K-Squared Ramblings

Free Gas with your Spam List!

Wow… you know gas is expensive when the spammers start hawking gas cards.

Our support contact address received a message touting “Finest List of Nurses Including Email Addresses - Free $50 Gas Card” I had to wonder what the heck it was, so I took a look at the message. They were trying to sell “sales leads” — i.e. names and contact information — of nurses, and were offering to throw in the gas card if you spent enough on “leads” to do your own spamming.

Double-Digit Danger

Andrew Gregory points out that some browser detection scripts might have trouble when Opera 10 eventually rolls around. Why? Because one of the easiest, ways of testing for a version number is to do look for the the “Browser n” or “Browser/n” patterns. The problem is that this strategy only grabs the first digit of the version number. That works fine for 1–9, but once you hit 10, suddenly it looks like 1 again.

Firefox and Safari, currently at just before and just after 3, are likely safe for now, but IE is creeping up on 8, and with their new, faster release schedule, IE10 may only be a couple of years away.

I’ll admit, I’ve written code like that myself (not the specific example, but I’ve done regexp matches that only look at the first digit), but always on sites that I expect to be able to maintain. Of course, one of the lessons to learn from Y2K is that shortcuts get entrenched, and code you thought you’d have time to clean up long before it became a problem has a tendency to stay in use far longer than you expected. And we’ve seen the same thing with web script archives, where someone’s example code that mostly worked in IE4 gets enshrined as “the” way to accomplish something, even though there have been better ways that work more consistently for years.

10 Ways for the Lazy Geek to Lose Weight

So, you’re a nerd (or a geek, if you prefer). You spend your life sitting in front of your computer, your TV, or your latest book. You don’t play sports, you don’t go running, hiking or cycling, and the word gym conjures up painful memories from middle school.

And you’ve put on a bit more padding than you’d like.

The problem is, you can’t stand exercise, you don’t want to spend the next 2 months eating cardboard food, and you don’t want to record your every caloric intake with a spreadsheet (though if that idea appeals to you, go for it). What’s a geek to do?

Well, here are some tweaks you can make to your lifestyle that, with a minimum of effort, will help. They won’t take the weight off quickly, but they’ll lower it over time. And you might be able to keep it off better than someone who goes on a crash diet, because you’re changing your habits, not just making a short-term change. Read the rest of this entry »

Missing Posts Found

Five posts since last weekend didn’t show up properly in the feed, so if you’re following by RSS or LiveJournal, you probably missed these:

• No, They Don’t Read — A study finds out just how little people actually read on the web.
• Hazards of DRM on Music (or video, or any other media) — If the DRM provider ever shuts down (as Microsoft is shutting down PlaysForSure), the tracks you bought will be a waste of bits.
• Efficiency at the DMV — no, really!
• Weirdest Spam Yet — It’s NOT your fault that your spells and rituals aren’t turning out like you want… YET.
• Judging a Book’s Cover — Historical novels that reuse the same covers, sometimes many times over.

(For the record: the GMT timestamps were set to zero. It seems to be this problem, probably triggered by turning on the XCache-based object cache last weekend. I’ve applied a patch, so let’s see if it works.)

The Vastness that is Central City

Central City is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to Central City. (With apologies to Douglas Adams.)

It’s an old post, but I just found the Absorbascon’s take on Central City, looking at the wide expanses depicted in Carmine Infantino’s Silver-Age drawings of the Flash’s hometown.

What is this vast complex? The National Science Center? NIH? STARLabs HQ? No. It’s Barry Allen’s back room. In his APARTMENT. In your house, this sort of room is barely big enough to hold the Cybex machine you don’t use. In a Central City apartment, it’s about the size of a bowling alley.

On a related, but more serious note, letterer Todd Klein has posted a 4-part study of the Flash Logo from 1940 through the present day: Part 1 · Part 2 · Part 3 · Part 4. With his insider knowledge, it’s far more thorough than the study I did a few years ago. (via Wallyoeste)

No, They Don’t Read

It’s clear that a lot of people don’t actually read web pages before they respond to them. They’ll do things like…

• Contact someone with a similar name, even when it’s clearly the wrong sort of organization — say, a student writing club and not the bookseller that’s been causing them problems.
• Ask a blogger for a job application for a company mentioned in the post.
• Ask unrelated tech support questions on a blog post because they used the wrong search terms for their problem.
• Ask for help creating Flash animations on a forum dedicated to the Flash super-hero, then get indignant when people have the gall to point out that they’re in the wrong place.

Now, usability guru Jakob Nielsen reports on a study showing just how much people don’t read. In the average visit, users only read 28% of your text if you’re lucky. You have to drop way down — to 111 words — just to count on visitors reading half of it.

Depressing, but it explains so much. And it suggests there’s a benefit to highlighting key phrases. If they’re only going to read ¼ of the text, you may as well make sure it includes the important stuff.

Hazards of DRM on Music (or video, or any other media)

Mark Pilgrim, in The Day the Music Died, points out what happens when DRM meets market failure.

On August 31, Microsoft will turn off the servers that validate their “PlaysForSure” DRM system (this predates the system they use for the Zune). This means that anyone who has bought music that uses PlaysForSure will not be able to transfer it when they upgrade or replace their computer, or get a new music player.

It won’t be an instantaneous death like DIVX was, or like a subscription system, because it doesn’t phone home whenever you try to play a track. But it’ll be a lot faster than simple technological obsolescence. I can still play my old VHS tapes until my VCR breaks down (and then I could probably still get it fixed if I really wanted to), even though I don’t think I’ve seen a pre-recorded tape in a store in years.

This is also why I prefer to check Amazon’s MP3 store first, before going onto the iTunes Music Store, and then prefer DRM-free iTunes Plus to standard iTunes tracks. Given their current position, Apple isn’t likely to get rid of iTunes anytime soon, but if they ever did, I’d be in the same boat as people who purchased PlaysForSure tracks. (Though I’m hoping they’ll move the entire catalog away from DRM long before that happens.) Whereas since Amazon’s tracks are plain, ordinary MP3s, they could abandon the business tomorrow and I’d still be able to play the tracks for as long as I can find software that plays MP3s.

