Quests for Power

I figure I should post before a full year since my last post elapses. I'd like to share the fun story of trying to find a replacement power cable for my SATA dock.

I have a hard drive dock. Sadly, I appear to have misplaced the power cable. No problem! I'm sure power cables are easy to replace. First I went to Radio Shack. I told him I needed a 12V/2A cable with an H-connector, and he proceeded to tell me they didn't carry them. That sounded fairly wrong, so I led him over to the wall where they indeed have power cables with a neat little adaptor that lets you put any connector on the end. However, it turns out the main cable plus the H-connector somehow costs $35, which is considerably more than just buying a whole new dock. Since Radio Shack was probably my best hope of finding a cable, I decide to try and find another dock or enclosure instead, but they don't carry them.

Next I tried to go to Best Buy, but couldn't find it. Probably a good thing, as I imagine the docks there cost more than multi-terabyte hard drives at other stores. In desperation, I went to Walmart. I don't think I've ever bought anything computer-related at Walmart, but I tried anyway. I poked around in their external hard drive section for a minute until one of their very helpful staff came over. This is verbatim, even the last line:

Me: Do you guys have any hard drive enclosures?
Helpful Walmart Employee: ...what?
Me: Any hard drive enclosures? Or docks, maybe?
HWE: Uh...no, we just have...the RAM
Me: ...OK, thanks

In conclusion, I was disappointed in Radio Shack, but completely unsurprised by Walmart.

On a totally unrelated note, I now have the power (I originally typed "ability", but couldn't resist the pun. I'm weak) to control my hall light from my computer, which I'm fairly pleased about. I planned to describe the complicated procedure involved in settings this up, but unfortunately it's pretty much:

1. Take off a light switch and wire the WS467 in
   
2. Plug in a CM11a and connect it to a computer
   
3. Install heyu
   

I'm still awesome though. I need more of these modules. Lots more

C++0x

There is massive confusion about C++0x. I've heard the name made fun of no less than five times in the last couple days, most recently in a blog post that spends a good half page mocking the possible pronunciations. On a side note, I recommend not reading that blog post, it's rather impressively packed full of ignorance. I made a joke about the name on Reddit and realized from the subsequent comments that people seriously think the standards' name is going to be C++0x. "0x" is supposed to be the ratification year -- "x" is not going to stay there. If it gets ratified in 2009 like they expect, the standard will be called C++09. This is not in any way new. C had C89 and C99, released in 1989 and 1999, and they're working on C1x (OMG AN X; how will we pronounce it?). C++ had C++98 and C++03, released in 1998 and 2003, and they're working on C++0x. Just like how we don't clarify C89 or C99 unless it's necessary (we just say "C"), we're not going to be saying "C++09"; we'll be saying "C++". C++0x is not a "new language", it's a new standard for the existing C++ language.

Linux isn't for everyone

I've wanted to write this entry for ages, but I keep forgetting. Fortunately, there's plenty of people on the Internet that helpfully remind me. There's a massive misconception about why people should adopt Linux, and I see it over and over again (because I still read Digg comments; the drama is just too enticing). Quotes like this pretty much sum up the problem:

people want an OS that works OUT OF THE BOX - they don't want to tweak with the kernel ... and no flavor of Linux is getting that done properly.

NO. "they don't want to tweak with the kernel" is 100% wrong, and that is the issue. The inevitable banal response to this is somebody saying "Ubuntu means you don't have to mess with the kernel", which is completely the wrong tack to take. The right answer is "If you want things to work out of the box and you don't like fiddling, Linux is not for you". "I just want it to work" is not the attitude of somebody that should be using Linux, that's not what it's for. Yes, it is entirely possible for things to work out of the box on Linux, and Ubuntu is very good at that, but what's the point? You might as well use Windows, you're not getting the main benefit of Linux: infinite flexibility. You can make arguments for security and reliability, but obviously Windows users (or at least the 87 that dugg up that comment anyway) don't particularly care, or have no issue with Windows in those areas.

