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There are a number of things I could complain about in VoodooPad, but I'm not going to. I'm still using it after a week and the pace seems to be accelerating. I keep finding more ways to use it.
It's weird, but this is the way that HyperText systems (as I learned about them) were supposed to function. It feels very natural to spin things off every which way as I take notes for meetings and while reading docs, preparing drafts of messages, or just wandering around the web gathering the normal snippets of Ztuff.
It's free form like all the notepad type applications, but it has a terrific linking mechanism which allows one to clean up messy sections by branching off. It also obviously allows one to link all the bits and pieces together. Many have compared it to a personal Wiki, which is appropriate in many ways. I want something like this somehow tied into my broadcast channel.
I'm off to pay up (done).
This is just zany enough to almost sound like the real thing. [Dan Gillmor]
Ben Hyde argues that the complex middleware specifications act as a significant barrier to entry in the market. I don't know that I completely agree with the concept, but it certainly is an interesting thought.
In A need to vote with the remote, Tim Rutten presents the argument that local TV news coverage sucks. Not just here in LA, but nationally according to a study by the University of Southern California and the University of Wisconsin (PDF format document).
Color me shocked. Not.
What I found interesting were the comments by Martin Kaplan where he claims that much of the fault for declining news quality can be linked to consultants who move around frequently using the same arguments. Cut costs by reducing serious news coverage (which is ratings poison anyway). I don't know if he's right or not, but it seems to be so, as does the quote below.
I believe that entertainment -- the need to grab and hold audiences -- has come to dominate every other realm of contemporary American life, for better and for worse, from news and politics to education and religion.
Back to Mr. Rutten's article... This section from the article really bothers me.
"The local TV business is among the most profitable businesses in the entire entertainment industry," Kaplan explained. "One of the things that makes local stations so profitable is the huge quantity of paid political advertising on which they have an absolute lock."
That franchise would be threatened if station owners aired even modestly comprehensive amounts of political journalism. Why should campaign managers pay to put their candidate's views of the issues across if they're being included in responsible electoral coverage? By holding their news budgets down, station owners push their election-year revenues up. Or, as Kaplan puts it, "Why buy a cow when you're getting milk for free?"
The article closes out by asking "Should we accept it?"
Do we have a choice? I stopped watching the local TV news a long time ago, voting with my remote as it were and it has had precisely zero affect. Or perhaps my defection and that of others had a negative affect, because the people left watching don't really care. C'est la vie!
Links:
http://www.localnewsarchive.org/Kurt pointed this out to me... thanks!
The Lebowski Fest, is a now annual event held in Louisville, Kentucky in celebration of the 1998 Coen brothers movie, The Big Lebowski.
I'll readily admit that I don't get this, but it's funny in a 'look at what those crazy Americans are up to now' sort of way. I never did get the movie, but according to the IMDB ratings, I seem to be in a small minority.
The most recent event was big enough to get a small story in the LA Times entertainment section 'Lebowski Fest': It's cult culture as well as the Washington Post and a host of other publications.
Now they are talking about doing something out west (I assume that means the LA area). We shall see...
It's time to make a list of the changes I still need to make before going live (i.e. contacting the world again).
This mornings email brings some interesting links from Dave Farber's list related to new developments in the voting software world.
John Schwartz of the New York Times covers a report by Avi Rubin of Johns Hopkins University which is highly critical of Diebold Election Systems voting software.
Mr. Richardson of Diebold said the company's voting-machine source code, the basis of its computer program, had been certified by an independent testing group. Outsiders might want more access, he said, but "we don't feel it's necessary to turn it over to everyone who asks to see it, because it is proprietary."
Voting is a fullfillment stage of democracy and can not be subject to 'proprietary' requirements. Voting (and any software used to enable that activity) must be open, easy to follow and audit. If we allow a company to maintain a closed system here, then we are saying that a corporations right to profits outweigh the publics need for an open democratic process.
I think I missed something somewhere. The article Data security efforts are aiming at the wrong target had an interesting surprise.
In fact, California has recently passed legislation to force companies to encrypt certain types of data, such as credit card numbers, Social Security Numbers, etc. However, even encryption on disk is only going to prevent the data from being read if somebody were to steal the hard disk, an unlikely event. A clever hacker with a hijacked user account can still log onto the server and read the data as the file system will decrypt the data as it is read from disk and transfer it in its decoded state.
I knew about the new law, but had not previously paid a lot of attention to its meaning. Hmm, this publication has some useful information. I suppose this could be interpreted as saying that California has required companies to encrypt this data. Here's another document which spells things out a little more completely.
