Ramblings of a Wayward Code Slave

My wife's birthday gift to me this year was a portable DVD player with a 7" screen. As I'm an avid collector of anything with remote controls, I was delighted to see that this gadget came with one. It's a small display, but viewed up-close as intended it hits the spot. It's also very portable, weighing in at about 40% of the poundage of my venerable Dell laptop that Tech owns. Heh, they can lug it around themselves soon enough.

It's time for cake and ice cream, a birthday tradition in the Alexander household since we don't buy cakes except for special occasions. Chocolate on chocolate, a true caloric horror experience that I'm bound to enjoy.

So while my zeal for the clock ticking away yet another year is somewhat daunted by the fact that, well, the clock ticked away yet another year, at least I've got a wife who cares about my happiness, some good grub, and a really cool gadget.

Well, at 6:10 tonight I get to put another notch in the great belt of Life. I was born 37 years ago today at Southeast Memorial Hospital in Houston, Texas (back then it was South Houston, Texas). I can't help but wonder what, in the past 37 years, has made a distinguishing mark on society to announce that I was once alive and here. Of course, I've done nothing great, so I shouldn't expect to be known to later generations just like the countless nameless people who've lived and died before me. Still, it's a bummer when you stop to think that your legacy to the world will be a rock with some writing on it out in a field. Provided, of course, that contractors don't plow you up and haul you off to the dump because you're in the way of a new strip mall parking lot.

So, another year older and how much wiser? I wonder what I was doing when I was supposed to be standing in line for wisdom -- probably in line for a second helping of sarcasm. Oh well, we live and learn, but of course that's debatable in my case as well...

Somebody has put a curse on me. Whatever we have, it breaks. The latest thing to get the Big Zap is the digital cable box. I don't know how or why it broke, but I know what and when. "What" is the module that receives the remote signal. "When" is this weekend. So the remote control doesn't work any more for the cable box. Aargh, the horror! We actually have to get up to change the channel. If God had intended for us to perform this kind of menial labor then he wouldn't have allowed RF, infrared, and WiFi to be invented. This is just a perversion of nature and won't be tolerated, i.e., the cable box is getting swapped out tomorrow for one with a working remote control module on it.

The three things a man takes seriously are his woman, his beer, and his remote control. You don't want to get between a man and one of these. Especially on a Sunday during baseball season.

I just saw this from the Apollo 11 image website I hyperlinked into my previous post, and I felt my heart sink. The Saturn V rocket at Johnson Space Center in Clear Lake (Houston) is in dire need of repair before it's too late. It's going to cost $2.5 million to repair it, but they have a dollar-for-dollar cash match through a government fund. They still need over $500,000 (not including match) to fund the restoration, though.

This is a piece of American history that has been on display at JSC since 1977 and is one of only two Saturn V's with which I'm familiar, the other being at Marshal Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. Please consider donating anything at all to help restore the rocket back to its original condition so future generations of kids and space fans can see it. It truly is an awesome sight to behold when you're standing right there.

The website at the beginning of this post has a hyperlink at the top of the page that will take you to Amazon.com where you can make a secure donation in any amount from $1.00 on up. C'mon, you can spare $1, can't you? How much did you pay for fast food this past week, eh? Coughing up $5, $10, even $20 won't break the bank.

Thank you.

I just thought that I'd remind you of what we did 35 years ago while still quibbling over healthcare, welfare, social security, defense spending, and the like. Remember that we did this when computers filled entire rooms and when microprocessors were science fiction. We've come a long way, baby...or have we?

Thanks to a Slashdotter, I and the rest of the /. community got a reference to the website.

So, here, here, and here are where we are and, at the same time, here's where we should be.

Well, our esteemed government in its infinite wisdom decided on the 35th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing to cut the NASA budget by 7%. It amounts to over 200 million dollars less than last year's budget and over 1.1 billion less than what Bush requested. Most of the cuts occurred in new exploration areas.

