February 01, 2008

:w saves

I saw that on a t-shirt last night at an OLPC meetup; setting the stage for today's xkcd, a emacs/vi/etc. beatdown:

(I use nano)

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August 14, 2007

XYZZY

I can't think of anything geekier than my liking this article: Somewhere Nearby is Colossal Cave: Examining Will Crowther's Original “Adventure” in Code and in Kentucky

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August 07, 2007

Linux.com review of CoffeeWars

I'm partially to blame for DefCon's (the annual hacker con in Vegas) CoffeeWars, where hackers put their favorite coffee beans in battle to determine the best brew.
Linux.com, in their review of this year's con, gives us a mention and a short piece of history of our chambean-ion ship. So if you were wondering, is it "that" griffjon that they mentioned while you were reading Linux.com, the answer is yes.

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June 19, 2007

Adobe and Firefox

I just updated Adobe Reader to 8.0 - and Adobe used Firefox's addon infrastructure to install the software. That's nice, is all.

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June 17, 2007

On Startup

So, in my previous post I was lamenting the number of programs that start at boot. I've ruthelessly disabled the Quicktime/iTunes startup, winamp's agent, MSN messenger, and all those annoying TSR and update-checkers. I'm looking forward to being competent enough with Linux to drop windows altogether and never have to deal with its craptastic updating ever again (in most Linux versions, updating all the software on your system is a few easy clicks/commands!)

Anyhow. What DO I still let run amok at startup?

• Cygwin + SSHD - this gives me Linux like abilities to connect to my computer via SSH and transfer files/start and end programs, and what not. It pairs well with:
• MyEnTunnel - which maintains an SSH tunnel between my laptop and my webserver for secure email and remote access to cygwin
• A Backup monitor/program - 'cuz I like having those weekly incremental backups without having to worry about it.
• I8kFanGui - manages my fan speeds and CPU temperature, which gets around my thermistor problem
• VNC - because sometimes, SSH isn't enough with Windows. I lock this down to the local network only, though
• An IR remote control daemon - because you can't have enough ways to remotely control your computer (this is primarily for media control, though my winamp now has a sleek web interface.
• AVG - AntiVirus from Grisoft - one of the best and least-intrusive anti-virus programs out there

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The continued tribulations of my Inspiron 8200

My poor Dell 8200 - it was a lemon from the start. I've manually replaced the motherboard fans - three times, the CD/DVD drive more times than that (and it still sucks), and had to muck with the video data cable for the monitor when it started giving out. I can only say, thank god for sites like Parts-People, where you can buy replacement parts for Dells, cheaper, and with less hassle, than you can at Dell. This Inspiron reminded me to never ever buy a laptop from Dell outside of their Latitude line. I've seen Lats run over by SUVs and survive, where my Inspiron fails doing day-to-day activities.

Anyhow. I was having all the symptoms of another fan breakdown - the CPU never going into overdrive, but the fans always trying to run. Unusually, they were running even when my CPU was not all that hot (45C), and - more mysterious - both were running at reasonable RPMs, so obviously they were functioning fine. Some googling about turned up this thread which has seemingly proven correct - the thermistor circuit has gone haywire, causing my computer to think it's constantly overheating (thus, running the fans constantly and not speeding up, even when it really needs to). So now I have yet another program running in my system tray (which offends my geek-minimalist sensibilities), but my computer's managing better and staying within a reasonable temperature range. Woot.

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May 23, 2007

lost email

BTW - if you've sent me email this past week and I didn't respond, I might not have gotten it. An awesome script I wrote back in Jamaica that read an SMS and replied with bus directions got caught in an infinite, exponentially expanding loop[1] which drug the mail server to a grinding halt. At the same time, my learning (bayesian) spam filter's database grew to an unusable size, and the clean-up method corrupted it, causing me to receive all the spam from all my accounts, which is a deluge of viagra and bank fraud schemes. Cleaning that up and re-training my spam filter have meant some lost email. In geek talk, we call this "fun"

[1] The script reads a mail and tries to extract bus numbers, street names, or points of interest from it, then sends it back in up to 3 messages (cut up to avoid the limitations of SMS). It for whatever reason sent one of these to itself, resulting in 3 messages with street/bus/POI information, each of these 3 spawned 3 more, and so on. Bad.

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April 19, 2007

RCN Cable sucks (even more than most!)

They "upgraded" to a new digital cable system a few months ago, which, apart from having the most non-responsive, yet loud and advertisement-ridden interface for the onDemand stuff, has been cutting off my Internets!!!!

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December 24, 2006

Looking dapper

So, I finally took the plunge and continued the upgrade process on my Linux laptop. As background, I don't have the space or the time in any one place (since y2k, I've lived in 10 different places in 2 different states and 3 different countries!), so I own 2 laptops; one is a 2Ghz machine I run Win XPsp2 on, it's a Dell Inspiron that's caused me enough despair, and is heavy enough that I don't lug it around much, and the other is a 300mhz Dell Latitude CPi that is lightweight and low-power, and I drag it's indestructible box around everywhere (I've seen a similar CPx laptop be run over by an SUV and still boot - no screen, but everything else worked, even the touchpad!). The CPi has had a variety of Linux distros on it (it was bought with Win2k), and I've settled on (k)Ubuntu. Ubuntu is definitely too heavy for the thing, but it's the only debian-based distro I've found that has the right magic dust to work with the sound card. Every major DSL release I download a LiveCD and try it out, but not luck yet.

Anyway, it was stuck on Hoary Hedgehog for a while, but for a variety of reasons, most of which I'll admit center around usability, I finally brought it to Breezy Badger and this holiday season I've upped it to Dapper Drake. The move to Drake took for.ev.er - almost 24 hours, admittedly with a few very long waits for me to decide on overwriting config files as I walked away, went to sleep, etc.

However, it's happily purring along, with a few improvements that have been visible - the Synaptics touchpad drivers are better, and they feature a quick diasble-annoying-tapping option. Suspend has been amazingly improved, no more scary-screens, or instability (that I've noticed). It sucked a lot more of my HD usage, so I had to clean up some packages that have no business being on here (Celestia? Yeah, that'll work well with 300mhz and 128MB RAM!).

