February 28, 2003
Further adventures on Open Source Software
George Schlossnagle originally posted a bit more of a detailed and intellectual follow up to my quip about users. It seems this sparked off a bit of a debate between he and Sterling Hughes. A fairly interesting read if you care to follow IRC conversations between what seem to be two diametrically opposing views on end users.Posted by Dan at 02:16 PM | Comments (0)
February 27, 2003
Computers and Things
I've been using an Apple Powerbook Titanium for the last 2+ years now running OS X for as long as I've had the machine. I've enjoyed it for many reasons, but there have always been a few dark spots on it. Recently these spots are getting to be much larger, more annoying, and plenty visible.
The main culprit is the Airport wireless ethernet card. The card works alright for me, nothing great. For example, trying to surf the web via the Airport (being the only one on it mind you) is noticeably slower than if I were to plug into the ethernet (yes I know the technical differences).
There are times when the Airport card just can't even download files that it just looked at. When trying to build some software, I can forget about using the internet as it seems large builds kill the cards capability to continue functioning. Thankfully all these issues can be worked around or dealt with somehow. Not saying that they should exist at all, but they aren't the number one priority.
The biggest problem, lack of signal strength. It seems that while I can pick up various signals close by (100 ft max), those that others can find with ease are not to be seen by me. This is typically a problem for normal use and has been worse in the past week while working and having to hunt for a nice hot spot for use. I'm starting to look into using an external antenna based card to see if that will solve any of my issues. I'm really disappointed for the first time with the signal strength issues.
On the other side I've discovered that I don't have any presentation software. This could be a big problem in Montreal, as I have to make a presentation there. So I bought a copy of Keynote. What a nice change this software is from Power Point and the mistakes in designing slides. Mind you, Keynote has the advantage of taking the best of Power Point and trying to do something new without having had to go through years of backwards compatibility support. Too bad I'm running out of disk space now...
Posted by Dan at 09:36 PM | Comments (0)
Beijing Bicycle
Having been in a Hong Kong film mood for the past couple of weeks is both good and bad. On one side it gives me a chance to move away from the American mind set of film and experience the culture of the world as best as I can from an armchair. On the other side, you sometimes get some truly awful films. Thankfully Beijing Bicycle is just an excellent story and film. The story as a whole is about a guy (Guei) who moves to the city from the country. He's pretty fascinated by the world around him, and soon gets a job as a bike messenger. Since he has no money, the company gives him (and other employees) a bike to do his job. The catch is he has to work off the debt through a percentage of his paycheck. Breaking this down a bit, I found this interesting. The company could be seen as the government giving each of it's employees/citizens a chance to be equal... but you have to pay taxes for that (bike payments in this case). Despite doing his job well, Guei eventually has his bike stolen and becomes determined to find it. We discover later that a young teen has stolen it to be accepted by his peers, and win the fancy of a girl. Ah youthful ignorance of trying to impress a girl by riding a bike. Guei decides to steal the bike back, and the story moves from here. The illusions of communism though return later in a solution for the bike. Watching the movie, I felt it was a really fantastic movie. Well made film (nice color, angles), enjoyable script, and interesting characters you begin to care about. After having thought about the film for a bit though, I began to see a lot of political under tones. The communism mentality being one of the larger. Another idea later, that you can't keep the hard worker down, is repeated over and over again. Buy It: If you like foreign films, sure Rent It: definitely TV: I doubt you'll ever see this on a channel other than Sundance.Posted by Dan at 09:09 PM | Comments (2)
February 26, 2003
Testing out Kung-Log
It was suggested by George that I should give Kung-Log a try. So I am. Initial use, I like it a lot, the interface is easy to navigate, and even easier to setup. If I can keep it working offline as well as online, I think he'll find a donaton coming in quicker and quicker.Posted by Dan at 08:14 AM | Comments (0)
End users continued
Hartmut pointed me a few articles of interest. The first (in a babblefish translation from German) works pretty well in describing the scenario yesterday. You can find it translated here or in the original German here.
He also pointed me towards another article describing the phenomena entitled Unskilled and Unaware of It. I'm still reading it, but so far it's been pretty interesting read.
