Category Archives: Smackdown!

Remember our air conditioner problem? The fine folks at Ultra Heating and Cooling told us that our compressor had failed and that we’d need a new compressor– say, $900 or so– and that given the age of our unit, we’d be better off buying a new one (oh, $2800 or so).
The home warranty company required me to call a company that they have a contract with, so I did: Oasis Heating and Cooling. Their guy came out, puzzled over the unit for about 10 minutes, and brought in a dead fuse. After it was fixed, voila! 61° air from the air vents.
I don’t know whether to ascribe Ultra’s diagnosis as incompetence or malice on the part of their tech. Either way, a) I won’t be calling them again; b) you shouldn’t either; and c) their pres is going to get a letter from me in the near future.

So, after I registered at TechEd yesterday I wandered over to the grandiosely-named “TechEd Mall”, a big plexiglas cube in the CommNet area. The book section was supposed to be substantially larger, and I was hoping to see Secure Messaging with Exchange 2000 substantially featured. After all, I reasoned, it’s from Microsoft Press, it’s about a Microsoft product, and this is the largest Microsoft-centric conference in the world– a natural fit. I slowly cruised by the display wall outside the door, where there were lots of MS Press books visible. Not mine, unfortunately. “Oh well,” I thought. “They must be inside.”
Nope. There were MS Press books in abundance (and a nice selection of other titles from O’Reilly, Wrox, and others), but no copies of my book. I spoke to the (very pleasant) bookstore manager; it turns out that two books didn’t make it here on time for the show– mine and one other. I was pretty unhappy until I learned that the other author’s book failed to arrive after they’d planned a big book signing because yesterday was the guy’s birthday. Ooops. Hopefully some copies of the book will appear before I leave today.

If I had time, I’d write Sam Palmisano a nasty letter. I don’t, so this will have to suffice. Why in the hell doesn’t the battery for the T20 series ThinkPad fit in the T30? They’re the same size, but there’s a protrusion on the T30 battery that’s not there on the T20. Identical capacity, nearly identical casing– I’m tempted to use a Dremel tool to make it fit. Grrrr.

Jeremy points to a Bruce Perens article which more or less accuses Microsoft of being the puppetmaster behind the whole SCO-Linux mess. Josh Allen has a great rebuttal that correctly points out that a conspiracy in this case is, ahem, unlikely. That’s all I have to say about that.
Well, OK, not really. I have to admit that I got a kick out of Eric Raymond’s contention (see page 2 of the story) that the Linux gang is the “principal source of innovation in software”. They’re busy ripping off copying reinventing every feature they can grab from vendors as diverse as MS, Apple, and Opera (not to mention Sun and Palm). I have yet to see anything as innovative from Linux as any of the following: auto-discovery of WiFi networks (Win XP), Quartz compositing (Mac OS X), browser-based S/MIME email (Exchange 2003), complete support for FireWire 800 (Apple), support for IP over FireWire (Apple, Microsoft, and some other third-party ISVs)… I could probably think of some others, but I have real work to do.

