Archive for January, 2008

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I wonder how the advent of coilguns will affect firearms bans

Wednesday, January 30th, 2008

After looking at a video of a homemade coilgun powered by 8 AA batteries shooting through 2 layers of cardboard, it made me wonder if and when countries like Australia and Japan, which enforce extremely strict firearms bans, will try to ban them, and how they could possibly hope to enforce that ban in the face of easy home construction of such weapons.

As anyone who’s thought about it will know, building an actual working firearm is a pretty difficult thing to do. Like building a clockwork watch, all pieces need to fit together with a high degree of precision – a job requiring advanced machine shop skills and tools. The barrel of a gun is impossible to construct in a DIY assemble-the-pieces fashion and must be forged or extruded from molten steel. And the requirement for ammunition is another set of problems – precisely machined packages with explosive components, all the ingredients for which are tightly controlled. Yup, not too many people going to be building their own guns, not without anyone noticing.

But none of these constraints exist with coilguns. There’s no requirement for a barrel to withstand the high physical forces produced by an explosive propellant – the barrel on this one is made of fricking nylon. There’s less requirement for mechanical precision, or for a machined frame to hold it all exactly so. Sure, everything needs to be laid out fairly precisely and held in place tightly. But it’s more akin to building an electronic watch than a mechanical one.

I can’t deny that right now, anyway, a homemade coilgun is far less dangerous than a proper handgun. Battery, capacitor, and efficiency limitations provide an upper limit on the amount of energy one can realistically expect to put into a projectile. For comparison, the muzzle energy of a normal gun is usually around 350J – ie, the bullet leaves the gun with 350J of kinetic energy. The muzzle energy of the gun in the video looks more like 5-10J to me, comparable to an airgun, although the specs state it has 219J of source energy – less than 5% efficiency. But efficiency goes nowhere but up, and it already looks fairly dangerous to me. Airguns, by the way, are also completely banned in Australia – this homemade coilgun would already be an illegal weapon here.

But how can you possibly stop people building them? Unlike conventional arms, with all the requirements for machining, explosive propellants, and custom-molded metal, everything needed for the coilgun in the video is a common electronics component. You can’t ban capacitors and solenoids, it would be ridiculous to even try.

I hope you weren’t waiting for a conclusion, because I don’t have one! But it promises to be an interesting development to watch.

Here’s a Youtube video of the EM-15. Note the construction from sheet metal and ultra-common electronics. There’s nothing I see in this gun that you could come remotely close to banning, or even restricting.

Tags: coilgun
Posted in technology | 2 Comments »

OSXCrypt – a TrueCrypt for MacOSX

Monday, January 28th, 2008

For some time MacOSX has lacked a top quality, open source, plausible-deniability encryption solution. TrueCrypt is the obviously leader here, but is incompatible with OSX – you could try and run the Windows version in a VM, but that’s not an option for serious day to day use; a native version is infinitely preferable.

Seems like the drought has broken, however, with the latest version of OSXCrypt, which looks very much like it will become the encryption client for MacOSX.

While OSX has shipped for some time with some built-in encryption capability, namely encrypted disk images and FileVault, these have severe problems in that they support only a single internal password & volume, and thus provide no plausible deniability. There is no point encrypting files if you can be arrested for not divulging your password – unless it’s to simply divert casual 3rd party inspection as in the “computer repair shop” scenario. Until now the only case I could think of that would be useful for, say, an airport check would be to run a third, FileVault-encrypted account and simply claim it was for your “roommate” or what not and you didn’t know the password. Use of Truecrypt solves all these problems – one password will open one internal volume, another will open another, and there is absolutely no way to prove the second’s existence.

There is also the very real possibility that Apple retains “escrow” keys for all encryption schemes implemented in MacOSX. Without the possibility of source code review by experts, it’s impossible to say. Microsoft certainly backdoors its encryption (NSAKEY, anyone?).

The source code is available and an alpha is available for testing. Command line only for now, a GUI is on the way. Finally, a real encryption solution for the Mac! Great news for the ultra-paranoid .. like me ..

UPDATE: a tutorial is available (in german) here.

