Category: obscure pursuits

ongoing; Email Tech 2004:

“In the last few weeks I’ve upgraded my email environment here and there, and I thought it would be worth passing on hints in the areas of mail-sending service and security.

I’m sure that quite a few of my readers, who are a pretty bleeding-edge bunch, know about all this stuff and mastered it years back. Typically I’m sort of at the trailing edge of the leading wave of early adopters; so I’ll bet that there are a few folks out there for whom this will be useful.”

Tim has a nice writeup on how to get yourself set up with signed (certificated) email in OS X’s Mail.app. It almost worked for me . . .

I found that Mozilla stubbornly refused to work (neither 1.5 or 1.6 would let me back up my certificate files), but Mozilla FireBird was glad to help. Of course, changing browsers means redoing the whole process since the cert is tied to the browser until it’s installed.

<grumble> All the same, I’m glad I did it.
Continue reading “certified mail in the digital age”

The Web Death Penalty

There are a few things that a Web site can do that are unforgiveable and should not be forgiven. For example, I just unsubscribed from MacNN (as in CNN, get it?) because on one too many occasions, I followed a pointer there and there was this violently offensive banner ad, flashing multiple colors at a high rate of speed, and saying “If the link above is flashing, you have been selected as a Winner! Claim here.” First of all, this is a lie, I have not been selected as a winner. Secondly, it hurts my eyes. Any Web site that runs this ad will receive no more visits from me, it is way, way, way beyond the bounds of what’s acceptable.

I have had some success masking ads from adservers with my /etc/hosts.
[ongoing]

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall: January 18, 2004 – January 24, 2004 Archives:

“This story in today’s Boston Globe should knock everything else off the front page. It’s an amazing story, a huge scandal. Read the lede ….

”Republican staff members of the US Senate Judiciary Committee infiltrated opposition computer files for a year, monitoring secret strategy memos and periodically passing on copies to the media, Senate officials told The Globe. From the spring of 2002 until at least April 2003, members of the GOP committee staff exploited a computer glitch that allowed them to access restricted Democratic communications without a password. Trolling through hundreds of memos, they were able to read talking points and accounts of private meetings discussing which judicial nominees Democrats would fight — and with what tactics.“

Remember the kids we all knew in school who cheated at every turn? This is where they end up: not necessarily as Republicans but as cheaters, liars, and thieves. It’s not credible that someone raised with good solid values would suddenly take up this behavior as an adult: I believe it’s been part of them all along.

“The United States could become a nation in which the dominant party rules for a prolonged period, marginalizes a token opposition and is extremely difficult to dislodge because democracy itself is rigged.”

It couldn’t be true, could it?

Seen @ [metafilter.com]

[Posted with ecto]

General manager of Microsoft’s Windows digital media division David Fester has suggested that iTunes’ emerging dominance would be bad for consumers, because it would limit them to the iPod.

He told journalists at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas: “Windows is about choice . . . . “

It could be, but it’s not always about the user’s choice.

To no one’s surprise, Dell weighed in with a “me too” comment: “Over time, however, customers will want industry standard choices.”

Hmm, last I looked mp3 was pretty well-established as a cross-platform option, while Microsoft’s WMA seems to be tied to a single platform.

Microsoft and others have declared that choosing to adopt the open standards-based AAC format championed by Apple deprives consumers of “freedom of choice”. By this, the company means consumers are not using its proprietary Windows Media Audio, which it claims is an industry standard.

And to her credit, HP CEO Carly Fiorina remembered who buys all this stuff: customers like us. “The next big thing isn’t the next gizmo or killer app or hot box. Customers want all this to work together and they want a seamless approach.”

Dirkon – The Paper Camera [pinhole.cz]

During the 1970s, magazines published in Communist Czechoslovakia were controlled by the state, like the majority of other enterprises. Very few good magazines were available and were difficult to get hold of, so people would borrow and exchange them when given the opportunity. This also applied to magazines aimed at young people, which was probably one of the reasons why almost everyone from my generation, when we get on to the subject of pinhole cameras, has fond memories of the cut-out paper camera known as Dirkon*, published in 1979 in a technical magazine, translated as An ABC of Young Technicians and Natural Scientists.

Its creators came up with a functional pinhole camera made of stiff paper, designed for 35 mm film, which resembles a real camera. It may not be the most practical of devices, but it works!

Sample images: 1 2 3 4 5

And I have a few rolls of B&W film I have been wondering what to do with . . . .

via BoingBoing

[Posted with ecto]

If the conversion/migration goes as planned, this will be the first entry posted into a MySQL database, moving from a Berkeley DB file structure that I suspect has been stretched beyond my expectations.

Some things I have been thinking about in the process:

• Safari doesn’t cope well with lengthy CGI processes: it gives up on them after 60 seconds and that’s not nearly enough time to extract, parse, and munge about 2000 artifacts from the Berkeley DB and insert them in MySQL. Accordingly, I had to use Mozilla FireBird to drive this.
• It does take a long time: and the results are hard to follow, since the artifacts are exported in a non-numerically sorted order:
  MT::Category
1
10
11
12
13
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9

  Hard to know when you’re going to be done . . .

• And of course, most important, it would nice to know how to back out of this. I guess I would end up exporting records from MovableType (easily done) and them import them as a new empty weblog (again, easy enough).

Done copying data from Berkeley DB to your SQL database! All went well.

Well, here goes nothing . . .