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What a mess.

Yesterday when I turned my computer on, an old Acer Aspire One, the "Upgrade to Windows 10!" nag screen popped up. Okay, what the hell, I'll try it, since Microsoft says going back is easy.

It took four hours to download and another hour for "preparing to upgrade Windows" to finish, and I was given a choice - upgrade now, or schedule for later? I scheduled it for nine last night, since I wanted to use the computer for, you know, computing.

At nine I told it to go ahead. I probably went to bed around ten, and the computer screen was still black with a "working..." graphic.

This morning it said it was ready. It rebooted, and took a full half hour to reach the desktop, which was simply butt-ugly and primitive looking. The kids doing the designing at Microsoft really suck at what they do.

Before it got to the password box there were some user-hostile Microsoft spyware to opt out of. That, and the extreme slowness and butt-ugliness is all I could see that was changed. All of the changes seemed completely cosmetic. I found no additional features or usefulness at all.

My shortcut to Firefox on the task bar was gone. Microsoft Word and Excel were gone as well, although Open Office was still there. I went through the start menu's "other programs" or whatever it's called, and those applications were just gone.

Microsoft is just evil.

I have the flashblock extension installed, with a few sites whitelisted. Since KSHE changed their stream provider, I can't hear it on Firefox, so I set it to run IE on startup with the KSHE player as its home page. It took a full fifteen minutes before any music came out.

The new IE is called something else, I forgot what, but fortunately they didn't change the icon much or I'd never have found it. What is wrong with those people?

And I have never seen a slower computer, and my first one back in 1982 had a CPU that was over a thousand times slower than my notebook. The computer was simply unusable and extremely hard to navigate.

I was really glad I have my passwords written down, and it looked like I was going to lose all my bookmarks. I downloaded Firefox, and decided to go back to W7 before installing. I worried I'd have to buy Word, since the magazines all insist on it and Microsoft had apparently uninstalled it. Oh, magazines. I got my first rejection letter yesterday. I'll post it tomorrow.

Windows Ten is the worst operating system I've ever used. Of course, I understand that W8 was worse.

I went to uninstall it and it said I'd have to plug it in to - and it was fully charged. I figured it would take all day, so I plugged it in and set it going. Then doing something I never do, I went to facebook on my phone, and I hate typing on a phone.

Surprisingly, it only took an hour, and after it booted it seems to be like it was before the "upgrade". Firefox, Word, and Excel were back.

Tomorrow: Stealth

The day I met Rio’s favela master: the drug lord who championed the poor: Misha Glenny tells of his prison meetings with Nem of Rocinha, the slum crime boss who channelled some of his cocaine profits into running a welfare state for 100,000 people

After his arrest, I wrote to Nem in prison and asked if he would speak to me. He agreed. The story that emerged was fascinating: once he reached the top, Nem was, in effect, mayor, police chief and director of the chamber of commerce for a community estimated at 100,000 residents. With the receipts from the cocaine trade, he ran a business that supported nearly 1,000 people. He also channelled some of his profits into a basic welfare state. He could do this because he paid close attention to accounting and budgetary matters.

“The food baskets and the support we gave to extracurricular school activities, such as the Thai boxing or capoeira classes, were all accounted for as part of our business expenses,” he explained. “But the burials, prescription costs or if anyone who couldn’t afford it needed gas, these were all extra payments.”

In the absence of any regular police, law was maintained by 150 armed men, most in their teens and early 20s. But while the man known locally as Mestre, or master, decided over life or death, he usually opted for the former. Under his rule, homicide rates dropped by more than two-thirds.

This was part-calculation, part-intuition. Rocinha was so profitable for the cocaine trade because it is surrounded by the three richest areas of Rio – Leblon, São Conrado and Gávea. By turning Rocinha into the safest and most attractive favela in Rio, business boomed. “He was not a man of violence,” said Detective Bárbara Lomba, who led the three-strong team that patiently investigated the Rocinha drugs operation for four years. “He had a policy of avoiding confrontation wherever possible and of not facing down the police. Rather the opposite, he was in contact with them in a corrupt relationship.”

Nem’s policy paid off. Rocinha became a fixture on the tourist route; Brazil’s biggest pop stars such as Ivete Sangalo and Claudia Leitte were happy to include the favela on their tours, boosting their popularity with Brazil’s poor. Politicians including former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and the current incumbent, Dilma Rousseff, were keen to tour, as were members of Brazil’s national football side. Above all, the youngsters from the surrounding middle class areas went to buy coke.

Beltrame knew that he would have to “pacify” Rocinha because of its symbolic power and its location. As the World Cup and the Olympics approached the pressure grew. But by taking Nem out of the equation, Rocinha’s character has changed. The relationship between the police and residents is uneasy at best. In July 2013, a group which included the chief of Rocinha police murdered an innocent bricklayer, and the favela came close to open insurrection.

Since then the drug cartel has been edging its way back and there are sporadic shootouts with the police. Homicides remain at historic low levels but domestic violence, rape, assault and burglary have increased fourfold.

Started my oldest son reading the Little House series. He tore through the first book in a day. We did some online reading about the parents and siblings of Laura Ingalls Wilder.

I didn't get into Rose Wilder Lane with him (yet), but she is a very interesting character to read about! The FBI kept a file on her because she was "subversive," meaning she didn't approve of everything the government did. (Just like me, and one day my children, too, I hope.) I love this account of her tearing into a state trooper who was sent to check her out. The FBI insisted that they had no choice but to investigate, because she responded to a radio survey about Social Security by expressing her disapproval of it.

