Category Archives: Rants and Raves

Today’s useless legislation brought to you by…

Connecticut state senator Andrea Stillman thinks that you should pay a $250 fine for using your cell phone at a gas station because she heard their might be a chance that your cell phone could cause a fire.

Of course, there is no evidence that even one fire has been caused by cellphones, and experimental evidence shows that it’s far more likely that simple static electricity is the cause of many more fires. Perhaps we should outlaw those silky undergarments that spark when you slip in and out of your car.

Nah, that would be a tragedy.

“Who cares what others think?” redux

A couple of days ago I commented on the whole podcastalley hullaballo and the role that popularity plays in the actions of blogger/podcasters. You can go back to here if you missed it all, or just wanted to review. My point was really that pursuing popularity (or more specifically, superficial measures of popularity) was kind of silly. You can get upset that you aren’t at the top of somebody’s list, but it’s not going to make you more likely to do things that are of value, but rather only what you need to do to be popular.

But no less a network personage than Wil Wheaton gives me some pause in that overall assessment: he makes me think that perhaps more goes into it than I had presented in my simplified, two toned world.

You see, Wil is saddled with the legacy of having played Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation. As a young actor, he was given some of the most hackneyed, stilted, warped and generally contrived lines ever to grace a science fiction show (and that’s saying something). The idea of having a boy genius on the Enterprise could have been good, with brilliant writing, but without brilliant writing it was a completely hopeless task. There were brief flashes where things worked out, but overall it came off as kind of silly.

That’s not to say that I’m not a fan of Wesley Crusher. There are many characters on STTNG who I found much more consistently annoying, and virtually every character on the many successors to STTNG were more annoying. I think that Wesley gets a bum wrap.

But now I’ve shown my geek colors, what did this have to do with the original intro? I’m getting back to it.

Wil is faced with one of those TV Guide polls where people choose “their most annoying Star Trek character”, and is dismayed by the fact that he (or his character, rather) was leading in the early polls. His comment:

Normally, I’d stuff this ballot box entirely on my own, but if some of you WWdN readers want to legitimately and honestly vote for another character, like The Computer Voice for instance. I mean, come on! How many times did the stupid Ship’s Computer actually save the crew? Yeah! That’s what I thought. She’s got nothing on Wesley Crusher. I would be ever so grateful.

His comments seemed eerily familiar, but for some reason I found myself feeling more empathy for Wil than I did for my fellow podcasters who may have been suffering in similarly unscientific polls. And I wondered why I reacted differently to Wil than to others.

Perhaps it is because Wil has written so eloquently about the pain of being perceived as an unpopular character on a very popular television show. He spelled it out so that while we haven’t experienced it, we do all relate to it, at least in some way. We all want to be perceived as being good at what we do. We crave that validation, even years after we’ve made our own internal peace with ourselves. We still want to be picked first. We want to work with the cool people at the cool job and do the cool thing that everyone talks about.

So perhaps I am being too harsh. If I can empathize with Wil, perhaps I should be able to empathize with others. We don’t need praise because it will bring us fame or money. It’s much more personal than that. And I shouldn’t have pretended like that wasn’t a valid concern.

Addendum: Most annoying character: Lwuxana Troi, definitely. But I bet you Majel had a blast playing her.

Screw You, America West

Well, it’s one o’clock in the morning on Monday. If everything was right with the world, I probably would be at the Oakland Airport awaiting the arrival of my wife and son on their scheduled America West flight. After all, I checked the flight information before I left for the airport, and all seemed well. But what apparently they didn’t bother to update was the fact that my wife and son were held onboard the plane in Las Vegas for over an hour so that they missed their connecting flight.

For no fucking reason at all, other than their own blatant incompetence in scheduling gates for arrivals.

So, my wife and son get to have about four hours of sleep in a hotel in Las Vegas before boarding another flight (via Southwest) to arrive at 8:30 9:05 in the morning.

Screw you, America West.

Anybody else have problems with America West? Pile them on! Let’s start a new meme for this craptacularly bad service.

Update: Wife and son are safely back home. It was nice to see them both.

Oh, and screw you America West.

