Never been one to let the carrier drop

I recently noticed in a wikipedia article about easter eggs that Microsoft – once one of the largest producers of software with easter eggs in the biz, has stopped permitting easter eggs to be written into their software as part of their ‘Trustworthy Computing’ initiative.

Well, as if I needed more reasons to hate m$, but..

I hate the concept of ‘enterprise computing’. It basically says, let’s sell the same buggy software for ten times as much while making sure that we don’t put any jokes in the manual. We all should take our computing sooo seriously.. it plays into the mental model that computers are not toys, that big business and making money are far more important than enjoying your life or having fun, and that anything cobbled together by a bunch of hackers on the net can’t possibly be as good as something cobbled together by a few hackers in a building somewhere that’s then had a brand name slapped on it.

They’re taking away our easter eggs in the name of fighting cyberterrorism. How far are we going to let the suits go in their pursuit of trading joy for big profits? These people need to be stopped – which is why I’m calling out for all software developers everywhere to sneak a few dozen easter eggs into every product, and all auditors to look the other way..

Oh, yeah, *that*’ll happen.

Seriously, though, am I the only one who thinks this preoccupation with ‘enterprise grade’ solutions – which, let’s all be honest, break just as often as the duct-tape-and-perl-script variety (and if you think otherwise, you either aren’t in the industry or you’re covering your arse) – is somewhere between silly and stupid? I have a client who hates mysql because it’s not ‘enterprise grade’, even though it’s every bit as reliable as Oracle and for the particular task he’s doing, every bit as fast. These people carefully ignore that a number of the biggest sites on the internet.. the wikipedia for ${diety}sake.. are running LAMP! It’s amusing to see how fast the higher-ups turn pale when words like ‘open source’ are spoken. I can only imagine what would happen if I were caught writing easter eggs into things.. (which, now that I’m aware that they’re under fire, I will make sure I wedge into every major app I write from now on)

Of course, I’m basing this all off a wikipedia article that might not even be correct.. (that’s the problem with encylopedias that anyone can edit.. or encyclopedias that *anyone* can edit – yes, even Britannica is wrong in spots..) but, it does sound like it fits the current Climate Of Fear ™. Nothing scarier than a few easter eggs – after all, they mean that clearly the types with no sense of humor and no interests other than money aren’t completely in control of the code…

Actually, thinking about it, who *are* you going to trust? People who stick video games into your word processor, or people who think that sticking video games in your word processor is a untrustworthy action? As usual, I know which side I’m on..

Sometimes I wonder.. as I’ve mentioned many times before.. how many job opportunities I lose because of my blog.. ah well. Until I actually *am* starving, I’d rather not work for those who take themselves so seriously anyway, so the job loss is mutual. I hope.

(in case anyone was wondering, I got this fine quiz at http://www.rdos.net/eng/)

(and it says:

Your Aspie score: 111 of 200
Your neurotypical (non-autistic) score: 75 of 200
You are very likely an Aspie

)

(that title was intentionally intended to catch Google’s attention)

After trying many, many things to get Samba and XP to peacefully coexist, I tried the registry changes listed in http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-2820556.html and found that the one that fixes the problem is the one described in http://support.microsoft.com/kb/321098

… or not.. (the problem appears to have returned)

I always wondered what these were…

So, last weekend me and Kayti built a 2100′ extension cord.

my gallery has pictures, for those of you who doubt. The setup is thus: There’s a annual party in a certain abandoned train tunnel that will not have it’s location mentioned here (although, I suspect the people over at Molecular might know where it is). In prior years, we’ve just run generators in the tunnel, because a convenient 20mph wind has been blowing through. This year, due to a collapse at the end of the tunnel that we *don’t* enter at, we were forced to reconsider the location of the generator. The party is traditionally held after the first of three air baffles in the tunnel, for accoustic reasons. This unfortunately is 1950′ in.