This is all in training to move whole-hog to Linux on my next computer purchase. I have zero interest in Vista, and while Mac is nice, it's a bit pricey. 'sides, I like this whole OSS thing.

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November 29, 2006

Workin' on the T'bird

I heart Thunderbird. I think it's a fantastic email client. But like all email clients, we abuse them and they break. With Thunderbird, it's a painful process to fix this. With Outlook, there is no painful process because you probably just lost all your emails. You back up regularly, right?

Note: my favorite all-time Email client was the old (1996-vintage) Eudora. I could activate my MP3 streaming from my home desktop to my work computer by sending myself an email. I also turned lights on and off by the same method. It was AWESOME. Sadly, it can't handle the crazy login methods I use nowadays, or RSS feeds, and the new versions that could got all sucky on me. I hear now Eudora's about to be re-written...using Thunderbird.

Anyhow. As for Thunderbird, you sometimes stumble into the Bad Parts. You might be eaten by a Grue. The Bad Parts are when you:

*Are moving a Tbird profile to a new computer

*Have trouble with your Tbird not starting

*Your Tbird emails are all "wonky" - displaying different titles, but always the same message?

I'm posting this here and in my wiki for future generations to amuse themselves with.

First, You need to find your Thunderbird profile, which is conveniently located in:

C:\Documents and Settings\[[USERNAME]]\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\default\[[RANDOM STRING OF CHARACTERS]]\Mail\[[EMAIL ACCOUNT NAME]]

Note that the Application Data directory is hidden, so you have to go and turn on the "see hidden files" in Folder Options to get past there. You also have to be wearing the Hat of Pointiness and have reached level 5 in at least one class before passing through. Also note that all the other cool programs keep their data here. It'd be good practice except for having to type/find/use "Documents and Settings" instead of how Unices/Mac does it, with the more simple "home" directory. Anyhow. Don't blame Tbird for being so obtuse, blame Bill. Don't even get me started on where the Windows equivalent to the *nix /etc/hosts file is! (It's in C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\ETC\hosts)

Back to our story. In this dark and abandoned place, you will find two types of inhabitants, FOLDER NAMES and their shadows, FOLDER NAMES.msf. First, use your one-shot Ring of Save Game and backup/zip/whatever the entire profile directory, then continue. If you're moving a Tbird profile to a new computer, you can move this entire profile directory over, but I seem to remember that blew up in my face and I ended up moving just the Mail folders over. Try it, let me know what works for you.

If you're having Tbird problems of not openingn/not showing you the right emails, keep reading.

Try deleting inbox.msf (While TBird is NOT running) (msf is the index of the email, Tbird will recreate it if missing) and re-opening thunderbird.

If that works, delete the other msf files. Otherwise, the best thing to do is to delete the entire profile directory (you made that backup, right???) uninstall Tbird entirely, reinstall the latest version, and set up your account again, then start dropping in the FOLDER NAME files (sans msf) while tbird is closed, and re-open it and see if that works.

Posted by griffjon at 06:19 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 25, 2006

Incremental Improvements

I fool around a lot with my old Dell Latitude CPi laptop. It's from 1998/99 or so (I bought it used at Agillion's dot-bomb auction in 2000). I run kUbuntu Linux on it, and use it as my travel laptop. It doesn't have much hard drive space, and very little memory, but it's light and has good battery life.

It's also a good learning tool. I find silly problems that I want to solve, and it lets me make progress. My recent mucking with it has been around general usage improvements, improving my usage of its limited memory while also optimizing for my personal usage. PArt of this was getting standby finally working (it takes forever and a day to reboot, and it's Linux, so doesn't really need rebooting like Windows does). Suspend I got working last year, and recent kernel upgrades made it so that I didn't have to much with the wireless card before suspending. Standby nevertheless wouldn't work right unless I deactivated the wireless card (it's old, an Orinoco silver, and doesn't have good power management).

Anyhow, I found a workaround; drop this script into your /etc/apm/scripts.d directory:

#!/bin/sh
# apmd proxy script to power down wireless cards
# that don't support iwconfig [interface] txpower off
# like old Orinoco silver/gold cards
case "$1,$2" in
suspend,*) ifdown eth0 ;;
standby,*) ifdown eth0 ;;
resume,suspend) ifup eth0 ;;
resume,standby) ifup eth0 ;;
esac


Then symlink to it from the resume and suspend directories (follow the permissions and patterns in there, I presume the numbers affect ordering of the script executions). Works like a charm!

UPDATE The ifdown/ifup on suspend screwed with my suspend working; removing that seems to have fixed it. Things is weird that way.

Posted by griffjon at 02:49 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 09, 2006

At least it's not chicken

Japan's robot sommelier thinks humans taste like pork:

But when some smart aleck reporter placed his hand in the robot's omnivorous clanking jaw, he was identified as bacon. A cameraman then tried and was identified as prosciutto.

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September 08, 2006

Science

XKCD hits the nail on the head, once again.

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June 17, 2006

Spam

I am getting SWAMPED with empty (zero-length-body) spam messages. Like, 1-5/minute. I added a procmail filter to auto-junk any email without a body:

:0
*$ B ?? < 1
spam

But I still find it annoying, even though it no longer technically affects me. Is this some badly-configured virus? Some bot checking for bounces?

Posted by griffjon at 11:07 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 15, 2006

It's worse than we thought

So, I've been using CVS for this summer class to keep all my reading, presentation slides from the prof, articles for my paper, and writings themselves, in sync across my home laptop, my travelling Linux laptop, and my thumbdrive (and my work computer at times, and a private directory on my website).

Though it comes with some annoyances when handling big annoying docs in directory structures and not plain text files, it's made my life a lot simpler (no more counting files in a directory, sorting by most-recently-modified, etc.)

So yeah, I'm working on my paper at the GTown building (the roof has a great view of the potomac, electrical outlets and open wireless!), and I just raised my arms and shouted towards the Potomac "I LOVE CVS!"

I especially love the automatic version numbers. I am on rev 1.2 of my paper. It gives me a sense of accomplishment.

