Ninja Assassin

So I just wanted to say that the trailers for this look very cool and I am definately going to see it. There is one small point that is already bothering me though; ninjas are assassins. This title is annoyingly redundant. I hope the film does not follow suit.

Pictures Display in Firefox but not IE 6, 7, or 8

So I had some trouble with some web development lately. I designed a webpage using Bluefish Editor on GNU/Linux using some code that a friend provided and modifying it. and checked my pages with Firefox and Ganelon. So far no problems. Then I tried multiple versions of IE. My page would display but not the images, except for on 1 page, and only in IE. My doctype was good
meaning


-- There are many reasons why IE does not display things properly, and my solution may not work for you, but in the end it was simply that IE sucks filthy balls, and I figured out exactly why in my case after reading through a ton of other documentation and comparing my code. You see the other browsers read my code and ignored white space issues, IE did not. In this bit of CSS where I defined #top I accidentally left no white space between my image name and no-repeat. Once I put the space back in all versions of IE worked correctly. Again, this may not solve your issue, but if you've done code verification, read all of the other forums, and still are having trouble give your code another closer look. Especially if you don't see a red x image place holder like I did not.


#top {
background: #8B956D url(HMS_small_CSS.jpg)no-repeat top center;
padding-top: 375px;
}

#top {
background: #8B956D url(HMS_small_CSS.jpg) no-repeat top center;
padding-top: 375px;
}

I hope this helps someone out. At any rate I don't want to condone initially sloppy coding, but really the largest software company in the world can't create a browser that deals with this?! At any rate some day we'll all use GNU/Linux or similar operating systems and, well I'm about to rant.

Netflix Streaming (Watch Instantly) On Ubuntu 9.04 ALMOST

I have been working on the Netflix/Ubuntu 9.04 problem for quite some time.
I offer the following obervations with no implied warranty.
I started with looking at the directions here
http://fatbuttlarry.blogspot.com/2009/02/netflix-ubuntu.html
but since this user had the most success with 8.04 I had to keep looking. Which lead me to this forum amongst many other places.
At any rate here's what I did after trying the moonlight 1.99.5, Coral IETab, and User Agent Switcher combinations and only getting as far as the Active X is not enabled screen. I tried ies4linux as well.

-- At this point I can get a instant movie to load to the point that I get the black backdrop with the swirling blue loading icon on Netflix in Firefox 3.5 run using Wine 1.1.3 with Silverlight 3 and some Windows Fonts installed as explained below.

-- I added http://wine.buggetdedicated.com/apt edgy
to the Third-Party Software tab under System -- Administration -- Software Sources and added an authentication certificate for winehq.
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=338400
this explains getting the winehq gpg key. If you don't have it you should just get a warning when installing. Adding it should make the warning go away forever. This allows you to install the most recent versions of Wine which may not be the stable releases.

-- I then went to System -- Administration -- Synaptic -- and installed Wine 1.1.3, wine-dev 1.1.3, and wine-gecko 1.0.0. Note: In theory after you add the source and refresh the package list, when prompted, the Update Manager should tell you that there is an update for Wine, or if you use Add/Remove to add Wine and then use the Update Manager (System -- Administration -- Update Manager) it should tell you. Anyway, I just used Synaptic so whatever floats your boat.

-- I downloaded the Windows version of Firefox 3.5 from www.Mozilla.com/Firefox3.5, went to Application -- Wine -- Browse C: drive and dropped the *.exe in there. I then double clicked on it and installed it.

-- Launch Firefox 3.5 using Wine, go to Netflix and log in, then choose something to watch instantly. You will then be told to download Silverlight 3. Save the *.exe file for it and move it into your Wine C: drive as explained in the last step.

-- Close Firefox and install Silverlight. If you go to Netflix again at this point you will get a font error stating that you must be a Crapple user if you're getting a font error. Of course you're not, but Netflix believes that people only use Windoze and OSXcrament so that's what you get. If they didn't believe this they would have just used something that already works on everyone's systems instead of painting themselves into a corner with Silverlight... I still like Netflix, but the whole Silverlight thing gets on my nerves...

-- Anyway, to solve this font problem you need to move some Windows fonts into your Wine virtual C: drive\windows\fonts folder. I copied them from my legal copy of Windows in it's C:\Windows\Fonts folder. I have a dual boot setup so this was easy. I'm sure some linux font guru probably has a welcome substitution to this step that doesn't involve having to use Crapple or Microshaft fonts but that's what I did.

