Category: Uncategorized

What’s shocking about this news story to me is that it’s not shocking at all. These are the times we live in.

Man angry with son-in-law fingers him as terrorist to FBI

“…father-in-law wrote an email to the FBI saying the son-in-law had links to al-Qaeda in Sweden and that he was travelling to the US to meet his contacts. The son-in-law was arrested upon landing in Florida. He was placed in handcuffs, interrogated and placed in a cell for 11 hours before being put on a flight back to Europe…“

You can sue your local police department for wrongful arrest. Can you sue the US Government? Can you sue the US Government as a foreign citizen?

Whenever I connect my WD1600XMS (a 160gb 2.5″ USB-powered external drive) to my Mac, it now takes 10+ minutes for it to mount, and even then it only mounts after some prodding. I initially formatted the drive using my Mac (FAT32), but have since used it many times back-and-forth between my Mac and PC. After only a week of owning the thing the drive has become unusable from my Mac, but is fine on my PC.

Immediately after connecting the drive I see the following error on the console:

Nov 4 14:43:47 WeeMonkie diskarbitrationd[40]: unable to mount /dev/disk1s1 (status code 0x00000047).

The drive light then flashes for about 5 minutes, and then the drive’s status information appears in Apple System Profiler:

USB High-Speed Bus:

Host Controller Location: Built In USB
Host Controller Driver: AppleUSBEHCI
PCI Device ID: 0x00e0
PCI Revision ID: 0x0004
PCI Vendor ID: 0x1033
Bus Number: 0x5b

External HDD:

Removable Media: No
Detachable Drive: Yes
BSD Name: disk1
Version: 1.04
Bus Power (mA): 500
Speed: Up to 480 Mb/sec
Manufacturer: Western Digital
OS9 Drivers: No
Product ID: 0x0702
Serial Number: xxx
Vendor ID: 0x1058

If I then refresh Apple System Profiler, the drive lights flash for another 5 minutes and then the drive finally appears on the desktop.

There’s only about 20gb of data on the drive, but there are a ton of files… Does MacOS suck at handling FAT32? Is it trying to cache the entire file table before it mounts the disc?

Nokia bashes Apple for “locking” their phones:

The ad says: “Phones should be open to anything” and “The best devices have no limits”

OK, Nokia! You talk the talk, but can you walk the walk? Where’s your $200 price drop? The N95 phone is $795 retail!

Man! So many people are complaining about how the iPhone is locked to AT&T, and how Apple won’t let third-parties develop software for iPods, and wah-wah-wah… I’m tired of hearing about it.

If you don’t like it, don’t buy it.

I love my iPod. It’s a great music player. I bought it for the purpose of listening to music. I didn’t buy it to run 3rd-party applications or write software for it. I would love to write software for the iPod, but Apple won’t let me. That’s fine. Again, I bought it for the purpose of listening to music on it!

The iPhone is a closed system (unless you mod it of course). If you don’t like that no one is twisting your arm forcing you to buy one. And if you bought one and then decided you didn’t like the closed system then that’s your fault for not doing the research up front. What does the iPhone do that no other smartphone doesn’t do? Nothing. It just looks freakin’ sweet, that’s it. If you want an open system go pick up a Symbian UIQ/S60 or Windows Mobile phone.

Better yet: Buy an iPhone, hack it, download the community SDK and stop your whining.

Monday’s incident where a UF student was tasered and arrested for asking Senator Kerry some direct questions about the 2004 election has highlighted some serious issues we have in this society regarding how we deal with people that wish to speak their mind and provoke debate. Especially those who want to rant on a microphone in a public forum with a US Senator.

A lot of what I’ve read on the internets points out how poorly the police handled the situation–by trying to forcefully eject the poor guy, and then pinning him to the ground and tasering him. After watching videos of the incident I agree the police completely mishandled the situation. I think UF did the right thing suspending the officers.

I like Senator Kerry’s politics, but I think this incident speaks more to Kerry’s poor abilities as a public speaker than it does to police officer’s poor handling of the situation. A good orator knows how to redirect and/or silence people that try to hi-jack the debate. In a public forum like this you need to be ready to cut off someone that’s trying to escalate the situation and gracefully steer the conversation back to a comfortable level. Andrew Meyer was clearly trying to rile things up. Kerry should have stepped in and calmed the situation down. I can think of several ways Kerry could have joked with Meyer, bounced Meyer’s accusations right back at him, or even better, like a great politician: answer the question he wished he’d been asked.

