Year: 2005

Grand Theft Legal

mike 0 Comment Lawyers

The Grand Theft Auto game is again being accused of being the cause that led to murder. This time, the accusation is from Fayette, Alabama, and the accusor is the families of victims shot by the accused Devin Thompson. Thompson is accused of killing 3 police officers. The family members bringing the suit certainly have some tear-jerking stories. They say they want to punish the companies that made this murder happen by selling this kid a video game.

Don’t believe a word of it, this is about money.

The lawsuit is against Sony, Wal-Mart, Gamestop, and Take-Two Interactive Software (in other words, anyone who has money). If the plaintiffs really cared about changing the world and making it a better place, why are they in civil court trying to collect money? They should be petitioning for laws to change, or working to make stricter age-limit controls, or working to help parents be aware of video game violence.

But no, these people don’t really care about making the world a better place. They pretend to be “punishing” the wrongdoers. But the monetary damages which would come from this case will NOT be significant enough to punish Sony or WalMart. So its not about punishment. If its not about punishment, what is it about? Its about making a buck for the victims.

To the victims: Look, we live in a dangerous place. This event was a tragedy, there is no doubt about it. But a bad guy killed 3 men. These brave men were guys who put their lives on the line every day. And unfortunately, on this day, the bad guy got them. It sucks, and I’m sure your lives will never be the same. But taking it to civil court isn’t the answer. Spend your time trying to change the laws that made this possible. Spend your time raising parental awareness. Spend your time boycotting the companies that built this game until they change their policies. Why aren’t you doing that? Too much work? I bet there aren’t any lawyers volunteering to help with that for free. Naw, the lawyers definitely only care about the green.

The reality is that these kinds of frivolous lawsuits are already built into the cost of making a computer game today. The makers of the game knew all too well that some money grubber like this would be coming after them eventually. As such, they built it into the cost of the video game. They’ve made $2B in sales on the game, so I bet they have quite a bit of room to accomodate this lawsuit. So you aren’t punishing these companies. Instead, you are part of the system which is taxing every American consumer. We’re paying a higher cost for goods because the manufacturers know that they’re going to have to pay you off. They already had earmarked the money for you to take.

To the victims I probably sound callous and cold. But there is nothing we can do to help soothe your suffering. If you really believe in your cause, then help others by getting our laws changed. That would be progress. Instead, it looks like you are just cashing in your lottery ticket.

And to the lawyers in this case, I guess this is where you guys are playing your own version of “Grand Theft Auto”. Only, for some reason, “Grand Theft Legal” isn’t against the law. How whacked is that.

Mono

mike 0 Comment .NET

I’m a C# fan. Its been on my list for a while to finally install mono on my Linux machine (running redhat 9).

Download
For the initial download, I picked up the following packages (I know, if I were 3 years younger I’d pick up the sources and compile them myself!)

  • Mono core – mono-core-1.0.6-1.ximian.6.1.i386.rpm (4.75MB)
  • Mono development – mono-devel-1.0.6-1.ximian.6.1.i386.rpm (857KB)
  • Mono Web Dev tools – xsp-1.0.6-1.ximian.6.1.i386.rpm (141KB)
  • Mono Apache module – mod_mono-1.0.6-1.ximian.6.1.i386.rpm (13KB)
  • Mono Web Services/Form support -mono-web-1.0.6-1.ximian.6.1.i386.rpm (994KB)
  • Mono data – mono-data-1.0.6-1.ximian.6.1.i386.rpm (826KB)
  • libicu international lib – libicu-2.6.2-1.rh90.dag.i386.rpm (4.57MB)Overall, pretty cool. If this works, thats about 1/2th the size of the regular .NET framework.

