I’ve always been fascinated by the duality of client/server games. The primary user experience is the graphical client but the reality is the protocol underneath. It’s like seeing the code beneath the Matrix. Back in the good ol’ days of Netrek a popular hack was to show your opponent’s position with more precision than intended, even when they were cloaked. The data was there in the client, so why not display it and gain an edge?

The security problems intrinsic to interface hacking have never been fully solved. At least modern games no longer trust the client. A big problem is macros like fishing bots; leave your character online with a script running and come back a day later to lots of ill-gotten wealth. You can even auction off the results for real money on eBay, except that Blizzard is trying to stop that.

Internet life

Google toolbar and DQSD to do searches
Trillian Pro, my favourite IM client
Macromedia Flash because you have to have it

System tweaking

Sandra to see how your computer is doing
3DMark to benchmark graphics
The latest ATI drivers
Rage3D Tweak to overclock the graphics card
Hmonitor to keep an eye on temperature

Hacking tools

Python for general programming
Ethereal to sniff the network
Cygwin for the X server
SecureCRT for an ssh terminal

Media software

ATV2000 to watch video input
Winamp 5 lite to play MP3
AudioGrabber with lame to make MP3s
gimp to edit pictures

Other useful things

ATnotes is a great post-it note app
Quicken for the checkbook
FeedDemon to read RSS and Atom feeds
Bitstream Vera fonts for the sans mono
Google desktop search to help you find things later

Warning only 896MB will be used.
Use a HIGHMEM enabled kernel.
896MB LOWMEM available.

I’m sure this has something to do with some hideous aspect of the PC architecture. I really don’t care. Couldn’t the kernel just figure this out for itself? Ah, but then we wouldn’t be l33t linux haqrs.

1. 9am is a fine time to go shopping. Under no circumstances should you enter the mall after 11am.
2. A 3.5′ tall Christmas tree on a tabletop looks almost good as a 7′ full standing tree, but is 1/3 the work to decorate. It’s also cheaper and fits in the back of your car.
3. It only takes 10 minutes to pick a tree if you go by yourself.

This time around I bought a gaming machine from EndPCNoise.com, an online retailer specializing in quiet PC components. And this machine is sweet. High end ATI X800 video card, excellent disk and CPU, etc. And it’s so quiet I thought it wasn’t working when I first turned it on. The server locked in my closet 10 feet away from me is louder than the new machine sitting next to me.

The main trick to being quiet is to not have fast fans. The new box has no case fans, something I would never have thought would work. And the CPU and GPU fans are big and slow. The Zalman CPU fan is only running at 1400 RPM, and the wacky 350 gram Zalman GPU cooler has enough heat pipes and heat sinks that it can also work with a quiet 1400 RPM fan.

It all adds up to a very nice machine that’s very quiet. I probably could have saved 10-20% building it myself, but then I wouldn’t have gotten it right, either. And I’m happy with the service I got from them. It took a bit over a week for them to build the machine, but they did a good job on the build and did a bit of customization I wanted with no hassles. Recommended.

I complained earlier about restaurants in New Zealand. That’s not really fair; we had a lot of great dinners. Alas, NZ lacks a long tradition of upscale dining, so sometimes you find good food with poor service, or mediocre food masquerading as a fine restaurant.

I love ordinary food, too, just eating at fine restaurants would be tiresome. The Kiwi take on the hamburger is good. A serious sandwich where the meat is secondary to the stacks of crisp tomatoes, lettuce, salad dressing, and a surprisingly good addition: beets. I also really appreciated the humble meat pie, a simple snack turned into something special with good pastry and flavourful gravy. And NZ has my new favourite coffee drink, the flat white, sort of like a cappucino but with rich cream instead of milk foam.

Finally, New Zealand’s serious farm business means that local ingredients are excellent. Terrific fish, of course, although not a lot of variety. Nice tiny Nelson bay scallops, served with the roe. Local specialties like golden kumara, a mild flavourful sweet potato; feijoa, a funky fruit; manuka honey, tasty as well as medicinal; and muttonbird (titi), an oily fishy bird no one seems to actually eat. But the most impressive foodstuff was the best lamb I’ve ever had. Tasty juicy baby sheep.

I cringe to call the music “lounge”, since that implies a sort of faux-clever cynical hipster sound. Nothing against the US Esquivel set, but part of what’s lovely about Pink Martini is they play their music with sincerity, and are enjoyed straight ahead, without irony. They’re calling themselves a little orchestra, that seems about right. They’re also first class musicians playing a lovely style of music that’s mostly abandoned.

But listen for yourself. Click the Pink Martini radio link on this page. On Sympathique I recommend “Amado Mio” or “Andalucia” for a quick flavour.

X-Pobox-Antispam: Looks like broadband returned DENY:
adsl-63-194-75-26.dsl.snfc21.pacbell.net looks like a consumer broadband machine (contains 63.194.75.26)

Looks for signs that a message came from a DSL or cable modem user, directly. Most DSL or cable modem users should send mail through their ISPs’ outgoing mail servers. This is by far our most effective condition, catching upwards of 20%% of all the mail caught by Spam Protection. To make sure it is active on your account, go set up Spam Protection, and set “I correspond with people who run their own MXes on broadband lines.” to “NO”.

However, if you know Unix/Linux users who run their own mail servers on their broadband lines, you probably do not want to activate this blacklist. You should set that question to “Yes”.

This filter is an example of the end of SMTP. Internet email was designed so that any one computer could send mail to any other computer. Compared to centralized mail systems (think Compuserve) this is a radical design. Alas, in the era of spam zombie machines it’s not working any more. Pretty soon we’re all going to have to route our email through ISP-approved mail servers.

Pobox seems to be doing a simple whitelist of their own. The real switch will be wide deployment of a system like DomainKeys, where ISPs use DNS and digital signatures to indicate “this IP address is a legitimate mail sender”. Every other IP address (like mine) will then be suspect.

I couldn’t figure out how to get the machine to scan my groceries right. And the checkout stand had some nonobvious thing where it was weighing items, so when I rested something I hadn’t checked out yet on the bagging platform The Voice told me I was wrong, “please clear the bagging area”. The Voice was quite intimidating, loud and forceful, an unfriendly schoolmarm. And all the while I was checking out I was afraid I’d do something wrong and be considered a shoplifter.

It seems like the technology was all about preventing people from stealing items rather than helping them check out. Buying groceries shouldn’t be an intimidating experience. I’m sure I could get used to self-service checkout, but I don’t want to.

YOU HAVE BEEN RENDERED UNCONSCIOUS ON A POISONED DART.  
YOU ARE L0GGED OFF CATACOMB FOR 00:30 MINIMUM.  
YOUR ACCOUNT BALANCE IS:  
$     0.78 FOR TODAY 
$    12.40 FOR THE GAME 
$     7.50 TREASURE BONUS {RESERVED}

But the most fun part of the story is the link between treasure in-game and real world money. The idea you could make a living playing the game, either as a heroic adventurer or a thief who preyed on heroic adventurers. We’re not quite there with online games yet, but we’re close. There’s the unofficial economies in MMORPGs, mostly realized via eBay, and a few niche games like Project Entropia. I think players making money in online games will inevitably hit the mainstream.

Ah, thanks to Majcher I now know that Cory is way ahead of me with his story Anda’s Game.

Some industrial designer must have spent six months getting this exactly right. Balancing the spring force against the magnet just so. Choosing a spring that wouldn’t wear out over time. Figuring out what manufacturing tolerances were necessary to do this reliably, then figuring out how to build it on an assembly line. Expensive design, but the result is worth it.

Calendar c = new GregorianCalendar(2004, 12, 30);
System.out.println(c.getTime());

Sun Jan 30 00:00:00 PST 2005

And don’t go looking for some obvious method, say Calendar.getMonth(). No, what you really meant was Calendar.get(Calendar.MONTH).

I was about ready to get a new computer anyway, but I was hoping to do it in a more gentle fashion. Like get some of the files off the old machine. But I can’t just plug the old drives into another computer. I used RAID 0 striping with the Promise 20276 RAID controller on my A7V333 motherboard. So the data on the drive isn’t in a standard format, it’s in some weirdo proprietary layout.

Short of finding a working motherboard with this RAID controller on it, do I have any hope of getting the data off the drive? Email me if you know! I’d be willing to buy a $30 PCI card just to get the data off, but I don’t really want to set up a whole new motherboard. I wonder if someone’s written a software emulator of the Promise RAID layout?

I’ll never use hardware RAID again for a home computer.

The other thing I’ve learned the past few years of travelling is the US no longer welcomes visitors. I already mentioned the extra security measures for US bound flights. There’s also the extra rules for “congregating near toilets” on flights, and the immigration forms which you have to fill out perfectly in pen or else get a replacement, and our new fingerprinting of visitors. Welcome! I met one British couple who flew from England to NZ the long way, east, just so they didn’t have to pass through LAX and US immigration. Can you blame them?

Coincidentally, today’s NYT has two excellent op/ed pieces on the US turning its back on foreigners: one talking about the drop in foreign students, the other a very dismaying story about getting a US visa in Nigeria.

Lots to say about the trip. New Zealand is very pleasant, and comfortable, and relaxing. And beautiful. Restaurants aren’t so terrific but the quality of the local wine and the friendliness of the people more than makes up for it.

Compare this to this. Interesting differences, yes?

I completely agree with Bruce. First, does anyone really believe that the TSA needs all “72 airlines[’ ...] June 2004 domestic passenger flight records” in order to test their system? Assuming the system were verifiable, a sample of real data would be sufficient. Second, how will they know the difference between a successful test and a failed test? Did they catch a set of actual terrorists through other means in June 2004, so that they have a group of expected true positive matches? Seems unlikely, given the publicity that each minor incident has raised.

No, the purpose of the TSA test is not to verify their system -- such verification isn’t possible, and if it were, all 72 airlines would not need to participate for a valid test sample. The real test the TSA is running is whether or not the airlines will comply, and how badly the public will freak out.

The airlines have complied -- test 1 passed. So, onto test 2. This would be a great time to write your congresspeople and freak out.

Driving on the left is surprisingly easy to get used to. The tricky part is the turn signal, on the opposite side of the wheel. You can tell the Americans because they run their windshield wipers everytime they try to turn in an intersection.

Matt Haughey is getting beaten up in the comments of his post about ad banners coming to TiVo, but he’s absolutely right to complain about TiVo’s move. This is a big deal, yet another chapter (along with the recent TiVo-to-Go and Macrovision moves, and others in the past) in the “two masters” problem for TiVo.

TiVo’s original pitch was that it transformed television viewing for the audience -- here are the set of features that you want to make it “TV your way.” Most prominent among these features was ad-skipping -- certainly the reason I bought a TiVo. Ad banners during ad-skipping are, at the very least, an odd choice, and they dilute and poison the “TV your way” message. Matt’s detractors have claimed that sophisticated TiVo users will be able to get around the new feature with the undocumented 30-second skip command, but they miss the point.

