Thursday, June 30

Daily Kos: Reid's SCOTUS recommendations  

Daily Kos: Reid's SCOTUS recommendations:

U.S. Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid suggested on Tuesday that four of his Republican colleagues be considered by President Bush if a vacancy occurs on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Seeking a possible consensus nominee, Reid recommended Republican Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Mel Martinez of Florida, Mike DeWine of Ohio and Mike Crapo of Idaho.

Reid described them all as bright and able lawyers who would be strong additions to the nation's highest court.

I read this on a Florida blog, that was amazed about Martinez being suggested for SCOTUS, but I'm even more bowled over by the inclusion of Mike DeWine! Please! I really don't consider DeWine to be smart enough to handle such a job. Then again, maybe that's a good thing?

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Wednesday, June 29

Blogger is "fixed"  

Blogger now offers a switch to get rid of that damn <div> that they were automatically throwing in. I've already thrown my hissy fits to both support and to bloggerbuzz.

You know, the biggest fix you could actually do is stop putting in HTML code! Period! Get rid of the inserted <div>s!

You've finally gotten rid of the <p class="mobile-post"> that you were wrapping email gateway messages with (then again, that may have been with text messages, now that I've got HTML messages working, you might not be wrapping that, since I'm not seeing it on my latest linkblog entry - it's been a b---h because the program I was using, I lost the source to on a hard disk crash, and all I really needed to fix the issue I was having was add a -html switch to my email program. But I've managed to get that reconstituted, so that's become a non-issue).

Blogger really has no business whatsoever inserting any kind of HTML into our blogs. I don't care what kind of new functionality you are adding. If adjustments need to be made, they need to be made in the template itself, not kludged into everybody's blog, and kludge is exactly what's going on. Because at this rate, adding more kludges are you go along is just going to break more and more stuff.

I can understand that Blogger is in the middle between a rock and a hard place, but adding new functionality shouldn't require screwing over somebody's site formatting. As one of the first to have blogged about this (judging from PubSub and Technorati), the reports that I've heard are that this change snackered several of the templates that Blogger offers. I will say that this problem has finally pointed me to the source of a problem that I was having with my comments, so when I get the latest upgrade installed, I now know what to change in the CSS to make it work correctly.

I don't know, maybe a reasonable compromise of trying to shiv fixes in for those that don't want to deal with CSS and such is to have an option that states either allow us to add additions as we see fit, or no thanks, I'm responsible for my own formatting, I just want the data please, no handholding.

But I'll repeat myself again, it's my opinion that Blogger has no business whatsoever adding any kind of HTML to our output. It can break our formatting, it can break our validation even. Start thinking like Google, first, do no evil, and adding HTML capriciously is exactly that, doing evil.

I'm sorry to be ranting, but this is definately rant material. And I'm finally seeing something reported about this, when I (and others) started reporting Thursday night. I still haven't gotten an email back, but then again, I haven't seen anything but auto responses for the past 5 things that I've reported to Blogger. Zip. Not even a screw you, we're not changing it. So I'm getting real confused about what's what.

It would be nice if somebody were actually kind enough to blog what kinds of changes that Blogger is making, especially those changes that can effect users, such as the mobile-post class (yes, I can see how that might be handy - but is it really neccessary?), and then the change from accepting regular text HTML to it has to be sent as HTML mail or otherwise it's encoded. Actually, I don't see it as being nice, I pretty much think that it has to happen. And think about when you put changes in. Evidently the <div> change was made late Thursday, which meant that you might know something was wrong by Friday, but now you've got users stewing over the weekend if there is a problem. Not a good thing.

Thanks for listening.

I have taken out the "fix" as I found out that it was still causing problems on my blog, I just hadn't scrolled down far enough to notice. I'll be changing the sticky a bit after I publish this.

Permanent link posted by bytehead @ 6/29/2005 04:00:00 PM    0 comments Links to this post

Tuesday, June 28

rootburn: Lockdown in sector 4!  

rootburn: Lockdown in sector 4!:

I installed the Greasemonkey Gmail Delete button and now Google has locked me out of my Gmail account for 'between one minute and 24 hours'. I'm surprised - use Greasemonkey and Google whacks you. Oh mighty and benevolent Google, can I have my freakin' email back?

