Stretching the Truth: I don't understand why AOL doesn't flush their profile database when screen names are no longer in use. I've been desiring the "camworld" AOL screen name for some time now and have done what I can to make sure it's really a dead account, yet AOL does not allow me to register it as a new screen name because someone a long time ago had an AOL account with the name "camworld". I believe that Earthlink also does this with their userIDs. The only reason I can think of is that both Earthlink and AOL are continuing to include dead accounts in their user tally so as to make it sound like they have a larger number of users than they actually do. How many of AOL's 30+ million users are actual active users and active screen names? When AOL does their figures, are they counting the number of screen names in use or the number of paying accounts? Are they falsely claiming more users than they actually have? Lots of people use multiple screen names for different purposes. For instance, I have three AOL screen names and five Yahoo accounts, but I am a single user. Has anyone done any research on this? Can anyone at AOL tell me if there is a way to acquire a screen name that is no longer being used?
An analogy to the above. Let's say that between 1994 and 2000, 900 million copies of some version of Netscape were downloaded. But it's well-known that a high percentage of the same users downloaded new versions of the same browser on a regular basis. If you follow the logic of this thinking, it's possible that Microsoft is doing the same thing with their numbers when reporting how many MSN and Hotmail users they have. And if that's the case, be suspicious of how many Passport users Microsoft claims to have as it's likely the're aggregating their Hotmail users, their MSN users, their .NET site partners, etc. into one big number to make it sound more impressive. Microsoft's claim of the number of Hotmail accounts is likely false because we all know that spammers are using account setup scripts to set up one-time-use email accounts for catching replies to spam.
Man, Japan always gets the cool stuff first. Check out this UFO-shaped remote control. Funky.
Linux Journal: XSLT Powers a New Wave of Web Applications
On Dave Farber's Interesting-People mailing list is an email to Dan Gillmor from a guy at Microsoft that talks about why Microsoft Entourage does not have Excahnge Server capabilities. This has been a huge problem for me. Microsoft's incompetence in producing a quality email client that works with their own damn mail/calendar server is clearly showing though here. Entourage is clearly the best email client ever made for the Mac, but Microsoft insists on shipping a separate email client thats work with their Exchange server.
Here's an interesting article at Time about the rise (and fall?) of DoCoMo, the giant Japanese cell phone carrier that gave the world i-mode, the very popular Web-on-a-phone technology. There are currently more than 30 million Japanese subscribers to this service and i-mode is now being launched in Europe.
Linux Journal: Linux in the US Government
47 comments made by the public to the U.S. DOJ on the U.S. vs. Microsoft Settlement. Good reading, even if you don't care about the fate of Microsoft or the computing industry.
Comparing Bill Gates to Johann Gutenberg is a bit over-the-top. This entire article (ahem, Microsoft press release) at Salon is a little over-the-top. Yeah, Microsoft's .NET is an interesting implementation of the already well-known and well-tested concepts of Web services, but it's not "revolutionary." Any journalist who thinks so has obviously been snowballed by Microsoft's well-paid public relations people.
Is the Times of India a reputable news source? This article saying that the U.S. military is dropping $100 bills in envelopes with a picture of George Bush over Afghanistan sounds a little fishy. In fact, it sounds like made-up news. Is it true? A reader wrote in and said that this story is actually from the Reuters feed. Interesting... [via dangerousmeta]
Fun with Spam: I received a piece of spam at one of my Yahoo accounts with a 1-800 number, so naturally I called:
Them: Hello, Sweepstakes Center, this is Amber. Me: Yes, I'd like to speak with Jose please. Them: I'm sorry, there's no one there by that name. You have the wrong number. [click] I call back: Them: Hello, Sweepstake Center, this is Amber. Me: Yes, can I speak with Bob please. Them: There's on one there by that name. You have the wrong number. [click] I call back: Them: Hello, Sweepstakes Center, this is Jerome. Me: Yes, can I speak with Mr. Hormel please. Them: I don't think there's anyone here by that name. Hang on... [In the background I hear Jerome asking, "Hey is there a Mr. Hormel here?" Them: There's no one here by that name, you must have the wrong number. Me: Yeah, you guys make a packaged meat product called Spam, I'd like to speak to someone about it. Them: I'm sorry, we don't know nothing about any Spam here. Me: Can I speak with your supervisor? [click, I try calling back a few times but no one answers. I'm sure it's because they have my phone number logged.
