BunkBlog

The article LPO: Caring for Your Introvert isn’t new, but I just bumped into it via Neal Stephenson’s page. Here’s a short excerpt:

Are introverts arrogant?

Hardly. I suppose this common misconception has to do with our being more intelligent, more reflective, more independent, more level-headed, more refined, and more sensitive than extroverts. Also, it is probably due to our lack of small talk, a lack that extroverts often mistake for disdain. We tend to think before talking, whereas extroverts tend to think by talking, which is why their meetings never last less than six hours.

Just a quick test to see if the latest Live Press update fixes what ails me.

Update – Sure looks like it.

University of Texas, in Austin, has decided to remove the books from their undergraduate library. Now, it’s filled with computers and chairs and barstools. It’ll have some kickass wifi, too.

A strange thing about the Amazon recommendation system – it’s retarded.

It may make sense, in the context of books or music, to suggest you might be interested in something similar to a previously purchased item. But, in the context of technology, it’s just bizarre. “Hey, we noticed you own a wifi card, so you might be interested in another wifi card.” Um, yeah. Thanks, got one. “You purchased a couple books on Microsoft Access, maybe you’d like all the other books on Access ever published.” Why would I?

And don’t even get me started on the way that different editions of the same book or CD get hawked, after I purchased one already. “You bought Depeche Mode’s Songs of Faith and Devotion, maybe you’d like Songs of Faith and Devotion [Enhanced]?” Seems unlikely, doesn’t it?

Blu-Ray and HD-DVD disks will have DRM that is compatible. Isn’t that nice? Not that any DRM system has ever worked, but it’s great that they can find ways to funnel money into worthless technology that has the only end result the inconveniencing of their own customers. One piece of this technology, ROM Mark, is meant to stop the big pirates in Asia. Want to bet it won’t work?

The other piece is called BD+ and is geared to hindering attempts to crack the encryption technology shielding the content. Essentially, it allows the BDA to update the encryption scheme should the current technique be cracked. If a coder comes up with the Blu-ray equivalent of DeCSS, the BDA simply updates the format’s crypto engine on all future releases, limiting the volume of content that can be nabbed. Does that mean that the existing players will cease to work with newer movies? Hey, great way to punk your customers. Alternately, the system could force all DVD players to have an internet connection in order to have “updates” forced on them at the whim of the manufacturer or the MPAA. Um, yeah, good idea. How many people are ready to hook their television set to the internet?

Explain how it’s possible to protect things my eyes can see and my ears can hear from being copied in some way. Sure, you may be able to slow the adoption of technology that makes perfect copies. You won’t stop it. More importantly, the MP3 revolution has taught us one thing – people don’t care about perfect copies, just decent ones. Nobody can say an MP3 encoded at 160 kbps sounds just as good as the CD, but it’s good enough. Nobody can say that an XVID-encoded 1 gig video rip of a DVD looks as good as the original DVD, but it’s good enough.

So, why bother with DRM that won’t stop the big pirates in China, won’t stop people from making “good enough” copies at all, and just annoys the hell out of people who aren’t geeky enough to read the internet instructions on how to make those “good enough” copies? It’s an amazing waste of money, when the movie industry claims it’s low on cash. Ignore their record-setting box office numbers – if the MPAA says they’re hurting, those crocodile tears must be dealt with.

This article neglects to mention facts contrary to this quote:

bq. “This (Foo Fighters) CD has a copy protection scheme that makes it totally useless to 30 million iPod owners,” wrote C. Anderson of Plano, Texas on Amazon.com’s customer review link.

You know, the fact that it takes about three minutes to break the copy protection on the latest Foo Fighters disk.

So, not only do they piss off millions of customers who can’t play their Foo Fighters in their iPods, they don’t actually stop the distribution of the music on the internet to begin with. What an amazingly savvy marketing move.

In case you are unaware, I’m a “Data Management Specialist” for a defense contractor; this means something rather vague, but includes a lot of database administration. Unfortunately, the particular DoD agency which employs my company at this location doesn’t think we need an actual enterprise-quality database management system. I use Microsoft Access.

I know, it’s shameful. Alas, it is my lot in life and I must do what I can with it. The near-complete lack of concurrent transactioning in Access was not much of an issue back when the office had a half-dozen people entering data throughout the day. We’ve got a few dozen now, and boy does it suck. Somehow, the upgrade to Win2k and Office2k a few months ago (right on the cutting edge, eh?) seems to have only exacerbated the errors. In Access 97, I could edit the forms or even the design of a table while people were using other forms or other tables; in Access 2000, I have to have completely exclusive control of the database to make even the slightest structural change.

Structural changes should be rare, you would think. Not with some of my cow-orkers attempting new and astounding feats of “what does this button do” every few days. To make things more interesting, the network we are on has random hiccups of a distressing length and severity. And, just for kicks, the system design folks (who don’t work on this base or even in this state) forbid any exposure of the network group lists so I can’t automate any sort of real security on the database itself. That means, anything I can do as the programmer/administrator, any other user can do too. You can imagine how much joy this brings me.

So far, I’ve had to redesign a couple forms to stop someone from changing his own name and therefore reassigning all his work to a non-existent person; I’ve had to redesign forms to stop someone from filling out a date inappropriately, thereby moving documents into the wrong stage of the review process; I’ve had to redesign forms to stop someone from erasing someone’s name from the database.

Did I do these things preemptively? No, I didn’t think anyone would ever try some of those things, so it never occured to me to stop them from being possible.

Can I get MySQL and PHP, please?

