VCDL Saslaw Dinner Went Well
Rebecca and I went to the VCDL’s Saslaw dinner today at Champp’s in Reston. Sadly, Senator Saslaw was unable to attend, but I suspect he’ll get the message anyway. Roughly 50 people showed up, openly carrying, and there were no police cars, helicopters overhead, or hysteria. In fact, it was downright boring.
It turns out the general manager at Champp’s is strongly pro-gun and welcomes open carry at his restaurant. He spoke to the group for a few moments and welcomed all of us back. I, for one, will never set foot in TGI Friday’s again; Champps will be my preferred casual dining facility now. As an added bonus, it’s just as close to my house, so I’m not even giving up anything.
UPDATE: News of the event hit the AP wire, complete with the requisite Saslaw-foot-in-mouth quote.
Now, here’s another cat/girl/gun pic:
and another
Upgraded to Slickedit 2008 after fascism false alarm
Not long ago the makers of SlickEdit, my favorite programmer’s editor, released the new version, SlickEdit 2008. Since I have an active maintenance and support contract, I got the upgrade free (although it took a few days of support hell to figure out how to get my updated 2008 key).
As a long-time SlickEdit user (I first used Visual SlickEdit 2.x back in the late 90′s) I am used to the painless upgrade process, but this time was different. This time, when I launched Slickedit for the first time, it wanted to activate! As in, Microsoft WGA Fascism Lives DRM Bullshit! From Slickedit of all people! I unplugged my network cable and tried to proceed; sure enough, activation failed.
Through force of will I didn’t know I had, I resisted the urge to type a nuclear nastygram to Slickedit support, and instead came up with this fairly moderate missive:
Support:
I just upgraded to Slickedit 2008 under my Maintenance and Support
contract, only to discover that the new version of SlickEdit has the
same obnoxious phone-home activation feature we all know and love from
Microsoft products like Vista. In order to install SlickEdit on my
laptop I had to either use my Internet connection to get a node-locked
license, or download a node-locked license file.Before I uninstall SlickEdit and find another text editor, I would
just like to confirm this is indeed the new SlickEdit regime, with no
option to go back to the old Slickedit 2007 offline license key
verification scheme.I’m sure this new licensing scheme is not support’s doing, and I
apologize for the snarky tone of this email, but I suspect you’d be
grumpy too if you were facing the prospect of learning another editor
(God help me I might even have to use emacs!)Thanks,
I expected to get some canned MBA “for your safety” bullshit, but instead I got:
Hi Adam,
I copied the “nullpointer” email address because that is the email address used to register your SlickEdit licenses.
The new version of SlickEdit (SE2008) provides two options for licensing, the activation (or phone-home) and the file based which was used prior to SE2008. Obtaining the file based licensing is very easy. Here are the steps:
- Log into your SlickEdit web account and click the “Registered Products”. Once in the registered Products page…
- Click on the “Product Description” for your active license (ser#: WLxxxx)…in other words “SlickEdit 2008 Windows/Linux Bundle”…this will open the licensing window.
- In this window you will have your license key and product install file for the product(s)
- Click on the “License File (optional)”…this will take you through the process to obtain your file based license
Should you have any questions, please feel free to contact myself or our tech support team at 919-473-0070.
Please confirm everything went smoothly.
Best regards,
Wow! So there is a non-node-locked option from Slickedit. Thank God!
Browsing their support forum, it seems I’m not alone. It seems the beta had FlexLM node locking, and users (like me) revolted. I still think Slickedit fucked up here; in the old version the FlexLM license server stuff was for site licenses and numbered users, and you had to seek it out in the installer. This one seems to come by default in that mode. I’m not the only one who missed the option to download the license file, as you can see for yourself in the support forum threads.
