Indian nicknames

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The NCAA has recently imposed a ban on post season displays of mascots that are based on Indian nicknames (ie. Florida State Seminoles). As can be expected, FSU is not very happy about this. The school I attended used to be called the Hurons, however some PC idiots decided to change the name to the Eagles. This, despite the okay from local Huron tribes in Michigan.

Aren’t there governing bodies for these tribes? I suspect this is the case since they are independent nations of sorts with special provisions under US law. If this is, in fact, the case and said governing bodies approve the use of said mascot then what’s the beef? Now, if the name of the team is the “Reds” or “Redskins”, which many Native Americans find offensive, I can see the point.

What the NCAA should do is require schools using Native American mascots to get approval from the governing bodies referred to by said mascot. If the Native Americans are okay with their namesake being used as a mascot then who cares?

Next up? Iran!

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The foundation is being laid for invading Iran as we speak. Various news outlets are reporting that various explosives found in Iraq after the second Gulf War were ‘clearly from Iran’.

U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Tuesday that weapons recently confiscated in Iraq were “clearly, unambiguously from Iran” and admonished Tehran for allowing the explosives to cross the border.

Combine this with Iran’s pursuit of nuclear technologies and you’re looking at what the neocons will be using as the foundation for invading Iran. It’s pretty clear that we cannot fight wars on three fronts (Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan), which can mean only one thing: bringing back the draft. I’ll be watching this with great interest until March 15th, 2006, which is when I turn 26 and will no longer be eligible for the draft.

Stealing WiFi Access

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There has been much talk in the news recently about stealing WiFi from your neighbors. I have a middle of the road point of view on this that I think most of my fellow geeks will agree with. There is much confusion as to what is okay and what is not okay. To help clear up some of this confusion I’ve created a simple grid that you can now reference whenever you come across a WiFi hotspot.

  All Good Totally Uncool
Is it an open access point? √  
Is is protected by WEP, etc.?   √
Is it located in a coffee shop? √  
Are you using it for illegal activities?   √
Are you splitting the bill with your neighbor? √  
Are you just using it for email while your connection is down? √  
Are you sniffing traffic or browsing their network neighborhood?   √
Is the SSID NETGEAR and the password “admin”?   √
Did you sniff traffic to obtain passwords in order to access the hotspot?   √
Is the SSID named “FBI Headquarters” or “CIA HQ”?   √

I look at it this way; if you knowingly leave your access point open to the world then it’s perfectly okay for me to use it, however, I should respect your kindness and not use it for malicious activities of any kind. The exception to this is what I call the “Idiot WiFi Hotspot”, which is like picking on the retard during recess. If someone is too stupid to at least change the admin password then they have no idea what’s going on with their WiFi and, while taking advantage of this idiot might be tempting, it’s just not very cool. The only exception to the IWFH rule is is if your connection is down and you want to check your email or read the news.

If you had to sniff packets or crack a WEP key to gain access to a hotspot then you’ve just broken the law and are a total douche bag. I liken this to someone breaking into your cable box and siphoning free HBO.

We’re not talking quantum physics here people. If you knock on someone’s door and they either don’t answer or the sign says “Closed” then you don’t just come on in. Use common sense and the handy reference table above and you most likely won’t be arrested for stealing WiFi.

Flip flops Exposed!

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Ran across a rather amusing story today talking about the serious dangers of wearing flip flops. You read that right; an entire article devoted to the serious dangers of wearing flip flops. Researchers, and I use that term lightly, have found a wide range of problems associated with flip flops including the following.

  1. Flip flops can cause accidents by getting stuck under the pedal or “foot slipping off the pedal altogether.”
  2. Toxins in flip flops can cause lower sperm counts in men and are known to attack the liver, kidneys and reproductive organs.

They even have some in-depth first hand experience about just how dangerous this type of footwear can be.

Leigh Purves, gossip columnist for the Daily Star, is among those to have had a close call while driving with designer flip flops. She has told how, while travelling on the M1, her sandal got stuck under the brake pedal and she missed another car “by millimetres”.

I wear flip flops probably every day during the summer. Now that I live in Seattle, I wear them pretty much year round. According to this “research” if I’m are drinking with my friends at the beach I can pretty much kiss my liver goodbye (not that five years in college and a fraternity didn’t help with that effort).

