This is great fun if you’re a fan. It’s from the end of Tennant’s run, which is also where I am in my remedial Whoism, so discovering it today was a nice coincidence.

I’m trying to get some support from Mozy now, on our corporate account. Mozy have a pretty good product that I don’t mind paying for, but their support SUCKS.

The first sin they’re committing is in the back-end user-self-service portal. It’s a nice set of tools for managing their product, but there are no support options. Support is sequestered on an entirely different site, with different credentials. WTF, Mozy? I can’t just log in and open a damn ticket when I notice something weird.

The second issue is something I suspect some idiot marketing droid thought was a good idea. It’s a variant on an old problem. The right way to do hold music is to play something decent and inoffensive so the holding party knows they haven’t been disconnected. Real music is best, not made-up production library bullshit — and then just fucking let it play. Do NOT periodically pitch me with ads, or tell me how important my call is, or babble incessantly with little messages the Chi O in your marketing department thought were cute. Just shut the hell up and let the music play.

Why? Because if it’s music, I can just put the call on speakerphone and go back to work, and maybe even get something done while I’m on hold. It’s easy for my brain to half-listen to the hold music and notice when it’s a human voice again, which signals I should pay attention again and shift back to the task at hand (in this case, figuring out why my backup didn’t run). Peppering the hold channel with lots of meaningless human chatter means I have to basically listen to the fucking thing much more closely, which makes it commensurately harder to shift to a different task while on hold.

At Mozy, the music never plays for more than 20 seconds without a cheery message popping up. It’s insane.

How about a rack fo awesome disembodied fictional doctor heads, suck in Futurama jars? Note Houston’s own Dr. Cooper at the lower right, who’s keeping very good company indeed — not in the least both Dr Howser and Dr Horrible.

If this delightful holiday carol resonates with you, then it’s entirely possible it’s time for me to talk to you about Cthulu.

(Video link via MeFi.)

Calvin ponders the nature of history and knowledge.

Besides, where would I store a piano catapult?

I love this. Note they’ve included status 418, which is actually from another standard.

On this list of you-might-be-an-early-adopter-if-you-owned-these over at Wired, I find myself batting .500: I had:

• a MiniDisc player;
• A Sharp Wizard;
• Three Newtons, unfairly maligned as they were;
• An original Palm Pilot.

I missed both eyeglass displays, and all my modems were at least 1200 baud (and built-in, without acoustic couplers). I’m also pretty sure WebTV shouldn’t be on this list — it was a product for technophobes, not people who actually knew technology.

Exhibit A.

Exhibit B.

Today’s Indexed cartoon is a leetle bit close to home.

No, really. CarrierIQ is installed on most Android, Blackberry, and Nokia phones, and reports everything you do upstream to CIQ and, presumably, the carrier. You cannot turn it off, and there is no opt-out provision short of rooting the phone and installing a new OS.

Just go listen.

A List Of Things Turbo Pascal Is Smaller Than may make your day, if you’re as geeky as I am. Hilariously, one of these things is the Wikipedia page for C++.

So I’m finally catching up on the Doctor Who revival, and I’ve really, really enjoyed it . . . so far. And by “so far” I mean up through the end of Season 3. I took a bit to warm to David Tennant’s Tenth Doctor after the solid performance Christopher Eccleston gave as the Ninth, but soon enough I realized he was just about the best Doctor ever. (Sorry, Tom).

As long as we’re talking about superlatives, I’ll sign on with everyone else who believes Billie Piper‘s Rose made the best companion since Elisabeth Sladen‘s Sarah Jane Smith — though I’m also very fond of Martha (Freema Agyeman) perhaps the first young female companion with professional training (Martha is, of course, a medical student).

So anyway: one area of serious weakness for me was the Runaway Bride special between series 2 and 3, post-Rose and pre-Martha. The special had the apparently-huge-in-Britain Catherine Tate as Donna Noble, a sort of one-off companion, and holy CRAP was she ever annoying. Frankly, she’s an awful screeching harpy, and I was very, very happy to see her go away at the end of the special.

Except, of course, as more up to date Who fans know, she came back and stayed, and will apparently hang out for the whole of season 4, Tennant’s last run. Two episodes into Season 4 (absolutely the weakest writing yet (the Pompeii episode was particularly awful)) and Donna is still a screaming, awful drag on the entire affair. I love Tennant’s Doctor, but the prospect of ELEVEN more episodes with her is seriously daunting. Wikipedia tells me that we get some parallel, returning companions as part of this season (including the beloved and sadly departed Sladen), which is welcome, but any Donna at all still constitutes Yoko tracks on a perfectly good John Lennon record.