Anyway, I’m glad Slickedit listened to its loyal users rather than stubbornly clinging to the users-are-crooks-software-should-phone-home bandwagon. So far I’ve managed to fend off attempts to make AppAssure’s enterprise backup products node-locked and phone-home, and our stuff is alot more expensive than Slickedit. I just hope they can resist the siren’s song of fascist licensing schemes in the future, and that this kerfuffle is just a hiccup along the way.
If Slickedit goes the activation route, I will not continue to use it, just as I refuse to use Vista under the activation regime. Much like Windows, Slickedit is not the only game in town, but switching to another game is time-consuming and painful.
Now Available: Official apocryph.org carbon offsets
Most days during the spring and summer months I ride my bike to and from work each day, instead of driving my car. According to this calculator, assuming a savings of 1000 miles per year, that’s 0.305 tons of carbon I’m not spewing into the atmosphere. Sure, I can pay $15 and buy a plenary indulgence–I mean–carbon offset to counter that much carbon emission, but where’s the fun in that? By making the sacrifice myself instead of outsourcing it like some filthy capitalist pig, I can now don the hair shirt of environmental responsibility, with all the smug condescension and pompous bullshit to which I am now entitled.
In the spirit of pompous bullshit, for a limited time you can ease your troubled climatic conscience by paying me to NOT fuck up the Earth. It’s easy. Let’s say you keep driving your not-so-fuel-efficient car around with the improperly-inflated tires and el-cheapo 87 octane gas like some sort of lazy fascist eco-fucktard. You keep meaning to get around to shaping up, but American Idol and YouTube keep distracting you. Rather than suffering the inhuman guilt of your selfish procrastination, you can now buy a few ton’s worth of official apocryph.org carbon offsets equivalent to the damage your privileged life inflicts upon Gaia the Earth Mother. In return for your trifle of change, I will refrain from a variety of planet-killing activities.
For $10, I will not burn enough tires to belch 0.2 tons of carbon into our human habitat.
For $20, I won’t make 0.5 tons of carbon from a bonfire of discarded Chinese toys and old gasoline.
For $50, I won’t slash-and-burn acres of Amazon rain forest to make room for my private cute-little-bunnies-with-broken-legs canned hunting preserve, sparing our planet 2.0 tons of carbon death.
For $100, I will refrain from staging a machine-gun shoot into a tributary of the Potomac with enough .50 cal lead to make a Chinese toy maker cry, which doesn’t actually have anything to do with carbon but is nonetheless very very bad.
For what amounts to just pennies a day, you can banish the nagging guilt of a life lived for want of nothing, and regard your equally-apathetic friends with righteous Algorian contempt. In recognition of your contribution, you will receive a Certificate of Ecological Superiority suitable for framing in one of the many empty air-conditioned rooms in your sprawling suburban dwelling. For a very limited time, if you buy all four offset options you’ll receive the much-coveted “What have YOU done to not fuck up the Earth today?” t-shirt to let everyone know you’re part of the solution, or at least slightly less of the problem.
Now, obligatory green, airy stock photo:
PayPal and major credit cards are accepted.
Support Vern McKinley for Virginia's 10th District
A while back I mentioned Vern McKinley’s 10th district congressional bid. He’s gathered enough signatures to make it on the ballot for the Republican primary, and is gearing up to fight the Feckless Wonder, congressman Frank Wolf, with whom I am not amused.
If you would like to see Frank Wolf turned out and replaced with a small-government, go-to-hell-I’m-keeping-my-guns Republican, contribute to Vern McKinley for Congress. I just did. Even Dick Heller of Heller vs. DC fame is supporting him.
Fed up with meddling scolds trying to control what they don't understand
Don Reisinger at CNET posted an angry blog entry yesterday titled “A tech lover’s call to arms”. It’s the usual hand-wringing over various and sundry attempts to regulate/control/limit technology, ranging from the RIAA’s and MPAA’s feckless crusade against the scourge of piracy to the seemingly endless procession of politicians banning violent video games “for the children”. Apart from being more alarmist and less..well..helpful than I think it should, it does resonate with the gripes I and I think my fellow geeks feel towards various encroachments upon our technological liberty.