(via ma.tt)

Efficiency at the DMV

Yes, I’m shocked as well. This morning I had to go into the Department of Motor Vehicles for the first time in several years, and was surprised to find that they’d actually worked out a very efficient system for handling people as they came in. I don’t know if this is standard across the California DMV, or if it’s specific to the Laguna Hills office, but I was impressed.

It’s a 2-stage system, starting with a single line, then a set of take-a-number queues running in parallel.

1. Everyone starts in a single line leading to a “Directory” desk. The clerk at this desk handles initial questions and hands out the appropriate forms.
2. You fill out the forms, then go back to the desk without standing in line again.
3. The directory desk assigns you a number in one of several queues, depending on the type of service you need (ID, license, registration, testing, etc.).
4. They call your number and send you to an open window.

The thing that impressed me was step 2. They have you fill out the forms before they assign you to a queue. That means that you won’t get caught half-way through the form when your number is called, so clerks at the windows don’t have to wait around while you finish filling things out. That means they can handle more people in the same amount of time.

The only problem I noticed with this part of the system was that it wasn’t clear where to go if you had an appointment.

Well, that and the occasional clueless visitor. I felt really stupid after marveling at the simple optimization, then discovering when I got to the window that I’d missed a section.

Weirdest Spam Yet

I’ve seen some pretty weird spam in my time, both as an email user and an email admin. My favorite is still the request to purchase a Dimensional Warp Generator. But this one, which showed up in the spamtraps a few days ago, has got to be pretty close.

Old Witchcraft Secrets - make your wildest dreams come true
Read the rest of this entry »

Judging a Book’s Cover

Reusable Cover Art in Historical Novels: A Gallery. A lot of them are clearly using classical paintings, but some of them are photographs or even modern-style art. What’s especially interesting are the covers which used the same source material, but altered it subtly: adding a headband or a pendant, replacing a bedframe, etc.

The Rap Sheet has even more examples.

(via Colleen Doran)

Did the Flash Save Comics?

Yesterday’s article about the Flash (warning: major spoilers for this week’s DC Universe: Zero) in the New York Daily News brings up the hero’s key role in launching the Silver Age of Comics. Superheroes had fallen out of favor in the early 1950s, and comics were exploring genres like westerns, horror, romance, etc. When DC successfully relaunched the Flash in 1956, there was an explosion of new super-hero titles.

The Daily News quotes former Flash scribe Geoff Johns as saying, “Without Barry Allen, we’d still be reading comic books about cowboys.”

I don’t think that’s precisely true. Not to discount Barry’s contribution—it’s entirely possible, even likely, that super-heroes would have remained a background genre. But for one thing, we’re looking at half a century of ephemeral pop culture. For another thing, let’s consider: why were comics going after the western, crime and horror genres when super-heroes failed? Because that’s what was popular in movies and television at the time.

I’d guess that, without the Flash revitalizing super-heroes, we would have seen more science-fiction comics in the 1960s, more police comics in the 1970s, sitcom comics in the 1980s, and so on. Comics genres would probably have followed along with trends in pop culture instead of becoming heavily focused on a single genre.

We wouldn’t be reading cowboy comics today; we’d be reading reality comics.

Perhaps the presence of multiple genres would have eventually gotten rid of the “but, you know, comics are just for kids” mentality. (Not that it’s worked for cartoons or video games yet, but video games are still relatively new, and cartoons have similarly been dominated by the musical fairy tale and slapstick comedy short.)

Eh, who knows? Maybe they’d be all about pirates.

Edit: The comment thread at The Beat also has some interesting speculation on comics without the Silver Age Flash.

Flagging (Non)-Spoofed Mail

Following up on the PayPal anti-phishing discussion of a few weeks ago, I see that PayPal is promoting a service called Iconix. You install the program on your system, and it looks at your inbox for messages that claim to be from one of its customers. It tries to verify them “using industry-standard authentication technologies such as Sender ID and DomainKeys.” Messages that pass get a lock-and-checkbox icon attached to the sender’s name, and in some cases the name is replaced by the sender’s logo.

On the tech side, it’s similar to SpamAssassin’s whitelist_from_spf and whitelist_from_dkim features. Both allow you to specify a sender to whitelist, and it will only give a message special treatment if it can verify the sender.

On the user-interface side, it’s similar to EC certificates, in that it tries to highlight a “good” class of messages rather than flag or filter out a “bad” class.

It’s not a bad idea, actually, and now that I’m surprised I haven’t seen something similar in other email clients. It’s sort of like setting up custom rings or images for images on your cell phone address book

They seem to be focused on webmail and Outlook so far, and only on Windows, but it looks like the perfect candidate for a Thunderbird extension. They do have a sign-up form to notify you when they add support for various programs and OSes, and I was pleased to see not only Thunderbird and Mac OS listed, but Linux as well. Too often, Linux gets forgotten in the shuffle to ensure compatibility with every Windows variation.

Ben Stein Compares Scientists to Nazis

Well, what little respect I had left for Ben Stein is rapidly evaporating. Apparently it’s not good enough for him to claim that “Darwinism” leads to genocide in Expelled, now he’s running the interview circuit making statements like this:

When we just saw that man, I think it was Mr. [PZ] Myers, talking about how great scientists were, I was thinking to myself the last time any of my relatives saw scientists telling them what to do they were telling them to go to the showers to get gassed.

or this:

Love of God and compassion and empathy leads you to a very glorious place, and science leads you to killing people.

Now, let’s leave aside all of the lives saved by medicine, engineering, and other applied sciences for a moment.

And let’s ignore the fact that Stein said this on an interview with the Trinity Broadcasting Network. On television. About a movie. Both products of science. (I wonder if he ever sees doctors, or takes medication.)

And let’s table the fact that he seems to think (or finds it convenient to claim) that evolutionary biology and Social Darwinism are the same thing.

And let’s not even bring up the fact that the Holocaust was rooted in centuries of anti-Semitism, and the most scientific thing about it was the means of execution. Or that even the ADL is upset that the film “misappropriates the Holocaust,” pointing out that “Hitler did not need Darwin to devise his heinous plan to exterminate the Jewish people and Darwin and evolutionary theory cannot explain Hitler’s genocidal madness.”

And God forbid that we mention all the people killed in His name.