(And yes, I know Pond is coming, but she can’t get here soon enough. I resent Noble’s drag on my Who enjoyment, dammit; there’s a limited amount of this stuff, and making me wish part of it away is really annoying.)

For years, it was a truism that MSFT operating systems were almost criminally broken when it came to security. There was no point in even arguing it; they just were.

They’ve gotten much, much better. A full up to date installation of XP, even, is reasonably safe if you’re behind a firewall, and Windows 7 is a genuinely nice OS. But in the interim, a whole industry of protection software exploded, most of which sucked.

As part of their ongoing improvement, I guess, Microsoft decided to enter this market themselves with a free tool called Microsoft Security Essentials, and I’ll be damned if it’s not one of the absolute best options on the market. It’s relatively lightweight, doesn’t get in the way of real work (I’m looking at you, Symantec — what you’ve done to Peter Norton’s name should be a crime), and is free. So that’s what my users have at work, and it’s what I use on my Windows 7 VM.

Well, I had to do some modifications of my VM last week, and that ended up convincing my copy of Windows that it’s not genuine. Not sure how that happened, because it completely is, but when I try to “Resolve this online now,” it takes me to an online store at Microsoft.com. Cute.

Even cuter is this:

Read that carefully. Apparently, if Windows decides it’s not “genuine” (read: legal), then the security product refuses to protect you. Whisky. Tango. Foxtrot.

Seriously, people, you think THIS is how you’ll quash malware in the Windows world? By not giving a shit what happens to people running pirated versions? Here’s a hint, Redmond: there’s probably more pirated copies than genuine ones, so if you want to generate some herd immunity against viruses, you need to try to cover them all.

Christ.

Check out the urban apiary, which is currently only a “concept” and not an actual product. Fortunately.

Animoog puts 1982 in your iPad. Oh yes please.

From the makers of the utterly impossible QWOP, we now find GIRP. Instead of running, you now climb. Marginally more possible. Beware. Personal best: 10.5m.

Edit: Fixed link to QWOP.

Several folks online pointed me to this story of a developer who now works via iSSH, an iPad, a bluetooth keyboard, and a virtual Linux box in the cloud. It’s a cute approach and all, but my real takeaway was: Congratulations! You just re-invented the terminal.

Apple has announced that, by next March, all apps for sale in the Mac App Store will have to be sandboxed.

This will make it very hard for any of those apps to do anything naughty, intentionally or accidentally, but one would hope the curated nature of the Mac App Store would take care of that for us anyway. However, the downside is that it will vastly limit the legitimate capabilities of software to that which Apple decides is a good idea, and that’s going to be dangerous. The App Store is already a very important market, and it’s likely to become moreso; insisting on the sandbox for those apps will effectively limit the capabilities of the entire Mac ecosystem. Frankly, I’m about 75% convinced that Apple is so in love with the implications of “curated computing” on iOS — ie, the model where they, not you, ultimately decide what software you can run on your phone or tablet — that they intend to bring it to the Mac over time, with baby steps.

If that’s true, it’s going to run a lot of people off, Heathen included.

At parking-scarce UC-Berkeley, bagging a Nobel means you get preferential and free parking spaces.

(Academic geeks, take note: apparently the UCB parking office views the Fields (mathematics) Medal as equivalent.)

The free-software, open-source world is full of characters, many of whom are known by their initials. Probably the most infamous of these is the president of the Free Software Foundation, Richard M. Stallman, or rms. RMS is notorious for his inability to interact with other humans in anything resembling a “human” way, and for his (some would say) infantile insistance on correcting and challenging other people’s choices about technology and software. Stallman believes all software should be open source, and that there is no moral place in society for closed-source software, or proprietary hardware, or anything of the sort. It’s an extreme position really only viable for someone who doesn’t have to interact with the business world more or less at all, but whatever.

Anyway, it should come as no surprise that rms had something to say about the passing of Steve Jobs. He was of course gracious and respectful while also acknowledging their ideological differences, and making the case for his own position.

No, I’m kidding. He said he was glad Jobs was gone, hoped his influence would end, and called all Apple users fools:

Steve Jobs, the pioneer of the computer as a jail made cool, designed to sever fools from their freedom, has died.

As Chicago Mayor Harold Washington said of the corrupt former Mayor Daley, ‘I’m not glad he’s dead, but I’m glad he’s gone.’ Nobody deserves to have to die — not Jobs, not Mr. Bill, not even people guilty of bigger evils than theirs. But we all deserve the end of Jobs’ malign influence on people’s computing.

Unfortunately, that influence continues despite his absence. We can only hope his successors, as they attempt to carry on his legacy, will be less effective.

