The major wireless carriers in America are legalized gangsters who shake down excessive use fees in exchange for access to their network. AT&T is particularly evil because they use their profits to lobby against net neutrality, permit warrantless NSA wiretaps, and are on the precipice of assisting the RIAA and MPAA with Draconian Internet monitoring. When you buy an iPhone, you’re donating at least $2144 towards the erosion of your civil liberties and the destruction of the open Internet. It saddens me to see thousands of people wait in line to patronize a corporation that is hostile towards their own customers.

The unfortunate reality is that non-Apple phones are so terrible that the iPhone’s debut is equivalent to selling everyone in hell a glass of ice water. The problem is that the Apple water was poisoned by AT&T. Cory Doctorow agrees with a boycott. Dave Winer concludes that AT&T doesn’t deserve to live. I support both of these ideas.

I’ve always dreamed that someone would make a music video just for me. Imagine my surprise after I woke-up today and learned that the lazyweb had obliged.

Flickr added support for email notifications a few months ago. This was a much needed feature as Menalto Gallery has had support for this since the early 1970s. Today, I noticed that Yahoo! decided to append text advertisements to all email notifications. The ads are pretty unobtrusive, but I’m offended that they would dare monetize my attention since I pay for the service. Subtle offenses like this are usually harbingers of future exploitation. It won’t be long before Jerry Yang has the idea to include pop-up SUV commercials and interactive “Punch the Monkey” ads in a misguided attempt to keep the corporatocracy happy (CONSUME! BUY! DESTROY THE ENVIRONMENT!). I’d like to personally thank the Yahoo! staff for ruining yet another great web site. I’ll be exporting all of my Flickr pictures back into gallery and cancelling my account in the near future.

• Rachel got a job working at the Catnip and Bones
• Andy Grimm celebrated his “perfect” birthday today. He then independently discovered that there always exists a prime number between two consecutive squares.
• My California driver’s license finally arrived. I love the government!!!11!!
• Bumper sent me a mysterious Rockbuster in the post.
• jwz introduced everyone to the wonders of Jam

Stephen Bonds has written a wonderful article on how to identify schemers. You know the type. Schemers view all humans as pawns in their elaborate game of success-money-power. They communicate at you with manipulative rhetoric to be perceived as being “in-charge”. They will mix reality with fiction to cloud your judgment. Your only defense against them is to try to handle them the way that try to handle you. My best advice is to just agree with what they say and do the opposite.

Even though gd, gd-devel and the ruby GD and CAPTCHA gems were installed on my Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 server, Ruby’s CAPTCHA gem seemed to blow-up with the error:

undefined method `StringFT'

Hmmm. I googled around and found that you need a library to bind the GD calls to ruby. This makes perfect sense, but documentation for the issue is scarce.

Eventually, I found the following rpm and installed it.

wget http://ftp.at.gnucash.org/opsys/linux/redhat.com/contrib/libc5/i686/ruby-GD-1.0_97111
rpm -ivh ruby-GD-0.7.4-0vl1.i386.rpm

Unfortunately, the RPM assumed that ruby would be installed under /local, but on RHEL everything is under /usr. So, I found where the RPM stored the library and relocated it to the proper directory.

$ rpm -qpl ruby-GD-0.7.4-0vl1.i386.rpm
/local/lib/site_ruby/1.8/i386-linux/GD.so
sudo mv /local/lib/site_ruby/1.8/i386-linux/GD.so /usr/lib/site_ruby/1.8/i386-linux/

Lo and behold, Ruby’s CAPTCHA gem worked like the clappers after this was sorted. Unfortunately, it took me over an hour to sort out the problem. It would seem that something as mundane as CAPTCHA would have just worked under Rails. The major problem seems to be that the ruby-gd maintainer’s site http://tam.0xfa.com is out of commission.

Under Mac OS X, it’s a bit easier because you can use Darwin Ports to install rb-gd. However, that install appeared to bomb for me because I’m using the latest ruby compiled via the Hivelogic instructions. I attempted to symbolically link the ruby binaries to /opt/local/bin, but that didn’t resolve the issue. I’m still looking for a workaround to this.

Recently, I attempted to create a loop in Ruby on Rails that iterated through the last month worth of dates. Stupidly, I just typed in the following code, and tried to run it… (you need to require ActiveSupport for month.ago to work.

# This code does not work
1.month.ago.step(Time.now, 1.day) { |d|
  print d.day,”\\n”
}

Unfortunately, that doesn’t work, because ActiveSupport returns a Time class value for month.ago. Ruby’s Time class doesn’t define a step method. So, being lazy, I just casted the time to an integer with to_i, and constructed the following loop which does work.

1.month.ago.to_i.step(Time.now.to_i,1.day.to_i) { |d|
   print Time.at(d).day,"\\n"
}

Later on, I learned that Date’s have a step class. So, I simplified the loop.

1.month.ago.to_date.step(Time.now.to_date, 1.day) { |d|
    print d.day,"\\n"
}

It seems like there should be an easier way to do this though. Does anyone have a better idea?