The Licquia Blog

JROBI, a chess blogger, on energy policy:

A large study in Europe concluded that it takes more gas and oil to produce a bottle of bio-fuel than it does to produce a bottle of gas. What does this mean? It means that Bio-Fuel is more damaging to the environment in the long run, and on top of that it is driving up the cost of basic food supplies. Millions and millions around the world in a number of countries are unable to afford the rising food costs for basic staples like Corn, and for what?

If Bio-Fuel is not better for the environment, why are politicians and environmentalists getting behind this growing industry? I think it’s because it seems to be the “trendy” thing to do, and we all know what happens when the media promotes a new trend. We get tons of media coverage telling us why it’s a good thing, and hardly any coverage of the negative impacts. Already people from the Bio-Fuel industry are getting on television shouting out that there are many factors contributing to rising food prices, trying to deflect the fact that their destruction of food to fuel vehicles is the main culprit.

Actually, I suspect the emphasis on biofuels in the USA and Europe has to do with the fact that it’s the only alternative to fossil-based motor fuels proven to be sustainable and scalable:

The success of FFFVs, together with the mandatory use of E25 blend of gasoline throughout the country, allowed Brazil to get more than 40% of its automobile fuels from sugar cane-based ethanol in 2007.

I see no link to the European study in question, but previous studies have suffered from various faults; for example, the assumption that trucks transporting fuel cannot themselves shift to biofuels. I’m sure better analysis of the study is on its way.

But that’s not the most interesting thing, to me. More interesting: my general impression that a lot of the climate-change hysteria is just that.

If we hear what science seems to be telling us about the environment, and we think that something needs to be done, then we should do things that will actually work. One thing that really works is conservation: use less of the bad stuff we’re using. But we’ve done quite a bit on that front, only to hear that much, much more is required to make a difference. I’m not sure there’s much, much more benefit for us to realize in conservation, at least in the short term.

So, to make a real difference, we have to make more radical changes. Can we change our motor fuel?  Sure; starting with something that pollutes less, and that even absorbs some of that same pollutant in its production, sounds like a winner.

JROBI, again:

It makes no sense whatsoever to create Bio-Fuel when there are much better options on the table - for instance Hydrogen vehicles. When was the last time you heard someone on the news talk about Hydrogen initiatives?

I hear it every so often. But most talk, today, focuses on the very real problems with hydrogen as a motor fuel. There are many; just look at the discussions of hydrogen fuel tank technology for a sample. But one of the biggest problems is that of developing an infrastructure for delivering fuel to the customer.

No one talks about the problems of setting up an ethanol infrastructure. We already have it. Brazil has demonstrated that the current gasoline infrastructure can easily be adapted to deliver ethanol instead, and that there is a viable migration plan for gradually moving people off fossil fuels.

Now, this isn’t to say that the world of ethanol is hunky-dory. It’s arguable that, while ethanol may be sustainable, the corn-based system the USA has adopted isn’t. Some people are talking about sensible tweaks that may solve the food problems while continuing to support biofuels–removing our silly tariff on Brazilian ethanol, for example, or developing alternative feedstocks for ethanol production.

The problem is that hysteria seems to be breeding hysteria. Global warming is so severe, we are told, that we need solutions, and we need them immediately. So we develop solutions we can use immediately. But no! These solutions cost; we need something else, and we need it immediately, and we need it cost-free.

Practically, this kind of insistence on perfection–that we deploy solutions with no drawbacks, only benefits–has the effect of dampening our enthusiasm for environmental solutions. We tried, our leaders will tell us, but nothing was good enough, so we gave up. And so, rather than do something that helps, or even something that lays the foundation for helping, we continue our use of fossil fuels.

Perhaps ethanol is the wrong solution. But if it is, we should resign ourselves to the inevitability of the future, as foretold by science, or fervently hope that the global warming deniers are right, because other solutions will arrive too late to do much good.

So it’s a few days after Christmas, and like most of us tech-heads, I’ve got a few more gadgets to play with.

First up: the Creative Zen 4GB. This one was a little bit of a saga.

Last year, we got the kids no-name MP3 players, on the theory that we didn’t want to spend megabucks on something they wouldn’t use. They made valiant attempts to use them, but the little machines just weren’t up to the job. So, it seemed prudent to buy them iPods this year.

Well, except for Apple’s attempts to break all non-iTunes iPod software, which had the side effect of making the devices unusable under Linux. Still, this was what they wanted, and they had been good this year, and very patient with my ever-more-convoluted schemes to get the old players working. So, iPod Nano 3Gs for both of them. My heart sank as I watched some of my hard-earned money go to reward such behavior.

As part of the deal, I vowed to find a non-Apple player that would be good for when the iPods gave up the ghost or became “uncool”. And my dear wife, upon hearing this, went online, did some research, and bought me the aforementioned Creative Zen 4GB.

