Fred Gallager needs to get some thicker skin.

Okay, so some backstory. Scott and Fred are both webcomic artists. Fred writes and draws MegaTokyo, while Scott does the same with PVP Online. Scott has a habit of shooting his mouth off, and Fred has a habit of collapsing from acute lack of self-esteem.

There's some backstory involved with a friend of both of them, and Scott tried to make a funny (or so he says) that (a) wasn't funny and/or (b) fell flat.

Instead of actually apologizing, he's decided that it's no big deal and all this has been blown up all out of proportion by the fans of MegaTokyo. See: [PVPOnline Forum] -- and if you poke around on his website, you'll see more.

Fred didn't really need to provide an impassioned defense of his side of the story -- and doing so apparently only indicated to Scott that he [Fred] is just a big whiner. I somewhat agree; I think Fred should have just said that Scott was trying to tickle his [Scott's] tonsils with his [again, Scott's] toes, again, and let it go at that. But he didn't, 'cuz that's not his way, and apparently admitting to failure in humor isn't Scott's way. No, it's that we don't understand his Italian-German sensibilities.

However, I think Scott is in the wrong here. He's basically accused Fred of stealing, in print, in such a way so as to damage Fred's reputation. That certainly looks like libel to me. I think Fred is legally and morally justified in taking Scott to court, suing for damages, and getting enough from Scott to retire on. (Of course, attempting that would only enrich the lawyers, so you can't really blame Fred for trying to explain. It won't work with the anti-MegaTokyo subset over at PVPOnline, and it isn't needed for the fans of MegaTokyo, but hey, Fred is just this nice guy.)

Scott has made a jibe at a guy who is too nice to take his words and shove 'em down his throat sideways. Picking on nice guys doesn't demonstrate a sense of humor. Quite the opposite in fact.

And another reason I think Scott is in the wrong has to do with his recent set of confrontations with "Wiley" -- the creator of the newspaper strip "Non Sequitur". Wiley has been taking subtle and not-so-subtle potshots at Scott, and Scott gets pretty wound up about it. You'd think that someone who gets upset about something might be a little bit careful about making someone upset in a similiar way.

This whole debacle has me thinking that Scott is just as much of a blowhard as he [Scott] thinks Wiley is. There's deep wisdom in "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" -- and it gets all the more obvious when it's not practiced.

All that being said, I enjoy all three artists. Non Sequitur is capable of some deep insights while making you laugh, PVPOnline is consistently amusing, and MegaTokyo has some of the best graphical storytelling I've seen since Sandman. All three are good, in different ways.

It's quite possible that I have the whole thing wrong-way-round; these are just my impressions from watching this mess take place. As a fan, I'm appalled at the whole mess. You'd think this was taking place on Usenet or something!

As I was going to the Internet for my kicks,
I found a machine with seven NICs,
Every NIC has seven IPs,
Every IP sent seven packets,
Every packet had seven bytes;
NICs, IPs, packets, and bytes,
What was my bandwidth like?

On a few of my accounts, I use a custom attribution line in my newsreader and mail client. The attribution line is:

begin quoting $name $mumble:

Where $name is the name/account/whatnot of what I'm quoting, and $mumble is whatever else that follows, such as the date, reference-id, or suchlike of whatever it is that I am replying to.

This breaks some versions of Outlook and Outlook Express (mail- and news- readers from Microsoft), in that they see begin-space-space and say "Aha! This is a uuencoded 'attachment'!" despite the fact that "attachments" are a MIME phenomena, and there is no attachment, nor is this a uuencoded anything as it doesn't follow the uuencoded spec.

It is, in fact, a bug.

Microsoft's response was, basically: "Don't use the word 'begin', use words like 'commence' or 'start', or capitalize every use of 'begin' as 'Begin'." That was many years ago... and the bug is still there, even if the "workaround" webpage isn't.

That's right. Don't fix the bug, change the language.

Not that this is unexpected from a company that considers that it can own normal English words, like "windows", "outlook", "word", "excel", and so on and so forth. It has money, and power, and lawyers, and what's more, a near-monopoly and an entrenched user-base. From power comes arrogance, after all.

This bug has been around for quite some time. It's not a new bug. It's not a hard bug to fix. It's just a bug where the work around is just mind-boggling in its scope.

It's been around a long time, it's known, and it's still unfixed. Thus, the attribution line. Something ought to be done.

But this still seems to spark a lot of controversy and brings up a lot of questions:

Why are you doing this?
Because I resent a corporation trying to change the language instead of fixing a bug. I'm outraged, offended, livid at the thought that a solution to a bug would be to get other users remove a word from their lexicon so that software they don't use doesn't demonstrate a bug.

It's not the user's fault. Why are you hurting the users?
There are two flaws in there. Let's deal with the second flaw first.

