I’m a packrat. Especially when it comes to email and logs from conversations, I’m obsessive. I’m like a Gareth on steroids when it comes to these things. I have no idea why, but for instance, my email right now takes 613 megabytes. I have email dating back to July, 2001 (I did have email dating back to the 1900’s but unfortunately I lost it). In fact, here are the subject lines and dates of the 10 oldest emails I have — by topic (i.e. I’ve excluded all the replies and replies-to-replies on some of the entries):

1. [Tue July 31, 2001]: Re: SV: SV: SV: SV: SV: SV: SV: SV: Historia.
2. [Sat October 20, 2001]: Welcome to Skotos! (No, that email was actually for a second account I created, because I’d forgotten my first account’s login info)
3. [Mon October 22, 2001]: XYZ account
4. [Mon October 22, 2001]: test banner
5. [Tue October 23, 2001]: Prelim rooms
6. [Wed October 24, 2001]: marble texture
7. [Thu October 25, 2001]: loki_update-full-… issue
8. [Thu October 25, 2001]: SV: And the hunt goes on…
9. [Fri October 26, 2001]: TWiki - Registration for SerConvoitise
10. [Wed October 31, 2001]: Your login details for Skotos Forums

Phew. Some of those seriously made me twitch. Let’s see if anyone can beat me (I bet Nino can, maybe, but not sure).

My mother and I decided that the free “movie” tickets we received those months ago should not go to waste — you know the ones that require Windows? Anyway, since I do have a lap top with Windows preinstalled on it (I would rather assfuck a snail than pay money for Windows, pardon the french) we figured we might as well hook it up to my monitor/speakers and watch some movies.

So she came over and, cunningly, she brought her knitting… stuff, with her. For various reasons, the rest of this post is in bullet form. Enjoy!

1. I plug my wireless thing, my monitor and my speakers into my lap top and boot up. The wireless keyboard does not work. I use the laptop keyboard “for now”.
2. I give up on the “for now” concept, pull the wireless thingie, plug in my wired keyboard and mouse. Nothing’s happening. It died? I end up doing the “hold-it-fer-five-secs-m8″ trick to force a reboot. My mother is getting the hint, and pulls out her knitting stuff and goes at it. I admire her foresightfulness.
3. Computer finally gets back up, but that reboot took 10 minutes, what the fuck? Anyway, the wired keyboard + mouse work now at least, imagine that. I log in and start up Firefox and head over to sf-anytime.com.
4. *meep* They require Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 or above. I knew that’d happen. I happen to have IE 7 installed. I try to start it up…
5. And then I try to start it up again.. thinking maybe Windows didn’t actually realize that when I clicked on that icon I wanted it to start — if I click it again, maybe it will get the hint.
6. And then I try to start it up again, thinking that it might, just might, have missed the fact twice.
7. Reboot. Or, attempt to. Everything’s frozen. 5-second-killer-c-c-c-combo!
8. Back inside, I decide to do a Windows Update. Ha! Thought I! Windows Update uses IE which, currently, does not work very mightily.
9. I cunningly decide to open Firefox, head to sf-anytime.com, and tada! There’s the “if you want to upgrade to IE, click here” link. Yeah, I want to upgrade to IE. Upgrade. Yes. Let’s upgrade ourselves, because upgrading ourselves to IE is such an upgrade. Anyway, I download IE via the functional browser, Firefox, and start up the installer.
10. It wants to make sure I have a valid version of Windows, for my sake, so that I may buy a legal version in case I was handed a dirty one. So thoughtful of them! Now it wants to reboot.
11. Okay, we’ve rebooted. That took 10 minutes. I log back in and it wants to delete the old version of IE. Fair enough, I prefer a clean upgrade. Ha.. haha. It takes 10 minutes to remove the old version. (What on earth? I’m beginning to suspect the hardware is fried on this thing, except that it works perfectly fine in linux, and while, as we all know, linux is superior in every single way, shape and form, it does not have the ability to magically use broken hardware.) It wants to reboot. Wow, this reminds me of when I was a little ignorant and exceptionally dumb boy who used Windows .. what was it? 95? I think so. Anyway, I quickly grew up. Moving along.
12. We’ve rebooted again. It wants to install IE now. Yay! Finally we’re agreeing about something. Well, sort of anyway. It seems stuck.
13. We’re waiting for it to unstick itself. I am beginning to recall my Windows l33t-ness which is a Zen-monk’s patience incarnate. Yes sir. Meanwhile, I’m explaining to my mother whose wide-eyed, incredulous stare has been glued to the monitor (all the while knitting away on whatever it is she’s knitting) for all this time that in Windows, it controls you, and you obey it. (She’s been using linux since she started using computers some 3-4 years ago. Exclusively. Windows scares her shitless, and believe me, it scares me shitless too.)
14. I decide to make some coffee while we wait. Suddenly my mother yells excitedly, “It’s finished! I think.” I look at it and, believe it or not, but the little shit rebooted! It didn’t even ask! What the hell? I log back in, and it starts doing some weird “Setting IE up, customizing your computer, optimizing the hyper drive”, whatever. I ignore it and drink my coffee. Afterwards, I am faced with a dialog telling me it wants to upgrade Windows. No, it needs to do so. Okay then, I let it.
15. 30 minutes later it’s done. We sat down to watch the movie at ~8 pm and it is now 10.30 pm. Will we finally get to see that movie? That remains to be seen.
16. I load up IE (it works this time) and head over to sf-anytime.com. Or I try. It seems Internet is down. Huh. I open up Firefox and go to google. It works in a flash. Hm. I close IE, reopen it, do not hit ESC to stop it from loading “blabla.msn.com” this time. Wait it out. It loads up fine. Try sf-anytime.com again, and this time it works. The wonders of Microsoft.
17. After installing a DRM thing (a little piece of my soul died when I clicked ‘install’), we finally got in, to see exciting titles such as …
18. … movies that were hip 20 years ago. That, and a few obscure titles from 2004. Is this a joke? The selection is pretty large, I give you that, but there’s literally nothing on there worth watching. My mother finally points out a movie (Zozo by Josef Fares) that she said I’d like, so we watch that one (super-condensed review: started out great, ended suckily). Or we try! Ha. Ha. Ha.
19. Or as Santa would put it - ho. Ho. Ho.
20. We are told that some DRM error occured. For some magical reason (I think it’s my ancient Windows intuition pinging me from someplace), I decide to upgrade Windows Media Player. I do so. I try again.
21. It works.
22. Except it’s now 11 pm.

