dwasifar's daily gripe

Are you crazy?

17 July 2010, 1:42 am

Today I was noticing bumper stickers as I was driving home from work. One guy had the Darwin Fish being swallowed by the Truth Fish. (Actually they’re not completely swallowed; it looks more like the Darwin Fish is caught in the Truth Fish’s throat. Which makes sense, really; the Jesus Fish crowd does kind of choke on Darwin. But I digress.) Darwin Fish/Truth Fish indicates a creationist. Other stickers of note: “Before you were formed in the womb, I knew you. -God.” So that one’s an antiabortionist. I saw this one stuck on a sign: “9/11 Was An Inside Job.” Conspiracy theorist. “Never drive faster than your angels can fly.” Just plain stupid, that one. You see this kind of thing all around you in America, every day, and you sort of get inured to it. But for some reason today they stood out, and I found myself asking a simple question:

How does America continue to function when so many Americans are just plain crazy?

Not just crazy, either, but proudly crazy. Boldly and vocally crazy. Besides the obvious foolishness of christianity as Americans practice it, we have “birthers” who believe the president isn’t a citizen, scientologists, homeopaths, New Age bullshit, orbs and chakra and bible codes and holocaust deniers and moon landing deniers and all sorts of other nutball stuff. Astrology, for pete’s sake. I can’t believe that’s still with us. Somewhere out there I’m sure there are people who think the little slips of paper inside fortune cookies are real messages from some genuine cosmic oracle, or the Magic 8 Ball really does tell the future, and I’ll bet there’s a Church of Elvis, too. In any rational or reasonably civilized society, people holding these opinions and others like them would be objects of general hilarity; you’d be ashamed to show your face in public if people knew you believed in angels and demons. But in the USA, if you have an irrational belief, there’s a bumper sticker for it, so people who’ve never even met you can know you’re proudly nuts just by driving behind you.

How do we function? Seriously, how? We have a culture that not only tolerates irrational stupidity, it actually encourages it. We make a business out of it. Here we are, a decade into the 21st century now. Everyone has a cell phone and a computer and a car, and some of us have access to amazing lifesaving medical care, and we have a thousand other benefits of science and technology that simply didn’t exist a hundred years ago. Quite a lot of them didn’t exist even a generation ago. We live in this high-complexity world, surrounded by products of science and reason; and our culture is shaped around it, or by it; and yet huge chunks of our population are walking around with very little understanding of how it all works, because they don’t have the mental tools to grasp it. The spot in their brains where reason and logic should live is occupied instead by the same superstitions that have been holed up there for generations upon generations. You’d reasonably expect a high-tech society to be run by intelligent, thoughtful people; instead we have people who think god has a perfect plan for the universe but will put it aside for your benefit if you murmur a few words to the empty air.

People who can’t think (or won’t, which is nearly functionally equivalent in this context) would seem clearly unsuitable for the task of operating our society. And yet we muddle on, although I can’t see how we will manage to do so indefinitely. Our muddling latitude is almost over. I don’t know how much longer the rest of the world will put up with it, especially if the muddle-heads get in charge of the government again, which is looking increasingly likely. The “tea party” movement is basically a group of know-nothing reactionaries who wear their crass anti-intellectualism on the outside as if it were a medal or some sort of ghetto bling for Republicans. They don’t want to think; they want to be told what to think, by a book with onionskin pages, or a preacher reading it to them and telling them what they should believe it means, or some loutish loudmouth on television whose idea of winning a debate is to shout the other guy down for two and a half minutes. If this crowd gets back in the driver’s seat, well, it’s like letting the dog drive the car. Just because he can put his paws on the wheel doesn’t mean he can steer.

We often sneer at the muslim world because they are stuck in the 9th century ideawise. Well, so are we. Maybe not all of us, but a lot of us. We think we’re superior because we have a higher standard of living and are surrounded by tech toys and the benefits of affluence, but that won’t last long. If we’re going to live our lives by 9th-century philosophies and refuse to take on the responsibility of living in the modern world, then we won’t have the modern world much longer; we’ll join Afghanistan in the 9th century soon enough. Autopilot will only take us so far; eventually someone’s got to be at the controls.

And overtly crazy people are just not qualified.

Filed under Culture, Politics, Religion.

7 Comments

If it’s too loud, I’m too old

13 July 2010, 9:15 pm

The other night I was out driving and wound up behind a ramshackle old Saturn bearing a bumper sticker for a local tattoo shop and another that stated “If it’s too loud, you’re too old.” Eventually I found myself beside this car at an intersection; the driver was a young guy, ragged like his car, and true to the sticker, the music coming from the car was indeed too loud. Not so bothersome as to rock my car on its springs, like some of those “bass cars” can, but loud enough for me to hear it clearly through closed windows and imagine with a slight shudder what it would be like to be his passenger.

“If it’s too loud, you’re too old.” I’ve seen this sentiment expressed before, a thumb of the nose by youth to their elders. I know it’s aimed at me. It doesn’t bother me all that much, because I have it coming; when I was this kid’s age, driving a car like that, I inflicted my stereo on those around me too, and for much the same reason. It’s like marking territory, I guess; sort of a broadcast audio swagger. It’s the kind of thing young guys do when they haven’t learned the difference yet between confidence and cockiness.

