June 2003 Archives

With TSA people who rummage for gifts in luggage they are supposed to be inspecting for bombs, soldiers getting sniped on a daily basis in Iraq, and President Bush having absolutely no clue who is in charge of actually finding the WMDs, I don't feel safer. Not one bit.

How do you attack the Spin-Tsunami of the Bush administration?

Daily Kos: "What the party, from the DNC down to your local candidates have to pounce on is the theme that Bush has weakened this country with a series of rash, ill thought out decisions, which looked for quick solutions over long term resolutions."

You could nail them with this strategy on the environment and the economy as well. Only one more problem to overcome at that point: apathy.

With Google News you now never have to bother telling people that a link to the New York Times website requires a registration.

1. Copy the text of the headline on the nytimes.com page that you want to link to
2. Go to Google News
3. Click in the search input field and then paste the text
4. Search and then copy the link to your story

Google has a syndication deal with NYT not unlike that of UserLand that gives you links that don't require a registration.

Heck, one could even use one of the many Google bookmarklets to skip most of the hassle. No, they don't seem to work in Safari. Safari seems to have trouble with a bookmarklet getting the selected text on a page. C'est la vié n'est pas?

President G. W. Bush: "When Americans are sitting down to dinner, or a parent is reading to his or her child, the last thing they need is a call from a stranger with a sales pitch. So we're taking practical action to address this problem."

Jamie Zawinski: Well, even if you buy that story, it's still useless, because the law exempts:

• long-distance phone companies;
• airlines;
• banks and credit unions;
• insurance companies;
• all political organizations;
• all charities;
• anyone conducting a survey.

Sweet. I'm glad that got taken care of.

Whiskey Bar: "I guess it's a good thing I no longer have any pride left in my country, because if I did I'd be ashamed of it right now."

Getting from back to Sydney from Perth was supposed to be a Qantas flight. The only problem was that there was major track maintenance during the time we needed. Originally we were going to take the train from Sydney to Perth. So Kat had the travel agent flip it around, so we flew to Perth. It worked out fairly well. The pictures from our trip on the Indian Pacific are no online.

Rarely do I speak highly of Windows. I don't really care that 95% of computers, or whatever other percentage you want to throw out, run some version of Windows. I myself, have no need for it. My problem comes in that the people around me, mainly family, do use Windows. This is what causes my pain. I don't blame my family for needing help with their computers though. I blame Windows. I'm sure if they had Macs or Linux installed (Hahahahaha!) I would be just as annoyed with these operating systems. But they don't have those OSes installed. They have Windows. Windows 98. Windows Me. Windows 2000. Windows XP. Windows, Windows, Windows...

Here is a list of what Windows can't do for those close to me right now:

• Connect to a Canon S400 digital camera (Windows 98)
• Stay connected to a Wireless Access Point with an Instant Wireless USB Adapter (Windows 2000)
• Remember it's monitor resolution (Windows 98)
• Stay connected to Earthlink DSL modem (Windows 98)
• Have Word use the Adobe Acrobat conversion plug-in to make a PDF

Now, since these computers belong to family or friends, I'm prohibited from tossing them out the window or taking a sledgehammer to them. I can only imagine the wave of satisfaction that would roll over me as I pounded these crappy beige boxes into tiny bits of twisted metal.

We could easily frame my feelings with a little back and forth from Randal and Dante from Clerks:

"I love technology."
"But you hate computers!?!?"
"I know, ironic isn't it?"

If Windows didn't hate me, it would do all of these things and I would be free to spend my weekend reading the Sunday paper, watching some movies, and generally goofing off. Why do you hate me Windows? Besides cursing you at every turn and trying to make you look bad as compared to my beloved Mac OS (any version except 7.1), what have I ever done to you?

"F*ck the ozone, I'm sweaty."

Once again Whiskey Bar serves up a nice stiff drink of truth. This time it's Bill Frist in the cross hairs of his own words.

The Memory Hole has a 12.5mb quicktime of Bush at the Florida school photo-op on 9/11. Now wonder the administration is doing everything they can to make sure 9/11 info doesn't make it to the public. Certainly in a crisis situation you will not be your most polished, but this video points out more than just a lack of polish. Watch it and draw your own conclusions though.

Fred von Lohmann: "It's plain that the dinosaurs of the recording industry have completely lost touch with reality."

What's EFF up in arms about? The RIAA is about the darken the skies with lawsuits against people offering songs for download through P2P clients.

Here we go...

Will this be like a W3 "Recommendation?" Sure MT/blogger/et. al can put it in their default templates, but a lot of people modify those to their own tastes. People running weblogs now will have to bring their sites "up to speed" much like people trying to move from "tag soup" to valid HTML. Are we headed towards a time of "blog soup?"

Will there be multiple "recommendations?" Will I have to specify a BlogType to tell tools which "recommendation" I'm following? Oh the humanity! ;-)

I sucked a lot less this week. Yay!

