The fleeting nature of data with DRM

This article from the Washington Post highlights a problem which is bound to increase in frequency. It discusses the fact that Walmart has just cancelled their digital movie download service.

When you lock yourself into some form of entertainment which makes use of DRM, you're at the mercy of the company providing the data/service to continue offering it. Now the people who have downloaded movies can only continue watching them on the same PC they downloaded the file to in the first place and they can't re-download should their PC hard disk fail. I'll concede it was more convenient to purchase a movie this way but there wasn't a significant savings involved and what do they have now? Data subject to rapidly increasing entropy thanks to shifting business priorities. They'll definitely lose access at some point... it's just a question of when.

I think the same problem will occur with the e-book readers currently on the market. The Kindle (from Amazon) certainly makes purchasing and carrying lots of books much more convenient and even gives a pretty good ease of use, something important in a device designed to replace physical books. But at what cost? The books themselves aren't offered at a huge savings over paperback editions and they're subject to DRM. So you're tied to the device and should Amazon decide that the device isn't profitable enough and discontinue the service, you're stuck with an expensive device which will continue reading books you've already purchased but won't be good for much else. If they discontinue the service, you can bet that the wireless connection will no longer work.

I've also got other concerns about the device. Can you back up your purchases onto a PC or are you forced to re-download them if you want to re-read them in the future? There are some books I like to read again periodically so a proper replacement for physical books would have to take this into account.

Some companies have little interest in guaranteeing customers have continuing use of their DRM laden files. Microsoft changed DRM formats when they introduced the Zune. It won't play any of their previously purchased songs using the earlier Microsoft DRM technology.

The real answer is to avoid all forms of DRM. Applaud the move of 3 of the 4 major record labels to offer DRM free music on Amazon by supporting their efforts. Whenever possible, support the work of independent artists who haven't been punishing their customers the way the RIAA has. But most importantly, put your foot down and say hell no to DRM.

the sad state of Linux email clients

I use the Thunderbird email client under Fedora at work. I've been searching for a different email client to use to retrieve my personal email since I prefer to keep those messages totally separate. After doing a bit of research, it looks like Evolution and Balsa are the two top email clients (aside from Thunderbird).

I didn't find either to my liking. Evolution (at least the latest version available from Fedora's package manager) was terribly unstable. It also had the worst address book of the 3 email clients. Its rendering of HTML messages was substandard at best. It doesn't display embedded images by default and didn't always display them when I selected the display images option.

Balsa wasn't much better. It was more stable than Evolution but it really didn't support HTML messages well at all. Retrieving messages frequently caused the sorting of message in the Inbox to get confused, forcing me to select the Date heading to force a re-sort. The filtering feature was very disappointing. Adding filters made it activate procmail filtering which caused messages to get stuck in the command line mail utility.

I've settled for using Thunderbird for both work and personal email. Using one of the others just wasn't feasible.

Good Books

I'm reading a couple excellent books at the moment which I thought I'd pass along.

During my commute, I'm listening to Spider Robinson's Callahan's Legacy. Whenever I read a new book by Spider or go back to re-read one of his older books, I'm always amazed at how good I feel while reading it and how I don't want the book to end. There are a handful of authors whose work makes me feel this way: Rudy Rucker, Robert Heinlein, Carl Hiaasen, Richard Feynman, and Richard Dawkins to name but a few.

At night I've started reading Theodore Sturgeon's The Nail and the Oracle: Volume XI: The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon. I've been reading this complete collection of Sturgeon's works as they have been published which has been sorely trying my patience as I wait for each new volume. I was originally under the impression that there were to be 10 volumes in the series but a good friend recently mentioned that he had received volume 11 as a gift which caused me to order it as soon as I got home. When I started reading Sturgeon 30+ years ago, I was struck by the fact that his work really transcended the genres of SciFi or Fantasy and that it was sad his audience was probably much smaller than his talent deserved because of these labels. Reading Harlan Ellison's lengthy and touching foreword in this volume, I find I'm not alone in this feeling.

I highly recommend both books. If you haven't read anything by one or both authors, I envy you. You're in for a great read.

Wireless Keyboard Security Compromised

This post at the excellent HackADay web site discusses how the security of wireless keyboards has now been compromised. This makes it even easier for hackers to capture passwords and other information you type on your wireless keyboard. They don't need to risk physical access to install a hardware keyboard capture device or install software to perform the same function. They just need to set up a sniffer device in close enough proximity to capture your key strokes. Under ideal conditions, wireless devices can transmit far beyond their stated maximum range.

I personally use a wireless mouse, a wireless Apple Mighty Mouse which I love, but not a wireless keyboard. I see little benefit to getting rid of the wire on my keyboard since I don't need my keyboard to move so the wire never gets in the way.

