K-Squared Ramblings

Firefox: Going for the Record

For the upcoming release of Firefox 3, the Spread Firefox campaign is launching Download Day 2008: a campaign to set a world record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours. Participants are asked to pledge to download Firefox 3 on the day that it’s launched. The exact date hasn’t been scheduled yet, but everything seems on track for June. (via The Mozilla Blog)

Update: The release date is June 17.

Ignore This Sign

I don’t think that’s quite what they were trying to say…

Watching Opera

My first post on Opera Watch is finally up: What Makes a Safe Browser?

It grew out of my rant on blocking IE6, which pulled in aspects of PayPal’s comments about blocking “unsafe” browsers. I had it mostly finished a month ago, but someone asked to review it before I posted it live, and he promptly got swamped by work on Opera Dragonfly. I finally got the go-ahead about 2 weeks ago, but I was caught up in packing, and then moving, and then unpacking.

Things are finally settling towards a semblance of normality, and with the recent change in how Opera treats EV certificates, I figured it was time to post the article before it became completely out of date.

Hidden Costs of Moving

This past week has mostly been taken up by unpacking, at least to the point that we can use things. We got most of the bedroom set up the first night — we needed somewhere to sleep — but the rest has been slow going. We finally got the TV and DVD player hooked up today, and tested it by re-watching Raiders of the Lost Ark.*

One thing I’ve noticed is all the extra expenses that pile up after the move.

You have to replace things lost during the move. I misplaced the screws that held together the bed frame when I dismantled it, so after we moved the last boxes in and got cleaned up, I drove out to Lowe’s looking for replacement hardware. Similarly, we forgot to remove the under-the-cupboard paper towel holder, and had to get a new one.

There are also things you can’t take with you. Stick-on wall hooks in the closet, for instance.

Or things that are included in one place, but not in another. Our old apartment had a built-in lock on its garage storage. At this place, we had to get a padlock. (Well, actually, we didn’t. A day after buying it, I found one in my toolbox that I’d forgotten.) We also had to get a shower curtain rod. Fortunately we have plenty of lamps, but that’s one I’ve run into when moving before.

All this on top of the stuff you expect to pay: rent, deposits, boxes, movers or a rental truck, pizza for friends who are helping, etc.

*Regarding Indy, I had originally planned to re-watch the entire Indiana Jones trilogy before going out this weekend to see Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. But it took a while to empty enough boxes to get the TV set up. We did manage to watch Last Crusade on one of the computers, which was a bit awkward. We went out with friends on Saturday to catch the new film. It was a lot of fun, but not phenomenal. Better than Temple of Doom (which is still better than a lot of films) but not as good as Raiders or Last Crusade.

Alphabet Soup: XP SP and EV SSL XSS!

Sorry for the lack of updates this past week. I was just way too busy prepping for our move this weekend.

A couple of interesting news bits I noticed when I got into work this morning:

It looks like I’ve been lucky with installing Windows XP Service Pack 3. I’ve had no problems with the one machine I installed it on. According to Information Week, a lot of people are having serious problems with SP3, including BSOD on AMD-based systems.

Also, NetCraft has a screenshot of a PayPal page with both the green bar of an Extended Validation (EV) SSL certificate and a cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability. It’s a step or two beyond the standard lock icon, but there are still limits to what an EV cert can tell you. Unfortunately PayPal and others are really trying to drum “green bar = safe” into people’s heads.

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)