Posted by Dan at 08:04 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 25, 2003
Spam Senders
I got a piece of spam today through my normal filters. This is pretty unusual as the DCC system works rather well I think. Kevin tells me that Spam Assassin is working even better for him. I might want to give that try as well soon.
But I question the mind set of spammers. The topic of this spam "My dog has broken my hymen" is just unsettling. To those of you who send spam with this kind of a topic, please just stop.
Posted by Dan at 09:51 AM | Comments (0)
Open Source != Free Help
One of the projects I work upon is the PHP project. I somehow became the maintainer of the ODBC module in a short period of time. Typically this is fine as I've made a lot of good friends through the project, and have increased my code knowledge by a significant portion. Like any project, I've had my good times and bad times with it. I don't hold any of that against it right now.
One of the problems though I've found are the users. As a sysadmin you hear quotes to the tune of "This job would be great if it weren't for the (l)users" and other tidbits like so. Under an Open Source project though things become much different, where users throughout the world can suddenly instantly get in contact with an code author and question them.
Sometimes this has a great pay off with interesting dialog going both ways. I've heard from some interesting people on various other projects, and have asked questions of others on projects. I like this part. The intelligent users.
The other 90% of emails I receive are the problem points for me. The requests for help or the "how do i do...". These are the emails that are generally not appreciated. Sterling Hughes has an interesting take on how he deals with these types of questions. I'm still debating the usefulness of this method.
My bigger problem with these users is the response when they realize you won't help them. Many become angry or irate, and feel the need to inform me that they will be switching to (insert alternative program/project here). There seems to be this misguided conception that because you got something for free, it should still be supported for free.
This makes me laugh especially hard when I realize that many of those asking questions are happily employed. I wonder how many of them realize that they are asking me to take my free time, give them an answer they could find with a few web searches, and not ask for anything in return. It seems rather one sided to me. I have no problem working on the software, typically it's designed to make my life easier. The fact that you as an end user find it to be useful too is an added bonus, but not a primary concern of mine.
Posted by Dan at 07:03 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 24, 2003
Coolest new software this year?
Marko pointed me towards, what I think could be the coolest piece of software to come out in a long time. The Sony Ericsson Clicker now allows me to control my OS X machine from my bluetooth enabled phone. This is just an awesome idea, and I really can't wait to put it to use in future presentations and what have you.
Right now I'm finding it hard to think of any way this little hack can't be considered the best software of 2003 and the year has a long way to go. Wow.
Posted by Dan at 09:53 AM | Comments (0)
February 23, 2003
Commericals and Movies
I'm a few days behind on it's initial posting, but thats okay, it's the content that matters. Right? This article, from the Chicago Sun-Times, was found by someone else, and forwarded to me.
What's it about? A lawsuit to remove the recent trends to include commercials before movies. I, for one, am absolutely for the removal of these doubly-paid for premium crap ads. Think about it this way, the theater gets to not only make money from the showing of the ad, but they've also increased the cost of your ticket to make even more money. Yes, I know this is a rather simplistic view of things, but you'd expect the extra bit of income to cut down other costs.
It still baffles me how a fast food establishment can offer a large all-you-can-drink soda for about $1, while a movie theater offers a cup full of ice with minimal soda for $4-$5. I won't even get into the $4 candies ($1 at your local CVS), and the crazy cost of popcorn ($2.75 per pound of yellow corn). I could understand the slightly higher costs from before (independent movie theaters, etc), but now most theaters are national chains. It makes no sense. Check out the article in any event it's worth reading.
Posted by Dan at 09:18 PM | Comments (0)
Hacking Gallery code
After my little tirade about the state of affairs on my web-page, I became motivated to make things look better. Thanks to the magic of CSS I now have a rather consistent looking home page system. How odd and terribly frightening.
The big problem seems to be getting Gallery to work with it. They've done a great job on creating a PHP based system for displaying graphics, but it's not very extensible right now. The html_wrap directory only allows you to edit the headers and footers essentially of the system. So I hacked the code a bunch. This will most assuredly make it a headache to upgrade in the future, so read on only if you like headaches.
I wanted to use the same CSS file in all my pages, as such the util.php file contains the path/directory information for the gallery based CSS in a function better known as _getStyleSheetLink(). Note the leading underscore. Altering this to always return my common CSS file works for me. I don't plan on embedding this, so I really didn't care about many of it's options and just cleared them out.