[click] I call back:
Them: Hello, Sweepstake Center, this is Amber. Me: Yes, can I speak with Bob please. Them: There's on one there by that name. You have the wrong number.
Them: Hello, Sweepstakes Center, this is Jerome. Me: Yes, can I speak with Mr. Hormel please. Them: I don't think there's anyone here by that name. Hang on... [In the background I hear Jerome asking, "Hey is there a Mr. Hormel here?" Them: There's no one here by that name, you must have the wrong number. Me: Yeah, you guys make a packaged meat product called Spam, I'd like to speak to someone about it. Them: I'm sorry, we don't know nothing about any Spam here. Me: Can I speak with your supervisor?
[click, I try calling back a few times but no one answers. I'm sure it's because they have my phone number logged.
So, if you want to waste their time and money and fight spam at the same time, call 1-800-430-9639. If we're enough of a nuisance maybe we can shut these lame kinds of "Sweepstakes" companies down.
Update: I tried one last time and got through. This time I got to speak with a supervisor. Apparently this "Sweepstakes Center" spammed a bunch of addresses they got from an organization called GroupLotto.com. Honestly, I believe that these people don't realize what they are doing is wrong and that this GroupLotto organization has obtained email addresses from somewhere. The representative I spoke with before being transferred to a supervisor told me that my email address and home phone number were likely obtained by purchasing the information from one of the credit card companies I have an account with. Aha! So that's the trail. I used this particular Yahoo account with my NextCard account. You may notice a disturbing trend here regarding NextCard, who earned a couple of juicy links and comments last week.
You know spam has become a serious problem when mailing list administrators have resorted to converting email addresses to images in order to fool the email-harvesting spambots. What an interesting and intriguing solution, though! Go ImageMagick! [via Joe Stewart]
I started my job in New York two years ago today. So I guess this would be my two-year New York anniversary.
ArsTechnica: Overview of Microsoft's .NET. Still reading this...
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I have an acquaintence here in NYC who has been struggling for a while now to find someone who knows the intricacies of building out a web site that has an ecommerce back-end, i.e. is able to accept credit cards. The site also needs a user management system and the product database requires that some products have expiration dates assigned to them. If you're in the New York City area and have experience doing this and can take on a new client, please let me know so that I can refer you.
My brother is putting a couple of things together over at MrBarrett.com. Very intriguing. Escape from the Microsoft Exchange Server tyranny!
Microsoft is quietly changing the fine print of a lot of their applications to make it legal for them to sniff your computer over the Internet and automatically download/install upgrades and other maintenance software. Wait a minute, this is just crazy. How soon before a security hole in something Microsoft has written starts allowing for corporate espionage and the theft of company trade secrets (already possible, BTW). I think that companies that deal with highly sensitive information need to seriously re-evaluate the use of Microsoft OS's and software within their organizations. It gets worse. What if a security hole in Microsoft's stuff starts creating national security problems? Wouldn't the appropriate thing be for the NSA to shut Microsoft down until they've minimized the threat? Microsoft needs to be held responsible for the crapware they're releasing onto the world. They've regularly put their own profits and motives ahead of their customers' needs and security requirements, routinely pushing insecure software out the door before it was ready. They're now doing the same thing with their .NET initiative, which is the foundation for their distributed software campaign. I for one, am very afraid of what Microsoft is trying to do to the future of computing. It's be a whole different story if Microsoft didn't have such a piss-poor history in the security department because I do think that networked computing and distributed software is the right direction; I just don't think Microsoft should be the one to give it to us.
No.
Apparently the FTC wants to now do something about spam. I wonder if they will be successful. Spam will always be around until ISPs are proactive about it and start instantly blocking offending mailservers. Spam-reporting techniques are almost to the point of being real-time, so once a mail server has been identified as a culprit of spam it can be blocked until it's proven to be secure again. ISPs can also put in global filters that automatically block any email that meets the requirements of being spam. They might want to start with blocking any HTML-based email. OK, yeah that's kind of a joke but there is some truth to it. Easily 90% of the spam my filters catch is sent as HTML-based email, whereas only about 10% of my legitimate email is HTML-based.
Somebody keeps clicking reload on CamWorld about every 10-20 minutes (it's random, not a spider). I did an nslookup on the IP number and I was not surprised to see what internal network the requests are coming from. Can you guess who it is? I guess some people have nothing better to do with their time...
