Ran across a pathetic entry on qbit.cc on water rights, but the the page required Javascript to leave comments -- so the site is run by (an) idiot[s].

Not surprising, as the author of the entry was profoundly upset at the idea of water rights. Apparently, this idiot worries about the government enslaving people by controlling the water, but never reflects on the subject for five minutes to think about what the underlying problem might be: else he (or she) might have had an actual thought, and perhaps wondered what would happen if, instead of a government (answerable to all of the people) controlling the distribution of water, a random citizen were to "enslave" people by controlling the water.

Many laws are bloated, twisted, unreadable, useless, and stupid -- but most of the laws that affect most of the people in the country are, oddly enough, not without some sort of justification. They address a problem, concern, or issue, that was or is important. Sure, the law may introduce a different problem, but that, too, is often addressed by the law (which is how we end up with such bloated, twisted, unreadable legal codes).

This isn't to say that laws shouldn't be routinely challenged, or re-evaluated; it just means that we should take a little time to learn some of the history of the issue, and ponder the concerns the law was apparently made to address. It may be that our national values have changed since then (it used to be -- as in before I was born -- illegal for a non-white to own my house, for example, something I find quite offensive), or not (I quite like it being illegal for someone to shoot me just because).

I ran across http://wordaligned.org/articles/brackets-off and, well, I disagree.

"Thomas Guest" writes:

And secondly, if a coding standard were to rule on how to parenthesise, it would be difficult to find a middle ground. This leaves as candidate rules the two extremes:

1. parenthesise everything
2. never parenthesise

The first quickly leads to unreadable code. The second seems overly proscriptive.

Thomas misses the obvious middle-ground: parenthesize everything where order matters.

Sure,

x = ((((a * b) * c) + e) + f);

may be overkill, but even the most passionate parenthesize everything advocates don't go that far; they write

x = ( a * b * c ) + e + f;

where every operation at the same level of precedence is left alone. This provides maximal clarity and promotes readability, as the reader doesn't have to think about the order of precedence for that language.

He then goes on to discuss order of precedence as if it's a universal rule, rather than a convention of infix notation in programming languages. (I've had this discussion with people, some of whom could not be convinced that precedence was anything other than a convention, arguing that it derives from fundamental principles of mathematics that I was too stupid to comprehend and thus it wasn't worth explaining.)

Perhaps Thomas should try programming in more than just one language. I suggest Smalltalk.

I bought something online. DHL was the cheapest/fastest combination offered, so that's the shipping method I selected, and I've always used FedEx or UPS, so variety is good, eh?

And, this being the Bright New Future, I received a link to the DHL tracking page for my order. Hurrah!

Then I follow the link to see what the status of my shipping order is... and I get a blank page. WTF?

I poke around and discover that the "tracking link page" is nothing other than a form, with all fields hidden, and a fragment of Javascript to change one of the hidden fields and then submit the form. Really, it does nothing of any importance whatsoever, other than consume time, waste bandwidth, and exercise some idiot's Mad Javascript Skillz.

I fix up the page, rip out the Javascript, add a proper submit button (why do so many "web developers" despise the submit button? ), and visit the real tracking page. Whereupon I'm informed of all the information I desire... and I'm also presented with a notice that I am either using a browser that doesn't support Javascript, or that I need to enable Javascript in order to use the page.

Dumb. I already used the page. I discovered the information I was looking for.

Of course, if someone at DHL runs across this, I see three ways it can go:

1. Nothing happens. I'm a crank on "the internet" and it's vitally important not to upset the web developers by offering up criticism; besides, I should just get with the program and jump on the Web 2.0 bandwagon and trust everyone already, instead of being a paranoid freak.
2. The "programmer" in question takes offense at my Mad Javascript Skillz comment, and further obfuscates the javascript and content, so that I need to spend considerable time reverse-engineering (and presumably I would then give up and concede that my it's-my-computer-not-yours-keep-your-hands-off attitude is no match for mad skillz, and join the rest of the shee^Wpeople in enabling Javascript because that's what everyone else does) the page.
3. This gets to an actual programmer who looks it over, realizes that this "technique" is indeed entirely bogus, and rips it all out, or at least makes the few minor changes needed to have the system work just fine with and without Javascript.