Space...the final frontier.

These are the voyages of your imagination only.

Our five year mission is to explore strange, new taxes;

to seek out pork, and new lobby kickbacks;

to boldly stay home and drain NASA 'till its poor.

The Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo astronauts were the heroes of my childhood. What a tribute to those who risked everything to be explorers and pioneers. We only went to the moon as Cold War one-upmanship to beat the Russians and make up for Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin. Now that Russia isn't a competitor we've lost the will to explore.

So the federal government cuts back on the NASA budget repeatedly over the years and expects them to live up to the same standards they did when they were funded back in the Mercury-Apollo era. They set NASA up for failure and then pointed their fingers and yelled "Look, see!" when NASA fell on its face. NASA scientists, engineers, and researchers are brilliant beyond the capacity of anyone on Capitol Hill to contemplate and if we had funded them adequately for the past 25 years then we'd already be at Mars.

In the end, we're to blame. We want lower taxes, support for Medicaire and Medicaid, stability for Social Security, etc., etc., etc. We can't get it all and we can't tell them what we're willing to pay for. Now that would be a great idea -- "Here's my taxes, but you can only use it for these budgetary items."

So, regardless of who's to blame, the congressional budgetary decision was a travesty. The shame...

Today, 35 years ago, astronaut Neil Armstrong said that as the Apollo 11 landing module, named "Eagle," touched down on the surface of the moon. Several hours later he popped the hatch, walked down the ladder, and hopped onto the surface of the moon while stating the phrase that we all know by heart. I don't know where he got the words, whether they were from his mind or suggested by someone else, but he was a real professional. As Bill Cosby mentioned in his stand-up act, it would have been really easy for him to step on the moon and holler "Coca-Cola!"

By the way, there's an urban legend surrounding the "Good luck, Mr. Gorsky" comment that is completely false but funny anyway.

http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/blgorsky.htm

Hey! It wasn't enough to have had the week-long sweat-o-rama last month because our A/C fan motor gave out. No no no, that marathon sauna session was just an indicator of things to come. Our A/C stopped blowing out cold air sometime Saturday and, by Sunday, it was back to a balmy 83 or so in the house.

So we packed up, stayed at Chez Ramada another night to the tune of $65, and got Dubach Air & Heat over here today. They took one look at it and were stupefied as to why the compressor outside that's three years old has a pair of fuses from the 19th century. Edison could have manufactured these fuses himself. At any rate, one blew (small wonder) and that's how come we got to sweat some more.

This all goes back to the people we hired to install the A/C back in 2001. I won't mention them here because I don't care to get sued for calling them the lazy, incompetent buffoons that they are, but they really are lazy, incompetent buffoons. And high-priced, I might add. We dropped over $8,000 for a new Trane air conditioner/heating system along with some attic insulation blown in and they did an acceptable job excluding the return air duct. For the return air duct, they removed the old attic fan in the ceiling of the hallway and used that; however, since the filter is 24" x 30" and the attic fan is larger, they did some impromptu carpentry work and created something to stick up there that would frighten Frankenstein's monster. They knew it would never have flown in a home north of the interstate, but we're just some morons on Bonner Street who wouldn't know any differently. We complained, they hesitated, and by that time my wife was so upset with them that we just dropped it.

We then had them on a yearly maintenance contract and when they came out they forgot to service the outside unit and didn't reconnect something up in the attic so water from condensation started dripping through our dining room ceiling, leaving a really attractive stain to complement the "scorched earth" return air duct in the hallway. I complained loudly and they sent someone else out to tighten up a pipe upstairs and check the outside compressor. So having a zero for two record, I refused to pay them for their shoddy work and dropped them. Only after not having heard anything from us for a few months when they sent out bills did we start receiving voicemail messages from the owner asking what was wrong and how he could make things right. Heh, he could have made things right by not having treated us like we had a house in the ghetto, which we don't.

