With Memorial Day just past and Independence Day coming up in about a month, the parade of miliaristic emails masked as patriotism is making the rounds. The text of one of these follows (in quotes and in red), interspersed with my comments in reply:

“I HOPE THERE ISN’T ANYONE ON MY E-MAIL LIST THAT WON’T KEEP THIS GOING.”

Veiled threats are unbecoming. To my mind, this translates to: I hope I don’t know anyone who doesn’t agree unquestioningly with the rather broad palette of jingoist sentiment... [More]

Installing OS X Leopard on my old 1.4GHz PowerPC 1GB Mac Mini went surprisingly well. I used Lacie SilverKeeper to back up my Tiger hard drive before wiping it out and doing a clean installation. I avoided installing all of the extra languages and printer drivers and managed to save several gigabytes of hard drive space for other stuff.

The only thing I had trouble installing was rdiff-backup, which is a UNIX utility for performing backups. OS X Leopard sports the vaunted Time Machine for its... [More]

There are many online services available these days through which a user can access a vast music library. One of the most popular is the iTunes Music Store, which offers a relatively large library of music for sale. It’s not even DRM-encoded anymore and has thus become more attractive. Amazon also has a pretty extensive library and has offered its music DRM-free from the beginning.

Those are sources where you pay for a license to an MP3 file. You can put it on any many gadgets as you like.
... [More]

When a .NET application exhibits behavior on a remote server that cannot be reproduced locally, you’ll need to debug application directly on the server. The following article includes specific instructions for debugging ASP.NET applications, but applies just as well to standalone executables.

Prerequisites

There are several prerequisites for remote debugging; don’t even bother trying until you have all of the items on the following list squared away or the Remote Debugger will just chortle at... [More]

This article was originally published on the Encodo Blogs. Browse on over to see more!

At Encodo, we’re using the Microsoft Entity Framework (EF) to map objects to the database. EF treats everything—and I mean everything—as an object; the foreign key fields by which objects are related aren’t even exposed in the generated code. But I’m getting ahead of myself a bit. We wanted to figure out the most elegant way of mapping what we are going to call enumerated associations in EF. These are... [More]

This article was originally published on the Encodo Blogs. Browse on over to see more!

At Encodo, we currently run Debian Etch on our servers, with a Xen hypervisor managing a bunch of individual virtual machines (VMs). Most of the VMs also run Debian Etch, but one of them runs Windows Server 2003 instead. We use this machine for testing integration with Microsoft technologies like Sharepoint, Exchange and so on. Recently, we had to re-install the Exchange instance on that server and were... [More]

Wolfram Alpha aims to save you a bunch of clicks when searching information online. You should probably check out the screencast by Stephen Wolfram (13½ minutes) in order to get really charged up. The reality is that it kind of works like it does in the screencast. I started off by requesting some information about the town in which I grew up, namely its population. That worked just fine, but it couldn’t find historical information, so no fancy graphs for me. So, I chose a larger nearby city and it did just... [More]

Recently, Lindsey Graham said in a hearing: “[…] one of the reasons these [torture] techniques have survived for about 500 years is apparently they work.”

In that, Mr. Graham is 100% correct. Torture does work, but not in the way touted by its proponents. In order to examine the issue more closely, we need to first clarify—come to agreement on, as it were—the definition of the word “work”, in this context. It’s just tossed in there, at the end of the sentence, as if its intent were... [More]

Hold on to your hats, citizens of the world, the American president is rattling sabers at a former ally. A parenthetical was left off the end of his statement, though. It should have ended:

“…that you don’t end up having a [another] nuclear-armed militant state ... [More]”

The Convention Against Torture (CAT) is an American law passed during the Reagan administration. It extends the provisions to which America was already bound as a signatory of the Geneva Conventions.[1] Even if we assume—as so many of the leading light’s of America’s intellectual elite and media have already done—that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to America, we have to acknowledge our own laws, don’t we? We can assume that a 21st-century America doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the Geneva... [More]

Rough Music: Blair, Bombs, Baghdad, London, Terror by Tariq Ali

Ali’s scathing recap of the Blair/New Labour era in British politics reminds the world that the British have just as much to answer for as the Americans when it comes to picking absolutely corrupt leaders. It’s a very short book, but packed with a very succinct rundown of the depths of Blair’s moral depravity – depths which brings him to the nadir once monopolized by good old “iron balls” Maggie Thatcher.

