UPDATE: the big man has spoken. Executive summary is, of course, um, yep, hysterical security theater continues to trump ration.

Recently, as any even moderately informed American knows, the Transportation Security Administration began a new program to coerce travelers into submitting to the porno scanners--the backscatter X-ray machines that the TSA calls Whole Body Imaging--by instituting a new policy to punish those who opt out of being photographed naked.

Many people do prefer to opt out, due to the legitimate safety questions, or perhaps because they just don't feel like having naked images of themselves (or their hot teenage daughters) viewed by airport rentacops and captured on computer (the TSA's ludicrous assurances that they ‘cannot be stored' having already been disproven).

The new deterrent, to prevent people from exercising their right to opt out of the nude imaging process, is that those who do so will now have one of those ubiquitous blue-gloved TSA agents physically grope their entire body, including testicles or breasts and vagina, as a consequence.

The numerous women and children who have recently been traumatized in this way has been fairly well covered in the media, and especially, of course, on the internet tubes. Frankly, it's another fucking disgrace, one which quite rightly has generated some outrage.

However, there are still a lot of uninformed citizens out there (and they couldn't ALL be ignorant cowards who are already prepared to jettison the most fundamental of American values for a theatric pretense of security (could they?)). Plus, few people I meet outside of the US, Americans included, know much about this story.

That's why I was glad to see a new web site that does a fairly clinical job of explaining the issue simply and unhysterically:

www.dontscan.us

This site looks professional and coherent, and it also features a handy printable pamphlet that has already proven helpful in explaining this important issue to people who for whatever reason don't get much information.

Which is good, Because according to a CBS News poll, so far the hysterics and cowards are winning. Will sanity prevail? I wouldn't put money on it, but here's hoping.

These cutting boards are the best that I've ever owned. With single-slab maple cutting surface on each side, they are kind to my sharp knives, and they have some kind of laminate polymer layer in the middle, which has held up for almost three years now, through hundreds of dishwasher cycles and aggressive hand washings.

I have a couple of them in each size. At less than a centimeter thick, having a bunch of them doesn't take up much more space than having just one.

simms undoubtedly worst tv nfl announcer on the a-team of any major network

gonna zzz now, just sayin':

these announcers are

w∆K

When it comes to the "Android is open" shit, all the people[1] trying to do John Gruber's job for him are growing tiresome.

Yeah, wow, you're right--Android isn't really "open". And yeah, wow, nobody even knows what the fuck "open" means. SO FUCKING WHAT. It's like the old saw of the grizzly bear in the campsite. I don't have to run faster than the bear, motherfucker, I just have to run faster than YOU.

Android doesn't have to be open, whatever that means; it just has to be perceived to be more open than iOS. And it is.

Certainly, the perception that Android is more open than iOS puts pressure on Apple. Perhaps not pressure to actually become more "open", but pressure to at least create the perception that iOS is somewhat more open than everybody thought. Which is what they did (and all they did) with their announcement yesterday.

So, um, good work, Android! Now please somehow produce a phone that doesn't suck and you'll be getting somewhere.

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[1]: and okay, one person doesn't make people, but I'm too tired to dig up a bunch of links, but you know they're out there [update: yes, run-on but clauses are fully supported in recent versions of galactic english]

That guy Michael Arrington says of Cappuccino:

Developers we've spoken with have praised the framework, calling it one of the best ways to make applications with little programming knowledge.

Let me fix that for him:

Developers we haven't spoken with have praised the framework, calling it one of the best ways to make web applications without having to swallow bucketloads of morcellated fecal matter through a beer bong, as has traditionally been the case.

Cappuccino isn't some kind of dumbed-down web development. It's actually significantly smartened-up web development, and I'm just oh so fucking thankful for its existence.

Now, I have a gentlemen's agreement with Nakahara not to rant publicly about developing for a certain mobile platform, and that's sensible because most of what I have to say rhymes with DUDE, I fucking just fundamentally can't reconcile with the concept of having to tongue-bathe Adolf Hitler's nutsack just to get permission to install my own software on my own motherfucking device, much less sell it, and which oh by the way is called an iPhone and is made by Apple, those motherFUCKING CONTROLFREAK COCKSUCKAAAAAAARRRGGGGGGGG ARRRGHHHH ARGH ARRRRRRRRGHHHH--well, you see where that goes. (I do prefer it as a consumer, though, of course. At least until one of these other douchebags figures out how to make a phone.)

But, largely due to the bad taste that fellating the iPhone Developer Agreement left in my mouth, for the past year or so, I've gone back to doing mostly internal corporate network apps. And although I still love Mac programming (at least until Apple somehow fucks that up too), in modern U S and A my current area of development almost always means web-based apps. Or "web-delivered" apps, as I've taken to calling the newest breed of them.

The tools, for the most part, are still brutally, horribly shitty--like what we had for desktop development ten years ago. Like Newton Tool Kit and CodeWarrior had a developmentally-delayed inbred ketamine baby that is intellectually stuck at the mental age of three even though it is actually fifteen. Dumb editors, caveman code completion (or worse), no static analysis, and reverting back to mainly using print statements to debug because the debuggers still really are just that shitty.

BUT: Objective-J and Cap make the process so much less painful that... that... um, well, that I can at least?bear it, and maybe even get excited with it from time to time.

There's no fucking DOM freakishness, no CSS koans to unravel, and if you don't push the envelope you barely even have to deal with browser idiosyncracies (as long as you're man enough to tell IE6 to go suck a bag of dicks to its face (not actually an easy thing in corporate IT)). You lay out views and subviews, you set targets and actions, you post notifications, you send messages ten miles in the snow uphill both ways with square bracket syntax... for a Mac programmer, the mental shift is measured in hours, not days. Huge swaths of Nakahara's Mac/iOS code run under Cappuccino with extremely minimal 'porting'. Basically just changing variable declarations from NSString *foo = bar to var foo = bar, and NS to CP.

