digitalraven | Entries tagged with rant

I’m sure that a lot of the news media outside the UK is telling the rest of the world how excited all we British people are about some wedding that a couple of over-privileged rich thickoes will be holding at the end of the month. A lot of the news media within the UK are busy telling us how excited we should be. Those of us who actually live here put up with this with a mild sense of apathy, since nobody with more than three brain cells to rub together actually gives a toss.
That’s not entirely true. I give a toss. Not because I’m secretly a fan of moneyed cretins (I’m not⁰), but because they’ve got some bloody cheek picking the date.

A brief refresher: May the 1st is International Worker’s Day. I think that this is one of the few public holidays that has merit, rather than being a hangover from when the country had a majority of people who went along with schizophrenics because that’s what they’d always done¹. In the UK, we celebrate this holiday on the first Monday in May. This year, that happens to be the 2nd of May.

The vapid twats’ celebration is on the 29th of April. This is apparently a public holiday, because some idiots find it so excruciatingly painful earning a wage while a lot of people who have never needed to work—and in many cases have never worked—hang around a church for a bit.

Where’s the other boot? Oh, yeah. It’s the two-tone Tory filth currently in charge who want to stop International Worker’s Day being a public holiday, instead moving it to St. George’s Day (in England) and St. David’s Day (in Wales), or a newly-created Trafalgar Day sometime in October.² Because the country has more people who fought at Trafalgar than it has workers, or some equally vapid statement acting as a flimsy cover for the Government’s hatred of those of us who didn’t go to Eton or get jobs on Daddy’s recommendation.³

The “Royal Wedding” nonsense thus plays out over a four-day weekend, with nary a thought as to where the Monday off comes from, thus greatly increasing the chance that nobody will complain about the Tory bastards stealing one of the few good public holidays left.

⁰: I’m a republican, in the British sense of the word: we’d be better off consigning the whole concept of royalty to the dustbin of history as the classist wank that it is.
¹: Christmas, Easter, that sort of thing.
²: Fortunately for me, their insane plans only affect England and Wales. Nobody in Scotland has yet to be that stupid. And we have our own public holidays anyway.
³: The closest I could have got to that is my Dad telling me when his factory had an opening sweeping the floor for minimum wage. I’d still have had to apply, hope for an interview, then survive the interview. Back in 2003, I was a fresh Computer Science graduate, so I’d have been underqualified compared to everyone else.

Today, the Times paywall dropped. I’d not have noticed myself were it not for a storm of idiots linking to the Times on Twitter.

Cheers, guys.

I mean, on my best day I think Rupert Murdoch should be deprived of the oxygen of oxygen for being a vile bigot and bigot-enabler, a man who believes it is his right to manipulate governments and laws simply because he has vast pots of cash. I’m not about to click links to Times stories on my best day. But all of a sudden, just because it’s FREE! for a change, people are linking to it like that’s a fine and noble thing to do.

Now, far be it from me to think that the paywall goes down to drive up visitor numbers so as to “prove” that people still read the Times even though it has taken a brain-damaged step of cutting itself off from the rest of the web. Actually, no, I do think that’s what happened. At least in part.

I’ve been reading a very good book, Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational. It’s a book about behavioural economics, and is very interesting indeed for examining how people’s minds work. One of the chapters goes into how FREE! is more than just the price point below 0.01. It’s a powerful psychological trigger, especially when we’ve been imprinted with a “default” value that’s not FREE!. The Times paywall has been up for long enough for people to get used to the idea that access to the Murdoch’s tentacle costs money. Now that it’s FREE!, people flock to it.

So it’s a combination of clever, cynical marketing and manipulation of visitor numbers to make the paywall look like something other than a massive flop that’s driving readers away at an alarming rate.

I tweeted as much:

While the Times paywall is down, why not ignore it anyway as it's part of Murdock's foetid empire fit only for lining the litter-tray?

(yeah, I can't spell the Foul One's name)

One of the replies I didn’t expect was “It has the wonderful Caitlin Moran’s articles.” I mean, I ~~stalk~~ follow her. I’ve read some of her stuff. Yes, it’s good. But not good enough to justify having anything to do with the Murdoch organ. She herself later tweeted

THRILLED everyone's enjoying my stuff, but have to say I am in favour of paywalls - I watched the music industry crumble without them.

WHAT? No, seriously, what the cunting fuck is that supposed to mean? The music industry, for people who haven’t heard a new song since 1998, hasn’t crumbled. It’s undergone a change, one that’s particularly painful because the kinds of idiots in charge are the same kind of dangerously incoherent morons who think that paywalls are at all worthwhile. But it’s mostly come through that change and you know what? The same incredibly overpaid idiots who made a metric fuckton of money in the 1990s still make a metric fuckton of money. New music still comes out. New music that’s sometimes good and sometimes shit; but even Simon Bloody Cowell’s just Stock, Aitken and Waterman in new drag.

So the foundation of her braindead argument is shot out of the water by simply existing as a human being with a set of ears. And all of a sudden, I’ve no stomach to read her words even when they’re not sponsored by a bigoted oligarch. Fuck that. If you’re that stupid, I refuse to acknowledge your worth in any endeavour.

Current Mood: annoyed
Current Location: stew@flat:~/sofa
Current Music: Waking the Dead finale

Sorry,

weaver42, I stole your gig. But "Ranting with MIRVs", while more accurate, is not as catchy. Blow me.

As regular readers (and anyone who knows me in person) is already well aware, I’m hardly the calmest human being. But even now, I’m pretty sure I’ve not so much crossed a line as jumped over with both feet.

Maybe it’s the lack of sleep talking, I don’t know. But I’m currently on a train⁰. I’m in the quiet coach¹. The train’s been underway for about ten minutes—Auld Reekie has given itself over to snow-covered fields, but only just. And so far, three people have had noisy phone conversations, and another one is ignoring his phone. His phone with a stupid bastard squeaky ringtone. His phone, which has sounded this disgusting offence against the ears of everyone with a brain at least thirty fucking times.

