Among the layoffs is Alan Kay — one of the founders of Xerox PARC.

James Montgomery Doohan, 1920 – 2005. Previously unknown-to-us fact: Doohan was a D-Day veteran.

Ladies and gentlemen, Sun is doomed. In case McNealy hasn’t noticed, we remind the public that there’s already a pretty hot-shit, widely supported, powerful Unix-based laptop on the market with access to both regular office apps and everything the Open Source world has to offer.

THIS IS WHY ENTERPRISE DEVELOPMENT SUCKS. Trust us. We’ve been there.

Laura Lemay points out the worst esoteric computer language yet: l33t. Sample:

// "Hello World" by Stephen McGreal.
// Note that the views expressed in this source 
// code do not necessarily coincide with those of 
// the author :o)

Gr34t l33tN3$$?
M3h...
iT 41n't s0 7rIckY.

l33t sP33k is U8er keWl 4nD eA5y wehn u 7hink 1t tHr0uGh.
1f u w4nn4be UB3R-l33t u d3f1n1t3lY w4nt in 0n a b4d4sS 
h4xX0r1ng s1tE!!! ;p
w4r3Z c0ll3cT10n2 r 7eh l3Et3r!

Qu4k3 cL4nS r 7eh bE5t tH1ng 1n teh 3nTIr3 w0rlD!!!
g4m3s wh3r3 u g3t to 5h00t ppl r 70tAl1_y w1cK1d!!
I'M teh fr4GM4stEr aN I'lL t0t41_1Ly wIpE teh phr34k1ng 
fL00r ***j3d1 5tYlE*** wItH y0uR h1dE!!!! L0L0L0L!
t3lEphR4gG1nG l4m3rs wit mY m8tes r34lLy k1kK$ A$$

l33t hAxX0r$ CrE4t3 u8er- k3wL 5tUff lIkE n34t pR0gR4mm1nG 
lAnguidGe$...
s0m3tIm3$ teh l4nGu4gES l00k jUst l1k3 rE41_ 0neS 7o mAkE 
ppl Th1nk th3y'r3 ju$t n0rMal lEE7 5pEEk but th3y're 5ecRetLy c0dE!!!!
n080DY unDer5tAnD$ l33t SpEaK 4p4rT fr0m j3d1!!!!!
50mE kId 0n A me$$4gEb04rD m1ghT 8E a r0xX0r1nG hAxX0r 
wH0 w4nT2 t0 bR34k 5tuFf, 0r mAyb3 ju5t sh0w 7eh wAy5 l33t 
ppl cAn 8E m0re lIkE y0d4!!! hE i5 teh u8ER!!!!
1t m1ght 8E 5omE v1rus 0r a Pl4ySt4tI0n ch34t c0dE.
1t 3v3n MiTe jUs7 s4y "H3LL0 W0RLD!!!" u ju5t cAn'T gu3s5.
tH3r3's n3v3r anY p0iNt l00KiNg sC3pT1c4l c0s th4t, be1_1Ev3 
iT 0r n0t, 1s whAt th1s 1s!!!!!

5uxX0r5!!!L0L0L0L0L!!!!!!!

JS/UIX is a Unix-like OS written completely in Javascript.

It includes vi.

Superdickery, because Superman is a dick.

I don’t know why we all don’t work in Beatnik, or maybe HQ9+, or, for the truly geeky among us, Varaq, the warrior’s language.

But UnLambda? That’s just silly.

Don’t you need the Vi command reference coffee mug?

We have combined the census and archive pages into a single format since they really should’ve been in the first place.

So in looking for the old entries referenced below, we realized just how awful the comment spam problem had become here. So we did something about it.

As we’re not the first to notice the problem, a quick search revealed the existence of Scrub, a perl script designed to remove comment spam from Blosxom/writeback comments via user-supplied regexps. It won’t solve the whole problem, but it’ll got a long way down that road — especially since we’ve cron’d the execution of said script.

For this to work, though, a few words will become off limits in the comments — but unless you’re aching to talk about incest, viagra, cialis, etc., I don’t think we’ll have a problem.

However, one new rule may bite some of you: no links. You can put in an address, but you can’t make it a link.

