Days: it's a blog thing
Previous ramblings are stashed away under Replays.
Sunday, February 23, 2003
WEEKEND ROUND-UP
Been having some server troubles this week, which aren’t completely resolved yet, but I’m getting there…
Anyway, before I zip off to Sweden in a few hours, here’s some of what I’ve been looking at this week — and it’s been a week to fuel paranoia.
For example, there’s this article on Wired by Christopher Null, claiming that “hackers have thoroughly compromised security at America Online, potentially exposing the personal information of AOL’s 35 million users”. Not without interest to me, because (look, don’t laugh, OK?) I actually have an AOL account. (I can hear you laughing. Stop it. Look, I got the account when the Web was young and people were less sophisticated… and I’ve just kind of kept it.)
This is what makes me giggle, though I suppose it should make me mad:
These so-called social engineering tactics involve calling AOL customer support centers and simply asking to have a given user's password reset. Logging in with the new password gives the intruder full access to the account.
In a telephone interview, two hackers using the handles Dan and Cam0 explained that security measures (such as verifying the last four digits of a credit card number) can be bypassed by mumbling.
Yes, mumbling. Go ahead and read it for yourself.
John Leyden adopts a more reassuring tone in a follow-up article in The Register, AOL probes hacker “breach”.
By the same author in The Register, How to get an ATM PIN number in 15 guesses should get you going if you’re always in fear of someone getting your cash card details.
More on the Google/Blogger story. On the BBC news site, Bill Thompson asks: Is Google too powerful? Among his paranoid points are:
Google is a privately-owned US company that has a policy of collecting as much information as possible about everyone who uses its search tool.
It will store your computer’s IP address, the time/date, your browser details and the item you search for.
You mean like every web site stores your computer’s IP address, the time/date, and your browser details (we have heard of server logs, haven’t we?). And it’s not really surprising it should store the search terms…
It sets a tracking cookie on your computer that does not expire until 2038.
This means that Google builds up a detailed profile of your search terms over many years.
Ah, the old cookie paranoia again. Hey, I don’t know about you, Bill, but I don’t think I’ll still have the same computer in 2038. Or even 2008.
The way it ranks pages is a commercial secret, outside any external supervision or control.
What, you mean like every search engine?
If Google decides it does not like you then you can be dropped from the index.
It’s their index, mate. Just because you have a site on the Web, nobody is under any obligation to index it.
Just as well there’s a sensible reply to a couple of these points amongst the comments, from a certain Danny Sullivan. If it weren’t for the fact that his location is given as the UK, I’d think it might be the Danny Sullivan.
Away from paranoia, but still on Google: someone landed on my site yesterday after searching for hilarious boobs. I wonder: were they searching for tales of amusing blunders, or just funny looking tits?
Meanwhile, Dave Norris wonders: What if Operating Systems Were Airlines? I love the description of Unix Airlines:
Each passenger brings a piece of the airplane and a box of tools to the airport. They gather on the tarmac, arguing constantly about what kind of plane they want to build and how to put it together. Eventually, they build several different aircraft, but give them all the same name. Some passengers actually reach their destinations. All passengers believe they got there.
Jeremy Zawodny has compiled his personal list of The 10 Habits of Highly Annoying Bloggers.
Bloggers who don’t enable comments on their blogs.
He’d hate me, then. It’s not that I don’t care what other people think, but I’d feel obliged to respond to comments, and I have little enough time as it is.
Bloggers who rarely produce original content, instead simply aggregating links to other blogs that I already read.
Hmmm… I do try. And I’ve never linked to Jeremy before, and I doubt many people reading my site will know him.
Bloggers who spend more time blogging about blogging than anything else.
Depends whether they have anything useful to say. A lot of good technical info and help has come from some of those bloggers who blog about blogging.
Bloggers who are FontBitches and don't care.
I agree, of course. So why is the body text on my site set at 13 pixels? Ah well…
Bloggers who don’t provide any “about me” info on their blog, or pointers to it elsewhere on their site. I like to know more about the people I’m reading.
I like to find out about the authors too. But then some of us probably overdo it.
Bloggers who don’t provide a blogroll.
Yeah, I like to see what other people are reading, too. Expands my blogosphere, and all that.
Bloggers who post excuses for not posting. I don’t care if you’re busy today. If you’re not posting, fine. I’ll just assume you had other things to do.
I think some explanation for an expected long absence might help. Then regular readers won’t think you’ve died, lost interest, or emigrated to Papua New Guinea.
