This artifact is from one wherein Jack Chick read way too much H. P. Lovecraft.

EDNMagazine is running this mildly technical discussion of various DRM schemes, their problems, their pitfalls, and the whole business model surrounding it. Among other things, they note pretty clearly that there’s really no incentive for electronics makers or consumers to cooperate with these schemes, though the content providers want the schemes to be as restrictive as possible, even to the point of eliminating fair use and casual copying (say, to play the same music in your car and in your home).

They come to a pretty clear conclusion:

Of course, you can always try charging a reasonable price and trusting people to be honest. Just think of all the money you’ll save not having to implement DRM.

SCO has been threatening to sue a high-profile Linux user for some time now, insisting as they do that THEY own the rights to Linux (poppycock, as Gartner has said, among others). An anonymous source is cited today in Linuxworld saying this high-profile target may well be Google, which would be provocative indeed.

Almost certainly a doomed effort, but provocative, at least. The real question is whether Microsoft is involved in this thing somewhere, since we know they loathe Open Source, and we also know they want to buy or destroy Google.

SCO’s claims of ownership of Linux — and their “license or litigate” tactics — haven’t impressed IT analysis/research firm Gartner. According to them, we ought to assume SCO is going to be laughed out of court, and should therefore not even consider paying the “license” for Linux that SCO is brazenly insisting everyone now needs. They also note, for the record, how SCO has managed to convince Boies to entertain their abuse of the tort system: lots and lots of money, much of it in the form of stock.

Excellent. I’m shocked anyone would really take SCO’s claims seriously once they examine the issue; it’s good to see someone of Gartner’s stature calling SCO, Boies, and McBride on their bullshit.

I’m a clutter person. This is not news to anyone who knows me. It’s ordered clutter, mostly, but sometimes not. This extends to my digital environment as well as my physical one; in addition to scraps of paper on my actual desk, I use a program called Stickies to mimic the behavior of Post-Its on my computer desktop.

Okay, make that “mimic the behavior of LOTS AND LOTS of Post-Its.”

The problem with Stickies is, well, it’s very basic. You can set color and font, and you can minimize each note down to a single line, but there’s no way to group related notes, or view only a certain set, or make sub-notes, or anything like that. Real organization is almost impossible with more than a few notes.

This fuels the clutter, and in a bad way; I have several notes that include include arcane command lines for doing this or that on our production machines, or for constructing elaborate SQL statements, for example, but they’re mixed in with notes listing books I want to remember to read, or links I should visit, directions to people’s houses not yet transferred to my Palm, or even half-written posts for this very weblog.

Yesterday, though, I found VoodooPad, a new and very inexpensive OS X tool ($19.95). The description on the site was very promising, so I downloaded a test version limited to 15 pages per file. Fair enough, I started playing. A VoodooPad document is a sequence of linked pages, which makes it very, very easy to organize little bits of information on an ad hoc basis. Creating a link is dead easy (I’m honestly not sure how it could be easier). I went from experimenting to actively moving my Stickies into it in about 2 minutes; by the time I hit the limit, there was no doubt I was giving them the twenty bucks, and now I don’t have fifty-eleven Stickies on my desktop anymore.

If you’re on OS X, DEFINITELY check this out. (Mohney, I’m talkin’ to you, too; it’s sort of like a hypertext authoring tool, but much easier to deal with.)

Someone’s calculated the airspeed of an unladen swallow.

Apparently, you can’t easily copy saved games from one Xbox to another. Nice one, Redmond.

Mac OS X, like all Unix-related operating systems, is terribly, terribly stable. To wit:

[Yakland:~] chet% uptime
12:23PM  up 47 days, 46 mins, 4 users, load averages: 0.14, 0.13, 0.19

Yup. Up and running with no reboots for any reason for a month and a half.

“But Chet, what about your applications?”

[Yakland:~] chet% ps -aux | grep Safari
chet  7965   3.3  9.4   747212  49384  ??  S    10Nov03 161:43.13 /Applications/Safari.app
chet  9993   0.0  0.0     1116      4 std  R+   12:23PM   0:00.00 grep Safari
[Yakland:~] chet% ps -aux | grep BBEdit
chet  2962   0.0  3.6   239568  18876  ??  S    10Oct03  93:37.31 /Applications/BBEdit.app
chet  9995   0.0  0.0     1116      4 std  R+   12:23PM   0:00.00 grep BBEdit

The date column is what you want to look at; Safari, easily the best browser I’ve yet used, has been running for better than a week. The real standout, though, is BBEdit, which is where I spend most of my time: it’s been running since October 10th. Try that with Word.

Cool.

Mark Pilgram posts an early programming action shot, age 11.

This guy put his whole home directory into CVS.

Damn.

Remember my porn post from a week or so ago? It seems inconceivable that I missed this site, but there you go.

