Oh Jesus. So I've had a little trouble with certain folks from New York who handle the tech administration for a certain regional blog (site A) that I do some tech things for. And tonight I learn that at least some of these NY tech staffers are also affiliated with a public transport arrival time SMS service (site B) that invaded site A's comment section after I declined to cover site B, given that my own site A-branded public transport SMS service was about to debut. I chased their apparent spamminess out of site A's comment section with some testy replies.
Man. This kind of explains a lot of the intransigence I've experienced from the NYC gang. And it's kind of a pain in the ass. What a tangled web we weave, when first we write some PHP.
I've been holed up in the apartment coding an Awesome Science Project all weekend, so I'm a bit too exhausted to try this out at the moment — but I just got an email indicating that Mozes has just announced developer support for their text-messaging product.
If you don't remember Mozes' debut, I don't blame you. Basically, they've bought an SMS short code — one of those nifty five-digit phone numbers that you can text things to (instead of using a cumbersome ten digit code like some services I know). You go to their website, register for a keyword that's unique to you, and then... uh... things happen. Maybe. When other folks SMS your keyword to Mozes, they get your contact info. And you can store song titles and stuff. It doesn't make much sense to me, to be honest.
But! Although I don't see the appeal of their SMS-based note-taking functionality, I think the newly-announced developer access is a big, big deal. So far as I can tell, it lets you hook a script up to your Mozes keyword. So you can host a service elsewhere on the web and get free SMS service via Mozes. This is a fairly cool thing to get for free — shortcodes cost $2k to set up, then $1k/month after that — and that's before the charge you have to pay for every SMS you send or receive. Having your users specify your keyword for every query might be a pain, but for simple apps this could be a great way for developers to get SMS capabilities without having to find funding first.
Of course, if you start to make money off of the service you can bet that Mozes will shut you down pretty quickly. Hell, if Mozes starts to make money off of reselling their short code, I imagine the telcos will shut them down pretty quickly.
But it's a neat service, and a step in the right direction. Mobile services are a pretty closed set of systems right now. But that can't last. This stuff is going to continue to get more accessible to the common geek, I think.
Controversy! So, This American Life, the astoundingly good public radio show, finally got around to ditching the irredeemable RealAudio format for its online offerings and put everything up as mp3s. Geeks, doing what they do, immediately created podcast feeds out of this newfound bounty. Then the trouble began.
TAL seems to be run by nice and generous folks, but they sell their episodes through iTunes and Audible.com. They also give royalties to their contributors and the folks they license music from (they have good taste in music). These entanglements mean that they can't endorse the free downloading of permanent copies of their shows — although they seem to be okay with old episodes being streamed off of their website (they wrapped the new mp3s in m3u playlist files; for the non-tech-savvy, this would conceal the downloadability of the underlying mp3s and appear to be a stream-based offering).
TAL has begun contacting the folks who put up the podcast feeds and politely asking them to take their feeds down. The feed maintainers have all complied, so far as I know. But folks aren't uniformly happy about this, or convinced that TAL is unambiguously in the right. BoingBoing has been operating a clearinghouse for the resulting discussion. See here, here, here and here. Folks seem to be backing off due to their fondness for the show, but the copyfighting contingent isn't particularly happy.
That sums up my position pretty well, too. I'm conflicted about this. I love This American Life and I want it to survive. And, after reading this glowing profile, I'm pretty much ready to pledge my undying allegiance to Ira Glass.
On the other hand, I don't really believe in the idea that content producers have a right to restrict how their work is consumed after it's been given away in one format. Consumers shouldn't be begrudged the right to time-shift programming and consume it as they see fit. That's the underlying idea behind DRM, and it'll produce an incredibly irritating system for interacting with our culture if it's allowed to take hold.
So what to do? Compromise — and be discreet. The dopes who submitted their homebrew TAL feed to the iTunes Music Store had precisely the wrong idea. If TAL doesn't want other folks to decide their distribution system on their behalf, I suppose that's fine. So long as they don't bother those of us who quietly make use of technology to more easily enjoy their show, everyone should be happy. I'll admit that it's not a very democratic solution, but it seems like the best one available at the moment.
And on that note, if you happen to have a web hosting account available to you that can run PHP scripts, you might be interested in the one I whipped up this afternoon (you'll probably want to secure it from prying eyes). Also: shhh!
BTD, Unfogged, Kriston — all have been having trouble with their Movable Type 3.2 installations. The culprit in all cases seems to be an overabundance of comments and trackbacks in the junk folders — for some reason these continue to be indexed as part of day-to-day MT operations. Eventually the load gets too large, scripts start timing out, and shared hosting providers shut you down for consuming too many resources. Maybe it's just a coincidence, but I'm not convinced — assuming a constant level of spam, these breakdowns have all occurred very close to one another. It looks to me like an inevitable shortcoming of MT 3.2 is surfacing.
From what I hear, SixApart hasn't been very helpful — despite these folks owning licenses. I'm sure this new Vox thing is going to be very cool, but they probably ought to spend some time fixing their existing flagship product, too. It seems to be breaking in a fairly serious way.
For those MT users who haven't crashed yet, all I can suggest is that you delete everything from your junk comment and trackback folders. That hasn't been a cure-all for everybody, but it can't hurt.
UPDATE: Check out the comments for more detail from Becks on the problems Unfogged ran into. Spawning lots of individual Perl processes isn't necessarily a bad thing (or avoidable, given MT's overall architecture), but the scripts clearly need to be made lower-impact — at least until the submission is definitively identified as non-junk (at which point resource consumption can be escalated).
Meanwhile, WordPress, MT's chief rival, continues to not-quite-intrigue me. I like that it's in PHP and that it's open source. But it's not capable of handling load in its default configuration, and it's been built with a nasty coding approach that, while intended to make template designers' lives easier, mostly just infuriates me with its quirkiness, opacity and illogical nature.
Gizmodo has a hands-on with the Sidekick 3, which apparently will be unleashed on T-Mobile customers in 8 days. Perhaps it's just the Gizmodo reviewer's lack of familiarity with the SK platform at work, but I find this piece somewhat discouraging. Yes, there's Bluetooth, an audio player and a slightly better camera, but large parts of this review read exactly like the author is talking about the Sidekick 2:
Little notifier icons in the top right corner inform you when you have a message in IM, mail, or SMS/MMS. Messages appear in a little bubble for a moment before disappearing, so you can assess the value of emails and messages before reading. There is an airplane mode that turns off the wireless and basically lets you browse your mail like a madman but little else.
The trackball is a real winner. It lights up with all the colors of the rainbow—actually about 10...
The battery lasted one full day....
Voice quality was fine and reception as about as good as can be expected. One pet peeve—it would lose its GPRS connection and only a full reboot would get it back...
Ah well. I think the GPRS speeds have been bumped up, too. If that's the case, it's probably enough of a reason to upgrade (the Bluetooth is the main attraction for me). Still, I was hoping for better battery life... maybe even... GPS? I know, I know, I'm asking too much.
Trend prediction! I think that the next skill that IT recruiters are going to be looking for without knowing why is knowledge of KML. It's really just a simple XML format that lets you keep track of geographical locations. Check out that Wikipedia link — KML's not rocket science, but it seems like it's suddenly showing up all over the place.
Maybe it's just my perception of it. Irongeek put together a KML-based hack a while ago allowing a database of unsecured wifi access points to be mapped into Google Earth, but I just saw it today. But there are other, more timely signs: cheap GPS loggers like this one and this one seem to be popping up very quickly. And Mologogoappears to have only gotten KML support in January. I'd say we're hovering near buzzword-dom.
There are plenty of other ways to store geographic data, but Google Earth seems to have tipped the hobbyist balance in favor of KML. Everybody says that location-based stuff is going to hit big in the next year or so. Seems like KML is going to be the format of choice for powering it.
That is all!
Also, I swear, entertaining blogging to resume soon. I'm brainstorming, people.
Because I've been working pretty hard this week, and because my plate of things that have to get done right away turned out to be relatively small today, I decided to treat myself to a little recreational nerdery this afternoon. Sadly, it wasn't successful. But I'm posting anyway in order to help the nerds of the future.
See, I really, really hate that MySpace doesn't let you link directly to songs. Not necessarily the raw MP3 (though my hardline copyfighting inclincations say they should), but at least to the band page with something in the URL that tells it: "Play this particular song. Don't just randomly select one of the other, crappier ones in the featured playlist. I want to send this to my friends, goddammit."
So I fired up Ethereal and the Firefox LiveHTTPHeaders plugin and started looking at the conversation that happens between your computer and MySpace when you click on a song in their Flash audio player.
First things: an XML file comes back, specifying the playlist. It's called mediaxmlprovider.xml, and it's served by a fairly easy-to-find URL (which has to be passed some of the random codes specified in the HTML of the band's page — I didn't bother to confirm this, but it seems pretty likely). The contents of the file look like this:
Those yellow parts look pretty promising. In fact, it seemed like this might be susceptible to a variation on this method (which has since become outdated). But those mp3 filenames are relative URLs, not absolute, and I got 404s when I tried them against any of the likeliest domains & paths.
It's possible that URLs like http://c.myspace.com/BandSongs/48/41/3071484/3071484_8fcdc23f.mp3 were just being clever, noticing my lack of a myspace.com HTTP referer, and lying to me about the file's presence. But I don't think so: I went to the page of a random band that offers downloads and found that the URLs used to obtain the mp3 look like this:
There's no redirect or anything like that going on here. It looks like they've set up a dedicated mp3 gateway that serves the song out of a non-public part of their filesystem. This lets them lock things down as tightly as they care to — ie, they can check against the database to see if a song is genuinely supposed to be downloadable before sending it out. Nuts.
Of course, the Flash player still has to get the audio somehow. But I don't know enough about Flash to figure out how that happens. If I had to guess I'd say that it might use a proprietary (and secure) Flash streaming audio solution. It's still possible to grab the audio to an mp3 — until we get trusted computing forced on us, it'll always be possible — but for purposes of linking directly to mp3s, there isn't a lot of remaining promise here. Not that I can see, anyway.
Ah well. Perhaps a cleverer geek will pick up the mantle and figure out how to make MySpace mp3bloggable. Or perhaps MySpace will eventually remove its head from its ass and allow incoming links to specify particular songs. Till then I'll maintain the attitude of apathy and gradually-spreading terror that I'd been directing at the site up until this point.
neat to think about - can you believe that just five years ago iPods and social networking sites amongst other ever-present tech and media things weren't part of our day-to-day lives? five years from now, "which products, used by few today, will be essential?"
Unsigned editorials are terrible. I realize that I should be getting into the habit of dutifully reading the ones on offer from the Post and Times so that, during the dinnerparties of the future, I can cluck my tongue insightfully over the latest institutional outrage (in between lighter conversational fare, e.g. "Preschools Are So Expensive Now" and "We Think The Maid Is Stealing From Us").
But I just can't do it. They're like particularly badly-written blog posts, except without a name to offer accountability or references to back up their bizarre arguments-by-fiat. If newspaper editors had any brains they'd ditch the unsigned editorials (and political endorsements) immediately, before people start laughing in their faces in social settings. But I suppose they're too focused on fomenting the next war (how'd that last one work out for you guys, by the way?).
Today's an exception, though, because the Post's anti-net neutrality editorial is so staggeringly dumb that it deserves to be reprinted everywhere — to ring throughout the online universe as an emphatic testament to the fact that Writing, Editing, and Not Being A Total Fucking Idiot are three distinct disciplines.
Between the LASIK and my generally geeky ways, my friends give me a lot of shit about my potential for becoming a post-human abomination. Digital-themed tattoo? I've thought about it, but probably not. RFID chip? Maybe in a few years. Intracranial bluetooth headset? Eh, I'll wait until I start seeing them in rap videos. I'm not actually all that anxious to modify my body in permanent ways.
But this... Oh man. I want this. The ability to feel electromagnetic fields, people. To tell when a wire is live, or a hard drive is being read, or a transmitter is on, or if a surface is ferrous. It's just a little too cool. Make it safe, then sign me up. Sorry, humanity.
I wrote about the GNU Radio project a long time ago, but my efforts were probably fairly incomprehensible . Today Wired has an excellent story that profiles the project, explains why it's so cool — and does so in more lucid terms.
The signal processing applications that are opened by this project are truly mind-boggling. The linked article mentions that some folks are already using it to track which department store window displays are the most popular by triangulating the cellular keepalive signals emitted by shoppers' cell phones. That's just astoundingly awesome.
Some of you might remember me asking for career advice a while back. I ended up deciding to take the new job, then blogged the first day. Then everyone at work discovered this site (using their strange internet powers), and, aside from some generalities, I haven't mentioned it.
Well, let me fill you in. It's been about six months, I think. People use the phrase "it was the best decision I ever made" to describe getting a hair transplant, or buying a boat, or ordering a Cobb salad. So I'd like to avoid joining their idiomatic ranks, but I can't. It just seems so obvious. These are the smartest, coolest, funniest, most talented people I've ever worked with, and the job itself is interesting, varied and rewarding. I look forward to work every day. Okay, every non-hungover day.
The reason for my gushing: we're hiring. If you're geeky, really smart and interested in working in the non-evil sector, you should think about applying. You'd like it. Seriously.
Prompted by a WSJ article, Bunnie, the man most frequently credited with cracking the copy protection on the original Xbox, lets us in on the work he's doing on the Xbox 360. The recent exploit that allows DVD dual layer backups of commercial games came thanks to the other star of the WSJ article — a guy named TheSpecialist (he didn't release his work, but it was replicated). Bunnie's been mostly quiet about the XB360, implying at times that he wasn't planning to really get his hands dirty with it.
Well, that didn't last. Exposing a chip's silicon and extracting the cryptographic keys hardcoded on it = BAD ASS.
I was talking about Google with Matt last night — more specifically, when they'll fall from grace. He thinks it might be a while, and considers the period when the Gmail Generation begins running for office a likely date for the turn, what with all the secrets that have been entrusted to them.
Personally, I think it'll be much sooner. The cracks in the facade are showing: Google Pages is a bust; Orkut is mostly a bust; Google Talk is mostly a bust; and I'm deeply dubious about Google Base ever turning into anything. Amazon S3 seems to have beaten GDrive to market. We'll see if they ever do a web-based office suite replacement, I suppose — their Writely acquisition is suggestive, but I have doubts about them being able to pull off a really compelling Word replacement in the browser.
There are plenty of failures that I'm forgetting, too. Google fans generally defend this hit-or-miss history by saying the company throws stuff at the wall and sees what sticks. But now they're having trouble with their core offering, too: from what I'm reading, their search difficulties extend beyond the Sitemaps problems I've been having. The "site:" operator hasn't been working correctly, and the debut of a new crawler codenamed "Big Daddy" has been wreaking havoc with folks' PageRanks.
The trouble in search-land seems like big news. If they can't keep a handle on the cornerstone of their business, the company will stop looking quite so much an eclectic whiz kid and begin appearing a bit more like an ADD-addled savant. Now that they're public, a loss in confidence could send their suspiciously dot-commie culture and strategy spiralling off into unpleasant places.
Or maybe I'm just feeling pissy because Gmail has been screwing up all day. Either way, I'm souring on GOOG.