I think the middle option is actually the most probable outcome, and would demonstrate level of corporate stupidity that moderately intelligent people have come to expect.

I played Arkham Horror [ http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/arkhamhorror.html ] for the first time the other night. I played the nun (7 SAN and "never lost in time and space" were the big draws), managed to engage in quite a lot of combat (especially for a newbie), and had a great time.

By the end of the night, I was almost managing to remember what to for each phase of the game.

Oh, and we "won".

Great fun.

I spent some time today looking for spreadsheet and word-processing software for my new MacBook. I figured I'd look to see if there was anything worth spending money on.

I had mixed results.

Some vendors offered a trial version, others, not so much. I found this astonishing... there are free-as-in-beer alternatives out there. Why for the love of ladybugs would I pay to check out some software? Because the marketing hype is so convincing? I think not!

But, that simplifies the process a bit. No trial version? Move on to the next product in the list.

Some vendors would offer to give me a trial version, but they wanted contact information first. I'm just browsing, folks; I do not feel like providing you with a name and email address. I get enough junkmail as it is, I don't need something more to ignore (or directives to go to a website to unsubscribe from something that I never wanted in the first place). Move on to the next product in the list; I'll come back if nothing else can do the job, but otherwise no go.

Now we're cooking with gas. I happily download several .dmg files (I have become a heavy user of tabbed browsing, and will often take actions in parallel). I mount each of 'em in turn to start evaluating the products.

Some of the programs are installers. They want to splatter themselves across my system for a trial version. Sorry, no. Move on to the next product in the list.

But some... some products let me run them straight from the .dmg -- drag-to-where-you-want-it kind of installation. These I can evaluate. Some work better than others, of course, but that's why I'm doing the little evaluation dance.

These vendors deserve a biscuit.

However, that's not the point of the ramble. I'm concerned with the reasoning behind those vendors who made it difficult (or at least annoying) for me to evaluate their product. How does this happen?

And why?

I was poking around on the apple discussion boards, and ran across some assertions by one Scott Radloff.

He explains that OS X is safe from viruses because it's UNIX, and then he goes on to assert a number of things about UNIX that just aren't so, to the best of my knowledge. The thing is, I've heard these assertions before, from Linux advocates mostly, which means this isn't just another standard case of excessive Mac advocacy.

Scott first asserts that UNIX was built with the Internet in mind. To the best of my knowledge, UNIX was first conceived and built prior to the Internet, and its basic structure and principles were established before even the Internet's precursor, ARPANET.

Scott further asserts that "UNIX was conceived as a rock-solid fortress of security". This is laughable, as even a cursory reading of UNIX history reveals that UNIX is very much a "good enough" system. The name itself is a pun on MULTICS, about which one might be able to defend Scott's assertion. UNIX was a simplification over MULTICS (thus the pun).

This isn't to say that UNIX lacked any sort of security. UNIX was built in the days of timesharing computers -- many users, one machine -- so naturally there are *some* controls in place. Just enough to do the job, however, which is a far cry from being a fortress. Many of the modern UNIX security advantages are due to efforts to retrofit a better security system on to UNIX, rather than to design it in from the very beginning.

(MSWindows, on the other hand, comes from a tradition of microcomputers, which were not typically networked, and had one user per machine. NT attempted to bring a more sensible infrastructure, but by all accounts, that's mostly been subverted in the name of market share. And hey, it's the right business decision for Microsoft: most of their users don't actually want security.)

Scott's assertion that MSWindows "began life as no more than a port of the early MacOS to the PC" is a huge stretch. But then, when I think of "port", I think of starting with a copy of the source code of what I'm porting, not an attempt to reimplement functionality from scratch. If MSwindows is a port, then so is MacOS -- Xerox invented the GUI, after all.