Ten minutes. I’m fit to be tied. I swear if things don’t change I’m going to find this cunt and feed him the twatting phone. And then I’m going to throw him out of a bastard window. Next, the gobby bellends who think the world needs to hear how they think they’ll be on time, and maybe they’ll have red sauce with their tea or maybe it’ll be brown sauce because they don’t have the conversational skills of a six-year-old. I’m going to cut out their tongues to make a necklace, then beat them to death wit their own twatphones.

Then I might pause for a bite of lunch.

The idea of the quiet coach is an excellent one, but the lack of enforcement really fucks me off.

---

Just passed through Berwick Upon Tweed. Scarily, much of the river under the bridge and out towards the sea was frozen over, large sheets of ice that didn’t look like they could hold much weight—but this is the UK, where rivers freezing over close to the sea is a once-a-century occurrence.

I’m not going to get this posted until I get to my parents’, because the train company has apparently decided that the best way to ensure that their free wifi doesn’t shit itself at the thought of people using it is to stop them. First class still gets it, but for proles like me I’m limited to 15 minutes unrestricted then they charge way over the fucking odds for something that makes dialup look worthwhile.

The window-side armrest refuses to move up. As I’m 6’3”, the only way I can use the laptop is with my back to a window (or to share with three random fucking strangers at a table, which is about as likely as my suddenly joining the Conservative party, or shaving). So I’m randomly uncomfortable, but listening to the delightfully sweaty Amateur Transplants’ χmas album² has suited to mollify my previous murderous rage.

---

One thing that pisses me off⁴ is when people claim that the greatest of Pulp’s political songs is Common People. Now, don’t get me wrong, Common People is an excellent song. But these people are missing one little thing: the aforementioned song is all about how the bastards with power can’t understand the lot of people who do not have power and money.

What’s the point of being rich if you don’t know what to do with it because you’re too bleeding thick?

On the same album, also released as a single, is Mis-Shapes. Less a political song and more a full-on bellowed screed inciting revolution, it is the song everyone claims Common People to be. It’s not about misunderstanding, it’s about grabbing those in power by the bollocks and kicking the evil cunts until they stop moving.

We’re making a move, we’re making it now, we’re coming out of the sidelines. Just put your hands up, it’s a raid. We want your homes, we want your lives, we want the things you won’t allow us. We won’t use guns, we won’t use bombs, we’ll use the one thing we’ve got more of: That’s our minds.

Yeah. Fuck Common People.

---

Having got in and spent an evening here, I’m now well appraised of the quality of television available to people stupid enough to pay bigoted Australian cunts named Murdoch. And fuck me, it’s pretty fucking grim.⁵

The BBC has A Question of Sport, a quiz show about, well, sport. This works on multiple levels—in addition to being interesting, the host and the captains have real chemistry, and the guests generally turn out to have hidden depths.

Sky has A League of Their Own, a show so bland and forgettable that I had to google the title having seen it not an hour beforehand. Bad enough that this is yet another vehicle for pathetic whining cunt James Corden, the man who could sell condoms with a picture of his face and the words “His parents didn’t. You should. For all our sakes.” The only funny person available is cricketing legend Freddie Flintoff, who is actually a funny man with a wonderfully deadpan delivery. John Bishop looks like he’s been dragged in from being the kind of pathetic club-compere that Dave Spikey lampoons in Phoenix Nights. The other team members are a footballer notable for being the son of someone famous and being married to a forgettable pop nothing who provided countless teenagers with wank material throughout the late 90s; and a woman who has accepted her role as braindead tits&arse, and demonstrates this by shagging Ant and/or Dec. The other guests are selected primarily by the criteria “Are you mates with James Corden?”

This programme lasts an hour, but that hour feels like several decades. The game “features” two rounds and a quick-fire thing. One team “answers” one question, a task that should take a competent human being roughly twenty seconds, and an Only Connect team somewhere around the Planck Time. Unfortunately, the remaining quarter of an hour allocated to each team’s answer to a question is given over to Corden not yet realising that most teenage boys have left funner things than him in an old sock, and the panels trying in vain to be witty and all failing. Miserably.

The only reason for any human being to watch A League of Their Own, which does require fattening the bank balance of a corpulent non-com racist and homophobe who thinks Fox News is just what the world needs, is to see precisely what the human race is heading towards. Anyone who can raise a laugh at this awful excuse for prime-time television should be made into Soylent Green post-haste. That they’re not reminds me of just how much despair it’s possible for one human soul to contain.

⁰: Note to Americans and other aliens: a train is a strange conveyance designed to move large numbers of people over long distances at high speeds between all cities and towns. This is called “public transport” and is neither Communist nor the sole preserve of the poor. The only way to get mugged on a British train is to buy something from the snack trolley³.
¹: One of the finest inventions known to man: an entire carriage where one must wear headphones to listen to music, put phones and other electronic devices (like my laptop) on mute, and not talk too loud so people can actually relax while travelling.
²: As mentioned, that’s a pre-emptive “fuck you” to the “xmas is blasphemy” retards. Not because I think blasphemy matters; I’m somewhat more militant than Dawkins in my mocking of the religious, but because taking the piss out of the braindead is funny.
³: (added later) Or pay for the wifi.
⁴: Because fuck know the world isn’t full of the bloody things already…
⁵: I’ve currently had a bottle of wine, so give me some leeway on the spelling.

Because that's the whole point of nursereys...

ANGRY residents are campaigning against a house being turned into a nursery because they fear it will increase noise and traffic and could attract paedophiles.

No, I can't add any commentary that makes sense of this story. Chris Morris, your works have become reality.

I've not been blogging a lot about politics, which will surprise long-time readers.

