Or: My Lovesong For A Fork.

This is a post I’ve been meaning to write for a long time, but never quite got the grasp I needed around it. Plus, when I originally envisioned writing it I was still blogging in Swedish, and Swedish lacked the proper fullness to fully convey what I wanted to write about. Also, I really don’t know what the swedish equivalent to “over-engineered” would be. Probably something less elegant.

So, let’s continue.

Over-engineering. How do you define it? I did a search on Google but most of the websites listed there referenced it as something that’s been overdone, something that’s been designed to death. That’s not the term I associate with over-engineering.

Over-engineering to me is when something is just so much better than it has to be, so much better that regardless of what the item in question is you just have to stop and appreciate the beauty of it. Not only does it function better than expected, it’s more reliable and just perfected in a sense that’s difficult to describe.

A real-world example of this is classic Mercedes-Benz cars. Each detail on them is just simply better than need to be. A doorlatch will work thirty years later, and not look worn down. In the ’80s Mercedes discovered that this was rather costly, and that they could get away with not over-engineering their car to the same extent any longer.

Now, I’m not saying that modern Benzes are crap. They’re not. They’re very nice cars. They just don’t have that perfection to them that older Benzes have. A friend of mine once owned a vintage Benz, built from parts collected from two other Mercs. It was a thing of beauty in it’s pure function. Everything in it felt solid, everything in it oozed quality despite being 30+ years old and not properly maintained. Doors closed like the should.

Over-engineered items are a rare commodity today. Most companies only produce their goods as good as minimum needed. Sure, there’s a lot of quality merchandise out there, but the really nice over-engineered items are few and far between. Most consumer electronics for example are designed with a built-in obsolescence. Despite my generally favorable opinion to Apple-products I’m of the opinion that The Steve insists on this, since it’s more profitable for the company. Several other companies do this as well. Over-engineering is just not good for a companys margins, since it’s never in the best interest to manufacture things that last long.

Over-engineering isn’t cheap. If you want stuff that really lasts, just look at the requirements that militaries all over the world put on their equipment. There’s a good reason why pretty much anything in the army costs a lot - it’s been designed to take a beating for several years.

A good example of over-engineering in the military field is the Humvee. You know, that big clunker of a car that the US Army roams around in, and which you can buy in a civilian version for a silly amount of cash. I’ve heard about Humvees that are 10-15 years old and who have never seen any service except for a regular change of oil and gaskets, despite working in some of the most demanding applications a wheeled vehicle can be expected to do. I’ve heard of civilian Hummer-owners who put their own vehicles through the paces, and rarely do anything but refill oil and replace worn-out tires.

Over-engineering is almost a thing of beauty, especially when it’s a simple item that’s been so perfectly engineered. A Humvee is impressive, but it’s a complex machine and will eventually wear out no matter how much (or how little) maintenance it receives.

Which brings us to the heart of this posting. There is at least one item that’s so brilliantly engineered it will last practically forever.

I present you with:

Yup. This is a fork. But it’s also an awesome thing and a beautiful example of a simple thing that’s just Too Darn Good.

This is a swedish militar-fork. It’s a standard piece of equipment in any backpack carried by a soldier in the Swedish army. It’s made of stainless steel, is a rather heavy utility, and it’s practically impossible to destroy.

My particular fork was found in a drawer containing old cutlery at my parents place. I estimate that this fork is at least twenty or thirty years old, yet looks almost like new. The only tell-tale signs of age is that it has myriads of microscopic scratches almost invisible to the naked eye. In this photo they for some reason are clearly visible. Also, please excuse the poor photo. My digital camera got quite confused by all the stainless steel and messed up the white-balance.

So, why is this such a great example of over-engineering? First off, like I mentioned it’s virtually indestructible. I assume that the only thing capable of destroying this fork is a volcano or possibly throwing it into the sun. Or something.

You can’t bend it, I’ve tried. Maybe if you use something like a five-ton hydraulic press you can bend it, but with plain muscle-power it won’t budge a millimeter. It’s a bit heavier than a normal fork, but normal forks won’t withstand the abuse this one has and will take. The prongs are as sharp as when it was new, and you want to be careful not to chop yourself with this one. It’s really, really sharp. Have I sharpened it? Nope, never. I’ve just tossed it in the cutlery-drawer and used it as often as I can.

