briancarper.net (λ) (Category: Rants)

Happy Day Against DRM

Fri, 04 May 2012 13:23:52 -0700

Books are 50% off at O'Reilly today, using code DRMFREE. (This includes my book, Clojure Programming, by the way...) I'm a bit late with this, given the offer expires in 9 hours, but there's still time.

Whether you want to buy books today or not, it's worth pointing out that today is International Day Against DRM!

Brand Loyalty. Step 1: Make good stuff.

My anti-DRM article is quickly going to turn into a pro-O'Reilly Media infomercial, so you've been warned.

I am not the kind of person to feel any kind of brand loyalty. I'm the kind of person who deliberately buys a different brand of peanut butter every time I go to the grocery store, to try to screw with the store's customer-tracking database.

O'Reilly is probably an exception. I like O'Reilly. Why is that?

First, O'Reilly books tend to be pretty good. At least, I have yet to buy one that wasn't pretty good.

Allow me to digress. My college's CS curriculum was based around C++. Now, I'm the kind of person who thinks that programming is vaguely enjoyable no matter what I'm doing. Computers are fun. But for a new programmer, coding in C++ is like an hours-long shouting match with the compiler where your goal is to try to get the compiler errors to shut up. Producing a working program is an occasional side-effect. C++ doesn't exactly promote explorative, imaginative programming.

The first class I had in college where I actually enjoyed programming was a class that taught Perl. My textbook was Learning Perl, aka the Llama Book¹. What a good book. I still have it. I remember feeling like I learned more reading that book that I had in two years of slogging through C++ data structures. And what fun Perl was.

I remember immediately spending a bunch of money I should've saved for food, and getting Programming Perl, aka the Camel Book¹. So good! Who knew a book could be witty and fun, and teach you things at the same time. You can tell when a book is written by someone who knows their stuff, and who enjoys talking about their craft.

Not sure if it was Perl itself, or the great Perl books, or probably some combination. But I've been cemented in dynamic, vaguely-Perly, powerful and fun languages since then. First Ruby, then Clojure.

I'm also likely to buy an O'Reilly book, given a choice between alternatives.

Step 2: Be Humans and give a crap.

A second thing that creates brand loyalty is when a company seems to be made of human beings that you can relate to.

When I heard O'Reilly was writing a Lisp book, and what's more, it was a Clojure book, and what's more, I could be involved in writing it... I was pretty excited.

Our book was written in ASCIIDOC, and lived in an SVN repo hosted at O'Reilly.² We could upload code with a certain string in the SVN commit log, and that'd trigger a rebuild of the ASCIIDOC on O'Reilly's server, which was compiled into PDF, and then we could download the PDF from SVN to see how the final product would look. Turnaround time was about 10 minutes. It was a nice, programmer-friendly setup, to be sure.

Whenever I dealt with people at O'Reilly, I generally got the feeling that I was working with programmers, or people who cared about programming. There aren't a lot of Clojure gurus there, but there were people who knew why wrapping long lines of could needed to be handled just right.

It's a great feeling to work with people whose goal is advancing the craft, as opposed to some kind of Death-Star-like entity whose goal is wringing extra pennies out of customers' bones.

DRM sucks

So does O'Reilly actually give a crap? Well, fiiiiiiiiinally getting to the point: O'Reilly's stance on DRM is pretty much spot-on. O'Reilly books are sold without DRM. DRM is not the way to make good stuff. DRM is a good sign that you don't give a crap. DRM doesn't advance the craft, but rather does the opposite.

I leant a guy my copy of K%R a while back. Now there's one more person in the world with a bit more knowledge of C. This is a really good thing. If my copy of K&R was a DRMed ebook that I couldn't lend out, the world would be a tangibly worse place.

I highly recommend this article by Mike Hendrickson at O'Reilly where he talks about piracy, DRM, and making books. Also this one by Tim O'Reilly where he talks about the same.

Now that my name is on a book, have my opinions about DRM changed? Not really. I'd obviously prefer that people pay for my book. I pay for books. It's only fair.

At the same time, I would be really disappointed if my book was sold with DRM all over it, and I'm glad it isn't.

Treating your customers like thieves a priori is not the way to build brand loyalty. Thinking that DRM is going to stop anyone from pirating a book is pretty much delusional. Using DRM to maintain some kind of iron-fisted control over stuff you're selling to other people is morally sketchy.

DRM is not the way to advance the craft. Advancing the craft is the important thing.

When you make smart decisions like not selling DRMed books, the result could be dorks like me spending an hour or two unprovoked, writing an article about how good your company is. And yeah, this is surely a bit self-serving because I want to sell my book, but I'd have written this same article two years ago too.

One way to tell a good book is if it's widely known by an affectionate nickname or acronym. K&R? TAOCP? SICP? The Camel Book? You probably know what I mean right away. ↩
Obviously I'd have preferred Git, but I'll take what I can get. ↩

I don't have cancer

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 14:29:58 -0700

2011 was an interesting year. A year of firsts!

I worked on my first book, Clojure Programming (soon to be released, in fine bookstores near you).
I bought my first house.
The first of my maternal grandparents died.

Hmm, kind of took a turn for the worst there. Then, one fine sunny day in 2011, sitting at my favorite pub, enjoying my favorite beer, I started coughing up blood. Another first!

More firsts:

First Emergency Room visit.
First bronchoscopy.
First CT scan.

Coughing up blood¹ is caused by a huge number of things, from nose bleeds to lung cancer to food going down the wrong pipe to cocaine use. It turns out that 30-year-old non-smokers with no other symptoms tend not to have lung cancer. That didn't stop me from fearing the worst.

Canadian Health Care

This was my first chance to experience the Canadian health care system first-hand after immigrating here. "Free health care" is not entirely accurate, but is very close. I pay some small amount of money monthly ($30-40 I think) to be included in the government-provided Medical Services Plan (MSP). Many employers pay this fee for their employees, but mine doesn't. No big deal.

Once in this system, every "essential" form of health care is paid for completely by the government. Emergency room visit, bronchoscopy, blood test, x-ray, visit with my family doctor, visit with my pulmonologist, all of it was 100% paid for. Show them a government "Care Card" and you're set.

Prescriptions are not covered. Things like eyeglasses, non-emergency dentistry, and elective procedures are not covered. I can get private health insurance to pay for some of those things, but I never bothered, because the cost of that stuff is so low.

I'd hesitantly call this a step up from the US system of huge numbers of people being uninsured, and of insurance not actually covering all of your medical expenses even if you have it.

The one bad thing about Canadian health care is the wait times. It's often a month or longer to get an appointment to see my pulmonologist. I'm currently scheduled for another medical test... in June. This was scheduled about 4 weeks ago. Thank God I didn't have cancer, or I'd probably have been dead before I got to see a doctor.

I never went through a similar experience in the US, so I'm not sure what the wait times are like in comparison. I do remember my father waiting for over a month (in severe pain) to have a surgery performed because his insurance company dragged their feet in approving it, or something like that. So yeah. I probably can't complain much.

