappy "Dell Dock" knockoff of Apple's Dock. Worthless and instantly uninstalled.

This thing caused the desktop icons to be hidden by default. Who would possibly want to do this in Windows? I can image everyone and their grandmother being awfully confused by the missing icons.

When quitting this dock, it said "Undo is not possible". I love a program that has no going back once you quit.
I wanted to find drivers for the wireless card that came with the Dell. So I went to Dell's support site and typed in the tag number on my computer. It gave me a link to drivers for the wrong card. I had to google all over the place to find the right ones. Way to go.

Dell's website is a labyrinth full of outdated information and dead pages in general.
The instructions I got with the computer reference Vista. I don't have Vista.
There's a "Windows inside" logo on the case. It will be removed shortly. They leave an awful lot of glue behind.

The good?

The i7 is about as fast as I had hoped. It only took a half-dozen cores and 12 GB of RAM to let me watch full-screen flash videos on Youtube. I feel so modern.
The inside of the case is OK. There are a lot of hard drive bays and lots of extra screws. It should be easy to expand if I need to.
It came with bloatware and crapware, but actually far less than I was dreading. And most of it was trying to sell you Dell crap.

In the olden days you'd get a hundred links to AOL and other 3rd-party crap. I saw a link to Skype and the obligatory nag to buy an anti-virus subscription (fat chance), but not much else.
Dell delivered the computer 2 days past the original estimated delivery date. So in spite of all the bullcrap and phone-jockeying I had to go through for billing, I can't complain about how fast it got here. Two days late isn't bad.

I've heard rumors that these computers are built in Malaysia, and mine was definitely shipped from the US (per the Purolator tracking site). So I'm surprised they can get these things delivered as fast as they can given that it was shipped halfway around the world first, and had to go through Customs at least once coming from the US to Canada.

Purolator was the only shipping option for Canada. I would've preferred to rush it. But maybe that's not possible given that it's coming from the US. Oh well.
It runs pretty quiet, given how huge the fans are. We'll see how hot it gets once I start putting some load on it.
It came with a DVI to VGA adapater and a DVI to HDMI adapter. I thought that was a nice touch, though it could be that they come standard with any nVidia card nowadays.
Works OK with Linux. It took 20 minutes to set up. (Not counting wiping the Windows partition and re-installing on a smaller partition from my own copy, minus the crapware. That took over an hour.) Sound, video and wireless work out of the box in Linux. All 12 GB of RAM are usable, given a 64 bit OS. (I discovered this the fun way, by unthinkingly trying a 32 bit OS first.)
It didn't burst into flames (yet).
It has a peanut tray on the top. Or MP3-player tray, I guess. But I really want to put peanuts in there.

Brian, you're stupid!

So why did I get a Dell? Because I had good experience with them in the past, at home and at work. Given, that experience was 5 years in the past, and a lot can change. And I'm new to Canada, and relatively unaware of what options exist here.

The other (main) reason was that they were far, far cheaper than going through newegg.ca to get the same hardware. But I guess you get what you pay for. Caveat emptor.

I wouldn't recommend Dell to anyone else, given how chaotic the whole buying process was. Too much uncertainty, too much room for mistakes.

Dave asked in my previous post why I didn't just a computer myself, like I had in the past. I said I didn't have time, but what I meant wasn't build time, which should be an hour or two max. I meant research time. Trying to match up compatible hardware, trying to find the best prices on all the components, checking for Linux compatibility, this takes forever and a half. I don't have hours / days to dork around with this any more.

On the other hand I can just google "xps 9000 linux" and see instantly what problems people had. I can be semi-confident that the hardware would all be compatible. And that did work out OK.

And the last reason I got Dell is that unfortunately I need Windows for work and gaming. Blarg. Paying the Windows tax to Dell is bad enough, let alone buying one off the shelf for $6,000 or however much they cost nowadays.

Dell sucks

Fri, 02 Jul 2010 10:57:41 -0700

Why did I order a computer from Dell? I guess I had a good opinion from 6 years ago when I last bought something from them.

Let's count the ways in which their customer service has failed me. (And my computer isn't even here yet.)

As documented, their website couldn't process my credit card without a phone call.
After a week of my computer being "in production", I started getting more phone calls from an unidentified phone number that Google told me was Dell. Fearing another billing problem, I called back. And I was told "Thanks for calling, but our order tracking system is down. And we're all going home. Call back tomorrow morning.".

If only Dell had some means to acquire reliable computer systems on which to build their order tracking database.
I called the next day and was told my order was fine. I was also told (per script, I'm certain) that I could check my order status on Dell's website. Which of course I knew. I know it costs the company money every time someone calls, and they try to strongly discourage calls for that reason, but their script made it sound like I was an imbecile.

I found it quite condescending. I dislike these canned scripts pander to the lowest common denominator of customer. They should be happy to take my call. I just spend upwards of a thousand dollars on their crap.
Turns out the phone calls I was getting were from someone trying to give me "free internet from Shaw or Telus for 3 months", and I was eligible because I bought a Dell computer. So I was being telemarketed before my computer even got here.

I said I already had internet service, and they said "Oh, too bad, it's for new customers only." I do not appreciate this.
I got an email saying my order shipped. Joy! 20 minutes later I got an email saying my order was delayed, and if it didn't ship in 5 days I should call. What?

It really did ship though, I have a tracking number. Why the contradictory emails?

All of my phone dealings with Dell were via some offshored far-eastern country, judging by the accents of the phone reps. I have nothing against this in principle; I'm not a xenophobe. But the phone connection is always so static-filled and laggy that it really puts a damper on communication.

My computer isn't here yet, and I just hope to God it works and doesn't break in a month. I kind of wish this article had come out a week earlier.

That'll teach me for trying to save time, I guess. Next time I'll build my own system from scratch. Dell goes onto my List of Companies Not to Buy From in the Future (LCNBFF), along with Westinghouse and oh so many others.

I am an edge case

Wed, 30 Jun 2010 10:03:20 -0700

I am an alien. An American who emigrated to Canada. This has resulted in a lot of fun and a bit of pain as I've managed to break the systems of many of the businesses I deal with.

As a programmer I can appreciate the importance (and sometimes difficulty) of handling edge cases. It's been an interesting experience living as an edge case myself.

H&R Block(heads)

Taxes are confusing enough when you don't have a wife from another country. The friendly folk at H&R Block had no idea how to handle my situation. Their computers demanded a Social Security Number for my wife, which she doesn't have, because she's Canadian. So they left it blank. (Leaving it blank was the consensus opinion of everyone at H&R Block, including the managers.)