Scott then oversimplifies the concept of a virus (or, less charitably, demonstrates an ignorance between virus, trojan, and worm). He, like many "UNIX-is-secure-out-of-the-box" advocates, miss the point.

A virus doesn't have to compromise the whole machine. It just has to replicate somehow.

So long as you, as a user, can create and run executable programs in your home directory, you can, in theory, support a virus.

Why there aren't viruses galore for the UNIX platforms I don't know -- it may be that the kind of person who would write a virus can't justify spending the money for a Mac or UNIX box (or can't figure 'em out); or that there aren't enough UNIX users among the general population to keep a virus viable; or that there are UNIX viruses but they're very slow, very subtle, and don't break anything; or that UNIX users tend not to run everything as root or the administrative account, making the payoff less juicy; or that the virus-writers believe the hype, and just don't try.

One of the things that most UNIXes get right, but OS X gets wrong, is that they have you create a "normal user account" in addition to the root/administrative account. The first user you create in OS X is, by default, the Administrative User. There's a reasonable justification behind it -- most users won't or can't track two distinct accounts -- but it's still uncomfortably close to the MSWindows "solution" of making everyone a Administrator so they can get their work done.

Remember, one of the first viruses ever created was created on a UNIX machine. Some of the most widespread worms spread on UNIX machines. UNIX isn't immune to malware, at least not if you have a gullible user.

Update: Seems like I'm not the only one annoyed by this attitude. I just ran across this article on unix viruses.

I wanted to run some OSes in a virtual machine on my laptop, but my venerable Titanium Powerbook just wasn't up to the task. It's short on disk, short on power, and starting to fall apart. So in the middle of January, I go and buy a MacBook.

(I looked at a variety of machines, but the constraints were simple: it had to ship with some variant of *nix, support wireless out of the box, and have a keyboard I could enjoy, or at least not loathe, typing on. The last is often the killer... I could've gotten a macbook pro, but the keyboards suck, for me.)

Since I'll be using this laptop for presentations, I ask the guy in the store: "This WILL run all of my existing PPC software, right?" "Yes, unless it's Classic. If it's OS X native PPC software, this macbook will run it out of the box."

Cool. That's what I need to know. Transaction ensues. New laptop is brought home.

I dig out the box for Keynote. I install Keynote. It crashes on startup.

Crap. Okay, let's poke around the Apple site.... good, here's the upgrade to 1.1.1 -- and it says this makes Keynote work for all versions of OS X 10.2.8 and later.

Download. Install.

Crashes on startup (got a little farther, but not much) again.

Damn, damn, damn.

Okay, time to use that AppleCare support I bought. My new laptop won't run software that it ought to run. I call... and end up on hold.

Eventually, I get thru to a nice support lady, and we fix the permissions, verify the partition, reinstall, and do the fix-permissions dance again.

No joy.

It _ought_ to work, but it doesn't. So... she bumps me up. Back on hold.

Eventually, I get a guy, who listens to the problem, listens to what we've done so far, agrees that it ought to work, and then explains that he'd have to spend some time researching this to find out what's wrong, and it would be faster to get bumped over to iApps Support.

Okay, fine. Back on hold.

Ten minutes in, a voice tells me I'll be with a representative inside of 15 minutes. An hour and twenty minutes later, I finally talk to someone.

He stalls on the fact that I'm having a problem with Keynote. He corrects me: "iWork".

We go around and around; he all but calls me a liar, not until he takes my CD's version number and goes away for another quarter-hour does he come back and acknowledge that, indeed, I do have Keynote, not iWork. (No apology, either.)

He then asks how I can expect such old software to work anymore. I point him at the Apple Website, and point out the bit where it says "10.2.8 or later", and get him to grudgingly agree that 10.5.1 is, indeed, "later".

"But that's an old website!" he cries. "How can you expect it to apply?"

