An increasing percentage of the shit we buy today is encumbered by DRM. The acronym stands for 'digital rights management', but the 'digital restrictions management' moniker that freedom zealots came up with is probably more apt. That term never really caught on, though; most people don't have a real understanding of what DRM is, nor do they really give a fuck. And perhaps that's as it should be. Life is too short to waste much time on understanding bullshit, especially if you aren't going to use that understanding.

But one basic thing that people should understand is that virtually all DRM is broken. That is, if you buy a product restricted by DRM, at some point it will malfunction, and not only will you be prevented from doing all the things you aren't allowed to do, but you'll also be prevented from doing those things you are supposed to be able to do—-the things you paid to be able to do. This may happen through the incompetence or negligence of the party implementing the DRM. It may happen because they are sued, regulated, or go out of business. Or it may happen because they are just a bunch of fucking ass-clowns.

Today, for me, was a reminder of that--an infuriating exercise in DRM shit making my life just that little bit worse.

For all the happy things that have been born of humanity's digital two steps forward, DRM takes us the corresponding and inevitable one step back.

UPDATE: it's back

The pretty (and utterly weird) NERV Power Supply Monitoring System now reports that TEPCO is generating 'NaN kilowatts'... (x_x)

I guess I have no recourse but to visit 東電's pathetic official offering, where I am told that we've got "5,270 10 thousand kW" available to sustain human society in Tokyo today.

Parsing that isn't made any easier by the sweltering heat and lack of civilized air conditioning, let me tell you...

I visited Google Groups today, to read some archives and think about posting a question to the PhantomJS (awesome, btw) group. I was startled to find that the UI was not the deplorable piece of shit that I was used to, nor was it the completely dysfunctional 'new' version that didn't work at all and yet was foisted upon me automatically from time to time and had to be manually disabled repeatedly.

Instead, it was something totally new (to me), and actually quite good, as far as web-based email list interfaces go:

Any decent email client is still better for a list you read a lot, but at least this thing isn't inferior in every single conceivable way anymore. Good use of avatar pictures (albeit without Gravatar support, which is retarded), attractive and responsive layout, and a good-looking and functional threaded discussion view when you click on a thread topic.

good job goog, now try a little harder on your phone OS pls

So, does my rant about Amazon's staggeringly awful Kindle book reader mean that the Japanese Nuclear Clusterfuck of 2011 is over? No. Things are still fucked. The food chain is suspect, some areas are ruined. From my selfish Tokyo perspective, the main problem is the looming electric shortages. We haven't had blackouts for a while, but it's not the hot summer yet. Even though we don't have the blackouts yet, the entire city (and basically eastern Japan), is doing setsuden (節電), or electricity conservation, which completely fucks up a city like Tokyo. It's hot in the buildings, most escalators are stopped, and it's dark on the streets at night as if it was fucking China or something.

So it still sucks. But in one important way, it has improved:

That's the levels of cesium and radioactive iodine in the drinking water in Tokyo. None detected. While I don't tend to drink that water (even before Fukushima), I do have to shower in it, and recently since it is looking better I have started to cook with it again.

And then there is the rain:

That's looking good, too. It really sucks when you can't walk around in the rain and get wet without tripping out about what kind of radioactive shit might be giving you cancer and harming your unborn children, etc. I walked to work this morning, got wet, and didn't worry about it.

Those numbers are from http://atmc.jp (which we all still check every day), and are clearly good news.

This summer is still gonna fucking suck, though.

Amazon is one of my favorite companies, but they sure make some shitty fucking software.

I don't often use the pathetic Kindle for Mac application, because it is a fucking steaming pile of shit. But occasionally, when programming in one of my non-native languages, say, I want to look something up. But every other time I launch this shitty app, I am rudely shown this message:

I grit my teeth and try to remove the book from the 'device', per those shitty instructions, but always get this:

At that point, I try to nuke my Kindle registration and start everything over. I have gone through this process at least a dozen times. It usually goes like this:

...and stays like that indefinitely (it "may take a moment" indeed, it has been hung like that throughout the process of launching MarsEdit and writing this blog post up until here), until I quit the app... at which point, of course, it crashes:

 

AMAZON: PLEASE STOP WRITING MAC APPS. YOU JUST SUCK TOO MUCH. THE EXISTENCE OF YOUR KINDLE APP MAKES THE WORLD WORSE. STOP IT. STOP.

most useful links:

• by-prefecture radiation/contaminant levels for atmosphere, rain, and water supply (typically lags by 2 days)
• latest TEPCO electric power capacity vs latest consumption level and rolling blackout info
• google map of Japan with neartime radiation levels
• NY Times reactor-by-reactor status board (updated every day or two)
• International Atomic Energy Agency site, prominently featuring a detailed, timely, reliable chronology of the clusterfuck
• xxx
• xxx

more links:

• my twitter account (pretty much used only for posting links about the fukushima nuke clusterfuck)
• Chris Martenson's remarkably good blog post about the state of the clusterfuck as of April 1
• aerial drone's-eye view of clusterfuck
• post-earthquake graphs of radiation dosimeter in Hino
• another Tokyo tap water contamination site (iodine 131, cesium 134, cesium 137)
• amazing animation of the 800+ quakes in Japan over past few weeks
• expose of TEPCO's incredible lack of preparation(Wall St. Journal)
• xxx
• xxx

Japan's government has proven to be incompetent; its media dysfunctional. So it takes some work to stay abreast of the nuke situation in Fukushima, and how it affects Tokyo. These links are among the most helpful we've found.

(This post will be updated by various people as time/circumstance permit.)

以上

This is probably the first event that caused anybody to actually seek out this blog in order to read the latest updates, but I've no time to update it.  Instead, I am experiencing my first twitter-can-be-vaguely-useful moment, so for rad levels, status, and links of interest to me, look there.

(I'll probably post a long rant about this whole triple-shitstorm someday, but for now I'm busy with more immediately practical concerns.)

Ever heard of UTF-8?

UPDATE 2011-03-23: less than two weeks after I reported this bug to JetBrains, the issue has been marked FIXED in RubyMine 3.1.1 (aotw still unreleased).

You know, like for the record and shit.