Technical

Yesterday, I bought a Sony Reader – the electronic book reader that uses E Ink’s electronic paper. The electronic paper display on the reader is very nice. It uses encapsulated white and black pigments that can be brought to the surface of the page. The only power consumption involved happens when you make a change. Once the change is made, it requires no power to keep the image. The upshot is that you’ve got a very long battery life, a decent contrast ration and a display that can be read in any light – in fact, the more the better since it’s reflective (like paper) rather than backlit (like a monitor). Moreover, because it’s not backlit, it’s easier on the eyes when reading for a long time. I read for a couple of hours last night and it was no different than reading a paper book. ...

Thanks to Luis, I find out last week that Tracks 1.5 has been released. Tracks is the implementation of the “getting things done methodology which I prefer. 1.5 is pretty nice. In particular, I look forward to hiding actions until a particular date. In the past, I’ve wanted to track a todo some six months in the future. I put it on the list and had to watch it for 180+ days. ...

The CTO Project makes an interesting observation that faculty are a bit like some corporations. They feel obligated to use Web 2.0 technologies in order to engage student interest and actually make some token effort to be up to date. But that they only want these technologies if they can exert complete control. Trust me, I can relate. We’re currently contracting with a part of the government that wants to do something similar. They want to make use of the knowledge of a number of experts to produce an encyclopedia of a given technology. Of course, this has been dubbed the FOOpedia (where FOO is the technology). ...

A few years ago, I was accused of using the word “interesting in subtle ways. Sometimes it means a truly novel idea that I would like to learn more about, other times, it’s a novel idea of which I’m more than a little skeptical. In both cases, I stand by the description, to me, both are interesting – but it can make it a little hard to know what I’m really thinking. So take it with a grain of salt that I just read an interesting article in the February 2008 issue of IEEE Computer on how to turn music lovers (particularly teenagers) into music distributors. ...

We’ve got voice over IP phones at the office. For the most part, they are a very smart way to handle our communications. We’re too large to want to use individual analog lines through the local telephone company – their rates would be prohibitively expensive. We’re too small to make a private branch exchange (PBX) worthwhile. So sending our voice data over the internet is a good approach. When the phones work, the sound quality is excellent, the cost is relatively inexpensive and the system is fairly reliable. Unfortunately, when the phones don’t work the challenges begin. ...

Few people have been on top of the extension of FISA like Glenn Greenwald. As a quick overview for folks that haven’t been paying attention to the issue: Late last year a real potential problem with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) (as written in the 70s and amended after Sept 11) was recognized. Namely, communication between two foreign entities that was routed through the US was subject to the law’s requirements for a court order. This was never the intent of the law and largely crept in due to the routing of Internet traffic through major US networking hubs In addition to correcting this, the Whitehouse and the Republican congress pushed for a change to FISA that went beyond correcting the oversight and significantly extended the ability of the government to spy on citizens. Congress couldn’t pass this permanently, but did pass a six month bill before the August recess, in large part because of scare tactics used by the FBI (releasing warnings of predicted attacks in DC) Six months was up last week and the Whitehouse was pushing to: a) correct the known oversight, b) extend its ability to spy on US citizens without court order, and now they’ve added c) grant retro-active immunity to the telecommunications companies for illegally helping the government spy both before and after Sept 11th. And of course, if they don’t get all of this, we’ll die in our sleep, murdered by terrorists. The Senate caved and gave the Whitehouse everything it asked for. Surprisingly, the House didn’t and we’re now seeing extra pressure claiming that we’ll all die and it’ll be their fault. This is of course BS, but that’s the state of discourse in the country. I don’t have much to add on the spying per se, but I will admit to being particularly offended and disturbed by the telecom immunity issue. Essentially, these companies started helping law enforcement to monitor calls, read emails, etc. well before September 11th. Their actions were not scared or patriotic, they were largely motivated by greed. ...

One of the things I dislike about blogs (and actually most webpages) is that the static content is formatted very nicely using different fonts, etc., but the dynamic content is all pure text. And since there are only a few fonts you will find on every computer, the text all looks pretty much the same: sans or serif. On my own blog, I find that particularly annoying. I’ve got, what I think, is a nice clean looking theme that reminds me of a Victorian-era journal (except perhaps not that fancy). But all of the titles and dynamic content are plain text. ...

The ISP move went reasonably well. There were a couple of minor glitches. One was a character set problem when I tried to take the most recent database snapshot from Linksky. I’m not entirely certain what happened, but I wound up with extra characters after some punctuation marks. Rather than spend too much time with it, I just grabbed the latest post and dumped it into the Dreamhost site and changed the time. ...

Saturday is moving day. Nope, we haven’t bought a new house. We hope not to have to do that for a long time. It’s time to change ISPs. After only 10 months with Linksky, I’ve had enough. In the past year, between working on the non-profit’s website and my own, I’ve had the following issues: arbitrary version changes with no notification random breakage due to “security upgrades – like the time w e couldn’t do anything with a friend’s account or email because his last name contained the letters “curl random lockouts of service insults from the security “guru because he thinks he knows more about Unix and IT security than anyone else around etc. The last straw for me came earlier this year when a gallery page broke. I tried to login to diagnose the problem and found that they had removed my SSH access. When I emailed, I was to ld there is a “security issue that makes sites with SSH more vulnerable and that they were looking for a workaround and would re-enable SSH by the weekend. Outside of dictionary attacks on passwords, this is really complete BS. Of course, the weekend came and nope, no SSH. Another week rolled around, no SSH. Forget this. ...

There’s something about the idea of global warming that seems to drive people of a certain mindset completely insane. You start seeing things like: “the planet’s not warming up! “Okay, maybe it is warming, but humans couldn’t possibly be causing it. “Fine. We are causing global warming, but we can’t do anything about it. “What, we can? Well it’ll destroy our economy. “You mean it won’t? Well, you must be French. ...