Partly, this is a result of exasperation with the whole fucking mess. For all that the new Labour leader looks like he might have promise I'm not about to forget the party's disastrous record on civil liberties. And for all that it's factually correct to call Nick Clegg a liar and Vince Cable a liar, for all that the Liberal Democrats got votes based on being a left-wing rival to Labour and then went back on that when they got into bed with the fucking Tories, for all that a millionaire heir to a baronetcy and a millionaire cousin of the fucking Queen are telling us that "benefit cheats" are robbing the government but are happy to ignore rich cunts avoiding paying £30bn in tax, for all that the bastards in Westminster claim it's wrong to strike in protest at the cuts because they've been made by an elected government, even though the minority half of the coalition promised not to do that thus making the election result inherently fraudulent...

This is why I've not been getting political here. Have you seen the size of my run-on sentences? And it finished on an ellipsis, for fuck's sakes?

To be serious, though, I'm getting fucking tired of the whole thing. The Tories are happy to make the rich richer while robbing the poor. Tory cunts are privatising universities (hey, kids! Welcome to the second-most-batshit idea America's ever had!) and robbing the BBC so that their own racist, homophobic, and generally bigoted Australian tax exile puppet-master is fit to dance on Auntie's corpse.

Is there any wonder that I alternate between wanting to sleep until the next general election and climbing the Scott Monument with a high-powered rifle? Any cunt wearing blue or yellow has a fucking bullet coming for him. Admittedly, IKEA employees who get too close to my sights are buggered, but they're acceptable collateral damage.

Admittedly, another reason I've not been blogging on politics is that a lot of other people already are. I've been making great use of the Shared Items in Google Reader, passing on bits of commentary and snark that I agree with because I don't think I've got the energy to do it myself.

Possibly the finest bit is from Anton Vowl, presenting an Austerity Cuts Drinking Game.

I think that says it all.

Windows has always had a dubious relationship with scripting. It likes programming, although it wants everyone who writes Windows code to consider themselves a Software Engineer with a proper big methodology that allows for a solution development infrastructure that leverages the strengths of a team dynamic in order to fully satisfy the customer's needs. Any code that is written is entirely incidental to the project.

Windows hates scripters, though. Scripting is the fine and noble art of saying "fuck methodology, I need {Task X} done five minutes ago so let's string together a bunch of simple tools or some Perl and get it done". On a decent OS, scripts can do all manner of things, but the same isn't true for our Friend from Redmond.

Given its roots in MS-DOS, admins had to write Windows scripts in batch files. The clue there is in the name: run a bunch of commands in a batch. The escape sequences are insane. The use and abuse of variables is frequent. And the syntax itself could only be conceived of by a drunken lunatic halfway through a DIY attempt at a pre-frontal lobotomy. This is because nobody designed the syntax, it "evolved"[0]

Come Windows XP, MS pushed the Windows Script Host—a system that would allow people to write proper object-oriented scripts for Windows. In layman's terms, that's a bit like going from barely having discovered fire to harnessing the power of the atom. Or like the transition between the intelligence required to enjoy Hollyoaks to that required to enjoy Only Connect. Massive jump. Astronomical in scale.

Except the Windows Script Host is fucking stupid and broken in a whole bunch of other places and ways. The one that had me banging my head against the problem was with the way it handles external commands. Now, scripts have to have a nice, easy way to call external commands because that's what scripts are for. Programmers write their own interface to a regexp library to search through files, scripters say "fuck that" and pipe the output to grep or local equivalent. If an external command does what you want, then as a scripter you use it.[1]

External commands hang together using pipes. As in "Run this command, then pipe its output to that command." They're a staple of scripting. And the Windows Script Host shits itself every bollocking time one appears. Seriously. Pass a pair of commands piped together to Wscript.Shell.run, and it does nothing. Worse, it does nothing in a really horribly broken way, because it gives an error message. Not just any error message, but "The file could not be found." Not being able to handle pipes has nothing to do with finding files. But that's the error message you get.

Now, maybe I'm weird.[2] But I'm pretty sure that it's normal that if you see an error message, that message comes within half a billion light-years of telling you what caused the cunting error! But no. Windows Script Host does not want to do that. Because that would be useful, and as anyone who's been exposed to Windows Script Host for more than ten minutes knows, every single twatting aspect of it was designed[3] to have no relation with the very concept of being useful.

One day, I'm going to get on a plane[4] to Redmond, and I'm going to find the people responsible for this abomination of code, and I'm going to cunt them right in the fuck. And no judge on Earth would hold me guilty once exposed to their evil!

[0]: If you're reading this in the State of Arkansas you are legally mandated to replace the quoted word with "was designed by some higher intelligence who nonetheless made the kinds of mistakes first year engineering students would commit Seppuku for making." Which in this case is probably closer to the truth.
[1]: The philosophy is fundamentally different. A script is something I write for myself to run over systems that I have control over. A program is something I write for other people to run on systems that I have no control over.
[2]: I know I'm weird. Shut up at the back.
[3]: I'm going to bet it was designed by a committee. If not, he should be.
[4]: The infinite area and innate existence in only two dimensions should help.

Current Mood: Fucked off

So this lunchtime, I and lots of other paid for the dictator of a repressive theocracy to show up, have tea with the Queen, and tell her (and the world) that me and people like me are just like the Nazis, just because we don't have invisible friends.

He'd know, given that said dictator used to be a member of the Hitler Youth.

I was too busy cleaning (oh, the luxuries of a day off) to actually see the event, gesture obscenely at the car, and so on, but the crowds of people thronging the streets did give me pause when I made an attempt to get to the library.

I'm not the head of a state that has made an institution of hiding child-rapists. I was and indeed am not a member of the Hitler Youth. I have never made any claim that would make me complicit in what is tantamount to genocide in Africa. I do not glorify homophobia and bigotry.

So why does this evil shit get to close down my city and have me foot the bill?

I sense an angry letter to the council coming on...

Don't worry, Dropbox. It's not just you. I understand that you're doing ugly and perverse things that run directly contrary to the security guidelines and best practices of the platform you're coding for in the name of "convenience" and because your Allmighty Business Model doesn't seem to include organizations wanting each member of staff to have their own Dropbox. I think it's distinctly dangerous and more than a little short-sighted, but there you go.