Bloggers who react but rarely act. Commenting on what other people say or do is interesting, but I’m annoyed by folks who never seem to have original material. (Yes, this is like #2 but it’s not quite the same.)
Oops! Here I go, commenting on what other people say…
Bloggers who don’t provide obvious RSS links for their blog. Yes, I know that RSS auto-discovery is great, but not all tools do it.
I have an RSS feed, but the link isn’t obvious. In fact, there isn’t a link. That’s because I’m still experimenting. All in good time, children.
Bloggers who have TrackBack but don’t use it.
I don’t so I don’t. So what?
And finally, as Trevor McDonald would say, no — this isn’t a recipe: Baked Apple.
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Tuesday, February 18, 2003
BLOOGLE? GOGGER?
So, I go away for a few days, and Google buys Blogger (well OK, technically they bought Pyra, but it amounts to the same thing). I suspect in the long run it will be no bad thing; I’m sure that Google’s resources will ultimately be beneficial to Blogger. I use Blogger Pro for this page, and although the annual fee isn’t particularly expensive, it narks me that sometimes the service has proved less than reliable. Maybe that will all change.
I’m curious about one thing, though. I have a pretty clear recollection that Pyra/Blogger was already acquired or propped up in some way by Dan Bricklin’s Trellix outfit (which has itself been bought over by Interland). I wonder what happended to that arrangement?
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Tuesday, February 11, 2003
SILENCE
It’s going to be quiet around here for a few days. I’m heading back to Gothenburg later this morning, and won’t be home until Saturday evening.
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URLs URLs URLs
Zeldman recently pointed to this W3C note regarding HTTP implementation problems. Although it’s really directed at people on the server side of things, there are a few wise words for web site developers and content management types. For example, choose URIs wisely:
- Use short URIs as much as possible
In order to make URIs easy to type, write down, spell, or remember, they should be short enough. - Choose a case policy
URIs are partly case sensitive which means that, for example http://www.example.com/foo and http://www.example.com/FOO are different URIs and may refer to different resources. - Avoid URIs in Mixed case
A case policy should be chosen, and enforced. All policies are, however, not equally preferable. Mixed-case URIs should be avoided. - As a case policy choose either “all lowercase” or “first letter uppercase”
We suggest that either “all lower-case” or “first-letter uppercase” policy be chosen. Among these two, “all lower-case” may be preferred for its simplicity.
Some people make a real pig’s ear of naming directories and files, with little logic in either the nomenclature itself, or in the bizarre mixture of cases they choose — so this is all good advice.
Of course, content management systems on large, database driven sites often create horrific URLs that you couldn’t possibly remember, and wouldn’t want to write down. I built a site for a client recently that features a links page with a whole raft of links to the European Union web site. These EU pages have very long, complex URLs. Now, you might say that doesn’t matter when you’re coding them into a links page. But I’ve set this page up with style sheets so that the URLs don’t display on screen, but they do when you print the page. The EU links would have been terrifying affairs, wrapping over a couple of lines on the printed page, and would have been pretty useless to anyone wanting to read them off at a later date and enter them their browser’s address bar. So, I used Metamark, the “link shortening” service that I mentioned a few weeks ago to make short links of them all, and the result is much neater and more manageable. I mean, isn’t http://xrl.us/zx3 a whole lot better than http://europa.eu.int/smartapi/cgi/sga_doc?smartapi!celexapi!prod!CELEXnumdoc&lg=EN&numdoc=32001L0023&model=guichett?
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Monday, February 10, 2003
YOU CAN TELL IT'S MONDAY MORNING
Because there are 123 e-mails your mailbox, and 119 of them are spam.
Oh, the bandwidth.
Thank you, Mailwasher.
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BLOGROLLING UPDATE
Since the fawny Joe Clark no longer updates NUblog regularly, the time to remove it from Regularly Watches was overdue. Not that I’ll stop reading Joe’s other works, and you might take a look too — especially at the online serialisation of his book, Building Accessible Websites. It’s a brave author who risks injury to his own book sales by giving most of it away for free. And it says something about his commitment to making the Web more accessible.
Anyway, I’m pleased to fill the vacant slot with the newly-discovered Giornale Nuovo from misteraitch; it’s a joy to view as much as to read.
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THOSE PESKY PIRATES AGAIN
So the record industry is bemoaning its declining CD sales, eh? And once again, it points to the great bogeyman of piracy:
Some of the decline can be explained by price-cutting. There is fierce competition in the leisure market as rivals in the entertainment business try to woo British shoppers.
But the BPI says piracy is the main factor.