Student Arrested For Terroristic Threatening Says Incident A Misunderstanding

One of my (admittedly many) pet peeves is when law enforcement overreacts to a situation. Today’s example comes fro Clark County Kentucky, where an 18 year old student has been arrested for writing a story about a zombie attack on a high school. He claims that he was merely writing a short story, and that it was all taken out of context. The police call it a second degree felony.

He’s currently being held in a detention facility after his bail was raised to five thousand dollars.

I’m glad that the police and district attorney of Kentucky are occupying themselves with trying to prevent their high schools from being overrun by zombies. After all, threat of zombie attack is every bit as credible as the threat of WMDs.

Idiots.

Sick of Rain

Damnit, when I was living in Oregon, I could put up with this crappy weather, but I live in California now. Can’t we just call it quits on the rain and have a couple of hundred days of consecutive sunshine? I’m tired of puddles damnit, I think my webbed toes are coming back.

And what’s with the perversity of the universe? Lately some mornings have been remarkably nice, so I put on a happy Hawaiin short-sleeve shirt, and go to work. But when work is done, it’s crappy and raining again!

I’ve had it.

Music download prices to rise

The Register reports that major music labels are trying to get music retailers to increase prices. What a good idea! Let’s make it even more costly for individuals to acquire music, that’s sure to drive down the rates of copyright infringement!

Seriously, what are they thinking?

The problem appears to be related to Apple’s iTunes Music Store. Apparently 65% of all music downloads for money occur through the iTunes music store. Apple’s success in online marketing of music appears to be at the expense of the major labels (or so they apparently believe) and they apparently aren’t happy.

I do see why they are worried. The wholesale price for songs is 65 cents per track. Apple collects 99 cents per track, netting themselves 34 cents. The record companies do have expenses that Apple probably does not: they do after all pay to produce albums, and they have to manufacture them. One could expect that over time, online distribution of music will become the norm, and the overall market for the solid vinyl plastic form of music will become a thing of the past, and record companies will not be able to maintain their lofty lifestyles.

But it’s there fault for handing a huge market over to Apple for a pittance. You can’t put the djinni back in the bottle, and it will be damned tough for them to take the market back. Raising prices at this point results in a Pyrrhic victory for all businesses involved.

It’s time to evolve or perish.

Another Librarian Who Doesn’t “Get It”

Oddly enough, I find myself agreeing with Dave on this matter: Gorman doesn’t have much respect for blogs or Google.

In my career, I’ve done a fair amount of library research. I’ve tried to find books related to esoteric topics by hunting through card catalogs, pouring over stacks and generally just browsing. It’s not a very efficient use of my time, and unfortunately it requires that I actually cart myself to the library. Yes, I know, many libraries now have online catalogs, but they do nothing to index content, and therefore they are only useful in telling me if they have a resource I already know about, not finding one that might be relevant to a given query I have.

Let’s accept for a moment Gorman’s basic premise: that Google is a terrible search engine that returns links in random order. Even if that were 100% true, his opposition to the digitization of millions of books by Google is absolutely and completely unfathomable. If there is one thing that is obvious, it’s that providing universal availability to the bulk of published works in existance can do nothing but increase the general level of education world wide. He says…

In the eyes of bloggers, my sin lay in suggesting that Google is OK at giving access to random bits of information but would be terrible at giving access to the recorded knowledge that is the substance of scholarly books. I went further and came up with the unoriginal idea that the thing to do with a scholarly book is to read it, preferably not on a screen. It turns out that the Blog People (or their subclass who are interested in computers and the glorification of information) have a fanatical belief in the transforming power of digitization and a consequent horror of, and contempt for, heretics who do not share that belief.

The problem with this idea is that doesn’t properly understand the economics of the situation. It’s glamorous to have nicely bound copies of books: I have thousands in my house. I love them dearly. I do find them more pleasant to read than text on the screen. But simple economics makes it impossible for most communities to have these warehouses of dead trees. Most libraries aren’t very interesting places to go, because they can’t afford to fill in the long tail of interest that humans being have. The big ones are expensive monuments: useful, prestigious but not within the reach of the vast masses who crave for information and education.