Now what?

After months of waiting and months of not knowing, and then having a few cameras shoved into my lungs, it turns out I probably don't have cancer. So that's pretty good news. I still don't know what's causing me to sporadically cough up blood, but as more and more "serious" things are ruled out by tests, I find myself in much better spirits.

2011 will go down in my biography² in as the Year of Lost Productivity. I didn't handle the stress very well, to put it very mildly. It's unfortunate that the act of worrying about dying and not having time to do things I want to do ended up hindering me from doing many things I wanted to do.

I sometimes hear about people who actually have terminal illness showing bravery in the face of their illness. By contrast, it didn't even take terminal illness to essentially blow me out of the water. Just the real threat of it. I feel a lot of shame and regret at how poorly I handled myself. I'm trying to use that regret as motivation. I have a lot of things I need to accomplish, and who knows, maybe not as much time to accomplish them as I'd like to imagine.

So I have a lot of plans for this year. Old projects need to be dusted off and brought up to speed. Step one is probably kicking some life back into this old blog.

Hemoptysis. From Greek hemo (blood) + ptýsis (spitting). A word I'm now intimately familiar with. ↩
I'm not actually writing a biography. ↩

2010 in review

Wed, 05 Jan 2011 10:10:03 -0800

Another year down the drain. A good year, in the end.

2010 Geek Achievements

Wrote some code...
- cow-blog - The engine running this blog.
- oyako - Clojure ORM library.
- gaka - CSS compiler for Clojure
Finished a huge project for work, my first AJAX-y web app (in Rails). That was fun, albeit stressful.
Learned a lot of git.
Learned a lot of Clojure.
Learned a lot of Emacs.
Learned a lot of Javascript.
Learned a lot of PostgreSQL. It's good to be free of MySQL.
Switched to ZSH. This was a good switch.
Tried to learn a lot of Japanese, but kind of fizzled out at the end of the year.
Alllllllmost got a Clojure gold badge on Stack Overflow. I'll get it soon though. Not losing any sleep over it either way.
Read a lot of books. The best: probably Feynman's books of anecdotes.
Blogged a bit. Got an article in Hacker Monthly. Was flamed repeatedly. Learned a lot in the process.

2010 Non-Geek Achievements

Immigrated to Canada. A good move, without a doubt.
Lost 25ish lbs. :)
Learned how to cook better.
My most important achievement from 2010 is actually non-geek: I finally obtained a bit of an offline social life. This is not an easy task for one such as myself.
Continued to learn to appreciate good beer. Longwood Dunkelweizen, mmm.

2010 Failures

Did not blog enough.¹
Did not write enough code.¹
Missed the first Clojure Conj. Maybe next year.
Re-gained 10ish lbs. :( ²

Plans for 2011

Re-lose 25ish pounds. I'd like to reach the weight I had in college.
Finish my rewrite of oyako. I have ambitious plans for it, if I can just find the time.
Finish my rewrite of cow-blog to match oyako.
Keep working on the RPG my wife and I are creating (in Clojure).
Attend the next Clojure Conj, I hope.
Learn more Clojure.
Learn Haskell? Trying and failing to learn Haskell has become somewhat of a tradition, no sense stopping now.
Learn all 2000+ jouyou kanji by the end of the year.
Supar sekrit projekt. But I haven't signed the contract for it yet so I won't talk about it until I do.
Maintain social life at acceptable levels.
Buy a house.

I feel like I have solid plans for completing each of these things. Blogging more often and finishing oyako are high on my list of priorities. I expect 2011 to be my most productive year to date.

See also, non-geek achievement #4, "Obtained social life". ↩
See also non-geek achievement #3, "Learned how to cook better". ↩

iPad? More like iAd. Vertisements.

Thu, 16 Sep 2010 18:43:35 -0700

Via Slashdot, it seems soon you may be able to subscribe to newspapers on the iPad in the near future.

Sure. Why pay $10 for a paper copy of something when you can pay the same $10 for a likely-DRM'ed copy that can only be read on a $500 portable computer?

In all honesty though, instant delivery, lack of clutter, "take it anywhere", being able to archive issues indefinitely, text search... those features might be worth the money, if it was a really good newspaper/magazine.

But wait, there's more.

The Cupertino company has agreed to provide an opt-in function for subscribers to allow Apple to share with publishers their information, which includes vital data that news organizations use to attract advertisers, industry sources say.

...

While the leap into the digital tablet market comes with short-term problems for newspapers, the iPad and future tablets will provide a new digital palette for publications to create sophisticated and lucrative ads, said Needham & Co. analyst Charles Wolf.

"I would say it's a risk, but I would argue it's a short-term risk," Wolf said. "If you can put animation and multimedia into ads, that will greatly enhance reader views. I am certain of that."

So as I understand it, first I buy a $500 gadget. Then I pay for a newspaper subscription. Then a bunch of companies want me to give them personal information about myself, so they can share it amongst themselves. And then I have to view ads.

Animated ads.

The only thing better would be if the iPad also woke you up at 4AM and tried to sell you life insurance. Maybe Apple would let me install a free ad-blocker script for my news reader though. It is my hardware, after all... pfffft, yeah, I could't keep going with a straight face.

And thus my desire to get an iPad, kind-of sort-of building over the past couple of months, once again flatlines.

Dell: the aftermath

Thu, 08 Jul 2010 11:11:28 -0700

In a previous post I outlined the ways in which Dell's customer service sucks. I finally got my computer yesterday, a Studio XPS 9000. Here are my first impressions.

The bad

This computer weighs so much I almost hurt my back lifting it. I thought computers were supposed to be getting smaller and lighter?
The HD indicator light is tiny and on the top of the case. I can't see it with my computer under my desk.

The optical drive is behind one of those stupid plastic flap door things. So there isn't even an indicator light for the DVD drive. I'm seriously considering taking a screwdriver the case to fix this.
It didn't come with a Windows install disk or a driver disk. It only has a recovery partition on the HD.

I found an order form which I think will get me my disks. In the mail. Seriously, Dell? Seriously? Why not come to my house and kick me in the balls while you're at it?

The recovery partition doesn't help you worth a crap if you want to do things like repartition your drive to put Linux on it. Windows7's sucky partition shrinking app wouldn't shrink it lower than 500GB.
The Dell recovery program is called DataSafe or something, and when you use it, it tries to upsell you like crazy to get a "pro" version that has a bunch of useless backup features. Uggggghhhhh.
The side of the case is white. In 10 years it's either going to be yellow with age, or scuffed up beyond hope. Kind of ugly, but I don't care much. The front of the case looks OK though. Black with red highlights. About as good as I could expect.
It came pre-installed with some crappy "Dell Dock" knockoff of Apple's Dock. Worthless and instantly uninstalled.

This thing caused the desktop icons to be hidden by default. Who would possibly want to do this in Windows? I can image everyone and their grandmother being awfully confused by the missing icons.

