Many people even have this problem when using XSLT to transform XHTML into XHTML… the input and output namespaces are the same, and they’re using properly formated and validated XHTML documents (complete with the doctype statement and the xmlns attribute on the html element).

Many people just want to force the transforming engine to blindly copy the elements as is over to the new document, and ignore the namespace issue. The below XSL should do this, use wisely.

<xsl:template match="*|@*">
    <xsl:element name="{ local-name( . ) }">
        <xsl:apply-templates select="@*|node()"/>
    </xsl:element>
</xsl:template>

So, now I can go use XHTML in my input and have it spit back out unmolested.

(available in HD)

This is why the Daily Show is the best fucking news team on television. Remember to vote third party this year, preferably Ron Paul.

And I’m not the only one out there who thinks that, not by far. There are literally tens of thousands of my fellow geek brethren who think most, if not all, porn is complete shit. And just the subject matter isn’t bad, there are students in film classes all over the world that don’t make the mistakes that porn directors do: bad lighting, bad camera angles, static camera placement; and then the actors and actresses are horrid: their rendition of their lines (if any) are flat and lack emotion, they act like they don’t want to be there, and they simply go through the motions.

What we need, folks, is porn for geeks.

Ernest Cline – Nerd Porn Auteur, (transcription).

Because of the new motherboard, of course, Windows XP activation was triggered. “During the requisite call to Microsoft for an activation number, we were told that Microsoft could NOT give us the activation for this particular copy of XP since it was sold through a ‘special licensing agreement’ with E-Machines. Even though we had the 25-digit license number, Microsoft insisted we would have to contact the manufacturer for the activation number. Two separate calls to E-Machines elicited the same response. NO activation number would be given since we did not install an ‘official’ and expensive E-Machines motherboard. So the customer is forced into purchasing another copy of Windows XP even though they already paid for the original license when they first bought the computer and have all the required proof.”

In other words, the reader’s customer — who has done nothing wrong other than have a motherboard fail on him — has the choice of paying ransom to E-Machines or to Microsoft to have a functioning OS again. Which led the reader to wonder just what would constitute piracy in such a situation. “We all know there are plenty of copies of XP that work fine without the product activation scheme,” the reader wrote. “Usually these are copies of corporate or academic versions of XP originally sold by Microsoft with broad licenses covering many computers. Is this customer justified in installing such a ‘pirated’ copy of XP on this system? Or should the customer have to buy yet another copy of XP, and presumably throw his old copy in the trash, just because his motherboard failed?”

There is only one proper way to respond to this: Fuck you, Microsoft. Why do you think people are pirating Windows; or worse, switching to alternative operating systems (such as the Ubuntu Linux distro?) Because they are tired of the shit you pull.

For those out there that want to startup a new commerical software buisness, here are three rules you should follow:

1. Do not treat your customer as your enemy, remember that they are ultimately your boss and decide if you get to eat this month.
2. Do not make it difficult to use your product, if they find it difficult to use they will just use something else.
3. Do not abuse the trust of your customers, remember the consumer industry runs on karma and everything you do will come back to you ten fold.

Microsoft has managed to break all three of those rules in just this one instance, and I seriously don’t see Microsoft even lasting long enough to get Vista out the door (which is at least another 4 or 5 years away).

Sorry, Bill, but it seems to be time to look for another job.

I’m extremely depressed to report that things seem to only be getting sadder concerning the people so devastatingly affected by Katrina last week. Two car loads of us headed over to Falls Creek, a youth camp for Southern Baptist churches in Oklahoma that agreed to have its facilities used to house Louisiana refugees. I’m afraid the camp is not going to be used as the kind people of the churches who own the cabins believe it was going to be used.

Jesse Jackson was right when he said “refugees” was not the appropriate word for the poor souls dislocated due to Katrina. But he was wrong about why it is not appropriate. It’s not appropriate because they are detainees, not refugees.

This is bullshit, and it needs to stop. These are people, not prisoners.