I don’t suppose it would have occurred to them that perhaps people aren’t buying as many CDs because they are too bloody expensive and that perhaps in Britain we are finally getting tired of being ripped off. Grow up and stop whingeing, guys, and do what every other business has to do in the face of declining revenues: find ways to be more competitive. Give value for money to customers. Make your products more attractive.
Perhaps there is hope amongst the smaller independent producers:
But others, including some of the smaller record labels, say the big companies are simply not keeping up with the demands of modern music buyers.
The critics argue that piracy is a convenient excuse for the record industry to hide behind.
They claim that tastes are changing and people prefer a wider range of electronic formats for their entertainment.
Some analysts say that the record companies must accept the reality of the internet and the desire of consumers to download music.
Quite. So get with the programme. And in the unlikely event that there are any suits from the recording industry reading this, no, I have never downloaded illegal copies of music from the internet — in fact, I know hardly anyone who does. But as I’ve said before, I’ll be happy to use a legal mechanism if it’s reasonably priced, and doesn’t force me to download and pay for ten tracks that I don’t want in order to get the one that I do.
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Friday, February 07, 2003
CONNECTIONS
Spending so much time in Sweden, I’ve become interested in the writings of other non-Swedes who live or work there. Hence my frequent visits and references to Francis Strand’s How to learn Swedish in 1000 difficult lessons. Then of course, a chap I had been reading for a long time already, got married to a Swedish girl and has gone off to live in Lidköping for a while. And now, I’ve stumbled on Giornale Nuovo, the blog of the mysterious misteraitch.
Misteraitch doesn’t tell us much about himself, but he was born in Wales, and from a couple of throwaway lines in recent entries (“in the James Thin bookshop in Edinburgh last November”, “the Edinburgh years”), seems to have lived in my home town for a time. He tells us that he and his wife live “in a town on the Baltic coast of southern Sweden”, but doesn’t seem to mention it by name. However… he talks about a new pub having opened there a month or so ago, the Fox and Anchor. Now I just happen to know (don’t ask how, it involves alcohol) that a pub of that name and description opened in December in Karlskrona — a town on the Baltic coast of southern Sweden. He mentions O’Learys sometimes, and there is an O’Learys in Karlskrona too. Karlskrona has seen the biggest expansion in the IT business in Sweden, boasting the TelecomCity network and the Blekinge Institute of Technology — which fits in neatly with misteraitch’s stated profession of IT consultant for a telecoms company. I think we know where you live, misteraitch. Just got to figure out the name, now…
Describing the Fox and Anchor, misteraitch says:
It is the third English/Irish-style pub to have opened in the town where we live, which now seems to boast more such establishments than it does Swedish bars. A good deal of money had evidently been spent in creating a quite convincing simulacrum of English pub decor: with dark wood, brass lamps, stained glass skylights, and old prints and plates on the walls. If an English pub-goer were kidnapped, blindfolded and brought there, it would be a few minutes, perhaps, depending on how much he or she had had to drink, before an uncanny realisation that something was not quite right might begin to dawn. One such false note that registered with me only in retrospect was that the lighting was slightly too bright.
The English/Irish-style pub phenomenon is common enough throughout Sweden, no less so in Gothenburg, which has its fair share (my own favourite watering hole being The Dubliner). I’m not sure how much this stems from the fact that Gothenburg is often known as Little London, because of long ties with the UK and the eternal presence in the city of so many Brits. A lot of the Brits are Scots. I hear Scottish accents around me all the time; on planes coming and going, on the streets, in the restaurants and bars. And yes, there is even a (supposedly) Scottish themed bar, called — with a deplorable lack of imagination — The Flying Scotsman. I felt obliged to pay a visit some months ago, just to check out the owner’s vision of what a Scottish pub is like. (I’m not sure that there really is an archetype for the Scottish pub — they’re not all decorated in tartan, you know.) Anyway, on entering I found that the owner’s vision was maybe a little out of date. By a couple of centuries. The cramped interior was reminiscent of Rabbie Burns cottage, or of some of the drinking howffs conjured by the Bard himself in poems like Tam O’Shanter. The place was crowded, but I suspect I was the only Scotsman present, flying or otherwise. Behind the bar, there was a notable absence of any kind of beer that could be thought of as traditionally or even typically Scottish. Just as well for the Guinness…
(A word to the wise: if you find yourself in Sweden, and you’re a beer drinker — beer as in ale, rather than lager — you should probably stay away from the indigenous draught beers like the ubiquitous Pripps Blå or Falcon, which are fizzy, characterless lagers. If you’re hell bent on trying something Swedish, ask if they have bottles of Mariestads. But then that’s just my taste, of course.)
