I love my Brother MFC 9700, but...

All you Brother fans out there on Windows XP (sp2), download and run filemon to see the repeated access by BrmfRsmg.exe (the Brother Resource Manager) of the file C:\WINDOWS\BrmfBidi.ini. Next, start the task manager, select the Processes tab, then on the View menu Select Columns... and check I/O Read Bytes. My machine had been up a few weeks, and I had printed maybe 10 pages on the printer, and I almost fell out of my chair when I saw that BrmfRsmg.exe had read more than 80,000,000,000 bytes. 80 billion bytes of data. WTF?

Frontline's News War should be required viewing for every American

I didn't really learn anything new in watching all 3 parts (there was a 4th part, but it was on Frontline/World and not really part of the main subject as parts 1-3). What happened to me was profound, however. There are two main issues discussed in this series: the history of the battle between the Executive branch of our government and journalists, and how the internet and media mega-companies are changing the landscape for the old media that do all the heavy lifting in protecting us from our own government and large corporations.

If you look at the last 40 years, love them or hate them, the New York Times and the Washington Post have been there for the American people. Watergate, for example. More recently the Times storing breaking what the NSA was doing to spying on the American people without warrants. Because of the Times story, our government has decided to get warrants (through FISA) for all wiretaps. On the other side, yes, Judy Miller was a key player in selling the Iraq war. Without her cheering section in the Times, it may not have been possible for the American people to get behind the war. I'm not arguing that the Times and the Post are infallible. They're not. But, they serve a vital function in our democracy.

Watch Frontline's News War and see for yourself.

Monkeys like money, too

An interesting experiment by the Freakanomics guys referenced here. For, the absolutely interesting thing is the use of the coins to barter for... sex. Perhaps the first occurrence of monkey prostitution ever? Someone should spank that monkey.

Walgreens are worse than crack dealers

The Freakonomics Blog has an interesting entry on the price of generic drugs at various stores. No wonder our health care system is completely broken. No wonder people without health care are completely screwed.

The Drug War

Recently there have been a growing number of articles about the horrific drug laws in the US. An article on alternet.org about a two-year study from a British commission makes some excellent points. For example:

• The notion of a drug-free society is "almost certainly a chimera. ... People have always used substances to change the way they see the world and how they feel, and there is every reason to think they always will." Therefore, "[t]he main aim of public policy should be to reduce the amount of harms that drugs cause." A policy based on total prohibition "is bound to fail."
• The concept of "drugs" should include tobacco and alcohol. "Indeed, in their different ways, alcohol and tobacco cause far more harm than illegal drugs." These substances should be brought into a unified regulatory framework "capable of treating substances according to the harm they cause."
• The heart of this new regulatory framework must be an index of substance-related harms. "The index should be based on the best available evidence and should be able to be modified in light of new evidence."
• We need a new way of evaluating the efficacy of drug policies. "In our view, the success of drugs policy should be measured not in terms of the amounts of drugs seized or in the number of dealers imprisoned, but in terms of the amount of harms reduced."

The hypocrisy and drug laws are out of control. When someone can spend 20 years in prison for Marijuana use and a murderer of 2 people can get out of prison after 5 years (with a 7 year sentence), something is very, very wrong. When someone can get a 11 1/2 year sentence for growing mushrooms, something is very, very wrong. When alcohol is responsible for many, many more deaths each year and it gets a pass, something is very, very wrong.

What is it about transparency that people don't get?

Government of Country X is found to be spying on its own citizens. When a newspaper develops the story, they invite the super-secret "security" agency of Country X to pass judgement on the story (run it or not?). The agency says "niet" and the newspaper's editors decide it is not worth the trouble. They pass on the story.

Have you guessed the identity of Country X? The old Soviet Union? Niet. The United States of America. It is what happened at the LA Times. If you remember, the New York Times broke that story, because the whistleblower took it there after the LAT passed.