No, let’s not mention any of that. Let’s focus on one specific item:

In internet culture, there’s a concept called Godwin’s Law. It was an observation that, as long discussions continue over time, eventually someone will compare the other side to Nazis. A tradition has developed that once this happens, the discussion is over because no reasonable debate can be had when one side thinks the other is just plain evil. Generally, whoever makes the comparison is considered to have forfeited the argument, because they couldn’t think of anything else to support their side but stooping to the basest ad hominem attack imaginable.

At least he’s come out in the open and admitted that the movie isn’t just about suppressing the theory of evolution, but is explicitly anti-science.

(via Bad Astronomy)

DC Comics Archives Survey

The Comics Archives has launched its 2008 DC Archives Survey. Readers are asked which DC Archive books they own, and which series they would be likely to buy if new volumes were released next year. Results will be collated and sent to DC Editorial.

DC’s Archive line is their line of hardcover reprints on nice, glossy paper, usually following a character or team starting at the beginning of the series. DC has two sets of Flash archives right now:

• The Flash Archives: 4 volumes following Barry Allen from his first few appearances in Showcase through the start of his solo title, covering 1956–1962.
• The Golden Age Flash Archives: 2 volumes following Jay Garrick through the first 2 years of Flash Comics and All-Flash, covering 1940–1941.

The survey also asks about other reprint formats, including the paperback Chronicles series, the Omnibus series (hardcover, but lower-quality paper), and more thematic reprint sets (one suggestion is Flash: The Death of Iris Allen

So if, like me, you’re still hoping for that next volume of Golden Age Flash Archives—or any other classic DC book that hasn’t been reprinted in decades, if ever—stop on over and fill out the survey.

(via Comic Bloc Forums)

Browser Bits

Avenicus compares Firefox 3 beta 5 to Opera 9.50 beta 2 on performance and memory usage. The surprise: Firefox 3 uses less memory than Opera 9.50. Clearly all the work Mozilla has done on cleaning up memory usage has paid off.

Codedread comments on Apple’s Web Inventions.

Asa Dotzler counteracts FUD about the safety of Firefox, Safari, and other alternative browsers. His main point: the key measure of security is not the number of vulnerabilities, but the window of vulnerability: the time between a hole being discovered and the patch getting onto users’ systems. (In addition to a responsive security team, automatic updates really help here.)

In just over a week, Opera’s new developer toolset, code-named Opera Dragonfly, will be ready for an alpha release. This will be a welcome addition, not just for developers, but ultimately for Opera users as well. Obviously, it’ll make it easier for web developers to debug compatibility issues, leading to fewer sites breaking in Opera. But it could also bring more people in. Firefox’s growth got started with recommendations by techies. If Dragonfly proves to be as good or better than Firebug, developers will spend more time with Opera, which could lead to recommendations.

Rainbow Feather Cloud

On my way back to work after lunch today, I looked out the window and saw this feathery wisp of cloud with a clear rainbow pattern running from red at the the top to violet in the middle, then turning plain white below.

As I drove south, the colors moved down the cloud, disappearing entirely by the time I got back. By the time I could safely snap a photo, it was already more or less midway down the cloud.

I believe it’s a fragment of a circumhorizon arc, judging by the description:

Look for a circumhorizon arc near to noon near to the summer solstice when the sun is very high in the sky (higher than 58°). It lies well below the sun — twice as far from it (two hand spans) as the 22º halo.

The arc is a very large halo and is close to, and parallel to the horizon. Usually only fragments are visible where there happen to be cirrus clouds.

We’re still 2 months from the summer solstice, but it was 12:38 PM DST (half an hour before true noon), and the sun was apparently near 70.6° high. (The site is aimed at UK visitors, after all.) It also looked too far away from the sun to be part of the 22º halo, plus of course the colors were more well-defined.

This also points out the should-be-obvious fact that ice crystals can still form in the upper atmosphere even when it’s warm — say, 90°F — on the ground, so there’s no need to limit halo-hunting to winter.

I recommend checking out Atmospheric Optics’ additional pictures of circumhorizon arcs, most of which are more complete than this one. Some of them quite spectacular and must have been really impressive to see live.

There’s a convention for everything

Here’s a weird one. it turns out that ROFLCon, dedicated to all those Internet fads, was held at MIT this past weekend. Found via the Mozilla blog: Firefox Spotted at ROFLCon (look there for a picture of a life-size Firefox mascot with Tronguy).

Flash Sighting? Opera: The Fastest Browser Alive!

Opera Software has just released a new beta version of the desktop web browser, Opera 9.50 beta 2. The splash page makes me think of something a bit different, though:

Opera 9.5 beta
Speed, security, and performance matter.

Now, we’ve made the fastest browser in the world even faster. Opera’s new beta is quicker to start, faster at loading Web pages and better at running your favorite Web applications.

Hmm, a red and yellow blur, zooming across the view? And an emphasis on speed? That reminds me a bit of this guy:

Opera has long promoted itself on its speed, and it has used a super-hero theme in its advertising before. The vaguely Superman-like* “Opera Man” was used heavily in advertising Opera 8, despite being ridiculed by most of the browser’s user community.

So why not a subtle reference to the Flash?

*Blue costume + red cape. Hey, if a blue shirt and red jacket work for Clark on Smallville, you know the color scheme has become iconic.

WordPress Update & Plugin Request

WordPress 2.5.1 is out, with a slew of bug fixes and one “very important security fix” which will reportedly be disclosed soon. It’s worth upgrading ASAP. You don’t want your blog hacked.

Highlights are listed at that first link, but for me the most noticeable change was a fix in the new media uploader. When uploading images on Linux, the thumbnail+properties form would display 3 times, none of them actually usable, for each image uploaded. Once I clicked on the gallery and went back, it was fine, so I could still use it, but it was an extra step that shouldn’t have been necessary. I kept meaning to report the bug, but it looks like someone got to it ahead of me. Thanks, someone!

And now, a request to WordPress Plugin Developers. When you release a new version, please tell me what has changed. Some plugin authors are good about this, including announcements on their web pages. Some even include a changelog with the download. But some don’t do either, and the only way to find out is to download the new files and compare them to the old ones using a tool like diff.

Now that I think about it, putting a “release notes” section in each entry in the Plugin Directory would go a long way toward making this work. It would put the information right there in the directory, and it would encourage plugin authors to compile the information int he first place.

