fak3r

Dik needs no support from u.

Since its introduction, my beef with the iPhone has been obvious; buying it ties you to AT&T, a company that violated the law, and the rights of its customers, by allowing and assisting with the illegal wiretapping and data-mining for the NSA.  Keep in mind, there were other phone companies asked … but AT&T is the one that said yes.  So if you want to put your money where your mouth is, be like me and consider Credo Mobile.  Their recent promo postcard (seen to the right) has a permanent place on my refrigerator, so I’ll wait until they sell Android based phones, or support an Openmoko phone (drool) to get rid of my ancient (aka- 1 year old) cell phone.  The copy on the flip side of the postcard tells it like it is; if you’re paying AT&T for anything, you’re contributing to the current administration.

“Sorry to say, but the political action committee at AT&T contributed the maximum amount allowable by law to the Bush/Cheney campaign — twice. So, go ahead, check out your mobile phone company. And then check out the mobile phone alternative you can trust. It’s called CREDO Mobile, and it’s mobile phone service that stands up for your values, brought to you by Working Assets.

On the other hand, if you’re happy with your mobile service just the way it is, accept this photograph as your gift from a real, ahem, Richard.

To get your phone in line with your values, click here.”

Never forget

Someone has taken time collecting pictures of Anthropomorphic Cannibalism at Flickr, which is essentially ads for food, showing the subject of the food, eating itself. Really funny when you think about it, but it took this pool of pics to really make me see it.

Pretty cool, but anytime you look at ads too closely you’ll find disturbing things - I really long for a place without the constant distractions of ads thrown in your face, and no, me having ads on my site does not play into that…

Here’s some news that near and dear to my heart, Super Mario Bros has been voted the greatest computer game…evar! (in one poll at least) “The classic platform game was first released in 1985 and has since become one of the biggest selling ever with more than 40 million copies flying off the shelves worldwide. In the game brothers Mario and Luigi - now recognized the world over - try to conquer the Mushroom Kingdom in a bid to save Princess Peach. Super Mario Bros 2 was released in 1988, and Super Mario Bros 3 in 1990. The third version was considered by many as the best, and has sold 18 million to date. The poll of 2,000 gamers, conducted by www.onepoll.com, revealed ‘old skool’ games are still firm favorites with Britain’s army of gamers.”  A few weeks ago I played Super Mario Bros. on the Wii, yeah, the original one from 1985, while the rest of the family watched.  I was flying through worlds jumping at nothing when a coin would appear.  My wife asked, “How do you remember that that invisiable spot became a coin?”, to which I couldn’t answer, it’s just that ingrained into my mind - the simple game means/meant that much!  What I like about this, and the other 19 in the list, is that it shows what really matters to make a game immortal as it were; it has to be creative and fun.  Damn to the graphics, the 5.1 sound, the online play, if the game isn’t fun, forget it. “This shows that classic games will live on forever in the hearts of computer game fans. The gaming industry is getting more and more competitive, releasing more and more innovative games by the minute - but this survey proves that sometimes the most simple formats work well to keep game players hooked.” (more…)

What’s wrong with this picture? Can you say debt? Good, how about recession?  Notice the gray areas, those are recession periods, we’ll wait for ours to appear here.  Who thought it could get this bad this quickly?  Here’s the graph at the Federal Reserve for you to research.  Enjoy

NOTE: at work I installed a web proxy to separate internal user traffic from external traffic hitting our production servers.  While I’m not part of the network team, they asked me to do this because of my prior experience and interest in such things.  The idea of this was to be a temporary fix until they get a new line installed providing greater bandwidth, but my argument is for the continuation of this segmentation even after the new line is installed.  Below is a slightly sanitized version of my arguments for this. Note that my thoughts and comments are driven by years of running networks, thus it is something I care about and have spent years thinking about, so it is wordy.  I’d be very happy to discuss this, or other solutions, via the comments below because I never want to stop learning.

I’d like to share my thoughts in as to why I think the network is better served with keeping internal traffic and public traffic separate.  Regardless of if you use the existing web proxy server, or another one with different network topology, I care less about the tool, and more about making the network and user experience better for both internal and external users (more…)

NOTE: As a St. Louis native, I was asked to comment on the sale of local St. Louis brewer Anheuser-Busch to European beverage conglomerate InBev. The following are my comments from the thread.

A couple of things here, AB has been a big STL employer for years sure, but just because they’re big doesn’t mean they’re good. Look at other big employers here; Boeing, AG Edwards and now AB - while they’re headquartered here, they’re not much more than bragging rights for St Louisans - just because they’re based here, they’re far from ‘local’. They’re all multi-national corporations which means the money is a) not staying here and b) is fluid, ready to be munched up by the next corporation up the chain, which leaves the employees as a line item - so much for loyalty. So why should a local market worry about a corporation that doesn’t care about them? (more…)

