Entries Tagged 'Tech' ↓

And, this, kids, is why Google always launches its products little by little:

Still, Yahoo! Pipes seems like a cool service. I’ll try it out next week.

Good news… ABC (that’s the Australian ABC, not the American one) plans to follow the lead of the BBC and open its archive of TV and radio shows for download. They now offer several shows as podcasts and video podcasts and, reportedly, more than 2 million files are downloaded every month.

The possible catch is that they may charge for old shows; that would be a way to improve the financial health of the network, which is fully supported by taxpayers at the moment (ABC broadcasts no ads in any of its TV and radio stations, but it’s been exploring the possibility of displaying ads in its web site). The BBC does charge for downloads of shows that have been broadcast more than a week ago, but I don’t know how much money they’re making out of it.

The front page of Techmeme has an article from Zunerama about, say, difficulties sharing songs between Zunes (Zune is the Microsoft answer to the iPod, and one of its exclusive features is the ability to wirelessly send songs to another Zune). It seems that the owners of the rights to some songs — the most popular ones, apparently — decided that they should not be shared between customers, even if the shared copy can only be played three times and expires in a few days.

Now, the famous response from Steve Jobs to this “sharing” feature of the Zune is that, by the time you manage to try to send a song to a girl, she’s already gone; it’s much better to get close to her and share the earphones instead (preferably with an iPod).

So… any bets on how long until record companies try to outlaw the sharing of earphones?

In Firefox 1.5, when you hit “back” and the focus is not in a text field, the effect is the same as that of clicking on the “Back” button or typing Alt + left arrow. In Firefox 2.0, this does not happen. If you want it to work as it did in FF1.5, do this:

• in the browser address bar, type “about:config” and hit Enter
• in the screen that will show up, type “backspace” in the “Filter:” box
• you should see a single configuration option left, “browser.backspace_action”, with value 1
• double-click on it and change the value to 0 (zero)

That’s it. No need to restart the browser or save anything, and the backspace key works as desired again.

Quite a while ago, I wrote about my disappointment with Bloglines (in a post that actually got a few responses from their team) and, later, with stand-alone feed readers. In the end, after using Omea Reader for a while, I ended up gravitating back to Bloglines (especially after I moved to Linux on my desktop machine) and stayed happily there (but always wondering about possible missing posts…).

When the first version of Google Reader launched, I imported all my subscriptions and tried using it for a few days, but gave up; their “river of news” approach, with content from all feeds “mixed up”, did not appeal to me. Nor to many other people, it seems.

And now Google came up with the new version of Google Reader, and I’m a convert. It maintains the two-pane, “folder-like” structure of Bloglines, but in a more appealing interface. This way, I can read feeds in the order I want and still get the “continuous scroll” of the first version. A few advantages of Google Reader over Bloglines, in my opinion:

• selecting a feed doesn’t automatically mark it as read: in Bloglines, if I want/need to stop reading a feed with several articles before getting to the end, I actually need to mark every unread post as new; Google Reader only marks posts as read when they are displayed (but, unnervingly, sometimes not even then)
• similarly, selecting a feed doesn’t display all of the new articles: it loads them in blocks of 20, seamlessly (if you scroll almost to the bottom, it starts loading the next block of 20 and appends them to the page)
• the interface doesn’t keep reloading the left pane (the list of feeds) all the time; although, to be fair, it looks like Bloglines released a few changes right after Google Reader lauched that do basically this

The one thing that irks me is that Google Reader is a bit “CPU intensive”, at least in Firefox; the CPU usage goes way up every now and then, and Firefox becomes unresponsive for about one second (this is in a fast machine). Maybe that’s just me, or just Firefox; I have still to test it in other browsers. Still, so far, I’m a satisfied customer.

On Earth, Belgium refers to a small country. Throughout the rest of the galaxy, Belgium is the most unspeakably rude word there is.
-Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

In the news today there is a report that a Belgian association of newspapers managed to get a court to order Google to remove all of the French- and German-language Belgium-based news items from Google News and the regular Google cache. The argument is copyright violation (debatable) and causing loss of ad revenue (very weird, considering the Google News only shows a few words from each news item and then sends users on their way to the original web site; if anything, they were getting more ad revenue from the users sent to them by Google).

It’s interesting that, at a time when most web site owners are thinking about how to be displayed more prominently on Google, some people seem to simply “not get it” and do their best to get out of it. It’s not clear to me, also, whether that association actually asked Google about being removed before going to court; shouldn’t the judicial system be a “last resort”,only to be used when a situation can’t be resolved amiably? Or am I the only one thinking that?

This is probably not new, but I just noticed it… if your search query to Google contains words spelled in the British way, Google will search for both spellings:

But it doesn’t work the other way around:

Does this mean that those of us who spell things in the British way are getting more complete results from Google?

(the word “search” is in the query just to give slightly better results; if you search just for “color” or “colour” you will notice the same effect; also, try “license” and “licence” etc.; Yahoo! doesn’t seem to do the same)

It is a little known fact that the first computer used to play music in world was the Australian-built CSIRAC (initially know as CSIR Mk1), in 1951. The computer was then in Sydney; after it was moved to Melbourne (in 1955), mathematician Thomas Cherry (after whom a building in the University of Melbourne was named) developed a system that allowed the use of musical notation to program the pieces to be played.

Earlier today, The Music of CSIRAC, a book telling the story of these first experiments, was launched in Melbourne. The book comes with a CD containing 16 pieces played by CSIRAC. It is a great book for anyone interested in computer history; it can be ordered online from the publisher or from Amazon.com.

Rather than referring to “not safe for work” links, “hotlinking” is the practice of embedding, in one’s web pages, images (or other multimedia content) that comes from an unrelated site, without permission (or even notification). The effect is that the owners of the web site that hosts the images pay for the bandwidth used when someone views the pages that belong to the “hotlinker” (which gets a free ride) without getting anything in exchange; not even visibility. It may also be a copyright violation, depending on the terms of use of the site in question.

All this is to say that yesterday I looked at the stats for this site and noticed several hits with referrals coming from an auction site; they were all requests for one particular image. As you can guess, one of the auctioneers decided that one image from my site would make a cool avatar for him.

Now, if you scroll down to the bottom of this page, you will see a “Creative Commons” logo. That means that the content from this site can be freely copied and used for any purpose whatsoever, provided that the author (that would be me) is acknowledged.

However, I’m not a free hosting provider. Had that user copied the image somewhere else and used it, I’d be cool with that (and I probably wouldn’t ever find out about it, anyway). But using my bandwidth and not acknowledging authorship is a little too much.

So, after a quick fiddle with my .htaccess and thanks to mod_rewrite, that user’s avatar is now a red-on-white block of text saying “this user steals images”. I don’t think that’ll improve the chances of him selling whatever it is he’s selling.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(www\.)?[auctionsite].com.*$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(www\.)?myspace.com.*$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(www\.)?[fotologsite].com.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule \.(gif|jpg)$ http://www.netwhatever.com/hotlink.png [R,L]


At first I considered blocking all hotlinking, but that would break image search engines (such as Google Images), and I didn’t want that. So, I’m limiting it to known offenders (I also found one guy using the same image as an avatar in myspace.com, and another one had a different photo as his background image in a fotolog). If it gets out of hand, though, I’ll white-list Google, Yahoo etc. and block everything else.

Yes, the title of this entry answers the question of which player I chose. I got the NW-E407L: L for bLue (B is for black; why not B for blue and K for black?)

There are good things and bad things about this player. Most of the good things are in hardware, and most of the bad things are in software (including firmware).

The good points first: this thing is simply beautiful. The OLED display is very clear, the feel of the unit is very good (it is heavier than it seems, though) and the controls are well located, for the most part (although it’s hard to handle the unit when it’s in your pocket without accidentally pressing some buttons). Sound quality is very good, and it plays loud. One weak point is the earphone: it feels cheap, and it probably is; you can’t use the unit seriously without a new phone. And, of course, the feature that made me choose this player: it can play for up to 50 hours without recharges; an iPod won’t go over 12 hours.