When quitting this dock, it said "Undo is not possible". I love a program that has no going back once you quit.
I wanted to find drivers for the wireless card that came with the Dell. So I went to Dell's support site and typed in the tag number on my computer. It gave me a link to drivers for the wrong card. I had to google all over the place to find the right ones. Way to go.

Dell's website is a labyrinth full of outdated information and dead pages in general.
The instructions I got with the computer reference Vista. I don't have Vista.
There's a "Windows inside" logo on the case. It will be removed shortly. They leave an awful lot of glue behind.

The good?

The i7 is about as fast as I had hoped. It only took a half-dozen cores and 12 GB of RAM to let me watch full-screen flash videos on Youtube. I feel so modern.
The inside of the case is OK. There are a lot of hard drive bays and lots of extra screws. It should be easy to expand if I need to.
It came with bloatware and crapware, but actually far less than I was dreading. And most of it was trying to sell you Dell crap.

In the olden days you'd get a hundred links to AOL and other 3rd-party crap. I saw a link to Skype and the obligatory nag to buy an anti-virus subscription (fat chance), but not much else.
Dell delivered the computer 2 days past the original estimated delivery date. So in spite of all the bullcrap and phone-jockeying I had to go through for billing, I can't complain about how fast it got here. Two days late isn't bad.

I've heard rumors that these computers are built in Malaysia, and mine was definitely shipped from the US (per the Purolator tracking site). So I'm surprised they can get these things delivered as fast as they can given that it was shipped halfway around the world first, and had to go through Customs at least once coming from the US to Canada.

Purolator was the only shipping option for Canada. I would've preferred to rush it. But maybe that's not possible given that it's coming from the US. Oh well.
It runs pretty quiet, given how huge the fans are. We'll see how hot it gets once I start putting some load on it.
It came with a DVI to VGA adapater and a DVI to HDMI adapter. I thought that was a nice touch, though it could be that they come standard with any nVidia card nowadays.
Works OK with Linux. It took 20 minutes to set up. (Not counting wiping the Windows partition and re-installing on a smaller partition from my own copy, minus the crapware. That took over an hour.) Sound, video and wireless work out of the box in Linux. All 12 GB of RAM are usable, given a 64 bit OS. (I discovered this the fun way, by unthinkingly trying a 32 bit OS first.)
It didn't burst into flames (yet).
It has a peanut tray on the top. Or MP3-player tray, I guess. But I really want to put peanuts in there.

Brian, you're stupid!

So why did I get a Dell? Because I had good experience with them in the past, at home and at work. Given, that experience was 5 years in the past, and a lot can change. And I'm new to Canada, and relatively unaware of what options exist here.

The other (main) reason was that they were far, far cheaper than going through newegg.ca to get the same hardware. But I guess you get what you pay for. Caveat emptor.

I wouldn't recommend Dell to anyone else, given how chaotic the whole buying process was. Too much uncertainty, too much room for mistakes.

Dave asked in my previous post why I didn't just a computer myself, like I had in the past. I said I didn't have time, but what I meant wasn't build time, which should be an hour or two max. I meant research time. Trying to match up compatible hardware, trying to find the best prices on all the components, checking for Linux compatibility, this takes forever and a half. I don't have hours / days to dork around with this any more.

On the other hand I can just google "xps 9000 linux" and see instantly what problems people had. I can be semi-confident that the hardware would all be compatible. And that did work out OK.

And the last reason I got Dell is that unfortunately I need Windows for work and gaming. Blarg. Paying the Windows tax to Dell is bad enough, let alone buying one off the shelf for $6,000 or however much they cost nowadays.

Dell sucks

Fri, 02 Jul 2010 10:57:41 -0700

Why did I order a computer from Dell? I guess I had a good opinion from 6 years ago when I last bought something from them.

Let's count the ways in which their customer service has failed me. (And my computer isn't even here yet.)

As documented, their website couldn't process my credit card without a phone call.
After a week of my computer being "in production", I started getting more phone calls from an unidentified phone number that Google told me was Dell. Fearing another billing problem, I called back. And I was told "Thanks for calling, but our order tracking system is down. And we're all going home. Call back tomorrow morning.".

If only Dell had some means to acquire reliable computer systems on which to build their order tracking database.
I called the next day and was told my order was fine. I was also told (per script, I'm certain) that I could check my order status on Dell's website. Which of course I knew. I know it costs the company money every time someone calls, and they try to strongly discourage calls for that reason, but their script made it sound like I was an imbecile.

I found it quite condescending. I dislike these canned scripts pander to the lowest common denominator of customer. They should be happy to take my call. I just spend upwards of a thousand dollars on their crap.
Turns out the phone calls I was getting were from someone trying to give me "free internet from Shaw or Telus for 3 months", and I was eligible because I bought a Dell computer. So I was being telemarketed before my computer even got here.

I said I already had internet service, and they said "Oh, too bad, it's for new customers only." I do not appreciate this.
I got an email saying my order shipped. Joy! 20 minutes later I got an email saying my order was delayed, and if it didn't ship in 5 days I should call. What?

It really did ship though, I have a tracking number. Why the contradictory emails?

All of my phone dealings with Dell were via some offshored far-eastern country, judging by the accents of the phone reps. I have nothing against this in principle; I'm not a xenophobe. But the phone connection is always so static-filled and laggy that it really puts a damper on communication.

My computer isn't here yet, and I just hope to God it works and doesn't break in a month. I kind of wish this article had come out a week earlier.

That'll teach me for trying to save time, I guess. Next time I'll build my own system from scratch. Dell goes onto my List of Companies Not to Buy From in the Future (LCNBFF), along with Westinghouse and oh so many others.

I am an edge case

Wed, 30 Jun 2010 10:03:20 -0700

I am an alien. An American who emigrated to Canada. This has resulted in a lot of fun and a bit of pain as I've managed to break the systems of many of the businesses I deal with.

As a programmer I can appreciate the importance (and sometimes difficulty) of handling edge cases. It's been an interesting experience living as an edge case myself.

H&R Block(heads)

Taxes are confusing enough when you don't have a wife from another country. The friendly folk at H&R Block had no idea how to handle my situation. Their computers demanded a Social Security Number for my wife, which she doesn't have, because she's Canadian. So they left it blank. (Leaving it blank was the consensus opinion of everyone at H&R Block, including the managers.)

To even be able to leave it blank, they had to print the forms, because the computer refused to submit my taxes electronically with a blank SSN. This should've been a red flag to me, looking back.

The correct thing to do was for her to get an ITIN from the US, which from what I know is a like an SSN that doesn't get you SS benefits or allow you to work in the US. It's just for tracking. But they didn't tell me that.

Moral of this story: That's the last time I'll ever use H&R Block. If I want to do my taxes wrong, I can do that myself for free.

IRS

The IRS refused to believe that my wife existed without a number to assign her, so they rejected my tax return and threatened to charge me tons of penalties. So I drove down to the friendly neighborhood IRS office. Surely they'd know how to fix this, right?