Gormon seems to want to justify his own existance by claiming that he’s the right professional to act as an intermediary between the knowledge that the world needs and the individuals who need it. Not only is he wrong in his particular case, he’s wrong in principle. The best of all possible worlds occurs when there are no intermediaries at all: when anyone can access whatever information they want whenever they want as cheaply as humanly possible. When we need the assistance of librarians and scholars, we will be able to find them on the internet as well, at least if they decide to come down out of their ivory tower and participate.

Scoble is laying down fertilizer

Mark Hughes reacts in much the same way (but far more entertainingly) than I have to the cheerleading that Scoble is doing for his corporate puppet masters. The best part:

Robert, you haven’t been fired for what you say because you’re not a “journalist”, you’re not any kind of respected voice, you’re just a dancing bear. Microsoft desperately needed a marketing shill like you to make it look like they were more open, but you haven’t actually produced any of this “openness”, “innovation”, or in the latest round of Gatesian NewSpeak, “interoperability”.

If real Microsoft programmers went ahead and said what they think without fear of censorship, that would be open. Linux developers say whatever the hell they want, and are only judged on the quality of their software. Even our insanity is better–our crazies are crazier than your crazies. Even Sun developers can say what they think these days, now that Schwartz openly kicks sand in the face of corporate rivals on his blog.

I know it’s beginning to look like I’m gunning for Scoble, but I find his apologetics for Microsoft to be annoying. Scoble is the amiable face to a vast, unsympathetic and largely inept corporate behemoth. I’m sure he’s a nice guy, but he is spreading fertilizer. It might just be possible that occasionally he is able to serve his corporate puppet masters and you, his customer.

But I’m not betting on it.

Elementary Crypto Lesson

I’ve been interested in codes and cryptography for quite some time. I find them at the fascinating intersection of history, mathematics and computer science: all topics that I like to read about and experiment with. Let me give you a basic crypto lesson, with a moral at the end.

Let’s say that all your messages are coded just with capital letters, and you remove all spaces. This gives you an alphabet of (suprise!) 26 letters. Let’s say that you wish to encode a message. You think to yourself: golly, I know what I’ll do. I’ll convert each letter its corresponding number in the range of 1-26. That will make it confusing! So my message HELLO will translate into

8-5-12-12-15

But that doesn’t seem very hard. People could crack that pretty simply. What to do… what to do…

Well, I could scramble the letter order. Perhaps if A was represented by 13, and B by 8, and so on, they couldn’t figure it out. But if you do cryptograms in the newspaper, you know that even with a modest amount of code text, you can crack these things pretty easily using frequency analysis and the like.

Let’s go back to our simple code again. Imagine that we had a second text, the same length as the first that we could use as a key. To encode we add the two numbers together, and if the result is greater than 26, we subtract 26. That will certainly jumble up the frequencies, preventing some kinds of analysis, and since the key is long, techniques for polyalphabetic ciphers won’t really work either.

But there is a serious flaw. Imagine that you could guess a word in the cipher text. Perhaps if the message were addressed to me, it would contain BRAINWAGON or even worse VANDEWETTERING. You could try to subtract these words out of the cipher text, and if normal words popped out the other side, you would have a partial decrypt of both the message and the encoding stream. This may seem difficult if all you are used to is normal substitution ciphers, but in fact it is dead simple to break.

One way to avoid this problem is to use what is called a one time pad. If the encoding stream is truly random, then when you can’t recover the encoding stream (it is, after all, perfectly random). One time pads are perfectly secure, with the caveat that you can never, ever, ever reuse a one time pad. Why? Because then you could subtract the two messages, the one time pad data drops out, and you are left with the simple, easy to break case listed above.

Why the cryptography lesson? Because Bruce Schneier (author of the excellent book Applied Cryptography) points out that no less than Microsoft makes this exact error. When you save a Word document, it reencodes it with precisely the same stream, and therefore if you have access to multiple versions of the same document, you can recover the entire document with elementary cryptanalysis.

This is one of the reasons I like open source: you can audit software to find errors like this, and work to correct them quickly.

Anyway, if you like cryptography, privacy and information issues, subscribe to Bruce’s Cryptogram. It’s good stuff.