A small victory, it's true. But I had to fight long & hard with Windows XP to get this far. The Mac has a nasty habit of quickly hanging up the connection when the Airport is simultaneously on. I think that's because OS X is clever and tries to save you modem charges when you have cheap wifi. Let's hope it's really clever and doesn't extend this policy to when you're sharing your modem connection over an ad-hoc wifi network.
I'm heading to the beach this Memorial Day weekend, and I'm intent on bringing the internet along with me. Last year I still had a fly-by-night dialup ISP that only charged you in months when you used the service. That business model has since run its course, and I'm casting about for another way to ensure connectivity. Needless to say, the alternative is too horrible to contemplate.
So I stopped by the Ver/iz/on store on my way home and signed up for EVDO service. By the numbers: $80/month, $150 for the PC5740 card and — most importantly — 14 days to return it all. I'll still get charged a prorated fee for the service I use, so it's not totally shady. Just mostly.
There's one complication, though: the card doesn't work with Macs. Well, okay, it sort of does: I've already gone through these instructions, but they mean it when they say the account has to be activated on a PC. Sadly, Charles' laptop isn't up to the task (it's always been flaky about PCMCIA cards, and refuses to recognize this one). But we have one sort-of-working PC laptop at work, and a number of EVDO cardholders who've successfully gotten their Powerbooks working with the nominally PC-only technology. So spirits remain high.
For those who don't know, the idea behind the sitemap is to give Google a specially formatted file that says "here's where my content is, here's when it was updated, and here's how important each piece of it is relative to the rest". It's supposed to make the Googlebot that crawls your site work more efficiently, and give you better results. Personally, I'm sick of having old-style URLs (e.g. 001234.php) showing up for our site.
But so far the sitemap hasn't managed to do anything except banish every included URL from Google's systems entirely. Which is pretty much exactly the opposite of what it's supposed to do. I posted the following message to the Sitemaps Google Group; I'll let you know if I hear anything back.
I hope someone can help me figure out what's going on. Last week I submitted a sitemap for my blog (http://www.zunta.org/sitemap.xml). Everything seems to be working properly according to my Google Sitemaps account dashboard.
However, since submitting the sitemap every page that is in it has been excluded from the index, including many that I know used to have relatively good pageranks. I know that there have been some recent hiccups with the site: operator, but this applies to other queries as well. I wrote an SSH tutorial with the word "sshirking" in its title a while ago that got a number of links and attained a high pagerank for the unusual word "sshirking". The proper permalinked URLs used to be among the top hits; now they can't be found anywhere in the index (as proven by entering the full url as a query, e.g. http://www.zunta.org/blog/archives/2005/08/30/sshirking_work_1/index.php).
What's more, the old version of these pages -- before I changed permalink naming styles -- are still in the index. http://www.zunta.org/blog/archives/004498.php was the original URL of the above link (it now redirects to the proper URL). Only this second, less descriptive URL (which is NOT in the sitemap) is still in Google's index. It's only the files included in the sitemap that have been dropped from the index.
I tried deleting and resubmitting the map, and have patiently waited since May 18 for a new crawl to include the results. Nothing so far.
Can anyone tell me what's going on? Right now it seems that having a sitemap achieves nothing other than nuking your results from the index entirely.
It turns out that Feed on Feeds + this incredibly simple PHP XML-RPC library = your own Technorati. Well, okay, not quite — you'd still have to write your own app to crawl the internet for new blogs and add them. And I have some concerns about using the FoF RSS reader in a shared hosting environment — seems likely that those lengthy 4x/hour blow-crawling sessions are going to start getting noticed by somebody eventually.
But for now, and for a limited pool of blogs (say, all the DC-related ones), it's working pretty well. You can probably guess where this is going...
Anyway, why would I want to do this instead of just using Technorati's open API? There are a few reasons. One, to restrict the search results to a particular pool of blogs that I have control over. Two, to avoid paying Technorati money. And three, for fun. Sort of.
Hmm. Remember a day or two ago when I mentioned some quick & easy ways to generate a Google Site Map for your MT/WP/Drupal site? Well, you might want to hold off on that — all of a sudden we seem to have dramatically fewer entries in Google. I'm having trouble finding blog posts that I know were available before.
Hopefully this is just a case of Google clearing our their old entries prior to picking up the new ones from the site map. I'm taking some steps to make the sitemap more accessible, then I'll give it a few days to settle down. But right now this seems like a pretty bad way to optimize your site.
Saw this on BoingBoing yesterday and meant to blog it, but then didn't: FeedRinse is a pretty neat idea. Put your various RSS subscriptions in, combine them into channels (if you so desire), then set up filters on various criteria.
Why would you want to do this? Maybe because you have no idea what the hell I'm talking about when I write about tech stuff, and don't care to learn. You could filter out all of the tech posts from our feed and just see the others. Or you could just view posts by Catherine. Or add richer keyword filtering to a Craigslist feed.
Sadly, their site is a little too slick for its own good — in order to keep up with the guy's 19orsodifferentblogs, I tried to put together a "Kriston" channel. Unfortunately, the dynamic feed-adding process seems to have a bug; when I added new blogs I'd get empty select boxes instead of meaningful UI elements. Oh well.
But it's still a good idea, and probably works just fine in IE or Safari or Camino or Opera or something. And the feed filtering stuff works fine, I believe — it's just the channel-creation feature that's broken. Once they get the kinks sorted out, this will be the kind of thing that ends up being unepectedly useful on a regular basis.
When Google Sitemaps came out I didn't really bother to check it out. Custom-authoring some arcane XML format in order to support one (admittedly gigantic) private company? No thanks.
Well, it's been a while, and folks have gone ahead and done all the hard work for us. So if you want to be sure Google can find everything on your site (and that it'll know when you've updated it), you might want to follow one of these sets of instructions:
Movable Type (ignore the bit at the end about URL encoding; just submit the sitemap here)
Alright, it's been a week. How's LastCall holding up?
Day
Requests
5/9
291
5/10
165
5/11
54
5/12
79
5/13
85
5/14
63
5/15
64
type
# queries
%
metro
423
52%
opentable
70
9%
music
45
6%
movie
56
7%
weather
117
14%
No huge surprises. I guess I'm a little surprised that more people are using the opentable capability than the movie and music features, but it's pretty close.
Traffic might seem low, but I'm pretty happy with this level. People are using the service, but it's got a lot of spare capacity. And, more importantly, this level of use seems unlikely to provoke the ire of my mobile carrier.
I've gotten requests for a few more movie theaters and two reports of "no trains" being incorrectly returned by the metro component, but otherwise no real complaints. I'll be trying to address those two items — particularly the bug — as soon as I can.
An interesting insight from a Slashdot thread on the Nintendo Wii and its prospects, made by a gentleman named John Hu/mmel, aka "Dark Paladin" (awesome):
it would appear that Nintendo has a lot of 3rd party support time time around, which made me think of why, and then something that Ubisoft president commented on made me figure it out.
Long story short, he made some less then flattering remarks about the PS3 — how it just ups the power. The same could be said for the 360. But that's no the issue for a publisher; for a publisher, all of that extra power and HD requirements goes into cost. Now, a development team needs even bigger hardware, a bigger graphics and sound team to get the same game out, which now increases the cost of the game by a large margin - say from $1 million to $7-$10 million. For a publisher, that means increased risk, reduced margins, and relying ever more on "certain" hits (which can vanish if something goes wrong — look at the Tomb Raider franches, and what they've had to do to get it back).
Nintendo is offering publishers something more than just a gimmick: they're offering them reduced price. Look at "Brain Age" - developed, tested, and ready for market in 90 days, and it hardly needed a graphics team. Since the Wii uses really Gamecube development systems with more power, that's an easy transfer of knowledge, which is why I predict that for the first year, Wii games will look pretty much like Gamecube games, maybe a little smoother.
But for the publisher, once you get past the controller issue, it's reduced cost, reduced time, reduced risk over time. If the Wii takes off at all, it may be that publishers wind up favoring it if for no other reason than it makes them more money over time.
Another commenter follows up:
Your numbers are a little off. My understanding is that a XBox/PS2/Gamecube title costs $8 - $12 million to produce (with some AAA titles going into the 20s), and last I heard HD games were expected to at least double the costs. (Is it any wonder publishers are afraid to take risks with money like that involved?)
...
Yes, sure, it might take more people to program a game for such a complex controller, but you aren't going to need 200 people churning out high res textures that will only be appreciated by people with HDTVs. Nintendo knows what it's doing.
Alright, here's another stab at a legitimate complaint about OS X: my copy can no longer play Flash movies. Every time Flash launches on a webpage it apparently tries to connect to my Bluetooth headset (which is nowhere nearby and hasn't been used in months). I then get a "Bluetooth Audio Failed" message and playback stops — and can't be started! Argh. This despite my decidedly non-headset-oriented settings in Preferences and Flash's settings.
This guy seems to be the only other person on the internet having this problem, and he hasn't got a solution. It's pretty goddamn irritating — I'm missing out on YouTube-based hilarity on a daily basis.
Today is E3, when we'll supposedly learn some more details surround Nintendo's new console and the plans of the Big Three in general. Already revealed: the PS3's $500 price tag — and that's just for the entry-level model without wifi or HD support. Yikes.
I sort of had a PSOne in college — a roommate owned it, but I chipped it — and it was a pretty fun, but not great system. I've always had a grudge against Sony's offerings, though, on the basis of their insanely bad controller. I think they just shot themselves in the foot pretty seriously.
Meanwhile, I'm getting more and more excited for the Nintendo RevolutionWii. Everytime I look at that new controller I get a little more excited.
UPDATE: NYT coverage of the Wii can be found here. In general the various gaming news outlets are saying Nintendo hit it out of the park with their demo, It's getting very favorable comparisons to Sony's presentation. which is being treated as something of a flop (largely because of the huge price tag for the PS3). No word on price for the Wii, but they've previously pledged it'll clock in at under $300. No release date either, other than the disappointingly vague and far away "Q4".
Well, my SMS project has finally been loosed on an unsuspecting world. And yeah, it's for DCist. Go check out the announcement message here — it's got all the details on what the service does and how to use it.
My dirty little secret? Throughput is an unimpressive 4-6 outbound messages per minute. If things don't crash horribly under the announcement traffic, I'll be very surprised. But there's nothing I can do but dive in and see how it handles load. Once it breaks I'll start sorting it all out.
Okay, after reading Steve Rubel's explanation, I think I get it — it's just that there's nothing much to get. Or rather, there's exactly what I thought there was: OPML sharing will be used to determine what people are interested in. Consumers can find new sources of news and marketers can pitch to them more effectively.
This seems like a much bigger win for the marketers than the users, though. RSS empowered content consumers in some obvious ways — it made it much easier to stay on top of many sources of news. OPML provides a slick, hi-tech framework for providing statistically justified blog recommendations, but to be honest I've always felt that blogrolls and interblog links work fine for that sort of thing. OPML's big advantage will be centralizing that data so that it can be more easily mined.
I suppose it may help inject some more ad revenue into the blogosphere, but that's really the only major benefit I can see. I can't imagine a scenario under which an end user would be all that interested in using OPML sharing. This is a technology that'll be implemented in the backend of RSS readers in order to provide a shiny but unnecessary recommendation engine — and, not coincidentally, a new source of marketing data. But that seems to be about it.
I gotta say, I don't really understand what's so exciting about this OPML business. Is it a good format for exporting lists of blogs? Sure, apparently. For note taking and compiling lists of references? I think so, based on what I've read. And could Share OPML.org provide Amazon "people who bought X also bought Y"-style recommendations to the world of blog reading (or at least bring a more accurate version of it, since I'm sure it already exists somewhere)? Sure.
But beyond that, I have to admit that I don't get what the big deal is. There's apparently a community of people really excited about OPML, so I feel pretty confident that I'm missing something. I don't remember, but I can imagine that in the past I might've foolishly said dismissive things about Dave Winer's last XML format — I certainly wasn't able to imagine its usefulness for tracking packages, finding apartments on Craigslist, or powering my screensaver. So I'm trying to be circumspect, and to bite my tongue — I really do want to understand the OPML hoopla. But right now it's lost on me.
New project time. The SMS dealy should be released imminently — I just need to write the help system (and, uh, ignore a persistent bug and elusive bug). I should be able to wrap that up this afternoon.
I've got a new project in mind, though. For a while I've wanted to be able to pipe sound around the computers in the apartment more easily. The Linux server is connected to a pretty nice stereo system, but it's a headless unit. We tried using SliMP3 as a webserver-based MP3 jukebox for a while, but the latency was pretty irritating. And besides, I want to be able to pipe other kinds of audio around — streaming internet radio, youtube soundtracks, even mail notification beeps. And I'd like for the various computers in the house to be able to use it (not simultaneously, though).
There are varioussolutions to the problem of playing MP3s over a network, but I want something a little more universal and cheap. Ideally, it'd be an icon that sits in the system tray. Click on it and it turns green (or something) and all your sound starts magically coming out of a server connected to a set of nice, big speakers.
This page shows the outlines of a solution. It involves piping raw audio samples across a network to something that catches them and shoves them at the soundcard. There's no buffering, but that should be okay — I want realtime audio, so that everything stays as closely sync'ed as possible. If the wifi gets spotty and some samples get dropped from time to time, that's fine. I've managed to get a proof of concept variation on the article working:
On the server: listen for incoming data on port 1234 and pipe it to the rawplay application
nc -l 1234 | rawplay
On the client: convert an mp3 into raw audio samples
mpg123 -s somemp3.mp3 > somemp3.raw print the raw data across the network to the rawplay instance on the server
cat somemp3.raw | nc <server's ip> 1234
This setup works decently — it sounds slightly weird, like the sampling rate is a tiny bit off and as if it has a weirdly flat frequency response. But I'm going to blame that on mpg123 for now. Unfortunately, this trick doesn't account for grabbing live audio off of your system — that's the hard part. But I think this example code, combined with SoundFlower and some OS X Sockets 101 (yet to be learned), should take care of that.
Justin gave a demo of OS X software development on Thursday that made everything look encouragingly awesome and easy. Ideally I'll be able to wrap everything up in a slick GUI package, then resurrect my .NET skills and build a Windows version. Construct a proper server (a few dozen lines of Python should do), throw in FLAC support to avoid wasting bandwidth, and I'd have a pretty neat app.
That's the plan, anyway. I'm sort of hoping someone will pipe up in comments and say "that's already been done, you can download it here".
So, as everybody knows, Mike Grass, friend to me and Catherine and cofounder of DCist, has launched his newest professional endeavor, a blog for the Washington Post's Express newspaper. The site looks great, and I have no doubt that it will be a wild success — Mike was born to be an editor. It seems highly likely to me that I'll be pestering him for a cushy IT job someday.
But there's already a tic of the new site that's erupted in controversy: the bolding. Between this and DCist's now-partially-abandoned editorial "we", Mike's establishing a pattern of copy-editing controversy.
Well, personally I can't get enough of it. And if you can't either, I can help sate your bottomless lust for bold. Presenting the Expressamifier, a Javascript bookmarklet to bring FreeRide's distinctive look to virtually any webpage! Just click on and drag this link up to your browser's quicklinks bar (where Firefox sticks "Getting Started" and "Live Headlines" by default):
Then browse to any site and press it. Our sophisticated algorithms will selectively highlight text to maximize, uh, boldousity. Yeah.
