For some reason I bought an Apple TV today, their latest doowacky that lets you attach a TV to your iTunes like you would an iPod, playing your video and music and what have you. The people I know are about evenly split on whether it will be cool to be able to buy TV shows a la carte and watch them on this, or whether it is the most useless Apple invention ever. I may have an opinion on that later, but right now I just want to yell about this one thing:

There is no Simpsons on iTunes. That is a major, possibly fatal, failure that might get the Apple Tv returned to the Apple Store. Apparently Fox considers iTunes to be a place to dump its garbage shows that aren't making money any other way, judging from the fact that they don't sell their most popular and longest running show of all time, but they do offer every episode of Stacked.

Ok. But here's what's worse: I searched for Simpsons, found only the "Simpsons Foxcast" under Podcasts. For about a minute I thought they had every recent episode in podcast form, for free. Then I noticed that the podcast "episodes" are only a couple minutes long. So I figured it was at least a Simpsons clip? Wrong again. It is an audio-only ad, where some smarmy LA-radio-clown voice describes an episode of The Simpsons:

It would actually be better if it stopped there. Because it goes on to explain the entire episode in 109 seconds, which is about as funny as explaining a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon. When it is over, I want to punch the voice actor right in his Botoxed Ryan Seacrest face, but I never, ever want to watch that episode of The Simpsons. Well done, Fox. Bravo.

Wow, that really made me mad just now, and I haven't even opened it yet. Maybe it was for the best that I had no way of being exposed to TV. More news as it develops.

29 Apr 2007 22:41 PT - persistent link - trackback - 3 comments

This was attached my door this morning.

You would not believe how low the music was that I was playing last night, as it is every night when I dare to try it at all. The squeezebox volume goes from 0 to 50, with 0 being muted, and I have it set to 1. The bathroom fan is louder. But I know that the problem is that those speakers that I have and their nice 150w amplifier, which I went to some trouble to acquire because I like them, seem to resonate somewhere in the mid-bass, maybe around 160-200Hz. Sound in that range goes through these shoddy walls like tissue paper, and there is nothing I can do about it. And I can't reduce the bass unless I did some horrible software thing, it's just a plain amplifier.

In a way it sucks even more that my unseen neighbor is trying to be polite. Whoever lives behind my bedroom has immediately pounded on the wall if any noise was not to his (or her) liking for as long as I have lived here, and I decided a couple weeks ago that it was time to stop rewarding this behavior. After all, I get woken up every day when they get up for work. I can hear them snore, and use the toilet, and much as I hate this, there's not much I can do but live with it. But if they're not going to be jerks and call the police or whatever (as has happened at past apartments) then there's nothing for me to be mad at, except this shantytown apartment complex.

The shabby construction of every place I have ever lived in California makes me mad for reasons I can't explain very well. But it's late and I'll leave that for another "rants" entry on another day.

15 Jun 2006 02:44 PT - persistent link - trackback - 2 comments

...or one of them, anyway, is that the people I have to help are self-selecting. To see what I mean, consider three completely hypothetical professors:

Professor "A" considers her (or his) access to my Unix systems to be a privilege. She mostly knows how to do what she wants, even though it's pretty far removed from her nominal field of study. She has never yet asked me a question that could be answered by the first link of a Google search on the same question. It's not that she doesn't use the system, because she correctly identifies the situations that do require my attention and reports them. She's just pretty self-reliant and needs little maintenance.

Professor "B" knows very little about computers, at least my kind, and does not always have a well formed idea of what he (or she) wants. He knows this is the case, and describes his problems in terms of what he wants the system to do, and will usually take my advice as to what is the easiest way to do it. When I solve a problem or show him how to do something, it usually stays solved and I rarely have to show him how to do the same thing again. So this is more work than I have to do for Professor "A," but it's not unpleasant and it leaves me feeling like I did something worthwhile.

Professor "C" knows a fair number of things about Unix that are correct, and a good deal more that are outdated or just wrong. He (or she) tends to frame his requests in terms such as, "I need a Slugworth Bubblegum server installed before my class tomorrow morning." If I suggest a Wonka bubblegum server instead, he will invariably say that it would be too hard, and too inconvenient, since he couldn't possibly learn to use a Wonka server before his class tomorrow, and anyway he already knows that Slugworth servers are the best. He does not read much of the email I send, and hence will sometimes ask me the same thing three or four times in a month. He might know the difference between a problem that belongs to the system administrator and a problem that doesn't, but will not hesitate to give me any assignment that I can do, without regard to whether I should do it.

