The Blog of Harald

[via Anders Jacobsen] New Scientist reports:

A US record company has issued reviewers with portable CD players that are glued shut to prevent two new albums from being pirated online before their official releases.

Epic Records Group has taken the drastic step of sealing CD players shut and gluing headphones onto them to stop digital copies being made from promotional albums. The albums involved are Riot Act by Pearl Jam and Scarlet’s Walk by Tori Amos.

A spokeswoman for Epic told New Scientist: “Obviously we have a problem with piracy and this is one of the ways we’re trying to address it. We’re trying lots of things.”

I find it particularly amusing that after all the hype about the Secure Digital Music Initiative, this is the best security they can come up with. A glued shut CD player is hardly tamper-proof. It would be worthwhile for a genuine pirate to purchase a replacement if she damages or destroys the original while removing the CD. Or one could take the CD player apart and tap into the electronics to get a digital playback of the CD direct from the hardware. Or…

New! It’s BURN RATE: The dot-com card game.

With a simple, fun, and uncannily realistic game system, you and your friends will struggle to keep a dot-com startup afloat as the bad business pours in and the money runs out.

Be the last one in business, and you’ll win the dubious honor of “Best CEO”!

This is scarily familiar; my employer is a member of the 99% club (companies that lost 99% of their value in the dot-com crash), and we’re currently racing to see whether we reach profitability again before our cash runs out.

Thanks to michael newton for the pointer!

Thanks to heavybit.com – michael newton for this one (and for Crash Bonsai):

One of the problems plaguing modern technology is that designers can’t seem to build user interfaces that people understand. Buy a microwave in Canada and try to use the popcorn button; it doesn’t work. Or look at digital watches, VCRs, even cars; the interface sucks. Even worse, they’re all different.

Washington designer Burkey Belser agrees, and has a humorous presentation on the subject. Here’s the quote from michael newton’s blog that caught my eye:

The buttons were marked Chop, Grate, Grind, Stir, Puree, Whip, Mix, Blend, Frappe, Liquefy. Belser found the distinctions absurd.

“If I’m not mistaken,” he said recently to a roomful of colleagues, “you turn this thing on and the blades whir around with a singular purpose, slaughtering everything within reach.”

Belser created his own one-word identifier: Vaporize. For the buttons, he created a scale of speed, from In A Second to Now.

See the Washington Post article for more examples.

There’s something wonderful about the concept of wrapping model cars around bonsai trees.

Why do I never think of these things?

“The Internet treats censorship as damage, and routes around it.” – John Gilmore

An article in New Scientist shows this phenomenon once again. It describes ‘elgooG‘:

The mirror site, called elgooG, is a parody of the English language version of Google in which all the text on the web pages has been reversed. The text terms used for searches are also entered in reverse. The site, which returns all the same hits as Google, can be accessed from behind China’s “great firewall”.

Apparently, one can read the site fairly easily in a mirror (the letters will be reversed, but humans can easily compensate for that). An unusual way to get around access restrictions, to be sure…

I received a message on Friday night claiming to be from SpamCop, telling me that my site was “being watched”. There were no details in the message, which made me suspicious; anti-SPAM organisations are usually quite diligent in pointing out the error of your ways. I think it’s an uber-geek thing; they like to be more standards-compliant than thou.

On the other hand, I thought it no coincidence that I received this shortly after I registered two new domains, and started updating my blog more regularly, so a small part of my brain worried all weekend.

Sunday night I received a notice from NANOG that it was a forgery. Phew!

A common issue discussed in weblogging (and many other WWW environments) is the permalink.

It is often necessary to redesign web pages, or change layouts, in such a way that previous URLs no longer work. I’ll have to do this soon; the initial base URL I chose for my weblog is incorrect. But if I do, I’ll invalidate all of the existing links to my pages, unless I keep the old name or old hierarchy around.

Here’s a potential solution; the Persistent URL from the Online Computer Library Centre.

Functionally, a PURL is a URL. However, instead of pointing directly to the location of an Internet resource, a PURL points to an intermediate resolution service. The PURL resolution service associates the PURL with the actual URL and returns that URL to the client. The client can then complete the URL transaction in the normal fashion. In Web parlance, this is a standard HTTP “redirect”.

In MovableType, for example, the permalink for an entry depends on the default archive format you choose; if you need to change that format, all your permalinks change. I’m currently using Individual as the default, but as my website grows that might require too much disk space (a 512 byte entry wastes 1532 bytes of disk space on my server).

However, every blog entry has a blog ID and a six-digit entry ID. One could conceivably construct a PURL with this information and use it as the permalink; then register with an existing resolver (or run your own) to map the PURLs to your current blog archive layout. That would allow me to change my archive format to a more efficient weekly or monthly page without invalidating permalinks.

I’ll play with the software a bit at CFRQ, and report back.

