VaporWarning

Anybody can be hit by a motor vehicle when riding a bike, but it takes real talent to be discriminated against by someone whose political philosophy is grounded in the 1940s.

According to recent (and obscure) Gallup polls, most Americans believe that discrimination against bike riders is a thing of the past. I have first-hand evidence that they are tragically mistaken.

As few as two days ago I was a victim of drive-by Neo-McCarythism. While biking across an intersection, dressed all in green, with no emblems of Che Guevara to be found, a man in a blue, 1990 POS yelled out a single word — “Communist!”

His car screeched down the off-ramp, insofar as a crappy little car can do so. Ever the optimist, I first thought that the man might be giving me a friendly warning. I checked behind me to see if there was a communist attempting to common-ownership-ify my wallet, but there was no-one to be found! At that moment, I was struck with the realization…

Maybe it was psychological. Maybe it was the reclaimed waste water. All I know is that, somehow, I felt unclean. I was being called a communist, because I was biking to work. At that moment I could only take solace in the fact that, due to the extreme crapitude of his car, the accuser must be a really bad capitalist.

Although I don’t personally associate the act of pedaling one’s legs with a desire to overthrow the bourgeoisie, I can take a guess at the twisted reasoning that leads some people to do so. Bikers don’t buy leg-gas. In the extreme case, where you bike everywhere, you don’t even need a car. You know who else didn’t have cars? Communists.

In any case, the modern-age bike-rider should be aware of the political sentiments surrounding biking, lest history repeat itself.

Dear property owners of Santa Clara,

As much as I appreciate your movement to nurture the sidewalks during their critical summer-growth phase, I do not appreciate being sprayed with reclaimed wastewater every day on the way home from work. Being a bicyclist, I will choose being hit with poo-water over being hit by cars, but I will not like it. I will also be forced to curse your name and everything you stand for. [For example, in the following story.]

Legend has it that Axmark was taking a walk around Sun’s beautiful campus one evening, contemplating acceptance of Sun’s fascist policies, as an impact sprinkler’s arm fatefully slammed against its nozzle. Axmark was quickly doused in processed toilet liquids, and came to realize that he didn’t have to take that kind of shit.

With terrible puns,

Chris’ Raging Bile Duct

What do world readable plaintext passwords and toddler murder have in common? They’re both easy.

Oh, right… not to mention they’re both bad! I, for one, have accepted our not-evil corporate overlords and have been using GMail since my full-time-student unbecoming. As a result, I was looking at the GMail notifiers available in the Ubuntu repository.

One, called cgmail, was written in Python and had a fairly beautiful codebase. cgmail tied nicely into gconf and had everything going for it. I totally would be using it if it didn’t crash ten times during five minutes of configuration. [0]

Another, called gmail-notify, worked perfectly. The source looked like it was written by a Java programmer (you know, making a “main” method for classes and such) who didn’t believe in refactoring or PEP8, which made me a little sad. What made me really sad was finding that it stored my password in plaintext in a word readable file, and I had never gotten any warning.

This is a bug on the part of two parties: the MOTU who maintains this package (I’ll be submitting a bug report) and the creator of the program. The Gentoo wiki has a page on the ability to install via portage, from which I quote:

elog “Warning: if you check the ’save username and password’ option”
elog “your password will be stored in plaintext in ~/.notifier.conf”
elog “with world-readable permissions. If this concerns you, do not”
elog “check the ’save username and password’ option.”

Ideally this would read: “There is no ’save username and password’ option.” Just to recap some things:

1. Do design your program to allow for plugins that tie into keyring managers,
2. Don’t knowingly put some of my most sensitive data where any user on the system can read it, and
3. Don’t, for God’s sake, let me install a program that does this without telling me!

I don’t mind that Pidgin stores my password in plaintext because it’s an Instant Messaging client and it’s as careful as possible to use file permissions as protection. gmail-notify used my default umask, which is clearly not good enough, to protect perhaps the most personal data that I have.

You know who you should really feel sorry for, though? Linux-using toddlers.

Footnotes

[0] I’ll probably end up contributing to this project.