Quotulatiousness

October 23, 2009

WordPress plugins to consider

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:27

Charles Arthur looks at a few recommended plugins for WordPress blogs:

First, there’s been another upgrade to WordPress (it’s now at 2.8.5). The WordPress blog describes it as a “hardening release”.

Much more important, in my view, is the release of the WordPress Exploit Scanner plugin. Plugins are little extensions to WordPress; and Exploit Scanner is probably the next one you should install. (The first you should install, in my opinion, is Dr Dave’s Spam Karma 2 – which weeds out spam comments more effectively than anything I’ve ever seen, and is specific to your blog.)

The Exploit Scanner does a number of things: it compares your files against an MD5 hash of the WordPress files for whatever version of installation you’re running; it finds examples of suspicious code in your files – three principal ones being the use of “invisible” text through CSS; the use of iframes to embed code from other sites; and base 64 encoding, which can be used to obfuscate entire programs. It will also look through your posts and users to see if there’s anything suspicious or spammy about them.

October 22, 2009

Instant reactions to Windows 7

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:31

The Register polled their readers about their out-of-the-box experiences with the new Microsoft operating system:

Microsoft takes the wraps off Windows 7 tonight, but thanks to the UK’s looming postal strike Reg readers have been playing with the final, shrink-wrapped product for days.

So before you go out and spend money on the new OS and/or a new PC, you might be interested in our what ad hoc panel of real readers has to say.

First up is Gary, who says installation took a blisteringly fast 30 minutes “end-to-end from removal of shrink wrap and checking what was left in situ”. And what was left in situ? Everything, apparently.

Phil, a self-confessed Linux fan, was more restrained, but after upgrading Vista on a work laptop, declared: “I’m fairly impressed really.”

Installation was not as quick for him as Gary, taking over three hours. Phil doesn’t mention any problems with the shrinkwrap, so we presume it was the installation process itself that slowed things up.

Not quite the adoration Microsoft’s marketing department would have liked, but Register readers are a tough crowd . . . this is high praise from them.

October 20, 2009

Windows 7 cometh

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 17:22

I’m likely going to take the plunge and upgrade my laptop to Windows 7. Of course, I bought the laptop just before the start of the free upgrade program (I have wonderful timing that way), so I’m going to be paying retail price for my copy. I’m bookmarking resources to ease the transition. For example, PC World has posted a Windows 7 Survival Guide with lots of potentially useful information.

Windows 7 launches on Thursday, and everywhere you look retailers and manufacturers are getting ready for a big day of sales. Apple may be looking to rain on Microsoft’s parade with stellar news about its financial performance, but there’s little doubt this week belongs to Windows 7.

Yet questions still remain about upgrading to the new OS, how Windows 7 works compared to Vista, and whether there will be any serious compatibility issues once Windows 7 is finally installed on computers across the United States.

There are a lot of questions out there about Windows 7, and I have answers. I’ve gone through the PC World vault to find all the information you need about upgrading, the pros and cons of buying a new system, Windows 7 security, and more. With this handy guide at your side, you’ll be able to embrace everything Windows 7 has to offer.

October 16, 2009

Careful with those compact fluorescent bulbs

Filed under: Australia, Environment, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:43

Andrew Bolt wonders why the Australian government — which has banned the sale of old-fashioned incandescent light bulbs — is not being more pro-active about handling and disposing of the replacement compact fluorescents:

Tens of thousands of Australians will next month be forced to buy these new greenhouse-friendly CFLs without the Government warning them that, unlike normal light bulbs, they contain mercury and are dangerous when broken. What’s more, they shouldn’t just be thrown out with the rubbish.

How many consumers know this?

How many of them have looked up the Environment Department’s website to find what its bureaucrats falsely describe as the “simple and straightforward” precautions to take against poisoning should one of these lamps smash:

– Open nearby windows and doors to allow the room to ventilate for 15 minutes before cleaning up the broken lamp. Do not leave on any air conditioning or heating equipment which could recirculate mercury vapours back into the room.

– Do not use a vacuum cleaner or broom on hard surfaces because this can spread the contents of the lamp and contaminate the cleaner. Instead scoop up broken material (e.g. using stiff paper or cardboard), if possible into a glass container which can be sealed with a metal lid.