Tags: osxcrypt
Posted in mac, recommendation | 1 Comment »

Timezones in core Rails

Sunday, January 27th, 2008

“Official” TZ support finally appears in edge rails. Cue mixed feeling of anyone who has already implemented it.

Posted in rails | No Comments »

Sup updated to 0.4.0

Friday, January 25th, 2008

Sup, the really cool ruby pine/elm/mutt replacement, has been updated to 0.4.0 and looking sweet as. Mailing list is friendly and active. Clone from git for the latest and greatest.

Posted in technology | No Comments »

Multiple classes in CSS

Friday, January 25th, 2008

I don’t know how the hell I didn’t know this, but you can assign multiple classes to any element in CSS. This allows some really neat tricks if you basically treat classes as stackable “tags”. Just separate the classes with a whitespace and you can add as many as you want.

To whit:

="hide faq_answer">
The answer to the question!
>

Imagine you’re writing an FAQ, and want to 1. have a certain style for the answer and 2. hide the answer unless the user clicks on the question. Before I knew this, I would have just had one class – say, faq_answer – and styled that in CSS. I then would have written something in JS which hid any instance of that class in the DOM.

That sucks because it’s conflating style and behaviour. And whenever I decided I needed to hide something else, lo and behold I have to add yet another JS rule to hide any instance of that .. before you know it you’ve got 30 JS functions hiding 30 different classes. It’s nasty, it’s fragile, it’s bad practice.

Now I know this, I’ll just write one JS handler to hide anything with the class “hide”, and I’ll style by adding a second (or third, or fourth!) class to the div. Classes can act like tags! Fantastic discovery.

I have no fucking idea how I didn’t come to know this before today.

Tags: classes, css, javascript
Posted in development | 1 Comment »

ActiveCouch

Friday, January 25th, 2008

. From Chu Yeow, the guy who won Rails hackfest in December, and his colleague Arun Thampi, both of Bezurk (god what a terrible name – sorry guys) so it has a lot of cred.

Posted in lifestyle | 2 Comments »

slashdot quote

Friday, January 25th, 2008

cult (n): A small, unpopular religion.
religion (n): a large, popular cult.

Tags: mini
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

MS to force IE7 upgrade

Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008

Apparently Microsoft is going to issue a forced upgrade to IE7 to all XP users on February 12.

All I can say is: about fucking time. This is the first step to the final removal of the scourge of IE6, and the need to cater for its utterly fucked up rendering, in web design. Wonderful.

Tags: ie6,
Posted in development | No Comments »

Coen Brothers Joke

Saturday, January 19th, 2008

An Englishman, an Irishman, a Scotsman, and an American walk into a bar. They walk up to the counter and place their orders.

The Englishman says to the barman, “Top o’ the morning to you, old sport! I’d like a good long pint of the best drink in the world – a hearty English ale, nice head on it, not too cold and filled to the top!”

The barman gives him his drink and in one movement the Englishman grabs the beer, drains a quarter of it in one gulp, and slams the glass down on the counter with a satisfied “aahhh”.

The Irishment looks at him with scorn and places his order:

“Oi’ll have the real best drink in the world, sonny – a nice cold pint of Guiness!”

The barman gives him his drink and he drains half of it in one gulp, slams the glass back down on the counter before giving an even louder, more satisfied “Aaahhh!!”.

The Scotsman stares at the Englishman and the Irishman in disgust, turns to the bartender:

“These wee sissies don’t know what a real drink is! Give me a good long pint of the best drink in the world – single malt Scotch whiskey! Hold the ice, and fill it all the way up!”

The barman looks a little concerned, but busies himself behind the bar and in a moment hands the Scotsman his glass. The Scotsman drains three quarters of it in one gulp before slamming the glass down on the counter so hard it almost shatters, and sighs with delight so long and loud it dwarves the others’: “Aaaaahhhh!!!!!”

The American cocks one eyebrow, looking at each of the others in turn. He then turns to the barman.

The barman is polishing a glass. He draws a clean rag from a drawer and rubs the glass on the outside, then the inside. He holds the glass up to the light and inspects it, then repeats the process. Finally, the glass is perfect. The barman looks across the counter. All the men are dead, their bodies lying on the floor, riddled with bullets. The camera turns back to the barman, who is now also dead on the floor.