You just know it’s gonna be good if it involves pumpkins and a trebuchet.

“How about we let the U.N. run the Internet?”

Well, dictatorships would love it, but the rest of us, well, not so much. The net has thrived on the dyanmic ad-hocracy that runs it; anything that puts control in the hands of governments is bound to fuck it up. There’s a (shelved) plan on the table, so the idea is out there; let’s make sure it never happens.

I think Erin, Lindsey, Charlotte, Anne, Aimee, Emily, and a host of others I can’t recall right off the top of my head DEFINITELY need one of these.

Okay, this is a rant. It’s a rant about some specific software, but it’s also a rant about the fact that normal humans still can’t just buy software that does a job and expect it to work, for the most part. Companies market these products as easy-to-use, but a huge percentage of the time, it’s so broken, unusable, or just plain confusing that someone like me has to get involved. For esoteric database servers, that’s okay. For backup software — something everyone ought to be using — it’s absolutely inexcusable.

Yesterday, I got a call from one of my clients to come out and help him with his backups. He’s the odd duck in my client roster, since I do no development for him; I just do desktop support. Since he’s a friend’s dad (and a friend in his own right), I really see him socially more than I see him professionally, but a week or so ago he called me and asked what sort of backup software I suggest to folks. He wanted total fire-and-forget, and he wanted to be able to span CDs, since his user directory had grown beyond a single CD’s capacity (due primarily to pictures of a certain baby girl, I’m certain).

Well, I don’t really have a favorite. I mirror my stuff across a couple drives, and I burn CDs of key directories pretty regularly, so that software niche isn’t something I have firsthand knowledge of, and I told him so. Then I said something I regret: “I hear good things about Retrospect.”

Ooops.

Well, as I said, he called me yesterday, and I went out to his office this morning. He’d been getting all sorts of weird errors when he tried to do backups, and his computer crashed when he tried to run DiskWarrior to investigate the claims Retrospect made about various failures. In no case did Retrospect make a usable backup.

I ran some tests, since I feared the worst, but I couldn’t find anything wrong with the machine, either with the hardware or the drive itself. I killed a few stray processes, and then tried to do a backup. Retrospect dutifully started copying his user directory to a CD, ran out of space, asked for a second one, finished the backup, and then asked for the first one again in order to verify the backup.

“Hm,” I thought, “perhaps [CLIENT] just did something weird.”

Ah, no. Retrospect refused to recognize the first disc, despite having written to it only moments before. A second try at a backup yielded the same results 15 minutes later, so I called Dantz, the company that makes Retrospect.

Now, [CLIENT] is not a power user. He’s been a Mac guy since the early eighties (he had a Lisa, for crying out loud), and doesn’t ask too much of his systems. He’s got no goofy software on the thing, and it’s a nice, newish 17″ iMac — I actually helped him move into it last year, from an old Power Computing machine. There’s no reason to think it’s gone nuts in any way.

When I finally got to speak to a smart human at Retrospect (half an hour later), I gave them [CLIENT]’s serial number, the version of the software, the version of OS X, and the model name of the computer. I then described Retrospect’s behavior, whereupon the “tech” asked me to verify what model CD-R drive the iMac had. I told him.

(The problem with that solution was that (a) I wasn’t sure he had a DVD burner and (b) since DVDs have a 4.7GB capacity, he didn’t need $80 worth of backup software to get his 1.4GB of data on a single disc. He can just drop one in, drag is user folder to it, hit “Go”, and be done with it. Period. As it happens, he did spring for the Superdrive, so DVDs it would be.)

I expressed my amazement AGAIN at how ridiculous this was, since there was nowhere I’d yet found that said this incompatibility existed. Tech’s feeble response was that it was included “on a compatibility list on the web site.” Folks, I’ve looked on the site — I had half an hour to search the site while I was on hold — and I never saw such a list. Even if I had, I’m not sure if it would have occurred to me to check it, since the drive in question was a STOCK DRIVE FROM APPLE that is commonly found on their iMacs (it’s an upgrade, sure, but a pretty damn common one). Who doesn’t work with stock equipment? I mean, it’s not like a bunch of companies make iMacs. (Incidentally, I just tried to link to that list, and it appears their support site is now down. Appropriate, I guess.)

I expressed to the Tech precisely how weasely it was that they don’t actively exclude iMac Superdrives from their compatibilty list on the fucking BOX instead of on a page buried on their website that’s full of technical mumbo jumbo people like [CLIENT] shouldn’t be expected to understand. He’s an oil guy, for the love of Mike; he’s got no idea what model drive Apple put in his iMac. After all, I don’t need to know anything about drilling for oil to put gas in my car, right?

I advised [CLIENT] to return the software to PC/Mac Mall (something he had zero trouble doing; they’re eating the shipping both ways, too; since I’m slamming Dantz, I may as well note how impressed I am that PC/Mac Mall does business this way). I advise anyone reading this to avoid Dantz until they get their act together, if they ever do.