– Use disposable rubber gloves rather than bare hands.

– Use a disposable brush to carefully sweep up the pieces.

– Use sticky tape and/or a damp cloth to wipe up any remaining glass fragments and/or powders.

– On carpets or fabrics, carefully remove as much glass and/or powdered material using a scoop and sticky tape; if vacuuming of the surface is needed to remove residual material, ensure that the vacuum bag is discarded or the canister is wiped thoroughly clean.

– Dispose of cleanup equipment (i.e. gloves, brush, damp paper) and sealed containers containing pieces of the broken lamp in your outside rubbish bin – never in your recycling bin.

– While not all of the recommended cleanup and disposal equipment described above may be available (particularly a suitably sealed glass container), it is important to emphasise that the transfer of the broken CFL and clean-up materials to an outside rubbish bin (preferably sealed) as soon as possible is the most effective way of reducing potential contamination of the indoor environment.

“Simple and straightforward”? Peter Garrett’s department not only deceives you about global warming, but about the ease of this useful “fix”.

It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to foresee a lot of lawsuits down the road, as the majority of folks who need to change lightbulbs won’t have read these instructions, and will try to handle them the same as the ordinary light bulbs they’ve used forever.

Friday links of possible interest

Filed under: Britain, Football, Health, Humour, Religion, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:25

October 14, 2009

Neuter NASA to save manned space exploration?

Filed under: Economics, Space, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:14

Gregg Easterbrook, to be polite, isn’t a fan of NASA’s big-budget plans:

Soon, Barack Obama must make a decision on whether to continue funding NASA’s daffy plan to build a Motel 6 on the moon. The president will be put on the spot when the final report of a space commission [. . .] is delivered. Rumor is that in keeping with the tradition of Washington commissions, the report will contain extremely vague language about sweeping reform; then cite every item on every wish list of every interest group with a finger in this pie; then recommend nothing specific, so as to offend no interest group; then close with a call for higher subsidies. NASA is not one of the core missions of government, and spends only one-half of 1 percent of the federal budget, so space waste is relatively minor in the scheme of things. But if public policy can’t get this right, what can it get right?

Right now NASA’s budget is $18 billion annually, and the quarter or so spent on science — planetary probes, telescopes that scan the far universe — is going very well. The rest of NASA is a mess. The agency has just thrown $100 billion of your money down the drain on the space station, which has no scientific achievement and no known purpose other than keeping checks in the mail to favored contractors and congressional districts. The station is such a white elephant the current plan is to “deorbit” the thing in 2016. “Deorbit” is polite for “make it burn up in the atmosphere.” So after spending $100 billion to build a space station, we’ll destroy it. Your tax dollars at play!

Since 2004, NASA has said its next goal is a manned outpost on the moon, as a stepping-stone to manned travel to Mars. There’s nothing a person could do on the airless, lifeless lunar surface that a tele-robot operated from a Houston office building could not do at a fraction of the price and risk. And the moon has nothing to do with Mars. Any Mars-bound mission will leave directly from low-Earth orbit to the Red Planet: stopping at the moon, then blasting off again, would consume the mission’s fuel to accomplish nothing. Though NASA has been studying moon-base and Mars-mission proposals for five years, the agency refuses to give a cost estimate — a sure sign the plans cannot pass a giggle test. Considering the space station price was $100 billion for a limited facility that was not accelerated to the speed necessary to reach the moon — speed means fuel which means higher price — even a Spartan moon base easily could cost several hundred billion dollars. For what? Why, for “economic expansion”! Today, no one is interested in economic expansion at Earth’s poles, which are far more amenable to life than the moon, have copious resources, and can be reached at one-ten thousandth the cost of reaching the moon.

There’s a lot more, buried in the middle of his weekly “Tuesday Morning Quarterback” column at ESPN.com. The numbers for manned exploration of Mars aren’t encouraging, either.

October 11, 2009

You tell ’em, Your Highness!

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:28

I’m not a reflexive royalist, but I’m very much in agreement with Prince Philip on this issue:

The Duke of Edinburgh has launched a scathing attack on the design of television remotes and controls.

The famously outspoken Duke, 88, criticised designers yesterday for making handsets small and complicated and for hiding controls on television sets.

His words gave an intriguing insight into life at Buckingham Palace.