But the ongoing scandal of wearing flip flops doesn’t just stop here. Oh, no, they can lead to international incidents as well! Recently, the Lacrosse team from Northwestern University, caused an international stir when they wore flip flops while attending the White House to meet President Bush.

The entire debacle unfolded after a player’s gay brother (he has to be gay; who else besides a gay man would notice a girl’s footwear in a photo?) sent her an email titled “YOU WORE FLIP FLOPS TO THE WHITE HOUSE?!” Oh the shame!

So there you have it. Flip flops cause car accidents, organ failure, the shooting of proverbial blanks and, quite possibly, the use of a CIA hit squad to kill you.

Cameron and Damien try out for The Amazing Race

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Geek friend and fellow blogger (God, did I call myself a blogger?), Cameron Barrett and his identical twin brother, Damien, are trying out for The Amazing Race.

This is one of Lauren and my favorite TV shows. Last year with Rob and Amber was simply some of the most exciting and entertaining TV I’ve seen. Cameron is the type of guy whose mind travels at about 15,000,000 miles a minute even if he’s not saying anything. I wouldn’t even know what to expect if they were to get on the show. But, you can definitely expect that Cameron will have a zany idea or ten and he’ll be moblogging like nobody else on the planet ever has.

Pass this on and blog about it. You can read more about it on Damien’s blog: Help Us Get on The Amazing Race.

Be the best bully you can be!

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Looks like Rock Star is looking to rock the proverbial video game industry boat again. It’s not the next GTA, but rather a game titled “Bully” where the object is to be the biggest badass in your boarding school. As can be expected, some people are a upset about this.

Liz Carnell of campaign group Bullying Online says: “This game should be banned. I’m extremely worried that kids will play it and then act out what they’ve seen in the classroom.

Jesus! Would somebody please stand up and ask, “Where are the parents?” Who are the idiots that let their young kids purchase these types of games? Call me old fashioned, but I think parents should be involved in setting and enforcing boundaries for their kids, not the government.

Here’s a crazy idea: How about you actually pay attention to what your kids are doing? How about you play the games your kids do and make sure they are appropriate?

Drinking makes you smart!

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From the, “Phew!” Department, comes this story about a study that says having a drink or two a day makes you a better thinker.

An Australian National University study of 7000 people has found those who drink in moderation have better verbal skills, memory and speed of thinking than those at the extremes of the drinking spectrum.

The researchers say it’s a mystery as to why the correlation exists. I guess that’s why college makes kids a lot smarter. It isn’t the hours you spend studying and in class, it’s the time you spend out at the bars with your friends. Of course, this would imply that the guys in my fraternity should be smart as a whip, however the study states that heavy drinking leads to the opposite.

Allegations of US Secret Detention Centers

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A recent story has popped up on CNN covering Amnesty International’s claim that two Yemeni men were held in secret US detention centers.

Two Yemeni men say they were held in solitary confinement in secret, underground U.S. detention facilities in an unknown country and interrogated by masked men for more than 18 months without being charged or allowed any contact with the outside world, Amnesty International said Wednesday.

Many of the war apologists say that such tactics are justified because the “War on Terror” is a special circumstance and that they, they being the terrorists, don’t fight fair. Since when do two wrongs make a right?

This is the biggest problem I have with the “War on Terror” and those who support it. They feel that the PATRIOT Act, illegal invasion of Iraq, secret detentions, indefinite detentions without access to any legal proceedings, etc. are tools for winning this war of ideologies. But, when you lower yourself to your cheating opponents level are you any better than they are? The President preaches about “advancing freedom” and, at the same time, keeps prisoners detained indefinitely without access to legal counsel in secret. We hear it all the time about how Saddam had secret prisons where people were tortured and how Saddam used vast intelligence networks to turn people against each other and keep them in line. How is the PATRIOT Act, which allows the FBI to monitor your reading habits, different?

“Land of the Free” my ass. Look in the mirror and say it with me, “I’m a hypocrite.”

PHP + AJAX + Dictd Interface

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Lots of my geek friends have already had a preview of this feature, but we’ve launched it on the live site and now I can tell everyone about eNotes.com‘s new Dictionary/Thesaurus Lookup feature. Below are instructions for looking up a definition or finding synonym’s for any word on any of eNotes.com’s pages.

