If you came to my house for Halloween this year the first thing you noticed was 18 inch tall green vampire marshmallows moving around on a 8 foot tall screen hung from the garage door. The next thing you noticed was that a laser assault rifle was placed into your hands and you were commanded to kill Marshie for candy. Ok, by laser assault rifle I mean a laser pointer put into a bunch of PVC, but it looked pretty cool. When a dot appeared on the screen it was detected by my iSight camera and Marshie exploded. If you're interested there are more details including a movie posted here.

I haven't written here in a while. For the most part I'm writing in my Blog.
I graduated from the Berklee College of Music last year (2006).
I am now working as office manager for Jazkarta, a Plone consulting firm based in Cambridge MA. It's a great job and I'm really enjoying it. We are located in the Betahouse, a loft style shared office space that has been featured in the Boston Globe recently.
Well, that's all for now.

The Notepad Bug still exists in vista.

Here's how to do it:
Open up Notepad, of course. Turn on 'word wrap'. Start typing. Enter some huge lines of text, ones that wrap several times. Save the document. Did you notice that the cursor position changed? Start typing again. Things get even more weird from there. Lines will no longer wrap properly. The text may get scrambled. Problems may occur. Your document may even get corrupted.

That's right, microsoft fucked up a featureless text editor.

I've been a Comcast customer nearly 4 years and have had a pleasant experience with them until recently. We received a phone call in December from someone claiming they were a Comcast rep to warn us of excessive bandwidth usage. After multiple calls to Comcast Customer Service that same day, we were told to ignore the call since their records said our account showed no issues.

Even the reference number provided in the call wasn't found in their databases. They mentioned it was probably someone trying to scam us. Now we've been disconnected. No follow up call or letter of concern and no internet service for 12 months. You get a single call then you're gone.

It seems other companies such as Verizon are having similar problems with the word unlimited. At this point I'm back to dial up as Comcast has no competition in my area. I've created a blog to help spread the word and warn people. Everyone in my neighborhood still thinks they have an unlimited residential account. I've educated them recently with articles such as this.

This has become such a problem that dslreports now has dozens of articles discussing this situation. Personally I'm ok with whatever the limits are. What's frustrating is Comcast reps are "not allowed to divulge data transfer limits" and cite a fuzzy AUP/TOS link which is helpful only to lawyers (no offense those who are lawyers).

While apologetic, Comcast Abuse department originally suggested we upgrade to a business account. Now we're told we should upgrade to a commercial account. The connection fee alone is $1700 and $1000 monthly for the line! Seems Comcast hasn't passed the word to their customer service either. I called them asking what the limits were, they will still tell you they have none. Archive.org shows the Comcast advertisement we received when we signed up

Personally I'm hoping Utopianet will become available in my area. After this experience, I'd love to get rid of Comcast permanently. I'm also hoping to encourage broadband competition so companies (such as Comcast) will feel the pinch financially when they become this arrogant.

A word of warning. Make sure you are fully aware of what your provider offers. If it's unclear then get it in writing or find another provider if possible.

Senator Barbara Boxer is giving away free money to candidates that are challenging incumbents. The catch is that you have to vote for who you want the money to go to. Pete Ashdown is not only running to unseat Senator Hatch (enemy of geeks everywhere) but is tech savvy himself, given that he is the founder of Utah's oldest ISP. His positions on tech issues should be of interest to many a slashdotter. So if you have a moment, click on the link below and vote for him to get some free money.

Vote for Pete Ashdown.

Every time CleanFlicks or similar services/technologies come up on /. there is a decided bias against them by the submitters, editors, and commenters. They're all missing the bigger picture! As I said in the most recent article:

This is a win for big copyright and a loss for free culture. /.ers are only seeing censorship here when they should be seeing remixing and control of content that you've bought. /. has consistently been on the wrong side of this issue because of a lack of vision about what it represents. How /. can champion Free DVD software for Linux so that you can watch a movie on the OS of your choice but not favor this is a mystery to me. What if that Free player knew how to skip the booring bits (Jar Jar?) or replay the naughty bits in slow mo while leaving the original media untouched? All the /.ers would be lining up behind it! But if someone uses technology for a purpose that is seen as socially conservative all the idiots here go bonkers. Your fear of "censorship" has blinded you to a corporate power grab of your culture.

Can someone out there in journal land explain to me why so many here at /. take the corporate/anti-free stance on this?

I just noticed a new Slashdot feature: tagging.

Ick.

I like tagging when it is appropriate. But tagging slashdot stories is not going to work well. For tags to work they must have some benefit to the individual and some use to the group. The two places they work the best are del.icio.us and flickr. In both cases you organize your data by your tags. Your data is bookmarks and photos respectively. As a side result, you can get statistics about the most popular things with different tags. People don't tag things for the good of the community, they tag things to organize data in some way that is relevent to them.

Take a tagging system that is a failure: amazon.com product tags. Amazon introduced tagging in hopes of getting some new ways of slicing their product database. It turns out that are using the tags mostly for who on their gift list might want the thing. So you end up with lots of tags like "Bob", "Sue", and "Caroline". These tags have almost no use to the larger community. Amazon makes it worse by displaying the top tags for a product even when there are only one or two folks that have tagged something that way.

So why is it bad for Slashdot? Slashdot's implementation doesn't do anything at all for the end user

. The tagging system seems to be designed only around the group aspects. Features that would be needed to make this work:

• Ability to see your articles as your have tagged them.
• See what tags you have specified for a specific article

Without those, people just have no incentive at all to tag anything.

