post 115

By anders pearson 27 Sep 2000

thanks to Jere for pointing out that the contact page wasn’t working. it’s probably been that way for a while and i just haven’t noticed. so if you’ve emailed me through the form lately and i haven’t responded, it’s because i didn’t get it, not because i’m an asshole. (probably.)

post 113

By jp 27 Sep 2000

so… Self just released their newest album, recorded entirely with toy instruments and pieces of electronic toys. and it sounds better than any other alterna-rock I’ve heard in the past year.

music sucks. not really, but you know what I mean. any and every song, band, or video that you’ll ever hear without taking the preventive measures of turning off the radio forever or melting MTV with an orbital laser is bound to be bad. any and every song I hear hummed in lab, pumped out of cars, or requested at parties makes me want to reach for the tater tosser.

I’ve liked Self from the get-go, cause they a) make all their own samples and b) turn most bad songs they hear into some absolutely torrid covers that shred the original artists. on the other hand, they do some less exposed music some real service with some pretty creative versions.

yeah it’s kinda poppy, but they’re from tenessee, give ‘em a break.

and yeah, this rant is a cliche, but when a few guys can hit the nail on the head without even touching a gituar or drum set, what kind of excuse do we have for not drowning limp bizkit in public?

post 112

By anders pearson 27 Sep 2000

when i first took a look at this, i was (and to some degree i still am) extremely skeptical. after digging through the incomprehensible marketroid speech and finding a little more helpful a description, it appears to me to be yet another attempt at taming the polyglot of online identities with one standard replacemnt for email addresses, multiple username/passwords for different sites, digital business cards, and e-cash. a good idea if one can actually get the system designed right and get it off the ground. so many have tried and so many have failed because of the old chicken and egg syndrome. so my first reaction to this XNS thing is to start up a pool on how long it takes before this one tanks too.

but i read a little more, talk to a few people and, while i still think that the chicken/egg problem will probably do this one in too, i do see a small glimmer of hope. first of all, they appear to be approaching it from the right direction, designing a flexable architecture and, most importantly, making it an open architecture. it’s also apparently a non-profit venture. they hope that by publishing the underlying protocols of the system, working within existing standards as much as possible and releasing a bunch of code under an open-source license, they can get enough support from open-source types and get it built into enough systems that they can reach that critical mass of having enough people using it that it is actually useful. should be interesting to see if they can pull it off. if they can, and it becomes widespread, i’m thinking that it could be a good framework for getting a nice public-key infrastructure up and running.

i wish them the best of luck, but i’m not holding my breath.

post 111

By anders pearson 25 Sep 2000

in part 2 of a two part series on things that make me happy: an Extension of the Body is a very nicely designed site with a lot of quality writing. and it uses a repurposed version of my vortex image. first of all, i’m happy to see someone else getting some use out of my work (makes me feel much better about spending my time on art instead of school or work). second, i’m happy to see it used well on a quality site in a much nicer design than i could ever do.

post 110

By anders pearson 25 Sep 2000

i think that one of the reasons i like PGP so much is because, everytime i type in my passphrase correctly when i sign an email, it says “Passphrase is good.” then i get to say to myself: “why yes, it is a good passphrase. thank you.” and i can feel all warm and fuzzy inside knowing that PGP approves of my passphrase. although i think it would be a good idea for them to modify the program slightly so that instead of giving me the same compliment everytime, it would mix things up a little. one time it could say “Passphrase is good”, the next time it could say “my, you’re a skilled typist”, or “damn, your hair looks sexy today.” ok, maybe that last one is a little more than i want to hear from my computer. nevertheless, i think there is a definate market out there for esteem boosting software. perhaps a random compliment feature should be added to the linux kernel. then, just when you’re getting all depressed cause you can’t figure something out, a message would pop up on your screen saying “you’re skills are under-utilized at work. they should give you a promotion” and you would feel much better about it.

