Last night I caught part of the Ed Schultz Show on MSNBC and some conservative hack was claiming (using an out-of-context quote) that Sonia Sotomayor is a racist against the poor downtrodden rich white male.  How come these days it seems conservative pundits (usually old white men, natch) claim only non-whites are racist? 

Thankfully, I got a great link off Atrios' site that digs into this issue and sets the record straight.  Much better than I could ever do.

http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/tapped_archive?month=05&year=2009&base_name=the_racialism_of_stuart_taylor#115268

I wish I would have read this on Monday.  This post at ginandtacos.com absolutely nails what Memorial Day is about and how we all should reflect on that day.

That said, I did enjoy my day off, but was a bit perplexed why MSNBC decided to run an all-day marathon of Lockup.

Today our house received a citation because we haven't mowed our lawn often enough.  Yes, seriously.  For some perspective, it's been a little less than two weeks since we mowed our front yard.  We've been getting  a ton of rain, so the grass is growing like crazy right now.

The inspector was super polite, so I have no hard feelings toward the city.  He said it was so borderline, that he had to measure it with a ruler and then found that we did, indeed, have a few blades of grass over eight inches of length.  I wonder if a subcommittee on grass blade length had to be formed by the city to determine this magic number.  lol

Anyway, it turns out the city itself doesn't really care, but we had a busybody neighbor report us, so they are obligated to investigate.  No doubt it was the same neighbor that complained to our HOA about our security camera near the front door when we installed it (which, btw, there is no city or HOA rule against having).

The inspector told us that he had been receiving tons of lawn complaints like this.  He thinks its due to newly unemployed people staying at home and having nothing better to do.  Personally, I think it's more probably due to people trying to assert some small form of mitigation of property value decline since they can't control the bubble burst.  Because, you know, an occasional few long blades of grass on your neighbor's yard makes a huge difference!

So how sad is that?  Seriously, people.  Get a life.

If you see a cess pool of a pond on someone's property, an insect or rodent breeding ground, or some other health hazard, yes, report that property!  But if somebody didn't have time to mow the lawn last weekend, STFU and get a freaking life.

I wonder what our busybody neighbors will think when we mow our lawn so low that all the grass dies.  See -- I don't really care what it looks like.  But they obviously do.  There's no ordinance against dead grass.  ;-)

Following in the wake of the massive blockbuster success of G4 and Spike TV, The SciFi Channel has decided change their name to "SyFy."  Their new tagline is "Imagine Greater."  No, it's not April 1st.  This is real.  I saw an ad that actually said, I'm not making this up, "Bright Lights, Big Imagination, Top 5 Channel."  Wha--?

Okay, I'm admit I'm not marketing professional like Dave Howe, but I think I have pretty good common sense.  I'm trying to figure out why companies think that changing their name will suddenly cause people to flock to their product (in this case, a cable channel).  Remember when Borland was going to take over the world as the newly christened Inprise: Integrating the Enterprise?  You know they thought they were oh-so-clever when they thought that one up.  Just as I'm sure SciFi is thinking now.  Well, you saw how well that turned out for Borland.  They became a minor player (and lost a lot of money) until they went back to the name that people actually knew: Borland.

Or how about the above examples?  Tech TV and the old G4 merged to become a mighty superpower of… COPs reruns and Japanese obstacle course shows.  Awesome!  At least Spike has some original programming.  The UFC stuff has a niche market.  Rassling, well, it's rassling.  I'm sure it makes some money.  Oh yes, SciFi has rassling too, I haven't forgotten.

Lipstick on a pig.  It's still a pig.

But really, I mean how do these people get these jobs and make these ridiculous decisions?  If you want a science fiction channel to be successful, you don't hide the science fiction stuff!  SciFi has been doing this for years.  From, essentially, forbidding classic ship-and-crew Star Trek like new shows in the late 90s, to showing every single lousy B movie in existence without little robots at the bottom of the screen poking fun at it (although, in their defense, they did do that too for a few years), SciFi has been in a holding pattern of reinventing itself for fifteen years!  Stop it!  You show science fiction, horror, and fantasy.  Stop wasting money rebranding yourself, changing your name, and failing at entering new markets that have absolutely no interest in you!

Look, some channels just have niche markets.  They aren't going to ever become massively dominant top-10 ratings machines.  That's okay!  Really!  Those of us that love niche programming, like science fiction, appreciate having a single place dedicated to it.  Stop trying to grow your channel to unrealistic heights.  Let it just be the size it is.  You don't need the money for dozens of massively expensive original shows and CEO bonuses. 

Ride your successes, like Battlestar Galactica, Stargate, Eureka, etc., and embrace your destiny as a niche market with geeky fans.  Stop ruining what is good about your channel under the guise of entering new markets.

Also, stop cancelling shows that are good and profitable, just because there might be a few more cents in a reality show or freaking rassling (I'm looking at you, ECW).  Really.  That pisses us true science fiction fans off big-time.  I'm still raw at Farscape getting canned without a complete fifth season which would have ended the story arcs at a natural pace and then quickly replacing it with the big steaming pile of fail, Tremors: The Series.  (Who in their right mind thought that show would succeed?)  The eventual Farscape miniseries was a nice olive branch, but it was far from the optimal outcome.

Whoever is making decisions for SciFi has officially now gotten on the Silly Wagon.  SyFy?!  This is the dumbest rebranding campaign I've ever seen money wasted on.  You have now officially surpassed Inprise.  You paid good money for this marketing campaign – i know you did.  That was a massive waste.  I'm telling you nothing is going to change.  I'm stating right now, today, that SyFy will be no more of a success than SciFi currently is.  You are wasting your money and depriving us of good science fiction that the money could have gone to.

