It’s all just 1’s and 0’s…

While reading Tao of Mac I came across his excellent guide HOWTO: Switch to the Mac. It does not say anything about why to switch, just gives a good explanation of how.

Anyway, while reading that article, I came across another gem of an application that only seem to appear on the Mac: Tofu. It’s a small aplication, in which you can paste text, which is then reformatted to newspaper style, i.e. in columns. This makes it much more comfortable to read off the screen without having to act like you’re watching a tennis game.

This got me thinking, the reason I love my Mac so much is not so much because it’s a great platform or operating system, but because there’s such a nice community around it of developers like this one, who share simple applications for free. If this was written by a developper for Windows, it would have looked ugly, feature nag windows and would cost you at least $10 after 10 days or something.

Looking back at the past few years, I can only conclude that the United States has lost the war on terror. And is losing it more and more. I went to a show of Dolf Jansen in which he said “America is the most terrified country in the world”. I couldn’t agree more. According to him, the breakfast news shows feature a terror-level, showing the odds that there will be a terrorist attack that day.

Another sign that they are completely terrified is the fact that today they tightened security on potential targets. Which is pretty stupid, because it’s not likely that they will have a coordinated attack across the globe and even if they did, you’re not going to stop them from making victims anyway. So the end result is only that the american citizens become more terrified.

Lastly, something that I will have to deal with when I’ll visit the United States in a few months: the tightened security for all foreigners on the border. They are keeping record of each and every visitor to the US:

In order to ensure appropriate safeguards for U.S. national security, the Department of Homeland Security enrolls travelers arriving at U.S. airports and seaports in the US-VISIT program. Enrollment includes collecting a digital photograph and electronic fingerscans of two index fingers. Enrollment takes only seconds and greatly enhances the security of U.S. citizens and visitors to the U.S., facilitates legitimate travel and includes safeguards for the privacy of foreign visitors. (Source, emphasis is mine.)

I don’t have a clue how writing down every single person who enters the country will enhance security. If you want to block known terrorists, you can do that without writing down the information of everybody else. The only thing this achieves is that if it turns out someone is a terrorist, they can dig through this huge database and try to figure out when and where he entered the country. As if that gets you anywhere.

Apparently there are also safeguards for the privacy of visitors; You’re forced to leave a picture, fingerprints, state what you’re coming to do in the US and write down the address you’re staying at. And if you look like a muslim, odds are that you’ll be strip-searched as well. What bit of privacy is there left to safeguard?

Last night I decided to reinstall my windows XP machine. I hadn’t done that in a couple of years and was having some minor problems with it. Before I did that I downloaded a personal firewall installer, because the mean time to infection is now 12 minutes and that’s longer than it takes me to patch it all.

Evertything went smoothly, until I tried to get the sound going. Couple of years ago I bought me a Soundblaster Live! 5.1 on the cheap, i.e. OEM and it worked fine before, but it didn’t make so much as a peep now. So I got online, went to the Creative website, searched for my model and couldn’t find it. Turns out Creative has taken OEM a little more literal now, you don’t get any extras when you buy it, and you don’t get any online support either!. I thought well, let’s try the driver pack, that must work? Well no, they built in a check to see if you have a real Soundblaster Live! in your system and apperantly SB0220 and SB0222 are not real.

But there is a way around this! I got it running by running the live driver pack, and when it displays the error, don’t click “Ok”. And then install the driver via the Windows new hardware way. Once it asks for driver files, look at your ‘homedir’: "C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Local Settings\Temp\". There should be a directory beginning with a ‘C’ there, with a subdirectory called Drivers, point Windows at that location and you’ll be able to install a driver and you have sound coming out through your Soundblaster.

Only thing that I haven’t checked yet is whether I can use the speakersetup utilities and other sound effects stuff. Any comments on that is welcome.