You can’t buy these forks in stores either. I’ve never seen them for sale anywhere, even though maybe at one time they were sold in surplus-military stores. I don’t know. As far as I know the only way of acquiring these forks is to do time in the Swedish army and then covertly stealing them with you when you leave.

In a pinch it can probably be used for anything required. I know of people in the army who use these to open canned goods. They simple use the fork to chop a hole in the can, then pry it open. I can imagine mechanics using it for some purpose. Perhaps when you run out of bullets and have lost your bayonet somewhere this fork can be used to stab someone in the kneecap? The possibilities are endless.

All thanks to some dude who took his fork-designing duty way too seriously.

I’m having a hard time thinking up things that are sold today that come even close to demonstrating the same durability and timelessness as this humble fork. In forty years, it will probably be just as usable as now. Even if the future is some kind of lawless Mad Max-dystopia this fork will still be useful as either an eating-utensil or an eye-stabber. Probably both, but hopefully not at the same time.

UPDATE: To give you all an idea of how durable and sharp this fork is, I’m going to tell you about this one time I was eating a particularly tough piece of meat. While I was trying to saw through this leathery piece of food I used that very fork to keep it still. Unfortunately, the plate I was eating on wasn’t up to requirement and shattered when the fork was pushed down in an attempt to keep the beef still. I was really frustrated with the stubborn piece of meat and didn’t discover the plate had cracked until I realized that the fork was lodged in the wooden table beneath, pinning the piece of meat along with it.

… and for a change I’m okay with it. There’s a billion things I need to do, but I have no energy right now. And that’s alright, I’m not gonna worry over things I cannot control. It’s just a waste of energy. Maybe later today something will kick in and I’ll go back into overdrive again. It’s the uncertainty that’s the real killer for me, and right now the current uncertainty has been laid to rest and even though the results are less than optimal I’m okay with it. At least I’m not uncertain any longer.

I got really upset earlier today when I read that IFPI/RIAA and the rest of the mediamaffia wants 1.6 million Euros from Pirate Bay, and I got really close to writing about it. But I wouldn’t really say something new; I’d just be repeating the same things which are known to everyone not living in the sphere of corporate greed. I’m not going to waste energy rehashing the same old arguments that any sane person already knows. I’m just amazed at how you apparently can get sued for ludicrous sums even though you legally haven’t done anything wrong, and where there are such enormous gray areas it boggles the mind.

Earlier today I went for a walk, and even though the weather today has turned to gray mush I still felt refreshed when I got home. I’m not letting the boring weather bring me down. Instead, I enjoyed the surprisingly warm air on my face, and listened to the kids who for some reason was playing in the melting snow. Sometimes I wish I could go back to more innocent times.

My blog got updated last night. I updated it to the brand new Wordpress 2.5 and quite frankly I’m a bit ambivalent as to the purported greatness of it. Sure, it’s always nice with a new version, but I’m not completely bowled over by the new admin-interface. It just seems… wasteful. There’s too much empty screen real-estate, and I don’t even have a particularly large monitor. I can imagine that someone running at even higher resolutions than my bog-standard 1280×1024 will feel the waste is even bigger.

I really shouldn’t be sitting here blogging about Linux, but instead get my lazy ass into the kitchen and doing the damn dishes. I’m excellent at procrastinating, so sue me.

Last night I had bit of a hard time falling asleep, and as is fairly common these days my brain goes into a maelstrom of thoughts. One that slightly coherent thought was “I should blog about Hardy” and then my mind fell back into chaos for another twenty minutes before I finally fell under the spell of morpheus.

So, what are my thoughts on the upcoming version of Ubuntu? Mostly they can be summed up with “more of the good stuff, less of the bad stuff”.

I’ve been running Hardy as my current desktop since upgrading my machine. Right after the upgrade I modified my current Gutsy-install to work with the new hardware, but I think I broke something in it and it started acting funky after a while. It didn’t want to play nice with my new graphics-card (BFG Geforce 9600GT) since it’s so new that Nvidia still haven’t gotten their Linux-drivers for it out of beta. This meant I had to install the driver the manual way, and also meant surgically removing some bits of Gutsy that otherwise would’ve conflicted with the new driver. I suppose that somewhere along the line my wild flailing broke something, and after a quick backup I decided to start fresh.