My first reaction is basically “Jesus, what a dick.” That’s not news; Stallman is infamous for inappropriate behavior, and more than a few folks have suggested his cause — the free distribution of software unencumbered by what he considers “onerous” intellectual property rights — would be better served by someone that didn’t seem so content to piss everybody off.

Fortunately, someone over at ReadWriteWeb had the time for an actual takedown:

It’s no secret that RMS and Steve Jobs held firmly opposed views when it comes to software freedom. I didn’t expect Stallman to hold a vigil at an Apple store for Jobs, or even to say much of anything at all. But his ill-considered response does nothing for the cause of free software, and actually does a lot of damage.

[…]

This is, unfortunately, typical of Stallman – and exactly why the self-appointed leader of the free software movement is the last person who should be spokesperson for anything. He manages to offend common decency by celebrating the absence of a man who contributed enormously to the world of computing, and insult millions of Apple users simultaneously. But I see no argument whatsoever here to persuade Jobs’ fans that they should be considering free software. Just a petty expression of relief that a rival is no longer available to compete with Stallman’s cause.

If Stallman had to make a statement emphasizing his dislike of Jobs’ influence, he could still have done so respectfully. Consider this; “I didn’t share Steve Jobs’ vision of computing, and I wish he’d chosen to embrace free software. I’m very sorry that he’s gone and we’ve lost the opportunity to have that conversation. My sympathies are with his family at this time.” There’s no need to pretend that Stallman liked Jobs, but his post is contemptible.

Even if you accept Stallman’s world-views on free software and ethics about software licensing, we shouldn’t be “glad he’s gone.” Jobs’s work has inspired a lot of free software developers over the years, and he and his teams at Apple set a bar for excellence that more developers should aspire to.

It’s unseemly to wish away those we do not agree with. What Stallman is saying, in essence, is that his ideals of free software can only compete with what users want from computing products when they’re less attractive. To me, that says Stallman would be happy to force his ideals on users rather than persuading them that free software actually matters. Or, at least, that he lacks confidence that it’s possible.

There’s more, if you’re geeky enough to care.

You really need to watch this.

(H/T Rob.)

Just go check this out, courtesy of Rob.

God knows we here at Heathen are Apple fans, though sort of accidentally — we lack the zeal of of the true believers, but by and by we seem to have accumulated one of about everything Apple makes. We’re sad about Steve, obviously. 56 is entirely too young (Christ, I can SEE that from here), and the guy was still churning out hits. It is not exaggeration to say that, without him, the personal computing landscape would be very, very different — and most likely much less interesting, and much less usable by the broad population. He didn’t invent the personal computer, but he did a huge chunk of the work required to get it to a place where my 76-year-old stepfather can use it without calling me.

But this post isn’t about Steve. This post is about Dennis. You Heathen are a geeky bunch, but even so most of you have know idea who Dennis Ritchie was, or even that he died Saturday at the age of 70, but the odds are overwhelming that, in reading these words, you’re enjoying his work.

Dennis Ritchie wrote C. The partially-geeky among you will recognize this as a programming language, but it may have never occurred to you that languages, too, must have authors. C is now ubiquitous. It is no exaggeration to say that C and its derivatives (most famously C++, but also Microsoft’s C# and the Objective C that Apple favors, among others) run the world. The definitive book on the language has a real title, but it is known to coders the world over as “The K & R book.” The “R” is, of course, Ritchie.

But that’s not all. C is intimately tied to the Unix operating system, which is also Ritchie’s work, along with his colleagues Brian Kernighan (the “K” mentioned above) and Ken Thompson. You may have heard of Unix, but you (again, the noncoding Heathen) have no idea of the scale of its reach in your life. Unix runs everywhere, in some flavor or another. That commercial flavors have fallen from favor in recent years is of no consequence, because their de facto successor is Linux, which began life as a noncommercial, open, and free implementation of the same ideas. Without Unix there is no Linux. More than that, though, the world wide web as you know is based on Unix ideas and tools and protocols. Without Unix, the Internet itself would not be the same.

Today, variants of Unix run on countless devices — every Apple device running OSX or iOS is running a variant of something called FreeBSD, which is itself a variant of Unix. Android runs on Linux. The New York Stock Exchange? Linux. Your Tivo runs Linux. This site, and countless others (including Google, Amazon, and Facebook), is hosted on Linux. The firewall at your office probably has a Linux kernel. VMWare, the dominant virtualization platform in the world, is based on Linux.

Much was made last week of how many folks learned of Jobs’ passing on an Apple device. I’m sure the figure, if it could actually be measured, was a very high percentage. If we ask an equivalent question about Ritchie, though, the answer is easy: All. There is no communications channel in modern use that does not, somewhere, rely on his work or its descendants.

