One bourbon, one scotch, and one mav

Warm:

“We’ve had an issue, a problem that we’ve had to confront, which is because of the way the GPL (General Public License) works, and because open-source Linux does not come from a company — Linux comes from the community — the fact that that product uses our patented intellectual property is a problem for our shareholders…

And we agreed on a, we call it an IP bridge, essentially an arrangement under which they pay us some money for the right to tell the customer that anybody who uses Suse Linux is appropriately covered. There will be no patent issues. They’ve appropriately compensated Microsoft for our intellectual property, which is important to us. In a sense you could say anybody who has got Linux in their data center today sort of has an undisclosed balance sheet liability, because it’s not just Microsoft patents.” - Steve Ballmer

Getting warmer:

“These devices are just repositories for stolen music, and they all know it, So it’s time to get paid for it.” -Universal Music chair Doug Morris

DING DING DING! We have a WINNER, Johnny!

“…those who would fight outside the rules of law, those who would use weapons of mass destruction, and those who would target civilians are, in fact, subject to a totally different set of rules…”

“we will adopt rules of engagement that use every technology we can find to break up their capacity to use the Internet, to break up their capacity to use free speech, and to go after people who want to kill us to stop them from recruiting people.” - Newt Gingrich.

Seriously, when the John Birch Society thinks your a Constitution-attacking nutball, you don’t have anywhere to go but down.

If there’s one thing in particular I really, really hate about being a fatass, it’s the fact that it seems fucking impossible to find a good, comfortable office chair. I know this probably isn’t a fatass-only endeavour, but it sure seems like it.

I’ve purchased 3 different office chairs in the last year, one for every time my old chair broke. Every time I have ended up hating the chair I bought and patching my old chair together somehow. Well, this is the last straw - my old faithful chair broke in a way that’s not easily fixable, and now I’m stuck dealing with crappy-ass chairs.

First one I tried was at Officemax, I found a small little chair that felt deceptively comfortable. Upon getting it home I discovered why - after a couple hours of sitting on the ol’ ass, it felt less comfortable than setting on a pile of rocks. Second one was very comfy, with the problem that its center of gravity was so skewed towards the rear of the chair that I feel like I’m doing a tremendous amount of effort to tilt it backwards. And it’s too high. Strike two. Third chair, which I bought tonight, jumped right out at me when I walked into the store - big, roomy, durable construction, and sitting in the demo model felt like falling into a cloud. Well, the one I pulled out of the box is uncomfortable and too high for my desk. Again. So it’s going back. Fuck. I’m convinced there’s some sort of magic spell going on with the demo aisle chairs. Pretty soon I’m gonna be sitting on a stack of milk crates. (At least it’ll be more comfortable than chair #1.)

At this point I’d be more than willing to drop $1000 on one of those flashy dot-bomb era office chairs, if in return it would be comfortable and last me a minimum of 5 years. $200 a year is more than worth it if I could find a comfortable place to park my ass.

It’s been an odd week-or-so. (In reality, it’s probably more than that, but bear with me.) It started out with a two-plus hour discussion between RD and I, which involved me trying to detail why I think Microsoft is evil. I did a crappy job of it and really need to work on that in the future.

Later, I tried once again to make Vista work with my modded XBOX, only to once again fail miserably. I thought of all the ways the OS is restricted and how much of a hassle running Windows has become in the last two years, and I can’t bear to do it anymore. Even XP is a pain in the ass. My Windows box has been permanently relegated to third fiddle.

I discussed with a few people the possibility of using an XBOX 360 (with a MCE backend) as a replacement for XBMC, but its limitations are too severe. It won’t really play anything that’s not WMV, and I refuse for both technical and political reasons to reencode all my crap into wmv. As far as time-shifting goes, Myth and its xbox frontend seem to be a far superior solution.