I occasionally reflect upon my hatred towards Microsoft Windows. I mean, people do use it, and there has to be a reason. Sometimes, a friend of mine decides to switch over to linux, saying they’ve “had enough!”, and I help them out. But inevitably, they will come to a point where they think “Dude, this is just too much work. I’m thinking of installing Windows again,” and I always tell them the same thing: “Yeah, do so. You should use what feels best for you.” One thing is abundantly clear, however, and that is that I personally cannot use Windows. It’s following a philosophy that I can understand, but never agree with. The philosophy of “handling stuff for me”. This philosophy works great for an absolute beginner, but not so great for a person with a tiny bit of adventurism in them. Try to “play around” with Windows and you will kill Windows. And I’m completely ignoring things such as virii and worms and trojan horses and whatever have you. The way I see it, those will come to linux as well, when linux has a big enough player base. What I do believe though, is that it will take an idiot to get a virii in linux, and it will be more about fooling people than it will be about brute-forcing one’s way into another person’s operating system, as is the case with Windows.

Security holes exist in both places, and I remember one time when some Windows advocate said in response to an article, “Where are the linux people now?” Well, my answer to that question is, “We’re somewhere else, not giving a shit,” because the blown-up “security holes” mentioned in that article were for specific pieces of software. It’s a much bigger deal when a security hole applies to every single computer running a particular operating system (i.e. a kernel flaw), and you will find very few of those in linux. Unpatched, that is.

In any case, there you have it, my Windows experience for the year. And believe me, I am not looking forward to a second one. Those movie tickets I got (I have like 6 of them) will remain unused. If you find something at sf-anytime.com that you’d like to see, let me know, and I’ll get you a code, but you better hurry — they expire on new years, GMT+1.

When I signed up for my new ISP, I received 3 movie tickets as a thanks. That’s pretty nice. However, the movie tickets turned out to be movie tickets for “viewing movies online.” I.e. a movie industry move to tackle those pesky downloaders.

Unfortunately I don’t have Windows.

Unfortunately for them.

If they expect a consumer to support their business (i.e. not download stuff from the ‘net) and purchase their products, they had better try harder than this. The movie site which provides the movies (sf-anytime.com) dismisses its linux users indifferently, saying DRM technology is unsupported on the platform and thus, the linux users can go fuck themselves. Using their hard earned movie tickets, perhaps. The same, by the way, goes for the Mac users. Yessir, you wanna be legal and watch movies from home, you better be using Microsoft Windows. “With all the doubts of crystal clear,” as Peter Murphy puts it.
So I contacted my ISP, saying I would like reimbursement for the 3 tickets I got. They did reimburse me, a whooping $2 US or similar. (Though in their defense, those tickets are still valid — I just have to go to some funny friend who’s dumb enough to run Windows.) Gotta give it to them, though. I definitely didn’t expect them to give me anything at all.

Conclusively, the message from the Music and Movie Industry is clear. Download stuff online, as you have no other option. “Buy the DVD,” you say? Well, sure, but that, too is borderline illegal. The encryption algorithm for DVD playback has already visited court on one occasion, and who knows when that whale resurfaces. “Buy Windows,” you say, and I shall steeple my fingers and snicker.

