Entries from January 2008 ↓

It is your responsibility to protect yourself and those you care about. It is not the responsibility of the police to protect you from anything. They are not knights in shining armor — they are often the janitors who clean up after the crime is committed. They are not legally culpable for crimes being committed and not legally held responsible — rarely even for crimes they commit themselves.

And so, in these great states you must fight for your right — your responsibility — to protect yourself. Minnesota and Washington are both “shall issue” states. This means that the Sheriff “shall issue” handgun conceal/carry permits to all who apply, unless there is danger in doing so as defined by law. Typically the danger is described as a history of mental illness, violent criminal convictions (including domestic abuse), etc. This is to prevent the crazies and crooks from getting permits to carry guns. Of course, they will carry anyhow if they have one, but won’t be doing so legally.

What does it mean if you don’t live in a “shall issue” state? It means that the Sheriff may — and most often will — deny your request for a conceal/carry permit for absolutely no reason whatsoever. Before Minnesota passed its “shall issue” law in 2002 or 2003, Hennepin County Sheriffs would refuse anyone without a law enforcement background regardless of an absolute lack of criminal record, mental illness, or any reasonable reason to deny a permit. The logic is nonexistent.

I got home today and read the following on SLOG:

So last night, I was innocently minding my own business (and maybe a little bit of the business of my friendly companion) when I experienced the most terrifying interaction I have ever had with a street person.

I was walking on Broadway to the Harvard Exit to see Persepolis and I was walking in front of the old, closed down QFC. A man approached me and asked if he could have some money. He was about 6’3”, Asian or Native, and wearing the typical uniform of a street person—dirty baggy clothes of an indeterminate blue-green-grey-brown-tan.

I refused to give him any money. Walking down Broadway, I’d already been asked for money four times. I didn’t have any money to give. Just cards. And, in any case, I don’t give panhandlers money. Sometimes I will buy traveling kids some food, but that’s it.

In any case, he began to follow me, calling me names.

“Fuck you, bitch!”

I rolled my head back on my neck and groaned to my companion. I can deal with “Fuck you, bitch.”

“You fucking slut!”

Again, been there, done that.

“I’m gonna…”

This is where it started to get truly obnoxious.

“I’m gonna grease your asscrack up with Vaseline and fuck you like the bitch you are!”

This is the part of the conversation where, if I had been born the way God originally planned, I would have reared my big fucking tall head around, asked this motherfucker to repeat himself, and when he did, beat the living shit out of him.

But through some freak accident, I was born into the body of a tiny little girl. And we were late for the movie. And my friend is probably not into confrontation (I didn’t ask). So I did nothing. I just kept walking.

I regret it. Generally, I don’t like to let people get away with threatening to violently rape me.

But here’s where I start to run into problems: What could I have done? Told him off? Probably a bad idea. He was obviously fucked-up and a lot bigger than me and my friend. Called the cops? Then, I would have had to wait until they got there to give a statement, if they ever came. What if he just walked away while I sat in Pagliacci’s and waited?

They all seem like dead ends. The only thing I could come up with is taking a picture of him with my cameraphone next time I see him and putting it on Slog.

This is absolutely abhorrent, particularly with the recent shootings and stabbings in Capitol Hill and nearby. If the Seattle PD doesn’t take unprovoked threats of violence seriously, no one should expect them to take actual violence seriously. No one will protect you from this guy or others. You must take into your own hands the responsibility to protect your life (and/or anal virginity.) Buy a pistol. If you live in a “shall issue” state, get yourself a conceal/carry license. Learn how to use it. Visit a pistol range often to get comfortable with it. Learn how and when not to use it.

As stated by someone in the comments of that post, someone who has less to lose than you is a potential threat — especially when they are threatening to rape you. Do not settle for pissing them off by attempting to spray their eyes with pepper spray unless you don’t feel capable of carrying (legally) a gun. In either case, you must follow through with reporting the incident to the police. Failure to do so is a breach in your responsibility to maintaining the safety of your community. Standing by and doing nothing when someone is violently threatened is a breach in your responsibility as an onlooker. The streets will be ruled by Those People™ unless law-abiding citizens stand together united against them. But first, individuals must be willing to stand up, themselves, to the trash that threatens their safety.

Learn the law. Arm yourselves. Defend yourselves, then we may defend ourselves.