WASHINGTON (AP): In a speech that surprised even such high-level Republican confidantes as Bill Frist, Tom Delay, and Brit Hume, US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld today called on Congress to allow President Bush to proceed with plans for military action against the state of Louisiana.
“We do not have the luxury of time to debate our strategy,” Rumsfeld told a
group that included members of the Senate and House Armed Services Committees, leaders of both houses of Congress, and selected members of the
news media.
“Louisiana has demonstrated, time and time again, that it is not interested
in peaceful coexistence with the United States,” the Secretary claimed. “The leadership there says one thing and does another. They tell the world that they have no desire to be aggressive, yet we have proof beyond a doubt that they are producing weapons of mass destruction, and that they would use them against us, especially if they had too much to drink.”
“Louisianians are like that,” he added.
When asked what types of weapons of mass destruction Louisiana had, Rumsfeld turned the podium over to Secretary of State Colin Powell, who produced a series of line drawings of Tabasco Sauce bottles and containers of cayenne pepper.
“They have capsaicin,” said Powell. “And frankly, we have never before seen chemical weapons of this intensity. Each small bottle of Tabasco sauce contains 720 drops. A teaspoon of the stuff has 60 drops. Two to three drops of capsaicin at these levels can disable someone, and five to six drops can cause choking, heart palpitations, respiratory decompensation, and even death. Four drops if the person is from Minnesota.”
Powell went on to describe Scoville units, the units by which pepper heat is measured, and said that the deadly chemical was produced in a remote part of Louisiana known as Avery Island. According to the dossier from which Powell read, when all four production lines of the Avery Island factory are in operation, over 450,000 bottles of Tabasco can be produced in a single day.
“That is enough to kill every man, woman and child in the free world many
times over,” he said.
Secretary Rumsfeld then returned to the podium and fielded questions about his new military directive, which he called a necessary assault on what President Bush is referring to as the Axis of Carville.
“The President believes, and I agree with him, that no one in America is safe until Louisiana is disarmed,” Rumsfeld announced. When asked about the possibility of sending UN weapons inspectors to Louisiana, Rumsfeld became impatient:
“There you go again, with the inspection song and dance. Don’t you think that hasn’t been tried? Every inspector that was ever sent there wound up in New Orleans, and came back drunk and weighing an extra ten pounds. If you knew anything at all about Louisiana, you wouldn’t be asking such an inane question.”
Asked about the possibility of allowing Louisiana time to disarm on its own, Rumsfeld said intelligence reports showed that if left to their own devices, the state’s leaders would eventually distribute capsaicin throughout every major city in the United States. There are already more than a thousand Popeye’s Fried Chicken franchises in the country, he said, and there are many other ways to introduce capsaicin to the population.
“But what about Governor Foster?” a reporter asked. “Isn’t he a Republican?”
Rumsfeld smiled. “We’re really not sure anymore, after the November election,” he said, “and anyway, his term will be up soon. And if you don’t think Mary Landrieu knows about the Tabasco plant, you are more naïve than even I could imagine.”
Later, at a briefing on the latest addition to the growing list of places
the United States will attack, Press Secretary Ari Fleischer was asked if
President Bush had visited Louisiana. Fleischer replied, “He thinks he may
have been there when he was governor of Texas, but he isn’t sure when. I
think right now it’s somewhat murky.”
“Louisiana has a lot of oil, Ari,” Helen Thomas asserted. My understanding is that it has 18 petroleum refineries, 27,250 producing wells, and is home to two of our four strategic oil reserves. Do you want us to believe that the proposed attack on Louisiana isn’t part of the White House’s plan to confiscate oil on a World-Wide basis?”
“Helen, it’s certainly true that Louisiana has a crude oil reserve of 529 million barrels of oil, but the president has no interest in that. What he does have an interest in is the security of the American people, and that security cannot be maintained unless Louisiana is disarmed of its stash of chemical weapons.”
With that remark, Fleischer ended the news conference. Later, however, reporters had a chance to talk with President Bush, who invited some of them to the golf course.
Asked if he thought an attack on Louisiana would be hard to sell to the American people, the president replied that American citizens were becoming more and more suspicious of the motives of foreign countries, and that they would not hesitate to do whatever was necessary to protect national security. When told that Louisiana was one of the fifty states, Bush nodded and said “God bless America.”
Asked about allegations that the White House wanted to attack Louisiana for
its oil, Bush turned and faced the group.
“I can assure you,” he said, “I know all about the allegations. They are crawling around all the swamps in Louisiana. Some of them are ten feet long. Make no mistake: we will hunt them down, and we will bring them to justice.”
The reporter reminded President Bush that Texas had even larger oil reserves than Louisiana. “Can we expect a future attack on Texas, too?”
The President turned toward the second hole. “Now watch this drive,” he said, then, turning and winking, added, “Don’t mess with Texas.”
original source unknown; courtesy of my mom

Woo! If I was a drinker, I’d buy Tim Mullen a beer for this column.

MS Press has generally been quite competent and pleasant to work with, but I’m not very happy with them right now. My book is due to be on shelves in 9 days (2/5, baby!), but do you think it’s mentioned on their web site? Noooo, of course not. There’s no “Robichaux” in the author list, and searching for “secure” turns up three books, none of which are mine. My original editor is out on parental leave, but his replacement has promised to investigate.
Why should you care? Well, until they get the MS Press page for the book up, I have no sample chapters to post here. That means you have two choices: be a trusting soul and buy the book sight unseen, or wait for the samples. Personally, I prefer the first option, but I realize that not everyone likes to buy on faith alone. I’ll have the samples up this week, even if I have to make them myself.

My wife likes to play bridge; so do all of my other female relatives (well, OK; most of them, anyway). She plays once a week against my mom, sister, and aunt, using Yahoo! Games‘ Java bridge applet. Their applet usually works fairly well, but that was before I installed ISA Server, which is much more capable than the appliance firewall I was using before.
To make a long story short, you must open some ports to make the Yahoo! Java games work right. They admit this, but they get the port numbers wrong! Ack! I eventually found the correct answer at Tom Shinder’s ISA Server site, but I shouldn’t have had to– not to mention the 20 minutes or so I wasted trying various combinations of ports according to Yahoo!’s specs. Idiots.
So, word to all vendors: if you’re going to publish security information, get it right. Otherwise, I will have to sic Russ Cooper on you.