Update (2006-08-20): I emailed my ISP telling them that my mother is in the exact same situation, and she, too, got the $2. Cute. (But to be honest, it’s actually not $2. It’s $1.39 according to the current exc. rates.)

When I switched to Debian those years ago, X apps done from a su’d user didn’t work. I in fact decided that they don’t work, period, and for a good reason, so I stopped using them.

Today, I installed FF 2.0, and really wanted it to not use (read: mess up) my default profile. Despite this, I didn’t want it to ask me which profile to use whenever I started it. I know, I’m lazy that way. So the “su doesn’t do graphical” issue reoccured. And this time I decided that I have a good enough reason to look into it.

Update: gksu basically fixes the issue. A launcher with ‘gksu -u testy /usr/local/lib/firefox-2.0b1/firefox’ is enough. gksu is a GNOME application, but has equivalents for KDE, at least.

http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/knowledgebase/index.cfm?id=6b3af6c9

Which other company would decide to not support newer hardware in this fashion? Adobe can go fuck themselves.

Stop using YouTube.

Stop using Google Video.

If you do that, I’ll give you $5. No seriously, I will.

So, gaim has started crashing several times an hour recently. It just decided to happen and it hasn’t stopped since. I’ve used it continuously for years, it’s crashed something like 2 times during all these years, and nowadays, it crashes 4-5 times/hour.

I keep thinking it must have something to do with my new AMD64 system, as a lot of other apps (e.g. Liferea) work flawlessly on a 32-bit machine, and barely start before they fall off their sticks on my AMD64 system. Oddly though, I’ve been using gaim since I got the machine back in June, and it’s only been acting up the last week or two.

What’s even more odd is that I upgraded temporarily to gaim 2 (the beta) and the problem remained. I’m now running on the SVN version of gaim 2, and hopefully things will be better now. I’m even considering finding alternatives, but I doubt anything out there beats gaim. :/

Update: *crash*

Renamed .gaim to .gay (I know, elementary school humor at its best) and re-entered all my account info. Running without all plugins, including OTR, so government nazi assholes of the world, here’s your chance to hear me speak really, really bad Japanese. A chance you mustn’t miss.

Update: *crash*

Testily compiled and started using gaim on the 32-bit environment instead. Man, it looks like shit, but if it stops crashing, who cares.

Update: *crash* (though I gotta give it to them, this time it stayed alive for over a day — trying again)

A few weeks later, I see this:

“Yesterday, Gaim started crashing for a bunch of people (most notably Windows users) when trying to connect a MSN account. This is due to a bug in Gaim which has been fixed in subversion (don’t use subversion), and we’re working on releasing a fix. We’ll keep you updated. In the meantime, feel free to commiserate with your fellow MSN-using Wingaim users. ” (from gaim.sf.net)
I am not a notable Windows user, admittedly, but it didn’t say exclusively — it said notably. Here’s to hoping…

A few months later, the gaim people claim to have fixed it. I am thrilled to hear that, and might actually give 64-bit a shot again. Gaim was the major reason why I gave up on it. Go Gaim peeps!

So, looking at my usage statistics for this blog, I see riiight at the very top:

#1. http://www.disney.com/

Now… someone, please explain to me why Disney is linking to my blog? *tilts*

Today I spent 13 hours (15 really, if you count the 2 hour pause in between) writing elisp extensions to Emacs for Skotos interaction. It was wonderful, and I was pleased. And the world smiled upon me…

So I tell Nino, the one person on this planet who actually might be impressed about this. But alas, he’s afk.

So my boss immediately goes into “afk” mode when I IM him the glorious news.

So Sahra starts talking about peacocks in spring when I tell HER the news.

I guess it’s not as big as I think it is. But man, I’ve wanted this for over a year. And now it’s in my grasp. Happiness!

http://enrogue.com/setp/ (link is broken and won’t come back up)

Sorry, I just had to brag about that one. Way cool. Next is WYSIWYG.

One thing I’ve noticed that is degrading over the years, is the fact that certain email applications are catching on on the translations. To put it simple…

Just because I prefer a certain language, does not mean everyone that I will ever ever email in my whole full entire life … prefers that same language. Let’s take an example. You write on a mailing list, I reply. I have Swedish language preferred. You see…

“Sön den 23 april kl. 08:13 -0600 skrev George:”

So much for a useful quoting header. I mean, sure, “Sön” might probably mean Sun(day). “23 april” isnt’ that hard to figure out. And at that point, you have it, but why would you have to? Isn’t this logic sorta flawed? This reaches a point of ridiculousness when you start using a language which does not use the regular alphabet, such as, say, Japanese, where most readers don’t know a single letter.

Conclusively, translating apps is a very good thing. Not that it ever really affected me as I always preferred English. But translations have to be logical. Translating something that will very likely be read by people with different language preferences than the user is a bad idea. I don’t care about the level of political incorrectness stating that English is the universal language right now, but there you have it.

Fighting for the rights of semi-translation since 1980.

(Yea, I admit this is more of a rant than anything else.)