post 109

By anders pearson 24 Sep 2000

a woman named Sherril Babcock was unable to register on BlackPlanet.com because some filtering software they use took offense to her last name. she contacted them and they refused to either fix the software or register her manually. eventually, she was able to register… using the name Sherril Babpenis.

post 108

By jp 24 Sep 2000

okay, okay, so maybe I’m just a little sensitive when the people that are usually out to destroy science start using our tools and technologies for their own purposes.

but really. this?

post 107

By anders pearson 21 Sep 2000

we finally got our copy of the MacOS X public beta today. in general, playing with a brand spanking new operating system is geek nirvana. OS X did not disappoint. all sorts of fancy tricks and neat toys to play with. haven’t had time to really rip it apart and see exactly what it’s capable of, but here’s my initial analysis:

if you haven’t been paying attention, X is really freebsd with a candy coating. it must be a really cold day in hell now that macOS has a commandline. naturally, the first thing i did when i got my hands on an iBook with X loaded onto it was to figure out how to get a terminal window. they buried it down a few folders deep, but it’s there right from the start. my first beef with X is that it only has tcsh, sh, and zsh. no bash or ksh. otherwise though, all the standard unix commandline tools are there and work pretty much as expected. i was also pleasantly surprised to find ssh preinstalled and zero network deamons running by default. it makes me very happy to see that Apple has resisted the temptation that microsoft and most linux distributions seem to have fallen prey to of loading a billion things onto the default install like ftpd, webservers, named, fingerd, etc, etc. the standard rationale seems to be that the more stuff they have installed and running by default, the more users can do without having to read manuals or call support. unfortunately, the way it works in the real world is that 90% of the services go completely unused and after a few months a security hole shows up in one of them. since no normal users patch their systems on a regular basis, the script kiddiez get to run wild. hopefully, with future releases, apple will be smart and keep the default setup simple and tight.

i was also surprised to see that the Aqua interface is much less annoying to actually use than i figured it would be from the screenshots i’d seen. out of the box, it looks like some sort of child’s toy with buttons and window decorations that look like hard candy and all sorts of annoying animations that happen whenever you so much as look at it funny. fortunately, it took about 30 seconds to figure out how to change it to the “Graphite” theme, which changed all the candy buttons to a nice greyscale that wasn’t too painful to look at and another minute to figure out how to turn off all the silly animations. at that point, it became a fairly usable interface. seriously though, the animations and other pointless eye-candy were so distracting and annoying that anyone who uses it for more than 15 minutes will (if they are at least computer literate enough to figure out how) turn it off. it really makes me wonder why apple spent any time and money developing it all in the first place. the NeXT-style directory listing was a nice feature that i really liked and would love to see in some of the linux file managers that i use. i was also really amazed at how responsive the GUI was. MacOS 9 was built up of so many layers of emulators and hacks and workarounds that it really didn’t do the G3 and G4 chips it ran on justice. G3/4’s are significantly faster than their intel equivalents but OS9 is so grossly inefficient that you would never know it.

OS X has the potential of being a very Good Thing ™ as well as the potential to be damaging though. from what i’ve seen, it beats the older versions of macOS hands down. it will take a while for me just to get over the fact that i can now get a unix prompt on a mac. for me, that makes it a viable operating system. the mac people can have their fancy GUIs but if i need to i can still get work done on the machine. joy. what worries me is how Apple is/will be playing with the open-source and free software communities. traditionally, apple has been an extremely closed company. despite the underdog image that people tend to associate with apple, when it comes to cooperating and sharing with others, their tactics make microsoft look like angels. windows2000 is a closed, proprietary OS, but MacOS is a closed proprietary OS running on closed, proprietary hardware. they’ve inserted themselves directly into the middle of the free software community, using (arguably) the free-est of the free OSes. i’m curious to see how, or even, if, they give anything back to the community which has provided them with a large portion of their new OS.