The barman’s glass, broken and flecked with blood, rolls across the floor. It stops at the boot of a man dressed all in black and holding the biggest gun you ever saw. The man tosses a coin and leers evilly at the camera. He looks French. The man strides out the door.

A previously unnoticed old-timer looks up from his Jack Daniels and says:

“I done had mahself a dream last night. I was ridin’ up in them mountains with mah old father, who was also a Sheriff. Mah horse had a silk coat and the reins were made the old-fashioned way, with Comanche hair. Mah father’s horse was far ahead and I could see the back of that ol’ hat he done always wore. Don’ much remember nuttin’ else.”

The door slams behind the Frenchman. The screen goes black and the credits roll.

Posted in lifestyle | 2 Comments »

Balloon Flight

Friday, January 18th, 2008

New from Shael Riley’s band The Grammar Club (well, December anyway): Balloon Flight.

Previously known for Miss Information with its fucking awesome lyrics. Lol .. I used to play that loud at a guesthouse I lived in in Japan, hoping someone would comment on the lyrics! Sadly, no-one ever did…

I take a liking to this style of music. There’s an unfathomable ocean of amateur hobby music out there, most of it utter shit – so much so that I generally avoid the whole genre like the plague. I like “nerdcore” though – it’s got a real good-natured, sincere feel that really shines through. Good shit.

The whole album is available free for download, but this song is the pick of the bunch IMO. If you really liked it, you might want to check out the rest.

Balloon Flight MP3 3.9M

Lyrics: (more…)

Tags: , shael riley, the grammar club
Posted in music | No Comments »

MacWorld roundup

Thursday, January 17th, 2008

Some thoughts on the new shit that’s gone down at MWSF2008.

MacBook Air

Obviously star of the show. The best mac for portability yet, edging tantalisingly close to a full computer one would simply take with you where e’er you might go. At 1.36KG, it’s getting light enough that one might simply throw it in the messenger bag as a default thing to do, like wearing a watch. Hell, I’ve carried books heavier than that to Starbucks in Shinjuku to read.

The MBA, and its implied usage scenario, does raise some questions, however:

  • Will we see better account synchronisation between an MBA and one’s “main” computer, that doesn’t involve .Mac? Is there a “home server” coming?
  • Is there a dock coming? I don’t want to mess around with wires. I want to just put the thing in a dock, iPod-style, and know that it will be charged when I go to get it later

Some commentators have voiced concerns about various aspects of the MBA:

  • Lack of replaceable battery: a complete non-issue for me. The life of a modern li-ion battery is generally within the relevant lifespan of a product anyway – and even if it’s not, there’s a replacement service. A reasonable tradeoff IMO
  • Still larger than 12″ PowerBook: This is a valid point, but to me a 12″ screen is almost unusable in this day and age anyway. Again, a good tradeoff
  • Lack of discrete graphics card: The MBA includes the GMA X3100, which is a whole lot better than the GMA950 on the original MB. You won’t be using Maya or playing Crysis but considering the form factor, this is fine.
  • Lack of ports: Again, if you’re complaining about this, you’re not in the target market. Bluetooth keyboards, mice and headsets are readily available, wireless access to disks is easy and fast (with modern hardware) and USB hubs are cheap and reliable. I don’t see the problem. The only surprising and possibly negative omission, to me, is a firewire port.
  • 2GB main memory cap: This is a bit of an issue, I agree, but probably a sensible decision at launch. I’d expect to see this bumped up quickly or a BTO option for 4GB to be made available in the short term. Still, 2GB is still enough for most.

Anyway, a very compelling product and I want one despite the 2GB memory limit and 80G hard drive.

Time Capsule

Mostly overshadowed by the hype surrounding the MBA, this looks like a great product. A wireless 1TB shared disk, with Apple ease of use and quality, would solve a great number of Home Networking problem scenarios I’ve encountered. It’s 802.11n, so nice and fast – paired with an MBA you’ve basically got yourself a 1TB local disk within network range. Won’t suit the advanced users who want to route their home network over the public internet but for a great many home network scenarios, this is the bomb.