Weird. My delete button via Greasemonkey has just disappeared, poof. Definately something that Google has done on their end. I haven't had my account locked out either. I am running the Mozilla Gmail notification extension, and that works, generally, although sometimes it won't login, but I find I'm already logged in when I go to gmail.google.com. Exitting and restarting Firefox fixes that problem.

• The Delete Button stopped appearing a couple of days after I installed it, because Google had changed the Gmail URLs. I updated it with the new URL, and it started working again.

OK, that may very well be why it's not working. I hadn't noticed a change in URLs. Weird. Definately need to keep up on this.

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Saturday, June 25

Update—Blogger still sucks—At least I fixed the problem for now  

Thanks to a commenter, ddeele, I've got a somewhat working CSS hack to fix what Blogger has done to me (and done to a whole lot of other bloggers out there too it seems).

This looks like it may fix an issue that I've been having with my comments as well (which appears to be really screwey right now—I think some comments are getting connected to the wrong entry. )

Also, I find that I can't go in an edit comments. I log in, and it seems to work, but whatever changes I make, Pffft! No change is actually made. Time to put that 2.2 update in, probably tomorrow. Then we'll see what kind of havoc I can wreak.

Permanent link posted by bytehead @ 6/25/2005 09:41:00 PM    0 comments Links to this post

Thursday, June 23

Blogger's killing me II  

Blogger is really pissing me off right now. You're probably wondering why this blog looks so fucked up. You can read the following message I sent to Blogger about this.

Monday, I published an entry, and it was fine. Tonight I publish an entry, and I find that Blogger has decided to put a <div style="clear:both;"></div> into my new entry. Why? Why is Blogger insisting on putting code that is not in my template, nor is it even shown when I edit the entry? From the formatting, it appears that this is new code that starts the <$BlogItemBody$>. There is absolutely no fucking (excuse my French, but I'm pissed at this point!) reason why Blogger should be inserting ANY FUCKING code into any blog! Period!

This little "experiment" or whatever the hell you want to call it breaks my blog, as I'm sure it's breaking lots of others. Does anybody actually consider what kinds of consequences code changes will have? What kind of problem was happening that this code needed to be added, IN BLOGGER, without just changing the goddamn template instead?

Since my current host doesn't offer MySQL or MSSQL or anything at all like that, I guess I'm going to have to switch to somebody else and get WordPress going. I'm not even remotely happy at this point. Blogger has gone down shit lane as far as I can tell. Hopefully my little message will kick somebody's butt into gear and get it fixed (although my linkblog is still screwed over, but I might be able to salvage it (still)), as I've got a lot more work ahead to get my own WAMP system working. I've found a printed copy of my url2mail.c program that I think I can get modified enough to work with the Blogger email gateway (by enclosing what I'm sending as a mime enclosure, not just sent as text).

How many blogs tonight are screwed over by this absolutely stupid move on Blogger's part?

Update: It's worse than that I'm finding. They've put in a <div style="clear:both; padding-bottom: 0.25em;"></div> at the end of the post, that I didn't catch before. Insert scream here!

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Monday, June 20

The Tax Foundation - Number of Americans Outside the Income Tax System Continues to Grow  

The Tax Foundation - Number of Americans Outside the Income Tax System Continues to Grow

Look at this later.

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Saturday, June 11

Cat blogging!  

OK, I'm off by a day. I realized as I finished off the last post that I had a picture of Kitto, but didn't manage to get it uploaded and posted.



This is Kitto, the stray that my daughter has decided to bring in. We got his shots, tested him for feline leukemia (negative), but he has FIV, Feline Immunodeficiency Virus. He's loosing the parts that make him a tom, so he'll just be a cat in two and a half weeks, when we take him in for his booster shots. He stayed away for almost four days before he came back to us. He spent the night with us last night, and I think he's been surprised that he can come and go as he pleases now. After the snip, he won't be passing on FIV via mating, and he won't be inclined to get into fights with other cats. He's already been around our cats, but I don't think we've had any fights that would mean that they've been infected. I've seen some swats, but certainly nothing to break the skin.