The Gutsy live-cd wouldn’t play nice either, and I felt that it was kind of bass-ackwards to install Gutsy just to upgrade it in a month or so. Thus, I went for the then-current Alpha6 of Hardy. Since then it’s gone into beta, so if you download it now it will be of that quality from the start and then get updated as you go along.

Installation went fine, it used the VESA-driver for the live-cd portion. I also went for the 64-bit version since I now have a CPU capable of those extensions. I had heard that there would be some issues, but I forged ahead boldly and decided that I’d have to figure out those issues as I went along. What does not kill you instead makes you stronger, right?

After some minor tweaking it was up and running. Still no Ubuntu-support for the 9600GT so I installed the drivers manually from Nvidia. Pretty simple for me, but newbies will definitely get confused by this.

Let’s break down my experience of Hardy. Remember that I installed Alpha6 of it, and I’ve applied updates for it since then so now my installation is “beta-quality”.

* GDM would consume a lot of CPU (a lot, as in 100% of one of my four cores) after logging in, and generally the system would become jerky and somewhat unresponsive. Logging out and back in solved this, but it was definitely an irritation. It has now disappeared after several updates.

* PulseAudio would sometimes lock up and die. This would bring Rhythmbox down as well. Restarting the PA-daemon would solve this until it crashed once again. This is no longer an issue and PulseAudio plays well.

* Unlike Feisty and Gutsy my Soundblaster Audigy2 ZS is now capable of genuine 5.1 Dolby Digital-surround. For some reason this never worked under Feisty and Gutsy (but did under Edgy!) and I could never figure out why.

* Some of my regular apps aren’t supported under the 64-bit arch, but I simply compiled them from source instead. This might change in the future.

* Setting up evdev for complete support of my Logitech MX1000 proved to be futile. Apparently a lot of things regarding hotplug and evdev has changed since Gutsy, and most of it is unfortunately poorly documented. Previously I had set up my mouse with a pretty arcane mix of evdev and xbindkeys but this wouldn’t play well under Hardy. Instead I discovered btnx which is a lot smoother to set up. Again, I had to compile this from source since there was no native 64-bit binary in the repos. A nice side-effect of this was that I didn’t have to mess around with my xorg.conf since btnx has a GUI, albeit somewhat obtuse.

* Flash actually worked out of the box. I had previously heard horror-stories about having to install a 32-bit Firefox in order to get Flash working since Adobe doesn’t provide a 64-bit version of Flash. This worked out of the box, no funky installs needed or anything. I haven’t investigated why, if Adobe decided to release a 64-bit version of Flash (highly doubtful) or if Canonical/Ubuntu does some impressive voodoo to get it all working (much more likely).

* Firefox 3 is faaaaast. At first I found it confusing and annoying, and most of my extensions wouldn’t work. Beta 4 of FF3 is included in the current Hardy, and it’s actually quite nice now that I’ve gotten used to it. Some extensions I like worked, others could be hacked to fool them into working. Some that got hacked made FF3 kinda funky and had to be uninstalled. Never the less, FF3 is very, very fast compared to FF2 .

* For whatever reasons Conky refuses to read sensor-readings from LM-sensors. Even though they’re set up correctly and reporting values Conky refuses to display them. I have no idea why, Conky doesn’t give any errors or anything. This led to me doing a bit of soul-searching and ultimately deciding that I didn’t like Conky any more, since it didn’t give me any information I couldn’t find out through a terminal (which I always keep open) and also it forces me to minimize whatever windows I have open. So bye-bye Conky, it was fun while it lasted.

* Gnome 2.22 is a much nicer experience due to myriads of minor touch-ups. The file/open/save/whetever dialogs are much nicer. Click on a picture and it automatically displays a thumbnail of that picture, rather than forcing you to remember a filename. Panels slide into view after login, and when dragging icons they are now completely alpha-transparent so you can actually see where you’re dragging and dropping them. Nautilus now detects the contents of memory-cards and give well-meaning suggestions as to what to do with it. There are no huge differences, but there’s several minor and they make Gnome so much nicer to work with.

