Wired’s June issue has a story about Good Eats host and geek-celeb chef Alton Brown. Enjoy.

Last week, my Palm died. Well, not completely; the digitizer won’t recognize any input, but other than that it’s fine — where “fine” means essentially unusable, anyway. I ordered a new Zire 72 from Amazon to replace it.

That’s when I discovered something HORRIBLE.

THEY CHANGED GRAFFITI.

This is NOT okay. I know why they did it — Xerox lawsuit and all that rot
— but goddammit, I’ve been using Graffiti since it was a product you bought to make your original Newton usable, i.e. before the original Palm Pilots hit the market, which puts my initial mastery of the single-stroke alphabet at nearly a decade ago. I do NOT want to take the time to learn new, “more intuitive” penstrokes,
especially when “more intuitive” is code for “slower.”

Fortunately, I’m clearly not the only one in this position; if you, like me, are vexed by this development, do this:

The basic procedure is:

1. Acquire access to an Original Graffiti (OG?) handheld.
2. Use a tool like Filez to get access to the unseen ROM files.
3. Beam Graffiti Library.prc and Graffiti Library_enUS.prc to your new handheld.
4. Do a soft rest on the new handheld.

Bingo! Back to OG. A hard reset — i.e., back to factory virgin status — will restore the new machine to the new heretical Graffiti, but why would you
want to do that?

Oddly enough, cornstarch-and-water behaves very, very strangely when shaken properly. (3.8MB Windows Media file)

Go Old Skool, and hook up with the Atari Homebrew Movement. Yup; there are still people making new games for the grandaddy of consoles, despite the fact that you have to work in 6502 assembler to do it.

Wow.

It seems unlikely that this will settle the apparently-endless Trek vs. Dr Who debate, it does seem likely that a number of other, ancillary conclusions may be drawn from its sheer existence.

It would be ungentlemanly to speculate about the proportion of these conclusions that concern the existence, or lack thereof, of the author’s social life.

Hot girl-on-girl action.

Why Windows is a security nightmare.

Back when we first built this site, we used Blogger, which was free, but not Free (also known as “free an in beer, not Free as in speech“), and which eventually got too slow and silly to use (they’re better now). We switched to a Free (or at least Free-er) tool called Greymatter, which worked for a while despite being an orphan, until it, too, stopped working so well for us (basically, it doesn’t scale all that well, and Heathen has a couple thousand posts now).

Last year, we looked around quite a lot before jumping to Blosxom, which is both free and Free. At the time, the also-ran tool was the ever-popular Moveable Type, which was free for noncommercial use, but definitely not Free. We figured that was probably not a direction we wanted to go, and the simplicity of Mr Dornfest’s tool appealed to us, so Blosxom it was.

We’re very glad we’re using Blosxom now, as Six Apart has announced a new Moveable Type release, but with limited new features — and a rather steep pricing model that’s all-the-buzz in the blogging world this weekend. Put simply, they’re now charging for use beyond a very limited installation, and the charges can mount quickly. This has met with no small amount of griping, and at least one prominent blogger has already switched to a Free system, WordPress (licensed under the GPL, so it’s Free forever).

Now: of course Six Apart can charge for their software. No one disputes that. The question is really that of choice from the consumer end of things. With blogging and content management systems like WordPress, Blosxom, Plone, Bricolage, Drupal, and others available — all open source — why would someone choose to pay for Six Apart’s product? What does that get you, really, besides a lighter wallet and potential vendor lock-in? It’s question worth asking for any software purchase, and it’s being asked more and more often these days. The answer, as Mr Pilgram pointed out, isn’t one that suggests a great future for commodity software vendors.

Black-line redaction in released government documents is pretty common. Some French geeks, however, have figured out how to interpolate the missing words. Heh.

Never underestimate the power of a geek’s curiosity.

One dimensional Tetris.

It’s been said several times that “the best operating system to use is the one you like, unless that operating system is VMS.” It’s funny, and especially snarky, and it contains at least a glimmer of truth; VMS has been essentially abandoned in the last 15 or so years. In my professional computing life, I’ve only worked in one place that used it: TeleCheck. They did so for very good reasons, of course; when they built their all-proprietary, custom system, VMS and Vax/Alpha hardware provided something not easily found on other platforms: failover via clustering. That VMS’ other great feature, versioning built right into the file system, gave us an easy way to retreat from buggy upgrades was just icing on the cake.

Still, with the rise of cheap, commodity hardware, the place in the world for the Digital Vax and Alpha machines dwindled. The rise of Unix, then NT, and then Linux left VMS alone and behind. Windows servers look like your desktop, and Unixy servers all look more or less the same, but takes a whole different skillset to manage a cluster of Alphas — and it’s a skillset that is in short supply, notwithstanding the oft-cited trusim that the last COBOL programmer will be able to name his price.