That Whiff of Decay…

Michael Malone has an article which has been going around the blog circuit, hypothesizing that there may be a whiff of decay about Microsoft, that the Redmond empire may have chinks in its armor.

Hey, it’s a popular idea, at least among the Open Source beatniks that I normally hang with. But we all know that their opinions are often formed by fanaticism rather than pragmatism. But just because they are fanatical is not a guarantee (or even evidence) that they are wrong.

Microsoft cheerleader Robert Scoble has something to say to counter this idea. But strangely enough, I sense more of the decay in the answer than I did in the original question.

It’s perhaps an unavoidable but nevertheless sad feature of decay that those close to it often deny that such decay is going on. In my experience, the more strident the assertion that all is well, the more uneasy I feel about the future direction.

Microsoft has given us plenty to be concerned about. Security and reliability of Microsoft products continue to be at the forefront of all sane consumers worries. Let’s face it, when you can only rely on your computer to be free from viruses for a few minutes after connecting it to the Internet, you are entirely justified to be concerned.

What does Scoble have to say?

Also, when I talk with “regular people” (you know, the people who don’t write code, but use computers) they kept telling me “solve your security/phishing/malware/spyware problems.” Or, “why do we need 3D graphics? Why can’t you make the performance/reliability/usability of Windows better?”

In fact, go back a few weeks where I asked my readers for what things they wanted Microsoft to do. Overwhelmingly you all said to focus on the basics and nail those. I don’t remember anyone asking for new 3D graphics.

A few weeks? People have been agonizing over problems caused by viruses and spyware for years. Granted, these problems have escalated dramatically in the last few years, but it’s not like anyone with any reasonable vision at all couldn’t have predicted this outcome. The idea of having untrusted code running in the context of a browswer or mail program was imbecilic to begin with. It constantly shocks me that class action lawsuits have not been filed against Microsoft for the absolute havok that this idea has perpetrated on consumers.

Longhorn is now years late because, as Scoble says, the Longhorn of PDC03 is no more, replaced by a new vision. I’m left wondering why they didn’t envision a secure, reliable operating system two years ago, and are only now beginning to come to grips with this basic idea.

Sliding down the slippery slope

I’m not paranoid.

Damn, I just realized that by saying it, I probably am, but holy-land-o-mercy. Have people gone completely insane?

A high school in Sutter California has ordered all students to wear mandatory RFID tracking tags.

The badges introduced at Brittan Elementary School on Jan. 18 rely on the same radio frequency and scanner technology that companies use to track livestock and product inventory.

Well folks, the transformation from “place of learning” to “place to store livestock and/or criminals (your pick)” is complete. And people wonder why academic achievement in the United States is so low.

It’s absurd to think that a group of 600 children in rural California need to have tracking devices akin to those attached to sexual predators just so that they can prevent vandalism and “speed up taking enrollment”. If I were a parent in their district, I’d be completely outraged. What this really appears to be is a draconian measure designed to limit the involvement (and thereby, the expense) of having teachers and staff deal directly with students and their problems.

Most kids aren’t criminals, but treating them like they all are will certainly not help. It’s your job to teach kids and help them become good members of society: do you really think that “we are watching you all the time?” is the message that you need to send to them to make them behave?

You’re not in the middle of Richmond or L.A. for pete’s sake. You’re in podunk rural California, and you are dealing with kids who are 14 and under. Get some perspective, man.

More musing on the nature of communication…

Today I was scanning my list of blogline feeds, and noticed an update to The QuotationsPage, which included this quote by Hansell B. Duckett:

What this country needs is more free speech worth listening to.

A nice quotation, and one that I agree with, but perhaps with a different spin that was intended.

To illustrate, let me present the following anecdote. I’ve taken a number of drawing classes in the past (mostly with beginners, the group that most matches my own ability) and i’ve noticed that I have an approach which is different than most. Most people sit and concentrate, and draw very slowly and precisely. They might work for a full half-hour and only fill in the edges of part of their subject matter. What they’ve drawn looks okay, but it’s clear that it will take them hours and hours to get something fully fleshed out, much less completed.

