CmdrFenix.org

Here in NH, some of the free staters have started recording their police encounters. I am not a supporter of the free staters, but I am a supporter of this practice as IMHO (in my humble opinion), there is no reason why a public encounter with police should only be recorded by the officer. It also puts them on notice that you do care so they’ll perhaps exercise more thought before they act.

Down in the progressive state of MA, even Martha Coakly is telling local LEOs to NOT use the state’s wiretapping law as a justification for arresting people. Here we have the case of Simon Glik who after walking down the street, observes some LEOs pulling a plastic bag out of the mouth of a suspect being a bit on the rough side. I am not saying they were, but he thought so, so he decided to record this event with his cell camera. This promptly landed him in handcuffs and under arrest for illegal electronic surveillance.

“One of the officers asked me whether my phone had audio recording capabilities,’’ Glik, 33, said recently of the incident, which took place in October 2007. Glik acknowledged that it did, and then, he said, “my phone was seized, and I was arrested.’’
The charge? Illegal electronic surveillance.
Jon Surmacz, 34, experienced a similar situation. Thinking that Boston police officers were unnecessarily rough while breaking up a holiday party in Brighton he was attending in December 2008, he took out his cellphone and began recording.
Police confronted Surmacz, a webmaster at Boston University. He was arrested and, like Glik, charged with illegal surveillance.

What do you think about this? Should the “only ones” accumulating evidence be the police? I am not saying we should all be detectives, or put comprehensive camera systems in our cars, but how many of the legal slip ups by people could be avoided if they had another eye on it?

OK I just got my Open Beta key for STO. I’m going to be around but *cough* occupied. If you have been living in a hole someplace and never spoken to me, check out STO here! I’ll post a quick review after I have had a chance to absorb it.

Well, I just want to wish everyone a safe and Merry Christmas!

Well, I have run Haiku on my laptop for about 2 days now and I’m ready to type up my thoughts and observations on it. Is it ready for use? No way. Does it show promise? Hell yeah!

Pros

• Boots my Dell Inspiron in 9 seconds. After 9 seconds it’s fully functional on the desktop.
• UI is a perfect clone of BeOS and very smooth and easy to use.
• Multitasking performance is insane! I ran multiple GL Teapot demos, the pulse demo, 3D Haiku demo, browser, and a few other file system windows and at no point did I feel even a slight drop in UI performance. (note: When I added multiple 3D apps I did see some after effects if the windows touched.
• Updated compilers and libraries meant I could get some of the newer apps compiled and working… well somewhat. (note: perl CPAN didn’t work at all and I couldn’t get it working in order to DL XML::Parser, which is needed for one of the dependencies of Pidgin)
• Networking setup was a breeze. It auto detected the NIC in my laptop and everything just worked.
• Downloaded a few apps from BeBits and they worked so BeOS compatibility is “good”. (note: many apps had MAJOR problems loading.)
• Installer was something I have been waiting for and I wasn’t disappointed. (note: There are obvious points where it could be improved / optimized, but for the most part it was simple and worked.
• VERY simple BeOS layout on the file system was a great touch.

Cons

• No package manager. This is a biggie as I had no easy way to uninstall apps I was trying to get working without going through the file system and deleting files.
• I mean I know it lacks a package manager, but being spoiled as I am a lack of an organized package delivery system like yum or apt is big now a days. This would *greatly* improve the functionality of the OS.
• Not a multi-user OS. That’s right, still unfortunately not a multi-user OS, but something that is “on the road map”.
• No way to password protect the single user account. Probably the biggest killer of this right now, but being in Alpha, I wasn’t probably going to leave this on my laptop.
• App support is limited. I was able to get “vision” working as an IRC client, but I couldn’t find a working IM client for this. Big Achilles heel here if you want to penetrate the desktop market.
• Buggy boot loader. After install, it wouldn’t actually boot on the HD. Had to boot the Live CD again and then run “bootman” in order to fix it.
• Needs a clearer roadmap for development. The roadmap they have looks more like a bug tracking system than a roadmap.

Considering the project started in 2001 and now in 2009 they are where they are shows the project definitely has great momentum and some talented developers. They started from the ground up and didn’t take the quick path of using the Linux kernel and just smashing in some GNU toolkits. As of 2008 it is now self hosting, which means it can check out and compile new versions of itself. They did update it to use the newest GCC compilers, which means the newer apps should all compile eventually, but it still has a long way to go.

I have always been a huge fan of BeOS since around 1999-2000. Simple, fast, and for its day very impressive. When the company went under, they took most of the code with them. A group started redeveloping the OS from the ground up in 2001. Last year, the OS because self hosting, which means it can compile new versions of itself. That in an of itself was a huge milestone. Well, this Sept the OS hit Alpha 1. This month, they released the “installer”, something that up until now meant you could only try Haiku within a premade VM. Well, I just burned my disc and started an install on my old Dell laptop. I have a huge grin on my face and cannot wait for it to finish.

Check it out here!

I’ll be sure to post some new info soon!

Using an obscure law that allowed police to seize the assets of criminals, the UK police have raided over 6,700 safety deposit boxes. What is very scary about this? Besides of course that they didn’t just raid the boxes of criminals. They cut them all open with angle grinders, cataloged the contents, and then basically said you had to prove you obtained the items (money, jewels, etc…) legally.

One survivor of Nazi Germany in his seventies told us how he had placed a bag of diamonds there – security if ever he or his descendents needed to run again.
‘
My wife and I had escaped from Germany with nothing but these gems,’ he said. ‘She sewed them into our clothing before we crossed occupied Europe, reaching Britain by ship when the jewels were snipped out and locked up.’