Of course, “go get some recordable DVDs and use them instead” wasn’t quite the end of the story. Don’t get me started on the whole DVD-R vs. DVD+R quagmire. Suffice it to say I forgot it existed, and poor [CLIENT] emailed me a bit later asking if he’d done something wrong, since his computer wouldn’t recognize the DVD+R (“dee vee dee PLUS arr”) media he bought. Macs, of course, use DVD-R (“dee vee dee DASH arr”) media. The only thing he did wrong was assume consumer electronics companies were rational, or that they gave a shit about being comprehensible. The fact that the only difference between the two is a subtle, unpronounceable, nonalphabetic character is nothing short of criminal; what the hell were they thinking?

But that’s a whole ‘nother rant.

Belkin Routers, according to the Register, are now redirecting some HTTP requests from their owner’s networks to an advertisement for Belkin’s censorware/parental control software. You can opt-out, but it’s still pretty nasty.

Read the original news.admin.net-abuse.email post here, and the follow-up, from the Belkin marketing droid, here. His position seems to be “but you can turn it off!” Uh, right. Routers are supposed to route data, not hijaak my packets so you can advertise at me.

Mike points out this link (a post by Linux luminary Doc Seals) that shows what each candidate’s web site is built on. It’s no surprise that the lion’s share run Linux, but I share Mike’s amusement that Sharpton is running Solaris instead of something Free.

The link also includes this quote, which could very well tell you all you need to know about the difference between Microsoft’s servers and Linux/Apache servers:

For what it’s worth, the Republican National Committee is running Microsoft IIS on Windows 2000, while the Democratic National Committee is running Apache on Linux. As of this writing, November 5, 2003, the RNC has an uptime of 4.26 days (maximum of 39.04) and a 90-day moving average of 16.91. The DNC has an uptime of 445.02 days (also the maximum) and a 90-day moving average of 395.38 days. Draw your own conclusions.

Microsoft apparently tried to buy Google. For their part, Brin & co. appear more likely to go the IPO route (they’re famously still private), should they decide the time is right for some sort of payoff.

As you may or may not know, Google runs entirely on Linux.

David Cross in Wired Magazine on a new crop of video games. Don’t miss the last paragraph. Hell, don’t miss any of it.

In what can only be described as a journalistic drive-by shooting, Forbes is running a piece about Cisco/Linksys’ trouble with the General Public License. It appears they used GPL code in their commercial products, but are now refusing to follow the terms of said license. This is the “viral” bit that Steve Ballmer has complained about in the past: if you incorporate GPL code into your product, you have to release the product (or at least the software) under the GPL as well.

There’s nothing wrong with this. These are the terms of the license; companies like Cisco and Linksys are free to use said code — and follow the license — or eschew said code and write their own. What they cannot do is use the code and then refuse to hold up their end of the bargain, but the Forbes piece seems to suggest that that’s what they ought to do. This is very, very odd, I think, and not at all what we might expect from what has been in the past a strong magazine.

More discussion at Groklaw (no direct link; the story posted on 10/14).

Citing the theft (copying) of source code, Valve/Vivendi Universal has announced that Half Life 2 will be delayed another four months, to April ’04.

Why some miscreant copying their code delays them is left as an exercise to the reader, but smart money’s on “it doesn’t; they’re just nowhere near ready, and are gradually approaching Daikatana territory, and the code theft is good cover.” Still, the advance screen shots and gameplay demos have been awful damn impressive.

If you haven’t noticed yet that 99% of those worms, trojan horses, and email viruses floating around target only ONE company’s software, you haven’t been paying attention. Virus writers write for Windows almost without exception. Microsoft would have us believe that this is an outgrowth of their market position — after all, what virus author wants to have his work limited to the few of us running something else?

Much as Bill might like that to be true, though, it’s not the whole story, or even most of if. The truth of it is that Mac OS X, Linux, and FreeBSD really are more secure, and are therefore drastically less attractive targets for virus writers. Security Focus’ Scott Granneman explains why in an article running at The Register. Worth a read, even if you’re not a geek like me.

Google introduced an advertising program a while back that’s actually useful for small sites; lots of folks jumped on the badwagon quickly, and a few started making real money.

Then the ugliness started. Contrary to Google founder Segey Brin’s “Don’t Be Evil” edict, it looks an awful lot like Google’s gone to the dark side on this one. The Terms and Conditions are absurdly draconian, and allow them to boot you from the program based on pretty much anything, without providing any sort of evidence of violation beyond their say-so. They explicitly refuse to provide evidence of, say, “inappropriate clicks,” hiding instead behind a proprietary algorithm. It’s also against their T&C to discuss the terms and conditions, or anything else Google decides is “proprietary” — which includes your clickthrough rates and what you’ve been paid.