I am not hurting the users. I am in no way compromising their system, in no way am I delivering malicious code on to their system, in no way am I opening a door for trojans or viruses or worms or any other sort of malware. No harm is being done to the user at all, and assertions otherwise are so much hot air and ignorance.

What I am doing is making things not 100% convenient. What I am doing is posting 100% flat ASCII text. What I am doing is writing and sending/posting perfectly legal email/netnews articles that follow all accepted conventions that break on just one MUA/netnews client because that program is buggy and the vendor can't be bothered to fix the bug.

Further, I'm told that there are several ways the user can read the "bogus attachment" ranging from ^F3 (<control>+<F3>) to right-click>properties>view source -- All it does is remind the user that they're using a buggy program and supporting a vendor that treats them like crap by giving them buggy software and never fixing it.

This leads into the first flaw, which is that it is the user's fault. The user chose to use this program. The user chose to support a vendor that expects them to use buggy programs and expects them to get the rest of the world to take special care to do anything that might demonstrate that the vendor writes buggy software. It's all about choice.

Users are, at a fundamental level, responsible for the quality of the software they use. User communities that accept buggy software end up with buggy software to choose from. User communities that demand quality software end up with quality software.

Users who keep buying and/or using buggy software are the ones who encourage buggy software to be produced. The market gets what the market demands; the market should accept responsibility, or choose differently.

(As an aside, this is why I'm vehemently opposed to legislating quality in software; you want quality software, then support quality software. Put your wallet where your mouth is, or at least take your mindshare somewhere other than with the buggy software. If you won't do that, then you really have nothing to complain about, and trying to legislate a solution just shows you want to eat your cake and have it too.)

One of the sad things about the whole mess is that it demonstrates how Microsoft can claim to be "relatively bug-free". I've read that they track how many complaints they get for a bug, and how often they get requests for features -- and they get very few complaints and a lot more requests for additional features, therefore, by their logic, they're doing pretty well, and what the users want are more features and not more bugfixes.

This is due, I believe, to users not bothering to complain about bugs. It's just too much of a PITA. Why bother?

The worst bit is that Microsoft isn't wrong. Their users do prefer features to bugfixes, ooh-shiney to stability, performance over correctness. Microsoft is in the business of giving their customers what their customers demand. (Of course, it's theorized that Microsoft makes reporting a bug so difficult just to skew the numbers in this way, but I haven't used a Microsoft program in years and haven't called to report a problem in even longer, so I don't know how it has changed. From what I remember, it was mostly just a matter of spending a long time on hold...)

You're just doing this because you're a sick jerk who enjoys making life miserable for others, right?
Not from my point of view. But if you want to be someone who gets off controlling others, I can be the sick jerk making your life difficult. Works for me.

Seriously, no, although I think Outlook/Outlook Express users have brought this trouble down on to their own heads, I'm not trying to make 'em miserable. I'm trying to make 'em aware that they're using buggy software and to encourage 'em to call up Microsoft and complain about the problem.

The funny thing is, most of the people that are offended at the begin doublespace attribution either (1) claim it really isn't a bug or (2) acknowledge it's a bug and yet don't call up Microsoft to tell 'em that it's causing them difficulty.

If you don't recognize it as a bug, I just think you have a really skewed view of the world and probably aren't in touch with reality. As such, your opinions are of dubious value and really only of concern with your therapist, and I hope that you find a medication that does the job for you soon.

If you do recognize it as a bug but won't call up Microsoft to tell 'em that it's causing difficulties, then it's not that much of a bug and claims that it's making things difficult, much less miserable, are specious.

But what about those people who don't have a choice?
There's always a choice.

There are dozens of MUAs out there, you don't have to use Outlook. Many of those MUAs are free, so it's not an issue of what people can afford.

Likewise, there are dozens of Netnews clients; you don't have to use Outlook Express. Again, many of them are free, so it's still not an issue about what people can afford.

So the only people who remain "locked in" are people who don't run their own machines, such as people at work, or people who depend on their parents or children to manage their machines.

The answer to this is simple: complain to your local technical support people. Complain to the IT department that O/OE is buggy and you'd like an updated version please, or something with fewer bugs. If they have a problem with you reading NetNews at work, well, that's hardly my problem.

If it's your parents who are in charge of your machine, then you should be under adult supervision anyway and why aren't you outside playing instead of sitting in front of the computer? (That's the subject for a rant all its own, actually.)

If it's your kids, well, ask 'em nicely. (This is really the only one where there's much actual problem -- what do you do when you have a parent who isn't overly computer-literate and a computer-ignorant child (say, 30 years old and living at home) trying to manage things? My honest reaction is that they shouldn't be on the Internet for their own good, as they've probably got a machine compromised six ways from sunday and are a part of a few zombie networks. THEY are causing harm to ME by contributing to the massive amounts of spam I get, by probing my firewall constantly, etc. etc. -- again, this is the subject suitable for a rant all its own.)