I think this qualifies me for dorkiness, beyond geekiness.

Posted by griffjon at 04:52 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 15, 2006

More spamusement

It's times like these that I really wish I could actually contact the advertiser.

I am happy with your visiting today Sir,

I am ready to kill myself and eat my dog, if medicine prices here (link removed) are bad.

Look, the site and call me 1-800 if its wrong..

My dog and I are still alive :)

Posted by griffjon at 09:04 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 07, 2006

PlayListCopy

So, I don't own an iPod. I do own a USB memory stick, and I am an OCD winamp playlist maker.

My frustration is this: I have an EXCELLENT winamp playlist for x. I want to take this playlist to a party, or work, or whatever, using my USB stick. I am left with not many good options. I can go through, find each file by looking at Winamp's metadata and manually copy each one over (most of my music is labeled and in folders, but still, this takes lots of time for non-artist/genre related music).

Or I can use a winamp plugin to write it out to wav files and re-encode these. That's a lot of machine and processor time.

OR, I can write a little perl program that parses m3u files and copies them to the current Windows user's desktop into a directory named after the playlist, and share this code with The World. It's GPL, and available at

PLC.exe

source code

Posted by griffjon at 01:15 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 26, 2006

IE 7

FINALLY PNG SUPPORT.

PNG is a "Portable Network Graphic" -- it's the successor to "GIF" images -- it doesn't have the annoying GIF patent problems (which are moot now anyway), and it enables true alpha transparency, which means that you can design a semi-transparent graphic that looks nice ontop of any background. With GIFs, you have to change the entire image if you change the background color, and forget about overlaying on top of another image.

Also, it seems like they tore out all the pages from the Firefox manual and a few from Opera -- tabbed browsing, better security (I'll believe that when it doesn't get hacked immediately... but it does do at least on the surface a better job), and the ever-cool "scaling" effect that Opera has had for so many years now.

It's still super-bloaty, and requires a reboot to install it, and it's not like I'm about to even use it for anything but purely testing my designs purposes, due to my inherent distrust of all things MS.

But.... yay for the png support. Even if the CSS positioning support is f'ed up -- in a new, and different, way. Sigh.

Posted by griffjon at 09:38 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 25, 2006

OCD Moment: Animated subway ads

So, DC just installed animated subway ads. They look like bigscreen TVs on the walls of the tunnel that you watch while going past. Of course, this would in reality just look like a big blur. Coming home tonight we pulled to a stop by them, and they're just little vertical lines. It turns out that they're actually linear zoetropes, designed by an astrophysicist-turned-artist-turned-advertising entrepreneur, Josh Spodek. I'm not sure why I find this so interesting, but read through Spodek's page -- he certainly strikes me more as a geek and artist who stumbled upon a hugely valuable advertising scheme than, well, a slimy advertiser-type. I mean, the guy's an open-source software supporter.

He has patented his linear zoetrope, though. Prior art, I can only imagine, was a bit difficult.

Posted by griffjon at 09:41 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 09, 2006

New BlogSpam

I've been getting tons of linkless commet junk recently -- I'm guessing they're spam "pings" to see if the comments get automatically posted, or to get around the TypeKey authentication method -- some systems allow any user, once they've had a comment approved and posted, to post without approval. Anyway, it's very bizarre, but an interesting way to see which entries are "popular"

Posted by griffjon at 12:25 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 06, 2006

Junk email zen

Is it spam, or Dadaist poetry?

mitt, ride the honey as pianist, the subjunctive!!! caterer electric shock, of pigheaded the parliamentary blameless squander of travels the or bagel to revolutionize a byte of by tacitly, was challenge and snobbery optician, obliteration!!! empower pedagogical social studies!!! news Mar. U-turn, a M.A., wildlife the nicotine shiftless, retrieve rock swear word. hatchback to quill alignment, an congratulate legislator the

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March 18, 2006

Your Copyright > My Security?

The usual band of consumer-haters, the RIAA, BSA, and MPAA, have rejected a plea to the copyright office in the wake of the Sony/BMG debacle (remember, the audio CD that installs a rootkit backdoor into your computer, and if you try to remove it, it disables your CD drive?)

The request was for an exemption to the DMCA (Which makes tinkering with copy-control mechanisms illegal) in the case that the "threaten critical infrastructure and potentially endanger lives."

The media industry associations responded that this just made things too confusing for them, and restricted their ability to cook up reliable DRM (which may or may not threaten your privacy, security, and/or critical infrastructure).

Read more at Freedom to Tinker

Posted by griffjon at 10:36 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 16, 2006

Worst. Tech Support. Evar.

So, I wss trying to print out my 1040 from TurboTax to fill out my Fafsa more easily (it gives all these hints e.g. (line 37 on 1040...) ). Since I'd entered my DC filing information (before I'd figured out that I could file to get it all back as a nonresident), TurboTax wouldn't let me print my Federal filing without paying to print my DC filing. You'd think that'd be a simple thing to communicate and perhaps come to some sort of conclusion.

You'd be wrong:

Terence A: Hi, my name is Terence A. How may I help you? Terence A: Hello, how may I help you today? Jon: I am having problems printing/viewing my completed federal forms Jon: I also have entered a state form, but I don't currently want to print that Jon: TTonline is requiring me to print and pay for the state forms to print the federal form Terence A: Jon, we apologize for the inconvenience/delay that this had caused you. Let us see what we can do to help you out with this one today, okay? Jon: great Terence A: And just to confirm Jon, what version of Turbotax Online product are you using? Is it Turbotax 1040EZ, Deluxe, Premier, Ultimate or the Free File Alliance Program? Jon: FreeFile Terence A: Jon, did you get any error messages/error codes during the process? And if any, what was the exact error code/error messages that was generated so that I could take note of it? Jon: it doesn't seem to be an actual error, it just won't let me choose to only print/view my federal return Terence A: Jon, have you tried searching the Help options on the Support web site of TurboTax first for answers before contacting Technical Support? What steps did you take and what were the results?