I was getting worried that we weren't seeing him, as my daughter kept telling people that he had FIV, and I had a thought that somebody might just shoot him to take care of the "problem".

Permanent link posted by bytehead @ 6/11/2005 11:05:00 PM    0 comments Links to this post

Friday, June 10

PBS | I, Cringely . June 9, 2005 - Going for Broke  

PBS | I, Cringely . June 9, 2005 - Going for Broke

I have to wonder what Cringely is smoking here. Must be that powerful sh!t that they grow in southern Ohio.

Intel buying Apple? I don't think so.

Let's take a revisionist look at the Apple news, asking a few key questions. The company has on its web site a video of the speech, itself, which is well worth watching. It's among this week's links.

Question 1: What happened to the PowerPC's supposed performance advantage over Intel?

This is the Altivec Factor -- PowerPC's dedicated vector processor in the G4 and G5 chips that make them so fast at running applications like Adobe Photoshop and doing that vaunted H.264 video compression. Apple loved to pull Phil Schiller onstage to do side-by-side speed tests showing how much faster in real life the G4s and G5s were than their Pentium equivalents. Was that so much BS? Did Apple not really mean it? And why was the question totally ignored in this week's presentation?

Obviously, it's because IBM didn't deliver what they said what they would deliver. I have no clue whatsoever what Intel has up its sleeves, as I really don't expect much more MHZ power out of the current crop. Going multi-core will help, certainly. But shouldn't we already being seeing 6MHZ and above now?

Question 2: What happened to Apple's 64-bit operating system?

OS X 10.4 -- Tiger -- is a 64-bit OS, remember, yet Intel's 64-bit chips -- Xeon and Itanium -- are high buck items aimed at servers, not iMacs. So is Intel going to do a cheaper Itanium for Apple or is Apple going to pretend that 64-bit never existed? Yes to both is my guess, which explains why the word "Pentium" was hardly used in the Jobs presentation. Certainly, he never said WHICH Intel chip they'd be using, just mentioning an unnamed 3.6-Ghz development system -- a system which apparently doesn't benchmark very well, either.

So is 64-bit really nothing to Apple? And why did they make such a big deal about it in their earlier marketing?

They made a big deal about it?

Question 3: Where the heck is AMD?

If Apple is willing to embrace the Intel architecture because of its performance and low power consumption, then why not go with AMD, which equals Intel's power specs, EXCEEDS Intel's performance specs and does so at a lower price point across the board? Apple and AMD makes far more sense than Apple and Intel any day.

Because Intel has made certain guarantees that I doubt that AMD would ever be able to make.

Question 4: Why announce this chip swap a year before it will even begin for customers?

This is the biggest question of all, suggesting Steve Jobs has completely forgotten about Adam Osborne. For those who don't remember him, Osborne was the charismatic founder of Osborne Computer, makers of the world's first luggable computer, the Osborne 1. The company failed in spectacular fashion when Adam pre-announced his next model, the Osborne Executive, several months before it would actually ship. People who would have bought Osborne 1s decided to wait for the Executive, which cost only $200 more and was twice the computer. Osborne sales crashed and the company folded. So why would Steve Jobs -- who knew Adam Osborne and even shared a hot tub with him (Steve's longtime girlfriend back in the day worked as an engineer for Osborne) -- pre-announce this chip change that undercuts not only his present product line but most of the machines he'll be introducing in the next 12 to 18 months?

Is the guy really going to stand up at some future MacWorld and tout a new Mac as being the world's most advanced obsolete computer?

This announcement has to cost Apple billions in lost sales as customers inevitably decide to wait for Intel boxes.

Apple's stated reason for pre-announcing the shift by a year is to allow third-party developers that amount of time to port their apps to Intel. But this makes no sense. For one thing, Apple went out of its way to show how easy the port could be with its Mathematica demonstration, so why give it a year? And companies typically make such announcements to their partners in private under NDA and get away with it. There was no need to make this a public announcement despite News.com's scoop, which only happened because of the approaching Jobs speech. Apple could have kept it quiet if they had chosen to, with the result that not so many sales would have been lost.

