cypher → arrr arrr arrr

posted by jack at 06:51 CET in / humor / funny_swedish

Often, non-Swedish movies are given new Swedish titles for the Swedish market, e.g. The Hulk becomes Hulken. This choice is made by whoever acquires the rights for distributing the film in Sweden.

Sometimes, however, movies are given new titles that are, at best, inexplicable, and, at worst, unintentionally hilarious. Some of the worst of these occur when a movie with an English title gets a new title which is—get this—another English title.

Case in point: A week or two ago, I noticed a movie in the Swedish TV schedule that looked interesting. Its original title is Cypher, which is of course just an odd misspelling of the word "cipher".

Now, Swedish has a perfectly good word for "cipher", that could be used to translate this film title for Swedes who may not know the word "cipher": The word is "chiffer". The distributer could have chosen to call the movie Chiffer or some artificial misspelling like Skiffer or Chyffer, whatever, to emulate the original. But they made a different choice. They chose to call the movie Brainstorm.

Don't get me wrong, "Brainstorm" is a perfectly good name for a movie. I quite liked the 1983 movie with that name, starring Christopher Walken, when I was a kid. But that's just it; If you're going to rename a movie to suit the local language, why choose a new name that (A) is not in the local language, (B) has already been used by no less than two other feature films, and (C) bears no relation to the original title! Why, oh silly film distributor, why???!?!

presenting Torched Turf

posted by jack.torchedturf1 at 09:19 CET in / compute / programming / torchedturf

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Please welcome Torched Turf to the world. Torched Turf is based on the standard old "artillery" style of computer game, but with a few new elements that make it stand out on its own.

Torched Turf was created for the iDevGames Original Mac Game Cup contest. The terms of the contest call for a game with one complete, playable level, and currently that's what we've got. In other words, despite its 1.0 status, Torched Turf is still a work in progress, and will be enhanced further in the future.

In the meantime, download the Mac version or the Windows version and give it a try! Later, sometime between Dec 1 2005 and Dec 15 2005, be sure to go vote for this or any other game you feel is a worthy winner.

I am proud to consider myself a member of this world-spanning team of like-minded would-be game-builders, and hope that the release of Torched Turf paves the way for yet more games featuring exploding sheep.

election theft

posted by jack at 12:14 CET in / politics

The notion that electronic voting machines without paper trails are dangerous to democracy is something that's been talked about before. Now, a General Accountability Office report shows pretty clearly that there were lots of irregularities in the 2004 U.S. elections, connected to the use of electronic voting machines.

Regardless of your political affiliations, regardless of whether you believe that Bush & co stole the elections, it's important to understand that electronic voting machines without paper trails produce unverifiable results. The simple fact is the actual results of last year's elections are, inherently, UNKNOWABLE. There is simply no way to know how many people voted, or for which candidates they voted.

This goes beyond the issues of "hanging chads" that vexed us after the 2000 elections; Then, you could at least theorize the existence of a person or device that could divine the intent of the voter with a high degree of precision. With unverifiable electronic voting machines, it's just a total crapshoot. The GAO report cites several known cases where large numbers of votes went to the wrong candidates, which were supposedly "fixed" afterwards. The problem is, how many unknown, similar cases are there? We'll just never know.

Again, this is an issue for EVERYONE concerned with the preservation of American democracy, regardless of party ties. This time it may have been criminal, unethical Republican asshats who used some wide-open holes the security of these machines to secure elections for their candidates; Next time it could be criminal, unethical Democratic asshats doing the same! For that matter, it may be that BOTH parties had people trying to fake out the voting machines in 2004, and that the Republicans just did a better job at it. Who knows?

spinvaders 1.0.0

posted by jack at 10:36 CET in / compute / programming / spinvaders

I'm pleased to announce the release of spinvaders 1.0.0!

The main change in this release is the introduction of fantastic music and sound effects courtesy of David Tweet. Collaborating with David on this release has produced fantastic results. It's almost like a whole new game!

Also new for this release is that spinvaders is now open source, with its own project hosted at sourceforge. This means that not only can Mac and Windows users download a precompiled package, now users of BSD, Linux, or other unixy platforms can download the source and all its dependencies (which aren't too terribly many) and run it on their platforms as well.

