Chris Blanc: Play and Projects: Blog
Archive for February, 2008
Tuesday, February 26th, 2008
The enlightenment was a beautiful thing. People cast aside dogma and authority. They started to think for themselves. Natural science flourished. Understanding of the real world increased. The hegemony of religion slowly declined. Real universities were created and eventually democracy took hold. The modern world was born. Until recently we were making good progress. So what went wrong?
The past 30 years or so have been an age of endarkenment. It has been a period in which truth ceased to matter very much, and dogma and irrationality became once more respectable.^
That consensual reality thing, that sounds so good when you’re on acid or in church? I guess it’s for real. Could mean problems. Definitely the prevalence of both corporate symbols on everything we own, and religion infusing our politics to a fanatical degree, as well as an inability to admit that despite great wealth we are as a society often unsure of our future, suggests a dark age.
On the other hand, many of us don’t suffer these problems because we haven’t bought into the consensual reality.
Thinking for yourself sounds great, but to paraphrase Bill Cosby, what if you’re an asshole? (His original comment was about “mind expanding” drugs.)
Posted in Culture | No Comments »
Tuesday, February 26th, 2008
Life imitates literature yet again:
Officers said they began searching for [the] car after a grocery store employee phoned authorities to report that a car leaving the store’s parking lot was missing a wheel.
Lt. Shaun McColgan said [the driver], who was behind the wheel of the car when police arrived, admitted to being intoxicated, but said it did not matter because “he ‘wasn’t driving.’”
The police said [the driver] did not know his car was missing a wheel, nor did he know where or why the crucial car part might have come off the vehicle. The officers said they retraced the path followed by [the driver] — aided by the scratch marks his car left on the pavement — but were unable to locate the missing component. ^
And the original, as written by F. Scott Fitzgerald:
Half a dozen fingers pointed at the amputated wheel—he stared at it for a moment, and then looked upward as though he suspected that it had dropped from the sky.
“It came off,†some one explained.
He nodded.
“At first I din’ notice we’d stopped.â€
A pause. Then, taking a long breath and straightening his shoulders, he remarked in a determined voice:
“Wonder’ff tell me where there’s a gas’line station?â€
At least a dozen men, some of them little better off than he was, explained to him that wheel and car were no longer joined by any physical bond.
“Back out,†he suggested after a moment. “Put her in reverse.â€
“But the WHEEL’S off!â€
He hesitated.
“No harm in trying,†he said. ^
Denial of responsibility seems an eternal trait.
Posted in Literature | 1 Comment »
Thursday, February 21st, 2008
Some of my friends say they’re a good idea because they fear the incompetence of others. Others say the cameras are an awful idea, but I think it’s because they’re afraid of getting caught. I just detest them. Cameras do not understand special circumstances, and they prompt a very negative reaction of slamming on the brakes suddenly when approaching a stale green turning yellow.
Photoenforced lists red light cameras and camera speed traps around you. If you can’t avoid them, see if you can run into them so I can avoid them.
Posted in Culture | No Comments »
Thursday, February 21st, 2008
But the Eee wasn’t the first to employ the broader concept of a mobile Web device that looked like a notebook PC, but was meant to function more as a secondary device. That was the idea brought to us by Palm founder Jeff Hawkins with the Foleo.
Hawkins, who invented the Palm Pilot and the Treo, insisted the Foleo was “the best idea he’d ever had.” The product was roundly panned by critics and eventually dumped before it even came to market late last summer.
The idea of a small form factor computer that is tinier than a notebook with solid-state memory, running a light operating system, Web access for e-mail is being tweaked and advanced by some of the biggest names in computing. ^
Over the course of your life, you will be told many times how wrong you are by other people who are projecting on to you. They are afraid you are right. They have a vested interest in you being wrong. The simple math is that if they can convince you you’re wrong, you give up, and they are safe. (Author Tom Wolfe, who draws our attention to things like this, invented the term homo loquax to demonstrate how much language changed humanity.)
The Palm Foleo was such a case. It was a great idea, because the average user (90% of all tasks) wants a way to quickly check email, surf the web, and do basic office operations. We’re not talking document authoring on a grand scale, but keeping meeting notes, sending emails, entering data in basic spreadsheets, maybe a small amount of conceptual sketching — that’s it.
The industry would rather have consumed its young than accepted this, since its business model was to cram many “features” into a machine, jack up the price, sell the customer on its whiz-bangness, and make a fat profit margin. This kept Dell going for many years, until they ran into a brick wall. The customer no longer saw the computer like a new car. Now, it’s like a toaster or television. We like the newest stuff, but as long as the old one works OK for the files and hardware our friends play with, it’s good enough.