Links: Freedom and Security

The CBLDF has issued a press released detailing the victory in the Gordon Lee case. This was the case in which a comic book store in Rome, Georgia, as part of a 2004 Halloween promotion, was handing out free comics left over from that year’s Free Comic Book Day. Among over 2,000 comics, they accidentally included a copy of Alternative Comics #2, which included a story about Picasso which included him running around his studio in the nude. And they accidentally gave it to a kid. The parents wouldn’t accept an apology, and pressed charges instead. The DA has been determined to make an example out of him, pushing grossly overinflated charges including felonies that would have given him prison time. 3½ years, 3 trial dates, a mistrial for prosecutorial misconduct, and $100,000 in defense costs later, the Rome DA finally agreed to drop the case in exchange for a written letter of apology — which is exactly what the store owner had offered in the first place.

Cookie Security in WordPress 2.5. The latest version of the blogging software has a feature that can make it harder for attackers to grab your login sessions. It involves setting a pass phrase in wp-config.php, one which you’ll never have to remember, but which will be unique to your site. You have to copy the SECRET_KEY section from wp-config-sample.php and add in your passphrase…or you can generate a random code at http://api.wordpress.org/secret-key/1.0/ (be sure to put it in the middle of the file!)

The Internet Storm Center writes on Hundreds of Thousands of SQL Injections — all websites that have been hacked to host various sorts of malware.

Easy Office Environmental Tip: The Disposable Cup

If you work in an office, chances are there’s a water cooler somewhere. And if there’s a water cooler, chances are there’s a stack of disposable paper cups (or possibly, even in this age, styrofoam). And chances are that most people will walk up, grab a paper cup, take it back to their desk and then throw it away.

Of course, all those paper cups end up in a landfill somewhere. And there’s the material to manufacture them (even if it’s recycled). And there’s the energy that went into manufacturing them.

So why not reuse that paper cup if you’re only using it for water? It’ll dry out between uses, so the water shouldn’t seep through the wax. If you have, say, one glass of water a day, and you use the same cup for a week, you’re cutting down your paper cup usage by 80%.

Or better yet: do you have a coffee mug? You need to wash it out anyway before you put more coffee in (unless you’re keeping it full all day long). Why not wash it out earlier, and use the mug when you want some water?

Sure, it’s less convenient than walking past the lunch room and grabbing a new paper cup. But let’s face it: you work in an office. And Americans, on the whole, don’t get enough exercise. You might as well take advantage of the extra activity for some incidental exercise.

Under Construction Indefinitely

We went to Wayzgoose at UCI on Saturday, which meant getting our annual taste of what’s changed about the college campus. I’d caught the new Student Center last fall, but Katie hadn’t been back since last year, before it was finished.

Some of the meeting rooms buried in the hill still remain from the previous building. In a food court next to the bookstore, I found a window looking down on this familiar-looking atrium.

Through the glass paneling is a stairway that leads up to the ring road entrance. Clone Copy and Clone Notes used to be on the lower floor to the right (off-camera). In the mid-1990s, the area below the overhang to the left was a pool hall whose name escapes me. I think they converted it to a study area when they remodeled the upper floor to create Zot Zone (which has since been demolished and relocated). The area where I was standing used to be an outdoor walkway connecting the main courtyard to the bookstore.

What was really odd was the west food court, where my brain kept trying to overlay the old layout even though I’m sure they ripped out and replaced that section of the building entirely.

The sad thing, though, was that they’re tearing up the large grass area in the middle of the Claire Trevor School of the Arts and putting in another building. Everything in the quad bordered by the Claire Trevor Theater (formerly the Village Theater), the Studio Theater, the scene shop, Studio Four, and the drama offices is a big fenced-off area of dirt.

Aside from the usual uses for a lawn, it was a great place for people to rehearse. It’s not clear how much of the fenced-off area will actually be turned into a building, but they may have finally finished paving the entire school.

I found it a rather ironic discovery to make at this time, considering that Wayzgoose/Celebrate UCI is also combined with Earth Day.

Blocking IE6: You, Me and…PayPal?

On Thursday I stumbled across a campaign to Trash All IE Hacks. The idea is that people only stay on the ancient, buggy, feature-lacking, PITA web browser, Internet Explorer 6, because we web developers coddle them. We make the extra effort to work around those bugs, so they can actually use the sites without upgrading.

Well, yeah. That’s our job.

And a bunch of random websites blocking IE6 aren’t going to convince people to change. If I were to block IE6, or only allow Firefox, or only allow Opera, I’d have to have seriously compelling content to get people to switch. Mostly, people would get annoyed and move on. Who’s going to install a new browser just so they can read the history of the Flash? Or choose an ISP? Or buy a product that they can get from another site?

Slapping the User in the Face

It’s so easy for someone to walk away from your site. One of the tenets of good web design is to make the user jump through as few hoops as possible to accomplish whatever you want him/her to do. Every hoop you add is an obstacle. Too many obstacles, and they’ll just go somewhere else more convenient.

Back when I was following Spread Firefox, every once in a while someone would suggest blocking IE. Every time, people like me would shoot it down. Read the rest of this entry »

Hannah

That’s one determined music star.

Or else one weird music/horror crossover film. (But then, is there any other kind?)

Sci-Tech Links

Scientists have built a computer model of the Neanderthal vocal tract based on fossils, and have simulated the kinds of sounds they could have produced. Ever since I read Robert J. Sawyer’s Neanderthal Parallax novels, I’ve been fascinated by the idea that there were two distinct human species, living side by side, for perhaps thousands of years. What happened to them? Did our ancestors kill them off, or interbreed with them? Did they fail to adapt to a changing climate? (via Slashdot)

On a related note, it seems that Expelled, the anti-science propaganda film that actually invokes Godwin’s Law by claiming that “believing” evolution leads to Nazis, opens this weekend. I’m curious to see how badly they misrepresent things (it’s always best to look for yourself, instead of just taking other people at their word—that’s the whole idea behind science, after all), but I can’t bring myself to support them by actually giving them money. Meanwhile, Expelled Exposed is interesting reading.