The fact that it's an Apple website makes no difference to this drone. In fact, the suggested solution is that I go out and purchase iWork 08.

No admission that perhaps the website is misleading.

No pointer to an announcement that Keynote 1.1.1 wouldn't be supported on OS X 10.5.

No promise to fix the misleading website.

I should just go out and drop close to $90 on a new copy of iWork. (Well, he said $79, but then there's at least $8 in taxes on top of that.)

Now, I'm not against paying money for value received. Fair is fair.

But to break working software, and then to suggest that the solution is to buy more than what I want (I don't need the rest of the crap in iWork) to "upgrade" what was broken, well, I've seen that attitude before, and I want nothing to do with it.

But I've been on the phone for four hours by this point. I'm tired, hungry, cranky, and am being given crap by some jerk on the phone who is trying to tell me that I just need to spend MORE money because the promises made by Apple employees don't mean anything.

In short, I'm pissed.

No way in hell am I going to go buy iWorks anything. This is a good way to lose a customer, Apple. Shoot, this is exactly how Microsoft lost me as a customer; I used to grudgingly accept their dominance, at least at work, until I got exactly this sort of treatment,and decided that I, as a customer, could not in good conscience give my money to a vendor who treated me like that.

So... a biscuit to the Apple hardware folks.

No biscuit to the Apple iApp folks.

It's not that it would have been hard to treat me as customer.

I didn't expect to be _given_ a copy of iWork 08 (although, that would have been nice). A discount for upgrading iWork would have been plenty of motivation; AT LEAST stating that the Apple Store employee was wrong in his assertion that OS X PPC software would run on the new laptops, that the website was wrong to say "or later" instead of giving an explicit version range, and promising to fix the website RSN, would have begun smoothing ruffled feathers.

If they can't be bothered to treat me like a customer, I can't be bothered to give them money, or talk nice about 'em.

So, time to look at the competition.

I still don't look at Microsoft. Sooner or later, they'll screw you.

NeoOffice still wants a package installer. No go.

OpenOffice, however, lets me drag-and-drop from the DMG file.

Huzzah!

OPEN OFFICE ORG GETS A BISCUIT!

However, OOo falls down after a bit, it seems. Some sort of X11 error.

However, the OOo Aqua alpha version runs, and seems pretty stable for alpha software. It's ugly as sin at the moment, but it'll play a presentation on the new laptop. I tried using it to create my presentation, but it's still a bit rough, but I can still use the old machine to create a Keynote 1.1.1 presentation, and then export it so the OOoAqua can play it.

I have great hopes for OOo Aqua.

Still... OpenOffice.org has changed for the better.

That's progress.

Have a second biscuit.

I have a spreadsheet in Appleworks that I'd like to give out to a few people. Appleworks won't save it in an "open" format, but I can export it to a Microsoft Excel file. Alas, that incurs some minor corruption in some of the formulas. Since I don't have Microsoft Excel on my system (any of 'em), I can't load it up in that to fix 'em.

The folks I want to give this spreadsheet to generally use OpenOffice. As this spreadsheet started life as a StarOffice document, I figured having the up-to-date version in the Microsoft Excel format and the original in the StarOffice format would provide enough information to correct the corruption due to the exporting of this file to Microsoft Excel.

It seems OpenOffice doesn't read StarOffice files.

Bad developers! No biscuit!

Okay, I suppose I can install OpenOffice long enough to do the fixup, with the added bonus of being able to provide the spreadsheet in an "open" format. Since I'm using a Mac, the recommendation is to use NeoOffice.

So I go to download NeoOffice. They want a donation. I want to try before I buy, so I skip that bit. It's in a DMG, yay! Mount... and it's a freakin' PKG installer. WTF? Well, maybe it'll let me install it in /tmp or something. No joy... it demands the Administrator password.

Bad developers! No biscuit!

