[FILM] Cars

As expected, it's really well-produced and really, really beautifully rendered. The introducing short was pretty funny, and the credits were definitely something to stay for.

It's just that the film in between is an unadulterated anti-progress ode to southern small-town America; just that in the family-friendly little cartoon, the NASCAR races are run by nice little sentient cars and there's a lot fewer gay-bashings, inbred trailer-trash, anti-Mexican witchhunts and meth labs. I literally waited for the name Dale Earnhardt in the credits and there it was. Literally. It's not that I can't endorse the whole "Republicans buy sneakers, too"-attitude, but that doesn't mean that I would've watched it if I'd known.

Verdict: Nice try, no cookie. There go the times when every Pixar movie was a must-see.

Whoa

This is a bazillion shades of awesome. (via bOINGbOING)

Yay: A new blog by somebody who might actually be fun to read!

My friend Soho (not his real name), the artist formerly known as Smarty (not his real name either), has a new blog at http://duhastrecht.blogspot.com/, and if he fucks up again, I will have most of his internal organs.

No, really, this is gonna be funny. You can basically subscribe right now.

[FILM] Underworld Evolution

 Not scary.
 Not sexy.

It's pretty good at being a totally dumb effect-laden b-movie, and I wasn't expecting anything else, so it was OK enough.

[COMPUTING] Welcome to a Rotten Industry!

Via a comment thread on The Daily WTF comes this whopper of a privacy protection failure by the Canadian bank CIBC.

If I had an account there, I'd take my money and run right now.

On the other hand, inspect the original DailyWTF posting and the thread under it — and see how many people there comment that they have seen procedures like unnecessary data entry by humans and similar egregious violations of reasonable expectations of privacy by one-time mistakes, general incompetence, lazyness or carelessness, or intentional data mining unnecessary to the transactions that are actually requested by customers. From what I've personally seen and from what I've heard from trusted friends and acquaintances, I'd say that's pretty representative.

Add to that the sale of customer data to marketers and snooping databases, and you get a pretty dire view of the IT industry and all industries connected with it (a.k.a., the whole goddamned world).

Lots has been written on identity theft and similar problems; I suggest you take the warnings seriously. Think before you provide information; and in doubt and where legal, provide completely fictional data.

[TRAVEL] Copenhagen Blues

On my return flight from Sweden, I spent 40 minutes standing in the economy check-in queue. That was enough time to note a few things:

- I never waited that long for check-in with discount airlines like Ryan or Thomson. Sterling opens a SZG-CPH route at Christmas. I'd guess that's another destination where the premium airlines will get their lunch eaten. I've checked prices; they're spectacular. About € 100 for the best round-trip dates, including taxes and fees, is less than a third than what it'll set you back on Star Alliance flights from Vienna. The same as with all discount carriers: Book early.

- My bet is that the discount carriers don't skimp on security but just squeeze their own structures for every cent. Big carriers don't do much of anything extra for customers, they just approach a high-tech problem (transport people over large distances at high speed, sending their stuff with them and the necessary data ahead) with completely calcified structures. Time to let the dinosaurs rest in peace.

- In the same vein, check-in is completely sufferable if you can do it yourself. Not only can more machines be provided for less than more humans, they are also faster on a check-in for check-in basis. That's really something worth stressing:
Untrained customers can check themselves in faster than experienced ground personnell can. I wouldn't blame the personnell; did you ever note how much they have to type for checking in one person?
That's probably the mother of all user interfaces from hell, the stench of an old mainframe practically reeks through the lines.

- I hate it when there are signs that just say "WLAN area" without any brand logo or provider indication, but when you try to connect everything resolves to the server of a payment system. WLAN means "free WLAN" if there's no company logo; everything else borders on false advertising. Vienna got it right.

Also, juggling
- a laptop that The Man insists on seeing bare of any protective sleeve,
- a camera that they want you to undress the same way,
- a backpack,
- a few personal gadgets (MP3 player, mobile...),
- a leather jacket with a few zips (yay metal),
- a hotdog and
- a glass of beer
through the security check at the same time can be a bit stressful. Some would consider the hotdog and the beer a bit optional in that specific situation, but I beg to differ.