Wrong. The fellow at the IRS was familiar with filing taxes for Mexicans living in the US, but not for a "non-resident alien Canadian spouse" like mine.

The ITIN docs say that I need to submit a notarized copy of my wife's passport, to get her an ITIN. But notarized by whom? By a notary in Canada or the US? The IRS agent spent at least an hour reading his enormous IRS manual, looking up treaties and international law, trying to figure this out. Eventually he found a footnote scribbled into the margin of his book that said a Canadian notary was OK. So that's what I gave him.

He filled out the new tax forms himself, stapled on a photocopy of the page from his own IRS manual saying the Canada-notarized passport was OK, stamped everything all official-like, mailed it away himself, and... a month later it was rejected again. I needed to get a US notary to do it, or my wife had to drive to the freaking capital of her province to get it super-notarized or something. Nine months later and 3 more trips to the IRS office, I finally got it worked out.

As a US citizen, living in Canada, working for a US company, being paid by a Canadian payroll company, I live in constant fear of doing my taxes next spring.

Moral of this story: Even the IRS doesn't know their own tax code. Thanks again, US Government.

No credit

I have good credit in the US. I was able to get a car loan without a co-signer 6 years ago. I have credit cards.

In Canada, I don't exist. My credit score here is zero, as you might expect. I tried to buy a car, and they just flat-out wouldn't let me without a co-signer for a loan. I guess I can't blame them. (Except that I have money, they have something I want to buy, and we both ended up losing out.)

I went to the bank to open a checking (er, "chequing") account, and all hell broke loose. They wanted my business, but how could they justify giving an account to someone with "no credit"? Eventually the bank manager managed to run a US credit check on me (at least she said she did) and they let me open an account.

But I can't get a credit card here. Not even a $500-limit high-interest card like they give to kids in college. Not even after I had the bank write a letter of recommendation vouching for me. I have to wait a year and keep getting paychecks before I show up in the system. ("Paycheques"?) I'm still looking for other options in the meantime.

Moral of this story: Well, no moral. Sucks to be me, I guess.

Shopping

I tried to buy a computer online recently (from Dell, which I'm starting to regret). Not having a Canadian credit card, I used my US card. This is OK, my card works up here, with a small foreign transaction fee of %1-3.

But the website wouldn't take a US address as my billing address. I had to give a Canadian address. "Province" was a drop-down, mandatory field.

No matter, I'll just go to my bank's website and change my billing address to one in Canada. I checked with my bank before I moved, and they said it was no problem to keep the account even if I moved to another country. "We have lots of international customers!", said the teller.

Well, my bank's website won't let me specify a non-US billing address. "State" is a mandatory drop-down. Which is awesome. I emailed the bank and asked them to change my address for me, and they did. Now when I go to the "change my address" form on their website, half the fields are filled in and half are just blank. So if I ever use the form again, something will probably break.

Once I got on the phone with Dell, they were more than happy to take my US credit card as payment. Their online form just couldn't handle it.

Moral of this story: Text fields, not drop-downs.

An so on

When I fly across the border, I have to fill out a customs declaration form. There's a field asking "country of residence". Well, technically I am a resident of two countries. So I pick "US" when I fly down to the States, "Canada" when I fly back.

I tried to get a Costco membership in Canada, and they wanted a driver license. My license is from Oregon. Hilarity ensued, and they decided I didn't need one after all. Any time I need to give a driver license for any purpose, I end up breaking something.

Note that in every situation I've described, what I was trying to do was valid, and after some hassle, everything usually worked out OK. Computers just got in the way and slowed the process way down. And I'm not that much of an edge case. 250,000 people immigrate to Canada every year.

I suppose it might be better to optimize for the common cases, force people to pick their province from a drop-down. And then deal with the edge cases like mine manually later. Every text field is another opportunity for users to type in gibberish and chaos. But I wonder if the programmers actually thought about it this much, or if they were just being lazy.

I'm not really complaining. I don't expect the world to change to accommodate me. It's been more funny than annoying. But I do find it interesting to see the flaws in computer systems exposed. I get a certain sick satisfaction out of seeing people write "invalid" values into fields that I know are going to break someone's database down the line.

Ads on license plates?

Sun, 20 Jun 2010 22:09:08 -0700

What if when your car stops at a red light, your license plate displays ad banners? What could possibly go wrong?

Quoth the person(?) who wrote this bill:

"We're just trying to find creative ways of generating additional revenues," he said. "It's an exciting marriage of technology with need, and an opportunity to keep California in the forefront."

The forefront of annoying the hell out of people. Certainly what I need is more distractions on the road. I mean, what if there's a new brand of toothpaste and I didn't find out yet? Someone somewhere needs to earn a dime for telling me about it by any means necessary.

I'm just waiting for the first company to propose paying new parents a few hundred dollars to tattoo ads on their babies.

Printer spam: what could possibly go wrong?

Thu, 17 Jun 2010 10:59:57 -0700

As further evidence that there are no depths to which companies won't stoop when it comes to advertising, HP has come up with a great idea: Get people to hook their printers up to the internet and then spew advertisements out of their printers.

Well, it's a win-win situation for the companies doing the advertising: Not only will people see your ads, they'll pay for the ink and paper to print them. Maybe not such a great situation for the end-user though.

And then there are the privacy implications of targeting ads based on geolocating the IP address of the printer. Which I find a bit disturbing, but I guess advertisers already do that with online ads. But wait, there's more:

Ads can also be targeted based on a user's behavior as well as the content, said Vyomesh Joshi, head of the HP's Imaging and Printing Group.

Looking at what I'm printing so you can try to sell me things? Just a bit creepy.

Most troubling to me is the intrusiveness of the whole thing. They're taking control of a physical object in my house and using it against me. May as well kidnap my cat and train him to spell out "BUY PEPSI" in his cat litter.

Quote some slimeball at HP:

"What we discovered is that people were not bothered by it [an advertisement]," Nigro said. "Part of it I think our belief is you're used to it. You're used to seeing things with ads."

Translation: "We know this is a really horrible idea, but if people are complacent enough to sit there and take it without complaint, what's stopping us?"

He's right though, people are used to it.

I guess TV, radio, internet, phones, product placement in movies and games, print media, billboards and the postal service just aren't enough. Clearly what the world really needs is another ad-delivery mechanism.

Windows7 Crash of the Day

Wed, 28 Apr 2010 09:29:21 -0700

I should start a running series of these.

Welcome to Canada

Mon, 12 Apr 2010 10:29:53 -0700

I haven't had much time to blog lately because I was busy moving all my stuff to Canada. I'm finally here and starting to get settled a bit, so I thought I'd write about the culture shock, or lack thereof. Here are some differences and similarities between Canada and 'merka.

Differences

In Canada people aren't very outwardly patriotic. You don't see Canadian flags plastered all over everything in sight. In the US there's a flag everywhere you look.