* Compiz Fusion 0.7.whatever is included and there’s a few new neat effects to dazzle your friends with. Some of them are pure eyecandy, some of them are quite useful, a lot of them are both or neither. It’s all up to you to decide what you want to enable.

* Several minor touches such as a prettier login-screen and a slightly fresher default theme help to make Hardy a bit more polished. First I thought it was a bit sad that the brand-new theme got delayed until Ubuntu 8.10 but since I’ve never used the default Ubuntu theme it was a pretty minor point.

* Installing the Konica-Minolta color-laser we have was a bit less painful than before. It pretty much autodetected, but I had to install the m2300w package in order to get the proper driver, since it defaulted to text-only. Other things that get plugged into the computer is detected automagically and work just fine, this includes my Wacom-tablet.

* For whatever reason the splashscreen doesn’t work. This is no longer true, at least not for me. The other night I decided to see if it had changed (since among several updates then was included an update to usplash), enabled splash and rebooted. Lo and behold, it worked.

—

Hardy gets released on April 24th and I think it will be interesting. I’m not going to proclaim any huge revolutionary inroads to the world of Windows, but I think Ubuntu is a pretty solid distribution. Sure, there were some issues with the Alpha6, but they’ve all disappeared with the updates and as far as I’m concerned my Hardy-installation is solid.

One thing though that constantly irks me with Linux is the sound-support. It’s nice seeing Hardy dropping the ancient ESD in favor of PulseAudio, but I still think that sound-support under Linux could use some serious cleaning-up. It’s a bit confusing with two different architectures (ALSA and the now obsolete OSS) providing the base, and then on top of that have to wonder about sound-daemons and sinks and such. Yeah, yeah, I know I’m essentially talking out of my ass since I’m not a developer and have no deep insights into the inner workings of the OS, but as a user I find it somewhat confusing - and I’m not a greenhorn! PulseAudio is neat, providing drop-in replacement for ESD (the Enlightened Sound Daemon, which hasn’t been developed since frickin’ 2001, so it was about time that it got shelved!) and also adding some neat tricks such as the ability to send sound over a network to another computer running PulseAudio.

If there’s any questions about Hardy I will do my best to try to answer them, but remember that I’m just a user and not a developer or in any way a part of the creation-process.

UPDATE 080331: I added a point of contention.

(Warning: This is a very, very, very geeky article. Do not read if you’re not a hard-core computer nerd)

I was sitting just a few minutes ago, idly surfing the intarweb. Milling around inside my head was various threads and yarns, and out of the chaos I realized that by all measures and means, Apple is the last real proprietary UNIX-vendor.

There was a time when proprietary UNIX’es ruled the kingdom of serious computing-use. This was back when the only real supercomputers came from Cray, the only real graphics workstation were badged Silicon Graphics and when the must-have UNIX workstations with almost complete certainty came from Sun Microsystems.

This was also back when Linux was in its infancy (or not even born at all), when GNU still was unknown territory to all but the most die-hard enthusiasts, back when Macs still were considered desktop-publishing machines.

It’s ironic how things have changed a decade or two later. Silicon Graphics renamed themselves SGI and then started flapping about like a fish out of water when regular beige PC’s started having enough power to be a competitor. Cray still exists, but have been made a margin-player by companies such as IBM and (ironically) SGI using what is basically regular PC’s in clustered modes running Linux and Open-Source Software. Sun seemed to be floundering as well, but rather than trying to fight for a dying market they adapted. First by changing their hardware around, and later by opening up their operating system as well as opening up Java.

Apple however did the biggest change. In acquiring NeXT back in 1997 they not only got The Steve back to One Infinite Loop, they also acquired an operating system with heavy roots in proprietary UNIX. NeXTstep, later known as OpenStep, which later became the foundation of MacOS X. Don’t be fooled by it’s pretty aesthetics, it’s solidly UNIX in the bottom. Admittedly, it’s not 100% proprietary in the same way that IRIX (which was the UNIX-flavor that Silicon Graphics pushed) was proprietary, but none the less it’s a lot more proprietary than most other free UNIXish operating systems around today.

