Outright Rant

While We're At It, I Invented The Web

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January 8th is the birthday of tags, according to the Technorati web log. I have one major problem with this: It might be the second anniversary of tags on Technorati but sites like del.icio.us had them first. Mr. Sifry even says that in the post, which puzzles me because it contradicts the message in the rest of the post: that Technorati invented tagging. The “Technorati Buzz” email said the same thing, only minus any mention of prior art. It’s nice to see that stealing credit is alive and well in 2007. Cluelessness thrives, too: The beauty of tags is that they’re metadata: data about data. What does that mean? Tags actually describe their subject, as opposed to, say, keywords, which …

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Yup, Yahoo! TV Sucks

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It’s very interesting that I went to Yahoo! TV today for the first time in probably a year, and upon finally arriving there[0] thought to myself three things: 1) What the heck did they do to this site? What’s with all the promos? 2) Where the heck are the actual TV listings? 3) What the heck did they do to the listings (once I found them, linking at the bottom of the page)? Why can I not get the listings to move except in specific three hour chunks, making it hard to see what’s on because I can’t get it to center on the current time? WTF? Then, no more than 10 minutes later, saw Jeremy Zawodny’s post about all …

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Only Keep What We Need

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Human beings tend to hoard things. There are various explanations for it, usually evolutionary. Wealth and possessions tend to be the first things we think of as “hoardable” but on a daily basis I interact with people who hoard data. In some places it seems to be an epidemic, a disease among IT departments and management, where folks try to collect, index, and retain gobs of data. I ask them “why do you need all this data?” and they reply with vague, ambiguous missives. They cannot even fathom not keeping track of absolutely everything. “You can never have too much data,” one fellow told me a few years ago. “You use the data when making decisions!” he uttered as if …

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OMFG, Commercials Are Sooo Dumb

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I don’t know what it is tonight, but I find myself watching television commercials more than usual, now that I’ve commented on other premature, white supremacist toilet brush commercials. The last commercial I noticed in the background was one from Glade. The final statement in the commercial is: “…and when the oil runs out the candle goes out.” Really? WOW! Maybe there’s a type of combustion that doesn’t require fuel. Which makes me think that if there is and the folks at Glade know about it they have the energy market cornered. Maybe they aren’t releasing it because it hasn’t passed various government safety tests. It’d suck trying to put out a fire caused by fuel-less combustion. Maybe it’s like …

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Christmas Already? And some KONE racism?

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I’m sitting on my couch catching up on my reading, and I have the television on in the background for noise. And… …a Christmas Tanqueray advertisement just played. I looked up because I heard the sweet sounds of “Deck the Halls.” WTF? We have — count them — eleven whole days until *Thanksgiving*. Every year we gain a couple more days of the Christmas season. This isn’t a bah-humbug sort of attitude. Similar to locking operations in software or XML tags, I like my holidays atomic. 🙂 I was stunned for a second following the Tanqueray ad, and ended up watching an advertisement for a new designer handheld vacuum, KONE, from Dirt Devil. “It’s beautiful enough to stay on display,” …

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My Favorite Problem Reports

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“Hey, there was a problem this afternoon with the application mail relay.” I adore anecdotal problem reports. Oh, there was a problem with the mail server? I’m sure I can find it in the 546,291 log entries for today. “Did you happen to note the error message?” I reply. “Would that help?” No. Error messages are just annoyances, and never to be recorded for troubleshooting. “Yeah, that’d be handy. Or, maybe you could tell me what time the error occurred.” “Hmmm, okay.” …two hours pass… “The error occurred again.” “What was the error?” “I don’t know but it’s happening on all of our web servers.” “You know, that’s actually the most helpful thing you’ve said.” There are really only three …

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A Shabby Updater

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I am not sure what the Apple Software Update is supposed to do, but it doesn’t seem like it works. Hmmm. So why does this window say there is new software available? Ah, yes, I see why there’s new software. iTunes has an update: I hope Apple Software Update can update itself.

Jackass Installer of the Week: Vista Upgrade Advisor

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I am trying to figure out if my desktop, currently running Microsoft Windows 2003 SP1, is going to be fine with Vista on it. But no! The Microsoft Vista Upgrade Advisor requires XP or Vista. Why in the flying fuck would it run on Vista and not the other Microsoft OSes? If you are running Vista you already know how compatible it is, right? The proper response would be to display a dialog indicating that there will be no in-place upgrade path from Windows 2003 to Windows Vista. Then it should continue to figure out if your system is compatible. I’d have preferred that over the snubbing I got. But what do I know? I only have to use this …

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Kidding Me

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You have got to be kidding me. Somebody wrote a half-assed tutorial on setting up a DHCP server and it made the front page of Digg? I crap better example dhcpd.conf files. You know damn well what I’m doing tomorrow. I am going to fight back with my own tutorial. Speaking of which, I need to update my IPMI tutorial. Thankfully Red Hat obsoleted most of it. But for now, sleep! P.S. No, I am not linking to digg or the tutorial. I don’t want to encourage them.

"You Chose Poorly" says the dumb installer

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I hate things that make my life difficult. Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0 does just that. Its installer will not install the product on Windows Server 2003, which is what my desktop happens to be. I argue that Windows Server 2003 is higher than Windows XP SP2 (for many uses of the word “high”). This crap drives me nuts. I can see a company saying that they don’t want to support their product on certain OSes, but just tell people “This is an unsupported OS and we will not help you when you have problems.” Then give them the option to install anyhow. Sometimes I can cheat and have Windows run apps in “compatibility mode” where it pretends to be XP. …

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