BunkBlog

Happy April Fool’s Day.  Today, even more than other days, don’t believe anything on the internet.  I saw squeeze bacon and a Tauntaun sleeping bag on Thinkgeek, and a Sony UMPC with mini-CD drive on UMPC Portal.  Who knows what we’ll see on Slashdot and others by the time the geeks go to sleep tonight?

To complain to Youtube, click here.

Scroll to the very bottom and click on “new issue”

Select “suspended account” from the options and express your opinion.

The mediafire link (to mirror the video) is here.

Came across this Watchmen-inspired animation on Boing Boing this morning.  Just got to watch it when I got home from work (stupid anti-fun filter on-base), and it’s freakin’ awesome.  I love the idea of Ozymandias playing Shaggy, and Rorschach being just a little nutty.  Right.

Check out the Galileoscope – it’s an attempt by the International Year of Astronomy to create a $10 telescope that can resolve the rings of Saturn.

I noticed in yesterday’s Best Buy ad a neat thing – the Acer Aspire One on sale.  Since I have no money right now, I am only window shopping for new toys.  In addition, I’ve always felt that certain personal technology must be seen and held before purchasing. This worked for me quite well, when I fell in love with the Sony Clie clamshell doodad (which The Boy has inherited with its new battery) way back when, and I stay firmly committed to this concept. I can’t imagine buying a laptop or MP3 player or cell phone (well, cell phone I can’t imagine at all) without first being able to handle the item. Some things are just too personal to be left to online research.

Anyway, back to Best Buy. I went to the store, and looked at the MP3 players for a bit, fending off three salespeople (my Sansa got dropped and now the headphone jack only works if you hold the plug at an unnatural angle). Then, I wandered over to the laptop zone, hoping to see a fabled netbook in the wild. I’ve already seen the Aspire One (a friend owns one), but the sheer novelty of one of the stores in this [expletive] town finally taking notice of the biggest trend in portable computing in years…well, I had to see where they had hidden the machine. It turns out, they hid it in some other store, because there was not one hint of the presence of the Aspire One nor any other netbook. So far, the only place in this [expletive] town I’ve seen a netbook actually for sale in the store is Target. We have an Office Depot, Office Max, and a Best Buy, and not one of those technology stores has seen fit to stock any netbooks at all. Nuts.

I wonder if the Sony Vaio P will end up in one of the local stores. I’m doubting it.

When I was 8 years old, I had two chemistry sets.  I went through all sorts of experiments, producing acids that I used to clean/destroy small objects, color-changing things, etc. I’ve seen several times over the past few years stories about the new chemistry sets, which apparently don’t contain any chemicals more interesting than tannic acid (tea extract). We don’t want our young people to grow up curious about science, obviously.

And then there is the curious case of Lewis Casey, who was arrested on suspicion of making meth in his garage. When it was proven rather easily that his chemistry lab was merely a chemistry lab (he’s a college chemistry major), the Canadian government charged him with making bombs instead. Have you ever heard the term “chilling effect” before?

Casey is no longer allowed to engage in chemistry experiments except under supervision in school labs. 

That’s insane.

The woman who is known as the voice of the Enterprise has died, at the age of 76. She’ll always be Nurse Chapel to some, but I’ll remember her as Lwaxana Troi, that saucy lady. Majel Barrett Roddenberry is the only person to have been in every movie, even if only as a disembodied voice.  That voice lives on, in the next Trek film, which is a great tribute to honor a great actress.

I’ve been working on military bases for pretty much my entire adult life.  In that time, I’ve been continually amazed and astonished at the utter inanity of the bureaucratic ninnies who are allowed to run much of the daily workings of the government.  For instance, we have a proxy server which blocks access to web sites deemed inappropriate.  Which sites are inappropriate and why remains a guessing game, as they have misconfigured the blasted thing to show a useless error message.  There are locations in the “Access Denied” template to display exactly what category of evil you were trying to access, as well as the usual boilerplate about Big Brother watching you and he’s gonna getcha.

Today, I discovered that RealClimate is blocked. Exactly how is a climatology site objectionable? Of course, the propaganda information sites they do allow are equally interesting. There has never been a day that drug abuser Rush Limbaugh or felon G Gordon Liddy has been blocked, to my knowledge. Comedian Al Franken’s Senate campaign site – blocked. Air America was blocked, then allowed, then blocked, and now it’s allowed again I believe. For the longest time, Little Green Footballs was allowed, while DailyKos was blocked. Now, they’re both blocked.  I can get behind that – neither of those sites is official use, I’d wager. Drudge Report and WorldNutDaily – always accessible.  Slate’s Video News – blocked. Go figure.

Seriously, RealClimate? Frack.

Ron Moore, you sonofabitch. You evil, twisted, sick muthafracker.