Here's where to get it:

• spinvaders for Macintosh (made for Mac OS X 10.4, but may work on 10.3 as well)
• spinvaders for Windows 95/98/ME/2K/XP
• spinvaders source for other platforms

Installation is the same as before: The Mac version is in a disk image; you can copy the enclosed application and run it from wherever you like. The Windows version is a zip file containing a directory; unpack the directory wherever you like, and run it by starting "spinvaders.exe" from within the directory.

software design sketching

posted by jack at 09:12 CET in / compute / programming

Peter Lindberg posted some thoughts about the lack of "sketching" in software development, which got me thinking a bit. The following was my emailed response to Peter:

Personally, I do a fair amount of software "modeling", in the form of prototypes. If an application calls for a new GUI component, for instance, I'll set up an empty application/shell/playground with some "scaffolding" to provide the component with its inputs, then start "playing" with it until I find something that feels right. Sometimes it will be a continual evolution of the design in the code, but sometimes I'll duplicate classes, and rename them with some sort of version ID in the class names, so that I can view several stages of the evolution at once.

The same applies to games I'm designing, or ideas I have for new applications, or, for that matter, changes I'm considering in the CSS code for a website. Seldom do I start off by mapping out "here's exactly what I want to implement" in my own projects; Almost always, in work that I'm doing for myself, I start off with an exploratory phase just to see what comes out of my fingers, and after a few iterations of coding, and trying out what I've done, and sometimes putting the project away for a few days or weeks, eventually things tend to settle into a zone that feels right.

In a group effort, this doesn't always work that well. When several people are involved from the beginning of a project, if everyone just spins off into an exploration of their own ideas, it can be harder to gather everyone back to some common point to get everything working together. Maybe that's why software design tends, as you say, to be focused on "producing construction plans" and defining APIs for how modules will work together.

NEWS FLASH: Republican Corruption!

posted by jack at 10:54 CET in / politics

OK, I can't say I'm surprised by corruption in the current U.S. administration that is being revealed more and more these days. Between Tom DeLay's money laundering, Bill Frist's stock dumping, and FEMA's no-bid contracts for Katrina cleanup, well, it's all pretty clear evidence of the philosophical bankruptcy of the republican party, and the end of the "Republican Revolution". In other words, no big surprise.

However, even I was surprised to read this seemingly clear-cut case of republican operatives' mob connections (including hitmen!):

The fraud allegedly committed by Abramoff and his business partner Adam Kidan involved a phony wire transfer they used to purchase a controlling interest in SunCruz from the company's founder, Konstantinos "Gus" Boulis, in 2001.

Abramoff and Kidan later fell out with Boulis in a bitter business dispute that turned violent. In February 2001, gunmen ambushed Boulis on a Fort Lauderdale, Fla., highway and shot him repeatedly. On Tuesday, Florida authorities arrested three New York men with mob connections for the Boulis killing. Two of the men - Anthony Moscatiello and Tony Ferrari - had received payments totaling more than $240,000 from Kidan and Abramoff. Moscatiello, a longtime associate of the Gambino Mafia family, and Ferrari were supposedly providing food and consulting services to SunCruz - or so Kidan claimed when questioned by prosecutors. There is no evidence, however, that Moscatiello and Ferrari provided any services to the company.

Connecting the dots isn't difficult here: Kidan and Abramoff want to get rid of Boulis, who won't go away. Kidan and Abramoff hire Moscatiello and Ferrari with SunCruz money. Moscatiello and Ferrari allegedly whack Boulis, without any motive of their own. If the Broward County state's attorney has sufficient evidence to win convictions for a capital crime, some people will probably be talking soon in hope of avoiding the hot shot.

Just to reiterate, let's repeat some of that last paragraph in big, bold bullets:

• Kidan and Abramoff want to get rid of Boulis.
• Kidan and Abramoff hire Moscatiello and Ferrari.
• Moscatiello and Ferrari allegedly whack Boulis, without any motive of their own.

Damn. I mean, damn! It's been clear for a while that Abramoff is a real piece of work, but this is just over the top. These are the kinds of murderous bastards that our man GWB is fronting for. Hooray for us, for putting this kind of thuggery in the White House, time and again. To quote Wanda Sykes, "You can't blame the blind man for wrecking your car when you're the one who gave him the keys."