It is completely beyond me why this doesn't completely piss off every citizen in this country. It is clearly a very bad thing when the government not only spies on its own citizens, but then squashes coverage of it by applying pressure to a newspaper.

In this case, the information came out. That's good. How often does the item not come to light? I would wager that a significant amount of really bad shit has never seen the light of day. That only means our government is much worse than we know, and it's already pretty !@#%ing bad.

Childhood ...missing

Richard Louv's stirring article, No Child Left Inside, is a good read. I have a 6 yr old, so I think about this stuff a lot. I had a game, starting when I was 7 or so: ride my bike somewhere I'd never been and get "lost". It allowed me to explore and test the boundaries of my world. It was wonderfully fun. (It was also good exercise, since the more I played this game the further I had to go to successfully play.) That game is partly responsible for making me what I am today. But, for all the great memories I have of this game, I cannot imagine my son having the ability to play it, and it breaks my heart. [via Boing Boing]

Of all the reasons I seen ascribed to the current condition of children today, with respect to freedom of mobility, I have never seen this one...

The size of families has declined in recent decades. Single child families are no longer the strong exception. When I was growing up, I knew very few families with one child (a single one comes to mind). Most had 2 or more, and the family across the street clocked in at 7. My wife is the youngest of 9. Right now I can think of one family of 5, but most of my son's contemporaries have a single or no sibling. Families of 1 or 2 are the norm, and larger ones are just plain rare.

The psychology of a single child parent has to be different than one with 2 or more kids. I see it in myself. There is a protective mindset that occurs, I imagine, because all of my eggs are in one basket. The what if's are that much worse when you have one child. When you have more, a loss of a child would be crushing, but you would have to recover from it for the sake of the rest of the family. With a single child... that is almost unthinkable. Especially for those who are past the ability to have more children. I can't prove any of this.

So, I have to wonder, if I got into a time machine and went back to the time and place of my childhood, would I allow or deny my own single child the behavior I myself had?

What you can do with Photoshop

This is well worth 7 minutes of your time.

Please ignore Unnamed Bitch

Today the media is in hysterics over Unnamed Bitch's comments about John Edwards, '08 Presidential candidate (“I was going to have a few comments on the other Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, but it turns out you have to go into rehab if you use the word ‘faggot,’ so I — so kind of an impasse, can’t really talk about Edwards.”). Why do people give Unnamed Bitch any air time at all? She doesn't believe the shit that comes out of her mouth. No one does. The only way to make Unnamed Bitch go away is to 1) not buy her disgusting books, and 2) don't pay her any attention whatsoever.

Thrown down a hole for learning Chinese

The LA Weekly has a facinating and disturbing about Billy Cottrell a brilliant theoretical physics student at California Institute of Technology, is serving an 8.5-year-sentence at Lompoc Federal Penitentiary for destroying $5 million worth of Hummers^[1]. He is also autistic. Now, go read this. [via Boing Boing]

Woman Faces 40 Years for Porn-Infected PC (Crazy, but True)

Those following the popup porn conviction of a grade school teacher should get a kick out of this.

What I don't really understand (and I don't believe she is responsible or that she should spend any time in jail, much less 40 years): couldn't she turn off the monitor? Failing that, even though she had been told not to turn off the computer, couldn't she turn off the computer? Crikey, the non-technical folks I've told to "never turn off a computer, shut it down instead" always ignore that advice. Always. I would think in an emergency like this would warrant ignoring all previous advice about turning off the damn thing.

This appears to have been a perfect storm of stupidity from the get go, from teacher to jury to judge.

Pennywise pound foolish?

Maybe this is part of the healthcare problem? Because $80 of healthcare was not available, a boy is dead and various medical providers will eat $250,000 (or more) of costs.