Jeff Bezos apparently likes to say that Amazon always tries to “delight the user” with the site’s features; similarly, Steve Jobs talks about “lickable” user interfaces. Don Norman’s recent book “Emotional Design” talks in depth about the emotional reactions great products give us. TiVo is still usable with banner ads, and it may still be possible for power users to avoid them altogether, but by any interpretation, a person who bought a TiVo to skip ads will not be delighted to see banner ads in their place. They will be annoyed.

Open source projects are often spurred by developers trying to “scratch an itch” they personally feel. TiVo has just spread Acme itching powder all over their product. With competition from above in the form of cable company DVRs, and from below in open source DVRs, is that really the right move? Do they expect the revenue from their banner ads to cover the potential lost revenue from users who come to distrust their motives?

TiVo is still thinking like a small company that has no option but bare survival. They should start thinking like a fighter. If they don’t fight for their users, they will wind up fighting with their users, and that’s a fight they’ll lose.

I’ll be offline relaxing and travelling up and down the country. I’m amazed to learn it’s only three time zones away from California.

I’ve renamed the image but the irony is the uncacheable 404 response I’m sending now probably will be more expensive than just sending the image. They only render the image at a tiny 10x10 so I can’t even do something mean like replace the image with a big nasty note.

• Video capture hardware. I have a GeForce4 Ti4200 video card (from ASUS) which has a video-in/video-out (VIVO) box.
• S-Video source. The video card can take in composite or S-video input, but the colours in composite are so awful that it’s not worth the effort. S-Video isn’t too bad.
• A WDM driver for the video capture hardware.
• Software to display the video capture. I like ATV2000, but I’m still looking for alternatives.

It’s amazing how complicated this is. It’s a lot of data: I’m surprised my PC can record full motion video to hard drive. And the NTSC input is in an awful format. The interlacing is the worst of it, here’s a nice visual explanation. There’s a neat program called DScaler that tries to deinterlace the video before displaying. That gives a much sharper still picture but in regions of high motion you get awful judder. I gave up on it.

Progressive scan HDTV is the only rational thing.

My favourite thing in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is the virtual place. The street layouts are heavily abbreviated, but it still feels like Los Angeles and San Francisco (haven’t been to Las Vegas yet). And the landmarks are well duplicated, to the point where I learned what the Watts Towers looked like first in the game and only later in real life.

GTA: SA goes beyond just landmarks to create the virtual place. Different neighbourhoods have different people with different dialogue: vapid blondes on Rodeo Drive, tough gangstas in East Los Santos, swimsuits on the beach. Different areas have different cars: lowriders in Hispanic neighbourhoods, big ol’ trucks in rural areas tuned to country music. Even the street furniture and generic house templates change: ranch homes and box apartments in Los Santos, Dolger Homes in San Fiero.

It all comes together to make the virtual environment feel real. So much so that when I could finally go to San Fiero, the first thing I did was drive around until I found the Castro (“Queens”). And I knew I was there because there were rainbow flags, gay clone men spouting campy dialogue, cute little sports cars, and stores named “The Barber’s Pole” and “Gaze Glasses”. I was home.

It’s weird quitting a MMOG. I feel like I’m killing my character, the one I invested so much time in creating, building up, and being. Goodbye, Dr. Jellylove.

Truth is there’s a lot of quality games out there and I don’t have much time to play them. I’m a fiend for innovative gameplay and get bored quickly with games. CoH has really dull gameplay, repetitive boring missions, and it’s not going to get better anytime soon. Not for me.

It’s still a cool game, worth checking out if you’re curious.

Flash Flash Revolution is an oldie but goodie. It’s an adaptation of the dancing game Dance Dance Revolution for the Web. And while it lacks the actual dancing, it’s got the rhythm and the music.

I play this game about once every six months and am always glad to see the site and game getting better and better. I’m impressed at how tight the timing is: being off 20ms really kills a rhythm game. I didn’t know Flash could do this right. I always play the same song (“Terror From Beyond”), and even after six months my muscle memory still works.

The backstory and world is amazing. The crazy radio stations. The funny characters. The beautifully drawn environment. The voice acting. The diversity of vehicles. The over-the-top writing. The setting.

Despite lots of flaws the gameplay is great. Amazing how quickly I take the open endedness for granted. GTA: SA also brings in something new, a diversity of gameplay modes and minigames. Lots of borrowing from other games: so far I’ve seen PaRappa/DDR, Sims: Hot Date, Hitman, rail shooters, Gyruss, Max Payne, Track and Field, and of course the usual GTA style drivin’. It’s like they said “let’s make this game diverse” and went to the well of 25 years of gameplay ideas.

The game is quite firmly adult. Your friends all smoke pot, which is apparently OK, but you’re out to kill the crack dealers. Lots of killing and pimping, of course. And I’ve never heard the word “fuck” so much in a game. It’s all part of painting the 90s ghetto hood scene. Combined with the excellent voice acting, good story, and great gameplay, it makes for a landmark game.

What’s next? Grand Theft Auto: Tokyo 2010?

Cordless controllers are essential for the lounging-on-couch gaming experience. And the Logitech hardware is quality. Sturdy, responsive, long battery life. Game controllers are complex: two analog joysticks, six or more force sensitive buttons, a couple of vibrating motors. Quality pays off.

But what’s best about these controllers is they aren’t infrared, they’re 2.4GHz radio. That means no line of site required, 50 foot range, and the reliability is rock solid. Radio is so much better than IR I’m suprised all quality audio/video gear doesn’t use it. Maybe it’s the battery life.

Yesterday I changed my mail setup to just automatically delete spam. And worms. And bounces from spam forged in my name. No longer storing it, just delete it. The psychological difference is enormous. My mailbox feels much lighter. I no longer have the pressure of “1000 unread messages in folder spam”. Then again if you need to mail me a Windows executable I won’t ever see it.

I archive absolutely all my mail, including spam. But I never even look at the archive files, so it’s no big deal.

Last I checked, ⅔ of my mail was spam.

• $1: local call
• $12.50 + $1.90/minute: long distance call
• Free: 800 number
• $1 + my rates: long distance calling card

I bought this after reading a review on Engadget. The gadget factor is good: USB interface, simple UI. But the photo quality is just useless.

The TiVo has an awful IR interface to change channels on the General Instrument cable box. I have to use the cable box thanks to Comcast’s evil channel encryption. But the cable box has no channel changing interface, so we’re stuck with emulating the remote control IR codes.

For four years this has worked fine with the TiVo set to IR code 00093. Last week the number 6 stopped working. This isn’t general IR flakiness, it was specific to the number 6. So after hunting around a bit I find that now I have to use IR code 10006 instead. And it works.

I feel like The Prisoner. Arbitrary meaningless punishment.

I finally figured it out. The Apple video hardware detects the resolutions that the VGA display can handle. If you plug the miniDVI dongle into the laptop with no monitor or projector plugged in to the dongle, the laptop can’t detect any resolutions and so drops to 800x600. If you plug the monitor or projector into the dongle first, then plug in the dongle, the laptop will detect resolutions correctly. Or you can force it to redetect by selecting the “detect displays” option in the control panel / menu bar.

I still have this problem where it only detects 1280x1024 on the projectors I plug my laptop in, not 1024x768. But my LCD can only do 1024x768. That means if I want display mirroring, I’m forced to use 800x600. Grr. Apple’s attempt to make things simple doesn’t quite work. Anyone know of a way to override the resolutions?

PS: what the hell was Apple thinking not putting a VGA port on their laptops? I hate the stupid dongle. The 12″ laptop is the worst, it’s not even a standard DVI port.

Contemporary simulation games are much more complex. The Sims 2 has an enormous amount of depth, complex social interactions and detailed dollhouse environments. And the Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 demo just blew my mind. Simulations of everything from your total park finances down to the details of what colour balloons your peeps are holding in their hands and how much extra for onions on the hot dogs.

The problem with all this complexity is it can be opaque and frustrating. Good sim games expose details of the simulation without revealing too much of how it works. SimCity 4 failed for me; despite reading the strategy guide and various websites I never could figure out the correlation between choices I made and what happened to my city.

The Sims 2 has a different take on this problem by making it basically OK to do anything. Yeah, it might be hard to make your Sim the smartest professor who gets the most woohoo, but you can have fun anyway just stumbling along and making him wet himself in front of guests. I can’t tell from the RCT3 demo whether they’ve got the right balance of complexity and approachability, and the interface is awfully complex, about 100 screens. Sure is pretty though.

What’s wonderful about Fable is that the innovations in gameplay make for a really compelling narrative experience. I feel like I’m the hero of a classic adventure story, not just visiting the nodes in an RPG story graph. Little touches like the townspeople calling out to you, your character getting older and more careworn, or the complex ways your personality changes in response to your actions. It’s a real step forward.

Molyneux is one of the most hyped game designers ever. Deservedly so, because his games are consistently innovative. Populous, Magic Carpet, Dungeon Keeper, Black & White; they’re all huge achievments. Molyneux’s apology is that Fable doesn’t quite live up to the hype, that it only has 15 innovative features and not the 25 he promised. I can live with that.

• XML is text. You have to base-10 encode numbers in XML. This is terribly slow and inefficient.
• XML can’t handle binary data. There is no reasonable way to embed a 400k image into your XML. Your choices are to base 64 encode it (whee!) or use some wrapper around the XML like MIME.
• XML is awfully wordy. I don’t begrudge the meaningful beginning tag names and the pointy brackets, but the meaningful closing tag names are superfluous if all your XML is machine generated.
• XML is complicated. We love XML because it’s S-expressions, but it’s a lot more too. Entities! PIs (whatever those are). Attributes vs. elements! Three different ways to describe the data model! Awful programming models! It’s awfully complicated when what you’re trying to do is pass a couple of numbers and a string.

Windows Update is one of the great unheralded Microsoft technologies. It really works. Well, mostly. I downloaded the various JPEG fixes from them and thought I was safe until I ran GDI Scan, a deep scan tool that tries to find vulnerable versions of the DLL. And it found a vulnerable version, C:\WINDOWS\system32\gdiplus.dll.

Now what do I do? I don’t know where to get an update. Do I have to install Service Pack 2? Does that even fix the problem? I’m a software professional and I’m confused. What does the other 99% of the world do?

At least Norton Antivirus blocks it. I downloaded a virus sample and Norton AntiVirus dedicted it as Roxe and wouldn’t let me copy it to my Windows box.

We had the 10 course tasting meal along with the wine pairing. Every dish was quite rich with bold flavours and fantastic texture. The menu was also inventive, a variety of unique combinations. And what a variety! 10 courses is an underestimate. My menu has 13 items on it, and that’s not counting a couple of pre-menu goodies. And on top of that the tasting menu was split, with Ken and I getting different items a few times. 20 separate items for a table is quite a feat for a chef to pull off.

