31 Dec 2006
Fare Thee Well, 2006

The last hour of the year has arrived - I suppose I should wax poetic and reflective, but naw - I think I'll pass. Lot's has happened this year, some good, some bad, some of as yet unknown propensity. Some things blogged, and some on which I've remained silent.

But I do want to thank my loyal readers: it took three years to reach 500 comments, and less than 11 months to double that number. My server logs show that this humble effort is being read, and surprisingly widely. According to The Truth Laid Bear I'm a Flappy Bird, and ranked 3628th in link popularity. Not bad for an old code writin' heathen farmer, if I do say so myself.

Being back in the corporate world has had an impact here: I've not been posting with nearly the frequency I'd like. But I will try to get better about that, if for no other reason than my own sanity.

So 2007 - bring it on!

23:37 /Home | 2 comments | permanent link

Capra classic 'commie propaganda'

Go figure ...

The all-American film classic It's a Wonderful Life was slammed as communist propaganda by US government officials in the 1940s.

(link) [The Register]

23:27 /Politics | 1 comment | permanent link

Animal sacrifices maim 1,400 in Turkey

Animal sacrifice, eh? If you've read this blog for any length of time at all, you should be well aware that I harbor only the worst of suspicions about the Muslim religion (although I count individual Muslims as friends) but in this case they're getting a bum rap. These animals (sheep and goats, mostly) are not "sacrificed" in the sense that modern Americans envision animal sacrifice, they're being slaughtered for meat using the religiously prescribed method called halal. I wonder if this writer would consider kosher slaughtering of animals a "sacrifice"? Probably not ....

In point of fact, halal, kosher and even heathen methods of animal "sacrifice" are more humane than modern commercial slaughterhouse techniques. They basically involve making sure that the animal doe not suffer needlessly, and in praying before the slaughter.

I guess that's the definition of "sacrifice" in modern America: praying over the animal before you take it's life to feed your kith and kin. If you pray over it after you've killed it, it's called "Thanksgiving"...

AP - Over a thousand Turks spent the first day of the Muslim feast of Eid al-Adha in emergency wards on Sunday after stabbing themselves or suffering other injuries while sacrificing startled animals.

(link) [Yahoo! News: Top Stories]

23:25 /Asatru | 2 comments | permanent link

Next big test of power to seize property?

Is there anyone out there who still believes that government has anything to do with fairness or justice? Mr. Didden should've asked Suzette Kelo about his investment opportunity. After having her property seized to build a new campus for a private company (Pfizer), she directed a Yule card to those folks responsible, including five Supreme Court justices. The cover showed Ms. Kelo's former home. It read:

Here is my house that you did take
From me to you,
this spell I make
Your houses, your homes
Your family, your friends
May they live in misery
That never ends.
I curse you all
May you rot in hell
To each of you I send this spell
For the rest of your lives
I wish you ill
I send this now
By the power of will

One of the receipts did not find it very amusing:

"It's amazing anyone could be so vindictive when they've made so much money," said Schwenker-Mayer on Tuesday, after receiving her card.

From this comment I can only assume that a passerby could sexually proposition Ms. Schwenker-Mayer, and they'd only have to discuss price... because everything has a price. We have become a society where the only measure of wealth is money and everything is for sale to the highest bidder. But for some of us, there are some things money can't buy, and MasterCard can't help with: some things are not for sale.

I've quoted a guy named Ed Howdershelt as saying "There are four boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order." In these court cases we're seeing the use of the jury box, to no avail, in a defense of liberty.

I leave it as an exercise for the reader to discern the next step, should this ultimately fail.

Bart Didden wanted to put a CVS pharmacy on his property in Port Chester, N.Y. He even obtained approvals from the local planning board.

(link) [Christian Science Monitor | Top Stories]

23:15 /Politics | 1 comment | permanent link

29 Dec 2006
Best Description of DRM Ever

Ran across this tale on Engadget this morning and had to pass along the best tag line ever for digital rights management:

DRM man, it's like a freaking möbius strip of consumer hurt.

 

23:04 /Copywrongs | 1 comment | permanent link

Disputed Fla. election to spill into U.S. House

Déjà vu ...

Reuters - A disputed election result in a U.S. House of Representatives race in Florida will be one of the first items raised when the Democratic-controlled House convenes next week, injecting partisan politics into the start of the 110th Congress.

(link) [Yahoo! News: Top Stories]

22:59 /Politics | 0 comments | permanent link

28 Dec 2006
FDA: No safety labels needed on cloned food

They're missing the point entirely: of course cloned meat is safe for human consumption. We eat identical twin cattle, sheep and hogs all the time, and they're genetically identical, which is all cloning is about.

The danger from cloned cows (or any genetically manipulated organism) come from the attack on bio-diversity that it represents. We've managed to reduce the diversity in livestock and other crops dramatically by selective breeding (and line breeding, or breeding in). Imagine the impact the "perfect cow" will have on the industry if it's available for cloning.