One of the things about Gallery that really annoys me is the system for de-marking an album. I figured the text "album" was enough and absolutely despise the fake "many pictures" graphic they use. This was easy to remove, and cuts down on the downloading of at least 3 misc graphics from my web-server. In the html_wrap directory there is a file inline_gallerythumb.frame.default. Make this just inline_gallerythumb.frame and inside of the file the last 3 entries for the table can be removed safely. No more annoying layered picture image. You'll need to do this same thing for inline_albumthumb.frame as well, if you want to completely get rid of all occurrences.
Next to make the initial Gallery page text look familiar to the rest of the site I had to alter the album.php file. If you scan through it for the word "Cell" you should find a comment that says something like "begin Text Cell". You can edit that section to alter any of the text that appears on the main page. Why this isn't in the html_wrap I'm not sure.
I wanted to alter the album views of images, but when I did I didn't like the output. In the essence of full disclosure though, you can alter these in the view_album.php file. Searching for the word "Viewed" helps to find the appropriate section to edit.
The end result of all this is the entire site is based off of CSS. I'm now starting to realize why Marko has a tag on his page that says "Friends don't let friends used table-based layouts". Once you can get into the whole CSS thing it is a lot easier to work with and makes a helluva lot more sense.
The bad part about it is that older browsers are not CSS compliant. By older I mean browsers from the Netscape 4 timeframe. One thought on this end: if you're still using such an old browser it's time to upgrade. Give it up, that piece of non-standards compliant bloatware isn't going to go anywhere useful. Not saying that Mozilla doesn't have a lot of bloat, but there are things like Opera and Mozilla spinoffs that aren't so bad. More importnatly thought they support current web standards.
The really really nice part about all of this hacking... if I decide I'd like to change the color scheme or what not, I just have to edit the CSS file. I was playing around with this and it was really quite fun. Maybe I'll make the web page skin-able.... naw...
Posted by Dan at 07:35 AM | Comments (0)
February 22, 2003
Confessions of a Dangerous Mind
Saw it. Sat through it. Was bored to death about it. I couldn't stand the washed out "testimonials", the odd angles, and frankly a lot of the story. Bob seemed to love it at least.
I'm not sure I can say much more. A lot of it was very predictable, a lot of it was not in sync, and frankly a lot of it I just didn't care about. A few good hidden jokes throughout the movie, but not enough to warrent the $8 or whatever it was to see it.
Buy It: No
Rent It: No
Catch it on TV: eh, if nothing better is on, sure
Posted by Dan at 10:25 PM | Comments (0)
The Big Kahuna
So when I remember this being out in theaters I completely missed it. Not being a movie that I particularly remembered for much of anything via media hype or reviews by friends, I wouldn't have picked it up again... except for the fact that I found it in the video store by chance. The Big Kahuna on the cover has a great title, and a nice photograph of Kevin Spacey acting like a big chieftain.
I thought it would be an interesting and thought provoking film, and it was almost all the way through. The build up was good, with a lot of tension and ground breaking between the three main characters. You're given enough of their backgrounds to get a feel for how each thinks. Kate said it best with the comment "It really feels like you're watching a theater production." She was right, this movie is obviously a stage adaption. The single room set, three characters working off of each other, a strange and simple situation with a lot of dialog... it was an excellent stage play. Looking on IMDB shows that initially this was a stage production. Interestingly enough adapted by the original author, Roger Rueff.
The end... the end is where the movie fell apart. I'm still trying to figure out what the phone call was about. My theory is that the phone call shows Phil was having an affair with Larry's wife, hence his semi-morbidness throughout the production. Others have disagreed with that opinion, but none had any better suggestions. If you know what it was, let me know.
Buy: If you like theater, and movie adaptions possibly.
Rent: Definately
On TV: I can see this not being as interesting with commercials
Posted by Dan at 10:20 PM | Comments (0)
If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of A B-Movie Actor
Bruce Campbell is the man. Everyone knows it. If you ever watch his acting you would see and recognize this fact. But if you were too blind to see it through his acting then, just listen to him talk about his acting, film, and numerous other topics to soon discover his brilliance.
