Geeky Baldisms http://www.baldguyweb.com/blog/ I'm bald, I'm a geek, and I have an opinion. Check in every now and then and see how silly it is. en Copyright 2008 Sat, 16 Aug 2008 12:15:16 -0600 http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss AOL in 1994 It was the summer of 1994. I had managed to install a 2400-baud modem in my PC running DOS 6.22 (no easy task in itself, ever heard of a DMA interrupt?) and was feeling my oats. I plugged the 3 1/2" floppy containing AOL 2.0 into the slot and began the install. The software found my modem and dialed an 800 number. About a half-hour later, I was a full-fledged AOL member with my very first email address (renderland@aol.com, go ahead and harvest that one, spambots ;-). AOL ran quickly enough over the old modem, but when I upgraded to a 14,400 later that year, it absolutely screamed. I soon began accumulating many free hours by referring friends. I didn't feel a bit guilty doing so, because it was worth every penny I paid for it (around 25 bucks a month). I picked up quite a few gigs as a fledgling penman via the Writer's Area. There were the freebies at first, followed by gigs that paid modest fees. When I wanted to kill a little extra free time, I searched through the profiles. In those freewheeling days, people would post lots of information about themselves, AND answer polite emails! Thus I exchanged correspondence with the great columnist Mike Royko and Dodger reliever (formerly Cardinal) Todd Worrell, among others. When I got Windows 95, I also surfed the web via a direct dial-up. The web was a vast, uncharted territory, according to AOL. They couldn't be held responsible for any virii contained in files that you obtained from archie searches, one of the few internet services that they offered then. Pretty scary stuff. http://www.baldguyweb.com/blog/2008/08/aol_in_1994.html http://www.baldguyweb.com/blog/2008/08/aol_in_1994.html The Auld Days Sat, 16 Aug 2008 12:15:16 -0600 Mirsky's WOTW Wikipedia entry,
Mirsky's Worst Of The Web (WOTW) was devoted to showcasing what Mirsky considered "the worst web sites ever". WOTW was the first well-trafficked site to feature "bad" web sites for entertainment purposes. His commentary was short on constructive criticism and long on insulting the web site layout, content and graphics, and sometimes the web designers themselves.
What I remember was gut-hurting hilarity. The sites were bad to the extreme, and Mirsky's commentary was like rich whipped cream on top of a perfect dessert. Here are a few recollections that I have: A site that sold horse sausage, complete with lots of gory photos of horses being turned INTO sausage. A software sales site created by a man (I'll never forget the name, Martin Fung) for whom English was a second, or possibly third language. The site had obscenities innocently dropped into its sales pitches, and a cartoon image of a pool of urine. A web page at a major university's web site (unfortunately I can't recall which one) touting the convenient locations of nearby liquor stores.]]> http://www.baldguyweb.com/blog/2008/08/mirskys_wotw.html http://www.baldguyweb.com/blog/2008/08/mirskys_wotw.html The Auld Days Thu, 07 Aug 2008 22:09:44 -0600 Let's All Weep for Barry Bonds this article. I hope Bonds never plays again. I hope he goes to prison for perjury. I hope his records get an asterisk, which is baseball's ultimate penalty. Just ask the family of Roger Maris, who did absolutely nothing wrong, but received one anyway. But instead, look for the grotesquely muscled "superstar" to be wearing pinstripes soon. Look for the "faithful" fans to boo at first, then become hysterical supporters with his first tainted home run.]]> http://www.baldguyweb.com/blog/2008/07/lets_all_weep_for_barry_bonds.html http://www.baldguyweb.com/blog/2008/07/lets_all_weep_for_barry_bonds.html Annoyances Wed, 30 Jul 2008 13:14:14 -0600 Shark Tank, One of My favorite Online Stops Computerworld's Shark Tank. I became an instant fan. The premise behind Shark Tank is that funny and/or frustrating in a funny sort of way things happen in the IT trenches. And we might as well laugh at them, because it's more fun than crying, and you get in big trouble for bringing weapons to work! ST has gone through some changes over the years. While always relying on a daily email to get the stories out, and archiving a couple year's worth on their site, a while back they switched to a short email teaser. The rest of the daily account is on their site. I was disturbed at first. I had created a rule, first in Lotus Notes, then in Outlook when my company switched, to send the daily Shark to a folder to be browsed when the day wasn't going well. But Computerworld added another feature at the same time: comments on the daily tale. At first, I was taken aback by the number of people whose comments consisted of how lame the story was, and how ST had gone to pot. What was with these people? If they hated the concept so much, what were they doing there? Enter JIM THE BOSS.]]