Like both assault rifles and vodka?

2007-03-23 by jhoblitt | 0 comments

Well then, this is the Vodka for you… Yep, it really is that Kalashnikov.

The Flaw in Representational Democracy

2007-03-18 by jhoblitt | 0 comments

Everyday I see news stories that leave me absolutely convinced that government in the United States at the State and Federal level is neither carrying out the wishes of the majority of it’s citizen nor, from an objective point of view, acting in the best interest of the majority of citizens. Why? Well there’s lots of reasons; corruption, thinking your “on a mission from god” (cough, cough), the agenda that causes a person to seek power in office in the first place, etc.. I’ve puzzled this over and over again and I’ve come to the conclusion that is there one principle reason.

Elected politicians more or less represent the views. opinions, and agenda of their constituent voters.

Do you see anything disturbing about that statement? If not, read it again. The key word is voters. Speaking your mind with your close friends and relatives is great, speaking your mind in public is even better, but it is speaking your mind in the voting booth that is required. Those that choose not or fail too vote are equally responsible for the government is power.

OSX account creation: Think Different, Think WTF?

2007-03-16 by jhoblitt | 0 comments

This has to be my absolute favorite “innovation” from Apple. Why run just two simple commands to create an new user account, like so:

useradd -d /home/foo -c”foo” -s/bin/bash -u 500 -g 100 -m foo; passwd foo

? I mean, that doesn’t even give the systems administrator a big sense of accomplishment for rote memorization of a massive pile of commands. Or why even pretend to be like most POSIX systems, except for in ad champagnes? Enter OSX — account creation from the command line requires the execution of 9 (yes, 9!) separate commands:

dscl / -create /Users/foo
dscl / -create /Users/foo UserShell /bin/bash
dscl / -create /Users/foo RealName “foo”
dscl / -create /Users/foo UniqueID 500
dscl / -create /Users/foo PrimaryGroupID 100
dscl / -create /Users/foo NFSHomeDirectory /Local/Users/foo
dscl / –passwd /Users/foo foobar
mkdir /Users/foo
chown foo:100 /Users/foo