Black Rapid can pound sand

Posted on by

A couple years ago, I discovered the cross-body sliding-loop camera straps from Black Rapid. It was a mildly novel but obvious riff on the idea of a camera strap, and lots of simliar products have graced the marketplace over the years, but the BR version was well made and well-reviewed. I bought one, and have enjoyed it.

But I will never buy another one, and I encourage everyone in the sound of my voice who is considering a Black Rapid purchase to look elsewhere, too, because they are aggressively using patent chicanery to shut down similar products despite the obviously invalid nature of their “patent”.

Luma Labs, maker of a similar product, document the sad situation, complete with citations of prior art, in an open letter to their customers.

Posted in Pix

The TSA Is Risking Your Health

Posted on by

Nobody likes the pornoscanners. We’ve heard plenty of evidence so far that the TSA has lied or mislead us about their safety, either for travelers OR for their own employees, and the security experts not in the employ of the DHS have repeated pointed out that the scanners don’t actually do much for us — for example, they probably wouldn’t have caught the underwear bomber, and would not catch anyone with C4 stored in the back door area.

Well, now this:

The EU has prohibited their use in European airports.

Opt out. Every time.

Who? Who.

Posted on by

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.)

Microsoft: Still Part of the Malware Problem

Posted on by

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:

Screen shot 2011-11-12 at 6.08.21 PM.png

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.

Holy Crap! Sanity from Texas AND Mississippi in the same week!

Posted on by

Obviously everyone’s aware that my ancestral state voted down a “personhood” amendment on Tuesday, but what kinda snuck in this week in Texas is that we’ve apparently rejected the notion of having any Confederate flag plates available.

This is, predictably, irritating to the Sons of Confederate Veterans, which is just fine by me because I’m pretty sure most things that irritate them are good ideas. The flag in question is a symbol of treason, slavery, and postwar terror.

More than you ever wanted to know about the McRib

Posted on by

Seriously, though go read this. It’s fascinating, in a morbid and awful way. Put short, it’s perhaps the apotheosis of the weird logrolling aspect of American food business, wherein perfectly usable food — like fruit, or meat — is processed beyond all recognition to be resold as something much less healthy, useful, or cost-effective so that an entity like McDonald’s can suck more dollars from the consumer. A taste:

Barbecue, while not an American invention, holds a special place in American culinary tradition. Each barbecue region has its own style, its own cuts of meat, sauces, techniques, all of which achieve the same goal: turning tough, chewy cuts of meat into falling-off-the-bone tender, spicy and delicious meat, completely transformed by indirect heat and smoke. It’s hard work, too. Smoking a pork shoulder, for instance, requires two hours of smoking per pound–you can spend damn near 24 hours making the Carolina style pulled pork that the McRib almost sort of imitates.

And for its part, the McRib makes a mockery of this whole terribly labor-intensive system of barbecue, turning it into a capital-intensive one. The patty is assembled by machinery probably babysat by some lone sadsack, and it is shipped to distribution centers by black-beauty-addicted truckers, to be shipped again to franchises by different truckers, to be assembled at the point of sale by someone who McDonald’s corporate hopes can soon be replaced by a robot, and paid for using some form of electronic payment that will eventually render the cashier obsolete.

There is no skilled labor involved anywhere along the McRib’s Dickensian journey from hog to tray, and certainly no regional variety, except for the binary sort–Yes, the McRib is available/No, it is not–that McDonald’s uses to promote the product. And while it hasn’t replaced barbecue, it does make a mockery of it.

The fake rib bones, those porky railroad ties that give the McRib its name, are a big middle finger to American labor and ingenuity–and worse, they’re the logical result of all that hard work. They don’t need a pitmaster to make the meat tender, and they don’t need bones for the meat to fall off–they can make their tender meat slurry into the bones they didn’t need in the first place.

Reached for comment, Nazi Pope Ratz said…

Posted on by

… “Hey, at least we’re not Penn State.”

According to the attorney general’s office, in 2002 a graduate student assistant went to Paterno’s home the day after he saw Sandusky sexually assaulting a boy in the shower late at night at Lasch Football Building on the Penn State campus. Paterno told Curley the next day.

About 10 days after the incident, Curley and Schultz met with the graduate assistant who had witnessed the abuse. Their executive action, according to the grand jury report: They told Sandusky that he could not bring any children from his foundation into the football building any more.

No one from Penn State — not Paterno, not the human neckties, no one — ever reported the alleged incident to law enforcement, which the grand jury report says is required under Pennsylvania law

The Michigan GOP is objectively pro-bully

Posted on by

No, seriously. They insisted on what amounts to a “safe harbor” provision in an anti-bullying law that protects bullying based on religious beliefs.

[S]ocial conservatives believe that efforts to protect gays from assault, discrimination or bullying impinge on their religious freedom to express and act on their belief that homosexuality is an abomination. That’s stating it harshly, but it is the underlying belief.

What. The. Actual. Fuck.

Everything Old Is New Again

Posted on by

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.

Things that worry us a little

Posted on by

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.

Oh, Mississippi

Posted on by

Because Mississippi doesn’t have enough poor, unwanted babies, and because they feel being first in teen pregnancy is something to be proud of, my home state is almost certain to pass the most restrictive anti-abortion law in the country. In fact, it’s not a pro-life bill. It’s an amendment to the state Constitution that defines personhood as beginning at conception, and welcomes all that follows from that. No exceptions are to be made for rape or incest, for example. More troubling, the boosters are welcoming the fact that many broadly accepted means of birth control work by first attempting to prevent fertilization, but then also prevent implantation: those methods would likely become illegal under the law, to say nothing of emergency contraception, some IUDs, many procedures associated with IVF, and presumably medically necessary abortions (e.g., as with ectopic pregnancies).