Dell and its ilk were used to the easy hunting glory days of the early internet, when everyone and their dog wanted to get online and so was buying a computer. Your first computer, you’ll spend more on. As time goes on and you realize that even if you were using a ten year old machine today, there are still ways to do the basic things you need, you stop caring. At about the second computer purchase, the average American blinked, said, “Well, our current TV is good enough…” and went off and spent the money on gasoline instead.
The paradox of big computing is that it relies on not only a busted business model, but a busted usability concept. The user does not need more features, since 90% of users will not use most of those features. The user needs expandability, cheaply, so they can add features as they need. They do not need a ton of horsepower. Actually, they need less, because more horsepower means more cooling gear and other restraints. The average user now wants an efficient, secure, reliable version of the 500 mhz computer they could have bought in 2001 — and if you’ve seen a desktop box running BeOS/Haiku, Linux or BSD, you can tell how much power a 500 mhz machine really is.
Asus is about to make a fortune with the Eee PC because it delivered what Apple promised, and what most users want: simplicity for most everyday functions. Very few of us need any software beyond the major packages. Even if we do, we are often doing so out of preference. There just are not that many tasks in life, or that many that need to be done on a PC. The average person is not a geek and they don’t need overpowered hardware.
Palm was ahead of the game. It’s too bad they let the big manufacturers, including Apple and Dell, convince them (indirectly) that the Foleo was going to fail. Palm, unlike Asus, wanted to “get along” and “play well” with big computing, and that meant listening to Intel ferry back fear and doubt from Cupertino and Austin. Asus doesn’t want to get along well with these people. They’ve sold them motherboards for years. They want to replace them, and as long as they keep resurrecting consumer-positive ideas, they’re on track to do that.
Posted in Information Technology | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, February 20th, 2008
This blog post is more of a scribble with some valuable information that at least to me seemed hard to find. The short answer is that you follow the instructions in the WebWorks Help 3.0 guide, and do a bit of trial and error to update that format. The slightly longer answer is this list.
Manually merged help can be created by taking two or more existing help systems (not their source files), and combining them with a little sleight of hand and the aid of a nifty little program called wwhelp5.exe, which is what indexes the content in each help system. Merging help systems allows them to share a table of contents, an index, and a search engine. You might use this approach if you have several projects, and your best customer orders three of them and wants them to share a help system.
- Create a new folder for your merged project, and copy every top-level folder which contains content (as opposed to code, a.k.a. the wwhdata and wwhelp folders) to the merged project folder.
- Go into one of your top-level folders which contains content, and copy the wwhelp folder, wwhelp folder, and index.html file, and paste them at the root of your merged project folder.
- In the root of your merged folder, go into the wwhelp folder, and open the file books.xml in a text editor.
- Find xml entries that look like <Book directory=”folder-name” >. Change these entries to point to your top level content folders, relative to the root (if your folder in the root is named EatingCrow, enter directory=”EatingCrow”).
- Find the text showbooks=”false” and change it to showbooks=”true.”
- In the root of your merged folder, go into the wwhdata folder, open the xml folder, and open the files.xml file in a text editor.
- Find xml entries that look like <Document title=”folder-title” href=”folder-pathname” />
- Change these to use the correct title (shows up in table of contents) and href to your top-level folders with content, but append this suffix to each /wwhdata/xml/files.xml.
- In each top level folder, open the wwhdata folder, open the common folder, and then open towwhdir.js in a text editor. Locate the line that reads { return “” } and replace it with return { “../” }
- Open a command window (Start->Run->”cmd”) and type a variation on this command:
“C:\Program files\WebWorks\ePublisher Pro\Helpers\WebWorks\wwhelp5.exe -wwhdata “C:\path-to-merged-project\wwhdata” -wwhelp “C:\path-to-merged-project\wwhelp”
That’s it. I apologize for the hasty nature of these notes, but they contain everything necessary to get a moderately experienced WWeP user up and running with this procedure.
Posted in Technical Communications | No Comments »
Friday, February 15th, 2008
I read Doc Searls whenever I get a chance:
Ralph thinks We the People means We the Government. So do most of your basic Democrats. Your basic Republicans think We the People means We the Market. So Democrats like solving problems with Big Government while Republicans like solving problems with big market. ^
 This is an interesting division that reveals how politics is not duality, but a circularity. If Democrats on the left believe in government, they’re all for centralized power, which I’d always thought as a tenet of the right. But as Searls says, the Republicans on the right believe in emergent forces and markets, which makes them more like anarchists with credit cards in my book. When I read stuff like this, I feel less compelled to see politics as anything but a show projected on the wall of the cave, while the real power lies in demographic change, convincing masses of people of ideas, technologies and markets.