So, I was drinking coffee this morning and watching my twitter stream and somehow the thread count of sheets came up. Being as I didn't feel like fitting my feelings on the matter into 140 characters, it goes here.

High thread count sheets can suck it. I'd happily pay inverted prices to have to never sleep on them again. It is my firm belief that sheets should not feel like you're lying between two ultra-thin layers of cloud. They damned sure shouldn't end up wadding themselves into a ball just from one night's worth of sleeping between them.

Sheets should feel like you're sandwiched between two new dollar bills. Slightly rough and starched as stiff as you can manage. You should damned near be able to make a drum head out of them. As soon as they start feeling soft and showing signs of wadding up, they should be laundered and starched to within an inch of their lives again.

It took a while to get there, life gets in the way, but today I finally made it to 1000 stories edited/posted. This excludes all the stories as second editor, and the dozens of submissions i've made over the last year or so.

So please feel free to shower me with adulation for all the hard work!

Worst provider in terms of spam:

- Yahoo

- Hotmail/Outlook

- Gmail

- OVH

- AWS

- Yandex

- Bezeqint

- AOL

I've listed them in order of what I think is most to least worse. Outlook spam sucks extra hard because Microsoft tacks about 5k of headers on every email which makes it that much more expensive to report to Spamcop. But Yahoo, especially from yahoo.co.jp, amounts to almost 50% of the spam that gets through to me.

My 10yo son just came to me and asked "Is the moon pulling on the earth?" I confirmed it was and reviewed gravity with him. Then he asked "So is there a place in the middle where if you put something there it would just stay there?"

Wow, son! You've figured out Lagrange points! I'm proud. :)

So I just got this message from Aaron Hoag at the DOJ.

It looks like we're fucked.

My original letter to the FTC, which was then forwarded to the DOJ, is here.

Mr. Hopson,

Thank you for your e-mail regarding changes to Microsoft's Secure Boot policies in Windows 10, which was forwarded to the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice by the FTC given our history with our cases against Microsoft.

I spent many years working on enforcement of the Division's judgment against Microsoft. As a result, this is an issue that I personally have followed since it initially arose, as you note, in Windows 8. While I appreciate your concerns and those raised by the open source community at large, from an antitrust point of view it is difficult to build a viable case in light of, amongst other factors, Microsoft's willingness to work with the largest Linux vendors to ensure their operating systems will be able to load when Secure Boot is enabled. Without disputing or diminishing the fact that in your own case this solution has not been sufficient to allow you to install your preferred variety of Linux, I can only note that to build an antitrust case, we would be required to show a market-wide effect, which would be exceptionally difficult given the ease with which a user can install Fedora or Ubuntu, to take two of the largest Linux flavors, on a machine even where the OEM has chosen to prevent users from disabling Secure Boot.

We will of course continue to watch this market and will take appropriate action if Microsoft engages in anticompetitive behavior in violation of the antitrust laws.

Thank you again for taking the time to ensure that we were aware of this issue, and do not hesitate to contact us again should future events warrant it.

Yours truly,
Aaron Hoag

-------
Aaron Hoag
Assistant Chief
Networks & Technology Enforcement Section
U.S. Dept. of Justice, Antitrust Division
450 5th St, NW, 7th Floor
Washington, DC 20530
Phone: (202) 307-6153
E-mail: aaron.hoag@usdoj.gov

If you have something to say to him, be civil, rational, and kind. No good will come to our cause by being a dick.

So I converted my /home to btrfs, because I'm quite tight on space and thought the compression would be a benefit.

I had to compile btrfs-progs myself, which also included compiling libext2fs from e2fsprogs. Once I started the conversion, it took 3 hours to convert.

It was successful. I rebooted, logged in, and all my data was intact. The transparent compression I had asked for in my fstab was working.
There was a noticable performance penalty, but that's to be expected with compression.

I use compressed btrfs on my portable SubLinux thumbdrive I keep on my keychain. I've had no problems there,
However, once I started copying data to and from the newly converted filesystem in any size, I noticed a padlock had appeared on everything in Thunar file manager. I suspected a problem, so I went to dmesg. There was a backtrace from btrfs. The kernel's driver had crashed, and it had remounted my new filesystem read-only.

I panicked, fearing the worst. I quickly went to a tty, killed Xorg, unmounted /home, and ran btrfs-convert -r on the partition to undo the conversion.

Thankfully, the un-conversion was successful. I remounted /home and restarted my login manager, logged in, and everything was normal again, running from ext4. No data loss I can see. I ran md5sum on files I suspected might be damaged, they match. No harm done it appears.

Lesson for today: While the filesystem's disk format is indeed stable, the drivers and utilities for managing the filesystem are NOT. Use btrfs at your own peril.

I still like ext4. It's so hard to kill an ext4 filesystem.

I use the Gnu Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) to design book covers. It's an excellent free open source program that has three weaknesses -- its menu structure is completely illogical (but can be gotten used to), I can't find a full spectrum palette, and its text handling is so poor as to be useless.

I have a workaround for the bad text. Open a word processor that will output a PDF file, choose your typeface and size, choose the text's color and write the text. Save it as a PDF and GIMP will open it as an image in as high a resolution you need. Just make the background transparent, situate it over your graphic, and merge the layers.

Speaking of books, I made a Mars, Ho! YouTube video. Yes, there is a pussy in it.