And for all that dinner was quite reasonably priced, $85 for the menu and another $60 for the excellent wine pairing. Not bad for one of the best meals you’ll find in San Francisco. This chef is working hard: go and enjoy it!

Here’s our menu.

The SF Chron has a couple of followup articles. a review, and something about the chef. I put this on Chowhound, maybe I’ll get responses.

The key thing is you can plug a tiny device into your computer and copy files off of it with no special software. So my MP3 players just mount and let me drag my MP3s on. And both my real camera and my keychain camera let me download photos just by plugging it in. So simple, and I don’t have to use some horrible software with a proprietary protocol.

Some of these devices are even bootable; you could take your whole Linux environment with you. In the guts of these devices somewhere must be a $3 part, a USB controller that speaks the hard drive protocol. A good thing.

I was having a heck of a time parsing RFC 822 strings like you see in HTTP headers and email. The problem is timezones are not supported by strptime() or the tuple format. But the Web is my programmer:

def parseRFC822Time(t):
    return calendar.timegm(
      time.strptime(t, "%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S %Z"))

But boy is the usability inhumane. You can get a flavour for the design æsthetic by looking at the website, or revel in the screenshots of 15 different screens. Design is a good idea, but Roboform used up all its good ideas on features.

The only problem is the PocketPC OS is apparently locked in 240x320 resolution. This fancy Toshiba has a 480x640 screen, but the OS refuses to run at that resolution. Fortunately there’s MyVGA, an open source hack that puts the PDA in 480x640 mode. Add in Undead Hack and some cosmetic fixes, and it’s like your PDA really is high-res.

Most apps work just fine in the full VGA mode, including PocketPlates. Now the charts look pretty good (if tiny). I wonder why this wasn’t easier? Does the Windows on Pocket PC only officially support 240x320 resolution?

I generally like Guernsey’s articles, but I think she relied too much on Diebold for this article.

Firefox 1.0PR

The latest Firefox has a new master password to encrypt passwords (screenshot). It works pretty well, but two flaws. First, there’s still no way to get all your passwords. (You can view them in a window but can’t copy and paste them!) Second, the password store is only accessible if their “this page has a password” heuristics work. If you’re on a site like MyWay where Firefox doesn’t realize there’s a password, there’s no way to store / retrieve one. Still, it’s pretty good.

Password generator bookmarklet

Clever idea: have a master password that statelessly generates passwords for different sites. Then roll the whole thing up in a bookmarklet. Alas, it doesn’t work in MSIE.

Password Scrambler

Same master password idea as the bookmarklet but in a Windows binary with MSIE toolbar button. I’m not wild about the password generation idea. You have no way to get a list of all your passwords, and you have no way to change your password on one site without changing the master.

Password Safe

Standalone app that maintains a password database. This was originally by Bruce Schneier’s people as a Blowfish demo, now a SourceForge project. I like the app pretty well but it has a bug with the text export of its database. And the integration with MSIE is lacking.

I need something better. Can anyone recommend a good account name / password keeper? The UI is key, it has to integrate with a web browser well. Given a URL, I want it to tell me my account name and password. Filling out the login form is better, but not essential. The tool needs to be transparent. I need to trust the crypto it uses to protect my passwords. And I need some simple way to get a plain text dump of all passwords for backups.

MSIE’s built-in password thing isn’t secure. The standalone tools I’ve seen all have lousy UIs. I like how Quicken’s “PIN Vault” works, except it’s not for browsers and it fails the transparency test. Know something good for MSIE or Firefox? Email me at nelson@monkey.org

Please see the followup post

The nice thing about doc/lit is that it’s really just any ol’ XML message with two SOAP tags wrapped around it. SOAP says very little about what’s inside your message, just that it should have a namespace and it should be describable via XML Schema. Here’s an example:

Even those two SOAP tags might seem like too much, but they give you a couple things. The headers give you a transport-neutral way to add header metadata to a message, and SOAP Faults (not shown) give you a structured way to indicate detailed errors.

If you’re comfortable parsing XML, you’re comfortable parsing doc/lit SOAP. But SOAP also offers the possibility of automatic data bindings (no parsing required) and WSDL (service description). Alas, those technologies still don’t work so well in Perl, Python, or PHP where doc/lit support is weak. It does work pretty well in Java and .NET.

The story is tiresome too; the Rashomon thing is only clever when the different views of the story reveal something about the character telling them. And the conclusion, with the Noble Hero sacrificing himself for the good of The State, is too creepy for me.

Still, it’s a good movie, worth your time to see.

• The 150k+ chart shows that Lineage and Lineage II are enormous, 4.5M users between them, 10x the size of Everquest. These are South Korean games, totally different userbase.
• The 100k-500k chart gives you more detail on the non-Lineage games. I’m surprised how little drop-off these games have. Everquest has had 400k subscribers for 3 years! (That’s about $150M in revenue).

Page title

If you try to load a page and get an error, the window title says “Cannot find server”. All well and good. But if you press reload in that window and it succeeds in loading the page, the window title still says “Cannot find server”. They don’t reset the title.

Cache too big

I set my browser cache high, like half a gig. Disk is cheap, bandwidth isn’t. But there’s some weird bug in MSIE where when the cache gets too big things start misbehaving. External programs like WinZip or Acrobat have a hard time reading things out of the cache. The only solution seems to be to flush.

favicon.ico inconsistency

MSIE randomly loses the little icons associated with URLs. Related to the “cache too big” bug above?

# Grab the headers first
headerReader = csv.reader(fp)
headers = headerReader.next()

# Now construct a second reader on the same 
# file stream to get the actual data
dataReader = csv.DictReader(fp, headers)
for d in dataReader:
  print d

CoH still suffers from the same level treadmill that all online games seem to. And the storytelling isn’t that great. But it’s really a pretty fun game. This is the first online game I’ve seen where playing together with strangers is actually entertaining. The game got more fun for me when I created a pure healer character, where the only way I can even play is to find other folks to play with. It’s good amusement.

I still wish the game had better support for story. The whole point of being a superhero is you’re saving the world from bad guys. But in this game the bad guy supply is inexhaustible. Any time day or night if I walk down a street in Galaxy City I’m going to see a group of bad guys. And if I “arrest” them, walk away past the clipping region and walk back, there will be another group right there. Nothing changes. This is a difficult gameplay mechanic to avoid in MMOGs, but it’s still dumb.

The film is ostensibly about space aliens that come to New York to kill heroin users at the moment of orgasm to capture opiates in their brain. Or something. But really the movie is a beautiful and lyrical exposition of the New Wave scene, with amazing costumes, makeup, and soundtrack. Anne Carlisle makes an amazing dual appearance as both Margaret, the Connecticut girl turned bisexual punk model, and Jimmy, the nasty little queer boy model. It’s kind of like the Warhol scene, only much cooler.

See a video sample or enjoy her tips on making art with pills. For yet more, see her LiveJournal fan community.

To win an election, the first thing you have to do is control the terms of the debate.

page = '''
<html><head>
  <title>%(title)s</title>
</head><body>
<h1>%(title)s</h1>
The time is %(time)s.
</body></html>
'''

print page % { 'title': "Time of day",
               'time': time.asctime() }

The HTML is all by itself with only the simplest Python in the middle of it. And the substitutions are named, not positional, so it’s self-documenting. You can substitute the same text more than once. And if you want to be clever, you can use locals() in place of the hand-crafted dictionary to directly substitute Python symbols.

So if the whitespace is scaring you off Python, put that issue aside for a week and try it out. If you use emacs, python-mode helps and is part of the default install.

First, a big raspberry to Real, who posted the full text of my blog post to their marketing site without permission or proper attribution. It’s still there, although they’ve trimmed to a fair-use-sized quote.

Second, a thank you to Aaron, who in email pointed out a flaw in my logic. I called the iPod a “jail for music” because Apple makes it hard to copy music out of the iPod. However, I also said “Real has succeeded in unlocking the door”. That’s not right; Real didn’t make the iPod less of a jail. They just enabled another DRM format on the iPod. Not so exciting, really, although I still don’t see it as a bad thing.

Finally, a theory. I was truly puzzled why people were beating up Real and defending Apple when both parties seem enamoured of DRM technology. Then I got it. Basically, people like Apple more than Real. Even if iTunes has some DRM they’ve done it in a way that mostly doesn’t annoy users (with some exceptions). By contrast Real has a long history history of annoying users with hostile software and proprietary awkward formats. Now their captive users are issuing some payback.

My digital hipster friends have a bit of a double standard around the iPod. The same folks who decry RIAA strongarm tactics and make fun of proprietary music platforms are happy to pay an extra $100 for a fancy Walkman that doesn’t let you use the software you want to copy music to it and doesn’t let you copy music back out at all (without unauthorized hacks).

The iPod is a beautiful piece of design. But it’s a jail for music. Real has succeeded in unlocking the door. Why are people beating them up?

Installers should be simple. SuperPimp is good. Windows MSI Installer is OK too, but it requires the user already have the 1.7 meg environment installed. And Install Maker has gotten some traction by being simple and free.

I just finished reading Serpent in Paradise, the narrative of an Englishwoman who went to Pitcairn pursuing her fantasies of island paradise only to find cold loneliness as an outsider in a complex, tiny, isolated society. Everything she describes about the island — the gossip, the newspaper, the work, the language, the religion — all seems so alien. Good book. For a taste, read this short article by the same author.

Pitcairn is in the news a lot now, the result of child rape charges against most of the adult men on the island. Lots of complications: arguments about British sovereignty, arguments about where the trial will be held, and of course the question of what punishment means in such a tiny community. The effect on the island could be horrible, and the prosecuters have their own issues. The islanders were just told they have to hand in their guns for safety.

I’m going to New Zealand in November and am vaguely thinking of visiting Norfolk Island, population 1841. There’ve been two murders there in the past two years.

• Good vs Bad 2, a video game. On SourceForge, available for download. I tried it out. It is, um, strange.
• A profile on gamedev.net, with lots of posts, some recent.
• Usenet posts on lucid dreaming and psychedelics.
• A home page, gone except for a cache with only a hit counter (15145).
• Various bits in this Google Web search.

What I like best is how simple it is. The core is a USB flash storage unit. Just plug it into your computer and copy files over, no DRM or software nonsense (screw you, iPod). It doubles as a giant floppy disk. Then plug it into the AAA battery (10-14 hours of life) and the headphones and you’ve got a tiny music player.

The device UI is nice and usable and the sound quality is good. The hardware does feel a bit flimsy, but what do you want at that weight?

There are some good things about CoH. The comic book genre is great: crazy and fun and not taking itself seriously. CoH doesn’t license any other comic book IP, so the world is free from past association. And the character costume creation is fantastic, allowing an amazing variety of looks.