And, as a special bonus, you can try running it on the Express website itself for a unique surprise. The resulting reaction is not unlike matter and antimatter colliding.
SPECIAL BONUS NOT TONGUE-IN-CHEEK ADDENDUM: Okay, so the bookmarklet will try to remove the bold from FreeRide. But it turns out that there's so goddamn much of it that you have to run it several times to remove it all. No joke.
ALSO: This bookmarklet is pretty inefficient, and could easily crash your browser. Don't use it if you have unsaved work in some other tab.
AND: It seems to produce an error in IE, and doesn't work at all in Safari. But shouldn't you be using Firefox anyway? This clearly isn't the sort of thing I'm going to waste time debugging. Probably.
FINALLY: Because it's late and I apparently can't adopt a consistent sarcastic voice, I should point out that the stuff above about Mike is meant in earnest. The stuff about liking the bolding... yeah, not so much.
I expanded on my little science project, and now you can call 202-318-0196 and use an automatically-updated menu system to navigate & listen to the ten most recent podcasts from work. And hear my voice! Excitement, internet stalkers! And yeah, it sounds weird to me, too.
If you're interested in hearing me hold forth on Asterisk and why it's sort of awesome, head on over to the EchoDitto blog — I've got some more voluminous ruminations over there.
I think this setup is kind of neat (if somewhat pointless). But I am disappointed that, now that I've fixed the script to actually grab the ten most recent podcasts (instead of the ten most recent that have media enclosures in the RSS), our Chuck Brown podcast no longer shows up. Go go's not really my cup of tea (outside the context of DC Lotto commercials, anyway), but I'm still mind-bogglingly happy that such a podcast exists, even though it was recorded before my time with the company. I'll have to remember to ask Tim how the hell he pulled that one off. I sort of suspect that Mr. Brown was deeply confused by the experience.
Believe it or not, I still get a steady trickle of comments on parts one and two of my SSH tutorial from last August. I'm happy to help those unfortunate enough to be shackled to a cubicle inside a restrictive firewall. And although there are better SSH tutorials out there — mine uses an old and relatively user-unfriendly SSH server package, for one thing — there are probably few that are more loquacious.
But I didn't answer all the questions that folks had. As I ate lunch today I took a stab at finding an answer to the biggest one: how to play Yahoo Games over SSH. I was pleasantly surprised to find how easy it was to get working, so I thought I might as well write it up. This method should work for other apps too (World of Warcraft comes to mind, although I guess it might let you configure a proxy server manually, instead of using this SOCKS hack).
Pretty much everything but "twitch" games, which use the un-SSH-able UDP protocol (and would suffer from the latency anyway) should work with this method.
Well, I'm at least glad to see that network neutrality is beginning to garner blogospheric attention. Kevin Drum posted an honest appeal for clarifying commentary on the issue, to which Atrios responded with, um, characteristic pithiness. This is all good; some folks aren't yet clear about what's going on. They want either additional nuance or for someone to explain a few more times that the situation really is as black and white as it seems.
The problem is that the nuance-providers are ready to serve, whether their interjections are justified or not. In the process, they make the issue seem much more complicated than it needs to be. Witness Crooked Timber's fretting that imbalanced service will lead people to dial down their packet timeouts, flooding the net with junk in order to get their message through faster. Abandoning network neutrality would break the internet's tenuous social contract! Gasp!
This is an extremely silly idea. Application developers generally don't handle this stuff — it happens at the level of network libraries, or even lower, at the interface driver or TCP stack. There are fewer different implementations of these pieces of software than you'd think, and their authors are not going to break the internet just because Johnny's upset that YouTube keeps stuttering. These people regularly get into epic, months-long flame wars over differences of opinion about algorithmic implementation that are much smaller than this. Also, they use SpeakEasy. They're not going to break the internet without a reason so incredibly good that it only exists as a Platonic ideal.
Could there be rogues? Yes, of course. And they'd be caught and blocked, the same way that someone running a DoS attack, or voluminous ping scans, or an open SMTP relay on a consumer connection would get caught. Enforcement right now could use some beefing up, but in the unlikely event of abandoned-NN actually endangering the system's network infrastructure (rather that just its societal and economic infrastructure), you can bet there would be remedies. Contrary to Henry's assumed social contract, there are already a lot of jerks on the internet. We have ways of dealing with them.
The other side of the fake-shades-of-gray crowd is nearer and dearer to my heart: check out thislengthyseries of posts over at Freedom to Tinker, which inspired the CT post. Call it the Garrulous Geek approach — to understand any technical issue, you have to start by talking about the different energy levels an electron can occupy. By part 36 of the series, we'll have gotten to principles of mass-producing crystalline silicon — almost there!
But I'm being unkind (particularly given my own guilt on this score). Ed Felten's discussion of how traffic shaping policies, inequitably applied, could degrade internet service is interesting and thoughtful. It's also beside the point: we're not talking about different ways of marshalling a limited resource. Is it important and worthwhile to think about how to prioritize traffic when a consumer's data connection is fully utilized? Yes, of course.
But dropped packets are, by and large, not what's at issue. Most of the time, most consumers are only using a fraction of their bandwidth. The average person simply doesn't have a gigantic Bittorrent download going in the background. If they do, then yes, it's good to ensure that VoIP traffic gets priority. But again, that's not what we're facing. Network neutrality is about cases like this one or this one, where Vonage customers lost service or were forced to upgrade their accounts by their predatory ISP, because the ISP didn't want competition to intrude upon its own plans for VoIP domination. They're getting more artful at these shady tactics all the time, too — rumor has it that Vonage customers using Comcast's network experience significantly degraded service shortly before Comcast deploys their own VoIP offering in an area. Ed's attribution of this problem to an architecture that innocently produces jitter problems is, I think, extremely generous — particularly given customers' earlier ability to use Vonage without problems.
We're not talking about preferentially scheduling cable company VoIP packets over Vonage ones when we face a bottleneck (although we should talk about that when we get a chance) — this is about a private firm intentionally crippling the services of another in order to provide an advantage to their own competing product, regardless of whether bandwidth is scarce or not.
So please: stop looking for nuance. It's simpler than you're making it out to be. Here, let's let AT&T chairman Ed Whitacre explain:
"They don't have any fiber out there. They don't have any wires... They use my lines for free — and that's bull... For a Google or a Yahoo or a Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes for free is nuts!"
But of course, they don't use them for free. They pay a broadband wholesaler. You pay the Ed Whitacres of the world for your home connection. And Ed and the broadband wholesalers (he's one, too) have complicated agreements governing how they exchange traffic equitably. Everything's paid for; nobody's getting away with anything.
It's as simple as this: Mr. Whitacre and the other ISP stakeholders have convinced themselves that when someone isn't paying them money, it constitutes an injustice. They're wrong — really wrong. Don't give an inch, don't give equal time, don't pretend there's more to it than this. There isn't.
Two stories that are a little old, but suddenly coming into better focus:
Remember when Google ran this custom logo to celebrate Joan Miro's birthday? And Miro's family complained, prompting Google to take it down? I know, it all happened ages ago (Thursday). But until today I didn't realize that the takedown request had come from the Artists' Rights Society, which did something similar when Google paid tribute to Salvador Dali in 2002. I had initially thought that this was a case of a stupidly litigious family, but it now seems that the attitude may be characteristic of the Great Dead Artist establishment.
I find it all pretty unseemly. I realize that intellectual property is the only real asset an artist has. But Google didn't copy a work, they emulated a style — and a style that was formed by works more than half a century old. In any sane society that IP would already belong to the public domain.
But let's be generous and assume that the motivations of Miro's estate in this matter are non-venal — that they aren't just trying to squeeze licensing fees out of Google, and that they realize Google's tribute doesn't represent competition for Miro-related income. Let's say this is just about controlling the man's legacy. You'd still have to count me as unsympathetic. I don't think a person has the right to control how society views him or his work. I suppose an artist is welcome to take a stab at doing so, but I don't think it's unreasonable for society to expect him or her to quit bugging us when they die. Lobbying from beyond the grave is just tacky.
I hate to unabashedly stick up for GOOG — I've got first shift on the "How Long 'Til They're Evil" watch. But on the issue of net neutrality, they've already publicly committed themselves to doing the right thing: the search engine says they won't pay protection money to ISPs when the broadband providers start making the rounds with hands outstretched. Good for them! Maybe completely surrendering every shred of privacy to a commercial venture won't be so bad after all.
As worked up as I get about intellectual property controversies, net neutrality is a much more pressing and unambiguous issue — I find it genuinely hard to see why anybody would oppose NN unless they're in the pocket of the telecom industry. If you haven't got an opinion on the matter or don't totally get what it's about, you might be interested in watching this brief video on the topic (thanks to Mike for the link).
Let's nip this in the bud right now: just because an electronic device has two different embedded circuit packages in it does not make it "dual core". I'm going to find it pretty irritating (admittedly, for no good reason) if "dual core!" stickers start getting slapped on every new consumer gadget. In this case it's a particularly bad example: having a digital/analog converter outside the general-purpose processor is completely normal and unremarkable. If you were building an mp3 player out of off-the-shelf components (that weren't specifically designed as integrated solutions for building mp3 players), you'd end up with a separate DAC quite naturally — it's not exactly a premium feature. And you'd really be a dope to call such a solution "dual core".
But if you insist on it, you might as well call the iPod sextuple core. Check it out: it's got a genuinely dual core ARM processor, a DAC, a firewire controller, an LCD controller and (not listed on that page) I believe the video on newer models is handled on a separate IC. What does all this mean? Nothing, other than that — surprise! — electronic devices aren't magic boxes. They have pieces inside of them. Unless you know what they are, counting them won't tell you very much about which gizmo to buy. I suggest sticking with the traditional "shiniest" heuristic.
I've been threatening to mess around with Asterisk for a while now — it's the voice-over-IP hotness at the moment. Well, with taxes finished unexpectedly early and a professional motivation for getting it under my belt, I took the plunge today. Signed up for a $5/month DIY account with BroadVoice, compiled the tarball (@Home is for the weak!) and immediately ran begging to the #asterisk IRC channel for help.
Well, I eventually got it figured out. Disappointingly, the text-to-speech project Festival is already installed under FC4, and not in a way that Asterisk can use. However, there's a handy little hack out there (bottom of this page) that lets you get away with generating then throwing away WAV files instead of actually streaming sound from the Festival server.
All of which is to say that, in a new feature that will doubtless make your life much richer and easier, you can now dial a phone number and have a robot read you the latest RSS headlines from this blog. I know, pretty useful. Give 202-318-0196 a ring if you want to hear what a wasted Saturday sounds like.
This may not stick around that long — it's just a proof-of-concept science project. And yes, I realize how stupid it is.
Warning: gibberish ahead. Those of you who don't find Perl and Javascript really, really fascinating should probably stop now.
There, I'm all disclaimed. On to what I've been messing with this week:
WWW::Mechanize is fairly awesome — I wish I'd known about it back when I was doing everything with LWP. However! It isn't really up to the task of interacting with ASP.NET sites. I've generally had a pretty positive outlook on Microsoft's current web platform, but trying to interact with it via Perl is changing my mind — the Viewstate and Javascript stuff is just a mess.
The site I currently want to talk to changes some dropdown options via Javascript based on what you select in other fields. This is a fairly bad idea, but it really sucks in this situation: because of a "feature" in HTML::Form, you can't submit a value via Mechanize that isn't available for that form element in the page's original HTML. Because of this Javascript situation, the value I need to submit isn't available and Mechanize throws an error.
The solution seems to be to download the page to the disk, rewrite the parts that don't match my requirements, then point Mechanize at that local copy with a URI::File. For those who don't speak geek, take my word for it: this is a huge pain in the ass. And I'm still not sure it'll work, although I have all the different pieces working in a proof-of-conceptish way. Perl gurus would be welcome to chime in at this point.
Earlier this week Emily pointed me an an old post of Michael's complaining about PDF links that don't label themselves. I feel his pain, and because I felt like wasting 20 minutes writing Javascript, I wrote a GreaseMonkey script to fix the problem. That's not that exciting. What is exciting is that when I tried putting it through the GM script compiler, it actually worked (previous attempts were, um, less successful). So voila: a Firefox extension that does the same thing as the script without having to have GM installed.
I've tried to mess around with writing FF extensions before, and it's been a mess (I've got no talent for XUL). The GM compiler still won't give you access to the cool, chrome-y things you can do with a real extension, but you can get a lot done with this.
A hybrid vespa? Hmm. Seems sort of pointless to me: why not just ditch the gas engine entirely? Sure, I get that energy density is a problem, but surely a scooter has a weight and expected-range advantage over electric cars, which are at least on the edge of plausibility. Besides, those tiny scooter motors are dirty and inefficient — surely you could pack a day's worth of use into a vespa's-worth of batteries if you ditched the pollution-spewing lawnmower pieces.
Anyway, I've been thinking about this since the last issue of Make's feature on homebrew EVs. It's cool to see that people are spending some time on building electric vehicles for applications where they could shine — namely urban transport — rather than just waiting for them to become all things to all people.
We have to talk, fellow children of the internet. I think that, by and large, you're all doing a bang-up job of building out this new digital commons. It'll soon come to define our planet's culture for the foreseeable future, and we're off to what I would call a solid, monkey-punching start.
But we do have a big problem. The images, people. Many of you abuse them shamelessly, as if you somehow don't know or care about the difference between a GIF and JPEG. I have a hard time even conceiving of this possibility, to be honest. But since I run into this a lot, both with new DCist contributors and with submitted press releases, I thought I might as well write something up explaining how different graphical formats work, and what situations you should use them in.
The switch to OS X has been occasionally bumpy, but overall I'm extremely happy to have made it. Generally whatever problem I've had has turned out to be due to my own ignorance. Whenever I ran into an annoyance, helpful Mac gurus with the gentle eyes of true belief would swoop in, diagnose my problem, and help me get past it. There are still things I don't like — control-clicking, non-standard keyboard shortcuts, Expose's occasional unpredictability — but overall I'm very pleased with it. After yesterday's news, I would unconditionally recommend Apple notebooks to anyone with enough money to buy one.
But last night I finally came across a bug that really does seem serious and inexcusable. Maybe someone will point out what I did wrong. But I have my doubts about this one being my fault.
I was trying to burn a CD. In OS X you do this through a pleasantly-intuitive mechanism called a Burn Folder. You create one and drag files into it. OS X makes shortcuts to the original file in the burn folder rather than copying them in their entirety. When you've got your disc properly laid out, you press a little "Burn" button. It's nice.
Except here's the thing: if you delete a shortcut from the burn folder, it deletes the original file. Perhaps there's a way to suppress this behavior, but I couldn't find it. And it's definitely the default action. This was particularly horrifying to me because I was working off of Charles and my mp3 collection, which currently resides on a removable USB hard drive and nowhere else (I haven't had a chance to move it back to the Linux machine since rebuilding it). It took me a little while to realize what was going on, and when I did, the Undo function would only repair the most recent deletion.
