In the days of Windows and only Windows, the usual routine was find a bug, hit report a problem, kick back and maybe someone would get around to eventually, if you asked really really nice and forked over a hundred, maybe possibly fixing it. If they weren’t busy sucking back a beer or something. There was no real two-way exchange of information, per say–they either fixed it and you didn’t know about it until later, or they ignored it and you didn’t know about it until later if at all. Flash forward to the last week or so.

As I make no secret of, I power this site on WordPress plus about 20 wickedly handy plugins to take care of everything from statistics to adjusting things so folks who come across a 4-year-old link that no longer works can still find the entry they’re looking for at its new location. It was that latter redirect plugin that decided at one point to give me issues. For the record and those curious, if you want something similar for your own site the plugin is Smart 404, and it only works–to my knowledge, anyway–on WordPress. Now, before my year or two of experimenting with that other blogging platform, I had this site running under a different piece of software. That piece of software, still in development, took care of my needs back then with the exception of the whole comment spam thing–but the way it handled links in general was just different enough that when I set this up, and included the old entries from my first attempt at a blog, those links promptly broke. Not horribly, just a slight enough change that Apache threw a page not found error.

WordPress in general is very good about redirecting things within its own isolated environment to where you want to go. So, for example, if you were to go to http://www.the-jdh.com/index.php?post=123, it would redirect you to the appropriate post automatically–and to the appropriate, much more readable URL of that post–with no coaxing from me whatsoever. Kind of wicked nifty cool in an “I’m a lazy tech geek” kind of way. The problem is, there’s no native functionality for redirecting other links, not created by WordPress, to their appropriate wordpress equivalent. Enter the redirection plugin, Smart 404.

When I set it up to do what it was intended to do, though, I ran into another, slightly frustrating, problem. If you were to go to http://www.the-jdh.com/year/month/date/some_post.html, which was the old link structure on the blog, even with the plugin in place you’d get a 404 instead of being redirected to http://www.the-jdh.com/year/month/some-post/, which is one of WordPress’s default structures. Now, if we were talking closed source projects here, I’d of just switched to something else that did a similar thing–I’d have a better chance of seeing the problem fixed, and sooner, by doing that. But instead, it started out entirely in public comments on the blog of the developer of the offending plugin.

The actual conversation was, were it to happen over IM instead of blog comments, very short yet still very effective.

I posted a couple comments over there, pretty much explaining what happens when someone references one of the old, non-working links, and what according to the plugin documentation is supposed to happen. After running a real quick test to get access to exactly what it was the plugin was trying to do, the conversation effectively turned very quickly to something like this.
Dev: Okay, try this line of code and let me know if it breaks.
Me: *copy, paste* Okay, looks like it doesn’t explode. And hey, it does what it’s supposed to now. Who knew?
Him: Awesome. *throws it into CVS*
Me: Hey look, new version. And there’s the fix I tested. Awesome squared.

Yeah, it was literally that easy. And a very awesome reason for why sometimes, being able to actually see the program’s inner workings is a very good thing–you get to escentially debug and test a patch for your own problems, rather than waiting on the software’s tech support department–if they have one–to get around to communicating with the developers, who may or may not then get around to actually diagnosing and fixing the problem. The open source community as a whole gets major props for that. And major props to the Smart 404 developer for being nearly as quick to implement solutions to problems as his users are at finding problems to fix. And huge props to WordPress, because–really, do I need a reason? Now excuse me while I go consider for the thousandth time learning PHP or something.

Unless you’ve been under a rock all afternoon, you’re probably aware already that former US Senator Ted Stevens died in a plane crash in Alaska at 86 years. Now, being that I live in the great white north, beyond the whole “series of tubes” quotation, I couldn’t tell you the first thing about this US Senator. According to some, he was apparently quite the moron. Well, sir, you very well might have been an idiot. But you’ve provided years of hillarity among my particular geek circles with that one quote. For that, you’re awesome. And because it still makes me snort, here’s the infamous monologue in video format. Yes, brought to you by that very same series of tubes.

A couple weeks ago, I made mention to the fact Canada’s only real alternative to DSL from Ontario east was taking it to their customers again, in the cleverly sneaky form of decreasing the quality of service provided and maintaining the same pricing structure. At the time, all the techy blogs were up in arms about it–and that was pretty much as far as it got. I suppose Rogers should be congratulated for finally breaking that barrier, what with the Ottawa Sun doing us all a favour and publishing their own take on it. And y’know, reading that doesn’t make me feel any less like kicking Rogers squarely in the face. But I’m still no closer to reconsidering my decision to avoid having anything to do with their internet packages for as long as I have at least one other alternative. On the bright side, at least geeks aren’t the only ones who’re about ready to slap around a Rogers employee–this was posted under the finance/money section of the Sun, for the curious. I’ll take my small moments of satisfaction where I can find them, thank you.

Does anyone actually even remember remotely considering doing something relatively useful with Google Wave? A few geek blogs I follow were all over it when it first opened up–hell, even Mike was singing its praises for a time. It was supposed to be the thing to replace email/twitter/facebook/what have you. How’re we doing on that? According to Google, not well. So it’s dying a slow and painful death that’ll drag out until the end of the year. I won’t say I saw it coming, but well…

I have a long and complicated history with Windows XP’s service pack 3. Mostly, it consists of me installing it and it doing all manner of bad things to the machine it’s installed on–like, for instance, being partially responsible for the temporary breakage of an internet connection. Recently though, I’ve noticed a slightly disturbing trend. Machines older than mine and less stable than mine are taking SP3 with little to no problem and even less headache. And I’ve personally seen it installed on one with plenty of other problems of its own–hello, less than stable IE 8. So there was definitely something out to get me–now I had proof.