The Red Box: how to out-Windows Windows

posted by jack at 16:25 CET in / compute

The past few months have spurred lots of discussion and opinions about Mac on Intel. One thing that's been neglected in most commentary I've seen is mention of Apple's old "Box" model.

Back in the late 90s, Mac OS X wasn't called "Mac OS X", it was called "Rhapsody". The developer previews ran on both PPC Macs and normal Intel PCs. Apple spoke of different application environments that would be enabled in Rhapsody:

• The Yellow Box was the OpenStep application framework collection, which is now called Cocoa;
• The Blue Box was the legacy Mac OS 9 compatibility environment, now called Classic;
• The Red Box was the rumored (never confirmed by Apple) Windows compatibility environment that would allow Rhapsody for Intel to run Windows applications in a native environment, similar to VirtualPC, but running full-bore at native speed since no CPU emulation would be necessary.

Well, Rhapsody begat Mac OS X, and Mac OS X wasn't going to be available for Intel. Apple stopped talking about their "boxes", VirtualPC worked pretty well, and the world moved on. Now, the Mac is veering back toward Intel, and before we know it we'll be running with Intel, and Microsoft will surely sell native-speed VirtualPC for running Windows...

But, what if there's another way? What if we could run Windows apps on Mac OS X/Intel that were freed from the VirtualPC OS-in-a-window appearance? What if we could run Windows apps with something that strives toward a Mac OS X look? What I'm thinking about are the WINE project and its offshoot, Darwine.

For those who don't know, WINE (which stands for "WINE Is Not an Emulator) is an independent implementation of a subset the win32 APIs, which most existing Windows applications are built on top of. The main purpose of WINE is to be able to run Windows software on Linux (the Darwine offshoot targets running Windows software on Mac OS X). Both projects sport screenshots showing a variety of applications running. WINE's subset of the win32 APIs seems to be quite a large subset indeed.

WINE's main advantages over VirtualPC are twofold: First, it doesn't require Windows in order to run (VirtualPC actually has a Windows installation) since it's a reimplementation of some APIs rather than a full OS. Second, Windows created by WINE can be mixed on the screen with standard Mac windows, instead of being trapped inside another window.

Before WINE is fully ready to provide a proper Mac experience however, there are (at least) three main hurdles to overcome:

1. Incomplete APIs. WINE can run lots and lots of applications, but to be on a par with VirtualPC, it really needs to run nearly everything.
2. X-Windows. The current implementation of Darwine using X-Windows for drawing. This is an obvious stepping-stone for the developers, but in the long term it needs to use standard Quartz windows.
3. Windows look'n'feel. Windows applications running in WINE look like, well, Windows applications. Ideally we'd want them to look more like Mac applications. I'm not sure if there's any simple workaround for this; My (perhaps mistaken) understanding is that win32 is usually used in a fairly low-level way, and that Windows apps (or the libraries they're built with) actually draw most of their components themselves, including "standard" buttons, etc, so it would be difficult to give them Aqua-styled buttons, scrollbars, bevels, etc. But it seems like some things could be done to make the experience more Mac-like, perhaps by forcing menu bars to draw at the top of the screen or something.

Now, I'm sure that the WINE and Darwine teams have limited resources like most open-source projects do. But, hey, Apple has some cash in the bank, and a great team of engineers. What if they set a team to work on taking the existing WINE codebase, completing more APIs and adding some polish, to provide a smooth Windows-on-Mac experience for Mac OS X 10.5 on Intel? And then submitting most of their enhancements back to the original project? They've pulled similar stealth stunts before, both with building Safari from KDE code, and building the core Darwin OS with parts of various BSD UNIXes. If anyone can do it, Apple can.

What we'd end up with is a more flexible Mac OS X that would, in addition to the current APIs from Cocoa, Carbon, POSIX, and Java, support Win32 as well. This would even further ease things for potential switchers, since even though we assume that there are equal or better Mac apps for most uses, it would be even easier for people to switch if they knew they could bring their favorite text editor or graphics package with them.

I have absolutely no inside knowledge of what's going on inside Apple, and no idea if this concept has even been considered, let along worked on, but it seems to me like lots of people would appreciate this.