Good luck to any hackers who want to derive meaningful information out of my mouse movements and clicks. Without knowing what's on the screen at any given moment, that information is next to useless. I know it's possible to spy on Van Eck radiation to read what's on a monitor from a distance but the equipment required to do so is either expensive or complicated to build. It's also a non-trivial problem to tie what's on the screen at that moment (an analog signal) with what's being typed. I'm quite satisfied that the barriers to that my monitor and mouse emanations being compromised are sufficiently high to discourage all but the most determined hacker. Realistically, you can never make something 100% secure. All you can hope to do is to raise the barriers high enough to nudge them along to easier targets. Rest assured that there are many easier targets. I can see 2 completely unsecured WiFi networks from my house and I suspect this is constrained by the distance between houses more than anything.

NTFS Alternate Data Streams

Quite some time ago, Microsoft quietly added the ability to embed an alternate data stream in another file. This was ostensibly done to improve interoperability with other modern file systems such as Apple's HFS. The problem is that many of the command line and GUI utilities supplied with Windows don't support (or at least easily so) manipulation of these alternate data streams, making them an ideal place to store data undetectable by normal means.

This capability can be useful for OS features such as displaying thumbnails images when a user opens a folder containing image files. That way, the thumbnail image gets deleted when the user deletes the image file itself. The user is also not confused by the presence of a multitude of files which they don't remember creating.

The negative implications of alternate data streams are twofold. First, it can make figuring out what is occupying your disk space. Second, it makes a convenient place for Malware authors to hide their malicious software. They love this functionality which has been embedded into the Windows operating system since NTFS was introduced because it frees them from the need to resort to a rootkit to hide files. To Microsoft's credit, in Vista they've added switches to the venerable "dir" command to give it the ability to detect alternate data streams. Users of older versions of Windows will need to avail themselves of a utility such as Streams from the great team at SysInternals, now part of Microsoft.

For a good summary of the security implications of alternate data streams, see this write-up at Security Focus.

PayPal Security Key

Since I do a lot of technical reading in my spare time, I find myself becoming more and more interested in computer security. One thing I'm particularly concerned about is is the use of usernames and passwords alone for authentication on web sites which contain any of my financial information. A while back while listening to the always entertaining and informative Security Now! podcast, Steve Gibson (one of the hosts) mentioned that PayPal had started offering Security Keys for a nominal fee. These keys display a number which changes in an unpredictable pattern every 30 seconds and which can be used to tighten security on your PayPal and eBay accounts.

PayPal should be commended for offering this capability and at such an affordable price. Multifactor authentication is much safer than its single factor sibling.

Find out more about the PayPal Security Key here. If you have trouble accessing this link, go to PayPal's site, click the Security Center link at the top and click on the picture of the Security Key. This program is on a timed deployment so it may not yet be available outside the U.S.

OpenID

A new post on the Blogger in Draft blog indicates that Blogger, the service this blog and many others depend upon, may soon support OpenID for identity verification for posting.

I've been following discussions about OpenID, including one on the excellent Security Now! podcast and have been anxious to give it a try. It appears Blogger may afford my first real opportunity so I've signed up for a free account at Verisign Labs' PIP web site. There are a number of other free OpenID providers. I chose Verisign primarily because of their long history. I'd hate to commit to a provider only to have it fold because they couldn't find a way to monetize the service.

You may want to sign up for an account so you can get an URL you can remember. The URLs associated with your OpenID identity must be unique so there's benefit to having one which has your favorite user name embedded.

Running IE on your Mac

There's a new method of running IE (Internet Explorer) on your Mac. Now you may ask yourself, what do I need IE on a Mac? It's only really useful for visiting those annoying web sites which refuse to display properly in Safari or Firefox for the Mac. Yes, you can also download a Firefox add-on called User Agent Switcher to lie about your browser user agent, but that won't emulate all the quirks associated with IE so some web pages may still not display properly.

The software to accomplish this magic is called ie4osx. Basically it runs the IE version of your choosing under Darwine (Darwin Windows Emulator) under X11 (a traditional Unix style graphical user interface environment). You need to install X11 (available from your OS X install disks or Apple's web site) and Darwine prior to installing ie4osx.

If you find yourself encountering the occasional web site which refuses to display correctly (or at all) under a Mac browser, this software may be useful for you. It runs pretty well though it's a bit quirky. I found myself having to double or triple click on links occasionally. I also had trouble getting back to the search term form on Google's search page. Still, these quirks are a small price to pay to be able to finally view web sites that were otherwise inaccessible or garbled.

Free Windows disk image tool

LifeHacker has an interesting article about a free Windows disk image tool called DriveImage XML. It's reasonably quick and offers the capability to restore a disk to an earlier state.

I/O redirection into an editor

Sometimes it's handy to redirect the output of a Linux/Unix command into an editor. One reason to do this might be to try to weed out unwanted search pattern matches when running grep. Fortunately the Linux (and before that Unix) developers have anticipated this need. Editors like vi, vim, gvim, and gedit (and possibly others I'm not aware of) can all accept the output of a command as the "file" being edited.

For example, you can direct the output of a grep command to gvim with the following command:

grep searchPattern | gvim -

If you really want to get fancy, you can pass a command to gvim to cause it to search for the same pattern you used grep to find by using the -c argument.

grep searchPattern | gvim -c/searchPattern -

Since searchPattern appears twice on the command line and engineers never want to type any extra characters, I'd define a command alias to perform this action. Since there are so many shells out there, I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.

Readability rating

I think the rating should be more like "Evil Genius". It must be all my posts about obscure Unix commands, eh?

Adding color to grep output

Most of the longtime Unix users like me love grep. Regular expressions make the silly wildcards available in Windows seem completely underwhelming.

One thing which I find makes grep even more useful is to configure it to highlight matching terms. Like most things I decide would be useful, a little poking about in the man pages shows that the Unix developers have anticipated my needs yet again. They've added a couple environment variables which can tell grep to highlight matching terms in the color of your choosing. Since I prefer my xterm windows with a dark background and light foreground colors, I find the following colors work well. Note - I use tcsh at home so you may need to alter these commands a bit to get them to work with your preferred shell.

# highlight search terms with a red background and white foreground
setenv GREP_COLOR '01;37;41'
setenv GREP_OPTIONS '--color=auto'

A word of warning is in order. I've found that using these terms can cause strange failures in seemingly unrelated activities. For example, I build Linux kernel modules at work and I've discovered that fails if I've got the grep color environment variables set (in the modpost step). So I've defined command aliases to set and unset the environment variables. That way I can easily enable grep colors before performing a grep and disable them again before doing something which may fail if grep colors are enabled.

Rudy Rucker

One of my favorite SciFi authors, Rudy Rucker, has kindly released his latest novel called Postsingular under a Creative Commons license. This is a great way for people unfamiliar with Rudy's work to try it out. If you like it (and I'm sure most people will) please buy his earlier books. I like to keep my favorite authors gainfully employed because that means more good books for me to read.

Feeling old

I was in the hospital visiting my grandmother this weekend. Last week she had fallen while trying to put on her shoes and broke her leg near the hip. Thank goodness it wasn't her hip as that's supposed to be much harder to recover from. So thanks to a metal pin and 3 screws installed Thursday, she's starting the long hard road to recovery.

I was amazed that the physical therapist was able to get her to try a few steps while I was there. She was in a lot of pain and was reluctant to do anything which made it worse, such as moving the injured leg. The thing which was toughest for me to take was the sounds she made when the pain hit her. I was also struck by how small and frail she looks now. I know it's been a long gradual process but it really struck me while watching her struggle with the pain.

It's strange how the roles feel reversed now. When I was small, she used to take care of me while my mother was at work. She was always able to help with anything I needed. Now we've got to do the same for her. It seems kind of strange for all of us and is taking a little getting used to.

Hazmat Modine

A couple months ago, my wife was reading the latest edition of the schedule of entertainment from our neighborhood community center. It's well worth doing because they always have some sort of program which we find entertaining. It turns out they had managed to attract one of my favorite new bands, Hazmat Modine, to perform near our house.

You might have heard them on NPR about a year ago. I didn't catch that program but a friend did and was so amazed by their music that he felt obliged to tell me about it. After listening to his CD, I had to buy a copy for myself.

As much as I like their CD, they were much better in person. I highly recommend seeing them if you get the chance. I can hardly wait for their next CD to be released. Yes, they're really that good.

You can search on YouTube for samples of their performances. Here's one to get you started.

One of Carl Sagan's last speeches

I've just finished listening to a Point of Inquiry podcast featuring Ann Druyan (widow of Carl Sagan). That would have been interesting in its own right but this episode also features Carl Sagan’s last public address for CSICOP (Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal).

While I've always enjoyed Sagan's work, I found this speech particularly interesting. In it, he makes a number of very accurate prophecies about the slow backwards slide America seems to have been taking in its understanding of scientific topics. What I find most amazing is that he could be skeptical of pseudo-science and still be so understanding of people who subscribe to these erroneous beliefs. In this speech, he urges skeptics everywhere to be more understanding of the individuals on the other side. We must learn to separate the erroneous belief from the believers. Education, not ridicule, is the proper response.

He also manages to sneak in a few jokes at the expense of those who believe in alien abductions and crop circles. Why would a race sufficiently advanced to have traveled such long distances waste time making circles in wheat fields? It seems a bit silly when put that way, eh?

Point of Inquiry podcast

I've just started listening to the Point of Inquiry podcast and have consequently been catching up on older episodes. The episode I was listening to today featured one of my favorite scientists, Bill Nye. Bill was making a case for improving the poor state of scientific literacy in this country. He was doing it with his usual enthusiasm and humor.

With all the environmental challenges currently facing us, this is an unfortunate time to have enrollment in engineering and science programs at such low levels. Given the absurd popularity of pseudoscience these days, it's particularly disturbing to see so few new scientists entering the workforce.

This podcast also has episodes featuring interviews with or information about more of my favorite scientists and/or skeptics - Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Phil Plait (AKA The Bad Astronomer), Harry Houdini, and James Randi. I can't wait to listen to those.

The same company which produces this podcast also publishes Free Inquiry and Skeptical Inquirer magazines.

Pitfalls of being the family tech support person

The always entertaining LifeHack has an interesting article about How to Survive as the Family Tech Support Guy (or Gal). Most of us with more than a passing interest in technical matters get stuck in the role of tech support for family and friends from time to time. Sometimes this can be a rewarding experience but often it can be frustrating if expectations aren't set early.

1) This probably isn't your full time job. Even if it is, who wants to work extra hours for free? Let the person seeking your help know that you have other obligations and that their problem will have to fit into your schedule. It's okay to be a bit flexible for emergencies but if you continually sacrifice your own downtime to help others, your resentment will show eventually.

2) Find and/or train a first level family tech support person so you can advance to second level support. Usually younger people are good candidates for this since they seem to inherently understand new technologies better than most oldsters. I've been lucky that my stepfather has taken on this role for me. I'm happy to take his calls because I know when he has questions, he's done a complete job of troubleshooting which means that I've got a difficult problem to deal with. I enjoy a good problem now and then. It's telling someone how to convert pictures to a different format for the 23rd time that annoys me, especially when they can do a Google search just as easily as I can.

3) Learn which people are time wasters and avoid them. Few things are more frustrating than spending some of what should be your leisure time doing research to give someone advice only to have them do the opposite because the sales clerk at the local electronics warehouse has given them a contradicting opinion. Wow, 6 months in the industry at minimum wage gives them the equivalent of all your training and/or experience, not to mention the fact that they probably get incentives for pushing whatever crappy product they've recommended. In this case, I bow out gracefully but resolve never to spend time helping that family member or friend again.

More advice for young engineers

A few more pieces of advice occurred to me since I wrote the last post.

1) Never accept counter-offers. The chances are pretty slim that the only reason you were changing jobs is money. An offer of more money or a change of titles probably won't fix all the problems which caused you to take the relatively drastic step of looking for a new job. While it's quite flattering to hear how your old company can't do without your valuable contributions, usually none of the promised changes are permanent aside from a raise in salary. Once you get used to that, and sadly it never takes as long as you'd think it would, you'll probably be dissatisfied again. What's worse is you may have burned a bridge with the company which made you an offer by accepting your old company's counter-offer. It rarely pays to burn bridges.

2) Don't go back to an old company unless you really loved it the first time. This is for much the same reasons as the point above. No matter how much a company claims to have changed, the truth of the matter is company culture rarely changes. Companies with glaring flaws usually never correct those fundamental problems.

3) Socialize with your co-workers on a regular basis. You'll be surprised at how a few lunches or the occasional happy hour can build stronger working relationships which is good for everyone involved. Keep up those relationships once you change jobs. That's the best way to build a wide network of friends. Your network can help you with finding new jobs, recommending ways to solve problems, as well as giving you someplace to do a little venting about workplace frustrations.

Advice to young engineers

A long time ago I was given a bit of advice that has served me well over the years. An engineer with much more experience than I had at the time made the simple statement that "your company doesn't love you". What he was trying to say was there's only one person you can really count on to look out for your best interests and that's you. Over the years, I've refined that simple statement into a philosophy which has helped me make some small amount of sense of how engineering companies work.

1) Never trust head hunters. These paid recruiters have a list of jobs to fill. They'll always try to steer you towards their least attractive positions since those are the hardest to fill. The rare "dream jobs" require almost no work to sell. Recruiters will lie to you about lots of things, including what contracting rate is equivalent to a given full time salary. If you do decide to work with a head hunter, make sure you tell them you want to be informed before they submit you on any job. That will help prevent misunderstandings where you apply to a company only to find out the head hunter has also submitted you. This is especially important if you ever decide to work with multiple head hunters at the same time. Being submitted by several agencies may lead to disputes about which should get paid if you want to accept the job. Companies don't like dealing with that sort of ambiguity and may decide against hiring you altogether to avoid the potential conflict.

2) Rarely trust Human Resources. Their job is to hire and retain workers at the lowest possible cost to the company. The best HR representatives will realize that if they can keep employees happy, the company will benefit in the long run. That's as rare as a car salesman who realizes that if he works with you to find the car that best meets your needs instead of one which offers him the best commission for the least amount of work, he might be rewarded with your return business and referrals. In my 30 years in the computer industry, I've met just two HR reps who I felt were true advocates for employee satisfaction and as a consequence might work to see I was treated fairly. That's not a terribly encouraging percentage.

It probably pays to do some negotiating when you're faced with a job offer. They're probably walking the tightrope of seeing how cheaply they can hire you without being too insulting. That's why they look for hints about how much you were making at your last job. You would think that a job has a specific worth to them which would be easy to calculate which would dictate what they'd offer you but you'd be wrong.

3) Salary increases are almost never fairly distributed. Companies tend to pick company wide target percentages for raises and those percentages tend to remain unchanged as they pass down the line though the executive staff is almost never restricted to such tiny percentages. So the person in the mailroom who has precious little impact on a company's bottom line may have the same target percentage raise as engineers working extra hours. What's frequently worse is when they create a raise pool by giving a first level manager this same target percentage for all the employees who report to him/her. A manager with an outstanding team of workers will either be forced to give the same percentage to everyone or worse yet, to attempt to steal from some employees to correct past salary inequities. Meanwhile there's no incentive for managers to return part of their pool should they have mostly average or below average employees working for them. Keep an eye on what you're worth to other companies in the industry and always make sure your salary measures up.

4) You're only as good as how well your last project or assignment was perceived. The minute you're not viewed as contributing to the bottom line well in excess of what it costs to keep you employed, you're no longer an asset to the company. That puts you at risk of making the list for the next lay-off. Sometimes this is exceptionally unfair because the perception may have been caused by you getting assigned to a project doomed to failure by factors outside your control. Keep an eye out for signs of project failure and explore transfers if things start looking bad. Always keep your resume up-to-date because we've already seen that HR cares more about the company's needs than yours.

5) Strive to give the company good value for their money. It's really your best hope of getting glowing referrals from your manager and co-workers. Part of this requires that you make sure they know how good a job you're doing. Suffering silently doesn't serve anyone except for a boss who isn't interested in trying to reward good workers.

6) Network with former co-workers. No job lasts forever so it pays to always be thinking about what you would do if circumstances were to suddenly change.

7) (courtesy of my friend Chard) A company never treats you any better than they do when they're trying to recruit/hire you. So if they're unresponsive, evasive, or misleading during the recruiting and interviewing process, you should see that as a preview of how things will be when/if you're hired.

Life with Linux

I haven't been very good about posting lately. I've recently started a new job and there's lots to learn. I'm dealing with Packet over SONET (POS) now which is somewhat unfamiliar.

I was given my choice of development platforms at the new job - Windows or Linux. I've grown quite tired of the poor performance, hangs, and crashes which seem to come with using Windows a a development platform so I opted for Linux. That also kept me from having to go through the effort of setting up the CygWin utilities to get a reasonable development environment. With CygWin I can almost tolerate Windows. Without, Windows is just too painful to use. The standard command line tools in Windows are not terribly powerful. The telnet client is buggy and poorly featured. And the command shell is decidedly substandard with its broken pipes and terribly weak wildcard support. Give me regular expressions any day!

I had to install Fedora 7 on the laptop my company provided on my first day there. The Linux install has gotten much better over the years but the Fedora install still isn't as good as the Ubuntu install for finding hardware and picking appropriate drivers. The Fedora install did not recognize the Nvidia video adapter which the laptop has. Fortunately, Fedora now comes with an easier method of updating software called yum.

Once I figured out how to use yum, finding the Nvidia driver was easy. With the Nvidia driver installed, the laptop is now able to drive the 22" LCD monitor I now have at work at its maximum resolution. I always like to drive monitors at their highest resolution because it allows me to fit more information on the screen at one time. That makes me a lot more productive because I'm not forced to switch constantly between windows. What would be ideal is multiple large LCD monitors like Al Gore's setup. Maybe someday I'll find that sort of dream setup.

After living with Linux full time for about 6 weeks, I still like it. Would I recommend it to my parents? Not quite yet, but it's getting close. For most tasks, it's pretty easy. But having to fool around with command line tools like yum and using su to change to the superuser mode (yeah, yeah, I know it's the root user but I'm not assuming everyone who reads this is a Unix type) is sufficiently cryptic to keep me from giving it a hearty recommendation to normal users.

Less we assume that everything has been sweetness and light, running Linux has not been without a few gotchas. Being a long time geek, I can't help fiddling to try to improve my setup. Fedora/Gnome has an optional window manager called Compiz which features a very cool way to switch between virtual desktops. It's got a 3-d cube you can rotate by holding down the Ctrl and Alt keys while dragging the mouse. The cube rotates to show the next virtual desktop. It's much cooler than the desktop switcher which sits in the tray. Of course it relies heavily upon the capabilities of the video driver. Fedora by default checks for updates every time you book. Being a compulsive geek, I always want the latest and greatest software running so I always apply these updates as soon as they're available. Last week, an update to the nvidia driver broke Compiz's rotating cube feature which left me with no way to switch to another virtual desktop. That will teach me to use new features. I uninstalled compiz and went back to the simpler and less elegant method of switching virtual desktops. I've learned my lesson... at least for the time being.

MST3K

The guys from Mystery Science Theater 3000 (AKA MST3K) have a new project called The Film Crew Online. It's sort of a continuation of the work they did with MST3K. I'm giving it a recommendation based on how funny MST3K was.

Michael J. Nelson, the former head writer of MST3K, also has a series of MP3 files you can buy and play at the same time you're watching DVDs. They're available at a site called RiffTrax. It's a funny concept.

Mike Nelson has also written a few really funny books. My favorite is Mind Over Matters though Mike Nelson's Movie Megacheese was pretty entertaining.

Cory Doctorow

Lately I've been listening to Cory Doctorow's podcast available from both his website CrapHound.com as well as from iTunes. On his podcast he frequently reads from his works in progress as well as some of his older stories. I've been finding them immensely entertaining. If you like Cory's work as much as I do, please buy his books to help support his efforts. He's a real stand-up guy. He used to work for the EFF, he gives lectures on the absurdity of DRM around the world, and he licenses many of his works under Creative Commons. All that and he edits one of my favorite blogs, BoingBoing. I don't know where he finds the time to do all of that but I'm glad he does.

Creating strong passwords

Gina Trapani has posted a great article on LifeHacker showing how to choose strong passwords that are also easy to remember. I've been using a variation of this method for a long time and have made slight modifications based on advice I've heard from security experts.

I use 2 classes of passwords. The weakest is used for the multitude of web sites which ask you to create an account but which store no financial or personal data about you. I reserve the strong passwords for web sites which store data which could cause me financial harm if it were to be discovered.

Choose something which works for you but which offers reasonable strength. Use the Password Strength Meter at SecurityStats to test the strength of your chosen method to make sure your passwords can't be broken too easily.

Steve Wozniak interview

10 Zen Monkeys has a great interview with Steve Wozniak (aka Woz), a personal hero of mine.

Woz is a true geek success story. He made his money from sheer technical prowess. The elegance of his designs are the stuff of legend. Through it all he's remained a genuinely nice guy, seemingly unaffected by his success. Just last week he was handing out t-shirts while waiting in line for an iPhone.

If you get the chance check out his book, iWoz. It's a great read about a fascinating guy. Another great book about the early days of Apple is Revolution in The Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made. The stories will give non-engineers a taste of what it's like to create something from scratch.

miniature engines

I just found a New York Times article which brought back fond memories. It's about people who build scale model replicas of engines as a hobby. One guy built an amazing 1/6 scale model of a Chevy V8. These really must be seen to be believed. The pistons are not much larger than a quarter. The rocker arms (the parts which help the valves open and close) are incredibly tiny. It's hard to believe these small engines actually run.

I mentioned that seeing these brought back fond memories. No, I didn't used to build working engines though I did spend many happy hours in my younger days building model cars. This reminded me of one of my favorite books of all time, Trustee from the Tool Room by Nevil Shute. Shute is my favorite author of fiction, bar none, and Trustee is an excellent example of his best work. It's the story of an engineer who builds and writes articles about miniature machines including engines. He undertakes a very long journey due to a strange twist of fate and develops some well deserved self confidence along the way. Sadly, like many of his books, it's no longer readily available in America. You can still get many, if not all, of his books from Amazon UK though.

vi macros

Many years ago I learned vi, the visual editor which came with Unix. At the time it was one of two full screen editors readily available on nearly every version of Unix - the other being Emacs. For some reason, the vi commands seemed more intuitive to me. This was probably because I'd previously spent a fair amount of time using a PC editor distributed by IBM called "PE" (which stood for personal editor). In any case, it turned out to be a fortunate choice because vi quickly became available for every computing platform I used. Emacs was also ported to the same platforms but had higher resource requirements (memory and disk space) than I could afford on my hobbyist budget.

I wouldn't recommend anyone not already familiar with vi go through the steep learning curve to learn its somewhat cryptic commands. For those of us who have gone through that painful learning experience, the commands become second nature.

The end result is that I've been using vi for about 20 years and have come up with a few macros I use to save time. These are two character macros which help me perform various operations on blocks of text. My favorite vi port, vim, has many additional commands such as visual block commands which I use frequently. People learning vim and not needing to switch back to a more standard version of vi will probably not find these terribly useful. However I sometimes still need to edit files on Sun servers where vim is not readily available, so I find my macros pretty handy.

Here's a list of the block macros I use most often.

\m - marks beginning of line block
\y - yanks from beginning of line block to current line
\d - deletes from beginning of line block to current line
\p - pastes block previously yanked or deleted to current line
\i - indent block by shiftwidth
\I - indent block by 1 character
\u - unindent block by shiftwidth
\U - unindent block by 1 character

Here are the actual macro definitions. In the following definitions, the ^M is entered by typing a Control-V (which causes the next character to be entered without any special processing) followed by a Control-M (also known as a carriage return).