Microsoft Office 2008

Ridiculously late to the party but Office finally goes UB. Leave it to Microsoft to try to sabotage opposing platforms by use of the most predictable, lame trick in the book – but whatever, it’s here now. Apart from the much better speed (obviously), the new version is finally unicode-aware and recognises MacOSX spelling dictionary preferences. In other words, it’s nothing exciting at all – just Office working like it should have all along, nothing more.

I rarely use Office for anything other than data manipulation in Excel (damn you CSVs) but it’s nice to have around. And Word now launches faster, and is more responsive, than Pages …

VMWare Fusion

VMWare apparently showed a demo of Leopard Server running in a VM instance – 2 of them, in fact. This implies some kind of deal with Apple, since running an unhacked version of MacOSX on a machine, virtual or not, lacking Apple ROM is impossible – and I somehow doubt VMWare were running a hacked version of OSX, in public, at MacWorld.

Could VMWare have reached an agreement with Apple to license OSX for VM use? Big news if they have.

Tags: , MWSF
Posted in technology | 1 Comment »

ActiveRecord::Base.find(:last) in Rails 2

Thursday, January 17th, 2008

I don’t know about you, but when I see find(:first) I also expect there to be a find(:last). This hack was working in Rails 1.x but broke in Rails 2. So I fixed it. Paste this into environment.rb or wherever:

module ActiveRecord
  class Base
    def self.find_with_last(*args)
      if args.first == :last
        options = args.extract_options!
        find_without_last(:first, options.merge(:order => "#{primary_key} DESC"))
      else
        find_without_last(*args)
      end
    end
 
    class << self # Needed because we are redefining a class method
      alias_method_chain :find, :last
    end    
  end
end

I wouldn’t rely on this in actual production code (for a variety of reasons) but it’s a useful convenience method for script/console, which is where I tended to want this functionality anyway.

>> MyTable.find(:all).length
=> 2076
>> MyTable.find(:first).id
=> 1
>> MyTable.find(:last).id
=> 2076
>> puts "1337"
1337
=> nil

Tags: ,
Posted in development, programming, rails | No Comments »

Whale war hots up

Wednesday, January 16th, 2008

(I got sick of typing this halfway through so just posted what I’d done – if half-baked crap annoys you like it does me, skip it!)

The farcical battle between two equally despicable sides in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary is getting more interesting, with the japanese hunter ship Yushin Maru taking into “custody” two Sea Shepard members who boarded their ship illegally to deliver a “letter of condemnation”.

The fact that one of the detainees is Australian is interesting, as it forces open a line of communication between the Australian and Japanese governments – Australia demanded his release last night, and the Japanese govt apparently agreed, although it’s yet to occur. This is interesting because the new AU govt, headed by Kevin Rudd, had made all sorts of anti-whaling promises during its election campaign, only to now determinedly sit on its hands and avoid a diplomatic incident with Japan, a very important trading partner and partner in two critical recent agreements – a Free Trade agreement and, more recently, a formal security alliance. The Rudd government is understandably pretty eager to not start its term in office by inciting a huge diplomatic spat over a thousand whales, which even manic hyper-environmentalist Tim Flannery called a sustainable level of fishing.

Both sides in this high-seas drama are equally dislikable. Firstly, the Japanese whalers, who dogmatically insist on their “traditional” right to catch and eat whales, despite the fact that consumers in Japan won’t eat it – they have over 4,000 tons of whale meat in cold storage in Tokyo which will most likely never be sold. I have personally never met a Japanese person who likes, or even approves of, whale meat. They exacerbate the already hostile situation by insisting the whaling is for “research” – an obvious, blatant lie which just pisses everyone off.

But these Sea Shepard guys are just as bad. Like any cult, its members found themselves lacking purpose or meaning in their lives and happen to have arbitrarily picked “Saving the Whales” as their big mission. They picked whales but it could have been anything – you can see the same obsessed “I am trying to distract myself from my meaningless life by dedicating myself to a ridiculous degree to a basically arbitrary cause” in many situations. They’re the kind of eager-to-join-an-army guys who probably should have just joined the actual army, which thrives on such personality types.