Why should you care? After all, perfect cows make perfect steaks, right? You should care if you'd like to keep eating, because reducing the biodiversity of a given population increases it's susceptibility to disease and genetic defects - livestock today is actually much less healthy than it was before programmed selective breeding began to be practiced on a large scale in the 19th century.

We're busy playing god on a scale heretofore undreamed of: because if we make just one serious screw up we're gonna be real hungry for a long, long time.

Meat and milk from cloned animals may not appear in supermarkets for years despite being deemed by the government as safe to eat. But don't be surprised if "clone-free" labels appear sooner.

(link) [CNN.com]

21:34 /Agriculture | 3 comments | permanent link

Music denied -- shoppers overwhelm iTunes

Sometimes a server log is worth a thousand analysts...

Swarms of online shoppers armed with new iPods and iTunes gift cards apparently overwhelmed Apple's iTunes music store over the holiday, prompting error messages and slowdowns of 20 minutes or more for downloads of a single song.

(link) [CNN.com]

20:32 /Technology | 1 comment | permanent link

27 Dec 2006
Former President Gerald Ford dies at 93

Not all stereotypes are without merit, and Mr. Ford had quite the reputation as a bumbler. I was privileged to personally witness him in action once upon a time ...

I was stationed at Andrews AFB outside Washington during most of the Watergate crisis, going to Vietnamese language school at the old Anacostia Navy Yard. One of the "perks" of being at Andrews was being "invited" to the flight line whenever we were off duty and the President was flying in. As a consequence, I watched both Nixon and Ford come and go many times.

I forget the exact circumstances surrounding this, but Mr. Ford was arriving in Marine One (the helicopter) at Andrews with some foreign dignitary or another, and there was an Army honor guard present. As the chopper hovered, one of the guard literally rolled out the red carpet, backing up toward the landing pad, his burnished steel blue helmet shining in the sun. The copter landed, and started to slow it's rotors down just as he reached the area of the door. Suddenly the hatch popped down, bonking the solider on the head and sending him sprawling under the chopper, and President Ford appeared in the doorway, waving at the crowd (of which I was a part), as a couple of medics raced towards their fallen comrade.

To his credit, when he realized what had happened, he hustled down the stairs (and didn't stumble) and went over to help the fellow he'd inadvertently sent flying get up, proving himself to be an altogether decent fellow, despite his lofty office. I'm sure there's one former soldier out there who still remembers being almost knocked out, and then helped up off the tarmac, by the President of the United States.

RIP, Jerry.

Gerald R. Ford, who picked up the pieces of Richard Nixon's scandal-shattered White House as the 38th and only unelected president in America's history, has died, his wife, Betty, said Tuesday. He was 93.

(link) [CNN.com]

22:24 /Politics | 0 comments | permanent link

Who Killed the Electric Trolley?

A sordid tale, indeed...

A shadowy story of subsidies and subterfuge tracks the demise of America's most beloved type of public transit. In Autopia.

(link) [Wired News: Top Stories]

22:08 /Politics | 1 comment | permanent link

I Spoke Too Soon

I went off on quite a rant the other day, moaning about M$ Visual Studio and it's nearly unusable user interface. I compared it to the tools I was most used to, which were from Borland, namely Delphi and C++ Builder, and found MSVC sorely lacking.

Which is where the title of this post comes in: I should have made it clear that my references were to C++Builder and Delphi before the atrocity known as "Borland Developer Studio" was foisted on the unsuspecting programmer. You see, I downloaded a trial copy at work (it's 537MB download, not for an ISDN line at home). And what an eye opener it was.

Oh, they still have the VCL, a completely superior framework for Win32. And they've added .Net capability and even a C# environment. But they've tossed their old IDE to the trash heap of history, and rather than coming up with something new and better, they've slavishly imitated Visual Studio, right down to the idiotic project setting style, the bifurcation of each program into 'Debug' and 'Release' branches, and the utter and complete lack of usable help.

Un-fucking believable. Forms are now shown on tabs in the editor rather than free floating - and they've undocked the tool pallet and made it contextual, doubling as a template and wizard container. The screen's so busy and cluttered it took me thirty minutes just to figure out how to open a new project!

Imitation is said to be the sincerest form of flattery, but why they chose to flatter the dunghill known as Visual Studio is completely beyond me.

I was prompted to download the Borland tool out of frustration - I have gotten nowhere at work trying to do a simple SOAP client in Visual C++ without using the .Net framework (which is deemed too big a download for our customers). Knowing C++ Builder 6 as well as I do, I figured I could whip one out in an hour or two. Which I did. Tonight. At home. Using C++ Builder 6. Because the ultra expensive and expansive Borland Developer Studio was completely unusable - I couldn't even get F1 context help to pop a readable class definition!

So it's Visual C++ and M$ tools for me: if I gotta use an environment that sucks that badly, I might as well use the one that's most popular with employers, and productivity be damned. Which should make some of the folks at Borland think: I've been using (and spec'ing and buying) Borland compilers since the 1980's. And unless I can figure out a way to make the IDE function in a "classic" mode, and get help actually working, it looks like Delphi 4 and C++ Builder 6 will be my last purchase from that venerable institution.

