rants.org

Editor’s note: This is the first guest post on rants.org — it was originally an email Winnie Fung sent, but given that, after all, the site’s name is “rants.org”, she graciously allowed it to be posted. I’ve never been an Apple user, so I can’t say this post sums up my feelings, but it certainly sums up my impressions! Apple users out there, any comments? -Karl

I am mad. mad mad mad. …

Apple is trying to control how I do everything, where I do it, on what devices I can do it, where I store it and I HATE IT. I am this close to wiping out my drive and sticking linux on it. icloud my ass. Not only do I have to pay for my .mac address all these years (fair enough I was too lazy to sever my ties), but if I want to keep the stupid address, I must transfer to icloud, oh but you have to upgrade to the newest OS in order to access it which btw will have to pay for.

So basically, I have been living in this address for years, paying the rent, and then one day my landlord comes and tells me that they are renovating the building and they are going to raise my rent and in order to stay in apartment, I must update my interior decoration to match spiffy exterior. No only that, I must buy my furniture from the landlord’s designer stores. And if I want to park my bike and my car at this address, I must also switch my car and bike to my landlord’s brand. Additionally, if I want to lock my bike to the building’s dock, I will need to purchase their special lock which only works for my landlord’s buildings and their company policy is to change the lock socket with every model so I should plan on collecting a pile of obsolete locks… No thank you, I think I will move.

-Winnie Fung

An old tradition holds that the location of the discoloration in the marble of the Washington Monument prefigures the end of the Republic:

The discoloration represents the division between the two phases of the Monument’s construction. The phases used marble from different quarries, resulting in a clear visual boundary. The pause between the phases lasted nearly two decades, from 1858 to 1876, and although the original reasons for it are complicated, it was drastically lengthened and nearly made permanent by the Civil War. We may take the discoloration as representing the Civil War, forever the spiritual halfway point in the United States’ history.

The discoloration occurs at 46 meters up, and the Monument’s total height is 169.29 meters; thus the dividing line is 27.17% of the way up. Depending on whether you use the beginning of the Civil War (1861) or its end (1865), the corresponding end year for the United States is either 2089 or 2104 — that is, the year 1861 (or 1865) occurs 27.17% of the way from 1776 to 2089 (or 2104).

So it looks like we’ll make it to sometime between 2089 and 2104. We had a pretty good run. Maybe someone else will find a use for our Constitution, especially since it’ll be in such good condition. (“Like new! The previous owners barely took it out — it just sat in the garage for the last few years, really.”)

The construction of the Monument is itself is a fascinating story. It turns out that our national weakness of historical amnesia is sometimes a blessing. Then too, it could be said that every nation’s weakness, and blessing, is historical amnesia.

Lesson #2401:

When deploying text input forms on your web site, make sure to add your company’s name to the spell-checker dictionary, so it doesn’t get the jaggy red underline thingy when people type it:

(click to enlarge)

No, I wouldn’t have thought of that either! But I’m going to try to remember it from now on. Is anyone maintaining a checklist for web designers somewhere? If so, please add this .

Got this by email yesterday:

From: maka konan <maka3030@hotmail.com>
Subject: hi
To: maka3030@hotmail.com
Date: Tue, 20 Dec 2011 09:32:44 -1200

Hi, my name is Maka, I visited
(sucs.org/~rohan/git/linux-3.0/CREDITS) while searching for
relationship, I found your contact there. I'm interested in a love
relationship with you. I would like to know more about you and if you
don't mind to mail me back, i will reply you with my pictures and tell
you more about myself ok.
I wait your lovely response.
Maka.

I guess all that work is finally paying off!

This post is for people who use Redmine; others are welcome to stay for the ride if they wish.

I’m writing this post mainly so it will turn up in results when people do a web search to find out how to edit multiple issues at once in Redmine (e.g., search://redmine batch edit multiple issues/). I recently did that search, to no avail, and was stumped until someone gave me the answer in IRC.

It turns out the feature is there, a bit hard to find, and more powerful than I expected. Here’s the email I sent to my colleagues about it (lightly edited). I’m too lazy to even make screenshots, but the prose recipe should suffice:

  From: Karl Fogel
  To: The Team
  Subject: Most incredible Redmine hint ever.
  Date: Wed, 02 Nov 2011 18:40:56 -0400

  For those using the Redmine issue tracker:

  I don't normally like to spam lists with random UI hints, but in this
  case, there is a very powerful capability in Redmine that you probably
  won't spot unless someone tells you about it -- I myself just found it
  out from "_Mischa_The_Evil" in IRC [...].

  You can batch-edit a set of issues simultaneously -- change statuses,
  assignees, whatever -- by selecting them from an issues list and then
  right-clicking in the selection (highlighted blue area).  For example:

    * Go to developer.civiccommons.org/projects/mktplc/issues

    * Select some issues using their checkboxes
      (or, use top-of-column green checkmark to select all)

    * Put your mouse in the blue selected area.