As much as I hate the whalers, I think I like them more than Sea Shepard. At least the whalers just remind me of stubborn old guys who are going to act out their tradition no matter what. And I can imagine the international pressure to stop just makes them more determined to not give in. Japan’s lost a lot of pride since WWII, it’s easy to imagine the mindset of not wanting to give up any more, no matter how misguided. But the Sea Shepard types, young men looking for something, desperate to prove themselves even if they have to die to do it, is far more scary. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that it’s the same basic driving force behind a lot of heartache in the world. People willing to sacrifice themselves to prove some arbitrary moral point? Reminds me of someone who’d bomb an abortion clinic, or murder a homosexual, or maybe blow themselves up in Iraq.

Check out this quote from their ship’s captain, Paul Watson:

“The Nisshin Maru is the cetacean death star and the most evil ship sailing the high seas today,” he wrote in a weblog. “It must be destroyed if the whales are to live.”

“At the risk of sounding dramatic, my crew and I are prepared to die for these whales if need be,” he said.

Anyway, two of them are hostage and staying in what sounds like hotel-like conditions:

“They are treated very, very humanely and they are provided with a warm, delicious hot meal,” Mr Moronuki said.

“They have [a] warm, nice bath and they are provided [with a] nice bed with clean white sheets so they are in very good condition.”

http://www.smh.com.au/specials/whalewatch/index.html

Tags: , , \/\/|=|4|_3Z
Posted in politics | No Comments »

ARAT still going strong

Wednesday, January 16th, 2008

Wow. The MacBook Air looks sweet – I want one! I wonder how much it is in australia?

US Price: USD $1799
AU Price: AUD $2499

Exchange rate as of right now: 1 AUD = 0.8861 USD

US Price in AUD: $2,030

Glad to see the ARAT (Apple Regional Assfuck Tax) is still in full effect down under. What do I get for my AUD$469 donation to the worthless lazy fucks at Apple Australia? That’s right – nothing!

UPDATE: Japanese price comparisons

JP Price: JPY ¥229,800

Exchange rate right now: 1 AUD = 97.1920588 JPY

JP Price in AUD: AUD $2,364

Sigh. You’d think with the USD headed downwards, prices outside the USA would go down, not up.

Tags: , Apple Australia, , macbook air
Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

MediaWiki as a personal knowledge base

Tuesday, January 15th, 2008

I finally decided to take a leaf out of Wincent’s book and start bringing some order to my hitherto highly disorganised external memory banks. Currently, I have no standard way to write down and sort out the things I know, especially things like uncommon server-maintenance procedures. You might have even noticed me using this blog as a repository for such information (and there’s many, many more unpublished notes to myself here ..) but obviously that’s a highly suboptimal solution.

There’s a variety of Mac tools for storing, organising and accessing the various forms of data and I initially thought I’d use one of them. After a fairly lengthy (but essentially half-hearted) evaluation of those options, though, I decided they just weren’t for me. My favourite desktop program was Yojimbo – it’s a great program and I highly recommend it if it suits your needs.

It didn’t suit mine, though, and I think I know why. Firstly, in 2008, I am not putting any work or energy into creating any sort of project based on a proprietary, non-free document standard, no matter how good it is. I’ve been burned personally by that many times and it’s just wrong.

Secondly, any type of information not served by default over the web is next to useless and an unacceptable path to follow in 2008.

Thirdly, the power of MediaWiki to auto-organise and sort information is unparalleled, despite its initial obscurity. For example its linking convention – to just be able to write [[RHEL4]] to auto-link to an article entitled RHEL4 if it exists, and offer to create one if not, is a joy.

Not to say MediaWiki (MW henceforth) is perfect – it’s an ugly, ugly bunch of PHP. But it’s the undisputed leader in the wiki category, much like that other ugly bunch of PHP, WordPress. Despite its flaws you’d be crazy to use anything other than WP for a blog these days and it’s the same with MW. Despite their ugliness, the sheer momentum and market presence of these projects overrides pretty much any other consideration. If we were talking about a closed source project (eg Windows) that wouldn’t be such a compelling proposition but for an open source project momentum is basically everything. You’ll be able to get information into and out of both MW and WP for the effective life of your information-gathering project – barring a nuclear holocaust, I’m tempted to say forever.