To a guy shifting from Mac development to web development, it feels like a gift from the mythological and nonexistent Christian god.

So it was with some trepidation that I read that MOTOROLA horfed down 280 North today. I'm truly happy for the founders of the Cappuccino project, because rumor has it that the money was quite decent and, like I said, I'm grateful. But let's face it: Motorola hasn't made a good product since my 1996 StarTAC. And while Cappuccino is open source, now all the best baristas work at oh god that metaphor made me puke in my mouth.

Anyway, it's not likely to be the frothy bloodspattered frenzy of destruction that we saw when Oracle sodomized Sun and flayed ZFS alive before raping the corpse of OpenSolaris and pouring gasoline over the entire scene and setting it ablaze in an orgiastic methamphetamine-fueled episode of corporate testosterone and roid-rage. That's only because Cappuccino really wouldn't be worth much if it weren't open source. A technology like ZFS, as the fighterjet-flying pussyhound who's almost as consistently wrong as Bill Gates in his public prognostications knows, is some fucking awesome shit that you could totally monetize, if you reined it in and controlled it, instead of letting human progress advance unencumbered.

Cappuccino, though--while also awesome--really isn't. It's still too young and it's github followers are meaningfully active. So, even though Motorola seems like a relatively dumbshit company overall, they probably won't actively seek out Cappuccino's destruction.

But they still might suck a whole lot of the oxygen out of the room, depending on what constraints our heroes Francisco, Tom, and Ross suddenly find themselves under. What we have is already very good, but I hope it continues to get better.

(but Atlas sucks hopelessly, and I actually hope they just kill that stillborn project, lol)

lol~ fuck yeah! i feel... not only vindicated, but also relieved.

( no tweeting either )

The only thing that need be said is that it stars Patrick Kilpatrick *and* Evan Evans.

Speaking of cunt-pus shitware[0], we have textmate. I fucking hate textmate.

Obviously, a text editor that can't be used[1] to type text in the main languages I use is useless[2].

Well, boo fucking hoo and cry me a river right? Lots of things[3] are useless; there's no need waste energy hating on them, though, right?

Generally, that is indeed the case. But textmate is a metastasizing virulent black hole of suck. It absorbs all this useful energy, the productive output of all these hackers making bundles and add-ons, absorbing it all down into the glistening gelatinous mass of its putrid guts.

So textmate not only sucks a shopsack full of dicks, but it makes all these other would-be useful tools suck, too.

None of this means that I don't sniff at the vapors of textmate 2 with a considerable amount of interest. It just means textmate fucking sucks.

UPDATE: OK, I get it, I get it. Many of you loves you some fuckin textmate, and don't care about typing in Japanese. And, somehow, you also found my blog. OK. Instead of emailing me about it, what I suggest you do is find Dr. Nickatina. He'll give you your medicine, take you to the Bay Bridge, and instruct you on how to proceed from there. Thanks.

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[0]: ok, nobody was actually speaking of that, but I earned the right to a rant by climbing a hill and singing the praises of Arq the other day

[1]: there's a CJK plug-in, but it doesn't make textmate conform to any reasonable interpretation of the phrase "it can be used to type Japanese" (or the phrase "it doesn't suck" for that matter, harhar get it)

[2]: to ME, duh

[3]: most things?

Ha ha! For a moment I thought Fox News had bought the Washington Post, but in the end it seems to have just been an an honest mistake.

Arq encrypts and backs up data from your Mac to Amazon S3. It's exactly as simple as it can be, and it fucking works perfectly.

I use various other backup software to completely backup my main workstation[1], but use Arq to assign peace-of-mind to certain applications on certain workstations and servers.

Example: we manage paper documents at each location by feeding them through a ScanSnap and into a PDF archival system. I tell Arq to clone the folder that stores the archival system's data to Amazon's cloud. All hardcopy can be shredded at the end of the day without worry, knowing we have a local copy and another copy, safe and encrypted, in some West Coast US datacenter.

Other one-off things that it might be handy to back up separately:

• master svn & hg repositories
• phone system (voicemail audio & call data)
• customer inquiry/support system (email and ticket data)
• financial/accounting software data files
• any set of very important documents
• ok pr0n too why not

Arq makes it EASY AND QUICK to set up, and its backups FULLY WORK, which is unfortunately not true of most Mac backup tools. Arq:

• passes all the backup bouncer tests (in other words, it really backs up your data, not a partially-corrupted copy of your data with various bits and attributes missing)
• fully documents the file format of its archives, providing confidence that you can get your data back even if Arq stops working and Haystack Software tells you to go fuck yourself
• stores versioned backups, keeping previous versions of your data around, too
• a properly designed encryption mechanism, not some bullshit where the datacenter operator or application publisher can read your data if they get subpoenaed or just happen to be assholes

Of course, S3, and therefore Arq, isn't suitable for ALL backups; terabytes of data take time to transfer and for most applications would cost too much to store. But for gigabytes-of-data situations where a small amount of money (roughly $2 per GB per year) isn't an issue, this setup really rocks.

If you're lazy and rich, or if your home directory is small, Arq can be a complete backup solution, too. But I find it useful in situations where the entire machine isn't my problem, or just doesn't matter, but this one application is important and I have to make sure its data isn't lost.

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[1]: Nothing good, though. Although I toy with apps like CCC, Super Duper, and CrashPlan, I always end up going back to compiling Mike Bombich's pain-in-the-ass-but-it-totally-works rsync myself and having a script run that nightly over ssh to another machine. But it's definitely an unwanted hassle to set this all up again every time I get a new Mac.