    Writing My First Application
    OK – so lets see if I can’t create my first mono application. Shall it be “hello world”? Lets try something a little more original (but not much)…. Keep in mind that I don’t run X on my linux box. So I’m compiling this from the command line. In my first attempt, I tried to write C# by hand. But, as anyone who has used C# will tell you, the code pretty much writes itself. Turns out, even though I have written plenty of C#, I can’t write a program that compiles without help. OK, so instead I created the following code via Microsoft’s visual studio. Took about 2 minutes to write:

    using System;

namespace helloworld
{
///
/// Summary description for Class1.
///
class Class1
{
///
/// The main entry point for the application.
///
[STAThread]
static void Main(string[] args)
{
Console.WriteLine("does this work?");

DateTime start = DateTime.Now;
for (int i=0; i

    Compiling
    Compiling turns out to be very easy, just use:

    mcs mike.cs

    Mono compiles the source and creates “mike.exe” for you. Its a little wierd to see “.exe” files on linux, but I can deal with that.
    To run the compiled executable, you now type:

    mono mike.exe

    And viola, I can see that it takes about 187ms to count to 100million on my linux machine. (The linux machine is a 1.0GHz AMD Duron).
    Comparing the same program on windows (without the debugger, of course) takes 140ms. My windows machine, however, is a 2.8GHz Pentium 4. Quite a bit faster.
    So Mono looks very promising so far! The next step is to get the Mono IDE installed. Trying to write C# code without an IDE is just not a very fun experience. In order to that, I need to get X up and running again on this box.

    • mt-blacklist installed

    mike 0 Comment Technology

    You may have read my earlier posts when I turned off comments on my blog. The reason for doing so was because I was only getting spammed, and it was just taking too much time for me to try to clean up. So, bye-bye comments.

    Well, to help lift the spirits of the crushed spammers, I’ve turned comments and trackbacks on again. This time, with MT-blacklist protection!

    I’m still running an ancient version of movable type. Not because I’m cheap, but because I spend too much time on system administration, and I just don’t want to take the time to upgrade.

    MT-blacklist was pretty easy to install. Copy 5 scripts into your movable-type installation, and you are ready to go. I then accessed the blacklist script page, downloaded their rules for obliterating comment spam, and viola, I was up and running. I actually had a few errors on my first try to run it, but it was only due to incompatibilities to changes I had made myself to the movable type sources. I reverted those changes and all works great. You ask it to find the spam in your blog, and it does (so far with 100% accuracy!), and then it deletes them all for you and fixes up your blog.

    So, if you’ve got movable type 2.6, get this mt-blacklist!

    3 easy steps for effortless documentation of C#

    mike 0 Comment Technology

    If you write C#, and you haven’t yet turned on the documentation features, you really should. Prior to C#, every team I ever worked on said, “yes, yes, we should do a better job at documentation.” But this task always fell too low on the priority list. Some developers did it, most did not, and all of the documentation fell out of date.

    C# helps you write it yourself in 3 easy steps.

    1. Make it a COMPILER ERROR if a method doesn’t have documentation.
      You really need to turn this on. Its very easy to keep your documentation up to date as you write the code. The quick compiler error reminds you, and you never miss a function anymore. If you wait, you’ll never do it, because retrofitting N methods takes too long!! Do this early. To do this in visual studio, right-click on the Project, go to Configuration Properties -> Build -> Treat Warnings As Errors. Set it to true.

    2. Enable generation of the XML documentation file as you build
      This step takes no work! Just right-click on your project and select Configuration Properties -> Build -> XML Documentation File. Set it to “docs.xml” (or whatever works for you).

    3. Use NDoc
      NDoc is a very easy to use, free utility which converts your code markup into actual documentation that looks just like MSDN. See the NDoc user guide documentation for an example, or their developer docs. Just download, install, and point it at your project and “docs.xml” file, and it will generate the docs in about 10 seconds.

    Thats it.

    If you’ve been programming for any length of time, you probably have some skepticism about the practicality of documentation in large software projects. But check out these 3 easy steps – I guarantee you’ll be impressed!

    Judge Orders Law Firm Back to School; What about Jail?

    mike Lawyers

    Maybe this should be something we do across the board?

