Ramblings of a Wayward Code Slave

The other day I was exploring on the Firefox website to see what extensions were available and, to my surprise, there was one called Adblock that looked promising. I installed it and have been amazed ever since. All of those annoying ads on CNN, Fox News, NY Times, and other places people tend to visit can just go away. Adblock does filtering based on URLs and can accept wildcards. As a result, if you right-click on an ad and select Adblock Image you can edit a URL that Adblock will use to filter any future images. You can even have a URL filter like http://*.adclick.net/ which will stop anything from the adclick.net domain from landing in your browser window or on your hard drive. I found that by hitting the major news websites and using some wildcarded URL filters I now can load web pages all over the place and not get ones littered with advertisements. Flash doesn't get Adblocked, but I've heard about something called Flashblock that I plan to try out soon.

If you don't have Firefox, you should get it. And then get Adblock -- both have actually made the Web useable again for me. While you're at it, there's another Firefox extension that will allow you to load a URL in Internet Explorer for those few pages that don't work properly without ActiveX controls. The only one to-date I know of is the McAfee update site -- they use ActiveX controls to dowload and update their virus scanner, firewall, and anti spyware products.

As most people probably do, I have the automatic update feature turned on in Windows XP. This means that, as Microsoft deems fit to release operating system patches, I automatically download them and then can click on a system tray icon to install them. Such was the case tonight, except...

I didn't want to reboot my computer right after the installation was over. With most applications, including the Microsoft automatic update, one can just click on the Close button and the update will finalize when the machine gets rebooted next time. Someone at Microsoft, however, decided that the typical user needs prodding to reboot the machine so they rigged the updater to nag the user every five minutes until hands get thrown up in exasperation as the machine gets rebooted.

They really went to some length to annoy users of Windows XP. The window that pops up, while not modal, always sits on top on everything else on the screen. You can either click on Reboot or Close, but if you choose the latter the window goes away for five minutes after which it pops up again with the same annoying reminder and the same two choices. I thought that I'd be slick about it and kill the process that was irritating me. The wuauclt.exe process is the Windows Update AutoUpdate Client process and killing it off doesn't work. It just respawns about ten seconds later, popping up that same awful window with those same two annoying options.

Microsoft really has a thing for rebooting right after an update, especially given that most Windows machines have to be rebooted once or twice a day anyway just to stay working. As for myself, I have a boat anchor of a laptop computer that is woefully low on memory. It used to be fine, but that was in the days before we needed a virus scanner, a firewall, and a spyware/adware checker. I have 256 Mb RAM in this computer and I'm pushing 51 processes and 240 Mb used right out of a boot. In order to even make the system useable I have to go in and manually kill off processes I know I won't need to bring the used memory down to about 28 processes and 200 Mb. As a result, it takes about five minutes to boot my computer completely with all of the page-swapping it has to do and then it takes me another 2 minutes to kill off the processes I don't need.

I only reboot when I absolutely have to. Otherwise, I just start processes when I need them and kill them off afterwards. Well, at least I have only five more weeks of this laptop and then I get to give it back and use something better. Too bad I can't say the same for Windows Update.

The Far Side was always one of my favorite cartoons and I think that's true for most scientists, engineers, and mathematicians out there. Gary Larson had a true gift for finding the humor in juxtapositions (cows on the sofa watching TV) and especially for finding the humor in science (two mathematicians madly writing equations on the blackboard with a third as a referee, yelling "Good hands! Don't choke!"). I don't know where I came across this particular cartoon -- it might have been e-mailed to me -- but I just love it. It's Gary Larson meets Jeff Foxworthy, an offbeat kind of humor with just a touch of trailer park in it. Enjoy.

Well, Texas can now be added to California and Oregon as states spearheading the Big Brother movement for vehicles. Inspection stickers might get replaced with RFID tags if the bill passes. Another brick in the wall...

TV news organizations used to be ethical, responsible entities, but the mighty have indeed fallen. The network news still behaves within reason, but cable news has turned into over-the-top sensationalism at its worst.

First it was Terry Schiavo. The poor woman was on CNN, Fox, Court TV and everywhere else for the last month of her life. It was almost the sole topic of discussion. The status of her kidneys and the concentration of her urine became national news. Aside from the controversy over what happened to her, this poor woman was plastered in the limelight in her twilight days. I hope when I shuffle off this mortal coil that my liver and kidneys aren't Fox News talking points.

Now it's the Pope. The poor man has been struggling just to survive for the past month and has seen his condition deteriorate to the point where he couldn't bless the crowd at Easter and he had to participate in some events via television. I'm not Catholic, but Pope John Paul II was probably the greatest man I've ever known. He showed that through intellect, conviction, and perseverence the righteous will always prevail over the violent. How is he being remembered now? With 24x7 coverage on cable news channels, complete with special full-frame lead-in graphics entitled "The Death of Pope John Paul II". I know that this is a blow to Catholics worldwide, and I myself mourn the loss of a great man, but enough is enough. The major news networks and the cable news networks have rented space around St. Peter's Square for the past decade in anticipation of this day. It's just downright morbid.

So when the mass media finishes picking the bones clean from Mrs. Schiavo and the Pope, I wonder who's next on the list? But of course, it's news, and woe be unto those who get in the way of the Free Press. I somehow don't think that the title "Free Press" means "free to do just about whatever we want in order to get those precious ratings so we can sell advertising at a premium price". I wonder what the going rate is for a 30-second spot on CNN with Pope coverage? There's a big difference between reporting the news and treating it as if they were slowing down at the scene of a car accident. It's morbid, gross, and genuinely reprehensible. Shame on all of them.