  1. Go to eNotes.com
  2. Select a word (any word, or even parts of word) with your mouse
  3. Hit SHIFT+D for a definition or SHIFT+T for a list of synonyms from the thesaurus

Being an educational site this is going to be an amazing feature for our users. Considering we have over 50 full books and plays online and over 70,000 pages of premium educational content it’s going to be great for users to be able to look up definitions and synonyms for any word on our web pages with little effort.

I’m sure everyone is wondering how we went about putting together this great feature. Surprisingly, it wasn’t really that hard. When the owners first came to me with this idea I instantly thought of AJAX. I contacted Ian Eure who is my go to Javascript guru. We talked through the options and decided that we needed some Javascript that used XMLHttpRequest to interface with a PHP script that, in turn, would perform the lookups over the TCP/IP enabled dictd. Below is a list of ingredients we used.

  • 1 Javascript guru
  • PEAR’s Net_Dict to interface with our dictd server
  • dictd installed with the WorldNet dictionary and Moby thesaurus
  • Some PHP code to parse the dictd response and convert it into XHTML
  • Some Javascript/XMLHttpRequest magic to capture the selected text and query the PHP dictd interface

We’ve spent a few weeks perfecting the interface and making it pretty, but Ian had the bulk of the prototype code done in a few hours. I’d like to thank Ian for his superb and highly professional coding skills and eNotes.com for letting us do cool stuff like this. In addition to being a great company to work for, eNotes has also agreed to release some of the library code that parses dictd responses into HTML back to the community. I would assume in the coming months HTML_Dict and Net_Dict_Parser will be released either via PEAR or, possibly, an eNotes PEAR channel.

IE 7 Beta Overview

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Well, Microsoft finally released it’s beta of the highly anticipated Internet Explorer v7. And the tech community rejoiced let out a collective groan. As exhibit A I’d like to introduce this this screenshot of the new browser UI. As exhibit B I’d like to introduce this screenshot of the RSS feature. Now, there are a few good things in this release.

  1. Tabs. Finally.
  2. RSS. Finally.
  3. Search. Finally.
  4. Phishing detection, which I think Microsoft should surely be commended for. Though I think the word “phishing” should be replaced with something less tech-centric that my mom would understand.
  5. They’ve added the ability to manage browser add-ons, which evidently wasn’t supported in previous versions.

My problem with this list is I find myself saying “So what?”. Firefox, Opera and Safari have had all of these features, except for phishing detection, for years (NOTE: Firefox has an anti-phishing plugin, but does not ship an anti-phishing feature by default). I find myself wondering if this is too little too late. Either way, Microsoft should ahem be commended for making these changes. They’re late to the party, but at least they came. As can be expected from someone who pretty much hates Microsoft products I do have a few complaints.

  1. Why the hell did the move the menu bar below the tabs? They’ve actually gone against their own UI recommendations. They should clearly put this back at the top of the window.
  2. No stop or refresh buttons? I don’t need a 500 pixel-wide location bar, but I do need a stop and a refresh button.
  3. What the hell is up with the phantom tab to the right of the tab? It opens new tabs, I get that, but it should be turned into a “New Tab” button next to the “X” for closing tabs.
  4. I can’t aggregate feeds? I assume this will be fixed before it launches.
  5. IE 7 still isn’t acid compliant and still doesn’t fix many of the CSS rendering bugs in IE 6. As someone who makes a living banging his head against various IE bugs I seriously hope they fix this before it’s finally released.

As a web developer I’m pretty pissed that the rendering bugs haven’t been fixed and the browser still isn’t compliant with even CSS1. Meanwhile, CSS3 is being proposed and CSS2 is getting wider support in Safari and Mozilla/Firefox. I would have liked nothing more than IE7 to come out and be fully CSS3 compliant. You would be reading a very different post if it had.

Overall, I give this beta a C. Why? Because Microsoft has done the bare minimum. They haven’t done anything ground breaking here and they didn’t even bother to fix the existing rendering problems. Unlike others, however, I’ll wait to pass my final judgement until the final release has hit the streets, which I think will be around when Windows Vista is released.