In related news, Friday morning I will be applying for my Washington conceal/carry permit.

Below is a detailed “how to” by myself, based on my experiences with doing so. These instructions are most helpful for someone meeting the following criteria:

• You own a Mac or will be using one during the jailbreaking process.
• You are a legitimate AT&T customer and wish only to jailbreak your phone, not unlock it.
• You have an iPhone, NOT an iPod Touch.
• You have at least a little familiarity with How Things Work™

Okay, so to get started, there are some things you should do in preparation for this procedure:

• Legitimately upgrade your iPhone to 1.1.3 via iTunes but be sure to backup/sync first — this will allow, if nothing else, for you to restore to a working 1.1.3 with your contacts and such intact.
• Download the iPhone 1.1.1 firmware from Apple
• Download lockdownd (you may need this for activation later.)
• Download the Mac 1.1.3 jailbreak package maker
• Download iNdependence v1.3.2 beta

And now on to the fun:

1. If you updated to 1.1.3 as you should before you started, you now have a legitimate, activated, jailed 1.1.3 phone. Congratulations, you’ve made it past the first step.
2. Now, go to this wonderful illustrated guide to downgrading and follow ONLY steps 1 and 2.
3. After you complete step 2, you now have a jailbroken 1.1.1 phone with Installer. Do not be frightened if you get messages about your SIM not being recognized, and that you do not have phone service yet. We will deal with that later.
4. Open Installer and, under System, install BSD Subsystem, OpenSSH, and vt100-term. Close installer — springboard (the main menu program thing) will restart.
5. Now, open the jb113 image and run “Run_This” — follow the instructions and hit enter when prompted, to patch and upload your 1.1.3 firmware image.
6. When prompted by “Run_This” go back into Installer, find and install the “1.1.3 soft upgrade” package under System. The correct one has Nate True as the contact. It will take more than a few minutes to install, so be patient. It likely will delay half-way, that’s fine. If you get a “main script execution” error, just dismiss it.
7. Your phone should now reboot (you may need to do so yourself in some cases), and when you get back to springboard you will see a message informing you of how to use your new jiggly icons, and you should see Installer next to your iTunes Store icon.
8. Dance a little jig of 1.1.3-jailbreaky-success.
9. Open up Installer and re-install BSD Subsystem, vt100-terminal, and OpenSSH.
10. If your phone is not activated and you have no phone service as a result, SCP that lockdownd file you downloaded earlier to /usr/libexec on your phone. Then, restart your phone. iTunes should open and you should automatically activate.

You should now have a jailbroken 1.1.3 phone with the Google LocateMe-compatible baseband, and phone service.

Update: Steps 5-7 have been deprecated, you should use the “official” jailbreak method instead of Nate True’s.

Jailbroken 1.1.3 firmware with 04.03.13_G baseband (working Google LocateMe) and phone service!

I am never touching this phone’s software again.

At my prodding (surely..), Macworld has done some less starry-eyed reporting on the MacBook Air and compared it to previous Mac models.

Yes, it is in every way, the slowest Intel Mac ever released.

Of course, the MacBook Air’s appeal is not about blazing speeds, but about small size and weight. However, these tests do give some indication about what level of performance users will have to give up if they’ve decided to forego a MacBook or MacBook Pro for the thin embrace of the MacBook Air.

After revealing the expected results of their testing, Macworld sputtered about how “b..b..but.. people expect portability from the m..m..MacBook Air, not performance!!1″ and failed to mention that the MacBook Air is not more portable than the vanilla MacBook, simply thinner. It will take up just as much room when you attempt to use it on an airplane in coach. It is only thinner. But, for those of you especially eager to enjoy UT2004 (p.s. it is now the year 2008) at under 20 FPS, the MBA is only $1800!

Oh, and it’s thin.

So, yesterday the firmware 1.1.3 jailbreak for the iPhone was released. After work I sped home as fast as the bus would allow, and went about turning my iPhone into a brick.

First, I updated via iTunes to 1.1.3 to upgrade the baseband to the latest version so that I would be able to use the Google MyLocation goodness. Then, I downgraded to 1.1.1 and jailbroke it. Unfortunately, at this point I received a message saying my sim was unrecognized / couldn’t be activated. I updated to the 1.1.3 hacked firmware, and my sim was still fucked up. So, I had a jailbroken 1.1.3 phone with no phone service. Fairly useless to me.