And even though I just called PHP ugly, god hosting it is a dream compared to Rails .. ;-)

This was all brought to a head tonight when I realised I’d never written down a step by step guide to renewing SSL certificates on RHEL4. I did it a year ago, like I do pretty much every year, and now I can’t remember fucking any of it. Why didn’t I write it down last year? Because I didn’t have anywhere “standard” to write it. I can’t just create thousands of text files whenever I have the urge to record how I did something. I didn’t write it on my blog because .. it’s a fucking blog. What I really need is a wiki, so now I’ve finally decided to create and maintain one. Should have done it a long time ago.

Posted in lifestyle | 10 Comments »

David Watanabe: illiterate or liar? You decide!

Monday, January 14th, 2008

Is an illegal chinese immigrant? I have no idea, but if so – he certainly needs to work on his english skills if he wants to pass as a native.

The meaning of the word “free”, for example, seems especially confusing:

acquisition pro: free!

Merry Christmas everyone! Did you get the shiny new iPod you were dreaming of? I hope so, because I’ve got something cool to go along with it. Starting today, you can get an Acquisition 2 single-user license for free (normal value of $26).

This is possible thanks to TrialPay, which will reward you with a free Acquisition license in exchange for signing up for special offers from a wide variety of other sites and retailers. It’s a cool idea, and it’s quick and painless. So if free sounds compelling to you, head over to TrialPay to check out the available offers, sign up, and get a free Acquisition 2 license.

David, I don’t want to come down too hard on an ESL learner – but if you have to sign up for credit cards, spam, and other crap, it’s not “free”. Free means without payment of any kind – whether it be money, time, or any other imposition.

…will reward you with a free Acquisition license in exchange for…

See the problem here? If you have to “exchange” something, it’s not free. Get it? Give without obligation = free. Exchange something = not free.

I hope that clears things up a little, David, and if you’re inspired to try and improve your English a little I can recommend several excellent teachers to gently take your puny yellow hand and guide you into the worldwide community of people who speak standard, non-misleading English.

Merry Christmas David! Not you celebrate christmas in China, you god damn heathen gook.

PS

Did you know the supermarket near my house has FREE food? All you have to do is give them some money, and then they reward you with FREE food! The more money you give them, the more FREE food you get!

And did you know the company I work for gives you FREE money? All you have to do is show up and work for 8 hours a day, and they’ll reward you with FREE money! The more you work, the more FREE money you’ll get!

I like to exchange the FREE money I got from work to get FREE food from the supermarket! Life is so sweet when everything is FREE huh David you fucking commie!

Tags: asshole, david watanabe, ESL, Yellow Peril
Posted in Language | 4 Comments »

My Tentacles!

Sunday, January 13th, 2008

If you have been putting off watching the 2005 remake of Bio Boosted Armour Guyver – whose hero shares my name, even though he’s a pussy – this screenshot should seal the deal:

My tentacles!

So is the show any good? Well, it’s about as good as the original I think! In other words: nope.

UPDATE: I extracted and uploaded the opening here (27M), for anyone interested. Anyone who can find a full length mp3 of the opening song 「Waiting For・・・」by れいり will be “rewarded” (not rewarded). I only have the TV size 90 second version. And my apologies for the quality, it’s not all that great but you get the idea…

UPDATE 2: I have received some compelling intelligence from high-ranking sources that the creature depicted in the above picture may in fact be David Watanabe in his true form. Stay tuned…

Tags: guyver, tentacles
Posted in recommendation | No Comments »

Crypto AG’s products – backdoored by the NSA for decades?

Friday, January 11th, 2008

Woah. Apparently, world famous – possible world number one – cryptography software provider Crypto AG has been secretly backdooring their products on behalf of the NSA and others for decades. Their software had customers in 130 countries – maybe not all governments, but certainly a lot of them. As the article speculates, that may be the greatest sting operation ever, at least in terms of pure quantity.

There is no such thing as cryptographically secure closed source software, it’s as simple as that. This incident drives that point home with about the greatest force imaginable.