Jon: Yes, they all instructed me to follow the path I had already taken to get to the print for my records menu, but nothing beyond that

(10 minutes go by. Did I break the chatbot and it had to go call for a real human?)

Jon: hello?
Terence A: Yes Jon, let me make sure I understand your concerns, you wanted to print and view your completed federal return and you can't. You also have entered information on your state but don't want to print that, is that correct?
Jon: Yes
Terence A: Jon, did you save first your federal return as a PDF FILE (".pdf" format) prior to viewing and printing?
Jon: I can't get to that step because it's asking me to pay for my state file
Terence A: Jon, can you please click on "state taxes" main tab.
Jon: ok
Terence A: Jon, what sub tabs under "State Taxes" can you see?
Jon: Your State Returns and State Review
Terence A: Jon, did you access your Turbotax Free File Alliance Edition through the IRS or is it through www.taxfreedom.com site?
Jon: IRS
Terence A: Jon, were you able to take note at the taxfreedom.com site below the red flag or red button that says "State available, fees apply" just below that red button?
Jon: I realize that the state print/filing costs money

Am I just being mined for demographic info, or is their help script truly this bad?

Terence A: But Jon, were you able to take note of that-"State available, fees apply" just below that red button?
Jon: I did not use the taxfreedom.com site, I came through the IRS. I do not know which red button you are talking about
Terence A: Jon, accessing
Terence A: Jon, accessing Turbotax through the IRS site will direct you to www.taxfreedom.com. You can double-check that later on to see the information that I was mentioning you after we troubleshoot your issue.
Terence A: Now Jon, can you please click on "Your State Returns" sub tab.
Terence A: Jon, what does it say on your screen?
Jon: it lists my DC return
Terence A: Jon, does it give you option to "edit" it or "delete" it?

At this point I'm fed up. I've already filed my DC request for reimbursement offline, but was just reluctant to actually delete it after putting the effort in, but the cost/benefit tipped somwhere during the last 20 minutes chatting with Terrence, and though I continue talking to him, it's out of spite to see how far we can go

Jon: Yes. I just deleted it so I can continue to print my federal return. I will just use the DC Gov't form for my DC return instead of filing through TurboTax
Terence A: Yes Jon. Can you please save it first as a PDF FILE before going through the process of printing?
Jon: NOW I can because I DELETED my state return. It was NOT POSSIBLE to do this previously without paying for the state return.
Terence A: Yes Jon. Please take note to save your return as a PDF FILE and to back up your returns as a TAX FILE using the "My Return" option at the lower mid-left portion of your screen and select "Other Options" then select "Download My Tax File" option.
Jon: that option does not exist on my screen
Terence A: In that way, you can have a reference for the next tax season and saving also your return as a PDF FIle will allow you to view or print a hardcopy of your return.
Jon: ah, now I see it
Jon: but when I had my state return entered it was still asking me for payment
Terence A: Would you agree that we have completely resolved your issue today?
Jon: yes
Terence A: Yes Jon. Federal is free but for State, there is a fee for that.
Terence A: Is there anything else I can help you with today?
Jon: no

Honestly. I'm actually still not convinced that I wasn't dealing with an advanced version of ELIZA.

Posted by griffjon at 05:01 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 13, 2006

Web 2.0

You've heard the hype about Web 2.0 and the social web. Well, that was last year. Meet Web 2.1

Posted by griffjon at 06:42 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 28, 2006

My New Hero

Stan Bubrouski is my new hero. He is the proud owner of null@vtext.com, which receives every badly addressed or mistyped verizon text message, including, it seems diagnostic error messages from OnStar-equipped cars.

Posted by griffjon at 06:05 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 25, 2006

Incoherence

So, here's some blantant plugging for an awesome stereo field analyzer for your music. It's a pretty stunning way to look at music. Plugins for winamp/itunes/media player are all available for free, and there's a professional version for better details.

Posted by griffjon at 03:53 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 21, 2006

Pringles Cans on the Saudi Border

This, among some others, are re-posts from my class blog that I deem readable and not-too-deep-into-the-materials enough to mirror here

In "Weaving the Authoritarian Web: Liberalization, Bureaucratization, and the Internet in Non-Democratic Regimes," Boas, details primarily Saudi and Chinese control on the Internet. This really made me want to buy some land on the Bahrain/Saudi border and install a little headless Linux box connected to a high speed or multi-modem dialup unfiltered connection in Bahrain on one end, and a wifi cantenna rig (O'Reilly recommends Pringle's) on the other.

Actually, in for a dime, in for a dollar, might as well use the winning methodology of the most recent DefCon "security" conference's wifi shootout (the 2005 winner achieved 125 miles), or the 2003 winner, which managed over 30 miles with equipment (beyond the wifi card and laptop) under $100.

The underlying point to the Boas paper of course is that they don't have to be perfect, just good enough to make the few who can evade the restrictions politically insignificant. This will continue to be somewhat of a cat-and-mouse game, as costs for access to alternate technologies/networks will likely fall over time (e.g. satellite, cell networks from neighboring countries, mesh wifi networks that route out through foreign connections, etc.), not to mention brave souls willing to take risks, as Jake mentioned talking about the Chinese reporter who posted a "blistering letter on the newspaper's computer system attacking the Communist Party's propaganda czars and a plan by the editor in chief to dock reporters' pay if their stories upset party officials." (The plan got dropped, but the hero of the story eventually got fired and the entire section of the newspaper has since been shut down).

Regardless, these ingenious little (architectual) tools and original-sense hackers provide an invaluable resource to ICT development; the Pringle's Cantenna has already found a use for an Egyptian entrepreneur to connect his home to his Internet cafe, and I can only imagine there are other similar projects.

Creativity becomes almost as valuable as access in rolling out ICT infrastructure projects, and the same forces are at work -- laws (protecting monopolies or restricting radio frequency usage, for example), cultural norms (a mesh network requires cooperation and a method to arrange antennas to maintain a mesh and not get stolen), market (cost-to-connect, cost of equipment...), and architecture; but it is with the architecture that creativity can have the impact. The others (law, culture, market) are beyond the control in almost every development project's time-frame and budget, but the architectural challenges might be already being pursued by the "mice" of the world.