But you're not the only evil ones. Take a package from today.

be a company that use a perfectly good installer for their product.
be borged by someone who doesn't like paying to licence the perfectly good installer when Winzip self-extracting exes are so cheap!
use the exe to place your binaries under %PROGRAMFILES%, then write all the other shit an installer should do into a batch file, dependent on buggy-as-buggery little apps you wrote to replace the function of an installer.
forget to actually add shortcuts to your fucking programs when writing URLs into the Start menu of the currently-logged-in user.

Seriously? Do you not want us to upgrade?

But fortunately, because you're crap, I can repackage all of this. It'll take me a short while and a refresher course in batch programming, but I can do it and do it neatly. Because you're a piece of shit written by people who've had their installer taken away, and they're trying to do good, honest.

The difference between shit software that I can package and shit software that I cannot seems to be the difference betwee ignorance and malice. If you show malice towards your platform of choice (spunking binaries into %APPDATA%, fuck's sakes, I don't think I'll see something that stupid for the next week), I will show malice towards you. But if you're just ignorant—and more than a bit thick—I can at least dissect your trainwreck and make it work.

Learn, fuckpigs.

I no longer use Dropbox.

It was good while it lasted, but just recently I've had reason to discover just how brain-damaged their "coders" are, and I refuse to support any platform based entirely on stupidity.

Anyone know of good (with non-retarded software) alternatives?

Why the hatred? Part of my job is tending the package-farms of our internal software repository. Think apt-for-windows but, but with a wide range of software. Oh, gød, some of you don't know what apt is. Right. Said thing allows people to install software without needing admin rights on their user account, as well as handling configuration aspects. It's all controlled through a GUI with multiple checks to avoid malicious activity on the part of the user. Also, it's internal only—we build the machines, we administer the machines, which acts as another safeguard.

Anyway. I wrangle packages. What that means is, I normally write a very small thing that installs a bit of software—OpenOffice, or Firefox, or something big and hairy like SolidEdge without the user having to do anything. Normally, this is about one line of perl.

I received a request to package the Dropbox client. Fair enough. It installs just fine on our system, so I add our wrapper script and try to hunt down some info on the support boards about silent installs. I find half a dozen threads, spanning the past year. The only replies are of the "I'm trying to do this too!" AOLism. For a technical support forum that Dropbox employees supposedly read and reply to, this is a bad sign.

I work it out anyway (strings on the installer tells me it's NSIS, which means /S should do) and give it a trial run. Hrm. It runs, and displays the "create account" post-installer screen. So it installs, but not as silently as it fucking should. Bad sign number two.

Part of making a package is making an uninstaller, so I go hunting. Nothing on the Start menu. Balls. Nothing in Add/Remove Programs. Balls. Check the registry, nothing in HKLM\S\MS\Win\CV\Uninstall. Balls. On a whim, I run the installer as myself, to check that it does work. Yup. Once that's done, I run a search, and find all the information stuck in HKCU. BALLS! And the binaries are in %APPDATA%. Sweet Zombie Jesus and his Man-Eating Testicles!

Why is this bad?

HKLM is software information about the computer. It should contain, among other things, a list of all the software that's installed. HKCU is stuff that only the currently logged-in user needs to care about. Likewise, %APPDATA% can only be read by the currently logged-in user, and is not supposed to be used for binaries at all ever because that's fundamentally fucking stupid. Even if installed just for the current user, binaries should still go into %PROGRAMFILES% and the basic install/uninstall information into HKLM. This is what should and must happen.

Our repository, to make sure that nobody needs a root password to install software, runs installers as the System account, a special Windows user. So all the Dropbox binaries, and all the registry information, only exists for System. If you let it run, it's System who is actually running it, and that's a security hole (that's why we don't let programs auto-start after installation, and shoot processes that try anyway in the back of the head). The whole idea of spunking everything into userspace must be very attractive to the kind of developer who doesn't possess a functioning prefrontal cortex, and who still has trouble spelling his own name, but it's an affront to good practice, good sense, and good taste!

In order to package this piece of... let's call it "software" and be kind—like one kindly considers the random daubing of primary colours onto construction paper to be a "painting" by a particularly dim child—I have to do the following:

Work out what files are created by a normal install
Do the same for registry entries
Delete all copies of the installer I come across. With fire
Write the files to %PROGRAMFILES%
Make the registry entries to HKLM
Run any post-install processes
Start the program to display the account-creation screen

That's otherwise known as "writing an installer", something the dribbling cretins at Dropbox should have fucking done in the first place rather than making someof the worst conscious decisions possible in the circumstances. I swear, if I contemplate how mind-numbingly stupid these imbeciles are for much longer I shall give myself an anyeurism.

They'd all laugh at me if they knew what I was trying to do... to create a new strain of super-installer in half an hour with a fraction of a software-house's resources and a fool writing documentation. "Stew Wilson, he's mad," they'd say. "He's insane. He's dangerous." Well I'll show them! I'll show them all!

Are you a cretin? More than that, are you a certifiable idiot, the kind of hydrocephalic moron who struggles to master basic speech?

Come to Edinburgh for the Fringe. You'll enhance the average intelligence of the crowd by quite a bit.

I'm not saying that everyone who comes to my fair city for the Fringe is a dribbling cretin who should, if the world were just, be forcibly ejected from the gene pool. Not all of them. Hell, not even most of them—see how charitable I'm being? But a significant amount are, and that's more than enough.

Fringe tourists are dangerous morons, we know this. They do moronic things, like walking three-abreast down a pavement so that no bugger can get past without darting into the road—in front of another tourist, because they're the only people stupid enough to think that driving in Embra in August is a good idea. They think nothing of stopping in the middle of nowhere to gawk at a poster, then hurl abuse at the people who collide with their erratic carcasses because the parties of the second part dared to think that they may be allowed to walk down the street. They stop in doorways, two abreast, to hold long conversations about whatever experimental-pronounced-arsegravy play they're going to see, stopping people getting in or out of the place.

There's no actual evidence for it, but it's scientific fact that the only form of life lower than Fringe tourists are the shitbags who hand out flyers. No, I don't want flyers. I'll never want flyers. If Scotland dissolved the Act of Union and went its own way and the Euro fell over and the currency of the resultant nation became Fringe flyers, I would give away everything I owned to become a hermit. This is because flyers are evil—I’ve slipped several times on drifts of discarded gloss cardstock that none of these retards cares enough to clear up—and flyerers are worse than the cocking telephone on trying to intrude into one's sensorium. They're on a par with chuggers as wastes of a human genome that one doesn't throw under busses for the simple fact that it's traumatic to bus drivers.

To highlight precisely why I hate these festering buboes on the rectum of humanity, I merely need to flash back to last year. Last year, I lived on the Lawnmarket. That's part of the Royal Mile, but not the part that's closed off so that Antipodean buskers can ply ten minutes of sub-par juggling into a demand for cash from people who accidentally thought that the High Street might actually be a fucking street. So yeah, not flyerer central. Even so, I was approached on my way back from somewhere by a cretin who thrust a flyer in my face. Naturally, because I wanted to get home, I wasn’t interested. I may have given the traditional Embra response to these cunts, which runs along the lines of “Fuck off”. Shitbag then goes off on one. “Why are you walking down here if you don’t want flyers?” “Because it’s one of the main streets in the city that I live in. And because I live on this street you gibbering cunt get out of the way of my front door!”

After all, I see no point to overreacting.

I made the mistake of walking down the Mile on Wednesday, having just got back from Dublin. I’d not realised that the bastards would have started early. I made a bet with myself, that every single one would get a cheery and unique “No!” from me. So far “I’d rather pan-fry my testicles and eat them with a balsamic reduction!” is my favourite, but “I’d rather cut out my eyes with a rusty butterknife!” is a close second. Since the polis will—quite unfairly—insist on taking the side of a flyerer who suddenly had his kneecaps removed with a crowbar, this is as close as I can get to justice. That and a I DO NOT WANT YOUR FUCKING FLYERS sign taped to my t-shirt again.

Well, the fix is in. ConDem rule is here. Fuckers.

"Oh, but it doesn't look too bad!" Well, no it doesn't. But it's hardly fucking rosy.

miss_s_b has a quick analysis of the ConDem manifesto here, and yeah, it doesn't look too bad.

But. There's always a but.

The majority partner here are the Tories. I'm from the Yorkshire and live in Scotland. The chances that I'd give any Tory cunt the benefit of the doubt are approximately the same as the chances that I will be saved in my own personal Rapture tomorrow morning with Gød himself and His host of angels beckoning to me.

Particular bits that worry me:

• The whole concept of the "marriage tax allowance". This is a fucking Neanderthal idea that promotes the fundamentally fucking insane idea that not only does "marriage" somehow legitimise a relationship, but that it's the only way of making a relationship legitimate. Imagine these next words in ten-mile-high letters of fire: FUCK NO. And the LibDems have agreed to abstain, meaning this toxic piece of single-parent-hating, widow-and-widower-hating, people-who-are-already-a-fucking-family-without-needing-a-bit-of-paper-to-prove-it-hating piece of shit stands a real chance of passing.

• The increase over time in the personal tax allowance. Yeah, I'll believe that one when I fucking see it. There's no actual timetable, just a promise. And I've farted things worth more than a promise from a Tory. I mean, come on. Those fucking morons are installing Gideon in the Treasury. Vince Cable's going to have his hands full changing the little shit's nappy every time Gideon loses control of his bowels and accidentally destroys the country's economy. This is an empty promise that isn't going to happen.

• A cap on immigration. This is being sold along with the line "and an end to child detention immigration controls" as one policy. Well I know this: you can garnish a shit sandwich with black truffle and serve it alongside lobster thermidor but it's still a steaming turd between two slices of bread.

• Tory welfare reform programmes implemented in full. Which is just a code-phrase for "Fuck the poor and disabled, I'll hunt them instead of foxes."

• Tory school reform programme. Aye, right. This is another really fucking bad idea designed to screw over every child not already on the fast-track to Eton.

• A referendum on, well, depending on who you read it's either a range of proportional representation schemes (which could possibly include STV and other less-idiotic ideas) or just AV (which is a different flavour of fucking awful to the current system). Knowing the Tories, the only electoral reform they want is one vote per field, plus one for every fag you owned at Eton. Plus, despite the referendum itself being the subject of a three-line whip, Tories are allowed (and given how prominent this clause is, that's pronounced "encouraged") to campaign against electoral reform. So the whole referendum is only being allowed because the Tories retain the chance to lie, cheat, and steal the result of keeping the current system. And those of us who want electoral reform are supposed to be happy about being cunted in the fuck like this?

Sure, some good things have been promised, but see above for how much that's really worth. The whole situation is Chameleon Dave saying "We pledge to do what we wanted to anyway, but you can sit with us if you can find a chair." Worse, Danny Alexander has been made Scottish Secretary. I quite like Danny Alexander, and now his job is defending the Tories to a Scottish audience. I give him a year before he hangs himself on live television.

What are the odds we can use the Tory—sorry, ConDem—rule to get Scottish independence? Fuck, but I live in hope. Anything's better than Call-Me-Dave the Photoshopped Man.

Mark Steel's unpublished column intended for today's Independent echoes my hate but ~~in more eloquent language~~ without using the word "cunt" quite so much.

[I need to vent about painful stupidity, and I figure ranting on specific topics might help. Hence "Why You're Wrong", dismissing the painful idiocy of modern cretins as found in places like the BBC's Have Your Say (link goes to pisstake site).]