From a Linux perspective, it’s in the “not quite ready for prime time” mode. Rhythmbox and Banshee are working on support; I tried a prerelease of Rhythmbox, and found its support to be very unstable. The only usable app is Gnomad2, which has a terrible UI and also occasionally crashes, but can manage to upload audio, video, and photos without too much hassle. Still, this is a problem of fine-tuning, and not of a hostile hardware vendor; I’m confident that these devices will be well-supported in the near future.

The Zen is picky about what video files it will play, but I managed to figure it out: DivX or XviD video, 320×200 or smaller image size, encoded at a 480 kbit/sec video bitrate or less. Other video files might work, too, but you’ll have to find them on your own.

My Zen has a little problem with the button locking feature: after unlocking, the screen comes up to all-white, and you have to power-cycle it to get the display back. I’m assuming this is a firmware bug, as the screen is still visible for a short time after engaging the lock. Other than this, the Zen is a delight, and every bit as functional as the iPod.

The other nice gadget: a 24-inch LCD from Envision, bought after Christmas with a combination of gift cards, exchanges, and some of my own money. It was an open-box, and I saved about $80 for that; the only problem turns out to be a single dead pixel in the corner of the screen which is barely visible. It does 1920×1200 in very nice, bright color.

Here, too, an improvement on my life only came after some effort. Debian 4.0’s drivers for the Intel graphics chipset are not capable of driving a widescreen LCD; the best I could get was 1600×1200, a normal-width resolution stretched across the wide display. I booted an Ubuntu Gutsy live CD to verify that the problem wasn’t with the monitor, and then set to the task of backporting everything I needed from lenny. Happily, before I started, I found that someone (Holger Levsen, to be exact) had done the work for me.

Things are now about 90% there. The new drivers still don’t have everything figured out for running both Compiz desktop effects and XVideo acceleration at the same time, so I’ve had to turn XVideo off. My computer can render video without hardware support, but the quality isn’t as high. But, I have my nice wide screen, with crisp fonts and lots of room. I figure I’ll live with what I have until lenny releases, and then see what progress has been made.

I’m very surprised about the popularity of an old post of mine, regarding my experiences with CompUSA. It continues to collect horror story comments, the last one coming less than three weeks ago. While any company has its detractors (especially any company dealing directly with the public), it seems odd to me that people continue to be motivated enough to post to my blog, of all places, their tales of woe.

For me, life has been very CompUSA-less of late. Indianapolis now has a Fry’s, one of only two east of the Mississippi as of this writing, and for someone in the relatively tech-starved Midwest, it is a godsend. (People from the west coast: please stifle your laughter as best you can.) And evidently enough of these horror stories have been passed around that they felt the need to close over half their stores in February.

The Indy store was spared that time, but not for long.

The electronics retailer decided to finish what it had started earlier this year, announcing that it would sell or close the remainder of its stores in the US after the holiday season. The company, controlled by Mexican retail management company Grupo Sanborns since 1999, has been sold to Gordon Brothers Group, a restructuring firm that will be responsible for selling off the remainder of its assets.

In an abstract sense, less competition in the electronic retail business isn’t ever good. But it’s arguable that we’ve never had so much competition in the electronic retail business if you count the Internet stores that have sprung up all over. And I’m certainly happy to see an outfit that will slander people for profit go belly-up.

Carver County, Minnesota, is in big trouble. (via buzz.mn)

Eric Mattson was not surprised that the small vacant lot he bought last year near the shores of Lake Waconia was increasing in value.

What shocked him was the $189 million market value the Carver County assessor’s office came up with for the 55- by 80-foot lot, making it the most valuable property in Waconia and possibly the county.

Of the resulting $2.5 million tax windfall, about $900,000 had already been spent by the time Mattson got the bill and came in to complain. They’re now looking at spending cuts and new taxes to pay for the shortfall.

“This is not an ‘oops.’ This is a major error that affects an awful lot of people,” said Mark Lundgren, director of the Carver County division that oversees the assessor’s office.

So how could someone make such an egregious error?

Lundgren said the trouble began in August when a clerk went into Mattson’s file to change the designation of the property, at 233 Lake St. E., from homestead to non-homestead to reflect its change in status after its sale.

The clerk filled in the $18,900 proposed valuation, but then mistakenly hit the key to exit the program. The computer added four zeros to fill out the nine numerical spaces required by the software, thus indicating the value was $189,000,000.

So many thing come to mind, most of which are probably too snarky. But a few observations come to mind:

• Don’t just pin this on the clerk. The major mistake was with the programmers, whose software did such an unexpected thing, and on the auditors, who missed a $2.5 million mistake. (Oddly, given that audit failure was an issue, the only solution worth mentioning in the article was “more auditing”.)
• Programmers, cherish your input. Do not auto-munge it without at least user review! And, I’d argue, don’t auto-munge it at all if the result is at all valuable. Validate it, sure, but don’t change it; force the user to fix his or her own mistakes. After all, if your program was so smart as to know what the user “meant”, why does it need manual data entry at all?
• Use modern tools! What kind of data store today requires zero-padding? MySQL is a free download, and very popular; for all its perceived faults, it can at least store numbers of variable sizes correctly.

