In the first place, we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the person’s becoming in every facet an American, and nothing but an American … There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn’t an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag … We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language … and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people. […]

Well said Mr. President; well said.

A little over a year ago, we released an early preview of Google Voice, our web-based platform for managing your communications. We introduced one number to ring all your phones, voicemail that works like email, free calls and text messages to the U.S. and Canada, low-priced international calls and more—the only catch was you had to request and receive an invite to try it out. Today, after lots of testing and tweaking, we’re excited to open up Google Voice to the public, no invitation required. […]

I personally love the service. I have the voicemail from my iPhone forwarded to Google Voice so that all my voicemail is in one place (and I can get them as text messages). The Google Voice number is the only one I give out any more since it is trivial to screen calls, block numbers from ever calling you again, and generally masking where you are (one number can connect to many phones) at any given point.

We need more silly stuff like this slide Volkswagen built in a subway.

Both AT&T and Apple have sent out statements Wednesday acknowledging yesterday’s iPhone 4 preorder meltdown. According to AT&T spokesperson Seth Bloom, preorder sales for the iPhone 4 were 10 times higher than the first day of preorders for the iPhone 3GS last summer. Apple has also publicly acknowledged that things did not go smoothly, apologizing to would-be customers who weren’t able to get an order in before the iPhone 4 sold out.

Apple said that it and its cell carriers worldwide took more than 600,000 preorders for the iPhone 4 yesterday. This was the “largest number of preorders Apple has ever taken in a single day and was far higher than we anticipated, resulting in many order and approval system malfunctions,” forcing many customers to abandon their attempts to complete an order. […]

600,000 preorders in a single day! I can’t say I would blame AT&T or Apple for system failures under that scenario. They planned for the loads they saw with the last model (and then some I’m sure), but were swept under by unexpectedly large demand to the point where Apple called it quits due to production availability concerns. You can only prepare for so much demand.

SCO was dealt yet another blow in court today when District Judge Ted Stewart rejected the company’s motion requesting a new trial or judgement of law. In a ruling issued today, Judge Stewart sided with a jury that issued a verdict against SCO in April, finding that Novell was the rightful owner of the UNIX SVRX copyrights. According to Judge Stewart, SCO failed to demonstrate that the jury’s verdict contradicted the evidence presented in the case. […]

One more step towards stopping the madness. It’s about time.

But the landscape is shifting, perhaps more quickly than we might like. Mobile browsing is expected to outpace desktop-based access within three to five years. Two of the three dominant video game consoles have web browsers (and one of them is quite excellent). We’re designing for mice and keyboards, for T9 keypads, for handheld game controllers, for touch interfaces. In short, we’re faced with a greater number of devices, input modes, and browsers than ever before. […]

This article couldn’t have been timed much better. I was just looking into what it would take to create a basic site theme that could handle the mobile browsers without browser sniffing and server-side nonsense. I strongly believe in progressive enhancement on the Web and approaches like this where the system can adapt on the fly to your device’s capabilities.

I was a little concerned about Mocha’s behavior at the vet. He has been so much trouble in the past that they have occasionally been forced to partially sedate him. That was not the story today. Other than not wanting to come out of the carrier once we were there, he sat quietly and rather passively while the vet did what needed to be done. Mocha got away without having any shots. Spot was not so lucky.

Spot has some sort of skin irritation that makes him scratch all the time. A lot. No, really, a lot. He’s been treated for it in the past, but it is a temporary solution each time. He’s been scratching enough lately to actually pull some fur off his stomach, and that had me a little worried. So, today he got two shots: one in the back leg and another up near his front shoulders. No whine, no whimper, no growl, hiss, or spat. He was great about it. Getting him back into the cage was much easier this time. All I had to do was open it and he made a hasty retreat into the back corner.

Neither cat wasted much time climbing out once we got home. I figure they’ll forgive me some day. Maybe.