To even be able to leave it blank, they had to print the forms, because the computer refused to submit my taxes electronically with a blank SSN. This should've been a red flag to me, looking back.

The correct thing to do was for her to get an ITIN from the US, which from what I know is a like an SSN that doesn't get you SS benefits or allow you to work in the US. It's just for tracking. But they didn't tell me that.

Moral of this story: That's the last time I'll ever use H&R Block. If I want to do my taxes wrong, I can do that myself for free.

IRS

The IRS refused to believe that my wife existed without a number to assign her, so they rejected my tax return and threatened to charge me tons of penalties. So I drove down to the friendly neighborhood IRS office. Surely they'd know how to fix this, right?

Wrong. The fellow at the IRS was familiar with filing taxes for Mexicans living in the US, but not for a "non-resident alien Canadian spouse" like mine.

The ITIN docs say that I need to submit a notarized copy of my wife's passport, to get her an ITIN. But notarized by whom? By a notary in Canada or the US? The IRS agent spent at least an hour reading his enormous IRS manual, looking up treaties and international law, trying to figure this out. Eventually he found a footnote scribbled into the margin of his book that said a Canadian notary was OK. So that's what I gave him.

He filled out the new tax forms himself, stapled on a photocopy of the page from his own IRS manual saying the Canada-notarized passport was OK, stamped everything all official-like, mailed it away himself, and... a month later it was rejected again. I needed to get a US notary to do it, or my wife had to drive to the freaking capital of her province to get it super-notarized or something. Nine months later and 3 more trips to the IRS office, I finally got it worked out.

As a US citizen, living in Canada, working for a US company, being paid by a Canadian payroll company, I live in constant fear of doing my taxes next spring.

Moral of this story: Even the IRS doesn't know their own tax code. Thanks again, US Government.

No credit

I have good credit in the US. I was able to get a car loan without a co-signer 6 years ago. I have credit cards.

In Canada, I don't exist. My credit score here is zero, as you might expect. I tried to buy a car, and they just flat-out wouldn't let me without a co-signer for a loan. I guess I can't blame them. (Except that I have money, they have something I want to buy, and we both ended up losing out.)

I went to the bank to open a checking (er, "chequing") account, and all hell broke loose. They wanted my business, but how could they justify giving an account to someone with "no credit"? Eventually the bank manager managed to run a US credit check on me (at least she said she did) and they let me open an account.

But I can't get a credit card here. Not even a $500-limit high-interest card like they give to kids in college. Not even after I had the bank write a letter of recommendation vouching for me. I have to wait a year and keep getting paychecks before I show up in the system. ("Paycheques"?) I'm still looking for other options in the meantime.

Moral of this story: Well, no moral. Sucks to be me, I guess.

Shopping

I tried to buy a computer online recently (from Dell, which I'm starting to regret). Not having a Canadian credit card, I used my US card. This is OK, my card works up here, with a small foreign transaction fee of %1-3.

But the website wouldn't take a US address as my billing address. I had to give a Canadian address. "Province" was a drop-down, mandatory field.

No matter, I'll just go to my bank's website and change my billing address to one in Canada. I checked with my bank before I moved, and they said it was no problem to keep the account even if I moved to another country. "We have lots of international customers!", said the teller.

Well, my bank's website won't let me specify a non-US billing address. "State" is a mandatory drop-down. Which is awesome. I emailed the bank and asked them to change my address for me, and they did. Now when I go to the "change my address" form on their website, half the fields are filled in and half are just blank. So if I ever use the form again, something will probably break.

Once I got on the phone with Dell, they were more than happy to take my US credit card as payment. Their online form just couldn't handle it.

Moral of this story: Text fields, not drop-downs.

An so on

When I fly across the border, I have to fill out a customs declaration form. There's a field asking "country of residence". Well, technically I am a resident of two countries. So I pick "US" when I fly down to the States, "Canada" when I fly back.

I tried to get a Costco membership in Canada, and they wanted a driver license. My license is from Oregon. Hilarity ensued, and they decided I didn't need one after all. Any time I need to give a driver license for any purpose, I end up breaking something.

Note that in every situation I've described, what I was trying to do was valid, and after some hassle, everything usually worked out OK. Computers just got in the way and slowed the process way down. And I'm not that much of an edge case. 250,000 people immigrate to Canada every year.

I suppose it might be better to optimize for the common cases, force people to pick their province from a drop-down. And then deal with the edge cases like mine manually later. Every text field is another opportunity for users to type in gibberish and chaos. But I wonder if the programmers actually thought about it this much, or if they were just being lazy.

I'm not really complaining. I don't expect the world to change to accommodate me. It's been more funny than annoying. But I do find it interesting to see the flaws in computer systems exposed. I get a certain sick satisfaction out of seeing people write "invalid" values into fields that I know are going to break someone's database down the line.

Ads on license plates?

Sun, 20 Jun 2010 22:09:08 -0700

What if when your car stops at a red light, your license plate displays ad banners? What could possibly go wrong?

Quoth the person(?) who wrote this bill:

"We're just trying to find creative ways of generating additional revenues," he said. "It's an exciting marriage of technology with need, and an opportunity to keep California in the forefront."

The forefront of annoying the hell out of people. Certainly what I need is more distractions on the road. I mean, what if there's a new brand of toothpaste and I didn't find out yet? Someone somewhere needs to earn a dime for telling me about it by any means necessary.

I'm just waiting for the first company to propose paying new parents a few hundred dollars to tattoo ads on their babies.

Printer spam: what could possibly go wrong?

Thu, 17 Jun 2010 10:59:57 -0700

As further evidence that there are no depths to which companies won't stoop when it comes to advertising, HP has come up with a great idea: Get people to hook their printers up to the internet and then spew advertisements out of their printers.

Well, it's a win-win situation for the companies doing the advertising: Not only will people see your ads, they'll pay for the ink and paper to print them. Maybe not such a great situation for the end-user though.

And then there are the privacy implications of targeting ads based on geolocating the IP address of the printer. Which I find a bit disturbing, but I guess advertisers already do that with online ads. But wait, there's more:

Ads can also be targeted based on a user's behavior as well as the content, said Vyomesh Joshi, head of the HP's Imaging and Printing Group.

Looking at what I'm printing so you can try to sell me things? Just a bit creepy.

Most troubling to me is the intrusiveness of the whole thing. They're taking control of a physical object in my house and using it against me. May as well kidnap my cat and train him to spell out "BUY PEPSI" in his cat litter.

Quote some slimeball at HP:

"What we discovered is that people were not bothered by it [an advertisement]," Nigro said. "Part of it I think our belief is you're used to it. You're used to seeing things with ads."