Wow. Has it really been that long since my last post?

It occurred to me today, as I upgraded to the latest WordPress and watched the ongoing security nightmares, that going through this effort is only useful if I actually use the darned thing.

And I’ve been busy; yes I have. I’m now the webmaster for my son’s Boy Scout troop, using MediaWiki as a CMS with an eye to encouraging more parent and Scout participation in the site. I’ve been to Montreal and Salt Lake City, among other places. And I’m preparing to upload a Debian package for virtualenv, a cool alternative to OS virtualization in the Python space.

More later.

The whole Kathy Sierra incident is coming to a close, with an NPR interview and a call for a blogger’s code of conduct. (Details at the links; basically, Kathy wrote an innocuous blog about software development, and was harassed into quitting her blog by a few nasty commenters.)

The latter item has touched off a rant by Teresa Nielsen Hayden, about the necessity of moderation:

Bloggers can ban anonymous comments or not, as they please. The problem isn’t commenter anonymity; it’s abusive behavior by anonymous or semi-anonymous commenters. Furthermore, the kind of jerks who post comments that need to be deleted will infallibly cry “censorship!” when it happens, no matter what O’Reilly and Wales say.

Anyone who’s read ML for more than a couple of months has watched this happen. Commenters who are smacked down for behaving like jerks are incapable of understanding (or refuse to admit) that it happened because they were rude, not because the rest of us can’t cope with their dazzlingly original opinions. It’s a standard piece of online behavior. How can O’Reilly and Wales not know that?

By coincidence, I got mail from Charlene Blake recently. Back when I bought my current van, I explained some of the reasoning behind my choice: poor customer service from Toyota caused me to decide to buy the Honda. In that post, I linked to a petition and some other information Charlene had put out there. Little did I know that Charlene had her own little “fan club” who liked to search for references to her and troll their little hearts out, trying to stifle any criticism of Toyota by lies, intimidation, fraud, and other nasty stuff. At first, I tried to be civil, but the stalkers got so vile that I was forced to do some “censoring” to keep my site from becoming an anti-Charlene haven.

Well, it’s two years later, and they’re still at it. As far as I can tell, she attempted to get some advice on cyberstalking from counsel.net, and got a lot of abuse instead. Here’s a sample:

If you can dish it out, you have to be able to deal with the
push back. Evidently you can’t. Whining about those who
don’t agree with you won’t get sympathy from myself, and
undoubtedly most other folks who read similar pathetic
moaning from anyone!!
It is clear you are the kind of individual who always blames
others for your problems.
My advice–get a life!

Interesting legal advice, that.

Now, it’s possible that the fine folks at counsel.net just take a dim view of Charlene. You’d expect, though, that if these people were regulars at counsel.net, they’d have more posts on the site than just posts attacking Charlene. So let’s take a look at some of the names of the people who replied to her: Dave Nightingale, Garnet Williams, Roger Francis, Cheryl Martell, Marisa Decker, Vincent Gagnier, Bruce Coristine, Walter Matthews, and Rick Fasan. Right now, not a single one of those searches returns a post that isn’t about Charlene Blake. (Just in case they try to obfuscate the point with irrelevant posts elsewhere: try to find a post by any of those people on counsel.net that was posted before April 24, 2007.)

By contrast, here’s one other poster on that thread: CK in Delaware. The person’s Charlene comment shows up, but so do a number of other posts, some of which predate Charlene’s initial post. That’s what a regular (or something vaguely close to a regular) looks like. If any of the names above really were regulars, they’d have search results looking like CK’s.

(For the sake of completeness, there’s only one poster left besides Charlene: T. Tonary, a defender of Charlene, also appears to be a one-timer. Ironically, “Bruce” above accuses Tonary of being a shill!)

It would be funny if it weren’t so pathetic.

Charlene comes across to me as a tough woman; certainly she has to have backbone to have pursued this for so long and with such opposition. But why do the Charlenes and Kathys of the world have to put up with this stuff? People talk about “censorship” in regard to deleting nasty comments, and I suppose it is. But Kathy is no longer posting, and Charlene can’t seem to post anywhere without vicious stuff following her. It seems to me that Kathy and Charlene are the ones getting censored.

And if we’re going to have censorship, of one stripe or another, better it be the pond scum than Kathy and Charlene.

Sadly, even I have been made to participate in the anti-Charlene campaign, even if by accident. If you search for Charlene Blake on Google, my blog is the second link, and Google’s excerpt from my initial post linking to Charlene’s petition is from one of the troll commenters. If you don’t actually click the link, you get the impression that I’m trashing her in the main article.

