My trip to Germany

I'm currently in Germany, visiting my cousin, her husband (he's in the US Army), and their 3 kids.

My brother came down to visit last weekend, from London, and oddly, spent a lot of time at the train station as the rest of us worked out our trip to Rome. I feel kinda bad for him, but he got to play a lot of 20-questions with the kids, so that's not all bad, I guess.

I've got some pictures up from my camera, at my picture gallery, and more to add.

So far my thoughts are roughly, "Woah, I can drink German beer." and "German roads are scary."

Is it strange to go to a Mexican restaurant in Germany? It was pretty good, actually, though.

A few suggestions for Bush

Bush, our illustrious president for another 4 years, needs to rethink his positions on science, preemptive war, apologize for the mistakes made in Iraq, truly support the troops by ensuring that everyone, including the poor fucks known as the National Guard, have adequate body armor, armored vehicles and training.

He needs to apologize for Abu Ghraib and actually hold the people that should have been dealing with those matters responsible, not the enlisted men that were there, poorly trained and horribly understaffed (by a factor of 20, IIRC)

He needs to fire his energy secretary (the department that suppressed dissenting views on the applicability of certain items to nuclear technology in Iraq), fire his Attorney General and fire his Secretary of Defense (the department that didn't bother to plan out the aftermath of the war it was about to run)

He should reread the Constitution and the Federalist Papers to get an idea of what freedom is supposed to be all about, because he seems to have forgotten. He should pay special attention to the 1st ammendment, the 4th ammendment and the 5th.

If he wants to be truly remarkable, he should consider returning to the historical Republican values of limited government and supporting states' rights.

Salesforce.com and other things

This week at work, we rolled out an update to our flagship application, including integration into Salesforce.com for our customer service needs.

What strikes me as odd is the apparent lack of feedback from the users that will interact with the system on a daily basis, such as the development team that I am part of.

All I ask for in a ticket/case/bug tracking system is that it can operate entirely via email, so that I don't need to login to it.

Salesforce.com, well, can't do that.

So incredibly annoying.

Hell, it can't even provide the entire details of the case in 1-click from the notification emails, it's 1-click to view the case overview, then 1-click per 'detail' to get at all of it.

I really wish we had evaluated a real product, in use by literally thousands of people first - like, oh, say BugZilla maybe?

Hell, even RequestTracker would be doing a better job at the moment!

My Hardware Hell is Over

Turns out I had a bum CPU. I've had the replacement running full out on distributed.net stuff for most of the week, it's running around 50°Celsius, which is warm but not horrible, and it works just fine, so I'm happy.

Nooooooooooooooooooooo!

Simply indescribable, imo:
(Original url http://www.antville.org/img/conspir/nooooo!.jpg or maybe this blog)

Irony? Or do I have too much faith in the world?

I just randomly visited The Register today, to read an article about trojans having trojans in them, and saw a humorous, and hopefully either ironic or satirical, comment to end the article:

At least one security expert says there's a lesson to be learned from the whole affair. "It obviously says you should always use open-source Trojans," says Mark Loveless, a senior security analyst with Bindview Corporation. "That's the moral. You can't even trust Windows malware."

The worst part is how accurate it is...

Hardware hell redux

I think I've pinpointed my hardware problems - running memtest86 overnight with all tests turned on got me a single error in the same spot as the ones I got when I had the ram swapped out.

That definitely makes me think "bad motherboard", so it goes back to the store to get that replaced.

Wish me luck!

New toys at work

At work, we've been switching to using BitKeeper instead of CVS - I'm even more impressed than I was when just using it as a lazy way to download updates to the Linux kernel to play with at home.

It's odd to feel inclined to do real work just to have an excuse to play with the tool involved.... but then again, my current project is to replace all text strings in our main product (ADX) with calls to gettext.... which is an incredibly boring task.

If only I could figure out why xgettext has no facility to set the character set (encoding? Whatever UTF-8 should be called.).... I'd love a way to get rid of the crapload of warnings that ends up causing me.

Hardware failure hell

For the last several weeks I've been battling a series of failing hardware - seemingly a losing battle, as well.

Last weekend I got angry at the server I've been using to host my email and such for years (An ABIT-BP6 with Dual Celeron 466s in it.), so I went out and bought an Athlon 64, case, power supply, memory to use to replace something.

I ended up (after several failures at other ideas) replacing my gaming machine with that, and moving harddrives around in other hardware so that everything else works.

First, I have to reinstall Windows XP on it (not really sure why), then after I do that, it still has spontaneous crashes to deal with, which may have been related to the bad ram I had.

Now it appears the gaming machine has killed its harddrive. sigh