Patrick's Rants

Yahoo has a decent roundup of the numbers:
75,000 sites go dark to protest SOPA and PIPA.
http://sopastrike.com/on-strike/ and Chris Dodd shows how clueless he is by saying,

“With today’s announcement, we hope the dynamics of the conversation can change and become a sincere discussion about how best to protect the millions of American jobs affected by the theft of American intellectual property,” Dodd said. “The threat posed by these criminal operations has been widely acknowledged by even the most ardent critics. It is incumbent that they now sincerely work with all of us to achieve a meaningful solution to this critically important goal.”

It is not. It is Not. IT IS NOT THEFT. It is copyright infringement. It is theft just like taking a photo of the Statue of Liberty is theft. Can we stop using this term? Neither is it piracy. Piracy happens on the high seas – sometimes the low seas. But definitely on the water – where they shoot at you and board your boat. And sometimes they get shot through the eye while their lifeboat bobs up and down on rough waters by navy seals. So it’s not piracy.

Now. Let’s address the idea that millions of American jobs are at stake. Copyright infringement occurs after those millions of people have already been paid their hourly wage to haul cables and hold cameras and serve food on the set. They were already paid. They won’t be paid any more or any less because Jerry made a copy. So let’s stop pretending that it’s about the “little people”. The little people are all union and their biggest threat is the studio.

Illegally copied movies have always been a problem for the movie studios. Illegally copies cassettes have always been a problem for the recording industry. Swap meets and flea markets were full of these copied movies and songs. The movie studios and recording studios weren’t clamoring to have the streets in front of the swap meets closed down based upon someone deciding that there were “stolen” movies at the swap meet. No. The people selling illegal copies were arrested and punished. The whole stinking swap meet wasn’t shut down. That’s what the movie and recording studios want. They want the whole swap meet shut down. And they want the telephone pole where someone posted a flyer chopped down. And they want the corner gas station to be seized if someone posts a flyer on the wall. And they want the road to the gas station ripped up, too. That’s what SOPA and PIPA would have done. Over react to an overblown problem.

Stop calling it “piracy”. Stop calling it “theft”. Call it what it is, infringement. Stop adding stupid laws to prevent me from watching a movie I bought on whichever device I choose. Stop convincing manufacturers to build defective CDs and players so I can’t listen to the CD I bought in my car. The Digital Millenium Copyright Act could have effectively outlawed the sharpie marker if it was used to “circumvent” the copyright stripe on your CD.

These bills were over reaching and draconian. The movie studios want to have meaningful protections? They need to start with meaningful and realistic language.

Some sites on the internet have gone “dark” to show what could happen under the proposed SOPA and PIPA bills being considered in congress. Please visit the action pages of these sites:
Wikipedia Google Craigslist

And from the People’s Email Network (PEN):

Though not as heinous on its face as some other legislation we have
seen pushed in Congress lately, the so-called Stop Online Piracy Act
(SOPA) would take a giant ax to the roots of the internet in an
attempt to a deal with a problem up the branches somewhere.

Junk SOPA Action Page: http://www.peaceteam.net/action/pnum1091.php

The bill is so poorly written and vague in its definitions that it
would potentially criminalize innocent behavior, an open door to
selective prosecutions. Worse yet, it would give single troll
complainers the power to completely and unilaterally shut down
websites on false accusations, and force those sites to engage in
lengthy legal battles to restore themselves.

Even those who originally supported the concept of SOPA are appalled
at the blunderbuss tactics of the bill as presented, and Congress
must go back to the drawing board, with the input of those who really
know how the internet works, to come up with a bill that will not do
more harm than good.

Though advertised as a bipartisan bill, on closer inspection only two
Democratic sponsors were initial sponsors, Schiff and Berman, whose
districts include all the big Hollywood movie studios. What a
coincidence! And we should add, having just finished producing a
movie ourselves we have great sympathy for those who deserve to be
paid for their creative work, for how else can we righteously
compensate our valiant cast, crew and support people? But this SOPA
bill is absolutely the wrong way to do it.