What doesn’t work:

• The lack of a clean CSS layout means it is hard for users to use the website in diverse environments. Many users who have special needs (such as using audio readers who depend on clean website layout), or simply users who want to access the website from a low resolution device (640×480 screens, cell phones, PSP, etc) cannot deal with the lack of a clean layout.
• The lack of good XHTML. The current SF.Net tag soup is the equivalent of a 14 year old script kiddy hopping on an AOL chatroom, and saying, “Y0 m4ng!1, w4ts upz0r!!!lolone!!eleven!” Welcome to the year 2005, where people use validating XHTML, and quit making poor Firefox use quirks mode.
• God forsaken <iframe> ads. I don’t really minds ads, people have to pay for their website somehow, but please! Drop those iframes! If you really need to support HTML layouts for ads, do something cool like dynamically insert the HTML using AJAX.
• The really backwards setup of SF.Net tracker. As much as people hate Bugzilla, and bitch about it’s usability bugs, its still lightyears ahead of the tracker. The tracker needs to match Bugzilla feature for feature, and I wouldn’t be against the cloning of the Bugzilla interface.
• Doodad Box bloat in the layout. I agree that Most Active and Top Downloads are useful, but they do not belong on most pages. IMHO, they belong two places, the front page, and My SF; nowhere else, its a waste of space.
• Lack of bandwidth/server power. Its not related to the design itself (actually, it is, if the layout would use half the images, I’d use half the bandwidth, because no client is properly caching the images anyhow), but the site is also slow because too many users are hitting the servers.
• Lack of forum/mailing list/whatever else integration. Too many projects have a huge disconnect between the ‘web user’ and the ‘clueful user’ groups. Web users typically use forums, the actual users we care about use mailing lists and/or news groups. For projects that have both enabled (which most do), the two groups have a hard time communicating with each other. What we really need is to get rid of forums, mailing lists, and the previously existing news groups, and fold them all into a single system. Someone can post from an email client, a news client, or a web client, and it all goes to the same place and talks to the same users.
• Get rid of comments on news items for both SF.Net news items and project news items. This is another case of communication method overload. Whatever users want to say using the comment system, it needs to be said somewhere else, commenting on the news entries is not the way. No one is using them anyhow.
• Get rid of project news items altogether. You know what? Quite a few projects aren’t even using them, or are using them improperly, or just aren’t keeping them up to date. The only place a project has to report news is their website space given to them by SF.Net.
• Project’s DB sucks. Yes, another thing not related to the SF.Net website itself, but it still reflects on the user experience. I don’t personally use the server myself, but I’ve been told its often slow, crash happy, unresponsive, and way overloaded. This should be the next thing to get loving from Santa. (CVS has been a naughty child, and it got two or three new overpowered boxen, how sad.)
• The download system.

What does work:

• Anything I haven’t bitched about. If I don’t bitch about it, I probably haven’t even noticed it. The more transparent a service is, the better designed it is. The perfect sf.net setup would involve a system that could accommodate any user’s work flow. And I really mean any, not most, and not half. Any.
• The new stats system. It works quite well, its a little glitchy, but its a clear step up from what we had before.
• The donation system. This is another useful service. Its always been hard to properly recognize our generous friends in the audience, mainly because we could not automate the system, but now we can. However, a lot of projects are not using the system, and giving users their Paypal address directly to avoid paying the “SF.Net tax”. Now, I agree with SF.Net’s assessment of the situation (“If you make money, so should we, especially since we are effectively hosting your stuff for free, and this costs a lot of money”), but for projects to do this, they are not helping their users, their generous donators, themselves, SF.Net, or the whole FOSS community. So, please, keep the Eeny-Weeny Wrenches and Gears.

Now, I understand you wanted us (the community) to nitpick things, but we can’t even nitpick things until the biggest issues are fixed yet. Sure, dark green is easier to read than light green, but whats the point if the whole system is designed wrong? Kris, come by #sourceforge on irc.slashnet.org sometime, and talk to the people there. You’ll find out what you need to know.

Though, theres a few people who agree with Jeremy: “Trackbacks are a good distributed system similar to fallout shelters of the 50′s. At the time, we really needed them, but now with the rise of Technorati, Feedster and PubSub, we have something much better than trackback.” says Steve Kirks.

For those that aren’t versed in the ways of Blog-fu, a trackback is, according to Wikipedia, “a mechanism used in a blog that shows a list of entries in other blogs that refer to a post on the first blog.” In other words, its a method to reply to blogs by using your own blog.

Trackbacks are not without problem, of course. There is the vicious scourge of trackback spam, where spammers send a trackback back to your blog, and try to convince your readers to buy their product. See this entry Alden Bates’ Weblog for an example of what people have to do to stop spamming, its quite simple.