Beyond Beef: The Rise... [More]

Modern discussions of law are very frequently mired down in discussions of minutiae of what is legal vs. what is moral. Very quickly, the discussion has narrowed further to niggling over minor quirks of American jurisprudence and precedence law.

For example, it seems that the relatively narrow topic of torture has become an almost impossibly unwieldy and unknowable problem for this modern age’s great thinkers, where hours and hours and hours are spent determining at what point a particular... [More]

This article was originally published on the Encodo Blogs. Browse on over to see more!

A developer on the Microsoft C# compiler team recently made a post asking readers to post their solutions to a programming exercise in Comma Quibbling by Eric Lippert (Fabulous Adventures in Coding). The requirements are as follows:

1. If the sequence is empty then the resulting string is “{}”.
2. If the sequence is a single item “ABC” then the resulting string is “{ABC}”.
3. If the sequence is the two item sequence “ABC”, “DEF” then the resulting string is... [More]

The economy has been topic numero uno for many months now, including the almost three months of the Obama administration. During that time, the administration, Wall Street and the media have tried on explanations like they were trying on hats, changing stories and justifications as soon as it looked like the American people—despite all efforts—might be grasping just how thoroughly they were being screwed by what amounts to nothing more than a self-elected aristocratic elite. The following... [More]

If only this were really the way it was:

Jeff Danziger: On the Elevator to the Executive Suite

That would be awesome, if only the subjugated classes—the other 90% of us—would realize our awesome power and bring those responsible for our current plight to justice. Make them give up every dime and shred of power and settle our accounts. If only we were brave enough to jettison all the criminals instead of putting up with those only willing to work with them. I’m looking at you, pretty much all of the Clinton (Greenspan, Summers, Rubin and co.... [More]

Once you’ve been coding for a while, you’ll probably have quite a pile of code that you’ve written and are regularly using. It’s possible that you’ve got some older code in use that just works and on which you rely every day. At some point, though, you realize that you have to get back in there and fix a few things. That happened recently with the upgrade of the earthli WebCore and attendant applications from PHP4 to PHP5 (which is ongoing). The earthli codebase was born in 1999 and was... [More]

Older versions of the earthli WebCore were more clearly delineated release packages and were hosted at SourceForge and offered for download on this site. Much time has passed and there have always been incremental upgrades made for the maintenance of earthli.com, but no more official releases.

A little while ago, the earthli WebCore’s source was moved from a private, firewalled Perforce server to an externally available Mercurial server. The structure has changed somewhat since the 2.7.0... [More]

Culled from Republicans: The Stupid Party by Brad DeLong (Grasping Reality), written in response to the House Republicans publishing a “19-page pamphlet that does not include a single real budget proposal or estimate”. Instead the pamphlet consists almost exclusively of criticism of the House Democrat proposal, offering no concrete alternatives.

It is not known whether taking the pulse of political opinion via political cartoons is statistically valid, but it is kind of fun—fun in a way that makes your teeth grind in righteous indignation.

Chavez chooses SocialismPut a Fork in it; it's done

At a time when the U.S. and all the nations that followed it down the rabbit hole of pirate/casino capitalism are suffering massive hits on all fronts, it takes real dedication to turn one’s laser-like focus from the U.S. economy to criticize Hugo Chavez for choosing socialism instead. Mort... [More]

Hinwil is a smallish town in the canton of Zürich in Swizerland. It can, by no stretch of the imagination, be characterized as either remotely Hawaiian or Australian. Even more so as an especially long winter retains its iron grip on the region. Why is it then that a local discounter (Aldis) has found it to be economically attractive to carry both ukuleles and didgeridoos, as shown in the photos below?