-- Once you do this, at least for me, when I go to Netflix using Firefox 3.5 and Silverlight 3 run through Wine I get the movie to start to load, then my browser freezes and goes grey. Anyway, it's at least promising.

-- I should mention that I'm using a Toshiba laptop that is using the generic Ubuntu video driver. I was never able to get fglrx to work totally so I went back to the generic. I sometimes get white lines on the right hand side of the screen when I scroll and 2ndary monitor support is not existent so perhaps I have larger problems and someone else, with a Dell for example, may have more luck with my steps. Perhaps the video driver has nothing to do with it at all. Anyway, I hope this helps someone out.

Don't Complain About Smokers Or Smoke If You Drive A Car

Ok, so I never actually tell anyone what they can and can't complain about. It's a mostly free country after all, and the mutilated first amendment certinally still covers the rights of people that complain about smoking and smokers. Every once in a while I have this conversation with someone who will often say "I guess" in response to my facts as if they aren't facts, or "I'll complain about whatever I want to", or "cigarettes are disgusting." Let me set the record stragiht. I think cigarettes are disgusting and that people should not smoke. I have never made an argument for cigarettes. I have simply made the argument that if you drive a car, which is way more polluting than smoking cigarettes, you can't complain about cigarettes effecting air quality.
http://www.forces.org/evidence/files/aircare.htm
The above report highlights how little effect cigarette smoke has on the environment in comparison with cars in general. Sure the numbers might be off here and there depending on what kind of car you drive, but in general if you even cut these numbers in half your car is still way more polluting than cigarettes. Here are a few of the equivalent numbers to vehicle emissions from the article however I urge you to read the whole article to put everything into its proper context. I should note that these are the more conservative estimates from the article. We can assume that the problems is much worse, but I don't like to assume.
* 5.78571428515 [to the 15th power] (57,500 billions) cigarettes each year
* 7,358,400 cigarettes each U.S. square mile every year (including Alaska & Hawaii)
* 22 millions cigarettes per person each year
* 20,160 cigarettes each U.S. square mile every day (including Alaska & Hawaii)
* 157.5 billions cigarettes each day
* 60,875 cigarettes per person each day
* 2,540 cigarettes per person each hour
* 42.5 cigarettes per person each minute
The point is that cigarette smokers have been banned in most states from smoking almost anywhere. It's even worse now then when Dennis Leary did his famous "where can smokers smoke now" bit. Sure we could have required more efficient vent fans in restaurant smoking sections, or allowed restaurant owners to decide if they wanted their own establishments to be smoking establishments, but instead the government went nuclear crapping on the rights of restaurant owners, for example, along with bar owners and many others. It's funny but I thought if I owned a place I could choose whether people can smoke in it or not, oh well not when big brother decides that sitting 26 tables away from me in a non-smoking section, behind a glass partition separated by vent fans to pull the smoke away still may effect their eating experience. The solution was simple. Non-smoking places could have advertised that they were such and smoking establishments could have done the same. If you don't like smoking don't go to a place that allows it. It's called personal responsibility. The government didn't need to get involved. What's really funny is that now, in most states, you can't even smoke at the bar. The bar for Pete's sake. A place where people go to abuse substances! Still in the end all of you hypocritical non-smokers can drive your gas guzzling tanks to the now non-smoking diner and do way more damage to the air quality than the smokers that used to use the smoking section there ever did.
So good job, and please don't argue with me on the point that cars are a necessity. Most of our people still live in and around cities and can walk, ride a bike, take mass transit, car pool, or many other things to reduce their car emissions or eliminate the need for a car at all. Cars are almost always a convenience, not a necessity, and even with that said most people own cars that are way more powerful than they need to go about their daily routines. So even if they are a necessity, like you live in the middle of the Great Plains or something, for you you can't argue the 100+ extra horse power you got in your car that you didn't need.
Anyway, if you own a car, drive one, etcetera then fuck off about getting down on smokers. Until you choose the primary mode of transit that I have, walking and biking for the most part, you have no right. Also, even though I have the right it would still be hypocritical of me to do so since I own a car that I used every once in a while. Oh yeah and how about all of you idiots that open burn and don't smoke, or use gas powered lawn equipment and don't smoke but get down on smokers anyway? Sigh... anyway I can keep going on but the moral here is that most Americans have no right to bitch about smokers polluting the air, making is smell weird, etcetera. In general people that live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.

Damned EML .eml attachments and a solution

So I remember having to figure this out some time ago, and then forgetting about it since I don't use Microshaft for the most part, but anyway I had to decode an .eml on my GNU/Linux machine today for the first time in a long time and was fortunate enough to find a solution here. Anyway, this solution worked for me.

http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-45838.html

Although this is an Ubuntu forum this should work with evolution and a simple text editor in general. When I say that I mean these directions:
A big thank you to user 8rdx --

I just ran into this problem w/yahoo and it took me a while to figure it out...

