Category: two wheels good

I, Cringely | The Pulpit

When I mentioned in last week’s column that I would this week be writing about a legal way to do a successful music downloading business — a business that would threaten the Recording Industry Association of America and its hegemony — dozens of readers wrote to me trying to predict what I would write. Some readers came at the problem from a purely technical perspective, ignoring the fact that the real issues here aren’t technical but legal. Some readers took a legal approach, but they tended to ignore the business model. Some were looking solely for the business model. Interestingly, nobody even came close to my idea, which makes me either a total loon or a diabolical genius. Truth be told, I’m probably more of a diabolical loon.

He is all of that: I don’t think this will work as a business, though it seems towork well enough for libraries. I’m not sure enough people would understand it well enough to make the commitment. It’s essentially a private library. But read it yourself and weigh in.

Windows Passwords Cracked in Record Time

Exposing a weakness in Windows encryption technology, Swiss researchers have published a paper detailing how to crack Windows computers protected by alphanumeric passwords in an average of 13.6 seconds.

The paper’s lead author, Philippe Oechslin, told NewsFactor that his research is not specifically about Windows software. “I’m looking for encryption systems where there is no random information for security encryption,” he said. He explained that Unix, Linux and Mac OS X use an initialization vector, also known as “salt,” which can have 4,096 values, making cracking much more difficult.

“On Windows, unfortunately, the two versions of password hashes (encoding technology) they use don’t have salt, so we can precalculate all of them,” Oechslin said.

I have to say, this surprises me. I have to ask anyone can honestly use a system with a risky security model in any kind of secure or mission-critical environment. I’m not sure with how one would exploit this, but it stands to reason tools based on these finding will soon be available at a warez site near you.

Word Html 2 Formatting Objects

WH2FO is a Java application that processes an HTML output, created with Word 2000, and transforms it into an XML content file and an XSL stylesheet file. From these files, a standard XSLT processor may be used to obtain a file containing only XSL-FO markup. You can also apply a stylesheet that converts the XML back into HTML discarding all the extra markup added by Word. Using an XSL-FO renderer, such as FOP, you can also render your document into PDF.

I was looking for a way to convert heavily-formatted Word docs to html, and was starting to gibber in fear of having to write a parser of my own. But someone has (perhaps) already made that unnecessary. In my dreams, I was hoping to generate real XML, but this tool claims to do just that.

ongoing · The Web’s the Place

[ . . . . ] Browsers are more usable because they’re less flexible.

I think I’ve told this story before here, but it’s a good one; at a content management conference, a woman from the Tandem-that-was saying “It was so wonderful when the browser interfaces came on; the vendors had to discard all those stupid sliders and cascaded menus and eight-way toggles, and only leave the stuff that mattered.”

This is a well-thought-out view of the software development ecosystem. The stuff I excerpt above resonates with me, because I’ve said much the same thing many times. Tools that do everything can stunt creativity; they remove your incentive to think. You find either too many choices to master or find that the choices have been made by someone else (saved any HTML in Word lately?).

This was the promise of the browser, circa 1995: one application that allowed you to interact with your data, your projects, whatever, with the OS rendered a commodity. And as you can imagine, that threatens companies who are all about controlling access to all that through an OS.

this is the way

This is the only way I’ll see these, so I figured I’d take a picture.

Steal These Buttons

Current button count is 839!

My excuse for using these is that they’re smaller.

I have always been annoyed when, as posts are rotated to the archives, the righthand sidebar content creeps across to the left. I’d rather have whitespace there.

After working through some of Eric Meyer on CSS today, I figured how to fix that. I just needed to add margin-left: 65%; to the side and sidetitle class definitions in the stylesheet and then tidy up some of the elements in the sidebar. There are a few serverside includes in there and I needed to remove any div tags from them to make everything work right.

Eric Meyer on CSS: Project 7

We can skip around the web all day long, clicking from page to page, but when you get right down to it, the engine of expansion on the Web is forms. Without them, people couldn’t input their personal information to let them buy stuff– let alone actually tell an e-commerce server what they want to buy.

Doing forms was got me interested in all this stuff back in the day (1994 or so). I had spent too much time collecting paper and rekeying information and when I saw that you could remove that whole process with this new WWW stuff, I was sold. Many ugly forms and bad perl CGI scripts later, I still agree with Eric Meyer.

Happy Fields and Dancing Schnausers: Units of Angst

[ . . . . ] Dad and I began to discuss angst, and we have devised a system by which to rate it. My sister helped to flesh it out, and gave the units their other names. The system follows:

The basic unit of angst is a mope.

Oh, you have to click through to this one: it’s worth it.

News Is Crappy
Behind The Scenes
This site is made with only the finest tools. We use Macintosh computers because they let us work on news not computers. We use PHP because frankly it kicks butt. We use BBedit because it’s better than you. MovableType packs the backend of the site and it rocks the casbah.