" delete lines (from mark to cursor pos. - uses b mark, b buffer)
map \d mb"ad'a`b
" indent one shiftwidth (which I have set to 4 characters)
map \i :'a,.>^M
" indent (1 char)
map \I :set sw=1^M:'a,.>^M:set sw=4^M
" mark beginning of a line block (uses the a mark)
map \m ma
" paste lines previously yanked or deleted at cursor pos.
map \p "aP
" unindent one shiftwidth (4 char)
map \u :'a,.<
" unindent (1 char)
map \U :set sw=1^M:'a,.<^M:set sw=4^M
" yank lines (from mark to cursor pos. - uses b mark, b buffer)
map \y mb"ay'a`b

OpenDNS problems?

For the last few days, I've been noticing my DNS lookups are much slower than usual. Today I actually had to retry several times because of timeouts in a proprietary registration application I couldn't control. I decided to bypass the OpenDNS servers and go back to those provided by my ISP. Strangely enough, my browsing is back to normal speed after making the change. I tried to look at their system status link but got a blank page back after quite a long wait. I wonder if OpenDNS is a victim of their own popularity? Something is causing their web site to behave so slowly.

I guess I'll wait a few days and try them again to see if this is just a short lived glitch.

Fighting Spyware

Jeff Atwood over at Coding Horror has an interesting article about the numerous steps necessary to fight a Spyware infestation. It goes to show that you can't trust web sites just because lots of people link to them.

I run a Firefox plug-in called NoScript which allows the user to select web sites which should be allowed to run scripting languages like Javascript, Java, and Flash. Scripting languages are very dangerous so it's imperative that users only allow their browser to run scripts from trusted web sites. I'd caution people that they should mistrust all web sites by default. Just because a friend sends you a link is not enough reason to trust a web site.

It's much easier to prevent a Spyware infestation in the first place than it is to remove one from a PC after it's gained a foothold.

Goodbye Mr. Wizard

Don Herbert, TV's Mr. Wizard, has died (see article). I credit Mr. Wizard for instilling a love of science in me as he did for several generations of kids. You've really got to admire people like him and Carl Sagan for helping popularize science.

Saving electricity

O'Reilly Radar's blog (always an entertaining read) has an interesting article about tools you can use to help save power. I picked up a Kill A Watt not too long ago and was amazed by how much power is consumed by my computers when they're in standby. Other things like the cable box and DVD player also use a fair amount while they're supposed to be powered off.

We all need to take steps to conserve power wherever possible.

Stan Kelly-Bootle

The latest issue of the ACM Queue has an interesting article by Stan Kelly-Bootle. I always loved reading Stan's articles in Unix Review and Software Development magazines. Sometimes his column was the only thing I'd find of interest in the magazine. Thank goodness for complimentary subscriptions, eh? I always got a chuckle and usually learned something by reading his articles. He has a real gift for making technical discussions interesting. Check out his article if you have time.

Also worth reading is his book, The Devil's DP Dictionary. I purchased my copy quite a while ago which is a lucky thing as it seems a little tough to find copies. It's very amusing.

New note: A good friend has pointed out that the new edition of Stan's book is called The Computer Contradictionary. That may even be the edition I have... it would be tough to tell since I can't lay my hands on it at the moment.

Possible solution to missing songs in iTunes 7.2

Some users have reported that iTunes 7.2 doesn't see some of their music. The songs in question seems to be ones which were originally purchased from the iTunes store and then later converted somehow to the MP3 format.

One possible fix being reported is to force iTunes to recreate your library via the following procedure.

The new iTunes gives you the choice of paying 30 cents more for music which isn't protected with DRM. Currently this option is only available for songs on the EMI label but I'm hoping more labels follow EMI's lead. The iTunes store gives you the ability to upgrade any songs purchased with DRM for the difference in cost (30 cents).

Another option you may want to investigate is the ability to "complete albums". If you've purchased a few songs from an album in the past and have since decided that you should have opted for the entire album, you can now get the remaining songs for the difference in price between the songs you've already purchased and the cost of the album. If you're interested in this option, be aware that it's only available for a few more weeks.

Parallels 3.0

Parallels, the popular software which allows Mac users to run Windows, Linux, or other Operating Systems in a window, will soon have a new version available. They're offering reduced prices for purchases and updates now through June 6th.

The most compelling reason to upgrade is the new support for DirectX 9.0. This allows 3d games to be run under Parallels.

Another cool feature is called SmartSelect. This allows you to associate a file type with any application installed on your system regardless of whether the application is Mac or PC based. This works with their Coherence feature which runs just the PC based application in a window without requiring a window for the Windows OS itself. This makes it appear as if the Windows applications are running natively on your Mac.

This is great news. I can't wait to upgrade so I can increase the number of games which will run on my Mac.

Google Experimental Search features

On my commute home today I was listening to a podcast from DL.tv. They mentioned Google Experimental which I'd never heard of but their description sounded pretty intriguing.