Oh, Mississippi. How am I supposed to convince people out in the world you’re not an insane bunch of right-wingers when, honestly, enough of you are that this will probably pass? This is being driven by the raving nutbird looney right, of course, but they find Mississippi pretty welcoming. Lest you forget, the American Family Association is based over there, presumably because Nevada got first choice.

There’s just so much defending you can do in the face of things like this. It’s like Mississippi is DETERMINED to stay ignorant, poor, and dead last in any category that matters. I commend folks who stay there and try to make it better; they’re doing God’s work, and I say that not just because they’re my brother. But I read stories like this, or pay attention to the ongoing fiascos of criminal justice in Mississippi that Radley Balko covers, and it just kills me. It makes me angry, sure, but ultimately it just makes me sad.

In Which There Are Changes

Posted on by

Spam comments have become a giant pain in the ass. Moveable Type — the platform I use here — has some basic antispam stuff, but I can’t seem to get it tuned right, so the only way I’ve found to keep the spam out is to have the filters set to “very aggressive” and sift through the spam queue every day or so for the ACTUAL comments. But they pile up QUICKLY.

I’ve been busy for a few days (hence no posts), for example, and now, after 6 days, I’ve just discovered over two thousand spam comments to zap.

What does this mean to you, the Heathen faithful? It means I’m restricting comments to authenticated users effective immediately. There are lots of auth systems I can piggyback on, and that you can use with very little effort. I hope you’ll do so. But I can’t keep up with the spam deluge.

MiscHeathen is also moving to a new platform sometime before Christmas. I was going to put off the comment login thing until then, but I just don’t have the time to deal with the flood. Henceforth, you’ll need to use an ID on one of the following systems in order to comment here:

  • OpenID
  • Google
  • AIM
  • WordPress.com
  • TypePad

If this doesn’t work for you, please let me know via email. Thanks.

Holy Crap, I’m Behind

Posted on by

Got super busy with revenue-producing activities, so you’ll have to do with a snarky bullet-point post. Strap in; here we go:

RMS: Still a Dick

Posted on by

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.

Because AT&T Hates You, That’s Why

Posted on by

At Heathen HQ, we pay nearly $30 a month, and have for years, to maintain a plain-old-telephone-service (“POTS”) line just for the alarm system. We use Vonage for our actual telephone, which is infinitely preferable to AT&T’s products.

I finally got fed up with this, and called ADT to see if there was some way to interface the alarm with Vonage. No, they say. No one seems to know why (I can fax with Vonage; seems like the alarm signal would work, but whatever).

What ADT does offer, though, is a quasi-cellular wireless hookup. The device itself is $99. There is no installation fee. It raises my ADT monitoring cost by $15 a month. It’s a no-brainer; they’re coming to install it this afternoon.

Think about this: Cellular alarm monitoring is more cost-effective than land-land. Why? Because AT&T wants to live in your pocket, that’s why. Treat them accordingly.

DEATH TO BENNIGAN’S

Posted on by

No, really. Apparently they — along with many other crappy chains — are in serious dire straits. The linked article notes that the ersatz Irish pub grub chain’s sales are down 88% since 2001. Ouch.

Why? First, people eat out less in a recession. Second, easier access to information about better local options via sites like Yelp made those who DID dine out more likely to choose independent restaurants over corporate crap.

I am completely astonished and pleased by this.

The Bible Tells Me So

Posted on by

We’d all be a lot better off if more the so called “Christians” in public life spent any time reading the Bible. Fred Clark reminded me of this passage I’ll quote completely here; it’s from a part of the Old Testament not all that far from the verses the antigay bozos are fond of quoting — but, then again, those books include all sorts of rules those right-wingers manage to forget, so it’s no surprise they’ve ignored Deuteronomy 24:17-21:

You shall not deprive a resident alien or an orphan of justice; you shall not take a widow’s garment in pledge. Remember that you were a slave in Egypt and the Lord your God redeemed you from there; therefore I command you to do this.

When you reap your harvest in your field and forget a sheaf in the field, you shall not go back to get it; it shall be left for the alien, the orphan, and the widow, so that the Lord your God may bless you in all your undertakings. When you beat your olive trees, do not strip what is left; it shall be for the alien, the orphan, and the widow.

When you gather the grapes of your vineyard, do not glean what is left; it shall be for the alien, the orphan, and the widow.

Imagine for a minute what it might mean if the idea of “politically active Christian” conjured not images of Pat Robertson and know-nothing right-wingers like Perry and Bachman and Santorum, but of men and women who remember verses like these, or the Sermon on the Mount, or — and this is a real stretch — what the Bible says Jesus actually did and said, and with whom he kept company, instead of cherrypicking Old Testament proscriptions designed to incite hatred and xenophobia in their base.

Yeah. Never happen. But it’s nice to think about.

Today in short book reviews: REAMDE

Posted on by

Stephenson’s latest is best skipped, frankly. It’s a turgid mismash of unearned and unplausible coincidences stapled together with NS’ trademark deep-dive research. Unlike his prior works, which typically used a fine story (“ripping good yarns,” even) to explore some other topic (nanotech, cyberspace, monetary development, etc.), this time it’s a scattershot explosion of whatever stuck on the wall — MMORPG gaming, money laundering, international terrorism, great circle air traffic planning, immigration, firearms, drug smuggling, northwestern geography, and Eritrean adoptees.

No, really. It’s kind of a mess, and feels lacking in the craft I found in even the more self-indulgent portions of the Baroque cycle, or Anathem.