cobolhacker.com

Why is it when something new and interesting develops, it is the scientists and academics who try so hard to debunk and denounce it?

The president-elect of the American Library Association apparently doesn’t like bloggers, maybe because some them called him out on his idea that Google is a useless piece of shit. And as well they should have. Only librarians think that those dread awful card catalogues are actually useful. The rest of us use these computer things. While Google is far from perfect, a lot of talented people try their very best to make Google the best search engine it can be.

Hypocrite that he is, Gorman even uses the opinion page of the Library Journal’s web magazine to deliver his diatribe against the bloggers. Yeah that’s right, a weblog.

And then there are the scholars picking on Wikipedia. Robert McHenry, the former Editor in Chief of the Encyclopædia Britannica doesn’t like it. His angry screed at the Wikians is not only inaccurate, it is downright mean. Aaron Krowne’s rebuttal sums it up nicely: Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. The former editor of the world’s foremost Encyclopedia is trying to scare you into not using Wikipedia.

You know, I would have expected more from the editor of an Encyclopedia than that. I would have expected him to offer his help in making the Wikipedia better.

And it is these same assholes who denounced nuclear power, airplanes, rocket ships, the Earth going around the Sun, again and again, for as long as anyone cares to remember. It always seems to come down to the brave individuals, willing to ignore the mockery, to actually go forth and discover new things.

And it truly puzzles me why academics do this to new and emerging ideas. What is it about the scientists and the scholars that makes them so hostile to new ideas and new ways of doing things? Is it vanity? Is it ego? Shame? Money? Boredom?

If it were up to the academics, nothing would ever get invented, and nothing would ever get done. They would sit in their towers with their books and their scrolls looking backwards at a past they weren’t part of, and away from a future they can’t be bothered to discover. It is the folks willing to go out and take the risks and make the mistakes and do the work that makes progress happen. It isn’t the ones doing the bitching.

Mr. Gorman and Mr. McHenry, you are the very reason why young people today don’t give a shit about libraries and encyclopedias. We are sick of listening to lazy academics like you tell us that we shouldn’t think for ourselves and try out something new.

I believe that open-source will ultimately save the computer industry from itself. But there is much work to do.

Although most serious open source developers understand that to win the software market they need to convince the layman to use their stuff, I don’t think they have a good grasp of the magnitude of this task. I was reminded of this again recently when I delivered a freshly installed machine to a customer.

“Ok. As I said earlier, your default web browser has been set to Firefox.”

“Set to what now?” I knew right away what I had done wrong and the response from the customer was predictable. “Soooo… where’s the Internet?”

“The Internet?”

“You know, the blue thing?”

It took me about ten minutes to lay it all out for him. And while it shouldn’t have to be that way, it is. I don’t buy into the argument that the users need to get smarter. Education can only take you so far. It is we, the providers of the information technology, who need to make it easier to understand. Microsoft gets this. Free Open Source needs to get this too.

The first mistake I made, and this is the first mistake that many software developers, open source and otherwise make, is that regular people do not understand computer guy lingo. The words “default”, “web browser” and “Firefox” are all confusing to a Regular Joe user.

The word “default” may seem simple enough, but from a usability standpoint it is the worst thing to say. It implies that there is more than one of something (which in the case of web browsers is true, of course). This automatically generates confusion. The novice end user immediately has doubts and asks himself, “which one should I use?”, “are they different?”, and of course, “why is it that I have more than one?”

This, of course, assumes that they know what a “web browser” is. Although many have heard the term, a lot of people I know don’t immediately realize that this means “the program I use to look at webpages”. While this may seem like utter silliness, take my word for it, a lot of people are not clear on the term. I think part of this is because to the general public the World Wide Web is the Internet, even though there are really many different systems working on the Internet. To the layman, the World Wide Web is the Internet, Email is Email, chat is chat.

To that layman, the word Firefox also means nothing. Worse, the word says nothing about what the product is for. For all he knows, Firefox is a piece of expensive military hardware desinged to sock it to those terrorists. But he knows what Internet Explorer does. Its title even says what it does for you. It explores the Internet.

The logo design for Internet Explorer and its mate, Outlook Express, was no mistake. The Big Blue ‘E’ is a triumph of simplicity and brand recognition. Every computer with Windows on it can access the ‘Internet’ with that Big Blue ‘E’. The shiny blue is easy to spot, it is easy to find amongst the jumble on the desktop (regular computer users never delete desktop icons, I don’t know why), and it stands out against most backgrounds. The name “Explorer” has a good connotation to it and it fits nicely into Microsoft’s metaphor for the graphical desktop.

Now, while Firefox and Thunderbird also feature well designed logos, they have years of brand recognition to overcome. An entire generation of Internet newbies have learned that the Big Blue ‘E’ gets them the Internet. They know nothing of the Fox with the Globe or the Bird with the Letter. The design of these logos alone, no matter how sassy they look, is not enough to convince Joe Average. Like Golden Arches at every McDonalds, the Big Blue ‘E’ has become entrenched in the minds of the public, and it has become synonymous with the Internet.