Posted by griffjon at 05:45 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 15, 2006

Kensington

I have a Kensington PocketMouse Pro -- it's wireless, just barely smaller than a regular mouse, is optical, automatically goes low-power when not being used, and has a very unobtrusive USB dongle for an antenna, which stows inside the mouse itself for travel (stowing turns the mouse completely off, too).

I'm giving Kensington a big-up, because they not only designed a product that's useful to me, but they have the bestest tech support in the world. I bought my original Kensington mouse in 2002 or so, and its scroll wheel broke. I emailed tech support, and they sent a new one out, immediately. No "send us your proof of purchase", no "it's not our problem" no "it's out of warranty", no "mail us the broken one back or we charge you the full replacement cost (*cough*Dell*cough*) -- they just did it. And last week, the wheel on their replacement broke (I guess there's this one design flaw...). And guess what? I emailed them again, and they're replacing it again, no hassle.

I wish more companies liked their customers.

Posted by griffjon at 12:26 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Global Internet Freedom

The news about the "Global Internet Freedom Task Force" hit the blogosphere yesterday;

The State Department announced plans Tuesday to step up a campaign to combat efforts by foreign governments to restrict use of the Internet. At a news conference, Josette Shiner, a top State Department trade expert, called the Internet "the greatest purveyor of news and information in history" but said too often the flow is blocked by government censors.

Shiner announced the formation of a task force that will consider, among other issues, the foreign policy aspects of Internet freedom, including the use of technology to restrict access to political content.
(...)The United States, she said, has "very serious concerns" about the protection of privacy and data throughout the Internet globally, and in particular, some of the recent cases raised in China.

Now, demonstrably, the US is not the biggest fan on "privacy," unless you're trying to keep communications private from them (which, cynically, may be the underlying issue here) with their track record of not only the pains that it took to establish EU/US Safe Harbor, but also the most recent NSA wiretaps, previous methods such as Echelon.

I'm going to chalk this up to grandstanding. I'd hope that human rights issues have a higher priority than Net access, and we've done such a good job at convincing China to address those so far.

Besides, to issue a unilateral statement like that rings false; if anything, we should push this up into the UN and work on it there (Though, I guess it might get shot down too quickly? Can you even see the US signing something like this were it proposed by the EU, for example?)

Being the good little hacker-type I am, I'm taking for granted that government censorship is bad, and information wants to be free, yadda yadda yadda. If the US wants to press something like this, I feel that they'll have to start locally, regulating Internet companies that do business in restrictive regimes (Yahoo, Google, we're looking at you guys) and make it a higher barrier to jump over, force them, for example, to make Google.cn a fully separate entity with trademark/copyright agreements or somesuch.

(Oh, but then, that might open the door to lots of really, really nasty possibilities; say, a township wants to restrict net pr0n locally, there's now legislation giving a blueprint on how to create that effect.)

I can't see how this, though a laudable goal, is at all realistic or enforceable. This has and will continue to be an important issue for China, and we don't have much leverage.

If free, unrestricted, and private communication is what the US gov't really wants to promote, maybe they should grant the EFF and a few choice F/LOSS projects like GnuPG...?

Ah, the times, they are a'changin'

Copyright, 1993. The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) -- A federal grand jury is investigating exports
of a controversial computer program in a case that could affect how
software is distributed worldwide.
U.S. Customs officials asked for an investigation into ViaCrypt of
Phoenix and Austin Code Works of Austin, Texas, and the companies' plans
for foreign distribution of software, including PGP, a program that turns
data into an indecipherable code using encryption technology.
William Keane, an assistant U.S. attorney, confirmed that an
investigation is continuing, but declined to comment on the case.
The PGP program has been distributed worldwide over computer networks
by some computer enthusiasts who oppose the U.S. government's trade
regulations on encryption.
The National Security Agency, which monitors international
communications, has supported strict encryption technology export
regulations, arguing that it would be difficult to keep tabs on hostile
governments and foreign terrorists.
But opponents say the restrictions hurt sales and violate the First
Amendment that protects the right to publish information about encryption.
"I wrote PGP to make democracy healthier. I didn't do it to make
money," said Philip Zimmermann, a computer consultant who developed PGP.
"We believe everything we are doing is above board and well within the
law," said ViaCrypt president Leonard Mikus. He said the company had no
intentions of violating export regulations.

--PGP Subpoena

Posted by griffjon at 09:14 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 13, 2006

Comment Spam

I just got comment-spam (auto-tagged, thankfully) trying to advertise free monkey bestiality. WTF?

Posted by griffjon at 09:45 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 01, 2006

OK, blogging is dead

Pigeons to blog air pollution

Each bird will carry a GPS satellite tracking receiver, air pollution sensors and a basic mobile phone.

Text messages on air quality will be beamed back in real time to a special pigeon "blog," a journal accessible on the Internet.

(see on Slashdot)

Posted by griffjon at 09:20 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 21, 2006

eCivilDisobedience

The recent illegal wiretapping done by King George II reminded me of my old email headers from Jam Echelon (Wikipedia on ECHELON), and so I updated them to more current events and have added a piece in my wiki on how you can add custom civil disobedience headers to your email to add more noise to the wires and maybe get you on a watchlist even.

(I'd recommend switching up the words to make it more fun for everyone)

Posted by griffjon at 11:39 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 18, 2006

Search Engine vs Websites

SlashDot links to Jakob Nielsen's (UI guru) article about search engines leeching value from websites. I think webmasters complaining about this are being whiney, and here's why:

I feel that Nielsen's avoiding (not missing, mind you) an underlying problem of conflicting interests:

User: I want information on X
Search Engine: I want to give users information about X and advertise services related to X
Websites: I want users to become involved at my website that contains content about X

Users want a quick answer, Websites want them to spend some time, sign up/login/register/ignore the "subscribe to newsletter" checkbox being pre-checked, whereas Search Engines want to provide things that look like the answer as best/fastest as possible (and also throw some ads around it). If websites don't want so much leeching from search engines, they must become better known, get a solid brand and offer good and complete information.