I understand the Linux community's desire to convert people to Linux: the more people that use Linux, the more supported it has to be by hardware and software companies. But harrassing every Windows user you find and telling them they should be using Linux if they know what's good for them is nonsense. Linux is not for everyone; it really isn't for most people, since most people are fine with the default configuration of everything and don't particularly need it to change. Leave those people alone and stop getting in arguments with them; if at any point in a Windows/Linux argument the Windows person says "I just want it to work", just let it go -- they'll be happier with Windows

Reddit power

Apparently I should get reddited more:





Sadly, that now makes the handful of visits I had before look like 0 on the graph, but oh well. I actually posted that entry on a comment to another post, but apparently somebody reposted it as a story. A surprising number of people agreed with me considering I think it's a minority opinion, but there were plenty that disagreed too. And my anti-Windows thing at the end got interpreted backwards, which lead to confusion: I was saying that Pidgin, as an open source project, should be avoiding the very things that tend to drive people away from Windows. The main reason I love Linux is I can customize whatever I want, effortlessly; Windows is far less flexible. Trillian is an example of an unusually flexible Windows program, which is the very reason I used it, but with Linux it's no longer the exception to find a program that lets me configure it the way I want

EDIT: Apparently I should've waited before taking that screenshot:

DNS flaw released without warning

I think the Kaminsky DNS vulnerability news was big enough that non-tech people heard about it, so hopefully everyone here knows what I'm talking about; if not, it doesn't really matter. There was a serious DNS vulnerability that Dan Kaminsky discovered this year. Ignoring the temptation to hack the entire Internet, he worked with DNS vendors to patch their nameservers; there's a fairly cool video that shows a map of the world over time colored to show if servers are patched or not:



The details of how the exploit worked weren't actually supposed to come out until his black hat presentation a few days ago, but they leaked a week or so early. Nonetheless, watch the clip above and look at how many servers were patched by the time the details came out in late July

Then some Russian guy discovered that the fix isn't completely effective, although it does make poisoning take way longer. Did he quietly share the news with DNS vendors and try to work out a fix? Hell no, not only did he post the story on his blog, he helpfully included exploit code with it, because having to write your own might slow down attackers for a few hours

I understand the desire to release the news as soon as possible; Kaminsky is pretty much the most famous security researcher in the world at the moment, but what the hell? Now the New York Times has picked it up, so anybody with a couple good computers and a few hours on their hands can try poisoning a nameserver just for fun.

Now I Can Manipulate Pictures in 3D

So I'm told there's this new interface that resembles the thing from Minority Report. For those too terribly sheltered to have seen Minority Report:




That part isn't particularly good, but I can't find the clip I like. You get the idea anyway. I don't expect the example for the real interface to be Tom Cruise solving future crimes, but I really hoped it would be something, anything, besides this:



Why?! Why is it always the freaking picture twiddling? It was the same thing with the damn giant table, is that all multitouch interfaces are good for?

Firefox Password Fail

What happened with Firefox remembering passwords? Around the middle of July I suddenly noticed Firefox wasn't remembering passwords anymore. It still had them all in the saved passwords list (I think -- it doesn't anymore), and I still had it set to remember them, but it wouldn't auto-fill forms anymore and it didn't offer to remember new passwords. Oddly, this happened to both my home and work machines. My work machine runs Windows XP and Firefox 3, while my home machine runs Gentoo and Firefox 2, so it's fairly odd that both broke at the same time. I finally got around to searching for a fix today, and found a bunch of posts with the same problem:

• http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=762045


• http://support.mozilla.com/tiki-view_forum_thread.php?locale=nl&forumId=1&comments_parentId=108743


• http://wccftech.com/forum/my-firefox-doesnt-remember-passwords-anymore-19358.html


• http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080524124947AADpbyu

All these people posted right around the same time, the middle of July. It seems Firefox simultaneously broke for a whole bunch of different people, and as far as I can tell nobody knows why; I'm not even sure if people have noticed the connection or not. The fix seems to be deleting the password cache so it can start over, but I haven't heard any explanation for what actually happened

McCain lies? No!