The bad points: the software you have to install in your PC is very bad. Very, very bad. If you’ve read other reviews (as I had), many of them mention how bad this software is. Don’t believe them: it’s worse. I haven’t tried the bypass route yet, but it seems like it’s unavoidable.

One other problem is that the unit is not very good for playing podcasts: it will only play MP3 files if they are encoded with a 44khz sampling frequency, and that’s not very common for podcasts (22khz seems to be more frequent). The way to work around this is to convert the files to ATRAC3, Sony’s proprietary format, and their software (SonicStage) lets you do it with relative ease. But that’s just the beginning of your problems.

You see, you’d expect the desktop software to be aware of the limitations of your player and refuse to upload unplayable files; but that would be a good thing, and, as we’ve already covered, this software has no good features. Instead, it let’s the player tell you that it “CANNOT PLAY” the files, and you have to find out why. Well, after you do, you right click on the file and select “Convert format…”. After the conversion, the same library entry will refer to two files (as you can see if you right click on it and select “Properties -> File Info”). At this point, if you chose to transfer the file to the player, you’d expect SonicStage to do the right thing and send the ATRAC3 file. It doesn’t; it sends the MP3 file, and there’s no way (that I can see) to change this. You have to delete the MP3 file (not from the library, but from the file system) for it to work.

As Chandler would say, could they be more stupid? Hard to see how.

But they try. They make available a tool to bulk-convert files from MP3 to ATRAC3, which sounds good once you’ve resigned yourself to live with it. After downloading and installing the tool, though, it refuses to run because it needs “SonicStage 2.1 or later”. You’d think SonicStage 3.0 (included in the CD that comes with the player) would suffice, but their definition of “later” seems to be different from mine.

Other than that, there are a couple of minor annoyances. The desktop shortcut for the PDF manual doesn’t work if your default browser is not IE; it opens www.programfiles.com instead, and it took me a while to figure out what was going on. The manual comes only in electronic format, by the way. The online registration process (which is also IE-only) did not accept the serial number of my unit, besides making me feel old (the last option for “age” is “over 30″).

What would make this a very good unit: the desktop software needs to be smarter (and easier to use). For example, it should convert files on the fly to ATRAC3 if it knows the player can’t handle them (alternatively, and even better, the player should play any MP3 file; it can’t be that hard). And it should come with decent earphones.

For the moment, I still think I can live with the problems, but if I get annoyed enough by the next weekend, I will consider returning it and getting something else instead (probably an iPod Shuffle). I’ll keep you posted.

This is SPF as in Sender Policy Framework, an antispam method that is becoming more and more popular. I liked it at first but, after thinking a little more about it, I realized that I don’t.

For those that are not familiar with it, read their How It Works page, there’s a fairly good explanation there. The basic principle is that a domain owner (usually not a regular user) will nominate a set of servers that are allowed to send messages that claim to have a sender from his/her domain. Compliant recipients (servers, not users) will check this nomination and reject (or mark) messages that come from “unauthorised” servers. The idea is to eliminate spam coming from forged addresses.

The reason I don’t like it is that it tries to fix the problem in the wrong way. It tries to authenticate servers, not people; and, in trying to do so, it enforces rules that don’t really exist and that most users don’t know about (and wouldn’t understand, anyway). Servers don’t send e-mail, people do, and unless you can authenticate the person sending a message, by whatever method, you can’t be sure the message is invalid.

Let’s see one scenario where legitimate e-mail will be dropped. Take an hypothetical ISP, which we will call T, where SPF is enabled. Also, take an hypothetical web site that we will call U. Now say that a user, W, who has an e-mail account with T, goes to the web site U and sees a news report that he thinks might interest another user, X, who happens to also have an account with T. There are a few ways for W to send the news item to X, but the easiest one is to click on the “send this news item to a friend” link on the web page. He does that, fills in the form with his e-mail address as the sender and C’s address as the recipient, and off the message goes.

And back the message comes with this error:

Now, I know what this message means. Would a regular user know? I think not. And, even if we get past this user-friendliness issue (one could always give a better explanation in the returned message), was this message properly blocked? Again, I think not. It was a legitimate message, initiated by the person listed in the envelope From: (thus ensuring that eventual errors are directed to the message initiator, and not to the web site owner) and sent to a person with whom the user had a previous relationship.

Granted, the message wasn’t sent from one of T’s e-mail servers, but why should it? That’s not a contractual obligation between T and its users, is definitely not an RFC requirement, and may not even be a technical possibility: many, many access providers block SMTP access out of their networks, or silently redirect it to their own servers. Yes, I know about port 587; do regular users know? Once again, I guess not.

This error is not hypothetical, in case you didn’t guess. And it’s just one of the failure modes: one other is the issue I mentioned above of access providers silently redirecting port 25; e-mail forwarding sounds like another, but I haven’t tested it.

As I said above, the problem here is that servers are being authenticated in an attempt to verify that messages are valid, but server authentication says nothing about this. Unless you have a way to actually validate the person who initiated the message (and I don’t really see how you can do that in all cases), you can’t guarantee messages are valid or not. And, if you drop messages that fail the SPF test, you will drop valid messages without your users even knowing that they are missing messages.

I would be a little more sympathetic to using SPF as a means to score messages in order to possibly mark them as spam, or to allow end users the option of rejecting/quarantining them. Rejecting the message in a way that does not allow the recipient the option to accept it (and, by the way, generating backscatter when forged addresses are used for real spam) is really bad.

Is it just me, or is the available crop of desktop RSS readers really, really disappointing, with very few exceptions? After deciding to leave Bloglines I’ve tried quite a few of them, free or not, and almost every single one has at least one thing that makes it basically unusable, in my opinion. Let’s look at a few of them, leading to my current choice of reader.

Thunderbird: it was the obvious choice, being already installed in my machine and being a reasonably good e-mail client. However, the key problem with it is simple: if, by accident, you try to delete an old post by hitting the Delete key and you have the feed (and not the post) selected, it gleefully deletes the feed and removes the subscription. That’s different from what happens if you do the same thing to an e-mail folder; there’s a confirmation dialog for that. If you then type Ctrl-Z to undo the deletion, it recreates the folder but does not recreate the subscription properly. After doing that a few times by accident, I decided I couldn’t keep subscribing to the same feeds over and over. Also, it has no built-in way to deal with removing old posts automatically.

FeedDemon: (not free, I used the free trial version) very decent software, pretty interface, very usable. However, its interface has a peculiar quirk: not all feeds can be visible at all times in the feed list. Only one group of feeds (or channels, as it calls it) is visible at a time. This wouldn’t be so bad in itself, but the feeds that are not visible are also not being updated. They will be updated only when displayed. This is, in my not-so-humble opinion, idiotic, specially if you subscribe to frequently updated feeds. You will miss posts in those. I can’t imagine why the software works like that, and I couldn’t find a way to configure it not to do that.

Sharp Reader: Mortal sin: if you click on the content of a post, the space bar stops working to navigate between posts. Also, it kept showing repeated copies of old posts in a few feeds, for no reason I could discern. One other annoying thing is that all my feeds were created in a folder called “Imported from export.xml”, and there’s no way to take them out of there. And, very frequently, when right-clicking on a feed it would barf with an exception like “ContextMenu cannot be shown on an invisible control”. The only way to make it stop happening is to close the reader (exit or minimize to tray) and reopen it.

RSS Bandit: for a while, I thought this was “the one”. It isn’t. My main issue with it is an unbelievable bug: it mixes up feeds. Posts from one feed show up in another. Over and over again. This happens most often with FeedBurner feeds, but not only with them. The first time, you think “that’s weird”. After a few days, you can’t take it anymore. Also, it seems to stop updating feeds if it finds an error; and boy, does it find errors! Connection problems, parsing errors… they may well be legitimate problems, but any reader has to be more accepting of feed problems than that. Other than that, and the habit of taking CPU usage to 100% for long periods while updating feeds, I don’t really have anything to complain about; it is a decent reader with a few annoying bugs which, if fixed, will make it a good product.