Then on Thanksgiving, I had a two-hour discussion with my cousin - a guy that once said he wouldn’t be happy until his entire network was authenticating through Active Directory - about how happy he is that he never went with AD and stuck it out with NDS, and how he would love to see all of his systems (desktop and server) running Linux. We also discussed the Microsoft versus the Linux community issue - I am firmly convinced that if Microsoft would come out and indicate exactly what parts of the Linux kernel are infringing, they could be replaced outright in a matter of days. It’s a scare tactic, and he seemed to agree with that.

I read a wonderful article by Andy Ihnatko in the Chicago Sun-Times about why Microsoft’s music player is a galactically bad idea. It eloquently sums up the situation without resorting to nerd rage (well, at least not so much.) Over here at ZDNet, Microsoft’s position on virtualization in Vista licensing is made more clear: virtualization is not mature enough to allow consumers to run it - apparently nobody at Microsoft has ever used Parallels, because it’s the best VM tech I have ever seen, anywhere, and I’ve got a VMware Infrastructure 4-proc server at work. At the same time, Business 2.0 describes the attempt to make Microsoft a little more light on its feet and less dependent on Windows. Products like the Zune are supposed to do that. How we’re not sure.

I still don’t have an eloquent answer for RD. One of the core pieces, though, defining whether Microsoft is evil or not has to do with the amount of FUD they produce. In the last two years, the message has been clear: we control the horizontal, we control the vertical, we control your updates if you pirate Windows (fucking not only you, but everyone who happens to be unlucky enough to share a network with you - like all the people on your cable loop, or in your dorm.) But in the last month or so, Microsoft has been kicking the FUD into overdrive: Open source is piracy, and Novell admitted it. MP3 players are piracy, because every time you buy one you pay the record industry a fine. Virtualization is bad and scary because it abstracts control away from Microsoft. If it’s good enough for President Bush, it’s good enough for Microsoft.

All of these things have one defining message: Microsoft is all about control. They are not about open standards. They are the epitome of the DRM world: take away this privilege you used to call fair use, and sell it back to you for a few dollars more. Any technology that would get in the way of this goal has to be crushed via any means necessary: legal attack, PR campaigns, stealthily taking away features and seeing if anybody notices. They are leading the charge. Vista is Microsoft’s attempt to become that pale horse. And that’s why, today, Microsoft is evil.

I’m sure tomorrow I’ll have yet another reason, but today this is enough.

I’ve contributed to the EFF this month; how about you?

If you’re even remotely a Tenacious D fan, GET YOUR ASS TO MARS THE MOVIE THEATER AND SEE

Tenacious D: The Pick of Destiny!!!!

For it is crazy fucking awesome and you owe it to yourself to see it. If you’re a D fan, you will find it hilariously funny. It is everything you ever dreamed of, and more!

There aren’t nearly enough exclamation marks in this post!!!!!!11111ONEONEELEVEN

Craig Neilsen died last Sunday in his sleep, at home. I suppose if there’s a way to go, being a multimillionaire, creating a crapload of jobs and several businesses and being damn determined to not sell out and then dying in your sleep is a pretty fucking good way to do it. The Times News has a really neat article about how important he was to us here in Twin, especially pre-Ameristar.

Like most Twin Falls residents (and for that matter, most Pete’s employees) I never met him; he was more of a myth than a person. He owned or had interests in a lot of different things in Twin Falls; was my landlord, as such, for a while (when I had the shop on Blue Lakes) and my employer later.

I don’t have any personal experiences to share, unfortunately. All I know is what I heard in passing. I heard that he was a bit of a perfectionist, didn’t tolerate his employees slacking or behaving unprofessionally, and was a bit of an asshole when it came to his dealings with Twin’s government. I suppose all of those things are traits of a highly driven person. I wish I had gotten to meet him at some point so that I could put a face on the myth, and some substance behind those stories, but it seems I have no such luck.

I hope there are no plans to close Pete’s or the Shu as that would create one hell of a lot of heartache for Twin Falls, and would pretty much destroy Jackpot outright.

In the interest of full disclosure. Some think I am a zealot. I’m actually just a big fan of things that work, and 99% of my rabid fanboyism comes from that.