For the record, we have a 2,400 square foot wooden home on a corner lot with 10-foot ceilings and hardwood floors. It was built in 1924 or 1925 and was owned for decades by the First Presbyterian Church down the street as the minister's home. In fact, many people have been married in our living room -- those who couldn't afford a wedding in the actual church were offered a wedding at the minister's home. The house fell into disarray with some of the subsequent owners, some of whom had grand plans and ran out of money and others who just didn't maintain the home at all. By the time we got it, it was in dire need of repair and looked horrible from the outside (the paint was a caramel color and was peeling). We've had the plumbing and sewerage lines completely replaced under the house and fully-insulated so they won't freeze up, a new Trane 14 SEER 5-ton A/C installed along with extra insulation in the attic, the entire laundry room rebuilt using the original tongue-in-groove siding instead of that cheap stuff that the last owner used, and the entire house stripped, sanded, and repainted with Benjamin Moore paint. We paid $84,000 for this home and spent another $32,000 fixing it up, and now it looks better than any home within sight of us.

So anyway, we now deal with Dubach Air & Heat and they've been really good to us. They're a bit pricier than the original place for maintenance, but then again they don't create leaks, forget to do things, and their work isn't reminiscent of a painting from Night Gallery.

As my web app grows in complexity without any stopping point in the visible future, I'm reminded of certain pithy sayings that I've accumulated over the years from the Internet and various books.

Software engineering truly is a marriage of science, art, luck, frustration, and copious verbal profanity. Enjoy the quotes...

"If you give someone a program, you will frustrate them for a day; if you teach them how to program, you will frustrate them for a lifetime." --Anonymous

"If builders built buildings the way programmers write programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization." --Weinberg's Second Law

"The first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time; the remaining 10% of the code accounts for the other 90% of the development time." --Tom Cargill

Program /n./
1. A magic spell cast over a computer allowing it to turn one's input into error messages.
2. An exercise in experimental epistemology.
3. A form of art, ostensibly intended for the instruction of computers, which is nevertheless almost inevitably a failure if other programmers can't understand it.
--From the Jargon File

Programming /n./
1. The art of debugging an empty file.
2. A pastime similar to banging one's head against a wall, but with fewer opportunities for reward.
--From the Jargon File

"Einstein argued that there must be simplified explanations of nature, because God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer." --Fred Brooks

"Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.” --Rich Cook

"... one of the main causes of the fall of the Roman Empire was that, lacking zero, they had no way to indicate successful termination of their C programs." --Robert Firth

"Writing in C or C++ is like running a chain saw with all the safety guards removed.” --Bob Gray

"In C++ it's harder to shoot yourself in the foot, but when you do, you blow off your whole leg." --Bjarne Stroustrup

"Consistently separating words by spaces became a general custom about the tenth century A.D., and lasted until about 1957, when FORTRAN abandoned the practice." --Sun FORTRAN Reference Manual

"The memory management on the PowerPC can be used to frighten small children." --Linus Torvalds

"But what...is it good for?" --An engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM, commenting on the microchip in 1968

"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." --Ken Olson, president/founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977

"640K ought to be enough for anybody." --Bill Gates, 1981

"MS-DOS isn't dead, it just smells that way." --Henry Spencer

"If you don't know where you want to go, we will make sure you get there." --Microsoft slogan translated in Japanese

"...the best way to prepare [to be a programmer] is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and fished out listings of their operating system." --Bill Gates

"When the grammar checker identifies an error, it suggests a correction and can even makes some changes for you." --Microsoft Word for Windows 2.0 User's Guide

99 bugs to fix in the code,

    99 bugs to fix;

Get rid of one

    and son of a gun

There's 98 bugs still in the code...