So this might seem to be somewhat at odds with my last post, but I just couldn't resist posting it. I'm not actually surprised by any of this, but maybe Republicans will be, since every time Obama varies his position in the slightest they go nuts. This guy took the time to make a massive list of all the lies McCain has told. And not small stuff like Obama's generally are, these are complete reversals on virtually every position he's ever had, including the same things Republicans attack Obama about. Technically these aren't "lies", they're more like flip-flops, but I'm more than willing to adopt Republican rhetoric in this case. Next time a Republican whines that Obama changed his position on something, direct them to this list

Politicians lie? No!

I've been bleeding my RSS feeds dry recently, which means I'm forced to read the bottom of the barrel:



80% of Digg articles are about the same thing: some politician said something that makes people sad. Usually, said politician is on record saying the opposite thing sometime in the past. Diggers are shocked, hurt, betrayed, etc. Diggers will never vote for said politician ever. Unfortunately, every politician is in the category of politicians that can never be voted for, which puts us in a predicament (if we listen to Diggers, anyway).

This just in: All politicians lie an alarming percentage of the time. They have to, or they'd never get elected to anything. Too many voters have positions that are deal-breakers, so if a politician has solid positions on everything a majority of people will disagree with one of them, and they're screwed. Not to say politicians don't have standings on these issues; of course they do. They just have to make sure you don't know about them. This either means they have to dance around things they know will alienate voters (that is, everything), or they need to change their position depending on who they're talking to. Unfortunately, with the Internet this no longer works, because now we know that the things they told people on the other end of the country aren't the same things they're telling us, but that doesn't stop them from doing it over and over again.

Yes, it would be awesome if we could elect politicians who didn't lie to us on a regular basis, but there are so many issues that America is divided on that it can't happen anymore. Stop being surprised when it turns out a politician lied about something.

Harriet Jones uses Saitek

In the first part of the Doctor Who finale (which, for the record, was excellent), Harriet Jones is controlling the subwave network from her house:



I do believe that's a Saitek Eclipse she's typing on. Nice choice, if I do say so myself, and high five for good product placement. And since the subwave network got the Doctor to Earth, Saitek pretty much saved the world

I am uncreative

I was halfway through a blog post about Haskell when I suddenly realized the blog's name is "Things that amuse me". So apparently my blog title is thoroughly uncreative; if I recall correctly, my title was originally going to be exactly that, but I added the "or depress" when I realized many of my posts would probably be things that are bad. Maybe I'll rename my blog, if I can think of anything else

Viacom vs Google

There's a fairly unbelievable ridiculous stunning typical case going through the courts right now. I saw it mentioned on other sites, but they focused on the vast privacy violations and generally sidelined the other impressively absurd parts of the lawsuit. Somehow Viacom has gotten it into its head that people occasionally post copyrighted videos on Youtube (Lies!). I read through the filing, it's impressive. For example in (4):

YouTube itself publicly performs the infringing videos on the YouTube site . . . It is YouTube that knowingly reproduces and publicly performs the copyrighted works

This is somewhat clever, and practically ubiquitous in these cases: abusing pre-Internet laws. When they say YouTube "performs the copyrighted works", we all know perfectly well what they mean: YouTube sits there while people stream off them. It's like saying my SMTP server performs recitations of my e-mails as I send them. Obviously that law was meant to forbid me setting up a projector and selling people tickets to watch videos I've bought, that's what "performing" a copyrighted work is. In case there's any doubt, they just come out and say it in (31):

YouTube then publicly performs the chosen video by sending streaming video content from YouTube's servers to the user's computer

Then Viacom complains because they're lazy (6):

it has decided to shift the burden entirely onto copyright owners to monitor the YouTube site on a daily or hourly basis to detect infringing videos and send notices to YouTube demanding that it "take down" the infringing works

Unbelievable, Google. What makes you think you can possibly shift the burden entirely onto copyright owners? Actually, they probably think that because of the DMCA. Yes, I was shocked too, but the DMCA actually does have a section buried in the middle entitled "Limitations on liability relating to material online". And in section 512, subsection d, bullet 3 (actually, pretty much every subsection of 512 is identical, this thing is absurdly redundant) it states that YouTube needs to, "upon notification of claimed infringement as described in subsection (c)(3), respond[] expeditiously to remove, or disable access to, the material that is claimed to be infringing". DMCA: fighting for the people.

