&nojs=1

Get It Try It

'Please click here if you are not redirected within a few seconds' says the Google Images site when accessed through the ACP Web Services. The page has a zero second refresh. Buried half a mile under an obscene amount of JavaScript.

<meta HTTP-EQUIV="refresh" content="0;url=http://www.google.com/...

But the link leads not to www.google.com but to images.google.com.

images.google.com is an alias for images.l.google.com. It has four IPs.

Addresses:
    64.233.183.147
    64.233.183.99
    64.233.183.104
    64.233.183.103

www.google.com is an alias for www.l.google.com. It has two IPs.

Addresses:
    66.249.85.104
    66.249.85.99

What's the big deal? Turn on JavaScript and reload the page to find out. The image on the left is what you get with JavaScript turned on. The image on the right is what you get with JavaScript turned off.

That's the only difference.



Google win today's Stupid Award.

Edgy Can't Find Edges

Here's a screenshot from Kubuntu's coming 'Edgy Eft' release. These guys need to go to design school. Stupid Award Runner-Up.

The Sincerest Form

Here's another screenshot from Edgy Eft. Gee where did they get that idea? Another Stupid Award Runner-Up.

The Art of Adoption

This needs no introduction or explanation. And the only reason it doesn't win a Stupid Award is because the principle is currently out of work.

How to Bulldozer Friends

This Michael Jackson look-alike is a VP at Microsoft. Before coming to Microsoft she spent 22 years at IBM. She's good at her job; she's ruthless.



Sitting on the US Secretary of Education's Commission on the Future of Higher Education, she like everyone else had a chance to vote on the panel's report and to appear at the public signing on 10 August 2006. And even though several members found trivial things they would have worded differently, they decided to forego further discussion so they could get the document out.

All that is except one. And you know who that one is and you can probably guess why too.

She objected to the following paragraph and insisted she'd never even seen it before and adamantly threatened to never sign the report if the wording wasn't changed.

The commission encourages the creation of incentives to promote the development of open-source and open-content projects at universities and colleges across the United States, enabling the open sharing of educational materials from a variety of institutions, disciplines, and educational perspectives. Such a portal could stimulate innovation, and serve as the leading resource for teaching and learning. New initiatives such as OpenCourseWare, the Open Learning Initiative, the Sakai Project, and the Google Book project hold out the potential of providing universal access both to general knowledge and to higher education.

Gerri Elliot, VP of Microsoft's Worldwide Public Sector division, gets today's Evil Award.

No contest.

Constitutional Masochism

Mordecai points towards a belated mention and a final award for the tards at O'Reilly who on this day link three articles about BBEdit 8.5 on their front page.

The Apple demographic is no help here. Windows users get hopping mad at Gates but Maccies are constitutional masochists: they only get hopping mad when somebody criticises Apple. It's the strangest phenomenon. You wouldn't even know there were several ongoing problems with Apple hardware by reading over at O'Reilly for example.

There's nothing on this most important issue but there are 3 (three) articles on the latest iteration of BBEdit. He's changed the colour of the icon or something and rearranged the menus and he wants another forty bucks off them as an 'upgrade'. Oh and the damn thing gee-zips as well now. Now it thinks it's a compression utility (and you can't expect a Maccie to type tar -cvzf archive.tar.gz file at the CLI). And they're lapping it all up - even Giles who is often sensible.

WTF does it matter what your text editor's icon looks like if your machine is too hot to use or keeps randomly shutting down?

BBEdit is a dinosaur with halogen fog lights. It's even crash prone. It splits a gut trying to be just 'Carbon'.

OS X does not need another text engine. It already has one - one far better than 'Slim' Siegel will ever be able to make.

Back in the days of the Beige Box when no one wasted time writing a text engine for that platform it could make sense. But not now. Not when things like TextMate, the PBX and Xcode editors, SubEthaEdit, Jedit, and above all Smultron are out there, using the OS X text engine, integrating fully with the operating system - and doing it for free.

This site even has a 'no code editor' you can download and hack with for free - and you don't have to know a thing about programming. You can write your own editor still the same.

The 'editor' part has already been written for you - it's in the OPERATING SYSTEM.

And as for doing the 'gee-zip': make up your mind. If you want a GUI end on tarring and zipping, there are alternatives that do just that.

But if you have to pull out that mad old dog BBEdit every time you want to zip something... You don't want to do that. You don't want the same piece of code existing twice on your computer.

It might look good in the hushed lighting of the showroom but it looks terrible in the harsh light of reality.

For this and innumerable other reasons, the hacks at O'Reilly - who aren't IT professionals by any stretch of the imagination - get today's John Gruber Appreciation Award for being the most evil and most stupid at the same time.