I really fucking hate it when people say "the unelected Gordon Brown"⁰—a sign that I should stop reading the comments, but sometimes it's unavoidable. I hate it because it implies that being unelected is in some way abnormal for our parliamentary democracy. The system here is not the USAnian² system. Nor is it what these cretinous imbeciles believe the USAnian system is—everyone votes and the person with most votes for is teh winnar! As with the actual USAnian system, I think you'll find it's a bit more complicated than that³.

So, why is using "unelected" as a perjorative against a Prime Minister a stupid idea? Because every single one of our Prime Ministers and other cabinet positions is unelected, and no amount of huffing and whinging by terminally mistaken Canadian immigrants⁴ will change that. In the UK, political parties are elected by virtue of individual members of parliament getting elected. Each area (a "constituency") elects one MP to represent it (that party gains the constituency's seat). The party with the most seats is in power, and the lot with the next-smallest total becomes the opposition party.⁵

That's the extent of our input into the political process. You'll note that at no point do we vote for who is going to be Prime Minister. That post is decided by the party (usually he's⁶ the party leader). Likewise, it's up to the party (and the PM) to decide who fills each cabinet post. See, so many MPs are elected that not all of them can have a wide-ranging job. Each of them is expected to represent the interests of the people of their constituency. Those who get cabinet posts get the added responsibilities of other jobs (Home Secretary, Foreign Secretary, etc.).

We don't elect our prime ministers or cabinet ministers. That's up to the parties. So "unelected" is a misnomer. But I think you'll find it's a bit more complicated than that. Using that word actually harms the existing system. It subtly convinces people that really, in a general election we're actually electing our Prime Minister or our Cabinet, or something stupid like that. It convinces people to vote for some figurehead who will never listen to their hopes and fears and desires. That's a bad idea, because you're actually voting for a whole political party as represented by your local individual arsehole. And political parties are made up of a bunch of arseholes who just happens to share a side (and a favourite colour) with each other, and who occasionally make the same promises. If your local arsehole⁷ doesn't care about what you want and just toes the party line, you're in the unenviable position of praying that the party remembers some of the things it promised to make you vote for them. Worse, the arsehole might be a Tory⁸ and then you're not even voting for something human.

Ideally, we should instead vote for the local MP who will actually get things done, the one who listens to the people he represents. And when he doesn't do what people want (see the current copyright fiasco), you can just tell him "Fix this, or you've lost my vote." Upon hearing that, he'll listen. Unlike that smiling cunt Cameron or the frowny-face-drawn-on-a-scrotum Brown, or Nick "Beige with Legs" Clegg, your vote really affects your MP's chances of reclaiming his seat⁹. This is how we keep even our national politics local.

0¹: Often, they go with "the unelected Gordon Clown", which just makes them a higher order of cunt.
1: On this blog we index from zero because that's how indices work and damn those of you who think otherwise!
2: Suck it.
3: With thanks to Dr. Ben Goldacre.
4: I generally like much of what Cory Doctorow does, but his histrionics about UK politics can get fucking annoying.
5: I'm not going to claim that this is a perfectly detailed guide, just that it's accurate enough to dispel particularly annoying myths. As always, I think you'll find it's a bit more complicated than that.
6: On the advice of several female friends, "Thatcher's not a woman!"
7: pron. "Politician"
8: I'll never understand Labour voters who switch to Tory. Lib Dem I can kinda understand, but going Tory? That's like saying "I always get my hair cut by the barber on the high street but this time I thought I'd set my head on fire!"
9: Unless your local MP is one of said party leaders.

Current Location: stew@ork:/office/desk

What the fuck is wrong with you this morning? Yes, yes, I get it, life's so hard when you're piloting a four-wheeled one-ton killing machine that'll leave me a bloody smear while not spilling a drop of your Starbucks "Taste the Burned Beans!" latte. But that's no excuse.

We already have a deal: You try your best to drive like you're not undergoing a prefrontal lobotomy at the wheel, and I'll do all the hard parts of getting the cock out of your way, whether I'm on foot, pushbike, or bike.

This morning, you broke that deal.

I mean, seriously. Two cars ran red lights on the Mound. I know they were on red because the pedestrian crossing was on green. Now I know it can be hard to recognise the colours with mobile pressed to ear—must be some sort of pressure point which, combined with the vibrations of a BMW, destroys colour vision along with the ability to use indicators—but two of you retards? That's just not good enough. Keep this up and I'm going to start carrying a crowbar again, and then you'll be sorry. Hard to run pedestrians down if one's just done your driver's side window and is beating you to death.

If that weren't bad enough, enough of you forgot how to drive around other people to block London Road in three places. Three shitbadgering places! Seriously, has fair Embra had a recent invasion of Highland farmers unused to seeing another human being who isn't in the pages of Crofter's Wives (Here's Morag out by the bothy, showing off her bothy!)? Have the Fifers finally overcome the decontamination station at Queensferry and stolen cars, mistakenly believing that they're able to drive?

Gah!

Current Location: $ORK, somehow
Current Music: Nothing good; boss has tuned back to Radio 1

No, it's not a new instalment or DLC. Just me having a bit of a ruminate.

Dragon Age, like Mass Effect before it, does something that most games find impossible: both games are significantly better on PC than on console. This flies in the face of received wisdom. After all, a port to PC should suck. PCs suck, don't they?

Well, kinda. Mostly, ports aren't handled by the original dev. If they are, that dev has to take code that's carefully constructed for a console and then tweak it so that it works as a PC game and that's hard. I mean, what's up with those PC-gaming jerks anyway? They're the kind of madly obsessive freaks who care about upgrading their video card drivers! They willingly play a game on a platform that requires more than putting in a disc, so they're freaks.

And thus, we get shoddy ports. Three come to mind. Mirror's Edge had a good transition to PC as far as control schemes go. Unfortunately, the porters decided to brute-force the engine, thus requiring a machine far more powerful than the average X360 to run a version that wasn't much prettier. And it came out late.