Let the chest-thumping begin

posted by jack at 08:33 CET in / politics

Just read a pretty convincing article arguing that the reason that people like dubya win elections is largely through assuming an "alpha male" pose; that above anything else, people will vote for the guy who's best at hollering, pounding his chest, and behaving like the top gorilla.

gotchur web teevee on d'innurnet

posted by jack at 08:46 CET in / compute

Stumbled across the DTV project, which promises to provide independent internet TV. Pay attention to two key features:

• Anyone can publish video content with the Broadcast Machine PHP script.
• The published file apparently doesn't have to be hosted on a webserver, you can share it as a bittorrent from your desktop machine. The DTV client software implements the bittorrent protocol for downloading content, and presumably sharing content as well, so as soon as your video is "out in the wild", the clients that have downloaded it will help keep your own bandwidth usage down

Currently only for Mac, but a Windows client is apparently on the way.

25 years too late: the Microsoft Shell

posted by jack at 07:33 CET in / compute

One bit of technology that Microsoft has recently started talking to developers about is the Microsoft Shell. This is something that may or may not be a part of the upcoming Microsoft VISTA OS. Basically, someone at Microsoft finally decided that DOS/Windows' horrid built-in scripting language, as exemplified in millions of nasty BAT files around the world, needed to be more like a UNIX command-line.

Kind of ironic, since that old DOS pidgin scripting language was never anything more than a really feature-poor, painfully bad imitation of 1979-era UNIX.

This is where Microsoft Shell steps in, bringing things such as reasonable syntax and (hopefully) complete command i/o redirection and piping, just like UNIX has had since the dawn of time.

UNIX advocates have long argued the advantages of a command-line interface, mainly that it enables us to use our innate language abilities to interface with a machine, instead of just dragging a mouse around (which evolution hasn't really built us for). So it's great that Windows is finally stepping forward towards UNIX in this regard. Welcome to the 80's, Microsoft!

spammer death

posted by jack at 14:17 CET in / compute

Famed Russian spammer Vardan Kushnir was found murdered in his home in Moscow yesterday. Kushnir was apparently famous for saying "spam was what e-mails were for".

It's unknown whether he was killed by a group of angry spam recipients, but that's where I'd put my money if I were a betting man.

spinvaders 0.0.4

posted by jack at 09:07 CET in / compute / programming / spinvaders

New version of spinvaders is out. This is primarily a bug-fix release; the main bug was that 0.0.3 and earlier could not run on Mac OS X 10.4; Now, spinvaders is much more future-proof and should continue to run "forever".

Changes in this version:

• This version now works correctly on the latest version of Mac OS X (10.4, "Tiger")
• Cleaned up some sprites
• Player weapon now turns partly green when it is in "supergun" mode

And here's where to get it:

• spinvaders for Macintosh (made for Mac OS X 10.4, but probably works on 10.3 as well)
• No windows build of spinvaders 0.0.4 is available at this time

Installation is the same as before: The Mac version is in a disk image; you can copy the enclosed application and run it from wherever you like.

Wil Shipley, my hero

posted by jack at 13:56 CET in / compute / people

Back in the mid-90's, when I was a NeXTStep consultant, getting a job at OmniGroup was a sort of recurring daydream to me. Like Integrity Solutions where I worked, OmniGroup did NeXTStep consulting, but also commercial application development. Started by Wil Shipley and Ken Case and surely some other dudes whose names escape me at the moment, Omni seemed like Shangri-La compared to my job. Browsing their website, you'd see descriptions of their work environment, which I'd contrast with mine:

As much as I thought about it, for some reason I never tried to get a job there. Probably partly because I didn't want to move, and partly because I was at a stage in my life where, for reasons I don't quite grasp now, complaining about shit seemed like a more useful proposition than trying to actually do something about shit.

Anyway.

At some point (I haven't followed the twists and turns that well), Wil left the company he founded, and started Delicious Monster, which has had a "monster hit" (yuk yuk) with Delicious Library, an application that, to me, seems like cool technology that I would never have guessed would find an audience. Fortunately for Wil and the gang, it has found a huge audience, earning them $250,000 in its first month, receiving awards, etc.