As usual with the ever more intense airport security measures, it's obviously more designed to make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside than to effectively increase security:
My laptop had to be stripped out of any protective sleeve, but I didn't have to power it on (even though it basically still was a solid brick on the X-ray as MacBook Pros have aluminium casing). About the heavy, also metal-cased replacement battery in my backpack, no questions whatsoever were raised. I feel more secure already.

[NATIONALRAT06] God, I Hate Politicians

Today's official berndhaug.net Moron of the Day[TM] is Heinz-Christian Strache, the nationalist-socialist FPÖ's lead candidate; I, of course, think the guy is the perfect poster-child for abortion, even more so than most Poliars. Let me count thee the ways:

HCS had an Interview with the ÖVP's (the conservative welfarist party) house paper, Die Presse.

The low points included (translations, both to english and then to "normal people"-speak, mine):

[Regarding the sale of the failed leftist-union-dominated bank, BAWAG] Of course they should look after an "Austrian solution"

Translation: There goes yet more of our tax-money.

Interviewer: Should foreigners only be allowed to work as seasonal labour in the future?
Strache: Yes.

Translation: Fuck all those high-tech industries I never understood; I'm sure Austria is so great we'll get foreign talent even if we kick them out for a few months each year.

[Regarding state-owned industry]
Strache: The fire sale should be stopped in many areas. The public should keep shares.
Interviewer: The state should limit its shares as most to 25.01% to keep some decision-making power?
Strache: Exactly.

Translation: I want to keep some companies for retirement posts for spent politicos. I'm sure we'll find many sucke...uhm...private investors for companies where beaurocrats can meddle in every decision. And if not, maybe we can fudge some deal with the people we install as the new owners of BAWAG.

Further points included separate state-sponsored insurance programs for guest-workers (yay! to the back of the bus with you brownies; that's bound to attract talent!) and compulsory work service for the unemployed (not that that was either unforseen or without precedent). Also, the usual protectionist drivel and then, out of nowhere, the following doozie:

Interviewer: Have you ever wondered whether you got the wrong door regarding business policy and really wanted to join the SPÖ [the old-left style socialists]?
Strache: Freedom of [the market, the ed [of Die Presse - Bnerd]] must have limits. The market on its own is stupid. I get extremely angry when it's said that the free market is absolutely necessary. Of course it needs regulation and shaping. Otherwise, we might have child labour soon.

Well, who knew? Good that those few idiots were set right at last:
The market is stupid. Maybe we should simply trust HCS on that one; after all it might just take one to know one.

On the other hand, maybe he should, literally, join the SPÖ: After all, that seems where Austrian liberals go to die (link in German) (occasionally amid allegations of corruption (link in German)). That I actually spent a year working for that club is a bit humiliating in retrospect.

The only light in there is talk about reducing a few taxes (inheritance, intra-family business inheritance, corporate taxes), but you know what happens to that kind of promise the second the elections are over.

I can't eat as much as I want to puke.

No, no, you don't understand...this is the official buzz!

As today is the International Talk Like a Pirate Day (Arrrr yarr yarr!), I visited their site and found a link to Keep To The Code, which is (drumrolls) The Official Fansite for Disney's Pirates of the Carribean Movies.

I liked both the movies, even the second one that most people hated, but let me make the obvious point: EL OH EL OFFICIAL FANSITE!!!1!

This oh-so-official oh-so-fan site has all the hallmarks of a movie studio internet presence, from the godawful flash intro (well, I'm sure it's godawful, I always skipped it) to a needless and definitely godawful sound effect ("Arrr I see turrrtles!" - Dear web designer: Please roll over and croak.) being played every time the window got focus.

Let me make another obvious point: INTERNET BUZZ DOES NOT WORK THIS WAY.

Calling something a fan-site does not make it a fan-site, and more so if it's obvious that some paid employee of your company cranked it out. Disney is a factory that crushes souls into synthetic dreams, and no amount of pretending it ain't so will ever change that:

After all, it's part of the very same cartel that creates copyright law ready-made for approval by the whores they hired in parliaments at home in the US and around the world explicitly to make sure that no fan may ever remix something they created without prior approval, which simply will not be given. As a result, we now have a copyright regime that is utterly optimized to save the business model of the old content providers like publishers and studios. As for secondary purposes, by now, it seems more apt to stifle critical speech about copyright holders than "promoting the progress of science and the useful arts". This is active customer-hostility, and more and more people realize it.