Humble pioneers are known for admitting that, in the words of Isaac Newton, “If I have seen further, it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants.” Apple’s modern success and resurrection are based on a solid software platform, the sine qua non of any technological endeavor. Steve clearly saw further than his contemporaries, but Dennis Ritchie was one of the giants who gave him a leg-up.

Godspeed, Dennis.

Update: This tribute post is worth reading, too. I didn’t cover it here, but it’s not just the C was influential and remains essential; it was also hugely groundbreaking in terms of portability. What Ritchie and his colleagues did with C — i.e., creating a portable computer language not beholden to idiosyncrasies of the various computing hardware platforms — was widely considered impossible at the time. Or, as the linked writer put it:

C is a poster child for why it’s essential to keep those people who know a thing can’t be done from bothering the people who are doing it.

It’s another BB hit, but it includes a bit of data I didn’t have: Octopi are very, very good at matching color, and they do it by sight, but they are color blind.

Go watch the video.

The other thing is this: Octopus camouflage isn’t about looking like the background. It’s about hiding itself from observers, and those can be two very different things.

Go check this out.

This is awesome. And true.

Thirty years ago, when I read the Dark Phoenix Saga in the X-Men, I totally missed the pretty remarkable subtext that, quite frankly, seems to obvious to have been wholly accidental.

H/T to Lemay on Twitter.

Go watch this right now.

h/t: Rob

How To Write Unmaintainable Code.

This is two Chatbots having a conversation.

This is apparently what the new version of Windows Explorer will look like.

They’re not kidding. Significantly, the only place I’m not seeing this ridiculed? The comments to the “not kidding” link, at MSFT’s own site.

When I was a kid on Boy Scout campouts, we’d sometimes play a game called “telephone,” which I’m sure you know: With everyone in a big circle, a leader tells one kid a secret, who whispers it to the next person, who whispers it to the next, etc. Amusement arises at the way in which the phrase has mutated by the time it reaches the origin point again.

Via MeFi, we find two Internet personalities who have leveraged Youtube’s new “automatic closed captioning” feature to play the same game.

This dude made a functioning photobooth for his brother’s wedding, complete with printer, triggered by a Staples “easy button.”

Very, very cool.

Anil Dash points out something hilarious; I’m quoting the whole thing because it’s brilliant:

For the past several days, Apple’s stock has been rising high enough that the company has flitted between being the first and second most valuable company in the world. Regardless of the final value of the stock on any given day, it is without a doubt the greatest comeback or turnaround story in the history of American business: A single company has gone from being just 90 days away from shutting down to becoming the unequivocal leader in innovation, design, branding and now valuation, and the transformation happened in less than a decade and a half.

Most interestingly, there’s a unanimous consensus, from fans and detractors alike, both within and outside the company, that a single man bears the lion’s share of the credit for the vision, leadership and execution that’s made this achievement possible.

So, who is this man? He’s the anchor baby of an activist Arab muslim who came to the U.S. on a student visa and had a child out of wedlock. He’s a non-Christian, arugula-eating, drug-using follower of unabashedly old-fashioned liberal teachings from the hippies and folk music stars of the 60s. And he believes in science, in things that science can demonstrate like climate change and Pi having a value more specific than “3”, and in extending responsible benefits to his employees while encouraging his company to lead by being environmentally responsible.

Every single person who’d attack Steve Jobs on any of these grounds is, demonstrably, worse at business than Jobs. They’re unqualified to assert that liberal values are bad for business, when the demonstrable, factual, obvious evidence contradicts those assertions.

It’s a choice whether you, or anyone else, wants to accept the falsehood that liberal values are somehow in contradiction with business success at a global scale. Indeed, it would seem that many who claim to be pro-business are trying to “save” us from exactly the inclusive, creative, tolerant values that have made America’s most successful company possible. I side with the makers, the creators, and the inventors, and it’s about time that the pack of clamoring would-be politicians be put on the defensive for attacking the values of those of us on this side.

By the way, before people whine about Apple stock being expensive, there’s a case to be made that AAPL is actually undervalued. Put simply, they’re just about printing money in Cupertino, get great return on what they spend, and don’t make stupid choices like some companies we could name.

The rifle being used by more elite sniper units today than any other is actually made by a British firm called AI, for Accuracy International. Wired has a great piece about them. Go read it. In 2009, Craig Harrison was using an AI rifle (in .338) when he made two consecutive kill shots in Helmand Province at 2,475 meters.

That’s a mile and a half. Twice. In a row. My guess is that you can’t do that with a deer rifle.