So I remember when I was that kid, and I don’t begrudge him his day. Enjoy them while you can, kid. Before you know it you’ll be in your 30s, and one day you’ll find you’ve made a habit of turning it down rather than up, and you’ll realize with a shock that you now know from experience what your parents meant when they said, “I can’t hear myself think.” And maybe you’ll think of that bumper sticker on that long-gone jalopy, and realize that you are now “too old,” by your very own definition, and maybe you’ll even think that you were kind of a jerk about it at the time. But don’t worry, we forgive you. So the best you’ll be able to do is go out and show a little forbearance to the younger guys who are doing the same thing. Because you deserve what you get, same as I deserve it today.

And time is not on your side.

Filed under Commentary, Culture.

6 Comments

Why we should thank Microsoft for Internet Explorer

7 July 2010, 8:23 pm

Regular readers know I don’t have much use for Microsoft. They dominate the desktop through marketing and inertia, not technical merit. But I’ve been thinking about the relative positions of Internet Explorer and its competitors, and I think we should be glad it’s out there.

Internet Explorer is a classic case of how Microsoft behaves in the market. They’re like Wal-Mart; undercut your competition until you drive them out of business, and after that it doesn’t matter if quality slides. Microsoft was pretty aggressive about developing IE until they finally crushed Netscape, which happened with IE6. Now, IE6 was arguably crap. It was the Windows Vista of browsers; sort of a halfway product. You could see what they were aiming at, but they hadn’t quite arrived there yet, and it had all sorts of rough edges and missing features and security holes and things that weren’t quite kosher, by which I mean not following the HTML standard. But because they had eliminated their primary competition, they could afford not to care about that, and indeed IE’s flaws and inconsistencies became the standard web developers had to code to. They had little choice in the matter, and since Microsoft had achieved market dominance with a free product, they let IE rest and never got around to fixing the flaws.

This created an opportunity for open source, and the Firefox developers stepped in to fill it, catching Microsoft flat-footed. They never expected they’d get competition from another free product. But Firefox was so much better than IE that it had two effects on the market: 1) It forced Microsoft back to the coding bench to finally fix some of the more egregious problems in their browser, and 2) It divided the online world into two tiers. People who knew what they were doing used Firefox (or Opera, and later Chrome or Safari or other Webkit browsers). People with no technical savvy stuck with IE. It is this latter development that earns Microsoft some left-handed thanks.

Most of the web is free. There are some pay sites that make money directly, primarily porn sites, but for the most part, websites that exist for profit are paid for by advertising, not by customers directly paying for access. (By websites that exist for profit, I mean that the site content itself is the business; I don’t mean online commerce sites like Amazon.) Banner ads, popup ads, promotional toolbars, chunks of ads running down the sides of the page. Who reads these ads and buys from the advertisers? Primarily IE users. Firefox has excellent ad blocking plugins available, and they are widely used. Such things exist for IE too, of course, but the Firefox user base is more technically savvy and more likely to find and use them.

I run Firefox on Linux and I rarely see ads. It’s actually kind of a shock when I see someone surfing without an ad blocker; it’s like being on a carnival midway, with shouting barkers and a bright flashy colorful riot of come-ons. But if you think about it, I’m getting my relatively controlled and sedate internet experience on the coattails of the vast majority of less sophisticated internet users, who buy a computer with Windows and use IE exactly as it comes out of the box. They watch the commercials and underwrite the free content for me. And of course, the advertisers know this, and spend the bulk of their development efforts in getting more ads onto the IE systems and not caring much about the Firefox freeloaders.

As long as IE remains the dominant browser, this will continue to work for advertisers, and the content they subsidize to get eyeballs on their ads will remain available. But if ad-unfriendly browsers like Firefox became the norm, they’d either have to code their way around that, or move to a different business model that didn’t involve free content in exchange for ads that no one would want to pay for because nobody would see them.

So, thanks, Microsoft, for bringing a bunch of rubes to the carnival to throw baseballs at the milk bottles for a dollar a try, while the rest of us just walk around for free watching the show. We appreciate it. Keep ‘em coming.

Filed under Linux, Technology.

3 Comments

Customer service goes to pot

27 June 2010, 9:58 pm

Friday I finally pulled the trigger on a purchase I’ve been wanting to make for a long time. I bought new cookware. Good stuff – Calphalon Tri-Ply, which is their competitive product to All-Clad’s professional products. Twelve-piece set, I think it came to about $300 after the outlet mall discount coupon was applied.

The conversation was jovial with the three clerks in the shop during the whole shopping experience, very friendly and colloquial throughout. My lady friend seemed to be the object of some jealousy from these ladies because I was buying the cookware for myself; she told them that I keep my house tidy and well-organized on my own, rather than expecting her to do the work. (It is, after all, my house.) They were envious of her for finding an independent man rather than one who expects his wife to mother him. They told us we should be life coaches (rather an exaggeration, I think, but flattering) and while two of them were talking to her, the third one turned to me and said, “God must have sent you to talk to us.” I gave my reply a moment’s consideration, and then said, “If that were true, it would be pretty ironic.” I probably should not have said that, because of course she asked, “Why?” And I was obliged to answer, “Because we’re both atheists.”