To this we add some Malthusian mathematics:
Adding together the component partial utilities, the rational herdsman concludes that the only sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd. And another…. But this is the conclusion reached by each and every rational herdsman sharing a commons. Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit — in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all. ^
We each want that house in the suburbs, and we’re all using politics to duke it out. It will be interesting to see how this is resolved from 2015-2020 as oil supplies pass the profitable retrieval point using today’s technology.
Posted in Culture | No Comments »
Wednesday, February 13th, 2008
The password pressure of modern life means that 61% of us use the same password wherever we can, according to a survey commissioned by digital communications agency @www. In fact, with more than one in 10 people having 50 or more separate online accounts to log into, many are not only using the same password for everything, but also writing all their passwords down in one handy place, such as the noticeboard in their office, a document on their desktop, or a Post-it note stuck to their computer. ^
 The paradox of computer security is that we must consider the human element, which is that although security is a big concern, it’s something people expect to just work. We don’t expect our cars to blow up because we put a lot of effort into engineering them. Similarly, we expect security to “just work” with little investment by us.
However, it does require careful designing to make this happen. One part of careful design is accepting reality as it is. In the case of security, this is that users are forced to know at least a dozen passwords to do the minimum required for having an online presence. It’s no surprise that, after wasting a few hours finding lost passwords with the kind of barely functional features available on most websites, they start using the same password everywhere. I bet the number’s higher than 61%.
As we approach Web3.0 being christened, one idea that’s essential is some digital equivalent of Real ID. I think it should be based on an online identity, not a real-world one, so people can stay hidden if they prefer. It should be relatively centralized, and have an identity that other sites can then associate with internal records. But let’s stop ignoring the elephant, which is that when you require users to have dozens of passwords, they’ll use the same one in multiple places, and eventually this will lead to compromised systems.
“A compromised [multifunction printer] is dangerous for a number of reasons. First and foremost, no one in the enterprise pays attention to them. That lack of visibility makes for a very attractive attack platform,” said Brendan O’Connor, a researcher who was among the first to call attention to the printer security risk during a Black Hat talk in 2006. ^
In Hollywood schlockbusters like Live Free or Die Hard, Hackers and Mission Impossible, hackers decide to bust into a major site, so they go attack the mainframe by smashing through routers, firewalls and impossible looking security screens with holographic cryptograms. In real life, hackers work like reporters researching a story. They nibble around the edges, then ask the right questions, then finally stage the big confrontation.
First, you gain entry to a site. Often this is by calling someone up and claiming you’re security and you need their password, or by snooping wi-fi networks for someone who might be using the same password on Yahoo! mail as on his corporate network. Then you get into the network, often through a printer or some simplistic trojan you mail to a secretary. Finally, you start by compromising machine around your actual target, so you can hide your traces and fake validation credentials. For the really big hack, the target should never know it was hacked if you’re good, because to it what happened was a normal transaction. Its infrastructure — the hacked network — can be all you need.
So much for the big screen. These common security annoyances are a bigger threat than the media fearmongering. Hacking is a task like any other, and it rewards research and diligence more than the ability to type cryptic commands quickly.
Posted in Computer Security | No Comments »
Wednesday, February 13th, 2008
 My old buddy and debate homey Alexandra Smoots-Hogan is running for Judge here in Texas. I know her as a person of integrity and tolerance, and respect how she has worked hard for her status in the legal community. She’s running as a Democrat for Judge of the 164th Judicial District, Harris County, Texas, and the link above is to her funding kickoff party. In the picture, she’s on the left.
Posted in People | No Comments »
Wednesday, February 13th, 2008
 Allison Tartalia is an old friend now making it in the world as a singer-songwriter in New York City. Her music can best be described as throaty folk with jazz rhythms and ecclectic influences. Putting her background in drama to good use, she has taken this form of music and given it a storyteller’s quirky, vibrant gaze. She’s got several MP3s online here: Let it Go, Advent of You, Absolutely Fabulous.
Posted in People | No Comments »
Wednesday, February 13th, 2008
From William Gibson:
I suspect I have spent just about exactly as much time actually writing as the average person my age has spent watching television, and that, as much as anything, may be the real secret here. ^
You will meet many “artists” in this life. Most of them are not serious about writing for four to six hours a day, or even for three, or even writing at all. Gibson said what all of us are thinking when we see this phenomenon.
Posted in Culture | No Comments »
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