Saint's Row II didn't have spacky requirements on PC, but that's because the engine didn't push any console to begin with. However, the developers still ignored basic facts about the PC. The control scheme, for example. I'm sat at my gaming machine, and in my right hand is the perfect tool to select options from menus. If that tool is too hard to code for, I can flicker my hand over to some dedicated arrow keys. But apparently, overloading the mouse to work as anything other than a dpad and a couple of triggers was just too hard, so menu selections are handled by ctrl and shift for left and right. No indication of which is which. No attempt to work with the platform. This kind of retardation goes way back, at least to Final Fantasy VII. That port mapped specific keys to specific controller buttons, and despite being a menu-driven RPG, the mouse didn't get a look-in.

Assassin's Creed is the crowning tower of turd. An interface that was clunky but at least usable on console becomes a bastardised nightmare on PC, with strange key-presses at random times, and an engine that works via brute force and ignorance rather than writing to the capabilities of the hardware, leading to system requirements that, for the time, were ludicrous. We're talking about a machine more powerful than needed for Crysis, shortly after that tech-demo released, in order to play a game that's not nearly as pretty.

So yeah. PC ports of console games suck. This is because PC gamers are smelly and weird. Hell, most studios deliberately hold PC release dates back by a few weeks, or trust that high-street retailers will do that for them. To console developers, PC games are the grandfather of the industry, a grandfather who used to be a war hero but is now in the advanced stages of dementia who insists that his glory days are still here even as he shits himself on the floor.

Except Bioware. See, Bioware were PC devs before getting a bunch of money from Microsoft to turn their efforts to XBox development. They created the Baldur's Gate series and the first Neverwinter Nights. So even when they've developed console games, they've always thrown PC gamers a bone. Jade Empire, for example, included everything from comprehensive graphical updates to new martial arts styles. Mass Effect comprehensively changed the whole squad command system to better use the PC controls and the tradition of pausing games to issue commands and have a bit of a think.

Then comes Dragon Age. Originally built as a PC exclusive, console versions were shoe-horned in to appease EA. And it shows. This time, for a change, console gamers have to put up with a bad port. Converting from a machine with real graphical capability to a pair of closed boxes has required lower-quality textures and shaders. This leads to an uglier game—because you can't inflate the system requirements of a console. Worse is the gameplay. Fundamentally, Dragon Age is a tactical party RPG, like Baldur's Gate. It needs careful placement and an ability to micromanage the party. With the top-down view on PC, that's easy. On console, the game has no click-to-move, making tactical positioning next to impossible. Targetting on console is clunky at best compared to the PC's swift click-to-hurt mechanism. And not having the ability to properly pause the game while ordering all the party around turns combat from a well-orchestrated ballet into a confusing mosh-pit.

Most of me is actually sad that this is the case. I want those people who can't be bothered to work a gaming PC to enjoy good games; the presence of a toolkit means I'll have content for Dragon Age for years to come (the same is true of Neverwinter Nights). A small part of me, however, revels in schadenfreude. This is our revenge for Assassin's Creed.

A couple of things have narked me off today.

I'm reading through the Exalted 2nd ed corebook PDF. Which neatly brings me to the first thing: publishers who just release their books as portrait PDFs with no thought to on-screen readability, and who use two columns. With the page fit to the screen so I can read without scrolling all the bloody time, I can't read the cramped serif font without squinting hard. If I want to read without squinting, I'm scrolling, which destroys the flow because of the columns. Ideally, the extant PDF version would be the "printable" one, and another would either get rid of the columns or just widen the pages (making said columns wider) and switch to a sans-serif font just a point or so bigger. Look after your readers' eyes, damnit⁰

The other thing is far more banal. As mentioned, I have to sort some stuff out at the bank. This bank has two branches in all of Edinburgh. Each one has had waiting times of well over an hour each time I've been to ask about seeing someone human (they're of the mistaken idea that replacing tellers with a whole bunch of ATMs and unmanned telephones makes the place more usable as a bank, rather than a soulless temple to the Mainframe God that lingers in the background). Over an hour. And this is at deliberately off-peak times. For fuck's sakes, if you're going to have a branch make sure it's well staffed.

⁰: Æternal Legends is already in a screen-friendly format, because it's a nonstandard "landscape bound on the short edge" book in print. 3:16, AlphaOmega, and Hellas do similar things, and they're all great for that.

Current Mood: grouchy
Current Location: stew@home:~/desk

I should never have started playing with web design tricks.

The example earlier has been redone with a light pastel blue in place of the drab grey background. That's the easy part.

Everything I've spent the day doing turns out to work in FF3/Win and IE7/Win, slightly b0rked on Opera/Win but b0rked hideously on */Mac. So it's useless. Fortunately, it's just a stylesheet I've got to trash. And I learned a fair bit.... at least, I think I did. It remains demoralizing to have to scrap a whole bunch of design because it doesn't work as intended.

Fortunately, I've managed to consume twice my own mass in pizza. Today demanded that.

I have two domains. Originally, I had a plan for each of them, but that didn't pan out after I a) started writing for money and b) moved to Edinburgh. And now, I wonder what to do with them.

Warning: Long and opinionated.

( The Past )

( The Present )

( The Future )

tl;dr:

digitalraven.org's becoming a new fairly-static professional site with a couple of old articles and stories tidied up and used as writing samples. I want to do something with zeropointinformation.com but I don't yet know what, and am interested in ideas.

I'm also up for recommendations of services and web2.0ish sites that either give something new to do⁴, or that give me better ways to do the things that I already do.

Hell, I'm also up for re-examining the way that I use the web in general. Fire it all out there.

Anything to take my mind off the fact that seven out of the last ten people to start reading my ramblings are Russian.

( Footnotes )

Just spent the whole evening coming up with funky character sheets for my Æternal Legends game. While Word is a fucking annoying program to write in[0], it's a passable DTP program. There's a few little details that make it better than OO.o for my mindset.

