Category Archives: /dev/random

12/10/06

RIAA Petitions

Currently there are two petitions going on with regards to the RIAA:

First the EFF is asking people to sign a petition to be sent to Congress to ask them to do something about the RIAA’s heavy handed tactics towards children, parents and the elderly.

The second, is the RIAA petitioning some federal judges to reduce the royalty payments they make to artists. Apparently, while they’re filing lawsuits against 12 year olds for stealing Brittney Spears from file sharing sites, the RIAA wants to lower Brittney’s royalty payments for legal downloads.

While I guess “something is better then nothing”, it sure seems rather hypocritical don’t ya think?

12/10/06

Treating users vaguely

So last night I’m playing with iDVD to make well, a DVD. So, long story short, you can choose to format your DVD for 4:3 or 16:9. I wish there was a way to gracefully support both, but that’s another rant. Anyways… so there’s this feature to show you the “safe area”, which is the area of the screen which is most likely to actually be displayed on someone’s TV; apparently iDVD isn’t a WYSIWYG tool.

Now some key things about safe area this:

  • No explaination why an NTSC formatted DVD on an NTSC screen won’t show the whole thing.
  • This is an approximation. iDVD doesn’t apparently actually know what is safe.
  • There is no hint like “after testing we found this appropriate for 90% of TV’s”, so I have no idea how accurate it really is.
  • It reduces the available screen area by like 20% WTF????
  • There’s no documentation telling you how you might go about determining the actual viewable area on a given TV.
  • Even if you figured that out on your own, you can’t adjust the safe area accordingly.

Now I suppose that if you’re using iDVD you’re not a DVD authoring or TV display area expert, hence I would appear to be iDVD’s target market. But I think this is a good case of treating your customers like idiots. I can understand hiding some advanced features by default (actually I think many applications like Word, Excel, Photoshop need an option to “Hide/Show Advanced Options”) so that non-power users aren’t overwhelmed by the vast number of options, but don’t dumb thing’s down so much that you’re only making things more confusing by your vagueness.

Of course what is most frustrating is that Apple knows what the resolution of an NTSC TV screen is… there shouldn’t be this issue in the first place. Sure, some cheaper TV’s may cut off a little at the edges, but not 20%!

11/7/06

Voting 2006

So I just finished voting here in San Jose using one of those Sequoia machines (same as last year). My in person impression hasn’t improved any.

1. Having to check all your votes twice (once on the screen and again on the paper printer) is a pain in the ass. Between state, county and city offices, bonds and measures it’s not only tedious to check, but error prone- especially since I don’t memorize whom I’m going to vote for in each race.

Ironically, the sample ballot that they mailed me was much simpler to use (just connect the arrow next to what/who you want to vote for), easy to verify, count and recount. And it takes a lot less time to vote since you don’t need to double and triple check that the machine didn’t screw up.

2. More importantly though, while the poll workers try to be helpful, they’re just not trained well enough. I was appalled to over hear one worker tell another how she removed the security sticker to open up the machine to “fix it”. Now, while she probably is honest and didn’t tamper with the machine (no way for me to prove otherwise), she now has violated the trust model of the election for that machine. The issue is that by breaking the security sticker, nobody can detect if anyone else tampers with the machine.

Unsurprisingly, the poll worker thought it was perfectly OK for her to break the seal and put it back in service, because she didn’t tamper with the machine. Aren’t there enough voting machine irregularities without the poll workers contributing to the problem?

Anyways, here are two videos about what’s going on with electronic voting:
First, is the HBO documentary Hacking Democracy.
Second, is the Daily Show’s John Hodgman’s comedic take on the machines.

10/20/06

How not to find great employees

I won’t name any names, but I came across a job posting which required two rather highly sought-after skills in today’s market, neither of which is particularly common. They were very specific about what a great job it was, how you would be worked like a dog, and how they were only interested in people with previous experience.

Then they laid out this lovely gem (emphasis added):

We know we’re asking a lot and I’m positive we won’t make it worth your while financially if you have this highly specific skillset.

Yep, that’s what I always look for in a job: Hard work, previous experiance reqiured and you’ll be able to find better pay just about anywhere else.

09/20/06

Why methods shouldn’t replace a language

There’s been a big push for OO scripting languages like Python and Ruby over older procedural languages like Perl. While I used to be quite the Perl bigot, lately I’ve learn to appreciate other languages like Ruby. But while OO techniques can make some things much much easier, strict adherence to the OO concepts can be more trouble then it’s worth.