Oh, well. Time to make amends.

AACS (the copy protection system for HD-DVD, Blu-Ray and other high-definition content) continues to crumble. In a nutshell, AACS adds layers to the process of decrypting movies on disc, and the layers are falling one by one. The previous cracks (see my report) opened individual discs and classes of discs; this crack opens all discs playable by a particular software-based player. It’s possible that the studios could revoke that player’s ability to play discs released in the future, but doing so now hurts customers who will have to update their copy of the player.

With all the news about copy protection failure, it’s worth reading some really good articles on why the efforts of multi-million-dollar companies continue to be cracked by smart teenagers. First, Cory Doctorow’s talk at Microsoft Research:

DRM systems are broken in minutes, sometimes days. Rarely, months. It’s not because the people who think them up are stupid. It’s not because the people who break them are smart. It’s not because there’s a flaw in the algorithms. At the end of the day, all DRM systems share a common vulnerability: they provide their attackers with ciphertext, the cipher and the key. At this point, the secret isn’t a secret anymore.

Cory references another paper written by Microsoft employees, now called simply “the darknet paper”. It’s a little more technical, but explains the problem well:

We investigate the darknet – a collection of networks and technologies used to share digital content. The darknet is not a separate physical network but an application and protocol layer riding on existing networks. Examples of darknets are peer-to-peer file sharing, CD and DVD copying, and key or password sharing on email and newsgroups. The last few years have seen vast increases in the darknet’s aggregate bandwidth, reliability, usability, size of shared library, and availability of search engines. In this paper we categorize and analyze existing and future darknets, from both the technical and legal perspectives. We speculate that there will be short-term impediments to the effectiveness of the darknet as a distribution mechanism, but ultimately the darknet-genie will not be put back into the bottle. In view of this hypothesis, we examine the relevance of content protection and content distribution architectures.

Finally, on the business side, science-fiction publisher Baen Books has been leading the charge away from copy protection in the world of electronic books. Editor and author Eric Flint explains why in a series of articles on their web site; here are the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth articles on that topic. The sixth article is particularly good, as it explains Baen’s (and Flint’s) experiences with publishing online without copy protection:

The titles are not only made available for free, they are completely unencrypted—in fact, we’ll provide you free of charge with whatever software you’d prefer to download the texts. We make them available in five different formats.

And . . .

The sky did not fall. To the contrary, many of those books have remained in print and continued to be profitable for the publishers and paying royalties to the authors. For years, now, in some cases. Included among them is my own most popular title, 1632. I put that novel up in the Baen Library back in 2001—six years ago. At the time, the novel had sold about 30,000 copies in paperback.

Today, six years after I “pirated” myself, the novel has sold over 100,000 copies.

If you’re curious, I encourage you to check out the Baen Free Library for yourself.

Boing Boing (via Slashdot):

Arnezami, a hacker on the Doom9 forum, has published a crack for extracting the “processing key” from a high-def DVD player. This key can be used to gain access to every single Blu-Ray and HD-DVD disc.

Previously, another Doom9 user called Muslix64 had broken both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD by extracting the “volume keys” for each disc, a cumbersome process. This break builds on Muslix64’s work but extends it — now you can break all AACS-locked discs.

AACS took years to develop, and it has been broken in weeks. The developers spent billions, the hackers spent pennies.

My HDTV threshold has been inching lower and lower over time, as issues get resolved: lower-cost HDTV monitors, useful broadcast TV, the defeat of the broadcast flag, useful Linux support in hardware and software. Still, it’s clear that my standing advice–don’t do HD yet–has been vindicated.

How much longer? Some of the HDTV options for MythTV recording can do both standard-definition and high-def. If we accept that the HD stuff has to be watched on a computer, I might very soon move to HD recording for local TV channels.

But for now, it seems the major hurdle is HD cable, an area where the technology is still in transition. The current standard is largely a bust, the new standard being rolled out still doesn’t allow certain capabilities (menus, picture-in-picture), and the new standard is due to be eclipsed by yet another standard in a year or so. It’s also clear that reality has yet to set in; for all the consumer confusion and hassle, HD content doesn’t seem to be lacking at the BitTorrent sites.

So, continue to be careful. If you want to be able to do something with your new HD equipment, make sure you can before you leave the store. The HD powers-that-be have yet to honor any promise about future capability, and have broken some of those promises. So if it doesn’t work on the day of purchase, be ready to live without it forever.

As for me, current capabilities (and current prices) are almost at the level I’m looking for. But I haven’t bought yet.

UPDATE (2007-02-14): According to Ars Technica, this crack is still not complete; while all Blu-Ray and HD-DVD discs available today are cracked, the studios could protect future discs by revoking the keys of the software player used in the crack.  To translate that into non-technical English, users of that player would be required to update their player, and discs made after a certain date would not be crackable–until a new software player’s device key is extracted using the same method.