A good example -- If I want information about a perl script, I know from experience and recommendation that I can go straight to perl.com or perlmonks and probably find the best answer, and more focused than a google search will generally provide. However, if I'm trying to find help about Random Microsoft Bug #8000436531, experience recommends that I avoid Microsoft.com (which you'd think would be the logical choice) as google will generally return more useful answers and **solutions** and viewpoints, whereas MS will provide only the MS-recommended approach, which may or may not take into account other issues (I love it when the help guide tells you to use a menu feature that's just Not There -- very helpful, thanks)

So, I'd recommend websites, if they're complaining about search engines sucking their users away, should ponder if there's a reason why the user would want to stay at their site -- is it comprehensive? Do you expire/charge for content? Do you require annoying registration? Move all that further back! Make content acquisition easier, and users will want to go straight to a known-good source rather than sifting through Search Engine results.

That being said, his recommendations are all valid, but before all that, make sure there's worthwhile CONTENT that Users are interested in and view as the definitive source on the Internet for. This might mean you need to narrow your focus, or work on expanding the quality of your existing focus a lot more.

Posted by griffjon at 12:43 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 10, 2006

2005 web in review

Interesting traffic facts for Griffjon.com:

I serve the most pageviews on Tuesdays, and between 11am and 3pm.

.mil addresses are the 6th most frequent visitor, behind .com, IP addresses, .net, .edu, and Canadian hosts.

Most of my traffic is googlebot searches.

Posted by griffjon at 10:27 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 08, 2006

grrrrrizon

I waited too long to upgrade the software on my cell phone. I bought it with the promise of an integrated MP3 player which wasn't there, and Verizon service reps kept giving me the run-around on how to enable it, but now they signed a deal with Microsoft that removes the poor, hidden MP3 playing capabilities in the cellphone.

Sigh.

Posted by griffjon at 09:48 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

The importance of allowing tinkering

It's stories like this, of a deaf geek hacking his cochlear implants to enjoy music again that not only warms my heart, but underlines the importance of fighting against laws like the DMCA (which he violated) and DRM-like protection. If this had been most normal situations of a hacker tinkering with a device, he would be liable for lawsuits left and right.

Posted by griffjon at 01:15 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 27, 2005

Google Ads

So, you may've noticed my Google search bar at the bottom, and the Google ads on the right side.

I think, though, it's a bad sign that the only searches run from the search tool are for "euphemism" -- twice.

Posted by griffjon at 08:47 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 17, 2005

A new hero?

Man creates colored bubbles:

Chemical burns, ruined clothes, 11 years, half a million dollars—it's not easy to improve the world's most popular toy. Yet the success of one inventor's quest to dye a simple soap bubble may change the way the world uses color.

Tim Kehoe has stained the whites of his eyes deep blue. He's also stained his face, his car, several bathtubs and a few dozen children. He's had to evacuate his family because he filled the house with noxious fumes. He's ruined every kitchen he's ever had. Kehoe, a 35-year-old toy inventor from St. Paul, Minnesota, has done all this in an effort to make real an idea he had more than 10 years ago, one he's been told repeatedly cannot be realized: a colored bubble.

Posted by griffjon at 08:27 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

$100 Laptop redux

From the BBC, backstory available here.

Although the laptops will initially be available to government only, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is in talks with commercial manufacturers to make it available on the open market.

To take part in the initiative, governments have to commit to buying a million machines for around $100 each.

...

To overcome the potential problem of secondary "grey markets" for the machines, Professor Negroponte said the idea was that they would be so ubiquitous and prominent it would deter potential re-selling.

"I hope there would be community pressure so it does not appear in the secondary market. The technology is in it so that the machine is disabled if not connected to the network after a few days," he added.

Now, I'm extending some credit here, based on the laptop's home page, that this "not connected to the network" means any network, not just the Internet. If that's not the case, then it will be a huge problem.

But the plan to avoid grey/black/"secondary" market problems (love those euphemisims!) by ... ubiquity? If companies can make money by bottling tap water and selling it at the grocery store, I posit that there's always money to made in reselling, no matter the ubiquity of the good. Now, make that good a super-useful laptop, and restrict who can acquire it through legal means (students, through gov't initiatives) versus the likely demand (pretty much everyone wants a computer, especially a laptop, for prestige/bling if not functional utility) (Heck, I want one!)... and... yeah.

Community pressure is an interesting thing to depend upon, and I can see some merit in it. With an obviously distinct item (a lime green laptop), I can see a best case scenario where people who aren't children seen with them are immediately recognized as thieves or having bought from a thief, and cultural/community sanctions/attitudes may obtain... Within the region that the project is advertised in... extra-region or international black markets won't be constrained by that social pressure.

Let me back off; I do think there is a lot that is being done well with this project -- the laptop has some good design features (particularly the crank-power option!) for the 3rd world situation. Hopefully the keyboard is dust/dirt/water resistant too. I just hope that the implementations, costing at least 100M, are as well thought out, and I don't think this part has really been shown as yet.

Posted by griffjon at 01:12 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 14, 2005

geek lust

I haven't had desire for a material good like this for years:

The Hard Drive Coffee Table top is an original 26" diameter hard drive platter from an early storage device (circa 1970). The center hub of the platter is solid aluminum. The custom-created pedestal is also solid aluminum; a cylinder measuring 5.9" in diameter and 18.5" in length. It has a machined top and bottom to fit into the hard drive hub and base, respectively. The base is a solid aluminum 12" diameter, 1.75" high round obtained from a now-defunct government laboratory. Four bolts are screwed into tapped holes in the pedestal in order to secure the hard drive platter and the pedestal is press-fit into the base. It is covered with standard 1/4" table glass. The completed design measures 19.5" high and weighs 64 pounds.

Posted by griffjon at 07:25 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 07, 2005

"Rights Management"

Putting a "Digital" before that... does that really change anything of note? DRM is the practice of restricting what you can do with digital files you've purchased. Like, can you listen to this CD on your computer? Can you copy it? Can you make a mix of it for your car with a few favorite songs from different CDs? Can you back-up a DVD (something I certainly wish was easier, as I just had to buy a second copy of Life and Debt as mine got too scratched). Wikipedia explains DRM.