Fortunately the damage wasn't too extensive, and I could rescue everything from the trash can. But did Apple really never consider the idea that someone would want to copy some top-level directory to a burn folder, then prune its subdirectories? A shortcut is a shortcut, guys. Check out "man ln" — it's good stuff! More importantly, have a look at how deleting a shortcut/symlink works in every other situation on every popular OS.
I like you, Apple, but if this is your way of getting me to repurchase all of my music from iTunes I'm going to be pissed.
It's working. The text messaging stuff I've been working on for the last six weeks is finally all working. The payoff is forthcoming. Right now, it's time to show off — and, more importantly, load test. Until the end of Wednesday, April 5, you can add comments to this post via SMS. Neat, huh?
Just text the number 202-299-7949. Seriously, please give it a shot. It'd be a big help to me. If your message doesn't show up within a couple of minutes, leave a comment to that effect. And don't worry, your phone number's last four digits will be scrubbed.
Warning: fopen(/home/zuntae0/public_html/sms/smslog.txt) [function.fopen]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/metamon/public_html/zunta/blog/archives/cat_tech.php on line 3003
Warning: filesize() [function.filesize]: stat failed for /home/zuntae0/public_html/sms/smslog.txt in /home/metamon/public_html/zunta/blog/archives/cat_tech.php on line 3004
Warning: fread(): supplied argument is not a valid stream resource in /home/metamon/public_html/zunta/blog/archives/cat_tech.php on line 3004
Here's the setup. There's an unlimited-SMS SIM in my cracked-screen Nokia 3100. From there text messages travel over my recently-acquired FutureDial cable and are picked up by Gammu's smsd daemon. That dumps them into a directory. A Python script uses the coincidentally-named Gamin to detect the arrival of the new files (because Gamin's Perl interface refuses to compile for me, even using CPAN). It then dispatches the content of the messages to an appropriate Perl script. That script packages the data up and sends it to a simple PHP script on this server, which unpacks the data and prepends it to a text file. A tiny bit of PHP in this post includes that text file, and some CSS formats it.
There! Some of the most tightly-packed technical gibberish I've ever written. The acronym density should give you some idea of just how much time I've put into this project, and how much knowledge I've had to pick up along the way. It took me a fucking lot of work to get this operating properly. I'm exhausted and ecstatic that it's finally working. When this system is hooked up to something useful, it should be pretty cool.
If you think the whole Mac/PC beef is religious in nature, try the Tivo/anything else one.
Ain't that the truth.
Go to an online TiVo forum and ask about feeding your TiVo listings from XMLTV rather than subscribing. Bask in the hostility.
Here's a hint: google for "oztivo", "tivocanada", and "service emulator". Learn perl. Then lament the fact that you'd be sued and lynched if you ever told anyone how you did it.
It's not a joke: with just 4% of the vote they'd establish a presence in parliament, and their favorability ratings have been polled as high as 57%. Of course, favorability doesn't necessarily translate into votes — people would probably express basic support for the Free Lollipops For Everyone Party, but perhaps not spend any votes on them. Still, the PiratPartiet folks seem to be going about this process methodically and responsibly, and from the (admittedly biased) sources I've read, IP issues have apparently become a topic of national debate in Sweden. They seem to have a real shot.
I find this pretty encouraging. I have no idea if the IP debate will ever take hold in America, but PiratPartiet's rise makes it seem to be possible, at least.
With all of that said, I can't quite bring myself to endorse Falkvidge's positions. Five year copyrights seem likely to seriously hurt content producers. And his take on the patent system is pretty stupid (his mobile phone industry example is laughable).
It seems pretty clear that some form of patent protection is necessary. It's just the details and extent of the system that needs fixing. Kill off coverage for business processes, algorithms, software methodology and discovered (rather than synthetic) genetic information. Make life harder for patent trolls. Spend more money on examiners and fire those who grant patents to perpetual motion machines.
It'd be a start, anyway. But it seems obvious that eliminating the patent regime entirely would be bad, bad news. Technology companies are going to protect their revenue streams one way or another. If you remove legal protections entirely you'll end up with a world full of epoxied-shut black boxes, all of which will operate on proprietary, closed standards and fail to integrate with one another. The digital world is still just now learning how to speak the same language. It'd be a shame to scare the corporations building it into packing up their toys and going home.
Perhaps PiratPartiet is pushing for more radical reforms than it actually believes in, planning for an inevitable compromise. If so, carry on, fellas. But as things stand I'm not yet quite ready to apply for Swedish citizenship. Better to wait until the EFF seizes the means of conduction at home.
Sunday: it's an up-and-comer. Between the injustice that is daylight savings time and the freshly-painted hallway flooding the apartment with solvent fumes, things were not shaping up well. But then a little Drupal installation, a little Chipotle and some cherryblossom-viewing with Michael, Emily and Tim served to brighten things up. Despite this flurry of activity, I somehow still found time to not clean the bathroom.
But, perhaps most exciting of all: the Radioshack cellphone cable recommended to me by this gentleman actually works with my Nokia 3100. I've been through two phones, a pair of Linux installations, and four $25 phone cables, but I can finally taste victory: I successfully sent and received SMSes from my miraculously un-lost Italian SIM. Score! Take note, Gammu googlers: the FutureDial cable (#22) is the one you should be investing in.
Now I'm over at Kriston and Matt's (whose names it now feels weird to hyperlink for some reason) for some grilled Italian links and Sopranos watching. It's the good kind of sausage party.
Remember how Sony's UMD format for the PSP was unexpectedly taking off? And everyone was surprised at the sudden success of a proprietary format with nothing to offer anyone who wasn't a Sony shareholder?
Yeah, turns out that was bullshit. Walmart is dropping the format following poor sales, and studios are beginning to cease production of UMD movies.
So how's the proprietary-format scorecard looking, Sony? Betamax? MiniDisc? And how's Blu-Ray shaping up? The only reason Memory Stick is sold at all is because Sony devices require it. Nobody else uses it; its price and performance characteristics make it a loser.
I know, I know: Sony helped invent the Compact Disc standard, then successfully licensed it. But Phillips handled the licensing (and much of the technology) for that, did it intelligently, and consequently avoided dooming the format to proprietary obscurity.
It's a beautiful dream, locking people into a format you own and then squeezing money out of them. But it doesn't work anymore. It'd be nice if the Sonys (and Apples) of the world would knock it off, rather than stranding their customers with useless devices every half decade.
Oh, Howie, Howie, Howie. First you post a picture of Turkey and claim that it's peaceful, kite-flyin', tube-top-wearin' Baghdad. But sadly, people recognize subtle, seemingly impossible-to-notice inconsistencies — things like, oh, say, Turkish writing. Suspicions are raised. And then bloggers find a different photo of the same street corner, taken from another perspective, on PhotosOfTurkeyNotIraq.com (or something similar). The jig is utterly up.
What to do? Damage control. Blame an intern, put up a shot from your REAL Baghdad vacation, and apologize for the misunderstanding. It's a not-very-convincing aerial shot, but hey, it's something.
Except whoops! Looks like you didn't scrub the metadata from the new shot. Turns out the photo was taken on July 13, 2005. Which, it seems safe to say, probably doesn't qualify as occurring during your "recent" trip.
Also, now your website is down. Not the greatest example of an effective online political strategy, I'm afraid.
Wow. What a spectacularly unproductive evening. I got sidetracked helping a new acquaintance set up a VNC/SSH setup, and even that didn't work.
So it's now 1AM, because god dammit I was determined to get something productive accomplished. So, here: the promised GreaseMonkey script. If you use Movable Type (and configure the include path to point at the URL for your installation(s)), this will autosave your work every five seconds, guarding against the browser crashes that we could avoid by responsibly writing entries in text editors, but don't. To restore your work, just bring up a MT entry editing screen and press the button that will magically appear near the top of the screen.
It ought to keep separate drafts for each individual MT weblog you work on, but that functionality hasn't really been tested. I'd doublecheck before relying on it.
This is for MT only, I'm afraid — it's what this site and DCist both use. It should be pretty trivial to adapt to other blogging platforms, though, if anyone's so inclined. Also, it's written for MT version 3.2 — I have no idea if it'll work with other versions, but it might be worth a shot.
UPDATE: Whoops! Found a major bug wherein a new, blank entry would overwrite your saved draft within a few seconds of bringing it up. That'd make this pretty useless, huh? Well, it's fixed now. Your in-memory draft will only be erased if you type something into one of the blank fields on a new entry form.
Seriously now: I'm on cell phone number 2 and cell phone cable number 3, and I STILL can't get Gammu working. Right now I'm trying to work off of these instructions, but it's not even clear that the thread's participants had success. And, to be honest, I'm not following all the instructions — compiling custom kernel modules seems a little advanced, but I suppose I'll give it a shot eventually.
Anyway, I'm officially running crying back to mommy, aka the project listserv. They haven't been able to help me out yet, but the current batch of Nokia crap was bought on their recommendation, so I'm doing my best to maintain my trademark childlike optimism.
Transpodder — when combined with a podcatching setup — will download your favorite shows via Bittorrent, transcode them to an iPod Video-friendly format, and provide an RSS feed so that iTunes can keep your iPod synched up. Slick.
co.mments has an awful, awful web 2.0 (stoopd) name, but a good idea. Sign up, subscribe to a personalized RSS feed, and add a bookmarklet to your web browser. Then when you next find yourself leaving a comment somewhere, hit the bookmarklet button. The conversation will be marked and periodically checked by co.mments, which will let you know about new entries via RSS. Unfortunately, co.mments seems kind of slow about checking up on conversations — and using the personal RSS feed via Bloglines makes it really, REALLY slow. But if you use a desktop newsreader, you might find it useful.
It looks like the Xbox 360 has been cracked. Check out the video:
It's true that another 360 could be plugged into the back of the TV. But word on the forums is that the video's author has a good reputation and the technical chops to have pulled this off. Plus, much of the work leading up to the breakthrough occurred in a public online forum. As of right now the verdict of the usually-dubious Xbox hacking scene is that this is probably the real deal.
The exploit is a little different from those that were used on the original Xbox. Instead of the BIOS being subverted, the DVD-ROM's firmware was modified to prevent it from telling the difference between a burned and pressed disc. MS beefed up the security on the parts of the system that had been attacked on the XB1; that console's DVD firmware was cracked, but very late in the system's lifecycle. By all appearances, MS didn't see this class of attack coming.
The downside: because the rest of the system remains secure, unsigned code still can't be run. So this hack is really only useful for playing backups — aka pirated games. Cool apps like emulators and media players are still out of reach.
The other fly in the ointment: the hack hasn't been publicly released. "TheSpecialist" and the rest of the developers might legitimately not want to foster piracy — or they may just fear Microsoft. But either way, their notes are available for all the world to see. Given that, I doubt it'll be very long until we see a mass-market mod of some sort for the 360.
Don't get me wrong: the new Macbook Pros look pretty sweet. Yglesias bought one after his Powerbook got pinched, and it's a beautiful machine. But most of the new features don't thrill me. Matt reports that the integrated iSight is tough to aim. And Apple has long ago spent all their credibility when it comes to the relative merits of different processor architectures.
No, the one feature that really got me excited was the new magnetic power connector. And now Gizmodo has a report of one of them catching on fire. Sigh. Here's hoping this is just a weird aberration.
Well, my star-crossed SMS project continues to trundle along. I've had to give up on my beloved T39 — it's just not working out between us. So I bought this Nokia 3100 off of Ebay for 99 cents (+ $10 shipping). That white blotch on the right side of its screen isn't glare; it's a big ol' crack in the LCD. In real life it's neon pink and looks vaguely like a pornographic cartoon.
It arrived in the mail today, loosely wrapped in newspaper. Thanks for the care, anonymous Ebay guy. In return I'll refrain from calling all of your definitely-not-deleted contacts and leaving obscene messages.
I headed off to Eport World, the slightly weird cellphone emporium down the street, to pick up a charger and a cable.
I'm a sucker. If I'd read the documentation a little more carefully, I'd know that any cable except the official Nokia one will work under Linux. Naturally, I ended up with the genuine article, which is totally useless on non-Windows machines. Worse, Eport World's return policy is nonexistent (I asked). So it looks like I'm out $25. D'oh. My only hope is to lean on the goodwill I earned by explaining my project to the guys there. The clerks were clearly in need of friendly cell phone nerd/computer nerd interaction and started quizzing me about posting to blogs via SMS. Here's hoping they don't actually use the email address I left — I'm pretty well tech-supported out at the moment.
So it's back to Ebay, I guess. Attention, googling cell phone hackers: you need a DKU-5 cable with a PL2303 chip in it. 2303 I say!
Pfft. I can produce way more boring posts than that.
To wit: I just got done adding a Drupal module to the company's open source offerings. Now, not only is it likely that none of you who aren't coworkers know what Drupal is, but any of you who do will probably find this module astoundingly useless. It creates a live tag cloud. Which, for anything but a huge flurry of folksonomic activity, will look a lot like an, um, normal tag cloud.
But! In the course of massively over-engineering this thing, I actually ended up using the Prototype Javascript library. And since the number of you who occasionally write JS may be non-zero, I should take a moment to sing its praises. I thought it was just an AJAX library, but no — it really makes a lot of things much, much easier (and with basically guaranteed compatibility). Some people say it's too large, but to them I say: shhh.
Its biggest problem is that it seems to be somewhat sparsely documented compared to its offspring Scriptaculous. But this article does a decent job of showing off its basic features, and providing enough code for you to get started.
Finally: I've mentioned it before, but if you're applying lots of event handlers to elements, consider Behaviour.
UPDATE: From the linked article, JQuery also looks pretty promising. And I might as well include the code for one of my all-time favorite JS functions, a method for safely adding OnLoad functions. It's behind the cut. Apologies to whoever the original author is.
Scott sent me this video of Sims-creator Will Wright demonstrating his new project, Spore, at the Game Developers Conference. The video is 35 minutes long, but he's demonstrating new functionality throughout all of it. The game looks flat-out amazing. It revolves around guiding the evolution of a species from its existence as a single cell to colonizing the galaxy — all with complete flexibility and customization. The way your species walks, dances, develops a culture and builds structures are all emergent behavior that comes from algorithms examining your choices, rather than canned actions. This is the most excited I've been about a videogame in a while — if it were anyone but Wright, I'd think this was just a slick demo. But he seems likely to have actually pulled this off.
This and this are probably the clearest, simplest explanation of Fourier Series that I've ever seen (admittedly, that may not be saying much). Perhaps not everyone's cup of tea, but I find it kind of fascinating. This is the essential mathematical insight that allows digital compression of analog information. Without it MP3s, digital video, our modern phone system, JPEGs, and a whole bunch of other essential stuff wouldn't exist.
One of the things I've been helping out with at work is the setup for DearAOL.com, an open letter/petition put together by the EFF to oppose AOL's recent adoption of a premium email service. The idea is that users can pay a small premium to have their email bypass spam filters. The spam filters could then be tightened up, and spammers would be dissuaded from plying their noxious trade.
The problem is that this would also affect groups like MoveOn, as well as a vast array of email-heavy businesses. Yes, there are supposed to be one-year exceptions for the MoveOns of the world; no, there are no guarantees. And the basic point made by the EFF — that under this scenario AOL will have a financial incentive to do a poor job maintaining its unpaid-email-spamfilters — seems basically sound to me.