Winner: Canada. I don't really need visual reminders of what country I'm in.
US: Dollar bills. Canada: Dollar coins.

Winner: US. You can't make origami out of coins.
Sizes of fountain drinks at fast food places are vastly different. I got a "medium" at Tim Horton's and it was smaller than a typical "small" in the US. My wife says she ordered a large drink at McDonalds in the US and had to send it back because it was too big.

Winner: Canada. Maybe this is one reason Canada has such a low level of obesity. Does anyone really need a liter of Pepsi with lunch?
In Canada there's French all over everything. In the US there's Spanish all over everything. I find they appear in almost equal amounts between the countries.

Winner: Draw. In BC you don't need to speak French, so I don't plan to learn it. Same with Spanish in the US.
Canada is metric. Temperatures are in Celcius and speed limits are in km/h. The US is Imperial.

Winner: Draw. Unit of measure for non-science purposes is a pretty arbitrary choice, so who cares?
I have a queen now.

Winner: Canada, because it's a still a novel concept to me. But most people in Canada don't really care about the queen, from what I can tell.
In Canada they put vinegar on french fries.

Winner: US. Seriously, come on now.
Everything is way more expensive in Canada and there's lots of sales tax. Example: gasoline is $1.10/liter (over $4/gallon). In Oregon it was always $2-something per gallon. On the other hand, everything is clean and there's cheap universal health care and the social programs seem to keep crime down.

Winner: Canada. What good is cheap gas if you're dead?
They spell things strangely up here. Favourite, colour, centre.

Winner: US, for our far more efficient use of vowels.
My bank card for my Canadian bank can't be used as a credit card. Haven't seen that in the US for a decade or two.

Winner: Draw. Almost everywhere in Canada takes debit cards anyways. Plus they have little portable debit machines so you can pay at your table in restaurants.
No one owns guns. I have yet to fear for my life since I've gotten here.

Winner: Canada. I imagine crime still sucks in the big cities, but here on the island it's nice.
Most people in Canada seem to keep up to date on US and world news. People in the US don't even remember that Canada exists most of the time.

Winner: Canada. Thanks for being educated.
The last letter of the alphabet is now "ZED" instead of "ZEE".

Winner: US. The alphabet song doesn't even rhyme if you say "zed" at the end.
Gay marriage is legal here. Relatedly, there isn't a church on every street corner and I have yet to meet many overly religious people. Censorship on TV and radio is way less. I actually saw a TV show with "atheists vs. religious people" testing their IQs via trivia questions. You would never see that in America.

Winner: Canada. The US can DIAF in this regard.

Similarities

Drivers suck in Canada as much as or more than they suck in the US. Speeding and passing on the right without turn signals seems to be a national pastime.
TV is mostly the same (i.e. not worth watching). There are mostly the same channels as the US other than Canada-only ones like CBC.
Walmart and Starbucks are still everywhere. But so are Tim Horton's and Canadian Tire.

Honestly things aren't that different up here. Sometimes I forget I'm even in a new country, other than the streets being clean and everyone being polite all the time. It's been a good move.

Advertising is devastating to my well-being

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 14:10:16 -0800

There's an interesting article on Ars Technica about how blocking ads is somehow unethical, and "devastating to the sites you love". The idea that I have a moral obligation to stare at an advertisment, the thought I have an ethical obligation to voluntarily annoy myself for the sake of a company's profits... it would be hilarious if it wasn't so repugnant.

Let's talk about ethics. How about some ethics for businesses?

Stop making the world a garish and hideous place to live by flooding it with ads.
Stop trying to grab my attention, evoke emotional responses in me, manipulate my mind, and trick me into spending money on crap I don't need. This is what advertisement is. Stop disrespecting me and insulting my intelligence. Stop viewing me as an anonymous, money-spending piece of cattle.
Stop trying to track my every move online. How many people understand tracking cookies? How many companies make it clear that every click is being recorded and data-mined? How is this ethical?

Here's the state of the world today: I can't drive down the street without seeing billboards everywhere. The radio is literally 25 to 50% ads, which is why I don't listen to the radio. Television is what, 20 minutes of commercials per hour? Which is why I haven't had television in 6 years. Newspapers and magazines are saturated with ads, and of course I don't read them either. Even then, ads are nearly unavoidable.

(By contrast, books (for example) are awesome. I pay for a book, and then I read the book start-to-finish with no ads, no distractions. A few pages at the back maybe, but I can ignore those. Books are nice.)

The internet is also a wonderful thing. FIRST a person or company puts a lot of information somewhere that everyone can read it effortlessly for free, and THEN they sometimes expect me to look at their ads. And I can simply choose not to.

If you want to force me to look at your ads, make me sign a contract or consent to an agreement before you display your site to me. Otherwise I owe you nothing. If your business is about to go bankrupt, and your business is so important to me that I want it to stick around, I'll give you money. Real money. I've done it before. But I will never give you my attention for free. No business has a right to that.

Businesses are not your friends. Businesses are not ethical entities. Businesses do not deserve the benefit of the doubt. Businesses exist to milk you of as much of your money as possible. The only sane reaction for the average person is a similar one: I want to deprive businesses of my money. I want to get as much from them as I can, while giving up as little as possible.

If I politely suggested that it's "unfair" for a business to have such a huge profit margin, and "if they cared about their customers, they would lower all their prices", I'd be laughed at. Why would a company do anything less than the absolute most they can do to bleed money out of me, after all? I laugh at any business (e.g. Ars Technica) which says the same thing to me. I will bleed you of product, as far as it's legal to do so. It so happens that advertisements are devastating to my well-being. Up to this point I have rarely read Ars Technica, and from now on I'll make it a point not to. If I do read it, I will block ads with the greatest feeling of malice I can manage.

I run my own website(s) at a loss specifically because I'd rather pay out of my own pocket than force people to look at ads. Admittedly my sites are so small that it's not much money. But there you have it. If I had to generate revenue to keep my sites going, I would find a way other than advertising to do it. Or I'd shut them down.

I love my ad-blocker. The only thing better would be an internet where I didn't need to use it.

Windows7: Welcome to 1990

Sat, 20 Feb 2010 15:43:49 -0800

Approximately one in twenty times when I try to log on to my work computer (running Windows 7 Professional™), it lags for 2 minutes and then I see this:

That's the Microsoft I know and love. (By "love", I mean the opposite of love.) Just like the good old days. I'm glad my employer bought this computer and I didn't have to spend my own money.

80% of the time on this machine I'm sitting in Virtualbox using Ubuntu, thankfully.

Technology ain't everything

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 15:40:55 -0800

Let's discuss can openers.

Growing up, my parents would often invest in electric can openers. These things never worked. Some of them sit robot-like on top of the can and walk themselves around the top while chopping the metal. Some of them were mounted on the wall and you somehow get the can to hang in a harness while the device spins the can around. It takes a PhD and double-jointedness to get the can set up in these devices properly. And then you push a button, a lot of noise happens, and usually the can ends up half-open, half-bent up to the point where it's un-openable short of dynamite.