Aren't you compromising the security on their machine?
Er, no.

Claims otherwise are due to FUD, ignorance, or just plain misunderstanding of what's going on.

Surely Microsoft isn't actually asking you to use words like 'start' and 'commence' instead of 'begin'? You're just making that up.
I am not making this up.

One of the reasons why I started this is that I discovered that Microsoft was telling people to change how they wrote so they wouldn't go around demonstrating a bug in Microsoft's software. I was so outraged at the arrogance of this that I cast around for something, anything, to express my anger and dismay.

Rather than following the instructions (remember, to avoid this bug, I, a user of software that had no problems with this sort of thing, was to remove or capitalize a word in my vocabulary, in order that the company could then ignore the bug), I resolved to do exactly the opposite, on the principle that acquescing to unreasonable demands only leads to more unreasonable demands.

Isn't there something else you can do instead?
Not that I can think of. Anything else I can do would either be illegal, immoral, or 100% ineffective. I mean, at the moment, I'm demonstrating there's an actual bug, and people still prefer to believe there's no bug in their software, it must be on my end as I'm sending empty attachments.

Better solutions are welcome. So far, I've gotten one suggestion that might not entirely fail the "ineffective" constraint. If you have a way to put pressure on Microsoft to fix the bug, do so, please.

Or people could just buy Macs. I hear that O/OE on the Mac doesn't suffer from the bug in question. I would see that as an even better result, as monocultures suck (Gosh, I'm just building up a collection of topics, aren't I?) and should be avoided.

Don't you realize that some people won't be able to read your posts, or won't take the time to do so?
Yes. That's a chance I take.

Surely nobody is suggesting that I have a right to expect everyone to read everything I have to say?

I'll just killfile you! *plonk* Hahahahahaha! Take that!
That's your choice.

[]

I say fairly, not because Yosemite wasn't breathtakingly beautiful, because it was. It was the other breath-taking thing -- smokers. Nicotine addicts. Junkies.

Smokers standing around the entrance of the airport, puffing forth blue clouds of lung-killing death. It's a gauntlet you gotta run when you fly these days. The only way to deal with it is to hold your breath and scurry. Of course, if you're headed _out_, about the time you let out your breath, there's some puffing a cloud in your direction in an absent-minded sort of way.

They're not malicious, most of 'em. They're just addicted. They don't have a problem with their smoke, and it generally never occurs to them that anyone else would. So they ring the entrances, each puffing away on their little stick of poison and stink, positioned away from the other smokers (because, I suspect, subconciously, they don't like having someone else poison their air). The emergent behavior is to create a barricade of smoke.

At least smoking isn't allowed on the planes or in the airport buildings. I'd be unable to fly at all. (Which, considering the security nonsense, might not be a bad thing...)

Restaurants are also no-smoking zones. It's always a shock to go out of state to a restaurant that allows smoking -- you forget how nice it is to be able to eat without a cloud of stink wafting your way. Food doesn't have to taste like ash.

So what do the smokers in California (at least on this trip) do? As soon as they're outside the doors of the restaurant, they light up, take a drag, and exhale.... which, likely as not, wafts into the restaurant. The law in California says you must be 20 feet (or more) away from all entrances, windows, etc. -- but by the time someone can get to 'em to tell 'em to move away, they have. Again, it's not malice. They're junkies, and they're in need of a hit, and they get it as soon as they can. The problem is again emergent -- lots of 'em do it. The net effect is as if someone were standing by the door, smoking.

Yosemite, being a park, is all about outdoors. Smokers think this isn't a problem, as it's outdoors. It's all legal (like smoking in restaurants in California used to be). What's remarkable is how many people stand around, admiring the view, breathing in the clean mountain air, and smoking. (So much for the clean mountain air for ME, if they've lit up behind me.)

It's troublesome, to be at a significant altitude, hiked back into the woods along a narrow trail, only to find the way blocked by some smoker emitting clouds of noxious smoke. The trail is narrow, they're no way around. The way is often steep, so holding your breath is an invitation to collapse. Shouting at 'em from a distance is futile, and often counter-productive, as it'll alert the malicious ones (a small fraction) to make it a point to blow smoke in your direction as you go past, and getting up close to ask quietly (which nearly always works, as these aren't mean people) means having to approach and then talk... and by that time, you're almost past, blue-faced and gasping.

It's not people smoking that I have a problem with, really. You can kill yourself however you desire. It's the doing it in public that bothers me. It's been said that you have a right to swing your fist, but that your right to do so stops at my nose.