Jim got me a signed copy of his book a couple months back. It took me awhile, but I've finally gotten around to reading it. It's not a terribly difficult read and ended up taking all of one snowed in weekend between shoveling contests. Rest assured though this is classic Campbell with comments and views on life and movie making that are great.
I'm not typically one to read autobiographies either, but I'd recommend this to anyone thinking of starting to make movies. Mr. Campbell shares with the reader many of the issues that had arisen during the filming of his numerous low budget extravaganzas. Granted, I'm still unsure how many of these issues were brought upon themselves by themselves, but it does let you realize that everything will go wrong somehow. The trick seems to be to keep on laughing about it. :)
It's worth buying. Or at the very least loaning from the local library. I'm just happy mine has been signed, too bad I've almost ripped the back cover off...
Posted by Dan at 07:12 AM | Comments (0)
As a whole
I've decided that my website looks like crap. Not that I ever intended it to be a web design award winner, but the current state of disjuncture that is my website was not what I wanted either. I tried to start a new design, one to incorporate some of my latest and greatest toys. It failed due to lack of interest and time.
I added in some links to the original website I've got here, so now others can see the photos, and about me stuff they've been dying to see. Enjoy! Eventually I'll figure out how to make Gallery work with the css file I'm using here. Until then, you'll have to deal with the mis-match of patterns.
As a side note, I've decided that I don't like the super graphical interface that MT is using. It's nice, it's fun, but when you get a slow connection it's a real bitch to work with. I might have to hack that up for a text only interface.
I've also just realized I forgot to enable TrackBack... how lovely.
[EDIT] It looks like I may have gotten most of the style sheet working in gallery. Hacks-r-us baby!
Posted by Dan at 06:55 AM | Comments (2)
February 21, 2003
Privacy Online
I attended a follow up lecture today by Dr. Lorrie Cranor concerning her research into online privacy, and the issues surrounding the current state of affairs with respect to the United States.
First the notes about the presentation.
The initial change from yesterday, she slowed down her presentation style a lot. A very nice change in that I was able to allow my attention to drift a bit here and there, and not have to worry about how lost I would be with the rest of the presentation. She countered this good move by reading from the projected slides instead of from her laptop screen. Essentially she turned her back on us more often than I would have expected. Once or twice is okay, but after the 5th time I stopped counting. She packed an awful lot of information on the overhead slides, which made the importance of some items become a bit understated. No where did I hear the word "whirlwind" in the presentation today.
Now onto the lecture content itself.
This wasn't a terribly in depth lecture on the issues of online privacy. It seemed to be much more a broad overview of the current state of affairs in privacy and how they are or are not changing. One of the more interesting points in the slides discusses how the lack of US privacy laws has conflicted towards European privacy laws, and how the US is starting to play catch up Europe. She also noted that many organizations are starting to "self regulate" in the hopes of stemming a nationwide law. It's functionality has yet to be seen.
Other interesting points in the lecture were not from the lecture itself, but from the audience participation. At one point she put up a series of shield icons from TRUSTe, BBB Online, and a Japanese site I've never heard of or seen (she claims the BBB Online has absorbed it recently). She asked how many in the audience have seen or know of these icons. Out of about 30 attendees, only 2 or 3 raised their hands (myself included). This frightened me, a lot. It was at this very moment it occurred to me that the need for something like PrivacyBird is much stronger than I had originally anticipated. How can a user blindly trust a merchant just because they are on the web? Compared to offline shopping, many of these same people would not give their information to establishments (or people) that they cannot verify or feel safe with. Is there some kind of inherent safe feel to using the web that causes users to blindly trust others?
After all was said and done, I tried to get her opinion/feel on topics such as the Patriot Act, and the Total Information Awareness project. She neatly described each of these, tried to describe what has happened with them, and disclosed absolutely nothing on her personal stance. Nice sidestep. Someone else furthered the question by inquiring if this was to be brought in under the radar next year or so, and she believed this to be a yes. Keep your EFF and ACLU memberships handy and upto date. Looks like we'll have a fight in the near future. Oh and keep reading CryptoMe for more details.