The new California law, section 1798.2 of the Civil Code (the Act), also known as SB 1386, requires public disclosure of security breaches regardless of where the company is located or where the security breach occurs. Starting in July, this first-of-its-kind law requires disclosure of any security breach to each affected resident in California whose unencrypted personal information was or is reasonably believed to have been acquired by an unauthorized person.
Here's a link to the chaptered version of the bill as well as the bills history. Or, you can download the PDF version.
Michael Swaine is now going to be writing some sort of recurring column for O'Reilly's MacDevCenter.
John Gilmore (early Sun employee, EFF founding member, etc.) is up to some new tricks in getting tossed off a British Airways jet to London.
For some reason, airlines just can't seem to stop themselves from making silly decisions when confronted with people making political statements. All this incident proves is that Gilmore is right, we're out of control and no longer have certain rights to free speech.
Bruce Schneier has an interesting take on How to Fight back against seemingly ridiculous security measures.
Sadly, I believe things will get much worse before they get better. Many people seem not to be bothered by stupid security; it even makes some feel safer. In the U.S., people are now used to showing their ID everywhere; it's the new security reality post-9/11. They're used to intrusive security, and they believe those who say that it's necessary.
I'm still not sure what the folks from the various OsX porting groups are trying to do with Metapkg, but it should be interesting. I hope they continue to use dpkg as the preferred packaging format, given that we use it at work and I've been doing more and more personal stuff using dpkg's.
Ah well, we shall see!
So this is how it goes in the new world.
Microsoft is chosen not as the primary contractor, but the exclusive contractor for Homeland inSecurity. How typical. The folks from Redmond can make guarantees to the folks in D.C. that no one else has the capitol to match. Not simply money, but the control of the end product as well.
No other company in the software and operating systems industry has the clout that Microsoft can bring to the table.
At the same time, a federal contract of this stature is a big step for Microsoft. They've always let VARs handle this sort of thing before. Now, for many Americans (and a whole bunch of others), they are going to have nearly complete (and for some, perhaps total) end to end control. Microsoft is now the filter through which all government policing data must flow.
The paranoid side of me wonders what they had to agree to. Was there a side agreement at the end of the antitrust suit as many have speculated?
This much seems apparent. 'Passport' like identity exchange mechanisms will be employed to allow the various agencies the ability to correlate the bits and pieces of data that each gathers on all of us. I understand how and why we got here, I'm just not sure I want to be here. What worries me more is the step this makes toward nearly eliminating the barriers of melding private data (purchased of course) with government data. We're doing this at a time when it seems that citizens have lost nearly all ability to connect with elected officials.
Jeez, this place is a mess.
After spending about 6 hours yesterday and today re-creating graphics, reorganizing, adding a top level index file to handle redirection here and mostly beating my head against style sheets, it seems to mostly work for the browsers I've tried it with.
Hopefully, it's less of a mess than it was and I can move over all the legacy stuff over the next couple days (time permitting).
Cascading Style Sheets are just ridiculous (much more complicated than they should be because there seem to be at least two ways to do everything). I know there are a lot of places to get CSS information, but this is the one I keep going back to time and time again. I'm not going to fight it any more right now because it seems to work. We'll have to see how bad it looks under a couple Windows browsers at some point in time, but for now, enough!
Rick Kamla has an interesting view on many peoples favorite Green Bay Packer, Brett Favre and how long his career might actually last. It's also currently available on Yahoo! Sports.
I wrote an article last year (that I left unpublished, intending to put it up the following day after the game) about how we should appreciate everything Favre has meant to the Pack and start preparing for his eventual departure. At the time, I was thinking that he might retire at the end of the year. The next day Brett was hurt and a lot of fans got the message without me needing to write anything about it.
As a lifelong Packer fan (no, not a cheesehead), I've been there through the good and the bad. When Favre decides to take his leave, the Packers won't immediately be a disaster, but offensively, they will be in trouble. The modern game demands a good quarterback. The team will also be without one of its most respected leaders. When Brett says something, the other players listen.
The ten year run we're in as Packer fans has spoiled us. We might have forgotten (the younger fans have no idea) just how bad this team was through the seventies and eighties. In '72, Green Bay went 10 and 4, taking the old 'Black and Blue' division but losing to the Washington Redskins in the playoffs. In the strike season of '82, they went 5-3-1, making the playoffs, beat the St. Louis Cardinals and then lost to the hated Dallas Cowboys. They'd gone 8-8 in '81 and went 8-8 each of the next three years ('83-'85) with Lynn Dickey as the quarterback (inducted into the Packer Hall of Fame in February of '92) before sliding back to being awful again. That pretty much covers all the highlights from 1970 through 1990.