Translation: "We know this is a really horrible idea, but if people are complacent enough to sit there and take it without complaint, what's stopping us?"

He's right though, people are used to it.

I guess TV, radio, internet, phones, product placement in movies and games, print media, billboards and the postal service just aren't enough. Clearly what the world really needs is another ad-delivery mechanism.

Windows7 Crash of the Day

Wed, 28 Apr 2010 09:29:21 -0700

I should start a running series of these.

Welcome to Canada

Mon, 12 Apr 2010 10:29:53 -0700

I haven't had much time to blog lately because I was busy moving all my stuff to Canada. I'm finally here and starting to get settled a bit, so I thought I'd write about the culture shock, or lack thereof. Here are some differences and similarities between Canada and 'merka.

Differences

In Canada people aren't very outwardly patriotic. You don't see Canadian flags plastered all over everything in sight. In the US there's a flag everywhere you look.

Winner: Canada. I don't really need visual reminders of what country I'm in.
US: Dollar bills. Canada: Dollar coins.

Winner: US. You can't make origami out of coins.
Sizes of fountain drinks at fast food places are vastly different. I got a "medium" at Tim Horton's and it was smaller than a typical "small" in the US. My wife says she ordered a large drink at McDonalds in the US and had to send it back because it was too big.

Winner: Canada. Maybe this is one reason Canada has such a low level of obesity. Does anyone really need a liter of Pepsi with lunch?
In Canada there's French all over everything. In the US there's Spanish all over everything. I find they appear in almost equal amounts between the countries.

Winner: Draw. In BC you don't need to speak French, so I don't plan to learn it. Same with Spanish in the US.
Canada is metric. Temperatures are in Celcius and speed limits are in km/h. The US is Imperial.

Winner: Draw. Unit of measure for non-science purposes is a pretty arbitrary choice, so who cares?
I have a queen now.

Winner: Canada, because it's a still a novel concept to me. But most people in Canada don't really care about the queen, from what I can tell.
In Canada they put vinegar on french fries.

Winner: US. Seriously, come on now.
Everything is way more expensive in Canada and there's lots of sales tax. Example: gasoline is $1.10/liter (over $4/gallon). In Oregon it was always $2-something per gallon. On the other hand, everything is clean and there's cheap universal health care and the social programs seem to keep crime down.

Winner: Canada. What good is cheap gas if you're dead?
They spell things strangely up here. Favourite, colour, centre.

Winner: US, for our far more efficient use of vowels.
My bank card for my Canadian bank can't be used as a credit card. Haven't seen that in the US for a decade or two.

Winner: Draw. Almost everywhere in Canada takes debit cards anyways. Plus they have little portable debit machines so you can pay at your table in restaurants.
No one owns guns. I have yet to fear for my life since I've gotten here.

Winner: Canada. I imagine crime still sucks in the big cities, but here on the island it's nice.
Most people in Canada seem to keep up to date on US and world news. People in the US don't even remember that Canada exists most of the time.

Winner: Canada. Thanks for being educated.
The last letter of the alphabet is now "ZED" instead of "ZEE".

Winner: US. The alphabet song doesn't even rhyme if you say "zed" at the end.
Gay marriage is legal here. Relatedly, there isn't a church on every street corner and I have yet to meet many overly religious people. Censorship on TV and radio is way less. I actually saw a TV show with "atheists vs. religious people" testing their IQs via trivia questions. You would never see that in America.

Winner: Canada. The US can DIAF in this regard.

Similarities

Drivers suck in Canada as much as or more than they suck in the US. Speeding and passing on the right without turn signals seems to be a national pastime.
TV is mostly the same (i.e. not worth watching). There are mostly the same channels as the US other than Canada-only ones like CBC.
Walmart and Starbucks are still everywhere. But so are Tim Horton's and Canadian Tire.

Honestly things aren't that different up here. Sometimes I forget I'm even in a new country, other than the streets being clean and everyone being polite all the time. It's been a good move.

Advertising is devastating to my well-being

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 14:10:16 -0800

There's an interesting article on Ars Technica about how blocking ads is somehow unethical, and "devastating to the sites you love". The idea that I have a moral obligation to stare at an advertisment, the thought I have an ethical obligation to voluntarily annoy myself for the sake of a company's profits... it would be hilarious if it wasn't so repugnant.

Let's talk about ethics. How about some ethics for businesses?

Stop making the world a garish and hideous place to live by flooding it with ads.
Stop trying to grab my attention, evoke emotional responses in me, manipulate my mind, and trick me into spending money on crap I don't need. This is what advertisement is. Stop disrespecting me and insulting my intelligence. Stop viewing me as an anonymous, money-spending piece of cattle.
Stop trying to track my every move online. How many people understand tracking cookies? How many companies make it clear that every click is being recorded and data-mined? How is this ethical?

Here's the state of the world today: I can't drive down the street without seeing billboards everywhere. The radio is literally 25 to 50% ads, which is why I don't listen to the radio. Television is what, 20 minutes of commercials per hour? Which is why I haven't had television in 6 years. Newspapers and magazines are saturated with ads, and of course I don't read them either. Even then, ads are nearly unavoidable.

(By contrast, books (for example) are awesome. I pay for a book, and then I read the book start-to-finish with no ads, no distractions. A few pages at the back maybe, but I can ignore those. Books are nice.)

The internet is also a wonderful thing. FIRST a person or company puts a lot of information somewhere that everyone can read it effortlessly for free, and THEN they sometimes expect me to look at their ads. And I can simply choose not to.

If you want to force me to look at your ads, make me sign a contract or consent to an agreement before you display your site to me. Otherwise I owe you nothing. If your business is about to go bankrupt, and your business is so important to me that I want it to stick around, I'll give you money. Real money. I've done it before. But I will never give you my attention for free. No business has a right to that.

Businesses are not your friends. Businesses are not ethical entities. Businesses do not deserve the benefit of the doubt. Businesses exist to milk you of as much of your money as possible. The only sane reaction for the average person is a similar one: I want to deprive businesses of my money. I want to get as much from them as I can, while giving up as little as possible.

If I politely suggested that it's "unfair" for a business to have such a huge profit margin, and "if they cared about their customers, they would lower all their prices", I'd be laughed at. Why would a company do anything less than the absolute most they can do to bleed money out of me, after all? I laugh at any business (e.g. Ars Technica) which says the same thing to me. I will bleed you of product, as far as it's legal to do so. It so happens that advertisements are devastating to my well-being. Up to this point I have rarely read Ars Technica, and from now on I'll make it a point not to. If I do read it, I will block ads with the greatest feeling of malice I can manage.