But the game is hugely boring. It’s the exact same level treadmill of every other MMOG I’ve seen: you’re rewarded for time spent mindlessly clicking, not for any decisions you make. The game makes a bizarre design decision to have no items - no loot to find, no objects to show off, no opportunities to customize your appearance over time. The costume creation that’s so wonderful at the game’s startup is essentially unavailable after you’ve started *. The environments are boring too, no distinctive landscapes.

The worst thing is that CoH totally squanders the chance to have interesting story-telling. The writing is non-existent: as far as I can tell the plot consists of “go here, kill these guys, read a paragraph of boilerplate”. Over and over again. Single player RPGs like KoToR or Planescape: Torment tell compelling stories with depth and richness. I understand storytelling is harder in the chaotic genre of MMOGs but please, throw us a bone!

CoH does have the virtues of being pretty and mindlessly amusing. But I don’t have 10+ hours a week to commit and I have better uses for my $15 a month. I think we’re a long way from a really rich MMOG experience.

PS: I love that the #2 result on an Amazon search for [triumph insult] is The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Just after the pooping dog puppet.

So thanks to Mark for pointing me at Earth Abides, a 1949 novel where all but a handful of people die from a mystery disease. The book follows one man’s attempt to rebuild something like a society.

What I love is the melancholy tone of the loss of civilization. At first it’s fat city, free food and cars and everything for the taking. But things slowly deteriorate: the power, the water, the cars. With less than 100 survivors in the whole Bay Area creating a society is tough, and reviving the trappings of civilization is impossible.

The second half of the book is even sadder. The protagonist sets himself up as the leader of a small group of people and sets to having children. All well and good, but he’s the only intellectual of the bunch. He valiantly tries to teach kids to read, preserves a library for them, tries to show them how technology works and what their heritage was. But it’s a failure and the new society reverts back to simple hunting and superstition. All of our hero’s knowledge is useless.

I love the idea of the impermanence of civilization; Earth Abides describes it very well.

John Waters’ film Pecker is a brilliant commentary on the hollowness of irony; listen to his DVD commentary for his take on the curtain of irony that enshrouds New York.

I try to be less ironic, but it’s hard and I’m lazy.

I expected slow, but not this slow: my virtual CPU speed is about 10x slower than my 1000MHz Athlon. Clearly those other partitions are pretty busy. I’d naïvely assumed the system would be mostly idle.

What surprises me more is the variability. On a normal unloaded Linux system ‘time sleep 1’ should return just over 1 second of real time, maybe 1.01 seconds. On my UML box, 5 times out of 100 a ‘sleep 1’ takes over 1.2 seconds! In other words, my whole OS has dropped out entirely for 200 milliseconds. Ugh!

Is this typical or did I get unlucky with my UML provider?

I may have just gotten unlucky; performance on another hosting service is significantly better. More details once I know more.

Ultima I-III defined CRPGs, using tile based graphics and intricate worlds to immerse the player. Ultima IV was the huge leap forward, with a deep back story and a morality system that required you play carefully, not just kill and rob everything. Ultimas V and VI extended this formula into richly entertaining games. Ultima VII sets a landmark for non-linear gameplay. Ultima Underworld was one of the first 3d games, as pioneering as Wolfenstein 3D. Alas, Ultima IX broke my heart.

If you’re too young to know these games, there’s a lot of info online. But reading is dull: buy the Ultima Collection and play to your heart’s content.

Except, well, PC technology has changed a lot and running the old games is nearly impossible. Enter preservation efforts. The most impressive is the Ultima Classics collection. “Sedryn Tyros” has collected the Ultima games and distributed them in a bundle along with DOSBox setups that make it easy to run the games. His supplement also includes original pre-PC versions of the early games, often better than the PC ports, along with the emulators you need to play them on a PC. Update: there’s now a 1.3 release that combines the two. Alas, this collection is completely unauthorized and you’ll have to scour your back alley’s bittorrent site to find it.

Another option is fan-made reconstructions of the game engines. The best is Exult for Ultima VII, a portable engine that runs the classic game on many platforms (including Xbox!). Just take the open source game engine, copy over the assets from your Ultima Collection CD, and you’re in business.

A lot of the first 20 years of movies are lost forever because no one preserved them. I fear the same thing is going to happen with games.

Then again, they are getting better at pushing updates so they don’t require reboots.

I stopped maintaining this list in early 1997. I’m surprised how many links are useful and relevant but are still slightly obscure. Alas, many of the URIs have changed.

• Ethnologue database: excellent reference
• Taco Bell Net: yum!
• WaxWeb: pioneering hypermedia
• Bordeaux and Prague: Carl Steadman
• This Modern World: he was online early!
• Typing injury FAQ: very helpful to me
• Grafica Obscura: brilliant and idiosyncratic
• Geography of Cyberspace: Martin Dodge is a pioneer

Unhappy that Bush tax cuts and military expenditures are destroying the US budget? Be an optimist! Worried that you have no job? Blame Kerry, that mean ol’ pessimist, for complaining about the economy. Upset that we’re in a war in Iraq under false pretenses? Blame the pessimists for confusing you with stories and congressional inquries. America Number 1!

By taking this single word “pessimism” and using it to characterize the Democracts, the Bush campaign brilliantly defuses any criticism of the Bush presidency. Even better, it shifts the blame to the opposition who is calling attention to the problems. Use of single words is the purest technology of campaigning; the Republicans are brilliant at it.

Bring ’em on. Mission Accomplished.

The reviews are a bit scattered. I tend to agree with the more negative ones; the core game story requires too many repetitive missions. But who cares? What’s amazing is the recreation of Manhattan you play in.

The game experience is architectural. You’ll be zipping around, then see a pretty skyscraper, then climb it for a breathtaking view of the virtual city. See another interesting building? Just jump off and swing over to it. Easy and very beautiful, particularly at sunset when the lighting is most dramatic.

But that’s all too hardcore so I set out today to learn some simple stunt kite flying. A bit of searching revealed that HighLine Kites is the Bay Area place to go to buy a kite. Tom sells kites out of his RV at the Berkeley Marina, a prime kite-flying spot. Lots of kite geeks. Tom’s great, by the way. I liked the Prism kites website, so after spending some time with Tom’s advice I’m the proud owner of a new E2.

Modern kites are pretty amazing technology, full of graphite and mylar and exotic polymer line. Alas, the line was my downfall; I made a bone-headed mistake and tangled one of the lines while setting up and after a frustrating hour of attempting to untangle the fog rolled in and I gave up. (Hint: pulling on knots does not make them better). I’m untangled and ready to try again tomorrow. Update 2004-07-04: success, at Balboa Park.

1. Download and install iTerm.
2. Edit “iTerm -> Preferences -> General -> Characters considered part of a word” to have the value:

   /*_-~+@%&.:;$,?=#
   

   Documentation of this step found here. I added a ‘%’ sign to the string.

Update: I updated the suggested “word” line after finding a few holes and resorting to reading RFC 2396. I omitted ‘!’, “’”, “(“, and “)” because I think those would cause more parse errors than they would solve in this context.

The ad also neuters the appropriate outrage of the Democrats. Frankly, this is the time for pessimism and rage. But the ad turns that on its head. Mean ol’ Kerry, wouldn’t you rather vote for nice piano music Bush?

And showing this video only on the web bypasses all sorts of pesky campaign laws. Because of the Hitler controversy this ad is now all over the mainstream media. It may be hypocritical, but it sure works.

I asked some friends - Cory, Evan, Jason, Eric, and Raffi - for advice on what to install to make my Mac happy. Things I’ve found useful so far:

VersionTracker, MacUpdate, and Mac OSX hints

Useful websites. If you’re searching Google for Mac software, adding “macosx” to the search term usually gets you what you want.

QuickSilver

Program launcher. Like LaunchBar, only free.

Firefox

Web browser. Make the default via Safari preferences.

Fire or Adium X

Free multiprotocol instant messengers.

Enhanced Carbon Emacs

I’m going to be using Brain-Implant emacs in 2023.

Vera Sans Mono font

Good fixed width font. Apple’s Monaco and Andale are both acceptable, but Vera is best. Note: this looks awful in Terminal unless you enable anti-aliasing via Terminal / Window settings / Display.

MacPython

MacOSX 10.3 has Python, but it’s missing the IDE.

MacStumbler

For finding wireless networks.

Fink

Debian-like ports of traditional Unix apps to MacOSX. I haven’t used it yet, but it’s good to know it’s there.

The main thing I’m missing is a more convenient app for sshing. Terminal is OK, but it feels awkward when using remote hosts. And I can’t figure out how to click on a URL to open it. Command-doubleclick. Thanks, David and Steve. And is there a DQSD for Mac? iSeek or Butler.

Isn’t Apple supposed to be the friendly computer?

I’m impressed with Vin Diesel, too. I like action movie stars who do what they do well. His new Riddick Xbox game is great, does the video game tie-in better than anyone so far. Smart move forming Tigon Studios, his own game company.

Maybe one day Vin will be governor.

Yesterday was the symbolic conclusion of the reconstruction, hoisting the cupola with a British-donated cross to crown the church. The cost is enormous: $175 million or more. Imagine the pride in this restoration, coming after reunification.

Quick tourist tips for Dresden: the Bülow Residenz is a great hotel, with a terrific Michelin-starred restaurant. And take a steamship tour on the Elbe.

But I feel powerless, disenfranchised. Sure, I can vote against Bush. But does voting even count? I truly believe the 2000 election was stolen. I could try to influence politics, get involved in the campaign. But personal action is sort of pointless; most of my friends already hate Bush too (and the others, well, we agree to disagree). Political influence seems to be entirely about money, not belief.

This is why I liked Dean. He made me believe that things could change. Kerry is uninspiring. MoveOn gives me some hope, but only a little.

Best as a book, it is also searchable online. The design is fantastically dense. The German guide, for instance, is 1500 onionskin pages in a handbook size. There’s a bit of information about each town, including excellent small maps for bigger towns and a line or two about major tourist destinations. Each restaurant or hotel then gets about 8 lines wherein you will find packed the name, location, contact information, hours, prices, and a couple of descriptive lines of text.

The most important thing is the listing’s icons. Restaurants get 1 to 5 forks. But it’s not just a 1-5 scale. If the forks are red then the place is a “pleasant restaurant”, a uniquely comfortable dining room. Rare places have the valuable Michelin stars that indicate excellent service and comfort. And there’s the “bib gourmand” for inexpensive places. That makes for four dimensions all for a quick scan.

The editorial quality of the reviews is fantastic (despite some recent controversy). Anything that’s even in the guide will be a good meal; to my American tastes 2 forks and up is a fine restaurant. These ratings are given by serious food people, much more useful than the crappy guidance from Fodor’s or Frommer’s.