Getting back to Giornale Nuovo, misteraitch has more to offer, such as his Selected Post-It Notes, in which he experiments with how much can be fitted on a single Post-It note. For example:
I was surprised by a colleague one day at the checkout of the ‘drug-store’ at Tiburtina station. In my basket were mineral water, toilet paper, and a bottle of wine: I’m a man of simple needs, I said.
Or:
I bought James Joyce’s ‘Finnegans Wake’ on the same day that I first consorted with a prostitute. With hindsight, I came to regard each of these purchases as having been terrible wastes of money.
Which reminds me of Gail Armstrong’s Finnegan’s Wake story. The slightly disturbing thing is that the prankquean makes a certain amount of sense to me. Must be the Celtic blood. Or the Guinness.
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Thursday, February 06, 2003
MONICA-CA-CA
Forgive this diversion, but top marks to Ben for linking to this gallery of Monica Belluci pics, featuring some great monochrome photography.
It’s just as well I’m sitting down, for I can feel my kneecaps dissolving. An indication of my favourites, before my brain turns completely to mush:
Hope Ben doesn’t get into trouble with the missus.
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THE ORANGE RETURNS
Before he really finished his recent “aqua” redesign JZ is at it again, once more redesigning in public. I reckon I know why he didn’t keep the “aqua” scheme for long: it didn’t have any orange. Zeldman loves orange. Zeldman can’t live without orange. Hell, he got me hooked on orange. (See that masthead? And those link colours?)
And the new design has… orange! ;o)
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A COUPLE FROM 'THE BEARD'
If you’ve never been over to John Robinson’s link-rich Sore Eyes blog, you really should take a look. I don’t know where he gets the time to find all this stuff. Amongst the recent items he has pointed to:
- Bowling balls from outer space. Yes, The Observer has the story on what a bunch of loonies — sorry, the Salt Lake Astronomical Society — want to do on the Bonneville salt flats.
- Which OS are you? I’m not a great fan of silly web quizzes, but sometimes you just have to have a go. So according to BBspot, I am…
Somewhat ironic, since I think the XP interface is garish (reminding me of what a now dead theatrical producer of my acquaintance would describe as “vibrant, whoory colours” — whoory, for the non-Celts amongst you, being “whorey”) and the OS probably isn’t a whole lot more stable than previous MS desktop abortions. Out of necessity rather than choice, I’ll be buying yet another PC soon, but it will run Win2000. Anyway, if you are pleased or horrified by which OS BBspot thinks you are, leave a comment with John.
John also has a few words to say about the excellent FaxYourMP.com:
The real question is why the excellent service offered by FaxYourMP.com is even necessary: isn’t this something that should have been set up by Parliament itself years ago? It’s like installing a internal phone network which offers a direct line to every MP but forgetting to employ a switchboard operator.
(That said, I’m not sure that anyone would trust faxes sent via FaxYourMP.gov.uk to get through. Sure, they’d say that your fax was received, but they would, wouldn’t they...)
Interesting point. FaxYourMP.com has published statistics on how quickly MPs respond to faxes. It’s revealing to note the names of some of those who never seem to get around to replying (one Iain Duncan Smith, for example) and those who actually refuse to receive faxes via FaxYourMP.com (for shame, Spectator Editor Boris Johnson!).
I used FaxYourMP.com recently on the matter of the government’s proposal to introduce identity cards, which term they have euphemised into entitlement cards. (Erm… I’m British, I pay my taxes and national insurance, so I’m already entitled — aren’t I?) I was pleasantly surprised when just a few days later, I received a real, printed-on-Houses-of-Commons-paper letter from my MP, Mark Lazarowicz. And not just some old form letter nonsense; a proper, personalised letter replying to the points I made in my fax. Now, I may not have been entirely happy or reassured by his responses, but I was pleased to receive them, and so promptly. Almost restores your faith in the system…
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Sunday, February 02, 2003
ROOTING AROUND
Although I’ve travelled a fair bit, had extended stays in some places, and I am more familiar with the insides of a number of hotels in the UK, Sweden and Malaysia than anyone has a right to be, in my entire life I have actually lived in only three houses — all of them right here in Edinburgh.
In contrast, Vicky the Vodkabird has lived in eighteen houses in umpteen towns in her twenty-nine years, and she’s just begun a project to revisit them all before she turns thirty. It’s a nice idea; see the first instalment of Back to My Roots.
Oh, and via Vicky, have a look at this. The map is a masterpiece.