Somewhat(!) less controversial, InformationWeek reports that Windows XP SP3 may be out as soon as next week. This reminds me: I really should look up some reviews of Vista SP1 and see if it’s improved matters any.

Still in software, dria.org explains why the AwesomeBar is awesome. That’s the nickname given to the new address bar in Firefox 3, which lets you search your browser history as you type. It’s the reason I never went back to Firefox 2 after trying out one of the later FX3 betas, and why I’ve installed Fx3b5 on two more machines. The Opera 9.5 previews have a similar feature, but Firefox’s implementation is better visually. It’s easier to spot the page you want, and over time, it learns which pages you visit more often. It’s so much faster to type a word or two than to hunt through the bookmarks menu. (via Asa Dotzler)

[Edit] I forgot to include IEEE’s article on how copyright law applies to websites, What Can You (Legally) Take From the Web?

Finally, ***Dave relates an incredibly cool story of going to see Avenue Q and what happened after the show. I had no idea that (at least in New York), the “Give Me Your Money” segment was actually collecting for a charity.

Apple Updates Software Update, Addresses Criticism

In conjunction with the Safari 3.1.1 security release, Apple has also released a new version of Apple Software Update for Windows. With version 2.1, they’ve taken the opportunity to fix one of the problems that caused so much criticism last month.

It now shows two lists: one for updates, and one for new software. This takes care of one of the three easy steps that I culled from discussions back in March:

1. Separate updates from new software and label them clearly. Done.
2. Leave the new stuff unchecked by default. Bzzzt! Try again!
3. When run automatically, don’t pop up a notice more than once for each piece of not-installed software. [Edit:] Done.

Unfortunately the new software is still checked by default, but one hopes that the separate list would be enough to make people stop, look, and make a conscious choice as to whether or not to install it.

I don’t know yet how it handles new software when run automatically, or whether they’ve made the ignore option apply to an entire piece of software rather than a specific installer. I’ve taken iTunes off the ignore list and set it to check daily so that I can find out. [Edit:] I haven’t seen it pop up in the last 24 hours, and according to eWeek, “Apple will now only prompt the user if there are critical security updates available.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Songs with a Twist

Recently, I was reminded of a conversation about songs with twist endings. Like a Twilight Zone episode, they’ll set up one situation and then in the final verse, switch things around to a completely different perspective.

One example would be Vertical Horizon’s breakthrough hit, “Everything You Want.” The chorus repeats:

He’s everything you want,
He’s everything you need.
He’s everything inside of you that you wish you could be.
He says all the right things at exactly the right times,
But he means nothing to you and you don’t know why.

Most of the song presents this sort of detached, third-party view of someone who perhaps is concerned for a friend, but that’s all. Then the bridge hits, with lines like, “It’s only what you’re asking for,” and the intensity builds, until you get to the final chorus:

I am everything you want,
I am everything you need.
I am everything inside of you that you wish you could be.
I say all the right things at exactly the right times,
But I mean nothing to you and I don’t know why.

It suddenly becomes clear that the speaker is himself right in the middle of things, and the woman’s affections are in fact extremely important to him.

Another one would be the Jim Steinman song “Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad,” made famous by Meat Loaf. The speaker keeps pleading with a woman that…

I want you
I need you
But there ain’t no way I’m ever gonna love you
Now don’t be sad
‘Cause two out of three ain’t bad

At the end of the song, he explains “There’s only one girl that I will ever love” and that, when she left him, “She kept on telling me…” at which point he launches into the refrain. Suddenly, this guy who sounded unreasonable throughout the entire song turns out to have been on the receiving end of the same dysfunction in a previous relationship—and he’s still messed up by it.

What other songs can you think of that do this?

Avatars!

Since Gravatar was bought by Automattic, the service has been a lot more stable. I had already re-enabled them on this blog before WordPress 2.5 came out with built-in Gravatar* support.

Not everyone has a Gravatar, though, so many comment threads just show the default icon, over and over. Not only does this look boring, but it misses out on the whole point of using an avatar: providing an easy at-a-glance visual distinction between each author.

When I first used Gravatars on this site, I set it up to use a giant first initial as a fallback. Now, I’ve been trying out two plugins that will automatically generate avatars for people who don’t have their own:

• Wavatars builds up cartoony faces using geometric shapes. Interestingly, it’s by Shamus Young, author of the screencap-based webcomic DM of the Rings and writer of Chainmail Bikini.
• WP_Identicon sounds like a Transformers faction, but produces a geometric pattern as inspired by Don Park’s Identicon, which built a similar image based on a visitor’s IP address. The same author also has one that generates cartoon monsters, which appears to be one of the earliest implementations of this concept.

These plugins will use a Gravatar if available, or else generate an image based on the commenter’s email address (if supplied). That means each comment by the same person should use the same image. Other blogs using the same plugins at default settings will come up with the same avatar for each commenter, as well. The images are stored in a cache, so each only has to be generated once.

Once I made sure both plugins worked, I showed the results to Katie. We ended up settling on Wavatars, since faces are easier to recognize than patterns. (Though the patterns are really cool!)

You can try out the automatic avatar by leaving a (relevant, please!) comment on any post. Or you can run over to Gravatar and set up an icon of your choice!

*What’s a Gravatar? The intent is to be a Globally Recognized Avatar. You upload an image to Gravatar and associate it with your email address. Then any site with Gravatar support will be able to display your image next to your posts. Right now it’s mostly used in blog comments, but it could easily be worked into forums, wikis, etc. The Gravatar Blog mentions other uses they’ve seen people apply it to, such as plugins for Thunderbird and the Mac OS X Address Book

Note: I did notice one important drawback to the WP_Identicon plugin: it’s very inefficient at generating the images. When I first visited posts with long comment threads, like Another One Bites the Dust (174 comments) and Songs Not to Play at a Wedding (87 comments), WP_Identicon took over a minute to generate all the icons and maxed out the server’s CPU. Sure, the images are cached, so it’s only really an issue when you first install the plugin (unless you get a lot more people commenting at once than we do here), but to compare, Wavatar on an empty cache finished the same posts in just 4 seconds and 2 seconds, respectively.

Linking the Real and the Virtual

The WaSP Buzz’ article on a new mobile web browser test made mention of phones that can read QR Codes—one of several types of 2-D bar codes that you see on things like shipping labels. In this case, the idea is that you can point your phone’s camera at the QR code and it’ll decoded it and send you to the appropriate URL.