My most fervent wish is we could have a Red Guide for the USA. Alas, I think we just don’t have the quality or culture to deserve it. Zagat is the closest we have, and it’s just not the same maturity. And so peculiarly democratic!

But talking to MSR is preaching to the choir. The people who really need convincing are the Windows OS product strategy team, in particular the folks behind the Next-Generation Secure Computing Base for Windows (aka Palladium). Microsoft has already made the decision to destroy general purpose computing in order to protect copyright owners’ interests at the expense of users.

With the DRM core baked deep into the hardware and Microsoft getting to sign a whole new set of licensing contracts, I fear the “don’t work” and “bad business move” arguments will seem to have been overcome long enough for this hostile stuff to be status quo for awhile, setting everyone back.

Melatonin is a partial solution for jet lag. It’s a pineal hormone that triggers sleepy time. The problem with jet lag is your ordinary circadian rhythm is on a 24 hour cycle, so until you adjust you’re melatonin-deficient at your new local bedtime. But take a melatonin pill or two and bam, you’re asleep. Without a sedative.

Because of insane FDA laws melatonin is available without a prescription, but it has a very strong effect, at least on me. I don’t make a habit of taking it regularly.

• Berlin: bright lights, big city
• Dresden: amazingly beautiful and reconstructed
• Leipzig: lively but ugly
• Goslar: cute medieval town
• Weimar: Goethe slept here, Buchenwald
• Eisenach: cheerless town, Wartburg

The car/iPod interface has been the worst part of the iPod experience -- getting the iPod music playing out of the car speakers is ridiculously hard, and just finding a place to rest the iPod while it plays is comic. I’ve tried using cassette adapters, which fake out the tape deck into playing iPod tunes, but they have consistently died on me, either fraying at the cable that dangles out of the deck or frying in the heat (just like a real cassette!). I’ve tried using mini FM transmitters like the Griffin iTrip, but the sound quality is terrible and finding a free radio channel in the Bay Area is impossible. (I had one for a while, until some anti-enterprising San Franciscans launched a pirate radio station on it.) I’ve tried removing the CD changer and using an RCA adapter to wire the iPod in directly, which, modulo the cables trailing from the trunk to the front, was great for sound and stability -- until the damn thing shorted out and took the turn signals, gas gauge, and brake lights with it, a $600 repair. Now I’m back to the cassette adapter, and I pack it into my bag every day as I head out of the car. What a pain.

Too many head units don’t provide auxiliary input, and all the solutions on the market are half-assed and clunky. A fantastic Apple head unit would be an amazing tool for the iPod, and would really change the car stereo experience.

Microsoft wasted a bunch of money on car PCs a few years ago. Wouldn’t it be funny if the iDash gave Apple a entry point to automotive computing?

I was following the IEM during the Democratic Presidential primaries, and was disappointed with the results of what I saw. These markets are sometimes claimed to “predict the future,” and rightly so in that they can expose upcoming events that are for whatever reason non-obvious by conventional wisdom. It was not obvious to me that Howard Dean would suffer such an upset in the Iowa Caucuses, placing behind Kerry and Edwards when all the polls were showing a different result. After the shoes had all fallen, I went back to the IEM to see if these futures markets -- based, after all, in Iowa -- had been able to predict what many of us had missed.

It seems they did not. Graphs of the market’s activity show Dean and Clark (who placed sixth, behind Kerry, Edwards, Dean, Gephardt, and Kucinich) leading right up until the day of the caucuses, January 19th. Edwards, who placed second, wasn’t even offered as a separate contract until after the caucuses were closed (he was included in the “rest of field” contract). I’ve created a detail graph of the end-of-day contract prices (drawn from here) for Dean, Kerry and Clark in the days leading up to the caucuses, and they don’t show any clue that Dean was headed for a fall.

No one has claimed predictive markets are perfect, nor that they can forecast everything -- just that they tend to outperform other predictive measures. I’ll be interested to see if this idea takes greater hold over time, and gains in effectiveness as it involves more participants.

What’s unfortunate about these articles is how obliquely they talk about the reason Accenture is based in Bermuda. According to Perfectly Legal by David Cay Johnston, the sole point of this is to reduce the corporate taxes Accenture pays -- they are essentially shopping for a nation with laws most favorable to their incorporation. In a chapter entitled “Profits Trump Patriotism,” Johnston talks about exactly this conflict between national security and awarding government contracts to quasi-foreign corporations -- including Accenture. It’s too bad the explanation of this issue isn’t more clear in the articles covering it -- especially since Johnston is a Times reporter.

I do think this is an interesting and important issue, and I’m glad to see the House taking some action on it.

Update: The article in Thursday’s Times has a somewhat better explanation of the issue.

Movie theaters are increasingly hostile environments. At this one showing, we had:

• about twenty minutes of ads, exclusive of the previews (which are of course ads in themselves);
• a few minutes of live and recorded exhortations to keep quiet and turn off cell phones;
• a full row of people behind us talking (sounded like a real-time Italian translation of the whole movie);
• two people in front of us talking;
• three cell phone calls, unanswered;
• one cell phone call (directly behind us), answered (at least the Italian translation stopped for the duration of the call);
• $4 for popcorn and $3.75 for a bottle of water;
• $5 for parking;
• $2 in Moviefone fees for two tickets (optional, but at this movie arguably not if you wanted to see it opening weekend); oh, and
• $19 for two tickets to the movie.

It would certainly be cheaper to buy the movie on DVD and own it forever, than to watch it once for nearly twice the price; the popcorn would be better, cheaper, and faster, and could be topped with real butter instead of “topping”; the water would be tastier, colder, and available for $1.49 per 100 cubic feet; and the talking would be sanctioned or actionable. Plus, no ads. It’s no wonder home theater is booming.

One thing I didn’t see at this film was the increasingly common kill-thy-neighbor copyright warnings or maudlin pleas to spare Hollywood its looming, BitTorrential Napsterization. (I love hearing that downloading somehow affects the set painters but not the producers. Just once I’d like to see one of those trailers starring Jerry Bruckheimer or Michael Eisner: “If you download movies, we’ll never be able to make Batman XXIII -- and you don’t want that, do you?”) Instead of these tear-jerkers, the Potter producers instead deployed night-vision equipped Voldemort Special Forces -- but predictably, they couldn’t prevent Harry and his friends from making it online just after the end of the first showing. That’s been a consistent pattern for more than five years, now, and I don’t think it’s due to get better any time soon.

What the movie industry doesn’t seem to realize is that the hostility of the theatrical experience -- up to and including their copyright pablum and their Maginot militarization -- is exactly what will drive people to try downloading movies to their home theaters. They are creating greater incentives for the technologies they fear the most. If Hollywood wants to keep “butts in seats” (as the saying goes), their “only hope” is to make the experience of being in those seats better.

I loved going to movie theaters because the crowd experience can’t be matched by any home theater. What would my first showing of Star Wars have been like without the lines, the gasps, and the applause? How can you match the experience of watching the scenes between Daniel Day-Lewis and Emily Watson in The Boxer without a full theater of people holding their breath to see what will happen? It’s not the same, and I’d miss not going to the theaters at all; but the experience I had last weekend, as with many of late, just isn’t worth it.

The book is The Deceivers: Allied Military Deception in the Second World War, by Thaddeus Holt (just published). The author, a former Deputy Under Secretary of the Army, describes with precision and wit how first the British and then the American military learned to deceive Germany and Japan regarding the Allied force strength and intentions. It’s the sort of book I would send to a Hollywood producer buddy if only Hollywood had any shot at not screwing it up (*ahem*).

Holt describes how the British “A” Force, the group charged with deception, undertook to cause German forces to take actions favorable to the British:

The object of a deception is not to induce the enemy commander to think something, but to induce him to do something: To act as you want him to act ... Your target is the mind of the enemy commander. You must judge what estimate of the situation given to him by his intelligence services will induce him to act as you wish. Your customers are the enemy intelligence services. You need to know how they operate, and what information given to them will induce them to give their commander the estimate of the situation that will cause him to act as you want him to act.

(p. 50.) The early learning process, in 1940-41, showed the British deceivers how to construct a “story” that would produce the desired effect:

[T]he most effective deception is one that confirms what the enemy already wants to believe; ... [A deception] “story” can be based on an operation that had been considered and rejected[.]

(p. 51.) I was particularly struck when reading the chapter on “The Customers” -- that is, the people to whom deceptive stories were passed, in order to induce a desired action:

Intelligence people in all wars tend by nature to inflate order of battle figures [to play it safe]; savvy commanders know this and make allowances for it.

And:

“Deception can never be effective either in love or in war,” Sir Michael Howard has well said, “unless there is a certain willingness to be deceived.”

(Both quotes from p. 101.)

How does all this apply to Iraq, WMD, Chalabi, and Iran? Well, we know that the Bush Administration has cited WMD as the key reason to go to war in Iraq, and that to date no such weapons have been found in the country. Suppose for a moment -- and I think this is a reasonable supposition, supported by Bob Woodward’s recent Plan of Attack and other sources -- that the Bush Administration really believed WMD existed in Iraq. Suppose also -- again, I think this is more than reasonable at this point -- that their belief was completely mistaken. The question that follows for me is, how did they make such a mistake?

Assume that no one in the US willfully made up the WMD story themselves in order to accomplish other goals (a complete contrivance is a remote possibility, but I suspect by now one of the originators would have leaked). Did the intelligence community provide the Administration with enough supporting material to make the case plausible, both to themselves and others? (Certainly seems that way.) Was it really just the Administration pushing the intelligence community for the answer they wanted -- did they effectively lie to themselves by forcing bad interpretations of innocuous data? Or did the inclination in the Administration towards action against Hussein meet with a deliberate attempt to deceive the US into action?

Holt’s book, of course, gives me no way to say one way or another -- but what it does show, I believe, is that all the conditions necessary for a deception existed:

• There was a “story” -- that Hussein had WMD;
• The furtherance of the story accomplished a clear object, the removal of Hussein from power;
• The story was based on real plans that Hussein seems to have abandoned;
• The story was bolstered by information given or suggested to the US intelligence agencies (Holt points out that deception is most useful when military forces are not in direct engagement but instead are planning for action);
• The story matched what the Bush Administration already wanted to believe about Iraq and Hussein;
• The story was built up over a long period of time; and
• The story was sufficient to prompt the US to take action.

If this was a planned deception -- and again, Holt makes it clear that much smaller-scale deceptions required tremendous planning efforts -- I wonder who planned it. Chalabi and his organization? That seems like it should not have succeeded since their interests were so clear and would have been so clear to everyone involved; plus, they seem unlikely to have been able to provide any logistical or physical support for the claims of defectors. Iran? I would have to say Iran is the primary suspect if a planned deception actually occurred: their interest in removing Hussein is clear; today’s Times article on the topic calls the Iranian spy service “one of the most sophisticated in the Middle East”; and they clearly had contact with Chalabi and could have fed him notional evidence to pass to the US. Others might suggest Israel, which would seem to have the sophistication but not, I suspect, any better access to Iraq than the US itself. I’d doubt even a very strong Israeli desire for Hussein’s removal could have produced this result by these means.