There's zero reason for an _application_ to require the Administrator password. I consider an application installation process that requires an Administrator password -- especially on the Mac, where run-from-the-DMG-file is almost a standard -- to be a sign of incompetence, arrogance, or carelessness on the part of the developers. Laziness is a virtue, but only sometimes.

And they wanted a donation?

No way. Not until they demonstrate a little professionalism and provide me, the user, a reasonable installation process.

Of course, a reasonable soul might point out that there's nothing wrong with a PKG installer, since Apple ships the PKG installer builder tool as part of the "standard" development suite. And they'd be half-right... the problem with PKG tools is that it doesn't do the right thing and allow the user to choose where and how to install an application (no matter what the developer does or doesn't do). Apple developers dropped the ball here.

Bad developers! No biscuit!

Sometimes folks wonder why "the average users" get so annoyed at developers. This is why. We have a tendency to take reasonable choices away from the end-user, instead of building our tools (especially our installation tools) to preserve the user's sense of control over the hardware that they've paid for and use on a daily basis.

So here I am, wanting to get a good set of Solaris 10 installation disks, and not wanting to go through the bother of downloading and burning a set. "No problem," thinks I, "I shall simply pay the $35 and order a media kit."

Sun's web-pages suck.

You'd think that a company with so many talented designers, engineers, graphic artists (you have to admit, their logo is cool and they have a very good eye for color), and so forth could manage to come up with a usable website. But noooo....

I suppose that $35 could be selling at a loss for them, and selling onesies and twosies isn't worth the cost or infrastructure -- but why then offer to sell it to me anyway? What's the use of teasing me by offering to take my money, and then going through all sorts of effort to make it difficult?

No wonder they're in trouble.

Update

Yay Sun!

They fixed it. Or I found an alternate approach at http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/ that worked. For free. And the media kit arrived in just a couple of days.

Of course, it's a DVD, which means I have to go juggle hardware now....

So there I was, with too many open projects, contemplating the purchase of a 160GB 2.5" Seagate Momentus drive. This laptop needs more storage, so why be stingy?

A little bit of poking around, and I end up at the ProVantage website. And there they clearly point out that if I want to offer to give them money, I must disable my Javascript-stripping proxy and enable Javascript in my browser.

Nice of them to be so clear about it. It saves me a lot of time and aggravation, plus, since I won't do that, it saves me all that money. I mean, if they don't want my money, that's fine with me, I'm sure I can find something else to spend it on, and it's not like I don't have sufficient projects to consume my time anyway.

So it's a big thank-you to provantage for not wanting to take my money.

Must be nice to be so flush you can treat customers like marks.

Where we left off: I wanted a remote for my JVC TV, and I discovered that the JVC website sucked.

But that's not the end of the story.

I still wanted a remote. I googled for the TV's model number, and got a couple of hits that claimed to have the remote for my TV. I went with the less-reliant-on-Javascript site -- PartStore.com -- and by searching on the TV's model number, I found a remote that was "compatible".

Yay.

"Compatible" ought to be good enough. All I really need is a way to navigate the menu so I can change aspect ratios and suchlike without having to stand next to the TV. So I order one.

It arrives in just a couple of days. Far faster than I expected.

Yay again!

So I unpack the remote, verify it's what I ordered, and go to try it out. It's even a JVC remote.

"Compatible" obviously means something different to the folks at JVC. There's virtually no useful feature of my TV that matches up with this remote.

A quick email to the support address and I go to bed, annoyed and frustrated. I am not a happy customer.

I get back a response informing me that I should call the toll-free support number. This I do.

And this is where the story gets short... after a couple of minutes on hold, I am on the line with a real human being. A helpful human being. He determines that yes, I did get the wrong remote for my TV.... and takes care of it.

I'm feeling like a customer. It's amazing. I was expecting to be told I was SOL, that the Computer Does Not Make Mistakes, and so on and so forth, and to end the evening in a lousy mood and a worse temper.

It's almost a let-down. Problem taken care of. End of problem. Finis.