> http://www.baldguyweb.com/blog/2008/07/shark_tank_one_of_my_favorite.html http://www.baldguyweb.com/blog/2008/07/shark_tank_one_of_my_favorite.html Everything Else Wed, 16 Jul 2008 12:13:47 -0600 ZDNet, What's up with Ed Bott and His Comment Section? For years, Microsoft has occasionally updated its Windows Update client software automatically on systems that are configured to check for updates. This has been true even when Windows Update is set to simply check for (and optionally, download) updates but not to install them. (snip, snip)
Unlike previous Windows Update updates, this one isn’t sneaking in under anyone’s radar. In addition to the Microsoft Update blog, this update will be documented in an updated version of Knowledge Base article 946928 (“Information for network administrators about how to obtain the latest Windows Update Agent”) and will be available for download there.
Gee, that's nice of Microsoft, isn't it? To actually TELL you before it forces an update on your system (unless you completely opt out of Windows update alltogether)? Of course, Bott's take on this is that it is necessary, polite, and overall, just peachy-keen. I guess we're all allowed our favorite operating systems. I guess that if threats of operating system shutdowns, taking away of functionality, and possible legal prosecution if you can't prove your software is legitimate is your thing, then Microsoft is for you. But that's not what makes me bad-crazy about Bott's style. No, it's the difficulty in responding with an opposing viewpoint at his blog that really gets my dander up.]]> http://www.baldguyweb.com/blog/2008/07/zdnet_whats_up_with_ed_bott.html http://www.baldguyweb.com/blog/2008/07/zdnet_whats_up_with_ed_bott.html Annoyances Fri, 04 Jul 2008 16:33:59 -0600 The Door Is Open? This article by Computerworld's Cyber-Cynic, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, says that MS has fubarred their desktop scenario so badly by dropping XP (despite customer pleadings to the contrary) and pushing Vista that the door is wide open for Linux and Macs to take over a significant chunk of the desktop market. I agree to a point. Yes, Vista is crap, for many reason, not the least of which is found here. Yes, for every Vista apologist on comment boards, I would estimate that there are at least five detractors, probably ten. Yes, it's finally the dream OS as far as the RIAA and the MPAA are concerned. But what is going to have to happen is that PC manufacturers get fed up enough to tell MS to shove their pre-install policy where the sun's rays fail to penetrate. Do you really think people would go out and buy Vista to run their computers if it wasn't already installed? Take a look at Vista's store shelf sales to see the answer. Microsoft, which was nailed by the DOJ way back in 1994 for "monopolistic" practices that strongly discouraged PC manufacturers from offering any operating system but theirs, has apparently complied with the letter of the law, as far as the government is concerned.]]> http://www.baldguyweb.com/blog/2008/06/the_door_is_open.html http://www.baldguyweb.com/blog/2008/06/the_door_is_open.html Ubuntu/Other Linux Thu, 26 Jun 2008 11:45:09 -0600 Vista to Firefox: Thou Shalt Not! A non-computer-literate (that sounds less harsh than computer-illiterate ;-) friend asked me for some advice yesterday. He told me that his virus scanner was popping up and bugging him for money to stay current. I told him I'd come over and kill it off and install AVG, which wouldn't die (although I'm not 100% sure it doesn't nag you anyway). I regretted my promise when I sat down in front of his screen and encountered Vista, it all its glory. Oh well, I thought, surely a simple uninstall of whatever timed-death-crapware came with his system (PC-Cillin, in this case) combined with an AVG install shouldn't be too much trouble. And for good measure, I would install Firefox, with a few of my favorite add-ons. He was excited about the automatic spellcheck feature that came with the browser, too. So I started downloading both programs. I instructed the system to save the big AVG file, and install the smaller Firefox one. My buddy has AT&T's budget DSL, so it was taking a while. I watched the download dialog for Firefox disappear as the file completed, and waited patiently for the install to begin. It never did. Oh well, this is Vista, the single most despised operating system in history. What did I expect? So I tried the download again, this time indicating that I wanted to save the file. I was annoyed that the download started from scratch, ignoring the cached copy that existed somewhere. My annoyances were only beginning... http://www.baldguyweb.com/blog/2008/06/vista_to_firefox_thou_shalt_no.html http://www.baldguyweb.com/blog/2008/06/vista_to_firefox_thou_shalt_no.html Annoyances Sun, 15 Jun 2008 13:16:48 -0600 Firefox Buzz this one show just how much buzz has developed around Firefox 3, due any day now. I've been running the 3.0b5 beta that comes with Hardy, and it is amazingly faster than 2.0, which was no slouch. So here's to you, Mozilla team, for helping to dethrone the Microsoft mess that computing has become. Forget Google, Ballmer the Clown. Open source is what will do your corporation in.]]> http://www.baldguyweb.com/blog/2008/06/firefox_buzz.html http://www.baldguyweb.com/blog/2008/06/firefox_buzz.html Software Mon, 09 Jun 2008 20:21:59 -0600 A World Without Microsoft I woke up feeling funny yesterday morning. The sun was shining brightly through the window, but it was the same window that the setting sun uses to illuminate my bedroom! Strange... I went to the sink to shave. Being slightly OCD, I tend to notice small things. Thus, I noted that the water was swirling counterclockwise down the drain. I live several thousand miles north of the equator, this made no sense at all. So I thought I would log on and check out the news. But when I moved the mouse to wake up my sleeping system, it looked...different. The start button was gone, replaced by a little orange circle. My brand-new machine that I had brought home from Best Buy two days earlier had come with Windows Vista. This didn't look anything at all like Vista. I pressed the little orange circle. The menu popped up, but again, it looked...different. It was leaner, I guess. It was more to the point. But I missed all of the cool visual stuff that Vista would do. Where was my Vista? What had happened? I looked for Internet Explorer but couldn't find it. But the Start button had a menu choice called “Internet,” and there was something called Firefox Web Browser there. I opened it, and sure enough, there was my Google home page. Thank goodness not EVERYTHING had changed. I went to cnn.com to try to find out why things were so weird all of a sudden. The headlines looked pretty much the same, wars, typhoons, outrage over gas hitting $2.00 a gallon...HUH? It was nearing $4.00 when I filled up last Monday! Again, strange, but by now my slightly OCD eye had been caught by an ad for TigerDirect.com: Get a loaded PC for $199! Wow, that sounded cheap. So I clicked on it. The TigerDirect site gave the details: Intel dual-core E2200, 1 gig of RAM, 200G hard drive, speakers, multimedia reader, DVD burner, and Ubuntu 8.02. I was familiar with everything but this Ubuntu. What was that? I typed Ubuntu into Google and was directed to their website. The site was pretty cool, actually, until I started reading about this Ubuntu thing. Then, I became puzzled. Ubuntu was an operating system. That rang a bell. I had heard the techies at work refer to Windows XP as an operating system, and how much better it was than Vista. It seemed like I had even heard them mention Ubuntu, as well, in those breakroom conversations that they had that I had eavesdropped on and found nearly impossible to keep up with. I looked the site over for Vista machines. I didn't find any! There were Macs, bare-bones systems with no operating systems, and others with operating systems like Fedora, PCLinux, and SUSE. But no Vista, XP, or Windows anything. Well, my mama didn't raise no fool. That 200 buck computer must be missing some pretty important features