From Spin of the Day:

Sustainable Development: R.I.P.
“Sustainable Development is dead. It’s demise came, ironically, at the World Summit on Sustainable Development,” CorpWatch’s Kenny Bruno writes in his report from the UN meeting in Johannesburg. “It’s not that the phrase wasn’t invoked. It was, ad nauseum. But it was hardly discussed. Instead, sustainable development was deemed to be whatever compromise governments happen to reach on trade, subsidies, investment and aid, and whatever projects corporations see fit to finance. ‘Sustainable Development’ is now officially meaningless.” Source: CorpWatch.org, September 4, 2002

I don’t think it’s as bleak as all this. Several world governments are now fighting back against The Evil Corporate Opressors with internal policy initiatives. Some examples: Peru’s OpenSource debate; Brazil’s take on patent medicines; Zimbabwe’s ban on genetically engineered crops. I think there’s a growing catalogue of individual actions that are supporting sustainable development. It may be 0.5%, but growing.

Still, we have a very long way to go, and the nonsense in Johannesburg certainly didn’t help things. I blame George Dubya; it’s fashionable, after all.

Today’s software debugging tools, brought to you by IIS, Unicode, and UTF-8:

• one cross
• one mallet
• several wooden stakes
• one large vial holy water

I think I’ve wiped out another nest.

I’m sure someone will find another soon.

Quoted out of context from
Ampersand:

Blame is silly and counterproductive: it gets hung up asking “who made this mess?” Responsibility is productive: it says, “time to clean up this mess.”

Personal responsibility is a wonderful philosophy, and one that so few people understand or practice. It means taking responsibility for the consequences of ones actions, even the ones you didn’t expect. It means thinking about the possible outcomes before you do something, instead of afterwards when it’s too late.

It’s damned hard. I try to get a little better at it each day.

andersja has written more on his Niggardly posting.

ValerieF commented:

“I do empathize with the desire to go to lengths to avoid offending others, especially through a semantic misunderstanding. It seems to be an American behavior.”

To extend this, I believe it’s also an American behaviour to take offense where none exists or is implied. It happens up here in Canada too, but less often (I believe :-).

The movements against discrimination have been productive over the last century. Things that were unthinkable 50 years ago are taken for granted today. But they have also created an environment where people are extremely sensitive to perceived offenses.

I don’t really understand why people are this reactive, but I’ve been guilty of “flying off the handle” myself. I like to think that I’ve learned two lessons in my two decades on the ‘Net:

1. Read what other people actually write, not what I think they write.
2. Avoid using deliberately provocative language (“I think you’re mistaken” instead of “You moron!” :-).

But I still don’t think “niggardly” is “provocative language”.

Update: persephone.cfrq.net has been upgraded to a Celeron 1000 with 128Mb of memory. There are no more trackback ping problems <grin>

As discussed in the movabletype.org Support Forum, when your MovableType pings mine, the default timeout at your end is 10 seconds. My weblog is on a slow server, which takes around 25 seconds to respond to a ping.

Update: I’ve decreased this to about 18 seconds by modifying the MT source to reply after saving the ping, but before rebuilding the site, but that’s still too long.

Ben plans to increase the timeout in the default MT install. Until then, you can either manually delete pings from your “pings to send” list after pinging my site, or you can change the default on your site: add the line

PingTimeout 30

to your mt.cfg file.

Unfortunately, there’s nothing I can do from my end, at least until I can afford a more powerful server.

From Spin of the Day:

Monday, July 29, 2002
Making the World Safe for Obesity

PR giant Golin/Harris is bragging about its new “Global Obesity Task Force.” The Task Force doesn’t seek to fight childhood obesity, but to protect the interests and image of the multibillion dollar Obesity Industry. Their press release states: “With consumers becoming increasingly wary of American ‘big business,’ many companies find themselves under scrutiny. … The increase in childhood obesity has special interest and government groups seeking to hold someone responsible. And, corporate America is the likely target. Golin/Harris International has created its Global Obesity Task Force with proprietary tools to help companies under fire in the obesity debate… Wide ranges of industries are vulnerable and need to act to protect their brands, businesses and reputations. Quick service restaurant companies, snack makers, beverage producers, the television and video game industries… ‘When managed appropriately, companies can withstand issues without public confidence and brand trust eroding,’ said Kathy Weber.” G/H clients include McDonald’s and Tyson Foods. Source: Golin/Harris News Release, July 29, 2002

And yesterday, McDonald’s USA Announces Significant Reduction of Trans Fatty Acids With Improved Cooking Oil:

The new oil will reduce French fry TFA levels by 48%, reduce saturated fat by 16% and dramatically increase polyunsaturated fat by 167%. While the total fat content in the fries remains unchanged, health experts agree that reducing TFAs and saturates while increasing polyunsaturates is beneficial to heart health. Notably, McDonald’s French fries already had the lowest TFA and saturated fat levels in the national quick service restaurant (QSR) industry.

Now, as they point out, the total fat content is the same, which means that a single large McDonald’s fries still has 540 calories, about 1/4 of typical daily requirements. And it still has more than a third of the RDA for fat, although new research has suggested that RDA may be misguided.