This turned out to be a major revelation for her, and she immediately broke into the others’ conversation to relate it. By that time my transaction was pretty much completed and we said our goodbyes; everyone was smiles, and I took my new cookware out to my car.

That night I used the big pot to make some spaghetti, and carefully cleaned and dried it. In the morning I looked in it and found some spots of what looked like rust. So I took it back to the store and was met by one of the same three clerks we’d talked to the previous afternoon. The smiling friendliness and chatty conversation was gone; she was rather cool and curt, and tried several ways to make the spots disappear rather than replace the pot, approaching it as if it were a cleaning issue. There was no reason to assume it was such; she knew I’d only cooked spaghetti in it, and it had been perfectly clean when I put it away the previous evening. Brown spots appearing on clean steel are rust, period. Eventually the store manager got involved and promptly gave me a new pot. But the transaction was rather grudging, and quite a turnaround from the previous day.

Now, could it be that we were not as welcome on the second visit simply because I was bringing them a problem instead of a sale? Of course it could. But somehow I don’t think that was the whole reason. I get the distinct feeling that I made us unwelcome by mentioning our atheism. I don’t see why that should be a problem, really; after all, I was not the one who brought up religion. But on the second visit, the woman clearly did not want to serve us, and it felt personal. I can’t put my finger on exactly why it felt that way, but it did. I could be wrong, of course. Maybe she was just having a bad day. But it didn’t feel that way.

This will not be a problem in the future. I just won’t go back to that location if I ever have another problem with the cookware. It has a lifetime warranty, and I can take it to any Calphalon dealer. But it’s a little distressing nonetheless. Maybe I’m just being oversensitive and causing my own distress.

But maybe not.

Filed under Religion.

13 Comments

Telstar and the optimism of the space age

25 June 2010, 7:03 pm

For a week or so I’ve been listening to the 1950s radio channel on XM. I don’t listen to this a whole lot, but once in a while I’ll do something like this out of nostalgia. It never lasts very long because no matter how deep your 1950s playlist goes, you’ll eventually come to the end of it and start repeating; there will be no more 1950s music. Anyway, the other day they were playing some typical pop-song weepies – Oh, I lost her and my heart is broken, poor sad me, that sort of thing – and in the middle of this group of disposable pop songs they played “Telstar” by the Tornados.

Now, forget for the moment that “Telstar” was released in 1962 and doesn’t belong on the 1950s channel at all. The song was released to commemorate, or capitalize on, the launch of the first communications satellites – Telstar 1 and Telstar 2, both in 1962. It’s an instrumental, so there are no lyrics to analyze, but the feel of the song is positive, cheery, you might even say optimistic.

We absolutely don’t have this kind of thing any more. There are no pop songs celebrating advances in technology. In 1962, the space age captured the world’s imagination, so much that a happy dynamic piece of music named after a satellite went to #1 on the charts. Today, technological advances are viewed with either suspicion or apathy. Can you imagine a popular song named, say, “iPhone,” just to make you feel happy about how cool it is to be able to carry a tiny computer in your pocket and connect to the combined knowledge of the whole human race with it? If you think about it, we have tech advances almost every week that are as cool or cooler than Telstar was. The internet is a communications revolution that dwarfs Telstar by huge orders of magnitude, yet we don’t really think about it. We take that in stride now, and people are blase or suspicious about science and technology. Even the currently most popular branch of science, environmental science, doesn’t generate the kind of unbridled positivism that used to come along with space-age stuff. Its positivism, such little as exists, is more about the joy of not changing things, or changing them back. A song about eco-science would be full of stuffy warnings, preachy, like 1960s anti-war folk songs or civil rights ballads. Not to say it might not still be a good song with a useful message, but not full of optimism like “Telstar.” More like Sting.

I’m often filled with a sense of wonder and excitement about how much we can routinely do today that was simply not possible when I was a child, and how much more will be possible five, ten, twenty years from now. From that viewpoint, it’s a great time to be alive; technology and science and knowledge are advancing at breakneck speed and it’s exhilarating to watch it, to live in this era. I don’t understand why we all don’t stop and marvel daily at the changes and advances all around us. Life in the 21st century is amazing. Look around and try to see it; maybe you can get the same feeling that everyone had in 1962 when they pushed “Telstar” to the top of the top forty. It’s a great feeling. We should miss it in its absence.

Filed under Culture, Technology.

3 Comments

Wireless router, part II

23 June 2010, 10:22 pm

Well, the D-Link wireless router didn’t last long. After about two days it suddenly started losing its ability to control the DSL modem, and internet connectivity was dropping out for two and three minutes at a time. Back to the store it went, and I got a Netgear WNDR3700.

The Netgear has been in use for about a week and seems to be stable, but it has the same firmware restriction on DDNS hostname as the Linksys E2000 did – it refuses to allow a comma-delimited string of multiple hosts in the DDNS hostname field, even though this is a perfectly acceptable string to send to a DNS provider. Apparently someone has the idea that if a character is not legal as part of a domain name, there’s no reason to send it in an update string. So they added that restriction to the UI and in the process broke a perfectly functional option. Bastards. But I’m done buying and returning routers looking for one that hasn’t added this dumb restriction, so I reluctantly have gone to using a software client for DDNS updates. I installed and configured ddclient.

