jason thurber's blog

Dear Sirs:

Some day you will move me almost to the verge of irritation by your chuckle-headed, goddamned fashion of shutting your goddamned gas off without giving any notice to your goddamned parishioners. Several times you have come within an ace of smothering half of this household in their beds and blowing up the other half by this idiotic, not to say criminal, custom of yours. And it has happended again today.

Haven’t you a telephone?

Ys
Samuel L. Clemens (a.k.a. Mark Twain)
A letter to the gas company; February 12, 1891

Found it here.

I enjoyed this Editorial. I sort of wish it wasn’t about Macs (the religious aspect clouds the underlying content), but there you are.

From Doc Searls:

I’ve signed so many nondisclosure agreements in my life that I’m surprised my reflection still appears in mirrors.

Most of those agreements were required by a corporate paranoia about competitors – or anybody – “stealing” an idea. In most cases, however, there was no real cause for fear, because everybody qualified to steal the idea was 1) too busy trying working on their own ideas, and 2) possessed by the belief that their own ideas are, prima facie, better than everybody else’s ideas.

I used Fink (install linux packages on OSX) to install Subversion (a CVS improvement/alternative) on the 12in PowerBook on Wednesday. The process went quite smoothly, particularly when you consider that this is the only install/compile I’ve ever seen where the compile took 4 hours. In my experience something that takes 4 hours to compile doesn’t usually finish, but at the end of all that time I had a handful of subversion binaries that work on OS X. (Now, I’ve written 3000 line PL/SQL procedures that ran for 24 hours, but that’s a whole different ball game. My stored procs were simply free of any hint of optimization while I think Fink’s approach to creative de-optimization was to compile everything in the world… the darwin kernel, itself, do a bit of seti, encode some mp3’s, then compile svn 😉 … then discard 9.9/10th’s of it… but it did work, so I’m really not complaining.)

As an aside, Subversion may have jumped the gun a bit in shutting down their cvs repository while still requiring that you get an svn binary in order to bootstrap and get latest… bit of a chicken and the egg problem that could have been avoided by putting an old source tree on cvs? I say this only because it looks like they specifically shut down their cvs repository a few releases ago. I don’t know the whole story, but it looks like the client-side of the binaries totals to a grand 2mb zipped. That’s a lot of Fink compiling for a little app…

This afternoon I was back at the Fink site reading their docs to see if Fink was a simple method for creating OSX installers (I’ll save you the trouble, it’s not) and found this email exchange between the Fink and OpenOSX project owners. Some highlights:

Well, what you did can be roughly compared to downloading RedHat Linux from their ftp site, making some minor modifications (say, new boot disks and a streamlined installer), and then selling the result on CDs without mentioning RedHat in any way.

>Fink doesn’t install XDarwin or X-Windows for you, our product does.

Look again. Fink _can_ install XFree86 for you, even the months-old
version you’ve used. (So much for assumptions.)

Anyway, I thought it was a good read.

Reminds me of some of the fun Alex has been having recently.

More Photo.net goodness:

When shopping decisions are easy, it’s because there’s a clear distinction. Like Goldilocks, we can see that one’s too this, one’s too that, and one’s just right. However, when shopping decisions get harder and harder, it’s usually because all the choices are getting closer and closer together, and one choice doesn’t jump out as being clearly better than the others. This should make shopping decisions less important. Or so I’d think.

Strangely, though, what this makes people do is buckle down and work harder and harder to reach their conclusions Ñ and then it makes them doubly partisan and belligerent about the rightness of their choice. What’s the point here? Ego? Arguing for the sake of argument?

For Pete’s sake. Here’s the question: You’re considering three competing cameras. They’re all decent. Which one should you buy? And here’s the right answer: one of ’em.

From John Robb’s Radio Weblog (thanks Scott).

A war for liberation requires that we arm, train, and support freedom fighters in Iraq. We haven’t even tried to do that. We didn’t even start serious talks with the Iraqi National Congress until last week. The Kurds have languished in silent obscurity until recently. The propoganda we sent into Iraq doesn’t (as far as I have seen) incite people to revolt. Clearly, the US military didn’t want to deal with armed freedom fighters in the post Saddam military protectorate. We didn’t want their participation. Our inaction means that a popular revolt won’t happen. It can’t happen. This portion of the US strategy is clearly schizophrenic. We want popular support, but we don’t really want it because it can get out of hand. – Source Blog

This guy is worth reading!

I really do enjoy The Onion.