I have a completely different approach. I attack the page with careless disregard for the exact placement of any line. It isn’t that I actually want to be careless. I simply cannot tell whether any particular line looks right without drawing it in relationship to all the others. The best strategy for me is to put as much down on the sheet as I can as quickly as I can. I can’t visualize the partially completed drawing, only the completed drawing, so it makes sense to try to get a reasonable representation of the complete drawing so that I can see if it matches my vision.

The point? Well, writing is a lot like that. Podcasting is a lot like that. You could spend a great deal of time agonizing over the individual strokes, but you get far more out of just plunging in, boldly trying new ideas, smudging, erasing, and even occasionally wadding things up and throwing things away.

If you want to generate more free speech worth listening to, you can begin by simply trying to generate more free speech. Then your natural internal critic will have some ability to concretely analyze what you did say, rather than what you might want to say. A vastly more productive enterprise.

The cool thing about blogs and podcasts are that they remove any economic or practical barriers to publishing work. This makes it subject to not only your own criticism, but the criticism of others. It would be truly scary if you wrote stuff that nobody could find fault in: it probably means that whatever you are saying is meaningless or useless. Stuff worth listening to is more controversial than that.

Anyway, don’t sweat trying to say stuff which is relevant. Just say stuff. Relevance will come.

News Flash: Listeners Hate Commercials

Courtesy of I Love Radio.org, read this remarkable study: News Flash: Listeners Hate Commercials. How surprising, that people resent being pummelled by twenty or more minutes of advertising every hour.

Whenever I listen to real radio, it isn’t boredom that kills me (I’m only wounded by boredom) but just the irritation of having any kind of coherent thought broken up by worries about taxes, my deodorant, or whether my windows need replacing. Not to mention that any real news that might actually come accross the airwaves does so in the form of predigested pablum, neither appetizing nor nourishing.

It’s a step in the right direction, but you guys don’t just have to remove the interruptions: you have to improve the meal.

Why Try To Improve on Perfection?

Beastie on the way out?Slashdot is running an article which suggests that the FreeBSD core team is running a contest to design a new logo to supplant the ubiquitous BSD daemon that has long symbolized Berkeley Unix and its derivatives. Some people don’t seem to understand it, and now the world must seemingly work to accomodate these knuckle-draggers.

Sigh.

How can you argue with a mascot that was designed by John Lasseter?

Super Bowl or Sleeper Bowl?

One thing I didn’t mention on today’s podcast was the Super Bowl. I understand it’s supposed to happen sometime today. While listening to some of the ramp up to it on the radio over the past few days, I’m beginning to realize just how pathetic a sporting event it has become. You might as well call it “Advertising Whore Day”, where the excesses of the consumerism piggy back onto an over commercialized sport in the hopes of selling beer to a nation of people who couldn’t think of anything better to do.

Think that’s harsh? Go walk around an ask your average Joe on the street who played in the last Superbowl. I honestly didn’t remember, and I watched the game. Of course, most people couldn’t tell you who played in last years World Series either (Sox and Cardinals, for those of you keeping score), so maybe that isn’t the most telling statistic. But oh, my, god. Everyone seems to remember Janet Jackson’s half-time wardrobe “malfunction”. The most important football game of the year, upstaged by Janet Jackson flashing her boob for three seconds during the halftime show.

How pathetic is that?

Let’s face it, you hear it all the time. “The game will probably be boring, but the ads should be fun.” Advertisements more fun than sports. How pathetic is that?

Don’t get me wrong: I’ll tune in to watch the game, and the ads. The game will almost certainly be boring, the ads promise to be “tamer” than last year in the mad attempt to appease those states where bills against gay marriage passed in the last election, and nevertheless people will get drunk and in one or more cities tonight, someone will torch cars and people will die so that we can watch advertisements.

At least it is an excuse to make some spicy wings.

Lest anyone think I’m being unfair to football in deference to my preferred sport of baseball, the only reason I think baseball suffers from this less is that the entire season boils down to not just one game, but the best of seven. That keeps them from piling all their advertising tackiness into one basket.

And, of course, most people seem to think baseball is less exciting. But most people think digital watches are a really good idea, so there you are. 🙂

Oh, by the way, Happy Birthday Yasmine!