In the debate about universal healthcare, I really don't understand one thing: when I was on a PPO, the amount of time I spent hassling with my insurance company was amazing. I was constantly getting bills from people I'd never heard of (after some routine visit or procedure), and it always took me lots of my time to figure it out and pay the right amount. All this work is definitely not efficiently delivering healthcare. If there were universal healthcare, even if the agency that ran it was much less efficient than the current system, it would have to win hands down on efficiency. That is, a very simple system that is inefficient has to be cheaper than a grossly complex system that is inefficient. Why do critics of universal healthcare point to how badly the government would manage such a system when what we have now is a complete and utter joke, in terms of efficiency?

My Prisoner, My Brother

The story of what went on inside Abu Ghraib must never be forgotten. Aside from the innocent people that were detained and tortured, America lost part of their soul at that prison, and most people in this country don't even realize it.

Skype, eBay and the NSA... oh my!

7 years ago I would have read this slashdot comment and thought the author needed a little prozac to go along with his tin foil hat. Today? It seems entirely more plausible than not. That is a sad indictment of how far we have fallen in the last 7 years.

The context of this comment was in a discussion as to why Skype reads the BIOS and motherboard serial number on Windows PCs.

Here's the comment, by user sideswipe76:

I am gonna repeat my grand conspiracy theory: It is my belief that eBay's purchase of Skype was somehow coaxed by the NSA/CIA and here is why: Ebay's purchase of Skype never made sense. Ebay could have included skypeout:// links in their auctions without spending a penny. That would be like saying slashdot can't use IM unless they buy AOL. Skype spent way above considered market value for Skype and their share holders have applied no real pressure to have it turn a profit. This makes the transaction suspicious. The reason of course if because prior to the eBay's purchase Skype was owned in Luxembourg and definitely not an ideal partner for eavesdropping on "terra'rists" (given those crazy European privacy laws). Given that the calls are encrypted, and that Skype does maintain the keys to decrypt those session, getting Skype under US subpeona power is a powerful tool for eavesdropping. Infact, because it is VoIP for most if not all of the calls, it can easily route traffic into the US were it can be picked up, decoded and monitored. Or, since it is known that open IP's become super nodes, Skype can naturally be coaxed into steering packets toward a super-node that can easily be monitored. I use to work for the company that wrote Carnivore. People got worked up over that? It was only the prototype.

Free Press?

Murdoch confessess to being propaganda machine for Bush. That sort of gives an interesting slant on the FoxNews slogan We Report, You Decide, doesn't it?

Habeas Corpus, RIP

Adel Hamad has never been accused of a belligerent act against the United States. Despite not being captured on a battlefield (Mr. Hamad was arrested in the middle of the night from his bed) the U.S. nevertheless categorized him as an enemy combatant.

Read the 3 allegations and watch the video made by his assigned lawyers. Absolutely stomach turning, it is.

The trouble with Dick

He is the anti-Christ. The devil. My proof, Cheney said this on CNN:

You can go back and argue the whole thing all over again, Wolf, but what we did in Iraq in taking down Saddam Hussein was exactly the right thing to do; the world is much safer today because of it.

Either the man is insane, which is certainly possible, or he is completely evil. Either way, it's not so good for us. I can't even imagine what he'd do as President.

The myth of McCain

Sidney Blumenthal has a good commentary on John McCain.

Electronic Voting Machines

Being a software engineer, I'm sure there is a way to make an electronic voting machine secure and reliable. There is a good effort going on in Australia. Las Vegas does a good job with gaming machines. It's just gotta be possible. Well, the problem is fairly clear, with the voting machines in this country, the people running the voting machine companies in this country are idiots.

Hillary in '08?

If Hillary were to be elected in '08, just think about it. That would mean from 1988 until 2012 the United States would be ruled by Presidents from just two families. 3 Bush terms and 3 Clinton terms. That would be 24 years rule by two families.

Speaking of '08, the Liberal Media is at it again. Faux News reported that Obama had attended a radical Muslim school as a child. It's even a urban legend now. While there is a lot of good buzz about Obama, there is a lot of negative buzz, too. I don't think he has a chance in hell of getting elected. I hope I'm wrong, though.

