Paul Hutchinson's Blog

On the Microchip forum somebody read the license agreement for their new free IDE, “MPLAB X” and found this in section 1c.

Microchip’s authorized representatives will have the right to reasonably inspect, announced or unannounced and in its sole and absolute discretion, Licensee’s premises and to audit Licensee’s records and inventory of Licensee’s use of the Software, whether located on Licensee’s premises or elsewhere, at any time, in order to ensure Licensee’s adherence to the terms of this Agreement.

What! They demand the right to enter a companies or persons premises unannounced because someone clicked yes on a EULA! It turns out this is not all that new for Microchip, a post from June 2009 says that this is also in the dsPIC dev kit EULA.

This could be a huge problem for my work, I can’t imagine the company lawyers are going to allow me to use MPLAB X with this onerous of a EULA. Thankfully all current Microchip based projects are using MPLAB 8 and their Hi-Tech C Pro compiler which do not have this condition on usage. The problem will be in five or more years when MPLAB 8 is gone and we still need to support our products (our average life cycle is 20 years). I’ll just have to remember to keep a copy of MPLAB 8 around so that I can still use their debuggers and programmers when needed in the future.

I hope they change their tune and remove this onerous clause. If they do not change this I will be forced to no longer consider Microchip processors for new projects .

Thanks to Alan on the PIClist for pointing this out.

Yesterday the FCC adopted the 2010 Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation Act which should end the practice of having commercials louder than the programs into which they are inserted by the end of 2012.  Read the full announcement here, the implementation details are in the following pages Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5.

Read all about it here.

It disgusts me that students would want to keep employed a disgusting man who through his unwillingness to act allowed the sexual abuse of multiple children. I guess they feel that football is more important than the safety of children.

There is no valid excuse for Paterno’s actions and no apology can make up for his ignoring the actions of his subordinate. Maybe he thought that ignoring the issue made him a good Catholic Conservative Republican, after all many Conservative Republican Catholics still support the scumbag Cardinal Law who acted the same way around the same time.

Posts by better writers:

This is why I hate college football programs

Does Penn State Actively Condone The Rape Of Children

Penn State Students Riot, Tip Over Van, After Joe Paterno Fired

Idiot GOP members Richard Ross of Wrentham, and Steven Levy of Marlborough, in the Massachusetts House and Senate want to increase regulations to prevent imaginary problems. They’ve filed a dozen bills to require photo IDs for voting but there has never been any voter fraud significant enough to affect the outcome of an election in Massachusetts.

Fortunately our Governor is rational and will veto any of this absolutely silly legislation if it comes to his desk.

Of course most likely what these stupid Republicans want is to disenfranchise minority and elderly voters so they can more easily remove social safety nets.

Ed at Dispatches from the Culture Wars has a good post about this on the national level.

The Malware Survival blog has discovered that we-care.com is serving up bucket loads of malware to its users.

I’m getting very annoyed at a re-definition that is becoming popular. Many people on the internet are now using the noun blog to refer not only to a web log but also to the individual posts within a web log. This is just like referring to the articles within a magazine as magazines, it’s ridiculous.

From what I’ve found the trend started with MySpace, rather than have a button that said post article, entry, or page they made their new entry button say post blog.

Everyone please stop trying to confuse the situation, use the word blog as it is defined. Refer to the individual entries in a blog as either, posts, entries, articles, stories, pages or one of the many existing synonyms.

Merriam-Webster

Dictionary.com

American Heritage Dictionary via Answers.com

Wiktionary

Wikipedia

I’ve been using and promoting Firefox since the beginning when it was named Phoenix back in 2002. The browser has improved steadily in 8-1/2 years getting better with every release. The availability of version 4.0 this week brings major improvements in speed and usability, so naturally I had to upgrade. Since I didn’t participate in the beta testing and I also didn’t read up enough on this version, my version 4 experience was not what I’d anticipated.

This brings up my first tip, update your video driver or check the MozillaWiki to make sure your driver version is OK. I had very old Nvidia drivers so Firefox had to turn off the some of its new features. This made Firefox 4 not seem much faster than version 3.6 for page rendering. Once I updated my video drivers the performance improvements where definitely noticeable.

With my video driver updated I gave Firefox 4 a good workout on dozens of web sites I frequent and I’m very impressed with the rendering and JavaScript speed improvement over version 3.6. However as I played around with new features I hit a major crash problem that nearly made me roll back to 3.6. After logging out of Google Reader, and when opening some other pages, the loading icon showed that the page would never finish loading. When I closed the loading tab and then went to close Firefox the confirm close dialog said that Firefox thought I had more tabs open than where visible.

A few times Firefox even got stuck so badly I had to terminate it from task manager. Searching the support site and checking everywhere with Google I couldn’t find anyone else having this problem.

Following normal troubleshooting procedures I first disabled all my extensions and plug-ins to see if any of them was causing the problem, nope the problem persisted. I began to suspect there was something defective in the profile I was using. I’d been keeping this profile through all the upgrades since 2006 so it seemed quite possible it was corrupt in some obscure way. So I fired up my newest and cleanest profile, success, it did not have the problem. With my suspicion confirmed, I backed up my old profile, deleted it in profile manager then made a new profile with the old name. I repeated this for all my older profiles and they all now work flawlessly with Firefox 4. So my second tip is, if you have any problems after upgrading an ancient profile, nuke it and start fresh.

My next tip only applies if you are running Windows XP, turn on the new Firefox Button (it’s on by default in Vista/Win7). It replaces the standard menu freeing up a lot of screen space, see this article for details. Finally you may be wondering what happened to the Status bar, it’s now called the Add-on bar and Firefox 4 is really designed to run with it turned off freeing up more screen real estate.

The old status bar function of showing the target of links is now provided by a small pop-up at the bottom of the screen, very nice. Most plug-ins that put there control icons in the status bar can now have their icons in the navigation toolbar, so most people no longer need to have the add-on bar visible. There are a couple of exceptions, the Xmarks and Zotero plug-ins that for now need to use the add-on bar. To eliminate all the blank space in the add-on bar I’m using the Barlesque plug-in, it shrinks the bar to the minimum size needed and allows you to quickly hide the rest when you want to free up even more screen space.

Now that I’ve used Firefox 4 for a few days I’m comfortable saying this is the best Firefox ever! I recommend everyone upgrade today.

The FCC’s enforcement actions against illegal jammers continues, IN Compliance magazine has the details, Commission issues citations for marketing of cell phone jammers.