But people seem to have mixed feelings about this initiative. Hurting online advocates would be bad, but spam is pretty bad, too. In a perfect world we'd pay the email toll computationally, donating time to worthy causes through SETI@home-style computing. But botnets make that idea useless.
I'm inclined to agree with something our CTO JP said at work: this issue is more about precedent than the merits of the AOL scheme.
I like you, TechCrunch. I really do — you're a great way to keep up on what's cutting-edge. And certainly you can't be blamed for nearly everyone you profile failing and going out of business — that's just the nature of bubbly bubble boosterism.
I expect Ether to ramp quickly towards success, and it will be extremely hard for competitors to enter the space given the capital intensive infrastructure needed to do something like this.
"Something like this" refers to Ether's gameplan: selling ad-hoc expert services over the phone. But the "capital intensive infrastructure"? That'd be, um, voice over IP. Which, it turns out, isn't very capital intensive at all these days, unless for some reason you insist on building and maintaining your PSTN gateway yourself. But why would you do that?
So yeah: lease some space in a datacenter, talk to a bank about processing credit cards, then start setting up Asterisk boxes. This ain't the Apollo program (although it's still a neat idea).
everyone knows the people behind 37signals are smart (who doesn't use backpackit, or writeboard, or any number of their easy-to-use online tools?). but who knew they were KINDA HOTT. ? not me.
My SMS project remains in limbo — the Gammu project maintainer and I have been emailing back and forth, but I'm not optimistic about getting the software working with my phone. Most likely I'll have to buy a cheap, old, maximally-compatible model off of Ebay. Oh well. I'll give him another week.
Other projects are also frustrating: my VGA to NTSC converter has mysteriously died, putting the planned Linux reinstall on hold until I collect a monitor. I owe everyone a final Python tutorial, but more for the sake of completeness than anything else — I think I underestimated the scope of the project. I'm not feeling up to it quite yet.
So, lacking anything immediate that I can work on (or, more accurately, that I want to work on), I'm thinking about learning ActionScript, Flash's built-in language. Mostly I just want to screw around with Flashr and write something that talks to Flickr — a little slideshow for the sidebar that automatically grabs new photos from Catherine & my photostreams, maybe? That'd be kind of neat.
Anyway, in the course of looking through other people's code I came across SimpleViewer. It's not what I want — it's a full-featured photo gallery, not a sidebar widget. Besides, what I'm after most is a learning exercise. But it is a pretty slick slideshow app. And it's free! Any photographers out there (I know there are at least a couple) could do worse than to use this on their portfolio sites. Those of us unconcerned with publication rights and hotlinking ought to eschew the razzle-dazzle and stick with permalink-able formats, of course.
I've been meaning to write something quick about the state of console hacking, but kept getting sidetracked. Might as well do it now, before the news gets completely stale:
Xbox 360
Xplorer360 was released a little over a week ago. The app lets folks read and write to the Xbox 360's hard drive — but don't get too excited. The hard drive isn't encrypted, it's just in a mildly exotic format. This is a useful tool, but not a breakthrough in and of itself.
In other Xbox news, the "kiosk disc" was disabled by the latest Xbox Live update. You might remember me talking about it before — the disc was electronically distributed to retailers for them to play in display units. But recipients were expected to burn the disc image to a DVD-R, bypassing the console's usual prohibition on playing writeable media — this made it an intriguing means by which hackers could potentially inject their own code. The executable files were still encrypted, but the media assets (an in particular, Flash files) weren't and could be replaced. All of this looked like a promising, if less-than-surefire way to find an exploit on the 360. Sadly, that avenue is now closed for anyone with an up-to-date system.
Nintendo DS
But although the news for the 360 crowd isn't as encouraging as it might have first seemed, owners of the Nintendo DS now have more capabilities than they used to. Via BoingBoing I learned of the PassMe, a slick add-on for the DS. But BB got their facts slightly wrong — the PassMe isn't the only thing you need to hack up a DS.
Actually, all the PassMe does is transparently pass traffic back and forth to a genuine DS game (necessary because of the platform's encryption) — with one exception. When it sees a specific instruction — one that tells the DS to begin executing at an address corresponding to the beginning of the DS cartridge — it rewrites it, telling the console to go to the Gameboy slot instead... in which you presumably have a writeable flash cartridge (aka "flash cart") onto which you've loaded your hacked applications.
There are a lot of flash carts available for the Gameboy Advance, and they're all roughly compatible with the DS. But if you want to play "commercial backups" (aka pirated DS games), you'll need to use one of two specific brands, and you'll need to use some custom hacked ROMs that have been released by a group called Golden Sun. You can find details on all of this here.
So, sadly, the cost of modding your GBA isn't as cheap as the $20 PassMe, despite what BoingBoing thought. You also need one of those two brands of flash cart, which will run you another $125-150. For once, piracy doesn't come cheap.
And hey, while I'm at it...
PSP
It's cracked yet again. I can't afford a PSP, and don't really want one, so I haven't been tracking this particularly carefully. But last I checked, you can run homebrew apps, emulators and commercial backups on all firmware revisions.
Consumerist brings news that TechCrunch (which appears to be down at the moment) has just reviewed the private beta of a service called FlySpy. It looks fairly neat — enter your origin and destination cities, and get back a graph of fare prices for the coming month. You can overlay graphs for different airports, adjust parameters, and generally short-circuit the airlines' confusing pricing schemes.
Or that's what it looks like, anyway (there's a screenshot on Consumerist). The site is still in closed beta. So, on the off chance that anyone has invite capabilities... yeah. Drop me a line.
Among the many things I like about my new job is that it's given me the opportunity to learn a bunch of new technologies. Email triggers, .htaccess files, SVN repositories, XML, and of course the power to raise the dead (from the command line!) — lots of good stuff.
And useful stuff. For instance, this morning I finally fixed out broken archive URLs. Movable Type 2.66whatever built entries in the format
/blog/archives/000001.php
/blog/archives/000002.php
etc.
But since the upgrade to 3.2, we've switched to a more useful format, oriented around a value that MT generates called the basename (which is basically an abbreviated, URL-safe version of the title). The new URLs look like this:
/blog/archives/2004/01/22/round_the_world/
/blog/archives/2005/12/16/sweet_nostalgia/
The problem is that there are still lots of links to the old URLs, both within entries on this site and elsewhere. That's no good, since they don't get rebuilt when new comments are added, or when their entries are updated, or when we redesign, or when anything else happens on the site.
But now I can do something about it. And since it took me a few hours, and since it might help someone else, I thought I'd post my solution.
Today's Post has a an interesting profile of a botnet operator — one of those jerks who remotely infects computers, amassing swarms of enslaved machines that are then used to send spam, extort websites, steal information and generally do nasty things. The subject remains anonymous, only identifying himself as a high school dropout living in a small midwestern town. The three businesses closest to his house are also mentioned, but not named.
Except — whoops! It looks like the Post failed to scrub its photos very carefully. Within thirty minutes of the story being picked up by Slashdot, a user had noticed that the Post's photos contained metadata saying "Location: Roland, OK". Which, as you may have deduced, is a small midwestern town (pop. 3000). Another slashdot commenter googled for the businesses mentioned and was able to take a guess at the intersection where the guy lives.
Pride goeth before the fall and all that, I suppose. Have fun in jail, asshole.
I've got an idea for what I think would be a fairly neat DC-centric SMS application. I don't want to tip my hand just yet, but once the serial cable that I just ordered for my old t39 wings its way to me, I'll provide some more info. For now, though, some things I've figured out about sending text messages from your Linux computer:
Asterisk is neat (and likely to make knowledgeable techs a lot of money in the near future), but not really necessary for SMS. Most of the docs for it deal with using FastSMS, a custom SMS gateway that requires no hardware but costs about five cents/message. That's overkill for little guys like myself, though. I think it might make more sense to just run one of the programs mentioned below externally to Asterisk if you need less-than-heavy duty SMS capabilities. In my case, that means I won't be running Asterisk at all.
A cheaper alternative is to buy an old GSM phone off of Ebay and hook it up to your computer's serial port with an appropriate cable. It should then be able to act like a modem. Figure out what software you're going to use before deciding on a model. Avoid connecting to the phone with Bluetooth or USB — they just confuse the situation. Also, think about T-Mobile's Sidekick Data Only plan, which only runs $30/month and offers unlimited text messages.
I've got some links to relevant software here. Of these, Gnokii currently appears to be the most impressive (but is poorly documented). Also, don't miss this list, which links to a lot of SMS software for Linux.
Teleflip can't help you receive SMSes, so it's not quite what I want. But it does look neat. yourphonenumber@teleflip.com will automatically figure out your wireless carrier and send an email to their email-to-SMS gateway. For example, phonenumber@tmomail.net lets you SMS T-Mobile customers. The format/address is different for every carrier, though — Teleflip just figures this out for you and forwards your email along. It's free, but only works for North American numbers.
I'd be remiss if I didn't mention MoLoGoGo, which has nothing to do with SMS, but lets you track your GPS position by remote using a free app loaded onto a $80 Boost Mobile phone. And it now exports your location information to XML! I'm pretty desperate to figure out a way to do something useful with this. So far, no dice.
Via Slashdot: a Cincinatti company is requiring that its employees receive injected RFID chips in order to gain access to the corporate datacenter. Workers won't get fired if they say no, but one has to wonder what effect declining the injection might have on a person's career. Not a good one, I'm guessing.
I should work myself up into a righteous dudgeon, throw around some inflammatory superlatives and send everyone to the EFF's donation page. But honestly, I just feel a sort of giddy thrill about this. It's the same feeling as in the moment when a rollercoaster crests its first hill: we're on the verge of something bad, and completely powerless to stop it.
And, on that dogmatic pro-privacy note, allow me to inform you that we're now tracking you in new and terrifying ways. Well, okay, not that terrifying — we just put our RSS feed into Feedburner. Look! It's all pretty now!
I set up a forwarder so that you shouldn't have to change any settings in your newsreader. But I thought I'd mention the change, lest anyone freak out over the newly omnipresent Feedburner URLs in our RSS.
looking for a new, fun, web-based calendar? give 30 boxes a try. it's more interesting than other web-based calendar apps out there in my opinion because of the social networking feature in which you can keep track of your buddies' schedules and vice versa. you can read a review of it here. let me know if you join so i can add you as a buddy!
UPDATE: actually, the more i browse this program the more i realize i probably won't use it that much unless it really gets a lot of other users that are my friends. the ajax stuff is neat but unless the social networking stuff (and yes i realize what a retarded buzzword that is) really pans out, it's not really better than any other calendar app out there...anyway, we'll see!
Four: the bullet entry where I abandon this stupid numbering scheme. But check it out: $560, well-reviewed 30" LCD HDTV, Microcenter (B&M only). Who am I to resist? So much for the new austerity.
Verizon FiOS service blocks more ports than regular DSL. This is done to keep you from running a webserver on your home connection — the link is fast enough that you could get away with it for small sites, and Verizon doesn't want to supply that much bandwidth unless you're paying for business-class service. Fair enough, but it puts a damper on my hopes of fiber service — I like to run SSH over 443, since it provides a nice mixture of accessibility-from-behind-firewalls and not-getting-attacked-by-chinese-hackers-every-night. Dreams, shattered, etc. Sigh.
I'm planning to go to the Hold Steady show tonight, which has gotten me thinking about the band, which has gotten me thinking about its music, which has made me realize that it's a real tragedy that their latest album's final track didn't exist when the title for this article was being composed.
Yeah, I know. I can't believe I'm this immature, either.
or, trying to explain python to your hungover english major girlfriend:
pablohoney: functions look hard
halgernon: The words if then else and while all make sense in english
pablohoney: you say we already know one way to make variables contain mult values but i don't, what is it?
halgernon: Arrays are the way
pablohoney: oh yeah duh
halgernon: You could set different indexes in the array to the values you need to return
halgernon: Then return the array
pablohoney: that sentence makes no sense to me
halgernon: Ok, lemme rephrase
halgernon: If you had three values to return from a function
pablohoney: ok
halgernon: Like, let's say you had a LookUpShoe() function
halgernon: That you pass a model number
halgernon: And you want to return whether it's a mens or womens shoe, and the color
halgernon: You could say
halgernon: ShoeData = ['male','black']
halgernon: return ShoeData
halgernon: Make sense?
pablohoney: yes but i think my problem is that i dont understand programming at all
pablohoney: like where would y ou put that shoedata thing?
halgernon: It'll come back
pablohoney: i'm sure your tutorial is wonderful but i don't know if anyone with zero programming experience can understand it
pablohoney: at least, me
halgernon: That'd come in a function
halgernon: Yeah I was trying to walk a line between the programmers and new people
halgernon: But maybe I should take a step back and explain things more carefully
pablohoney: no, then you'd have to speak like you were talking to a retard
pablohoney: everyone else who is interested gets it fine i think
...
halgernon: Anyway, I think you will get it if you just ask questions
pablohoney: well you're nice to explain it to your girlfriend
halgernon: I appreciate that you want to learn my geeky stuff
halgernon: Seriously
pablohoney: it's HARD though
pablohoney: it's like a different way of thinking
halgernon: You'll get it, you're a brilliant girl
pablohoney: haha ok
halgernon: But that's the thing, once you get used to it it all snaps into place
pablohoney: this is coming from the girl who only got through high school senior computer science by manipulating the nerdy boy who sat next to her
halgernon: Well that option is still available
pablohoney: hehe
pablohoney: i can't have you cheat for me this time
pablohoney: i will learn python, goddammit
pablohoney: even if you constantly have to come up with shopping analogies to get me to understand
halgernon: I didn't do that to tailor it to you, actually
pablohoney: uh huh
halgernon: Shoes were just what came to mind
halgernon: And then I thought "shit, she'll think I'm being patronizing"
pablohoney: yes
pablohoney: but then i was like, ooh shoes
Nicole points me to news that West Virginia is installing DDR in its middle schools in order to fight childhood obesity. Neat. I remember seeing the news of the pilot study last April, but I never suspected it'd result in an actual, widely-deployed fitness program. Lucky fat kids.
Okay, not an ISO, really — I need the original disc. We're perilously close to successfully softmodding Kriston and Matt's Xbox. All we need is one of the flawed games that open the door to videogame mischief. Sadly, the local Blockbuster doesn't stock any of these (they're too old). So I thought I might as well ask here. If anyone in the DC area has a copy of MechAssault, 007: Agent Under Fire or the original Splinter Cell and wouldn't mind parting with it for an afternoon, let me know. It's got to be the original version, I'm afraid, not the edition released under the "Xbox Classics" brand. Thanks in advance.
this seems to me like an especially good and worthy use of the internet's social networking potential...besides the ability to find random sex partners, ride shares, couches for sale and the like.
all the free wifi connections in my apartment complex in chicago, which i had been stealing for the past four months, suddenly ran out yesterday.
it is a dire situation. i did not realize how much i loved the internet until now, coming up on my third hour in caribou coffee, where i am paying for the privilege to a) drink weak tea b) surf blogs and do homework. i love it so because i am subjecting myself to this pukehole of a fake log cabin, where i'm pretty sure i just heard the fourth different rendition of "i've got you uder my skin" in the past 45 minutes. either that, or i'm living in the matrix.
pray for me.
pablohoney: sigh, i am tired, but do not want to retreat to my den of no internet
pablohoney: i do not think i can live w/o the internet
pablohoney: it's one of the great love stories of our time
friend: wow sounds like it
friend: and yet, it just doesn't love you back
pablohoney: i know
pablohoney: ungrateful bitch
I've been meaning to post this for a while: ptunnel is an application that allows you to tunnel internet traffic over ICMP pings. Allow me to explain why this is cool.
