Slashdot

Out of the blue, I got an email from my mom. She's been corresponding with someone about some sensitive things, and asked how to encrypt her emails.

My writeup is 9 paragraphs long. *sigh* There's so way she's really going to be able to do all that without me eventually going over there.

This is on Mac OS X. Sheesh. A Unix that doesn't come with gpg out-of-the-box, and the preloaded mailer (mail.app) needs a hard-to-maintain 3rd-party hack just to get basic functionality: you call this "just works?"

I don't wanna turn this into a specifically-Apple flame (I know of another high-marketshare desktop OS maker that also makes some pretty shitty apps), so I'll just make this generic comment: mail encryption is a very fundamental thing and it's ridiculous for it to not be built into all desktops. That's like a web browser that can't talk https. The howto I sent to my mom should have been about key exchange issues, not installing plugins. It's a disgrace for any mailer to not have this. This kind of shit is half the reason crypto goes unused by so many people. It's a pain in the ass not just because of the complex concepts (e.g. learning how to exchange keys safely) but because the most highly-deployed apps don't even work as-is.

..a character was a byte, and you always knew what that byte meant, and you didn't have to worry about what database library the script interpreter was compiled against, and in turn what character sets the database library was compiled with support for? Remember when what you saw on the screen was the same as the underlying data?

How I long for those days. *sigh*

One of the things that annoyed the hell out of me when I made the "big switch" around 2000-2002 from AmigaOS to Linux, is the dynamic scheduling. I'm pretty sure I've bitched in my /. journal about this before, but I'm too lazy to go back and look.

Hey, when I "nice" a time-consuming process, I fucking expect it to not slow my computer down, no matter how CPU-intense it is. That's how it was on AmigaOS: I could run as many tasks as I wanted, and as long as I gave them a priority lower (or was it higher, damn I don't remember the specifics) than 0, it had absolutely no impact on the responsiveness of the computer, and anything that I ran at a normal priority, ran just as fast as it would if I hadn't been running those other tasks at all. That's the joy of an absolute scheduler: it starves the low-priority tasks, and as a user that's what I want.

But all the so-called "modern" systems after the 1980s, from OS/2 to Windows to Linux (and now Mac OS as of version 10) totally fuck this up.

My Mac here at work runs a long job every morning, that I have niced. When it's running, the whole damn machine feels sluggish and -- seriously -- I can out-type the speed at which my fucking keystrokes are appearing in this fucking web browser's textarea. It is so utterly ridiculous that a 1.5GHz machine can't run as fast as 50 MHz Amiga.

Niced processes should starve if there's anything better to do. Absolutely starve. That is a good thing, not a bad thing.

But can Unix have this? Nooooo, because something (I don't know what) might deadlock (at least according to Linus, when the topic comes up in the context of Linux). Well, get your locks sorted out, Unixheads, so that maybe someday Unix can run as fast as an Amiga that has a tenth of the processing power.

I would never see it again.

It's destroyed. A fire erupted at about 6 this morning (WTF happened?!). When I walked by it again on my way to work a few hours later, it was totally gutted. I could see right through the front of the building, out into the parking lot behind it.

So.. a bar burned down. What's the big deal? It's just a bar, right? No. This place was special. It was fucking gorgeous, easily the nicest-looking bar in Albuquerque. Classically decorated decades ago.. timeless. Red velvet-covered walls, chandeliers, tin roof, the Puccini opera posters -- they're gone.

I saw many many shows there, mostly metal. I particularly remember one snowy Tuesday night about 4 years ago, seeing my favorite local band, Wisdom of the Leech. I was the only fan who showed up, and they still played for me.

I had my first Bridgeport IPA there. It happened after I tried a "new" (at the time) awful-tasting cloyingly-sweet stout (I won't name names), and I had to wash the taste out of my mouth. "Do you have any IPAs?" I asked. I wasn't even a hophead at the time; I just wanted some bitterness. Mathias served me a Bridgeport and I fell in love with it. Over the next few years, I didn't even have to order; Ryan or Christine would see me and start walking to the right tap.

I've brought dates there, been shot down there, got "lucky" there, sulked there, and celebrated there. And rocked, rocked, and rocked.

Read the musicians' reactions at rocksquawk, see photos at The Alibi. KOB, New Mexico Business Weekly.

The Launchpad, next door and also damaged, is closed for a few months too. It will be back. Serious doubts about the Golden West, though, and even if they rebuild, it won't be the same. It was the one bar where the original fixtures will actually be missed. Every other place in this town was replaceable. That one wasn't.