Now, in my current job, I work for about 30 to 40 professors, and I would guess that about 25% of them are "A"s, 50% are "B"s and the last 25% are "C"s. But because of the characteristics I just described, I end up spending most of my time on projects for the Cs. Not only does this make me cranky, it's unfair to the As and Bs.

For example, a certain Professor A spent quite a bit of time recently trying to sort out a messy application problem. I wouldn't have known offhand how to fix it, but I could probably have saved her several hours if she had asked sooner. I would not have minded this at all, since as an "A," she gets less than her fair share of my attention to begin with, and I know that the cost to benefit ratio of spending my time is quite good.

Professor B is punished in a different way, which is that when he asks if I have time to do something, I say no, and that's that.

As for the Cs, I have found no way to deal with them, other than to give them what they ask for (not necessarily what they want), and to teergrube silly requests so that they don't take up the whole week.

I have spent a tremendous amount of time learning what I know about systems and programming, but the people that would actually benefit from that experience don't ask. People that are only interested in a Band Aid for their skinned-knee-of-the-day, on the other hand, bother me all the time. They make me want to stab my eyes out with a fork. That's what help desks are for, not me.

16 Nov 2005 01:54 PT - persistent link - trackback - 0 comments

In case you missed it somehow: Sony Music released several CDs recently that contained some malicious copy protection software called "XCP". (They won't admit exactly how many, or which ones.) This program secretly installs itself on your hard drive when you put the CD in the computer, like a virus. It goes to great lengths to conceal itself from you, like a virus. It wastes your computer's time and slows everything down by constantly scanning for non-Sony-approved activities, like a virus. It cannot be uninstalled, like a virus. It damages your operating system and leaves gaping holes that can be exploited by other attackers and viruses.

Sony was quite happy to ignore the resulting uproar for months, until an assistant to the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security told them in public to knock it off. The company is now facing class action lawsuits and criminal investigations in several states and countries. They have stopped the production of XCP-infected discs and have issued the following semi-apology:

A warm personal message from me to anybody that might be in any way connected with Sony/BMG Music, or any of its many labels and subsidiaries:

Your "XCP" copy protection scheme is the most disgusting example of arrogance and greed I have yet noticed in the music publishing industry, which is no small accomplishment. I have avoided buying crippled CDs for a while now, but because of the XCP debacle I have taken the trouble to look up the labels that you distribute (Arista, Columbia, Epic, RCA, and others) and will specifically avoid buying any more of your new releases whether they are crippled or not.

This is too bad, since you currently own some artists that I am going to miss (Trey Anastasio, for one). And your "dual disc" format, with DVD video on one side and CD audio on the other, could have been cool. That's all you ever had to do, was work just a little bit harder to give us some incentive to buy your products instead of pirating them, which has always been pretty inconvenient. If you had just used a little more carrot and less stick, we would have been fine. But now, I will just have to make sure I wait to buy Sony albums used, since I know that when I do that, you don't receive a dime and it really chaps your ass. Too bad about those silly courts and the right of first sale, eh?

But you could not care less about the few hundred dollars of my money that you have lost, so I will of course influence as many people as I can to do the same. I hope that thousands of people learn to associate the Sony brand name and your oh-so-distinctive Dual Disc and UMD formats with spyware and Trojan horses. I hope that this costs you millions of disc sales. I hope this motivates a few of your popular recording artists to find another publisher (to the extent that they are able, given that you were screwing your talent for decades before you turned on us customers). I hope that this accelerates the collapse of your publishing business and its entire parent corporation, which we know is already struggling. I hope that ten years from now, the names of Sony and Bertelsmann are remembered only as a cautionary tale.

Very truly yours,

M. Dickerson

14 Nov 2005 01:14 PT - persistent link - trackback - 0 comments

The short version: IE is a pathetic piece of crap.

The long version: Here is a true, unembellished account of my attempt to make this site work on Internet Explorer, which took place over a couple of weeks in October 2005.