Pings are the simplest way of testing connectivity over the internet. They're part of a protocol called ICMP that's used for diagnostic purposes and little else. Ptunnel reimplements TCP/IP b— the internet's main protocol — by tacking your messages' content onto the end of pings. You run a server on another machine that receives the tunnelled packets, converts them to normal internet traffic, sends them out, gets a response, and sends it back to you over the ICMP tunnel.
Why is this useful? Mostly, it's not. But ICMP is frequently the only thing that can get through airport/coffee shop-style wifi hotspots prior to purchasing time with a credit card. ICMP traffic is allowed through because doing so makes service technicians' lives easier. Now that fun fact can make your life slightly cheaper.
I haven't tested it myself, though. The problem is that you need to run ptunnel on a server that can receive ICMP — and most consumer routers aren't designed to let you forward ICMP traffic from the internet to machines on your LAN. I suppose I could make my linux server the network's DMZ host, but that would result in all incoming TCP traffic getting through, as well. Given the lousy passwords I have on my mp3 shared directories, that's not a great idea. Besides, even with a DMZ set I'm not sure that the router wouldn't just answer the incoming pings itself.
Maybe I'll try to get ptunnel running on the router itself — it is a Linux machine in its own right, after all. It would be pretty fun to see if Starbucks can be beaten this way.
How is it that I haven't heard of gumstix before? Linux machines the size of a stick of gum that run off of 5V power supplies... wow. One of those suckers + wifi expansion + AirSnarf + clever concealment at a wifi-enabled cafe = all kinds of mayhem. You can get a lot done with 200MHz.
My interview with the Shmoo Group is up on DCist, if anyone's interested in reading it. Their DC-based convention kicks off on Friday. I would've loved to have gone (esp. after they offered me a press pass so I wouldn't have to shell out hundreds of dollars). But this weekend I'll be in Chicago instead, having an even better time (albeit a slightly less nerdy one). Oh well — next year, I guess.
Bunnie Huang, the man commonly credited with cracking the Xbox 1, has some things to say about the burnable XB360 disc I wrote about last week. Nothing particularly new, but he summarizes the exploit approaches that were being suggested — and offers some expert confirmation that this burnable disc is a track worth pursuing.
If one wanted to — hypothetically — help set up his mom with DirecTV, and he hypothetically had a spare hypothetical satellite receiver, and her house already boasted a DirecTV dish, could he just activate the receiver @ $5/month on his account and plug it in for her? Or is there something that ties the receiver to the dish (the hypothetical one)? Remember kids: cable theft is a real and serious crime, even when there's no cable.
I'm interviewing someone from the Shmoo Group for DCist, so if anyone has anything intelligent they'd like to ask them, let me know.
In their rush to launch the Xbox 360, Microsoft had some trouble getting its act together. One of the consequences of this was uneven distribution of demo discs to retailers. In fact, it looks like they were so rushed that they accidentally released an unsecured disc — one that can be ripped, read, traded, burned and played in consumer 360s without any special hardware or cryptographic measures.
I couldn't say whether this will provide the exploit that cracks the 360 wide open, but it looks very promising. The next step will be for hackers to hollow out the files on this disc image, inserting their own code and using it to expose the machine's secrets. Something similar happened with the Dreamcast — it's a Pandora's Box kind of situation. If I'm reading the situation correctly, I'd expect to see some significant developments occur very quickly.
On the other hand, this is the kind of exploit loophole that can probably be closed in future hardware revisions -- which we'll no doubt see, given the machine's current bugginess. If I had to guess, I'd say this'll let crackers get their foot in the door on the 360's launch, but that door will be slammed shut sometime soon thereafter.
UPDATE: Nevermind. The code is signed, it's just that the "media flags" have been turned off, telling the machine it's allowed to play the content from a burned DVDR. So the executable files still can't be changed — but it has been confirmed that at least some of the media files can be. Now the trick will be to see whether any of the executables are susceptible to buffer overflow exploits inserted into the media assets. I believe XB360 uses some kind of virtual environment to prevent overflows, so I'm not particularly optimistic about this.
Analogy time: there's a man in a locked room who does nothing but read books. We want to make him do what we want. Normally the room is locked (content cannot be run from writeable DVDs because of the media locks). Now, suddenly, the room is open. But we still can't harm or influence the man (the executable code is cryptographically signed). All we can do is replace what he's reading (unsigned media files). Most of the time he'll read our replacement books and say "this is gibberish"; sometimes he'll read them, take them in but not be seriously affected. But if he has some sort of mental defect (programming error) and can be upset by just the right combination of words, we can reduce him to a blithering mess (buffer overflow) and get him to do our bidding (run arbitrary code).
Needless to say, the odds on a) him having this weakness and b) us finding it are rather long. But it's possible.
Creepy analogy, I know, but it's the best I could come up with.
I can never share the gospel of Attack of the Show with anyone besides Charles because a) Comcast doesn't carry G4 and b) there aren't enough colossal dorks around here. But if you've got DirecTV and a computer, you really ought to watch. Parts may be completely incomprehensible to those not yet beyond redemption, but the cast has enough charm and wit to keep everything moving. Right now I'm watching their year-end Best Of The Cons show, and it's pretty entertaining. But then, I'm the kind of guy who geeks out when he sees Scott Moschella or Phillip Torrone on camera.
Speaking of cons, here's something Defcon-y: TEMPEST phreaking. Remote viewing of television screens by detection of the radio frequency noise they emit was just a rumor back in the bad old BBS days, when I and scores of other antisocial geeks spent their evenings debating whether ymodem or zmodem was the superior protocol for transferring copies of the Anarchist's Cookbook amongst ourselves. Later on I heard mutterings about the government's standards for RF shielding in secret facilities; and it was hard to miss those signs in various defense contractor conference rooms explaining which TVs could be used to display secret material and which could not. Now, a real-world example: download this program, stick a radio in front of your monitor, and point the app at an mp3. It'll display patterns on the screen that are designed to produce waste noise that'll be picked up by the radio. You're playing an mp3 out of your monitor! If you can do this with the junk you've got hanging around your house, it seems like a safe bet that dedicated hackers can see what's on your television from behind a wall or across a street.
Unfortunately I haven't got any computer CRTs hanging around — and although televisions have the same vulnerability, the odds of this working with a laptop-to-TV setup seems unlikely anough that I'm not prepared to expend the effort hooking everything up (North American (NTSC) TVs are interlaced and have different refresh rates than monitors — the noise they produce would be very different). So I haven't given it a shot myself. Still, it looks pretty cool.
It probably doesn't help to preface this post with a tale of running crying to our webhost's helpdesk — but still, last night's happy hour represented a new frontier in personal geekiness.
"So," says Jeff, "I'd kind of like to see the first season of The Wire."
Well, my good friend, allow me to ignore you and start playing with my cell phone. I'll browse to the pirate bay, find and copy a torrent link to the clipboard, SSH to the server at home, wget the .torrent to the directory that Azureus checks every 15 seconds and BANG! It's sort of like I've accomplished something. The illusion is nearly almost convincing.
This is some kind of threshold. I know things probably can get nerdier, but I'm not yet sure exactly how. Hopefully I'll figure it out before I apply for this.
ALSO: It turns out that Movable Type 3.2 chokes on entries that include the word "wget". Which is pretty stupid, if you ask me.
i know a lot was made of jeff jarvis' dell hell saga, but i just wanted to note: i had a completely fine and pleasant experience with the dell customer service when my laptop monitor went all dead baby on me. yes, it sucked, having my monitor break about six months after i bought it, but everyone i spoke to on the phone was very friendly and helpful, and i though i did have to send my laptop in, it was picked up immediately and returned to me in 3-5 business days, just like they told me it would be. shrug. maybe it's cause i used my flirty-confused-girl voice on the phone when speaking with all the reps. it usually works wonders.
I've talked in the past about reasons for concern about our ability to beat DRM systems. But I didn't make my case as well as I could have. So go read this — a very, very good post explaining why rosy optimism about amateur hackers' future success against Big Content is a less than sure thing.
Securing content on x86 is hopeless. But as processors inevitably get cheaper, faster and more ubiquitous, x86 will handle less and less of our computing. The systems that replace it will largely be either a) not general purpose, and therefore less documented/harder to access or b) properly secured.
I recently took apart a SmarTrip card — one of the RFID-based farecards that work on DC's buses and subways (and subway parking lots!). Those interested can have a look at a Flickr set of the proceedings here. A detailed writeup should be appearing on DCist soon (possibly tomorrow), so keep an eye out for that. My goal is to get this thing reliably mounted on my keychain, freeing my wallet of the SmarTrip card and bringing my ass one precious millimeter closer to seated equilibrium.
Finding a good FTP client is irritating. FTP is the type of thing that's almost worth leaving to the command line, but does benefit from a minimal GUI. But as soon as a good program becomes popular its authors decide they need to fill it with spyware, fees and unnecessary features. I used to use WS_FTP, then it stopped being free. I moved to CuteFTP, then its authors made it bloated with crap. I switched to SmartFTP, but it's recently also become filled with junk (and crash-prone).
So now I'm using FileZilla, and I'm pretty pleased with it. It's open source — hopefully the absence of a profit motive will keep it from getting junked up.
Okay, so it's not a particularly impressive breakthrough — in fact, it's probably most similar to the sorts of idiots who unicycle down mountains, in that the activity is inefficient, slow and likely to result in broken things. But I may be the first person to dynamically generate graphics with Javascript in Greasemonkey! Woo!
Okay, so actually I'm just flipping the pallette information. Still, it's kind of cool. And, to put it in your primitive human language: the Gmail Colorizer script now properly handles messages with up to three labels applied. I've got more work to do before an official release (I plan to add a GUI to help users set colors and assign them to their labels). But if you'd like to check it out, you can find the gif-manipulating goodness here.
Stumbling around the del.icio.us blog, I came across playtagger — a neat little Javascript/Flash hack that lets you play mp3s without leaving a webpage. That's very, very slick, and a complete no-brainer for every band and mp3 blogger. This and Flickr's pre-DHTML interface might be the only two worthwhile uses of Flash, anywhere, ever.
UPDATE: I missed it the first time, but there's also a bookmarklet that'll let little ol' web-browsing you use playtagger on any webpage. I've taken it on a spin through largeheartedboy and been very pleased, although there are plenty of links with stupid redirects that confuse it (I'm looking at you, subpop). Maybe I'll take a look through the JS this weekend and whip up a slightly more universal version.
UPDATE 2: Apparently this post reads as jibberish to most people. So look, give it a try. Here's a link to a Lejeune song. It's just a hyperlink to an mp3, but playtagger adds a magic play button. Cool, huh?
Good for them. Yahoo did a lot of stupid, irrelevant things after accidentally becoming the biggest, richest portal on the internet. Then Google showed up and suddenly everyone realized that life isn't all stock options and foosball tables in breakrooms.
But Yahoo's recent moves have been very, very smart. I'm not sure whether the video stuff they're pursuing will pay off, but within the web space they've been making all the right decisions — perhaps best evidenced by their acquisition of Flickr. If they really wanted to complete the trifecta, they'd go make the 37signals folks an offer.
I haven't been doing anything unusual, so far as I know. Well, there's the GreaseMonkey colorizer script, but that should be invisible from Google's perspective. I suppose it could've been that stupid Gmail conversation preview script — but I didn't think that did anything unless I right-clicked.
Have I rhapsodized about Perl yet? Well, I'm going to. The language has been around for ages, but I've always been put off by its godawful syntax. And I still am. But it's just so damn powerful. The stuff you can do with the LWP module alone is staggering -- and that's just one of tens of thousands of modules that can extend the language's capabilities.
The syntax may be horrifying, but once you know how to do something it's simple to do it again. For example, retrieving a web page within even a friendly environment like .NET can be a relatively large pain in the ass. Generally speaking, you've got to initialize an object, use it to make the request, and set up an asynchronous callback to handle the response. With the LWP package you just write $variable = get($url);. That's hot.
For anyone who already uses Perl on a regular basis, my revelation is no doubt extremely banal. But for any vaguely techy types who might delay learning it, like I did: don't. It's way too useful.
With that said, my recent evangelism is motivated by the success I had over the weekend writing a set of scripts to scrape a Movable Type site (that shall remain nameless) off of the web and into a format that can imported into a different MT installation. My scripts are probably too site-specific to be worth releasing (email me if you want em anyway), but here are some general tips for googlers looking to solve the same problem:
Pull down the category archive pages.
Scrape 'em to get out the individual entries' permalinks.
Pull down each individual entry by its permalink.
Strip out the header and footer, but leave the RDF block (it's your friend).
Process the remaining entries for image tags, pulling the files down and rewriting the links to match your new site's URL.
Extract the data necessary to match MT's import format and spit it out into an appropriate text file.
This will all go without saying for anyone who knows what they're doing. For those that don't — hey, it's a starting point. Go read up on your regexes and get cracking.
If anyone knows how to export the contents of a Movable Type blog to which one has author but not administrator rights, let me know. Otherwise it's a weekend of Perl scripting for me. I guess I need to learn XSLT sooner or later.
Photos of the capabilities that will be found in Tivo's next software release. Traffic reports, weather, movie showtimes and tickets, podcasting — it all looks pretty cool. Back when I had a working MythTV install set up, I was very pleased with how convenient it was to check the weather using the TV remote. For some simple tasks the TV really is a nicer interface — even if there's a laptop sitting right in front of you.
Of course, Charles and I have a DirecTivo, so there's roughly no chance that this upgrade will reach us. As you might know, DirecTV is in the process of rolling out their own cut-rate DVRs, complete with a ridiculous ad campaign that seems to think rewinding live TV is an innovative and unique feature. DirecTivo is soon to be an orphan. I'll be counting on you conventional Tivo users to tell me how awesome all these new electronic geegaws are.
On an even geekier note, allow me to recommend Behaviour to any web developers out there. Very, very slick.
My sister emailed asking for webmail recommendations, and of course I sent her a now-superfluous Gmail invite. For some reason this got me thinking about the site, and one feature I wish it had: color-coding of messages. This feature was one of my favorite things about Thunderbird prior to an unfortunate incident involving a massive loss of email and sworn oaths to never use the product again.
But, for the period when I still had my mail, it was easy to set up filters, and quickly tell which messages were from work, which were from the blog, and which were from the various mailing lists to which I'm subscribed. I've got several email accounts pointing at my Gmail address — filtering through the messages at a glance would be handy. And no, I will not just look at the text labels, goddammit.
So I took a crack at making a GreaseMonkey script that provides that Thunderbird-style functionality. Check it out. It color-codes your messages by label. There are only six colors in there at the moment; if you've got more labels than that, some will repeat (and others may be skipped, if they're not present on a page).