The new remote arrived in two days. It's exactly the remote I need. As a bonus, it also can control the JVC VHS deck. (The remote that came with the VHS deck died. The universal remote isn't. But this one works. It's a bonus.)

This kind of service needs to be encouraged. I'm now wondering what other parts I need. They'll be the first stop.

But I won't use their webpage to order. I'll call to make the order.

And I'll ask for Don.

(The one downside of this is the FedEx website. Javascript Is Required, or you have a ton of manually parsing some convoluted javascript and source. Someone should take a stick to someone's kneecaps and knuckles over at FedEx.)

Well, it turns out I need a replacement remote for my JVC television. The so-called "universal" remote can just about power the thing on and off; I still need to go up to the TV and use the "menu" interface to change the aspect ratios. This is tedious and error-prone and distracts from the movie-watching experience.

"No problem," I say to myself. "I shall go to the JVC website and purchase one."

You can see it now, can't you? What a silly boy I am. I get to the JVC website, and it looks pretty, but I can't get it to do anything useful. No doubt I'm expected to "have an experience", but I can't see how that would benefit anyone if they don't make it dreadfully easy for me to part with my cash. I want to have experiences using their product, not their website.

I wonder what sort of thinking goes on in businesses these days. Has no-one pointed out the futility of having a pretty website that doesn't work for their customers?

Or do they expect that frustrated and annoyed customers are going to spend more money, and go around telling people (even strangers) how great their company is, than happy and satisfied customers?

What alternate dimension is this, and how did I get here?

It's either that, or they're incompetent.

If you travel enough, you might begin to see a pattern. Stuff disappears when TSA gets involve -- not the expensive stuff, necessarily, but little things. Things that may only have sentimal value. And stuff gets damaged. Not everytime, surely, but at a high enough level to be aggravating.

I'm not saying that all TSA employees gleefully vandalie the contents of suitcases, or steal trinkets and suchlike from duffel bags. But it seems that some do, and the rest apparently don't care. Trying to report this sort of thing puts you into a voice-mail hell, and contacting a human tends to result in a "so what?" attitude.

(The alternative, that the TSA inspectors are, in general, incompetent to pack suitcases, brings up a worse issue -- if we're hiring incompetent goons for security, how does that make us any more secure? Assuming incompetence has far scarier implications... I don't want to go there.)

It's preposterous that by travelling, we should be expected to give permission for some faceless cretin to damage, steal, or lose our possessions, despite all the money we spend buying quality luggage to protect those possessions.

I think we need some basic rights back in our travel. Nobody, but nobody, should be allowed to search your possessions without your presence, and if they damage your possessions, they should replace them and be penalized for the damage. Automatically. Making someone run a bureacratic gauntlet is just another penalty for daring to complain. And that's just wrong.

Well.

It seems that thinkgeek has a laser-keyboard widget. Yay! There's one problem taken care of right there.

Alas. There's still no way configure it with a non-Microsoft OS. Custom drivers still required, it seems.

But... it's looking better. Maybe the next version of OS X will fully support this sort of device naturally. We'll see.

Well.

Some time ago, Microsoft didn't think things through, and introduced a bug into Outlook that caused problems if you used the word "begin" and it happened to end up at the start of a line, followed by a couple of spaces. As they redefined the world in their terms, they called this an "attachment", and this caused problems.

See http://lists.jammed.com/ISN/2002/02/0042.html -- essentially, the Microsoft "solution" was to stop using the word 'begin', or to capitalize it no matter where it was in the sentence. Instead of fixing the bug, they tried to change the language.

That just pissed me off. I started using "begin quoting..." as an attribution line. This pissed of some people, but they weren't generally willing to file a bug report... so screw 'em. Others started pissed at me, but got pissed at Microsoft after discussing the issue. A brief search, and I found someone actively trying to get others to join in at http://www.ichimusai.org/oe/.

However.

It seems that Microsoft finally fixed the bug: http://msmvps.com/blogs/spywaresucks/archive/2005/06/18/53813.aspx

Huzzah!