A reader from Denver writes:
MSFT is holding an event for the .NET rollout here in Denver, and attendees must register with a Passport account. I figure the best place to get an email address (required for Passport) is a free account at fuckmicrosoft.com.
Etrade's Embarassing Oversight: A long-time reader writes:
I found it interesting that Etrade.com will introduce their upgraded web site soon and has a preview posted on their site. Being exclusively a Mac and Netscape user, I tried to look at the new site. I couldn't get it to load. I called Etrade tech support and was told that it will ONLY work with Internet Explorer on the Mac.
I noticed this too since I regularly use Etrade with Netscape 4.x on my Mac. I haven't had time to bother talking with Etrade's people but I find this incredibly disappointing. The company I am currently contracting with services the banking and financial markets and sells web-based data and news services to a very wide variety of clients. Our rule of thumb is to design for IE first but to not "break" anything in NN4 making it not usable. This means no IE-only client-side Javascript, no non-cross-platform DHTML whizzies, and no layout tables nested more than three deep. But we don't simply say "Sorry, you must use IE to use this site/technology" unless our clients specifically request it. It makes no sense for Etrade to specifically lock out the small percentage of their users that are still using Netscape 4.x. I guess it's time for me to find a new brokerage and bank. Not happy about this at all. Send me your recommendations.
If Etrade were smart they'd leave their old site (which works with NN4) up so that people who prefer it can continue to use it. Besides, the new site design for Etrade totally sucks. Large graphical beveled buttons for navigation went out of style in 1996. Do I need to remind people that when you're designing a site that deals with information, that the information needs to comes first in priority, not the design (the design should compliment the information it contains). This means that if you're do things with client-side Javascript (and DHTML) that could potentially get in the way of the delivery and retrieval of that information then you have failed. This is especially true for sites that deal with live, real-time financial data. If your users click reload often, the last thing you should be doing is increasing the page sizes with extraneous graphics, complex table layouts and non-essential Javascript.
Another reader points out that Etrade's production staff completely forgot ALT tags on their images and if you disable Javascript the site is rendered useless.
Register: The many faces of open source.
Advogato: Risks in Running Open Source Projects
Salon: One Film to Rule Them All
It's perfectly alright to have a religious President but it is written in the Constitution that Church (religion) and State (government) must remain separate. Our current administration needs to remember this...
I just ordered Running Weblogs With Slash, a new book from O'Reilly. I will post a review when I'm done looking it over.
Margaret Thatcher: Advice to a Superpower. Awesome, I hope Bush's advisors are paying attention to what other world leaders are saying and putting other interests aside for a while.
Oh great, now I'm going to need a Passport account to visit a Flash-based web site.
Userland Templates: Zimran Ahmed over at Winterspeak is talking about how Userland Radio doesn't meet the ease-of-use hype that Dave and his gang are touting. I have to agree. Back in April of 2000 I tried out Manila because back then I still liked Dave and was still a fan of what he was doing with Frontier. With his permission I designed and built a Manila-based weblog to cover Mozilla news. It took me a couple hours to figure out Dave's templating system in Manila, but I did figure it out. I was incredibly disappointed at how limiting it was. You were stuck with the default table-based layout that rendered dog-slow in Netscape 4.x browsers. I tried cleaning up the HTML and in the process started commenting out entire table rows and columns using a standard HTML comment syntax. What I did not realize was that this would break the way Manila rendered its templates and once I had committed my changes there was no way to go back in and undo them. I sought help from Userland's people and they had to go in with an admin account and undo my HTML comments. I had high hopes for using Manila to run my Mozilla weblog but this kind of thing killed it for me because I did not have the kind of control over the template editing that I needed. I realize that it's been almost two years since I've used Manila but I can only imagine that this flaw in Userland's template architecture is still there and that Radio has likely inherited it (I have not tried out Radio yet). As a web designer I was intrigued by the CMS capabilities of Manila but did not like how the default HTML templates limited the kinds of layouts I could do and did not let me easily use my own from-scratch templates. I realize now that this is why every Manila weblog looks almost exactly the same and all Radio weblogs are very similar: it's a limitation of the software being used to create them. The problem now is that if I bring up these issues with Userland I am seen as a critic and am blasted publicly by Dave and his cohorts. A good company will listen to the feedback from its customers (and potential customers), even the ones that they do not like. But I guess the people at Userland have not come to accept this basic tenet of running a business. Their loss.