It needs some work. Allowing users to customize the colors would be good; so would un-breaking how Gmail highlights rows when you select them. Interested geeks should feel free to have at it.
UPDATE: Wolfson's pointed out that the script ought to be wrapped in an anonymous function. And it appears that when Gmail makes an AJAX callback to check for new mail it drops the formatting. Which means I'll have to dig into Gmail's javascript to figure out which function needs to be overridden in order to reestablish the formatting whenever that check happens. Nuts. Well, it still looks kind of cool.
The Xbox Linux people have already started the Free60 Project, an attempt to get Linux running on the new XB360. Their documentation already contains some interesting tidbits about the machine's architecture. I'm not a hardware geek, but it looks like it's going to be a tough nut to crack. The CPU is designed to check that what it's running comes from Microsoft. That's a more deep-rooted level of trust-checking than was present on the XB1. The previous Xbox's protections could be removed by turning them off via an injected replacement BIOS. This time the checks may have to be fooled rather than simply disabled. They'll no doubt be harder to get to, as well.
At the moment I'd say the smart money would be on the discovery of an exploitable bug in a game showing the pathway to opening up the device. Whether such an exploit will translate into a multipurpose machine as practically useful as a cracked XB1, or simply prove to be a novelty, I couldn't say.
Looks like the Xbox 360 might have been pushed out of the gate a little early. Some users are reporting crashes, evidence of which can be seen on Flickr. Suddenly I'm not so disappointed about the shortages.
You've doubtless heard about Sony's recent DRM fiasco. Today, word that a piece of tape placed on the CD can defeat the copy protection. So can the holding down the shift key, or turning off autorun, for that matter.
This is all very funny, but I'd encourage people not to conclude what the following Slashdot commenter did:
Really, there's nothing they can do. If someone can create software to copy-protect a CD, some enterprising soul can create software to defeat it.
This is true, but only because it includes the term "CD". At the moment we're lucky to have a popular digital audio standard (Redbook CD) that has no DRM built into its format, and a digital video standard (DVD) with poorly designed security that is now easy to break.
But let's not lull ourselves into a false sense of security. The next generation of digital media will have very strong protections — geeks have won this round because the DRM people were sloppy and at times relied on security through obscurity. That won't happen again. The cracking of the current generation's formats also took place under a lax legislative atmosphere that, post-DMCA, does not exist. And it's only thanks to a relatively small handful of brilliant experts — people like DVD Jon and Bunnie Huang — that we enjoy the digital freedom we currently do. A little disincentive can go a long way. There simply aren't that many sufficiently brilliant people that have to be dissuaded.
It is theoretically possible to make a digital format that is all but uncrackable, and I wouldn't be surprised to see someone succeed at such an implementation. The electronics industry is trying to build DRM into our home entertainment centers and PCs. If they succeed in that effort the situation will be even more bleak. We'll truly be at their mercy.
Yes, the analog hole will always exist. But taking advantage of it requires expertise and some relatively expensive equipment. And the end product will never live up to the source — particularly since the source formats' fidelity gets better with every new release.
Sony looks like a bunch of boobs, but that's largely because the CD format ties their hands. CDs won't be around for ever; neither will Sony's chagrin. This is a battle that is going to have to be fought over and over. Maybe the geeks will save us every time. Congress would only have to do it once.
I hacked together some Javascript for Unfogged to help users (by which I mean me) keep track of their place in the site's fast-paced and sprawling comment threads. It'd be overkill for this site, but I may as well post the code. Perhaps someone else with a big Movable Type site will find it useful. It'd also be easy to adapt to any other HTML page that needs to remember users' scrolled positions from visit to visit. Code after the jump.
It's been a while since I've written a gloriously nerdy post. This hack would certainly fix that. The only problem is that it doesn't work. But it almost does.
I really like Quake 3 Arena. It's my favorite game in my favorite genre. Unfortunately, I don't really have a machine that's ergonomically suited to playing it. The laptop's awkward and the easy chair in front of the desktop swallows you whole.
Enter the Xbox. A clever Brit named Carcharius took the freely available Quake 3 source code, used the not-so-freely-available XDK, and released a port of Q3A that could be played on hacked Xboxes, provided that the user had the game's original data files (and a valid CD key, if he wanted to play online). That's a fairly impressive feat when you consider that the Xbox has a mere 64 megs of RAM — it's an extremely impressive feat when you see how smoothly the game plays. Sure, some of the graphical bling has been disabled, but it's still very fun.
The only problem is the controller. Internet opponents will generally be using the vastly superior mouse/keyboard combo. Stuck with the unwieldy Xbox controller, getting pwned was inevitable. But, like most of life's problems, this was nothing that a little soldering couldn't fix.
The Xbox's controllers are actually USB devices, despite their distinctly non-USB plug ends. Tear open a spare female USB cable (left over from an unused motherboard riser) and a spare Xbox cable-end (surplus thanks to an extension cable I had previously purchased) and you'll find that the wires match. Okay, the Xbox controller has an extra wire (yellow, I believe), but that can be safely ignored. Match 'em up, solder 'em together, apply tape, and bang! You'll end up with something like this:
That's the Xbox to USB cable, then a USB A/B cable, then a USB hub, then a USB to PS/2 adapter, then a PS/2 mouse and keyboard. I had come close to the geek holy grail: having all of the components for a nerdy project lying around in one of my tupperware tubs of electronic crap. I was just missing one thing.
I didn't have a USB keyboard. The setup worked great with a USB mouse, but I still had to use the Xbox controller for movement (I only had PS/2 keyboards handy). I made a trip to Microcenter to remedy this, but foolishly allowed myself to be seduced by the (not that much cheaper) idea of buying a USB to PS/2 adapter instead of a new, bulky keyboard. Sadly, the Xbox is too stupid to work with the adapter. The setup you see above is useless. I'll have to buy a USB keyboard after all.
Check out Amazon's new Mechanical Turk initiative. It seems to involve earning small payments for completing captcha-style tasks. It's broken at the moment, but this still seems like a pretty interesting development.
Microsoft appears to be deliberately undersupplying the Xbox 360 so that they can claim stores have all sold out of it on launch day. Way to inconvenience your customers, guys.
I've finally written up some release notes and cleaned the code up a bit (only a little; it's still a mess). If you'd like to play around with it or use it for your own project, you can get it here.
The code is released under the GPL; images are Creative Commons. It's slightly silly to bother with all these licenses for a 50kb application, I know. I guess my internet deadly sin is vanity (Catherine clearly gets dibs on wrath).
I missed it last year, but SchmooCon happens in DC and is (relatively) cheap. And the Schmoo group offers some of the best work on wifi security/pwning teh noobz anywhere. But can I stand spending an entire weekend in a conference room full of people nerdier than myself? Hmm...
Bill Gates doesn't likeBlu-Ray, Sony's proprietary DVD replacement technology. He presumably really doesn't like the fact that Blu-Ray seems to be edging out the MS-backed HD DVD in the war for third-party support.
None of that's surprising. But despite his distinct lack of objectivity, Gates is completely right: it doesn't really matter. Optical discs will be a niche product long before the end of the next format's lifecycle. Hard disk storage combined with mature network technology makes discs irrelevant.
It's true that there's a lot to be said for Warren Jackson's famous quote about the bandwidth of physical media — mass-produced discs will continue to hold an advantage in sheer price per gigabyte. But the average consumer is about to see their bandwidth needs level off. A speedy cablemodem coupled with a healthy BitTorrent swarm can already deliver a movie in about as much time as it takes to go to Blockbuster and back. We need faster connections and business support for online distribution of films, but those things are already within reach. After that, the next bandwidth plateau will be on-demand HDTV streaming — a technical problem that pressed discs won't help to solve.
In the very near future I suspect that we'll see devices like this one integrated with consumer routers and cablemodems. Throw a download client daemon onto its tiny brain, an interface for telling it how to start transfers, and maybe a VPN so that you can access it from anywhere. All of a sudden your files are securely stored and available from any place and at any time. You could already hack something like this together for three or four hundred dollars. I expect that within a year or two we'll see a consumer-grade network device with 100 gigs of redundant storage selling for around $250. At that point, what use do we have for discs?
Don't get me wrong: lots of money will be made off of Blu-Ray. Discs will be on the shelves of Best Buy and Blockbuster. They'll still be used for archival purposes. But they will inevitably be eclipsed as a distribution medium. The Blu-Ray/HD DVD format battle promises to be as confusing and irritating as Beta versus VHS was. But this time it's a fight that consumers can safely ignore.
Well, hell. It seems like I just boughtthis goddamn phone, and now the rumor mill says that a new edition is already on the verge of release. I'd like to say I'll stick with my perfectly-fine phone, but the addition of bluetooth and a quadrupling of connection speed might be too much to pass up.
It's been a while since I did anything here besides bitch about work. My poor, beloved tech category has been suffering in particular. Let's do something about that. Here's a silly little hack designed to help you avoid the more pointless parts of the workday. This one is pretty sneaky. I like it.
Meetings are one of the most godawful aspects of the cubicled life. For me they're usually a tense internal struggle between keeping my mouth shut so that the meeting will end quicker, and piping up in order to steer the conversation away from initiatives that are likely waste my time in the future and/or destroy the company.
But sometimes silence isn't enough to make the gathering end, and you badly want to get the hell out of there as quickly as possible. Wouldn't it be nice to borrow a page from the annals of sitcom hackery and have a friend call your cellphone at a predetermined time? "I'm sorry... I have to take this," you say with a grave look on your face, before heading to Starbuck's. If anyone asks, mumble something about a medical situation, everything turning out to be fine, and not wanting to get into the details. Works every time.
The only problem is finding a friend up to the duty. Fortunately, your computer is the very best friend you have.
Wonkette picked up my Google Maps Metro hack a little ahead of schedule, so I've pushed this sucker up to its final resting place — surprise surprise, it's DCist — and put up a forwarding notice.
Anyway, if anyone was biding their time to link to it, now you can go nuts. It's also had some bugfixes applied. There'll be an announcement on DCist later today if you want to trash me in a higher-profile venue.
Remember that DC Metro Google Maps hack that I posted? Well, I've finished it. You can now use it to create your own maps, get directions, and do geocoding. I think it's pretty slick. Have a look here and let me know if you run into any problems.
I can't tell you what a kick I get out of videogame creators' complete inability to differentiate between financial and creative success. Bungie is easily one of the worst offenders — just look here. A whole jokey cult, invented and nurtured by Bungie, has sprung up around cheesy cartoon depictions of the Halo series' protagonist, the Master Chief. Who is — guess what — a clear ripoff of the unnamed marine from Doom. The reason for this persistent aesthetic? A) because you don't have to animate faces that go inside helmets and B) keeping the uniform consistently colored has technical and gameplay payoffs.
Some people just can't understand that they were in the right place at the right time. The truth is that nobody gives a shit about Halo's story; or at least, nobody ought to. People like the game because it did a decent job of being a console-based multiplayer FPS after Goldeneye primed the mainstream pump. Some of them play enough and are dumb enough to start thinking that the game's aesthetic is more than a placeholder. A number of those people seem to work at Bungie.
I don't blame anybody for cashing out when Hollywood executives ask to buy a storyline that read "PLOT GOES HERE" until 3 days before the game shipped. All I ask is that they try to be a little more quiet about it. Let the goddamn movie come out, pay for itself, then gracefully fade into the annals of cinematic embarassment. You're not going to fool anybody except the fanboys. And they were fooled by default.
Catherine can't get UPN. Susan doesn't have a TV, and if she did it would mostly serve to confuse. How are we going to maintain our shared pop cultural language? Wouldn't it be convenient if someone put up a BitTorrent site offering easy downloads of Veronica Mars and Lost each week? Yeah. Seems like it would.
In totally unrelated news, I've started working on a hacked-up version of Blog Torrent that allows for the creation of private torrents. It won't provide real security — the tracker won't customize .torrents with unique logins, so this is really just security by obscurity — but it should stop those wandering in from the internet from seeing what on offer. I'll release the customized Blog Torrent to whoever else might want this sort of Darknet functionality.
But having thought about it a little more, this is clearly overkill. It'll be useful for DCist since we may occasionally need to ferry large amounts of video among the staff prior to editing it down, and we don't want it to be publicly accessible to everyone. But you lose out on the speed advantage of BitTorrent if your swarm consists of one downloader and one seeder. Plus, I'm running out of disk space. Running my own BitTorrent operation doesn't really make sense.
So: here's what I suggest. It's really simple.
Head to DCist Torrents and click on the "Easy Download" link for any of the torrents listed. Let it walk you through installing the software. It'll automatically detect if you're using a Mac or a PC. Once the download starts, you can cancel it. BitTorrent is now installed on your computer.
Each week I will supply links to the Pirate Bay pages for the torrents of the two shows. Go to the one you want, click the link that looks like DOWNLOAD THIS TORRENT, specify a save location, and your download will begin. That should be it.
Easy enough? Okay, you might need to install one other thing in order to play these files. But there's no getting around that. If your download is complete but you can't play the file in Windows Media Player (or its Mac equivalent), just go here and download and run the appropriate file.
A torrent for this week's episode of Lost can be found here.
A torrent for this week's episode of Veronica Mars can be found here.
Note to angry MPAA peons: I'm not linking to a copy of the TV show. I'm linking to a website that links to a torrent that links to a copy of the TV show. I can add some additional degrees of separation if you'd like.
One of the reasons for my recent relatively light blogging has been a little science project I've undertaken: a google maps version of the Metro. Yeah, I know, it's been done. Not as well as this, though, I don't think. You can have a look here.
I've got plans for this — it should evolve soon into something more useful (and at a different domain, so please don't publish the link yet). But for now, if anyone feels like clicking through and reporting any errors you come across, I'd be grateful. I'm particularly interested in how it works (or doesn't) in Safari. To all the IE users: I know it's dog slow and has transparency problems. Not much I can do about that, unfortunately. But if you experience other weirdness, let me know.
A lot of people seem to be wildly misinterpreting the Google Secure Access initiative that I wrote about this morning.
Despite Om Malik's high-profile (and if you ask me, ridiculous) prediction of a few weeks ago, Google is NOT getting into the "business" of providing free wifi to everyone. Reuters & co. seem to have seen "Google" and "wifi" within a sentence of each other and not bothered to read any further. But Google isn't becoming an ISP — they're just offering a free VPN.
Why are they doing this? For the same reason they offer GMail and the Google Web Accelerator: to drive more of your personal web traffic through their servers. They can then analyze it (check the terms of service!) in order to better profile you, which in turn allows them to better target you for ads, which in turn lets them make more money.
It's a pretty straightforward model, and it makes sense. It's basically a glorified version of your supermarket's discount card program. And yes, I think those are a nasty, evil mechanism with the potential to violate privacy, discriminate against the poor, and (most likely) steal your thoughts via secret government satellites. Google's no different from these other privacy brokers, and eventually their shareholders are going to start complaining that the company's "Don't Be Evil" motto puts them at a competitive disadvantage. For now, though, the consumer gets a lot in return for surrendering their privacy.