When I open a can, I use one of these. You jam the metal bit into the can and turn the crank, the can spins in a circle and 10 seconds later, off comes the razer-sharp top. The one I own was probably manufactured in the 1980's and it's still sharp enough to open a can with minimal effort.

Is it really that hard to turn a handle for 10 seconds? Do we really need computer-controlled robotic can-opening devices?

Consider books. I still buy and read all of my books in the form of compressed wood pulp. There are newfangled e-book readers, but I don't want one. Why? Because the only places I read are 1) In the bathtub, and 2) Lying in bed. Taking a computer into the bathtub is generally not a good idea, and holding a Kindle above my head for 3 hours is awkward compared to lying a (3-D) book on the bed beside me with one page bent up so I can read it. (Note: I have dropped a book in the bathtub on more than one occasion, and contrary to my expectations, once it dried it was still perfectly readable, no ink runnage at all.)

I know some day, maybe soon, paper books are going to be gone and we're all going to read books from digital devices. But I like my books. I know there are benefits to having electronic books instead of paper ones. But even though they're a waste of space, even though they can have pages ripped out, even though they can burn up or smudge or age and become brittle, I like paper books better.

Mostly I like paper books because they're simple, analog devices. I don't have to mess with any kind of user interface. Books don't have battery life. Books don't have copy protection. Books don't require me to sign up for user accounts at some website and worry about having an internet connection. I can flip through the pages with my fingers. I can tell how many pages are left by the thickness of the pages that are left. I have actually never comfortably finished a long e-book, not even books about programming, where you'd think the ability to copy/paste code would be a boon. I'll pay good money for a paper copy of a book even if the electronic version is free.

This is probably the most banal thing I've ever written about. But there is such a thing as too much technology. I say this as a person who spends all day trying to get people to use databases instead of keeping drawers full of paper records. Technology for the sake of technology is a waste of time.

Working remotely

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 10:59:46 -0800

I'm sitting here in Canada trying to work for my employer back in the US for a month. It's been a few weeks already, and I'm surprisingly pleased (or pleasantly surprised) with how well it's working. At the same time, certain aspects of this rather suck.

One huge obstacle so far is (of course) Windows. Aside from the Linux server that I convinced IT to let me run out of a closet, the whole place is Microsoft. Whatever MS VPN software we're using is slow, clunky, unreliable, and generally annoying.

At one point I tried to fetch a file from a network drive and watched it download at 0.2 k/sec. Then I had someone back home copy it onto my Linux box, and I downloaded from there at 120 k/sec. The Windows and Linux servers are in the same room in the same building behind the same network connection; I don't understand how VPN overhead slowed things down by that many orders of magnitude.

After connecting to VPN, there's about a 25% chance that Outlook will be able to connect to the Exchange server at work. Generally I have to fire up the VPN, turn it off, turn it on, turn it off, turn it on and then Outlook will find it. Sometimes I close Outlook, but it lives on as a zombie, futilely hammering away at the server but unable to find it, until I CTRL-ALT-DEL and kill it. This is with Office 2007.

But the work I do on the Linux server is (of course) easy. No problems whatsoever. Working over SSH is how I did things when I was sitting in my office anyways. I tunnel in and use local GUI SQL clients. I put VirtualBox on my laptop and I do a bunch of stuff in a Linux VM and rsync it back home with no problems. I can edit files over SSH right in Emacs as if they were on my local box, if I care to.

Sometimes I wonder if my dislike of Microsoft is irrational. Any belief that is caused by or results in a strong emotional response should be subject to questioning. Then reality comes waltzing by and reminds me that no, MS software really does suck.

I've worked for this company for over two years before moving. I don't know how well I'd be doing if this was a company I just started with. It's hard to see how important face-to-face communication is until it's impossible. Email is OK, but the benefit of knowing people in person and knowing how they talk and how they think really goes a long way to being able to interpret and understand plaintext communication.

2009 in review

Mon, 04 Jan 2010 21:18:38 -0800

2009 sucked because I was living in a different country than my wife, thanks to months of Canadian immigration paperwork and bureaucracy. This situation is going to be changing in the immediate future, which means 2010 will not suck.

I did have a lot of time to learn things, which is good. I got all kinds of things accomplished at work, learned some supervisory skills (shudder), wrote some code that was put to good use etc. My websites grew in popularity slightly. I learned Clojure and had lots of fun banging out a few apps. I tried to learn Haskell and failed. I feel like I advanced in origami a bit. I inched ahead slightly learning Japanese. I figure in another 50 years I'll know Japanese enough to say "Hello, I know Japanese but I'm too old to use it for anything now".

I read a gratuitous amount of books. I got into Asimov for the first time; usually I dislike sci-fi, but his stuff is good. I found Neal Stephenson, and wish I'd have found him earlier. I read more programming books than I can remember. I found some interesting books on psychopathy and other psychology-related topics, and read plenty of Richard Dawkins and other sciency and atheismy books.

There just isn't enough time in the day to learn everything I want to learn. I come home from a day of writing code all day at work, goof off on the internet a bit, talk to my wife, and then I read books and write code until 3 or 4AM, and it's still not enough time.

I have apps I want to code, drawings I want to draw, origami I want to fold, video games I want to play, movies I want to watch, music I want to listen to, and the list of books I want to read keeps growing faster than I can read them, even given that I already read 4 or 5 books per month. If I had a social life, I can't imagine how little time I'd have for these things.

This year I almost want to slam the brakes on, spend a lot of time with my wife, and let my brain settle. I will definitely do that to some degree, but I can't stop learning in the meantime. I'm running out of years. 29 years old, only four or five good decades left, if I'm lucky, and my brain will be deteriorating the whole time. At least I have plenty to keep me busy.

Respect is earned

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 00:16:57 -0800

Here's my theory of respect.

Everyone deserves some level of basic respect, just for being a fellow human being. This kind of respect means that I won't step on your toes, I'll smile and nod when you talk, I'll hold the door for you. This kind of respect isn't worth much.

The important kind of respect is the one where I will listen carefully to things you say and give your words a lot of consideration and weight. When we disagree, I will sometimes give you the benefit of a doubt (where applicable) and believe your opinion over my own. I will consider you to be a good person. I will want to emulate you. I will make every effort to treat you especially well. Your opinion of me will matter to me. The dictionary uses the words "deference" and "esteem" and that's accurate.

This is the kind of respect that's worth a lot. This is the kind of respect I hope to earn from people (though I don't know how much I succeed), and the people I respect in this way are the ones I seek out in life, the people I want to be around.

Here are just a few things that will not automatically earn you my respect (in the latter, important sense).

Being older than me.
Being friendly to me.
Being related to me.
Being clergy.
Being rich.
Being famous for something silly (e.g. sports, acting, singing)
Having a higher position than me in a company.
Being respected by lots of other people for a stupid reason.
Demanding my respect.