The next couple pages is the always impressively boring plaintiff exposition, but in skimming it I noticed something that made me smile: they list some of the videos they disseminate online themselves, including:

"SpongeBob SquarePants," and "Dora the Explorer," among others, from Nickelodeon; and "Beavis and Butthead," "Laguna Beach," and "Jackass", among others, from MTV

I would love nothing more than to hear a $500/hour lawyer expounding about how Viacom has willingly given Dora the Explorer and Laguna Beach to the masses

And while Viacom demands catholicons for their problems (can you have more than one? oh well), I can understand their annoyance. But then I found the latest filing from yesterday, which actually manages to top the aforementioned bitching (legal term). This is the one where the judge responds to Viacom's demands, so it's a nice concise summary of what Viacom wants. For example, the logs of everything everyone has done on YouTube ever ("all data from the Logging database concerning each time a YouTube video has been viewed"). This is obviously crazy, except as the wired article points out, it was granted. Viacom and Google probably stared at the ruling with identical slack-jawed amazement. Viacom claims that this isn't a privacy violation, because (quoting a Google blog post) "an IP address without additional information cannot [identify you]". Technically true, although the "additional information" required is really just the date/time you were using it; that's sufficient for an ISP to pinpoint who was using it. And since the data Viacom is demanding includes "the time when the user started to watch the video", this claim is specious. But other site have already talked about that, this is the epic one:

The computer source code which controls both the YouTube.com search function and Google's internet search tool "Google.com"

...right. Viacom knows perfectly well it'll be a cold day in hell before Google gives them the source code to their search engine, so I'm not sure what their angle is here; maybe it's the patent insanity that's lead other sites to ignore this. I purport that Microsoft has intentionally rigged Windows to blue-screen periodically; can I have the source code now? But wait, they're not done yet:

Defendants have purposefully designed or modified the tool to facilitate the location of infringing content

They're not kidding, they claim Google has modified their search engine to intentionally favor copyrighted data. They've apparently forgotten about their earlier filing, when they accosted Google for doing the opposite:

YouTube has also implemented features that prevent copyright owners from finding infringing videos by searching the Youtube site. YouTube thereby hinders Plaintiffs' attempts to locate infringing videos to protect their rights

So either Google is intentionally helping people find copyrighted videos, or they're intentionally thwarting it -- either way, Viacom is pissed off. It's a bold move claiming that Google is making it harder for them to find copyrighted data by taking it down. Not that this thwarting has actually slowed Viacom down (3):

Plaintiffs have identified more than 150,000 unauthorized clips of their copyrighted programming on YouTube

Way to get around that Google blocking, Viacom. You showed 'em. Here's the judge's actual signature on the order to "compel production of all data from the Logging database", just so you can see it :):



BLAME! E-mail that guy and tell him he should learn how computers work before he makes rulings

EDIT: Wow. Speaking of abusing pre-Internet laws, it's like the government saw this post and wanted to show just how far it can go: a woman was charged with violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse act because she signed up for MySpace with a fake name. Viacom sounds downright competent now

Heck yes it's Web 2.0

Awhile ago, Digg decided to Web 2.0-ify their site. Which I'm cool with, yay for the future and all. So now when you look at a story, the comments aren't included in the initial request, they're loaded via AJAX right after. Annoying but theoretically faster if there are enough comments on the story. What's actually cool is subthreads aren't loaded, just the initial comment tree; comments on comments are loaded as requested. Even digging and commenting is AJAXified...as long as you're logged in. If you're not, you get this:



Is this AJAX? Hell no it's not, to login you have to go to another page, which means all the progress you've made on your current page (which can be considerable since the rest of it is AJAX) is now lost; you have to start over. And it doesn't check to see if you're logged in at click-time like a real AJAX application, it's hard-coded into the link at load-time, so if you open a bunch of different Digg stories and then try to login, you need to reload all of them. Nicely done Digg. At least I've stopped getting a dialog saying I can't digg stories I've left open for too long, it only took them like a year to fix that one

Flippable e-books

I found a video about a dual-display e-book reader, which sounded like an interesting idea. And then I watched it:



...huh? They apparently seriously believe that pressing buttons to switch pages is a lot of work for users, and it's much easier to either manually simulate a page flip, or to actually flip the entire device over. I think they must be joking or intentionally lying, because anybody that actually used that device for more than 5 minutes would be so tired of either one of those actions they'd be begging for navigation buttons.

Worse is the "thumbnail" technology used for searching the entire text. The thing I hate most about physical books is it's hard to find a phrase I remember reading if I don't remember where it was. Never in my life have I needed to search through an e-book and thought "well, I can just use the find feature, but I sure miss being able to riffle through the pages hoping to stumble across what I want instead". The thumbnails are so absurdly small as to be useless, especially in a document with no pictures. Next they'll be telling us we should organize our photos on a giant digital table. I don't know how the trend of making digital devices that simulate analog devices and their flaws got started, but it should probably stop soon

Product placement

I never really understood why companies spend so much money on product placement. I've never stood in a store thinking "Well, I need X. What kind of X does Jack Bauer use?" (obviously if I were to think this, Jack Bauer would be the role model). I figured maybe it was just a subconscious thing, where people choose things they've seen on TV because they vaguely remember hearing of them, but then I found this

hey i was watching Psych and they mentioned something called Kangaroo Paste. What is it? & Where could I buy it?

Bravo, Psych. By having Shawn mention for 10 seconds that he wants a fictional item, you've convinced somebody they want it, without knowing anything about it since it isn't real. I'm much more impressed with marketing people right now

EDIT: Also the verticoli hair brush

Now I've got you

I'm having an interesting problem with Firefox 3: I'm unable to close my blog. Once I go to my main blog page, I can't close the tab or navigate away from the page, or Firefox segfaults. I like to hope all my readers have this problem, because then it's like a feature of my blog, but I expect not. I tried disabling Flash and all my extensions to no avail; I suspect the problem is one of the other media plugins, like Totem for playing audio clips. On the rare chance that somebody else is having this problem, let me know

Open Reddit

I'm a big fan of Reddit, particularly the programming subreddit, so I was excited to see that yesterday reddit went open source. I got a copy of the code and started poking around; I never realized that Reddit is written in Python, which automatically makes it good. I also hate the Reddit developers less now; they've had a problem for months now with their RSS feeds showing duplicate entries, and have thus far claimed they have no idea what's wrong. I don't know Pylons (the framework Reddit uses), but after my initial poking around I too have no idea what's wrong, so for the moment they're not idiots anymore, although I plan to look into it further. A comment calling something a hack appears 8 times in their code, which is fairly respectable; I particularly enjoyed this comment I noticed in /r2/r2/config/middleware.py:

#god this shit is disorganized and confusing

Linux Journal's Captcha

I forgot to post about this in my last article, I was too focused on my rockbox love. Linux Journal has a very unique captcha. Admittedly, the standard find-the-characters-in-the-distorted-image one can be difficult:



However, Linux Journal's solution is probably not the best. It's a particular annoyance because they require you to preview your comment before posting, which loads a new page, and they don't auto-fill/skip the captcha, so even if you fill out all the fields right you have to do at least two captchas. But that's not the problem, I can live with that, the problem is the captcha is a math question. And because (see myspace.com for corroboration) most people on the internet are stupid, they ask you a low number addition problem. Now, computers may suck at complicated OCR, but one thing they've pretty much got down is addition of single digit numbers.