There was a rabbi too, Yitzchak Schochet, of Mill Hill Synagogue, who said: ‘Safety deposit boxes are supposed to be confidential. The whole situation was very unsettling and an intrusion of privacy.’

I’m sorry, but unless I have no other option, I will NEVER travel to the UK.

I know this is a quick small article. I’ll have some more soon! Stay tuned!

I have mentioned and talked about Marie Morrow in Aurora, CO before. See is the commander of the school drill team, a model student, and is also facing expulsion for a school’s zero tolerance policy.

Marie Morrow is likely to find out today whether she will be expelled from school for having fake rifles used as props in a youth marine group on school grounds.
The 17-year-old Cherokee Trail High School senior was suspended Feb. 5 after other students saw the props in her vehicle and notified school officials.

They weren’t even real and they were used in a school function!

Colorado has a “zero-tolerance” law when it comes to guns on school campuses, and even a facsimile of a gun or rifle that looks real is considered a dangerous weapon.

They also have a zero brain policy. Laws are there to protect people and punish those will mal-intent, but it seems they are also being exercised to ensnare and punish people who make innocent mistakes.

Zachary Christie is a all around good 6 year old boy. He just joined the cub scouts and got a camping spoon, fork, and knife combo unit and was so excited he brought it to school to eat at lunch with. OK, so the kid made a mistake. Take it away, give it to parents, and maybe have a meeting with them. Something reasonable right?

Zachary’s offense? Taking a camping utensil that can serve as a knife, fork and spoon to school. He was so excited about recently joining the Cub Scouts that he wanted to use it at lunch. School officials concluded that he had violated their zero-tolerance policy on weapons, and Zachary was suspended and now faces 45 days in the district’s reform school.

In many way, this term “zero tolerance” seems to be a blanket excuse to prevent school administrators and anyone else from using their brain. I don’t want to have to make a mistake and try and determine intent here so I’m going wear my “zero tolerance” hat. Well, I’m sorry, but school administrators here need to start smartening (ironic for where they work) and try and bring some wisdom into their descisions.

I have written in the past about some of the injustices in Britain when it comes to self defense in one’s own home. In this most recent incident, a heavily pregnant woman (about 7 mos) was raped at shotgun point with a boyfriend there. But wait… shotguns and handguns are illegal and only should be in possession of the law enforcement in Britain? If only they had been allowed to protect themeselves. Well putting this aside, they have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in CCTV cameras so they can watch every citizen and catch the bad guys, right? They have one picture of some “people of interest”, but no solid suspects. I am sorry, but this is a big bag of FAIL.

Despite the desperate pleas of her boyfriend who begged them not to harm the mother-to-be, she was forced to perform a sex act by the masked man, who threatened to shoot the couple if she did not follow his orders.
…
Police decided to offer the reward after failing to trace the gang. They have released images of three men caught on CCTV at a nearby shop a few minutes before the attack, whom they wish to question.

But wait… the insanity gets much worse. With all the crime they DO have right now, what are the Police doing to stop all of it? How about arrest a father of four because his trash lid was ajar more than 4in because they only pick it up once every fourth night? Sure, why not! Jesus, they even wore “stab proof vests”, took a week’s wages from him as a fine, and he was even forced to pay a victim surcharge fine… which is amazing since the only victim was him and his family.

Magistrates convicted the 26-year-old bus driver after hearing evidence that the lid was four inches ajar, which is against rules to stop bins overflowing.
…
He was ordered to pay £210 – a week’s wages – after he declined to pay an on-the-spot fine imposed by the local council’s bin police, who visited him wearing stab-proof vests and carrying photographic evidence of his crime.

I’m sorry, but the number of incidents like this and others is piling up and there are too many, on such a small island, to say these are just isolated incidents. For all our problems, all our differences, it is when I read about stuff like this that I pat my 1911 and thank God I’m in America.

So there is a lot of talk about cloud computing being the next big thing since sliced bread. For non-IT people, this is where you host your server as a virtual machine on some hosting providers network. Your server is effectively out there on the Internet hosted on some server, somewhere you’ve never been, by someone you’ve never met. If you think that scares you, it scares a lot of people. Amazon EC2 is one of the more popular, but even Microsoft is getting in on the action. The benefits are huge in the sense of scalable hardware and redundant infrastructure, but with everything out there, nothing is fool proof.

All of the current systems by Google, Microsoft, and Amazon have been plagued with many unexplained outages and some that shouldn’t have happened. Imagine your server being down for 6 hours and you have absolutely nothing you can do about it. If it was at a collocation center or under your control at least you might have some options, but with this model, you are at the hosting providers complete mercy. Honestly for many, this is a scary prospect.
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Well this weekend has been busy. I went out and watched Star Trek again. Absolutely amazing movie. It had some incredible writing, and the acting was superb. Carl Urban as Dr McCoy was my favorite. If you haven’t gone to watch it, do it. Even if you aren’t a Trekkie.

In terms of geek stuff I’ve been doing this weekend. Let’s see:

• Rebuilding my file server here at home finally after 6 yrs. Got some parts and will upgrade her to 750GB of total storage on a RAID5 array under Ubuntu 9.04.
• Going to an open carry litter pick up tomorrow at the Concord State House.
• Dealt with some problems at work already this weekend!

Fun times… but anyhow, check out this trailer:
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