In the same vein, these are the very same people who make sure that nothing ever gets published to a wide audience around the major studios' control and at the same that nothing that got published by the major studios ever comes into the public domain.

When these same people try to fake spontaneity it's just pathetic.

Still, it's funny how it's the "old media" and communication channels that seem to (still!) get the evolving internet culture least of all people, certainly much less than many people who had no concept of themselves as publishers before the internet.

Non-Technical Apple Suckage

This is an interesting article (via the LewRockwell.com blog) that heavily reminded me of a horribly condescending OS/2 ad in German computer rags ("Why would I need a 32-bit OS when I already have two 16-bit ones?"), which presented the computer users it was designed to woo as Laurel & Hardy style doofuses.

I will post scans if I can still find some of the magazines I saw those (pretty expensive, full-page) ads in.

Even then, as a kid, I thought: What were they thinking? Who signed off on that? I was a happy OS/2 user then, but it was obvious even to me that the ad-campaign was completely off-putting. We know now how well that one worked: About as well as I expected. OS/2 is dead for all practical matters, and while there might be some installations surviving in banks (e.g., in German ATMs), I don't think there are any new installations nowadays.

Now Apple is falling into the same trap of smug self-satisfaction. At least this time it looks stylish. Oh well.

[COMPUTING] More Suckage With Apple

Dear Apple Computers,

Thank you for having the QuickTime 7 upgrade break in-browser MP3 playing in Firefox. I guess I should just be happy for you that it still manages to cram "Buy QT Pro!" ads down my throat.

Fuck you sincerely,
    Bnerd[TM]

David Icke: The Lizards and the Jews

This film (got it via Hit & Run) is a documentary about British conspiracy theorist David Icke. I can say with confidence, after hearing him describe in his own words what he believes, that the man is insane. He's not stupid, but he is insane.

In fact, I'm sure that he is bonkers; he is bananas; he is a few sandwiches short of a full picknick. He is not part of this complete breakfast. He is utterly batshit. So far for the man.

What's pretty creepy in this film (which, I think, makes fun of him in the driest of possible ways: Letting him speak) is that he's not coming off as the bad guy at all.

The whole thing revolves around Icke speaking about his belief that the world is ruled by a cabal of, literally, humanoid reptiles.

Icke's opponents believe that by way of "lizards", he alludes to Jews. Some of them, a front of do-gooders from the ADL and the usual suspects in the anti-racist groups, promptly kick into action to suppress his speech by, e.g., making phone calls alleging there would be racist violence due to readings by him and similar charges, which seem to have no particular base as far as seen in the film (although there certainly might be reasons to believe them that are not shown).

In my experience, "anti-racist" groups are in fact often more concerned with smearing people they disagree with as "racists" and promoting leftist political parties as the solution to racism than with actually existing (or rather, still institutional and ubiquitous) racism.
In this way, "anti-racism" is basically a supplement to "anti-fascism", a stalinist creation that was less created to fight fascism (which, properly understood, has very many similarities with communism) than to smear everything anti-leftist as "fascist". This arguably worked, as it helped polarize the burgeoisie to split into those that decided to fight the fascist scum (and tragically aligned with the communists) and those that decided that the communist scum were the greater danger — and called themselves "anti-fascist" — tragically leading them to align with the fascists. The sorry rest of the 20th century is well-documented.

But I digress. It's fairly interesting to watch how Icke gets tarred as a racist and an anti-semite partially because he got a good review from the British neo-nazi group C18. It is never explained how that shows agreement with that group on part of Icke. The very idiotic irony of a group like C18, which in full writing means Combat-18, is seemingly lost on both Icke's detractors and the film crew:
I would guess that Combat-18 alludes to "Combat Adolf Hitler", as 18 is often used as code for Adolf (A being the first letter) Hitler (H being the eighth letter) by neo-nazis. By the way, 88 is often code for Heil Hitler along the same lines. Now, just think about it for a second:
British neo-nazis adoring Hitler. Hitler, as in the failed postcard-painter-cum-dictator who tried to bomb Britain into the ground, failing as he usually did, but devastating Europe in the process. Those morons are immediate nominees for "world's stupidest nationalist", and that's saying something.
If these yobs commit violent crimes, they should certainly be locked up for a long, long time. What they shouldn't be, in any case, is being taken seriously. It only encourages the terminally stupid.