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A COUPLE FROM THE GUARDIAN
In New biz on the blog, Jim McClellan reports:
If recent rumours are to be believed, AOL is getting ready to add blogging to the homepage services it offers users in the next month or so. It’s a sign of how far these regularly updated pages of web links with personal comment have come in the past five years.
To all the people who deride AOL homepages for being of the “this is me and this is my cat/monkey/armadillo” genus from the Web Pages That Suck school of design, this will come as frightening news. Just think, legions of AOL-powered bloggers writing stuff that nobody cares about on pages where sharp sticks leap out of the computer monitor to poke visitors in the eyes.
Well, it might not be so bad. Maybe AOL will offer them some decent-looking templates to get them started, so they won’t be so offensive. At least, not to the eyes, anyway. And I ought to offer some defence for AOL and its members: the very first personal pages I ever put up on the Web were on AOL, and though they weren’t brilliant, they were better looking than my first pages ever, which were for the previous business I ran with a colleague. (Oh, the shame!) Anyway, people can get better. My technical skills certainly improved from those days; whether my design ability has improved is, I suppose, arguable.
Next up, in Intellectual property? You're taking the Mickey… Victor Keegan reflects on the US Supreme Court decision in Eldred vs Ashcroft, and by postulating an extreme case, shows how stupid the whole copyright/intellectual property law business is:
One of Britain’s historic mistakes was not to register intellectual property rights for the English language. If it had we could all give up work and live off the economic rent from royalty payments for the rest of our lives. And in the current mood of the US courts, our claim would surely have been upheld — especially if we had turned ourselves into a corporation for the purpose.
There’s a lovely idea. Every British national (as a shareholder in UK plc) earning royalties every time English is used elsewhere! But of course, the government would cock up the distribution mechanism (in the case of married couples, it would doubtless be paid directly into the wife’s bank account, since blokes could only be trusted to take the money straight down the pub and piss it up against a wall…), and the Chancellor of the Exchequer would find a way of taking it all back in tax.
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Saturday, February 01, 2003
REST IN PEACE: Ilan Ramon, Rick Husband, William McCool, Michael Anderson, David Brown, Kalpana Chawla, Laurel Clark
I’ve worked in aviation and space systems for most of my professional life, and I still do (at least for part of it). I get on and off around four aeroplanes a week. I’m acutely aware that take-off and landing are the riskiest parts of flying, and sometimes I get a reminder ― like some weeks ago when the flaps on the Fokker F-100 bringing me back into Edinburgh jammed, just as we were on the final approach to the runway. We went around again and made another attempt at landing, with the control surfaces still not all operating properly. We hit the ground fast, there was a lot of very heavy braking, and we were met by the fire tenders and checked over by the fire crew before the aircraft was allowed near the terminal building. Apart from a little disquiet amongst the passengers, there was no harm done ― though if the pilot had been unable to apply any flap whatsoever, then things could have been rather more difficult.
But the risks of air travel are as nothing compared to those of launching a vehicle out of the Earth’s gravitational pull, strapped to the back of a couple of solid-propellant rocket boosters. Nor of bringing it back through the atmosphere at twenty-five times the speed of sound, with very little margin for error in the angle of approach. More than 100 missions over twenty years without loss of a craft on re-entry are inclined to make us forget the inherent risks. Today’s horrifying events are a stinging reminder.
In its 113 launches, the space shuttle has failed only twice. In itself that is a good record but it is still high when translated into everyday terms.
If the same statistics applied to everyday travel then anyone who drove their car to and from work once a day would be lucky to live to the end of the month.
A sobering thought from David Whitehouse, the BBC News Online science editor, writing in another article.
It is seventeen years to the month since the Space Shuttle Challenger was lost shortly after launch, in what was, frankly, an entirely avoidable accident. The Rogers Commission, which investigated the incident, had the benefit of the membership of Dick Feynman, not only the greatest theoretical physicist of his generation, but also a practical man of good common sense; and with the directness, clarity of purpose and human skill to cut through the bureaucracy, evasiveness and cover your ass antics of executives at NASA and Morton Thiokol, to get to the cold, hard and strikingly crude simplicity of what went wrong.
The teams enquiring into this latest disaster won’t have Feynman to help them, as he died less than two years after publication of the Rogers Commission report. But I’d like to think that NASA has learned from Challenger, and that this investigation will be carried out in an atmosphere of complete openness and honesty. We can’t shy away from saying that space flight is dangerous and that it is inevitable that there will be accidents. But if we find an opportunity to improve safety and reliability ― especially if as the result of an accident ― we must grasp it positively.
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