My first thought was that this was just like the CueCat, which was a bar code scanner that you could plug into your computer’s USB port, then scan bar codes in magazines, or on cans of soda, or whatever, and it would tell your computer to bring up relevant information. It was marketed in the late 1990s, during the tech boom… and it was a total flop. No one wanted them. The company went under and had millions of the little scanners sitting around unsold.

But now there are multiple schemes in use for object hyperlinking. In addition to graphical codes, there are RFID tags, GPS coordinates, and short text codes that you can easily type into an SMS message or a web portal.

So why is this sort of thing working now, 10 years later? Is it a societal change? Was the CueCat ahead of its time?

I think there are two reasons:

• CueCat was a single-purpose device. All the applications listed involve smartphones or other multi-purpose handheld devices. No one wanted a device that would only scan bar codes, but a phone/camera/browser/MP3 Player/bicycle that also scans bar codes? Sure, why not?
• CueCat was tied to the desktop. Sure, you could plug it into a laptop computer, but you’d still have to take the object over to your computer to scan the bar code. Unless you’re a lousy typist, swiping the CueCat across your can of Coke isn’t that much easier than typing in www.coke.com. As a home user, you’re not likely to be scanning a dozen objects in a row (unless you’re cataloging all of your books for LibraryThing).

All the applications listed on that page are mobile. A tagging scheme does give you an advantage when you’re out walking down the street and see something interesting. It’s much easier to punch in a short number than to try to type a URL on most phones, easier still to point your camera at a graphic, and dead simple to pick up an RFID tag or pull in GPS coordinates.

Joining Opera Watch

Daniel Goldman, who has been posting news about the Opera web browser at Opera Watch since 2004, has embarked on a new project that has kept him too busy for blogging full-time. So he’s launching the next phase of the blog as a group effort. And, I’m happy to say, he invited me to join as a contributor.

Thanks, Daniel, for the opportunity to be part of Opera Watch!

Now I need to think of something to write!

Links, from the Astronomical to the Surreal

The Value of Space Exploration, via Phil Plait’s response.

Neil Gaiman on The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke, a painting by a madman that’s inspired its share of stories.

And from Comics Worth Reading, our WTF entry for the day: Paradise by the GoPhone Light. It’s a commercial done in the style of a music video, featuring Meat Loaf and Tiffany as the parents of a kid who wants a GoPhone. Completely surreal, especially once the random explosions start.

It’s just occurred to me that, aside from it being some sort of cell phone, I have no idea what a GoPhone is. [/me types "gophone" into Google] Ah, OK. Pre-paid cellphone. Meh. (And now I’m imagining how much spam is going to get posted to this thread. *sigh* )

Affluent Flowers

When I first spotted this sign, I just couldn’t believe the name of the florist at the bottom.

Okay, I’m sure people with more money send more flowers, but it seems a little tactless to point it out in the shop’s name.

Of course, it is Irvine…

Beta Than Expected

I haven’t been following the progress of Fedora 9 very closely (possibly because it took me until last month to finally upgrade my home PC to Fedora 8), but as the release date of April 29 May 13 approaches, I thought I’d take a look at the release notes for an overview of what’s new. Of course there’s the usual upgrades to the various desktop environments, including, finally, KDE4, but something that surprised me was the inclusion of Firefox 3 beta 5.

Admittedly, Linux distributions often include non-final software by necessity. Many open-source projects spend years in the 0.x state not because they don’t work well, but because the authors don’t feel that it’s complete yet. (Often, a project will take their checklist and build feature 1, stabilize it, add feature 2, stabilize that, etc. so that you get a program that’s a stable subset of the target. Off the top of my head, FreeRADIUS was quite stable long before it hit 1.0, and Clam AntiVirus has been quite usable despite the fact that its latest version is 0.93.)

Lately, though, there’s been a tendency toward sticking with the latest stable release, at least for projects that have reached that magical 1.0 number. Sometimes they go even further. Only a year and a half ago, Fedora planned to skip Firefox 2 and wait for version 3. (Clearly, they expected Firefox 3 would be out sooner!) So it was a surprise to see that this time, Fedora has decided to jump on the new version before it’s finished.

Conventions and Distance

You may have noticed I’ve been thinking about fan conventions lately.

It started after last year’s Comic-Con, when I decided I wanted to go to something a bit less…intense. Last year’s Wizard World LA was nice, but a bit sparse, so I went looking for more comic and general sci-fi/fantasy cons within driving distance of the LA/OC area. Surprisingly, I didn’t find much. Gaming conventions, costuming conventions, Anime Expo, sure, but sci-fi? Pretty much just Loscon, which we both gave up on after 2002 (and from what I’ve heard, hasn’t picked up again). I asked around a bit on some forums, and someone on either Comic Bloc or Newsarama suggested WonderCon, and suggested considering the city as a vacation destination, not just a place to find a hotel for the con.

Since WonderCon worked out so well, I’m looking at what else might be fun. That’s part of why I did my price comparison last month, and Kevin Standlee’s comments got me looking at WorldCons and the like again. Not for this year, but maybe a few years out.

Looking at all these cons, I realized that beyond a certain threshold, distance doesn’t matter. Only the destination. If it’s far enough away that you have to fly, the only thing that distance impacts is the cost of your plane ticket. Whether your flight is 5 hours or 10 hours*, it’s still going to take up most of a day or night when you factor in dealing with the airports. Everything else, from hotel prices to whether you need a passport, a phrasebook, or currency exchange, is a factor of the destination.

WonderCon, I think, was at the boundary of driving distance from here. We could make the trip out in one day, but it was a lot more fun to break it into stages and make it a road trip. San Diego is at the boundary of commuting distance. We could drive out there in the morning and drive back at night (and I did that with my parents for over a decade), but it’s not practical to do for more than one day. Whereas if I wanted to, I could easily commute to Wizard World Los Angeles 2 or even 3 days. (As it was, we only went for Saturday.)

With two cons in Q1, and San Diego coming up in July, any traveling we do later this year is probably not going to be convention-related. As it is, we’ve talked seriously about three possible non-con vacation spots. But it might be worth casting a wider net for cons in 2009 or 2010.