What's even weirder is that when Icke says that he did mean lizards when he said lizards, and did not mean Jews when he said lizards, his opponents said that that was support for the theory that lizards was a metaphor for Jews. What should he have said, then, if he indeed meant lizards? It's very much like witch dunking in ye olde tymes: If he sinks, he drowns, if he swims, he's a witch.
Could that representation in the media even be why the C18 critters thought that lizards means Jews when Icke says it in the first place?

You will have to see the movie for yourself (I'd really recommend it) to believe some of the surreal developments, but let me just conclude with this:

A conspiracy nut cannot hope for creepier enemies.

PS: I didn't edit the post itself but just appended to it because I'm not big on memory holes (and basically stand by its contents anyway) but would like to add a few things -

* Never review films that you haven't seen completely: The film itself alludes to a few of my points in the last minutes.
* Greens talking about others being full of themselves are always hilarious.
* The only one person in this whole thing who actually makes sense is a BC sceptic and psychology professor, Dr. Barry Beyerstein, who talks about the motivation of Icke's followers. "Yay, sceptics!"; or rather "Go Team!" as the kids say these days.

[FILM] The Italian Job ('03 version)

 I urge you to buy this mediocre movie so that I get money from Amazon.

It's not that it's explicitly bad on it's own, but you can actually see how pathetically this is stolen.

It's painfully obvious that they wanted to be Ocean's Eleven, and it gets more depressing when you think that it came out in '03 and Ocean's Eleven came out in '01: They must have started the project basically the minute they saw that OE was a box-office hit.

Oh look, there's a remake of a classic "big caper" movie! Matt Damon and Mark Wahlberg are so different characters (I'm shitting you not, I could hardly tell them apart without Mark Wahlberg's Golden Girls 'do)! There is a beatiful girl who doesn't want to see the mastermind any more but is brought around by his charms! Oh, and there is a black guy who makes things go boom! And a computer weirdo!

Wheeeee! We got a shitty remake that includes a shitty rip-off. This one, ladies and gentlemen, is a winner!

[TRAVEL] Swedish Beer

Besides for furniture with funny names and even funnier assembly instructions, the Swedes are famous for their hard drinking — and for doing said drinking on ferries between Denmark and Sweden.

That's because of the Swedish system of semi-prohibition against alcohol (outrageous taxes, state-owned shops for wine and liquor), which makes for an unfriendly climate for people who like to drink.

Of course, the whole thing works as well as prohibition usually does, and there's a bit of alcohol smuggling, and then there's at-home moonshine production, and there's the people who get permanent health damage from drinking that moonshine, often after making it themselves, or get injured from exploding home distilleries. It's The War on Drugs with the snail-like pace that's so typical of scandinavians.

Today, however, I'm not talking about illegal (or pretty much unaffordable) wine or hard liquor but rather about legal and semi-affordable beer.

I bought the following beers at a local supermarket, presented by our darling beer-model Susa:

 What a smile!

Now for the review:
Norrlands GULD - A bit watery, a hint of a nasty aftertaste. Meh.
PRIPPS BLÅ - A more bitter, fuller taste; a bit better than the previous one, but not much.
Harboe PILSNER - This horrid beer is a vile crime against the beer-drinking public. I hope the scoundrels who dared make this abomination will be the first against the wall when the revolution comes!
Spendrups OLD GOLD PILS - This was the best of the bunch, which would make it a little better than mediocre in Austria.

I'm particularly bitter because that kind of brew costs more than a Euro (~10 Swedish Kroner) here.

In conclusion, I cannot say that I condone that the Swedish drink unhealthy concoctions from their own distillery, but I sure can understand it, wedged as they are between vile beer and a state monopoly for decent liquor.

[TRAVEL] Swedish Supermarkets

In Sweden, they're pretty big on having self-service areas where there are little drawers and shovels and bags, and you can mix-and-match from different types of one particular kind of food. Witness:

 Dried Fruits and Nuts

 Tea

 More Dried Fruit (and Veggies)

 Candy

Frozen OH MY GOD WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT AAAAAAGH MAKE THE FOOD STOP STARING AT ME!!!1!