If trackback dead, why would Haloscan have more than 100,000 users*? Or why would Yahoo!, C|Net, and other big name sites support trackback? And I certainly wouldn’t have added trackback to my own blog if I didn’t think it was useful.

Supporters of alternate systems often say Technorati, PubSub, or other systems are the answer. They are simply part of the answer. Technorati simply tracks links mentioned from blogs, as to be able to see who is linking to who/what; problem is, you can’t display how many links are linked to your blog entry itself, unlike comments or trackbacks.

PubSub, on the other hand, is sorta like a Google for information sources, and you get all your results in an RSS feed. Amazingly useful, yes, but its only part of the answer. Neither PubSub nor Technorati allow your readers to be informed of further information contained on other blogs; said further information is written by your readers. In other words, your readers communicate with each other and form a community.

“Why is a community important?”, you ask. Communities are what power blogs, or really, all websites. Comments, trackbacks, forums, and message boards all allow users to communicate with each other. Then you also have websites and blogs about communication forms themselves, such as IRC channels and Usenet groups, or mailing lists, or just stuff for people who know each other in real life.

Just to prove trackback isn’t dead, I’m going to trackback to Jeremy’s article.

_{* 100,000 is quite a lot when you realise Movable Type and WordPress both natively support trackback, and a vast majority of active blogs use MT or WP.}

Update: The Net Is Dead has a few good comments on why trackback isn’t dead, and Temple of the Screaming Penguin explains why Pingback, an alternative to Trackback, doesn’t work either.

Like to steal cell phones and use them to take pics of yourself and make videos…. HA! guess what pal… i have every pic you took and the videos…. I will be plastering the town with pics of your face, that %!$#*& face and the childs face…. wow thieves really are dumb…. good day pal

oh yeah by the way…. the phone is now just a paperweight and can never be used again…

Fucktard replies:

yOoOo pimp tell sabrina i said hi ima b bangin her like i did my gurl n save on ur phone n dont b madd my dick betta den urz

Good bye, fucktard. Have a nice time in federal bang-you-in-the-ass prison.

Europhobia: London Tube Explosion Timeline
BBC News: London bombings toll rises to 37
BCC News: London blasts: At a glance
CNN: Blair blames Islamic terrorists
Wikinews: Coordinated terrorist attack in London
Wikipedia: 7 July 2005 London bombings

So, basically, he was going to rat out his employer for doing horrible things (such as criminally hammering web servers), and they accused him of stealing trade secrets, and got the cops to steal all his computer equipment. Thankfully, the criminal charges against him were dropped; but his former employer decided to use the law to their own advantage and steal his computers.

Not only that, but everything on them. Personal information. Website logins, PGP keys, personal photos, unreleased code, credit card information, etc. Everything. Between that, and the surmounting legal fees, he is quite screwed.

So, the infamous Anonymous Coward rears his/her/its head on the Slashdot article about this (and I quote):

I’ve been in a very similar situation recently, and also ran into huge legal bills, from a contracting client who made outrageous claims. It was the worst experience of my adult life. I can’t go into any details, but it was terrible, and the case turned on the same kind of criminal trade secret laws. These trade secret laws are so prone to abuse because they take what are effectively civil issues (ie, business disputes) and get the criminal justice system involved. Let me tell you, all this thing about “innocent until proven guilty” is nonsense. Yes, you are “innocent until proven guilty” when you actually get to trial… but by the time you get to trial you’ve already gone through hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal bills. Where does the average guy come up with that kind of money? I’ll give you the answer: he sells all of his assets (house, everything) and he still doesn’t have that kind of money, so he ends up getting a public defender, and public defender = plea bargain = no trial.

Basically these trade secret laws let big guys with resources or connection punish small guys (us) without any legal process. We’re out tens of thousands of dollars just from the moment the process begins, without a court or a judge even having seen the issue.

There’s also the emotional factor. It’s terrifying. If I got a criminal trade secret conviction, I would never be able to work in the programming field again. What else could I do? My life would be ruined even if I got probation only. The fear is incapacitating. It’s like someone telling you “you have cancer.” Even if the cancer is treatable, it is terrifying.