Oh, the pains of being an early adopter: Google to charge businesses for Google Apps

But it’s not just small companies who have been champing at the bit to make use of Google’s services, as organizations such as Disney, Pixar, and the University of Arizona are eager to sign up to have hundreds of thousands of accounts managed online by Google. The service was offered for free to businesses during Google Apps’ beta period, but will apparently be going live with subscriptions “in the coming weeks,” according to BusinessWeek. It’s still murky as to how much Google will charge organizations for the service, but the fee will reportedly amount to “a few dollars per person per month.”

Now, it is true that all references to pricing refer to business use; there’s no word yet on whether they will charge noncommercial users. And even if they do, a few dollars per month per user isn’t bank-breaking.

But I wonder how well Google will handle the transition. Will some GAFYD customers get cut off if they aren’t paying attention? Will traditional domain hosting get a rush of new customers fleeing? Will Google’s competitors?

I’ve been slowly, slowly warming to this idea of hosted apps. Google Reader took over from Liferea for online news and blogs after I got tired of the latter’s bugs, and Google Calendar works a lot better than the various hack-fests I’ve tried to get local shared calendars working. But I think I’ll stick with hosting my own domain for now, at least until I get a better sense that the providers have the costs figured out.

If you see this post, you’re seeing it from my new online host, a Xen virtual server served by RimuHosting. So far, it’s been pretty reliable.

I picked RimuHosting based on price and suggestions I saw from John Goerzen. I also tried VPSLink, the hosting provider he decided to switch to, but have had many of the same problems he had.

More later.

I’ve been a bit difficult to reach recently. Part of that has been general busyness, including attending the FSG Printing Summit in Lexington, KY, but that wasn’t helped by my former employer switching offices. They had generously allowed me to continue hosting there after leaving, but I had been lax in searching for alternative arrangements.

This was made worse because I had centralized too much of my online presence there, with no backups, so when they took everything down to move to the new office, I effectively disappeared from the Internet for a time. So if I’ve seemed a bit uncommunicative lately, that’s probably why.

Ian has been filling my head with tantalizing visions of replacing my hosted boxes with online apps. I think I’m going to give some of these a spin, but I’m not convinced yet. It seems to me that the lesson to learn–don’t put all your eggs in one basket–argues equally well either way.

Well, it’s been over a month since the last entry. So much for posting more often!

Today, I’ve updated the blog to WordPress 2.0.3, and installed a new theme. I wasn’t too happy with the old Steam theme, but it was a variable-width theme, and I can’t stand fixed-width themes. (Why buy a better monitor if all the Web pages are forced to 600 pixels?) But with the new and improved theme support in 2.0, there are some nice themes that use your whole browser window.

(Posted to all known aggregators, too; I hope Planet doesn’t decide all my posts are new now.)

UPDATE: Well, that was fun; the nice-looking theme happens to be completely invalid. Expect theme changes over the next short while.

UPDATE: Wow, that’s depressing; the state of valid XHTML in WordPress themes is, uh, underwhelming. So I switched back to the nice theme, and edited it to be valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional and valid CSS. I’ve set up a Bazaar-NG repository for my changes.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you: Diebold!

“For there to be a problem here, you’re basically assuming a premise where you have some evil and nefarious election officials who would sneak in and introduce a piece of software,” [David Bear, a spokesman for Diebold Election Systems,] said. “I don’t believe these evil elections people exist.”

(Originally from here, if you can read it.)

Nope. Evil election officials don’t exist, and never have.

Diebold election machines are insecure and poorly designed. Why does anyone tolerate this?

No, not really. But have you ever wondered how people in the South could have twisted their heads into thinking that the institution of slavery, with all its brutality, could possibly be a good thing, or how some Southeners, even poor whites, could have been so heated in their defense of their “peculiar institution”?

I have. The antebellum South has always seemed deluded to me. Often, their struggle against the North was framed in terms of freedom, liberty, and so on, even as they denied freedom and liberty to a whole class of their people. But I’ve never been satisfied with this conclusion. Most of the time, “delusional” thinking on someone else’s part is more correctly described as ignorance on your part–ignorance of some factor that, while possibly incorrect, at least brings that thinking within the realm of rationality.

So this article on Winds of Change has been a revelation to me. Its context is more modern: how does modern American society preserve public virtue today? (Or, more pointedly, does modern American society preserve public virtue at all?) But it makes its point by reference to the different theories of public virtue which held in the North and South before the Civil War, and how those views are still expressed today, although in different ways:

But North and South diverged on how best to keep the tree of public virtue well-watered and flowering. The puritan republicans upheld personal morality as the solution: A virtuous people could not help but be a virtuous republic.

And the South?

Rigorous private moral virtue was not necessary in the agrarian republican model — and was little esteemed among men in the South. Instead, jealousy of power and careful attention to governance would keep the flame of public virtue alive. Govern well, put men of pure virtues and total leisure in power, guard against demagogues and tyrants, and live as well as you please.