The problem with software clients is that generally they want to poll the web for an IP address. Not only does this seem like a complete waste of bandwidth when the router always knows the WAN IP, it also limits you to checking in five minute intervals. Five minutes is too long to be down. But, as it happens, there is an option in ddclient to scrape the WAN IP from the router’s status page. Not all routers are supported, but sometimes you get lucky and your “unsupported” router will work with the profile of one that is. In this case, I examined the Perl code of ddclient and found that the Netgear WPN824 router had the same status page name as the WNDR3700. I went to Netgear’s site and took a look at the UI screenshots for the WPN824; they looked similar, so I tried that config and was able to successfully scrape the IP from the router. I set ddclient to run at one minute intervals – which took some doing, because setting daemon=60 in /etc/ddclient.conf had no effect. It was still polling at five minute intervals. A little checking around revealed that you have to change /etc/init.d/ddclient and /etc/default/ddclient too. (This is for an install from the Ubuntu repos, by the way; it seems they did something unique and weird with those. Probably not an issue if you install ddclient some other way.)

In addition to running ddclient, this machine also runs a script that logs dynamic IP changes. So that one needed to be changed too, and to do that I needed to figure out a commandline option to scrape the page. Here it is:

wget -q -O - http://[your_username]:[your_password]@192.168.1.1/RST_status.htm | sed -n '/wanip/ {n;p;}' | sed -e 's/<TD nowrap>//; s/<\/TD>//' | cut -c2-26

This works on the WNDR3700 and it should work on the WPN824 as well. Obviously you should replace username and password with your own values.

It seems rather wasteful to have two processes polling the router for the same information, and I’m considering how to consolidate them into one poll that feeds both processes. But for now this works and it’s been pretty stable.

One downside to this approach is that this keeps the machine running these processes constantly logged in to the router. This was never a problem with any other device, but the Netgear, being an “enterprise class” device (whatever that means), prevents a second user from logging on to the admin UI if there’s someone else logged in from another IP. This breaks the polling if I actually force my way in from another address. For right now I’m just logging on from the same machine that does the polling, but I hope I can solve that problem with an explicit logout when I consolidate the polling. I can’t make ddclient do it, but I can make my own polling script do it.

Next time: UPS follies.

Filed under Linux, Technology.

1 Comment

Have a Mint

15 June 2010, 10:16 pm

Regular readers of my techie posts will recall I had trouble with upgrading to Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) on my primary desktop. Two clean installs failed to work right and I was forced to fall back on upgrading a 9.10 installation in place. This has been bothering me since it happened, and last week I decided to try another way around the problem. I popped in a spare hard drive and installed Linux Mint 9 (Isadora).

Now, this is not exactly abandoning Ubuntu. Mint is an Ubuntu-based distribution. New releases of Mint follow Ubuntu releases by a few weeks. The differences are partly cosmetic, and partly philosophical, as Mint includes things that Ubuntu doesn’t include by default, primarily proprietary drivers and media codecs. It also makes some different choices for default applications, as we will see. There are also a few features unique to Mint.

First of all, the burning question. Did Mint 9 install correctly where Ubuntu 10.04 failed? Yes, it did. I got a completely normal installation process, pretty much just like Ubuntu except in shades of green, with a snappy working system at the end of it. So score one for Mint on that.

The first thing you notice about Mint if you’re used to Ubuntu is the theme. Ubuntu abandoned the brown themes in favor of a dark theme with purple background with Lucid, but Mint retains its greens, with dark taskbars and window decorations. This makes it feel kind of like OpenSUSE. The windows use a very simple button style, plainer than Ubuntu, and the buttons are on the right, as apparently no other distro really wants to follow Canonical in moving them to the left. I moved them to the left manually, because all my other systems are Ubuntu right now and I’ve already gotten used to it. The startup sound is different too; a quick ethereal chime rather than the Ubuntu jungle bongos.

Ubuntu gives you panels (taskbars, for you Windows folks) at top and bottom; Mint uses just one at the bottom. They probably figure they can do without the top bar because Mint uses a custom main menu called Mint Menu instead of the standard Gnome main menu, so there is no “Applications Places System” dropdown area taking up panel space. I worked with that for a while and found I didn’t really care for it, so I added the small Gnome menu next to it; one small icon drops down into the traditional Gnome menu divisions. I’m used to using a single panel anyway, at the top, and a dock at the bottom, so I moved Mint’s single panel up to the top and was good to go. The shutdown menu is different too; it is the same as Ubuntu 9.04, with a list of choices (shutdown, restart, suspend, logout, etc) rather than the simple confirmation dialog Ubuntu has been using for the last two releases.

Shortly after installation, Mint presented me with some system update suggestions, and I got a chance to look at Mint’s update manager, which is custom to Mint. Unlike the Ubuntu update-manager, Mint’s manager shows you the available updates rated by priority. It’s nice to know, but I’m not sure what value it has, since most of us just accept the updates when they come.