He said: ‘To work out how to operate a TV set you practically have to make love to the thing. And why can’t you have a handset that people who are not 10 years old can actually read.

I’m not much of a TV watcher, so the few times I want to watch something on TV, there’s a 50/50 chance I’ll need to get technical assistance from Elizabeth or Victor. If the DVD player was the last component being used, the cable box may need to be rebooted. Usually, after rebooting, it’ll then need to be reconfigured to work with the TV set. Sometimes, the re-configuration needs to be done 2-3 times before it “sticks”. Even then, sometimes the TV doesn’t get a signal from the cable box, so the cable box has to be unplugged (so it loses its IP address from the cable provider) and then plugged in again (to get a new IP address). Then, if we’re lucky, it’ll connect properly and I can start to find the proper channel . . . it shouldn’t take 5-10 minutes of fiddling to turn on the bloody television!

And that’s ignoring the fact that none of the remotes does everything, so we use the cable box remote for most things, but the TV remote for widescreen/regular format and the DVD remote for pause/eject.

H/T to Elizabeth for the original link.

Update, February 2010: Apparently a lot of our issues were caused by the DVD player. We replaced it with a Blu-Ray player over Christmas, and we no longer have anything like the same sort of hassle. Still too many different remotes, but everything now works.

October 10, 2009

Where High Speed Trains can beat short-haul flight

Filed under: Economics, Europe, Railways, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:46

Spain has a new high speed railway (HSR) network that appears to be a huge success, according to the Guardian:

Last year’s drop in air travel, which was also helped by new high-speed lines from Madrid to Valladolid, Segovia and Malaga, marks the beginning of what experts say is a revolution in Spanish travel habits.

In a country where big cities are often more than 500km (300 miles) apart, air travel has ruled supreme for more than 10 years. A year ago aircraft carried 72% of the 4.8 million long-distance passengers who travelled by air or rail. The figure is now down to 60%.

“The numbers will be equal within two years,” said Josep Valls, a professor at the ESADE business school in Barcelona.

Two routes, from Barcelona to Malaga and Seville, opened last week. Lines are also being built to link Madrid with Valencia, Alicante, the Basque country and Galicia. The government has promised to lay 10,000km of high-speed track by 2020 to ensure that 90% of Spaniards live within 30 miles of a station. The prime minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, boasts it will be Europe’s most extensive high-speed network.

While I’m always skeptical of HSR advocates’ larger-than-life claims, the Spanish system may be in a good position to permanently claim a big share of the short-haul air passenger market. The situation works to the strengths of HSR: relatively dense population corridors, short-to-medium length journeys, and government subsidy of construction costs.

HSR cannot be run on the same tracks as regular freight trains and commuter passenger trains: the signalling, degree of curvature of track, and speed differential between the HSR and ordinary trains creates too many risks. HSR must have its own right of way, which pretty much always means that governments must get involved to condemn existing properties and expropriate them for the benefit of the railway.

That HSR is, or may become, a success in densely populated European countries does not make the case for North American HSR efforts, as I’ve posted a few times before.

Passwords and the average user

Filed under: Humour, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:22

In this day of widely publicized panic about online security, it’s time we revisited the basics of password security. I’m sure that none of you reading this would ever have a less-than-ironclad routine for all your online activities:

  1. Never ever use the same password on multiple sites. Once they’ve grabbed for login for the MyLittlePony site, they’re into your bank account . . . or worse, your MyLittlePonyDoesDallas account.
  2. Always use the maximum number of characters allowed . . . I know it’s a pain when a site allows 1024 characters, but your online security is paramount. I believe most health insurance now covers carpal tunnel treatment, so you’re golden.
  3. Never include any word — in any human language — embedded within your password: this includes all the words in the Scrabble® dictionary for every known language. Can’t assume that the black hats speak English, y’know.
  4. Always use both capital and lower-case letters and include at least a single digit and a non-letter character in every password.

    5. Note: Don’t try to be clever and use 1337speak. The folks trying to crack your password all post on 4chan: you’re giving them a head-start. They dream in 1337.