Now I know full well there are a lot of people who think that prehistoric wildlife is delicious, but it sure disgusted the bejeezus out of me.

[FILM] Flight 93

 Watch it.

This is an amazing film, but it really hurts. It's been a long time since a movie made me cry but seeing the fear, the confusion, the helpless desperation of relatives on the ground — the sheer cruelty of the whole thing — really got the memories back.

I literally had to run until it hurt after seeing the movie just to get the images out of my mind.

I'd rate it at must-see, but don't hope for a jolly evening afterwards.

Five Years

[TRAVEL] For Once, Austria Excels Online (also, Starbucks@AT sucks)

WLAN@VIE

Yesterday, I flew to Sweden to visit Susa, which is why I posted yesterday's entry today. Anyway:

— Vienna Airport (VIE) has free Wi-Fi basically everywhere where passengers need to wait. Ooooh yeah.

— Austrian Airlines' Online Check-In absolutely rocks. You enter your name and your Miles-and-More acc't number, check which flight you want to check into, and choose whether you want to sit aisle or window. Once at the airport, you just enter your credit card (or Miles-and-More card), your etix number (or the three letter code of the destination), say whether you travel alone or in a group, and whether you have luggage to check-in, and drop off your check-in luggage. It works amazingly well. I was checked in literally five minutes after I walked into the airport, and that on economy. The fun thing is that it doesn't seem to have caught on much, as there were huge crowds of the technlogically afflicted standing in line while I waltzed right through. Effin' a!

Additional benefit of the procedure is that you're one of the first people to check in, which, for me, meant sitting alone in an emergency exit row, and that in a short-distance jet where even the vertically challenged like me normally need to fold themselves in half (the jet, BTW, happened to be a Canadair jet, and we spent part of the landing after a somewhat rocky approach on the left rear gear only — while still rolling left for a short while. Yay. Those things feel a little too tiny when there's wind.).

Yesterday's real suckage was provided by Starbucks, however. Since I needed some java after I entered the passenger-only area, and saw that there's a Starbucks, I had a tall latte and a choc chip brownie, for €6.10. What the fizzuck‽

It's not like they're cheap in the US, but the coffee is real good there. The coffee in Austria was mediocre at best and ridiculously expensive. Avoid.

[FILM] Lost in Translation

What all the reviews that I saw when this was in theaters missed was the marvellously black humour.

I actually didn't watch it then in a theater because it seemed like a genuinely depressing movie without a real plot or a point, and I've had enough of those aplenty.

Now it turns out it's fun, just in a very depressing way.

I know I don't make sense here, but just see it; I riwy riwy iked it.

[COMPUTING] Setting Up a Mac

I just got done with an upgrade setup for a little old Mac, and decided to do a completely fresh clean install.

I started a little past 3 pm. [this was (obviously) written yesterday]

On the system I installed Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, a few of the included developer tools, a few of the included optional installs (e.g. X11), Thunderbird (with Enigmail), GnuPG , Firefox (with the del.icio.us, Fasterfox and Adblock extensions), NeoOffice Beta 3 + Patch 1, fink, iWork '06, iLife '06, AdiumX, Skype Video Preview, WriteRoom, Screen Spanning Doctor, and SuperDuper!.

Looks like a fairly complete work & play setup, with some unixy goodness sprinkled in to help me help the person who is going to use this thing. I also did some configuration already, and it's 4:50 now.

That's the fastest useful setup I've ever seen on a commercial OS.

I have to admit that I got a somewhat usable Ubuntu config just yesterday in little more than one hour, and that the Ubuntu setup is less interactive (i.e., not as much click next, click next, click next...), but that's not that big a difference in absolute numbers, and Gnome usability just sucks in comparison.

So I guess it worked out for me. Do you have a Mac?

PS: If you note something (particularly if it's free) that I missed and that a smart, creative user who is not interested in computers per se (read: definitely not IT crowd) might need, please post it in the comments!

War on Terror Drinking Game

I just had a very similar, less elaborate idea.

Also drink whenever "Al-Qaeda's number 2 man" is captured. That alone should get you pissed in a jiffy.