Players like Brett come along very infrequently. He has combined a great love of the game with tremendous physical talent and leadership on and off the field. More typically, they're missing some vital part of the package, be it leadership, or less than great skills and in some cases, don't even appear to like the game.
Favre has been special and we fans need to remind ourselves to appreciate what time is left. The clock is ticking...
Mary Chen has captured the Gorman hills very well. We drove through there and saw this purple mountain phenomenon for the first time this spring and it startled me so much I didn't take any pictures. We also didn't have any time for stopping.
I've been going through there for fifteen years, and it's always been just about the same. Brown, brown, brown and more brown until this years amazing display.
I'm glad someone took pictures!
Yahoo! Sports is pretty damned neat. It's been my sports news home for a few years now (since around the time they first released sports content on My Yahoo!). Even as they do things that frustrate me, I keep finding others reasons to love it.
Their sports section, like any in a metro area newspaper pulls from many sources, the big difference is that they have no visible editorial staff (no Yahoo! generated content). The version we see in the US is focused almost entirely on US Sports, with a smattering of International events (mostly because someone from the US is playing there). They rely on AP and Reuters (what happened to UPI?) for basic live information. In sports with significant news organizations of their own (mostly American professional sports, but they also tap into special event feeds here in the states), they have established close to live data feeds for event data (scores, basic statistics, etc.) and in some cases, occasional content. Finally, they add in opinion feeds from several leading sports word shops (The Sporting News, Sports Illustrated and USA Today for most things).
They flow all this data into their own front end and then wrap it all with some interesting functionality and access to a variety of coordinated data feeds. For instance:
The downside to all of this is that they reflow a lot of data. And things can go horribly wrong at times. Mostly, wild emphasis and italics which carry on for the rest of the page; sometimes things that leave articles hanging somewhere in the middle.
The bad part is that the content doesn't have a link to the external source (as many partial articles are done on Yahoo! News). If I were in charge of these data contracts, I would insist on having full article links. Otherwise, your content is being submerged inside your aggregator. A top level link to CNN/SI does me little good when I want to see the article links inside a Paul Zimmerman article (especially since the people doing content navigation at CNN/SI ought to be told farewell; there is very little coordination happening there). I need to go stumbling all over a place I had avoided intentionally to find (or in CNN/SI's case, often not find) the article I wanted to follow links from.
My other constant bitch is that like the rest of Yahoo!, they decided a few months ago to put all the article text inside a tiny font, so I need to resize every window. I decided I could live with it, obviously.
I heard a report on the radio yesterday as we headed out to supper. According to a poll, 90% of American's still believe the United States is the greatest country in the world. I mumbled something like "that's too bad" under my breath and Sarah took me to task on it.
I remarked to Sarah that the way the question was asked could make a considerable difference. Just about everybody working in politics knows this. So too, do the demographic researchers who create these studies to help to sway opinions by couching questions to generate a favorable response.
Given an attempt to widely cover events, most of our 'serious' media sources (news, commentary and entertainment [which used to be mainly sports unless you lived in a metropolitan area]) are stuck following up the news generated by other local and national media outlets, with few (if any) doing 'serious' national coverage. For most outlets, there hasn't been any real local competition for a long time.
The good old days of the mid twentieth century have been merged and we no longer have strong, sometimes independent, often well funded and always competing news and commentary systems in our nations biggest cities. Thirty years ago, when newspapers still ruled the roost, areas with a couple hundred thousand people were nearly guaranteed to have two stable and independent news gathering organizations, usually with well represented opinions on how things should be. The carving up of the print media by monoliths has taken care of that problem. Once you have have two sources for everything in a modern corporation, you standardize on one for cost efficiency and investor happiness.
This leads to a bland sameness.
I believe that this need for distinction led the local TV news in LA to become bizarre (unique?). Out here, they long ago threw common sense and restraint overboard in a rush to be different. I don't know how it happened, but by '87 (when we moved back to SoCal from North Carolina) most of the important local stations had moved to cable deals and had created a 4p to 7p news time. Once you have so many shows, you need to pay for them, which becomes a commercial question, so you start to market yourself. Over time, the marketing has to become sensational in order to get people to pay attention when other, serious distractions arise. This kind of nuttiness creates the kind of phenomenon we all know as "Freeway Chases".
Sadly, this seems to have become a nationwide fad. We stayed in Raleigh and on the Outer Banks last summer and I watched the evening news from Norfolk and Raleigh. It was interesting to see the shift after not seeing TV there for fifteen years.