A few things don’t quite add up, here, suggesting that I’m taking my enjoyment of the book too far. If Iran was running a deception, and the US was reading Iranian intelligence traffic (see the NYT article), why didn’t we catch on earlier -- were they that careful? Why was Chalabi deliberately blown, and why did he tell the Iranians what he is accused of telling them? And finally -- why is this news coming out at all? Does the Bush Administration really hope the American public will forgive them for their mistaken war because they were lied to about WMD by Chalabi? That seems impossibly naive -- Mayberry Machiavellianism indeed!

In any case, the one thing more and more apparent to me, as I read further in Holt’s book, is that the Bush Administration decision-makers do not fall into the category of “savvy commanders” who make allowances for inflated intelligence estimates. It seems instead to have been the opposite -- that the intelligence estimates were not nearly enough to support the war effort, and they went ahead regardless. If they were systematically deceived, how much the deceivers must have celebrated at the enormity of their success, and the paltry effort needed to produce the action they desired.

Holt, by the way, is speaking this Friday in New York at City University of New York. I’d love to hear a report of what he says -- it would be interesting to see if he addresses this topic.

[A long first post! The next will be shorter and more amusing.]

-Marc

I’m shopping for a new car and figured I should make having a reasonable MP3 solution part of the choice. I don’t want to buy an aftermarket head unit; I live in San Francisco, things get stolen. I found several trunk mounted hard drive players that integrate in various ways. Do you know of something better?

PhatNoise. 20 gig: ~$850

Goes through great lengths to emulate the CD changer protocol so you can control the MP3 collection from your head unit. They also make the Kenwood Music Keg, an RF system.
UI: head unit’s CD changer. Interface: CD changer.

MuzicVault. 20 gig: $350

Hooks in via FM or patched into stereo.
UI: Palm Pilot (wacky!). Interface: FM or patch in.

Neo Car Jukebox. 20 gig: $300

Looks like the Fast Eddie edition.
UI: wired remote. Interface: FM or patch in.

Omnifi DMP-1: 20 gig: $600

Big feature is a wireless adapter ($70) which lets you load music on it when the car is in your garage. I have a feeling this doesn’t work as well as you’d hope.
UI: wired remote. Installation: patch in, scanty details.

The bug seems to be triggered by faulty logic around wearing the sand people robes. In certain circumstances the robes are removed from you; teleporting to the Ebon Hawk, for instance. When this happens the robes get glitched. If you put the robes on again and try to enter the Enclave it fails and you get killed without explanation.

The workaround I used was to take the robes off. This got me past the glitch. My “looks like sand people” bit was still set, so I was able to enter the enclave without being attacked. Another option is to go back to before you ever put the robes on and then only put them on at the last minute. You may still hit the glitch though. A final option is to give up on the disguise entirely and just roll in.

See this forum search for more info, also see the KotOR XBox bug FAQ. To the 95% of my readers who have no idea what this is all about; isn’t being a game geek funny?

If you’re into this sort of technology make a point of seeing the video. It’s a 160 meg download.

CRPGs have another theme: the acquisition of stuff. You start out wimpy with a tiny little dagger and a loincloth. By the end of the game you’re a bad-ass with +7 glowing long swords and titanium power armour. RPG-like games like Diablo make the acquisition of stuff the primary gameplay experience, like clothes shopping with more killing.

Which brings me to my idea: how about a game where the goal is not to acquire stuff, but to get rid of it? You start out super powerful with all the geegaws and skullsplitters you could want. In your process of saving the world you learn these things have no power and you have to simplify to find true meaning and technique.

It’d require a tricky game mechanic to make work. Maybe in getting rid of things you focus and customize your remaining stuff until you are left with one simple elegant possession which is the focus of your power.

Guyelle’s wife is now officially the worst 24 character ever. She’s on screen for, what, 45 seconds? She’s in the office for a total of 15 minutes. Her husband dies a few hours earlier, we’re in the midst of a bioterrorism crisis at CTU, but she has to clean out his office right now. It only takes 10 minutes to pack his stuff, but that’s just enough time for her to create another Plot Twist. Deus ex vidua.

They don’t wrap up the interesting side stories. Will anything redeem Chloe O’Brian, the person so awful she doesn’t even have her own fan web page? And what about Jack’s junk habit? It sure would have been a better ending to have Jack go back to his SUV to be alone with a nice syringe full of smack.

The best thing about the show was Chase and the axe. Kim abandoned her last amputee boyfriend. Poor Chase.

This admission is astonishing. Usually it’s a single reporter to blame; here the NYT as a whole is saying they got it wrong. This article is an important milestone in the US coming to terms with the fact that the war on Iraq was based on false pretenses.

Why don’t programming languages let me put spaces in variable names? whyDoIHaveToDoThis or_this_crud, why can’t I just put spaces in things?

for user id in user ids {
  if is valid user (user id) and
       is authorized user (user id) {
    show report(user id)
    user(user id).bill for report(one dollar)
  }
}

tell application "Finder"
    set windowName to name of front window
    close front window
end tell 

I know there’s a sucker born every minute, but who would fall for this stuff? The particularly remarkable thing is you have to have an e-gold account to even play. Wouldn’t you think the few people who have e-gold accounts are likely smarter than to fall for this? Maybe their marks are scammers too and this is all about money laundering.

But there’s one problem with my aggregator lifestyle: it feels like work. Blog reading used to be fun goofing off, nipping off to BoingBoing for a few minutes. Now all my blog reading is compressed into 45 minutes in the morning before I drive to work. It’s a morning chore.

Worse, my aggregator keeps track of unread items. And that list gets bigger if I don’t get around to it for a few days. Suddenly I have a giant backlog of random blog entries I have to read. Another workqueue.

The foremost reaction I think most people had when seeing this video was complete disgust, horror, and sadness. It’s an awful thing. I find it both fascinating and hideous that people seeing the video immediately went below the surface view to look for discrepancies, evidence that there was something more here than what was presented. And making detailed comments, like the style of the plastic chair or the presence of a ring on someone’s hand. As if to ignore the primary image, a man’s head being sawed off by a large knife.

I’m also interested in how quickly some Americans are willing to believe that this video is not real, that it was staged by some pro-US faction. I don’t fully trust my government either. I’m still surprised that someone didn’t just plant WMD evidence in Iraq. But somehow this video seems to go too far. Can I really believe my country would stage this?

The detailed examination of evidence is interesting. As soon as you look at something like this closely, all sorts of weirdnesses pop out. The jumping timecodes and the out-of-sync audio are technical discrepancies. The lack of blood and movement makes the beheading look strange (although what would a normal beheading look like?!) And the story is odd too, Berg’s being held by Iraq and/or the US, the coincidence of Berg and Moussaoui.

The final thing that intrigues me is that if you believe that all these discrepancies point to deception, then you have to believe the deceivers had the power to set this up and yet were so incompetent as to not even get basic things like video timestamps and people’s accents right. How can that be?

I am awed at the power of the brutality of this video and ashamed at my own fascination with the speculation surrounding this poor man’s death. This conspiracy analysis is a way to intellectualize a tragic event, to replace basic sadness and horror at a man being brutally killed with some clever made-for-TV conspiracy plot.

But then again, this event is a crucial happening in a crucial time. Governments have done worse things to protect their positions. Perhaps all these discrepancies do add up to something. How will we ever know?

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Forgive me for being harsh, but, um, yeah. Your “job” consists of accepting credit card payments in a PayPal account, skimming 20%, and then wiring the cash to Ukraine? What did you think you were doing?

Here’s a hint: payment processing jobs do not involve an individual’s private account. And another hint: Ukraine is essentially jurisdiction-free when it comes to the Internet.

That’s why I liked Jackie Brown so much: Tarantino could indulge his obsession to homage while actually telling a meaningful human story. You know what would be brilliant? A Dogme 95 Quentin Tarantino film. Have the filmgeek boy make a movie without all the lighting and editing tricks. Restriction is freedom.

The difference between the actual video and the limited images in today’s papers is astonishing. The newspapers pictures look calm, quiet. The video is swift and horribly brutal. The most disturbing thing is hearing the murderers shout “Allahu Akbar” over and over again.

I watched it because I think it’s important to view the truth of things. I hate modesty censorship of news. But there are some things you may prefer not to see.

But I never quite felt cool enough to listen to Sonic Youth. It was just a bit too raw and punk for my nerdishness. Now I’m an adult and my music doesn’t identify me and I’m glad to say Sonic Youth still rocks. Sister, Evol, Dirty, even Washing Machine are all just great. I feel both alienated and hip.

I continue to look for a copy of their first album. At this point I’m almost ready to rip an 18 year old cassette tape.

The advertisement said the pleasure’s everlasting.

The demonstration was at Eurocrypt. Le Monde seems to have the first news report (translation). More: Nicolas, Kos, Slashdot, an earlier deredacting attempt.

Two glitches to be aware of. The copy protection is user-hostile. And on my GeForce Ti4200 the game crashes regularly unless I underclock the video card 5%. Weird thing is it doesn’t seem to be heat related.

Distribution is via BitTorrent
Shop as usual... and avoid panic buying

It’s cool. The most apparent thing is how bright the display is and how it looks good from any angle. Passive lighting is a good thing. The redraw rate is horrible and the algorithm is weird: does some sort of inverting of the screen. This all makes this generation of tech useless for most computing applications. But as an ebook, it’s good.

I can. The apostrophe rule is simple. An apostrophe never marks a plural. The rule about CEO vs. C.E.O. is less clear. The NYT style guide probably has a list of where you don’t use dots. I think it’s better to never use dots at all.

Python makes doing things like this such a joy. Here’s my hack code. Ugly, but simple.

The story is simple enough. The End Times are here, Christ has raptured the faithful, and the unfortunate folks left behind have to face Antichrist and the tribulations. What makes it work is the stories are told from a very ordinary point of view, individuals you can relate to. The books are basically potboilers with evangelical intent. The hero doesn’t get the girl, he comes to Christ.

They’re entertaining. The stories are simple and well told. The language is plain but well chosen. The character names are great: “Nicolae Carpathia”, “Rayford Steele”. And you have to love titles like “Tribulation Force” and “Soul Harvest”. (See Slacktivist for an alternate view.)

Entertainment aside, the books’ real intent is to convert. Not buying. I can’t help but feel something sinister in this kind of proselytizing. The books aren’t overtly offensive. But the head of the UN is the Antichrist, religious peace and unity is actually The Harlot of Revelations, there’s a lot of excitement about 144,000 Jews converting to Christianity, and one of our hero’s minor nemeses is an obvious lesbian who is made out to be a mean bitch “who wears sensible shoes”. Not a worldview I choose.