Facebook, MySpace, and other social networking sites have reportedly been passing very granular user data to advertisers without informing users about it, in violation of their own privacy policies.[…]

Color me surprised. Just glad I made the decision to leave. This could still have affected me to some degree, but it cannot any more.

(Typekit is on board with it and sounds somewhat excited to see Google join in.)

Google’s long-awaited open-sourcing of the VP8 video codec has finally happened and both Mozilla and Opera are on board with it. The new codec and container combine decent quality with open source licensing and royalty freedom. Might this be enough to topple H.264 as the Web video codec of choice? […]

Glad to see Google, et. al., making strong moves to ensure that the preferred video format for the Web is open and free. It was refreshing to see Adobe even signed on and will support the codec inside Flash.

(We’re on the right track for it to take the next 100 years to migrate over to IPv6)

Students who were photographed at home by the Lower Merion School District IT department will have the opportunity to see the photos thanks to a court order issued Friday. The students will be able to view the images with or without their parents, and request that the court block their parents from seeing “sensitive” photos if they so choose. […]

Facebook’s decision to open up more of my content and information to the general public, by default and in some cases inexorably, was perhaps the final nail. I’ve done my best in the past to fix the settings in their most restrictive positions, but when Facebook decides to move those settings around without my permission, my only recourse is complete withdrawal. I won’t go into any detail about those changes as I expect you are already aware of them if you really care, but if not there’s a Wired article that does a pretty good job of summing it up.

I still plan to post stuff here, on my blog, but it will be up to you to seek it out if you care (there is a RSS feed). I’ll miss the interesting updates, photos, and links you all post on Facebook, but hopefully email, IMs, and even blog comments can pick up the slack.

Oh, do me a favor and stop tagging me in photos.

I had to report to the assembly area by 8:00 AM on Tuesday. I ended up arriving early which gave me time to pre-pay my parking and get settled by about 7:45. Nothing much happened until 8:30 when they closed the outer doors, took up our summons, and played a video for us talking about jury duty. Once that wrapped up, they began calling number ranges (we each had a number assigned on our summons). I got called as part of a group of sixty-five folks for criminal court. Let me just establish right here that I was actually a bit hopeful that I would get selected for a jury, and if I was going to do it, I’d rather see a criminal case. So that perked my interest, as did the size of our group.

After heading downstairs, meeting our bailiff, and getting a new number assigned we headed over to the correct building. I pity the bailiff. It’s like dealing with an kindergarten class sometimes. The court we were assigned to was District Court #338 on the 15th floor of the criminal building. Let me just say, metal detectors are stupid. Their operators even more so sometimes. As it turned out we had plenty of time to navigate security. We were asked to wait in the hallway outside the courtroom until we were called in. So we waited. And waited some more. And … waited more. Finally, after about two hours we were lined back up and marched in to sit on perhaps the most uncomfortable benches known to man.

Judge Jones, who is even now presiding over the case, introduced herself and launched into a rather haphazard-feeling government and law procedure crash course. She outlined the various stages of the trial, defined a few terms, and read the indictment. I’ll save you the trouble of searching her docket to find the relevant case. She had a number of questions for us as a group as well. Mostly dealing with the punishment phase of the trials, and whether we would be able to “abide by the law” and consider the full punishment range. In the case of this felony (Aggravated Assault with a deadly weapon [firearm]) the punishment range, if found guilty, is two to twenty years in the state penitentiary and up to $10,000. She had each of us affirm, or deny, that we could deal with that range. Then she went through the entire group again specifically asking about the lower range, then again for the higher range. I guess it was an attempt to ferret out what the problem was if we had objected to the overall range. This punishment range question took at least twenty minutes to get through, but that’s not all!

If the defendant has a prior felony conviction, the punishment range changes according to Texas law. With a single prior the range shifts to five to ninety-nine years to life and the same $10,000 fine. The judge went around the room again asking if we were okay with the range, with the lower bound, and with the upper bound. This part took even longer since a potential life term was involved and folks were beginning to smell a possible exclusion from service. But that’s not all!