Callimachus coins the phrases “totalitarian liberty” and “aristocratic liberty” to describe the respective approaches taken by the North and South. While the North sought to preserve public virtue by forcing private virtue on its citizens, in the South public virtue was preserved by an orderly class hierarchy. Slavery was essential to preserving this hierarchy, as the wealth of the higher classes was supported by the wealth of the lower classes.

And where did the South get this idea of public virtue? From history:

As odious as much of the old South is to modern attitudes, it had the approval of history. The Spartan, Athenian, and Roman republics — the principal examples available to the Founders — all were built on essentially the same social and economic model, with a mass of slaves at the bottom.

Thus, attacking the institution of slavery was seen as a way of attacking the foundations of the Republic at its base, drawing forth the stirring defenses of liberty you often see from such folks as John C. Calhoun.

They would have been right, of course, except that they didn’t notice the alternate path ahead of them. The North managed to preserve public virtue with a much flatter and less stratified view of society. The excesses of slavery didn’t look to Northerners like the bedrock of civil society; they just looked like needless brutality, certainly nothing that should be defended. And in the end, Northern victory did not bring about the end of democratic civil society, as so many Southerners thought it would.

But in all this moralizing, we have to recognize that the Southerners were right about some things, even if they were wrong about one particular detail. What if the North had been able to convince the South (without warfare) that industry could substitute for slavery in preserving that lowest level of society, and that it could do so without brutalizing whole classes of people? Perhaps today, we would have a better appreciation of some of those Southern values of days gone by: limited government, non-interference in personal affairs, and eternal vigilance as the price of liberty.

Once upon a time, there was Windows, MacOS, and Linux. MacOS was a joke, so we won’t talk about it for now. Windows was easy to use, but also not quite stable and quite insecure. Linux was more difficult to use, but was also a lot more stable and secure.

This seemed like an interesting correlation: more security leads to more difficulty, and vice versa. Was this necessarily so? Both sides said no; Linux users claimed they would achieve ease-of-use without sacrificing security, while Microsoft claimed they could eliminate the stability and security problems of Windows while still keeping it easy to use. And with that, each side went to work.

We’ve been seeing one side of that work–the Linux side–gradually manifest itself. There’s no question that Linux has improved tremendously in ease of use. As the new technology has been developed, it hasn’t really affected stability more than usual; the main problem is that the new usability features are in high demand, and thus are more likely to be deployed before they’re ready.

Now the other side of that work is starting to come into focus with the recent betas of Windows Vista. So far, it seems that things are not going well:

Let’s say you have a 250GB external USB drive packed with music files, videos, pictures, and backed-up documents. When you plug it into your new computer, Vista assigns it the drive letter F:. You have no trouble viewing those pictures and playing those music tracks. But as soon as you start organizing your files into new folders, Windows Vista begins prompting you for permission to perform file operations. You have to click Continue, switch to the Secure Desktop, and then click Continue in the Consent dialog box to complete each operation.Why? Because the default permissions on that external drive give Full Control to the Administrators group, but only Read permissions to Users. And remember, you’re running with the process token of a standard user, unlike Windows XP, which gave you full credit for logging on as an administrator.

This sounds like a major blunder, but it’s not. Long-time Linux users will recognize the problem immediately: how do you secure removable media like USB sticks or CD-ROMs? We went through several iterations of that problem before coming up with a sensible solution: by default, the user who inserts media has full permissions to work with that media, and no one else should. It doesn’t sound like Microsoft has been learning from our experiences so far.

Slashdot has an article on Vista’s new security system, which has motivated some interesting analyses in the comments:

• The new Windows ‘protection’ scheme will browbeat the user until they disable the security system (in some way or another). That way, when the inevitable virus and spyware hits the system, Microsoft can wash their hands and say that it’s all the user’s fault for making use of their computer bearable.

• Here are the simple solutions all the windows experts are missing:Set yourself up as the owner of all files on the drive.
  Set full permissions to all files to the “user” group.

  Oh gosh gee. I don’t know how we could have been so stupid. Please forgive us for doubting the security, power, and flexibility of Microsoft operating systems.

  Dear Microsoft “experts”: You just permanently lost the user privilege security argument, and you probably don’t even know why.

• “Granted, I have to set the ACLs on both directories and registry settings, but it’s never been very hard.”Your Momma.

  As in, ask Your Momma to do that.

• From that review, it seems that running as a regular user will be easier under Ubuntu today than under Windows whenever it is released. There’s no excuse for that.

It’s interesting to note that Mac OS X–the successor to the previously-dismissed MacOS–is now cited as a model for implementing usable security, and that they’ve done so by building on a Unix base.

Yesterday, I finally achieved a goal I’d been working on for a long time: getting MythTV to display on our family room TV.