I run my own website(s) at a loss specifically because I'd rather pay out of my own pocket than force people to look at ads. Admittedly my sites are so small that it's not much money. But there you have it. If I had to generate revenue to keep my sites going, I would find a way other than advertising to do it. Or I'd shut them down.

I love my ad-blocker. The only thing better would be an internet where I didn't need to use it.

Windows7: Welcome to 1990

Sat, 20 Feb 2010 15:43:49 -0800

Approximately one in twenty times when I try to log on to my work computer (running Windows 7 Professional™), it lags for 2 minutes and then I see this:

That's the Microsoft I know and love. (By "love", I mean the opposite of love.) Just like the good old days. I'm glad my employer bought this computer and I didn't have to spend my own money.

80% of the time on this machine I'm sitting in Virtualbox using Ubuntu, thankfully.

Technology ain't everything

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 15:40:55 -0800

Let's discuss can openers.

Growing up, my parents would often invest in electric can openers. These things never worked. Some of them sit robot-like on top of the can and walk themselves around the top while chopping the metal. Some of them were mounted on the wall and you somehow get the can to hang in a harness while the device spins the can around. It takes a PhD and double-jointedness to get the can set up in these devices properly. And then you push a button, a lot of noise happens, and usually the can ends up half-open, half-bent up to the point where it's un-openable short of dynamite.

When I open a can, I use one of these. You jam the metal bit into the can and turn the crank, the can spins in a circle and 10 seconds later, off comes the razer-sharp top. The one I own was probably manufactured in the 1980's and it's still sharp enough to open a can with minimal effort.

Is it really that hard to turn a handle for 10 seconds? Do we really need computer-controlled robotic can-opening devices?

Consider books. I still buy and read all of my books in the form of compressed wood pulp. There are newfangled e-book readers, but I don't want one. Why? Because the only places I read are 1) In the bathtub, and 2) Lying in bed. Taking a computer into the bathtub is generally not a good idea, and holding a Kindle above my head for 3 hours is awkward compared to lying a (3-D) book on the bed beside me with one page bent up so I can read it. (Note: I have dropped a book in the bathtub on more than one occasion, and contrary to my expectations, once it dried it was still perfectly readable, no ink runnage at all.)

I know some day, maybe soon, paper books are going to be gone and we're all going to read books from digital devices. But I like my books. I know there are benefits to having electronic books instead of paper ones. But even though they're a waste of space, even though they can have pages ripped out, even though they can burn up or smudge or age and become brittle, I like paper books better.

Mostly I like paper books because they're simple, analog devices. I don't have to mess with any kind of user interface. Books don't have battery life. Books don't have copy protection. Books don't require me to sign up for user accounts at some website and worry about having an internet connection. I can flip through the pages with my fingers. I can tell how many pages are left by the thickness of the pages that are left. I have actually never comfortably finished a long e-book, not even books about programming, where you'd think the ability to copy/paste code would be a boon. I'll pay good money for a paper copy of a book even if the electronic version is free.

This is probably the most banal thing I've ever written about. But there is such a thing as too much technology. I say this as a person who spends all day trying to get people to use databases instead of keeping drawers full of paper records. Technology for the sake of technology is a waste of time.

Working remotely

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 10:59:46 -0800

I'm sitting here in Canada trying to work for my employer back in the US for a month. It's been a few weeks already, and I'm surprisingly pleased (or pleasantly surprised) with how well it's working. At the same time, certain aspects of this rather suck.

One huge obstacle so far is (of course) Windows. Aside from the Linux server that I convinced IT to let me run out of a closet, the whole place is Microsoft. Whatever MS VPN software we're using is slow, clunky, unreliable, and generally annoying.

At one point I tried to fetch a file from a network drive and watched it download at 0.2 k/sec. Then I had someone back home copy it onto my Linux box, and I downloaded from there at 120 k/sec. The Windows and Linux servers are in the same room in the same building behind the same network connection; I don't understand how VPN overhead slowed things down by that many orders of magnitude.

After connecting to VPN, there's about a 25% chance that Outlook will be able to connect to the Exchange server at work. Generally I have to fire up the VPN, turn it off, turn it on, turn it off, turn it on and then Outlook will find it. Sometimes I close Outlook, but it lives on as a zombie, futilely hammering away at the server but unable to find it, until I CTRL-ALT-DEL and kill it. This is with Office 2007.

But the work I do on the Linux server is (of course) easy. No problems whatsoever. Working over SSH is how I did things when I was sitting in my office anyways. I tunnel in and use local GUI SQL clients. I put VirtualBox on my laptop and I do a bunch of stuff in a Linux VM and rsync it back home with no problems. I can edit files over SSH right in Emacs as if they were on my local box, if I care to.

Sometimes I wonder if my dislike of Microsoft is irrational. Any belief that is caused by or results in a strong emotional response should be subject to questioning. Then reality comes waltzing by and reminds me that no, MS software really does suck.

I've worked for this company for over two years before moving. I don't know how well I'd be doing if this was a company I just started with. It's hard to see how important face-to-face communication is until it's impossible. Email is OK, but the benefit of knowing people in person and knowing how they talk and how they think really goes a long way to being able to interpret and understand plaintext communication.

2009 in review

Mon, 04 Jan 2010 21:18:38 -0800

2009 sucked because I was living in a different country than my wife, thanks to months of Canadian immigration paperwork and bureaucracy. This situation is going to be changing in the immediate future, which means 2010 will not suck.

I did have a lot of time to learn things, which is good. I got all kinds of things accomplished at work, learned some supervisory skills (shudder), wrote some code that was put to good use etc. My websites grew in popularity slightly. I learned Clojure and had lots of fun banging out a few apps. I tried to learn Haskell and failed. I feel like I advanced in origami a bit. I inched ahead slightly learning Japanese. I figure in another 50 years I'll know Japanese enough to say "Hello, I know Japanese but I'm too old to use it for anything now".

I read a gratuitous amount of books. I got into Asimov for the first time; usually I dislike sci-fi, but his stuff is good. I found Neal Stephenson, and wish I'd have found him earlier. I read more programming books than I can remember. I found some interesting books on psychopathy and other psychology-related topics, and read plenty of Richard Dawkins and other sciency and atheismy books.

There just isn't enough time in the day to learn everything I want to learn. I come home from a day of writing code all day at work, goof off on the internet a bit, talk to my wife, and then I read books and write code until 3 or 4AM, and it's still not enough time.