And remember: The terrorists hate us for our freedom, so let's keep removing freedoms until there is no more terror in the world.

Indian Instant Meals

 Mmmmmmmm...

As a result of a gig I pulled in India a while ago, a good friend and former colleague of mine brought/sent me ready-made food when she or any of her co-workers came to Austria. Indian readymade food (mostly) comes in plastic pouches that you put into boiling water for a few minutes. Some of the things I like about Indian food in general is that it's not very fat (freshly made even less so than instant) and not very salty (the packed meals don't do so well on this count...) compared to European food. Compared to Austrian readymade meals, they are also very durable (a year from packaging) and still sanitary (they don't just get heated a little, but rather quickly brought to a boiling temperature).

Time for an in-depth review.

 How it's done. Either that or the microwave.

Haldiram's - "Gulab Jamun" - Gulab Jamun are basically sugar balls in a sugar sauce. In case you didn't notice, this can make you hyper a little. The ones I got in India had a more flowery-tasting sauce, whereas the ones from the tin are pretty much sweet, and sweet only. The canned Gulab Jamun are a bit like instant coffee insofar that the stuff isn't really a delicacy, but it does the job: SUGAR RUSH TYPE TYPE TYPE TYPITY TYPE SUGARRUSH!!!1!

MTR - "Pav Bhaji" - potato in a pretty hot tomato-based veg sauce. Delicious.

MTR - "Palak Paneer" - Paneer in a spinach sauce. Paneer is normally billed as "cottage cheese" on the packaging, but it's not even similar to the stuff we get in Europe as cottage cheese. I like both variants a lot, and creamed spinach as well, so this is one of my favourites. As all Indian food, it's pretty hot, but not quite as much as the Pav Bhaji.

 It tastes great, trust me

MTR - "Pea and Mushroom Curry" - a little less hot than the others, and a bit sourer. I liked it. If I have any complaint at all with it it was that some of the mushroom pieces were a little undercooked.

MTR - "Chana Masala" - it's chickpeas in a tasty, tomato-based hot stew. I liked it; especially that the chickpeas are a bit al dente and sour, not overcooked as you often find them if they're not in salads.

MTR - "Paneer Makhani" - It's not really bad, but I liked the others more. A lot more. It was also the mildest one. Coincidence? I think not.

MTR - Alu Methi - I didn't like the texture so much, but it tasted absolutely delicious. I'd say this could well be the best of the bunch.

 The Winner

---

In conclusion, I think that I wouldn't want to eat only Indian food, but then again I wouldn't want to only eat from any one cuisine. Every now and then it's a delicious alternative for lovers of hot food.

Luckily for Graz, there is a Indian restaurant, the Taj Mahal, that not only offers great meals and Kingfisher beer, but about which I have firsthand testimony of three (3!) genuine Indians that it actually tastes authentic!

Just don't eat the small green chilis lest your head explode.

[FILM] Rundown

It's a semistar-vehicle with The Rock and Seann William Scott; so you can probably guess that it's not good at being a good movie. It will not edify your character, show you the beauty of the world or impart any kind of wisdom.

However, shit is blown up and bad people get beaten up (and sometimes shot!), also there's an exotic beauty and a villainous villain. I had an imperial arseload of fun.

I borrowed it from a friend, but you should click the image to buy it (never mind the different title, it's the same movie) so that I get $$!

Stayin' Alive

That's funny. Last time I heard of him, he was still in the closet with Tom Cruise.

Oh, and I generally highly recommend The Superficial. It's like People Magazine, only it's for mean-spirited assholes who aren't really that interested in celebrities per se.

[COMPUTING] In Our Ongoing Series On Computer Suckage...

 What you get for cutting Linux some slack.

So, yesterday's "my data's still there, so far" had one prescient part: "so far". I don't know what ruined my day — was it the ever rebooting after resizing a volume? Was it booting (without actively selecting to change anything, just booting) from an Ubuntu Desktop install CD on a system that already had an Ubuntu installation? I may never know. Probably the answer was in my data.

Luckily there was nothing important on that box that I didn't have backed up or checked in somewhere else, but it sure was an interesting little experience. Would make a great game, as well: "LVM: File Eater". You would have to try to sneak your data around your OS. Be noticed and you're fsck'd!