This means that there must have been some overriding reason why Apple HAD to make this public announcement, why it was worth the loss of billions in sales.

(emphasis mine)—Yeah, this is the part that I have issue with. MacTel in time for Christmas, not a problem. But waiting a whole year? Then again, the Mac faithful will probably continue to buy their boxes, regardless. I guess.

Question 5: Is this all really about Digital Rights Management?

People "in the know" love this idea, that Hollywood moguls are forcing Apple to switch to Intel because Intel processors have built-in DRM features that will keep us from pirating music and movies. Yes, Intel processors have such features, based primarily on the idea of a CPU ID that we all hated when it was announced years ago so Intel just stopped talking about it. The CPU ID is still in there, of course, and could be used to tie certain content to the specific chip in your computer.

But there are two problems with this argument. First, Apple is already in the music and video distribution businesses without this feature, which wouldn't be available across the whole product line for another two years and wouldn't be available across 90 percent of the installed base for probably another six years. Second, though nobody has ever mentioned it, I'm fairly sure that the PowerPC, too, has an individual CPU ID. Every high end microprocessor does, just as every network device has its unique MAC address.

So while DRM is nice, it probably isn't a driving force in this decision.

I'm going to agree with this. It may be entirely wrong, but DRM could just as well be done with the PPC, as with the x86.

Then what is the driving force?

Microsoft.

…

Microsoft comes into this because Intel hates Microsoft. It hasn't always been that way, but in recent years Microsoft has abused its relationship with Intel and used AMD as a cudgel against Intel. Even worse, from Intel's standpoint Microsoft doesn't work hard enough to challenge its hardware. For Intel to keep growing, people have to replace their PCs more often and Microsoft's bloatware strategy just isn't making that happen, especially if they keep delaying Longhorn.

Enter Apple. This isn't a story about Intel gaining another three percent market share at the expense of IBM, it is about Intel taking back control of the desktop from Microsoft.

Intel is fed up with Microsoft. Microsoft has no innovation that drives what Intel must have, which is a use for more processing power. And when they did have one with the Xbox, they went elsewhere.

So Intel buys Apple and works with their OEMs to get products out in the market. The OEMs would love to be able to offer a higher margin product with better reliability than Microsoft. Intel/Apple enters the market just as Microsoft announces yet another delay in their next generation OS. By the way, the new Apple OS for the Intel Architecture has a compatibility mode with Windows (I'm just guessing on this one).

This scenario works well for everyone except Microsoft. If Intel was able to own the Mac OS and make it available to all the OEMs, it could break the back of Microsoft. And if they tuned the OS to take advantage of unique features that only Intel had, they would put AMD back in the box, too. Apple could return Intel to its traditional role of being where all the value was in the PC world. And Apple/Intel could easily extend this to the consumer electronics world. How much would it cost Intel to buy Apple? Not much. And if they paid in stock it would cost nothing at all since investors would drive shares through the roof on a huge swell of user enthusiasm.

That's the story as I see it unfolding. Steve Jobs finally beats Bill Gates. And with the sale of Apple to Intel, Steve accepts the position of CEO of the Pixar/Disney/Sony Media Company.

Remember, you read it here first.

OK, I'm a bad person because I'm still running a five year old Pentium III running at 450MHZ (running XP of all things…) that I'm not going to upgrade because my Microsoft runs just fine on it? Er, no. I upgraded my first computer because things were going bad on me, memory, which nobody seems to sell anymore, and other things that the motherboard was indicating would crap out on me. Instead, I've had two hard drives fail on me after the upgrade. Grrrrrrrr. Apple's going to be the driving force for upgrades? Give me a break. If Apple does come up with software that requires a four core CPU running at 5 or 6 GHZ, doesn't that mean that Microsoft is just going to eat their lunch?