Anyone in the programming field needs to be aware of these risks. You don’t think about it because a) these things usually do not result in convictions (in TFA’s case, if his telling is accurate, there is no evidence of any wrong-doing) and b) when they go away without a conviction, we’re all scared to talk about them (like I am posting as AC right now). But even if the case goes nowhere, running into a $40k legal bill is disastrous. That’s a down payment on a house. That’s 100% of your after-tax income for more than a year (probably). That’s your new-car and vacation fund for several years. That could cause so much financial stress as to lead to divorce, family estrangement, etc. That’s “liquidate all of your assets right now and borrow from all of your relatives” disastrous. That’s a penalty this guy is suffering without any trial or judicial overview. That’s (possibly) without even having a grand-jury rubber-stamp the police side of the story.

I’m afraid to even post this lest it have some bearing on my situation, but I’m posting because I want all of us Slashdot crowd to be aware of it.

I don’t really have a solution, but one thing that seems to help is to put up a very aggressive and determined defence from the very beginning. Let everyone involved know, “there will be no plea bargain. There will be a vigorous defence. Trying to bring a civil matter into the criminal system will not work and I’m not going to beg for mercy. If it gets to a trial, we’re fighting all the way and there will be an acquittal.”

This guy is brave to even be talking about this publicly. I’m sure his lawyer advised him not to (mine did). Most of us who are victims of this are silent victims like me.

Thats basically the situation Chip is in. Oh, yeah, hes looking for donations too, go give him some money.

Update 12:03am, June 25th: Wow, John has raised $925 so far, and has advanced his goal to $2,000.

Update 04:20pm, July 7th: Up to $3,100.00 out of a $4,000 goal. Rock on.

/join #unix
<ms_hechos> http://globals.irc-hispano.org/mshechos
<ms_hechos> Las principales empresas y analistas independientes lo confirman:
<ms_hechos> Windows tiene un coste total de propiedad inferior al de Linux y ofrece mejores resultados.
<ms_hechos> Aquí están los hechos que necesita conocer para elegir entre Windows y Linux.

What the hell, Microsoft? You can’t get enough money off of the English speaking population that don’t know any better, now you have to go after Spanish speaking people that don’t know any better? Quit spamming IRC you losers.

At the ceremony for George Lucas’ AFI lifetime achievement award, Carrie Fisher properly thanks the director for over two decades’ worth of Star Wars nerds masturbating to an image of her in a slave-girl bikini.

… thus deserves a photoshop in her honor (see article for original photo).

Yes, I know. I have no life.

Technorati – If Google is the average person’s homepage, Technorati is the homepage of the underground, tech-savvy web user. Technorati is a blog portal whose average visitor enjoys podcasts, Wikipedia, and the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Providing more cutting edge results than a normal search engine, Technorati would integrate well with Google News and/or Blogger, and could perhaps feature blogs on the Google Personalized Homepage. Technorati is somewhat similar to Bloglines, which was purchased by Ask Jeeves recently.

I agree here, Technorati would be a great purchase. I currently use Technorati services to allow people to see who’s linking to my blog, and I would love to use the Tags system, except there is no clean way to intergrate this into my layout without help from the Blogger software itself.

Ultimately, I’d like to put it where the “Posted at: whenever | Comments | Trackback” stuff is, and thats very hard to do without embedding tons of HTML right into the blog posts themselves, which defeats the entire purpose of having templates and automagic in the first place. Anyone at Blogger wanna take a crack at this?

Another great service that he talks about is Koders…

Koders – Koders is a search engine for open source code that works remarkably well. With the recent push for plugins for Google Desktop search, Koders would be an interesting addition to Google’s software initiatives. It would make sense to combine with Google Code and Google Linux Search in some way.

Wow… just wow. I’ve never heard of this service before, and it looks great. I’ve been playing around with it for the past 10 minutes, and it has been giving me useful results; I’ll definitely be using this more often when I need to find code and don’t want to reinvent the wheel.

Hey Pisanos, its the Super Mario Bros. Super Show!

The Legend of Zelda and The Super Mario Bros. Super Show are finally coming to DVD. This represents a chunk of my childhood that I still fondly remember: I used to watch these before I went to school in the morning, and then again when I came home from school. Wow. Now all we need is Captain N, the Game Master and my set will be complete.

The conspiratorially minded think that this update is just an effort on DirecTV’s part to get them to buy receivers with PVRs built in. A DirecTV representative responds “I can absolutely say this is not a tactic to get people to switch over to another receiver,” which is just the sort of thing you’d expect them to say if there were a conspiracy.