Embrace your niche!  Stop screwing it up by trying to become more mainstream!

Also, more Anime pleez. :-D  (Anime historically makes little money for teevee stations, but I have to try!)

Apparently there was a bug in my website forums that was preventing new users from registering. OOPS! Sorry about that. All fixed now!

Would the "torturing keeps us safe from terrorists" meme please die already?  Please?  Even if it torture does work (it doesn't), it is still morally wrong!  Terrorism is not as much about killing as about making everybody afraid of being killed.  If we are so afraid that we throw morals out the window, then the terrorists have won.

I'm adding PowerShell support to RD Tabs to create a scripting environment where the application can be automated in many wonderful ways.  I followed the super easy instructions at the PolyMon project for adding PowerShell support.  The basic tests succeeded and I was happy.  Then I tried actively integrating RD Tabs with the PowerShell script by providing a pre-defined variable that contained various methods for controlling aspects of RD Tabs.  The simplest example was creating a new tab from within the script itself.  When I ran the script and got to the step that executed that function, I got the following exception.

Current thread must be set to single thread apartment (STA) mode before OLE calls can be made

That's quite strange, because VB.Net Windows Forms applications are STA by default.  If you don't know what STA is, don't worry about.  Just know that it's related to how COM handles multithreading.  Since RD Tabs itself extensively P/Invokes things, I do make heavy use of COM interop.  However, there are plenty of built-in framework classes that also wrap COM, so mismatched threading models may happen even without any P/Invokes. 

Why was I getting an error that implied I was not set to STA?  It turns out the problem is with PowerShell.  PowerShell runs in MTA mode by default (the other threading model).  When you create a new RunSpace and Pipeline, you are effectively creating a new thread for PowerShell to run on.  Since it's a brand new thread, it sets it to the default that PowerShell uses, MTA.

Thankfully, The Google did not fail me.  I found somebody else having a similar problem with PowerShell when creating a snap-in for MMC.  The solution is to cleverly dig into the RunSpace and essentially tell PowerShell to execute scripts on the hosting application's thread.  The original author used C#, so below is a translated VB.Net summary without any exception handling.

Dim rs As Runspace = Nothing 
rs = RunspaceFactory.CreateRunspace
rs.Open()

' Set the default runspace to the one we just created
Runspace.DefaultRunspace = rs

' Fetch the EngineIntrinsics from the runspace (this is needed so we run the engine on the current thread
' (which will be STA instead of MTA) which is required because VB.Net defaults to STA)
Dim ei As EngineIntrinsics = CType(rs.SessionStateProxy.GetVariable("ExecutionContext"), EngineIntrinsics)

' Create a scriptblock from the engine, supply the user code
Dim sb As ScriptBlock = ei.InvokeCommand.NewScriptBlock("Insert Your PowerShell Code Here")

' Invoke the script
sb.Invoke()

I'm glad there's a solution, but I'm also a bit perplexed that there isn't an easy property you can use to change PowerShell's default threading model.  Such as rs.SetThreadingModel() or something.  Oh well.  Such is life!

Why is it acceptable that employment is a top-down dictatorship when government is a bottom-up democracy?  I've been thinking about this and I can't figure out why those two completely opposite approaches seem so unquestioningly compatible to basically everybody (myself included) in day-to-day life.

Bizarrely, an error not seen since the early days of IE8 Beta testing has cropped up in, of all things, the IE8 RTM (or, er, RTW – whatever)!

If you work on applications for smart devices (one of my current favorite hobbies) and you try to create a new C++ project for smart devices, you will get the wonderfully explanatory error "project creation failed" in the status bar of Visual Studio.  Thanks for the excellent details, VS team.  Seriously.

It turns out a script error in the wizard (which is driven entirely by the IE platform for some reason) is the cause of all this.  In fact, Microsoft already has a workaround.  A hotfix will be released at some point in the near future.

I'm usually pretty forgiving about software bugs because I know how deadlines and simple mistakes can lead to bad unexpected outcomes.  However, this is just too strange for words.  The entire point of a release candidate is to fix the last outstanding bugs.  Nothing should be done to compromise another feature or which might require regression testing.  You would think that some change in the behavior of the security model (which is responsible for this bug) might have warranted an RC2 to iron out any unexpected kinks. 

But then again, deadlines and stuff.

Anyway, here's the workaround.  Enjoy!

I'm trying to figure out why the so-called "liberal" media keeps asking Senator McCain what he thinks about things.  I don't remember Senator Kerry getting this much post-election loser exposure in 2005.

I'm also trying to figure out why my "liberal" Senator, Kay Hagan, is joining a so-called "moderate" (code word for conservative) group of Dems that plan to oppose Obama on spending plans.  She apparently didn't notice that at the same time she beat Dole, Obama turned a historically red state blue.  Even Clinton didn't do that.  Does she really want to be on the opposing side of the most popular president in recent history?  It's not like Obama is asking to allocate a trillion dollars into the investigation of missing left socks.  He's trying to jump start a very neglected economy and provide health care for all citizens.  How on earth is 0pposing (or reducing) any of that a good thing for Americans, let alone your own constituents who are very deeply affected?  Balancing the budget right now will give us the exact same outcome as when Hoover did it in the early 1930's.  FAIL.

Right now, Hagan is not making her Democratic constituents happy in her state.  In addition, it's not as if any Republicans will ever vote for her anyway.  Why is she doing this?  If she keeps this up, I'm voting in the primary against her in 2014.  She is better than Dole (Dole was notorious for doing little for NC and when she did do something, it only helped her uber-wealthy friends), but she is very far from being a Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT).