Preston L. Bannister { random memes }

Bird on cactus

This variety of bird is one I have seen before, but seldom and never this close. He flew over, landed on the cactus, then sat there looking at me long enough to get out the camera. Pretty unusual to land so close and hang around after seeing me.

This bird was the start of a series of improbable events.

A bit further down the trail I noticed a skunk about twenty feet away going the same direction, parallel to the trail. After a few dozen feet the skunk disappeared into some brush. I see skunks maybe a few times each year.

Just a little further down the trail an unusual animal popped out of a hole in the ground, directly in front of me, in the middle of the trail. I have seen what I thought was the local burrowing critter a few times – a mole-like creature with gold/gray/brown fur. The critter I saw today I have never seen before. A weasel-like critter with black snout, a white mask that extended as stripes down lower sides, and a brown back.

Closer to the bottom of Dreaded Hill came across a small black case containing a multi-function bike tool, no doubt jarred off a passing mountain bike on the descent. Now it is not unusual to find lost water bottles on the (rather steep) descent, but this is the first time for something like this.

Each event by itself was unusual, but not surprising. Taken in combination, the combined probability is a bit exteme. By the time I got to the bottom of the hill, I half-expected to bump into Alice and the White Rabbit around the next bend in the trail.

Improbable.

1984
“Imagine a world
where people fear that their opinion cannot be expressed freely,
where leaders are not held accountable for their deceptions,
where perpetual war is waged against an unseen enemy” …

That last part sounds kind’a like today.

YouTube – Microsoft iPod

QuizFarm.com :: What is Your World View? (updated)
You scored as Materialist. Materialism stresses the essence of fundamental particles. Everything that exists is purely physical matter and there is no special force that holds life together. You believe that anything can be explained by breaking it up into its pieces. i.e. the big picture can be understood by its smaller elements.

Materialist 94% Existentialist 81% Modernist 75% Postmodernist 56% Idealist 44% Romanticist 38% Cultural Creative 31% Fundamentalist 6%

What is Your World View? (updated)
created with QuizFarm.com

I have to admit to being considerably annoyed.

On my Ubuntu box spent time getting Eclipse and Java setup. For ideological reasons, Ubuntu comes with a third-rate Java JVM, so I followed the twisty paths to get the current Sun Java JRE and JDK installed. After a bit more magic to get Eclipse to use Sun Java, startup and response times dropped quite a bit. Installed Apache Tomcat (manually of course – the same ideological nonsense).

Yes, I know all about the license differences. I first read the GPL back in 1985, and thought it was a sort of golden hammer then, and my opinion has not changed.

At this point I’m a bit aggravated. Went on to install the relevant Eclipse plugins (Tomcat, Freemarker, Visual Editor, UML, and CDT) … only to find the online help does not work.

Turns out they turned it off.

Re: Eclipse – integrated help is not available
“The Breezy repository didn’t include Tomcat 5, because it was too late. So the we had to disable the help system for the Eclipse packages in Breezy.”

Right. Like no one is going to care. Took some digging to figure out why it was broken.

Tried to figure out just who got this nonsense started and about what they care. Came up with this gem:

DebianJavaInSarge
“Most notably there are very much improved and new free java runtimes in sarge, which are capable of running several programs. Also a lot of software got packaged and moved to the main section. If you find Java packages in the main section then it is buildable and runnable by the free runtimes.”

Let’s nail this to the floor, shall we? The Sun JVM for Linux is free to developers. The Sun JVM for Linux is free to customers. Developers and customers just want their applications to work. Something the sort’a kind’a works (“capable of running several programs” – indeed) is a non-starter. So for all practical purposes, developers and customers want to run the Sun JVM. It makes no sense to waste time with anything else.

Admittedly Sun appears to be part of this roadblock. With all the good words out of Jonathan I don’t believe they are actually trying to screw up the works, but it is always possible I am mistaken.

Now if for ideological reasons there has to be a separate repository for Java-on-Debian, so be it, but let’s not pretend to install Java support, only to then force folks to grudge around and to try and find something that works!

Google Buys Writely
In an overt challenge to Microsoft, search giant Google said Thursday it had acquired Writely, an online word processing tool, for an undisclosed amount.

Years ago the press reported all about how whatever Microsoft was doing was a “challenge” to IBM. Now it is Google compared against Microsoft.

Just to point out the obvious – Google buying an outfit with a decent web-based word processor Just Makes Sense. This has nothing to do with “challenging” Microsoft, and has everything to do with delivering a compelling service to Google’s users.

Can we please drop the lame “challenge” metaphor?

VW GTi Commercial (Catapult) – Google Video
Someone had way too much fun building that catapult. Too big for the contest?

My sister sent me a link to this article.

Windows Defender Beta 2 vs. spyware | Spyware Confidential | ZDNet.com
“As promised a few days ago, I finally got a virtual machine upgraded to Service Pack 2 for testing Windows Defender Beta 2. For the sake of convenience, I’ll refer to it as WD for most of this post. When I wrote about WD previously, I mentioned the review at PCMag.com where WD was tested against 6 keyloggers, which is not a particularly valuable test in my opinion.” [...]

Have to admit that I stopped reading computer magazines with the demise of Byte. Did not realise they had sunk so far. To be fair, the early years of Byte had quite a few clueless articles written by various authors who did not really understand what they were trying to cover. In the later years the Byte crew included some reasonably sharp folks.

In this instance the writer identified by ZNet as a “spyware researcher and consultant” is clearly not very good. She starts her review by running a scan with each spyware tool, and reporting the counts from each – and then uses the numbers as an absolute measure. This would only make sense if each application counted things exactly the same – and they don’t.

The end result is what you are interested in with a spyware scanner. The methodology is simple – cleanup with tool A, and scan with tools A, B, C (etc.) for all combinations (you can eliminate some combinations if some tools always return a subset of what another tool returns). The tool(s) that remove everything harmful are all winners – if any do a complete job. The counts reported by each tool are mostly meaningless – either it’s clean or it’s not (though you do want to look for false positives).

Using a VM as a base for the test was the right idea, but reconnecting to the network in the middle of the test pollutes the results. Better to connect a disk/folder to the VM – if you know how to use the tools.

So this is what ZNet is offering as an expert? Ouch.