I’ve been aware of the frenetic activity around Twitter for at least a year now, but I refuse to use it, both because it’s hard for me to see the value of 140 character text messages and because centralized Internet services leave a bad taste in my mouth. Such is the extent of my aversion that I limped along with my own PostFix/Courier-IMAP mail system with shitty webmail clients like SquirrelMail for years before my time in Iraq convinced me there’s simply no open-source email system remotely competitive with Gmail. When I switched my domain over to Google Apps for Domains, it was with a strong sense of shame, as though I’d been beaten in some epic contest.

The difference, of course, is that I desperately need stable, performant, spam-free, accessible email. I do not desperately need Twitter.

However, I am interested in the concept, and I’m not arrogant enough to believe all those millions of Twitter fans are all wrong.

I finally decided I wanted to set up an OpenID ID attached to the URL of my personal website, apocryph.org. I just set up an account on MyOpenID, installed the Drupal OpenID URL module, and configured it to point to my MyOpenID URL.

I set OpenID Server to ‘http://www.myopenid.com/server’, OpenID Delegate to ‘http://codebloc.myopenid.com/’, and OpenID XRDS Location to ‘http://codebloc.myopenid.com/xrds’. And that was it. Now http://apocryph.org is a valid OpenID. Too easy.

Today the Supreme Court released its decision affirming Heller v. District of Columbia, finding the Second Amendment protects an individual right to own and possess a handgun for defensive purposes in one’s home.

The finding of an individual right has been widely expected in the gun rights community since oral arguments earlier this year, but the results were still a bit surprising, at least to me.

First, the court was divided 5-4, with all four liberals dissenting. If Justice Kennedy had gone the other way, we’d have a SCOTUS precedent for the collective rights interpretation of the 2A!

Two unrelated but nonetheless telling bits of information came to me today.

First, the Irish, being as they are not team players, just had to run the Lisbon Treaty past their citizens, even though every other EU nation was smart enough to limit the decision to their respective elite Eurocrats. It turns out the Irish, upon reflection, aren’t too keen on ceding their remaining sovereignty to Brussels, as the treaty ratification was voted down with extreme prejudice.

As an American, albeit an unusually politically active one, I don’t have a very firm grasp on European politics, but I can’t help but compare the EU with the formation of my own country back in the late 18th century. The thirteen colonies were all pretty independent, and our first attempt to organize into a nation, the Articles of Confederation, failed due to an excessive lack of cohesion.

At work one of the devs was running into a weird problem. He could run a group of our unit tests on his dev box without any problem, but when the same tests ran on our build machine the test host process crashed with an unhandled exception. Thankfully we run all of our processes with an unhandled exception trap which generates a minidump before terminating, so we were able to determine the failure was in a C runtime function _chkstk called upon entry into a particular function that allocates alot of stuff on the stack.

At first, I was thinking stack overflow, but there wasn’t anywhere near 1MB of shit on the stack, which is the default maximum stack size. I thought about stack corruption, but the C-runtime stack checking routines provide an explicit message when stack corruption is detected.

I just repaved Wyoh with Windows XP Professional x64 Edition, since I wanted a 64-bit OS and there’s no fucking way I’m running Vista on my primary dev laptop. I’ve been running XP x64 at work for a while, but my work box has shit on-board graphics so I never had to seek out the latest ATI drivers for a 64-bit XP install. Wyoh on the other hand has an embedded Radeon Mobility X1800 graphics board that really needs ATI’s latest drivers.

Apparently the OEMs that license the Mobility Radeon chips don’t like ATI providing the latest and greatest Catalyst bits online, since dumb users could download them before the OEMs have a chance to verify them, thus marring the user experience and (more importantly) costing said OEM a support call. Lame!

Fortunately, there’s a workaround.

My work on a tool to migrate Drupal content to Wordpress’ eXtended RSS (‘WXR) led me into some dusty corners of the WordPress codebase, and I’ve been meaning to write a grumpy post about how much I hate PHP (in which Wordpress is written), but Jeff Atwood at Coding Horror beat me to it with his own PHP sucks lament. Like me, Jeff wonders at the success of PHP given what a dreadfully sucky software engineering tool it is, and scratches his head at the many major Internet properties (Wikipedia, Digg, and Wordpress among them) which are successful notwithstanding an implementation in a language a VB6 programmer might reasonable call “shit”.

Interestingly, though, Jeff and I arrived at two different conclusions on the matter. Jeff surmises:

Some of the largest sites on the internet — sites you probably interact with on a daily basis — are written in PHP.

For a few months now I’ve been running Vista and Windows Media Center on prospertine, hooked up to a nice widescreen LCD monitor mounted to the wall in my bedroom. Whenever I want to watch movies or TV shows and I’m not working in my office, I play them on ‘prospertine’ over my GigE network from my NAS box. I even have the Vista IR remote control, and a nice little wireless keyboard complete with a trackball. I can sit back on my bed and watch my media and even do basic web browsing.

However, prospertine is four years old, and has some serious thermal issues which cause the ICH6R chipset to ‘forget’ about one of the drives in its RAID 0 volume from time to time, which causes the system to crash. I then have to turn it off and let it cool before it will work again.

Last month I shot my first IPSC match at the NRA range. The scores have finally been posted.

There were a total of 30 shooters in all classes, out of which I placed 17th with 49.48% of the highest scoring shooter. In my class (Limited) I placed 4th. I didn’t get DQ’d, shoot myself, or score the lowest, so I’m pleased with my performance. It sucks I missed the signup for this month’s shoot; hopefully I’ll make it in June.

A while back I noted the appallingly tone-deaf BATFE procurement of “Always Think Forfeiture” leatherman tools. Today I received an unsolicited email from the offices of Congressman Bill Sali of Idaho, containing a press release announcing Congressman Sali’s success persuading BATFE management to stop distributing the coveted “Always Think Forfeiture” Leathermans. I don’t know anything about Congressman Sali or his politics, but anyone who reality-checks the BATFE is OK in my book.