Omea Reader: from JetBrains, the makers of Intellij IDEA, this is my selected reader for the moment. But get the 2.0 beta version, and not the latest “stable” version! The 1.0 version has a very strange bug that messes up with the tree-list of feeds when you navigate between posts using the space bar. To their credit, I reported the bug to them and was told to use the beta, which fixes it beautifully. They have also a Pro version, not free, which I haven’t tested. I have nothing to complain about this piece of software; it is definitely the best one I’ve tried. It also reads Usenet news, which I realize is something not many people still do, but for me it’s useful.

Of course, other recommendations would be welcome, as long as it’s not for any software that works as an add-on to Outlook…

Yesterday I attended the first meeting of the Melbourne Python Users Group (this is a temporary page, soon to be replaced with a more useful and permanent one); kudos to Anthony Briggs for organizing it, getting people interested, providing a venue and giving the first presentation!

As is the case with almost all first meetings, this one consisted mostly of people getting to know each other: there was a quick round of presentations after the first few people arrived, and a larger, slightly more formal round once everyone was there. In total, some 15 people attended. After that, Anthony gave his presentation on automation, some people volunteered to give talks in the next meetings (the next one will be on Twisted, by Justin Warren), and people went out for dinner (I went home at this point).

The next meeting will be in one month (no date was actually set while I was there, but I’m betting on either the 14th or 21st of July). If anyone else is interested, there is a mailing list where you can talk to people, ask questions, or even volunteer to talk about something you like.

This whole day, I’ve been listening/watching (mostly listening) to the keynote address Steve Jobs delivered at the WWDC 2005 (I have work to do, so I’ve been playing it in two-minute blocks…). That, of course, is where he broke the news of the transition Apple will do from PowerPC to Intel processors.

In the Watchmen graphic novel (by Alan Moore and David Gibbons), the “master villain”, when confronted, spends quite a lot of time talking to the two “heroes” about his plan to end all wars, like most supervillains use to do. The critical scene, though, comes up when the heroes say that they,of course, will stop him from doing that. His response is “stop me? you can’t; it’s already done; do you think I’d waste time talking about it if there was any chance of you stopping me?”. And, indeed, the plan had already been executed.

The keynote address felt a little like that. Yes, we’re moving to Intel, for these reasons (the main one being power consumption). And yes, we will need to port OS X to Intel. But… it’s already done. OS X was made from the start to run on Intel and PowerPC. And, in fact, you see this machine I’ve been using for the demos? Yup, a 3.6Ghz Pentium IV. Did you think we’d announce it before we were ready?

I like Steve Jobs. He’s a little crazy at times, but he has style.

I’ve attended today a seminar about the history of and the technology behind the new MSN Search. The speakers were Jim Walsh, Development Manager and Hugh Williams, Senior Software Design Engineer of MSN Search.

The first few minutes were mostly about the history of the service; up until 2002, Microsoft didn’t really care about search: the MSN home page had a search box that was only 10 characters wide, and they outsourced the service to Inktomi (now owned by Yahoo!). It was not until early 2003 that they decided to write their own search engine from scratch; they unveiled it in January, 2005.

About the technology, I think one of the interesting bits is that, like Google, they run the service on a large cluster of consumer-grade machines, with reliability created by software (but with the provision that software is also expected to fail every now and then). Unlike Google, however, they run the 64-bit version of Windows Server 2003 on all boxes.

They also discussed their spam-prevention techniques for a while, without delving into too much detail. They claim that 15 to 20% of all web pages reached by their crawler are junk or spam (things that no user wants to see listed as search results, in short) and need to be discarded.

And a final interesting point is that approximately 10% of the search queries are misspelled (in the USA; less in some other countries, more in others). They have algorithms for dealing with that and will return results for the correct spelling if there are not enough data for the incorrect one. Very often, though, there are very good results for the misspellings, especially common ones (the example they used was Britney Spears, which is apparently written in many different ways by the users; curiously enough, that was the same example used by the Google engineers who were here last year).

I asked them about plans for indexing non-textual content; the response was that they are working on it, starting with images: their current image search technology is from a third-party and, in their words, “not very good”. Audio and video will come later.