If Slashdot actually changed the page because of how you tag stories the results might be better. For example if somebody tags something "dupe", or "boring" it would be removed from that person's front page. On the other side, if it was tagged "cool" it would remain on the front page for longer.

As it is, I'll probably be tagging stories as to how I feel about them to start with and see if anybody notices. If nothing happens, I'll probably stop tagging altogether.

Please read the alert here. The Broadcast Flag is back, this time as a WIPO treaty, and if you don't speak up, it'll be decided by bureaucrats without any democratic input at all.

The alert provides a web form to write to your congress person. Please do that. And please put the alert up elsewhere, so that other people can help too.

I'm in Washington DC working on this today, and your support will help.

Thanks

Bruce

Please see http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=175093&cid=14558550 I don't see a reason for the negative moderation. I'd appreciate if anyone with mod points would help fix this.

Bruce

Why do I dislike Microsoft? It's not because they're so damn big, or charge so much for their OS, or pretend not to be a monopoly, or stifle innovation, or refuse to release the source to their OS. They're a company, companies are expected to try and suck as much money out of the economy as possible. So they make business decisions in line with that singular goal.

No, it's because they're goddamned assholes.

New features developed for their next OS, ones that AREN'T deal-breakers and WOULDN'T keep people from buying the new products, somehow never seem to make it into patches or updates for the older versions of Windows.

An Example: "Lock the Taskbar" was a rather nice and useful feature they added in WinXP. But how hard would it be to add that feature to Win2k? A tiny little patch right? It's not THAT complex, since after all it's just an option that breaks the resize functionality of the taskbar. If there wasn't a switch for it and it happened seemingly at random, it would be called a bug.

There are many other examples of that.

Their refusal to admit that bugs or problems even exist with their OS also ticks me off. It's not that hard either. "Our bad, we screwed up and we're fixing it/have fixed it." Not that hard to say.

I'm sure anyone who's played around with Windows to any extent and kept track will have a nice list of problems they've encountered, but here's my favorite:

There's a bug in Notepad. Roll that around on your tongue. THERE'S A BUG IN NOTEPAD. That's right, they fucked up a featureless text editor. The bug still exists even in Windows XP.

Here's how to do it:
Open up Notepad, of course. Turn on 'word wrap'. Start typing. Enter some huge lines of text, ones that wrap several times. Save the document. Did you notice that the cursor position changed? Start typing again. Things get even more weird from there. Lines will no longer wrap properly. The text may get scrambled. Problems may occur. Your document may even get corrupted. To fix it, you have to turn word wrap off and then back on.

Now, I could understand if this was a bug that only occurred when doing something really bizarre or unexpected or unintended. But this isn't THAT unusual of a series of events. Typing with word wrap on. Saving the document. These are all the usual things I would expect to be able to do with a text editor. Am I wrong?

Slashdot user rodgster sent me 1000 slashdot subscription pages because he likes my comments. Thanks, rodgster!

I have now entered WalMart three times in my life.

Before I go on I should mention that I really don't have time to be shopping today. I am moving today and tomorrow. I have other things to do.

Yet I was a WalMart today at 4:10 am. The prospect of a $378 laptop was too much to resist. There were about a hundred people in line in front of me. Assuming that they didn't all want a laptop I figured that I would be ok.

Wrong.

First, the line got mysteriously thicker as time went on. There were easily 300 people in front of me when the doors opened at 5:00 am. This does not include the people that stood in the parking lot and simply sprinted at the door when it opened. What kind of jerk do you have to be to do that?

Second, they put the laptops in the grocery area. At least this is what I was told. I never saw a laptop box. I went to the electronics area which was a mob scene but lacked laptops for some reason. According to a helpful WalMart employee, the laptops were gone from the grocery area before I got into the store anyhow.

Now if you claim to be selling a sub-$400 laptop but can't/won't sell anywhere near as many as people want then you really aren't selling such laptops. You are simply claiming to. Maybe if they offered rainchecks I would believe them, but they don't and thus I am convinced that it is a scam. Classic bait and switch.

I walked out of WalMart at 5:10 am vowing to never return. Unless they will give me a raincheck, which isn't going to happen.

There seem to be two camps when it comes to computing and technology in general.
1) Those who want something new and better daily
2) Those who whine when something new comes out because all of a sudden what they purchased isn't the best.

STOP IT!
Technology companies aren't putting out 'too many updates'. I have seen too many people whining on Apple forums about this. 'Oh they are putting out too many products, i can't afford them all.'
Oh well. We can't have it both ways. I personally welcome frequent upgrades and i'm more than happy without having the newest (and buggiest) car, wireless, computer, technology stuff..

It all keeps the market fluid so that prices DO drop. Look at stuff like Digidesign's Protools. They put out major platform upgrades every 4-5 years it seems. The prices stay really high. iPods on the other hand drop in price because well, they are small/breakable and there are new ones every year or less.

Subsribers see stories before everybody else. These stories are marked in red to indicate that they aren't published yet. However, the Slashdot interface doesn't tell you how long until they will be published. The stories are just marked as "To be published in the Mysterious Future!"

As a subsriber you also get a customized RSS feed. This feed has all the same stories you see on the home page including the stories soon to be published. Interestingly, the actually publish time for the story is included in the RSS feed. You can tell exactly when the story will go live on Slashdot. My RSS reader really unmasks the "Mysterious Future"

The ancient "--" before the signature to make it bloody obvious where the signature starts should now be replaced by a div around the signature. The old behavior could be emulated by sticking the "--" before the signature using css.

The new CSS layout rocks. It looks much cleaner, although a little flatter. Now that they Slashdot has it, it can be used to do all sorts of nifty new stuff.