00:37 /Technology | 1 comment | permanent link

25 Dec 2006
Vista Security The 'Longest Suicide Note in History'?

Read this: Microsoft's just killed the goose that's been laying those golden eggs.

How does this new system play with the opinion of it's founder? He's right: consumers simply won't put up with this kind of treacherous computing. So what's M$ really thinking? Only time will tell...

The Inquirer is reporting on an analysis of Vista by Peter Gutmann — a medical imaging specialist. This isn't the usual anti-Microsoft story — just a professional looking at what is going to happen to his computer if it is upgraded to Microsoft Vista.

(link) [Slashdot]

22:26 /Technology | 2 comments | permanent link

24 Dec 2006
Where "Santa" Got his "reindeer"

Yule Buck

Dressed in goatskins and wearing a frightening mask and horns, the Yule buck visited children's houses, giving gifts and threatening the nonconformists. Sometimes this character, wearing a buck head, "went after" children. In some areas, the Julbok survived as a straw puppet tossed from hand to hand in games, and in still others, survived only as a buck-shaped cake.

According to Ruth Cole Kainen, in America's Christmas Heritage, the Yule buck is one European creature who made the crossing to America, where he lived on on Hatteras Island, North Carolina, late into the 1700's. Christmas there began with a parade of fife and drums, and shortly before dark the townsfolk dressed in "grotesque" costumes. Then Old Buck emerged from the woods, where he had lived all year. With a steer's head and horns on a pole body covered in quilts and adorned with a bell, Old Buck rushed at the crowds awaiting him.

The Julbok survived in another capacity, pulling the sled for the gift-giver known as Jultomten, a Yule elf...

Despite Jultomten's popularization as a fun-loving gift giver, however, an undercurrent of fear lives on at Sweedish Christmas. Adults in the mid-twentiethe century considered Jultomten a destructive spirit, and set out porridge and milk on Christmas Eve in the hopes of warding off his malevolence. And, although the Yule goblin brings gifts, there is a dark side to the visit as well, and the whole family sleeps together on the floor on Christmas Eve as protection against the goblins who roam the earth during Yuletide.

from Santa Claus: Last of the Wild Men by Phyllis Siefker

12:13 /Asatru | 1 comment | permanent link

Bitchin' bout the Weather ...

is every farmer's favorite pastime, and I guess I'm no different. Although I daresay that we've had some mighty strange weather this last year - and for a few years running, in point of fact.

Here's a link to the Weather Underground's data page for West Lafayette for the past year. Records are pretty irrelevant for this, so I've left them off on the chart, but look at the averages (in blue) and last years data (in red). Temperatures seem to hover around normal, but then look at the rain and snow. No snow to be seen - but the rainfall has made up for it! We're so soggy it's almost beyond belief. Drainage system are overloaded, the ground is completely saturated, and while there's no rain on the immediate horizon, I'd bet almost anything that we're in for more before the turning of the year.

My rain gage (at 5 inches) has overflowed this past week. Cattle are having a hard time navigating the pasture, and the sheep are just hopping from semi-dry spot to semi-dry spot. The horse, the goats and the llama will hardly venture out of the barn, for fear of sinking, I'd wager.

The back half of my neighbor's winter wheat field looks like a rice paddy. The creek's out of it's banks and over the flood gates, and has been since Wednesday. If this keeps up, I think I'm going to have to evolve webbed feet and gills.

Egg production has plummeted, of course, despite some moderate temperatures, and nearly every egg gathered now has to go through the washer, as they're completely filthy. Moss is starting to grow on the barn walls, which may be normal in the Pacific Northwest rain forest, but is very weird around here, despite our rap for high humidity.

So there: weather rap over! Back to wrapping presents.

10:26 /Home | 0 comments | permanent link

The Blog Mob

Hmmm...

"Written by fools to be read by imbeciles."

"...like remora fish on the bellies of sharks, picking at the scraps."

Somehow, I don't think this editor at the Wall Street Journal likes the idea of blogging very much. We're just not "professional" enough for him. I suppose he believes that we of the unwashed masses should leave the punditry of politics to our betters, and simply parrot what we're told, lest we poison democracy itself.

Methinks these folks need to remember that the Hoi polloi are their readers, their customers and, in the final analysis, their power. We are not simply statistics to be flown over and ignored except on Election Day - we are perfectly capable of forming opinions of our own, even nuanced opinions. And now, we are perfectly capable of letting the world in on our little secrets.

Are some of us fools? No doubt. Do imbeciles read our pontifications? Yep. But I feel compelled to point out that the same could be said of the mainstream media in general, and the Wall Street Journal in particular.

Because nowadays, there are lot's of other fools with cyber pens in hand to call them to task.

Blogs are very important these days. Even Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has one. The invention of the Web log, we are told, is as transformative as Gutenberg's press, and has shoved journalism into a reformation, perhaps a revolution.

(link) [Opinion Journal]

03:10 /Politics | 3 comments | permanent link