But the Free Open Source Software movement is not completely useless in this area. Some of the distributions have started to simplify the phrasing used in the graphic user interface. Redhat did it for a while, not referring to Firefox as Firefox, but as “The Internet”. Evolution was called “Email” and Gaim “chat”. And while that may seem extremely lame to a Linux veteran (I suspect this why they aren’t doing it anymore), it is this willingness to swallow some pride that will allow the Free Open Source movement to eventually prove to the millions of end users that the Firefox web browser can give them the Internet just like the Big Blue ‘E’ can.

From the absolutely-stupid-junk-mail-dept.

Of all the images that they could have picked for this ill-advised campaign, they pick an image of a textbook. Heaven forbid that your children ever want to study anatomy and become doctors, huh?

Do you know how to protect your kids from inappropriate content? You hang out with them when they surf. Or you don’t connect them to the net at all.

Trusting a computer to censor content for you is as futile as it is stupid.

God, I have this fantastic craving for a beer!

Easily solved, as there is beer in my fridge. Having a beer after a hard day of hacking on comps is the best thing ever. I sincerely hope they don’t make it illegal, but I suppose it’s coming sooner or later.

Speaking of getting out of your head, check out Modern Drunkard Magazine, a niche rag a good friend put me on to. It is an amusing, irreverent, and sometimes informative look at drinking and drinking culture.

Editor Frank Rich is just hilarious:

“Hemingway was a great literary drunk, and I think a lot of teetotalers would trade their lives for his in a second. Alcohol is the great socializer. Can you imagine a world without it? Well, I guess you can — it’s called the Middle East.”

Well worth a read.

Don’t you just hate it when you are having a frank conversation with an old friend and he’s secretly taping you and then the tapes leak when you become a big shot?

Notice how Douglas Wead (now there’s a name) leaked the tapes before his book release. He says they weren’t intended to be public. What a lying cocksucker. If I was Bush, I’d be some pissed off, though I suppose he should have known better than to do a telephone interview.

Sure, everybody knows he used to be a boozehound, a dope fiend, and a cokehead, but to hear him actually say he used marijuana is just rich, given his government’s position on the issue.

I wouldn’t answer the marijuana question … ’cause I don’t want some little kid doing what I tried.

Here in Canada, having a politician admit that he smoked dope is practically a non-issue. In fact, people might be a little suspicious if he says that he didn’t. Over forty percent of Canadians have admit to having tried dope at least once in their lives. I know I have. More than once, actually. . .

coverfire jokingly pointed out to me that, “those were his wondering years. Then he found religion.” It’s true. Though I’ve always wondered about the Religious Right and their stand on marijuana. Why is it that they are so afraid to get a little out of their heads once in a while? Or more importantly, why are they afraid of me getting out of my head. Just because you believe in God doesn’t mean that you can’t enjoy a big ole fatty now and again. God did make dope too.

See how badly dope has fucked up his life. Loving family, wealth, top job in the free world. I suppose this might have happened for him because he kicked, but I’m not buying it.

Benjamin Franklin once said that “beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy”. He could have just as easily said the same thing about weed. I wonder how the U.S. would have turned out if he had?

looks like something is a little bit bollocksed at cobolhacker.com

After I put in an upgrade to Wordpress things got a little crazy. For some reason if you visited www.cobolhacker.com the site would render all funny. But visiting the http://www.frankie.ca/blog URI would get you in no problem. Some kind of misconfiguration on the webserver that I didn’t notice until now.

I have patched up the problem temporarily until I figure out what’s up.

Here are ten simple steps I use to help make Windows XP machines not suck quite as hard.

One.
Turn off System Restore. The thing doesn’t work half the time and it slows down your machine. Very rarely does System Restore give you more functionality than simply un-installing the bad item of software, or using the Roll Back Driver function (which works even with System Restore disabled). Worse, viruses can hide in the restore data.

Two.
Install Service Pack 2. Service Pack 2 will make your machine run slightly slower, but it will also improve it’s security. This is a good thing. The best part about Service Pack 2 is the new and improved Windows Firewall — now somewhat useful! While it’s no substitute for a good standalone firewall, it is at least something. SP2 also unbreaks the wireless access client, also making it somewhat useful. SP2 even has that Security Center thing which, while annoying, will nag you into doing the things everyone neglects, but shouldn’t — things like patches and antivirus updates.

Can’t install service pack 2? Maybe this is because your computer guy got you a bootleg copy. Sorry about your luck.

Three.
Get high-speed Internet if you can. It doesn’t have to be the mega-fast stuff — the “lite” services will do just fine. You see, dial-up Internet makes any operating system suck, not just XP. The kinds of things you likely got XP for are also likely the kinds of things that benefit from a fast, always-on Internet connection.