Konfabulator was bought by Yahoo, so now it’s free. I played with it yesterday, but I’m not sure it’s really much use for me. Maybe if I was anal about the statistics of my system, or if I didn’t have an RSS reader already, or if I cared what my internal IP address was (it’s static to the router)… well, I don’t see much use for my system, but here’s what my desktop looked like after playing with it for a while:

Lots of photos were taken the past two weeks. It will be a while to get a substantial number of them uploaded, but a starting set are up now, and more will come soon. Keep checking back, or hit the Gallery to see when new pictures are posted on our site.

I pre-ordered the new Foo Fighters double CD set when it was first listed on Amazon over a month ago, and it showed up today. Wanting to listen to it on my Rio Karma, since that’s what I usually listen to, I tried to rip the CD. It wouldn’t rip because it’s been “protected” by Sunncomm’s digital restrictions. About five minutes later, I found exactly what to do to rip the CDs that I paid for so I can listen to them.

Of course, it’s faster to just go to Usenet and download them after someone else has gone through the trouble of reconfiguring their system to use their own music on their own computer, and then shared it illegally with the world. Interesting that it’s faster and easier to do the wrong thing than it is to exercise the fair use rights that I’m told are mine by legal precedents and Constitutional lawyers. Great.

Oh, and did I mention that the copy protection didn’t protect it from being copied? Just want to make that perfectly clear.

Ang’s Rio Chiba, after getting a replacement batter cover, appears to be suffering from a well known defect – its circuit boards are somehow not lining up right and this causes it to be stuck trying to upgrade its firmware (which is the most current version thank you very much). Naturally, the player has a 90 day warranty (the shortest in the industry) and it’s 6 months old.

It’s too bad this is such a delicate player, since it was so neato. Anyone know of a durable flash-based MP3 player? Cheap is good. 🙂

Update: Thanks for all the suggestions, but the board is physically loose, so no amount of reflashing the firmware or reseating the battery will help. The actual printed circuit boards are disconnected in a physical electrical way.

I finished archiving my digital music onto DVD (replacing the dozens of CDs I’ve got lying around). It took up fifteen DVD-ROMs, all 12339 tracks. As of this afternoon, I’ve got 12782 tracks on my hard drive, since I found a 12-disk set of Sinatra songs and a few other albums that seemed like I might like ’em.

Now to teach the woman how not to delete 3000 tracks from my Karma to add 150. Geez. Took me two hours to refill the darned thing.

I can’t help but assume that Microsoft is adopting XML as the default file format, not because they love open and interoperable formats, but because OpenOffice has received Oasis certification of their open and interoperable XML formats already.

I think it’s good that Microsoft feels threatened. I think it’s bad that they are offering their XML schemas with “royalty free licenses” to all and sundry, because that just encourages further lock-in to MS products. We’ll see how it plays out, I suppose.

As reported in What’s New:

bq. It’s been traveling for 28 years and is now 8.7 billion miles from Earth. It just reported that it has entered the region of the heliosheath, where the solar wind begins to dissipate. It may be in this region another 10 years. Its Pt-238 radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG) should keep operating until about 2020. When Voyager 1 crosses that final boundary, becoming the first human artifact to enter interstellar space, Earth won’t know. Communications with Voyager will be cut off to save $4.5M of NASA’s $16.5B budget (.025%), for Bush’s Moon/Mars “vision.”

Ferrett’s ruminations on comic books reminded me of the two longboxes I’ve got sitting in the closet. Most of what I bought was purchased because I liked the artwork or stories in them. A few were bought for possible collectibility (some Batmans of the late 80s and early 90s mainly). And then there’s the book I didn’t remember I’d bought.

I was a big fan of the miniseries “Black Orchid” – authored by the now-famous Neil Gaiman. After that run, he came out with a permanent series, and I purchased the first issue of that series, found it had pretty pathetic artwork, and never bought another one. Want to guess which Gaiman book I have? That’s right, sports fans, “Sandman” number one. The only Sandman I ever bought, and it’s a first edition of the first issue. If I’d known Gaiman was gonna be more famous than Eastman and Laird, I probably would have the first ten issues in nice polybags.

Court has ruled against the broadcast flag, making many pieces of hardware legal again. Yay!

Because my ISP now provides more disk space and bandwidth for the same cost, I’ve brought back my LJ Userpics subdomain. I might not be making any custom userpics soon, but there’s stuff there for folks to peruse at least.

Have fun.

Gore to Get Lifetime Award for Internet

Nuff said.

I had some custom shoes made at the tail end of the Dot-Com Era. They were cool. I actually still have them, although they’re kind of worn to the point of being slippers. Anyway, I wandered over to their site tonight, just out of curiousity about what new designs they might have. Last time I headed over there was maybe a year ago. Tonight I discovered they seem to be gone. There is another site with a similar name (Customatix Kix) but I’m not 100% sure that’s the same crew, and they don’t do individual shoes.

Damn. I was kind of thinking about getting another pair of uniquely Gary shoes sometime this fall. Oh, well. Guess it’s Big 5 specials for me. *sigh*

We’ve been playing with Celestia the past couple days, and boy is my graphics card tired.

Alex keeps wanting to look at the lava flows on Venus, and I’ve got models of the Deepspace 9 station and Babylon 5 and stuff all over the universe. This is going to be such a timesink this summer, I’m betting. Wonder if I can get it working on the TV-out for the Linux MythTV box I’ll be putting together. That would be cool – flying around space on the television, making Alex go, “ooh! Let me see the lava, Daddy!” over and over again. hehe