One year ago today, the good people of Boston displayed their vigilance in the international war on terror by reporting Lite-Brite displays of Ignignokt and Err to the authorities. A shameful display of fear, incompetence, and demagoguery immediately followed. Thank God the perpetrators’ hair was safe.
I’ve commented before that the 2008 presidential election was at serious risk of being a matter of getting to choose between a small handful of candidates chosen for us by the news media. California bumping our primary date to February 5th, the first day of the official primary season, was supposed to give us some say in who the nominees of the major parties were going to be, but it looks like we’ve been cheated again. A list of the fallen:
Each of these candidates had their problems, but chief among them was lack of face-time at the national level. Without Anna Nicole Smith or Natalee Holloway drama to clamp onto, most news outlets simply latched onto every little thing that Hillary Clinton or Michelle Obama said and did, with so-called pundits bickering for hours about their subset of darling candidates (Clinton, Obama, McCain, Romney) for every minute of coverage any other candidate received.
Now it looks like Giuliani and Edwards are dropping out. Being registered “undeclared,” the Republicans wouldn’t let me vote for Rudy, but I had four choices left on the Democratic side of things until today: Clinton, Edwards, Gravel, and Obama. Maybe I didn’t want Clinton or Obama to walk into the convention this year with a majority of delegates. Maybe I wanted a real convention for once. Maybe I wanted Edwards to hang in there and play king-maker. Yeah, a big part of me really did. The conventions for both parties have been a joke since 1980. No question as to the nominee. No question as to the platform. No question as to the running-mate. Just a balloon-drop and a bunch of cheerleader speeches.
So the Democrats have let me down. Hopefully Huckabee, McCain, and Romney can split up enough of the February 5th delegates to keep things interesting on that side of things.
note: the Edwards campaign site still has its “contribute” link accessible, so maybe I’m jumping the gun here.
*Update: yep, he’s out.
Looks like the hive-mind of Anonymous has picked February 10th as a big day of action in its war on the Church of Scientology. Security experts have reported that attacks against the church’s Internet presence has been waning since the first big outburst on January 18th, which makes sense due to the frivolous nature of Anonymous.
I’m certainly curious what these “IRL” raids will turn out to be. Apparently February 10th is the date that “The times they are a changing” was originally released by Bob Dylan (in 1964), and this has been offered as an explanation for the choice of date. I have no idea what idiot drew that connection, as a far more relevant February 10th is that of 1959: the birth date of Lisa McPhearson. Along with Elli Perkins, McPhearson is one of those very sore subjects that apparently the Church of Scientology just doesn’t like to come up in conversation. I suppose that we can expect a big push for March 13th event as follow-up (the date in 2003 that Elli was murdered by her untreated schizophrenic son).
Warren Ellis, noted comic-book author, is apparently totally down with these ominous threats, and offers a glowing review of the above video. This strikes me as appropriate, as this is something that might happen in one of his works. Of course, in fiction Anonymous would back up its bluster with action. In reality, there will likely just be small mobs of youths in sweatshirts filming each other as they hand out fliers to disinterested passers-by.
Nevermind that link I put up. It’s rubbish for my purposes. I didn’t really have my heart set on making a Vista gadget so much as simply making an alternate means for somebody to open up a Vista box for ICMP echo response. So I loaded up a copy of Visual Basic, learned a couple things, and brewed up a simple application that tests for a firewall rule of a particular name, then allows the user to open up ICMP (if the rule isn’t already there) or close it off (by deleting the rule). All done through janktastical wshShell.run legerdemain. At first I used wshShell.exec (as it allows access to stdout), but I suppose I know better now.
I’ve got some testing to do, particularly in regards to the “publish” mechanism in Visual Basic. I’ve never used that beast before, usually just brewing up remedial scripts for use on Apache web servers, so all this business regarding signing and means of distribution are totally foreign to me. Once I’m satisfied that it works properly on systems other than my laptop, insert some means of LARTing fools that try to run it on pre-Vista boxen, and narrow down precisely which hosts I intend to let ping it (the Sonic.net latency tester and technical support IPs being obvious choices), I’ll put a little finishing polish on the text, and…
Boy is it easy to make a mountain out of a molehill. The things I’ll do to help little old ladies not have to do this.
p.s. – the escape characters in Visual Basic are retarded.
So here I am trying to make a quick little sidebar gadget. Nothing fancy, I just want to be able to tell if a specific, named, firewall rule is active, and either present a button to disable it (if it’s there) or a button to enable it (if it isn’t). This can be done handily through the command line, but requires elevation. So I search around a bit. Turns out I’m the only person on the face of the Earth that actually wants a gadget to prompt for elevation. Turns out a sidebar gadget cannot do that directly. Guess I’ll have to kludge it.