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Interview with a comment spammer.
New Apple Powerbooks released today. Still G4. Very small bump in processor speed (to 1.5 and 1.67 Ghz.) 512 megs RAM now standard using 1 DIMM, so going to 1 Gig is only $150 more from Apple (probably a little less if you buy yourself.) It's about time they stopped with the 256 meg nonesense. Slightly faster hard drives (5400 RPM.) And slightly bigger video card with the option of adding a 128 meg ATI with dual-link DVI support for driving the 30 inch Cinema Display (I can dream!)
The trackpad now supports scrolling (horizontal and vertical) through an interesting sounding interface - touch the pad with two fingers at once and it then acts as a scroll wheel type surface (drag up and down and the page moves up and down.)
Nothing to get too excited about, but lots of nice little things and the prices drop a bit too.
Looks like Cingular, following in Verizon's footsteps, will also disable the Bluetooth DUN profile on the Treo 650. (DUN stands for 'Dial Up Networking' and is the part of the bluetooth stack that lets a bluetooth equipped computer use a bluetooth cellphone as a modem.) Jerks. Why not just charge by the bit and let us do what we want?
Again, I don't mind paying! But at least offer me what I want to pay for. Do they not like profits? We are talking about telecoms, so judging by their recent performance the answer might actually be yes.
The Motorola E815 looks really nice. Due 2nd quarter 2005. Presumably on Verizon since it's EV-DO. But will they (Verizon) let the bluetooth do file transfer? And what about (even less likely,) acting as a modem? With EV-DO speeds this would be very reasonable. So far Verizon wants you to buy the PC Card version if you want to use EV-DO for your computer's data connection. This is silly. Look, I don't mind paying more, so why not give me the option of using my phone for both? I don't want to pay $x/month for my EV-DO phone plus $100/month for my EV-DO data access, especially when I don't need voice and data at the same time (I barely need voice at all.) Why not offer a single package in the form of a cellphone/modem?
Still, until Cingular rolls out UMTS, Verizon is the only way to go for high speed cellular in the U.S. So I guess they can be jerks if they want.
Jerks.
John Perry Barlow's The Intimate Planet is a funny blog about meeting random people through Skype.
The bottom line is this: they reached at random out into the Datacloud and found a real friend. And I feel like I have been graced with a real friend in both of them. Given the fact that I've been getting interesting messages from distant strangers since 1985, why do I think the big deal? Why is this different? Because these strangers have voices. There's a lot more emotional bandwidth in the human voice. I'm always surprised by the Meatspace version of someone I've only encountered in ASCII. I'm rarely surprised by someone I've only met on the phone. But one doesn't get random phone calls from Viet Nam or China, or at least one never could before.Skype changes all that. Now anybody can talk to anybody, anywhere. At zero cost. This changes everything. When we can talk, really talk, to one another, we can connect at the heart.His use of the word "intimate" reminds me of Joi Ito's formulation: "full time intimate community". This is the big picture version of why I am interested in all this technology.
The potential of establishing a real emotional connection is exponentially advantaged.....
....Anyway, I feel as if the Global Village became real to me that night, and, indeed, it has become the Global Dinner Party. All at once. The small world has become the intimate world.
I'm beginning to think this Internet thing may turn out to be emotionally important after all.
Google finally has a plan to deal with comment spam! And all the big players are on board. Great. The idea is simple: hyperlinks tagged with rel="nofollow" don't confer any google juice, thus hopefully taking away the reason for the spam in the first place.
I would install this feature here right away except for one thing. We already strip out *all* HTML from anonymous comments. Links are not in any way possible. And we still get comment spam! Still, maybe if everyone does this it will help. Clearly the situation is out of control and it is worth trying something.
Tim Bray is noticing what everyone else who runs a weblog is noticing: A Referrer Spamstorm.
PHP is getting SSH. That is an ability I have wanted for some time. This would finally let me write the file uploading scripts I want (at least for people running unix which is a lot of us here.) Using form field uploading from the client browser is fine for getting images onto the server. But for bigger things like music and video I've been having people use FTP. Those few extra steps are kind of a drag though. FTP is easy enough, but it's so inelegant. Way too close to the metal for what an end user should have to deal with.
Unfortunately getting this running is a bit over my head at the moment. Hopefully I will be able to find some documentation I can understand. Or maybe this is something that could just show up as a built in function in the next release of PHP? That would be the best for me.
Computers are strange in that you can do really powerful things with them, but you have to know exactly what to say in order to get the desired result. Or maybe that's not so strange.
Anyway, like most servers, mine has PHP installed as an apache module. That means I can't invoke PHP, or a PHP script, from the command line (to the best of my knowledge.)
But like most problems, it's just a matter of finding the right way to ask:
lynx -dump http://www.digitalmediatree.com/somephpscript.php
does exactly what I want, although through a mechanism I would have never thought to use. Lynx is a text based web browser that can be used from the command line. The -dump argument just suppresses all output from lynx. And the URL given is the page for lynx to open. Of course that page is a PHP scirpt, so the result is that somephpscript.php gets run from the command line. Genius.
This means I can now invoke PHP scripts using procmail. Very nice. Before this I was calling Perl scripts that would then use HTTP::Request::Common and LWP::UserAgent to make a request to the PHP script.
That was a lot of work that is now unnecessary since I discovered the little lynx trick.
Wow. Joel Johnson, the gizmodo guy, somehow got a big interview with Bill Gates out at CES. In part four he asks gates about the 'IP rights people are communists' comment and gets into a pretty good talk with him about DRM. It's one thing to complain about it on some obscure blog, and it's quite another to sit down with Bill Gates and ask him some pretty tough questions to his face. No way would a mainstream reporter have asked some of these things.
Gizmodo: What seems to me - what hurts my feelings - I feel like I, as a customer, want Microsoft to be totally on my side. In that, as far as the people that are producing things, that might want more DRM and might make it inconvenient, I don't understand what it necessarily benefits you to help them.Nice. And he does pretty well for a while as Gates tries to derail him with a bunch of bullshit. But Joel keeps coming back. Not rude, but persistent.
Unfortunately in the end he misses going for the kill (or maybe he chose not to.) Gates confused him with the "but what about medical records? Don't you want those to be protected?" argument. It almost seemed valid to me at first too, but of course the answer is "of course I want my medical records protected. But I want to hold the key! You're building into the platform the ability for *other* people to hold keys to the bits on *my* computer. Why are you doing that? Shouldn't you be for me?"
It's not very long. Really worth reading since you never see Gates have to answer anyone talking to him like this.