• The keyboard feels stiffer. One of the keys didn’t respond until I pried it up and air-cleaned it, apparently something was stuck in there during production.
• The oddly asymmetric screen borders trip my OCD a lot.
• The new power adapter cord is stiffer and harder to deal with, and at the same time the strain relief on the Magsafe connector seems kind of weeny. Perhaps that’s the origin of all those damaged MagSafe connector issues.
• Sleep takes 6-8 seconds now instead of 2. This bugs me.
• Sleep light on the front has 2 states: solid on, when screen is powered off; breathing, when system is in sleep. This can be confusing at first glance.
• On one occasion the headphone jack did not properly reset when the connector was removed. (This did happen once on my PowerBook too, FWIW.)
• The new latch is harder to unlock than the old one was.
• Remote and camera windows are both ugly.
• I still can’t get it to boot of USB proper-like.
• The downside to the huge trackpad is sometimes you don’t realize when some part of your hand is touching it. This really fucked with me for the first couple of days, especially during scrolling.

There are a lot of things I really like, but in keeping with the “full disclosure” comment, I’m not gonna go into that right now.

Seriously, could there have been a better display of how diametrically opposed the newest electronic toys are than last week?

If you’ve been hiding under a rock, the monolithic (literally, not figuratively) Playstation 3 and strikingly dissimilar Nintendo Wii made their market debut over the last few days.

While the Playstation 3 was causing riots, fights, drive-by shootings (seriously, you can’t make this shit up) and Sony stores were behaving so amateurishly that Boston’s mayor wrote them a note to take home to their mommies, Nintendo’s console sold out with more units to go around and still managed to be the great bringer of peace to such a dramatic degree that the damn thing should have rolled up in VW vans, blaring Hendrix and discussing how to convert a Wiimote into a bong instead of being delivered in ice cream trucks.

Interestingly, ten years ago Nintendo was the game company of war, suing ROM sites into oblivion and crushing everyone who attempted to mod their shit, while Sony (taking the Microsoft tack, I suppose) seemed to completely ignore modders and hackers. Ten years later, Nintendo seems to care more about making good games than suing people, while Sony is suing small, specialized distributors into oblivion for stupid, petty reasons.

Edit: I finally found it! That Sony VP quote I was looking for, circa 2000, courtesy Slashdot:

“Sony is going to take aggressive steps to stop this,” Heckler told the Summer Forty-Niner. “We will develop technology that transcends the individual user. We will firewall Napster at source — we will block it at your cable company, we will block it at your phone company, we will block it at your [Internet-service provider]. We will firewall it at your PC.

“These strategies,” Heckler said, “are being aggressively pursued because there is simply too much at stake.”

That was the quote that made me quit buying Sony anything. Not like it was a big sacrifice, since they haven’t made anything but cheap crap since 1990 or so.

http://swedishcrunk.ytmnsfw.com/

After 2 days of Vista training, and a few suggestions from my colleagues, I came home and reinstalled Vista from scratch. I couldn’t possibly keep track of all the GPO changes I had made so I figured a fresh install would be bulletproof. It still won’t work. Everything in the house works except for XBMC communication. I completely fucking wasted another 2-3 hours reinstalling Vista and fucking with group policy only to find myself back where I started - no version of XBMC (1.x, 2.0.1) will connect to Vista through SMB.

It’s like this: My Windows box only does 2 things these days: play games, serve NTFS drives. It does the latter WAY, WAY more than it does the former, so if it can’t do it, that’s a big goddamn problem.

What I don’t get is this: I installed XP. SP2. With all updates. Apparently this is insecure, I guess, because I was able to set the proper perms and get XBMC to connect to it in milliseconds. I installed CCCP (which I am using instead of Defilerpak, since Defiler seems to have fallen off the goddamn earth) and within seconds I am playing VAST. Not only that, but I am running a proper goddamn mixer (which Vista does not have) and running XNview, which will not fucking run at all under Vista (it runs, blows up, then Vista insists that the newest version works, and takes me back to the XNview homepage and insists I download the same version I just tried to run. ) The thing that really pisses me off about this whole thing is I had this exact set of shit back when XP was new - I had to go through all sorts of hell and GPO hacking to be able to get it to talk to Linux back then.