I did not have to set up the medibuntu repositories and install proprietary codecs; those things were already in place. That’s one step saved from a regular Ubuntu install. I did have to manually choose to install the proprietary Nvidia drivers, though. However, compizconfig-settings-manager was installed already. This should be in Ubuntu, and I don’t know why it’s not; if a distro comes with Compiz enabled, the settings tool should be part of it. Score another point for Mint.

Mint has a few different choices for default apps, as I mentioned. The default IM client is Pidgin, as opposed to Empathy. I know Ubuntu chose Empathy because it integrates better with their notification area, and Empathy looks nicer and more modern (like Adium) but Pidgin is more robust and supports Gaim encryption. I don’t really have a clear preference. Ubuntu’s default mail client is Evolution, and Mint uses Thunderbird. I switched to Evolution a while back because of peculiarities in how Thunderbird formatted outbound mail (it would sometimes remove paragraph breaks on its own, and you couldn’t see the change until you looked at the mail in the Sent folder). Thunderbird 3 may have solved this, but since my mail backups were already in Evolution format, I installed Evolution from Mint’s repos, and ran into the first serious problem.

In Evolution, like every other mail client, unread messages in the list are displayed in bold, and read messages in normal weight. At least, that’s how it’s supposed to work. In Mint, Evolution displayed all messages in bold, whether read or unread. The statuses were being set correctly, but the font weight wouldn’t change. I struggled with it for a while. It was impossible to get any information about the problem from Google. (Try entering “read messages bold evolution” in Google; most results are about creationism.) So I entered a bug report with the package maintainer and received a swift response telling me they could not reproduce the problem, and asking me to upgrade to a later version. I installed 2.30 from someone’s PPA and that solved the problem; but if 2.28 has this bug, why is it the version in the Mint repos? Minus one for Mint.

Another peeve: Mint annoyingly brands Google results. If you do a Google search, the results page comes back in a modified format, with the Mint logo prominently displayed at the top. This is just bad manners. Removing the Google formatting required downloading someone’s altered google.xml file and copying it into three different locations. Minus one. In fact, minus three. That’s just inexcusable. And for some unknown reason, they changed the config file for cups-pdf (installed by default) so that it dumps the pdf output into the home directory instead of ~/PDF. They also enabled “fortunes” in gnome-terminal, so that every time you open a new terminal window, you get an ASCII penguin with some random saying. Cute but pointless. I edited the configuration to disable it, and changed the color choices for the prompts while I was in there; bright green on off-white is not a very readable color for a system prompt. (But at least they didn’t start you off with white on dark purple background like Lucid does.)

There are some flaws in Ubuntu Lucid that made it into Mint 9 unfixed. For example, the startup and shutdown splash screens get big and ugly once the Nvidia drivers are enabled. This is fixable, sort of, but requires geekery with the grub config files and is mystifying. I’m surprised Ubuntu didn’t catch it, and I’m surprised Mint didn’t fix it after all the complaints when Lucid was first released.

Most other things you would expect to work on Ubuntu work just the same on Mint. I installed my DVD and DVD-A burn scripts from my own online guide, and they work fine. Installing Amarok 1.4 from my own online guide also worked fine, right down to having to manually install a dependency from a Karmic package.

All in all I’d say the Mint experience was pretty much a wash; there were some things that I didn’t need to do on Mint that I’d have had to do in Ubuntu, and other things I needed to fix in Mint that aren’t broken in Ubuntu. But, and this is the key, I got a good working installation to start with, whereas Ubuntu didn’t give me that this time around. So on that basis alone, I’m sticking with Mint for a while.

Filed under Linux.

1 Comment

Wireless router tech support – Linksys vs. D-Link

13 June 2010, 7:57 pm

Recently my Linksys wireless-N router became flaky. It would forget it was a wireless device and stop accepting wireless connections. Sometimes this would solve itself after a while, other times it required a reboot. As a stopgap measure I hooked up a second cheap-ass wireless-G router I had on hand and configured it as an access point with DHCP disabled so it would obtain IPs from the other router. This didn’t solve the problem, really, but it did fix it so I could get a wireless connection without having to drop everything and go reboot the router when things got hinky, which usually happened when I was using the laptop in bed and didn’t want to get up and go do geekery in the basement with the router.

This held me over for a while. But then the Linksys got to the point where it wouldn’t accept new connections at all any more until it was rebooted, so there was no denying it – I needed a new router.

Naturally I wanted the migration to be as clean and easy as possible, so I got another Linksys – an E2000 to replace the failing WRT300N. I looked through the manual online before buying, and everything in the configuration was pretty much the same – all the options available in the old were in the same place in the new. So I thought things would be pretty easy.

Maybe, I thought, I can just back up the configuration on the old one and load it into the new. Nope. That didn’t work. So I set about the process of manually copying all the settings from the old one and about halfway through I hit a snag.

The Linksys routers have a built-in DDNS client. This allows you to use a service like dyndns.com to map a dynamic IP address to internet DNS, so you can host a domain on a dynamic IP. If your internet IP changes, the router knows right away, and it sends an update command to dyndns.com so users on the internet can continue to access your domain without a break. Not all routers do this, of course, but it’s nice to have one that does; otherwise you have to run an app on one of your servers that watches the IP and updates dyndns, which takes longer and generates more traffic. So I prefer to have the router handle it. I have multiple low-traffic domains hosted on a server behind that router, so on the old Linksys I just put them all in the same field, comma-delimited: domain1.com,domain2.com,domain3.com, etc. Dyndns parses the string when they receive it and everything is taken care of. It’s worked fine that way for quite some time.