Anyone who has read anything of the British crypto effort during WW2, especially regarding the Enigma machine, should be familiar with the name Bletchley Park.  It was the home of the UK equivalent to our NSA, and also housed Alan Turing during the war.  You’d think preserving such an important location would be completely uncontroversial.  Apparently everyone agrees that the site is a wonderful historical locale and its museum of computing is also a great resource.  But, they’re not too willing to pay for it.

The curator says they may be able to keep running for two more years, unless some generous folks step up.  That would be a shame.

Oh, and if you’re not a crypto geek, at least read Between Silk and Cyanide – it’s a fantastic read and a very interesting look at the difficulties of covert agents and how they tie in with the crypto geek culture as well.  Crypto geeks have all read Cryptonomicon, so I won’t bother to link to that one.  🙂

Yeah, Weezer is totally the band of geeks everywhere.

Remember when the MSN Music Store shut down over a year ago? Remember that Microsoft said that songs you “bought” from the MSN Music Store were going to be yours to keep forever? Guess what, sucker? After August, you can’t upgrade your computer without losing your music.

Yet another in a long series of “DRM Hates Customers” stories. You’d think the computer industry ditching copy protection years ago, coupled with the complete meltdown of DRM in music over the past couple years, would make the movie industry wake up and kill their copy protection plans. You’d be wrong. Not that their DRM will hold up either… Oh, yeah – it didn’t! HAH!

I’ve been using a WD MyBook 500GB USB-attached drive for my nightly backups for about a year now.  This week, it stopped working reliably (SMART errors intermittently).  Of course, it’s out of warranty, so it had to die.  🙂

I’m looking into a more reliable storage system, perhaps a RAID or Drobo box, maybe attached to the network, but probably direct-attached to the desktop.  Does anyone have any advice, based on personal experience?

The Drobo looks awfully sweet, if a bit pricey.  I like the idea that I can just swap in a new drive whenever I have some extra cash (or drives drop in price or go on sale), and the device just uses it automagically.  The traditional RAID approach of having multiple identical drives, preferably all the same model, seems somewhat rigid and unreasonable to me.  What happens if a drive fails a year or two from now, and that model is no longer available?  Imagine you have a RAID filled with 80GB drives today; good luck finding a replacement drive new.

Following Wayne’s tip on Gear Diary, I requested a “free” Senseo coffee maker (just pay for shipping) last week.  Guess what’s in my kitchen right now?  Oh, yeah, baby.  I’m not a big coffee drinker, but someone else is and for fifteen bucks, what the heck?

I guess I didn’t read the offer very well, because I was surprised to see a canister in the box, along with a bag of coffee and the machine itself.  The machine is on sale at Amazon for about 65, coffee bags cost around 4 dollars, and the canister is another 4 bucks.  So, almost 75 dollars worth of coffee swag for 15 – dude, hit that site, if you (or your significant other) like coffee even a little bit.

A great look at upgrading from Vista to XP.  Amusing and yet very informative as a primer to the various issues Vista users encounter far too frequently.  Except Wayne, who thinks Vista is wonderful.  Cuz he’s insane.

Review: Windows XP – Coding Sanity

The base where I work uses some of the most arbitrary web-blocking filters I’ve ever seen. Yesterday, I could get to ScienceBlogs, today they’re listed as forbidden because they are “Reference/Education” pages. Yes, we wouldn’t want anyone here at the Air Education and Training Command to get to any sort of reference or education page.

My personal website has been blocked today (but not yesterday), listed as a “Forum/Bulletin Board.” Strangely, I can still get to Rush Limbaugh; I’m sure that’s official government use there. Al Franken’s campaign page is blocked for being a “Personal Page” – no political slant at all there, is there?

The web filtering they’ve had in place has gotten ever-more draconian over the years, to the point that I’m actually surprised if a hyperlink does not end in an “Access Denied” page. Science Blogs has got to be the top of the WTF list, though.

Remember the chucklehead from martial arts class? I somehow couldn’t get it through to him by my reading while he was talking, that I don’t really care to hear his wacko far-right talk radio dittohead talking points. *sigh*

I’m reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s latest trilogy, which hasn’t a name yet that I’m aware of but we’ll call it the Climate Change Series, absent anything better. I’m about 30 pages into the second book, and I do rather like to read books that I have open to read. But, chucklehead decided to regale me with more of his tales from the conspiracy side. Global warming may or may not be happening, and if it is it’s nothing we can fix anyway, blah blah blah. Of course, he admits that he has never read anything on the issue, and only gets his information from talk radio. Personally, I try to read the occasional article from an actual scientist, but I’m sure Laura Schlesinger is very well-read on subtle issues of climatology.