*Katie and I were talking about this, and realized that it’s probably different if you have kids. In that case, a 5-hour flight probably would be significantly harder to manage than a 3-hour flight.

Silliest. Image Spam. Ever.

I don’t think I’ve seen this one in the wild, but variations pop up on Spam Or Not from time to time.

I’ve obscured the website address, though I’m sure it’s been replaced by now.

Seriously, how can you look at the combination of poorly-drawn not-quite stick figures (probably done with a mouse in Microsoft Paint) with the visual equation demonstrating the supposed effects of a diet supplement and not laugh?

Edit: I’ve realized why I haven’t seen these in the wild: We use the MSRBL-Images signatures in our spam filter, and that list is built using ratings from Spam Or Not.

Three Kinds of Time

I was thinking about the timeline of DC Comics’ Earth-51 (home to the Great Disaster in Countdown to Final Crisis) and trying to wrap my head around what the past and present might mean for a world that’s been created and destroyed twice in as many years, and realized that some of the time paradoxes make much more sense if you consider that there’s more than one kind of time.

Real-world time is, as you’d expect, the time that passes between when two stories are published. For example, it’s been 45 years since Spider-Man first appeared in Amazing Fantasy #15 (Aug. 1962).

In-story time is the time that passes within a story. So even though it’s been 70 years since Superman first appeared on the newsstand, it’s only been 10–15 years since his debut within the DC Universe.

The tension between these two leads to a strange, fluid take on time, which has its own issues.

But then you get into time travel and cosmic retcons, and in-story time can’t quite explain things. Read the rest of this entry »

Backwards

From a food allergy alert released today:

Cracker Barrel Old Country Store, Inc., is recalling “Chocolate Covered Almonds” due to undeclared peanuts and “Chocolate Double-Dipped Peanuts” due to undeclared almonds. [emphasis added]

I have to wonder: are they just really bad about keeping their ingredients separate, or did they get the labels switched on a couple of batches?

How does that work?

Wait a minute… how does one lease a tax refund?

The Born Queen

We’ve both finished reading The Born Queen, the conclusion to Greg Keyes’ The Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone. Yesterday we spent the day reading in tandem on the couch: I read book 3, Katie read book 4, and finished within an hour of each other. Determined to catch up, I read 100 pages last night and spent this morning and afternoon reading the final book.

It was well worth the wait.

The series is set two millennia after humans, led by Virginia Dare (explaining where the lost Roanoke colonists went), overthrew the demonic race that had kept them as slaves for generations. Virginia had discovered how to harness the sedos power, essentially magic. The last of humanity’s oppressors warned them that the sedos would eventually destroy their world. Of course, no one believed him.

2200 years later, this corner of the world is not unlike Europe in the early Renaissance. Except that the church is based on the sedos, in the person of saints, and its priests walk the paths to harness the sedos powers.

The world is also beginning to rot. Things of nature are dying, human alliances are crumbling, and terrible creatures thought to be myth are walking the earth. There are several factions who claim that they want to save it, but their true goals are suspect, and their methods differ greatly. The various viewpoint characters are thrust into the middle of things without any real sense of what’s going on: a holter, a princess, a novice priest, a knight, a swordsman, a composer and a queen.

One of the things I find so fascinating about this series (as I mentioned when I first read The Blood Knight) is the fact that everyone is acting on partial information. This makes them screw up, sometimes mildly, sometimes horrifically. And there’s a curveball that comes about 1/3 of the way into The Born Queen that turns everything on its head.

I don’t think it’ll give too much away to say that one of the key struggles in this book is for control of the sedos. Even 100 pages from the end, I wasn’t sure which faction would give the world a better chance of surviving.

Music also figures importantly, starting with the second book, where it’s learned that certain combinations of sound can have a profound effect on the human psyche. I found myself wondering whether Keyes had someone set any of the songs to music.

By the end of The Born Queen, most of the major questions about what’s really going on have been answered. Of course, they’re answered in pieces, by different characters with different agendas. The major characters’ arcs reach (mostly) satisfying conclusions, with some finding what they want, some finding what they need, some doing what needs to be done, and some getting what they deserve.

It’s weird to finally be done with the series, which started around the same time as this blog. The first post that I made that wasn’t “Hey, look! I have a blog!” was a review of The Waterborn and The Blackgod, Greg Keyes’ first novel and its sequel. In it, I mentioned looking forward to The Briar King when it came out.

Cities at Night, seen from Space

This is cool: a fascinating tour of the world’s cities as seen in visible light from the International Space Station.

Cities at Night, an Orbital Tour Around the World

It’s interesting to see how just lighting illustrates different patterns in city development. European cities have this star topology, US cities tend to stick to the north/south grid. Different countries tend to use different colors of lighting, with the western cities more yellowish and cities in the middle east and Asia more greenish. There’s a view along the Nile, where the river runs through the middle of a channel of lights, beyond which everything is empty.

There’s also a mosaic of the Los Angeles/Orange County/San Diego area, which really points out that there’s quite a bit of emptiness still in the OC area: The Santa Ana Mountains to the northeast, and the San Joaquin Hills to the sourthwest, make large dark areas. The northwest plain melds seamlessly into the Los Angeles area, while a narrow (but very bright) channel winds its way through the middle before opening up into south county.

The downside, as pointed out in the comments, is that this is all wasted energy. With lamps that direct all of their light downward instead of out into space, we could light our cities with less energy and keep the skies dark for stargazing.

(via Neil Gaiman)

What I Want from a Mobile Phone

I want a phone with…

• The basics: voice, text, picture messaging and voice mail. (check)
• Bluetooth connection. (check)
• Easily transfer files to my Linux computer. (check)
• Working voice dial.
• A real web browser (Opera, Safari, etc., not just WAP).
• Wi-fi capability, at least for its internet access.
• A camera with at least 2 megapixels of resolution.

Those I can get; it’s just a matter of shopping around.  (Well, looking at what T-Mobile has, since I’ve got over a year left on my contract) .  But I also want:

• A camera that actually shoots good pictures.  At least 3 or 4 megapixels, optical zoom, and can pick up color and detail in different light conditions.
• A music player with enough space to hold my entire music collection.