With this nutrition initiative, McDonald’s becomes the first national QSR company to set a goal of eliminating TFAs in cooking oil.

Probably strictly true, however:

• Wendy’s switched from shortening to oil six years ago, to reduce saturated fat and trans-fatty acids.
• Burger king cut saturated fats by 50% when it switched from an animal/vegetable mix to partially hydrogenated vegetable oil in 1990.

Ah, that wonderful ability of PR flacks to mislead with the truth. Be ever on guard against Spin… (Source: a Reuters article at Yahoo)

So the bottom line is this: McDonald’s french fries are still bad for you; they’re still high in fat. Then there was that recent report about fried potatoes containing potential carcinogens. And if new research proves true, the potato part of the fries are even worse than the fat part…

Another enty from PR Watch‘s Spin of the Day:

Tuesday, September 3, 2002
“Invade Iraq? Are you nuts?”
George Hesselberg, columnist with the Wisconsin State Journal, is fed up with all the government and media hype for war on Iraq. He excoriates the ignorance of US citizens as reflected in recent surveys but asks, “What do you expect in a country where … the media seem to spend more money printing fast-fading flags and producing flag-waving promotions than on researching and reporting the actual degradation of rights, even the dissolution of rights, among citizens. … Isn’t it odd that government leadership is so rabidly intent on invading Iraq that it appears more attention is being paid to overthrowing a nation’s psyche (our own) by zealous public relations than accumulating any solid evidence such an invasion is necessary? … We wait and wait for someone in charge to ask: Invade Iraq? Are you nuts? We wait and wait for the media to stop showing deference and start showing some defiance. … Is it a measure of cynicism if we think that this is an attempt to take everyone’s attention away from endemic regulator-ignored corporate criminality? Or to keep people from noticing that a human-rights-stomping religious fanatic may be running the Justice Department?” Source: Wisconsin State Journal, September 3, 2002

In last nights news, I saw Tony Blair arguing that the allies should be supporting the United States in their actions against Iraq. I wonder what it took to buy him off; the UK was against the invasion, weren’t they?

I don’t believe that Iraq has any more weapons of mass destruction (nuclear, chemical, or biological) than Canada does. I guess the United States will be invading us next.

Seriously, Iraq has been under severe sanctions, and a microscope, for over a decade. I’d be far more nervous about the goings on in other parts of the world that we aren’t paying attention to. What would the world be like if the Russian Mafia had smallpox?

I’m writing about -What She Really Thinks-, +Perverse Access Memory+, because she’s testing trackbacks (and I’m feeling playful).

MovableType, and now others, have implemented Trackbacks, a method of keeping track of references to a blog entry, and thus keeping track of a conversation across multiple separate sites. Pretty Cool.

andersja’s blog: American Political Correctness & the word “Niggardly”

A wonderful essay on language, and ignorance, and political correctness, and the wrongs that result. I couldn’t have said it better myself (so I won’t).

The IT rust belt

Apparently there are too many programmers in the world; thanks to globalisation and the Internet, we North Americans are now competing for jobs with Pacific Rim programmers who work harder for less. Similar things happened to US factory workers 20 years ago.

Yikes!

Quoted from the Spin of the Day at PRWatch:

It’s an Ad, Ad, Ad World

“The next time an overly friendly blond sidles up in a crowded bar and asks you to order her a brand-name martini, or a cheery tourist couple wonder whether you can take their picture with their sleek new camera-in-a-cell phone, you might want to think twice,” warns Daniel Eisenberg. “There’s a decent chance that these strangers are pitchmen in disguise, paid to oh-so-subtly pique your interest in their product.” Eisenberg examines the growing use of “stealth marketing” — covert product placements. No longer content to place their products on TV shows and movies, marketers are planting shills in bars, restaurants and other places, blurring the line between advertising and real life. Source: Time magazine, September 2, 2002

I find it hard to believe that this could be cost-effective…

Here are my initial impressions:

• It’s a memory pig, like most modern software. My 128Mb laptop has trouble keeping other processes in memory while I’m browsing.
• I like tab browsing. Unfortunately, a key configuration option from Mozilla, that forces target=”_blank” windows into a new tab instead of a new window, is missing. So is the option that disabled unrequested pop-ups; I doubt that’s a coincidence. Maybe AOL likes pop-up ads :-)
• The jury’s out on the sidebar. On the one hand, it’s nice to have a bunch of stuff available there (like my blogroll). On the other hand, the interface seems clunky to me, and I can’t find any keyboard shortcuts.
• The UI takes up too much screen real-estate. I could probably fix that with a skin, but it would be nice to have it available in the base install.
• ICQ in the browser is cool (especially since it’s ad-free ICQ), but the ICQ UI sucks like a hoover.
• The new cookie handling is pretty good, but I have an even better application called CookieWall for IE, so no major new feature there.

In short, I think I’ll stick with IE on windows for now, security holes and all. (I’ll probably stick with Mozilla on Linux).