I have apps I want to code, drawings I want to draw, origami I want to fold, video games I want to play, movies I want to watch, music I want to listen to, and the list of books I want to read keeps growing faster than I can read them, even given that I already read 4 or 5 books per month. If I had a social life, I can't imagine how little time I'd have for these things.

This year I almost want to slam the brakes on, spend a lot of time with my wife, and let my brain settle. I will definitely do that to some degree, but I can't stop learning in the meantime. I'm running out of years. 29 years old, only four or five good decades left, if I'm lucky, and my brain will be deteriorating the whole time. At least I have plenty to keep me busy.

Respect is earned

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 00:16:57 -0800

Here's my theory of respect.

Everyone deserves some level of basic respect, just for being a fellow human being. This kind of respect means that I won't step on your toes, I'll smile and nod when you talk, I'll hold the door for you. This kind of respect isn't worth much.

The important kind of respect is the one where I will listen carefully to things you say and give your words a lot of consideration and weight. When we disagree, I will sometimes give you the benefit of a doubt (where applicable) and believe your opinion over my own. I will consider you to be a good person. I will want to emulate you. I will make every effort to treat you especially well. Your opinion of me will matter to me. The dictionary uses the words "deference" and "esteem" and that's accurate.

This is the kind of respect that's worth a lot. This is the kind of respect I hope to earn from people (though I don't know how much I succeed), and the people I respect in this way are the ones I seek out in life, the people I want to be around.

Here are just a few things that will not automatically earn you my respect (in the latter, important sense).

Being older than me.
Being friendly to me.
Being related to me.
Being clergy.
Being rich.
Being famous for something silly (e.g. sports, acting, singing)
Having a higher position than me in a company.
Being respected by lots of other people for a stupid reason.
Demanding my respect.

Let's take age, for example. I agree that we should always respect the elderly to a degree, in the superficial sense; I'll hold the door extra long for them. Staying alive a long time is hard in this world, so kudos for that.

But just because you're old doesn't mean your opinion is worth more than mine, or indeed, worth anything at all. In fact many times it's the opposite. Some people grew up in different times, when racism, sexism, homophobia and such were universal, and while many people have changed since then, many others haven't. For example...

While 41 percent Americans under 45 support legalizing gay marriage, only 18 percent of Americans over 65 agree, and nearly half of seniors do not think there should be any legal recognition of same-sex marriage.

41% sucks, but it's way better than 18%. To some degree I can't blame older people for still believing these things; the world was different 65+ years ago, literally everyone had horrid beliefs. People tend to adopt the opinions of society at the time they were raised. Probably I hold some beliefs myself today that will seem horrific in 50 years because I'm too ignorant to see how they're wrong.

However, in another sense, I very much can and do blame anyone who clings to a harmful belief. There's no excuse for it. Age isn't an excuse.

This doesn't just apply to social issues, though social issues are a good example. It could be beliefs about programming practices or views of science and medicine or anything else.

If people progressively learned things over time and used those things to inform their beliefs, then yeah, old people would always be the smartest/wisest people around, and I would respect older people universally. But that often doesn't happen. Many people (of all ages) stop, decide their beliefs are perfect, and cling to them until they die. Many people use their accumulated knowledge and experience to come up with clever (but wrong) justifications for their crappy beliefs. Or they just don't care.

Age is perhaps a necessary condition for wisdom, but it's not a necessary and sufficient condition. Older people definitely have the most potential for wisdom, but many people seem to squander that potential. Sometimes I suspect that society advances not by lots of people changing their minds, but by people with crappy beliefs getting old and dying and leaving a new generation behind with incrementally better beliefs. (I don't know if this is correct. Someone should do a study.)

Being family doesn't excuse your crappy beliefs either. Nor does being my boss, being a pop star, being rich or anything else. If your beliefs suck, I will look down upon you for that.

Here are some things that will earn you my respect.

Being demonstrably intelligent, rational, skilled and ethical, valuing the truth, and having a desire to improve oneself over time.

Oh wait, there's just that one.

I'm lucky that some of my family members are intelligent and reasonably rational and ethical. But many aren't, and I don't respect those ones. I've had bosses who were worthy of respect and some who weren't, and I didn't last long at jobs where they weren't. I'm perplexed that celebrities speak and people listen to them; what have they done to earn the right to be listend to?

I am confused and saddened by societies where people are supposed to "respect their elders", in the sense of giving their opinions weight, or to be unconditionally loyal to their families. What a horrible idea.

Personally, I had many horrible beliefs in my youth, partly due to the sucky place I grew up, partly due to the ignorance and na?vet? of youth, partly due personal weakness, or who knows what. I gave my beliefs long consideration and got rid of many of them. Theist => atheist, "homosexuality is wrong" => "no it's not, you idiot" and so on.

I don't think I can be blamed (much) for the sucky things my brain absorbed as a child, but if I still believed those things as an adult, I should absolutely be blamed and judged for them. If I still ignorantly believe stupid things right now, I should be blamed and judged for that (and I hope someone will point it out). I don't want anyone to respect me unless I've earned it.

Godaddy sucks

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 12:56:57 -0800

I'm in the process of moving all my domains the heck off of Godaddy. I'm trying Namecheap which seems slightly less evil, if the sheer amount of ad banners and upselling bullcrap is any indication. But probably only slightly less evil.

Honestly Godaddy has so many ads I can't even find the button to renew my domains. The process of buying anything takes you through 6 or 7 pages of the most garish, fanatical sleaze-peddling that you are likely to encounter on a website.

Domain registrars are the used car salesmen of the internet.

Time to pay the Windows tax

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 01:39:13 -0700

Now that Windows 7 is out, it's only a matter of time before I'm forced to buy it. I don't want it. I won't use it. But as a programmer, it's nearly impossible to survive without owning a copy of the ~~latest and greatest~~ latest version of Windows.

Why? Because if you want a job, unless you're one of the fortunate few who get to pick your development platform AND dictate the platform for all of your users, you need to know Windows. You need to know how to navigate around it when you're forced to use it on your work computer. You need to know how to troubleshoot (to some degree) your users' Windowsy problems as they try to install and use your program. If you want to communicate with people in the world, inevitably they're going to send you a bunch of MS Word documents and nothing is ever going to read them properly 100% of the time except MS Word itself.

I have a copy of Vista Business on my laptop which I am deeply ashamed for having bought, but at the same time it helped me land a very nice work contract. Without being able to VPN into the company's network (via some MS proprietary VPN software that I tried VERY hard and failed to get to work in Linux) I wouldn't have been able to complete the job on time, and I might be living in a cardboard box under a bridge right now.

For this contract I actually developed the app at home entirely in Linux. I used only Linux-centric tools (Vim, Gimp, Firefox, Ruby etc.). Thank God most of those tools have Windows versions, because deploying it to Windows land at work and working on it there when necessary was (mostly) trivial. But I still needed Windows to finish the job. And all the users of this app were Windows users. The specs for the app were sent to me in Word and Excel documents. The website frontend is being viewed in IE much of the time in spite of my pleadings to the contrary, so I have to support it.

Such is the life of a programmer. I'll probably buy Windows 7 eventually but it'll sting. It'll rankle.

No accounting for taste

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 00:20:26 -0700

Somehow my post from yesterday about Church numerals in Clojure hit the front page of Reddit briefly. I don't understand why. It wasn't that interesting. It was an interesting topic, but there are other sites with better information about the topic. (Even Wikipedia has more/better info. This one is nice too in spite of being C#.)

I think it's because it was submitted to Reddit with a vague and inflammatory title about brain explosions, and people click links without thinking too much about what they're doing. Even programmers do, I guess.

My blog got around 14,000 visits yesterday, which is not much these days, but a lot by the standards of my tiny blog. If you added up everyone I ever had a conversation with in real life, would it be 14,000 people? I doubt it. Kind of crazy.

I run three websites out of one JVM/Clojure instance on my lowly VPS server and it didn't crash, so I'm kind of happy about that. I've crashed from lesser loads than that in the past. So either my programming is getting better, or my new host is better than my old one, or it was dumb luck.

All of my data is persisted in Tokyo Cabinet nowadays but mostly it's read from caches in Clojure refs, so maybe that helped a bit too. Maybe. Who knows? I know nothing about scaling websites. Slashdot would reduce this site to a puddle of goo.

In any case I appreciate the opportunity to blather about things and have people listen.

Comcast blocks port 25

Sat, 15 Aug 2009 15:22:00 -0700

Testing a remote SMTP server is kind of hard when Comcast is secretly blocking all inbound and outbound traffic on port 25. I only figured it out when telnet wouldn't even work. I could've saved myself an hour of frustration if I'd known this. Thanks, Comcrap.

Windows Powershell: Can you handle the power?

Sat, 15 Aug 2009 14:50:38 -0700

MS Powershell is Microsoft's ripoff of Bash. I don't think this is a bad thing necessarily. Bash is a good tool and it's open source. If Windows bundled a sensible, full-fledged Bash and got rid of CMD.EXE I would dance for joy.

So Powershell lets you refer to your home directory as ~ and a bunch of commands have *nix aliases like ls and cat. This is nice for those who have *nix commands firmly internalized. You have to use .\foo.bat to run things in the current directory instead of just foo.bat, which I thought was cool.

But Powershell is not without its problems. For one thing I see this a lot:

The redirection operator '<' is not supported yet.

How hard is it to implement input redirection, really? For another thing, tab completion continues to be broken. When you hit Tab it still doesn't put a slash at the end of the text it inserts. You have to type a manual \ every time you hit Tab, to continue tabbing your way through directories. Thus doubling the number of keystrokes you're forced to type. This continues to drive me crazy. There's a small amount of evidence that someday it'll be fixed, but I'm not holding my breath.

You also usually can't bundle flags together. e.g. rm -rf would have to be rm -r -f in Powershell. This is just annoying enough to bother me, but I can look past it.

Sadly, Powershell also runs slower than a geriatric sea turtle. I don't understand what it's doing that takes 10-20 seconds to startup. Or why tab completion often lags for 5+ seconds itself.

My happiest surprise was when I tried to uninstall Powershell (so I could try version 2) and got this:

This dialog listed every program installed on my computer (in random order) including every Windows Update I'd ever installed. The worst part is that I couldn't even dismiss this dialog as an error. For all I know, uninstalling Powershell could cause every program on my computer to stop working. I've seen stranger things happen in Windows.

A person walking past my office when I saw this would have heard the crazed, maniacal, tortured laughter that only the experience of being forced to use Windows can elicit.

Wikipedia, You Scare Me

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 00:33:36 -0700

Weird Al's newest song has been on Youtube for less than 30 minutes and already the Charles Nelson Reilly page has been updated with a link to it.

How long is it going to be before the internet acquires a physical body and rules over us all?

I paid for music

Sun, 24 May 2009 20:06:32 -0700

As a general rule, I don't pay for music. The main reason of course is that the music industry are a bunch of thugs. If you don't know that already, you've been living under a rock for the past few decades. I won't even buy music for other people as a gift if I can help it.

Recently however I did buy music, specifically Jonathan Coulton's latest DVD. JoCo releases his music under Creative Commons, which is awesome, and when you buy it (from What Are Records) you get MP3s that are not infested with DRM, which is also awesome. When you buy that particular DVD, you get a DVD of the concert, a music CD of the same concert, AND you can immediately download MP3s of said concert while you wait for the DVD in the mail. All for $20. Well worth it for such quality music.

I first heard most of JoCo's music via shaky concert recordings on Youtube and via MP3s acquired "elsewhere" (nearly all of which are free downloads on Joco's website though); otherwise I'd never even have known he existed. And yet I ended up giving him my money, happily and willingly, and probably will again. Amazing how things turn out.

The other music I bought recently is Stephen Lynch. Again I heard most of his music first on Youtube. Again I gleefully spent money on his latest CD because it's good music and because it's DRM-less and thug-less entertainment and a good portion of that money is going to the artists.

Most of the music I like comes from Japan or various corners of Europe. Amazon sells a few (very few) Japanese music CDs, for between $50 and $90 each (plus shipping). Do you know how much it costs to ship a stream of bytes from Japan to the US via the intertubes? Hint, it's not $90. How does a stream of bytes increase $90 in value when it's written onto a piece of plastic?

These are strange times. There's such disparity between what the average person believes is right and wrong on the internet and what the law says is lawful and unlawful. This kind of disparity can't last forever. My high school history teacher said that in America at least, a law that is opposed by the majority of citizens in the country never lasts long; I think that's true. And it's as it should be. In a few decades, we're going to look back at how things were in the 90's and 00's and laugh.

Microsoft, you still surprise me

Mon, 11 May 2009 23:18:21 -0700

I use Windows XP at work (not by choice) and I've been continually saying "no" when it tried to install SP3. Why? No tangible reason other than that decades of experience with Windows has shown me that any time you touch any system files or settings in Windows, crap breaks. When it comes to Windows, you set things up and then like a teetering house of playing cards, you back away slowly and try not to breathe.