Of course, the current news is Sony's DRM on recent CDs. It installed a program that kept you from being able to copy the CD, and was forthright about that. What it wasn't so upfront about was that it was doing so using a rootkit -- a blackhat method of getting around Windows' security (what little there is) to hide files from the system itself. And that any program could take advantage of this humongous hole by renaming itself to with $sys$ at the front -- poof! gone.

Any malicious program could use this hole and suddenly be invisible from virus-scans, spyware-scans, etc.

In fact, people immediately, once it got reported, found ways to use the hole to cheat at World of Warcraft, and even to get around Sony's DRM itself using the same hole.

Sony has now provided a (painful, many-email method) way to have in uninstalled (doing it yourself disables your CD-ROM drive completely), but refuses to admit that it was any sort of security blunder.

What's worse, the same guy who discovered this dug further and found that it sends the CD name and your IP information to Sony each time you play the disk, to get updated info on the CD -- even though the license agreement says that this is a one-way data transfer, not bi-directional.

Sigh.

Lots more information from the guy who discovered all this.

Posted by griffjon at 09:49 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 04, 2005

MIT's $100 laptop

I wrote an extended comment to a post in Slashdot and figured I'd duplicate it over here. To get the background, check out Laptop.media.mit.edu

Technology is not the answer to every problem.

Sure it is, you just have to frame the question differently. e.g.:

Problem: "Our school doesn't have a roof over it!
Answer: "You should have a fundraiser to buy roofing construction supplies and some alumni to volunteer labor"
Results: New roof for the school, community strengthening, cost of roof spread out among the entire community via the fundraiser.

Whatever. That might be cost effective, sustainable and useful. Really, you should say:

Problem: "Our school doesn't have a roof, we need CAD software, new computers and a trained IT specialist to help us design one!"
Answer: "Let us give your education ministry a loan from the IMF or DevBank to pursue a CAD-in-Schools project, delivering top-of-the-line CAD-capable desktop computers with the latest non-F/LOSS software on it, spending millions of loan-dollars that we'll have to repay later."
Results: New computers in every school which get ruined as they got delivered during the rainy season to schools with no roof.

But seriously. The problem of course is Negroponte can create buzz with a $100 laptop-for-every-child program, whereas "put a roof on every rural school" just doesn't quite get the same level of interest from most folk, despite the fact that the cost would be lower and benefits per cost much higher. Try arguing that for the value of ventilated pit latrines (or, gasp, running water) -- people blink at you, because they don't get the fact that that is a need for many schools in the developing world. Cheap computers, they grok.

This is not in defense, just explanation and frustration from my own experience.

Basically, I agree -- If you're gonna pony up $100US/child, lemme suggest, oh, maybe, a billion better projects you can direct that towards.

On the other hand, if you've got some of the basics, not having basic computing skills can be a real barrier in getting a good job. Current solutions (that I've seen enacted in programs!) are keyboards with a tiny lcd screen and palmOS for $200+, so a fully functional laptop with some made-for-3rd-world ruggedizing, solar/handcrank power, etc. concepts built in is a potentially valuable idea.

I find it interesting, however, that (according to http://laptop.media.mit.edu/):

"Please note that the $100 laptops--not yet in production--will not be available for sale. The laptops will only be distributed to schools directly through large government initiatives. "

I for one would pay twice the price to get a ruggedized, hand-crankable, low-end, paperback-book-sized Linux laptop. I smell something funny, economically speaking, going on here. Either the hardware cost will be at a loss and there's service/support/gov't contracting fees to balance it, or (as the website seems to indicate in the FAQ), it requires huge production runs to make it feasible, or possibly something else funny. I'd imagine the demand for these in the developed world would be reasonably high, so by doing this he's killing his profits that he could use to improve the design for the developing
world...

Posted by griffjon at 02:10 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 16, 2005

Grad Adventures: The First Big Paper

Actually, at this point I'm pretty much done. I might go back through and tidy things up one more time, check references, spelling, etc., but the structure is complete, and I get to revise it again after class discussion on the book manana.

It's a lit review on a wide variety of readings and one book. It's heavily academic and probably not my best piece of work, as I only really got in to one third (content, sadly, not length) of the readings, but had to find an argument that encompassed the whole set. Below are some tidbits from my writing process:

GoogleFight for neologism spell-checking

I'm referencing in my paper an idea of Foucault and I wanted to say Foucault-ian, but I didn't know how to adapt the word, because I've seen FoucaulDian and foucalTian both.

So I used GoogleFight to determine the most used version

Foucauldian wins 4:1 http://www.googlefight.com/index.php?lang=en_GB&word1=foucauldian&word2=foucaultian

In related news; I whoop the ass of a hoard of pirate cybermonkey ninjas.
http://www.googlefight.com/index.php?lang=en_GB&word1=GriffJon&word2=A+hoard+of+pirate+cybermonkey+ninjas

But I bet the Pirate Captain of the Internet could still be a fair fight.

Amazon for citations

One of the books for Monday's paper/presentation is Marginal Gains. I've been abusing Amazon's Search-inside-the-book to find some citations I'd failed to take note of while reading. Amazon also provides SIPs -- Statistically Improbable Phrases, that occur in one book and few (if any) others. In Marginal Gains, one of the SIPs is "enough petrol"

Yup, that's statistically improbable.

"Productivity"

While writing this paper, I discovered everything I can do in a given amount of time that doesn't include writing the paper:

-made and eaten dinner (kinda important)
-cleaned up the kitchen
-read up on today's DC newspaper
-checked email, blogs, etc.
-moved paper around
-cleaned out keyboard/handrest gunk on my laptop
-made this blog entries/responses

Posted by griffjon at 07:05 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 13, 2005

dreamweaver

I always forget just how much I despise DreamWeaver until I'm forced to use it. It really enforces a lot of design methods that I really and truly dislike.

Posted by griffjon at 11:56 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 11, 2005

Ad Revenue!