---

Now for something completely different: It's non-destructive but annoying as hell how iPhoto treats meta-data editing:

For example, it can display the titles below the images, but when you select click the title there, you can't edit it. Not even when the photo is already selected. You have to select the photo, open the info pane, then select title, then edit it there.

There is no shortcut I've noticed so far that lets you move to the next/previous picture in the Library/Album which means that you have to Select photo, open info pane if it's not open yet, click the title, edit it, click the next photo...click,click,click,clicketycklick,click...

Moving between keyboard and mouse is notoriously slow, and labelling a lot of photos like this is a real pain in the ass. Not that I expect them to fix that in the next release, they're probably way too busy with adding DRM "features" and .Mac tie-ins.

[COMPUTING] Computers Suck (and Users Too!), Linux Edition

A little addendum to yesterday's (technically, the day before yesterday's) rant: I think Linux is way better than what I tend to give it credit for. It's a very practical general-purpose kernel that adapts extremely quickly to new hardware and features and generally works well.

Additionally, when we say Linux, we normally mean the whole OS, which is Linux together with (almost always) the GNU userland, which is very versatile and feature-complete and manages admirably to pick up the best features of all worlds, mostly keeping to applicable standards, but not so slavishly that it follows every brain damage on their part.

Of course, it also has its problems:

Its hardware support is great to a fault, literally — sometimes hardware that is just plain bad is supported as well as possible, and you have to look around a lot to find out if the stuff you're buying is actually compliant and sanely built. You'll inevitably fail to do so sooner or later, and then you're in a world of pain, quite possibly with much less data than before.

There's no filesystem that's both reasonably feature-complete and fast and tends to retain data. In doubt, take ext3, at least your data will stay put. Mostly.

Some developers seem to have the same brain-damaged attitude in respect to fast-vs-safe as the MySQL folks.

Sound doesn't work properly (all the way, all the time). Some configurations can e.g. play multiple sounds at once, then something subtly changes and it all goes to hell.

Whatever. It's software, on hardware, so it's bound to suck somewhere. I mostly bash it so intensively because I think it's way overhyped already, and somebody has to stick a knife in its soft underbelly every now and then and twist it a little.

Still: You can always buy cherry-picked hardware, pay some guru for support and most of these problems can be managed. I prefer Solaris on the server and MacOS X on the client, but I have to admit that for an OS that tries to do both desktop and server well, it does a reasonably good job, and sometimes more than that.

Sometimes, however, Linux behaves really strangely; in fact, it's occasionally worse than Windows:

Today, e.g., I tried to init S in a terminal window, and the screen just froze. I let it run for a long while (a few hours) but it didn't budge. After a while the screen went to powersave, and nothing more happened. It didn't react to any keypresses, not even C-A-DEL. I didn't have another machine on the network, so I gave up and pressed power. As soon as I touched the "smart" power button, the machine shut down safely. Now, that's almost OK, but sorry — no cookie.

Things like these should work out of the box nowadays, without fail. In fact, they do on Macs and on fresh Windows installs.

Ask a Linux group however, and you get tons of docs to read, some condescending answers about how you didn't read them in the first place, sermons how much that particular graphics card you got for your box sucks (although it's listed as usable with both kernel and X server), a few trolls and a lot of answers how you wouldn't have the problem with a different distribution, of which the poster just so happens to be a zealot user.

Ask a question about some trivial thing (that even Windows manages without fail) not working, and you'll be treated as if you'd have expected a distributed directory server setup to work automagically.

Even the more helpful answers will lead you to endless reading and tinkering because, you know, you really want working video mode switching, and that's seemingly still a big thing to ask for in the Linux space.

It's often not so much that Linux users are stubborn per se, they just tend to honestly not see anything wrong with that picture. Some even seem to enjoy solving and constantly re-solving the same problems instead of getting things done.

Then, sometimes you get treated to helpful comments about having to fix things "only once" on Linux: "Do it and it stays as it is, not like Windows where stuff breaks itself". Talk about adding insult to injury. It's not even like it's completely wrong; things mostly don't deconfigure themselves on Linux. It's just that the software changes - sometimes radically - between releases, both in supported hardware and features. Sure, your config is still there, it just doesn't work any more. That's a great consolation right there!

