Apparently John McCain thinks it’s pork to control Mormon Crickets in Utah.  So much so, it seems, that he’s marked it the #6 piece of pork in a trillion dollar spending bill, despite that it’s less than one one thousandth of one percent of the cost.  Given that he’s biblically old, I would have thought he’d understand how important it is to stop SWARMING LOCUSTS.  I shit you not, the quote:

$1 million for mormon cricket control in Utah – is that the species of cricket or a game played by the brits?

I mean seriously, that’s so fundamentally uninformed that I can’t even mock it.  A million dollars is a bargain for statewide pest control that costs hundreds of millions of dollars in structural and crop damage annually.  He’s old enough that, statistically speaking, he should have seen every living thing at least twice by now (including brontosaurus); one is tempted to remind him of that crawly sandwich he had with Joseph Smith.

“I have no idea what they’re even talking about, so surely I’m qualified to think it’s pork!  Who needs locust control anyway?”

Asshat.

One of the most amazing things to me about the typical adware scumbag is their desperation to justify their own behavior.  An interview with such a person just went onto slashdot, in which in the site afterword, he attempts to compare his choices to the Millgram Experiment.

Of course, anyone with half a clue will remember three things:

1. He was not being instructed by an authority figure that adware was in the victim’s best interest
2. His goal was making money
3. He had months, including time away from the authority figure, in which to think it over

The dirtbag goes on to talk about how difficult it was to ignore a challenging occupation when one doesn’t have many other options.  Thing is, I could be making tons of money as a pirate, or writing malware, and I manage to get through my day without doing it.  I’m also willing to bet that Drew Peters wasn’t actually looking for other jobs at the time.

“It’s even harder if the bad starts out small and slowly gets bigger.”

Horseshit.  The second you do something bad, you object, and if they try to force you, you walk away.  That’s why when I found out my old boss Russell was triple- or more billing his clients in my name, I told him that he stopped tomorrow, or I walked.  Did I get fired?  Sure, but I told the client what happened, so so did Russell, and I ended up getting the job back with a different boss and a much larger hourly billable.

Oh, and I had my honesty and decency intact.

Go to hell, Matt Knox.  It’s not that hard to not write malware.  It’s just hard for people like you.  I hope that eventually you find yourself the victim of the things you’ve done to others; you’ve almost certainly caused far more damage than you’ll ever understand, during a time where it was extremely easy to get other work.

Disgusting.

Best Buy just illegally called my cellular phone to make announcements about rewards.  No option to speak to a human was given, which is also illegal.  And, of course, the number’s on the do not call list.

Pity the Boise police show so little interest in corporate illegal behavior – I’ve already reported three of these to them, and they don’t even open reports.

Unsurprisingly, this has ended my being a Best Buy customer permanently.  They were, previously, taking in about $1500 per month from me.  Wonder if it was worth it.

[digg-reddit-me]I put an email address on usenet which I created solely as a test, using a name that I’m pretty sure nobody on Earth has.  Within four days, it was getting Classmates reunion notices, and emails saying that my friends were trying to contact me, and that all I had to do was sign up for an account to find out who, and about what.

Unsolicited commercial email, and fraud to boot.  Pretty much the definition of SPAM, isn’t it?  So why isn’t anyone going after them like they are for the other spammers?  Aren’t there vast sums of money involved?

The post office has mislaid a package containing more than half of the christmas presents I was going to give out, which were supposed to be here a week ago.  It’s 4:30 christmas eve, and they have no idea where it is.  Time to find out what last minute shopping is like, and also, giving presents that aren’t awesome.  Failboat; all aboard.

I’ve lost more packages in the year since I’ve moved here than in the rest of my life put together, and the ones I do get are usually in piss poor condition.  It’s a wonder they pass quality control.

Am I the only person who resents having to pay for SMS when I’m already paying for unlimited data?

THIS IS ONLY HALF WRITTEN.  I have been sitting on this post, waiting for the mood to finish it, for months; because EEP18 is now being treated as a likely implement, I am immediately publishing the half-written version, because it exposes many (though not all) of the serious, irreconcilable problems with EEP18.