So, last night at midnight, I accompanied my friend, business partner, and boss (one guy) to the first local screening of Lucas’ latest fuck-you to his fans. Our review follows.

Sweet CHRIST Lucas, would have been too much to ask for you not NOT FUCK THIS ONE UP, TOO?

What the hell were you thinking with that bullshit Frankenstein scene — a scene that reaches its shockingly awful nadir with a melodramatic “Noooooooooooooooooo!” from the newly-reconstituted Vader upon hearing his brides’ fate. Which, fortunately, almost certainly frees us from the possibilty of “Bride of the Sith,” something we cannot assume Lucas would not otherwise attempt.

Also, Chewbacca? What is this, the world’s smallest universe? And what’s with the Wookies doing Tarzan yodels?

This whole affair makes us want to create the Star Wars Suck Scale, which we offer below.

The Star Wars Suck Scale

Being a revisitation of the relative quality of Lucas’ plodding epic.

1. The Empire Strikes Back. Honestly, it’s the only decent film of the lot. It’s also the only one with its head firmly above water here.
2. Star Wars, which frankly finishes this high only because of its cultural touchstone status. Lucas’ direction was crap even in 1977. Unfortunately, too, this represents the last vaguely acceptable filmmaking effort. All below here are in suck territory.
3. Return of the Jedi, which appears inordinately proud of its “best of the suck” position — a position it gains only for being associated with the top two finishers, really. I mean, c’mon, EWOKS? And ANOTHER Death Star? You’re not even trying, Georgie.
4. Revenge of the Sith. There’s a huge drop here, but not as big as the drop before we get to…
5. Attack of the Clones. Blissfully free of what-Lucas-did-to-Liam Neeson — and mercifully low on Binks-ism — this one only barely edges out the worst of all.
6. The Phantom Menace. Never have so many waited so long for something so awful.

BTW: If you’re gonna post whining about spoilers above, don’t bother. In fact, here’s some more:

• Sidious == Palpatine (oh, like that’s a shocker)!
• Anakin turns into DARTH VADER!
• Padme gives birth to twins — LUKE AND LEIA!
• Rosebud was his SLED!
• Bruce Willis was DEAD THE WHOLE TIME!
• That chick in “The Crying Game” IS A MAN!

JWZ points us at this meatspace virtual wireframe simulation of the famous computer graphics demo. Don’t miss the video. (Local copy here.)

Joel on Software makes us laugh with this:

[…] That’s because j might be of a type that has operator* overloaded and it does something terribly witty when you try to multiply it.

We were saying just Thursday that the “corporate thinktank analysts are devoid of credibility,” and then we see this:

A recent Gartner report gives new meaning to the old saw about “lies, damn lies and statistics.” Trumpeting the “fact” that RIM is the leading PDA vendor, the report gives the BlackBerry-maker a 20% market share, vs. 18% for PalmOne. The problem is, the report doesn’t include smartphones (something that’s mentioned in a footnote), which means that PalmOne’s hot-selling Treo 650 (pictured) isn’t included in that company’s rankings. Confused? It gets even stranger. According to an analysis of the study by Personal Tech Pipeline, Gartner included seven BlackBerry products that include cellphone capabilities. Additionally, the Nokia 9300 and 9500 — which certainly look like smartphones to us — are also included, allowing Nokia to be listed as the fourth-largest PDA vendor, behind RIM, PalmOne and HP. So who really has the largest market share? While we agree with PTP’s Mike Elgan that “the stand-alone PDA market is on its way to irrelevance,” we’d still like to know where each of these players really ranks. But it looks like we’re not going to find out from Gartner.

Was the check from RIM big, Gartner?

While it’s laudable that BBEdit has only crashed a very few times for me, it is absolutely unacceptable BBEdit possesses no autosave/autobackup/working-copy-recovery feature to preserve unsaved work in the event of such a crash. Deeply immersed in a problem, I hadn’t hit the magic save key in about 45 minutes — and then BB went away, and so did all my work.

BBEdit has famously used the “It doesn’t suck” tagline for years (it’s a registered trademark for them, even). Having now been bitten by this jackassery, I realize that such boasts are in fact false advertising. Every other serious editor of which I’m aware either has an autosave feature (of which some are justifiably wary, since it implies overwriting the previous version automatically) or some kind of working copy file from which one may recover from a crash. BBEdit appears to have neither, and this earns it a spot on my Shit List.