To stave off boredom at channel-clicking my way through the summer on the idiot box I decided to write my first professional web app. It started out as a dinky thing for my website, storing data in an XML file on the webserver and then writing a stylesheet file to display it all nice and pretty. Then I got to thinking about how much better it would be with that data in a database and the XML being generated on the fly. Pretty soon, I have the basic idea for an entire web application with a database back end. I checked around -- I don't have any competition whatsoever for what I'm doing -- so I'm sure it'll make money when I get the site up and running. I'm still not used to using so many different technologies all at once anymore -- it's fun and scary at the same time. Teaching for seven years got me out of the habit, but it's coming back.

In the span of a week and a half, I've gotten much of the way there, the main holdup being the user interface. Photoshop isn't my strong suit, and it took a while to get up to speed on how to create custom tabbed navigation bars, buttons with rollover and click effects, and so on. But I'm getting there. So far, I've used HTML, PHP, Javascript, cookies, XML, XSLT, and MySQL. I'll be adding SSL to that after I purchase my site certificate. I have a newfound respect for web developers and I really like the whole web app paradigm. I'm betting that 5-10 years from now we'll all be running thin clients and have our apps served to us over the Internet on a subscription basis. You get global access, automatic updates, and developers keep licensing control. I'm surprised that Microsoft hasn't already started doing this.

As for my web app, I plan to offer the service on a yearly subscription basis with three tiers depending upon how much data each person uploads to the server. I figure an entry-level subscription of $19.95 would be worth it to people to access their data anytime from anywhere. I already pay McAfee $35/year each for their AntiVirus and Personal Firewall products, and I pay Spam Arrest the same to keep my Inbox clean. So I'm shelling out over $100/year just to keep pests away -- $20/year isn't much in comparison.

Readers might notice that I haven't indicated what my web app is. Well, when it's ready I'll debut it, but I don't want someone coming along and getting a team to hurriedly deploy something ahead of me. I'm only one person, after all. If you're reading this, then you're likely either family or friend so I'd tell you anyway, but since this is on the Internet there's no telling what might be indexing keywords in this thing. A scary thought...

I've gotta say, though, that I really like the idea of working for myself. Being able to have creative control and administrative control over what I'm doing is something I'm not used to having, and it's a good feeling. When you're an employee you're working to make money for other people, but when you have a stake in the company -- all of it or even just some of it -- then the work becomes more personal and meaningful.

When I get finished, though, and start advertising, I'm anticipating that I'll eventually need a set of dedicated servers for the website. It's not rocket science, nor is it some kind of wonderful technology, but remember that eBay was based on a simple idea and has turned into the most profitable website in history. I don't have an eBay-level idea, but it's in a similar vein and can be adapted to a number of similar areas so that a number of websites can exist, all with slightly different content.

And no, it's not Internet porn. Shame on you for thinking that. Pervert.

They stole our lawn mower! Just last night, some opportunistic scum-sucking barracuda purloined our new push mower, complete with bag and gas can. That's $180 down the drain. Now that I've voiced my moral outrage at the sorry state of humanity these days, it makes me reminisce about a day about 14 years back, but right around this time of year...

I've been around for right at 37 years now and in that time I've had a variety of things stolen, usually due to my carelessness and my now-failed theory that people are basically good. I've lost the usual -- hats, calculators, a few umbrellas -- but also a whopper: my car.

The date: Saturday, July 28, 1990, one day before my birthday.
The place: New Orleans, LA, on Poydras just south of Camp in the CBD.
The time: sometime between around 3 P.M. and 10 P.M.
The car: a light green metallic 1986 Chevrolet Caprice.

When I look back at this time in my life I cringe at the thought of how naive I was. I was a graduate student in Hattiesburg, MS, at the time and rode down to New Orleans with a guy and his kids I met through a mutual friend. Michael was a nice fellow and a great cook and used to invite me over for dinner now and then to be nice. So when he suggested that we make a day trip to New Orleans I was happy with the idea. I've never been much for most of the French Quarter -- it's got a big reputation as a party location but for me it's just a lot of tourist traps and it always smells like old beer and urine. On the other hand, the first few streets in the Quarter -- Decatur and one or two back -- are fun to go through since they're clean and more family-oriented.