I last saw VMS in 1997, which is far later than most folks. I left TeleCheck and joined the boom, and spent my time on Solaris and Aix servers, with the occasional and ill-advised Windows NT box thrown in for variety. (Since then IBM has thrown in its lot with Linux, and Sun is clearly circling the drain, leaving Windows and Linux almost alone in the server market.) I assumed, in the years since then, that VMS had gone the way of all flesh, especially after Microsoft made much noise about its NT-on-Alphas move (hey, it sounded like a good idea at the time; ultimately, I think I only ever saw one Alpha running NT, and it was run by the single least competant big-company IT man I ever saw (no, I won’t tell you the client [HDANCN?])).

All of this is just background, of course, to this story. See, Compaq and Digital merged, and then HP and Compaq merged, and now it comes to this.

It appears that Doctor Doom is alive and well, but no evidence suggests that he’s threatening his old cronies, not even Sue Storm, who now hides in the Kansas House.

Peter Parker could not be reached for comment.

CSS Pencils is pretty amazing, though wholly impractical.

What happens when Doctor Who calls Doctor Who on Radio 4?

The BBC has a nice long story about the 30th anniversary of Dungeons and Dragons.

Goofball fundie preachers, take note.

What’s a more basic geek toy than a yo-yo? Science News covers the state of the yo-yo art. I love that there are now yo-yos with ball-bearings.

LaserMonks.com, of course!

CIO Magazine has a long piece on the ongoing efforts to replace a 40-year-old system with something modern.

Here at Heathen Central, we maintain a variety of computing platforms, from the obsolete to the supersexy. Since we’re not true ubergeeks, though, sometimes we require help, which is why we’re terribly glad that this sort of thing is available on the web. Or we would be, if we wanted to do that to a badger.

Scans of the very first issue of Action Comics — containing the debut of Superman — are now online.

It is now possible to play several classic Infocom text adventures (e.g., Zork, Hitchhiker’s Guide, etc.) via an IM client. It’s been widely blogged, so if it’s not terribly responsive, try again later.

Turns out, the link to the Greymatter-to-Blosxom script from the colophon of the parent site got broken, perhaps when we started using Mason.

Fortunately, someone called our attention to this problem, so if you’re looking for that script, here it is.

We just got this bit of no-doubt virus-laden mail. I wonder how many folks will fall for it?

From:         noreply@nogators.com
Subject:      Important notify about your e-mail account.
Date:         March 3, 2004 1:28:50 PM CST

Dear user of Nogators.com gateway e-mail server,

Our antivirus  software has detected a large  ammount  of viruses outgoing 
from  your email account,  you may use our free anti-virus tool to clean up
your computer software.

For details see the attached file.

Attached file  protected  with the password  for security reasons. Password is 21570.

Have a good day,
The Nogators.com  team                               http://www.nogators.com

Cheeky, they are. Who wants to guess what’s in the payload?

So I help out a local nonprofit here and there. They’re very cool people and they do very cool work. Since web stuff is what I do, I’m also rebuilding their site to avoid the abomination that is Frames, and since I’m doing that, it occurred to Ms. Intrepid Managing Director to call me this morning when they couldn’t get their PayPal buttons to work right on their gala ticket sales page.

Apparently, PayPal has a very nice, friendly tool for creating these buttons. You hand the PayPal site the appropriate information, and it spits out a lump of code you stick into your HTML file and bammo! You’re done!

Well, you would be if Dreamweaver weren’t in the picture. Apparently, by default ol’ DW will change form variable names for you when you paste in code if it senses name duplication. Since each button is its own form in the PayPal paradigm, this meant that the meaningful variables (“cmd” and “encrypted”) occurred six times on the page — so each one we given a number suffix. This is utterly absurd, since each variable was in its own form, and therefore its own namespace; no collision was happening. PalPal’s script, to which the form posts, knew nothing of these new names, nor should it have. Consequently, the buttons didn’t work. So, as I said, Ms. Intrepid Managing Director called me, and I called PayPal.

The bright side of this is that PayPal’s tech person was extremely helpful, but the bad news is that the help she gave would have been almost useless to a non-programmer. Their tool assumes the user will cut and paste the code as if it were an incantation to be recited but not comprehended. That’s fine; I’ve done the same thing, and it’s very common on the web for things like buttons, logos, and the like. The problem is that DW decided to “help,” and in doing so created a situation from which the inexperienced cannot easily recover. I’m told that this behavior is an option that a user can disable, but that’s pretty cold comfort — I mean, under what circumstances would it be okay for any development tool to unilaterally change variable names for you?