C4

A Maccie is very easy to identify, just insult Apple and you'll get a reply like this. 'What did you say about Apple... I'm gonna strip C4 to myself and take you out.'
 - Urban Dictionary

Date: Fri Sep 8, 2006 23:52:06 UTC
To: Leland Scott <lscott@XXX.gov>
Subject: Re: I'm confused about Rixstep

Hi Leland,

You're absolutely right. We've been grossly unfair. We've bashed that silly company in Cupertino with no warrant. It was totally unfair of us. Heaven forbid.

You're not going to try to tie semtex to your chest and run up and hug us, are you?

Oh - and it's nice that you 'put' us on your purchase list. A man must guard his finances and make his move when he can. But those are just words.

Leland, I don't know if you realise this, but it's so transparent that you're trying to work on us here. We might as well be in Jonestown and suggesting you make a run for it. You just don't get it, do you?

Rick

PS. 'Contextual menu offerings'??!?? 'Mainly for Finder compatibility'? Maybe if you're such a big fan of the site you could read a LOT MORE and then you'd most likely find the answers to most of your questions? You do get time off to study knowledge retention at the National Science Foundation?

PPS. Leland, this is obscene:

make me very hesitant to ccmmit myself to using tools from a company that no longer believes in the Mac OS X platform.

Hi,
I've been a big fan of Rixstep's contextual menu freeware offerings for the last year or two, and welcomed Shortcuts with shouts of joy. I recently read the latest Rixstep newsletter and appreciated being educated about the flaws in the HFS file system that Apple uses, mainly for Finder compatibility it seems. I had put on my purchase list your ACP offering and look forward to using XFile and the rest of your fine, pure Cocoa products.

However, today I perused your website and am taken aback by the sharply negative anti-Apple tone that's taken over recently. Looking at your "About" page, I get the same warm fuzzies I had before: You are strong Unix fans with great appreciation for Mac OS X's Nextstep roots. You want to promote good Cocoa programming and refuse to follow Apple's path when they get silly. However, your blog entry at http://www.rixstep.com/2/20060711,00.shtml makes me wonder whether you aren't abandoning Mac OS X for Linux in the near future?

Statements like

"Why did I keep on buying Macs? Because I didn't want Windows. Ubuntu didn't come around until 2004, long after my purchase, and it wasn't until this past January I discovered it and made my foray into Linux.

Go ahead and search my past posts on MacNN or all of the other fanboy Mac sites. You can call me a fanboy for all I care with the posts I made in defending the Mac platform, but I stopped being one after Oompa and a little after when the emperor commenced his undressing ceremony garment by garment. Being lied to doesn't sit well with me."

make me very hesitant to ccmmit myself to using tools from a company that no longer believes in the Mac OS X platform.

What's up? Are you giving up on Apple and Mac OS X, or will you continue to write great software to help users make the most of the platform's best features?

If the latter, why all the Apple bashing? I'm sure that doesn't help your credibility with the fanboys in Cupertino, let alone guys like me who simply think Mac OS X is still the best hope for the desktop.

Thanks,
Leland

Do you also want to get hung out to dry at the Rixstep site and be ridiculed by the ENTIRE professional IT community? WRITE! Don't worry about grammar - or having anything essential to say! Just put it in your best fanboy words - it's bound to be good enough!

Write today!

PPPS. As you guessed, Leland got today's Daring Fanboy Dicklicker Award.

Date: Fri Sep 8, 2006 00:51:24 UTC
To: Leland Scott <lscott@XXX.gov>
Subject: Re: I'm confused about Rixstep

Leland,

You're a fanboy. Go on, say it to yourself.

'Hi, my name is Leland, and I'm a fanboy.'

'Hi, Leland!'

Leland, you people are SICK. That's right: you're SICK. Read it again. SICK.

What is it with you people? Jonestown doesn't even begin to describe you. It's a COMPUTER, Leland - it's not a fanatical cult movement.

At least it's not supposed to be.

You know what gives the platform a bad name, Leland? More than the exploding hottops, the totally shitty AppleCare and support, the outright denial of issues when people are getting burnt left and right with substandard Chinese electronic crap at gouging price levels?

More than the 'dweebie' beige box cruft forced into the operating system - a system that used to be clean and pristine and elegant?

You know what that is, Leland?

Look in the mirror, Leland. It's YOU. YOU give the platform a bad name. Your ignorance, your presumptive arrogance, your conceit, your unabashed evil, your...

THIS is the reason people have to stay away from OS X, Leland: YOU.

YOU and the ten million fanboys just like you.

You're SICK.

Rick