And the best part? If they shut you down, they don’t have to pay you anything they owe you.

Commentary:

• Kottke
• Russell Beattie

I mean, c’mon, people. You guys act like I don’t even look at my server logs.

There’s now a trojan horse that can infect Windows machines through banner ads, which will allow nefarious dorks to run malicious code on your computer. There are plenty of alternatives to Internet Explorer, even if you’re running Windows. Most of them are much, much better by any reasonable metric.

Mozilla is probably the top dog, though it comes in several flavors (a big honkin’ suite of programs, or a much more streamlined browser-only version called Firebird). If you’re on a Mac, do yourself a favor and use Safari. The good news is that virtually all non-IE browsers have built-in pop-up advertisement blockers, which can make your browsing experience much, much nicer.

It’s a shame that this lucid and fairly damning explication of SCO’s actions of late is, well, written by Joe Firmage.

Firmage was a Silicon Valley wunderkind of the first order; he founded two companies before he was thirty, and made a big pile of cash doing it. Then he started talking about UFOs and the capital-T Truth, and got essentially ushered out of USWeb. Don’t get me wrong; his points above are strong and clear, and everyone even vaguely curious about the SCO dustup should read it. I just see what McBride & co. might say, and I think the words “ravings of a crackpot” will probably be involved.

Check out Greg’s Digital Portfolio for an excellent review of what can be done with PhotoShop. In particular, look at this sample, where the differences are really striking. Assume the hot swimsuit models pervading the mediascape are getting at least this much mojo.

Coke’s newest contest involves putting a GPS into certain cans, and then using its signal to find you and drive the prize (a Hummer) to you. As a surprise. With no action on your part.

On Wednesday, a panel of experts including a man named Dan Geer released a report strongly suggesting that our reliance on Microsoft is a danger to national security. These views are difficult to dispute; computing is dangerously close to monoculture — over ninety percent of corporate desktops are a single type of computer, right? — and the culture involved isn’t a terribly robust one (it seems every couple weeks, we have a new worm or virus to worry about [or, rather, you do; I’m MS-free {HDANCN}]). Recall what happened, for example, when Ireland relied primarily on a single strain of tuber.

Today, Dan Geer was fired from his position as CTO of @stake, a consulting firm with close ties to Microsoft. In a prepared statement, @Stake said “Participation in and release of the report was not sanctioned by @Stake. The values and opinions of the report are not in line with @Stake’s views.”

And dissent, of course, isn’t allowed. Especially of the “but he’s NAKED!” variety.

Some very particular walking directions: Bag End to Cracks of Doom, from what is presumably Middle Earth’s best mapping resource. (via tjic, but not from his blog)

I’ve added a [categories] link above, which should produce, if you gesture at it, you’ll get a list of our current categories here at Miscellaneous Heathen (they’re noted at the bottom of all the links now). Select one to show only entries from that category.

The basic functionality should work for any browser, but it’ll work best in a modern browser. It works most well in IE 6 or Safari; Moz does pretty well. IE 5 is, of course, continuing to ride the software short bus, but since this is a personal site, I don’t have to humor its fucktard ways.

This Apple advertisement from nearly 20 years ago includes three computer industry luminaries. The middle one is Mitch Kapor, designer of Lotus 1-2-3 and current leader of the Open Source Applications Foundation, currently hard at work on a true Open competitor to Outlook. The one on the right is Fred Gibbons, whose company has essentially disappeared.

The real question, though, is “does the dork on the left still have that shirt?”

I know some of my readers are just as geeky as I am (if not moreso!), but many of you aren’t. Maybe you don’t know what all this fuss is about over Open Source software, or why it matters, or why it might be a good idea even for your business or home. Most people outside the tech business world probably don’t understand any of this, and that’s not surprising.

Fortunately, the Economist is running this piece, which paints a pretty fair picture of why OS software is appealing to businesses and government, and why proprietary (i.e., closed) software is seen as undesirable in some contexts no matter what the cost. In no small part, it has to to with control and flexibility: if you’re using OS, you’re free to do as you please with your software. If you’re tied to a vendor, then that vendor’s business plan will start dictating your own business plan. It’s not a long piece, so its coverage is limited, but it’s as fine a rundown for the lay person as I’ve seen yet.

This is a list of all the search terms people have used to find this site so far this month. My favorites: “antibiotics or pitying or performer or counterpart or imposing” and “a list of things auto mechanics do.” I have no idea why either led those poor fools here.

Fantastically, the list also includes “they say that the road ain’t no place to start a family” and “work hard to get my fill everybody wants a thrill.” I’m used to Journey-based searches (what with hosting this and all), but actual Journey lyrics are new.

Updated Colophon now online, reflecting the migration to and rationale for Blosxom, plus some additional bits and details. Oh, and now that page actually validates for real.