Author Archive

Why Have EBAY Prices for 2003’s Palm Tungsten E Skyrocketed?

I used to be able to get them for $40-50, plus shipping.

I’ve seen them go for over $100 this month.

Is there some new use for them?

George Orwell’s 1984 and Other Books Go Down Project Gutenberg’s Memory Hole

I still maintain my Palm Tungsten E and one of my favorite activities is reading books by backlight (so as not to wake up my wife) in bed at night. In the last few months I’ve been reading classics like Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and George Orwell’s 1984.

Today a friend emailed me about his concerns about the “Fairness Doctrine” affecting American radio and I was about to recommend that he download 1984 and was about to provide the link that I had once used to get the Plucker version that would work in my Tungsten’s reader… but not only wasn’t 1984 there, NONE of Orwell’s titles were available. See screencap below:

George Orwell no longer available at Project Gutenberg

As of 28 January 2009, Australia’s Project Gutenberg still had George Orwell files: http://gutenberg.net.au/plusfifty-n-z.html#orwell

I have copied the files and the links will be here as long as I’m allowed.

• Down and Out in Paris and London (1933)
• Burmese Days (1934)
• A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935)
• Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936)
• Shooting an Elephant (1936)
• The Road to Wigan Pier (1937)
• Homage to Catalonia (1938)
• Coming up for Air (1939)
• Animal Farm (1945)
• Politics and the English Language (1946)
• Nineteen eighty-four (1949)
• Fifty Orwell Essays

I hope that I will be able to update this post with news that Project Gutenberg’s new omission was a technical glitch and not throwing Orwell down the memory hole [linked to Wikipedia].

More Fairness Doctrine sources:

• The Fairness Doctrine at Work
• Liberals, too, should reject the Fairness Doctrine
• Fairness Doctrine Fouls Out
• Limbaugh Is Right on the Fairness Doctrine – Wall Street Journal
• Fairness Doctrine Watch

MSIE Slow Open Tab – Solved

Disabled FoxyTunes add-on and now opening a new MSIE tab is quick.

To fix this, open MSIE, then go to TOOLS >> MANAGE ADD-ONS.

Select FOXY TUNES and disable it. Voila, 4+ seconds of your life returned to you each time you open a tab.

Here’s how I set my open tab internet options:

And my browsing settings:

I still prefer FireFox by a couple of orders of magnitude but YouTube is still flaky for me.

30 Months in Prison for Spammer

And sometimes the news is good…

NEW YORK (Reuters) – A Brooklyn man was sentenced to 30 months in prison on Tuesday for sending spam e-mails to more than 1.2 million subscribers of America Online in a scheme that foiled the Internet company’s spam-filtering system.

Adam Vitale, 27, was sentenced in federal court in Manhattan after pleading guilty more than a year ago to breaking anti-spam laws. He was also ordered to pay $180,000 to AOL in restitution.

Vitale was caught making a deal with a government informant to send junk e-mails — known as spam — that advertised a computer security program in return for 50 percent of the product’s profits, prosecutors said.

“Spamming is serious criminal conduct; this is not a teenager engaging in child’s play,” U.S. District Judge Denny Chin told Vitale as he sentenced him. Vitale earlier apologized and said he had learned a lesson.

Prosecutors said Vitale had 22 prior convictions and had also helped run an online prostitution ring on the Web site www.craigslist.com, but he has not been criminally charged.

In the spam e-mail case, Vitale and another man, Todd Moeller, defeated AOL’s filter system by using several different computer servers to relay the e-mails and changed the e-mail header information to ensure the spam e-mails could not be traced back to them.

Moeller, of New Jersey, was sentenced last November to 27 months for his role in the scheme.

Court papers said that in less than a week in August 2005, Vitale and Moeller sent e-mails on behalf of the informant to more than 1,277,000 addresses of subscribers at AOL, the online division of Time Warner Inc.

Cory over at BoingBoing talks about another spammer bent on ruining Craigslist by bypassing the phone verification system. Cory refers to an article on Blackhatworld.

My feeling is that the only way to turn the tide is to aggressively turn the tables on spammers and make it very physically unpleasant for them.

WordPress News: Automattic secures $29.5 million B round

 Don’t tell me blogging software isn’t mainstream and ready for primetime…

Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, just secured a $29.5 million B round of financing.

Automattic’s $1.2 million first round was secured in 2006. In this round, The New York Times joins their investors.

January 23, 2008
Times Company in Group Investing in Blog Publisher
By BRIAN STELTER

 Automattic, the commercial arm of the popular WordPress publishing platform for blogs, has received $29.5 million in financing from four companies, including a small portion from The New York Times Company.

WordPress is open-source software used by bloggers to publish posts. Its chief competitors are Blogger (owned by Google) and TypePad (owned by the software company Six Apart).

Automattic received $1.1 million in financing about two years ago. Polaris Venture Partners, True Ventures and Radar Partners were joined by the Times Company in the second round of financing.

Toni Schneider, the chief executive of Automattic, said the additional funds would provide the profitable company with a buffer as it invests in other services, including an antispam filter and an online-identity product.

The companies did not disclose the size of each firm’s investment, although the Times Company’s stake is the smallest.

The Times Company had previously maintained a business relationship with Automattic. The About.com guide site, which was purchased by the Times Company in 2005, is published using the WordPress platform. The New York Times has also produced more than 50 blogs using the platform.

Martin A. Nisenholtz, the senior vice president for digital operations of the Times Company, said the company hoped to improve the publishing technology at the foundation of WordPress and harness the platform’s ability to aggregate blog posts.

“As we’ve adopted blogging and started to treat it as a mainstream publishing platform, there are all sorts of things we might do going forward to improve our approach,” he said.

Citing a potential application of the technology, Mr. Schneider said blog posts from across the Internet could be featured alongside stories on The Times’s Web site.

Superior Catalog Design

Check it out. See if you can find the majestic møøse

A Møøse once bit my sister …

Drug Dealers vs. Geeks

Best Gadget Ads of 2007

Wired
has dead links but I’ve found good ones… My fave is the rabbits.

10. Transformers – XBOX

9. iPhone “Hello”

8. Sony “Universe of Entertainment” PS3 Ad

7. Disturbia

6. Dell m1330 “Devo” Ad

5. Sony Bravia “Rabbits” Ad

4. Garmin Man Ad

3. Philips “Robot Skin” Ad

2. Zune “Academy of Dreams” Ad

1. The Bourne Ultimatum

MSIE8… Will Microsoft’s Browser FINALLY Work?

I hate using MSIE because it renders CSS so poorly. Is the end near? See the article where this lovely quotation comes from:

Well, slap me with a moldy turnip and color me flabbergasted! I just think it’s a sad thing that Microsoft is receiving praise for doing something that everyone knows they should’ve done five to seven years ago

December 20, 2007 (Computerworld) — A Microsoft Web evangelist hinted yesterday that news of Internet Explorer 8’s development progress was disclosed months earlier than planned because Web developers recently stepped up criticism of the company’s support for standards.

The news of IE8’s ability to pass a widely used Web standards test also came just two weeks after Microsoft Corp. chairman Bill Gates said he didn’t know why the company’s IE development team was keeping a tight lid on information about the next browser.

IE8, the next upgrade to Microsoft’s browser, passes the Web Standards Project’s Acid2 test, according to Dean Hachamovitch, the IE group’s general manager. “On Wednesday, Dec. 12, Internet Explorer correctly rendered the Acid2 page in IE8 standards mode,” Hachamovitch said in a post to Microsoft’s official IE blog yesterday. “While supporting the features tested in Acid2 is important for many reasons, it is just one of several milestones for the interoperability, standards compliance and backwards-compatibility that we’re committed to for this release.”

A week before IE8’s first Acid2 exam, Web standards advocate and blogger Molly Holzschlag had asked Gates about the lack of information coming out of the IE8 group. Gates’ answer: “I’ll have to ask [IE General Manager] Dean [Hachamovitch] what the hell is going on. I mean, we’re not, there’s not like some deep secret about what we’re doing with IE.”

In his blog Wednesday, Hachamovitch seemed to take a shot at those who had criticized his team’s silence. “For IE8, we want to communicate facts, not aspirations,” said Hachamovitch. “We’re listening to the feedback about IE, and at the same time, we are committed to responsible disclosure and setting expectations properly. [But] now that we’ve run the test on multiple machines and seen it work, we’re excited to be able to share definitive information.”

Posts placed on the IE blog last month drew disdain from a large number of users, many of whom identified themselves as Web developers frustrated with the lack of information about IE8’s support for standards and angry at the current IE7’s lack of support for those same standards.

Another Microsoft employee, Joshua Allen, essentially said that the timing of the IE8-Acid2 news was prompted by complaints from users and developers. Allen, an evangelist at Microsoft and one of the hosts for MIX Online, echoed Hachamovitch’s news about IE8’s progress, but said the news was intended for March 2008.

“I had hoped that we could keep the news secret until MIX08, but the masses were demanding information,” said Allen, who linked to an earlier Hachamovitch blog post that had attracted more than 580 comments, the majority of them negative.

MIX08 is the Microsoft-sponsored Web developer conference slated to run in Las Vegas March 5-7, 2008.

The comments attached to Hachamovitch’s Tuesday post, however, were generally supportive, although some users remained cautious. “Well, slap me with a moldy turnip and color me flabbergasted!” said a user going by the name David Lane. “Who would’ve thought. [But] I just think it’s a sad thing that Microsoft is receiving praise for doing something that everyone knows they should’ve done five to seven years ago.”

I am not David Lane nor do I play him on TV. But it’s funny to restate his cogent point about their MSIE browser:

Well, slap me with a moldy turnip and color me flabbergasted! I just think it’s a sad thing that Microsoft is receiving praise for doing something that everyone knows they should’ve done five to seven years ago

Read the rest.

Learn about ACID2.

Image above from Turnip Family Secrets.

Movable Type — Now Open Source, Plays Catchup to WordPress

Movable Type has gone open source. It’s the only way they’ll compete with the rapidly-improving WordPress. Yeah, WP is sloppy and freewheeling at times (oy, I’m working with bbPress and it’s far from ready for primetime) but it’s a lot more nimble and there are plugins and capable and helpful users in forums up the wazoo — that’s tech-speak for “there are many competent technicians”.

I’ve been with WordPress since it was b2. I’ve tinkered with Movable Type. I’ve agonized through MT’s compiles. I came to the conclusion about 18 months ago that few new blogs should go the route of MT over WP but that existing installs, especially professional sites, certainly didn’t need to do a tear-down.

WordPress is PHP-based and MT is PERL-based, if that matters to you or your tech staff. Background. I live eat and breathe MySQL databases and HTML and I haven’t needed to manipulate text much since my days doing pattern matching for an art museum back in the late 1980’s, so PHP is my preference.

The wisdom of MT going open-source is good for MT and good for its client base and good for all of us. It means that more people will be contributing plugins, more will be testing, and it will be come a more secure and robust product. Competition is good.

Prediction: 2008 will probably be a banner year for script-kiddies hammering MT political sites. If you’re running MT and you’ve got anything controversial, make sure your webmaster and your web host is up on security measures. If you’ve been running MT and are happy with it, make sure it’s current and there’s no reason to change. If you’re on the fence and need to develop something soon, I’d go with WordPress until the dust settles and the first few waves of script kiddie mischief have been managed by the MT folk.

No doubt, like the early days of the WordPerfect and Microsoft Word wars, there will soon be open source conversion utilities allowing your new site to be morphed into the latest superior open source content management system.

And let’s not kid ourselves… it’s far beyond blogging software now.