So like I was saying, Michael suggested we head down to the Quarter and wander around Decatur, perhaps going to eat lunch at Maspero's and getting the required beignets and cafe au lait across from the cathedral. It being a Saturday and being bummed out because the girl I was seeing at the time didn't want to do anything with me the day before my birthday (she turned out to be a real piece of work) I happily agreed. So I drove us down there because Michael's car was in and out of the vehicular ICU too much for my taste, and when we got there I couldn't find a good parking place. The lot by Jax Brewery was completely full and I was about to park in the Hilton garage when Michael said "Oh, just go up Poydras and park there -- I do it all the time." Now what should have gone through my mind was "He does it all the time in that heap of his that a crack addict in need of a fast $20 wouldn't steal" but instead I thought "Hmmm, cheap! Let's go!" Well, I parked on the street (big mistake) right at the end of a line of parallel-parked cars (bigger mistake). We went off and didn't come back to fetch my car until around 10 P.M. when we disovered that (drum roll) it wasn't there. I put Michael up in a hotel (another mistake, but another story) and got a taxi to my aunt's house up Canal Blvd. close to the end of Veterans.

New Orleans is famous for many things, but two of them are murder and thievery. Most people don't realize that New Orleans is the per capita murder capital of the nation, beating out such garden spots as New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago for that dubious honor. Well, people in New Orleans also have to contend with the fact that whatever isn't nailed down gets stolen. One of the scams at the time was for criminals to hook up with a tow truck driver and have the driver look for an easy target. Since vehicles getting towed in the CBD are about as common as someone eating a hot dog on the street in New York, nobody looks at it closely and, in fact, people tend to filter it out. Including cops. So the drivers would back up to an easy target -- like a car at the head of a line of parallel-parked vehicles (!) -- and would just tow it off. So my car apparently suffered this fate according to the NOPD, which was supported by the fact that it was later found on Religious St. completely stripped.

I never saw the car again after it was stolen, but the insurance claims adjustor got a cop to drive him past the car and told us about it. The adjustor wouldn't go down there alone, and the cop wouldn't stop without significant backup, so the police cruiser just slowly passed what was my car while the adjustor took pictures out of the window. They even stole the instrument panel and the turn signal lever. They stole the flicker switch! The bastards! And, just to add insult to injury, I had just filled up the gas tank in Slidell, about 15 miles away.

Everything turned out okay -- that car had 80,000 miles on it from four years of commuting and with the money from the insurance settlement I paid for half of a brand new 1990 Chevrolet Cavalier and managed to get the other half on a 5-year financing option through GMAC for $69/month, which was easy enough for a student to pay off. So aside from the three weeks I had to bum rides to get to the university, it turned out for the best.

Of course, getting picked up on my birthday by my parents in New Orleans wasn't fun. I got the lecture of a lifetime about being naive and stupid, perhaps deservingly so and perhaps not. Nevertheless, that birthday marked my first foray into the cruel, harsh world. I wish I could say it was my only life lesson in this respect, but one thing the last 14 years have taught me is that if there is only one constant in the world when it comes to people, that constant is their ability to take everything you have and leave you in the dust, wondering what happened. Take count of your friends and family, because everyone else in this life is out to get everything they can and they don't mind if you suffer at their expense. It's cynical, but life isn't easy because people, by and large, aren't the nice and decent folks that the media would have you think. Christmas TV shows are fantasy and I'm convinced that Norman Rockwell was in the Twilight Zone. With the exception of my wife, my family, a few friends in Lafayette and elsewhere, and a few of my former students, I trust nobody. Everyone's got an angle and, if you leave it to them, you'll find out what it is after you've lost something and they're gone.