And after you submit the action page you can now request a bulk order
of the new “Occupy America” bumper stickers that have been so very
popular. Demonstrate your support for the spreading occupy movements.
We are just asking about a dollar each in bulk to help cover our
costs, which include sending free single stickers to anyone who wants
one. We just got in the latest shipment and all remaining single
sticker requests are going out now. Here is a direct link to the bulk
order page.

Bulk Occupy America bumper stickers:
http://www.peaceteam.net/bulk_occupy_stickers.php

And you can still make all the single sticker requests you like at

Single Occupy American bumper stickers:
http://www.peaceteam.net/all_bumper_stickers.php

Mark Your Calendars For A Radio Appearance By The Pen

In the meantime we are getting attention in the progressive media. On
Jan. 16 at 2PM PST, yours truly, The Pen, will appear live on the
Harrison radio show in Los Angeles on KPFK to discuss these latest
developments. You can tune in from anywhere over the internet at
either http://www.smartshow.org or http://www.goharrison.com.

We’d also like you to know we are doing the final tweaks now on the
mix for the theme song for “The Last War Crime” movie and anticipate
getting it posted on iTunes in about a week. It would be wonderful if
we could make a splash on iTunes about the song, as a way of
introducing people to the movie itself. We pulled in the top rock and
roll and jazz studio musicians in Los Angeles for this, and the best
background singers on the planet, who have worked with everyone from
Natalie Cole to Phil Collins. It’s one hopping rock and roll track
entitled, “It’s A Crime”, so please stay tuned for that.

Please take action NOW, so we can win all victories that are supposed
to be ours, and forward this alert as widely as possible.
Contributions to The People’s Email Network are not tax-deductible
for federal income tax purposes.

If you would like to get alerts like these, you can do so at
http://www.peaceteam.net/in.htm

Or if you want to cease receiving our messages, just use the function
at http://www.usalone.net/out.htm

usalone451b:90158

Steve Jobs, dead at 56.

I’ve spent the past few weeks reinstalling this server. What led to this was what should have been a simple upgrade; at least I thought so. I was attempting to go from CentOS 5.6 to 6. Bad news. Red Hat (which CentOS is based upon) recommends against this particular upgrade and I was forcing the install of new packages. The first, biggest thing was breaking RPM. Once that was broken libraries stopped working properly, I couldn’t log into email (although it was still spooling).

No problem, I’ve broken and recovered before. I grabbed the latest burned CD and headed to where the server was hosted. The machine didn’t respond from the console either. To make matters worse, the CD drive was refusing to open so I couldn’t just upgrade in place. I pulled the machine and brought it home. First things first, I had to find a working CD drive in the stack that my wife wishes I had thrown away years ago. I did finally find an operative drive and popped the CD in. It took about a day of messing around before I gave up and decided to do a fresh install with the CentOS netinstall CD.

The “problem” with the netinstall disk is that with the amount of ram on that box it would only do a text based install – and the problem with a text based netinstall (which I learned later) is that it ignores the partitions already on the hard drives and repartitions and formats the drives based upon some internal settings in the scripts. While annoying since I have to restore all of my backups back onto the server, it’s the way the install was set to go – so let’s go.

Here’s a tip. It’s not a new tip or an overly brilliant tip, but here it is: back it all up. Make sure your backups are of everything you need. And test a raw install. I’m not going to follow my own advice, I know that. It’s my failing as an admin, as a human. I lost over five years of mailing list archives and about 20 or so ads that are posted throughout the site. I lost the ads due to my backup procedures not fully rebuilding the databases when I restored them (and not having a good way to rebuild them). I had to rebuild the ad database by reading my own ad code. I made it, they’re alive – sort of – the ads are all new. That’s the only database that I lost, a cheesy MySQL based ad server.
I had good procedures in place for the email system (except no backup MX record ) so no email was lost in the week long transfer.
The web server has slowly been resurrected (after seven days – hmm) the mailing lists are creaking back to life. And some additional procedures are in the planning stages.

One thing that does happen with a major reformatting of the hard drive is that the cruft is gone, hacked away. There is more space on the hard drive. And in a Zen like way, it causes a rethink of one’s life – well, maybe I wouldn’t go that far.

I was trying to get my mom to send me an invite for her remote assistant in Windows. I was ready to jab a spoon in my eye when I stumbled upon TeamViewer. It’s not the best screen view on the controller’s end, but it is super fast and super easy. And the settings might be adjustable, I just wanted to get her computer down so I could get on with my day. It somehow bounces off the TeamViewer servers to find the end points and that could be a minor security concern, but again I wanted it done.