Yup, and its all apart of the Trilateral Commission’s plot involving Girl Scout Cookies and stolen nuclear weapons from Russia.

You know what we could have done with $370 billion dollars? We could have fed everyone in the world, and given them the medical care they need. We currently spend only $5 billion a year on cancer research, and we could have cured cancer with that money. We could have cured AIDS, which killed 3.1 million people in 2004, and 23 million since 1981.

We could have converted every car in the United States to a fuel efficient engine that doesn’t burn gasoline, and made it easy for all diesel users to switch to biodiesel. We could have finally researched to see if cold fusion exists or not. We could have setup a mining facility on the Moon to mine Helium 3 for a clean power production method. We could have finally stepped foot on Mars, and even made a permanent settlement there.

We could have improved the lives of everyone on Earth, and we didn’t.

And Kennedye (the poster of that comment) has got a point: hand tuned PPC and Altivec may have not been the best idea, the compiler should be smart enough to auto-vectorize my code and get some decent performance out of it. Hell, GCC should learn to just read my mind; or maybe not, it’d explode from my semi-sarcastic realistic outlook on life.

Now, everyone is thinking Steve Jobs made a mistake, but I’m thinking this may be a brilliant move. See, Steve has something called the Reality Distortion Field™. This field is a documented phenomenon of quantum physics that causes Steve to just think about something, and make it a reality. He can convince anyone of anything, and if he can’t, he can just take your side of the argument up as if that was his side all along, and you’d never know otherwise. This field is so powerful, that even if you know about it ahead of time, you’re still affected.

So, I think Steve watched X-Men (the movie), and saw Magneto’s Spinning Mutant Generator, and thought to himself, “Hmm, wouldn’t it be nice if I could build something like that to project my Reality Distortion Field™ all over the world and convince everyone that my new Mactel machines really are something awesome.”

Although I may be under the effects of his hideous yet elegant and wonderful machine, I think he may be partially right. Due to his reliance on Altivec to close the gap between G4 processors and x86, he got screwed. An ounce of garden variety speed is worth a pound of special case optimization, and the PPC was far overweight in this respect.

Sure, I may have gotten a 25-500% improvement in code that was SIMD-friendly; but using a (at that time) fast Pentium 4 vs the (at that time) new G4, I could easily see a 25-100% improvement in programs that weren’t SIMD-friendly. And seeing as the overwhelmingly vast majority of code isn’t SIMD-able, I’d gladly trade Altivec for raw speed.

Take into the fact that the Athlon was beating the pants off the Pentium 4, the G4 was a really bad deal for Apple users. Sure, it was elegant (and Apple thrives on elegance), but you paid for that by having slower processors.

Of course, if you actually had said special case, PPC was the winner. Take a look at the Cell processor in the Playstation 3. Cell* is a derivative of the PPC meant for machines that need high performance and repetitive (but complex) calculations, such as games, or certain scientific applications. It simply performs better than x86 would in that situation, and Sony knows it.

So, Apple now has effectively traded the rarely used Altivec for lots of generic speed, and got cheaper and more readily available CPUs to boot. So, Steve, what is your next move? A mouse with zero buttons?

_{* I’m not factoring in Cell’s 8 special use vector units. With those included, it unfairly destroys any competition. Without the vector units, its still a high performance 3.2 GHz PPC-like core.}

However, this rule applies to FOSS development as well. The smaller projects are producing the better software, and the larger projects are doing all the wrong things. GNOME has literally a hundred developers, and its one of the worst products (or, really, a group of products ‘sold’ under one suite) I’ve seen FOSS produce in a long time.

But the Apache HTTP Server, on the other hand, has less than a dozen active developers and is ran on the majority of web servers on the Internet. KDE has issues due to size as well (but has a smaller number of active developers than GNOME and has more users to boot), but the Simple DirectMedia Layer is widely used, and has only one official developer.

In FOSS, if small really is bigger, then really small is ginormous.

Nice part is, it boots about 10-15 seconds faster on my P3 550 workstation (at least some of that is attributed to my 5 year old Debian install). The KDE distro is well packaged too, and Ubuntu comes with X.org by default (instead of the old method I was using by stealing X.org from Ubuntu, and replacing Sid’s XF86 with it.)

All in all, its now the best distro on the planet, kicking Debian from that title.