So goes modern marketing. Speaking of which, it may not be as modern as I've always thought of it. Recent material suggests that it's been with us all along, it's just never been easier to get your message drilled into the head of everyone in a country in such a short period of time. The marketing profession has always fascinated me. I understand a lot of what marketing people do, much of the way it's done and can even see the why. I just couldn't exist in an environment in which I had to do it.
Nearly all of our modern politics outside of fliers and community events are directly influenced by the media we are exposed to and for most, that comes from TV. Local TV here long ago went nearly entirely national (with the rest dedicated to local human interest) in an effort to get national marketing dollars; the only way to get a local issue mentioned on a local TV station is to get big headlines in the papers or lots of play on the radio.
Thirty years ago the media lost its mind following Watergate. They kept trying to duplicate the incredible ratings bonanza, which was impossible because it was an isolated blip. A significant portion of the media has been chasing that ghost even since. I understand this. The Watergate hearings got me watching them regularly as a teenager; I didn't know exactly why, but it seemed important. Just as watching the Apollo 11 moon landing meant it was OK to stay up all night even though I was only ten. Something really big was afoot.
Under these conditions, it has become a pay to play system. Political money has become marketing dollars. The person with the most compelling advertisement campaign wins, often without serious rebuttal (because that money remains is usually spent on a campaign which may or may not work). Where money was once spent buying advisors who could help translate a message to the masses, and in some cases to create a message for the masses, these days that money goes towards contracts with corporations that do political marketing.
I love this country. Still do. I gave up nine years of freedom to serve in the armed forces. During the first six years, I had the unique opportunity to travel all over the world. I learned many things, saw numerous forms of government and learned a significantly broader perspective. Visits to Israel and Egypt played a part in shaping that perspective as did being a target inside the Line Of Death (LOD) when we shot down the Libyan fighters, being called upon to do guard duty when Sadat was assassinated, conversations with close friends about the Persion gulf incursion and a number of other incidents that have cost friendships. I came back believing this was the best country in the world and having evidence to back it up.
Our most significant fault has always been the idea that we understand exactly what other nations need to do to remake themselves in our image. No can do Buckaroo. Less meddling and more guidance would be a good thing.
I'm still hopeful that we're going to make a direction change that will help us break out of this myopic funk. If not, we'll teeter for a while on the verge of being democratic and collapse as have so many other great civilizations. We'll also leave behind a great deal of anecdotal information.
I was checking out trailers and wandered across one for The Incredibles, a Pixar (and Disney) production that made me laugh.
And then I realized that this film isn't due until November of 2004. At what point does marketing hype become obscene? I don't know the answer, but this certainly appears to be in that category.
I can finally install things again. A bit more than a month ago my system hiccuped and I've been unable to run an installer ever since.
When Safari informed me that I had better fix it soon or I'd be toast (the old beta I had expired on June 30) I finally got around to chasing it down. Nuts, I have enough things to think about without dealing with this nonsense.
Back to research I went. I knew that I was dying in update_prebinding (or the equivalent call from the installer). Everytime I ran the following command I'd get an array out of bounds error and update_prebinding would fail fatally.
sudo update_prebinding -verbose -root /
I poked around for a while and finally found an interesting thread on the macosx-admin@omnigroup.com list from a while back. Someone there mentioned using fs_usage. I ultimately used the following command after starting update_prebinding:
fp update_prebinding | awk '{ print $2 }' | sudo fs_usage -w
My fp script looks like this:
#!/bin/sh
#
# fp - find process
#
# find information about a particular process
#
if [ $# -eq 1 ] ; then
ps -auxwww | grep "$@" | grep -v grep | grep -v bin/fp
else
echo ""; echo "fp (find process) usage:"; echo "";
echo " fp process-name"; echo "";
fi
I should probably add a PID printing option, eh?
Anyway, I found the culprit, the BBEdit Unix Utilities reciept package was somehow damaged. Killing that off got update_prebinding to finish and I have now installed 10.2.6, plus a boatload of stuff I should have installed over the last month or two.
I'm struck by one thing. It was a hell of a lot easier to find damaged files in OS9 and prior. A resource fork had a checksum and writing a resource fork scanner was well documented. There are all kinds of files in the current MacOS that barf when they are slightly mangled. Since the applications don't take down the machine, there is a lot of sloppy code out there. The worst offenders that I've come across are applications that terminate when launching because of some minor nit or another with config files or application generated files. Gone are the days of detection, reporting and moving on.
I blame part of this on Cocoa. The lack of a reasonable exception model means you have to do much it yourself, which is a proper pain in multi-threaded applications.