I normally use other software, remote desktop across an ssh tunnel, but there was no way I was talking mom through that. In a pinch it worked and worked very well. And the price is right for personal use – free.

Microsoft¹ is losing 25,000 more office suite users in Denmark. Thirteen hospitals in the Copenhagen region are moving to virtual desktops allowing users to log in anywhere and get their desktops. According the the linked to article the hospitals have tried to work with their vendor to come to a reasonable licensing model to no avail. And so Libre Office has another small win.

1-presumably Microsoft, they aren’t specifically mentioned in the article.

I started to get spam for this Aluma Wallet thing. The same thing happened a few years ago when those miniature helicopters and cars were all the rage for Christmas gifts. So just what is the Aluma Wallet? Well, it’s made of aluminum and the claim is that it will protect you from having your RFID enabled credit card information stolen by someone with a hidden reader. Here’s how to prevent someone from stealing that information – don’t use “speed pass” cards. I mean, you might as well broadcast your credit card information. Of course if you are required to use some kind of ID card at work that utilized RFID technology you might just prefer put it all in this hard sided wallet.

It’s a long read, but if you can muddle your way through it, Groklaw has the Barnes & Noble legal response to Microsoft. In case anyone was wondering, this is exactly what I don’t like about the Redmond giant. They are using bogus, unrelated patents, questionable non disclosure agreements and bullying tactics to extract licensing fees from unrelated products or extinguish them from the marketplace.

Several of B&N’s responses are essentially, “Microsoft told us we had to promise that what they told us was a secret, before they told us what they say we did wrong.” Patents are public information so where’s the secret?

The bottom line is that Microsoft appears to want to control who and how the Android operating system, developed by Google, is used. Suddenly, the agreement with Nokia (that caused a Friday sickout at Nokia) seems just a little more sinister. They want complete dominance over which operating systems are used and which features are available to users of other “smart” phones, computing pads, and e-book readers. This is overreaching, overbearing and, when the company is as big as Microsoft, illegally anti-competitive. The last anti-trust suit did too little and did not put today’s version of Big Oil in its place. I expect calls for MS to be broken into three or more pieces to resurface, especially with them buying Skype for $8.5 billion.

The recent cell phone commercials are attempting to use humor to make you think their phones and networks are better. The AT&T commercial has two guys stuck on ski lift, the one guy asks his buddy if he can ask his ex-girlfriend out. The ex replies, “sure, we’ve been broken up for six months, but she wouldn’t go out with you”.

And now to the guy asking his friend’s ex-girlfriend out, “bing, bing, bing” goes the the jerk’s phone. He has a running commentary, “she says she’s wanted me to ask her out for a year, oh look, she send a video.” Hmm. The girl is a jerk too. She and the ex have been broken up for six months and she’s wanted to go out with the jerk for over a year.

Mr ex asks to see the phone and flings it over hand into the snow. Excellent – revenge on the jerks.

Our next jerk example is the Windows phone using sky-diver. Let me reiterate my disdain for phones that try to do everything, the dumb-ass phone. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, two guys jump out of a plane. One tries to take a picture with his smart phone and has to fumble with the settings. The other, using a Windows phone 7 smart phone pushes a single button* to take a picture of his buddy during free fall which he can then smugly post to Facebook and then pull his rip cord. As his buddy, still in free fall, struggles to complete his snapshot of the earth, smart phone jerk yells after him, “open your shute, Dave. Hey is it all right if I date Emily after you…” (Dave’s parachute opens), “never mind.” Smart phone jerk is trying to date his buddy’s girlfriend while he thinks his buddy might slam into the earth at 180 mph.

*I can push a single button on my dumb phone and on every camera in the house to take a photo. As a matter of fact single button cameras are pretty old school, but this is supposed to convince us they are state of the art.

My old rewrite rules have been blown away by WordPress 3.1. The links were so broken I only got blank pages. So, I had to retire the rules from How I Cheated to the right and replace them with:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ – [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

Very simple, but a pain to try to figure out. Nothing else I found on the internet worked.