All of this of course doesn't mean that Linux is bad per se, I just think it's excellent for its own niche and that niche only: People with lots of time and interest in computers, like CS students or high school nerds. It's not that you can't do great stuff with it (e.g., run Google) or that you can't learn a lot about computers in the process — it's just that you have to learn a whole lot just to survive, and that it's sometimes so excruciatingly difficult to do simple things.

That the Linux community seems mostly unable and/or unwilling to even acknowledge that there's a huge problem in that is probably the reason why Linux hasn't seen much mass adoption outside web hosting and huge companies that basically can afford to "roll their own" so far.

I think the first few steps in the right direction have been made, and they're called Ubuntu; still, Linux has a long way to go until it is allowed to play with the grown-ups, or at least with the majority of them.

I, for my part, just grew an XFS on LVM2 volume on-the-fly, and my data's still there, so far; one of the big things that Linux seems to get right most of the time (but by far not always, so have your tapes ready when growing filesystems!). Now I have a giant half-a-terabyte heap of storage, and I guess I'm going for another Solaris 10 06/06 VM. One operating system, after all, just isn't enough trouble for one man.

[COMPUTING] Macrashes - also, computers suck.

There's the [Morale] of this post, which may otherwise be seen as a pointless rant.

Maybe I'm just more conscious of it since the hardware switch, but it looks to me as if my Mac crashed a lot more (maybe once every two weeks on average) since I have an Intel Mac.

Sure it's fast, but it almost burns off my fingers (not to speak about keeping it on my lap...) and it seems to be a little flaky. Apart from the crashes, it sometimes fails to pick up wireless networks that are set as the only network to connect to at a given location.

On wired ethernet, it occasionally even fails to detect that the cable is plugged in. If I set my location to one without any configured interfaces at all, then set it to DHCP on TP again, it mostly works. In rare instances I have to repeat the procedure a few times.

I'm a lot more nervous about crashes recently as well, since I've started using FileVault, which is notoriously prone to corruption. And no, it's not fixed in Tiger. A friend lost data a few times (note the plural) already on 10.4.

Now, the really sad part is that all of this still sucks a lot less than the realistic desktop alternatives:
Linux is horribly ugly (a fact disputed mostly by those who have used nothing else for a long time - and yeah, I know Ubuntu 6) and crashes all the fucking time if you dare to demand power management[1]. Not to mention that Linux filesystems come in two flavours, somewhat unstable and really slow. Also, I don't write n kilo-lines of configuration for a fucking text editor, TYVM. Not that I couldn't have linked to Emacs just as well, but then there are a few different cults right there.
Windows is Windows, and as far as I'm concerned the biggest switcher ad ever is scheduled for January. Not that I expect Vista to be released then.
Let's not forget that I love to talk about Solaris. Well, not for the desktop I don't. I don't want to be a stickler for facts (nobody likes those), but I really think a computer in 2006 should have multithreaded sound support OOTB. Or, for that matter, at all. Finally, I like hardware that's supported and computers that don't sound like jets taking off as soon as I switch them on.[2]

I'm thinking about going into landscaping right now.

[Morale] Also, the event that triggered that particular rant was my MacBook Pro crashing instead of going to sleep after the battery was empty. WTF? That never happened on PowerPC. Anyway, dear fellow Intel Mac users: Take heed; the end-of-battery sleep is not reliable any more, and neither is the new Windows-hibernate-like "commit to HDD before sleep" feature.

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[1] Yeah, dear Loonix weenie, I know. Your notebook a from vendor b with firmware c works really well with Linux version d.e.f. Choke on my cock. And don't even get started on how I could have an always-on machine somewhere running a screen(1) with my software and just log into that remotely. Try that on a fucking train (the next person to mention SSH from a Treo will be beaten severely and buried in a cornfield while still alive). Oh, also: SVGA — Loonix weenie; Loonix weenie — SVGA. Welcome in 2006, you two. In this beautiful future, we have so called computer graphics.
[2] Disclaimer: 10 06/06 is still the best server OS I've seen so far. Also, x4x00 is teh grate. Also, Niagara. They just can't build a decent desktop, and Rays don't count here.