Which brings us to the other day. I first noticed something was up when a got a popup dialog on my work machine asking me every 15 minutes whether I wanted to Reboot Now or Reboot Later. Confused, I clicked "later" but again and again and again this prompt appeared. After hours of this interrupting my futile attempts at work I relented; I laboriously shut down my half-dozen command prompts and carefully-placed Vim sessions and various server daemons and all the tools I got to look forward to re-opening after Yet Another Unnecessary Reboot, and then I rebooted.

So then XP left me alone and all was well with the world. Ha, just kidding, it started doing the same thing again almost immediately. Reboot Now or Reboot Later? I hatefully tolerated this for as long as I could but it was a futile battle. Microsoft won in the end and I rebooted again.

A few other people at work reported the same thing on their systems, so I thought maybe it was a virus, but I checked a few things and noticed a shiny new SP3 installed on my system (so my initial guess was close). Somehow SP3 was forced onto my machine, not sure if it was the sysadmins pushing it out or Microsoft's doing, but either way: why was it possible to install a Service Pack on my machine without my even being aware it happened? I do not consider this a good thing.

In any case, after the second reboot, strange things happened. My taskbar settings were all reverted to defaults and I noticed my Address Bar was missing. The Address Bar is a little URL/file path bar in the taskbar where you can type a file path and open an Explorer window quickly. One of the very few semi-useful bits of the XP interface.

But it was gone. What happened? A short Google later and I learned that Microsoft removed the feature in SP3 permanently, by design. Why? Because of anti-monopoly regulatory concerns.

Wow. So it turns out I wasn't disappointed, and a few dozen cards toppled from the shaky tower as I watched, helpless. Not the end of the world, but what an annoyance.

The reason I bothered blogging this is because, hilariously enough, you can still add the Address Bar back in SP3. As I read somewhere or other, probably here, you simply 1) Drag a "My Computer" icon to the top of the screen to make a useless "My Computer" toolbar, 2) Right click that and add the Address Bar, which is still an option there, 3) Drag that Address Bar to your main taskbar, 4) Remove the useless toolbar from above. And then you have your Address Bar back. Oops!

So, in summary:

Two forced reboots via 20 repeated un-ignorable popup prompts.
Service Pack installed without my knowledge or consent.
Useful piece of functionality removed.
Item 3 caused by a history of monopolistic business practices and the resulting legal fallout.
Functionality in question removed so incompetently that it can be added back anyways in a matter of seconds.
Another hour of my life sucked into the black hole of the Microsoft Windows User Experience?, forever lost.

Internet Explorer 8 Review

Sat, 21 Mar 2009 00:35:52 -0700

I installed Internet Explorer 8 today. I need it to test the websites at work. I couldn't care less if my personal sites render properly in IE at this point, but I must accommodate people at work.

I should mention right off the bat that given the way Microsoft takes a dump all over web standards and the hours and hours of grief as a web developer trying to get sites to look proper in IE6, unless IE8 crapped gold nuggets every time I clicked a link I don't think I'd like it.

Installing

I wasn't disappointed. IE8 is hate-worthy. A steaming pile of offal. First there was the joy of trying to install it.

Why does installing a web browser require checking my computer for "malicious software"? Why can't I opt out of this? In any case I didn't have to worry about it, because the first time I tried the install, it bombed before it got that far, and demanded that I go to the Windows Update site and install some patch for IE7 before I could continue. Note: I don't have IE7 on my computer. This is a work machine that I kept IE6 on for testing our company websites. This blew my mind.

So I tried to download this patch for IE7, but I couldn't, because I had to get Windows Genuine disAdvantage first. Rage filled me at this point to the point of overflowing. If it was my home computer I'd have stopped right there. But I need this garbage for work, so I held my nose and did it.

Of course the patch required a reboot. Reboot #1.

Now I was able to continue with the install. A slow, plodding download; I think it took 5-10 minutes to do its thing, but it's hard to tell. There was no progress bar to show me how far along it was, nothing to tell me the elapsed time, no indication how large the files were that were being fetched. There is something resembling a progress bar, but it doesn't actually show you much in the way of "progress". Instead a little green thing bounces around like the car from Knight Rider. How much cocaine do you need to imbibe to invent a GUI like this?

Of course IE8 itself required a reboot. Reboot #2.

Why? Installing Firefox and Opera don't require reboots. They download as self-contained .exe installer files. I run them and software appears. This is 2009, for the love of God. Maybe in 20 more years Microsoft will finally manage to re-invent emerge or apt.

The IE8 install, including patching and reboots, took me 45 minutes. If I had to do this on more than one machine, I'd probably jump out the window. How much time have you sucked out of my life, Microsoft? To compare, I decided to install Opera. Opera took less than one minute to download AND install and didn't require a reboot.

Features

When you first open it up, it sends you through a wizard and asks you if you want to enable a bunch of crap. I said no to everything. What the hell is an "Accelerator"? I assumed it was something that tried to make web pages load faster, like the download accelerator scams you used to get popups for all the time in 2001. So I said no.

Turns out "Accelerators" are plugins. Why didn't they call them Plugins? Did some marketroid decide "plugin" wasn't EXTREME enough, so decided to make up their own word? Why do I have to relearn the English language every time someone releases new software? Not Invented Here syndrome?

Windows tried to default me to Live Search, but I give it credit for being upfront in allowing me to turn that crap off and use Google. (No doubt thanks to US anti-trust court proceedings.) 473 wizard dialogs later I had a browser.

The next thing I noticed is more lame attempts to push more Microsoft services at me. In the URL bar every time you type anything, you see this:

Awesome. Is there any way to remove this spamvertisement other than installing Windows Search? If I planned to use IE8, which I don't, I imagine I'd inevitably click that by accident, which is probably the whole idea.

IE8 also added a bunch of useless garbage to my bookmarks toolbar which I insta-deleted. Or tried to. My favorite feature of IE8 by far is this one:

Apparently deleting things from the bookmarks toolbar is just too much for a modern 4-core CPU to handle. Congrats Microsoft. Hang, crash, boom.

There is no menu in IE8 by default. No wait, there is a menu. It's just in the wrong place (lower right side of the top browser area), and instead of readable text it's mostly unlabeled buttons with tiny arrows next to it.

It's like a traditional menu and a fun mystery novel combined! What is in the dropdown next to the house? I'm sure it's a fun surprise.

And actually you can get the old menu to appear too, if you press Alt. Insanity. But it doesn't appear at the top, it appears under the URL bar. One of the few arguably good things about Windows is that programs have consistent GUI parts and work the same way: they have a menu at the top, it's always in the same one place, there's a File and an Edit, and it's predictable. Thanks Microsoft for getting even that wrong.