Update: In email back from support, their answer turns out to be “Yeah, we don’t do autosave. We might add that someday. Our advice is to save a lot.” Um, right. How about I just use an editor that doesn’t think it’s 1985, and that is FREE besides?

“Seaside is a framework for developing sophisticated web applications in Smalltalk.”

Rhino: an implementation of Javascript written entirely in Java for embedding in Java apps.

Um.

As it happens, our eyes are fucking liars. Bastards.

(via, but being build on in several places.)

Apple has confirmed that OS X 10.4 — a/k/a Tiger — will be released on 29 April.

Back in the boom, serious web application development more or less began and ended with some kind of application server and lots and lots of Java. Now that many simpler technologies are growing more and more capable, though, plenty of folks are reconsidering this assumption, and with good reason. While Java is great for some things, when it comes to complex or demanding automated web applications, there’s almost no reason at all to touch Java. The LAMP architecture (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl/Python/PHP) replaces it very, very well and much lower development costs and much greater flexibility. Don’t like MySQL? Use Postgres. Don’t like PHP? Use Perl and a framework like Mason. There are even whole new frameworks (with real-world examples) coming up behind LAMP, too, that will further push Java aside in this market.

(Obvious in the above is that there’s also no reason for most people to consider paying good money for a database server. This is why Microsoft is glad it has other products, and why Oracle has been busily finding other database-based businesses to move into as the database server itself becomes a commodity item.)

How about a 3U 19″ Rack-mounted Wine Rack? Hold four of your favorite bottles in the cool confines of your server room. Excepting, of course, that while the room itself may be cool enough, the space in your racks likely is NOT. (As of this writing, the internal temp of one of the boxes Chief Heathen is responsible for is a cool 95 degrees, or about 25 degrees higher than ideal cellar temp. Actually, that’s the ambient temp around CPU 1; its internal is 107. And this is with fans running at better than 4,000 RPM, so there you go. (How much do we love Apple’s Server Monitor? [HDANCN?]))

This BBC bit is, well, set in the UK, but in my experience his summary on the state of PC support is spot on here as well (though a good chunk of the failures he finds are at their root problems of what should be viewed as criminally poor design, the germ is still true):

It seems incredible, but millions of families and thousands of businesses have no-one to turn to but a bunch of unqualified amateurs to fix the most complicated pieces of equipment that have probably ever existed. It’s a scary thought.

There is no standard, no Bar Association, no AMA, no APA. There is no way for my clients to know that my experience actually qualifies me to do what I say I can do, or that J. Jackass Fucktard with a 15-year-old CNE knows precisely nada of modern use.

In response to, well, no demand at all, we’ve prepared a little automatically-updated analysis magic; yes, that’s right, now you can gaze at the wonder that is the Heathen Census, updated nightly! Total posts! Averages per year, month, and day! Breakdowns by calendar year and month! All a single click away via the CENSUS link over on the right! Now how much would you pay?

Yeah, we know. Whatever. It was fun to do.

BBC: “Lab fireball ‘may be black hole’“. Presumably not the kind with cool robots, either.

This time, we don’t mean just us here at Heathen; there’s plenty of shit WE don’t get — Serbo-Croation; matrix algebra; how alternating current actually works; Finnegan’s Wake; why a slim majority of this country voted for a manifestly incompetant boob; how to get Mason to play nice with Apache 2.0; what airspeed of an unladen swallow is; etc. That’s nothing special, and nobody wants to read about it.

No, we mean stuff NOBODY actually understands. That’s interesting. And the folks at New Scientist have a fine list of thirteen such phenomena for your perusal.

AOL has just adjusted the AIM Terms of Service to say, essentially, “we own everything you type in AIM, and can use it any damn way we want, and fuck privacy.”

I’m pretty sure this means we switch to another tool at work pronto.

Some great thoughts and reflections from a computing pro on why the Mac actually makes her more productive. It’s a worthy read, and free of ideology (for the most part).

The post header is an old jibe at Windows. Ms Stamper quotes it in her final graf:

I’m sure that everyone has heard the old saying, “Mac for Productivity, Unix for Development, and Windows for Solitaire”. My experience has shown me that at least for my needs, the Mac is not only for productivity, but for development as well. Windows? Well, some things never change.

