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News ·Monday June 11, 2007 @ 20:16 EDT (link)

A collection of random things (heading refers to Word co-authoring "slogan"; I forget who said it originally but I printed out copies for the feature crew).

First, some rants:
  1. I'm annoyed at the state of Linux NES emulators: most are about 5 years abandoned and horribly documented. (I suppose the closed source crowd will crow something about free lunches.) FCE Ultra is supposed to be one of the best, but it looks like it died and then an attempted revival in 2006 also died. In its current state, very few games work; most fail with a gray screen. I'll try one of the better-supported Windows versions (perhaps Nesticle), but that of course means I can't play using the TV, just my laptop, my only Windows box (actually dual).

  2. Windows is an intolerably lousy piece of software for requiring a reboot after changing the domain/workgroup. True, it has gotten much better in that it requires a reboot for far fewer things than, say, NT 3.51, but that's faint praise. Changing the domain should be a minor change to the system. It's personally annoying since I have to switch between my work domain to work remotely and my local workgroup to share files over my internal network.

  3. Speaking of working remotely, IT Connection Manager, the software I use to connect to my work VPN, is also intolerably lousy: it frequently gets "wedged" into a state where it can't connect any more (even after being restarted), and (this I've mentioned before) the "smart" access card needs to be removed somewhere between 2 and 4 seconds into the "checking password" phase, or the password check will count to infinity.

Here's a fun story about personal responsibility (from July 2005, because I dredged through my 'to log' email archive):
Recently a woman called me and said she had no idea who I was but she had been told by someone—she couldn't remember who—that I give money to people like her. The woman said that she and her husband had nine kids and had moved to a desert in the Middle East. Now they were having difficulty supporting themselves because, well, they had nine kids and had moved to a desert. She figured the best solution was to call me and ask if I would support the entire family indefinitely. If you have nine children and think it's a good idea to move to the desert it is fair to say that you are not a good decision maker. So the question I had to ask myself was this: If I gave her money, would she be more likely to a) use it to feed and educate her children, or b) grunt out nine more children and move to a dislodged glacier floating in the Arctic Ocean?

The interesting part of the conversation came after I politely declined her invitation to fund the nonstop production of doomed babies. She got mad at me. Apparently she analyzed her situation and came to the conclusion that the root cause of her problem was the unwillingness of total strangers in other countries to give her money. And her solution to that problem was to get angry.
(Yes, of course it's probably a scam, but if it is it's a particularly stupid one.)

And finally something I only wanted to jot down here so I wouldn't lose it again (from December 2005), about fixing the NTLM authentication on Apache. Also remember: only \ ("\\") works in domain\user (not /; the LWP::Authen::Ntlm module doesn't like it); use keep_alive => 1; the proxy messages in the log mean nothing; LWP::UserAgent needs to be fixed to have $realm set to '' if it's undef in get_basic_credentials; credentials() must be called with 'server:port(not optional)', '', 'domain\user', 'password'; the "Negotiate" protocol warning can be ignored. Term::ReadPassword is nice for password input.