After the lecture I did get a chance to talk to her a bit more about PrivacyBird and it's operation. It seems that she does have hope of cleaning up the code base and releasing the project as Open Source in the sometime near future. The hope is that other developers could port the IE plugin to thing such as Mozilla, Safari, and Opera. She didn't have a time estimate on when the code release would occur or what license it would be released under (push for BSD).
One of her hopes is to release a Macintosh based version before this happens. It would be nice to see, especially since I believe now (more than ever before) that such a tool should be integrated in the core of every web browser.
I presented the question on if the group had asked for advice/input from guru's of HCI (i.e. Jef Raskin, Andy Hertzfeld, etc..). Apparently there were a series of HCI specialists working on the project who were in fact responsible for one of the failed designs. This design presented a series of questions using sometimes vague terminology for the user to pick and choose between. The catch was that on the side of each screen were glossary definitions of these vague terms speecific to the page. It seems that when reading people don't browse the rest of the page, as few of the users ever even noticed them. Later due to cutbacks and constraints by AT&T, the HCI specialists were no more, and her group continued on.
She pointed out that this project was done on a minimal shoe-string budget, and as such had no money to spare in consultations with outside HCI gurus.
Posted by Dan at 08:37 AM | Comments (0)
Err...oops?
Kevin pointed out that my knowledge and use of HTML is poor at best, and that I cannot make hyperlinks if my life depended upon it. So I fixed that.
Posted by Dan at 05:43 AM | Comments (0)
February 20, 2003
Catch Me If You Can
Saw this movie for the Christmas holiday, and I've been meaning to write about it a bit. A very sweet movie indeed. I won't say it was great, but it was a nice mental movie. I was excited to see next what would happen, but without having to go through a series of black helicopters or explosions to make the transitions. Not that I mind black helicopter movies.... but it's good to get away from them at times.
Major complaints with it? The whole he did it because of his parents divorce. Not having gone through a divorce (thankfully) I can't really say if the outcome is true or not. Then again society today has a much more open idea of divorce than a 1960's time frame.
I wouldn't recommend buying this though. Sorry it's just not worth the money.
Posted by Dan at 06:16 PM | Comments (0)
P3P
I went to a lecture today by Dr. Lorrie Carnor today, where she spoke about her work in providing P3P authorization and protection services. A very interesting talk to say the least.
Minor quips about the talk first, and then everything else. Dr. Cranor rushed through the talk, it seemed rather obvious to me. Her speech just felt like it was going too fast and without emphasis (and pause) on the important parts. It's obvious there is a lot more to discuss than just the 1.15 hours she was alloted. I'd love to hear her talk more about this at some point in a casual manner. We all have words that we prefer to use a lot, hers is "whirlwind."
Now onto the rest of it.
The progression of her work towards implementing a series of privacy 'catches' for web browsers is fascinating. One of the points she makes is that people REALLY don't have a clue about what data is being collected and distributed about themselves online. Even more important is that users don't even realize it when they are giving out this information!
One of the other things I took away from this, privacy experts are so far removed from the audience they are protecting that they cannot communicate with each other.
Her initial project started out as a large matrix of checkboxes denoting good and bad options for a website to collect. The matrix size began to jump dramatically as more legalese was added, eventually becoming just unusable. Her group realized this and began to find new ways around this. Clumping multiple options into the same group, and limiting the extra fine granularity of user control.
What I took away: P3P isn't hard. The suggestions are in place, and the framework is ready. It's just a matter of running through those steps to make it useful. The hard part is, believe it or not, getting users to become knowledgeable. Not only do they not realize when data is being collected about them, but they don't realize what data they do want collected. Dr. Cranor used an example of not distributing a social security number ever to a website, but in cases of a health care provider the blanket option didn't work. It was later shown that it is easier for users to decide what they DON'T want a website to collect rather than what they should offer to be collected.
More importantly, they learned a massive amount about human computer interaction and GUI design. The end result of all of this work, Privacy Bird, is truly an amazing thing. Unfortunately it only works on Windows platforms, and worse yet for Internet Explorer only.
Now the semi-good news. The good folks at Mozilla have implemented a series of P3P restrictions EXTREMELY similar to all of her work. The only big downfall is the lack of a nice big means of notification that Privacy Bird uses. Hopefully there will be a correction to this in the near future.