Do to others as you would have them do to you. I'm not one for quoting Bible verses, but this one is Luke 6:31 (I had to look that up) and is called the Golden Rule. I learned it in elementary school, as did most kids in America, and elsewhere it's called the Law of Reciprocity, defining a moral philosophy about social conduct. It doesn't define good or bad behavior, but rather it defines the approach each person has toward how they wish to be treated.

It doesn't work. Been there, done that, got the T-shirt. The foundational problem with it is that it assumes that people have a driving moral philosophy. Aside from the philosophies of consumption and getting something for nothing I haven't seen an overwhelming supply of moral philosophy in most people. The Golden Rule only works if everybody particiaptes, or, perhaps, if the belief that one person changing the world is true. In my experience, if you act trusting to people then you just become a doormat for every con artist, scammer, and charlatan coming down the pike. So, applying the Golden Rule to myself, I should expect everyone to question what I say, wonder about my motives, and require proof of claims I make before believing me. Perfectly reasonable. So the Golden Rule, in actuality, works for me now whereas it didn't earlier. Unfortunately, the context in which the Golden Rule is usually conveyed includes a moral statement on the benefits of being good, trusting, and believing in the goodness of mankind. That's the part that doesn't work. It's fine to be good -- I'm not a saint but I'm far from evil -- but it gives kids unreasonable expectations of the future unless they live in a ghetto and see it from an early age.

So I'm 14 years older, somewhat wiser, a good deal more cynical, and I'm still getting stuff ripped off. Now, at least, I don't wonder why.

After the dismal turnout for Star Trek: Nemesis I was worried that my lust for seeing 20 foot high starships blowing things up would never again be sated. Conidering that Nemesis was an even-numbered Trek and was therefore immune to the odd-numbered-dud curse (ST:The Motion Picture, ST III, ST V, ST:Generations, and ST:Insurrection were all the weakest Trek movies), I was astonished at how small a turnout that Nemesis got. Nemesis wasn't ST II or First Contact, but it was a good Trek film. Perhaps it was Brent Spiner singing that Irving Berlin tune that did it...

At any rate, this new Trek film is going to focus on the Romulan Wars and the creation of the Federation. Sounds like my lust for excessive and superfluous violence will be pacified without having to watch a rerun of Lethal Weapon or another Schwarzenneger movie. As a side note, I wonder if they'll do Terminator 4 before the Governator gets out of office?

but you can never leave...

Here's a riddle: what does the Columbia Music Club, Gevalia Kaffe, and The Terminator have in common? Give up? Well, they don't. Ever.

I made the mistake of signing on for one of those "Buy 199 tapes for one penny!" deals back when I was about 14 or so. Back then it was then called the Columbia Record and Tape Club but it should have been called the Music Mafia. I think my parents still get mail from them addressed to me. It wasn't that the Club had lousy music selections, it was just that a $9.99 tape at Wal-Mart was $12.99 there and with their shipping and handling that rose to something like $18. For that much money the artist should have delivered it my door personally and held a concert in the front yard.

Now I found the latest one -- Gevalia Kaffe. Suckered in by that nice-looking coffeemaker that they give away for free (and it is nice, by the way, albeit plain), I find later that I've sold my soul to Juan Valdez. They just keep sending me coffee as if I grind up the beans and sprinkle them on my food daily. Their coffee is pretty good -- personally, I think Community whole-bean is better -- but they keep sending me coffee and will not stop, ever! I think that Sgt. Reese will have to travel back in time to stop me from signing up on their website before the Kaffe Terminator drowns me in a bucket of freshly-brewed dark roast.

I asked for them to wait longer periods of time between sending care packages. They didn't. I now have something like 16 or 18 packages of whole-bean coffee, most between 12 and 16 ounces, and I'm one of those who doesn't drink coffee after noon. Having coffee after noon for me is like an 8 A.M. martini. My problem is that I don't really get up early enough on most days to warrant brewing a pot of coffee -- the schedule of a professor is about the only thing I'll miss from the profession.