It’s not clear what Don would have his readers do, save for the obvious:
For what it’s worth, I call on all journalists, readers and companies to forego their apathy and do what they can to stand together and fight the ridiculous notion that technology should be throttled back for fear of its inability to adapt to the expectations of the Old Guard.
What that means, exactly, I don’t know. I’m pretty sure the fix isn’t regulatory, though. The same government that can ban “excessive” broadband prices and force telecomms into network neutrality can just as easily go the other way. If the last 250 years have taught us anything, it’s that placing one’s fate in the hands of government is always and everywhere foolish.
I would like to see the tech community focus more energy on hardening the Internet and content distribution technologies against government and corporate munging. The early days of the Internet were preoccupied with the notion that cyberspace would be a new frontier free of the constraints and yokes of meatspace, and it was upon that Utopian vision that the modern Internet was built. As it turned out (not surprisingly, in retrospect), the Internet does not “[interpret] censorship as damage” and “[route] around it” as John Gilmore famously said back in ’93. At the time, though, it seemed government and corporate meddling in the free flow of information was finally over, thanks to a the holy trinity of freely available encryption, anonymity, and global interconnectivity.
Though the Internet’s architecture makes it easier to censor and regulate than I first thought, the advantage still lies with us. If the Pirate Bay can stand up to the worst the MPAA can throw at it, then defiance of the DMCA and government and corporate attempts to monitor/regulate/censor content is also possible. If rich content could be hosted and distributed anonymously, how can content bans be effectively enforced? Where do you send the DMCA takedown notice? To whom do you serve baseless search warrants and frivolous law suits?
There’s nothing wrong with agitating for less technological forms of change, but giving governments more regulatory power over the Internet should not be undertaken lightly. What happens if the RIAA buys the chairman of the Network Neutrality subcommittee? What if some fundamentalist Muslim or Christian religious figure gets control of the Internet regulatory agency? All those powers that seemed great in the hands of a Network Neutrality warrior would suddenly be turned against us. It’s possible somewhere in human history a government has been given awesome power and subsequently not abused it, but nothing springs to mind just now.
Much like an armed citizenry is (supposed to be) the last bulwark against government tyranny, a decentralized, anonymous, covert darknet tunneled through the Internet should be established as a last bastion of freedom of thought and expression if the world’s governments’ contempt for virtually limitless freedom of conscience reaches its logical conclusion.
Reading this back to myself, it sounds like an angry cryptoanarchist rant. I’m not some sort of fringe libertarian, I swear! I just don’t like to be told what to do by clueless bureaucrats and pandering politicians, and if the time comes I want to be sure I have the means to disobey those who presume to control me.
Lesson Learned: Deleting stuff from SVN is a pain
Recently it came to my attention that I accidentally committed some sensitive information to my SVN repository. I had already deleted it months ago, but as those of you who use SVN well know, nothing is ever really gone from SVN; any deleted items can always be recovered from the previous revisions in which they were not deleted. What to do?
Well, not surprisingly, I’m not the first person to have this problem. The SVN book describes the solution, and it’s not pretty. I’ll summarize:
- run
svnadmin dumpon your whole repository - run
svndumpfilteron the dump file to filter out specific path prefixes - delete and recreate your repository, or create a new one to contain the modified dump
- run
svnadmin loadon the dump file output bysvndumpfilter
If you’re lucky you have a very small repository like I do, and this only takes a half hour or so. I can only imagine doing this with a production code repository like our AppAssure repository; the dump/load operation could easily take days.
So the lesson here is pay attention to what you’re committing, because unless you’re the SVN admin there’s no way to uncommit something once it’s in. This is a feature of SVN, not a bug, but that comes as no consolation when you really want something gone permanently.