Still — what if tomorrow Google started selling public access to GMail users' email for a buck an hour in a "best of Craigslist" sort of setup? What would you do? How would you get your messages out of their system? I don't have good answers to these questions, and it makes me uneasy. Relying on the continued benevolence of a company — particularly a publicly-traded one — is not a position in which any of us should want to be.
UPDATE: And yes, I realize that running a free ISP would be a great way to capture users' traffic. But others have tried it and failed — usually while actually placing additional ads in front of the user (ala NetZero). That's far more profitable than simply showing better ads. It's true that running a wifi ISP would be cheaper than the dialups that failed. And I wouldn't be surprised to see Google partner with a business to provide free wifi, or perhaps get involved in a municipal project or two. But the sort of vast wireless GoogleNet that Malik posits seems very unlikely to me.
UPDATE 2: I should point out that the Craigslist example is probably unrealistic. As noted in section 5 here, you retain the copyright to your emails. The point is just meant to be general: Google is in a position to do a number of evil things, should they decide to.
An interesting new release from Google — they now offer software to help you secure your wifi connection. Put briefly, it seems to install a virtual network adapter representing a VPN connection to Google, then redirect all your traffic through it. It's very similar to OpenVPN's setup, except that the installation is smoother, and of course Google is providing the VPN backend.
I haven't tested its throughput, but I can confirm that it doesn't require wifi. So for those of you daunted by my SSH howto, this could be a good, easy solution (until your IT department starts blocking it, that is). Oh, and Aaron: this will probably let you get around MLB.com's policy of blacking out webcasts of Nats games for DC-area IP addresses (all of your traffic will appear to be coming from Google's servers). It may not be fast enough for streaming video, but it's worth a shot.
For those interested, it looks like the program sets up the connection over SSL — from there Ethereal seems to think that it's sending data out using compressed PPP, which doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me (I thought PPP was a protocol that runs under TCP/IP, not over it). Maybe someone with better networking credentials can fill me in on how this works.
UPDATE: Of course, now I realize that it's PPTP — tunneled PPP. Which is one of the two big VPN standards. Nothing unusual here. PPTP is encapsulated in TCP/IP and sent to the host. Wikipedia's got something about it here, although the GRE portion of the protocol remains less than clear.
I forget if I mentioned this before, but it's worth noting again. Scott Moschella of the venerable plasticbugs set out to redesign the interface of the GIMP, a powerful open-source image editor, so that it would be more familiar to Photoshop users. Today brings an interview with him about the project.
But more importantly, the project has progressed enough to start showing up in easy-to-use packages. Click here for a windows installer. Despite the project being Mac-based, the latest version isn't yet available as a .app package. But you can find install instructions here. If that's too daunting, just stick with the original release for now — you can find a binary install package here.
Sorry. That was terrible. But it's hard to avoid these awful puns when talking about the Nintendo Revolution — the console's name makes it bad-prose compatible out of the box.
Anyway, the controller has been announced, and it's weird. But also intriguing. Don't be put off by the pictures — actually read the text. It sounds kinda cool. There's also a video here, which my enfeebled computer refuses to play. But I'm confident that it's awesome.
Nintendo seems to be aiming for the nongamer audience with this move. I think it's a good strategy — this actually does look like something I could get my mom to play. But I'm pretty excited about the implications for first person shooters, as well. As this guy points out, Nintendo is responsible for pretty much every controller innovation since the joystick. It's hard to imagine that they'd make a serious misstep in this area.
I'm still on board for the Xbox 360, first and foremost. Nintendo's software lineup is simply too weakened for any serious geek to consider it as a console of first resort. But the Revolution is supposed to be pretty cheap. If I somehow stumble across an extra $150, I could now easily see myself blowing it on one of these things.
So the guy from whom Catherine and I are borrowing wifi (until hers is installed) — he didn't even bother to change the administrator password on his router. And it happens to be a Linksys WRT54G. Which means that I could upgrade his firmware to the Sveasoft edition. Which would allow me to boost his signal strength, which would improve the marginal reception the two of us are experiencing.
Well, I doubt I will. Maybe I'll try to figure out his email address when he gets home and send him a polite anonymous note explaining how to change his admin password. Although the fact that I just came across this link today (via hackaday) makes the situation awfully tempting...
Spurred by the news that it just got bought for $2+ billion, I finally tried out Skype last night. Charles gave me a hand trying it out, and with 10 euros worth of SkypeOut credit loaded up, I called the apartment. And hey, it worked pretty well. Charles' voice was very clear, albeit slightly delayed. My own voice could be understood, but the Axim's lousy integrated microphone made it pretty muddy. On the other hand, our 150 second call cost all of three cents — and if I had been calling another Skype user, it would've been free.
So it was pretty cool. All it would take is a cheap bluetooth headset to make it really cool. The only problem, from my perspective, is justifying this gadget. I've already got a VoIP phone for work. I've already got a cell phone with free long distance (but not many minutes). Neither of them have integrated bluetooth, meaning the headset would only be good for Skype — which, as I mentioned, solves a telephony problem I don't really have.
Well, screw it. I can always get one of these suckers to make my non-BT phones ready to play with the wireless headset. I've never been able to resist a sexy new gadget. Between this and the sidekick, I somehow seem to be extremely susceptible to marketing conducted via rap star product placement. Seems a bit odd given that I barely listen to any rap at all.
A portable version of firefox that works on Windows and OS X. Stick it on a thumbdrive and never again waste time synching extensions and bookmarks between work and home.
Slate's got a piece up by two thirtysomething guys evaluating Xbox Live. It's pretty accurate — the people on it really are insanely good, until recently cheating really was widespread, and virtually every kid on it does deserve to be grounded.
But it's still fun, even if they found it a bit overwhelming. It might be worth pointing out that the "senior league" sort of arrangement the Slate article asks for will almost be present in the Xbox360's implementation of Live. The plan is to offer a choice of four "GamerZones": Pro, for the hardcore; R&R, for the casual gamer (and the hardcore who feel like abusing them); Underground, which is for cheaters, so far as I can tell; and Family, which will presumably just turn off players' microphones entirely.
I doubt any of this will work out the way it's intended, but it's at least a nice thought.
With 4.7.1, iTunes introduced a 5-connection limit on sharing. A lot of my friends work in offices where everyone shares their music, and they found this to be a real pain in the ass.
Well, perhaps I'm late to the game on this, but this site claims to have a workaround, and it's as simple as setting a password on the music share. Supposedly password-protected shares aren't subject to the 5-a-day limit. The authors suggests using the share name to tell folks what the password is in order to make connecting simple for everyone.
I haven't had a chance to test this out, but if anyone's in an iTunes-heavy office and wants to give it a try, I'd be very curious to hear if it works.
Related: iLeech and RendezvousProxy, for pulling songs off iTunes shares and making shares accessible across different IP subnets, respectively. Documentation is sparse, but if either of these sound useful you might want to give them a download. They're written in Java, so they ought to work across platforms.
There's a good howto here. With this method you can upgrade your console without ever opening the case. All you need is a memory card, a particular rented game, and a Gameshark-like device called the action replay (or a friend's modded xbox).
They promise an update explaining how to add a larger hard drive with the softmod method — important, because the xbox's built-in drive is only 8GB. That's large enough for a decent number of emulators, but not much else.
But I'm more interested to hear if a softmod can be made to play nicely with Xbox live. Connect to XBL with your modchip turned on and your xbox — and perhaps your account — will be banned for life. But if you flip your modchip off before booting up (and don't make any other really egregious mistakes), you can play happily. Seeing as I've got at least one more modding job on the horizon, it'd be nice to know if it can be accomplished satisfactorily without shelling out for a modchip and firing up the soldering iron. That d0 connection point is a real bastard.
I'm pretty excited about all the traffic generated by my SSH howto (part 1, part 2). I should've submitted junk to hackaday long ago!
Anyway, I'm doing my best to respond to all the questions posed in comments (and that's definitely the place to pose them). Here are answers to the two most common problems: restrictive work security policies, and mac ownership.
Wow. Sorry for the deluge of tech posts today, but this is too cool to ignore. Maybe you've already heard of it.
I knew that downhillbattle made cool t-shirts; I didn't know they also made cool software. But check out BlogTorrent — particularly their technical explanation. It lets you run a BitTorrent tracker on any website with PHP! Installation is as simple as uploading a directory! And users don't even have to have BT installed... it wraps downloaded .torrents in a BT executable that works on Windows or Mac!
Frankly, it's taking a lot of effort to keep myself from installing this right away, opening it to the world, and getting sued for millions of dollars. But it does seem likely to doom the RIAA's strategy of going after tracker sites — any jerk can anonymously obtain some PHP hosting (often for free), set this up, and become a mini Pirate Bay. For a few weeks, anyway.
Or maybe I'll just set up a private tracker to distribute important TV shows* to Catherine, Susan and the rest of the 05/06 DC blog diaspora. Either way: I badly wanna play with this toy.
* for which I have obtained legal distribution rights, of course
No? Hmm. I was probably just muttering it involuntarily, then. Happens all the time.
Seriously though, this is pretty cool. Sounds like their technology works by causing tiny droplets of water to condense out of the air, which are then used to diffract projected light. It essentially creates a screen of fog in midair, then paints an image onto it with light. Neat. With today's swamp-like DC air, I bet it'd work great here.
When last we left our hero — that'd be you — he had a functioning SSH server running on his Windows machine. You've poked a hole in your firewall and/or router, and maybe you've signed up for a dynamic DNS service. That, or you at least have an IP address. The bare minimum is the same: to proceed from here, you ought to be able to connect to your OpenSSH server with PuTTY when you're away from home.
A little while ago I mentioned that I've been tunnelling my web traffic out of work and through my home connection. That post inspired a firestorm of public interest (one person emailed me about it). Here's the beginning of how to implement such a setup yourself. When it's working your boss won't be able to snoop on which websites you're visiting, or block them, or really tell anything about your internet traffic apart from how much of it there is (and that it's strangely hidden).
First, the big picture. I've explained the idea behind ports at least a couple of times. We're going to take our browser's web traffic — the stuff going out through port 80 — and send it through an encrypted tunnel to a PC at home that's running a proxy server. The proxy server will make an unencrypted request for the webpage we're trying to access (using our home connection) and send the data back through the encrypted tunnel.
We're going to need a few things. We'll need a PC that's at home and turned on at whatever times the link should be available. And we're going to need to make some assumptions. So this is going to be a Windows tutorial. All the software required is free and open source, though, and you could certainly accomplish this setup under OS X or Linux. In fact, in some regards it'd probably be quite a bit easier. But Linux users don't need my help setting up a proxy server, and Mac users are used to being ignored. If anybody with a Mac really wants this functionality, just let me know. I'll be happy to dig up the relevant links.
Finally, I'm going to assume you know how to open up ports on Windows firewall (or at least turn it off) if you're running a version of XP that has it installed. Same thing with ZoneAlarm, or whatever other software firewall you might be running. I can't account for everything, people!
So let's get started. In this post we'll take care of the software that supports the encrypted tunnel. This is the hard, but not that hard, part.
thanks to ogged for pointing me towardsGreatNews, an RSS reader that is, oh, about two billion times better than bloglines. i've become increasingly frustrated with bloglines lately - the interface sucks, it's slow as molasses, etc - but i didn't want to give up the capability to read my bloglines feeds from any computer (since it's browser based instead of a desktop application). amazingly, GreatNews has a feature that will synch your bloglines feeds, so you can read your RSS feeds through GN, but if you happen to be at another computer at another point, you can still check bloglines, and the feeds will be the same. it's awesome, and superfast, and i haven't found any major glitches with it so far. so, hurrah.
It's been fun basking in blogospheric attention for an HTML hack that could be performed by any number of middle-schoolers. But, sadly, a commenter has pointed out that the zoo is on to us -- the butterstick submission form no longer works. I'll try to have another look at it tonight, but it's likely that there's nothing to be done. On the upside, this means that there probably were votes labeled "butterstick" making their way into the zoo database. Which is pretty great.
Catherine suggested explaining the hack, so for those interested, a rundown of the relevant webdev principles is behind the cut. The rest of you should start thinking about the next step in fomenting the Pale Yellow Revolution.
The novelty's worn off, guys. I get that your boss will give you a better evaluation if your list of Q1 accomplishments includes "viral", "blog" and other words he wishes he understood, but this is getting ridiculous. Vis: Microsoft's latest website, which implies that something will be happening on September 27 at noon. Nobody thinks the Xbox360 will be out before November, so this is probably an announcement of a pending announcement. A metannouncement. Aren't you glad you paid attention to it?
In other XB2π news, you might have heard that two flavors will be offered -- one for $299 and one for $399. The pricier bundle comes with a removable 20GB hard drive, a wireless controller, a headset, and a bunch of cables and other unexciting shit. Disappointing, and irritating, but I'll cave: the nerds are worried that the system will be neutered without the hard drive (there'll be no backward-compatibility without it, for one thing). The most irritating part? Larger capacity drives will no doubt soon be released (and bought by me, should a modchip be developed). The smart money's also on some clip-on MP3 hardware turning this into a portable player.
IGN's got a story up that attempts to take the sting out of the gouging. Here's the only important part: a chart showing past console launch prices, adjusted into 2005 dollars.
Atari VCS
launched in 1977 for $249.99
$811.21 in
2005
Nintendo
Entertainment System launched in 1985 for $199.99
$354.91 in
2005
SEGA Genesis
launched in 1989 for $249.99
$389.67 in
2005
NeoGeo launched in 1990 for
$699.99
$1041.12 in 2005
Super Nintendo launched in 1991
for $199.99
$282.21 in 2005
Jaguar launched in 1993 for
$249.99
$328.69 in 2005
3DO Interactive Multiplayer
launched in 1993 for $699.95
I've recently started working as a subcontractor on a new (incredibly boring) project, and it's requiring that I spend a fair number of days in a cube farm at the prime's office in Crystal City. Worse, the people here actually have some technical savvy, forcing me to worry about my internet traffic (and vigorous daily blog regimen) being observed by folks for whom I'd prefer to maintain the illusion that I'm an industrious and conscientious worker 100% of the time.
As a result, I've set things up so that all of my personal internet traffic goes through an encrypted tunnel, back to our apartment, and then out to the internet over our DSL connection. Office snoops will see traffic going out, but have no idea what it is. And from Verizon's perspective I might as well be sitting on our couch right now.
All of this has gotten me thinking and reading up on encryption and security, as you might have noticed from the post I put up over at BTD this morning. But since it's been a while since I did something really techy over here, I figured I might as well write a bit more about it. And since it's a pretty meaty subject, I figured I might as well split it up across a number of posts.
So first things first: let's talk about how modern encryption systems work. And let's do it in few enough words that it isn't confusing, or too terribly boring. Movie and Xbox references behind the cut, I promise.
Remember when Google ran this custom logo to celebrate Joan Miro's birthday? And Miro's family 
Well, my star-crossed SMS project continues to trundle along. I've had to give up on my beloved T39 — it's just not working out between us. So I bought this Nokia 3100 off of Ebay for 99 cents (+ $10 shipping). That white blotch on the right side of its screen isn't glare; it's a big ol' crack in the LCD. In real life it's neon pink and looks vaguely like a pornographic cartoon.