  5. Change your password regularly. Daily, if necessary. Even hourly if you share a computer with others.
  6. Never, ever write your password down. That’s the first thing they’ll look for when they break down your door and trash your crib.
  7. Never, ever re-use a password. Don’t pretend you haven’t done this one. We all used to do it, until site admins started checking that you hadn’t re-used an old password.

Of course, even the professionals don’t do all of this. Some of ’em don’t do any of it. Do like the pros do: set all your passwords to “passw0rd”. Nobody ever guesses that.

For actual password advice that might be helpful, you can try this post on the Gmail Blog.

October 8, 2009

Google’s neglect of its USENET archive

Filed under: Economics, History, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:05

Maybe giving Google a monopoly over all those millions of out of date books won’t work out as well as we might hope. They’ve (kinda) been here before, and the results weren’t what you would expect. For those who remember the “good old days” when USENET was the place to be (before the Web, it was the best thing online), Kevin Poulsen looks at what happened after Google took over the effective ownership of the archive:

Salon hailed the accomplishment in an article headlined “The geeks who saved Usenet.” “Google gets the credit for making these relics of the early net accessible to anyone on the web, bringing the early history of Usenet to all.”

Flash forward nearly eight years, and visiting Google Groups is like touring ancient ruins.

On the surface, it looks as clean and shiny as every other Google service, which makes its rotting interior all the more jarring — like visiting Disneyland and finding broken windows and graffiti on Main Street USA.

Searching within a newsgroup, even one with thousands of posts, produces no results at all. Confining a search to a range of dates also fails silently, bulldozing the most obvious path to exploring an archive.

Want to find Marc Andreessen’s historic March 14, 1993 announcement in alt.hypertext of the Mosaic web browser? “Your search — mosaic — did not match any documents.”

October 7, 2009

Maybe they’re using these cases to train their lawyers?

Filed under: Law, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:49

Apple is litigating against another company for claimed infringement on their logo:

Hey, Apple, Inc.: Every apple can’t be yours.

The latest target of your intellectual property monopoly effort is Woolworths Ltd., apparently a shirttail sibling of the five-and-dime stores I remember as a kid, but which is no longer operating in the U.S.

It seems Apple, Inc., maker of iMacs, iPods, iPhones and, historically, Apple IIs and IIIs, thinks Woolworths’ clever stylized logo, wedding its “W” initial into a green image of the fruit, infringes on Apple, Inc.’s trademark.

Comparing_Apple_Logos

There may actually be some merit in this case (although not enough to overturn common sense, I would hope), in that Woolworths is planning on using the brand on electronic devices as well as its more traditional lines of products.

October 5, 2009

Anonymous and the Church of Scientology

Filed under: Liberty, Religion, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:41

Julian Dibbell looks at the beginnings of the “Anonymous” campaign against the Scientologists:

In the evening of January 15, 2008, a 31-year-old tech consultant named Gregg Housh sat down at the computer and paid a visit to one of his favorite Web sites, the message board known as 4chan. Like most of the 5.9 million people who visit the site every month, Housh was looking for a few cheap laughs. Filled with hundreds of thousands of brief, anonymous messages and crude graphics uploaded by the site’s mostly male, mostly twentysomething users, 4chan is a fountainhead of twisted, scatological, absurd, and sometimes brilliant low-brow humor. It was the source of the lolcat craze (affixing captions like “I Can Has Cheezburger?” to photos of felines), the rickrolling phenomenon (tricking people into clicking on links to Rick Astley’s ghastly “Never Gonna Give You Up” music video), and other classic time-wasting Internet memes. In short, while there are many online places where you can educate yourself, seek the truth, and contemplate the world’s injustices and strive to right them, 4chan is not one of them.

Yet today, Housh found 4chan grappling with an injustice no Internet-humor fan could ignore. Days earlier, a nine-minute video excerpt of an interview with Tom Cruise had appeared unauthorized on YouTube and other Web sites. Produced by the Church of Scientology, the clip showed Cruise declaring himself and his co-religionists to be, among other remarkable things, the “only ones who can help” at an accident site. For the online wiseasses of the world, the clip was a heaven-sent extra helping of the weirdness Tom Cruise famously showed on Oprah. But then, suddenly, it was gone: Scientologists had sent takedown notices to sites hosting the video, effectively wiping it from the Web.