Shot first IPSC match yesterday
Yesterday I shot my first IPSC match, held at the NRA headquarters range in Fairfax. Going into the shoot I was very nervous, even though I’d practiced drawing from holster, double-taps, and administrative reloads at length. Happily, my fretting was for naught, as I shot well and safely (well, not so safe for the no-shoot target I drilled, or the ceiling light I took out with a ricochet, but other than that 
). The scores aren’t posted yet, but I expect I won’t have the lowest score of the evening, which is all I was hoping for.
I shot the US Limited 10 division, because that’s the division the ROs told me I would be in. I think I’ll shoot US Production next month assuming my holster is on the approved list. There are other IPSC divisions where guys shoot tricked-out “race guns” using completely impractical gear which you’d never consider using for defensive purposes, but that doesn’t appeal to me. I want to shoot IPSC to become a better defensive shooter, not to artificially boost my score with crazy hardware tricks.
When scores are posted I’ll note them here.
UPDATE: Scores posted here
Cat, Girl, or Gun?
Look at the photo below and note which detail you notice first:
The correct answer for normal hetero males is “girl”. If you have an unhealthy fixation with firearms, you said “gun”. If you said “cat”, well, I don’t blame you, but you really need to re-evaluate your priorities. If your first thought was “that rug really ties the whole room together”, we have nothing in common.
Positive Open Carry Dining Experience
Since Timmy Kaine vetoed legislation that would have allowed gun owners with concealed handgun permits to carry in restaurants licensed to serve alcohol provided they don’t drink themselves, those of us who carry must carry openly in such establishments (unless of course we’re members of the privileged caste, such as Commonwealth Attorneys).
Interestingly, during the Virginia Senate debate on the bill to allow concealed carry in restaurants, Dick Saslaw claimed:
In most urban areas, you walk into a restaurant with a gun on your hip, they’re going to tell you to get out…You’re not going to get any meal or any drink.
The Post article also noted:
Saslaw said in an interview that he and his wife dine out “all the time” and that they have never seen anyone in a restaurant in his district with a gun.
Of course, that’s because most people don’t even notice. I open carry around NoVA from time to time, and in most cases people are not paying enough attention to even notice the gun on my belt. But in Saslaw’s mind apparently his own ignorance conceptions of gun ownership are a suitable substitute for the facts.
In protest of Saslaw’s yawning ignorance, VCDL have organized some open-carry lunches in Saslaw’s district. I participated in one today. VCDL are keeping the details quiet until the campaign is over, so I won’t say where we were, but I will relate the experience.
Rebecca and I both OC’d to a nice little restaurant in Fairfax county. I had my trusty Glock 19 in a Comp-Tac strong-side OWB belt holster, and Rebecca borrowed my S&W M&P 9, carried in a Fobus strong-side OWB paddle holster. As is typical of my open carry outings, this one was mostly uneventful. As we were leaving the owner/manager came over and asked us about the blatant visibility of our weapons; we educated him on Virginia’s ridiculous law and corrected some misconceptions he had about gun laws in Maryland and DC. There was no hostility, no bouncers escorting us to the door, no terrorized patrons begging for their lives from beneath the tables; it was a non-event.
I suppose I could be making this all up, so here’s the photographic evidence:
Molon Labe, Saslaw.
Shooting in April IPSC shoot at NRA range
This morning I called the NRA headquarters range to sign up for the IPSC pistol shooting competition being held there on Tuesday 15 April. Registration opened at 10 AM; I called at 10:45 AM and got the last available slot, on the 9PM squad! The RO I spoke with said most slots are usually gone in the first ten minutes of signup! Unbelievable. There are five squads (hourly from 5PM to 9PM), with roughly eight to ten shooters per squad, and all of them were full with waiting lists 45 minutes after registration opened.
On the one hand, it’s great to see such a large and active shooting community in an urban, Democrat-leaning area of the state. On the other hand, it means there are more of us competing for very limited shooting facilities. I read on Arfcom that the IPSC shoots at BRA are booked months in advance, and the NRA range always seems packed whenever I go. We really need more indoor shooting ranges in Fairfax County!