to be that cheap. So I read the fine print. http://www.baldguyweb.com/blog/2008/05/a_world_without_microsoft.html http://www.baldguyweb.com/blog/2008/05/a_world_without_microsoft.html Ubuntu/Other Linux Tue, 13 May 2008 22:30:27 -0600 "Every Home Will Have a Computer" Storm bot will continue to get larger and larger. Want to spam? Rent the Storm bot. It's available for hire. It's just a shame that computers must be sold with Windows, unless you want to jump through some hoops. The thought of supporting Linux is a scary one for PC manufacturers. It shouldn't be. Sure, it's different, but once a system is up and running, keeping it going under Linux is a snap. I personally like living on the "bleeding edge" and running Ubuntu, but there are many more stable releases out there for those who aren't into upgrading so often. What's even more sad is that Dell will sell you a PC with Ubuntu on it, but it costs more than a Windows-equipped one. Why? Because of the lack of crapware kickbacks.]]> http://www.baldguyweb.com/blog/2008/05/every_home_will_have_a_compute.html http://www.baldguyweb.com/blog/2008/05/every_home_will_have_a_compute.html Annoyances Sun, 04 May 2008 12:54:23 -0600 Upgrading to Hardy Heron this forum. I untarred the update (located here) and ran the script that came with it. VMWare was back! However, my brother still has compile errors on his system (not sure what it is). He's going to wait until VMWare releases a version specifically for Hardy. Another bit of strangeness: My second hard drive had exactly the same files on it as the first! This was resolved by editing /etc/fstab and changing it from /dev/hda to /dev/sdb1. Strange, but easy to spot and fix. Note: I was informed of a better solution, using the actual UUID of the drive. Now, its wandering is a thing of the past. Typical fstab listing: UUID=f13f7091-63a3-4d4e-b4b7-a8e7945f683f /home ext3 nodev,nosuid 0 2]]> http://www.baldguyweb.com/blog/2008/04/upgrading_to_hardy_heron.html http://www.baldguyweb.com/blog/2008/04/upgrading_to_hardy_heron.html Ubuntu/Other Linux Sun, 27 Apr 2008 13:24:18 -0600 R.I.P. RIAA When Hitler was in the midst of gaining world domination, he underestimated an enemy. Germany's rousing defeat at the hands of Russia during the winter of 1942-43 was the beginning of the end of the Nazi regime. The RIAA, a fitting comparison to the fuehrer, has made major assaults on its home territory by suing everyone from prepubescent children to grandmothers who don't know how to power on computers. However, the corporate entity's future fate is sealed by going after the same enemy that whupped the Germans: Russia. They pressured the Russian government via bribes or whatever to shut down allofmp3.com. No problem, now there are a handful of Russian sites offering the same deal, music for about a dime a song. And in case the RIAA should manage to buy enough Stoli to get them shut down, there are plenty more where they came from. The end result is slow death for an entity that exists solely to make money off of the talent of others by charging exorbitant middleman fees. I don't know about you, but I'm certainly not shedding any tears. What did these clueless morons do to get in this mess, anyhow? Simple. They ignored technology, and the benefits thereof. They also ignored what their customers wanted. It doesn't matter how big you are, or how many politicians you have in your pocket, thumbing your nose at paying customers will put you out of business. The RIAA has stubbornly stuck by their CD package for nearly 25 years. And while the price of media and digital recording technology has fallen to the point that it's practically free, record companies still try to sell CD's at the same price that they cost when introduced. I have a sub-$100 car stereo that plays mp3's from CD's, USB drives, or camera flash drives. I can put over 30 hours of music on one drive if I wish. Standard CD's give you a bit over an hour of music, then have to be changed for more. Do you think I want to mess with the only musical format that I can buy in a store? Another problem: consumers don't want to pay a dollar for a song. I used to get TWO songs on a vinyl 45 for that price. Ten cents a song is an acceptable price, and double that wouldn't chase me away. There should be plenty of room for everyone to make a nice profit with a twenty-cent song. Even middlemen. Thirdly, DRM is