After exiling SP3 from my machine for being pretty much a complete and total failure, I’d also a while later gone ahead and got rid of Eset’s Smart Security product for a whole host of other, unrelated reasons I’ll get around to posting at some point in the maybe not too distant future. That fixed a few dozen other slightly irritating, but not ultimately hindering, problems. After seeing SP3 crop up on some of these machines and ultimately not cause mass amounts of destruction, I decided just before I came down here to install it again on mine. I took that opportunity to test IE 8 out on a non-frankenputer as well, but I’ll save that for when I figure out what about the offending machine is making it break. And, surprise of surprises, it didn’t result in extreme amounts of bloodshed, or physical damage to the computer.

So, after much of the getting pissed with Microsoft for making yet more work for me, and after confirming not once, but five times that SP3 did not, in fact, break me severely on install, I officially withdraw any cursing, swearing, or overall snarkish remarks directed at Microsoft on its behalf. Instead, I shall officially aim those remarks at Eset/Nod32, and add them to the 50 billion others I’ve had plenty of time to prepare and direct at the offending antivirus manufacturer. But don’t worry, Microsoft still has much for me to snark about–I still have to figure out in exactly how many pieces they’ve managed to break .net framework on this machine, which may or may not warrant a separate entry. But SP3, at least so far, is not as evil as it looked a few months ago. Good job, MS. Now fix your framework, goddammit.

Either the 21st century’s slowing down, or copyright law’s finally starting to speed up south of the border. Jailbreaking your iPhone or equivalent may break your warranty with the manufacturer, but as of now, it won’t break the law. Almost makes me want to move to the US and get an iPhone. Apparently, this also works for unlocking your smartphone in order to move it to another carrier. Which is still technically against copyright law up here. You taking notes, Tony Clement? You’d better be.

I used to be a Rogers cable subscriber. Yes, even though–kind of like now–I don’t actually watch a whole lot of content strictly on TV. And every so often, something happens to remind me why it is I pretty much won’t be returning to them for anything but the absolutely necessary any time in the near future. This week, it’s their response to the coming availability of netflix streaming in Canada this fall.

They have apparently decided, because God forbid anyone actually want to use their internet connection for more than just the basics, no one actually needs 95 GB/month of bandwidth (it used to be unlimited). So they’re lowering it to about 80 GB/month instead. For the same price. This isn’t an out of character response from Rogers by any means–when they launched their own online video on demand service at the end of last year, they did the same thing with a twist. Rather than lower the bandwidth cap when they launched that service, Rogers decided that, even though it was a service administrated and maintained by them, it would not be exempt from the bandwidth limitations the company imposed on its internet customers–thus making fairly sure people like me kept doing what they were originally doing to get a hold of TV content online, since there wasn’t a whole lot of benefit to doing it any other way.

Hey, Rogers? I kind of suspected I’d be doing the right thing when I told your telemarketting rep earlier to take your internet service and shove it right up your ass. Thanks for proving me right. Now, if you’re done completely screwing your customers, I’m still waiting to have that conversation with you. Not holding my breath, just waiting.

Okay, so, here’s your basic summary. An airplane controled by artificial inteligence, capable of traveling huge distances and picking its own targets without human interference. Highly experimental, it may or may not actually enter production. But, it’s supposed to be able to perform more complicated maneuvers that wouldn’t be possible without the removal of the need for a pilot what with the stronger g-forces playing an issue. Sounding familiar, yet? It should be–particularly if you’re a millitary type movie fan. Apparently, the guys that came up with this idea are at least a fan of this one.

Hey, guys? You have awesome taste in movies. Really. But did you really have to go and recreate it in reality? Well, okay, if you must–but please, for the love of God, keep it away from the 20-year-old war scenarios, would you? Thanks.

I was going through Facebook on Jess’s behalf earlier, seeing as her machine would probably die if she tried to use it over there and well, I was here doing other things anyway. Apparently, they have this new security feature put in place–if one can call it a security feature. Apparently, if you’ve not logged in to your account on that computer, you get to jump through a series of convoluted hoops just to get to the point of saying “by the way, yes, I own this account”. One such hoop involved identifying people who were tagged in a specific set of photos. Not a problem if you spend all your time on Facebook, or can see, but a right proper pain in the royal ass for folks who don’t or can’t.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t give you–or doesn’t make readily apparent, anyway–an option to bypass this supposed ID varification check when you’re logging in from a new computer. Which means we got to spend an hour sitting here while she, being the most sighted one of us at an impressive not very, squinted at the photos presented and tried–usually with absolutely no verifiable results–to identify/recognise folks being shown to us. With no way to bypass it and try something else, and a need to wait an hour or so for it to let us get in again, we eventually just decided to say to hell with it. Fortunately, after we managed to get done what needed doing.

Now, I get the whole security thing re: trying to make sure folks are authorised to actually have access to the account. But folks, we’re either totally or nearly totally blind over here. You’re showing us pictures. What in the hell are we supposed to do with them? And, just for the record, I was perfectly authorised to access the account in question–just not authorised according to Facebook. Meanwhile there’s enough of a back door that I could actually do what needed doing without being authorised according to Facebook, thus rendering whatever security checks they were trying to have, um, rather pathetically useless.

Hey, Facebook? I’m not a hacker, honest. I’m just blind. Thank God, really–you didn’t exactly make it difficult. Just irritatingly inconvenient. And I’d still like to know the logic behind flashing random photos for folks to stare at, like they’re gonna remember most of them. I don’t even remember half the things I’ve probably been caught on camera doing and I’ve been accused of having a good memory. So. yes. Please, stop failing. It’s bad for you.