UkulelesDidgeridoos

Is it really so bad to see the back of an economic system that provides us with lunacy... [More]

In colloquial Swiss-German, the English word “easy” has been incorporated in some of its senses: as a synonym for “simple” and as a synonym for “relax”, as in a shortening of “take it easy” or a replacement for “no problem”.

For example (and I’m taking liberties with the Swiss-German spelling here because there are, at best, unwritten rules for that), you can say:

“Das isch doch easy! (But that’s easy!)”

and you can also say:

“Kasch es nid mache? Easy, ich mach es.(You can’t do it? No... [More]”

• Asgard: Windows workgroup; no longer actively used. (home of the gods)
• Valhalla: Wireless network. (where warriors go when they die)
• Loki: First Alienware computer; deceased. (trickster god)
• Thor: Second Alienware computer. (god of thunder)
• Idun: “scoop of rice” iMac. (wife of Odin, god of gods)
• Nott: Kath’s iPod Shuffle. (goddess of night)
• Sif: Marco’s iPod Shuffle. (corn goddess; wife of Thor)
• Freya: Kath’s Sony-Ericsson K550i phone. (goddess of love, fertility and sexual desire)
• Goll:... [More]

When someone posts a link to your web site on Facebook, it retrieves a preview and presents that as the default text, along with a selection of pictures it found in the page. Clearly, Facebook has some sort of scraper that extracts what it thinks is the best preview text from a given URL. Sometimes it works well, sometimes not. Luckily, you can tune your pages for Facebook requests, emphasizing the parts you think are important and belong in the preview.

It’s anybody’s guess how the scraper... [More]

PHP is a programming language like any other; like any other, it’s possible to construct a bug complex enough that it can only reasonably be solved with a debugger. Granted, most PHP code is quite simple and limited to single pages with single include files and a limited library or framework. However, the advent of PHP5 has ushered in more than one team with the courage to build a full-fledged web framework. You would think that the state of PHP development had concordantly improved to the... [More]

This article was originally published on the Encodo Blogs. Browse on over to see more!

In August of 2008, Microsoft released the first service pack (SP1) for Visual Studio 2008. It included the first version (1.0) of Microsoft’s generalized ORM, the Entity Framework. We at Encodo were quite interested as we’ve had a lot of experience with ORMs, having worked on several of them over the years. The first was a framework written in Delphi Pascal that included a sophisticated ORM with support... [More]

Once you’ve worked with computers for a while, you end up with a lot of them around. They don’t seem to outgrow their usefulness as quickly as they used to and they manage to limp onward more reliably as well. That doesn’t, however, mean that all is rainbows and ponies when using them with newer technologies.

Exhibit A: wireless networking.

As it stands, I’m in charge of IT support for four wireless devices: a 6½-year–old iMac (scoop-of-white-rice edition) with OS X Tiger (Idun), a... [More]

Conservatives recently gathered at a large conference to deliver a yearly report to one another on the state of the nation. Though the president was invited—and lauded—last year, they didn’t see fit to invite the still decidedly conservative[1] current president this year. It is more than mildly appalling to watch, however, as one commentator after another blithely acts as if conservatism had had nothing to with the ruling of the country for the last three decades or so. Though fiscal policy... [More]

The Finder in OS X is a notoriously old, cantankerous piece of software. With every major operating system release from Apple, we wait with bated breath for the announcement of a long-awaited replacement. There are two primary reasons for this: support for external drives, like CD- or DVD-players and support for networked volumes. In both cases, OS X, ostensibly a multi-tasking powerhouse, capitulates completely to the whim of the external resource, slowing to a crawl that is often nearly... [More]

A meme is an idea that takes root and spreads from person to person. A quick-fix meme[1] is such an idea, usually a solution, that sounds good but doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. Often the meme preys on people’s basic ignorance of the subject matter and their desire to believe that their gut instinct won’t steer them wrong.

One example of such a meme is that countries should pay people to scrap their cars, commonly called “scrappage payment” plans. Germany has something like this in place and... [More]