Maybe when millions of people disappear suddenly I’ll believe this literalist form of Christianity. In the meantime, the books make for a fun commute. If I run out of the main series, there are enough auxilliary books to rival Star Trek.

Advertising is OK when it works right. This is offensive.

What’s really great is XBMC has Python embedded. It has standard Python2.3 and xbmc and xbmcgui modules for programming. There’s a forum for development discussion, an official script download site, and some docs and scripts from a developer.

I made text Python XBMC documentation from Alex’s Word tutorial if you want a quick look at how it works.

An XBox is just another PC, except it’s cheap and designed for your living room. It’s great that someone’s finally made your living room TV scriptable.

An old friend of mine from the 713 scene, Jason Asbahr, made Python for PlayStation 2 and GameCube.

Voting machines

It’s obvious that electronic voting machines don’t enable fair elections. The software is buggy, the companies are dishonest, and there’s hints of fraud. So why are we even considering using them?

Kerry and Vietnam

Kerry served honourably in Vietnam and then came back to the US and honourably protested the Vietnam war. Why is this a problem for his campaign? Shouldn’t it be considered a qualification?

Bush and Iraq

It’s painfully obvious that the Bush administration used the 9/11 terrorist attacks and selective intelligence as false pretenses to invade Iraq. They lied and now we’re in a disastrous war. Why is there any question about Bush’s fitness for leadership?

Budgets and tax cuts

The Bush financial policy is clearly headed for disaster. We’re simultaneously cutting rich people’s taxes, spending more and increasing deficits, and pretending the $50+ billion we need for Iraq isn’t part of the budget. Why is the Bush administration still seen as fiscally responsible?

This is all so clear to me, I wonder what the rest of the country thinks. Maybe I’m in some sort of weird bubble in San Francisco? Even so, young people coming back dead from Iraq seems hard to ignore.

Part of the issue is length: 944 is a lot of pages. But a lot of it is editing. The book is just too much. Too bloated. There are some really cool ideas in there, and some fun research, but it’s buried deep in the 944 pages. I finally checked out entirely after the second book about Half Cocked Jack. I kept waiting for something relevant or interesting to happen and it didn’t.

I like Stephenson’s writing. I thought The Diamond Age was brilliant and Snow Crash has a lot of interesting ideas in it. I even managed to get through Cryptonomicon, although it suffers from the same bloat as Quicksilver.

Maybe he needs fierce editing? Maybe I need patience.

Which is all a long-winded way of saying that the MP3 market is being owned by computer companies, not stereo companies. And it’s nice, too. I love having 20 gigs of stuff in my car that I can sync to work. I love having 40 gigs of music on my stereo, letting me move from Górecki to Bach to Schönberg to Messiaen to Wendy Carlos without having to fumble for CDs. Isn’t it amazing that companies like Sony missed it?

First USA just sent me an offer to write a check for over $15,000 at 4% fixed APR for the life of the balance. There are a few catches, but they aren’t terrible:

• 3% of the value of the check is charged as a fee, but it’s capped at $50.
• If I screw up a payment in any way, including if I “pay another creditor late”, I lose the good rate.
• Any payments I make on the card first go to this loan, and only later go to pay off normal charges that bear a higher interest rate

AT&T’s only apology to me ever was two weeks’ free on my contract. $15 compensation for about twelve hours of my time straightening out their mess.

I received 8800 emails last month at home.
That’s 300 a day.
63% of that mail was spam.

If you’ve heard of Henryk Górecki it’s probably because of the Dawn Upshaw recording of his Symphony No. 3 that achieved huge popular success a few years ago. Where that symphony is haunting and lyrical, this 1980 concerto is forceful and propulsive.

Amazon has a sample of the recording I have, see track 5. The dizzying introduction gives a good flavour of the complexity of the piece. For minimalist music with relatively limited instrumentation there’s a lot going on.

Man, I need to make a million bucks a year.

I love Hot Links because the design is good and the thumbnails are surprisingly useful. For another linkblog aggregator (more data, less design) see delicious. And of course daypop, Blogdex, and Technorati give a view of what’s hot in blogs in general.

Online distribution isn’t anything new, but this is the first time I’ve seen it work so smoothly. Trymedia is the company behind this. Their ActiveMARK suite includes DRM, distribution, and payments. At $20 a game, maybe they’ll make this work? A quick check suggests that a crack for the DRM is not widely known. Trymedia’s survey suggests that folks who steal games by downloading them would be willing to pay for them if the terms are right.

The main site for this distribution channel is Trygames. The games there are generally second tier and/or old. I don’t know if Trymedia seeded the Tycoon bittorrents themselves or the publishers did. Atari/Infogrames, one of the main Tycoon publishers partnered with KaZaA to distribute ToEE awhile back.

Commercial mayonnaise is pretty good but homemade is supposed to be easy and better. I tried last night with a simple recipe and it didn’t go so well. The first attempt was going perfectly up until I added the last bit of oil at which point the sauce broke. You go from having a silky suspension of oil in egg to chunky, greasy mess of egg suspended in oil. The second attempt was better but I got the flavouring wrong. All told it took me an hour. I can’t imagine what it’d be like with a hand whisk.

Here. Listen for yourself. I believe I can fly (excerpt, ogg).

This spring, daylight savings time changes at 45 different times around the world. No wonder it’s so hard to know what time it is.

Note the evolution of these bots:

What’s most interesting is this is the first big bot network that doesn’t use IRC for the control channel. Instead it uses WASTE, bootstrapped by Gnutella. No encryption yet.

We’ve come a long way since The Morris Worm (whose author is now an MIT professor). Stacheldraht was the first of the coordinated worms I learned about; amazing how much further it’s come. We’re still not quite to the 8 minute nightmare of Warhol worms, although Slammer was close. These things are so powerful, I just wish someone could use them for good.

• Last night Ken’s cell phone woke me up at 5am. It starts beeping when the battery is low.
• Last week a quiet high pitched beeping woke me up at 6am. It took me 20 minutes to locate the source; a home security alarm panel.
• Smoke detectors make noise when their battery is low. The high pitched noise is frustratingly difficult to locate.
• My microwave beeps when it’s done microwaving. Then it continues to beep, twice every 30 seconds, until you open the door.
• One of my officemate’s cell phone beeps every 15 seconds when he has a message.
• Trucks all over the US make loud high pitched noises when they are in reverse gear.
• At every meeting, every conference, someone’s Windows laptop plays a little tune when it starts up.

This is another reason why unit tests are so important. They’re like a badge of quality. The fact that there are tests at all is a good sign. Run them, do they pass? Scan through the test code; does the coverage look good? The tests are usually a handy API example, too.

Mark and his feed parser are famous enough that I figured it was good quality code. But seeing 1882 tests pass sure is reassuring and it’s quite interesting to read the tests.

For the bad side of this see the tests for pywebsvcs. Many of the tests don’t work last I looked. It’s not clear which tests are even useful. I don’t mean to slag the pywebsvcs developers — they’re doing great work — but I’d sure feel better about the code if it had a test suite I understood.

I use Alcohol 120% to create virtual CD drives. It’s great for saving the trouble of finding the actual CD and it’s able to emulate a bunch of the crap that copy protection schemes look for. Ubisoft has decided to punish their paying customers by refusing to run if you have Alcohol installed. It’s almost enough to make me join the 12,938 other people who are downloading a fixed version of the game off of BitTorrent. I’m not even trying to run the game with an emulated CD; just having Alcohol installed is enough to break Far Cry.

Fortunately the software engineers aren’t any smarter than the decision makers at Ubisoft and upgrading from Alcohol 1.4.3 to 1.4.8 fixed my problem. But I had to waste an hour of my life figuring that out.

Palladium, the uber-DRM system Microsoft is pushing, will make it impossible for me to work around crap like copy protection. With “Trusted Computing” Ubisoft will have more power over what my computer does than I will.

KALW is having a very unintrusive pledge drive now. If you listen to KALW, why not donate?

I spent most of the weekend in Healdsburg, CA, about an hour and a half north of San Francisco just off 101. It’s a cute little town with an upscale tourist infrastructure but still relaxed. The Hotel Healdsburg was pleasant (but not perfect). The real highlight was Charlie Palmer’s Dry Creek Kitchen, a fantastic restaurant concentrating deeply on local food and wine. Healdsburg is full of good looking restaurants: Bistro Ralph, Madrona Manor, Zin, etc.

The best wine of the weekend was at the restaurant sommelier’s recommendation, a Hafner Vineyard’s 1993 Alexander Valley Cabernet. The elegance of a proper aged Bordeaux at a price that wasn’t wacko.

Alas, the housing prices are wacko: nice homes in Healdsburg are $700,000 and up, and a little 1800 square foot vacation home in the hills with a few acres of land is $1.5M or so. So much for the fantasy of a weekend place.

The gameplay itself is unremarkable, a simple linear shooter. But the hallucinogenic graphics and fantastic mellow techno soundtrack make this a fantastically engrossing game. The cleverest thing is the way that reactive sounds (shots fired, explosions) are looped in sync into the soundtrack. The graphics are astoundingly beautiful and innovative and the trance vibrator is rumoured to please all the senses.

My favourite thing about Rez is the way the game is like a journey, a relaxing trip that has a bit of challenge but isn’t too demanding. I wish there were more games like that.

Here’s what $20/month gets you on a few hosting sites:

Rise of Nations: Thrones and Patriots

Expansion pack for the most satisfying RTS I’ve ever played, Rise of Nations. I’m not sure this is going to add a lot to the original game but I’m hoping it facilitates a second wind for RoN.

Hitman: Contracts

Sequel to the fantastic Hitman 2, the stealth FPS. Hitman 2 was just the right mix of silly and intense with a gameplay that could be easy if you wanted or hard if you were careful. Hitman: Contracts looks to be a bit more serious and dark, but I think it will work out OK.

Thief: Deadly Shadows

Sequel to the groundbreaking Thief: the Dark Project, the game that invented the stealth FPS. Thief is the nexus of a lot of game development talent: the original was made by the late-lamented Looking Glass Studios who also developed System Shock 2 and whose alumni have gone off to do great things. Thief 3 is Ion Storm and Warren Spector’s chance to recover from the disappointing Deus Ex: Invisible War.

The Sims 2

Sequel to the genre-busting Sims. I haven’t heard much buzz about this game. But just adding modern graphics to the Sims formula will make for a pretty entertaining product.

What a dumb idea! The problem is spamassassin treats this mark as strong evidence of not-spam (-8.0: +5.0 required to be spam). So of course a bunch of spammers are including it to slip past spam filters. My carefully tuned spam filters started failing recently because of this. Sure, some day maybe a copyright lawsuit will bring some relief, but that’s years away.