Sad.

A friend of mine who’s a web designer did the Corvallis Fall Festival website a few years back, and just discovered today the city of Liberty, Missouri shamelessly ripped off her design for the Liberty Fall Festival website. The sign up page even redirects you to the Corvallis Fall Festival website!

At least they were thorough enough to change the metadata, which claims “HI-Tech-KC” as the author.

I just had a situation where Acrobat Reader was freezing up on startup. After searching, this page suggested the fix: delete all acr*.tmp files in C:\Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings\Temp.

That did the trick. Acrobat had created 66,000 temp files for me. Yay.

While searching, I also came across this page that suggests moving all of your Acrobat plugins to an “optional” folder so it launches faster. Yay again!

Of course, this only helps you if you’re running Acrobat 6. I refuse to upgrade. I wish I was still running 5. That version seemed to work much better. Are there free (and better*) alternatives to Acrobat Reader on Windows?

* This rules out Ghostview I’m afraid.

How? Be a mid-level employee at a big company and then make statements at a public conference that become taken out of context to make dramatic headlines like, “War on Terror overblown according to Microsoft“. The article even has a picture of the twin towers on fire next to the word “Microsoft”. Wow, you can’t buy that kind of great publicity!

But it gets better: He also touches on kidnapping. Another great thing that I’m sure Microsoft wants to be associated with! Next time you think of 9/11 or child kidnappings, think Microsoft. I know I will now, al beit with a chuckle.

Microsoft has apparently gone so far as to censor the portion of the conference video where their employee made the remarks that resulted in this headline. My respect for Microsoft will go way up if they don’t further reprimand this guy, but in this State of Fear we live in I can’t imagine them letting it slide. I totally agree with his point of view 100% but you can’t make statements like that while you’re representing a major corporation.

BoingBoing recently posted a blurb about “Zeitgeist: The Movie”, a budget film* (I wouldn’t exactly call it a documentary) that “purports to tell the real truth about Christianity, 9/11, and the International Bankers.” I had to see what this was about!

I couldn’t even get a minute into the movie before I felt like I had to jump out on to the internets to verify some of the material they were throwing out: “Horus [the Egyptian Sun God] had 12 disciples, was resurrected, … was born on December 25th … and that is why Christmas is celebrated on December 25th.” This contradicted what I had thought previously; that Christmas was celebrated on December 25th because the Romans had made it that day to attract followers. Searching the internets for q=horus christmas returns little useful results. Searches for q=horus disciples actually turns up a lot of hits disputing that claim. Wikipedia’s page on Horus makes no reference to Horus having 12 disciples or any kind of birthday.

Next up was this bit about “ages,” or “eras”, a period of 2150 years corresponding the movement of the Earth to the signs of the Zodiac. The movie says that the Moses ushered in the age of Ares, Jesus ushered in the age of Pisces, and the next age will be the age of Aquarius. Whistling a certain tune I headed out to Google again. q=jesus zodiac pisces returns 220,000 hits, but I wouldn’t exactly call the top hits reputable; it’s mostly people hawking astrological bible books. Some of the quotes on these pages look like a classified ad from the Weekly World News: “The Great Pyramid’s ‘missing capstone’ has puzzled Egyptologists for centuries…” (But for $24.99 + shipping we’ll explain everything!) q=moses zodiac returns similar pages. q=era 2150 returns a hit to the science fiction book “2150 AD”.

OK. So the movie is a little flakey on the facts and references. In fact, here’s a Google search about the movie that does return some reasonable hits: q=zeitgeigst movie bullshit — 437,000 results!

As pure entertainment, Zeitgeist hits the mark. (A better title would have been “Illuminati: The Movie“)… But seriously, if you’re into this sort of stuff, I would recommend viewing Bill Moyer’s Joseph Campbell and The Power of Myth, which is based on scholarly inquiry, not conspiracy theories. It’s a little dry on the special effects, but at least you won’t feel like you’re being fleeced while you’re watching it!

Update: Too funny. I just noticed the “statement” page for Zeitgeist says, “some information contained [in the movie] is not obtained by simple keyword searches on the Internet…” …why? Is The Man keeping this information from us? It gets better: “It is my hope that people will not take what is said in the film as the truth.” LOL. I’ve been pwned.