To top it off, Wil has started blogging, which has been fun. One of the more interesting posts lately is about his Student Talk from WWDC 2005, in which Wil gives newbies some advice on starting their own company. Like Wil, I once started my own company; Unlike Wil, I didn't really consider doing commercial app development (if you think the Mac market for commercial software in 2005 is small, try to imagine the miniscule size of the NeXTStep market in 1997!), but focused on consulting, and then let it sort of flounder after I couldn't, on my own, find enough interesting work to do that way.

Three cheers for Wil, the man who proves that nerdery + chutzpah == success.

Pay no attention to the processor in the box

posted by jack at 11:01 CET in / compute

Last week, Apple made waves when it announced that future Macintosh models, beginning next year, will contain Intel processors just like other PCs. Some people have asked me what I think about this, so here goes:

The transition to Intel is going to be a great thing.

Now, before I continue: I really don't much care for the Intel architecture. I am a True Believer in the RISC approach embodied in the PowerPC architecture. However, for reasons that should become clear as I continue, for most intents and purposes, the processor doesn't matter.

I started off working life as a NeXTStep developer. For those who don't know, NeXTStep was a product of Steve Jobs' other computer company, NeXT, the one he created during the "dark years" (ca 1985-1997) that he wasn't with Apple. NeXT was a financial failure, but they created some great technology, both hardware and software. The software, in the form of the NeXTStep operating system and development environment, makes up the underpinnings of Mac OS X. I have always held the opinion that Mac OS X could more accurately be called "NeXTStep 5.0".

Anyway, back in the early 90's, NeXTStep ran only on NeXT's own hardware, great beastly black boxes with Motorola 680x0 processors. The hardware was technologically similar to top-of-the-line Macs of that era, but typically with much larger screens, larger hard disks, more RAM, and a much higher price tag. In 1993, NeXT announced that they were getting out of the hardware business entirely, and were going to focus on the NeXTStep operating system, which they had secretly ported to... Intel! Does this sound familiar to anyone?

So what was a developer to do? Well, in most cases, they could simply compile their software for Intel by clicking a single checkbox in the NeXTStep IDE. The compiler would then compile the code for both platforms, and bundle them together into what could have been called a "universal binary"^* (again, does this sound familiar?). This would then run on both Motorola-based NeXT machines and Intel-based PCs.

Not content to stop there, NeXT also ported their operation system to run on Sun SPARC workstations and HP HP-RISC workstations. And as a developer, all you had to do was click on the checkboxes to enable those platforms, and off you went!

But could it really be that easy? Well, in a word: YES. If you didn't do much low-level bit-flipping, it really was pretty much that easy. So much so that freeware developers routinely released "quad-fat applications" that ran on all four platforms, even if they never had access to one or more of the target platforms for testing. They'd just put it out there, say "email me if it doesn't work right on your machine", and call it a day.

Of course, there are applications that require low-level bit-flipping, but that can usually be done with per-platform compiler macros and what have you, so you can abstract that away and off you go.

So, we jump forward twelve years in time and arrive at last week. Apple announces technology that old NeXT nerds like me have always known they've had, and that we know works. Hell, even people who've been Apple nerds since 1997 or 1998 or so should remember that the early, pre-release "Rhapsody" versions of Mac OS X ran both on old Apple G3s and Intel PCs. So really, the technology is not new and has been obviously under the covers ever since Apple acquired NeXT, who nailed this a decade ago.

[*] But of course, it wasn't called that. It was called a "fat binary". No one ever accused NeXT of being especially good at marketing.

One concern I've heard thrown about is that PPC hardware will be "orphaned". Although this will surely happen at some point, it's still years away; everyone using current hardware will be able to use it several years into the future. Look at it this way:

• Currently, Mac OS X can run on every Mac released since 1998, from the very first bondi blue iMac all the way up the chain. This is millions of machines.
• The Intel version won't be readily available until mid-2006 (Apple's estimate) at the earliest. Many developers won't bother shipping universal binaries until then.
• Intel won't take over the whole line until at least late 2007 (Apple's estimate) or, more likely, 2008.
• Therefore, Apple won't be shipping all-Intel Macs until perhaps nearly three years from now. No developer in their right mind would ditch PPC support any time before that.
• Even when Macs are all-Intel, there will remain a huge PPC user community. Unless Mac sales go up dramatically after the Intel release (we can hope), it will take several years before the numbers of Intel Macs equal the number of PPC Macs. My guess, we're talking at least 2010.
• Until the numbers of Intel Macs seriously overtake the number of PPC Macs, smart developers will support both platforms. So maybe 5 years from now we'll start to see significant amounts of Intel-only software, but many developers will probably continue to ship universal binaries much longer than that, since they will keep access to the PPC users "for free".