Via Bruce Schneier, who perhaps wisely points out that the facts in this case are yet to be proved. Unfortunately, if history is any guide, it’s highly unlikely that they ever will be – or, indeed, that they even can be. With operations like this plausible deniability is the name of the game and I’ll eat my hat if the NSA ever allowed anything to be put on paper, reducing the incident forevermore to a conspiracy theory of hearsay, 30-year-old eyewitness accounts and mysterious coincidences.

Tags: cryptography, NSAKEY, open source
Posted in technology | No Comments »

David Watanabe: greedy, whining asshole

Thursday, January 10th, 2008

I’ve long harboured a dislike for mac software developer David Watanabe. He’s one of those greedy parasites who tries to make money by repackaging open source software as proprietary, paid products – his first effort, Acquisition, was nothing but a pretty mac wrapper for open source gnutella clients for mac, and Xtorrent is little more than a wrapper for free, open source Transmission.

Now, he may well have been within his strict legal rights to do that, I’ve never bothered to find out what the actual licenses for the software he integrated were. But ethically I’ve always thought it was highly questionable – especially when the primary use of such software is to download other’s intellectual property. Not that I have any problem with that – in fact I loathe the prevailing copyright regimes, believing copyright should have no more than a ~5-year limit – but to actually try and make money from its circumvention is pretty scummy, IMO. And the fact he built strong anti-piracy protections into his software, when a primary use of that software was to download pirated versions of other’s software – is just the icing on the asshole cake.

Which is why his reaction to people’s complaints about his adware Inquisitor is so precious. For those who don’t know, Inquisitor is a nasty InputManager plugin which hacks the ability to choose from a menu of search engines in Safari, similar to FireFox’s search box, and autocompletes certain words and results like Spotlight. It’s an unstable piece of crap, and I uninstalled it after a brief trial a couple of years ago when it caused Safari to repeatedly crash.

Anyway, there’s recently been some complaints in the “blogosphere” about Inquisitor’s sneaky adware functions, which silently insert ads into its search results, pointing to paid affiliate links to Amazon, the Apple Store, and so on – very nasty.

David’s reaction is hilarious. Lengthy section follows, where I paste much of his blog entry, interspersed with will-deserved rebuttals.

So, imagine my surprise when I wake up to a mailbox containing words unfit for publication, blogs declaring me as the biggest asshole in the world, and demands that people sabotage and steal my work.

Well David, you’re not *the* biggest asshole in the world, but I suspect that’s mainly a matter of opportunity. You’re merely a minor asshole for now. But since your entire software business is built upon stealing the work of others, I certainly support anyone who “steals” your own. What goes around, comes around.

I’ve always been very proud of Inquisitor. It’s small, lightweight, and entirely unique at what it does.

It certainly is small – smaller than many FireFox plugins. But what it does – hack in a few other search engines to Safari’s search box – is hardly unique.

Best of all, the revenue model means that Inquisitor 3 is totally free for users.

You know you’re a greedy son of a bitch when you need to have a “revenue model” for a fucking browser plugin.

Now, I guess people have forgotten that Inquisitor 2 was a shareware product.

Actually, no – I haven’t forgotten how you actually tried to charge users for a crashy, poorly made browser plugin which did nothing but offer a menu of search engines. I remember quite well thinking you were a prick – a belief which continues to this day!

The release of Inquisitor 3 as ad-supported freeware was a massive risk. I doubt many shareware authors would take a successful revenue-generating product and make it freeware on a whim. However, at the time I was feeling idealistic.

Oh my fucking god. Yeah, David Watanabe, you’re the fucking Prince of Giving. Half Ghandi, half Linus Torvalds. Your selfless generosity is fucking inspirational. I’ve got a fucking tear in my eye just thinking about how you just threw it all away for the good of the little guys. For the people. For a better world.

I genuinely felt that Inquisitor was a great experience that everyone ought to be able to enjoy, and that it made the world (a small bit) better.

Maybe this would be true if Inquisitor wasn’t a nasty little browser-crashing hack, and if you weren’t sneakily inserting unmarked links to your affiliate accounts in people’s fucking search results.