Last time I talked with this man, he told me about the evil Law of the Sea Treaty, which was going to give our sovereignty to some group of UN bad guys (it’s not). Ever notice how the far right has some sort of paranoia about the UN? Considering how completely ineffectual the UN has been in almost everything they’ve ever attempted, how scared could anyone be of them? So, this time around, his UN conspiracy is surrounding the IPCC, which of course he doesn’t even know the name of but just calls “them scientists.” There are some people who wrote pieces of the IPCC-4 report who don’t agree with the totality of that report. Surprised? Of course not. How many people wrote that document? Look up Richard Lindzen; I’m certain that’s the most prominent person that fits his description. Chuckles says that there are a lot, well, maybe a few, at least a significant number, of IPCC signers who want their names removed from the document. Let me just say, every large group has some nuts and publicity hounds. Doesn’t mean that the entire organization is wrong. The lack of any coherent alternate hypothesis to the prevailing one does not imply that there is a conspiracy which is repressing information. There aren’t a lot of coherent alternate hypotheses to the Earth being an oblate ovoid either; doesn’t mean there’s a conspiracy against Flat Earthers.

Wandering farther off the path, chucklehead then had the insane notion that one should “follow the money” to find out who is benefiting from the climate change folks. Um, if we were to follow the largest streams of money surrounding this “debate” (not really a debate in the scientific world, no matter what politicians may think), we’d find it leads to the anthropogenic climate change deniers, as backed by the most wealthy corporations in the world, the petroleum industry. I’m no conspiracy theorist, but if you want to throw around “follow the money” tropes, maybe you should have a clue what you’re talking about first.

I tried to explain thermohaline circulation, and the fact that its disruption took less than a decade but caused the 1300 year Younger Dryas period of intense cold (5 degrees Celsius drop in the North Atlantic region), but I’m sure it was pointless. He’s also oblivious to the fact that our instruments get better each year, and so do our predictive abilities. The concept that theories are refined and perfected over time is foreign to him, of course.

Somehow, he even worked abiotic petroleum into his meanderings. Remember, this is someone who quite openly admits he has read nothing about the science behind all this, but just goes with his instincts on things. Our instincts are great for catching balls and shooting at slow-moving animals; they aren’t much good at megayear musings and thousand-mile discussions. I find it interesting that the majority of abiotic petroleum believers are in Russia, which is famous for such scientific breakthroughs as Lysenkoism (Lamarckian evolution).

Seriously, it’s not hard to learn enough to be halfway cognizant of the underlying science. Chucklehead is one of a depressingly large number of people who are willfully ignorant of things that they form strong opinions about. Just because you wish something were true doesn’t mean reality must bend to your will.

It’s amazing to me how many people will deny reality in order to defend their prejudices and pre-existing notions. And there isn’t just one area of life that is vulnerable to this sort of reality denial; it can be everything from computers to cosmogony to theology.

Linux users have, for years, said it’s not the OS that is causing usability and productivity problems – it’s the lack of drivers. Of course, the average user doesn’t care why their printer doesn’t work, and is not going to blame HP for not supporting Linux, because their printer works just fine in Windows so it must be Linux’s fault that it doesn’t print.

Although the vast majority of the technology industry has come to the conclusion that Windows Vista is more trouble than it’s worth, some people defend it to the most ridiculous lengths. The driver defense comes up, just as with the Linux geeks from years past. “Vista is great, it just needs some drivers and people need to understand how to manage it. And the User Access Control dialog boxes aren’t very intrusive after you get used to clicking them every single session once per program or operation; people just need to get used to it. Of course, you can’t expect to run Vista on a machine with only one gigabyte of memory, no matter that the big box retailers sell 1GB machines with Vista Premium installed on them.”  And so on.

No, people won’t learn the OS in order to work their applications; they just want to click a file and make it work. To assert otherwise is to deny the reality of how the vast majority of people approach computing, in favor of some ideal world where everyone takes a three-week course in Vista before they operate it, and never go to skeezy websites and always keep their virus software updated… Well, you know.

Oh, you thought I was going to talk about theology? Nah. PZ Myers can do that for me.

As I watched Mark Klein on the news this morning, it occurred to me that none of the major internet peers care about their customers.  In a world where one of the peers was more concerned with the safety of their data and less concerned with sucking up to the government, AT&T would have been routed around via a DNS poisoning. Any organization which cannot be trusted to keep the data on the internet safe and secure should simply not be trusted with that data.

Yet, none of the peers dropped AT&T as a peer. They continued to route data through AT&T’s routers, even as it became perfectly clear that AT&T was copying all the data as it went by for analysis by the government.

I’ve deleted nearly 600 pieces of comment spam in the past two days.  I’ve noticed, in the past, one or two legitimate comments being tagged as spam, but I didn’t look through this recent flood for such stragglers.  Every time a legit comment was tagged as spam, it’s because the commenter was using an obviously fake email address in their info; no email address is needed, so if you just don’t put one, it should be good. If you’ve commented recently and it didn’t post, there ya go.

Frickin’ spammers…