So what changed that made the impossible possible? One thing changed: the video card in the computer by the TV. It’s now a cheapo NVidia GeForce 4 MX card, instead of a super-expensive (at the time) ATI All-In-Wonder Radeon.

Windows users aren’t used to the troubles Linux users often endure getting hardware to work. When it works, it usually works very well, better even than in Windows. When it doesn’t just work, it’s usually a huge effort to get working, and sometimes there’s just nothing you can do except dump the hardware on EBay and get something else.

When I bought the ATI card, I had been reading some enthusiastic reviews of the card. ATI was, at the time, the most Linux-cooperative graphics card company, and while no support existed yet for the card’s cool TV recording and TV-out features, everyone assumed it would be just a matter of time.

Well, it’s been several years since then, and ATI was in the process of changing the way they did Linux support. The documentation they normally released to open-source driver writers never came. There were efforts to reverse-engineer the card, with varying success. Soon after, ATI announced that they would be providing their own proprietary driver for newer cards, making their Linux support worse than NVidia’s. (NVidia also does proprietary drivers, but the drivers are at least decent and support all of the card’s functionality; with the ATI drivers, for example, you can’t have both accelerated 3D and accelerated video support at the same time.) Video capture was not, and still isn’t available; ATI actually sends people to the reverse-engineering project above for that. And my card was too old to be supported by the proprietary driver.

To get an idea of the impact of ATI’s new Linux support policies, check out this page, which documents video input for ATI cards based on the older Mach64 and Rage chips, with this page, which documents video input for ATI cards based on the newer Radeon chips. The process for older chips is simple, as Linux driver support goes: download the module, build it, load it, use it. By contrast, the Radeon process has sections for “conservative”, “advanced”, and “adventurous”, where “adventurous” means “using TV-out”, and everything depends on using their special program for doing video input. Forget about using MythTV with this.

So, after months of very frustrating episodes of trying to get TV-out working on my ATI card (never mind video input), I finally broke down and bought the NVidia card. Total time to get TV-out working on the NVidia: about three hours, most of which was occupied in getting my thick S-Video cable past a metal bar in my case.

Lessons learned: avoid “do-everything” integrated hardware in favor of single-purpose hardware; never, ever, buy hardware without knowing that it will work that day; and stay away from ATI, at least for now.

Every so often, I see computer setups with multiple monitors hooked to a single computer, usually set up as a single very long desktop. You move the mouse to the edge of one monitor, and keep moving; the mouse then jumps to the other monitor. This can be really handy for some specific goals; for example, there’s no better way to create an immersive experience for a simulator. Most of the time, though, multi-monitor is used just to give the user a bigger screen.

I don’t generally have a problem with screen room. (Virtual desktops are very handy in that regard.) But I do have a problem controlling several computers, and switching between sets of keyboard, mouse, and monitor to use them.

So I was very intrigued when several people began blogging their experiences with Synergy, a little utility that links the desktops of several computers together into one, such that the desktops look a lot like multi-monitor. It even handles cut-n-paste across the desktops; I can cut or copy on one machine, sweep my mouse across to the other computer, and paste. It’s cross-platform, too, running on Unix/X11 systems, Windows, and Mac OS X.

So right now, I’m typing this blog entry on my main workstation’s keyboard, but into a browser running on my laptop. And instead of having a zillion tabs on my browser to keep track of pages I want to reference in my blog, I can just zip over to my workstation’s browser with a flick of the mouse, get to the page I want, copy the URL for it, zip back over to my laptop, and paste it into my blog post. Sweet.

If you find yourself using more than one computer at a time, you should check Synergy out.

It’s been a busy several weeks, centering around my brother’s wedding last Saturday in North Carolina. Before it, I was busy doing my part and traveling, and after it, I’ve been catching up on work. Less importantly, I’ve been catching up on TV shows I recorded on MythTV while I was there, including a series that looked fascinating: 10 Days That Unexpectedly Changed America.

A few of their choices for those ten days weren’t surprising, such as the battle of Antietam during the Civil War, the passage of the Civil Rights Act, and the Gold Rush. Some were a little strange, like Shay’s Rebellion and the assassination of President McKinley. And some were, to put it mildly, weird: the appearance of Elvis Presley on the Ed Sullivan show, for example. This was a large part of the appeal of the series. Speculating on the importance of Antietam wasn’t nearly as interesting to me as satisfying my curiosity about how Elvis was so earth-shaking.

Now, I’ve watched four of the shows (the Gold Rush, the Homestead strike, Elvis, and the Scopes evolution trial). They’re well-done, and I haven’t seen any evidence so far that the shows were seriously inaccurate. But at least some of them are disappointing: three of the four so far, to be exact.

Let’s take the show about the Scopes trial as our first example. The popular view is that Scopes, and his celebrated lawyer Clarence Darrow, lost the trial but won the publicity war, and that celebrated prosecutor William Jennings Bryan, broken in spirit from his loss, died a short time later. Admirably, the show casts doubt on the received wisdom, noting Bryan’s ambitious plans for the future and the suppression of the teaching of evolution that spread after the trial. But throughout the show, the trial was portrayed as a battle between faith and reason. Or, to show my take on the show’s bias, between superstition and progress.

