Now, in certain circumstances I can understand a cancellation charge. Specifically when there is some actual non-recoverable cost incurred by the vendor. Special order items, custom products, anything not already in stock, etc. But when an item that they had in-stock was ordered then canceled, and all they did was pick the order, charging me money to not send it to me simply ensures I will never place an order with that company again.

Someone I knew once said that a customer who doesn’t bring you repeat business is not a customer, but a victim. I feel abused by this company and the only thing that makes me feel better about it is that a more reputable company had the same product for less than the crappy company even with the $25 cancellation charge.

The meta-data shows that the file was created using version FIVE of adobe’s own acrobat creation tools, so why doesn’t the title meta-data say “Guide to the SWEBOK” or some such? And the author field should be the IEEE Computer Society, not RobertD.

When someone in the IEEE Computer Society, writing a document on how to write software can’t even get their tools to work the way the designer wanted them to work, it’s a damning testament to the quality of software engineering. I’m sure RobertD isn’t an idiot, his software should have helped him make this document, not made the IEEE look like a bunch of morons.

I’m not even going to begin to comment on the fact that the official swebok pdf download page seemingly ‘requires’ an email address, while the html version is served up anonymously, but you could always just download the pdf directly from the IEEE CSDP education portal.

I’ve been a member of the IEEE Computer Society and the IEEE for years, and a software developer for even longer. Sadly, this is totally indicative of the mishmash of disciplines that make up software engineering. Computer scientists are keen to point out how every discipline can make use of our science, but frankly software needs other disciplines as well. Marketing, management, communications, you get the idea.

Think on this, and think on it carefully: you are seeing a manmade object falling gracefully and with intent to the surface of an alien world, as seen by another manmade object already circling that world, both of them acting robotically, and both of them hundreds of million of kilometers away.

You can view full images and get a nice collection of links over at Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD).

If only it were possible to get new prints of the cards and maps so we could play this old game. There is a beta module for VASSAL available, however. VASSAL allows you to play board games online. Mostly geared toward wargames, it’s a fairly generic engine that lets you produce your own modules. It seems handy, but I’m yet to find someone to try it with.

The Great Southern California ShakeOut is a week of special events featuring the largest earthquake drill in U.S. history, organized to inspire Southern Californians to get ready for big earthquakes, and to prevent disasters from becoming catastrophes.

The other day, I got an email from Edd, an OpenBSD user, claiming that Samba would crash when serving files off an MS-DOS filesystem. This was Samba built from sources and not the one from ports. Since I use myself Samba a lot and for a quite large user base, I got interested in the issue and started investigating it.

What I found out in the end is a surprise and was not expected: A bug that has been there in all BSDs for almost all the time, since the 4.2BSD times or for roughly 25 years…

The daemontools-installer package modifies /etc/inittab to cause the svscan/svscanboot process to launch. With upstart, there is no /etc/inittab, instead it is replaced with a collection of config files in /etc/event.d. There’s currently a bug for this misbehavior, however it is over a year old, but has the workaround documented.

The solution is to first create an empty, bogus /etc/inittab, then run the installer, and then put a manually created file in /etc/event.d to actually launch svscan.

1. Create a bogus inittab, touch /etc/inittab
2. Install the installer, apt-get install daemontools-installer
3. Fetch the code, get-daemontools
4. Build the package, build-daemontools (and, of course, install it when prompted)
5. Create /etc/event.d/svscan
6. Run initctl start svscan
7. If desired, rm /etc/inittab

The following is the contents of /etc/event.d/svscan:


start on runlevel 2
start on runlevel 3
start on runlevel 4
start on runlevel 5
stop on shutdown
respawn
exec /usr/bin/svscanboot


Now you will get the desired behavior of svscan starting at boot and being kept running by upstart.

I am in full agreement with the following passage from Why Do Textbooks Cost So Much which describes the three party pricing that occurs in healthcare.

Welcome to the world of textbook pricing, where, it would seem, the usual market forces don’t apply. The textbook market in no way resembles the trade book market, in which the same person - the consumer - desires the book (the new War and Peace, the latest diet guide or whatever), acquires it, and pays for it, so that price points and competition are crucial. What the textbook market resembles most is the market for health care, in which one entity (the physician/the professor) desires - that is, assigns or prescribes - the product, a second entity (the patient/the student) consumes it, and a third set of entities (insurance companies/parents) foot the bill. Spiraling prices for textbooks, like spiraling medical costs, seem to be the inevitable result.

However, I’m not as negative about the spiraling costs of healthcare that most people are. I believe the US medical system delivers high value for dollar, and the only thing that’s really missing is pricing transparency. For example, I actually spent MORE on healthcare than was strictly necessary because the price I thought a particular procedure would cost was actually the “insurace” price, and had I paid directly I would have saved several thousand dollars. I look forward to the day that I can see a plain statement of costs and services from a doctor.

• Run fewer programs (though they have to repeat it SIX times)
• Defragment your hard drive (welcome to 1990)
• Turn off visual effects (isn’t that what the whole point of vista is?)
• Restart your computer regularly
• Buy more memory

And if none of that works….

• Buy a new computer!

How, exactly, is this advice different than the advice they gave for Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows ME, Windows XP…. ?

Of course, I write this on a computer that was last rebooted 5 days ago while connected to a computer that was last rebooted 300 days ago, but I guess that’s because I’m not using windows.

Seriously, the number of assertions I see where someone says they are ‘close’ and only need a ‘bit more work’ to get a working bench model are dizzying. Of course, one wise person on the Intarwebs pointed out…

The Internet has been taken over by truth seekers and things like free energy, and then of course all the scams that I assume are funded by the oil companies hoping that people will buy in to them and get scammed and then never touch free energy again.

So, if you ever get burned by some free energy plans or schemes, just remember, it’s the oil companies that are seeding disinformation.

In the meantime, give Idiocracy another viewing.