Four.
Un-install MSN Explorer and Windows Messenger. They are useless and take up space. I don’t even know what MSN Explorer does. And although the improved Windows Firewall more or less fixes the Messenger spam problem, no one uses the old Windows Messenger anymore. These days, everyone uses MSN Messenger, which you can download from Microsoft.

Five.
Download and install a copy of Mozilla Firefox. Make into your default browser and use it always. This will serve to substantially improve your Internet security and makes the hundreds Internet Explorer exploits useless against you.

Six.
Turn on the Automatic Updating Wizard. Update when it tells you to. Microsoft doesn’t release critical updates for the hell of it (well, not usually), they release them to fix potentially very serious problems. For example, the Code Red worm wouldn’t have happened at all if people kept up with their updates. Same with all of those nasty little worms like Blaster.

Seven.
Don’t use multiple user accounts unless you really have to. Windows user accounts waste a lot of space. Having more than one, therefore, wastes even more space. The only real reason to have them is to support personalized settings. For most people this means multiple email accounts and bookmarks. But these days, multiple email accounts aren’t so useful. A lot of people (particularly teenagers) use webmail services and it doesn’t matter what user account you log into these from.

Eight.
Download anti-spyware software like Ad-aware or Spybot or both. Run them weekly. Just in case.

Nine.
Don’t install software that claims to make your computer work better. It won’t. This includes stuff like Norton Systemworks. Notice how it doesn’t claim to make your system any better? Un-install all that crap and watch your machine speed up.

Ten.
Give XP more than 128MB of RAM. It takes XP around 80MB or so to get going, less if you’re clever and willing hack out some of it’s less useful default features. But once you start to actually run things, the more RAM you have, the better. Sure, Microsoft says that XP will work just fine with a 300Mhz processor and 128MB of RAM, what they really mean is that it will work with these specs, but it will suck hard and be really slow. You can however, run XP just fine on a Pentium-700 (I do), provided you give it the kind of RAM it wants: 256MB or more.

We often use retail processors in systems because they come with excellent heatsinks. Intel always uses plastic inside their retail boxes to hold the CPU and heatsink. Bad Intel! As much as fifty percent of my garbage volume is taken up with this kind of non-recyclable plastic packaging. Takes up space in the landfill. Not good for the environment.

AMD has thought of this. Retail Athlon 64 processors come in a nice box with virtually no plastic in it. There is a cheerful green packaging form on the inside of the box holding the processor and heatsink. It is made out of some kind of special formed paper and it can be recycled with regular cardboard. Yay AMD! Good for the environment.

Unfortunately the packaging is brittle like a china vase. So if the box is hit sharply (oh, the shipping guys would never never hurt my parcels), it smashes into a whole bunch of peices and powder. The heatsink and processor bounce around inside the box, and the green papery powder gets everywhere, including under the plastic that covers the thermal compound on the bottom of the heatsink. The paper chunks stick to the soft, silvery material, contaminating it and rendering it useless. So you have to scrape it off and replace it with new thermal stuff.

Now AMD doesn’t come out and say in their documentation that you have to use the included thermal compound. But some documents on their site suggest it. So now I wonder if the processor warranty is voided because I was not able to use the included thermal interface (although my stuff is probably better anyway).

Someone at AMD should have thought this through better. They could have achieved both environmental friendliness and durability by simply using regular, folded cardboard. What would have been wrong with that?

The NHL season is toast.

I’m not really a big hockey fan, but I see this as an extreme failure attributable to greed, an increasing problem throughout much of the World. Good job guys! Show the fans how much you care and bicker about money until the season is lost.

The press session went on and on and on, reiterating the same thing again and again. The players and the owners couldn’t come to an agreement on money. And were not talking about a little bit of money here. We’re talking about a metric assload of money. Some 200 million across the whole league.

The money involved with pro sports today is seriously out of wack with reality. Only in pro sports can one guy on a whole team be worth ten million dollars a year. What human is worth that? What the hell does a hockey player do which is so important that society thinks he’s worth that kind of money? Thanks to these astonishing wages doing a hockey game with decent seats for you and a buddy is a trip worth around two hundred dollars.

“If you want to talk about greed, maybe you should ask the other side.”

No, you’re both greedy. And your greed has just cost hockey fans their season. Your greed has cost your support staff their jobs. Your greed has betrayed your fans. You know, the ones where your money comes from. You could have had a season, you could have had some games. Now all you have is the anger of your fans.

So when I hear players and team owners whining about the millions they aren’t going to make all I can imagine saying to them is, Fuck You. Your ten million dollar paycheck is more than I’ll earn over the course of my life. And I actually do something useful. So fuck you, you greedy sons-of-bitches. I hope your sport implodes and you all have to get real jobs.

You get chilly at night, blogging away, sitting in the basement with all the cold air.

If my old furnace was really around for my comfort, I would have it set to some warmer temperature than twenty degrees Celsius. But like many Canadian homes, my furnace is really
only there to keep the water pipes from freezing.

But yet I stay down here, typing away, waiting for my bittorrent downloads to complete, waiting for the end to come.