1) Open the attachment in gedit.
2) Scroll down to the "From:" line and copy it.
3) Paste the "From:" line at the very top.
4) Remove the ":" (colon).
5) Save.
6) Drop it back into Evolution.

It SHOULD work. At least it did for me.

If HTML mail looks silly, you may need to allow images:
Edit>Preferences>Mail Preferences>HTML Mail>Load Images
"Always load images from the internet"

Hope this helps! :)

iPhone 3GS (Who Cares?!)

I won't waste a lot of time talking about the technical aspects of the iPhone. I also know that any publicity can be good publicity, but I feel that I should post about this anyway. As with many Apple products, they are pretty decent, and listed along with "in your face" advertising in many places. Still I am led to say who cares whenever Apple releases a new phone because of their philosophical problems as a company.
For example, the partnership with AT&T. Few people read their contracts closely enough to notice the fascist things that Apple did especially with the first gen. iPhones. For example, you can not get a discount on the phone at all on your monthly bill, like if you're a state employee, but you can with any other phone. Now remember that this phone launched at $600 bucks, and then they almost immediately started drastically dropping the price on the phone, basically screwing their die hard customers that bought it on opening night. Of course with every phone released after that you could, but then they also raised the monthly rate of the phone from $70 for a base plan to $80 per month, meaning that even though the phone is $200 bucks it ends up being way more expensive in the long run. Also, let's not forget the ultimate screw time table that Apple used on its customers when they released a better iPhone in less than a year that was $200 bucks. Sure technology changes quickly, but if they were able to release a much better phone so quickly, and the SIM card in the 1st gen was a 3G SIM card anyway, maybe they just should have released a $200 phone, or a 3G phone in the first place, but then they wouldn't have had the opportunity to screw their die hard customers. Yes they did release a $100 in store rebate to customers that bought original iPhone but only if they bought it at full price. Then on to the advertising. I am personally so sick of their childish Mac vs. PC advertising. Sure we should all be using GNU/Linux, but PC has come a long way when it comes to security, and people do get real work done with PCs, plus OSX has a lot of security problems and as it becomes more popular these make the news more and more. Apple's recent commercials again childishly attack the security of PCs, but if we actually had a real universal definition for viruses Apple would no longer be able to claim that their systems did not get them since they can get plenty of other nasty malware. The thing that keeps systems safe is education. Apple is simply less popular, but with a user base that mostly buys the systems because they are "easier to use" and because "they don't want to have to worry about how their computer works" these systems are ripe for attack, but since their percentage of use is still so low we all again basically get to say "who cares" when Apple releases anything. Even when they charge $130 for an OS that is basically totally open source, but that is a rant for another posting. Still the advertising for the iPhone shows a lot of Apps, but remember they are not all free apps, and even if they were the phone is very expensive to use every month, and only works with one carrier that leaves a lot to be desired itself. Plus with Apple busy trying to sue Palm for using touch gestures that humans have used since they've created written language, we are starting to see much better phones emerge anyway. So that's my 2 cents on it.... Let's stop rewarding this company that is all nice on the outside but super fascist on the inside. Apple is the corporate equivalent of cream filled chocolate that's sweet on the outside, but filled with bitter lies inside, or more literally like a Cadbury egg that someone filled with creamy bullshit.

Cash For Clunkers (Open Your Eyes)

Although I am unwilling to side with either the republicans or democrats on this issue I have worked on cars for a long time and I find that, although this program is successful, it is deeply flawed as I will explain below as a series of points.

-- First the republicans need to get off of saying that the money for this program was mismanaged and this somehow has to do with how the government will handle healthcare. This was a seed program where some money was put in to see if it would be used up. The money was then used up and we had to consider putting more in. With this kind of program that means it was successful.

-- Second, if the republicans wanted to talk about something legitimate they would worry about this and the next few points. This point is that the cash for clunkers website is creepy. Meaning that if you actually read the privacy statement at first it looks like a simple 1974 privacy act statement, but then you receive a warning that basically tells you that your computer and its files are now government property. That's flat creepy.