On the mailing list, people are actively trying to bring Erlang up to snuff with regards to web standards.  One of the more unfortunate choices being discussed is JSON as a data notation.  JSON, unfortunately, does not actually map to Erlang in a useful way.  Joe Armstrong has gone as far as to suggest BIFs, which are decidedly unrealistic as well as unnecessary.  My goal is to create a JSON handling library.  However, the mailing list is beginning to put momentum behind an alternative proposal which is currently presented in BIF form.

This post explains why my approach is different.  Many of the issues herein are discussed by the tabled EEP (EEP 18, “JSON BIFs” by Rickard O’Keefe), but some are not, and some of these issues are accepted when I believe they should not be.  It is my position that EEP 18 is unacceptably dangerous.  I will explain why.

Read the rest…

[digg-reddit-me]My good friend Jeff happened to mention offhand his knowledge of a document I’ve been looking for for quite some time now.  I’m sharing it with my readers in case they’re looking for something similar.

Let me be forward: I cannot stand the various Objective C books I’ve tried.  They all want to teach me to be a programmer.  I’m already there.  I just want a book like Stroustrup.  The PragProg book is awful: the first several chapters are about Mac development tools, like I give a damn.  Everything’s through interface wizards.  It’s nauseating.

Jeff heard mein painz0rz, and turned me on to From C++ to Objective-C.  It isn’t perfect: it’s not super comprehensive, and it’s translated from a different native language (French), which leaves a few passages cumbersome.  However, as one can tell from reading the intro, the author of the document, much like me, found little to love in the state of Objective C documentation, and wanted to write something for people who were already well established.

Kudos to Pierre Chatelier for writing the book that Apple and Alan Kay could not.

So, I’m not really sure what to do here.

There’s this host.  I’m not going to name them, because it isn’t clear to me whether it’s ethical to do so.  Four times in the last year, I’ve caught their engineers telling customers who are shared with my employer complete horseshit.  They’ve blamed their servers being compromised on our application without a lick of evidence (which turned out to be their own fault after basic inspection), they’ve made absurd claims about our policies, and now they’re making claims that we don’t support MS Exchange, which is of course completely false.

What’s worse, when their engineers get caught being completely full of crap, the company’s response is to isolate those engineers from explaining the claims they made, and instead they’ve been going to my company’s CEO, trying to get me in trouble for telling our shared client to be careful about the advice received from their engineers, despite knowing perfectly well that the advice being handed out by their engineers (particularly during commercially motivated server takeover) was dangerously incorrect.

So I’m not really sure what to do.  Do I go public with the names and claims of the individuals involved?  Do I just choke on the rage and be silent?  I tried going to their bosses; their bosses’ response was to try to get me fired from my own job.

How do my readers suggest that I handle such an improbably unethical hosting company?

[digg-reddit-me]One of the things I was most looking forward to about my new iPhone, knowing there were SSH clients, was the ability to use it as a genuinely remote terminal, no matter where I was, to do little shell tasks and write simple code and so on.

Ha!  The problem is, the iPhone has an autocorrecting keyboard which corrects if you don’t tell it not to (the obnoxious kind like Outlook has), and it makes completely asinine replacements (its becomes it’s, as if the word its doesn’t exist).  This is bad enough if you just speak above the level of an eighth grader, but it makes using unix shells and writing code genuinely impossible.

Classic apple zealot response from IRC: “don’t be stupid, just teach the iPhone every word you want to use when programming.”  Like they don’t even think before they answer.

Apple: why can’t I turn this off?  It’d be simple enough: there’s bound to be some function somwhere get_best_replacement(char* current), which signals no reasonable match (as you get for, say, ‘zzzzz’) by way of an empty string, or something similar.  That’s the hack point.  Add if (customer_isnt_retarded()) { return “”; } else { previous_logic(); } and it’s fixed.

Seriously, who locks people into an autocorrecting keyboard?  Ugh.  This ruins the iPhone for any kind of technical use.  What a mess.

If you hate this too, vote this up on digg and reddit, so that an Apple employee will see it.