I told Gevalia to close my account. They offered me...free coffee! They're either moronic or they're insidious like drug pushers. "So you don't want the French Roast any more? You sure? You know you're gonna be hurtin' for it later. Well, how about we give you some Jamaican Dark Roast for free and see how you like that?"

I finally got them to quit sending me coffee. I changed my credit card number and then threw away the bills that kept coming from them. I also marked "REFUSED" on each shipping box of Gevalia that landed on my doorstep and sent it back to them. So now I don't have the coffee they sent, I don't get any more from them, and I have a collection agency sending me nasty letters for $50 of coffee that never got credited back to my account. Stop the insanity!

Herald Sun: Flash on the Titan [05jul04]

The article referenced above talks about the most recent (as of July 5, 2004) images taken by the Cassini space probe of Saturn's largest moon, Titan. It reports that NASA scientists have found an atmosphere, soil, and organic compounds that form the building blocks of life along with what they think is pure water ice. They liken Titan to a primordial Earth.

Lightning was the major catalyst on primordial Earth in forming the first amino acids, so I wonder if Titan has lightning? It has weather, because it rains on the moon...

So is this '2001' three years late or '2010' six years early and minus Roy Scheider? We'd better get working on HAL, seeing as how we can't even keep Windows up for longer than 24 hours without rebooting...

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

The title of this entry is actually from the Preamble of the Constitution, but it suits the day well. I wonder how far along we are since those words above were written 228 years ago? Every person will answer that differently, but it's something we should all consider. Are we living free and pursuing happiness? And if not, why? We owe it to ourselves, the ones we love, and the people who have died in combat to give us these unalienable Rights to answer that question.

In the meantime, read these if you haven't already. If you have, read them again. How can we be anything other than literate cattle if we don't understand what the Founding Fathers meant and how we as a country have interpreted this over the years?

Declaration of Independence: [Transcript] [Image]
United States Constitution: [Transcript] [Image]
Bill of Rights: [Transcript] [Image]
Amendments 11-27: [Transcript]

You put your left foot in

    You take your left foot out

You put your right foot in

    And you shake it all about

You do the Chokey-Pokey

    And you squirm all around

That's what it's all about...

Well, Microsoft has not only been pokey in coming up with a patch for the vulnerability in its Internet Information Service 5.0 software (IIS 5), but they finally laid their cards on the table yesterday and just completely choked in front of the entire planet. Talk about "while(1) { foot.insert(); foot.withdraw(); }"...

Do we install a patch? Do we fix the problem? Of course not. We disable the piece of Internet Explorer that the vulnerability uses! In other words, we break IE. The ADODB.Stream object is useful and is used in a number of web-based applications. The Microsoft Update for ADODB doesn't fix it -- it turns it off. So if you're one of the poor folks who actually needed it running then the update just hosed your application that needed it. Of course you could opt to not install the fix or uninstall it and then start donating money to the Russian mafia or whoever is behind this.

When I looked around at the CERT alerts and the website Microsoft has on Download.JECT I was stunned that I was having to kill ADODB.Stream and disable all Javascript, ActiveX, and Java. In one week we just took an amazing leap back to the state of the web in 1995. Time for the flip-flops and the lava lamps boys and girls, it's Retro Time! After reconfiguring IE as instructed, I couldn't download McAfeee virus updates, the download for Opera just flat-out wouldn't work (what a way to put it to the competition, eh?), and all of the fancy mouse rollover doodads I have on my website just lost their flair and are now dooduds.

Being generally disgusted, I downloaded and am now using Netscape. It still has Javascript and Java enabled, but ActiveX isn't built-in and from what I understand that's enough. Since I'm not using IE, websites don't try to use the ADO object at all and opt for the Mozilla equivalent. They say that 95% of the world uses IE; I guess opting for the road less traveled does make all the difference.