If the defendant has two prior felony convictions, the punishment range shifts to a minimum of twenty-five years and a maximum of life, with the same $10,000 fine. Of course we repeat the questioning phase, and of course it takes even longer. I don’t know if some of these people were being honest, or just trying to get out of jury duty, but it got ridiculous really quickly. One of my fellow citizens said “life isn’t enough.” Many folks simply failed to grasp that the range is established and we would have to choose within those bounds if the defendant was found guilty. They wanted to set their own boundaries, including I suppose, a death penalty. *sigh*

EDIT: I forgot to point out that, if I read the Criminal History correctly, it appears the defendant in this case has at least two prior felony convictions on his record. That certainly shines a different light on the whole questioning process. During our lunch break, that line of questioning and the extent to which it was detailed made most of us believe that he had priors, although we did not yet have access to that information.

By about 12:45 we finished up that part and we were released for a lunch break. One cafeteria stop later and I was back to waiting in the hallway outside the courtroom. A little after 2:00 we were ushered back in and seated. Now the attorneys had their chance to address and question all of us (we were not separated and questioned individually or in smaller groups).

The prosecution went first and seemed to focus on witness credibility. He asked us to explain what tools we would use to assess the credibility of a witness. I think he was more than a little flustered by some of the responses, but he did his best to remain looking upbeat and positive. The first real warning bell that went off for me was when he asked if we would automatically assign higher credibility to a police officer. After harping on that for a while he asked if we could simply start every witness off on an even level and go from there after hearing the full story. There were a few mixed responses that led to a rephrasing of the question. Really it was a completely new question, but I could see the link he was trying to make. We were asked what we would do if the prosecution had just barely failed to prove beyond reasonable doubt their case, a police officer was a witness, and if after lending the officer’s testimony just a little extra credibility due to their position would we find the defendant guilty. (Hope that made sense.) About half of the group ended up raising their little juror numbers indicating they would (which is not what the prosecutor wanted to see). There was a little frantic scribbling of numbers on the notepad and his time was up.

The defense reiterated a few of the same points, but largely left witness credibility alone. She, instead, focused on the indictment itself. What if, she posited, it was proven that a firearm was not involved at all? What if it was shown to have been a knife? Would we convict? You might call it a technicality, I sure would, but according to the letter of the law, we as a jury would have to find the defendant not guilty of the charges. The ensuing argument, clarification, argument, pointed questioning, “three strikes and you’re out”, and so on took most of the remaining time. She was left with enough to kick up another firestorm when we were asked about personal involvement in an aggravated assault. Some rather amusing stories were told about bar fights and one rather gruff Vietnam reference: “Yes I had a gun pointed to my head and I had one to his. How did that turn out? Well, I’m sitting here right now and he’s not.”

Thankfully the end was in sight. The attorneys gathered with the judge at her bench and began their whispered striking of names from the list. I’m not sure how many were eliminated in that round, but I’d have to estimate twenty to twenty-five based on what we could overhear and how the rest played out. A couple of people were called up to the bench for “clarification” on something they had said earlier, but the questioning never took long. Overall it took about 15 minutes for them to sit back down. The judge then explained that the prosecution and defense each would now be able to strike ten more names from the list without reason (although the standard non-discrimination laws limited them a little). We we told that when they had finished, the first twelve people remaining (by juror number) would become the jury. Remember, there were sixty-five of us in there and I was number thirty-eight. I didn’t figure they would get down the list far enough to be in striking distance of me. Oh how I was wrong.

The list was compiled, names struck, and a final list drawn up. The first person selected was number … thirteen. Holy cow! Suddenly the possibility that I might actually get selected was increasing dramatically. Remember that I didn’t consider that a bad thing either. A few more numbers were called out in the twenties and then they skipped to thirty-five. Maybe five people had been picked at this point. It was all but guaranteed that I’d be on the list now. The next number to be called was something like forty-seven. They’d skipped most of my entire row, including me. To show just how many people had been cut in one or the other rounds, the final juror selected was sixty-three or sixty-four out of the total sixty-five available. They had dug deep.