I believe that 5 years is a pretty good amount of time for people to think about buying some new hardware, so I really don't think this is going to be too painful.

The only real scenarios I can see being problematic are where people are running specific PCI hardware such as for high-end audio/video applications; If your manufacturer can't or won't create new drivers for MacIntel (if they've stopped caring about their Mac products, or have gone out of business, or whatever), you'll probably have to buy new extra hardware for your special needs when you switch to MacIntel. But in five years time, you'd probably want to replace it anyway, since considering the march of progress, today's "top-of-the-line" audio gear is tomorrow's "free-with-your-subscription-to-PC-user-magazine" throwaway kit, so hey.

acko acko

posted by jack at 14:37 CET in / thinking

(I never thought it would come to this, but here I am: blogging about Michael Jackson. Hopefully this is the only time.)

So, the big "not guilty" judgement came down the pike yesterday. I'm not plugged-in to the 24/7 American disinfo feed (FAUX News, CNN, etc) so I didn't hear this important news until this morning when I awoke to hear the TV saying "Michael Jackson blah blah king of pop blah blah" followed by my wife calling out "Michael Jackson's DEAD!!!" That kidder. As if.

Anyway. I caught a clip of some jurors talking about the reasons for their decision, and one of the explanations was that no sound parent would let their child attend sleepovers at Michael Jackson's house. Let's lay this out:

1. Michael Jackson is a known freak.
2. That mom let her son stay at Michael Jackson's house.
3. No good mom would allow that.
4. Therefore, that's a bad mom.
5. Therefore, Michael Jackson is innocent.

Now, I know a little bit about logic, and I think that the jump from step 4 to step 5 there is a little wide. But then I'm no legal expert, and the law surely can't be held back by something like logic.

This reminds me of the Chewbacca defense, a Johnny Cochran parody defense in South Park, which (in extremely shortened form) goes something like this:

1. Look at this picture of Chewbacca.
2. Chewbacca is a Wookie.
3. That makes no sense.
4. Therefore, my client is innocent! You must acquit!

In *my* day, phishing was done properly

posted by jack at 21:29 CET in / compute

I tell you what, phishing attacks ain't what they used to be. It used to be that internet hucksters really tried their best to make their pitches seems realistic, but I feel like the scam artists are just getting plain old sloppy. Take a look at the latest in my inbox. I've taken the liberty of marking obvious spelling errors in red:

From: paypal@mail.paypal.com
Subject: Security Center Advisory
Date: June 6, 2005 8:02:55 AM CEST
To: Jack

We Recently noticed one or more attempts to log in to your PayPal account from foreign IP adress and we have reasons to believe that your account was hijacked by a third party without your authorization

If you recently noticed one or more attempts your account while traveling, the unusual log in attempts may have been initiated by you. However, if your are rightful holder of the account, click on the link below to log into your account and fallow the intrusctions.

https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=login-run

If you choose to ignore our request, you leave us no choise but not tempor aly suspend account.

We ask that you fallow at least 72 hours for the case to be investigated and we strongly recomanded to verify your account in that time.

If you recived this notice and you are not the authorized account holder, please be aware that it is in violation of PayPal policy to represent oneself as another PayPal user.Such action may also be in violation of local, national, and/or international law. Paypal is misappropriate at the request of law enforment agencies to ensure that perpetrators are prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

Thanks for your patiance as we work togheter to protect your account.

Sincerly, PayPal Account Review Department PayPal, an ebay Company

* Please do not respond to this e-mail adress as your reply will not be recived

Don't even get me started on the grammar; the bad spelling just screams out "bullshit!" Not that I'm super-uptight about spelling or anything, but the super-scary warning supposedly from paypal lost its effect when they "recomanded" me to "fallow the intrusctions".