Feedback on Userland will be posted unless you request it not to be.
VCs 'R Dum: One of the founders of ArsDigita recounts how the VC idiots and "professional management" ran the company into the ground. Anyone who has been part of a VC-funded company can relate pretty easily. Like many people I'm starting to think that the entire "Internet bubble" thing was a direct result of greedy venture capitalists and if they'd kept their fingers and money away the Internet would be a much better place (and industry to work in) than it is today. But I'm starting to see a back-to-the-basics momentum growing among the people left working in the field, many of them like myself who started working professionally with the Internet prior to 1995. People are less obsessed about the money there is to be made and more excited about how we can use the technologies to make the Internet a better and more fun place to be. What worries me though, is the efforts of Microsoft and AOL to privatize the Internet by building proprietary technologies and networks that create competitive barriers of entry.
An ArsDigital employee says goodbye.
I asked in July 1999:
Why is it that any jerk with a Harvard M.B.A. who doesn't understand the Internet economy or the new media culture is listened to by the executive morons, while every cube-farm dweller is hopping up and down and shouting at the top of their lungs that what the Harvard M.B.A. is proposing is going to do more harm to the company than good?
Excellent directory of HCI-related resources. Bookmark this.
This is awesome. Deaf people in the U.K. are going crazy over the ability to use SMS on their cell phones for communication. [via Boing Boing]
Matt IM'd the other night telling me about his beef with Critical IP. I mentioned to him that my phone number in the whois database has been 000-000-000 for over a year now, which probably explains why I haven't received a call from them. Or maybe it's because my Verison land line hasn't worked since September of last year. People know that if they need to reach me, email or IM is the easiest and fastest way, or they have my business card which has my cell number on it.
Oh yeah, the LOTR bootleg I have is a copy of the screener sent out by the Academy Awards people. It's got the scrolling warning across the bottom the screen at the beginning of each chapter. Ah well, I'm definitely going to buy the legitimate DVD when it's released this Fall.
CMSwatch: Why Getting Laid Off Is Better Than Building a Proprietary CMS
The XDA is a new PDA for the European market that combines a color screen with the PocketPC OS, J2ME, and GPRS (General Packet Radio Service). "GPRS support means that the phone connection is 'always on' for web browsing or email applications."
If you read anything today, read One Runtime to Bind Them All.
I guess it's a good thing I cancelled my NextCard last year. There were rumors about them acting in bad faith towards their customers. Perhaps those rumors were true.
Arsdigita, the content management systems company founded by Philip Greenspun (who was then ousted in a nasty executive turnover) has closed up shop and sold its assets to Red Hat. Interesting...
Nice. A couple of scientists in Norway have been awarded the Turing Award for inventing the concept of object-oriented programming. If you don't know what OOP is, you should start looking into it. I am especially fond of Jeff Veen's description of modern Web design as "object-oriented web publishing."
LOTR Bootleg DVD: I did not have time last night to watch my bootleg LOTR DVD, but I did briefly pop it into my DVD player (a standard Region 1 three-year old Sony). My first observation was that this DVD was very watchable on a standard television. I also noticed that the surround sound worked, so that tells me this is not a camcorder transfer. Additionally, the extras/features were all there and there was even subtitling that worked (the English subtitles worked but the Chinese and two other unidentifed subtitling did not). A couple of readers wrote in saying that most of the bootlegs on the street are copies of the DVD the Academy Awards people sent to the voters/reviewers. Another theory is that this bootleg is a copy of an in-production DVD at one of the manufacturers. This would make sense since not all the subtitles worked and the fonts on the DVD menu are of very poor quality. I'd like to take this opportunity to remind my readers that selling bootleg DVDs is illegal, so I will be unable to resell the bootleg I acquired from the streets of New York. I will, however, likely give it away to a family member as a gift and purchase the final DVD when it comes out later this year.
This isn't exactly wearable computing, but it's going in that direction. Pioneer has come out with a set of stereo headphones (page is in Japanese, but look at the pictures) that when not in your ears connect together to form a stylish necklace. It's an interesting concept but I don't see it being very popular.