Let's take age, for example. I agree that we should always respect the elderly to a degree, in the superficial sense; I'll hold the door extra long for them. Staying alive a long time is hard in this world, so kudos for that.

But just because you're old doesn't mean your opinion is worth more than mine, or indeed, worth anything at all. In fact many times it's the opposite. Some people grew up in different times, when racism, sexism, homophobia and such were universal, and while many people have changed since then, many others haven't. For example...

While 41 percent Americans under 45 support legalizing gay marriage, only 18 percent of Americans over 65 agree, and nearly half of seniors do not think there should be any legal recognition of same-sex marriage.

41% sucks, but it's way better than 18%. To some degree I can't blame older people for still believing these things; the world was different 65+ years ago, literally everyone had horrid beliefs. People tend to adopt the opinions of society at the time they were raised. Probably I hold some beliefs myself today that will seem horrific in 50 years because I'm too ignorant to see how they're wrong.

However, in another sense, I very much can and do blame anyone who clings to a harmful belief. There's no excuse for it. Age isn't an excuse.

This doesn't just apply to social issues, though social issues are a good example. It could be beliefs about programming practices or views of science and medicine or anything else.

If people progressively learned things over time and used those things to inform their beliefs, then yeah, old people would always be the smartest/wisest people around, and I would respect older people universally. But that often doesn't happen. Many people (of all ages) stop, decide their beliefs are perfect, and cling to them until they die. Many people use their accumulated knowledge and experience to come up with clever (but wrong) justifications for their crappy beliefs. Or they just don't care.

Age is perhaps a necessary condition for wisdom, but it's not a necessary and sufficient condition. Older people definitely have the most potential for wisdom, but many people seem to squander that potential. Sometimes I suspect that society advances not by lots of people changing their minds, but by people with crappy beliefs getting old and dying and leaving a new generation behind with incrementally better beliefs. (I don't know if this is correct. Someone should do a study.)

Being family doesn't excuse your crappy beliefs either. Nor does being my boss, being a pop star, being rich or anything else. If your beliefs suck, I will look down upon you for that.

Here are some things that will earn you my respect.

Being demonstrably intelligent, rational, skilled and ethical, valuing the truth, and having a desire to improve oneself over time.

Oh wait, there's just that one.

I'm lucky that some of my family members are intelligent and reasonably rational and ethical. But many aren't, and I don't respect those ones. I've had bosses who were worthy of respect and some who weren't, and I didn't last long at jobs where they weren't. I'm perplexed that celebrities speak and people listen to them; what have they done to earn the right to be listend to?

I am confused and saddened by societies where people are supposed to "respect their elders", in the sense of giving their opinions weight, or to be unconditionally loyal to their families. What a horrible idea.

Personally, I had many horrible beliefs in my youth, partly due to the sucky place I grew up, partly due to the ignorance and na?vet? of youth, partly due personal weakness, or who knows what. I gave my beliefs long consideration and got rid of many of them. Theist => atheist, "homosexuality is wrong" => "no it's not, you idiot" and so on.

I don't think I can be blamed (much) for the sucky things my brain absorbed as a child, but if I still believed those things as an adult, I should absolutely be blamed and judged for them. If I still ignorantly believe stupid things right now, I should be blamed and judged for that (and I hope someone will point it out). I don't want anyone to respect me unless I've earned it.

Godaddy sucks

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 12:56:57 -0800

I'm in the process of moving all my domains the heck off of Godaddy. I'm trying Namecheap which seems slightly less evil, if the sheer amount of ad banners and upselling bullcrap is any indication. But probably only slightly less evil.

Honestly Godaddy has so many ads I can't even find the button to renew my domains. The process of buying anything takes you through 6 or 7 pages of the most garish, fanatical sleaze-peddling that you are likely to encounter on a website.

Domain registrars are the used car salesmen of the internet.

Time to pay the Windows tax

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 01:39:13 -0700

Now that Windows 7 is out, it's only a matter of time before I'm forced to buy it. I don't want it. I won't use it. But as a programmer, it's nearly impossible to survive without owning a copy of the ~~latest and greatest~~ latest version of Windows.

Why? Because if you want a job, unless you're one of the fortunate few who get to pick your development platform AND dictate the platform for all of your users, you need to know Windows. You need to know how to navigate around it when you're forced to use it on your work computer. You need to know how to troubleshoot (to some degree) your users' Windowsy problems as they try to install and use your program. If you want to communicate with people in the world, inevitably they're going to send you a bunch of MS Word documents and nothing is ever going to read them properly 100% of the time except MS Word itself.

I have a copy of Vista Business on my laptop which I am deeply ashamed for having bought, but at the same time it helped me land a very nice work contract. Without being able to VPN into the company's network (via some MS proprietary VPN software that I tried VERY hard and failed to get to work in Linux) I wouldn't have been able to complete the job on time, and I might be living in a cardboard box under a bridge right now.

For this contract I actually developed the app at home entirely in Linux. I used only Linux-centric tools (Vim, Gimp, Firefox, Ruby etc.). Thank God most of those tools have Windows versions, because deploying it to Windows land at work and working on it there when necessary was (mostly) trivial. But I still needed Windows to finish the job. And all the users of this app were Windows users. The specs for the app were sent to me in Word and Excel documents. The website frontend is being viewed in IE much of the time in spite of my pleadings to the contrary, so I have to support it.

Such is the life of a programmer. I'll probably buy Windows 7 eventually but it'll sting. It'll rankle.

No accounting for taste

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 00:20:26 -0700

Somehow my post from yesterday about Church numerals in Clojure hit the front page of Reddit briefly. I don't understand why. It wasn't that interesting. It was an interesting topic, but there are other sites with better information about the topic. (Even Wikipedia has more/better info. This one is nice too in spite of being C#.)

I think it's because it was submitted to Reddit with a vague and inflammatory title about brain explosions, and people click links without thinking too much about what they're doing. Even programmers do, I guess.

My blog got around 14,000 visits yesterday, which is not much these days, but a lot by the standards of my tiny blog. If you added up everyone I ever had a conversation with in real life, would it be 14,000 people? I doubt it. Kind of crazy.

I run three websites out of one JVM/Clojure instance on my lowly VPS server and it didn't crash, so I'm kind of happy about that. I've crashed from lesser loads than that in the past. So either my programming is getting better, or my new host is better than my old one, or it was dumb luck.

All of my data is persisted in Tokyo Cabinet nowadays but mostly it's read from caches in Clojure refs, so maybe that helped a bit too. Maybe. Who knows? I know nothing about scaling websites. Slashdot would reduce this site to a puddle of goo.

In any case I appreciate the opportunity to blather about things and have people listen.

Comcast blocks port 25

Sat, 15 Aug 2009 15:22:00 -0700

Testing a remote SMTP server is kind of hard when Comcast is secretly blocking all inbound and outbound traffic on port 25. I only figured it out when telnet wouldn't even work. I could've saved myself an hour of frustration if I'd known this. Thanks, Comcrap.