I’m not the only one with this problem: Anders Jacobsen, no such weblog, truerwords, uncle dirtae, etc. The problem is that spam is an arms race: as soon as the spam filters impolement a technique the spammers find an exploit. ‘Test for this magic string’ is awfully easy to exploit.

Solution? score HABEAS_SWE 0.0.

Does this sound like America?

I occasionally worship at the Church of Tufte and have taken a lot of inspiration from his emphasis on simple and clean design. But many of his ideas seem awfully hard to apply well. A particular frustration is that many of Tufte’s design elements rely heavily on 1200dpi multi-colour printing on fine paper. That’s great, but these days all of my design is for 100dpi computer screens.

Tufte has written amazing and comprehensible books that have had a good influence on everyday design. But often when people cite Tufte it’s just “oooh, pretty” without really thinking about where the ideas are applicable.

The more vexing problem are Slashdot and Metafilter. The aggregator experience is impoverished. The strong design is lost in an aggregator. And the comments that make both sites so interesting don’t come through at all.

I’m loving the linkblogs. If you want the linkblog experience without the setup try the aggregators Hot Links or del.icio.us. I prefer following linkblogs from just a few folks, it’s more personal.

• Jefferson Airplane Takes Off
• After Bathing at Baxter’s
• Surrealistic Pillow
• Crown of Creation

import sys, os, time

print "Content-Type: text/plain\n\n",
print "Script started"

if os.fork() == 0:
    # Reassign stdin, stdout, stderr for child
    # so Apache will ignore it
    si = file('/dev/null', 'r')
    so = file('/dev/null', 'a+')
    se = file('/dev/null', 'a+', 0)
    os.dup2(si.fileno(), sys.stdin.fileno())
    os.dup2(so.fileno(), sys.stdout.fileno())
    os.dup2(se.fileno(), sys.stderr.fileno())
    # Do whatever you want asynchronously
    time.sleep(2)
    os.execv('/bin/sleep', ['sleep', '5'])

print "Process was forked"

I still haven’t seen a good explanation for why Apache doesn’t send partial output from a CGI: Apache says it doesn’t buffer and neither does python -u. Grr. Ah ha, mod_gzip does buffer, unsurprisingly.

I still don’t like the blandness and detachment of RSS readers. Oh, and my RSS 0.91 feed isn’t going to validate. I’ll be switching to Atom soon and deprecating RSS.

Some essential features:

• Correctly load relative image links. I was amazed at how many aggregators don’t work without a hostname in the <img> tag.
• Support for gzip and conditional GET.
• Atom support. It’s not hard.
• Ability to deal with poorly formed XML. Yeah, I read the debates. Any developer who thinks their user wants to know about a badly encoded & in line 23 column 8 is plain wrong. Hassle the developers, not the users.
• OPML import and export. The actual format may be dumb, but the ability to share a list of channels is important when evaluating software.
• Tranquility.

I like a few things about FeedDemon:

• Browser window on the side: tall rather than wide.
• Clever newspaper view. I don’t like the available styles, but it’s customizable.
• Tabbed browsing.
• Single key to read through all unread articles.
• Customizable blog-this command

One thing I’ve learned is finding syndication feeds is harder than it should be. Autodiscovery helps but NewzCrawler was the only aggregator with it built into MSIE where I need it. The worst thing is folks who publish 9 different syndication formats. I don’t want to have to choose, I just want good bits.

I’m still unhappy with one thing: the visual blandness of an aggregator. Everyone’s blog looks the same! It’s no better than eight months ago. We need a way to rationally apply CSS to Atom. It’s a hard problem.

Iraq started out better with an educated wealthy populace and no cold war battle history. But fourteen years of US sanctions and two US wars has destroyed a lot of the infrastructure, even its hospitals. And the security situation is only getting worse, averaging 1.5 coalition casualties a month and over 10,000 civilian casualties. The targeting of Iraqi civilian police is particularly unsettling, a determined campaign to prevent law and order.

The moral consequences of destroying countries and not rebuilding them is bad enough. But the practical consequences are worse. The Bush administration’s foreign policy is undermining US security.

Email addresses are not secrets.

Today I’m particularly aware of another cost of having net access at a conference: attention exhaustion. At a normal conference your attention is divided between talks and hallway chatter. Here you’ve also got your laptop competing for attention, what with IRC heckling, blogs, blogging, random net surfing, foolishly trying to keep up at work. No wonder I’m so tired!

Life used to be slower.

Presumably the program has found something in my slides that it wants to check online and the 90 seconds is a timeout. How do I find and expunge that something?

Networked apps are great until your network flakes out.

Looking at my old email so many funny things jump out. The verb “mosaicable”. Connecting locally in Oregon as a way to start on the Web (thanks, Eric Tilton!). Convincing my college to let students publish without editorial approval. Debating whether to use the GN server to stay Gopher compatible. Confusion about how to write HTML, simplistic guides. Explaining the web to some very brilliant scientists. And my own contribution to Web development, html-helper-mode.

Two things made the World Wide Web succeed over University of Minnesota’s Gopher or Brewster Kahle’s WAIS. Everyone knows about the importance of inline images in Mosaic. But a much more subtle success factor is the Web’s decentralization. Making it easy for anyone to publish was a revolution. WAIS was centrally adminstered, requiring help from someone else to bring your site into the network. Gopher was a bit more decentralized but it was still hard to publish a new page without involving an admin. By contrast anyone could set up a Web page and start linking it to other pages. And so they did, and so the Web was born. It feels permanent.

What impressed me most about Franklin was the combination of practical businessman, intense intellectual, and statesman. The man was one of the best scientists and thinkers living in America at the time with many inventions to his credit. He was also a successful self-made businessman and spent the majority of his life shaping the political future of the United States. Well travelled and warm and human, too. I do not think we have such well rounded people today, certainly not in politics.

Not anymore on eBay. From my mail today:

The ironic thing is they support Microsoft Passport for signon. Passport keys your identity to your email address.

According to NASDAQ Head Trader Alert #2003-093 they have some quantitative process to detect spraying; when they find it, they take an average price from the last 15-30 seconds. Another interesting nugget is AMEX’s memo to the SEC in November 2003. It’s in response to NASDAQ trying to block the S&P change, basically explaining that this is a good change and AMEX has no say in it anyway.

The real problem is the notion of a ‘closing price’ at all. Why not trade 24 hours a day? It will happen soon enough. The world gets faster.

I suspect they think I owe them money. I tried calling but, guess what? Due to heavy call volume your wait will be over 10 minutes. And their hold music is offsensive, a mixture of advertising, static, and volume changes that guarantees you can’t concentrate on anything while it’s on speakerphone.

I am amazed at AT&T’s contempt for its customers.

Now there’s nothing I can do to straighten this out. Calling support results in 10-50 minute hold times. Email support is not empowered to help. Every three weeks I accumulate enough patience to wait through the horrible hold music. The person always politely and confidently assures me that she has fixed everything. Then I get another bill with another improper charge.

I realize this is fairly dull blog-fodder. Hostile customer service is so horrible precisely because there’s nothing a person can do but rant impotently. I even tried going the regulatory route, but near as I can tell there is no consumer protection from cell phone companies that overcharge you and don’t provide adequate customer care.

Bottom line: the Bayesian stuff really works if you train it. The collaborative things are helpful but not complete.

Why is that? It’s not technology - there are some beautiful integrated debuggers that let you hook deep into running code and poke around. And it’s not ignorance, at least for me - I’ve had many happy experiences with fancy debuggers in the past. But I still keep going back to printing stuff out.

Why? For me it’s about simplicity. Running a debugger on an active process is often awkward. And it’s a bit spooky: I never quite fully understand what’s going on. Still I can’t help but feel like I’m working with stone age tools.

We have a suspiciously elected president who lied to the American public to build a case to invade Iraq. (“Let them eat yellowcake”.) His vice president’s former company is making huge, fraudulent bank on the deal. His attorney general is systematically dismantling civil liberties, detaining citizens in secret with no due process. And that’s just foreign policy. Let’s not overlook the ruinous financial policy that is digging America deeper into debt so that his friends don’t have to pay taxes.

Isn’t anger an appropriate response?

The MP3s are well encoded via Lame 3.90 --alt-preset standard resulting in VBR with rates around 175kbps. The files have good ID3v2 tags (but lousy names). And the downloads are fast, 100kbytes/sec or better.

The usability on the UI is good although I’m not wild about the monolithic Flash app with tiny fonts. The music preview option works well. My only real complaint is they don’t let me download stuff forever: you’re responsible for keeping track of the files yourself.

Buying music online makes so much sense. I could buy Autechre EP7 for $13 on Amazon and wait a week to get a CD I’ll rip and then store forever, or I can download it on Bleep for $7. And I’d rather pay a few bucks than try to steal a crappy, incomplete copy online.

The + has a very useful meaning in almost all mailers: stuff after it is ignored. Ie, xyzzy@example.com and xyzzy+foo@example.com are basically treated as the same email address by example.com’s mailer. Both addresses deliver to the mailbox owned by xyzzy. This has been a feature of sendmail for at least 10 years. It works in Postfix and qmail, too.

The plus sign makes it easier to track how your email address is spread around. If I ever get email to nelson+cheapviagra@monkey.org, I know who to blame. It’s also helpful if you’re debugging webapps and need to create email-keyed accounts.

In the meantime the US is already at Mars via robotic landers. With a less than 50% success rate to Mars it seems prudent to send robots instead of people. Better science too — concentrate on investigation rather than protecting fragile humans. Space telescopes like Hubble or WMAP seem much more valuable (and cheaper) than planting a flag and radioing the president from Mars.

I understand the romance of sending people to space. But aren’t we past that? And it’s not like we can do both: without significant new funding what this Mars program means is that we don’t have resources for robotic missions, space telescopes, etc. For the next forty years NASA is all about flinging meat to Mars.

PS: this editorial calling for one-way manned trips to Mars is pretty interesting.

The 600 x 4200 GIF is beautiful, particularly the fine grained structure in the Sloan survey. start at the bottom and scroll up to see a logarithmic view. Read the article for more info. The Princeton site also has higher res maps, and there’s some Slashdot discussion.

I’ve been on a map kick lately. I just bought The Times Atlas of the World, a giant beautiful atlas with huge amounts of political detail. I’m now eagerly awaiting the DK Great World Atlas, which hopefully has more geographical data.

Maps help me understand how the world (or universe) fits together. Hugh Johnson’s World Atlas of Wine is the single thing that best helped me to understand wine. Somehow cementing my fuzzy taste-memory to concrete cartographic representations made wine make sense.

Drawing good maps is hard. For some more on the politics of world map projections, this essay is quite informative.

The EFF is fighting CAPPS II, as is the ACLU. The airlines aren’t particularly interested in going along either.

My talk is Google is Harder Than it Looks. I gave a talk kind of like this at Gnomedex last year that went well.

The New Year’s Eve tasting menu, a 3 hour meal: