Indigo Jo Blogs

In today's Guardian Media supplement, there was a familiar range of complaints about the new DAB (Digital Audio Broadcasting, or something like that) radio system, among them the fact that the radio units are expensive and that reception in the writer's area is poor (in this particular case, the area is ten miles from Portsmouth on the south coast). I recently acquired a digital radio to replace my ageing (1980s) clock radio which occasionally failed to go off, leaving me late for work, and did not pick up my favourite station, BBC London, very well. The new radio certainly does the latter very well. However, setting the alarm proved a nightmare, and has prompted a long-suppressed rant about badly-designed technology.

Continue reading "Brain dead technology" »

Posted by Indigo Jo at 10:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Last week I installed the new version of Movable Type, version 4. Six Apart have made much fanfare, understandably because it's quite an overhaul of the software, and the look and feel of the administration system has changed an awful lot. They actually seem to have taken more than a few leaves out of Wordpress's book: the login screen, for one thing; the dashboard (although it's not really like Wordpress, on which the Dashboard is dominated by material sourced from two Wordpress-related blogs); the menus along the top of the screen rather than the side.

There are, however, a number of annoying features in the new MT. The first is that the admin screens always open to one particular blog, not to the System Overview as before, which means you have to take two steps to do what I always do on logging in to MT: check my comments and trackbacks, across the board, for spam. There does not seem to be an option to set how the admin interface opens. While I'm sure many MT installations are multi-user and many users only have posting rights for one blog, that's not the case for the personal bloggers which still remain from "the old days".

Second, the drop-down menus are actually a nuisance. They can be slow to appear (perhaps the Six Apart developers have access to fast new machines, but not all of us do) and when menus overlap with other features on the screen, they often get cut off (the "Manage" menu is particularly prone to this). It seems to mostly affect Firefox, particularly on Linux.

Third, the template editor is actually incompatible with some browsers, particularly Konqueror. The code appears briefly, then disappears, leaving the editor window blank. If they cannot fix this problem, they should at least give us the ability to turn the new editor off and use the old one. Of course, some might say that I should just use another browser, but Konqueror has features that Firefox - its only real competitor on Linux - doesn't, like the ability to store Yahoo and Hotmail IDs and passwords. (Thankfully, the entry editor is not affected by this problem.)

Posted by Indigo Jo at 11:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

A couple of weeks ago I got myself a new computer - or rather, a new old computer. I did not actually want to, because apart from one particular habit, my computer was performing quite adequately. That habit, however, was simply switching itself off from time to time for no apparent reason. So, despite the fact that I could not really afford it (my dad agreed to pay for it), I had to get a new one. What I got was a Compaq AP550, a dual Pentium III.

Continue reading "My new computer" »

Posted by Indigo Jo at 10:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (8) | TrackBacks (0)

This is something I read on the Planet KDE blog I use to gather news for my other blog: an account of what the author found when she downloaded the recent Microsoft Office demo. Quite simply, all worthwhile functionality has been disabled. The "new" and "save" functions have been greyed out, with a message attached saying "to enable it purchase a licensed copy of Microsoft Office", and you can't even edit documents!

It took 50 minutes to download and install it, and 20 minutes to remove after an attempt at use that lasted two minutes. They call this a "fully functional demo". Like, what's the point?

Posted by Indigo Jo at 11:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Operation Ore flawed by fraud - Guardian Unlimited Technology

This tells the story of a witch-hunt against supposed downloaders of child porn who were jailed for the offence in the UK on the basis that their credit cards were used to buy the material (or at least to join the sites concerned), and how it turns out that their credit cards were actually used by people other than them, i.e. fraudsters. How could the police not consider this, given that online credit card fraud was known of well before Operation Ore started? Given that it's been known for years that Windows-running PCs were open to penetration from botnets and other forms of piracy, how could they assume that a evidence of credit card use, or even of web browser access (because programs can identify falsely as other programs, which is often how Firefox users are able to access "IE-only" sites), to be evidence on its own?

Posted by Indigo Jo at 7:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

O'Reilly Radar: Draft Blogger's Code of Conduct

I'm really quite surprised that it's taken the recent "Kathy Sierra affair" ([1], [2]) for the blogging community to get around to drawing up a "code of conduct", but the law does already prohibit libel and threatening messages. The draft code also includes an "anything goes" badge (complete with dynamite and lit fuse), disclaiming responsibility for people's comments. Again, this falls foul of the law in some countries - much as a newspaper is responsible for the articles it prints, even though they are not written by the proprietor or editor. (I've rejected, and removed, comments because of this, including a suggestion that the Hemel Hempstead oil fire was started by the local council in order to free up land for housing development.)

The code barely mentions that much of the abusive behaviour under discussion also goes on on online fora, including abuse related to material published on blogs. The line between a blog and a forum is often blurred, of course, but I've had an experience of online threats which were made on a forum and "provoked" by things I'd written here and on other blogs. This code, if it's to have any value, needs to take in online fora as well. Apart from anything else, there is a reference to authors of threatening or abusive comments withdrawing them, which you usually just can't do on a blog if it's not your blog, as the software just does not have that functionality. Blogs are often highly personalised, with the (often sole) author deciding what goes and what doesn't (this is certainly the case here); besides, many of us could not have open comments or trackback nowadays because our sites would get filled up with spam pretty quickly. But it's a welcome development, even if a lot of blogs and fora already exist for the purpose of spreading mistrust and misinformation about entire groups.

Also, this article by Oliver Kamm appeared in the Guardian yesterday, debunking the idea of blogs being some sort of revolutionary participatory democracy: he calls it parasitic, reliant on the mainstream media for material to which to react, and "a reliable vehicle for the coagulation of opinion and the poisoning of debate". This was in reaction to the recent controversy over "Guido Fawkes" in the UK. Still, I'm sure Oliver Kamm will continue blogging himself.

Posted by Indigo Jo at 1:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm just typing my first ever blog entry on a computer running Windows Vista, on my uncle's new Dell. And really, it's the most appallingly slow piece of software I've ever used. (I'm using Internet Explorer rather than Firefox, if that matters.)

Everything which appears, or changes, on the screen takes ages except (when you've been doing it for a while) typing text. For example, when you move your mouse over something which has a tooltip, a "ghost tooltip" will appear and won't go away for ages if you move your mouse away. And this is not an old Pentium 3 - it's a brand new Athlon 64, albeit with only 512Mb of memory, with a NVidia graphics card. How on earth did Microsoft conclude that this was fit to release? Perhaps they bargained that they needed something which would be "current" if they took another six years to put the next version out, but even so - this is dire.

And the design is not even that great, anyway. It's not that dissimilar to what I've been using on KDE (on Linux) for ages. Even the window head design was copied by Kubuntu before they could get it into Vista, so it ends up looking like a knock-off of Kubuntu, which is free. But even though Kubuntu does not have the most responsive desktop in the Linux world (which is why I stopped using it), it still beats the pants off Vista.

Terrible. They deserve to go bust.

Posted by Indigo Jo at 7:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

Further to UZ's post linking a NYT article on fighting email spam, the Guardian's technology supplement today printed an article on a new front in the malware wars: programs which cripple your computer while demanding money from you. In this case, it's companies using this to demand payment for debts supposedly incurred through visiting porn sites (imagine the effect that can have on a marriage), while an earlier article discusses "ransomware", in which the aim is straightforward extortion by such means as locking the user's data away until they come up with some money. Makes me glad I don't use Windoze much.

Meanwhile, the paper's comments section has two disturbing stories about two different corners of Muslimland. This one by Victoria Brittain tells the story of a British Asian who went to Mogadishu for the wedding of a family friend to a Somali woman, and ended up being tortured by the Kenyan police for supposedly helping the Somali ICU. Meanwhile, Mike Marqusee reflects on the fifth anniversary of the Gujarat pogrom, in which organised mobs attacked Muslims and their properties and places of worship using information provided by the state while the police looked the other way. He can't visit the UK or USA (although he did visit the UK the year after the pogrom), but he is still in charge of the state and attracts both Indian and foreign business to the state with "hire-and-fire rights unique in India".

Posted by Indigo Jo at 8:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Upgrade Rage (from today's Guardian)

Tim Dowling on the annoyances of Windows which manifest themselves as "upgrade rage, or Upgrage, the uncontrollable anger which occurs whenever a software upgrade deemed to be either essential or beneficial proves to be a pointless waste of your time, or a quick way to cripple your outmoded computer". In his case, he downloaded a "Vista Upgrade Adviser", which was supposed to tell him which version of Vista he should get, but which he could not find on his hard drive when he had finished downloading it. (He needs to find out which directory Explorer uses to store downloads; it may well be in the Settings or Preferences.)

The article generally is about the hardware-hungriness of Vista, which if you want all the funky 3D "Aero" graphics, you'll need to buy a new computer with a good accelerated 3D graphics card if you haven't bought one recently. That old Pentium 3 won't cut it anymore. I don't think this is altogether a bad thing; after all, Windows XP has been around for about six years, and if the next version after Vista is similarly delayed, the cards Vista needs for Aero will be standard, even old, before the name of the next version is announced. But it may well result in a spate of perfectly serviceable computers being dumped, with all the environmental consequences.

Posted by Indigo Jo at 10:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Getting the blog spammers to hang up their affiliations (Guardian Unlimited Technology)

An article from today's Guardian Technology supplement, about the intricacies (as they seem to me) of affiliate schemes and how they help spammers. The important part of this article is how difficult it was for the reporter to get straight answers out of the affiliate schemes themselves. 94% of blog comments are spam, and I get hundreds every day. Also, see this BBC article on "botnets", meaning networks of compromised computers, and their role in spamming and other online crime. Up to a quarter of all computers with internet access are thought to be in botnets, unbeknown to the owners.

Can I remind regular readers that TypeKey, which allows unmoderated comments on this site (unless I decide your comments are garbage, in which case I can ban your ID but allow you moderated commenting), is free? And unlike on TypePad blogs, you can leave your own link with your comment rather than the link going to your profile or email address. I don't like having to moderate comments from regulars, as it slows down discussion, but I don't want the comments sections to become forums for "debate" with bigots, as is the case on certain other Muslim blogs. If you are a regular, please use TypeKey and you can discuss whatever comes up here freely.

Posted by Indigo Jo at 6:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

The other day, with some money my nan gave me, I went into Borders in Kingston to get some books. I hoped to take advantage of the "three for the price of two" offer they've got going, but in the end couldn't find three books I actually wanted that badly among the selection they had in Kingston. (Noam Chomsky doesn't float my boat, even if he floats other Muslims'.) I ended up buying Libby Brooks' The Story of Childhood: Growing Up in Modern Britain. When I got to the checkout, they gave me the offer of 15% off my next purchase if I'd sign up to their email list. I thought, why not? So I did.

Continue reading "An offer I really could refuse" »

Posted by Indigo Jo at 10:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

The Independent's Extra section today published this article about Bill Gates' recent announcement that he is reducing his commitment to Microsoft to concentrate on his charity work. One sentence that stuck out was this:

The geek who changed the world by dropping out of Harvard to write the operating system that became known as MS-DOS for IBM's new personal computer, has not lost his love for tedious detail.

The well-known fact about the genesis of MS-DOS was that it started as QDOS, which was in the words of Eric Raymond:

A clone of CP/M for the 8088 [Intel processor] crufted together in 6 weeks by hacker Tim Paterson at Seattle Computer Products, who called the original QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System) and is said to have regretted it ever since. Microsoft licensed QDOS in order to have something to demo for IBM on time, and the rest is history. Numerous features, including vaguely Unix-like but rather broken support for subdirectories, I/O [input/output] redirection, and pipelines, were hacked into Microsoft's 2.0 and subsequent versions; as a result, there are two or more incompatible versions of many system calls, and MS-DOS programmers can never agree on basic things like what character to use as an option switch or whether to be case-sensitive.

Even if Gates had developed it, this would be no good reflection on his technical ability, as it was notoriously hamstrung by its inability to take into account advances in computer technology; its inability to manage more than 640Kb of memory or 32Mb of disk space at a time persisted long after such technology was available on all but the bottom end of PCs. Could the Independent's journo not get these basic facts right?

Posted by Indigo Jo at 2:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Earlier this evening I ordered a new hard drive for my Mac, one which has approximately triple the storage space of the one in there at the moment (120 gigabytes instead of 40). The total cost was about £44, including VAT and the cost of delivery, and it should, insha Allah, be here by the middle of the week at the latest. The main reason I've done this isn't that I'm running out of space, but that I intend to install another operating system (some version of Linux, probably Ubuntu) and there just isn't enough space for both my Mac OS stuff and another operating system. I'm doing a bit of software development: a blog management system called QTM which primarily works on Linux, and I'd like to be able to use my main desktop machine rather than my laptop, and the old family computer (on which I've also installed Ubuntu) will, as of last week, no longer switch on.

Continue reading "Buying computer gear" »

Posted by Indigo Jo at 11:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Guardian CIF has a blog piece by AlterNet contributor Deanna Zandt about how geek culture is still very male-centred - notably how a woman who made it onto the tech discussion website Slashdot found that some of the denizens found it more useful to discuss her looks than what she was doing. As a regular reader of the tech press, it has to be said that the community is rather male dominated, but it's also true that women and girls are just much less interested in becoming geeks than men and boys. You might see my comment on the below article, which is the second one down at present:

Comment is free: Girls can be geeks too

Posted by Indigo Jo at 3:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

The BBC reports about the UK government's concern that Windows Vista, the upcoming new version of Windows, will make it more difficult for the police to search people's computers for illegal materials. Guess why that is:

The system uses BitLocker Drive Encryption through a chip called TPM (Trusted Platform Module) in the computer's motherboard.

It is partly aimed at preventing people from downloading unlicensed films or media.

"This means that by default your hard disk is encrypted by using a key that you cannot physically get at...

"An unfortunate side effect from law enforcement is it would be technically fairly seriously difficult to dig encrypted material out of the system if it has been set up competently."

(More at A Fistful of Euros.)

Posted by Indigo Jo at 12:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)