So, with good intentions I made the switch to freeware. The inclusion of very limited advertising was a necessary evil, to dampen the financial disaster of the switch.

It’s not “freeware” if it’s got ads, you fuckhead.

Ultimately, designing great software isn’t easy, especially when it’s being done as a hobby.

You’re right – it’s not easy! Impossible, even. For you. And if it’s a hobby, why do you try and rip people off? I think you need a new dictionary, David – these words don’t mean what you think they mean.

I have few resources and since expectations are unbounded, it’s a certainty that I will always fall short. That’s not evil, malice, or incompetence

You certainly have few resources in the areas of ethics, honesty, programming skill and the English language, and you’re right in that you fall pretty fucking short on all counts. But you’re wrong in the second sentence – I actually do think it’s pretty much all due to your evil, malice and incompetence.

- it’s just meathook reality.

Another word that you seem to have a pretty non-standard definition for. Or do meathooks form a pretty large part of your daily life, David? You mentioned your software business is a “hobby” – you’re not a pig farmer by day, are you? In Canada, maybe?

But increasingly my good intentions and sacrifice are being met with cynicism and deliberate mean-spiritedness.

Oh my god. Back to Ghandi. O, David’s sacrifice and good intentions! Curse the mean-spirited, cynical world who just takes and takes from his font of giving.

Fundamentally I’m a nice person, quiet spoken and non-confrontational. Sacrificing six years of my life to enhance the lives of people whom I will never meet is not a self-serving action.

O, the humanity! Six years of selfless, unrewarded, unappreciated service – ignored and ridiculed by a cynical world. David you should apply for the fucking Nobel Peace Prize, you should be a shoo-in with your six years of selfless giving of nasty stolen-code adware.

But when I get threatened with harm and called an asshole by someone I have never met, when my ‘transgression’ was creating something unique and giving it away for free to everyone… well, my idealism about the Mac dies a little. If this is you, then I welcome you to leave. Your burden is not one I wish to bear.

I’m not threatening you with harm my softly spoken friend, I’m just calling you a deluded, greedy little shit. The mac community is worse off for the presence of nasty little bottom feeders like you, and people like you. Idealism? Don’t make me laugh, you weasel – you’ve been in it for nothing but your own profit since day 1. You talk as if you’ve bequeathed a great treasure to the future of humanity. What you’ve actually done is tried to sell a bunch of shitty apps which, if you had any fucking decency, would be freeware.

Your burden? Don’t talk to me about your “burden” you little prick. Your burden is the guilt you should be feeling for being such a sneaky, greedy little parasite. I bet you’ve never given a dime of your illicit profits to the open source projects you steal the majority of your source code from. You’re the one killing idealism. But you don’t have to tell me to leave – I wouldn’t touch your crapware with a 10-ft pole.

Too bad you got called an asshole. But David, that’s because you are one – a first-class, grade-A asshole – so fuck you.

UPDATE: David-さん has deleted his original post, thus proving he’s a pussy as well as an asshole – quite an achievement. Thanks to the leet skillz of a kindly reader, a copy of the article from google cache is attached below.

Tags: asshole, david watanabe, waaahmbulance
Posted in mac | 9 Comments »

Region locking makes me regret buying movies

Tuesday, January 8th, 2008

fuck this shit

Pissing around with DVD region locking makes me regret not just downloading the fucking movie. Or telling someone to pick me up a bootleg in HK. Seems I’ve got 3 more times to choose between my Japanese DVDs, my Australian DVDs, or my US DVDs.

Thanks, fuckers! Next time I’m thinking about buying a DVD, I’ll remember how I probably won’t be able to play it on my laptop anyway, and put it back on the shelf. I can play pretty much anything I’ve ever downloaded though – funny, that.

By the way, this is the Lord of the Rings Collector’s Edition, which was close to $60 (each) if I remember correctly? Or more? Unfortunately it’s the UK version, all three of them, and I don’t want to risk running out of region changes. So the $200 of worthless plastic goes back on the shelf, and I fire up BitTorrent, and let me tell you, my conscience is pretty fucking clear.

Tags: greed, mpaa
Posted in technology | No Comments »

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