For an amusing proof of concept, here's a greasemonkey script that will automatically fill in the captcha on any Linux Journal comment page:

// LJ-Captcha
//
// ==UserScript==
// @name LJ-Captcha
// @description Auto-fills the Linux Journal captcha
// @include http://www.linuxjournal.com/comment/reply/*
// ==/UserScript==

nodes = document.getElementsByTagName('span');
for(i in nodes) {
if(nodes[i].className == 'field-prefix') {
mathExpr = nodes[i].innerHTML;
mathRe = /([0-9]+) \+ ([0-9]+) \= /;

first = parseInt(mathExpr.replace(mathRe, "$1"), 10);
second = parseInt(mathExpr.replace(mathRe, "$2"), 10);

document.getElementById('edit-captcha-response').value=(first+second);
}
}

Rockbox > Linux Journal

I'm starting to wonder if Linux Journal is like The Onion for Linux. Every article I have ever read on that site (so like 3) has at some point made me stop and wonder if it's just a big joke. But they went too far when they did a video about Rockbox. Now Rockbox is pretty much amazing. It's an alternate firmware for MP3 players, and I've used it on mine since about 20 seconds after I got it. It has a million features and is in general better than whatever firmware you're using, in every possible way. Here is what the 6 minute video Linux Journal did on it consists of:

• First two minutes -- Talking about how he attempted to install Rockbox on an iPod Nano v3, iPod Nano v2, and Toshiba Gigabeat u, the last of which he actually went to the store to buy just for this video. As he discovered through totally unnecessary trial and error, Rockbox does not support any of these; ironically, it does support these devices, just not these particular versions. You can feel free to go through the same trial and error with your device, or you could just check the compatibility list helpfully offered on rockbox.org


• Next two minutes -- Playing DOOM


• Next minute -- Showing "demos" like plasma and fire. At one point he mentions for a few seconds that you can play music


• Last minute -- Advertisement for GoGrid. Seriously

At the very end he mentions that it can play music, but doesn't actually show it. I'm starting to suspect that maybe this was meant to dissuade people from using rockbox by covertly making it look terrible. He demos it on an ancient, monochrome iPod that he has to have plugged in because it has no battery strength anymore; he mentions several times what a terrible player it is. Super choice there. And then he spends half the time rambling about the players it doesn't support, the problems his ignorance has caused, and how neat GoGrid is.

I posted this as a comment on the video, but apparently they didn't feel it warranted approval: Despite what the video portrays, Rockbox is fantastic. It's not nearly as ugly as it looks in the video; that player blows and he's using an ancient rockbox version, there's a whole bunch of different themes, like:

Everybody who has a supported player go try Rockbox, you'll love it

Crypto-virus, oh noes!

I keep seeing articles on this, and I've even commented on a couple, but I haven't actually mentioned it on here: I don't get the gpcode thing. I'm not exactly old; I'm certainly younger than the people writing these articles about the coming malware armageddon, but this is not exactly unprecedented. There was a virus in the 80s (I can't find the name anywhere now) that copied your FAT to RAM and wiped the main copy, then made you play a slot machine type game to try and win your files back. Sure, not extorting money out of you, but that's only because they lacked the highly networked computers of today necessary. This was 20 years ago, so I don't know why everyone is so shocked by this revolutionary virus. Forget the slot machine virus, I remember before malware was the cool thing to write when viruses actually deleted stuff. None of this encryption, "pay us and you can get everything back" nonsense, and certainly no attempts to be stealthy so they can live on your machine for years sending spam e-mails -- they deleted everything they could find as fast as possible and then laughed at you about it. Why is a virus that encrypts some of your files worse than a virus that deletes all of them?

On an amusing side-note, if you use openoffice instead of office, tar/gzip instead of winzip/winrar, and png files instead of jpgs (none of which are at all unreasonable, my Vista machine does all three), you're practically immune to this virus, it doesn't check for any of those extensions at all.