I remember when I was a young nerd. I lusted for those horribly expensive but very powerful proprietary UNIX-boxes. When other teenagers had half-naked models on their walls, I had a poster from Sun, proclaiming their then-current slogan “the network is the computer”. I still think it’s a great slogan though.

My first real exposure to something of that magnitude was a Sun Ultra 1 back in 1997 or so. I of course had toyed with various free UNIX-like systems such as Linux and BSD’s, but Solaris was my first real exposure to a proprietary system. I came to a realization then, that proprietary UNIX’es were powerful in the sense that a Formula 1-car is powerful. It’s been designed for a pretty narrow field of operation, and is very good at it, but in regular handling it’s quite over-engineered and to most people quite useless.

Since then I’ve had plenty of time to play with alternative operating systems. I’ve played with IRIX, the proprietary system used on older Silicon Graphics-machines. If you’ve ever seen the first Jurassic Park, then you’ve seen the funky filemanager that was included as a kind of joke. I’ve played with that, and it’s quite useless. I’ve ran systems from Sun, both on regular old x86-hardware as well as SPARC. I’ve run NeXTstep/OpenStep. I’ve also tried the legendary and rather obscure BeOS. I’ve telnetted into various VAXen and I’ve even touched (as in physically putting my hand on it, since it was non-functioning at the time) a PDP-7, the computer system that the original UNIX was developed on. Note to other nerds, it wasn’t _THE_ PDP-7, just one of them.

So, again. I find it somewhat amusing and ironic that Apple remains as the only vendor of what could be called a proprietary UNIX. Sure, it’s not completely proprietary since most of it’s underpinnings come from the world of BSD and is called Darwin, but Apple guards OS X many secrets closely, and this is what I feel qualifies it for the label of “proprietary UNIX”.

So, the other day I was playing Half-Life 2: Episode Two. Excellent continuation of one of my favorite games of all time. I’ve had a blast playing it so far.

Anyhoo. There’s a segment where Gordon (i.e. You) need to go through a lot of stuff to get to a car. The car is needed for the next part of the game. I went through that whole level and finally found the car.

When I found it I did a bit of a double-take. It looked oddly familiar. In fact, upon closer inspection it was quite clear why it looked so darn familiar. It was a Charger! As you can see from the screenshots down below it’s essentially a heap of junk, barely recognizable. But that rear end and the headlights are a dead giveaway. It’s definitely one of the original B-body chargers, judging from the brakelights and split grille a 1969 model.

(Click the images for full-sized screenshots)

It was a while since I wrote anything about computers, so I guess it’s about time I got back to being white and nerdy.

Fairly recently I had the good fortune of being able to upgrade my aging and ailing computer. Even though it has served me well for almost a half decade (!) it started to show some cracks in the makeup. Often it had problems booting. Disturbingly often I was met with a black screen when I turned it on, only hearing the fans spin up but nothing more. Sometimes it would restart itself, usually when I was asleep but also sometimes when I was using it. Add to this that pretty much every time I turned it on I had to restore my BIOS-settings since the motherboard interpreted these false-starts as a problem and reset the bios to default, safe values.

It was no surprise that the computer needed upgrading, something that I originally had put off. My original plan was to flat-out refuse to upgrade my computer until I could afford a Mac. This turned out to be a bit unrealistic, and since being Windows-free for a year sorted out my biggest desire to get a Mac (i.e., not having to deal with Windows) I thought that maybe an upgrade of my PC was in order anyways.

Additionally, you get an almost silly amount of computing power for relatively small sums of money these days.

My new components got ordered and arrived a few days later. I went for an AMD Phenom, 4GB of RAM, a BFG Geforce 9600GT and stuck it all on a nice new shiny Gigabyte-motherboard. The Phenom is a quad-core processor, meaning it’s essentially four processors on one chip. I also knew about the so-called TLB-bug which AMD disclosed a while ago, and even though less levelheaded people than me were screaming bloody murder I felt that the hoopla was greatly exaggerated. So far I haven’t had any issues that I directly can relate to the TLB-thing, and I’m running my computer with the bios-fix for it disabled.

Which brings me to why I’m writing this.

Since I now had a rather nice machine I felt that it would be wasted if I didn’t try out the current crop of games. That meant installing Windows, which I somewhat reluctantly did on a separate harddrive. It went as well as could be expected, and once it was installed I got heavily reminded of one of the reasons why I really, really dislike Windows as a concept and as an operating system:

As a user you have no control other than what Microsoft decides to give you. Even that little control is unreliable and not something to count on.

One of the games I wanted to try out was the new SimCity game. I installed it, and when I tried starting it nothing happened. No error message, no crash-report. Nothing. Zip. Nada. Void. Null. It was as if I’d never clicked the icon.

And I had no way of figuring out what was wrong, because Windows intentionally limits the amount of control you as a user have over your own computer. You have literally no way of figuring out what’s happening behind the scenes of that awful GUI that Microsoft insisted Windows XP needed to have.

In Linux it’s easy. You run the app from a terminal, and it will output what’s going on. If it dies, you can use this to figure out why the app crashed, or even why it didn’t start at all. The same method in Windows will give you nothing.

Another fun moment is when that fullscreen game dies on you. It just freezes, and you sit staring at a pretty yet dead screen. What now? Yeah, normally you would press ctrl-alt-delete to bring up the task manager, but this is a broken method and doesn’t always work. Sometimes Windows just refuses to let this method work, for whatever reasons it might have. The only thing to do then is reach over and press that nice little reset-button on your computer. Then you can feel your life drain away while Windows does scandisking all the while accusing you of not shutting your computer down properly, don’t you know that you should always shut your computer down properly, you silly little user?

In Linux, the GUI is called X11, or X for short. When an application makes X freeze (yes, it happens even under Linux that apps crash or freeze) what do you do? You press control-alt-backspace and X restarts. That’s it. No cold reboots of your computer. No bad sectors on your harddrive. No hidden accusations that you’re a dumb person who needs to be punished.

And, if the worst of the worst happens and the ctrl-alt-backspace thing doesn’t work there’s always a fool-proof way of safely restarting your computer without resorting to pressing the reset-button. This method is called the Magic SysRq-Key and is a part of Linux since several years.

The magic-what key?

Take a gander at your keyboard. You will most likely find it above the number-keypad to the right. It’s labeled “Print Screen” and underneath that label is the second label: SysRq. Most computer users will agree that it’s probably the most useless button on the keybard. Well, at least until Linux found a use for it.

The story behind SysRq is somewhat convoluted. The version I’ve heard was that in the mid-80’s when IBM reigned supreme over the PC market together with Microsoft, Microsoft was planning for a new version of DOS. Apparently this version was going to be the coolest thing since sliced bread, and Microsoft insisted that IBM put an extra key on the keyboard to fully comply with all the awesomeness they were going to put in this new version of DOS. IBM complied and added the SysRq (short for presumably “System Request”). As for that legendary version of DOS that supposedly would change the way we compute… well… the world is still waiting for it.

Linux uses the SysRq-key in a very neat way. It allows you to send low-level commands straight to the kernel. These can be a variety of things, such as telling your computer to unmount all filesystems, ask all running processes to shutdown nicely, or to tell the computer to restart or shut itself down. Harnessing the power of the SysRq-key means a Linux-user will never have a corrupt filesystem, since even if everything he or she sees locks up, the SysRq-key will always obey the commands it is given.

Windows has nothing like this.

When the fecal matter has hit the oscillating unit in Windows, that’s were you’re stuck. Either that or pressing reset and getting implied that you’re a substandard human being who can’t even handle the most basic procedures of computing.

The control you have over Windows is an illusion. It’s a gilded cage without any real control, other than the control you have over the reset-button. When applications fail there’s no way of finding out what’s wrong except to be a programmer and have some complicated set of debugging gear running. Even then there’s no guarantee you’ll figure out what’s wrong.

I resolved my SimCity-issues. How? By completely uninstalling the game, making sure there were no traces of it left anywhere, then reinstalling it. I did this three times and finally it worked. I don’t know what changed, but something did and now it works. I most likely have no way of finding out either what was causing it.

There are a lot of things I want to write about right now.

I want to write about my thoughts about myself. My inner process. How the land lays with my soul, so to speak. What’s going on in the bubbling and frothing caverns of my inner being.

I also want to write about my nice new upgraded computer, thanks to a very generous aunt. I want to write about how much fun I’m having with my computer again, rather than seeing it as a big clunky stupid appliance that doesn’t meet what I want to do with it. I also want to go off on a rant about how frustrating I find Windows to be, after more than a year of exclusive Linux-use. I also want to reassure everyone that I’m still primarily an Ubuntu-user and that Windows is simply for playing Crysis, Unreal Tournament 3 and the like. I want to write about the upcoming Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) which I’m running right now, and how much nicer it is.

I want to write about politics. About how absurd I’m beginning to find the presidential election-race in the USA. I want to write about my plans to become a dual-citizen. I want to write hard-hitting insights about how messed-up the world is today.

I want to write about books, about science fiction. I want to start writing on my own novel. I want to write some memories and thoughts about a very special cat who recently ended her long tenure as the family pet.

But all of this is stopped by a complete lack of energy and “go”. I feel stuck in a creative slump. I’m not particularly depressed, even though it’s always there in the background. I just don’t have any… ooompf, if you know what I mean.

There’s a lot of nutcases on the internet, and I just found one that made me laugh. I found this entry about the Songjiang Hotel being constructed in a former quarry. Down in the comments I found this gem from a mr “Michael J. Schmitz” who proclaimed that

LAST FALL WHEN I INVENTED THE TSUNAMI DESTROYER, MY EXPERIMENTS FOUND THE BEGINNING OF THE GLOBAL WARMING SOLUTION. http://www.inventube.com/blog/view/59/thetsunamidestroyer ON FEB 2/2008 I FOUND THE FULL SOLUTION TO DELETE GLOBAL WARMING NATURALLY. THEIRS A NATURAL MINERAL THAT HAS TO BE EXTRACTED AND PLACED IN QUANITY IN CERTAIN LOCATIONS AROUND THE PLANET FOR NATURE TO RETURN TO NORMAL. IF YOU CHECK service@stumbleupon.com AND CHECK MY BLOG UNDER ooofox YOU’LL SEE THE FIRST STEP TO LOWERING THE OCEANS TO OPEN UP CERTAIN AREAS FOR PLACING THE EXTRACTED MINERAL FROM 12 SPECIFIC COUNTRIES. IT DEPENDS ON ALL COASTAL NATIONS IF YOU WANT TO DELETE GLOBAL WARMING AND IT WILL ALSO DEPEND ON THE 12 SPECIFIC COUNTRIES TO GIVE THEIR AUTHORIZATIONS. IT WILL ALSO TAKE ALOT OF MONEY.

I chuckled a bit at it and then decided to see what Google turned up about this character. It didn’t really turn up anything of substance, except for more equally lunatic comments on various blogs and news-postings.

He posted this on another blog

I HAVE FOUND A WAY TO SOLVE GLOBAL WARMING, SO THAT AT THE END OF MY PLAN NATURE WILL RETURN TO NORMAL. I’M ALSO A DISASTER SOLUTIONIST= I SOLVE DISASTERS. I HAVE PROVEN SOLUTIONS FOR FIRE, FLOODS, FRESH WATER. I’M IN A PROCESS OF SOLVING EARTHQUAKES FOR DRY LAND. I ALSO HAVE A EXPERIMENT THAT CAN WITH STAND HEAT, COLD, COLLISION AND IF I USED IT TO BUILD A HOUSE, IT WOULD ONLY COST ME $5,000.00. I PLAN TO SELL MY DISASTER PLANS FOR $35,000.00 SO THAT EVERYONE WILL BE ABLE TO PROTECT THEMSELVES FROM THESE ABNORMAL DISASTERS, ALSO THE MONEY IS FOR GLOBAL WARMING. I NEED 12 COUNTRIES OF MY CHOICE WITH THEIR PERMISSION TO USE THEIR LAND FOR THIS PROJECT. IN RETURN EACH COUNTRY WILL RECIEVE EXTRA DRY PROPERTY TO EXPAND THEIR COUNTRY (ON COAST ONLY) I WILL HIRE THEIR PEOPLE, TRAIN ETC. TO HELP THEIR ECONOMY. FRESH WATER FOR 100 YEARS, MORE ABUNDANT FOOD AVAILABLE AND NORMAL NATURE BACK ON COURSE. MY GOAL IN LIFE IS SOLVING AND INVENTING MY NAME IS M.J.SCHMITZ 22001 125TH.ST.E. BONNEYLAKE, WASHINGTON STATE 98391 USA. IF INTERESTED IN BUYING MY DISASTER PLANS AND HELPING TO AFFORD TO SOLVE GLOBAL WARMING. THANK YOU.

When the blog-owner let the comment stay, remarking that it was hilarious spam, mr Michael J. Schmitz proved that he actually was a person and not a bot by replying:

ONLY SPAM I HAVE IS FOOD THAT COMES IN A CAN= SQUARE CAN. MY BLOG IS TRUE I HAVE FOUND A WAY TO DELETE GLOBAL WARMING. YEARS AGO I WAS LOOKING FOR A WAY TO DESTROY TORNADOS, BUT THEY WERE TOO ELUSIVE SO I PUT IT ON HURRICANES INFACT== A SCOOP FOR YOU AND I MAY STILL HAVE THE PAPERWORK. IN THE YEAR 2000 I SENT ALL GOVERNORS A PROPOSITION TO STOP HURRICANES FROM TOUCHING LAND FOR ONE MILLION DOLLARS FROM TEXAS TO CONNICUTT. THEY IGNORED IT INCLUDING THE TEXAS AND FLORIDA GOV.’S BUSH’S. LOUISIANNA GOVERNOR CUSSED ME OUT ON THE PHONE FOR TRYING TO CHARGE HIM A MILLION TO SAVE HIS PEOPLE BEING THAT HIS STATE IS 3 FEET BELOW SEA-LEVEL.= ALL IS TRUE.

This guy makes MegaHAL sound like an Oxford graduate. Absolutely hilarious.

I just learned that the esteemed gentleman named Arthur C. Clarke passed away yesterday.

ACC was easily one of the most influential Science-Fiction writers to ever grace this planet. I always like his approach to scifi, trying to ground it somewhat in scientific reason, and I always enjoyed reading the notes on how he reasoned behind various inventions and technologies he presented in his literature. Add to that, his books always contained an interesting philosophical question, as well as excellent writing and thoughtful presentation.

If I have to decide on a favorite book of his it’ll probably be the Rama-series of books, especially the ones he wrote together with Gentry Lee. In fact, they were the first ACC-books I did read, even before I read his famed 2001-series. The Rama-books really set my imagination in motion, and I’ve read them at least five or six times since the first one.

Rest in peace, mr. Clarke. I’ll always be a fan of your books.

… seems to be to hire indians to write comments in blogs and produce subtle link-spam to british car rental companies.

The last two weeks or so I’ve had a lot of these comments end up in moderation. The comments themselves look really genuine, and relate to the posting they’re attached to. Most comment-spam looks very generic, like “good job, keep it up!” and such nonsense.

But these seem to be actually written by humans, and is an actual (albeit rather nonsensical) comment on my blog-post. Always with a link to some british car-rental agency or “blog” containing only one entry about car-rental agencies in the UK.

Every single time the IP-adress originates in India. Weird. Well, I guess they’ve outsourced their linkspamming to India as well.

Update (a little later): It seems that these human spambots are now hawking inkjet-cartridges as well. It’s also an excellent example of what these comments look like. This was posted as a comment to my story about the success of getting our laserprinter working under Ubuntu:

Janni | drkuki2000@yahoo.com | [some spam inkjet site].com | IP: 87.202.167.215

Nice post! Finaly good news you could make the printer work. BTW Linux rocks with every application.

If you do a whois in that IP-adress you’ll find that it belongs to an ISP located in Greece. As you can tell from the comment it’s incredibly “life-like” or whatever one might call it. It doesn’t have the trademarks usually indicating spambots since it’s actually almost on topic, as well as not filled with various retarded link-attempts. None the less, I’m not treating this as anything except spam.