So one of the companies I work with is evaluating Blackberry devices. I got one to use for a bit, and found it, frankly, utterly wanting. It receives mail pretty well, but managing and sending from the device is a very frustrating experience, beginning with the fact that folder management thereon is unusable; all messages are comingled in a single queue; all messages that come from it must come from the same email address; and the online “managment” site is so fucked it only works in IE. RIM may own this space for people saddled with Exchange back-ends, but their tool is a sick joke when hooked up to standards-based mailers — there’s not even any real IMAP support, for crying out loud.

Add to this the fact that the PDA functions are utter crap compared to, say, an 8 year old Palm, and you see why I pawned the thing off on a sales guy and got a Treo 650. Anyway, As part of the testing, I downloaded PocketMac for Blackberry, which allowed the Blackberry to sync with my desktop tools (well, mostly of them; it syncs only with iCal, Address Book, and Stickies — the Palm tools sync with StickyBrain). Since I’m done with the damn thing, I went to uninstall PocketMac.

It took a trip to the knowledge base before I found out that the install program (which I deleted) is how you uninstall PM. I re-downloaded it (jumping through some auth hoops in the meantime; thank goodness I kept the email with the URL) and stepped through to the “type of install” phase before I found the “uninstall” option; this alone is incredibly unintuitive, but what came next was even worse.

I’m accostomed to installers requiring my authentication before they do anything. This is normal on a Mac, and a good thing. What I was NOT prepared for was the fact that once I gave the PM uninstaller my password, IT SYSTEMATICALLY QUIT EVERY APPLICATION I HAD RUNNING. All of ’em. I had browser windows pointing to things I was planning to read; I had active terminal sessions on remote machine. A modern Mac is NOT a Windows machine; we don’t have to quit everything to uninstall a program, and we damn sure don’t appreciate having it done FOR us with no warning. It’s stupid, arrogant, and just plain fucked up.

PocketMac may be the only game in town for syncing Blackberries and Wince devices with Macs, and bully for them. But right now they’re on my shit list, and I’m damned glad I have no need of their software anymore.

Mike has more referrer-magic.

A fan writes, “Hey, how many posts on Heathen?” Well, son, we don’t know, but we figure we might be able to find out:

$ find . -type f -name "*.txt" | wc -l
2086


The earliest is dated 29 November 2000, which means we’ve been Heathening for just over 4.25 years, for an average of 490.8 posts per year, or about 1.3 per day.

No wonder our wrists hurt.

(Oh, and make that 2,087, counting this one.)

Later…

Actually, and somewhat shockingly, that figure is low; it assumes that all our posts are stored in .txt files, but in fact the “original” few months (from November 2000 through the beginning of July 2001) are still in Blogger-generated HTML files, and are therefore not in that count. What’s to be done?

$ perl -e 'while (<>){ $foo++ while m/"byline"/g; } print "We have $foo posts\n";' *.html
171

Heh. Now the total, as of the original post, is 2,086 + 171, or 2,257, which works out to 531 a year and an astonishing 1.45 per day. This is now high enough that we suspect a problem with our method or our hobbies, but who’s got time to chase that kind of niggling detail? We’ve got posts to write.

We have joined Flickr Nation at http://www.flickr.com/photos/chetman/. See also sidebar addition.

Jeff points out the best of all possible uplinks.

Microchip Mr T.

Company suspects nobody reads the EULA. Company decides to test theory by placing “we’ll send $1,000 to the first person who emails us at address@domain.tld” deep in their click-thru EULA.

It took FOUR MONTHS and 3,000 DOWNLOADS before someone took them up on it. (Techdirt link; they link to the story here.)

Apparently, you can order pizza from inside Everquest 2.

When he’s not creating hugely successful conduits for teen angst or being acquired, Brad Fitzpatrick has time to diagram who’s shagged whom in the Buffyverse. And thank God for that.

If you’re in software, or know from software, read this rant about the Groupware phenomenon.