Oh, and I've made $2.60 on the new ads in 4 days. That's kinda exciting. They could maybe pay for my website. I'll have an e-business! Now I just need some venture capital to spend on a big re-launch party for my new dotcom.

Wait, sorry. wrong decade.

But still, at 4 days in, that's just over $0.50/day, which would cover the hosting and domain name costs for my site. Which ain't much, but hey, for the amount of effort I put into it...

Posted by griffjon at 10:42 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 02, 2005

My next band-aid purchase

Duct tape style bandaids.

Posted by griffjon at 10:43 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 25, 2005

MT Upgrade

So, I decided to just upgrade to the latest MT, which includes some built-in spam protection. We'll see how that works with the trackback spam, and maybe I can take off the annoying registered comment thing if it works well enough!

Posted by griffjon at 11:07 AM | Comments (0)

September 23, 2005

Trackback spam

I've been getting aq whole lot of trackback spam, so I'm disabling that for the time being to see if I can get off whatever list of open-trackbacks I've gotten on.

In the mean time, here are the IPs of spammers I've blocked:

Deny from 66.70.
Deny from 66.134.121.182
Deny from 66.159.239.140
Deny from 66.219.161.190
Deny from 67.15.130.
Deny from 68.83.28.204
Deny from 71.105.32.203
Deny from 80.53.1.130
Deny from 80.58.3.172
Deny from 82.201.185.22
Deny from 139.179.14.111
Deny from 140.78.61.8
Deny from 194.58.41.126
Deny from 200.50.43.161
Deny from 203.190.254.9
Deny from 204.157.
Deny from 212.227.109.
Deny from 218.177.52.149
Deny from 218.248.1.13

Posted by griffjon at 08:38 AM | Comments (0)

September 20, 2005

GWU Wireless and Linux!

So, tho GWU doesn't claim it's possible, Linux can access the wireless network and VPN system they have in place.

Getting the Cisco VPN software can be a bit of a challenge. Google for it (linux cisco VPN) or ask the helpdesk -- they do have a copy for Linux. I was able to find it at another university unprotected (most univs required logging in for downloads, but not all).

For Debian systems, this is the beginning of the solution, from Ubuntu Forums' poster "hemps":

1. Mine was a fersh install
2. Place your latest Cisco Client in your home directory.
3. Do a sudo apt-get install build-essential
4. Do a sudo apt-get install gcc
5. Do a uname -r to find the correct kernel-headers for your build.
6. Use synaptic to search and install the correct kernel-HEADERS, not source.
7. Untar your Cisco Client, go to the vpnclient folder and do a sudo sh vpn_install
8. Answer all questions, the defaults worked for me.
9. make sure you start the vpn sub-system with
sudo /etc/init.d/vpnclient_init start
10. Copy your .pcf profile to the sudo cp /etc/opt/cisco-vpnclient/Profiles.
11. Do a vpnclient connect (without the .pcf extention)
12. Hope this helps.

The VPN subsystem doesn't start by default, so you'll have to do step 9 every reboot until you add it to your startup. The keys for me were steps 5 and 6 (I used apt-get instead of synaptic).

HOWEVER, if your wireless card is listed as wth01 or somesuch (anything but another eth0/eth1 thing) you'll have to patch your system some more, search for interceptor.c -- it's not too difficult to fix this.

Posted by griffjon at 09:31 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

PDF Bluescreens in XP and more tech frustrations

I've come to the rather sad conclusion that I can't read academic papers on my computer -- can't easily annotate, underline, and write long arguments in the margins. The tech isn't there. And especially with some of the policy reading, it's so incredibly dry and info-dense but insight-sparse that I find myself scrolling through it instead of reading it, and I come to the end and have no clue what I've just read.

Two of my 3 classes give out pages of URLs for each class, links to online journal archives, etc, so I spend an hour or so searching, downloading and printing. I appreciate being able to access these documents online, for sure (well, except one prof's links are all to scanned pages, not OCR'ed into text, so no searching, copy/pasting, etc., blah), but resent the extra hassle and time pushed on to me by this. I'd rather they go thru whatever University printing system they have and produce a photocopied book at the beginning, honestly, or use their duplication abilities and student workers to make copies for the class, it's not like it's a huge class, less than 20 people. If you're assigning 10-15 hours of reading, please don't add 2 more that is printing said reading.

Anyway, this means buying printer paper and carrying my laptop into the office room when no one's using it and hooking myself up to the printer there and printing many many files every week. Many of which are huge and annoying PDFs. Whih there's now a bug in Windows that causes a fucking bluescreen of death when printing (some) PDFs. Yay. Oh, it's a known bug, and Microsoft has a "hotfix" for it -- but they won't give it to you unless you call their support line. And guess what? You have to pay $$$$ to call their support line.

So, I've gotten all but one article printed out for next week. Since I've found that this is indeed a PDF error, ,and not some horrible hardware problem that would really send me too the looney bin right now, and the PDF I still need to print is thankfully not the photos-of-text variety, I can technically prolly copy it into Word and print from there. So all is well, but I think I'll wait on printing that article for now. I can potentially print it in Linux, but as much as I hate printing in general, I'm not sure I want to play with getting that working in Linux, either.

Today is not a great technology day. My Georgetown netID won't work, so I can't connect to the "blackboard" system for my tech/culture/dev class, I still haven't been able to get support on connecting my Linux laptop to the GWU wireless network VPN, my computer is being annoying, and my bed is broken, which, after so much effort to drag the damned thing out here, is not nice of it.

Grr. And it's noon and I've not read a page yet. Guess I should go do that.

Posted by griffjon at 11:01 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 02, 2005

DRM

The EFF has an excellent, easy-to-read, if hard-to-accept explanation of why DRM (digital rights management) is a dangerous and slippery slope, especially as being practiced by iTunes, Napster, Microsoft and the like:

The Facts: You Bought It, But They Still Own It

Imagine if Tower Records sold you a CD, but then, a few months later, knocked on your door and replaced the CD with one that you can't play in your car. Would you still feel like you "owned" the CD? Not so much, eh?

But Apple reserves the right to change at any time what you can do with the music you purchase at the iTunes Music Store. For instance, in April 2004, Apple decide