-- Third, this program does not help poor Americans out. The cut off includes vehicles that are less than 25 years old. God forbid we get the few cars still out there manufactured before we had any environmental standards off of the road, we're only going to focus on younger cars, which include huge SUVs. The getting rid of huge SUVs part is good, the bad part is that these cars, many of which end up in the hands of the poor because they have life left in them, won't even get them now. The poor also can't afford to get rid of the ones they have towards a new car even with some government help because new cars are so expensive in general. They are stuck with what they have and pray to God that it doesn't break every day and that they can afford to operate it just to get to work, etc. This means that the people really benefiting from this program are the assholes that bought vehicles that were too big to begin with because they could afford them, and now we're rewarding them for their disgusting choices to buy gas guzzlers in the first place. This also means that people that have already made a choice to be efficient, like those of us who have small 4-cylinder cars, can't really benefit from the program because many of us have cars that are not eligible. On a side note, can I get some money for my main mode of transit, a bicycle, no because I'm not a wasteful asshole and only wasteful assholes qualify. So we're rewarding the people that caused our fuel crisis, and were wasteful and lazy in the first place, unless they're poor of course. The main point here is, "if you give a mouse a cookie...."

-- Four the program makes no provisions for upgrading old vehicles to dual fuel, electro-charger, plug-in hybrid, etc. technology. So if you're restoring a 25 year old car, like I am, and you're installing parts to make it as, or more, efficient as some of the cars they're selling today, the program basically says up your ass you should be too stupid to work on your car, like most of our society, and then you can get some money form us. Otherwise you're too smart and can't be treated well by the government. By the way we'll need some more tax money for the clunkers program this year ok. I don't put the ok here in the form of a question since the government just takes more and more money from average citizens without asking permission.

-- Five this is not an environmentally sound program. I know it sounds like it is, and it does reduce dependence on foreign oil, which I think is awesome, but building cars takes a lot of resources in general. Recycling is not as grand as everyone thinks it is. Not all materials that are recycled can be reused, those that can don't always get reused, etc. This usually makes reusing materials, and being conservative, the best of all environmental plans in the first place, within reason. Of course getting rid of a Hummer, Escalade, etc. is going to make a big difference, but equipping an old F-150 with a small 6 cylinder (or like vehicle) with an electro-charger (for example) would be better than crushing them in favor of new cars.

-- Six when will it end? I can't take advantage of the program because I have one car that's too old, that I'm not driving anyway but restoring, and one that is too efficient. I ride a bike for the most part, but I still get to pay for the people that can afford new cars anyway, that made poor purchasing decisions in the past, to get new ones. What we should be doing is whipping the assholes that are bringing in huge old SUVs to remind them that they never should have bought them in the first place not giving them $4,500. You're supposed to be punished for and learn from your mistakes. Perhaps we should have just taxed the assholes that owned these tanks in the first place to get them to buy new cars, not reward them for it!

-- Seven is dealer scams. Many dealers are rumoured to be turning in cars that were sitting on the lot before the program went into effect, in against the program, by fudging the numbers. So they're stealing from us just like the American auto-makers did. Then again we seem to reward that kind of thing when it comes to American auto-makers. Ask yourself, why were the American companies in trouble and the Japanese companies not? Because the Japanese made better stuff, made stuff we actually wanted, and ran better companies. American car companies should be ashamed, not rewarded.

-- In short this a program with questionable impact on the environment, that is great for our greedy, poorly run, bailed out, American auto-makers. Like most government programs it leaves the poor and the intelligent in the dust, but pats those that can already help themselves on the back. It seems partially like a ploy to steal information from citizens, and boost auto-sales, but as far as the environment goes. Well if we want to actually were serious about that we'd give people money for not using cars and trucks at all. Remember a 30 MPG vehicle might be more than twice as efficient what your old Grand Cherokee got but it still uses about 500 gallons of fuel per car per year if it is driven correctly on average, but as we've noticed with hy-brids most people are not willing to accelerate at the cars' designed rate so they don't get the full benefit of its efficiency. Also, efficiency is always rated with perfect conditions in mind. A single driver, no cargo, for instance.

-- In the end we need to get off of cars period. Why didn't this money go to a technology that might have actually made a real difference, like a mag train? Electricity from a Wind Turbine could have even run it, partially eliminating the need for gas guzzling planes. Oh yeah, because then we wouldn't get to bail out the airline companies again. Keep in mind that a private jet, like Al Gore is so fond of, uses as much fuel in a one way trip from NYC to LA as a Hummer (H1 mind you) uses in 10 thousand miles. We need to build stuff people want to buy again in America. We need to stop rewarding poorly run companies with bailouts. Oh yeah, and where do you think all of this money is coming from with the war in Iraq still raging? Well the answer is probably China, but don't you worry, they'll bail us out as long as we adopt a system of government more and more like theirs.