I just found The Beast

I just discovered The Beast. What a treat that was. I started with The BEAST 50 Most Loathsome People in America. A pretty good list, which I can't quibble much with. The archives have lots of tasty morsels of humor with a chewy center of hate and anger.

My phone just crashed

I occassionally get crashes of my Treo650 when I receive a call. The #*377 message is this:

A reset was caused on
xx/xx/xx at xx:xx pm while
running "Tasks":

MemoryMgr.c,
Line:3771, Free handle

I googled and didn't find anyone else with this problem. I really love the 650. It's a great device. The software has bugs, though. Now that the 700 and 680 are out, I would be very surprised to see further software fixes for the 650. And, from what I've been reading, the 700p (the Palm version, as opposed to the Windows version) has its own software issues (slowness switching apps). I'd probably upgrade if they could get it right.

Update, 2/6/07: Had another crash, this one also while running "Tasks", but here:

ToDoDB.c,
Line:1583, Error querying record

This one happened when I received a phone call. Interestingly, I only get these when at home.

Best of the web

Sites I frequently visit:

reddit.com for... well, just about everything. It has news and interesting stuff, in a pleasing format. It is easier to understand than explain. Just check it out.

The Show by zefrank. The only video blog I've ever really watched. Perhaps you should just try this episode. I am a regular viewer of The Show.

I read Talking Points Memo to keep up on in what way our elected officials are screwing us (and each other).

Metafilter.com is still unique on the web. I read it less now that reddit.com is around, but I still find interesting stuff there.

I'm sure not everyone will find AskANinja funny, but I do.

For my tech news, slashdot is OK, but alterslash is better. Think of it as a protective coating for slashdot. A condom, if you will.

Boing Boing is an interesting multi-person blog.

Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools occasionally has some really interesting things on it.

For personal reasons, I really like What Jeff Killed. Jeff looks exactly like Little Penny, our cat that died in 2006.

I used to subscribe to salon.com, but I wasn't using it much after switching to reddit.com. Also, since using adblock plus with FireFox, I can't get a day pass anymore. <sigh>

Why I hate iTunes and the iPod

I've been a user of iTunes (on Windows) and the iPod for 4 years now. I hate them both. Let me qualify that. I have been really, really annoyed by iTunes and the iPod over the years. I don't know if there is something better, but it doesn't matter, since I already have the iPod. I'm not going to switch at this point, unless something else is clearly better. I haven't heard of an iPod killer out there. A lot of wannabe killers, though. (I'm talking to you, Zune.)

iTunes

The proverbial straw that broke the camel's back (and caused this rant) happened last night: I was on a mission to make a playlist of the 100 Greatest Guitar Solos. Many of the songs I already owned. A bunch more I had to buy (not from iTunes, but from allofmp3.com... more on that later). So, I'm painstakingly making this playlist. Why was it so painful?

• [nit#1] I was using the search feature of iTunes a lot, as you can imagine. There is no single keystroke that takes you to the search widget. None that I could find. This is really annoying, but that leads me to...
• Many times the first click or keystroke in the search widget is completely ignored. Here is the sequence I had to repeat 100 times: click in search widget, [bug#1] click again in search widget to make sure the focus is there (so what I type doesn't go in to the great void), type Control-A to select all the current text, [bug#2] type Control-A again to actually select all current text, and now type what I wanted to type. Do they test this stuff before they release it? And, this series of bugs has been in iTunes for as long as I can remember.

[bug#3] There appears to be no way to stop iTunes from downloading album artwork. I've looked for an option, but can't find it. I bloody don't want the damn artwork!

[nit#2] When iTunes is doing something it puts up messages in the rectangular area below the "Apple" logo. I should say it teases me with messages. They appear, and disappear, and appear, and disappear. Countless times I wanted to actually see what iTunes was doing. Actually doing. I would love an option that would either leave the status there or put it somewhere permanant. No, I would demand it, if I could.