But the new router wouldn’t accept the comma-delimited string. It would only accept a single domain name in the config field. The setup page looked identical, but didn’t behave the same. So I went to Linksys’ support site and started a support chat.

It took a while for me to rise to the top of the queue, but I eventually got someone who asked me about the problem and seemed to kind of understand it. His first step was to send me a link to the latest firmware. I clicked it and it closed the chat window, ending my support chat prematurely. So I swore a little and then got back in queue. By the time I was at the top of queue again, I had already found the latest firmware on my own, flashed the router with it, and tested the problem area to find it was still behaving the same way.

The second support chat tech also seemed to understand the problem; not at first, but after a little explanation. But before we got that far, he asked me to turn off the ad blocker in my browser and we spent about four minutes before he understood I needed to know whether he meant the browser I was using to talk to him or the browser I was using to configure the new router. So that was a little annoying, but once he had a handle on the problem he excused himself to do some research, and after about five minutes he came back and sorrowfully admitted there was a bug in the firmware of this router. He promised to submit it to the lab so it could be fixed in future releases. I asked if he could recommend another product without the problem. He told me the E3000, next step up in the product line, did not have that problem. I asked him how he could be sure, and he replied that they have all these products online on their own network so they can work with the product directly when helping customers solve config issues. The E1000 and E2000 have this bug, but he tested the E3000 personally and saw that it did not. Pretty neat, actually. I thanked him and we closed chat.

The problem is, if I’d wanted the E3000 for fifty dollars more, I’d have bought that in the first place. But I don’t need the extra functionality of that unit. So I went looking for alternatives and found the D-Link DIR-655. I downloaded the manual and it seemed to do everything the Linksys would do. I decided to try one out and found a unit at a local office supply store. Unfortunately I didn’t stop to read the big sticker the clerk put on the box until I got it home. “15% restocking fee if package is opened.”

Well, crap. Now I can’t try it out without incurring $13.50 in restocking fees if it has the same problem. So I went to D-Link support. They don’t have a support chat. They have something they call a chat, but it’s actually just a bot, and those never help me because I never need support unless it’s a really obscure problem. So I was forced to call them on the phone, and got an offshore tech who seemed to not really understand what I was trying to do. I told him I needed to know, before I opened the box, whether the DDNS field would accept a comma-delimited string of multiple domain names. He thrashed around for an answer for a while and finally told me you can only enter one domain name for DDNS, because each one needs to be separately updated. I already knew that wasn’t the case, and I asked him, are you telling me I can only enter one domain because there’s only one box for it in the setup? He said yes, and I said, okay, clearly we are not communicating; you don’t understand the issue, so please escalate the call.

Before he would escalate the call, he wanted to know the serial number of the router. I’m not giving you that, I told him, because if I do, and the answer turns out it won’t do what I want, then I have to return it to the store, and the next guy who buys it will have support problems if he ever calls you because it will already be registered to me. Amazingly, he seemed to understand this after having it explained only twice, and told me he would escalate the call, and to please hold.

At this point I was disconnected.

So I swore some more and called back. Waited on hold for a while and got another offshored tech who was even less acute than the last. I explained I was being escalated when I was disconnected and asked to be escalated again, but she insisted on trying to solve the problem first, and clearly didn’t have the first clue what I was talking about. “You want to know how to configure DDNS?” “No, I want to know if I can put a comma-delimited string of multiple domain names in the hostname field. Please escalate this call.” We were back and forth with things like that for a little while; she’d say something obviously wrong, I would try to explain it again, and ask her to escalate. Finally she told me she would consult the higher level techs for me and could I please hold. I asked her to escalate the call again and instead she put me on hold to go ask. In about five minutes she came back and said, “The higher level techs say yes, you can change the value of the field.” I asked her, “Do you mean to say you just asked them if that field is editable?” She told me yes, and I said, “Okay, that was not actually the question I asked you. Now, please escalate this call.” She finally decided to do that, and of course then we had to go through the serial number thing all over again.

Finally, after all that, I was put in queue for a tech at the next tier. This took about ten minutes on hold. When I got him I could barely understand him, his accent was so thick, but he glibly informed me the field would accept that kind of string, and we rung off. But by that time I didn’t really trust their answers. So I called the store where I’d bought it – OfficeMax – and talked to a manager. I explained my problem. He said, what exactly are you trying to do? I told him I needed to find out whether the DDNS setup would accept a comma-delimited string of multiple domain names. His response was refreshing. “Yeah, you’re not gonna get that information off the back of the box! If it were someone who came in after a month complaining that their cell phone wouldn’t connect to the router, I’d tell them they should have checked into that before they bought it, but in your case there’s no way to be sure without trying it, so if you need to bring it back within the next couple of days, ask for me and I’ll waive the restocking fee.”

Wow. Actual customer service judgment. I thanked him, opened the box, and went about setting up the router.