The technology difference between U.S. cell phones and European cell phones is amazing. Take the difference between the Nokia 8200 (U.S.) and the Nokia 8210 (Europe). They have the exact same front and look identical until you notice that the U.S. handset is nearly twice as thick. This is primarily because U.S. handsets like this come with a "tri-band" feature which usually means two digital bands and one analog. Because the US handsets need more room to put both technologies into the phones, the form factor and size increases. [via Ben Evans]
WebReview: The Myth of "Seven, Plus or Minus 2"
More adventures in bootleg DVDs: I picked up The Lord of the Rings on DVD today from a street vendor in New York City. I'm really curious as to how these bootleggers have this movie on DVD already, since it's not supposed to be released until later this year. I popped the DVD into my Titanium Powerbook and imemdiately noticed that the video was nowhere near that of DVD quality. I suspect this particular bootleg was shot with a camcorder and then transferred to DVD before production. I haven't watched the whole thing yet, but I did not hear any audeince noises, so perhaps this was somehow transferred to VHS somewhere and then back to DVD. I'm going to watch more of it tonight and will post a note later. If the quality isn't worth it for me to keep the DVD, I'll chalk it up as an interesting experience and get my $10 back by selling it on eBay.
Why don't you just use a portable hard drive? A computer this small has no real use unless you can easily attach a full-size keyboard and use a monitor with it. But then, you might as well just call it a "portable CPU". This is why Apple's Titanium Powerbook is so awesome. It's screen is big enough to use without an external monitor and its horsepower is equal to that of its bigger desktop brothers. And it's a damn sexy laptop too. I get plenty of envious looks from my coworkers who are all stuck on Dell desktops, IBM Thinkpads (not a bad laptop in its own right) and those tiny Sony Vaios.
Let's take a look at the innovations Apple has put into their iPod. It's got a 5 GB hard drive that is very small. Small enough that we'll start seeing similar hard drives in other portable computing devices. Like what happens when cell phones, digital MP3 players, and digital computing start to converge? Will we suddenly be able to stream MP3s to our cell phones, listening to your own custom playlists over headphones? What about device-to-device streaming and networking? Start looking at what's popular in Japan and Europe where the cell networks are more advanced than here in the U.S. What's selling there? What are people paying for? How can those trends be anticipated to sell in the U.S. market? What barriers of entry are there besides the incomaptible cellular networks in the U.S.? Yeah, too many questions, but this stuff totally intrigues me...
Tinywords.com offers a service that will send you a daily Haiku to your mobile phone and/or handheld. It uses SMS or Avantgo.
Remember the Psion Organizer? Remember how cool it was? Before there Apple Newtons and Palm Pilots there were organizers like the AgendA (mid-80s) and the Microwriter (1980).
A company called Digit Wireless has developed a unique keyboard called the Fastap for mobile phones and devices that combines the functionality of a full-sized keyboard with the form factor of a cell phone. Very interesting...
Research Paper: Thumbcode: A Device-Independent Digital Sign Language
Slate: Play the Enron Blame Game
NY Times: The Increase in Chip Speed Is Accelerating, Not Slowing. Do we really need faster and faster chips? Perhaps the focus should be less on speed and more on reducing chip heat, size and form factor. It cracks me up that some of the faster Pentium chips need these huge heatsinks just to run properly. As computing becomes more and more portable less emphasis should be put on speed and more on how small and cool these chips can be made, enabling innovation in the mobile computing market.
Awesome. Japanese Sex Slang. [via Boing Boing]
There are times when I don't like Michael Moore, but his recent Open Letter to George W. Bush clearly outlines the hypocrisy of the current Presidency regarding their connections to Enron. Worth reading.
Remember the rumor about AOL buying RedHat? Apaprently it was just another incident of a moron tech journalist making up the news again. [via Doc Searls]
I hope this product flops. It's materialism and American sports culture gone too far.
I'm lost. I need to find myself again. I'll be back when that happens. Usually, just a few days...
I thought Googlewhacking was the act of surfing Google with the Mature Content Filter turned to "off."
Pepsi needs a new ad agency. Talking dolphins. Beer-stealing birds. This year's Superbowl ads were OK, but most of them sucked. The mlife (AT&T Wireless) people really dropped the ball. They've been hyping it up for about a week, and then their Web site was down for most of the Superbowl. At least I couldn't get to it when I tried earlier.
Oh my, this doesn't sound good (or safe). Apaprently, future versions of GNOME will be based on top of Microsoft's Trojan Horse technology: .NET.
Cellular Networking Perspectives: Irreverent Acronyms