For those of you who weren’t aware, you can’t just plug 1950′ of 12-gauge extension cords into each other and plug them into a 110V outlet at the mouth. 12 gauge wire has a drop of 0.00187 ohms a foot – or 3.74 ohms for 2000 feet. That’s *per leg*. At the end of the line, a 20 amp load would cause, let’s see.. hang on. I don’t believe the value I keep getting here…

Okay. You all get the point. We needed 5kW at the other end of the tunnel. So, I bought a couple of matching transformers on E-bay.. (where else can you buy 480V-> 220V CT transformers for less than the cost of a good dinner? The shipping and handling costs were kind of brutal, though).. and me and Rich (of Manzanita Micro) spent some time building spider boxen, breaker panels, cable-tying all the wire together.. and then we went and installed it all in the tunnel..

it was like being on the fscking *grid* in there. The lights didn’t dim on the bass beats – the transformers barely got warm.. I was seriously worried that all of these things that I knew worked in theory wouldn’t actually work in the real world – but, no, it came off mostly without a hitch. (well, aside from a neutral wire that pulled out while the stuff was being dragged into the tunnel and got put back int he wrong place.. luckily they caught that before anything big got plugged in, but I understand they set fire to a powerstrip or two)

Anyway, I figured that building a 2100′ extension cable earned us some bragging rights. They say that’s how the (insert your favorite college, ethnic group, religion, or whatever you like to diss) are building their electric car.. unlimited range, but *man* you need a long extension cord.4

I’m not actually sure I have free will. The decisions that I make are driven by the state of my bloodstream, and by the inputs I’m being fed. There is no way for me to know what I would be in a vacuum. I can’t seem to shrug off the past, either, it weighs me down like a anchor..

does anyone have a use for three very-linux-friendly PCI voice modems?

I have to say, I have a rather low opinion of digium.

I paid a rather outrageous price for one of their phone interface boards, becaues it would do things like caller ID and hang-up detection that a voice modem wouldn’t. Or so I thought.

Probably it will in fact do these things, if I ever get the drivers installed. However, the nice manual that comes with it makes references to two servers, cvs.digium.com and ftp.digium.com, that don’t exactly work as advertised. cvs.digium.com doesn’t, in fact, exist, and ftp.digium.com isn’t real hot on answering ftp requests – though it manages http

ftp.digium.com is also *not* links-friendly – it wants to be used by a graphical web browser. And, thanks to a rather annoying redirect, you can’t just cut & paste the link for the zaptel drivers to wget. Honestly, people, ever heard of *including the drivers on a CD*? Or, failing that, making sure that you keep the servers that the instruction manual references *up*? This is what terrifies me about Windows XP – microsoft has to keep the authentication server up in order for it to work, and I’m sure that by the time ten or so years have gone by, they’ll decide to make us all upgrade by shutting it down. For that matter, Ubuntu has a bit of that going on as well.

In other news, apparently I’ve missed the entire point of sex.

As a exercise while I was blocked on a coding problem for work, I wrote a streaming icecast client in Flex. This isn’t a particular accomplishment or anything, but I thought you all might find it amusing nonetheless. It’s the first step on the road to revamping Sheer Sound Studio’s web site – this particular one replaces the old wshr player, and is at http://www.wshr.org

I’m not saying this is any great peice of code, and it’s blatently based on one written up elsewhere on the web (I should really dig up where..) – but here is a streaming mp3 player in flex, take one:

http://www.sheer.us/code/flex/wshr.mxml

(p.s. the VU meter is pure Sheer. Cute, isn’t it? Next version will have it colorized. Or maybe i’ll throw in a spectrum analyzer? Nah, let’s not get too clever. Better to get around to doing the database driven music browser for sheersoundstudios.)

Trains, all I really want is trains
And in the morning it’s trains
Cause in the evening it’s trains

I like the way they move
And it’s chill to hear them choo
And I can always make them run
Through the kitchen would be fun

Back in the day
There was this track ran near the bay
Was owned by my pal’s fiance’
He said with trains he did not play
I asked him, “Please?” he said, “You may.”
The gauge was tight and that’s okay
When I ran cars too fast they’d sway
I hoped that on the track they’d stay

I have to say that when I switch them they obey
I have a rather large array
They come with sound and lights and they
Can bring my lover a bouquet
Sometimes they break and I must pray
I fix the track and clear the way
I ran it just the other day
Still it derailed to my dismay

Trains – to move the dishes
Trains – to run through my room
Trains – right through the laundry
Trains – into the bathroom
Trains, that’s all I really want is trains
Four at a time I want trains
The DCC style I want trains
I’m gonna link ’em like chains, trains, trains, trains, trains!