Friday was the 30th anniversary of the introduction of the original IBM PC.

Wired News assigned a 30-year-old to check one out, courtesy of a collector.

Apparently, the T-800 has a Twitter feed. He’s somewhat single-minded.

HIghbrow (and delightful) magazine Foreign Policy answers the question we all wonder, which is “What comes next in a post-Voldemort wizarding world?”

Check this out.

It’s even MORE menacing because of the German-accented narration. Enjoy.

The Physics of My Little Pony is filled with theoretical pitfalls.

It’s an example of the awesome views astronauts get, along with commentary about what you’re looking it. It’s HD; make it full screen.

Why? Because none of your kids do this.

Many people don’t understand this, but even a “secure” wireless network is pretty much an open book to anyone who’s ON that network. Your network traffic, unless encrypted, is clearly visible to anyone on that network who takes even the most basic steps towards reading it. There’s even a Firefox extension that makes doing this utterly trivial.

What does this mean? It means that, if you’re bloody minded, you can sit in a Starbuck’s and monitor people’s Facebook and Amazon activity in order to spoof it later. By the same token, it means that anything you touch on wifi that doesn’t have an HTTPS in front of it is an open book that anyone around you can see and review if they want. Banks, for the most part, understand this; they mostly use the encrypted connections. But Facebook’s https://www.facebook.com just redirects to the unencrypted version by default. Security? What’s that?

If you’re nerdy, or know someone who is, you can easily set up ways to avoid getting compromised by this by using something like a VPN, or even Tor. But if you’re not, the absolute least you can do is avoid using insecure sites in public places. This goes for phones and tablets on wifi, too, by the way (you can probably assume your 3G connections are more secure, however).

Seriously. Don’t do it. Be careful. This goes for coffeeshops, airports, hotels, etc. Identify theft gets mighty easy if people can read all your network traffic, don’t you think?

The PR firm working on Duke Nukem Forever tweeted yesterday that some reviewers “went too far” in their reviews, and that they are “reviewing who gets games next time.”

This is the state of game journalism; the blacklist is a clear and everpresent threat. It’s a clear signal to everyone paying attention when a new movie isn’t screened for critics ahead of release, so I suppose the big money in gaming wants to avoid that by bullying reviewers into only and always saying nice things. Nobody trusts online reviews from most of the gaming press, and this is the reason (n.b. that the reviews I linked yesterday were from a general tech news site and a mainstream British news paper, not gamer press publications).

The biggest joke in gaming has been, for 15 years, the ongoing delays surrounding Duke Nukem Forever. Astonishingly, it dropped this month, finally.

Not so astonishingly: it’s apparently awful, awful, awful. The two reviews I’ve read are clinics in brutal-but-deserved takedowns.

From Ars Technica:

In another scene, a woman sobs and asks for her father. You see, the women in the alien craft are being forcibly impregnated by the aliens, and during your journey, you hear a mixture of screams and sexual noises. After I accidentally blew up a few of these female victims in a firefight, Duke made a joke about abortion.

This is what passes for humor in the game. It’s not racy, it’s not funny, and it makes you feel dirty. Every time I put the controller down, I felt the need to rub my hands on my jeans as if the game were making me physically dirty. It’s like watching your uncle tell racist jokes at Thanksgiving and praying someone has the guts to tell him to cut it out, but this time it’s interactive — and you’re the uncle.

[…]

Multiple developers have worked on this game for over a decade, so I don’t know who to blame for the unplayable, glitchy, ugly, offensive mess it has become. No humor can make up for the game’s rampant hatred of women, and the terrible writing and one-liners can’t even be compensated for by good gameplay. The game’s jokes about other titles are laughable when you see how putrid Duke is upon release.

Sure, it may still sell millions of copies due to the name alone, but it will disappoint buyers and make anyone with half a brain feel uncomfortable. I have no clue how a game so all-encompassingly ugly can suffer from so many framerate issues, but Duke finds a way. From a business and gaming history perspective, the fact that the title exists at all is fascinating; for everyone else asked to spend $60 on it, it’s merely sad.

I’m a fan of humor that’s willing to push the boundaries, but nothing is being sent up, mocked, or lampooned here. There’s just no reason for what you see and hear. This is an ugly game that exists to celebrate ugliness. The people involved should be ashamed.

But the even better slam comes at the end of this review in the Guardian:

If this was 15 years in the making, it makes you wonder what they did for the other 14 years and 10 months.

Not quite “I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul,” but it’s about as close as we’ll get in the real world.

The Noun Project has a variety of infographics, typically with very liberal copyright terms, for all your iconographic needs.