Wow, it sounds like this wasn’t thought through too well, apparently Apple requires you to activate your new iPhone at the store you buy it from. On a normal day this should work out alright, but not on today, with the rash of people snapping up the new model. “Problems with the iTunes server caused some enthusiasts who had waited in line for hours to walk out of the store unable to use their new iPhones, according to the disgruntled customers. “I’ve got two phones on me and neither of them work,” said Adolfo Peralta, a Brooklyn resident who lined up to purchase the iPhone 3G at 6:30 a.m. local time for the 8:00 a.m. SoHo store opening. “I have to go find a pay phone to make a phone call.” Ouch, so apparently the employees couldn’t activate the phones since they couldn’t connect to the iTunes server. “All of the systems are down,” Perillo said, adding that she had finished two crossword puzzles while waiting for her iPhone activation to be complete. She said employees were shutting down some computers at the store to try to fix some of the problems with the iTunes network the store was experiencing. Apple requires customers to activate the iPhone 3G in stores where they were purchased. This was not a requirement for the original iPhone, which was released a little more than a year ago.” Sounds like the most fun was had at Apple’s swank SoHo store where the backlog forced people to snake around the block. Damn, I think if I wanted a new iPhone I’d just wait until tomorrow…would be awesome to play Super Monkey Ball on too!

Half the fun of the Internet (capital ‘I’ please) is discovering new things, but it’s rare that you see something new that really changes your perception of things. For me that happened when I came across the online bookstore Zoomii.com, which sells books via Amazon; think of it as a new front-end to the Amazon book site. You really have to try it out to understand it, but in a nutshell you navigate the ’store’ via a huge overview of all the ‘books’ with an interface that feels quite a bit like Google maps since you can click and ‘drag’ the background. You can use your mousewheel to ‘zoom’ in on particular sections, all the way down to a particular book, which you can then click on to get all the info you normally get on a Amazon page. This is a cool UI, I’d like it if they released some source or a framework for this.

To understand how importance net neutrality is you need to watch the following video.  Think about the freedom that the Internet allows you, now think about how you are limited to certain ‘packages’ when you pay for cable or satellite access to watch TV. This is exactly how the corporate behemoths want to make your choices for the Internet. It makes sense, they’re not stupid, they see the opportunity to make money, and making your freedom into the proverbial carrot and stick makes perfect sense…for them.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2XPiqhN_Ns]

Their title for the video is 2012: The Year The Internet Ends.  Learn more, and how you can spread the word, at I Power.  Thanks.

With the barriers lowering, and other market factors creeping in, Macs are slowly making a move into the enterprise.  While this may/may not solely be Apple driven, the fact is that people like choices, and the Macs are now far more compatible with other systems than they once were, so finally folks have options.  In my recent travels to Woods Hole we had ~14-15 developers from around the world, and there were 4 Macs there.  Of course we had the normal thing where someone couldn’t get something working in Windows, Mac folks would chime in with, “just works on a mac” and later when Mac folks couldn’t plug a projector into the certain Macs, the windows folks throw the, “just works in windows”, so it was all in good fun.  So while I don’t consider these folks “enterprise” as in working for a corporation, it clearly shows that more people can use what they want, and have IT adapt for their needs.  I talked to a friend up there about his MacBook Pro - it’s a beauty of a machine, and he loves it b/c he can do everything he needs, plus run windows for dev work that you can only do in Windows.  Of course if I had such a beast it’d be running Linux, and that’s my argument for my buying my Dell laptop; while the Apple is nicer, it was also ~2500$ more than the Dell.  Yes, maybe when my work buys me a ‘top I’ll rethink it - but now I’m thinking smaller again - and I really like the Xseries Thinkpads (used be by IBM, but now it’s Lenovo - but the same otherwise) and they’ve always had excellent Linux ability.  two devs in WH had those, and I had to borrow them - not to work on them, just to pick them up - nice and light, thin, but with high screen resolution.  of course for a full fledged system like thatI could also look at the MacBook which shares most of the Thinkpads features - but for a Mac I’d prefer the black MacBook after my long, drawn out suffering with my old iBook…but I digress.  Now, what was the question?  Oh yeah, more Macs in the workplace, yeah, it’s how I’ve always said it should be, and it’s more that way now.  I run Debian Linux at work now, on my work provided HP desktop machine, on my personal Dell laptop when I bring it, on my Development server, and (soon) on my production server.  What kind of support do I need from IT?  Gimme an IP and a gateway IP and I’m all set.  So, in conclusion, I believe four reasons for Apple’s success with people using more Macs at work is due to the following reasons:

1. x86 processor which allows the bridge to those who still *think* they need Windows.
   
2. Microsoft’s epic fail with Vista has frustrated users to no end, witness the stay of execution XP has recieved from Dell.
   
3. Apple’s awesome design sense, which cannot be duplicated, puts it in that “wow, gotta have that gadget” bucket
   
4. and lastly (and maybe to a lighter extent) the fact that Darwin is a Unix derivative, so *geeks* can use it and get the same thrill they do via Linux.  I’ve seen this not only on my trip, but to the annual DefCon, where Macs are shown alongside the blocky black laptops of yore.

Look, business is like everything else, to survive it must evolve.  Plus, choice is freedom, which makes it an inherint human desire.  Wouldn’t you rather work somewhere that allowed, and TRUSTED, you to work with whichever OS you perferred?