Housh and other channers knew that Scientology had a long history of using copyright law to silence Internet-based critics. But this time, maybe because the church was stifling not just unflattering content but potential comedy gold, the tactic seemed to inflame the chortling masses. That evening, Housh logged in to an IRC channel frequented by like-minded chuckleheads and started talking with five others about the Cruise video. There was a sense that something must be done, but what? One of them logged out and posted a call to action on 4chan and some similar sites. By the middle of the night, 30 people had joined the chat. Within a couple of days, a consensus emerged: They would take down the main Scientology Web site with a massive distributed denial-of-service attack, or DDoS.

October 2, 2009

The destruction of Saturn

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:51

Tim Cavanaugh looks at the GM division that once looked like the solution to so many of GM’s problems:

I would not recognize a Saturn if it ran me over, but the brand showed every sign of becoming competitive, with the above-mentioned loyal customers and policies on haggling and customer service that have (so I’m told, though I have seen first-hand evidence to the contrary) since become industry standards. Saturn was hamstrung by something not mentioned here: It was for girls.

Those “officials in charge of GM’s other brands” (and at the UAW, which never liked Saturn Corp.’s more flexible contract) were status-stunted males so disgusted by the idea of innovation that they consciously chose to starve something every normal retailer would give a limb for. Saturn customers didn’t just like the product but felt real fondness and familiarity toward the brand. And this wasn’t treated as an opportunity to exploit but a problem to be solved.

General Motors isn’t the only American company that can screw up a wet dream. It’s probably not even the screwup company that is getting the most taxpayer dollars to keep screwing up. But it’s the most toxic. What’s good for America is the total liquidation of General Motors and the firing of every person, labor and management, who works for the company.

The few folks I knew who bought early Saturn models seemed very happy with their vehicles, and remained that way . . . until Saturn became just another branch of General Motors. Then, for the most part, they appear to have moved on, but not to other GM vehicles.

October 1, 2009

Twitter lists

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 13:12

I’ve been using Twitter for the last few months, and I’ve actually found it rather useful. Useful, in the sense of providing me with a wider range of information, which often leads to something blog-worthy. But the down-side is that for every new Twitter account I follow, I increase the ‘noise’ in my Twitter feed, making those gems sometimes harder to spot.

John C Abell looks at a new feature under trial for Twitter to allow grouping feeds together into lists which can be shared with other users:

Twitter is trialing a method to sub-categorize the people you follow into “lists,” making it possible for the first time to systematically organize — and recommend — feeds you follow.

Once rolled out to everyone Twitter lists will make allow you to create dynamically-updated timelines of your favorite news sites or opinion makers, celebrity administrative assistants, congressional Republicans and all those guilty-pleasure spoof accounts. If you’re already a somebody, you may be able to bestow upon some unknown a bit of Oprah-like fame.

The lists will be public by default — the better to increase viral discovery of an account you might like because your friend likes it — and can be made private. This is the nearly best of both worlds, but we always think that services which convey one’s thoughts and leanings and predilections and intentions ought to be opt-in, since failure to drop the curtain can cause inadvertent embarrassment or eliminate what would have been a competitive advantage.

I like the idea of lists, but I’ll have to wait to see how they’ve implemented this (it’s not available to my account yet).

September 28, 2009

You know the stories about “they built ’em better in the old days”?

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:13

Here’s an interesting video from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), pitting a 2009 sedan against a 1959 model at a combined speed of 80 mph:

In the 50 years since US insurers organized the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, car crashworthiness has improved. Demonstrating this was a crash test conducted on Sept. 9 between a 1959 Chevrolet Bel Air and a 2009 Chevrolet Malibu. In a real-world collision similar to this test, occupants of the new model would fare much better than in the vintage Chevy.

“It was night and day, the difference in occupant protection,” says Institute president Adrian Lund. “What this test shows is that automakers don’t build cars like they used to. They build them better.”

Even with the video evidence, not everyone will be convinced. This is my favourite quote from the Slashdot thread on the topic (I think the comment is offered in an ironic tone):

But then again, back in the 50’s we didn’t need all these fancy crumple zones, seat belts and air bags. Men were real men. Hell, I’ll bet you dollars to donuts any man from the 50’s driving that Bel-Air would have jumped right out of that wreck to help the crying sissy-boy with a cut lip driving that Malibu.

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