Posted by Dan at 01:46 PM | Comments (0)
Congrats to another...
I was supposed to post this last night, but I didn't, I got caught up in too much work. Marisa sent me an email the other day saying that Resa has gotten engaged to a guy by the name of Justin.
At first I thought she was joking, but then I realized April 1st is a long ways away. You see when I met Resa and talked to her (more than I do now) she flat out claimed that marriage was a lie. More important than that she vowed to never again have sex, and to never ever be married. It was towards the beginning of our 3626 days that I bet she'd be married within 5 years. Looks like I was right, neener neener! I vaguely remember making the bet, and don't remember what was put on the line... so I'll take a case of beer anytime you want to give it to me :)
Congratulations to Resa and Justin. Look out 2004!
On the other front, this marks Y.A.F. who falls victim to the engagement idea. Not that I particularly kept in touch with Resa, but as more and more do this engagement thing... the less and less I hear from them.
From what I've been able to tell, the count is down to 3 left in the bachelor status. While Bob and Chris aren't officially engaged, I can see it happening in the next few months if things pick up for both.
Posted by Dan at 04:56 AM | Comments (0)
February 19, 2003
The Closet
The other night while at Kate's place we rented a few movies for the weekly movie review party. One of those rented was The Closet. It's a French film where the main character devises a scheme to not get himself fired... pretend to be gay.
The story moves along and Francois soon discovers more and more about himself and his life. The process of this self-discovery though is what makes this movie a classic in humor. I can't really say much more about the film's premise as it will give away a lot of the fun.
Acting wise, the entire cast puts on a great show. From the super jock down to Francois neighbor. One of the parts I found really great was his teenage sons interaction with his mom. It just reminded me of conversations with brother I've had over the last few years.
If you're in the mood for a good laugh, don't mind reading subtitles, I do suggest renting this one. Very enjoyable.
Posted by Dan at 06:25 PM | Comments (0)
February 18, 2003
The Life and Times of Shovels
Well it was interesting day of digging out Nishod (Andy's friend) and (sort of) my car. We started with no shovels, only a garbage bucket and our hands. Then we picked up a garden shovel from one of Andy's classmates. Soon I remembered the little shovel in the car and got that out. A bit later a freaky lady came by and offered her help for $3. We gave her $2 for the use of her shovel. Work was progressing, but we had some serious problems, mainly where to put the snow.
As we piled the snow up against the sidewalk the residents of the basement apartments complained that they couldn't see out their windows. I had no sympathy for this as I really have no other place to put the snow. We aren't allow to put it on the street (supposedly) and the only open spot we have is the sidewalk. So there it piled up. Unfortunately, the snow became a bit heavier as the day went on, leading to the worst accident we could have had: the broken shovel. The Little Black AAA car shovel died an honorable death in mid scooping motion, a mere month after it's acceptance. A post-mortem autopsy reveled a small chunk of ice split the blade down the center, causing both sides of the blade to fall off the handle. So much for flimsy plastic shovels, where are those great orange shovels of my youth?
Once we discovered we had a shovel down and there was no way to fix it, a moment of silence was had for the shovel by all on the street. Little Black AAA Shovel was laid to rest in a graveyard full of shovel corpses from around the neighborhood that had not survived the task at hand, and promptly covered with snow. Then, we drank orange juice and water in an effort to regroup and come up with a new shoveling strategy.
After about an hour we got Nishod's car out, but in the process we buried mine slightly. I figured it was okay since I wasn't planing on driving anywhere anytime soon. This also adds to the joy of taking a terrorist parking spot. The way I figure it, if a tow truck really wants to pull my car out of the snow for me, the less work it is for me. But the tow truck has about a 4' x 7' block of snow that sits about 4' deep to get through first, and just barely a street wide enough to get the truck down now.
Posted by Dan at 07:37 PM | Comments (0)
First post!
Neener neener!
Testing things out...
So far I like the whole MT system. It seems rather crude and hackish in it's codebase, but it does seem to work very well. More importantly it's not that hard to setup and configure. I might submit some suggested language changes to the manual though.
Posted by Dan at 03:16 PM | Comments (0)