Patrick’s Rants

Massechussets Senators (state) question whether or not its citizens should be allowed to use any software to access state documents or whether the state should require that everyone own a copy of Microsoft’s Office suite. They seem to question the concept of “open government”¹. At stake here is whether or not documents produced by the government are available to citizens and under what conditions. The state is moving forward on the OpenDocument standard - a set of standards and specifications on how a document is created, stored, edited and read. It also determines how long a document is able to be retrieved by future software.

The Romney administration wants documents stored in a particular format that would allow the records to be read by a variety of software packages — except Microsoft Office.

Oh boo hoo! Microsoft Office can’t read OpenDocument. What will this do to their poor little business? In reality the only thing holding back Microsoft is… Microsoft. OpenDocument is called “Open” for a reason. There are no patents on using it, there are no royalties that have to be paid to anyone for implimenting it, and ‘lo and behold! Microsoft helped to write the specification. As it is now, only Microsoft products can truly read and write the documents that are created by the state. This becomes more alarming when we take into consideration the fact that Microsoft wants us to go to a subscription model - keep paying or you won’t get to see your precious data ever again. Bring in the state’s concern that data and documents must be publically available for longer than Bill Gate’s upgrade cycle and you really see where this gets you. Open standards and specifications or proprietary, locked in secret sauce concoctions that you can be locked out of tomorrow? I mean, they might as well be arguing about whether we should use a portable document format that consists of pen and ink or whether only owners of stone carving tools should be allowed to write. Assuming the move goes forward Microsoft will impliment the OpenDocument specifications into Office; there’s just no reason not to.

1 - Boston.com

In an article that bashes all things blog I was almost following the logic until the author attacked groklaw.net as being set up solely to bash SCO. Hahaha…. SCO threw the first stone, PJ threw back. Now Forbes is calling us the blog mob. Come on Forbes, the revolution starts with the peasants carrying pitchforks and torches. Maybe that’s exactly what they want us to be seen as, the angry mob against the misunderstood monster pieced together by Dr. Frankenstein. Poor monster of a media outlet - you’re just misunderstood.
And that was just on page one. The thing is the blog is the “poor man’s media” inasmuch as I can publish my little page without having to sell ads (ok so there are some on the page, but it’s not a huge amount of revenue) or subscriptions. You can read how Forbes attacks bloggers online using forbesdontbug/forbesdontbug. Now, I don’t completely disagree that bloggers can be malicious, that some are paid by sponsors to write good things about them or bad things about their competitors and detractors - but to paint all bloggers in the same broad brush diminishes their own “journalistic integrity” if they have any.
Follow up:
Boing Boing does a pretty decent write up on the Forbes attack machine as well.

Looks like Jon hasn’t been keeping his site updated…. This is what the current FreeRealty is based on… well not the bulletin board, but Jon wrote the “original” OpenRealty.

http://jonroig.com/freecode/phpBB/index.php

I just heard on the news that Harriet “never been a judge before” Miers withdrew her Supreme Court nomination, because no one really understood her positions on anything and she (the White House) refused to release papers from her time in the White House.
In other news that I almost missed, “Scooter” is expected to be indicted in the CIA leak probe, and Rove is not exactly out of the woods (which in theory could mean that Bush and Cheney are still potentially on the hook). And Tom “I am not a crook” Delay is still stuck in his legal battles with new subpoenas being issued.
Great week for the Bush administration and the Republicans.

What would Jesus Bomb? (with a mushroom cloud)

Jerome AZ
Population: Strange

What would Scooby Do?

Fire up the email client (thunderbird), clunk - chunk….
Blue Screen

Unable to write to drive C:
Data may be lost

Sombitch!
Close a couple of programs, again:
Blue Screen

Unable to write to drive C:
Data may be lost

Hit the power button. I have a 10g drive that I can throw in here. I just have to get it.
(two days later) Cool, it’s a 30g drive, not 10g like I thought. Now…. gently place the Knoppix CD in the drive - change BIOS to boot from the CD and we’re started.
dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb
Failing with drive/seek errors… crap!
Pull out the laptop and do a quick google search for copy failing hard disk with dd and amazingly, on a site for Tivo users I find the answer - dd_rescue. It’s on the Knoppix CD. (more…)

Well… did we have any doubts that there wouldn’t be fraud? This is the GWB administration after all.

By SAMEER N. YACOUB, Associated Press Writer

BAGHDAD, Iraq - A sandstorm that had closed Baghdad’s airport cleared Tuesday, allowing officials to resume flying ballot boxes to the capital Tuesday so “unusually high” vote totals in 12 Shiite and Kurdish provinces can be checked by election officials.

The investigation by Iraq’s election commission has raised the possibility that the results of the referendum could be called into question. As many as 99 percent of the voters reportedly approved Iraq’s draft constitution in some of the provinces being investigated.
(more…)

The latest commercial has the creepy king hiding behind a tree that is being cut down by a lumberjack. As the tree falls he playfully holds out this huge sandwich that he was hiding behind his back. The sandwich is called the “meatnormous”. Even for a meat eater the thing looks disgusting.
And what is with the underlying message? The creepy king is “hanging out” in the woods, cutting down trees, carrying around his meat on a bun, doing a little “log rolling” at the end of the commercial… got wood? Yikes…

On the $5.00 rack at WalMart sat a movie that I hadn’t seen since it was originally out, Pump Up the Volume starring Christian Slater. The copyright date on the back of the box is 1990 - 15 years ago. Time sure flies. Christian is a shy student in a new town by day, pirate radio DJ “Hard Harry Hardon” by night. He rails against the institution represented by his school commissioner father, the uptight principal who expels students whose test scores are low to keep her school at the top of the ranks. (more…)

When making changes to firewall rules always have another way of logging into the machine….