[nit#3] iTunes is a huge resource hog. I have an Athlon MP 2800+ with 1GB RAM. It is noticably slow on my system. Each release of iTunes makes it slower and slower, too.

[nit#4] Speaking of slow, when I upgraded to iTunes 7 recently, I was really surprised at a few things. When I first started iTunes after the upgrade it starts going through my collection of 6500+ songs and doing something. Apparently it had to do with gapless playback. What was it doing? Would I like what it was doing? I have no idea, since Apple decided to keep me in the dark. I do know that the next time I sync'd my iPod it copied more than a 1000 songs to it. What in the hell did it do to those 1000 songs? I have no idea.

Score: four bugs and four misfeatures.

iPod

Almost the first problem I had with my iPod was with playlists. If you make a large playlist for your iPod, once you sync it over and start using it, it is fairly useless. Yes, you can play the songs on the playlist, but can you display the playlist by anything but song name? No display by Artist, Album, etc? No. For me, this severely restricts the usefulness of playlists.

Unlike others, I haven't had severe problems with battery life, though I definitely think it never got the advertised number of hours (I tested it when I got it, but don't remember the advertised number nor the number I got).

iTunes Store

I've purchased 100+ songs from the iTunes store. It really annoys me for a few reasons.

• The selection is poor. Sometimes a single song is left off an "album" just so you can't buy the whole thing. This might have more to do with the companies that Apple gets the music from than anything, but it's still annoying.
  
• Once you buy a song from the iTunes store you are locked into their format and DRM. Yes, there are programs that will remove it, and at some point I will use them. However, I shouldn't have to use programs on off-shore servers that are considered illegal in the US to get access to music that I bought.
• $0.99 a song is still too much. That price is just support for the prices of the old distribution mechanism for music (buying a CD in a store). The management companies that take so much of what an artist brings in are really becoming irrelevant. We should be moving to an artist to consumer model, and some artists are pushing hard on that (Prince comes to mind). I want artists to get a larger share of the pie. I also don't want to pay $15 for a CD. In fact, before iTunes and allofmp3.com, I had almost completely stopped buying music. I would only buy a CD if I was both sure I would like it and sure I would like it a lot.
  

Conclusions

Aside from the business issues with the cost of music, I gotta ask one question: do the Apple developers that make this stuff actually use it? It feels like they don't. If they do, however, then it speaks volumes for the process in place at Apple to actually, you know, improve their product: it sucks.

Overall my feeling about Apple's job on iTunes can be summed up like this: it barely works, and when it does it is slow and unpredictable. If I had authored this software, I'd be embarrassed.

Update 1/7/07 12:52 PM: [bug#4] I forgot one really annoying feature of iTunes: when you minimize it it does not go to the bottom of the Windows z-order. It goes to the top. It means when you minimize and then do Alt-TAB, the "next" window is the iTunes window! It should be last.

Update 1/7/07 06:38 PM: [nit#5] every single time I do "Add Folder to Library..." it checks 681 files to find the album artwork. They haven't changed since the last time I ran the command.

Update 1/8/07 11:06 PM: [nit#6] would it have killed them to implement bookmarks? If I turn off my iPod in the middle of a song, and turn it back on before some period of time elapses, I'm at the same point I was at before I turned it off. However, if I turn it back on a little later than this period of time, I start fresh at the main screen. It makes it all but impossible to listen to audio books or long speeches, unless you really listen a little every day. Also, even if I listened every day, I'd still like bookmarks so I could switch to other stuff for a while and come back.

List: Top 100 Guitar Solos

A lot of good music in here. Definitely some missing entries, though. Lee Ritenour. Larry Carlton (his solo work). Al Di Meola. To name three.

Where is Update Rollup 2 for Windows XP?

Apparently, it is here: http://www.ryanvm.net/msfn/updatepack.html. Just ran across this very cool set of tools.