Now: if you’re a pro, (1) this never would have happened to you because (2) you write HTML in a plain text editor to avoid the kinds of pitfalls that generated code creates. So we’re left with amateurs who are less able to troubleshoot their situation than geeks like us — so why, again, is DW doing this? Are they taking lessons from Redmond about destructive and absurd defaults?

Matchstick Rockets: Eye-scalding Fun!

How To Write Unmaintainable Code.

Hey, didja know that a search warrant can put you out of business? Now you do. The Feds showed up at CIT Hosting in Columbus, Ohio a couple weeks ago, and wound up taking everything instead of just finding what they needed on site. Yup; they’re shut down despite not actually being accused of any crime — apparently, they just couldn’t sift through the terabytes of data quickly enough to suit the suits. (Leave aside for a moment whether we think the Feds can do it faster.)

<

p

Here’s CIT’s statement:

02/14/2004 FBI Confiscates all servers

Dear Customers of FOONET/CIT:

We regret to inform you that on Saturday February 14, 2004 at approximately 8:35 am EST, FOONET/CIT’s data center in Columbus, Ohio temporarily ceased operations.

Here are the facts of what occurred:

The FBI executed a search warrant issued by the United States District Court for the Southern District of Ohio regarding the IRC network that we host. According to the warrant, it appears that the Bureau is investigating whether someone hosted on our network hacked and attacked someone else.

After several hours of attempting to track down, inspect and audit the terabytes of data that we host, the FBI determined that it was more efficient (from their point of view) to remove all of our servers and transport them to the FBI local laboratories for inspection. This was completed at 7:00 pm EST same day.

The FBI has assured us that as soon as the data has been safely copied and inspected, the equipment will be promptly returned. Unfortunately, the FBI has not been able to tell us when they will be completed with their inspection.

We have been told by the Special Agent in charge of the investigation that If you need access to your data you are asked to please contact the Bureau via email to rwhite3@leo.gov. Make sure to include in your email your name, mailing address, and telephone number with area code.

Since we wish to focus 100% of our efforts on restoring services, we would appreciate it very much if you do not attempt to contact us directly. Please rest assured that we are doing everything possible to restore service to you as quickly as possible.
To the many who have inquired, Paul and family are OK, although shaken by these events. They are at home and awaiting the blessed event of their new child’s birth. We thank you for your good wishes and prayers.

Please check back here often. Through this site, we will keep you informed of ongoing developments as we know them.

Thanks again for your understanding.

Damn. I’m glad I don’t host there, because I’m pretty sure they’re, well, fucked. Have I mentioned lately that expanding police powers is probably a bad idea?

From Accordian Guy, whose adventures always amuse:

Writing docs for a constantly evolving app that you didn’t write is a challenge akin to trying to discover the shape of a moving object in a dark room by throwing flourescent golf balls at it and seeing which way they bounce. J. deVilla

Do you like to send mail with 12 fonts and 7 different colors? Read this. And stop it. 99% of the HTML-only mail her at Nogators is spam, so if you’re sending such mail, we probably won’t even see it. Trust us on this: send plain text.

BoingBoing points us to the Geek Hierarcy, which apparently inspired the pagan hierarchy.

The worlds’ angriest 404 page. Done in the style of Microsoft, natch.

Mitch Wagner breaks it all down for you. Disney is rushing to adopt Digital Rights Management, but the market has consistently rejected such measures (remember copy protection on software?) because they unfairly abridge fair use rights for consumers.

quotemeta is your friend.

Ten Technologies That Won’t Die. Yes, fax is included.

Ikea as game walkthru, courtesy of the Morning News.

Microsoft, aware that its flagship browser Internet Explorer is rife with security holes, is suggesting that you type in URLs instead of clicking them in some circumstances to avoid falling prey to such exploits.

What? Yep, that’s right: since clicking links in IE is a risky behavior, they suggest you avoid doing so. Here’s another suggestion: USE A DIFFERENT BROWSER. There is no platform where IE is the best choice, period.

Comcast, long hated in many towns in its capacity as cable monopoly, has brought monopolistic customer service to a new market: broadband. Despite not having a set policy or published bandwidth usage limits, it’s been warning and then disconnecting customers who use too much. The real kicker is that even when asked, they won’t tell customers how much IS too much. Fantastic.

Coverage at SecurityFocus.com and DSLReports.com.