For some reason I feel a little sorry for these jackasses, so I offer up some tips in the interests of helping my fellow men (even when they are maggots):

• Use a spell-checker before sending out your text.
• Have a native English speaker proofread your text.
• Don't include ludicrous warnings like "don't reply to this email, we won't get it". What kind of company sends warnings by email but can't receive email in return? Think, dumbass!
• If you must include a paragraph warning people not to break they law (working under the assumption that people will automatically believe anyone who quotes laws at them), at least try to make some sense. "Paypal is misappropriate at the request of law enforment..." ??? That dog won't hunt, slim.
• Above all, try to think up a plausible story as to why the mark should click your link and give up their password. I mean, what's with this warning about a "foreign IP address"? Foreign compared to what? You mean it's not an address in the US? Or what? And how the hell would you know? And do you know what country the mark is in? This kind of bullshit just shows that the person who wrote it not only can't write clearly, they can't even think clearly.

Hopefully these tips will help improve the quality of the phishing attempts I get in my email. If not, I'm going to have to give you all a big fat F pretty soon.

Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries

posted by jack at 22:39 CET in / politics

This link was passed to me by James:

http://www.humaneventsonline.com/article.php?id=7591

This is a "top ten" (plus lots of "honorable mentions") compiled by a bunch of conservervate, errr, "thinkers".

The list includes some obvious punching bags for the right (The Communist Manifesto), at least one obvious punching bag for most everyone (Mein Kampf), but a bunch of titles that I'm frankly surprised that any group of intelligent people, including plenty of college professors, can consider to be "harmful". For example:

• The Kinsey Report
• John Dewey's Democracy and Education
• John Stuart Mills' On Liberty
• Ralph Nader's Unsafe at Any Speed

Sure, if I were a conservative I would probably consider most of these works uncomfortable, or unpleasant, but harmful? How detached from reality does one need to be, to consider "Unsafe at Any Speed" harmful?

Bill Moyers

posted by jack at 06:38 CET in / politics

I just read this transcript of Bill Moyers talking about the NOW show he used to host on PBS before retiring. Living in Sweden as I do, I've never seen the show (except for short clips here and there), but I have read transcripts now and then, and have great respect for Bill Moyers as a journalist.

So I was curious what the deal was when I read that PBS leadership had been pressed by right wingers in the administration into trying to make PBS more "balanced" (i.e. make them tow the party line). Fortunately Bill Moyers has come forward to talk about these events and share some opinions. Here are some good bits.

On his detractors:

Who are they? I mean the people obsessed with control using the government to threaten and intimidate; I mean the people who are hollowing out middle class security even as they enlist the sons and daughters of the working class to make sure Ahmad Chalabi winds up controlling Iraq's oil; I mean the people who turn faith-based initiatives into Karl Rove's slush fund; who encourage the pious to look heavenward and pray so as not to see the long arm of privilege and power picking their pockets; I mean the people who squelch free speech in an effort to obliterate dissent and consolidate their orthodoxy into the official view of reality from which any deviation becomes unpatriotic heresy. That's who I mean. And if that's editorializing, so be it. A free press is one where it's okay to state the conclusion you're led to by the evidence.

And here's a good bit:

Hear me: an unconscious people, an indoctrinated people, a people fed only partisan information and opinion that confirm their own bias, a people made morbidly obese in mind and spirit by the junk food of propaganda is less inclined to put up a fight, ask questions and be skeptical. And just as a democracy can die of too many lies, that kind of orthodoxy can kill us, too.

You the man, Bill.

Tiger Bush Panic

posted by jack at 00:55 CET in / compute / programming / bushpanic

I've just released BushPanic 1.0.1. This is a bugfix release, so far built only for Mac. The bugs fixed are:

• The last level was inherently unwinnable. You couldn't even really get a fair start. This is fixed.
• The 1.0.0 release turned out to not work on Mac OS X 10.4 ("Tiger"). This is now fixed.

Go to the BushPanic page to download the latest badness.

hooray internet

posted by jack at 10:12 CET in / compute / blogging

Comments are back online. I've fixed things so that the spamming won't occur again, hopefully.

stupid internet

posted by jack at 00:42 CET in / compute / blogging

Some damned punk spammed the comments. I've cleaned it up, but posting new comments is disabled until further notice...