    What I don’t understand is why these people aren’t in jail? A federal judge found that this firm of about 80 lawyers “intentionally misleads” (that’s legal talk for “lies”). Isn’t the judicial system and the American Bar association all about truth? How can our Legal system work at all without truth? Who should be held to a higher standard than our lawyers?

    OK, fine, don’t send them to jail. Disbar them instead.

    Lawyers category

    mike Lawyers

    Well, I’ve decided to start writing more about lawyers. I just read too much about our legal system run amok these days to ignore it all.

    In case you haven’t figured it out, I believe our legal system is failing us. It incents people to sue for ungodly sums of money, and is ultimately the cause of our heath care cost problems, our governmental deficits, rising insurance costs, and increased prices at the stores. At one level or another, I think almost every economic problem our country faces could be alleviated by being smarter about who can sue and what they get when they do.

    But what do I know. I’m just a software guy.

    Google’s AutoLink Does Evil

    mike Technology

    You may have read about the Google Toolbar’s new AutoLink feature. You may wonder what the big deal is?

    I was wondering too. At first glance, they are just linking maps. This may be a little annoying to Yahoo, because it wants you to use their maps, but not the end of the world.

    But the real problem comes with books. For instance, there are authors out on the net promoting their books via their web pages. They make modest amounts of money each year doing this. But, if you install the Google Toolbar, Google replaces these links with links of their own! If the end user clicks those links, then the commission for selling the book bypasses the author and instead goes to Google! Woa! That is really unfair, unjust, and unright.

    Rogers Cadenhead writes a better article than this one about why its just not right for Google to do this.

    Here are some quick screenshots (see the circled red area for Google’s links)

    Before Google After Google

    Anyway, the really funny part of all this is that Microsoft tried this a few years ago with a product called SmartTags. Opposition was so strong to SmartTags, that after being blasted for a while, Microsoft pulled the feature. Lots of people are noticing this now. Dan Gillmor, Robert Scoble, and mikel.

    To Google – if you are listening – I love your company and products, you are doing a lot of good stuff. But this feature has to be removed. This will be the impetus to really stop using your products if you do not. (Boy will I miss adwords!)

    Why the world hates lawyers

    mike Lawyers

    Well, this site speaks for itself.

    Click here to see his ego.

    Click here to read that he only wants your case if you’re looking for a lawyer and plan to sue for more than $1Billion. (seriously, thats a BILLION)

    I wish this were a joke. The pages on his site read, “This website may, at first blush, strike you as a bit over-the-top. But its not designed to give you pause, or scare you away. Its simply a reflection of Stephen L. Snyder, the man….”
    man”.

    Firefox security vulnerability

    mike Technology

    There’s a Phishing technique in play now where crooks register international domain names with special characters that *look* like letters but are really not what they seem.

    Its so popular for everyone to complain about Microsoft security problems. Interestingly, this bug is present in Firefox and NOT in Internet Explorer. Firefox fans would probably say, “its just because Microsoft doesn’t support the latest standards for international domain names”. Perhaps that is true, but at the end of the day, this is a bug in Firefox, and not IE.

    The problem lies with Unicode. In the early 90s, you couldn’t use two character sets at the same time. If you were working in both Japanese and Chinese, you had to pick one character set to use at a time, which made it very tricky to use applications in multiple languages. Unicode was invented to solve this problem. Unicode defines basically all characters, in all languages, and has worked very well. It also, however, unleashes this particular bug. For instance, the letter “a”, has a unicode value. However, it turns out that unicode character &#1072, also LOOKS like “a”, but is really a different character.

    This allows the bad guys to create Urls like this one:

    Paypal.com

    To the user, this looks like a real link to paypal. But its NOT. Its a fake. Go ahead, and test your browser. If you are using IE, you’ll see a page-not-found error. If you see a page, then your browser is vulnerable.

    I hope that the domain registrars jump in to help fix this. Seems like we should be able to pretty easily spot bogus domain name registrations. There are probably a lot of combinations of forged addresses, but it should be detectable and prohibited from the root.