MyDoom is makingi the rounds this week; The Register notes it’s the worst virus ever, at least in terms of infection rate, and other sources agree. While initially thought to have been the work of a Linux fan upset about SCO’s legal shenanigans, it now seems to have come from Russia (alternate link) — and that the SCO DDOS activities of the worm are in fact a red herring, since it also installs backdoors on infected machines. Nevertheless, SCO is offering a $250K reward for the arrest of the worm’s author.

In the meantime, Techweb offers some tips on how you can protect yourself, but they leave out the one most likely to produce results: Stop using Windows. Corporate America is a monoculture of Windows, and this — coupled with Windows’ horrible security — creates a target virus authors find irresistable. My OS X machines are safe, as are my Linux boxen, partly because of a fundamentally better security model, but also because they’re not the majority platform. If you’re a normal human, when you next consider a computer purchase, look hard at the Mac. If you’re savvy and geeky and willing to dive into the deep end, consider running Linux full-time. You’ll be contributing to the end of the monoculture, which will save us all from the inevitable and catastrophic effects of such homogeneous environments.

NASA is using something called Aerogel as the collector for that comet-material catching mission. The substance is the least-dense solid ever, yet can support a huge amount of weight. It’s a near-perfect insulator, of course.

I want some.

Just about every amusing bit that we used to pass around the Internet before it became “September Forever“) is available at milk.com, which I found by looking for that story about heavy boots.

(No idea what I’m talking about? Don’t worry about it.)

Pocket Smalltalk, for Palms.

So, Hewlett-Packard announced that they’ll be licensing Apple’s iPod to sell as their own music device. They’re also set to preinstall iTunes for Windows on all their new PCs.

Microsoft is crying foul, complaining that this “reduces choice.” I think what they mean is “reduces our complete control.”

An unpopular Canadian high school senior was elected valedictorian last year as a joke — and used the podium to excoriate his callous classmates. Excellent.

Here’s a review of Windows security problems and patches during 2003. Make of it what you will.

Erin pointed out that I’ve gotten my first comment spammers (since removed). If it keeps up, I’ll have to take care it somehow — registration or disabling comments altogether. Ick.

I build web systems for businesses. I’ve been working with and around the Internet since before most folks knew it existed, and I’ve been working with corporate web systems since 1997. Most of you know this.

In the pre-boom days, we frequently had to actually build the business case for putting corporate assets and information online. People didn’t quite understand how to get payoff out of this new thing, so lots of silly ideas got tried. Generally, though, some best practices surfaced, and they continue to be followed by companies who Get It.

One of these very important maxims is simple: don’t get in the way of a user making a purchase, or finding out if what you have is what your browser wants. This is particularly important and applicable to large retail companies like Home Depot. Tell people what you have, and how much it costs, and they’ll come see you. This is the “internet as ur-catalog” school of thought, and it’s pretty much the rule — even if you don’t do it, everyone else IS.

On first glance, it would look a lot like their site is on the right track, and in no small part it is. You can find information on the makes and models they carry, and even compare features and functions. However, a marketing decision somewhere in their adminisphere has robbed them of true high marks.

Home Depot is their mainline brand, but they also have the higher-end stores called Home Depot Expo Design Centers. Expo carries the fancy brands, and is much more of a service provider and design center, as opposed to the ur-hardware-vendor that the conventional Depot stores are. You can’t get lumber at an Expo, but you can’t get a $4,000 DCS range at Home Depot. There’s some overlap, I’m sure, but mostly they’re distinct (unlike, say, the bizarre brand strategy at General Motors). Perhaps to emphasize this distinction — and to avoid cannibalization — “nicer” appliances aren’t available at Depot, but can be easily had at Expo. There is, in effect, a “ceiling” at work — if it’s too nice, Depot doesn’t carry it.

Herein lies our tale: Last night, we discovered (while making our second-ever fruitcake — don’t laugh, it’s delicious) that our oven had gone on the fritz. The cooktop works fine, and the whole box is getting power, so some sort of ignitor or valve has gone the way of all flesh (and, apparently, oven parts). Rather than spend the couple-hundred this will doubtless cost (between parts and labor and service-calls), Erin and I are going to shift from “new couch” mode to “new oven” mode.

I’ve done some simple research in the past; I specified all sorts of fancy bits for the first house I tried to buy (longtime Heathen know this story), and ever since I moved into the Treehouse I’ve been meaning to replace the basic, no-frills range the place came with. We’ve got a list of features we want:

• Gas. ‘Lectricity is no good.
• It needs to be stainless steel.
• There’s no point in doing this without including a convection oven.
• We want a “super-burner” of > 12,000 BTUs.
• A simmer burner capable of < 1,000 BTU heat would be nice, too.
• Self-cleaning, natch.