As it turned out, the DDNS configuration accepts that string. But it shouldn’t have taken this much effort to find that out. The D-Link is actually more configurable than either Linksys, though the configuration interface is less organized, and it has an annoying requirement to reboot after config changes. So for features and usability I’ll have to say it was a wash between the two. But Linksys’ support experience was definitely superior to D-Link’s. Both of them disconnected me unexpectedly, but the Linksys technicians both eventually understood what I was talking about, whereas two of the three D-Link people never did, and frankly I’m not sure about the third. His answer was right, but he could have been right by accident – after all, it was a yes/no question.

The router seems to be performing well. Time will tell. But I have to say, based on my support experience, I’d still consider Linksys next time even though the product disappointed me this time.

Filed under Linux, Technology.

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Knowledge or virtue?

6 June 2010, 11:30 pm

The discussion of the last post turned pretty quickly to the Genesis story, and it’s been making me think about that for a while. I went back and read the opening of Genesis to make sure I wasn’t mixing up what it actually says with what people tend to think it says.

First thing I noticed was that the antecedents get kind of screwy. Sometimes you don’t know who’s talking to who. For instance, when speaking to the serpent, god says: “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.” Whose heel? Adam’s? Eve’s? Their kids? It’s actually interesting to google that phrase and see how various christians explain what this means:

It is a prediction of Jesus defeating Satan.
It is a metaphor for sin tormenting your head and crippling you.
People stomp on snakes.
Eve and the snake had sexual relations.
Good stomps on evil. (My favorite part of the website where I found this: “Hitting a snake on the head is a death blow – seeing its brain is in its head.” Nice to have that spelled out. It also claims a snakebite on the heel is a temporary inconvenience and not fatal.)

Personally, what torments my head is the job of reading some of these explanations. They’re mostly just strings of non sequiturs, expressed with great fervor.

But I digress. Maybe the serpent was intended to be Satan (and most of the christian apologists I found in researching this piece, laity and clergy alike, are pretty sure of it). But the disturbing thing is not what this story says about the serpent; it’s the tree of knowledge thing.

To recap the story: God makes man, and tells him not to eat from the tree or he will die. Then he makes woman, who somehow also gets this keep-off-the-tree message – maybe from god, maybe from Adam, maybe some other way, the book doesn’t say; but she knows it. Then the serpent shows up and says, no, you won’t die, it’ll give you knowledge of good and evil. So they chow down, they get the knowledge, and they immediately cover up.

The first thing you should notice here is that god lied to Adam, and the serpent told the truth. They got knowledge, and didn’t die. So, if the serpent is Satan, then in his very first appearance in the bible he is not “the deceiver” – god is.

The second thing you might note is that once they get knowledge of good and evil, what is the first thing they do? They become ashamed of being naked. Apparently being naked is evil. But if that is so, then why did god make them that way and set things up so that they’d run around sinfully naked forever unless they ate from the tree? Does god get jollies out of this? “Ho ho ho, look at those happy naked idiots! They don’t even know how sinful they’re being!” It’s like watching a dog run into a glass door. There are people who get amusement out of that. I wouldn’t care to associate with them. It’s pretty sad to think that’s the kind of god christians want to have running things. But I digress.

The third and most disturbing thing is the sinfulness of the tree of knowledge itself. There is no getting around this: the bible starts off by unequivocally stating that knowledge is bad. It’s dangerous and sinful and god doesn’t want you to have it. Trust me, says god, you’ll be happier without it. And to drive home the point, when they get some anyway, he punishes everyone from then on.

What an incredibly stupid, damaging premise to hang a religion on. Stay stupid, or risk the wrath of the creator of the universe. What a choice. Makes the lady and the tiger seem like Let’s Make A Deal by comparison. This sets the tone for the repressive, vicious anti-intellectualism christianity is infamous for. Don’t question, don’t think, don’t reason, or we’ll kill you. And we’ll be doing god’s work.

But even if we’re not talking about things like the Inquisition, the effects are still widely felt. For example, it makes possible the kind of brain-hurting crap I endured while googling for the various explanations of the bruise-your-head verse. If you believe knowledge and reason are an impediment to holiness, as the Genesis story makes it seem, then you are free to spew illogical nonsense and call it enlightenment. And the more grip that belief has on you, the less likely you are to be sensible and rational about other things, like politics or money or how to treat your wife and children. Or science. How much of the organized resistance to teaching schoolchildren actual science comes down to the belief that education leads you away from christ? Offhand, I’d say 100%; all of it leads back to that in one way or another. When I say “education,” by the way, I mean actual education, the kind that gets people to reason and think freely, and not “religious education,” which is an oxymoronic doublespeak euphemism for “indoctrination.” Or perhaps “brainwashing” might be a better word.

But again, I digress. The tree of knowledge story in Genesis lays the foundation for a tragic dualism: not mind against body, but rather knowledge against virtue, and we’re still dealing with that silly notion to this day. Show me the American who hasn’t met someone who thinks “ignorance is bliss” is intended as sincere advice, and I’ll show you someone who doesn’t get out much. It’s astonishing that here in the 21st century we still tolerate it. Or, conversely, since we do tolerate it, it’s astonishing that the 21st century is any different from the 8th.

Filed under Religion.

