Rant

A collection of 32 posts

Rant

Did you bother to test this?

My feedback to Apple regarding Mail.app in Lion: Seriously, wtf? How could you not notice: 1. Emails I delete from the inbox come back after a few minutes. I’ve deleted the same messages 4 or 5 times now from my inbox. I guess you figured my delete key

Rant

Dear Google Recruiter

Dear Google Recruiter, I’ve been contacted by a recruiter at Google every 3-6 months for the last 4+ years or so and I’ll tell you what I tell all of them: I have no interest in interviewing with Google ever again. I expect to be treated professionally by

Rant

Ticketmaster is more evil then I thought

So here’s the email I sent to my season ticket holder account representative: Hi [name redacted], I’m very upset at what can only be seen as deceptive business practices by the Sharks partner, Ticketmaster against their best customers- season ticket holders. My wife and I are going to

Rant

SSL = Secure Sucky Layer

I upgraded from Apache 2.2.6 to 2.2.8 and found out it broke compatibility with SSL certificates requiring an intermediate signing certificate. Without getting too techno-babbly, cheaper SSL certificates ($30/yr vs well over $100/yr) that you buy require a slightly more complicated SSL configuration on

Politics

US Gov't admits torturing detainees

So between the US national intelligence chief Mike McConnell admitting waterboarding would be torture and less then one month later, CIA director Michael Hayden admitting that the CIA waterboarded three detainees; I guess we can now all agree that the United States has tortured people. If you haven’t yet,

Rant

Wiki's are evil

There, I’ve said it. Ok, so it’s a bit black ‘n white and reality is quite a bit more grey. But lately I’ve seen started seeing a trend where people think that putting information on a wiki is some how equivalent to having a conversation or disseminating

Photography

LGA: Security Theater

So I was flying out of LaGuardia, NY (LGA) this morning on my way home to San Jose, Ca (SJC). After checking in, I was directed by the nice woman at American Airlines to take my checkin bags to the x-ray machine. There were a lot of bags piling up

Politics

Safety without Freedom is worthless

After reading Mortimer Zuckerman’s editorial, Putting Safety First I’m both saddened and angered. You would think that someone of Mortimer’s position would be more well versed in both the facts and history. Considering that your chances of dying from a terrorist attack is far less then being

News

No more 5th Amendment

You didn’t really need it anyways right? And here I thought you needed to go through Congress to alter the Constitution. Apparently, I didn’t pay enough attention in my US Gov’t class, because apparently the President can just declare it null and void.

Geek Law

Alberto Gonzales: Disgusting

How many ways do I hate thee? Let me count the ways: 1. Lying to Congress under oath 2. Lying to the American people 3. Failing to uphold your promise and legal duty to uphold the Constitution of the United States 4. Failure to do you job 5. Coming up

It's Funny

Trying to buy a home

So my wife and I found a nice home up in the Santa Cruz Mountains which we really liked. Since Murphy’s Law is in effect, the owners had to be TCHOFH (The Crazy Home Owners From Hell). Anyways, rather then trying to explain the long and drawn out process,

Geek Law

Stop with the armchair lawyering already...

So there’s an on-going argument about Stillsecure’s use of Snort. As I look back, a few things become crystal clear to me: 1. Coders should code and lawyers should write licenses. 2. Coders shouldn’t try to write “clarifications” aka how they interpret a license. 3. If you

Rant

Siig quality sucks

I needed some fast disk space for working on my photos and after some research settled on a pair of Western Digital My Book Premium ES 500GB drives and a Siig eSATA ExpressCard/34 card to connect them to my Mac Book Pro. So far it’s been pretty much

/dev/random

Joe Louis Arena: Please sit down!

Attention Detroit Red Wing fans: SIT DOWN! Look, it’s great your excited about your team. I’m a Shark season ticket holder and I understand that hockey is exciting and you want to cheer your team on. But if you ever have watched a game played at “the Joe”

/dev/random

Saw that one coming

So I’m in the market for a small camcorder. After doing some research, I settled on a model (Samsung X210L) and started looking for the best price. Most online retailers I was familiar with were in the $400-$500 range, but one store (GearXSmall.us.com) was $340! Once

Code

No destructor? WTF?

Ok, I’ll the be first to admit that I’m no OO guru. Most of my OO coding has been done in Perl for heaven’s sake. I’ve also dabbled a little in C++. Now I’m learning Ruby. Ruby has some really cool idioms and features which

Rant

Treating users vaguely

So last night I’m playing with iDVD to make well, a DVD. So, long story short, you can choose to format your DVD for 4:3 or 16:9. I wish there was a way to gracefully support both, but that’s another rant. Anyways… so there’s this

Rant

Why methods shouldn't replace a language

There’s been a big push for OO scripting languages like Python and Ruby over older procedural languages like Perl. While I used to be quite the Perl bigot, lately I’ve learn to appreciate other languages like Ruby. But while OO techniques can make some things much much easier,

Politics

Not even I thought the number was 14,000

According to this AP article on Yahoo, 14,000 is the number of people being held without access to a lawyer or being charged with a crime that are being held against their will in U.S. run overseas prisons. 13,000 of them in Iraq. One such example is

Rant

Flying in the post-liquid bomb world

So I had the missfortune of picking last thursday to fly on vacation. For those of you living under a rock, last thursday was when the news broke out that some terrorists were plotting to blow up planes using explosives in the form of liquids and/or gels. The solution

Rant

Help me help you.

So here’s the deal: I don’t charge a single cent for tcpreplay regardless if you’re using it for educational or commercial use. You can even embed tcpreplay in your product and sell it, I don’t care. I don’t charge for the docs, man pages, or

It's Funny

Headhunters!

Got a phone call from a headhunter yesterday. I’m not sure if this is really a rant or just funny watching the headhunter squirm, I’ll let you decide. Conversation went sorta like this: Me: Hello? HH: Hi, is this Aaron? Me: Yes, who is this? HH: Hi Aaron,

Rant

Chinese ticket spam

So lately it seems that a certain Chinese company has started going around and spamming Trac sites by creating tickets promoting who knows what (honestly, I have no idea, it’s all in Chinese). Once was annoying, twice pissed me off, so I added this to my httpd.conf: RewriteCond

Geek Law

Confidentiality in email redux

So maybe it’s just me, but it seems that these “confidentiality notices” in emails are on the rise. Anyways, I’ve decided to do a little experiment. Many of these notices contain verbage to “notify the sender” if you receive the email… what will happen when I start replying?

Politics

Comedy Central censors pictures of Mohammed

So I’ll be honest, when I watched part two of “Cartoon Wars” and saw that Mohammed had been “censored” I figured it was just Matt & Trey (the creators of South Park) pulling a gag to make a point. After all, South Park had shown Mohammed multiple times in