Take for example this common case of a for loop:
for ($i = 0; $i < = 10; $i++) { &lt;do something with $i&gt; }
In Ruby you’d use:
1.upto(10) { |x| &lt;do something with x&gt; }

I’ll give the win to Ruby here for being more concise, even though those people coming from most procedural languages will be taken back by the syntax. Now lets make a simple change and increment by 2 instead of 1:

If you read the first Perl example, this should be obvious:
for ($i = 0; $i < = 10; $i += 2) { .... }
Ruby, however isn’t quite so obvious:
1.step(10, 2) { |x| ... }

Wtf? It’s a different method? For the record, I had to ask 3 people who write Ruby code how to do that because the first two didn’t know the magical method name. Sure it’s a small thing, but it’s really fustrating when the “obvious” solution isn’t correct and doesn’t lead you to the answer.

09/17/06

Not even I thought the number was 14,000

According to this AP article on Yahoo, 14,000 is the number of people being held without access to a lawyer or being charged with a crime that are being held against their will in U.S. run overseas prisons. 13,000 of them in Iraq.

One such example is of Bilal Hussein, an Iraqi citizen and AP photographer.

[Update: Here’s another great example of the “enemy combatants” who are so dangerous they must be held in Gitmo.]

Already, over 18,000 people have been released because they were deemed innocent. But one wonders after being held in a prision for months and even years, how this endears us to them after they are set free. More then likely, those that already hated us, hate us even more and those that were on the fence now see us as their tormentors. While “radical islamists” are telling the world we are evil, we go out of our way and prove it. In effect, our own actions only serve to create more of the enemy.

Bush tells us this is to protect us from those evil-doers who wish us harm. But you can’t fight evil by becoming it. The “war on terror” shouldn’t be fought by instilling terror in the hearts of innocent people. We as Americans need to stand up for what is right before the world can’t tell which side are the real terrorists.

09/15/06

1,000th comment!

Just reached the 1,000th attempted comment spam which was picked up by Askimet. So I guess the good news is that Askimet is very effective at combating comment spam. I guess the bad news is the near complete lack of actual comments. :)

On a side note, I tried signing up for a class over the web. Filled out the form, gave them my CC# and everything. Then I got an email saying that the class was full. After being put on the waiting list, I suggested they change their website to indicate which dates have availability… not something I would consider difficult nowadays. Imagine my surprise when I got this in reply:

Unfortunately because our availability changes constantly it
would likely be a full time job for someone to update the school
availability on the site and we just can’t do that. This is why there is
a note that comes up after you register that says you aren’t actually
registered until one of our staff contact you.

Hello? Is it still 1998?

08/14/06

Flying in the post-liquid bomb world

So I had the missfortune of picking last thursday to fly on vacation. For those of you living under a rock, last thursday was when the news broke out that some terrorists were plotting to blow up planes using explosives in the form of liquids and/or gels.

The solution was obviously to stop anyone from flying in their carry-on any liquid, gel or simular substance such as chapstick. Apparently now, you can’t even have gel inserts in your shoes.

As someone in the security world, these planned attacks and our response are somewhat interesting to me. Anyways, a few observations:

  • Some people traveling really are living under a rock. One woman who was trying to go to Disneyland was shocked that she needed some form of a government issued ID to fly.
  • TSA is obviously incapable of determining who is a terrorist and who is not a terrorist, hence everyone is now treated as a possible terrorist.
  • The terrorists are constantly coming up with new ways to blow stuff up.
  • The TSA responds by constantly banning perfectly harmless things which resemble dangerous things in an attempt to prevent terrorists from blowing things up because it is unable to efficently distinquish things like drinking water from nitroglycerin.
  • The impact on perfectly honest citizens who aren’t terrorists seems much larger then the impact on the terrorists (not just the people traveling, but the owners of duty-free stores, wineries who’s customers don’t buy as much wine, causing the price of oil to skyrocket, etc)
  • If the terrorists goal is to just strike fear into the average traveller, cause havoc with our economy, etc then the terrorists are meeting their goals. My guess is that actually blowing up a plane would be bonus points. It also explains why we call them terrorists not “random murderers of many people who take themselves out in the process”.
  • How long before the terrorists figure out how to embed exploisives into clothes and the TSA requires everyone to fly naked?