We were dismissed pretty quickly after that. Most everyone was pretty pumped up over not being picked. For me it was a mixture of relief and disappointment. Relief that I wouldn’t have to deal with downtown traffic and parking for the next few days, but a little disappointment over not getting to see and participate in the next stages from inside. I suppose I’ll have my chance eventually. All said and done, I’d been away from the house for about ten hours. A roughly normal length business day for me, but I was certainly more drained than normal.

“President Obama has proposed a 1.4% pay increase for active duty military in 2011. This is THE LOWEST SINCE 1973! Nice to know that during a time of rampant inflation, while war is fought in 2 theatres, our men and women in uniform get A LOWER PAY INCREASE THAN WELFARE RECIPIENTS. [Please repost if you support our troops.]”

Zimbabwe $100 trillion bill

While that number seems to be valid from what I can find at this point, a claim is made that we’re currently experiencing “rampant inflation”. I’d appreciate it if someone backed that up with some numbers. The Consumer Price Index for the United States is the usual reference point. To see how inflation is calculated, as well as a ton more information on the subject, start with the Wikipedia article on inflation. If you really want to see rampant inflation, take a look at the article on Hyperinflation.

Whether a 1.4% pay increase is appropriate or not, I’ll leave up to each of you to decide. Just keep in mind those of us who have not seen a pay raise for 2010, much less the 3.4% the military saw. A raise, no matter how small, is always preferred over no raise.

Oh yeah, the subtle “please repost if you support our troops” is pretty disingenuous too.

Idealism is what precedes experience; cynicism is what follows.

Especially funny since I have a co-worker that thinks very much along those lines. To top it all off, his name is eerily similar.

November saw another birthday. Nothing special, or as my grandmother would say “It’s just another day”. Sometime around that point I bought an Xbox 360. I never thought I would give Microsoft money like that, but there were a couple of games that I wanted to be able to play that were only going to be released on the 360 or the PS3. Sony wanted too much for the PS3, so hello Microsoft.

I picked up a few games initially (Orange Box, Halo 3, Gears of War, and Oblivion) and eventually got a few others (Army of Two, Mass Effect, Assassin’s Creed, and C&C 3). Many enjoyable hours playing those game were had by all. Portal (part of The Orange Box) in particular was waaaay too much fun.

It wasn’t all peachy at first with the 360. The first one, yes I said first, died within a couple of days. It quit reading DVDs, both games and movies, which basically makes it useless. I opened a support case with Microsoft until I realized the amount of downtime I was going to have to deal with (more than a month). That’s when I decided to just exchange/return the stupid thing.

Walmart, where I bought the first one, did not have any others when I tried to exchange it, so I just returned it. I took the cash and went down the road to Best Buy and paid 2 cents more. I have not had any trouble with the new one since that point.

More to follow before too long.

Here’s where the story gets ugly … I didn’t have any sound when the machine came back up. No sound! How am I supposed to watch a DVD without sound? It seems that the few applications I have that still have OSS support will function if I manually set them to OSS and not ALSA, but those apps are in the minority by far these days.

So, it’s been a couple of days and there haven’t been any ‘whoops’ updates to ALSA, nor does there appear to be a flurry of activity on the Web. That leaves me in a bit of a quandry. I don’t know enough about yum, even after digesting the man pages, to try and roll back to an old version to see if that fixes it, nor do I really know enough about ALSA (once upon a time I did, but a lot has changed since then).

What really confuses me is that Fedora has a few utilities for managing sound and sound cards. Some of the ‘can you hear this sound’ checks pass just fine (when selecting a card for instance), but the user level properties that let me select ‘Auto Detect’, or a specific device all fail (unless I select OSS, but even then my apps can’t play sound).

Anyone out there know enough to help? I’m on an IBM Thinkpad R50e that uses the snd_intel8x0 module normally (and it’s currently loaded). Help?!?