• Reboot my girlfriend's laptop into Windows XP, since it is the only remaining computer that even dual boots that I have access to.
• Try to load www.photoprism.net in Internet Explorer. Nothing works. Spend 10 minutes trying to find Javascript console. Oops, there is none.
• Search Google for what the hell I am supposed to do. MSDN page says to un-check a box labeled "Disable script debugging" somewhere in "advanced internet options".
• That does nothing at all, besides being a genius double-negative user interface element. Back to Google to look at search results numbers 2 through 20.
• Find another page that says I have to download something called "Microsoft Script Debugger". Sounds like an awful lot of bloat to get a Javascript console, but did you expect anything less?
• Go to MSDN download page, which advises me that this advanced, double-secret feature (a Javascript console) is only available to persons using Genuine Microsoft Windows. Fine, this is a laptop that came with it, so it's as genuine a copy of Windows as I have ever had.
• MSDN site forces me to download and run some random executable blob called the "genuine Windows verifier" component. This doesn't work until after rebooting.
• Back to MSDN site, which, assured that I am not stealing food from the mouth of poor starving Bill Gates, allows me to download the Microsoft Script Debugger. This doesn't work until after rebooting.
• Now, at last, I am able to select Script Debugger on the Internet Explorer menu. Go back to www.photoprism.net, and a popup window informs me that the getComputedStyle() javascript method doesn't exist. Hurrah, hurray, and only about 3 hours of life wasted getting almost as good functionality as "View->Javascript Console" on every other browser I have used in the past four years. (Of course, these 3 hours are spread out over 3 weeks because, as you may have guessed, I have zero patience for this crap.)
• Press Run in the Microsoft Script Debugger, which works once, and the second time ... it freezes. Eventually manage to kill it with the Task Manager, and now the browser is hung. Kill it, start over, and ... it hangs.
• And in case you were wondering, the Microsoft Script Debugger has three features, which are: It can give you a popup message telling you when there is a javascript error. It can highlight the line where the error happened. And it can single-step through lines of javascript, which is rather comically useless because the browser window is completely frozen and does not even redraw itself while the Debugger is running. This concludes our tour of Microsoft Script Debugger features. Set watch expressions? No. Browse the current DOM? No. Make local modifications to see what works? No. This is nowhere close to an actual debugger, for example, Venkman. It truly is just a kludged-on substitute for the Javascript console with a window for displaying source code.

This is about where I made the following executive decision: This is my personal site. Nobody pays me to use it, and I am not selling anything. There is absolutely no reason for me to work on it if I don't want to. There is not much reason for me to care if 85% of the people on the Internet can't see it (especially since it is almost exactly the dumbest 85%). So, if you continue to use Internet Explorer, I don't care about your problems. Use the crappy old frameset interface until you have got the training wheels off.

15 Oct 2005 18:15 PT - persistent link - trackback - 0 comments

The certificate security model peddled in SSL today is a joke, and here's why:

First of all, the supposedly trustworthy corporations that function as Certificate Authorities aren't. For example, it is not actually that hard to fool Verisign into believing that you represent Microsoft, as was famously demonstrated in 2001. As Lawrence Lessig points out, all of these "authorities" have adopted certificate security policies that enthusiastically disclaim any liability for any kind of mistake or incompetence whatsoever. Their interest is to sell as many certificates as possible, which aligns very poorly, if at all, with your interest in reliably identifying web servers.

An even worse flaw in SSL is that it is so poorly understood, by site operators and web surfers alike, that the legitimate warnings it generates are completely ignored in the ocean of bogus errors and false alarms. Everyone browsing the Web is acclimated to random failures and error messages--broken links, server timeouts, and so on and so forth. This means that when a browser attempts to warn of a fake certificate, the person clicks OK without reading, much less understanding, what went wrong.

Joe AOL doesn't know the difference between http and ftp, but we award him the responsibility to evaluate the trustworthiness of random certificates with signature chains that are seven links long, issued by distant corporations that he has never heard of. We did this to Joe because in about 1995, we were tripping over ourselves to get him to use his credit card on the Internet, so of course we did not want to make it sound like there was anything hard about Internet security.

I have operated SSL servers with untrusted certificates for more than four years, and I know the certificates have been used by about five hundred people. Exactly two of them have ever written to ask whether the certificate error was something to worry about. (Congratulations to Professors Zook and Fitzpatrick!)

When I run into a certificate problem myself, I ignore it, because I know that it is far more likely that the site operators have screwed up their certificate installations than that somebody is actually trying to fool me.

So we see, average users have not gained any meaningful security, because they do not understand certificates well enough to differentiate a false alarm from a real problem. Educated users have not gained any meaningful security, because the system is too sloppy and we are forced to tolerate too many honest mistakes. The only place where SSL has succeeded very well is in allowing sleazy companies like Verisign to sustain their business model of establishing a monopoly on some trivial service, then charging exorbitant rates. Last I checked, it cost more than $500 per year for a certificate signed by Verisign.

This is why I do not have one of their certificates: I pay for this site out of my pocket, and I have much better things to spend $500 on than snake oil.

23 Sep 2004 00:00 PT - persistent link - trackback - 0 comments