I pointed my browser to Home Depot and started looking. As it happens, their selection isn’t terribly extensive. They have a festival of Maytags plus what looks like a single model of JennAirs in different colors (why the model numbers vary by color is sort of odd, but that’s another rant). I quickly found almost the right one: a JennAir JGR-8775-QDS. It met all the critieria above, but lacked a convection oven. There was no evidence that Home Depot even had a JennAir with a convection oven, in fact, which struck me as intensely odd.

Odder still was the fact that Erin, searching at the same time at the Lowe’s site, found precisely what we wanted: a JGR-8875-QDS, which is the same model with a convection oven. Of course, Lowe’s price for the non-convection model was more than $200 more than Home Depot’s on the same item, so we figured their price on our target model was similarly high.

Now, had I been actually IN the Home Depot, I expect this is where a salesman might have noticed my interest, asked me questions, and figured out that what I wanted they actually sold — but in their upmarket store, not in the “regular” Home Depot. On the web, however, there was no indication that Expo even existed at all, so it appears that Lowe’s is the only place to get the range we want. (This isn’t true, of course, but Home Depot does nothing to make sure we know that.)

Since I’m reasonably savvy about these things, and also since I knew Expo existed, I did a web search and found their site. Of course, this did me very little good: Expo’s site is a disaster. You can do some shopping, but only for small items like blenders. There is no provision at all — at least that I can find — for browsing their appliance lines, something I’d expect any such store to have. Fancy stoves are things people shop for kind of intensely; stepping in the way of that process is a bad idea.

The madness goes on, however. At Expo.com, I found one of the most misguided things I’ve seen in years: they’ve gone to the trouble of digitizing their catalogs so you can browse them by virtually turning pages. This absurd and useless feature isn’t even hosted at the main Expo.com site; it opens in a new window. It features essentially no search tools, and in any case does not even emulate a comprehensive catalog (which could be at least quasi-useful). It’s as if Best Buy digitized their Sunday insert on a grand scale. I do web development for a living; this kind of thing isn’t cheap. I’d love to have the salesman who closed this deal hawking MY services.

Finally, I located a phone number for a local Expo center — in the fifth distinct browser window their window-happy site opened for me (yet another rant; there’s very little reason to do this, in particular when the windows point to THE SAME SITE). When I got someone on the phone (a very helpful man named Ciro), he was able to tell me that yes, indeed, they do stock the model we want, and that it’s $200 cheaper than Lowe’s, and that we can have one at most two to three weeks after we ask for it, probably sooner.

Erin and I will almost certainly buy this stove from Expo. It’s what we want, and it’s cheaper than Lowe’s. However, Home Depot very nearly lost this business because they’ve imposed a ridiculous firewall of sorts between their two brands, and furthermore because the Expo site itself — for people lucky enough to find it — turns out to be worse than useless. What HD should do:

1. First, include information about Expo brands and lines as part of the Home Depot site. Don’t make me guess that it might be possible to buy what I want from you, because most people won’t go to the trouble I did.
2. Put Expo’s lines and brands on the Expo site, for the love of Mike, so people can see what you’re selling. Again, don’t put barriers in the way of sales. You don’t have to sell online; just show me what you have.
3. Allow HD site searches to branch to the Expo site (going the other way doesn’t make as much sense, but how can preventing the upsell be a good thing?) as required; the perfect situation would involve the HD search returning links to Expo products as appropriate.
4. Hire someone competant to manage the Internet strategy across all brands.
5. Get rid of the ridiculous paged catalog minisite, and fire whoever bought it for you.

Of course, that’s free advice, and they’ll probably never see it. But that doesn’t make it any less true.

A week or so ago, the formerly decent but apparently now deeply lightweight PC Magazine ran a column by Lance Ulanoff crowing about how OS X had a vulnerability, and that this meant that it wasn’t any better than Windows after all. It’s a poorly written whinefest, really, full of misconceptions and perhaps even deliberate misrepresentation — either that, or Ulanoff is grossly unqualified to author such a piece.

Predictably, there was great hew and cry over the article on technical sites. (Given that PCMag has published John Dvorak for years — sort of a technological Bill O’Reilly — I wonder if this wasn’t their point, but never mind that.) There have been rebuttals great and small, but the best is almost certainly this piece by Richard Forno, a security specialist, author, and former Chief Security Officer at Network Solutions.

I’ve instructed my mail program to sequester all HTML emails into a folder of their own if they come from someone I don’t know.

So far, it’s all spam.

Computer-industry author Steven Levy explains it all in a piece utterly devoid of technical jargon. Read this, even if you’re not technical. The rights you save could be your own.

DOOM is TEN YEARS OLD.