I downgraded and upgraded a few times, in an attempt to get back to a jailbroken 1.1.1 state with phone service, to no avail, as my attempts to downgrade the baseband failed. I just resorted to restoring to a pristine 1.1.3 — non-jailbroken — for now, just to restore my phone service.

So, I have jiggly icons now, and Google LocateMe, and phone service, but no Installer.app.

Edit: Yet.

The “Cult of Mac” is a group of Apple fanbois that refuse to acknowledge downsides to Apple products. While I own a MacBook Pro, use a MacBook at work, and talk/listen/play on my iPhone, I am not a member of that cult. To be a member of the Cult of Mac, one needs to be able to ignore the shortcomings of Apple products while blindly praising those same faults or flaws as “innovative design.”

Case in point, the MacBook Air. It has worse specs than a vanilla MacBook, costs nearly twice as much, has only one USB port, no RJ45, no firewire, no optical drive, a slow-ass 4200 rpm harddrive, and a user-non-replaceable battery. Look at everything that you don’t get for $1800! Oh, but it’s thin. The only up-side is that it is the first MacBook available with a solid-state harddrive. Unfortunately, that would bring the cost up to over $3,100. At that price you could get a 17″ MacBook Pro with FAR better specs, ports, massive fast harddrive, superdrive, and an iPhone. Or, you can get something that’s really thin.

…

Nevertheless, the Apple fanbois eat this shit up. “It’s clearly for on-the-go businesspeople who don’t need cables!!1″ they say, nevermind that businesspeople who are on the go and stay at hotels which provide ethernet access but charge extra for wireless. Nevermind that they are still shackled to the wall since users cannot replace their own batteries, and so must charge up a single battery over and over again until someone from an Apple store replaces it for you — likely having to ship it to California first to do so.

The next most popular theory is that it is for use as a “second Mac” — clearly not as a primary machine! What, exactly, is the benefit of it as a second Mac when compared to a MacBook? The MacBook is nearly as small, faster, has firewire for direct-connecting to another Mac, video out, ethernet, an optical drive, etc. The only thing that the Air has going for it is that it is thin, and unless you routinely need to shove laptops into inter-office envelopes, that is a completely useless trait when compared to the perfectly acceptable thickness of the MacBook and MacBook Pro lines.

And now, I move on to OS X. Touting it as the “World’s Most Advanced Operating System” is abso-fucking-lutely retarded. All it is, is a lovely front-end for a *nix system and that is why I use it. There is one application which makes OS X worthwhile, and one only — Terminal. If Terminal were removed in a patch, OS X would become completely useless for anyone who desires to do something beyond reading their email and browsing websites in Safari. Terminal grants you access to all of the functionality which all UNIX/BSD-derivatives have but which the front-end in OS X refuses to let you even see. Perhaps OS X will be able to legitimately claim to be the “World’s Most Advanced Operating System” when they start enabling power-users to utilize the full functionality of the underlying operating system without having to rely on Terminal to do so. Instead, we get a fucking 3D dock with window contents reflecting off of it. Wow. Windows XP Pro is more “advanced” than OS X when it comes to features an average user has access to.

Today I read on tuaw that the rude, unprofessional, immoral jackass David Watanabe was up to his usual behavior by rigging results and hiding affiliate codes within his Inquisitor app. No, I won’t provide a link to his app.

Sure, it is free software. The moral issue is not that he is profiting off of his software, it is that he is rigging search results (while implying that they are direct from Google) with links to sites containing his affiliate link at the top so that he gets maximum kick-backs. It’s a half-step above malware, and Watanabe has a history of similar practices (along with what amounts to theft of registration fees.)

So, do not buy or use any software made by David Watanabe. This includes Inquisitor, Acquisition, or xTorrent (a $20 rip-off of the free, open-source Transmission torrent lib. who pays for torrent clients?)

I got the .. ahem .. Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, The Motion Picture Soundtrack (gasp for breath) from Amazon (in DRM-free mp3 format) for the same price as iTunes’s DRM-crippled copy.

Furthermore, the Amazon copy was several dollars cheaper — yes, less expensive — than the CD version. Hopefully Amazon is wildly successful with their digital content distribution and sets an example to be followed by others. I don’t care about packaging any longer. I don’t have space for jewel cases or tray liners. I don’t want to throw away more boxes and wrappers. All I want is the music, fast, and inexpensive. Amazon mp3 delivers this.

My only complaint is that once you download something, I don’t believe there is a way to re-download it (which should be possible considering that you’ve already paid for it.) I don’t believe this is possible with iTunes either, which is equally as silly.

Edit:
Another good reason to go with Amazon over iTunes — DRM-free iTunes mp3s rat you out by having your name encoded within the mp3 file. Fuck that. On a side note, the following quote from the comments of the link just above is hilarious:

anthony.picciano said…
Just think of it like the free laser etching. Now you name can be etched onto each song as well as your iPod. For free!

A forum which I admin (and recently upgraded to phpBB 3.0.0 — which I adore) needed a fairly robust backup solution. So, I set up a couple of simple shell scripts to dump the database, tar/gzip the filestructure and database file, and move those archives to a separate directory structure for backups on a second harddrive.

However, the issue remains that if something happens to that machine, somehow zapping both harddrives, we would be fucked. So, I needed a way to get those backups from the server and onto my machine on a nightly basis. Initially I wrote a little PHP script to make use of the FTP functions and just get things that way. FTP turned out to be disabled on the server, which led me to use the more-secure SCP. As SCP doesn’t have a way to pass the password within the command, I needed a way to run the command, then provide a password, then wait for it to trasnfer the files I wanted. Enter, expect.

Expect provides a way to run a command and interact with it as if you were at the keyboard. It is pretty nifty, and I ended up using the script below to SCP relevant archives onto my machine on a nightly basis. All automated scheduling thanks to cron of course.

#!/usr/bin/expect —

set timeout 1200
set USER “username”
set PASS “p4ssw0rd”
set HOST “host.name.com”
set REMOTEPATH “/home/username/location/of/files”
set LOCALPATH “/home/othername/place/to/put/files”

spawn scp $USER@$HOST:$REMOTEPATH/*.tar.gz $LOCALPATH
expect “Password:”
send — $PASS\r
expect eof

Yesterday I met up with Graham for the first time — we planned to have some Thai food and see Sweeney Todd at Lincoln Square. But, what? I’ve already seen it! Yes yes, but I didn’t mind seeing it again (without chair-kicking fuckwits behind me) and Graham worked backstage of the show before and wanted to see the film version. Also, Johnny Depp.

We met at Bellevue Square, at a fountain outside of Macy’s. He came from the parking garage across the way and I from within the mall, so there was an awkward moment where I recognized him before he recognized me. I gave him a couple small gifts (a totally-gay deck of playing cards and some Japanese candy) for late-Christmas which broke the ice a bit before dinner.

Before we saw the movie, we walked a (round-and-)round-about route to a nice Thai restaurant in Bellevue named Chantanee. I had the “Princess Favorite Chicken” which was chicken in yellow curry with cashews, broccoli, and carrots. Tasty tasty! I’m not sure if Chantanee is better than Buddha Ruksa, but it easily beats the piss out of any Thai places near Southcenter, or what I remember of Sawatdee in Minneapolis. The staff was very friendly and we were out of there sooner than expected.

So, we arrived at the theatre about 45 minutes early and to kill time fed $4.50 of tokens into Jurassic Park III, a really bad light-gun game. We fought a Spinosaurus and the fucker went down three times before he finally died and our in-game avatars tried to hide their man-love feelings from each other as the credits ran. Graham had triple my score at one point, but if anyone asks, I let him win to be polite.

After the movie I waited for the 55x back to Seattle and as I boarded a bus the driver shooed me away from the fare box and instead asked me to sit up front and talk to him. That was a bit.. odd.. but I obliged. I guess he thought he was doing me a favor saving me $2.50, but I already paid up-front for my bus pass, so /shrug. He seemed a nice-enough old guy, though clearly a bit sad and lonely. We discussed my move to Seattle from Minneapolis, differences between the two cities and Bellevue, and the impending light rail system before he dropped me off and I walked home.

All in all it was an enjoyable evening. Graham is a very nice fellow. Bellevue is also surprisingly lovely — everyone I encountered was polite and friendly. Even the people with little kids went out of their way to be courteous.