Jeremy Zawodny: "If there's anything the Open Source freaks are good at, it's blowing stupid licensing debates way out of proportion."

When it's all you've got, you hang on pretty tight.

This is where I spent all morning dealing with the CIPA crazyness.

to "full page ad in the New York Times."

Thanks Ren.

I haven't seen "Hulk" yet, but Bones has and here are his thoughts...

While, uh, randomly following referal links I found what I thought to be an odd rant on the EFF. It states that EFF supports censorship. This is in regard to Huntsman v. Soderbergh where people are using technology to view movies in different ways, mostly be bleeping out naughty words that offend delicate ears or too much skin that would offend sensitive eyes. It's the most ridiculous thing I've read all day, all let me tell you, there was a lot of ridiculous things on the net today.

From the EFF press release:

"If I buy a DVD and want to use some software to skip or mute parts of a movie I'm watching at home with my family, I should be able to do so," said EFF Staff Attorney Jason Schultz.

If you still think EFF is supporting censorship, I highly recommend you read the amicus brief which EFF filed in the case. If you only base your conclusion on comments in a slashdot thread, then I really don't think you are getting the real picture.

In my own opinion, which in incredibly biased since I work at EFF, this case is very much like the cases against Gator. The crux of the arguments being that copyright holders not only hold a monopoly on copying, but also on how people can view their work. This is just silly. Against Gator they claimed that putting another window over a window that happens to be showing their website is a violation of their copyright. Think about that for a second...now give me a list of applications that pop up windows which just might cover up a logo in a web browser window. Yeah, it's a pretty long list and includes about 50 from Microsoft itself.

But back to viewing movies the way the director intended... What if I watch the whole movie on mute? Is that censorship? I certainly watched any NBA game that Bill Walton was announcing on mute. I'm sure that violated the artistic integrity of the performance and I missed out on Tom Tolbert's continual Walton smack downs. Should I be sued? What about if I only have a black and white TV? Surely that would "ruin" Vanilla Sky! What if I hack my DVD player to always skip track 2 on any disc? Surely I will miss crucial plot points in The Blues Brothers! Worse yet, what if I'm color blind? Surely Kate Winslet's hair color must be viewed as it was dyed for the movie! Anything else is simply unthinkable! Somebody slap an injunction on me before I strike again! Oh the humanity! Think of the children!

If the service being provided was instead called "DirtyFlix" and promissed to add profanity, nudity, and punk rock hairdos to a movie using the same technology, and if EFF filed an amicus brief on their behalf, would they be supporting censorship? No. Just as they aren't in this case either.

(QuickTime 1.2MB)

Here we have Kat trying to capture my gross photographical incompetence on "film."

(Ali Jarekji/Reuters)

"This next one, is the first song on our new album."

Nothing quite like looking at your stats to realize what a goober you are, and for me it reaches at least two levels.

(Gil Cohen Magen/Reuters)

"Wow, Bush really craps on you a lot doesn't he?"

"Shut up and smile for the camera fat man."

I got a really odd e-mail the other day. It was from a person in Iraq, with the US Army. Obviously it was meant to go to family members and was just a quick update, "I'm fine, it's hot, etc." Luckily I was able to track down the intended recipient and get them the email.

I have a new found appreciation for the term "support our troops." I still feel that the best way to support our troops is to not set them up for snipers or car combers in a botched nation building mission.

Today was horrible. Too bad it's only 9am.

AP: Senator Endorses Tough Action Against Music Piracy -- "The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee said Tuesday he favors developing new technology to remotely destroy the computers of people who illegally download music from the Internet."

Well, isn't that cute. I don't really know if that needs any "commentary" but Rafe has already made the best point, it's vigilante justice.

This is just another area where Due Process is being tossed out the window. This really shouldn't be a conservative or liberal issue. Everybody should want the protection of Due Process. If you don't, you're a fool who should have to go back to school and take a basic civics class again.

Dave Winer: "When Blogger and MT reinvented RSS, and had the audacity to call it RSS (man that is nasty), you gotta wonder why they did it. I don't know. The only reason that makes sense to me is that they want to keep data interchange a dark art, understood only by a few, and widely considered impossible. That's probably not the reason. As some wise man once said, never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence. Either way, it's bad."

Talk about your left field "mind bombs." In all the conversations I've seen about RSS and who did this and who did that and who gets the respect for "it" I have never seen Blogger or SixApart mentioned as entities that "remade" RSS. High road indeed...

Update: A search for "Movable Type" on scripting.com show that between 3/3/03 and 6/10/03 it all went pear shaped. Who knows what went on behind the scenes. Needless to say I have yet to see MT/SixApart/Blogger take credit for any version of RSS. Maybe I'm missing something. I have been known to be wrong, from time to time.

MT comes with templates for "RSS 1.0" and "RSS 2.0." The user is in control of the template. This will of course change somewhat when TypePad hits I'm guessing.

Aaaagh my head. Stop shooting me!

The EFF Shop is now open to the public. Get t-shirts from the EFF archive, Linux BBC CDs, and other EFF shwag. Dig in.

Speech of Senator Biden

Winning the Peace: The Difficult Choices Ahead

World Affairs Council – Monterey, CA

Friday, May 2, 2003

Greg went a little nutty this weekend. I've reposted here, with his permission and in it's entirety, his adventure and conclusions.

Salon: "The White House says that supply-side tax cuts will cure all of our economy's problems, but a look at the record of such cuts in the Reagan years suggests just the opposite. Indeed, to many observers, a relentlessly executed program of tax cuts seems designed to accelerate a Social Security catastrophe, not avoid it."

There really is no excuse for making the same mistake again. It's one thing to have tried it during the Reagan years, but to fall for the same crap again...that's our bad. To expect that we can magically cut taxes and continue to let government spending go unchecked is silly. We paid for it once (well, actually were still paying for it technically) and we'll pay for it again (well, continue to keep paying and then pay some more...).

Many thanks to Mark Pilgrim for updating his ultra-liberal RSS parser (I guess it only votes for progressive feeds?) to fix a small glitch that showed up on feeds with guids. Thanks Mark!

It took him probably less then 10 minutes to make the fix, get the new code up, and post the entry about the update. Maybe it's time to Dive Into Python.

I needed the RSS parser for my new project, which is to grab feeds and archive them in a database. Off to google for mysql and python.

With the return of a conservative administration to the White House, once again we're all able to focus on what's really important, getting what's mine.

Greg Kucharo: The Berry Century, Berryification, Berrygemony, to paraphrase Al Franken, "I think in the future people will start talking less about other things and more about me, Pat Berry."

As Dave Winer often said, "It's even worse than it appears."

Dive Into MT.

California residents might want to get on the state do not call list. If you live in another state, you might want to consult your Attorney General's office to see if your state has such a program. The chances of a federal do not call list seem high at this point.

I'm not sure when this bit of social commentary, if you can call it that, went up but I just noticed it this morning. Luckily I had the camera handy.

This bitt of work is also new to the sidewalk. While not really social commentary or even humorous, it did remind me of Jeffrey Veen. Hi Jeff!

I'm starting to get a little consistency. Looks like I may have to try and get the same ball every week from now on.

14 R.E.M. albums.

What is it? It looks like SourceForge for java developers, only you also get wikis and weblogs. Interesting. O'Reilley is behind the scenes as well.

Normally this would be my response to the 'have you read comic X?' But Kathleen loaned me two trade paperbacks of Transmetropolitan. It's right in that fuzzy area between über-tech and Hunter S. Thompson. You can't really go wrong there. A quick search on Amazon shows that fellow EFF staffer Cory Doctorow has a Listmania for Transmetropolitan. Go figure...

Johnny Depp is 40 today.

Kat and I caught the latest heist caper last night. It was good. Not great mind you, but good. I couldn't help but feel that they tried to use the Ocean's Eleven formula, but bought cheaper ingredients and threw in more action sequences. It's not a bit for bit copy or anything, it just left me a bit empty. Maybe I was expecting too much from it.

Anyway, I'll give it a Matinee rating.

The New York Times has some fun P2P/music industry related articles up: Downloading Music Over the Internet Without Feeling Like a Criminal and In Battle Over Online Music, Industry Now Offers a Carrot
. EFF is quoted in the 'Carrot' story.

Partial © Interscope 2003, reproduced without permission.

The Jam - Going Underground

Some people might say my life is in a rut,
But I'm quite happy with what I got
People might say that I should strive for more,
But I'm so happy I can't see the point.

Whiskey Bar: As an American citizen, and a taxpayer, I am trully outraged.

"If we can hit that bull's-eye, the rest of the dominoes will fall like a house of cards. Checkmate!" -- Zap Brannigan

One of the many frustrations I've had with the war is the disparate and ineffective "anti-war" voice. The ability for people who were in favor of the war had their talking points down, even if they were fallacies.

Well, screw all that noise. This entry at Whiskey Bar, while incredibly depressing to read, shows a strong, coherent voice to combat the talking points.

Well...I haven't gotten any better yet. Darn.

Eldred Act Petition. Happy birthday Lessig!

At one point during the rehearsal, Powell tossed several pages in the air. "I'm not reading this," he declared. "This is bulls- - -."

Heh, as sad as it is, I just had to save this article for that quote alone.

NYT: Sympathy for Bombing Suspect May Cloud Search for Evidence (via This Modern World)

"He was a man who stood for what he believed in," said Bo Newton, a short-order cook in Andrews. "If he came to my door, I would've given him food and never said a word."

It really is all about beliefs. I guess as long as you believe in something strong enough you can rationalize anything from a pipe bomb in a trash can at the Olympic games to flying jets into buildings.

People scare me. A lot.

With apologies to hAx0r Economist...and thanks to J, K and K.