Admittedly, we’re getting into short skirt/long jacket territory at this point, but basically I want one device that can replace my phone, iPod, and digital camera.  I’m tired of carrying around all three.  At the moment, even the high-end iPhone only has 16 GB, which would just barely hold the music.  And while phones are cramming more and more pixels into their cameras, they’re still using tiny, fixed lenses.

I’ve said before that I think the iPhone, or a comparable device, will catch up to what I want in 2010 or so.  For now, I’ll have to raid the Batcave for a utility belt.

I can’t quite bring myself to get a Blackberry, but I keep looking at the T-Mobile Shadow. I’m a bit reluctant to run Windows on my phone, and really reluctant to run Internet Explorer, but it should be able to run Opera Mobile. And while the reviews seem to be good overall, they haven’t been impressed with the picture quality of the camera.

Well, one big purchase at a time. (It’s too early for me to get the full upgrade discount, anyway.) And who knows, a new phone that’s a better fit might be available in a couple of months when I’m ready to actually buy something.

Content Not Found

It’s 4:04 on 4/04.

Yes, sometimes I am easily amused.

The Race for Eslen

After working my way through The Briar King in bits here and there, I made time for The Charnel Prince.  I finished the second book Tuesday evening, and I’m currently 100 pages into The Blood Knight.

Meanwhile, I’ve been talking about the books* a lot, trying not to drop spoilers in case Katie might read them at some point in the future.  The night I finished book two, I had come home to find her on the couch, reading the first book.  Since she not only reads faster than I do, but has more time on her hands these days, she’s caught up.

It’s nice to really be able to talk about the books, especially since I remember so little of the one we’re both currently reading.

The funny thing is, at this rate, she’ll probably finish the series before I do!

*Greg Keyes’ The Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone

Tori Comics

So, what comic book event of the summer has me the most excited? Is it Marvel’s Secret Invasion?  DC’s Final Crisis? The release of The Flash Companion? Geoff Johns returning to The Flash for Rogues’ Revenge?

Well, that last one is close, but it’s actually Comic Book Tattoo, the upcoming ~500-page anthology of comic book stories inspired by Tori Amos’ music announced last December, and Comic Book Resources has a huge article about the project, including art.

(as last time, via Colleen Doran)

Flocking from Netscape

When AOL first announced they were discontinuing Netscape, they recommended Firefox (a logical choice for many reasons). Since then, they’ve also started heavily promoting Flock—to the point of offering seamless upgrades from NS8 to Flock. (In theory, anyway; I fired up the copy I had for testing and couldn’t get it to do anything but update to the most recent 8.x version. Confirmed. I let it sit open in the background for a while, and it eventually popped up the offer for 1-click Flock migration.) Netscape 9 has an update notice that offers to download Flock or Firefox.

The key issue, of course, is moving as many users as possible from a discontinued browser—there’s no doubt that security holes will be found in it over time—to one that is actively maintained.

Why Flock, specifically? Well, sticking with the same toolkit and user profile makes migration easier, so that narrows the field to Firefox and Flock. (Not sure about SeaMonkey’s profile.) Since Netscape 8 and 9 were big on integrating with websites, Flock’s “social browser” seems a slightly better fit. And it turns out most of the Netscape 8 team went on to build Flock. Talk about social networking!

(via Flock: The Netscape Spirit Lives On)

Foolish Links

IE9 to include alternative CSS.2012 standard instead of following anything remotely like the rest of the world.

Social tagging initiative from WaSP to physically tag bad web designers.

Opera hits 106/100 on Acid3 after discovering an Easter egg in the test.

The openSUSE mailing list announced OpenSUSE 4.1, with KDE 4.1, GNOME 4.1, MP41 support, OpenOffice 4.1, XEN 4.1, VirtualBox 4.1, and a 4-in-1 CD install.

Added: The Electronic Frontier Foundation has sent out a newsletter detailing its findings on a Congressional Listening program (apparently they monitor citizens for their opinions—who knew?), plans to move the EFF offices to an armored zeppelin, an NSA-sponsored social networking site (to “allow ordinary Americans to instantly share their private data with the government”), and Homeland Security’s conclusion that Wikipedia is a “Larger Threat Than Terrorism, Dixie Chicks Combined.” Sadly, the newsletter does not appear to be archived on the website.

Added: Virgle, a Virgin/Google joint venture to establish a permanent colony on Mars. Now seeking applicants for Martian pioneers. Takes the Google moon base from 2004 to the next level.

Added: A co-worker pointed out that all of YouTube’s featured videos are Rickrolls today. And it looks like Google is going all-out with some 15 hoaxes today. *whew!*

The Internet Storm Center is keeping a list as well.

California Craziness

Here are some interesting/amusing signs we spotted on our trip to Northern California last month.

This seemed appropriate for a trip to a comic convention. And like the Sylar Industries sign I posted earlier, all it needed was a little adjustment. Can you get a room with the power cosmic? Found in San Simeon, across the highway from our motel. (Keep in mind as you read on that the one on the right is the only doctored photo in the post.)

My personal favorite was this one in Sunnyvale. It’s always nice when city planners (or anyone making a sign, really) have a sense of humor.

Perhaps Mr. Speeder was frustrated by driving this street, somewhere near San Luis Obispo:

Read the rest of this entry »

Techno-weird Links

Lisa the Barbarian: A woman poses with a viking helmet and a sword…and an Opera Browser T-shirt. (via Espenao’s Opera the Barbarian)

CNET UK presents The 30 dumbest videogame titles ever, including “Spanky’s Quest,” “Ninjabread Man,” “How to Be a Complete Bastard,” “Touch Dic” and “Attack of the Mutant Camels.” (via Slashdot).

Cowboy Bebop at His Computer — examples of media articles (especially about pop culture) in which the reporters (and editors) clearly didn’t do their research. The title comes from a caption on a still from Cowboy Bebop. That’s not the character’s name, and the character in question is female. It probably is her computer, though.

Archeophone Records: Actionable Offenses: Indecent Phonograph Recordings from the 1890s. Comedians telling bawdy stories, recorded on wax cylinders. The write-up is PG, though the track list looks to be at least PG-13. Looked up after reading NY Times’ article on voice recordings from 1860 (recorded with ink on paper), whic