Google has added a way to do searches and display the output on a timeline. For example, you can search for the term "civil rights" and have the matching web pages displayed on a timeline. It makes it easy to isolate just the pages which discuss civil rights in the 1950s. Check out the civil rights timeline example search via this link.

They also have a way to to display search results on a map. One of their examples is to search for past Olympic sites. Check out this link to see the results from this search query.

Last but not least, there are a number of other cool new tools at Google Labs. I was familiar with some of these but some I'd never heard of before. I guess I really ought to poke around their "more" button to see what's new at Google more often, eh? Some of these new features look pretty handy.

50 Most Significant Fantasy/SciFi Books

Tonight I was catching up on some old posts I'd missed on the blog of an old friend, Chard Nelson, when I happened upon an interesting list of the 50 Most Significant SciFi and Fantasy Books of the Last 50 Years. Following the links back from his posting, I find that everyone posting this list seems to be marking the books they've read in bold. I've also taken the liberty of marking books I really liked with italics.


The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
The Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov
Dune, Frank Herbert
Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein
A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin
Neuromancer, William Gibson
Childhood's End, Arthur C. Clarke
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick
The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley
Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe
A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr.
The Caves of Steel, Isaac Asimov
Children of the Atom, Wilmar Shiras
Cities in Flight, James Blish
The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett
Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison
Deathbird Stories, Harlan Ellison
The Demolished Man, Alfred Bester
Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany
Dragonflight, Anne McCaffrey
Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card
The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Stephen R. Donaldson
The Forever War, Joe Haldeman
Gateway, Frederik Pohl
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, J.K. Rowling
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
I Am Legend, Richard Matheson
Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice
The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin
Little, Big, John Crowley
Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny
The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick
Mission of Gravity, Hal Clement
More Than Human, Theodore Sturgeon
The Rediscovery of Man, Cordwainer Smith
On the Beach, Nevil Shute
Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke
Ringworld, Larry Niven
Rogue Moon, Algis Budrys
The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien
Slaughterhouse-5, Kurt Vonnegut
Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson
Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner
The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester
Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein
Stormbringer, Michael Moorcock
The Sword of Shannara, Terry Brooks
Timescape, Gregory Benford
To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Philip Jose Farmer


I'm not sure I agree with all the books on the list. There are definitely some omissions I'd like to correct. For starters, I'd add more books by Theodore Sturgeon, Kurt Vonnegut, Robert Heinlein, and Larry Niven. If I weren't constrained by the SciFi/Fantasy category, I'd add a lot more by Nevil Shute, my favorite author of any genre. Then I'd add a few favorite books from more recent authors like Spider Robinson and Rudy Rucker. Ah well, I guess no list is perfect.

Do it yourself Firefox extensions

LifeHacker has a great how-to article on building Firefox extensions. They make it sound so easy I might just have to give it a try.

Speaking of Firefox extensions, here are a few of my favorites in roughly the order of usefulness they have to me:

NoScript - allows you to choose which web sites are allowed to run scripts in your browser. Since scripts have huge potential for delivering malicious software to your computer, this is very important indeed.

Google Browser Sync - This provides an easy way to keep your browser bookmarks and settings synched up between multiple machines.

Book Burro - This plug-in senses when you're looking at a book on one of several web sites to purchase books. Once it realizes you're looking for a specific book, it presents you with the prices at several web sites so you can find the lowest price. The list of sites it checks is configurable.

Long Titles - This prevents long tooltips windows from being truncated. Since a number of the web comics I read make use of tooltips to add hidden messages, this is very handy to have.

OpenDNS

I've recently changed the DNS server setting on my WiFi router from the DNS servers run by my ISP with those from OpenDNS. OpenDNS runs large DNS caches which can speed up your address lookups. They also compare all URLs submitted with a phishing site blacklist to help keep you from falling prey to phishing schemes. They also correct common typing errors in URLs. For example if you type "google.ocm", they will change it to "google.com" to prevent a lookup error.

On a related note, you may notice occasionally that address loopups for an URL you've typed into your browser may fail. This can be a sign that the DNS cache on your local PC has a stale entry. Here's a site which shows how to flush your DNS cache. They've got procedures for flushing the DNS caches on Windows, Linux, and Mac computers.

Space DVDs

I just started watching a DVD set I recently picked up of the HBO series From the Earth to the Moon. I hadn't watched this series since it was first aired on HBO in 1998 so I'd forgotten just how great it was. It really stresses just how monumental the task of landing a man on the moon really was.

It also serves as a great companion to Ron Howard's film Apollo 13, another magnificent film for science geeks.

If you haven't seen either of these, I highly recommend both. I'm something of a space program buff so I watch any film about it which comes out. I also liked The Right Stuff (both the film and the book) a lot.

Needless to say, I'm excited about NASA's recently announced plans to return to the moon. This is the type of challenge that people like me with an engineering mindset dream about.