Also: Accessibility? What accessibility? On Facebook? Surely, you Gest. Devs, design smarts. Get you some. It should not take me guessing to change a semi-simple setting. Only you would think otherwise. Again, stop failing. It’s bad for you.

I’ve always thought being able to call and/or text with someone in the US from Canada without Rogers taking its cut would be absolutely awesome. Or, for that matter, calling the said someone for free from Canada without handing over mass amounts of cashola to Bell. Google Voice was going to be the key to doing that. Except for one very minor, yet very annoying detail. It’s never been available in Canada. Now, today, they’ve dropped their invitation only beta, and still are only available in the US. By the time they become available in Canada, we’ll probably already have our own equivalent service–that’s been done before.

Google, you’re awesome–when you’re not trying to annoy me with random tributes to Pacman. This idea you have for managing multiple phones with one number is equally awesome. Now, kindly be even more awesome and actually let me use it. Trust me, we can handle it. The CRTC may not be able to, but we never really cared about them anyway.

Google voice is available for general public consumption. Just not outside the US. Let’s work on fixing that, shall we?

Everyone knows about my love afair with Linux. Specificly, Gentoo. Unfortunately, it being a source-based distribution means escentially any system maintenance task–like, say, installing a new program or updating an existing one–is potentially going to be a bit of a memory hog. Hence why I started using Linode for a lot of my playing around work–they give me an environment I don’t need to worry about breaking, the tools with which to potentially break it, and a price tag that doesn’t end up breaking my wallet. And, as of yesterday, they’re handing out more memory with which to break things. Now, one of my VPS’s on Linode presently has more memory than my only VPS on DreamHost, for about the same price. Woopsies. You know what that means.

It’s once again time to consider tossing around that age old debate. To slowly move everything away from DH, or not to. That is the eternal question. I’ve been pretty happy with their overall performance for the last 5 years, moving from shared to now VPS hosting during that time–and, yes, branching out to Linode as it’s been needed. They’ve had a few network issues, and I’ve had to prod tech support in the rear end a time or two, but they’ve been decent. In comparison, I’ve almost never actually needed to talk with Linode’s tech support–most server related issues I can fix myself, and most hardware/network related issues they’re usually aware of before I am. Still, when needed, both DreamHost and Linode have been pretty quick with their assistance. Why do I still stick with DH? Simply put, the manually editing of Apache‘s configuration files. I’ve done it before, on a minor skale or two. Much more than that and I fear it may result in irreparable brain damage. Similarly, setting up and maintaining an email system is probably second most likely to give me brain damage–even if I do decide to go with Postfix and have a pretty semi-nifty solution to the general, day to day administering of things like creating new users, etc. I could, presumedly, just let Google Apps handle email, but there’s something to be said about actually being able to control a semi-important system like that myself. And, if I did move entirely self-hosted, I’d probably want that.

So, while I figure out if and/or when I should start this whole migrating to my own server thing, I fully intend to take complete advantage of the extra memory being dumped on me by one of my awesome hosts. Which means those folks I’m currently hosting on one of those servers? Yeah, I’m looking at you. You’re about to get a performance boost. Happy 7th birthday, Linode. Even if it is a day late and a dollar short.

I know when you were released, you were defective as the day is long. I also know after several updates, you haven’t gotten a whole lot better. But could I convince you to, just for half an hour, not crash on every second or third website I attempt to open? Yes, even if the machine you’re on looks like it came from the spare parts from several les fortunate machines. That would be hugely appreciated. Alternatively, I could spend the next hour fighting to uninstall you and risk having the geeky son versus non-geeky parent conversation. However, since I lack the patience for that conversation, please stop screwing me over.

Die in a fire,
Me

PS: Your “website restore error”? Not very helpful. Also, IE 7 handles the exact same websites without problem. Granted, it’s not on a frankenputer, but still. Stop with the ultimate failure. It’s for your own safety.

I’ve been saying it for months. And, indeed, so have several others. Now, a Spannish court has effectively agreed with me (thanks, Techdirt). Since music, the written word, etc existed, people have been lending/sharing/finding ways to copy it. Predates the internet, predates CD’s, tapes etc, predates PVR’s. And yet, in 2010, the entertainment industry backed by governments is trying to say it’s always been illegal/a violation of copyright law/immoral/equivalent to breaking into a store and robbing it/the leading cause of death second only to cancer. everyone’s been saying we should be more like the US when it comes to piracy, copyright law, etc. Screw that–let’s be more like Spane. At least they recognise the difference between reselling a CD and copying it for a friend.

Note to US politicians: take your DMCA and hang yourselves with it. Then give me, the average consumer, a reason to buy as opposed to torrent.

A note to Canadian politicians: stop trying to please the US. We’re not the US. We do not answer to the US. And I’m certainly not going to support legislation that looks like it came from the US. Here, have a clue by four.

Every so often, I have such an idiot moment that it takes me forever to realise I was a complete moron. One of those moments happened, sadly enough, during the rebirth of the blog on this domain. For folks who’ve been keeping score, I’ve actually shifted blogging platforms twice–once from Movable Type to LiveJournal, and then from LiveJournal to WordPress. In all that time, while folks could always see the old blog over here, that left a gigantic hole on this site–one that quickly filled up with requests for pages that no longer existed. Enter the moronic that is me.

Being that I deal with computers, the interwebs, and things that make both tick on a regular basis, you’d think I’d of clued in on this a lot sooner than I did. Turns out–and I should have known this–search engines, other websites, random spambots etc don’t actually stop looking for a page just because said page stopped existing in 2008. Nor, for that matter, does anyone actually correct broken links it would appear. And, since until this morning I didn’t even have a clue how to go about doing that, they just kind of sat there returning the standard 404 request.

Fortunately, because the year I was on LiveJournal meant I wasn’t using this domain for it, there’s that much fewer posts I had to worry about correcting. That just left the 600 and change from the old MT install. Three hours on Google, various message boards, and other asorted sites later, I came across what I think might just be the almost right solution for that particular problem. After testing it on a handful of posts that I’ve been able to confirm were tossing back 404 errors, and finding them no longer doing so, I can safely say the blog now works entirely–or virtually so, if nothing else–the way I originally intended to.

The how and the why is semi-technical, though if anyone’s interested in the boring details I’ll be more than happy to elaborate. But, the short version goes something like this. Movable Type, for all its usefulness, had one huge drawback. It built static HTML files. Which, okay, made serving posts etc pretty much amazing. But once you got up to a certain amount of activity–the publishing of new posts and comments–the rebuilding of those static HTML files took about a hundred years. It also didn’t allow for a whole lot of flexibility in how you linked to those files. If you changed the post title and wanted to update the permalink to account for the change, MT didn’t give you much support for redirection to the new URL. You pretty much had to change it manually, then provide the redirection manually. Adding to the complication that is MT’s way of doing things, the directory structure it came up with was something like: http://www.the-jdh.com/2010/06/05/some_post_title_here.html . WordPress, on the other hand, goes more along the lines of: http://www.the-jdh.com/2010/06/some-post-title-here/ . Ignoring the arguments as to which one’s better than the other–I don’t really care to be honest, it presented a small problem post-migration. Problem solved.

A little addition in plugin form to WordPress, and the URL you request from the server suddenly serves a secondary purpose. It gets handled in this way.

• If the post and/or page requested exists, serve it as per normal.
• Failing that, scan the current list of posts/pages for a post who’s title matches the keywords available in the URL.
• If a matching post is located, redirect the browser to that post and hope that’s the one they were looking for.
• If nothing is found, return the standard 404 page as per usual and get on with the normal routine.
• If more than one option is found, then, optionally–meaning whenever I get around to implementing it–provide a list of suggested entries similar to what was detected in the URL.
• If none of those applies, then we have a bigger problem than I thought and I really should consider not tweeking the site while half a mile from no sleep.

Since nothing’s blown up at me during my testing, it’s a pretty safe bet things are at least 90% not broken. Or they’re clever about hiding their brokenness. Now, about that half a mile of sleep thing. Time to go fix that next.

I thought it might be more of an advantage having folks with a hint of tech savvy thinking working on Canada’s answer to copyright legislation demands being tossed at us from the US and other countries. turns out, not so much.

Industry Minister Tony Clement says cracking down on people who break “digital locks” on DVDs and video games brings Canada in line with many countries, despite criticism from Internet experts.

So, let me kind of see if I can’t maybe wrap my head around this one. Copying CD’s to your computer, to then put them on your iPod, is not illegal under the new bill. Purchasing music online to then put on your iPod is not illegal. So long as the said music from either source isn’t protected by DRM. Which escentially means we’re going to start seeing more companies employing DRM in order to prevent folks from copying, now that they have legal backing up here to do so. In spite of the fact DRM only ever actually makes things worse for people who actually *do* want to pay for it. Nice thinking, Tony.

With the appropriate props given to the originating blog, I explained my theory behind tactics like that as it applies to TV. The same can easily be expanded to music. I want to be able to listen to an album I obtain where, when and how I choose. Why? Because if I legally purchased it, it’s legally mine to do with as I see fit. The copyright bill as it stands right now escentially grants record labels the freedom to decide, simply by including DRM on a purchased CD, that by law I’m not allowed to do so. Hence, it’s then off to another illegal realm–I either break the digital lock on the CD, pay for yet another copy to put on my MP3 player, or just to have on my computer, or obtain the album the not so legal way via torrents. Which do you think I’m gonna pick? And I haven’t even addressed the case of an album only ever having maybe 1 or 2 good songs on it, but you’re still required to cough up $20 for the whole thing.

It was no doubt a common practice pre-internet for folks to copy a tape, or part of one, for a friend/family member. Or, for folks to copy songs off the radio onto tape for themselves. I’ve done both, and had both done for me–so have doubtless many others. With the advent of the internet and file sharing, that’s kind of the natural progression of that same practice. Under both the old and new copyright legislation, that practice–in spite of the fact it predates the internet–would still be rendered illegal. I’m pretty sure there are folks in government on both sides of the issue who’ve done the same thing I have. I’d lay odds minister Clement is one of them. I guessed as much already, and questioned whether or not he’d begin to see file sharing as it stands right now as a natural progression of that habbit. Given his viewpoint on this particular bill as it stands right now, my money’s on not likely.

In spite of statements etc up until this week that were shying away from the kind of copyright legislation being challenged in various forms on the other side of the border, Tony Clement still doesn’t quite get it. It’s sad, but I can’t help but wonder if anyone’s surprised. For about thirty seconds, I admit, I was. Now? I’ll be surprised if he switches.

This blog post by Xup brings up an interesting point on the matter of advertising, product placements, and such. A perhaps odd thing for me to be writing about, considering the Google ads present on my blog, but I think it explains my take on advertising in general and why, despite whatever opinions I may or may not have of some companies, I have no problem with ads in general. It started out as a comment to the original entry, but as I have a rather large policy against writing an essay on someone else’s blog, it gets pasted below.

If I’m going to end up buying something, I’ve usually already found a use for it before I seriously considered buying it. An example is one you’ve already questioned–the cell phone. I’m not very often actually at home, and if I’m looking for work, which I’ve been doing for a couple years now, people still need to be able to get hold of me. And, since not everyone–unfortunately–has taken to submitting job offers via email, that means cell phone. Additionally, just as soon as it becomes a viable option, my land line’s going out the window. But, I’m still going to need to be reachable by folks, including the afore mentioned potential employers.

Also, I tend to gravitate towards products that aren’t exactly actively advertised. For example, yes, this computer’s a Dell. But, it’s one of their lower end models who at the time–and, indeed not at any time to my knowledge since–wasn’t exactly getting a whole lot of marketting from the company. Indeed, I could have gone with an entirely different manufacturer–or none at all, as my laptop was still working; just very, very slowly. But for what I intended to use it for, the laptop wasn’t going to cut it. And, to be perfectly honest, at the time I was working for Dell, which automatically meant they could pretty much beat just about any price out there for a comparable machine–the, perhaps, second time I’ve taken advantage of what you might consider another form of advertising; employee discounts.

I could have waited until the iThingoftheweek came out, and bought it then. Since according to the advertising it’s all supposed to do everything except walk your dog–that’s in Apple’s next model. But, I didn’t need a touch screen. I didn’t need an MP3 player–I don’t even use the one I was given for a gift a while back. And everything else Apple’s equipment can do, I’ve got a cheaper piece of equipment around here that does the exact same thing and gets quite regular use.

I don’t think advertising’s so much designed to force people to make a purchase, either big or small, they wouldn’t have otherwise made–those with very little self-control would have probably done it anyway. But rather, I see ads as more of a way to inform people what’s out there. “Need a way to do xyz? Here’s what we can offer, and here’s why we think you’ll like it.” At the end of the day, you’re still the one deciding if, indeed, you’ll like it for the reasons they say–or, even, if you’ll like it for some other reason. If the answer’s no, it won’t get bought. Sadly, a lot of people are quicker to buy things than decide whether or not it’s something they’ll actually get anything out of, which is probably what at least some advertisers are counting on. But, I believe more so during the last year or so thanks to the recession, I think you’re going to start seeing less and less of that kind of reaction. And, consequently, less and less in the way of so-called brand loyalty, though that may warrant a separate post to explain. You’re half-right, though–if companies don’t advertise, they won’t sell anything. But that has more to do with a lack of awareness than it does a lack of a market.

You mentioned the microwave as an example of a created need. And, indeed, on that you’re right–but it was a need created by us, meaning the average consumer, in much the same way as the fast food industry was a created need. The more we as a society become a market of convenience, wherein we have 50 things to do and 2 hours to do them, the more supposed needs that will be created–again, see cell phones with email capability as an example. Also see 24/7 call centers, wherein there was apparently a demand to have, for example, banks set up centers that were open outside of the normal working day so people could still manage to get what they need accomplished outside their normal hours of operation. And, yes, those banks often times do advertise that–”Open eight ’til late, six days straight.”. But, company executives didn’t just wake up one morning, call a meeting and ask themselves if they could convince everyone else to drop their current bank just by extending their hours. If there wasn’t already a need for it within their existing customer base, it would never have been done. The fact they can then advertise it as a benefit of switching banks is a bonus–and, admittedly, not a very good one as the other banks started following shortly thereafter.

In-store, or in-restaurant sales are another matter entirely, and I’m not sure how relevant they would be to the overall scheme of advertising–they’re an in-store sale, likely one you wouldn’t be aware of had you not already been to that store. So, you’re already interested in something they have to offer. They’re just also saying “By the way, if you use this, we have it available for $x.xx for y bottles.” If you’re already using whatever it is they’re selling, you’re more likely to buy more of it. If you’ve been thinking about trying it, or have tried it before because someone else bought it, you’re more likely to buy it. And if you had no interest in purchasing it to begin with, the fact it’s on sale likely didn’t alter that interest. I’ll go back to your experience with VitaminWater. Had your daughter not brought some home, would you have bought it just the same?

I’m not saying there aren’t a varitable selection of crooked companies who’d just love to show you an ad for something that can cure cancer, get you to pay out your life savings for it and watch the product rather inexplicably fall over dead. But, largely due to the answer to another supposedly created need, now people are able to conduct a lot of their own research should they so choose–again, I’ll use your example of VitaminWater. Couldn’t do that 20 years ago, or even really 10 years ago. There’s no such thing nowadays as a market lock. If Apple puts out a completely crap product, and you see enough people having problems with that completely crap product, if you were initially interested in purchasing it you probably aren’t now. You may go for something else, you may stick with what you have. The advertising didn’t make you do either. All it did–indeed, all it can do–is tell you the product in question is available, and this is what it does. You can either use that product in your daily routine, or not. You can either buy the product hoping to find a use for it, or not. You can either completely ignore the advertisements, or not. If you’re looking, here’s what’s out there. And, here’s what we think it can do for you. If you’re not, it’s probably little more than white noise. And if they can come up with 50 ads to show the same thing you have no interest in obtaining, they’ll pretty well all be white noise. You do the shopping, at the end of the day. Yes, advertisers are counting on it, but they can’t fill a hole if there’s no hole to fill. If you got along just fine up until now without, for example, a cell phone, you’re not about to wake up tomorrow morning and decide you need one. And to this day, there’s not an ad invented that can change that, much to the dismay I’m sure of a few cell phone manufacturers.

And a small update, because clearly when I wrote this post, I was having a spelling fail evening. Corrected. Sorry, Xup!

Canada’s industry minister, Tony Clement, has finally come clean on what everyone and their dog already knows. His iPod, which he’s had since 2006, is chock full of music he legally wouldn’t be allowed under current copyright legislation to put there, regardless to the fact he owns those same songs on CD. Even James Moore, who’s on the entirely wrong side of the new copyright legislation, has finally admitted he’s already broken it with purchase of a DVR.

Mr. Clement, stickhandling the copyright file for the Conservative government along with Heritage Minister James Moore, is poised to introduce new copyright legislation within days. But until the law is updated to permit Canadians to transfer music onto MP3 players from CDs they have purchased, Mr. Clement stands on the wrong side of Canada’s copyright law.

“Well you see, you know I think I have to admit it probably runs afoul of the current law because the current law does not allow you to shift formats. So the fact of the matter is I have compact discs that I’ve transferred, I have compact discs from my children or my wife that I’ve transferred onto my iPod. None of that is allowable under the current regime,” Mr. Clement, a music buff who also legally purchases songs from iTunes to build a digital database that now stands at 10,452 songs.

“It shows that the current regime is not realistic and is not modern to encompass how people obtain their entertainment in today’s world,” said Mr. Clement, calling the current law “antiquated.”

“That’s what happens in a family. You do tend to share music that way and I think most people would find that to be perfectly acceptable behaviour. But our current law is so antiquated, it doesn’t contemplate that situation.”

Good lad. Now, let’s see if his partner in crime’s learned anything.

Mr. Moore, meanwhile, admitted to reporters last year he, too, ran afoul of the copyright law as an early adopter of the PVR. A spokesman on Wednesday said Mr. Moore was not immediately available to clarify whether any of the songs on his iPod put him offside of the law.

Gonna assume the answer is a resounding yes, otherwise he might not be quite so inclined to take the silent route. Now, if we can just convince these two fine gentlemen to admit they’ve copied tapes before for family/friends, or had tapes copied for them by family/friends, perhaps there might be an education in the near future on why exactly file sharing isn’t quite as wrong as they say it is. Hey, a guy can hope, can’t he?

Edit: Let’s try posting this a second time, seeing as my internet decided to pick a minute and a half before I hit post to crap out on me. Don’t do this to me, TekSavvy.

IsoHunt may or may not be heading towards shutdown after yet another, shall we say, less than brilliant ruling from south of the border. Now, keep in mind, IsoHunt is located in Canada so this ruling probably shouldn’t even apply, but the US has a thing for sticking its legal nose in where it doesn’t belong–ACTD, anyone? My favourite part of the ruling, if only because its mock value is through the roof.

Defendants shall be permanently enjoined from knowingly engaging in any of the following activities in connection with the Isohunt System or any Comparable System:

(a) hosting, indexing, linking to, or otherwise providing access to any Dot-torrent or similar files that correspond, point or lead to any of the Copyrighted Works;

(b) assisting with end-user reproductions or transmissions of any of the Copyrighted Works through a tracker server, or any other server or software that assists users in locating, identifying or obtaining files from other users offering any of the Copyrighted Works for transmission; or

(c) hosting or providing access to any of the Copyrighted Works.

So, escentially, a service not based in the US has been ordered by a US court to instinctively know whether or not something it’s hosting is protected by copyright and not supposed to be up there–ignoring the fact the service is used by people who hold the copyright for various types of media and actually want them to be up there. Brilliant. Because, you know, it just makes me want to go out and get back to doing things the legal way. Except, um, not really. Good job, folks.

If you’re curious to see what else was found wrong with the ruling, not that you probably need to, clicky. Moronic people are moronic. And now, back to whatever it was you were reading before me.

There’s probably an actual, about me update that needs doing at some point–probably around the same time I start having something not rant-ish to talk about. Which means probably after I figure out where this college thing’s gonna land me. In the meantime, have a techy type update. Folks not fans of linux can skip it if they so choose–there’s a little something for everyone up here somewhere.

One of the biggest knocks against Gentoo is the fact it’s pretty much entirely built from source. Which escentially means it’s not a matter of just hit install, twiddle your thumbs for a minute and a half, hit okay and go on about your business. It also means if there’s an update that has the potential of breaking things, the breakage tends to be a little bit on the larger than life side. So you don’t tend to do the update unless you’re sure you can block off a bit of time for any required troubleshooting afterwards. I’ve been using my gentoo instalation as a sort of means of learning my way around linux in both a technical and non-technical aspect. Which, is largely why it’s not yet made it to my production machine–if I break something horribly, which has yet to actually happen, I prefer to be able to just work at fixing it whenever and not have to bother with needing to borrow someone else’s machine for the important stuff. Although, using this machine for the test bed might have made this most recent update go just a tiny bit faster.

I don’t perform a complete system update very often–usually once every couple weeks, if I think about it. The rest of the time I spend tinkering with what I’ve got installed and seeing if I can get it to play just that little tiny bit nicer. So, this last update ended up being a pretty healthy one, including upgrades to several core libraries and utilities. thankfully, this update didn’t touch anything that belongs to the Gnome desktop interface, so I wasn’t left waiting all day for that to get around to finish compiling. Or, you’d think anyway.

turns out it did come with an update to the library that deals with processing and manipulating PNG-formatted images, known as libpng. While not a majorly huge update, 1.2 to 1.4, it was enough that I ended up being in for a rather long night anyway. I have a couple packages installed on the server for image handling outside of the gnome environment, as requirements for things like PHP–I’d planned to run a tiny webserver on my laptop, mostly for a testing environment if I didn’t want to take up my webspace with a project that may not exist for more than a week. One of those utilities also got some love. Only problem is when I went to compile it, it was nice enough to throw me this error in return. Seems it was hardcoded to look instinctively for libpng 1.2, which was no longer present on the system. Oopsies.

In comes one of Gentoo’s more popular utilities–revdep-rebuild, which escentially goes back through your entire dependancy tree and recompiles anything that could possibly be missing a library, or providing a library something else is missing. It’d been reported on that forum thread and on the Gentoo mailing list that that utility alone might not fix me, so I’d escentially blocked out the next couple days to diagnose, triage, clean out and recompile just about everything under the sun manually. If that didn’t fix me there were bigger problems here than I’m qualified to deal with. So I had that utility run, and surprisingly, it didn’t explode all over the place.

It found both image handling utilities outside of the Gnome environment, and another 96 packages inside that environment to rebuild. Fun times. So, 98 packages and 30 hours later–it’s a 5-year-old HP laptop I’m testing this on, remember–the thing managed to piece itself together without first collapsing in on itself. And I only had some minor cleanup work to do afterwards.

I found three interesting surprises in dealing with this latest round of coax the software. Gentoo is an awesomely cool OS to goof off with. If I wanted to start doing production-ready things with it, like I’m doing for both my servers–this website may end up moving to one of said servers at some point, it could probably run circles around this machine–yes, even if it’s on a 5-year-old box. Second, the OS handles itself supremely well during major rebuilding tasks–operations like this, if I attempted it on Ubuntu, would have probably resulted in epically catastrophic failure. And, most importantly, I don’t care which OS you’re using, rebuilding of even a small part of Gnome sucks. Royally. Just thought it needed to be said. But, at least if I have to rebuild Gnome I know it’ll probably not result in mass amounts of hair pulling. Now, if I can just get around to wrapping my head around the Apache configuration files, I’ll be in business.

I promise, there’s an actual update about, well, me coming eventually. But in the meantime, have a techy rant.

I’ve never really been an overly huge fan of Bell Canada. Usually, I’d default to them only because the alternative–which, at the time, was Rogers–isn’t exactly a whole lot better. I’d heard halfway good things about some of the smaller ISP’s, but couldn’t be bothered to switch–most noteably because they still escentially sold their services over Bell’s equipment. Then they started throttling their customers for doing anything they didn’t agree with–like, for example, downloading a season of a TV show via torrent. Then, because the kicker for the smaller ISP’s was they could start advertising they didn’t do that, Bell decided shortly thereafter to start throttling the smaller ISP’s in much the same way. Meanwhile while this was going on, they were inventing new and creative ways to try and screw me over entirely.

In May of 2008, shortly after word came out about Bell’s throttling of third party ISP’s, I switched my internet service to TekSavvy. While yeah, they’re still borrowing Bell’s services for their own uses, at least my money wasn’t going directly into their pockets this time. And I ended up paying less of it overall. Apparently, Bell’s decided users from third party ISP’s should be paying through the nose for their services, much like they would be through Bell directly. So they’ve opted to introduce a rather ridiculous overage fee on a per-byte basis to the third party ISP’s. It amounts to, according to the linked article, roughly $1.13/gigabyte. And naturally, it has CRTC approval, so prices will probably start going up even while the appeals by the affected ISP’s are being drafted. Way to go, Bell. If we had a third option, you’d get none of my money entirely. Sadly, I’m still not entirely enthusiastic about the alternatives.

And, of course, while I was writing this post, a friendly neighbourhood nag agent from Bell itself thought it might be fun to call me up on a Saturday afternoon and inform me my apparent new phone bill is now approximately $11 higher than it should be for same service. Once again, Bell’s got the wrong idea here. Here’s a random thought. You already lost me on your internet service–largely because your internet service, and the folks who support it, fail–contrary to the regular junkmail I’m still seeing in my mailbox encouraging me to reconsider. Are you trying to lose me on your phone service, too? You’re succeeding, if you are.

Update: And now I read Bell’s doing exactly the same thing to its direct customers. So much for unlimitted plans.

The CRTC noted almost all the individuals who voiced their opinions were “unanimously opposed” to Bell’s application.

And yet, the application was approved anyway. Officially screwed, again.

Because the few major problems it has need no explanation, have an increasingly rare list format rant. The target? That thing Microsoft would like to call an improved browser.

• The browser crashes more in one day than Windows ME ever did in a week. I’d know–I’ve used both.
• Websites I can access just fine in IE 7, or in firefox, break IE 8. Badly.
• IE 8′s ability to restore tabs on a crash? Absolutely useless–it fails more than it succeeds, leading me to need to fight with it to get back to where I was and pray it doesn’t crash again anyway.
• Its “fast search” functionality? Yeah, crashes at least once per restart. Fail.
• It really makes me wish my parents’ computer, which is currently running IE 8–I’m fixing that the next time I’m over there, wouldn’t threaten to fall over every time I want to install something new. I’d be going Firefox in a real hurry over there if it didn’t.

Yes, IE 8 is on my parents’ computer. I have no idea who put it there–this one’s at least running 7, and it’s actually more stable. When next I have a couple hours, IE 8 is going to find itself taken out back, sat in the middle of the lawn, and shot. Call it a mercy killing–my mercy. There are rumours IE 9′s around the corner. I hope to God it handles itself better than 8. For its own sake.

Sales of floppy disks come to a screaming hault in March of next year. I haven’t had a computer with a floppy disk drive since probably March of 6 years ago. Yet, I still have a case of well-used floppies kicking around the apartment that haven’t so much as been dusted off since the days of college. Signs of the times? I’d argue those showed up around the same time as the first $20 thumb drive. The era of depressingly little memory has ended.

As anyone who’s been following my ramblings for a while knows, I’m a recent and still in progress convert away from LiveJournal. To this day, I still blog on that site as Arinoch, though now it’s more a duplication of the content you’d usually find on this site. One of my big reasons for skipping out on LJ is the lack of control over what you actually have the ability to do with your blog. But, a slightly more important one–to me, anyway–was the lack of an ability to actually see who bothers to read the thing. Until recently, they had absolutely no means of statistical tracking. Which, admittedly, isn’t the primary reason I do this, but sometimes it comes in handy. They tried to correct that minor malfunction with their own, internal analysiss tool, called “My stats”. It was barely useful for more than to see how many of your “friends” continued to check up on you every 20 minutes. So now, they’ve taken the next logical step and gone with the use of Google Analytics instead, giving you the option to get as detailed or not a look at your blog as you please.

I’ve been using the same service on this site, after trying several things to see who would provide me with the more interesting stats–and, after consulting with one well-known expert in the field, Toronto Mike. And all I can say is it’s about goddamn time. If I hadn’t already switched from LJ, I’d probably reconsider doing so now. Particularly if they opened up what you could actually do with the blog you’re optionally paying them to host. Offering this, plus options for advertising on your own–hey, why should LJ-sponsored ads be the only option available–is a good start, though. Now keep it going. I may be tempted to not hang up completely.

What I’d like to see next? StatCounter support, for the realtime stats analytics doesn’t touch. Dunno why they don’t touch it, but oh well. Now, allow me to go play with this for a little.

One down side to my having moved away from LiveJournal and back to hosting my own blog is I have even less reason to go back and check various LJ pages. Lately, it’s included the friends page. Sort of sucks, since there are still several LJ users I want to keep up with, in spite of the fact I’m drifting away from using it myself.

A couple months back, in my quest for an RSS reader I could use from anywhere, I came across this software, which runs on a self-hosted environment. So far, it’s working out a lot better than I’d figured it would–so well, in fact, that I’ve actually set it up for Jessica to use. Now, if we can just get her using it. I’ve recently started adding the RSS feeds of various LJ people I follow, just so I don’t have to remember to pull up the friends page–I go into my RSS reader on a daily basis anyway, so they’ll be right there with everything else I read. So far, I have it set up to access all the public entries. But, thing about being on the friends list of some of these folks is that I actually like to read, you know, actual content. No such luck so far.

I tried to implement a form of basic access authentication, passing the username and password I need to give the LJ server as part of the RSS feed’s URL (example: http://me:password@you.livejournal.com). either LJ or the feed reader, though, doesn’t like that–I still only get the public entries. Trying to massage LJ’s version of digest-based authentication, which I don’t think the RSS reader likes either, gets me no farther.

LJ does some funky things with its digest-based authentication, which doesn’t lend itself to much in the way of strict URL manipulation. So I can’t, for example, do something relatively simplistic like, say, http://me:password@you.livejournal.com/rss?auth=digest and expect it to work. I mean, it should, but it doesn’t.

So, for the moment, I have some partially working LJ RSS feeds, and plenty of time to exercise my google skillz. In the meantime, so far what I’m using seems to be working fairly well. If I can just crack this digest auth issue, or find some other way to do it that doesn’t seem to be horribly broken, this thing’ll run like a dream. fortunately I have all kinds of time to do it. And I’ve been looking for an excuse to mess around with http stuff anyway. Probably just be a quick and dirty hack, but quick and dirty’s good, if it works. And this had better bloody well work.

Update. Well. It works. Kind of. Except not really, and not quite the way I was hoping. Messing around with trying to get my RSS reader to play nice with digest auth just wasn’t happening. Probably a good thing–I have too many people to be trying that on, and it’d get really freaking tedius after a while. Say, after about 5 minutes. So I did the second best thing. I cheated.

It’s quick, it’s dirty, and it may not amount to being a whole lot more than a temporary hack, but it gets the job done. Well, when it wants to. It involved snagging a copy of LJProxy, which is supposed to be able to make use of their login implementations, thus cutting my headache in half right there. It takes the LJ username/password I’m more than willing to provide it, makes use of LJ’s own client/server API–the same API any LJ client uses to do things like post entries, and grabs a list of friend groups and the friends you’ve listed in the said groups. Then, it makes easy use of their broken implementation of digest auth to nab the RSS feeds belonging to those friends. Finally, it compiles them into a single RSS feed, stored locally, that I can then plug into my feed reader–making about ten times less work for one lazy geek. Then I just slam that one feed into my reader, and away she goes.

Now, if it starts working on a regular basis, I’ll have what you might call my ideal package. There’s only one small problem. It doesn’t quite work that way yet. The instalation process was easy enough, and it does run–just not all the way through. It gets stopped before it can complete its pulling in of content and build the agrigated feed, possibly due to resource issues but even more likely due to problems staying connected to the LJ service. Currently, I’ve got 30 people in the group I’m testing it–the documentation says for best performance, keep it under 50. It’s only gotten all the way through the 30 maybe… twice. The highest I’ve personally seen it go, and stop, is 20. right now, it’s stopped at 8. How do I know it’s not a resource issue? During its second to last run so far, I pulled this from the server.

04:49:04 up 6 days, 20:36, 2 users, load average: 0.00, 0.02, 0.00

So, during the running of the collection routine, the system’s barely being touched. That rules out being killed on grounds of causing issues with something else. So I’m leaning towards timeout issues with LJ. When I get motivated, I’ll poke around and see what I can do about maybe correcting that. But, it’s entirely possible I’m going to have to wait for the connection to improve on its own. Or, failing that, go back to the drawing board. Fortunately, on this, I’m flexible. And, in the meantime, my dream rss solution is near. And hey, it’s an excuse to break something. I can deal with that.

We knew back in January we’d be getting bombarded with any and all things iPad. I knew back in January I didn’t want it. At all. What I didn’t know, and probably should have–it’s Apple, after all, is that people would go absolutely crazy over getting one. As in, camping out overnight just to be the first to get one. Well, at least they’re getting free coffee. But still, all this attention for what amounts to a glorified iPod. What’s next? Folks willing–or brave–enough to stand in line for a glorified cell phone? Oh, wait. Never mind. Hey, at least the line to buy yourself a netbook’s nice and short. Anyone wanna join me?