Of course, I'm going to find that opening these files in an earlier version of Word shags my layouts. That'd be par for the course, to be honest.

So, yeah. Quiet weekend, which I needed. I know I'm getting old, when a weekend in is a good thing. Not too old, though, as I spent much of that time levelling my invulnerable ninja robot. I'm still on the CoH wagon, and I'm enjoying it more. A change in mindset really helped — soloing scrappers should be intelligent and select targets, rather than wading in and dying repeatedly.

I'm blaming my lack of short fiction on my current online game addiction. My ideas have slowed down, those few I've had are all going to paid work (mostly Æternal Legends, which is good — though I need to start work on a supplement). Expect something somethime reasonably soon, though.

[0]: 2007 marginally less so than the others, given that it finally brings the styling engine front and centre. This breaks down the document creation process to three-pass — write document, apply styles, choose stylesheet-equivalent[1]. Which doesn't suck too much, especially as the stylesheets aren't completely ugly. The prior method was write document, apply formatting, pixel-bitch formatting, discover style engine, swear at style engine until the bastard thing almost does what you want, watch as the whole thing looks fucking hideous because of a small trick that nobody but the internal Word programmers properly understand, give up in despair.
[1]: Unfortunately, I've not yet found a bunch of keyboard shortcuts to apply specific styles. I may need to write a markup language in VBA to fully leverage the styles. Or just do more research.

Current Mood: Scattershot
Current Location: ~/desk
Current Music: Computer fans

This is a rant. Yes, it's going to be offensive. Don't bother whinging in the comments unless you want more.

Apparently, I caused someone grave offense today. I walked past a person in the street even after he'd hailed me.

In my defence, fucko had a big, bright jacket and a clipboard. He was either a quizzer or a chugger. In other words, he was lucky I didn't do the human race a favour and shove him under a speeding bus.

Princes St. on a weekday night (I avoid it at other times like one avoids contracting the Ebola virus) is infested with drooling subhumans in bright jackets. Several are simply giving away the evening-edition of the Daily ~~Record~~Fishwrap. They're easy enough to ignore, normally they're not in my field of view long enough to say "If I wanted that, I'd buy a fish supper."

On occasion, one will thrust a paper into one's chest. They prey on the instinct that makes people hold on to such things. These wee scrotes are the ones who should be pushed under a bus.Yes, it's messy. On the other hand it's fast, and from personal experience most Lothian Bus drivers would be glad of scoring the extra points.

More wield clipboards. Some of these are simply doing surveys. These quizzers claim that they're not as bad as chuggers and they're right, in the same way that genital herpes is generally not as bad as tertiary syphilis. Quizzers are the physical equivalent of cold-callers, though they're not as useful. You can't redirect them to twenty-quid-a-minute phone sex lines, for one. You can't hang up in the middle of a call, or turn their script on them, or any of the fun things. These people are advertisers and marketers, and should be treat as such. In the words of Bill Hicks: "Kill yourselves. Right now. Go on, kill yourselves. This isn't a joke, there is no punchline."

Given that the quizzers refuse to take personal responsibility, it's up to us to shuffle them off this mortal coil. The sensible way to deal with a quizzer is to kill it, mutilate the corpse, and post it where other quizzers can see it. Some of the more human ones may listen.

Chuggers are the worst. Shorthand for "Charity Muggers", these wastes of a human genome accost people in the street, trying to sign people up to make charity donations via Direct Debit. Normally, they suggest a fiver a month–you can afford a fiver a month, can't you?–and only later do you get pressuring phone calls demanding that you up your contribution. Cancellations aren't processed–a friend only stopped paying when she cancelled her bank account. Another suffered through six phone calls and was still receiving calls two years later, begging her to start donating again.

Chuggers are thieves, plain and simple. They're accepted thieves, working for "charities" that often need a quick firebombing to remind them that their donations are supposed to come from volunteers. That said, (to paraphrase Paul Tomblin), the PROPER way to handle chuggers is to smash the fucker's clipboard over his head, push him under a bus, then hire a hitman to kill his wife and kids, and fuck his dog and smash his home into little bits. Anything more is just extremism.

Some people think I'm a violent, cynical, man. These people have never walked down a British high street, let alone Princes St. So, fuckwit in the street, just be glad I was in a hurry because I was hungry.

Current Mood: chipper
Current Music: The Fratellis - Vince The Lovable Stoner

I knew this was going to happen as soon as I posted about the laptop[0]. Not to be left out, my home disk has shat itself.

This is all due to the joys of BillOS and disk write caching. I don't pretend to understand how it works down low, but it's writing to memory in the cache and either the cache is read-only or it's flushed before the cache is written. It's the "Delayed Write Failed" thing that nobody has a real answer for. This is for every file on the 400GB disk that's acting as my storage home. Let's review: Music? Yup. I've just discovered MusikCube and I'm nowhere near the tracks I had before the last hard disk died... video? Yup. All of Doctor Who for starters. Documents? Yup. Including everything for $CURRENT_PROJECT. I'm too dumb to have checked the backups that I do have... I'm not even going to mention the NWN savegames.

Further experimentation tells me that I have a read-only hard disk. Dunno how much longer this situation will last—it's either a problem in the disk (in which case it's going straight back for replacement as it's under a year old) or it's a problem in the motherboard's SATA controller. Either way, the disk is living on borrowed time so I'm starting the DVD archiving process. Part of me hopes that it's the motherboard so that I can upgrade the machine. The rest of me notes the price of decent components and winces.

One day I'm going to take up a simple hobby where the worst thing that can go wrong is me fucking up, rather than hardware deciding that I don't need it to work before my deadline...

[0]: I'm biting the bullet and going for a new macbook. $ORK has an employee purchase program that brings the new models within the same price range as the Core Duo ones currently on eBay. And yes, I'm getting AppleCare.

Current Mood: grrr
Current Location: flat
Current Music: The LARTing song (made up in my head)

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