universally despised by all but its corporate proponents. Windows Vista has enough built in to choke a fast dual-core processor. It's there for the benefit of the RIAA and their nearly-as-clueless cohorts, the MPAA. It benefits Joe Consumer not a whit. And it keeps fast hardware from translating into a fast operating system. http://www.baldguyweb.com/blog/2008/03/rip_riaa.html http://www.baldguyweb.com/blog/2008/03/rip_riaa.html Annoyances Fri, 21 Mar 2008 00:07:43 -0600 Microsoft Didn't Always Suck I'll never forget the day in 1993 that I excitedly unpacked my first PC, plugged everything in, and watched with keen delight as that first DOS prompt appeared. I was happily running MS-DOS 6.2. Somehow, that friendly CLI (on which I ran a wonderful, long-lost GUI called Geoworks) turned into the vile monster that is Vista. What happened? Why? The plain and simple fact is that when you run a CLI, its brand name doesn't matter nearly as much as when you begin depending on a GUI. I remember playing around with DR-DOS and NDOS as command-line shells. They all looked and acted pretty much the same. And Geoworks provided a graphical desktop, complete with rudimentary multitasking, as did Desqview and Windows 3.1. But by 1995, things had changed. 32-bit operating systems became the state-of-the-art, and a prepackaged GUI was an integral part of the deal. Witness OS2/Warp and Windows 95. While booting into a CLI was possible with Windows 95, there was no such thing as an add-on GUI that would run in 32 bit mode on top of it. So you were stuck with Microsoft's product, unless you wanted to take a walk on the wild side and give IBM's product a try. http://www.baldguyweb.com/blog/2008/03/microsoft_didnt_always_suck.html http://www.baldguyweb.com/blog/2008/03/microsoft_didnt_always_suck.html Annoyances Sun, 16 Mar 2008 13:30:18 -0600 Will Microsoft Ever Figure this Out? There are a smattering of I Love Windows Vista websites out there. However, these are dwarfed into insignificance by the legions of those who are unimpressed to a greater or lesser degree. I don't run Vista, I never intend to. I'm a happy Linux camper, and XP will be the desktop of choice at my place of employment for the foreseeable future. But it seems that a major bugbear that people have with Microsoft's latest and greatest(?) is its bizarrely different interface. Microsoft, who generally seems blissfully unaware of what is popular among the masses, has, since Windows 1.0, seen fit to radically rework the UI with each release. Up until Vista, the practice was more or less tolerated by its customers. But now, the rebellion of users befuddled by the Vista experience is evidenced by downgrades to XP (and a small but growing number of Linux converts). Microsoft, it's time to take a long, hard look at one of your hated rivals, and the way they do business. http://www.baldguyweb.com/blog/2008/03/will_microsoft_ever_figure_thi.html http://www.baldguyweb.com/blog/2008/03/will_microsoft_ever_figure_thi.html Annoyances Tue, 04 Mar 2008 13:54:49 -0600 A Few Hours that I Wish I had Back Well, occasionally I have to be reminded that you should just was pick your battles. I just wasted several hours on a comment board at the otherwise excellent Ziff-Davis website. The subject was Ed Bott, Windows worshipper, and his gleeful take on how people hated XP as much as they do Vista, and how one day soon it will all be moot as people learn to love Vista. It turns out that many of his followers share his philosophies. In short, it's a quagmire that a Linux fan would should stay away from at all costs. Some people just don't get Linux, FOSS, or the fact that the war for the desktop is not over, it's only begun. And trying to convince them otherwise is like attempting to teach the proverbial pig to dance. I know that some simply don't pull for the underdog. People who have never been to Florida loudly cheer for the Miami Hurricanes to crush Florida A&M. Yankee fans exist all over the country, screaming for them to get to the World series, ignoring their hometown team that's had some losing seasons lately. And Microsoft shills love their operating system, and the overall "trusting" nature of Ballmer and company. http://www.baldguyweb.com/blog/2008/02/a_few_hours_that_i_wish_i_had.html http://www.baldguyweb.com/blog/2008/02/a_few_hours_that_i_wish_i_had.html Annoyances Wed, 27 Feb 2008 11:04:15 -0600