While Judge Kimball did not grant IBM’s motion for summary judgement, he did have this to say:

“Despite the vast disparity between SCO’s public accusations and its actual evidence–or complete lack thereof–and the resulting temptation to grant IBM’s motion, the court has determined that it would be premature to grant summary judgment,” Kimball wrote Wednesday. “Viewed against the backdrop of SCO’s plethora of public statements concerning IBM’s and others’ infringement of SCO’s purported copyrights to the Unix software, it is astonishing that SCO has not offered any competent evidence to create a disputed fact regarding whether IBM has infringed SCO’s alleged copyrights through IBM’s Linux activities.” CNET

Spin this, Darl.

Yes, this is a picture of a Newton controlling a Mac Mini.

Cory Doctorow explains why you should care about your carrier’s policies toward your phone/handheld/device/etc.

It’s a good question. SFGate’s Mark Morford give it some ink:

My SO, she is not alone. This exact same scenario, with only slight variation, is happening throughout the nation, right now. Are you using a PC? You probably have spyware. The McAfee site claims a whopping 91 percent of PCs are infected. As every Windows user knows, PCs are ever waging a losing battle with a stunningly vicious array of malware and worms and viruses, all aimed at exploiting one of about ten thousand security flaws and holes in Microsoft Windows. Here, then, is my big obvious question: Why the hell do people put up with this? Why is there not some massive revolt, some huge insurrection against Microsoft? Why is there not a huge contingent of furious users stomping up to Seattle with torches and scythes and crowbars, demanding the Windows Frankenstein monster be sacrificed at the altar of decent functionality and an elegant user interface?

Excellent question. Why do most people just put up with this crap? The answer may be in a quote I heard years ago, attribution unrecalled: the greatest damage Microsoft has done to the computing industry is the degree to which they’ve lowered people’s expectations. They’re a marketing machine, not a real tech company, and it shows in both their market share and their product quality.

We’ve seen this part before, which is the bit about the guy who makes a computer keyboard out of an old typewriter as a gift for his wife, as she finds manual keyboards easier on her hands than the new electronic kind. What we missed the first time around was another of this guy’s projects: The Humphrey Room Inconveniencer. I’m so very sorry this idea didn’t occur to me in college, and that I didn’t do it to Mike back when I had a pass key.

Sony admitted it was wholly wrongheaded in its digital music strategy, and that it had let Sony Entertainment stifle innovation from its Electronics division — which is precisely why they’re not even an also-ran in the portable digital music market after having invented the whole notion of portable, personal music in the eighties:

Sony admits MP3 error
Yuri Kageyama in Tokyo
January 21, 2005
SONY missed out on potential sales from MP3 players and other gadgets because it was overly proprietary about music and entertainment content, the head of the company’s video-game unit said. Ken Kutaragi, president of Sony Computer Entertainment, said he and other Sony employees had been frustrated for years with management’s reluctance to introduce products like Apple’s iPod, mainly because the Sony had music and movie units that were worried about content rights. But Sony’s divisions were finally beginning to work together and share a common agenda, Mr Kutaragi said at the Foreign Correspondents Club in Tokyo. “It’s just starting,” he said. “We are growing up.” Sony officials have rarely publicly said the company’s proprietary stance was mistaken. Mr Kutaragi, who has long been viewed as a candidate to lead Sony, was unusually direct in acknowledging Sony had made an error. Sony’s music players did not initially support MP3 files and only played Sony’s own Atrac format. Sony’s technology innovation had been “diluted”, Mr Kutaragi said “We have to concentrate on our original nature – challenging and creating,” he said. Once the powerhouse of global electronics, with success exemplified by its Walkman, Sony has lost some of its glamour lately, losing out in profitability and market share to cheaper Asian rivals. Mr Kutaragi – known as the “Father of the PlayStation” for making the game machine a pillar of Sony’s business – said the new PSP, or PlayStation Portable, handheld will grow into a global platform for enjoying music and movies as well as games. The Associated Press

Stan Lee Gets Paid.

PJ over at Grokaw points out just how stupid you can be and still be referred to as a “tech industry analyst.” Basically, every professional geek’s worst fears about illiterate marketing droids are fulfilled in the works of folks like the ones she cites.

“Hey, check out this Transgenic Art.”

Need some geeky quotes? Try the Quote Database.

BBspot reports that Half Life 2 Physics Engine Contains Grand Unified Theory.