We've got quite the CPU power. Where things truly suck is IO. The gaming community has gotten the manufacturers to really improve on the video front, with great performance out of even the more modest cards. But hard drives? SATA II looks nice in being able to deliver some actual performance, but SCSI has been the top performer for quite some time, and most computers don't have SCSI. Not even the current crop of Macs. It's too damn expensive, and still is. CD-ROMs, well, you can only spin plastic so fast before it explodes on you, so the only thing that we can do there is increase density, while maintaining our 6300 - 7800 RPM limit of speed that we can spin that plastic. USB speed is improving, and so is FireWire, although it still needs more. And I won't go into Ethernet speeds. I'm rather surprised that my latest computer won't do gigabit Ethernet. My router won't do it, so it's not that important. When the other computer gets upgraded, it will be nice to have 100MB Ethernet on it as well. I'm rambling at this point.

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MilkandCookies - Shatner Does Seven  

MilkandCookies - Shatner Does Seven

Truly funny. With my linkblog down, I'm putting this here. Shatner does great here, even spoofing himself.

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Joe Carr : Photo Essay — Fallujah: An Unnatural Disaster - Voices in the Wilderness  

The good news in Iraq doesn't look so good. Downright scary actually.

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ApTel? MacTel? or just plain Osbourned?  

Apple has announced that they are making the switch to Intel chips. I find this extremely funny.

I've never been an Apple fan. I've never owned one, from a // to a Mac. I've been one those who have always preached software before hardware, and in my case it's either been Zilog Z80 (Intel 8080 compatible) or Intel. Because that's where I've seen my software take me. The whole evangelism of the Mac (and to a degree the Lisa) has really turned me off the company. Then there's the whole elitism, with their software, with their supposedly incredibly better hardware (sorry, SCSI was also out there for PCs, I was running it, and besides, Apple finally went with IDE, just like the rest of the PC market), their superior LocalTalk (yeah, which is why their Ethernet now sucks black eggs), and their just holy than thou whoever runs PCs attitude.

But I di/regress.

The first thing that catches my eye about this announcment is that Mac OSX won't run on ordinary PCs, only Intel Macs. It's obvious that Apple is not going to give up its lucrative hardware margins. If they are making them with off the shelf parts, which I say they have no choice but to do so, that means either a special boot ROM, or DRM. My current computer already has a 512K boot ROM, of which only half (probably truly only a quarter) is in actual use. If that still isn't big, then it won't take PC makers too long to put in ROMs big enough to handle both Mac and PC BIOSes in one. Getting the actual code may or may not be a problem. But certainly not overwhelming.

That leaves us with DRM, which Intel has supposedly already starting shipping in their 945 support chips for the Pentium-D. Which would also give Hollywood their foothold into the computer business, something that I'm sure Apple would allow. It's the continuation of the iTune-ization of America.

The problem for Apple now is, are new computer sales going to drop to the point where they can't sustain themselves long enough to get the new computers out? Does anybody really want to buy an anemic Mac Mini now, only to find out how badly it's been superceded by the Mac Mini Intel box?

I understand that Apple has been having issues with IBM about the kind of processor expectations that haven't happened, the ones that were supposed to take a year to happen, and two years later still aren't available. That has to be quite galling for them.

But I find it extremely hard to believe that Apple is going to be competitive in the end run with the hardware. Dell, IBM, HP/Compaq, beige box makers, I think Apple's going to be in for a real hard time. As somebody else said, who I can't remember unfortunately, Apple's liable to be shooting itself in the foot via their own head.

And this is after hearing about how much harder is was going to be for Intel to get much more speed out of their chips. Putting multiple cores on a chip can help, but that's going to require a paradigm change in programming to get the full use out of doubling that every two years. I like my HT processor, because I've got multiple processes programs going at one time. So two processors is good for me. I might even use four. More than that? I need processes, not programs to be multithreaded.

So that's my view from my fractured crystal ball.

Permanent link posted by bytehead @ 6/07/2005 10:20:00 AM    0 comments Links to this post

Saturday, June 4

Lakewood High School wins State Championship!  

Lakewood High School wins State Championship!

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Wednesday, June 1

Ed Bott: Buy these books, and then burn them...  

Ed Bott: Buy these books, and then burn them...

Agreed on this. I'm just pointing to this blog entry, not the original list. I don't think they deserve the traffic/Google juice.

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Permanent link posted by bytehead @ 6/01/2005 03:32:00 PM    0 comments Links to this post