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It’s magic

31 May 2010, 1:48 am

Howdy again, folks. I suppose I ought to change the name of the blog to something not containing the word “daily,” especially now that I have a new gig occupying a lot of my time. It’s been ten days since I posted. Sorry about that; I hope you’re all still out there.

Today (well, yesterday, technically) my friend and I went walking around the local main-street shops in the next town. One of them turned out to be one of those crystals-and-incense places full of new age hocus pocus. We couldn’t stay in there long, because the incense was chokingly intense (and as a cigar smoker, that’s saying something) but we did poke around long enough to get a good look at the books and stickers and ceremonial daggers (!) and spirit stones and other magic-and-fairy related gewgaws and trinkets. Bumper stickers that say things like “Witches do it in circles” and books about how to get in touch with your inner animal guide or whatnot. And of course, guides to performing magic.

Hm. Magic. I’m going to start by assuming this is not the Arthur C. Clarke magic, the kind that’s actually “sufficiently advanced technology.” No, I’m pretty sure this is the old fashioned idea of magic, wherein you perform a ritual, or cast a spell by speaking a special incantation, and something supernatural happens. The normal laws of cause and effect are then bent in your favor, apparently, so that something (say, for instance, doggerel recited to the empty air) that ordinarily wouldn’t cause something else (for example, good health) actually does cause it, and breaks the ordinary chain of cause and effect that would normally result in the poorer health you would otherwise experience. Do I have that right? I hope so, because sometimes I have a hard time actually explaining back spiritual bullshit.

This is all good fun when it appears in fiction. The Harry Potter stories are witty and entertaining with their alternate world of people who can do things like light a fire by waving a stick and barking “incendio!” (though they still need to explain exactly what advantage this has over a butane lighter). But there is a significant contingent of people who believe – or believe they believe – that these things actually work in real life, in spite of a complete absence of provable evidence. Witchcraft and wizardry are not real, but that doesn’t stop a certain type of person from practicing them anyway.

This tends to piss off christians.

Not all christians, I hasten to note. I have been called to task by commenters for lumping all christians in with the least rational of them. Sometimes that’s appropriate, because in many cases the least rational christians are the ones who actually read their scriptures literally and don’t play fast-and-loose with the bible to make the uncomfortably stupid and scary parts palatable to civilized sensibilities. (They have other reasons for playing fast and loose, but I’ve covered those elsewhere, and I digress.) In this case it’s not appropriate to lump them all together, because I’m pretty sure the bible doesn’t actually say you should deliberately cultivate an inability to distinguish between generally harmless goofballs who have trouble separating fact from fiction (on the one hand) and people who actually want to be evil (on the other). So in this case the christians I’m talking about are the Fred Phelps spittle-spraying variety who try to get Harry Potter removed from the public library and pick fights with store clerks because they don’t want to be served by a non-christian. You know the type.

I think this type of christian fears sorcery not because it’s foolish and clearly doesn’t do anything, but rather because they are afraid it might actually work.

How could anyone believe something so obviously foolish, you might reasonably ask? Well, think a moment. What is prayer, exactly? What are church services? Why, they’re rituals to be performed, and doggerel incantations recited to the empty air, in the expectation that something supernatural will happen in your favor, and the normal laws of cause and effect suspended. In other words, they are exactly what the books in the crystal and incense store promise. They are magic. And it stands to reason that the most rabid christians would feel the most threatened by non-christian “magic,” because they’re the most likely to believe in the reality of their own christian “magic” which differs from the other type mainly in the trivial details of the rituals and the words, not in the actual underlying superstition: say these words and make these motions and speak the name of this imaginary being, and things will happen without physical cause.

So I think those christians who are threatened by the wiccans and other new agers and their books of spells are not angry because they think it’s false; I think they’re angry because they fear it’s true – because if it is, it’s new competition in the magic biz, and we all know how ruthlessly religions pursue monopolies. And, of course, given the with-us-or-agin-us mindset that tends to come along with that kind of christianity, if it’s not the work of Jesus (as decided by them, of course) then it’s the work of the devil. Thus ordinary Harry Potter readers and harmless mud-smeared neo-hippies banging djembe drums around a campfire are transformed in the minds of christians into agents of satan spreading evil magic around, which can only be countered by redoubling the christian magic and encouraging others to do the same (unless, of course, it devolves into physical violence, which happens occasionally, though not as often here as in places like India or Africa, thankfully).

When viewed from outside, the whole thing takes on a bizarrely surreal aspect; one group taking up imaginary weapons to fight against another group, who mostly don’t even know they’re in a battle, and don’t even think their imaginary weapons are weapons at all. Imagine watching, say, a light saber battle in Star Wars before the special effects and sounds were put in, so that you have a bunch of people running around waving sword handles with no blades at each other. That’s what this looks like. Now imagine the actors think they can actually see and use the missing blades. It’s beyond weird. It would be funny if the people doing it weren’t threatening to cripple the secular world for the rest of us in the process, to make things safe for their particular brand of magic. It’s like a gigantic game of Dungeons and Dragons that spills over into the real world – not in the sense that orcs and dragons are roaming the streets, of course, but the tiresome fanboys (christians and new agers alike) are, and they’re almost as bad.

Filed under Culture, Religion.

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