Blackmoor Vituperative

This is pretty huge news. The Egyptian government has shut off the Internet there, in response to civil unrest which may be reach civil war proportions. And Egypt isn’t the only Middle Eastern country having problems.

I am not going to make any pronouncements or try to draw any conclusions from any of this. I will point out a couple of things, though. First, Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak has been in power for 30 years. I am probably typical (among Amercians, anyway) in thinking that this is too long for one person to hold that much power. Second, although the average Egyptian is poor, the Egyptian economy is in better shape now, and is less centralized, than it was 30 years ago. So would an Egyptian civil war make that better, or worse?

A revolution is a dangerous thing. The revolution which resulted in the creation of the United States of America is almost unique in how little it cost us and in how well it turned out (and it certainly wasn’t bloodless). People in the USA who call for overthrowing or even substantially changing our form of government should keep that in mind.

Be careful what you wish for.

Yesterday, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) rolled out new nationwide rules for traveler pat-downs. Want to keep your genitalia private by avoiding the new backscatter security scanners? You can request a pat-down instead, but the TSA is intent on making sure you won’t enjoy it. The new rules require agents to pay renewed attention to your crotch, and their hands won’t stop until they meet testicular resistance. (No word on quite how far they’ll go should you lack said testicles.)

[…]

But the new rules may not really be about “thoroughness” anyway, because “the obvious goal of the TSA is to make the pat-down embarrassing enough for the average passenger that the vast majority of people will choose high-tech humiliation over the low-tech ball check.”

(from Assume the position: TSA begins new nut-busting pat-downs, ArsTechnica)

This means that if you wish to take a commercial flight, you must submit to a search which is more invasive than that which is performed on a suspected murderer at the time of arrest. If you think I am exaggerating, call your local police and ask them.

If you do not have a Dropbox account, I would appreciate it if you would create one. For every person that does, using this link, they increase my file space quota a little bit. Plus, who knows, you may actually use it and like it.

I received some unfortunate news this morning.

Xmarks will be shutting down our free browser synchronization services on January 10, 2011. For details on how to transition to recommended alternatives, consult this page.

For the full story behind the Xmarks shutdown, please read our blog post.

Thank you for being a part of the Xmarks community; we apologize for any inconvenience this step may cause you. We believe we have the best users in the world, and we hope your bookmarks find a new and happy home soon.

This is really too bad. Xmarks has been one of the first add-ons I install when I get a new computer, for several years. I think it’s unfortunate that they did not try selling the service. There are people (like me) who pay for Fastmail.fm, despite the existence of Gmail. There are people (like me) who would pay for Xmarks.

Happy trails, Xmarks.

Where is the horizontal scrollbar in the left (navigation) pane? This annoys me no end.

Some disappointing news from the Ninth Circuit Court.

On Friday, 10 September, three judges in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, covering the nine western states of the US, handed down a decision that effectively means the end of the doctrine of first sale for commercial software. Speaking of the limited monopoly power granted by copyright law to a copyright holder, the 9th Circuit decision reads:

The exclusive distribution right is limited by the first sale doctrine, an affirmative defense to copyright infringement that allows owners of copies of copyrighted works to resell those copies. The exclusive reproduction right is limited within the software context by the essential step defense, another affirmative defense to copyright infringement that is discussed further infra. Both of these affirmative defenses are unavailable to those who are only licensed to use their copies of copyrighted works.

A fair bit of a fuss is being made over the restrictions imposed by this interpretation of the applicability of the first sale doctrine. Wired offers an article that focuses quite a bit of attention on the subject: Guess What, You Don’t Own That Software You Bought.

(from Court decision clamps down on our rights to software that we ‘own’, TechRepublic)

Hey, I won something from that silly out-of-sync video I made back in May. Pretty cool, eh?

You may be surprised to know that I have not always loved my job. Yes, it’s true. There have been days when I feel unappreciated, overworked, underpaid, disrespected… days when I just want to chuck my keyboard in a trash bin and go apply at the closest Starbucks.

Today is not one of those days. I am actually feeling pretty good about what I do for a living, and I am optimistic about the future. However, burnout is a real danger in IT, and it can have real effects on one’s health, happiness, and relationships. Tech Republic has an article about it. Why not read it, and take the burnout assessment quiz? It couldn’t hurt.

I got my start in computers by writing small applications in Basic, and then Visual Basic. In the late 1980s, I wrote a program that backed up selected directories by copying them, zipping them up, and writing them to floppy disks. In the early 1990s, I wrote macros to integrate PGP and Microsoft Word. I also wrote a reasonably popular dice-rolling program (I was one of the first few thousand people to do so). However, I got my start working in IT by doing web design. My friend Nathan told me about NCSA Mosaic in early 1993, and within two months of the release of Mosaic, I was creating web pages. (It still amazes me that the web took off like it did — I just thought it was a neat toy.)

I eventually migrated from what I call “front end” work (the part of a web site people can see), to “back end” work (the stuff behind the scenes that actually makes a web site work — setting up databases, writing scripts, managing servers, and so on). One reason for this is that I am not a graphic designer — I am simply not an artist. Another reason is that as more people learned how to do “web design”, I could maintain my value by doing something more difficult (difficult for other people; not necessarily difficult for me).

However, the number one reason I moved away from web design and toward back end work is because I had too many web clients who made my job difficult. Not all of them. Perhaps not even most of them. But a lot of them. What do I mean by “difficult”? I mean this.