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A robot will not steal attention from a human.

Yes, that applies to you also, predictive dialers.

I am experimenting with IPv6 at home using Hurricane Electric’s free tunnel broker. I had to upgrade my Cisco 877 router’s RAM, flash and software to get IPv6 support, and also my local caching DNS resolver, dnscache. There are IPv6 patches for djbdns, but since I installed them my DNS lookups seem slow. Using snoop and ethereal, it looks like the behavior of the server with or without the patches is quite different.

Considering the fact that djbdns has not had an official update since 2001, only collections of patches from third-parties, it was time to change, even though it was immune by construction to the Kaminsky bug. I opted for unbound from the same people who wrote the high-performance NSD server used on the RIPE root nameserver. It has a relatively simple architecture design for performance and security, and it supports DNSSEC, something that will become increasingly important.

While the configuration file format for unbound is simple, unlike the nightmare that is BIND, the devil in the details made the migration more painful than it ought have been, thanks in part to my split-horizon DNS configuration for machines on my local subnet. I don’t know if it is placebo effect, but my queries now feel faster.

An aphorism often attributed to eugenist and racist Alfred E. Wiggam goes “A conservative is a man who believes that nothing should be done for the first time“. Corporate lawyers (the kind who never see the inside of a courtoom) seem to believe the only way to escape liability is to do nothing. Sometimes, despite their protestations, a company actually does come up with products or services, so they take their revenge in making them as unusable as possible to ensure no one buys them.

I bought a car last December. It is festooned with huge ugly warning signs on the visors. They are painted directly onto the leather and not removable. The car computer shows an annoying disclaimer when started. Every time. And it has to be dismissed manually. My GPS does the same. These are completely mindless ergonomic hurdles that probably do nothing for either safety or even shielding the manufacturer from liability, and make everyone’s life ever slightly more miserable.

During the Macintosh’s development, Steve Jobs famously equated slashing boot times with saving lives. The lawyers with their aggravating disclaimers are doing the exact opposite.

Nearly every computer or software company is guilty:

• Apple has .Mac pushed down our throats everywhere in OS X, starting with the signup process, in iSync, and so on.
• Microsoft pushes MSN services
• Adobe tried to hook up photographers to its stock photo service, and at one point even shilled for Kinki’s
• All PC manufacturers sell out their users to crapware publishers and turn the average PC’s home page into a garish collage reminiscent of the stickers on a racing car.

In the most recent installment, Apple’s iTunes 8 insists on putting links to the iTunes music store and its nasty lossy, DRM-infected music when you browse your own library. The only way to disable them is to disable the iTunes store in parental preferences (one rare instance where lawyers and corporate risk-averseness actually help consumers).

Linux is immune to this phenomenon. Perhaps at some point people will switch just for a respite from the constant marketing pressure.

I started using it to organize my wedding list, and have come to the conclusion that while it looks pretty, it is a toy app unsuitable for any remotely sophisticated spreadsheet user:

• The header row cannot be locked in place, so when you are navigating a long spreadsheet, you lose track of what column is what.
• Its function library is incapable of even basic functionality like counting the number of checked checkboxes in a range
• You cannot rename columns/rows from their default letter/number labels to more meaningful ones
• When making a bar chart for a data series that holds percentages, the axis is mislabeled – instead of showing “75%”, it will show “0.75”
• It is horrendously slow. On my dual-2GHz G5 with 5.5GB of RAM, there is a noticeable delay in producing a chart for a mere 4×2 table.
• The bundle directory document scheme (where a document is actually a directory) is neat on paper but makes transferring Numbers files more unpleasant than it need be, because you now have to zip the file prior to transfer.

The 1980s called, and they want their spreadsheet back…