This is a hot button for me. Perhaps that’s a topic for another post; for now, I’ll just point out that science’s successes within the physical sphere have been nearly matched by its failures everywhere else. Science, religion, history, and other disciplines have their places in the realm of rationality. It is currently fashionable to crow about the folly of allowing religion to trespass into science’s territory, but pointing out the reverse is not nearly so popular. This was a huge part of Bryan’s message, and the show does not do it justice, portraying it as a reaction to progress instead of as a warning the modern world might have done well to heed.

The same kind of bias was also evident in the show about the Homestead strike. I don’t think the terms “Left” and “Right” mean much regarding political discourse, but to the extent they do, the Homestead strike show was quite leftist. The strike was not just a famous labor dispute, supposedly, but a referendum on what the show called “corporatism” versus the rights of workers, one that supposedly echoes today in the crimes of Tyco and Enron (both of whose corporate headquarters made an appearance in the show). The workers, in resorting to violence, were merely defending their way of life against men (Frick and Carnegie) who sought to profit from their destruction. The workers’ treatment of the Pinkerton army was merely an expression of their fears, whatever the Pinkertons thought they were promised in the cease-fire.

In saying this, I don’t mean to downplay the abuses of the robber baron age. But the acts of the union at Homestead were every bit as shameful, and the show seemed to minimize this, portraying them as merely controversial. To tie acts like this to the supposed corporatism of today, without recognizing the efforts (and successes) of later union leaders to help their workers without resorting to violence, is deceptive. Not to mention that for every Enron, we can find a Total-Fina-Elf, a Nestlé, or a Cotecna, all in the part of the world considered most sympathetic to workers’ rights.

So what was going on? I don’t think those shows were some kind of intentional whitewash; they were more of an inability to transcend one’s biases. Which brings me to Elvis.

The Elvis show was fun, no doubt, but it seemed quite pretentious. Most of the history was correct, but the small errors were telling: for example, the idea that Elvis was the first pop megastar ever (and not Frank Sinatra), or that this was the first time sexual mores were being questioned (Roaring ’20s, anyone?), or that this was the first time black music was being accepted by whites (again, the jazz of the ’20s). Too much effort was made to link Elvis to the rebellious, liberal Sixties.

Every era tends to see its own time and its own causes as the center of history. But this is a tendency to be recognized and avoided, not embraced as transparently as these shows seem to. Certainly, I could name perhaps a half-dozen events with far more historical impact on America than the Ed Sullivan show ever had: the Dred Scott decision, the failure of the League of Nations in the U. S. Senate, the impeachment of President Nixon, and September 11 come to mind without even thinking. Why were they excluded, and Elvis included? Perhaps the Homestead strike marked a strong shift in labor relations, but why link it to Enron, over one hundred years later, in an attempt to give it relevance? And why link the evolution debate to an overhyped trial in Tennessee, instead of to the Supreme Court decisions reversing the anti-evolution laws and generally strengthening the wall between public schools and religion?

I suppose I’m being too sensitive. The shows are really not that bad; I learned something from them. (By the way, they’re all showing again tomorrow on the History Channel.) But I get tired of seeing history tied to the yoke of the current media barons and their prejudices.

Today, Indiana joined the rest of the country and “sprang forward” to Daylight Saving Time.

The technology world may be experiencing a few glitches. Anything that’s aware of both location and time may have the wrong time as of today, including many computers. The easiest fix is to change the timezone to New York time, or to Eastern time instead of “East-Indiana” or some such variant.

Surprisingly, Sprint phones don’t seem to be aware of the time change. The update seems to be both late and iffy; my phone still reports the wrong time, while my mother-in-law’s phone has already fixed itself.

Debian 3.1 appears to still have the old timezone information, while testing (”etch”) seems to be correct. I wonder if this isn’t something we should update in stable.

I observed previously that we should avoid HDTV because, among other reasons, the next-generation HD DVD security standards isn’t supported by any equipment currently manufactured.

Well, that hasn’t changed, but at least one studio is promising to be nice:

At a technical briefing last week, Sony said that it will not use the Image Constraint Token to downsample the video output on analog HDTVs.

Why not? Well, the next-generation DVD space has been split into two standards: Blu-ray and HD-DVD. Right now, it seems that HD-DVD has a slight edge. And who is the prime mover behind Blu-ray? Sony. So this is a move to try and edge out HD-DVD in perceived quality.

Of course, the other studios could make the same pledge to counter Sony. Surprise: they have, all except Warner.

This is good news, at least in the short term. Of course, the technology still remains in the spec, and there’s no guarantee that the studios won’t turn the downsampling on in future movie releases.