Windows Powershell: Can you handle the power?

Sat, 15 Aug 2009 14:50:38 -0700

MS Powershell is Microsoft's ripoff of Bash. I don't think this is a bad thing necessarily. Bash is a good tool and it's open source. If Windows bundled a sensible, full-fledged Bash and got rid of CMD.EXE I would dance for joy.

So Powershell lets you refer to your home directory as ~ and a bunch of commands have *nix aliases like ls and cat. This is nice for those who have *nix commands firmly internalized. You have to use .\foo.bat to run things in the current directory instead of just foo.bat, which I thought was cool.

But Powershell is not without its problems. For one thing I see this a lot:

The redirection operator '<' is not supported yet.

How hard is it to implement input redirection, really? For another thing, tab completion continues to be broken. When you hit Tab it still doesn't put a slash at the end of the text it inserts. You have to type a manual \ every time you hit Tab, to continue tabbing your way through directories. Thus doubling the number of keystrokes you're forced to type. This continues to drive me crazy. There's a small amount of evidence that someday it'll be fixed, but I'm not holding my breath.

You also usually can't bundle flags together. e.g. rm -rf would have to be rm -r -f in Powershell. This is just annoying enough to bother me, but I can look past it.

Sadly, Powershell also runs slower than a geriatric sea turtle. I don't understand what it's doing that takes 10-20 seconds to startup. Or why tab completion often lags for 5+ seconds itself.

My happiest surprise was when I tried to uninstall Powershell (so I could try version 2) and got this:

This dialog listed every program installed on my computer (in random order) including every Windows Update I'd ever installed. The worst part is that I couldn't even dismiss this dialog as an error. For all I know, uninstalling Powershell could cause every program on my computer to stop working. I've seen stranger things happen in Windows.

A person walking past my office when I saw this would have heard the crazed, maniacal, tortured laughter that only the experience of being forced to use Windows can elicit.

Wikipedia, You Scare Me

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 00:33:36 -0700

Weird Al's newest song has been on Youtube for less than 30 minutes and already the Charles Nelson Reilly page has been updated with a link to it.

How long is it going to be before the internet acquires a physical body and rules over us all?

I paid for music

Sun, 24 May 2009 20:06:32 -0700

As a general rule, I don't pay for music. The main reason of course is that the music industry are a bunch of thugs. If you don't know that already, you've been living under a rock for the past few decades. I won't even buy music for other people as a gift if I can help it.

Recently however I did buy music, specifically Jonathan Coulton's latest DVD. JoCo releases his music under Creative Commons, which is awesome, and when you buy it (from What Are Records) you get MP3s that are not infested with DRM, which is also awesome. When you buy that particular DVD, you get a DVD of the concert, a music CD of the same concert, AND you can immediately download MP3s of said concert while you wait for the DVD in the mail. All for $20. Well worth it for such quality music.

I first heard most of JoCo's music via shaky concert recordings on Youtube and via MP3s acquired "elsewhere" (nearly all of which are free downloads on Joco's website though); otherwise I'd never even have known he existed. And yet I ended up giving him my money, happily and willingly, and probably will again. Amazing how things turn out.

The other music I bought recently is Stephen Lynch. Again I heard most of his music first on Youtube. Again I gleefully spent money on his latest CD because it's good music and because it's DRM-less and thug-less entertainment and a good portion of that money is going to the artists.

Most of the music I like comes from Japan or various corners of Europe. Amazon sells a few (very few) Japanese music CDs, for between $50 and $90 each (plus shipping). Do you know how much it costs to ship a stream of bytes from Japan to the US via the intertubes? Hint, it's not $90. How does a stream of bytes increase $90 in value when it's written onto a piece of plastic?

These are strange times. There's such disparity between what the average person believes is right and wrong on the internet and what the law says is lawful and unlawful. This kind of disparity can't last forever. My high school history teacher said that in America at least, a law that is opposed by the majority of citizens in the country never lasts long; I think that's true. And it's as it should be. In a few decades, we're going to look back at how things were in the 90's and 00's and laugh.

Microsoft, you still surprise me

Mon, 11 May 2009 23:18:21 -0700

I use Windows XP at work (not by choice) and I've been continually saying "no" when it tried to install SP3. Why? No tangible reason other than that decades of experience with Windows has shown me that any time you touch any system files or settings in Windows, crap breaks. When it comes to Windows, you set things up and then like a teetering house of playing cards, you back away slowly and try not to breathe.

Which brings us to the other day. I first noticed something was up when a got a popup dialog on my work machine asking me every 15 minutes whether I wanted to Reboot Now or Reboot Later. Confused, I clicked "later" but again and again and again this prompt appeared. After hours of this interrupting my futile attempts at work I relented; I laboriously shut down my half-dozen command prompts and carefully-placed Vim sessions and various server daemons and all the tools I got to look forward to re-opening after Yet Another Unnecessary Reboot, and then I rebooted.

So then XP left me alone and all was well with the world. Ha, just kidding, it started doing the same thing again almost immediately. Reboot Now or Reboot Later? I hatefully tolerated this for as long as I could but it was a futile battle. Microsoft won in the end and I rebooted again.

A few other people at work reported the same thing on their systems, so I thought maybe it was a virus, but I checked a few things and noticed a shiny new SP3 installed on my system (so my initial guess was close). Somehow SP3 was forced onto my machine, not sure if it was the sysadmins pushing it out or Microsoft's doing, but either way: why was it possible to install a Service Pack on my machine without my even being aware it happened? I do not consider this a good thing.

In any case, after the second reboot, strange things happened. My taskbar settings were all reverted to defaults and I noticed my Address Bar was missing. The Address Bar is a little URL/file path bar in the taskbar where you can type a file path and open an Explorer window quickly. One of the very few semi-useful bits of the XP interface.

But it was gone. What happened? A short Google later and I learned that Microsoft removed the feature in SP3 permanently, by design. Why? Because of anti-monopoly regulatory concerns.

Wow. So it turns out I wasn't disappointed, and a few dozen cards toppled from the shaky tower as I watched, helpless. Not the end of the world, but what an annoyance.

The reason I bothered blogging this is because, hilariously enough, you can still add the Address Bar back in SP3. As I read somewhere or other, probably here, you simply 1) Drag a "My Computer" icon to the top of the screen to make a useless "My Computer" toolbar, 2) Right click that and add the Address Bar, which is still an option there, 3) Drag that Address Bar to your main taskbar, 4) Remove the useless toolbar from above. And then you have your Address Bar back. Oops!

So, in summary:

Two forced reboots via 20 repeated un-ignorable popup prompts.
Service Pack installed without my knowledge or consent.
Useful piece of functionality removed.
Item 3 caused by a history of monopolistic business practices and the resulting legal fallout.
Functionality in question removed so incompetently that it can be added back anyways in a matter of seconds.
Another hour of my life sucked into the black hole of the Microsoft Windows User Experience?, forever lost.