    * Notice how your mouse pointer has a funny stacky-looking icon
      next to it suddenly.  Those crazeeee Redmine developers!

    * Right-click, see the magical choices available to you now.

    * Weep for joy.  My god, it's full of stars...

  As there is no hint in the page content that this latent ability is
  there, I thought I'd better just mail about it.

  -Karl

In a followup comment in IRC, after reading this post, _Mischa_The_Evil said:

kfogel: , nice one… btw: you can also multi-select by clicking anywhere on the issueline (not in inside links) combined with browser-dependent key. Most are ctrl-leftclick. I remember Opera being alt-rightclick (at least in the past, i remember reading something about changing it not so long a ago).

Happy Dennis Ritchie Day! (It’s the day before Halloween, so we decided to leave the spooky dog in the picture.) Here’s the close up:

If you don’t know who Dennis Ritchie was, or why he has a day, this post by Tim O’Reilly is a good place to start.

Ritchie, who died this October 12th, was a pioneering computer programmer who had an exceptionally good sense of taste and an instinct for where to invest it. Collaborating with colleagues (something his career was notable for), he designed long-lasting systems that programmers could get things done in. He helped create both the Unix operating system — which, depending on how you look at it, either is or is inside today’s GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, Macintosh OS X, and many other environments that you probably interact with all the time — and the C programming language, which is still the lingua franca for systems programming more than thirty years after its first release.

Some other appreciations:

• On Dennis Ritchie: A conversation with Brian Kernighan by Andy Oram
• Dennis Ritchie’s legacy of elegantly useful tools, by Mike Loukides
• a memorial by Ritchie’s collaborator, Rob Pike

There are many, many other such tributes to be found on the Net today. Some of us are using the hashtag #DennisRitchieDay on identi.ca and Twitter to mark the occasion.

Unix was the first operating system I really learned, and it’s what I’ve been using ever since (Debian GNU/Linux now, after various other Linux distributions starting from 1992). C was my first programming language. My copy of Kernighan and Ritchie’s “The C Programming Language” (always called simply “K&R” among programmers) is probably the most well-thumbed book I own, and looks it. I can’t really imagine what the computing universe would be like without Ritchie.

Maybe this is something Ritchie wouldn’t have celebrated. After all, whatever computing environments he first learned in, he clearly was able to imagine something else. Perhaps the best way to honor his contributions is to retain the ability to imagine something else, and to act on it when the time feels right, as he did.

Rest in peace, Dennis Ritchie.

Now that I have your attention…

Recently a friend posted to a mailing list about Yet Another Cold Fusion Experiment whose results will soon be in. Unlike most people, my worry is not that these experiments will all fail, but rather that one will succeed.

As the amount of energy available per dollar goes up, the amount of destructive power available per dollar goes up too. When the amount of destructive power required to destroy the world is available for an amount of money obtainable by an insane person, then we have a problem.

That line surely exists; the only question is how close we are to it. My thesis is that, wherever we are now in relation to that line, the development of cheap cold fusion brings us dramatically closer to it.

One of the nice properties of expensive energy is that you know who to watch. Only states and other really big actors can afford, say, nuclear weapons, so all the other states and big actors can watch each other and make a move if someone starts going over the edge.

(Note you rarely see someone get very close to the edge, because they know what would happen if they did.)

But if energy is cheap, there are too many people to watch. Thus I think it’s possible that cheap energy implies a surveillance society.

Sorry to be so grim. If I’m missing a way out, please comment. But right now, the risks of cheap energy look to me much greater than the benefits. (Perhaps it’s important to distinguish between energy that can be “surged” and energy that is cheap but can only come in at a certain maximum rate? That might help; I don’t know.)

Yo, Bay Area peeps!

Will Franken, this Saturday, September 10th, at the Purple Onion in San Francisco, at 8pm.

You already know how I feel about Will Franken. His shows are not to be missed. If I were in San Francisco right now, I wouldn’t be writing this blog post — I’d be buying tickets.

I just got back from a wonderful three-week vacation in China. The trip did, however, further my worry as a patriotic American that the Chinese are rapidly overtaking us — not just in industrial technologies and renewable energy production and the like, but even in the service economy areas where we might hitherto have presumed ourselves to still retain some advantage. For example, read carefully what’s on offer at the Fu Run Hotel in Xi’an:

Like I said, I had a great visit! Some of the other guests in the hotel didn’t have such a great visit, though.

☺ I’ll try to write a real post about my trip later, with some photos. But that was the single best Chinglish I have ever encountered, and I just couldn’t resist posting about it. In fairness, it’s no worse than some of the Chinese phrases we wear on t-shirts in America… well, okay, maybe only a little bit worse.