I recall Easy CD Creator 3, when installed on NT4.0, would completely brick the install, requiring a fresh reinstall. Two years later, Adaptec released Easy CD Creator 4, just in time for Windows 2000, and conveniently if you installed it you bricked your install and had to do a fresh reinstall. It’s only funny if you’re not the one dealing with this shit. If you’re the guy fixing it, it’s fucking incompetence of the highest caliber.

RD said that if this was a Linux problem I would be crawling over broken glass to fix it. I would respond by saying there simply is no counterpart in Linux-land; tradition dictates that even as security increases, one be allowed to shoot one’s self in the foot if one so desires. Fuck, OpenSSH can still be configured to allow ssh1 connections; it doesn’t by default, because that protocol has more holes than a watermelon post-buckshot, but it can.

To paraphrase Cory Doctorow, nobody ever said “It would be awesome if somebody would invent a way that I could do less with my computer today.” I think my stock response to “Why do you like Linux/Mac OS X/BSD/BeOS/DOS better than Windows?” is going to be “If I’m gonna buy a gun, I’d damn well better be able to shoot myself with it.”

Due to a couple of galactically huge mistakes on my part, an upgrade that I had originally thought would be a simple matter ended up being a massively huge undertaking. In addition, I reinstalled the OS on my Windows box about a good half-dozen times this weekend. Finally figuring out what the problem was really, really late Saturday night, I installed Vista.

It’s got a couple of issues. Out of the box, it’s only compatible with clients that do NTLMv2 authentication. In case you’re paying attention, that’s XP and 2k3. I have 1 Windows box in a sea of *nix systems. And thus begins my grand adventure through the wonderful and mindblowingly tedious world of group policy.

Fixing the Linux boxes was easy - either update them or don’t. Samba 3.0.22 does NTLMv2. My old Fedora Core 3 box doesn’t, but I need to replace or update it anyway, making it squarely my fault. Macs not so easy; Samba 3.0.10 is part of OS X 10.4.8, and for some reason it won’t quite work. Turning off NTLMv2 requirements makes them work for the time being, until I can find out why they won’t work (perhaps it’s just a setting.)

The real story here, though, is my xbox. I have a modded xbox running XBMC (circa 4.20.06) which plays content to my TV. It is the best media player I own, and since getting it from RD has become the center of my existence. It’s played through Farscape twice, half of Stargate, an endless number of Babylon 5 episodes, and seems to be completely incompatible with Vista. As I understand it (have not verified this to my liking yet) it is built on Samba 2.x codebase, and therefore can’t ever do NTLMv2. But that’s not the only thing that’s wrong; all my other systems authenticate with my own username and password. My xbox does not, for varying reasons including but not limited to the fact that I have shares on my systems that I don’t necessarily want everybody plowing through with impunity, and my xbox is basically fair game for everyone to use. Also, it’s way fucking simpler to just let it read things through guest, since it doesn’t write anything.

Trying to make guest auth work in Vista appears to be akin to getting a straight answer out of a Presidential candidate. It’s not possible, and even if it was you couldn’t trust it. I spent a couple of hours fucking with it today, and will probably spend a couple more hours fucking with it, I’ll probably end up going back to XP, and what I simply don’t understand is this:

With so many legacy clients out there, why isn’t it possible to just click a button and say “Listen, dammit, I know it’s insecure, but I want my old shit to work.”

Security requires a degree of simplicity to be effective. Make something too difficult, and nobody will care if it’s secure or not - they’ll turn it off to spite you. And if they can’t turn it off, they’ll resort to violence… the XP cd’s already in the drive, and if that isn’t violent, I don’t know what is.