Smoking doesn't stop at my nose. It invades it. Goes past.

Don't get me wrong. I think that you do have the right to kill yourself however you please, so long as you don't inconvenience others in doing so. Smokers can smoke all they want -- in their car, with the windows rolled up, or their house, or a friend's house, or on a boat at sea.

Yosemite was beautiful. I just spent too much damn time holding my breath, and walking away from beautiful views because of cigarette smoke. Smoke from good people, in their own world, who are considerate, helpful, friendly, nice people, who just don't think about the effects their actions have on others.

So here we are. Let's look at his objections, shall we?

• Arrays.

  Yeah, Arrays are halfway between objects and primitive types. Generally, I try to avoid 'em in favor of the collection classes, or something that wraps a collection class. Annoying, yeah. That'll get better RSN.

• A static method call in an instance method will always resolve to the class of the method implementer (unless reflection is used) so can't override statics even from instance methods, have to duplicate the inst. method. I.e. Cant override static in subclass if called from inst method in the parent.

  This is such a non-issue. A static method is, oddly enough, statically resolved. This is only really a problem if you've given up on the idea of objects as being, well, objects. Generally, the solution is to avoid using static methods except where you want that behavior.
  
  Oh, and "Cant" is a legal word that means something entirely different from "Can't".

• Command line arguments are not available to any class or method, just to the main method of the start class.

  Again, a non-issue. Giving arbitrary classes access to the command-line arguments breaks abstractions, and makes code non-modular. You'll end up with spaghetti, and magic back-door coupling... this already happens with the -D options passing data to modules from the command-line thru the System Properties.

• Compiler vs. Runtime

  I don't understand the annoyance here. Huh? You don't like + for Strings? THEN DON'T USE IT.

• Can't fully hide attribute implementation due to typing. For example, wouldn't be easy to change an Integer to a Long.

  It also means you can't easily change a Long into a Byte. You'd *gasp* actually have to go look at the code.

• Interfaces are touted as a panacea but Java2 has Unsupported Operation Exception! This means that a caller of an interface method can't rely on that method doing anything sensible in a particular implementation.

  Touted? By whom?
  
  Oddly enough, those are Javadoc'd in the standard API, and you could always have someone not doing anything sensible in a particular implementation. Interfaces are great, are wonderful are way cool, but they won't keep the incompent programmer from doing Bad Things.

• Try/catch blocks are treated as normal blocks even though they're forced on you. E.g. variables declared in the block are not visible outside!

  And had the decision gone the other way, there would be cries of fury about how inconsistent Java is. From the same types of people. The idiom to make that work is pretty darn simple, after all, and perfectly obvious to anyone not looking to crucify Java.

• Visibility modifiers apply to the class, not the object! This means that a private method in one object can be called from another object, if it is of the same class.

  Yes. So? This lets us implement reasonable equals() methods, singletons, etc. I fail to see any benefit to having the visibility modifiers apply at the object level. It's the package-private scope I object to.

• Protected methods and superclass visibility.

  I'd like to see some sample code for this.

• Primitive variables give a runtime error.

  Again, I'd like to see some sample code for this. I'm not entirely sure I understand what is meant.

• Member fields are treated differently from member functions. Field references are computed by the compiler based on the variable type, function references are computed by the JVM based on the actual object type.

  Why is that annoying?

• EJB stuff.

  Yes. EJBs are annoying. They suck. And? That's like saying Smalltalk sucks because Squeak/Morphic is cartoony.

• The lack of class instance variables makes caching difficult to define at the superclass level.

  Why?

• Code may be optimized out, causing problems later....

  Well, a finer-grained control over optimization would be nice. Or perhaps your build system should be set up to recompile ALL affected classes. Or stop using static final variables only to change 'em.

• Overriding static methods.

  Don't! Stop that! STATIC IS NOT YOUR FRIEND IN AN OBJECT-ORIENTED WORLD.

• Object hierarchy initialization.

  This is why the super method comes first in a constructor. If there's an example where given the source, you can't figure out the order of initialization, I'd like to see it.

• If a private method which is not final is overridden in a subclass, the subclass implementation will not be used if the method is called in the class which has the private definition; the compiler assumes that there will be no override.

  It's a matter of wanting to eat your cake and have it too. First we complain that objects can see the private members of other instances, and now we want to open up private so that it's more protected than actually private.
  
  The scope of a private method is the class. Subclasses don't get to know about the superclass's private methods, as if they did, you could change the behavior of the superclass in unexpected ways -- and then we'd need a visibility modifier to indicate that *this* method should be invisible to any subclasses...

Yesterday I learned that the guy who first pointed me to /. never bothered to set up an account and never posts. I guess that explains why I could never find his name or guess his nick.

Having fun with the "FRIENDS" feature.