When I highlight text on a web page, a little blue thing appears that I think I'm supposed to click on. The icon is a bunch of lines and squiggles and an arrow or something. There's no indication what that thing actually does. I clicked it out of curiosity and get a menu full of a bunch of random options like "Search for this". I think this is where ACCELERATORS are supposed to pop up, or something, who cares?

Fonts in IE8 look fuzzy. As a bonus, after installing IE8, fonts in a bunch of other programs (Outlook) are fuzzy now too. Hurrah! IE8, like its predecessors, apparently extends its tendrils into every nook and cranny of your system, corrupting and perverting as it goes. Maybe that's why it needed to reboot my computer twice to install it.

IE8 comes with a Firebug ripoff, which is better than View Source invoking Notepad, but took a full 2 minutes to load when I tried to open it the first time.

IE8 does render my blog properly, which is good. IE7 does too, I think, I only tested it once. I'm not losing sleep over it. Thank you Firefox and Opera: if you didn't exist and put the pressure on, we'd all still be using IE6 and I'd still be writing all my web pages twice to make sure they work in Internet Excrementplorer. As much as I detest IE, if people migrate to IE8 from the shard of utmost evil that is IE6, I'll be happy.

Science in America

Wed, 10 Dec 2008 01:25:51 -0800

In the news there is a recent study of math and science education internationally. A lot of the stories set a "US improves in math!" tone. The most negative tone I've seen is "US science performance plateaus".

How hard is it to say that math and science education in the US sucks? Because it does. See the image at the end of this post for one reason why.

In the meantime here's an anecdote. I went to school in semi-rural western Pennsylvania. My math education was pretty sound. Our high school had agreements with a local college so that I even got to take college-level calc while in high school. I held up well and I was competitive when I ended up in calc 2 in college.

Science was another matter. I consider myself to be not entirely an idiot, but I was given nothing to work with in high school when it came to science. My physics and chemistry classes were disgusting. My best physics class was taught by an evangelical Christian who sneaked God into class sometimes (without my realizing at the time how wrong that was). My other physics class was taught by someone who didn't even know the subject. I took a standardized college-entrance exam in physics and I think I scored in the 20-something'th percentile even among Americans.

Meanwhile in my computer programming class I was working on ancient iMac G3's (the crayon-colored space ship cube kind) which barely ran a C compiler. I think we used either Borland or Code Warrior; I don't remember, and it doesn't matter because it didn't work. We had to resort to using QBasic in a Windows 95 virtual machine on the Mac's.

Our library had Macintosh Classics (the box-shaped ones from the early 1500's, with tiny little built-in monochrome screens). There was one computer in the library with internet access, which ran only DOS and could only access the national weather service and some library catalogs. I used to go edit AUTOEXEC.BAT to do horrible things.

The priority at the school was clearly not science education. It was sports. We dumped huge amounts of money into a new sports stadium. Cheerleading and swimming were the most important things happening. No one gave the slightest crap whether anyone learned science at that school. And I suffered for it.

If I hadn't been motivated to teach myself how to program in my spare time, where would I have ended up? Even more behind in college than I was? Not in college at all?

Is it any wonder that at college, most of my classes were taught by non-Americans, and a very sizable portion of students were non-American? This in a city NOT known for its diverse international population. People flew in from elsewhere, went to school for 4-8 years and left. Down the street at CMU the American-to-non-American ratio was even more extreme.

The anti-intellectual, anti-science attitude of many Americans is what I detest most about this country. Science is the most important thing that human beings do. Science is what enables modern life. People owe science and scientists more than they could ever imagine. And instead people take it entirely for granted, and spit in the face of science at every turn.

Now, here's something to make you puke up your breakfast. Public acceptance of evolution, by country. I won't post much about this subject because it would be mostly profanities.

Ignorance is bliss

Fri, 24 Oct 2008 19:54:00 -0700

I remember the good old days of web-browsing, when I'd just zoom around the internet without a care in the world. The first time I got a small whiff of something foul was in college one day, when a professor yelled at the class because someone was using telnet to connect to remote machines. "Are you crazy? It sends everything in plaintext! Use SSH!"

Then eventually I put together a website where I had access to the server logs, and oh boy, it was not fun reading those the first time. Line after line of bots in Ukraine, trying to access vulnerable scripts that may or may not exist on my server. Then I checked some of my SSH logs, and saw the same thing. Thus my innocence was destroyed forever.

Nowadays all of my email traffic is SSL-encrypted, and FTP is disabled on every server I have root access to, in favor of SFTP. I cringe every time I set up a wireless network (even WPA is being cracked nowadays). My passwords are long, nearly impossible to remember, and legion. My browser cache is cleared daily. I reject all cookies by default, and Javascript is run on an as-needed basis.

One day I read on Slashdot about Flash cookies. So I had a really bright idea:

ln -s /dev/null ~/.macromedia

That'll teach them! No more flash cookies. (Note, don't do this if you like watching Flash movies in your browser. They stop working on certain websites. Annoying. Next best thing is a plugin to let you delete them.)

The bad thing is that I still don't know very much about network security and privacy. If I knew more, I'm sure I'd worry more. On the other hand, if I was a locksmith, I might feel bad with the quality of the lock on my front door. And yet my house has never been robbed (yet) and my computer has never been hacked (yet). People tend to worry about what's right in front of them. Maybe what you don't know can't hurt you.

But I still cringe when someone sits down in an airport or a Starbucks and logs into their bank account or work email.

Laptops at border crossings

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 22:08:28 -0700

There's an article on Slashdot about a US Senate hearing on laptop seizures at border crossings. This affects me, because I travel to Canada a lot and plan to move there within a year or so.

It's a problem because my job requires me to handle what amount to people's medical records as data files on my laptop. It's part of my job, and often I work from home. As of right now, I never take my laptop with me to Canada partly because I don't know what would happen if a border agent decided to inspect or copy all of my data. I can get in very serious trouble for breaching patient confidentiality. On the other hand I could get in serious trouble if I refused to allow a search for myself; at best I'd be turned way at the border, having wasted hundreds of dollars to travel there.

I really don't know what I'm going to do when I move. I'll probably have to wipe my computers clean before shipping them up there. Another option would be to encrypt all the data, upload it to the server that hosts my website, then download it all again after I move. It's insane that I'd have to do such a thing though. And shuffling sensitive data around to strangers' computers and servers isn't the safest thing in the world either.

How do lawyers and doctors and people with trade secrets and other people with classified or legally protected information handle border crossings? It's a bit of a conflict of interest.